Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 119: Destati

I was sleeping. It was a heavy, suffocating sleep. Have you ever had a nap where you couldn’t get up? Your whole body can feel exhausted to the point of collapse and there’s a sensation as if the world has its hoof on your chest, pushing down to keep you in bed. I’ve read about sleep paralysis, and it felt like that, the terrible sensation of having part of my consciousness aware even while the rest of my body refused to respond.

It wasn’t restful sleep. Flashes of memory pushed through. I’d been running towards something. Or from something. There was a bright light. Darkness. Cold.

“HI’LOS NI PRAAN.”

The statement didn’t wake me up as much as it shattered the concept of sleep and forced me into the waking world with the gentle ease of a Vertibuck crash. The world took longer to come into focus, hard edges snapping into place around me at what felt like a pace just slow enough that I was able to catch entire sections of the universe blinking into existence when they realized they were being looked at.

I sucked down air, trying to breathe. I must have been breathing, because I wasn’t choking, but it felt empty somehow. I don’t know how to describe it except to say that it was painfully empty, like a glass half-full.

“Where am I?” I asked. Nopony answered. The world around me wasn’t the one I last remembered. My thoughts were still struggling to catch up. I remembered getting the second key, and then…

I shook it off and looked around. I needed to get my head in the game or I was going to get myself killed trying to recall what had been on my grocery list.

I was standing at the bottom of stadium seating. I didn’t remember how I got there. Not that my recent memory was working well. It felt like I was coming out of being blackout drunk and was staring bleary-eyed at the world of sobriety.

I was halfway up the stairs and thinking about getting a look outside when I realized the railing I was holding onto didn’t have any vertical supports. It was just a bar of metal hanging in midair. I tried moving it, but it might as well have been nailed in place, with the good nails that I couldn’t just rip off.

At the top I looked over the edge at what seemed very nearly like the ocean, but I was sure the ocean wasn’t supposed to be as sluggish and green as lime gelatin.

The ground under my hooves was made out of some kind of hybrid of marble and steel, stone with veins of dark metal running through it and glinting in light that was coming from somewhere beyond the cloud cover overhead.

It was because I was looking at the floor that I noticed my hooves. They were back to normal, and that meant only one thing. Something I should have realized the moment I saw that impossible railing.

“I’m in a simulation?” I asked. “How?”

I didn’t remember an orb. And I didn’t think Welsh Rarebit was the kind of pony to put one in his vault. From what Lathe had told me, he didn’t care for simulations. He hadn’t done this and we were the first ponies to disturb it since…

Well, since the Black Dragon had burrowed into it, at least.

Might as well enjoy it while I figured out what to do. I flapped my wings, enjoying the sensation of having two wings to flap. In the real world, my missing left wing was giving me some serious phantom limb syndrome. It’s way worse than a pony might expect -- the description of it makes it sound like it’s only about thinking you’ve got a hoof or wing or whatever when there’s just empty space, as if you forgot you had a stump there. The truth was that the nerves still felt random sensations. My wing had been cramping for hours, and since it wasn’t actually attached I couldn’t stretch it.

“Can anyone hear me?” I called out. Lathe had been able to contact me the last time I’d been in a simulation like this. “Hello?”

The clouds overhead rumbled with the slow and building fury of an oncoming storm. If it was a sign, it wasn’t one I could interpret. Wherever I was, it didn’t feel safe. I turned around to take it all in. I’d woken up stumbling out of thin air like a crowd surfer finding an empty spot a little too late. I hadn’t actually looked back to see what had been behind me

It was shaped a little like a concert hall, a half-dome over a circular depression in the ground. Nearly circular. It was a polygon, all straight edges. I could see them if I looked closely enough at the edges.

A spotlight shone down in the middle of the stage, through a skylight in the dome, and when I looked up, I couldn’t see where it was coming from. There wasn’t a hole in the clouds or a visible sun overhead or anything. The light had an odd look to it, the edges clearly demarcated and almost liquid in the way it seemed to flow and pulse.

It landed on a pyramid the size of a refrigerator. It acted like a prism and redirected the light out of the back of the dome. The window it used was too small for me to fit through, so I needed to find another way.

I walked around the edge of the dome on a narrow path forming a circular lip around the bowl of the amphitheater. Behind the dome I found that light shining out in a horizontal beam at head height, passing through an open portcullis made of black iron, and continuing along a walkway that I was sure hadn’t been there a moment ago leading out into the distance. There were no safety railings to keep ponies from tumbling over the edge into the gelatin sea.

Before stepping out onto it, I checked to see if I could get into the air. I couldn’t. I wasn’t surprised. It hadn’t worked in the test environment either, and this place only seemed barely more real.

My steps were very careful. There was a sense that at any moment, the bridge might not exist, or that my hooves could clip through the apparently solid stone, or that it could explode like everything else in my life. The light next to me seemed to be flowing in this direction, urging me on.

Green lightning cracked down in the distance, the storm growing stronger. I didn’t want to be caught out in whatever rain was going to fall. I picked up the pace and squinted through the thick fog ahead. It wasn’t just thick, it was literally impenetrable. For a few moments on the long bridge, I couldn’t see either end, and I wondered if it was endless.

A second platform loomed out of the mist just as I was becoming really worried I was going to get lost on a straight road.

Part of me was aware that the platform was no more likely to really be stable than the bridge, but for some reason, it felt secure enough to make me glad to be off the narrow walkway.

This new platform was occupied by a skeletal building. Not literally made of bones, but if you in a very literal and not metaphorically stripped the flesh from a structure until only the most important parts were left, it was what you’d get. A few walls, enough to mark large rooms, stairs with no visible support, huge gaps that should have held load-bearing bits. In the real world, it wouldn’t have worked. Here, it didn’t have to care about physics.

The beam I was following went into the building, spearing through a window and vanishing into the depths.

“This is easily in my top three strangest places I’ve been,” I said. “Not as bad as the Cage in Limbo, but definitely worse than the mirror world.”

I stepped into what was either a hallway with no outer wall or a partially enclosed walkway around the outside edge of the platform. I didn’t have to go far to find an iron portcullis, this one closed and barred. There was another walkway continuing deeper into the mist on the other side, but I couldn’t figure out a way to open it. I tried pushing and pulling it, but all I did was make a lot of noise.

Red light caught my attention, and sudden fear saw me pressed against a low wall, ducking down and trying to hide. Until I knew how much trouble I was in, I wanted to attract as little notice as possible. I was glad I did. Something came around the corner. I’m not sure how to describe it properly. The thing was pony-shaped, but it clearly wasn’t a pony.

It was almost crystalline, triangles and flat planes, but they were set at odd angles, passing through each other and twisting in ways that seemed impossible. Some part of me that felt detached could see it, something I shouldn’t have been able to see. A direction they pushed into that wasn’t in our world but was happy to live in a place built out of exotic math and magic.

Red light outlined its flat black faucets, glinting brightly where the polygons passed through each other without intersecting, slipping in a direction I had no name for.

I needed a weapon.

I stayed low and crept along the wall. I couldn’t see eyes on the thing, but the red light it gave off was like a spotlight, sweeping over the half-finished building. Getting caught in the light seemed like a bad idea.

Once it passed, I quietly trotted deeper inside. There was a chance I could take it with my bare hooves but I’d really like at least a club before I risked anything. I pressed myself against the wall, waited a moment to make sure I wasn’t about to be attacked, then looked around. The room was littered with a few pieces of debris, clutter that resembled broken toys and props from some of the rides I’d passed by in the park, but simplified and slightly blurred.

A shaft of sunlight through a window in the far wall illuminated a box. It was warm and inviting, in direct opposition to the red danger of the monster I’d seen a moment ago.

It was probably a trap, but I was really good at springing those and as far as I knew none of them had killed me yet. I poked the box, and when it didn’t grow teeth and attack me, I tried harder. When I say it was a box, I mean in the most generic box way possible. It was a slightly stretched-out cube with no visible hinges, lid, or even texture. Was I supposed to take the whole thing with me?

The sunlight got brighter, and the box opened, the top levitating off as if a unicorn was manipulating it. I was hoping to find a weapon inside, but there was no such luck. All I say in there was a polyhedron, about the size of my head. It was pure white, with dozens of faces that made it look like a gemstone.

“You’re not a club,” I sighed, reaching in to grab it.

“HAAL NI WUTH HAALVUT KUN”

“Oh, buck--” I fumbled the almost-sphere, dropped it entirely, and it floated up to eye level. I couldn’t understand the words themselves, but I got two things from them. First, it was definitely Kulaas. And I knew that because of the second thing - every word was a maze of interconnected meanings that ponies weren’t equipped to unpack. I could feel the edges of it thanks to whatever the computer had done to me in the test chamber. It was a greeting of mild surprise with a little tinge of hope that I might be useful and going the right way.

Or something like that. It wasn’t easy to translate. The sensation was a little like a pony finding a new pawn on the chessboard in a very important game.

“Can we take it down two notches?” I whispered. “Maybe speak in Equestrian?”

It wiggled. The surface was less like a solid gem and more like ten of them all overlapping and sharing the same space, edges and faces flowing together seamlessly and giving the impression of a liquid surface.

A spiky shape pushed to the forefront, not growing but turning in that impossible direction I’d seen in the crystalline pony wandering and searching the area. It flashed yellow.

“Yes,” it said. It was Celestia’s voice, but clipped and somehow flat.

“Great,” I replied. “Do you have a weapon or--”

It flashed blue. “No.”

Red light filled the room. I looked over my shoulder and saw that twisted mess of triangles standing at the open doorway facing me with a blank expression. Not having eyes made its expression especially blank, but it definitely had a mouth, the thing’s snout distorting and twisting open in a way that would dislocate a real pony’s jaw.

For lack of anything better to do, I charged it and slugged it in the face to establish dominance.

It shattered like glass. Hard edges bit into me, reforming around my hoof and trapping me with my forehoof inside it.

“Uh,” I hesitated. “That wasn’t what I expected to happen. Can I get a re-do?”

The orb flashed blue. “No.”

“I wasn’t asking you!” I shouted. I glared at the red-edged monster attached to my hoof. “If I’m attached to you, you’re attached to me,” I reminded it. I threw my weight left, and the thing had to come along with me, both of us falling over and rolling to one of the unfinished walls. I gave its hooves a kick to keep it from standing and grunted with effort, bringing it to the edge of the platform.

It went over the edge. I braced myself, grabbing onto a cone sticking out of the marble floor and trying to get a grip on the smooth surface.

The edges of the thing’s polygons tried to do the same with my hoof. I looked down at it, triangles pressing against my leg and sliding slowly downwards. Below us, the sea raged.

“Just get off me you stupid thing!” I yelled, not feeling cool enough for a one-liner. My hooves were slipping. The monster wailed like a broken loudspeaker and lost its grip. Triangles clipped through me like they were made of air and shadows. It fell away, vanishing before even hitting the water and simply blinking into nothing, there one moment and gone the next.

I backed away from the edge. I really didn’t want that to happen to me.

Blue. “No.”

I looked up at the orb. “All you can say is ‘yes’ and ‘no’?”

Yellow. “Yes.”

I sighed. “I asked Kulaas to simplify things, I shouldn’t be upset that it did exactly what I asked.” I stood up and took a deep breath of nothing. It wasn’t calming or bracing. The sheer emptiness of it all made a distant part of my brain panic about drowning. “There has to be some way to get that gate open.”

“Yes.”

I sighed. It wasn’t useless information, exactly. It was just the next best thing to useless. I reminded myself that it was good to know that a solution existed, even if I didn’t have a cheat sheet for it.

It took me a full two minutes to think about finding where that beam of liquid light I’d followed actually ended up, and then another minute to push a pyramid-shaped block into its path in the right spot to shoot it through two windows, threading the eye of a needle and casting it into the closed gate, which silently swung open.

“Yes,” the orb agreed with a question I hadn’t asked. I chose to believe it was saying I was clever and doing a good job.

It seemed like my job was escorting the beam, or maybe I had that exactly backwards. I followed it out onto a bridge and trotted into the void. That storm was almost on top of me now, and lightning was striking close enough that being out in the open, high up with nowhere to run, was seeming like a bad idea.

I sped up, abandoning caution and hoping things would stay solid.

A platform appeared so suddenly it popped into place in front of me. A tremor ran through my legs and I wasn’t sure how real the feeling was but I jumped for it either way, spreading my wings even though the air refused to allow me even a tiny bit of lift. I landed heavily and rolled to a stop, lying on my back and feeling exhausted somewhere deep inside. It wasn’t like SIVA eating me alive - I was very familiar with that - it was more like the feather flu, a sense of unwellness creeping up inch by inch.

“I’m starting to see why the Imaginseers didn’t like these simulations,” I sighed. I sat up and looked around. The platform was cracked in straight lines that all intersected at precise angles, forty-five degrees to what I was sure was mathematical precision. Dim light glowed through the marbled composite of stone and metal, and just for a moment, I could almost catch a glimpse of it from some far-off place. A blueprint of a circuit.

The orb floated in front of me, breaking me out of that out-of-body haze and drawing my attention to what was actually perched on the broken platform.

It was a castle. No, that’s not exactly right. It was the silhouette of a castle, the outline of walls and towers in a facade, and I was on the wrong side of it. I could see the web of supports holding the panels in place, braces sunk into the stone like teeth biting the earth and hanging on. Gaps between them let light escape through the cracks.

I carefully made my way through the barricade. The light was as bright as full sunlight, and that made it almost blinding after all that gloom. The light I’d been chasing flowed through windows in the outer metal layers of the onion-like citadel, and in the center was a beam of light stretching up to the sky and cutting through the clouds, forming an eye the storm swirled around angrily. I shielded my eyes against the glare and looked into the middle of that blaze.

Kulaas. She was standing in the center of the wide shaft of light. She looked like Celestia, but I could see through it. It was just a convenient shortcut for her to explain herself without words. There were layers of metaphor wrapped around it, reminding me of my experiences with Alpha, that she was powerful and godlike and benevolent, and a hundred other things.

In the same place, I saw Destiny’s mother, who had created the hyper-processing super-maneframe and imprinted her own mind on it, though it had evolved so far since then that she was just a distant part of the fossil record.

In another layer of reality, I saw an infinite constellation of fractal stars sending thoughts along circuits drawn in the air.

“I sure am glad to see you,” I whispered. “Do I need to get you out of here, or--”

The avatar glanced to the side, tilting its attention and head just a fraction of an inch towards the shadows.

The orb floating near me flashed blue. “No.”

I felt danger crawling. It wasn’t a sixth sense this time - the whole place was giving me the creeps so badly I wouldn’t know if a flying shark was going to drop out of the storm up above. This was the kind of danger sense that came from common sense. I ducked into the shadows where she’d indicated.

A moment later, a red-edged figure dragged a ghostlike image of a pony into the castle. Something terrible followed. The same size as Celestia’s image, but where the alicorn princess was soft light and comfort, this was all armor and power, radiating it into the air. One set of draconic wings was held up like a cobra’s hood, making her seem even larger and more intimidating. A second set was against her sides. Invulnerable iron scales armored her body. Talons clicked against the stone.

“Please, don’t do this,” the ghostly pony begged. They were just barely here, looking more like smoke than a living being.

“Now, now,” my mother said. She motioned to the wall, and the shape was thrown into an alcove, red light flooding through it. The pony screamed in terrible agony. “All ponies have the desire to be useful. Once we break down that ego of yours, you’ll become part of me and do more good than you can even imagine.”

While I watched, the ghostly shape froze. It reminded me of water droplets turning into snowflakes. Crystalline shards grew through it, building on each other and twisting, eating into the pony and distorting the ghost as if it was a living pony on some terrible rack. Within just a few seconds, it slumped forward, another one of the things joining the one that had shoved it into that torture device. They were all but identical now.

“Better,” Lemon Zinger said, nodding in approval. “But we’re not alone, are we?”

She turned suddenly to look into the shadows.

“I sense a presence. Another pony.”

I backed up and hit the wall. Her faceless minions were on me before I could come up with a plan, shoving me out into the harsh light at the center of the faux-castle’s courtyard.

I tried to get up, but the two red-edged digital abominations held me in place. I couldn’t get the leverage I’d need to break free.

“Chamomile,” she said. “I thought I had you locked away.”

“Just can’t keep a good pony down,” I grunted. My mother shook her head and put a hoof on my back, refuting me by literally holding me there.

“You couldn’t have broken in here on your own. You don’t have the training or talent for it.” She looked around and found the orb that had come with me, then looked from there to Kulaas. “Ah, I see. Cute, but pointless.”

“Is that a pun because it’s round?” I asked.

My mother sighed. “Yes, very amusing. Are there any other stupid questions you’d like to get out of the way before we move on to my inevitable victory?”

“How did you get me in here?” I demanded. “Why can’t I remember anything?”

Lemon motioned at the empty air and boxes appeared, opening up like huge eyes and showing a view through some combination of security cameras and images set at impossible angles were there couldn’t possibly have been anything watching. I watched the images in the floating panels. It kicked something inside me to life. Memories came flooding back.

---

“Can you get it open?” I asked. I wasn’t panicking. I was staying very calm and cool and holding back the octopus-like thing that had been a severed talon not long ago. Black oil dripped from teeth that were being forged somewhere inside it and popping into place, assembling a deadly smile while I watched.

It lunged forward, and I held the vial of sunlight higher. The thing hissed and scuttled back. A dozen eyes on stalks rimmed the lipless fangs. Everything it touched was corroding. I wasn’t sure if it was just the hazardous chemical ichor leaking out of the thing or if SIVA was actively eating away the floor under it. Neither option was great.

“Almost!” Lathe yelled back. “We have two keys and there’s only one keyhole!”

“In the movie, the keys combined,” Embe said.

“How do we do that?” Lathe asked.

“They didn’t really explain it,” Embe rasped. “It was magic that came from the Prince’s purity of heart.”

“Try just smacking them together!” I called back. “Oh no you don’t!” I held the talisman higher, forcing the thing back. It spat a stream of something awful at me. I don’t think it was even corrosive, just extremely gross. I ducked under it.

“These are unique, delicate…” Lathe trailed off. “We’ll try smacking them together. Lightly.”

She tapped her huge sword-sized key against Embe’s like they were play-acting a duel in a middle-school drama. Nothing happened.

“Harder?” Embe suggested.

“That’s what she said!” I joked. I needed to joke because the smell from the monster was getting really bad. It was also starting to develop a worryingly thick skin of oily scales that didn’t seem to be burning or blistering in the light.

They brought the keys together harder, and sparks flashed between them. The blades locked. Some mechanism, probably with clever magnets and springs and a lot of love put into it, held the keys in a cross and let them unfold, gold and silver shards intertwining and supporting each other, forming an intricate, third key that actually looked like it’d fit into the hole.

“That did it!” Lathe yelled excitedly. “Embe, would you do the honors?”

“Oh, thank you,” Embe said, holding the combined key carefully and easing it into the vault door. It slid in smoothly, and there was a click audible even over the steam venting from the hissing monster I was facing down. I backed towards the door.

“Once it opens, we’ll run inside,” I said. “If we kill the main body, this thing should die, too.” I really should have gotten Acadia to make me an extra vial. Or ten. Enough to hose the whole stupid room down.

“It’s opening!” Embe said.

“Look at those hinges,” Lathe gasped. “And the interlocking armored bolts! It would take a megaspell to get through that! It’s beautiful!”

The pressure in the room changed. I think I was the only one to feel it. The air inside the vault should have been cold and dry. It blew out, hot and acrid like somepony breathing on the back of my neck.

Danger. Terrible danger. I could taste the oncoming doom.

“Run!” I gaped.

Something that had been a wing or a talon or just a twist of metal and flesh rotted down to a skeletal core of pistons and leaden, dead steel reached out. I pushed Embe and Lathe out of the way but I couldn’t save myself. I dropped the bottle of sunlight, the crystal tinking on the ground. I reached for it, but the claw was faster.

It snatched me up, knives burrowing into my flesh, and dragged me into the shadows.

---

“We got the door open but…” I whispered.

Mom nodded. “Actually, you solved a little problem for me.”

I looked up at her in confusion.

“It needs a living core,” she explained. “I suppose it was too much to ask for that vampire to sit and place nice.” My mother sighed. The storm rumbled. “Can’t you cooperate for me this one time, Chamomile? It won’t take long, and then I’ll have Kulaas under my control. You can’t imagine what that will mean!”

“I can guess,” I said. “Kulaas is the only thing with enough brainpower to use SIVA to its full potential.”

“Exactly.” Mom nodded and stepped up to the center of the platform, looking down through the shield of light at the form inside it. Kulaas looked back silently. Lightning cracked into the wall between them, the bolts stopped dead by whatever firewall or sorcery it represented. “We’re like insects compared to it. It can barely communicate with us, because the ideas it has are too big.”

“I can understand her just fine,” I said with a shrug.

My Mom stopped, blinking, and turned to look at me. “What?”

“Maybe it’s because we’re just on the same wavelength, but also maybe because she tweaked my brain a little bit the last time we talked.” I looked at Kulaas. She gave me a tiny, phantom smile, that image of Celestia overlaid with something abstract and otherworldly. I could see both at the same time. “Right now she’s telling me I can win.”

Lemon Zinger laughed. “That’s… Chamomile, you’ve grown into a confident mare, despite all the damage your father did. I’d love to know why you think you can win here, of all places, where your physical strength means nothing.”

“Kulaas is smarter than either of us. She foresaw things centuries in advance. It’s just like that game in the tomb. You’re so focused on one side of the board you didn’t notice her lining things up diagonally.”

“And you being captured is part of her plans?” Mom snorted.

“Yes,” the orb said calmly, flashing yellow.

It changed shape again, infolding and rotating through that extra dimension, turning from a sphere into a long, sharp shape. A sword. It dropped down within reach, and I grabbed it with my teeth, twisting and cutting one of the faceless creatures apart. The edge chopped through it along a line that didn’t quite make sense with just three directions but still cleaved it in half, the polygons blurring and falling apart with a terrible scream of static.

“Not a club,” I sighed.

“Yes,” the sword replied.

The second monster backed up in confusion and alarm. Only a few moments ago it had been a pony. I couldn’t see any trace of that ghost here now. It had been pulled apart and put back together, turned inside out in a way that had sounded like the worst torture possible. I knew what I’d want if somepony had found me in that state.

I struck it down before it could get far, then turned to my mom. She looked down at me with obvious annoyance.

“Chamomile, enough,” she said firmly. “You have no idea what you’re doing! I am going to save all of Equestria, and all I need is this one last little piece!”

“I saw what you did to that pony,” I reminded her. “How is that saving Equestria?”

“Oh, bah,” she scoffed. “Everything in this place is a metaphor, Chamomile. I simply erased his will and replaced it with my own. He would have been a good soldier, a useful part of society, but now he’s gone. You erased his mind. Instead of a happy productive pony, there’s just a braindead shell.”

“He was already gone after what you did to him.”

She shrugged. “That’s a matter of opinion. I think his friends and family would have disagreed. They would have said he was better than ever. Always even-tempered, never forgetful, doing his part for a better Equestria. One where every pony is a part of a greater being. Me.”

My mother grew larger. She spread her wings, carrying her out of the way before my sword-swipe could catch her. I tried to go after her, but I still couldn’t get in the air.

“That’s not fair!” I complained. “How come you can fly and I can’t?!”

“Rules exist to govern those that need to be governed,” she said. Her body started shifting and changing, scales on her shoulders peeling up and growing into more heads, one green and one red. The blue scales on her face shifted, her snout lengthening and fangs appearing.

“I am not nearly armed enough for this,” I mumbled around the sword.

Kulaas made a tiny coughing sound, barely audible. I looked at her. She tilted her head. The light shifted. A white, almost featureless box popped into existence next to me. The computer smiled at me. Maybe if it had made another thousand, I could have stacked them up to reach where my mom was flying.

“CHAMOMILE!” Lemon roared, her voice an echoing chorus. “BE A GOOD GIRL AND GO BACK TO SLEEP!”

Her maws opened to reveal terrible light and flame. I yelped and ducked behind the only cover I could see, that stupid box Kulaas had made. The torrent of destruction flowed around me. If any of this had been real, it would have turned the rock into magma and I would have baked alive. In the flawed simulation, the deadly breath didn’t touch me directly, and the ground simply wasn’t designed to react to it.

It wasn’t at all like real life. It was like the test chamber. The one Kulaas had deliberately made me go through to teach me how it worked.

“Yes,” the sword said.

I got on top of the box, grabbed it, and jumped. The box came along with me, and I jumped off it again in midair. It was something that only worked when the local physical laws had been written by underpaid and overworked interns. A series of quick hops took me up into the air and above my mother while the three-headed dragon she’d become watched in confusion.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” it asked, honestly and totally bewildered.

“Something stupid!” I yelled back. I let the box go and fell along with it. My mom hadn’t been prepared for this. She was smart, so she’d only made plans for things that made sense. She knocked me aside, knowing the sword was a real threat, but ignored the box.

That was a big mistake.

The box hit her, and even though it had been all but weightless while I was holding it, free-falling like this it abruptly had mass. She was flung down onto the top edges of the castle walls, narrow spaces that had never been designed for ponies to interact with. She clipped through the steel and a terrible sound filled the air, a hundred sound effects playing at once that all sounded like ponies saying ‘oof’ and tin cans with rocks in them being rattled.

I landed more or less safely, in a big heap but without being hurt. My mother was less safe. She was instantly jerking from one place to another, her body stretching and distorting in the simulated space, every point on her body trying to fling itself out of the collision zone in a different direction.

Kulaas looked at me and smiled a little more than before.

I picked up the sword where I’d dropped it and walked over to her.

“GET ME OUT OF HERE!” the dragon demanded.

“No,” the sword said.

“I warned you about her plans,” I reminded my mother. I brought the sword down, and in an instant, her body flashed between positions. That single swipe cut her a dozen times in a hundred directions. She shattered with a scream, vanishing along with pain and pressure I hadn’t even realized I’d been feeling.

The storm above us faded. The green lightning vanished. The clouds gave way to blue skies and white, puffy, happy clouds.

Kulaas cleared her throat.

I looked back at her.

I saw the computer struggle for what was a moment for me and probably the equivalent of hours for her as the hyper-processors tried to remember how to speak to ponies.

“Thank you,” she said.

I nodded and returned her smile. Everything went white.

Comments

[Thought Prism]

Oh my god the way you resolved that was perfect, I'm grinning ear to ear.

[Just a tree]

This is very nice, that sort-of-Destiny's mom is helping Chamomile fight her own mom.

[Reese]

"if you in a very literal and not metaphorically stripped"
"if you in a very literal and not metaphorical sense stripped"?

"its flat black faucets, glinting"
"its flat black facets, glinting"?

"All I say in there was a polyhedron"
"All I saw in there was a polyhedron"?

"that vampire to sit and place nice"
"that vampire to sit and play nice"?

Thanks for writing!