Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 120: There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow

I pushed against the membrane covering me. It felt like rotting meat slick with bile and blood. The tight, rubbery envelope stretched and pushed back, too soft and tough to simply rip. I started to panic. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see. I thrashed in alarm and felt my leg catch against the elastic barrier, tearing into it. I pushed my way through, gasping for breath. Slime dripped from me and I was thrown back out into the world, shivering and shaking like a newborn foal.

“B-buck,” I spat, after clearing my throat. Everything tasted like lime juice, harshly acidic and bitter. I tried to stand and tripped. My hooves were still tangled up in thick black cables. Pulling myself free felt like I was ripping out of the innards of some huge creature, and when I started to get a better look around myself, I realized that’s exactly what I’d done.

The Black Dragon, what was left of it, was all around me. I’d gotten free from what had been a ribcage that was, well, dragon-sized, and that meant it was big enough to swallow ponies whole. Even bigger-than-average pegasus mares like me. Something moved in the corner of my vision. I stumbled and tried to turn to face it, only to find one of the dragon’s wings collapsing, the metal bones pulling free of titanium tendons and slumping down into a pool of melting flesh.

“It’s dead?” I whispered, hoping it was true. Everything I could see was just bones forged out of what part of my brain recognized as foamed metal, lightweight and strong and impossible to build without micromachines like SIVA. The skull stared back at me from empty eye sockets. There wasn’t a trace of life in what was left. More than that, it was melting away into nothing. I knew it had been badly injured before by sunlight and a spear right into its heart, but it must have just been barely hanging on.

I gave it a tentative kick, tapping it and running back a step to see if it reacted. It didn’t respond any more vigorously than a rock might.

“I did it! Take that, Mom! So much for disappointing life decisions now, huh?”

I gave the skull a harder kick, and it rolled onto its side. It was at that moment that I remembered I hadn’t come here alone. I had no idea how long I’d been in the simulation. With the way these things worked, it could have been an hour like it felt like or it could have been two minutes. Or two decades.

The vault was a circular room, and the way back out was obvious. I ran from the disintegrating skeleton to the only door. There had to be a way to open it from this side. No sane pony would make it hard to leave after spending all that effort to get in.

I found a big red lever and pulled it. The doors hissed open. Black gunk fell from the gaps in the frame, dead SIVA dissolving into metallic mud.

“Embe!” I shouted. “Lathe! Are you--”

“Chamomile!” Embe grabbed me in a big hug. “You’re not dead!”

“Thank buck,” I sighed. “Are you okay?” I returned the hug and released her, taking a step back to give her a careful look. She didn’t seem eaten, poisoned, or torn apart. She was still an undead horror but that was normal.

“I’m fine too, thank you,” Lathe said. “It was very inconsiderate of you to get swallowed up like that.” The Imaginseer took off her respirator mask and looked at me with what she was trying to make a stern gaze but came across as worry. “We had to fight off that creature all on our own!”

She pointed.

The thing that had been a fragment of the Black Dragon and turned into a horrible acid and corruption-spewing creature was melting away just like the rest. Something bright and shimmering was all over it, reminding me of sunlight playing across water on a really clear day. Scorch marks surrounded what was left of it. It almost looked like it had exploded.

“You dropped the bottle when you got sucked in,” Embe explained. “After a little while the creature stopped being scared of it, so we had to open it and splash it.”

“As I calculated, it destroyed it,” Lathe explained. “I remembered how sunlight affected the infected creatures in the forest. I assumed this would work the same way, and it did.”

“She screamed a lot and threw the bottle into the monster’s mouth,” Embe said, nodding in agreement.

“I yelled a battle cry and remained fully in control of the situation,” Lathe corrected. “After eating the bottle, it started emitting flames.”

“We ran around screaming while it was chasing us and on fire,” Embe offered.

“We avoided the creature’s death throes until it finally collapsed, and then we started planning a way to save you,” Lathe said. “Unfortunately, after the door closed again, the infection in this place grew through the lock and blocked it.”

“It’s all over now,” I assured them. “I killed it from the inside. I think.”

“And are you… okay?” Embe asked.

I paused before answering. I’d just been through a lot so it was a good idea to take stock. I didn’t feel the horrible crawling death inside me of SIVA-based machines tearing themselves apart inch by inch after getting a face full of junk code from my mom. I wasn’t even sore or tired anymore, and I’d been exhausted before all the way down to my bones.

“I think I feel… pretty good,” I said. But I was starting to notice little things. I was sure I hadn’t had two long fangs before. And Embe looked a tiny bit shorter. And my left wing was tangled in my saddlebag.

Trauma reared its ugly head, got confused, and asked me to get a second opinion. I blinked and looked back at where I’d been missing a significant chunk of my body. I had to pull the mostly-ruined and still-damp saddlebag out of the way to see.

I spread my left wing gingerly.

“Oh my gosh, it’s back! It’s--” I stopped and frowned. “Wait a minute.” I was sure I didn’t have weird claw-tipped batlike wings before.

I gave it a few test flaps. My reflexes seemed to work, but it was a little like waking up with different legs -- even if you can walk around on them just fine, there were subtle differences. Scales lined the exposed skin, colored the dark blue of gunmetal. And a second key point politely cleared its throat and brought itself to my attention. The scales reaching up my legs like metal socks had vanished, replaced with perfectly-normal skin and fur on all four legs, including the foreleg that I knew I’d left somewhere in the ocean after it had tried to kill me.

“There’s definitely going to be some kind of catch to this,” I said wisely. I wasn’t an ultra-powerful mega-maneframe but I could still predict the future.

“May I?” Lathe asked. I held up my leg for her to examine.

She pushed past me into the vault, ignoring me. The Imaginseer pulled open a sealed drawer, the seal popping with a hiss. Inside were laminated sheets of paper. She held one up to look at it.

“Look at all this!” she gasped. “It’s amazing!”

On the paper was a pencil sketch showing a family of cartoon alligators.

“It’s some of the original development material for Gabby Gator!” Lathe explained. She reverently put it back, then checked another drawer. “And there’s so much more! Ideas for park rides he was never able to build! Plans for more advanced animatronics! It’s everything he wasn’t able to do in his lifetime.”

I walked in with Embe to look over Lathe’s shoulder at the plans. It showed a vastly different park to what was out there now. No crystals or virtual rides. Entire new sections of the park showcasing curated experiences from around the world, different places and times and some that were entirely fantastic, like a whole park area designed around the idea of a journey to the moon.

“That’s kind of neat,” I admitted.

Lathe wiped a tear from her eye. “He must have locked it away so the new park owners, the ones who didn’t care about his vision, wouldn’t destroy it. He saved it all for the future, and a hope that ponies in the future would appreciate it.”

“Are you going to take it all back to ETROT?” I asked.

Lathe shook her head. “No. The originals should stay here. We can’t build the park he wanted. Not yet. I believe we’ll be able to do it someday, and I want to leave it here so those future ponies can remember where it came from.”

She hovered her tablet over the pages, taking careful pictures.

“A digital backup wouldn’t be a bad idea, though. And I want to show them off to my brother.”

I smiled and nodded, patting her carefully on the back.

Embe gasped and grabbed my hoof, getting my attention and leading me over to a different shelf. “Chamomile, look!”

Among the prototypes and sketches were complete collections of all the cartoons Welsh Rarebit had made. The ones Embe had been watching were worn-out, faded, and glitchy. These looked pack-fresh, the tapes still sealed in plastic wrappers.

She looked at me, her glowing eyes glimmering with excitement. “They have all the movies!”

“Multiple copies, too,” I confirmed.

“Now I’ll finally know how the movie about the robot falling in love with another robot ends!” Embe growled, excited.

“There are some here that we didn’t even have broken copies of,” I said. “I bet the ponies at the resort will want to organize a movie night. Nopony has had anything new to watch for two hundred years.”

Embe nodded and started putting tapes into her bags, being very careful with them. I stepped back to let her rummage around and tripped over the vertebrae of a long, lashing tail.

“Should we do something about the bones?” Embe asked.

I looked up at the skeleton and brushed myself off. It wasn’t really dusty in here, but we’d made a mess of the place between the dragon tunneling in and then having the monster mostly melt away.

“Nah,” I decided. “Maybe those future ponies can put it in a museum about the history of the park. I don’t need big metal bones for anything.” And I could probably grow my own. “But you know what I do need?”

Embe tilted her head, thinking. “A bath,” she decided.

If a ghoul was saying that, it was definitely the truth. “I was going to say ‘a drink’ but yeah, we’ll start with a bath.”

---

“Come on, Chamomile,” Embe said. “You can do it!”

I was standing in the doorway leading out of the utilidors. My hooves were an inch away from the bright sunlight of the outdoors thanks to a break in the ashfall, and I was paralyzed with a sudden fear.

I made my saddest face. “I don’t wanna catch on fire!”

“You’re not going to catch on fire,” Embe promised.

“It’s not impossible, actually,” Lathe said, her voice distorted by her respirator. “Her body had to be repaired by the micromachines inside the dragon, and you saw how the liquid sunlight made that creature in the vault burn. It reminded me of a magnesium fire. Almost impossible to put out unless you have a bucket of sand.”

“...Could you please…?” I asked.

“Hm? Oh!” Lathe blinked. “Sure! One moment.” She ran off to get a bucket.

Embe sat down and watched her go. “She’s a strange pony.”

“She’d be much more interested in me if I had some visible pistons and gears,” I said. I adjusted the barding I was wearing. At least it hadn’t gotten eaten by the dragon’s SIVA. Maybe whatever metal it was made of was just too tough to process like that. “I swear half my gear went missing. Where’d my glue gun go? And my prosthetic foreleg?”

Embe shrugged. “Maybe they got taken apart to make your new leg and wing.”

“I guess the material had to come from somewhere,” I conceded. I spread my new wings. At least I didn’t get the worst of both worlds and have mismatched wings. Spending time with a certain lovely batpony had taught me that bat-wings, and probably dragon wings, weren’t really good for soaring like pegasus wings. There was a lot more flapping involved.

“I found something that should work!” Lathe yelled, running back with a hat in her telekinetic grip.

“You want me to wear a fancy hat?” I asked, looking at the wide-brimmed sunhat. It did have a cute ribbon. “I mean, it would probably help, but--”

“I filled it with sand,” Lathe said. “I couldn’t find a bucket.”

“Oh.”

“I also brought a fire extinguisher in case the sand doesn’t work. And if we don’t need the sand at all, you can wear the hat.”

“Can I have a hat too?” Embe asked.

“Yes,” Lathe said. “But first we have to deal with this.”

Embe nodded and, motivated by a primal undead hunger for headwear, she ducked under my outstretched wing and got behind me, shoving my dumb flank out into the sunlight. I screamed like a little filly.

The scream ended in a wet hack, and I spat out a glob of glue. It splattered onto Lathe’s face.

“Oh hey, I’m not on fire! And I found where the glue gun went!”

Lathe dumped the sand onto my head.

---

“Radaway isn’t that bad,” I said. Getting back to the resort had been a quiet, strange walk that let me stretch my legs and make sure everything was in the right spot. Since my reflexes seemed on point and I wasn’t having any weird phantom limb syndrome or tripping over myself, I guessed it meant everything was hooked up correctly.

After we’d gotten inside, we’d retreated to the safety of one of the small restaurants in the hotel buildings. I’d had to order for Lathe. She didn’t have a season pass like Embe and I did. The robots were still happy to scan her and give her needed medical supplies but refused to serve any alcohol.

Lathe shot me a glare. “I wouldn’t have to drink it at all if you hadn’t broken my respirator with all that glue. Do you have any idea how difficult it’s going to be to fix that?”

“Should I be drinking it too?” Embe asked.

Lathe and I looked at the ghoul. “Probably not,” I said. “It’s probably not good for you. It might even be poison.”

“At worst it might be caustic,” Lathe considered. “Ghouls need radiation and Radaway is designed to purge it from tissues.”

Embe leaned back from the table in alarm. “Oh.”

“After I finish this I’m going to go back to ETROT,” Lathe said. “The rest of the Imaginseers will go nuts when they see what we uncovered! I might even be promoted! Union rules allow for up to two promotions in assignment if the pony is giving exceptional service.”

“Mm.” Embe nodded. “I want to watch the movies we found.”

I nodded. “And I want another bath. That quick shower felt more like the robots were hosing me down to prevent contamination.”

“What are you going to do after this?” Lathe asked. “This place is going to be a little less exciting since you killed the only giant monster and blew up most of the raiders.”

“Good question,” I agreed, looking into my drink like the answer might be printed on the bottom of the glass. “I think I better figure that out.”

---

The next drink I got was in the spa while I was neck-deep in water hot enough to almost count as simmering. It didn’t have any answers for me either, so I closed my eyes and relaxed, letting the bubbling bath gently massage me while I drifted off into a nap.

I knew I was dreaming because I was back home. Not just in the Enclave, but actually all the way back home, in the little crevasse caught between two storm fronts that I’d grown up in after my dad and mom split up.

I was also much shorter.

“You’re not very good at this game,” the other pony said. I wasn’t sure who they were. I was too busy focusing on the board in front of me. It was a little like chess and a little like checkers and I knew I could win if I lined things up correctly but the exact rules were fuzzy and I was having problems remembering what I was supposed to do next.

“I could definitely beat you at hoofball,” I countered. I reached for a piece on the board. I was playing black. My opponent had red pieces. Some of the pieces weren’t either color, or kept changing between them, making it hard to know what would happen. I took a safe move, sliding a pegasus knight along the edge of the board, far from the rest.

“It’s too bad we’re not playing hoofball,” the pony sitting across from me said. The filly considered the board for a moment and moved her pieces. I couldn’t see what she was doing. Her pieces were too far away. All I knew was that she had control of the center and still had her giant ship lurking somewhere.

“It’s not fair,” I sighed. “I hate doing all this planning.”

“You have to think about what she’s going to do next,” the pony sitting behind me advised. She was very tall, and very pretty, and I couldn’t see her face. She felt like somepony else’s mother, or maybe a teacher. She waved a hoof over the board and for a moment the fog of war cleared. Things were even worse than I thought. There were only a few moves left until the endgame.

“I can’t win with just these pieces!” I complained, looking at my paltry forces. It wasn’t a balanced game. I really only had my knight. There were other pieces but I couldn’t reach them because they were on the other side of the board and my hooves didn’t go that far.

“The goal of the great game isn’t to take every piece,” my advisor said. “All you need to do to win is defeat that.”

She pointed to my opponent’s giant cloudship.

“How am I supposed to do that?” I asked.

“You have all these yet to play,” my advisor said. I had pieces on the side, ones I’d put aside many turns ago. I picked one up to examine it. A ship, just like the one my opponent had. But it wasn’t even on the board anymore.

“But how does it work?” I asked. “I’m all the way over here!”

“You have to think inside the box,” my advisor said. She moved the black ship, knocking over the red one and sending them both off the board, falling into a trash can along with the broken bits of pieces that had been discarded before I was even born.

“It won’t work,” my opponent advised. “I’m smarter than you.”

I looked up at her. Cozy Glow’s eyes were filled with crazed dedication and desire. Unfocused. There was something terrible sitting right behind her, whispering strategies into her ear. It placed more pieces on the board, and I don’t think my opponent even noticed that they weren’t quite the right color.

The shadowy figure smiled, and the dream shattered.

---

“It was definitely one of those prophetic dreams,” I said.

“Or it means you shouldn’t have eaten an entire cheese platter before falling asleep in the bath,” Fog Cutter suggested. “Cheese always does that to me. Well, not cheese exactly. It’s sort of a prepared cheese-like product made from bacteria in the protein synthesizer, but it still does terrible things to the sleeping mind.”

I groaned. With the break in the ashfall, ponies were spending what time they could outside. We were sitting at the edge of the pool, and I was enjoying splashing my hooves in the water now that the feelings weren’t dulled by a layer of steel scales.

“There’s no way off the island anyway,” Fog Cutter reminded me. “Everypony who wanted to leave took the last boats more than a century ago. None of them came back. I doubt it’s because they found someplace happier.”

“They’re probably dead,” I conceded. “Lathe said the same thing. At best I could get a raft together and maybe they’d be able to figure out an engine for it, but that’s not suited to ocean travel. One decent storm and I’d be wiped out.”

“She’s right,” Fog Cutter agreed. “Hey, what happened to your…” He held up his hoof, showing the bracelet that marked him as a season pass holder. “Without it you shouldn’t be able to order drinks.”

I very pointedly took a long sip of my Bloody Mary, which I’d ordered because I also wanted a snack and it came topped with half a salad.

“I think my body ate it like the GLUU Gun. Or the computer in charge of everything here decided to comp things for me because she owes me like, a million favors.”

“So what you’re saying is, everypony is grateful you’re here, and you’ve saved a bunch of lives, maybe the world, and the second there’s no looming threat and you’re not in pain, you want to take off and go somewhere worse?”

“It does sound stupid when you put it like that.”

“Trust me, there’s no way to make it sound smart.”

“Smart or not I still need to do it.” I held up a hoof to stop him. “I know other ponies can take care of things. I don’t even really have a plan. The problem is I left a lot of friends behind and I can’t relax knowing they’re still in danger.”

“I guess that goes along with being a--”

“A hero?” I suggested.

“I was going to say ‘a decent friend’.”

“Neither one’s very accurate, but I can try my best to be a better friend.”

---

“This definitely isn’t necessary,” I said.

Lathe hushed me. “Chuck, increase the power to level seven.”

“Level seven?!” Chuck gasped. “Lathe, I don’t know if it can handle that kind of power!”

Lathe rolled her eyes and looked back at him. “Level seven is barely halfway up the dial!”

I groaned and tried not to move. I’d been lying on the sickbay exam table for close to an hour now and I had to stay still and try not to even breathe while Lathe poked and prodded me to see if I was likely to explode into flames, glue, or dragons.

Chuck leaned against the control bank. “That’s my point. We’re not getting any results with the scanner because she’s too dense. No offense. I meant literally dense. You’re full of many heavy metals.”

“I am full of heavy metals,” I agreed. “It’s mostly in my skin. It’s like a layer of foil.”

“Hmmm… Maybe…”

“You aren’t allowed to flay me just to get a better X-ray,” I said politely but firmly.

“Fine, turn it up to eleven,” Lathe said. “Wait, no, that’s stupid. That would be dangerous.”

I sighed in relief. Lathe stepped over to a closet and pulled out two thick padded coats and gave one to her brother, then she put on a heavy welding mask.

“I almost forgot the safety gear!” Lathe laughed. “Okay, hit it, Chuck. Level eleven.”

---

“I’m gonna be sick again,” I groaned. I was lying on a slightly spongy floor, like linoleum that had something awful happen to it and was rotting from underneath. Everything was going dark, but that was mostly because the swamp witch believed that dramatic lighting was the only kind that counted.

“Do not vomit on my floor,” Acadia warned. “Maid, get de stupid sick pony some fermented ginger tea. Dat will settle her stomach.”

“She said it was only half of a lethal dose, but then she took a second set of pictures!” I moaned. A cup of tea was put in front of me. I took it gratefully and sipped at it. It was astringent and bitter and spicy and I was pretty sure Bird of Paradise had still poisoned it even though I was already sick from radiation.

“Is dere a reason you came here instead of finding elsewhere to curl up an’ die?” Acadia asked pointedly.

I looked up at her. “I had a really bad idea.”

“Dat is surely nothing new.”

“A while back, my sister and I needed to go from the cloud layers to the surface and we didn’t have a transport or anything, so she used these teleport beacon things,” I said. “They were like, crystal-tipped spears and they focused the spell so it would work properly at really long ranges.”

“And?” Acadia asked.

“I was thinking if we built some and hooked them up to the FastPass network, I could hop on a pad and teleport all the way back to the Enclave.”

“An’ you want me to build dem.”

I gave her my saddest kicked-puppy look. “Please?”

---

Embe watched Lathe and me as we marked out spots around one of the least-used FastPass kiosks. It used to offer access to a beach on the east side of the island that nopony used anymore. If we blew it up, it wouldn’t cause problems for anypony.

“We should really run a few tests,” Lathe said. “Union rules say that you never put ponies on a ride before you’ve done extensive testing for weight and balance using test dummies.”

“This isn’t a ride,” I reminded her. I checked the compass, then moved one of the crystal-tipped staves a little to the right. “I’m pretty sure that’s due east…”

“A failed teleportation spell won’t just kill you, it could turn you inside out, or disintegrate you into atoms, or do something really crazy like replace you with your evil counterpart from another dimension!”

I blinked and looked at Lathe. “Really?”

“Ancient union rumors say it happened during the first round of tests. There’s a line in the FastPass safety manual about ponies with goatees. If one exits a FastPass kiosk, you’re supposed to imprison them until their moral alignment can be confirmed with a standard battery of tests.”

“You can test for evil?”

“Oh sure. The Ministry of Morale printed pamphlets. You sit the pony down in front of this machine that measures their autonomic responses and read a series of questions to them to see if they have empathy.”

“Did it work?”

Lathe scoffed and chuckled. “If it didn’t work it wouldn’t be in the manual!” She held up one of the crystal staves and examined it closely.

“I think I remember a test like that,” Embe said quietly. “They kept asking me about turtles. I don’t understand why turtles are important.”

“They’re a standard unit of measurement for morality,” Lathe explained. “It’s important to have standards and diagrams, like the standard reference pear used in technical drawings. Without a pear, you’d have no idea how to read them correctly!”

I looked at Embe. The ghoul shrugged. She didn’t understand it either.

“Speaking of which, where did you get the plans for these?” Lathe indicated the teleport enhancers.

“Acadia was able to put something together from my descriptions,” I explained. “She said they probably won’t work more than once, if they don’t immediately rip open a hole into the abyss or explode.”

“And you’re still willingly doing this?” Lathe questioned. “If you give me… a year tops, I can get some kind of boat or airship together! Slower, but much safer and with a near-zero chance of a dimensional rift!”

“Near-zero?”

Lathe shrugged. “You never know for sure. Boats are complicated.”

“I’d love to spend a few months lying in the sun, but I’m worried about what’s happening back home.” I looked up at the clouds. These were just normal, puffy wild clouds, not at all like the glaciated hard-packed clouds that made up the floor of the Enclave. “I’m pretty sure this is another one of those world-ending things that needs to be stopped.”

“And we can’t go with you?” Embe asked.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I could explain the reasons. It was in the sky and Embe would fall through the clouds. Ponies might shoot a zebra on sight. I was going to do something incredibly stupid and I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be coming back even if it worked.

She didn’t argue. Embe hugged me.

“I’m sorry too,” she said quietly.

“All we have to do now is input some coordinates,” Lathe said, after giving us a moment of silence. “Do you have any idea where you need to go?”

“Here, I’ll type it in,” I said. I carefully tapped the keys on her tablet. I was going to use the same coordinates as the massed orbital strike my mother had initiated. It was the middle of nowhere, so I wasn’t likely to pop out inside a city or halfway through another pony. The numbers were frozen in my memory after that awful experience. Space travel sucked.

“Before you go, um…” Lathe coughed. “Can I…?”

“You only had to ask,” I scoffed. I pulled her into a hug.

“What are you doing? I wanted a blood sample!”

“You can have this hug instead.” I let her go. “Let’s get this thing going. Acadia warned me that it wouldn’t work if there was heavy ashfall. Something about the dark magic in the air.”

“Right.” Lathe said. She quickly whispered a small prayer and splashed me with something. “It’s, um… you’re part machine, so I’m praying for your machine spirit to protect you.”

I smiled. “I need all the help I can get.”

Lathe led Embe back, and I powered up the array, pushing the big red button Lathe had wired into the kiosk. The crystal staves started glowing, humming, and shaking.

“Are they supposed to do that?” I asked.

Lathe looked at me, then grabbed Embe and ran. I swore. The crystals surged and exploded, and I was flung into the space between spaces.

---

The FastPass teleportation charm had been one of the smoothest, cleanest transports I’d ever had. It was no worse than stepping through a door and walking into a different room. I think the average pony might not even know it happened if they were blindfolded. It would have made a great prank, teleport an unaware pony somewhere totally different and see how they react.

Clearly, they hadn’t been designed and optimized to work with jury-rigged crystal-based teleportation enhancers. It was a roller-coaster ride and I was the track, the car, and strapped in and screaming, all at the same time. I know that doesn’t make much sense, but neither did time and space.

Actually, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t survivable by a normal pony. My soul definitely tried to separate from my body at one point but couldn’t escape the metal cage around it. This was also horrifying and had implications I didn’t want to think about, but it was at least the third or fourth time I’d definitely died, so when I reappeared I wasn’t immediately thrown into absolute horror.

It did throw me enough of an emotional loop to make me forget to flap my wings. I hadn’t really flown anywhere in a long time, so my instincts there were atrophied.

I fell a hundred feet and landed on clouds.

“Owie,” I said. There wasn’t much point in exclaiming much more than that. The clouds were a perfectly soft and safe place to land, nothing hurt right in that moment, and I was okay.

The sky was huge and open and blue. I was home. Now I had to save it.

Four ponies flew above me. I blinked and sat up. They circled and landed around me, leveling beam rifles at me. All of them were wearing power armor, the flat black kind used by special forces.

“You’re in a secure area,” the leader said, their voice amplified and echoing through their helmet. They probably thought it made them sound more intimidating. “I’m going to ask you exactly once to come with us, and if you say no--”

“You’re here to arrest me?” I asked. I smiled. “Great! That’s exactly what I needed.”

I rolled over to sit up and offered my forelegs so they could cuff me.

“Take me to your leader.”

Comments

[Thought Prism]

Oh boy, is it finale time at last? I really liked that dream sequence, gives a bit of a teaser in dramatic fashion.

[Enaris]

Oh, man. That scene where she found where the glue gun went, briliant. That made my day and I cant wait how it the glue spit will be missused.

[Reese]

And I didn't notice any errors in this one. :)
I did enjoy it as usual, though; thank you for writing!
(And it looks like Welsh Rarebit isn't actually being revived yet; guess I was wrong there.)

Also: those poor special forces soldiers. They have no idea what they've just gotten themselves into. :D

[FridayPie]

This is definitely a "They will not expect it" plan