Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 128: Running from Evil

“Did it work?” I asked. I looked up through the skylight at the misty, unearthly sky above us. You couldn’t get that kind of negative black-on-white sky anywhere in Equestria, but I had to be sure.

“We’re definitely in Limbo. I can feel the same magical oddities,” Destiny said. She cast a spell that swept over the cathedral and the burned-out remains of the megaspell. “Everything went off without a hitch!”

I nodded. “What I really need to know is if we got the Red.”

“Are you implying a spell I designed might fail?” Star Swirl scoffed. “Don’t be silly.”

Just as he said that, part of the expended megaspell exploded into purple and pink sparks, releasing screaming faces made of smoke.

“That’s probably my fault somehow,” I said before anypony else could accuse me. “Destiny, this ship has some kind of sensors, right? Can you get us an accurate picture of what’s going on outside?”

Destiny nodded and plugged a terminal on wheels into the wall, tapping on the bulky keyboard. “The best radar, lidar, and divination scanners that I could build, and which fit into a very large budget.”

The deck rattled and shook under us again with something that was either an aftershock of the big impact we’d felt or a foreshock of something worse. I wasn’t sure which yet and I knew Destiny was getting a bad feeling about it just like I was.

“Oh, that’s not good,” Destiny mumbled. She had the screen turned away from me, so I had to walk around her for the dramatic reveal.

The two Exodus ships had crashed into each other and the Black had done significantly worse in the exchange. It was embedded into the front of the Exodus Red and had shattered, parts of the flying wing breaking off entirely and starting to drift away.

“The good news is the Red is definitely here with us, the bad news is we’re on fire and the ship might as well be scuttled,” Destiny reported. “This damage is worse than the orbital strikes the Exodus Red took, and we don’t have SIVA to repair it. The main structure is broken and we’re bleeding volatiles. Fuel, coolant, air, everything. The automatic damage reports might as well just be screaming and every alarm going off at once.”

“Can we contact the bridge?”

“I’m pretty sure they’re dealing with just as much as we are,” Destiny said. She pointed. “We need to get here.”

“Why?”

“Because remember how I said we’re bleeding coolant? That’s important for the arcana reactor. If it goes critical…” She trailed off.

“I have to veto any plan that involves you idiots blowing something up this close to the Cage,” Star Swirl groaned. He winced when part of the floor actually erupted into flames. “Bloody thing! The residual magic here is trying to cook off.”

“What’s the worst-case scenario?” I asked.

“I've no bloody idea,” Star Swirl admitted. “The Cage is a lot older than I am. It’s older than Equestria. Somepony went to a lot of effort to make it, and the tiny bit that it leaks releases horrors beyond our imagining. I’m in no rush to get a look at where the nightmares come from.”

“Good point. So I’ll go stop the reactor from exploding,” I sighed. “It’s no problem.”

“Chamomile, the last time you tried to operate a reactor you caused a meltdown in Seaquestria,” Destiny reminded me.

“That wasn’t my fault! I was possessed at the time. There was sort of this weird memory-sharing thing from a SIVA hivemind.”

“Oh, so you’ve taken a graduate course in Engineering and high-energy reactor design since then?”

“...No.”

“Exactly. That’s why I’m going,” Destiny said. “Star Swirl, can you…?”

“Clean this up?” Star Swirl suggested. “That’s my life in a nutshell. Cleaning up monsters and messes that other ponies left behind. I’ll make sure this doesn’t find a way to go off again, and then I’m going to warn the Princess that somepony did something extraordinarily stupid.”

“It can’t be that stupid, it’s the same thing she did.”

“She’s a bloody child with the power of a thousand exploding stars. That’s a recipe for stupid if I know it.” Star Swirl adjusted his hat. “Get going. I’m leaving this ship as soon as I can and so should you. Being on a haunted ship parked next to the Cage is a damned bad idea.”

---

“Keep using DRACO to scan the area ahead of us,” Destiny noted.

“I know what I’m doing,” I said. “I’ve been in a bunch of dungeons.”

“You’ve been in dungeons with me pointing the right way to go,” she reminded me. “You’re very good at following arrows on a compass. Don’t think I don’t know you sometimes stop looking at where you’re going and just watch the minimap.”

I blushed. “I keep a watch for enemies.”

“You usually find out about them because somepony shoots you,” Destiny retorted, but she said it with the tone of a joke. “I’m not as tough as you, remember? I want to avoid that option.”

“He really spooked you when he mentioned the nightmares, huh?”

“If they invaded the ship, would it get double-haunted?” Destiny asked. “What would that even mean?”

“Careful, you’re starting to ask the same kind of questions I do.”

The air filled with a horrible screech. Both of us froze. I motioned to the side, and Destiny took cover behind one of the elaborate buttresses lining the corridor like we were standing inside the rib cage of a vast snake. I took a few steps forward before I relaxed.

“It’s the intercom,” I said. I stepped up to the wailing thing and pressed the button. “It’s… never mind, this is still weird, it’s bleeding.”

Destiny popped her head around the corner and looked. “It’s not literally blood, it’s probably spoiled lubricant-- never mind, that is blood. Where is it coming from?”

“Who knows,” I said. I pressed a few more buttons. “Bridge, can you hear me?”

“Chamomile, that panel is extremely cursed.”

“That might mean it’s the first one we found that’s still hooked up,” I pointed out. The speaker crackled, and the screams were replaced with somepony else’s voice.

“Chamomile?” It took me a moment to recognize Captain Glint. “We’ve got our hooves full. You need to evacuate. We’ve got everyone available getting the sleepers out of stasis.”

“I’m going to shut down the reactor with Destiny,” I said. “Is anypony else going that way?”

“We didn’t even know it was a problem,” Captain Glint said. “I’ll try to let ponies know. Herr Doktor should be down there, she might already be on top of this.”

“She’ll be happy for some extra hooves,” Destiny said firmly. “When ponies evacuate, have them get as far from the Cage as they can.”

“I’m guessing the Cage is that tangle of rock out there?”

“It’s a prison. There’s a safe haven elsewhere, but this is the worst place to be!”

“Understood. There won’t be further updates from here. You caught me on the way to the Juniper. I’ll try to coordinate from there.”

“See if the Exodus Red is willing to listen to reason,” I suggested. “They’re stuck here, they might be open to talking.”

“I’ll try not to keep my hopes too far up,” Captain Glint said. “Signing off. Good luck.”

The intercom went back to static and screaming.

“They’ll have to be smart, right?” I asked Destiny. “They’re normal ponies. Once they know where we are, they’ll work with us.”

“For once, I agree with you,” Destiny nodded. “These aren’t insane ponies who’ve been living on cloud apples and two-hundred-year-old ration bars, they’re ponies that could have been my neighbors. They’re not used to shooting each other for scraps.”

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

“If spacetime cooperates and stays flat, we follow this firewall bulkhead around to one of the access doors…” Destiny looked at DRACO’s display, then motioned for me to follow her. “Basic safety means that dangerous areas like engineering are limited-access to stop the spread of fire. That’s why a lot of these corridors wrap around it instead of going directly there.”

“Oh, I assumed that was just because you built this place to be confusing and evil,” I admitted.

“The architecture is based on ancient structures with a long and interesting history. You come from a family of archaeologists, you should be able to appreciate it!”

“Destiny, you put skulls in the walls as decoration.”

“It might be a little over the top,” she conceded. She stopped at a marked door and spun the circular handle with her magic. Air rushed through, decompression sucking the door open and almost pulling her with it.

I grabbed her tail, and she yelped in pain when it was suddenly asked to support a significant part of her weight. I held on until the wind died down to a reasonable level, but it didn’t stop. Outside that door was empty space.

“You weren’t kidding about the ship taking heavy damage,” I mumbled.

Destiny composed herself as best she could. Her cheeks were red with embarrassment. “This is still the right way. Look.”

The ship had broken apart like a continent shattering under volcanic stress. The firewalls separating Engineering must have served as a shear line, because the section had largely broken off and was slowly drifting away from the rest of what was increasingly a wreck. Only a few wires and twisted metal spars still connected that part of the ship, and in front of us was a gap half as wide as a city block before the corridor continued.

“No wonder we’re bleeding coolant and volatiles. All the main lines are open to the air.” Destiny shook her head. “This is worse than I thought.”

“Can we still shut the reactor down?”

“I was hoping we could shut it down gently and bring it up again later once we’d done damage control.” She sighed.

“We’ll figure something out,” I said. I grabbed her before she could protest and flew across the gap. As we passed over the gap, gravity shifted, reversing in an instant that made my inner ear spin wildly. We hit the other side, bounced off what we had thought was the floor, and hit the ceiling.

“Wonderful, more good news,” Destiny groaned. She got up and looked at the rib-like buttresses, which had become chest-high walls across the corridor’s ‘floor’ with the gravity reversal. “This is going to slow us down. You’ll have to fly the whole rest of the way.”

“Climb on,” I offered, kneeling down. Destiny hopped up on my back with slightly less care than I would have liked, digging her hooves in for support. She wrapped her hooves around my neck and tried to settle herself.

“Be careful,” she warned. “There are probably more gravity shifts and I am starting to regret the amount of wrought iron and spikes that were involved in decorating.”

“Don’t worry. I’m actually an excellent flier. I’ve gotten hours of practice with these new wings!”

---

“Wow, I can’t believe you were right and we got here with no problems,” Destiny said, as she carefully climbed down off my back.

“Once in a while things go right,” I told her. We opened the bulkhead door. A wash of hot air hit us in the face. DRACO beeped a radiation alarm. “How well do you hold up to radiation?” I asked.

“That’s an excellent question,” Destiny admitted. “Is it bad?”

I showed her the readout. She scoffed.

“I’d be fine even if I was still biological,” she said. “That’s hours before it kills you. We’ll either be done or the reactor will have exploded before then.”

Destiny walked in, and we found the busiest part of the ship. Ponies had rigger up ropes and scaffolding and a few batpony crew members had taken the initiative to hang from the ceiling and trot around almost normally.

“There you are!” Herr Doktor shouted. “We could use an extra set of hooves!”

I spotted her in a radiation suit. She waved us over.

“This reactor design is really intriguing,” she said. “Enough thaumatic mass to power the ship almost indefinitely. I am most fascinated by the regenerative cycle.”

“Talk shop later,” I said. “How dangerous is it right now?”

“Ah, well,” Herr Doktor looked uncomfortable, and it wasn’t just because she was in a yellow rubber suit. “We need to realign the core and the hydraulics seem to be completely absent.”

She looked to the back of the room, where ponies were looking into a room with a single glowing pillar in the center hanging from the ceiling. Mist poured from its tip, and the light coming from within had the telltale color of being Extremely Dangerous. DRACO’s reading of the radioactivity in the room shot up just from from being pointed in its general direction, and they hadn’t even opened the door to the sealed area yet.

“I’ll do it,” I said. It was really bad, but I was sure I could survive.

“Don’t be crazy,” Herr Doktor scoffed. “The radiation would kill you. This is why they invented interns and grad students.”

“But--” I watched one of the mortal servants of the vampire cult step inside, the door slamming behind them. They were clearly in almost immediate agony from the heat, even if I couldn’t see their expression through the heavy radiation suit they were wearing. They reached up into the machinery and started adjusting things inside it, the light shifting and changing around them.

“Cultists are almost as good,” Doktor said quietly. “They take any opportunity to sacrifice themselves and call it preordained destiny.”

“Don’t try and blame me,” Destiny mumbled.

“More to the point, even if you’d survive, you’d be in no shape to help elsewhere,” Herr Doktor admitted. “You’d need hours in decontamination. A lot is going to happen in the next few hours.”

“She’s not wrong,” Destiny said. I shook my head and watched the poor idiot cultist in the reactor room slowly kill themselves fixing the ship. “I’ll help Herr Doktor get the reactor off-line. We’ve got another problem.”

“What else?” I asked.

“The cryopods! Remember what happened on the Exodus Blue after main power was lost? You’ll have backup power for a little while, but you need to get everypony on both ships awake and moving before they die in their sleep.”

I nodded. “Okay. But…”

“The pods are designed to be opened in an emergency by anypony who finds them. There’s a big red button. I thought making it simple enough would be foolproof but my friends still all died on my ship when there was nopony around to actually press the button.”

“I’ll make sure they get out,” I promised.

“Good. These ponies are all insane, but they’ll probably fit in just fine with the survivors from Flurry Heart’s ship. They won’t blink twice if they see a changeling. She might even be happy to have more subjects, and they’ll love having an alicorn step on them. Maybe we can convince them she’s--”

“Nightmare Moon!” somepony shouted. Everypony turned. We all turned to see a dark shape standing in the middle of the room. It wasn’t really her. It was something else, a shadow without anything casting it. A ghost of an alicorn, an echo made of magic and whatever made up that darkness between the stars.

It was razor-thin and barely on that edge between real and unreal, an optical illusion that refused to go away. A shadow in the corner of your eye that didn’t go away when you turned.

“Oh, that’s no good,” I mumbled. I watched the shape walk casually across the room. It moved like it was being cast by a broken film projector, speeding up and slowing down, some moments being skipped entirely. Ponies scrambled to stay out of the way.

I landed in front of it before it could get into the core.

“Hey there,” I said.

The air filled with whispers from all directions. I attempted to punch the shadow in the snout. It worked exactly as well as a pony would imagine punching a shadow would work. My hoof went through empty air. A second swipe with an added power field around my hoof did precisely nothing.

“Okay,” I said after a moment. “It’s a little spooky, but it can’t hurt us.”

Its horn blazed with un-light and it blasted me across the room. I slammed into pipes and busted them open, steam venting around me. I rolled out of the mess before it could cook me like meat in a can.

“Never mind, it can hurt us,” I groaned.

“Use the Dimension Pliers!” Destiny shouted.

“I vaguely remember something about it being dangerous to use in Limbo,” I reminded her, but I cycled through the weapons mounted on the barding’s sides until the familiar tuning-fork like shape appeared.

“Dangerous is good for a weapon!” Destiny yelled back. I couldn’t help but notice she was keeping her distance.

I pulled the trigger and hoped for the best. The Dimension Pliers were a space manipulation tool that required careful adjustment and micro-calibration to achieve a desired effect. I had no idea what was going to happen, and that’s even before taking the unique nature of Limbo into account.

The fabric of space tore open. I had no idea where it led, but looking directly at it made my eyes ache. The shadow alicorn was caught in it, and the darkness imploded. The whispers in the air vanished, leaving ringing silence. Ripples showed in the air where the rift had been, and space healed itself, though I swear a scar was left in place, a slight discontinuity like a long lens that only existed when I wasn’t looking directly at it.

“What was that?” I asked.

“You banished it,” Destiny said.

“To where? We’re already in Limbo! This is the place things get banished to!”

“Probably some kind of un-space or subspace or… well, there are at least even odds it banished it somewhere on the far side of Limbo. Like teleporting your problem down the street.”

“Good enough.” I said. I popped it free. “Herr Doktor, you take it. If the thing comes back, blast it again.”

The mad scientist took the insane weapon. “Miss Chamomile, I must thank you for the thoughtful gift. I will use it in good health.”

I nodded. “Destiny?”

She gave me the kind of hug that made me worried about the future. It felt like the kind that could become a goodbye.

“Be careful,” she said. “You always get in worse trouble when I’m not around.”

---

A few minutes later, blood was spraying at high pressure into my face and I wished I had worn the helmet, even if it didn’t come with conversation anymore.

I sputtered and gasped and tried to stop the flow at the source, putting my hooves over the cut and using what little magic I could to hold back the flow of dozens of gallons of high-pressure gore.

“I’ve almost got the valve!” Midnight shouted over to me. I frowned at her tone and looked over. She was feigning difficulty with the wheel, giving me a teasing smirk. We were in a maintenance shaft servicing a bank of cryopods, and the blood was part of the life-support system. It should have been horizontal, but gravity was twisted and turned it into a tight vertical space, with me at the bottom. I hated being the bottom in this relationship.

“Do you want to trade spots?” I asked. “If you’re having problems turning the bloody wheel--”

“Oh, is that what I was doing?” she asked. “Shoot, it goes the other way!” She giggled and twisted it. The flow through my hooves slowed and stopped. I was able to relax, even if I was ankle-deep in crimson.

“Come on, it was funny,” Midnight said. She hopped down from where she was standing and splashed into the puddle of blood. “Besides, now you look practically good enough to eat~”

She gave me a sultry look and pressed her chest against mine, looking deep into my eyes.

“Are you really trying to seduce me while I’m covered in this stuff?”

“It’s AB-positive, which is practically an aphrodisiac,” Midnight whispered.

“Knock it off, you two,” Emma shouted down at us from her perch at the door. Beyond it, gravity was more normal, so she seemed to be sideways compared to us. “We need to finish evacuating this section. We’re not here so you can make out.”

“You could join in,” Midnight suggested. “We might all be dead soon, we should have fun while we can.”

“I plan on surviving long enough to stop regretting being an immortal monster,” Emma retorted. “Chamomile, thank you for your help.”

I frowned. “Don’t thank me yet, I’m pretty sure I’m unleashing an undead plague.” We started climbing up out of the corridor towards the hatch Emma was at.

“You are, but they’ll behave,” Midnight said. “Trust me. I’ve run the numbers.”

“No you didn’t,” Emma corrected. She stepped back to let us through. The sudden shift in gravity was like stepping into a strong wind. It was a sudden force that took me by surprise until I was all the way through and things were steady again.

“I ballparked some guesses about how much hungry vampires can eat,” Midnight admitted. “But there were always enough cultists to be sustainable, and then if we add in some volunteers from the other ship and this city Chamomile mentioned, there’s plenty for everypony to eat.”

“That seems optimistic,” I said.

“If it gets bad enough, vampires can be put to sleep pretty easily, and without nearly as much fancy equipment as it takes for a regular pony,” Midnight shrugged.

“Is anypony there?” a voice came over the intercom, and for a moment I dismissed it as merely a phantom haunting the system. “We’re trying to get out of the ship but there’s a problem.”

“Who is this?” Emma asked.

“M-my name is Flowering Blue Raspberry Blossom,” the voice on the other side of the intercom said. “There are a lot of soldiers here and shouting. I’m scared.”

“She’s a kid,” Midnight said.

“I’ll go,” I said. “The ponies waking up here need familiar faces when they wake up and it’s too late to stop the cycle.”

“Follow the evacuation route,” Emma said. “If they ran into trouble, that’s the fastest way to find it.”

I nodded and turned to the door. Midnight grabbed my wing before I could get far, her fangs latching on and nearly breaking skin.

“Wait a sec,” she said. I stopped, and she got into my blind spot before I could react, kissing my neck. It was sweet until she started licking the still-fresh blood. “I wanted a quick snack before you left.”

I rolled my eyes.

“I’ll take the rest of you when you get back,” she promised. “So you better be alive enough for fun.”

---

I figured I was in the right place when I found soldiers holding guns on a crowd of pale, thin ponies who were shaking from a combination of chronic anemia and recent awakening from cryosleep.

“The first pony who fires a shot is going to regret it,” I warned. I pushed through the crowd. They were even smaller than average, and I felt almost like a giant. The wall of soldiers in power armor held their position. I could tell they were radioing back for orders.

The wall of bodies parted. The light shifted. I swear on my wings that somepony started playing a leitmotif. Cozy Glow, resplendent in her scarlet and gold armor that was a mirror of the barding I was wearing, descended down from the heavens to parley with the mere mortals before her. Or at least I’m sure that’s the impression I’m sure I was supposed to have.

I glanced down at her hooves. Somepony had literally set out a red carpet for her to set down on.

“So we finally come to somepony with authority,” Cozy Glow said. “I have decided to be generous and extend an olive branch to you.”

“Really?” I asked. “Because it looks a lot more like you’re holding these ponies hostage while they’re trying to evacuate.”

Cozy Glow’s expression didn’t change. She reminded me of a volcano. Pressure was building up inside her, and at some point it was going to explode out in a violent eruption of rage. She absolutely hated everypony in the room, including her own troops.

“A disorganized mess will lead to problems later,” she said.

“Keeping ponies at gunpoint leads to problems now,” I retorted. “For example, I might decide to start killing your troops.”

“Yes, you are good at that, aren’t you, Chamomile?” Cozy Glow asked. “You’ve had some recent work done, but I can see I made a critical mistake making Tetra my fourth pillar of support. I mistook obsession for true dedication.”

“And now he’s dead.”

“Mm.” She smiled slightly. I didn’t like that smile. “I seem to have lost almost as many friends as you have. We’ll have to discuss it like adults later, using our words instead of trying to kill each other.”

“Smart,” I mumbled. “You want to face me where I’m weakest.”

“For now, I need to discuss how to reverse whatever it is you did.”

“You mean when we banished you to Limbo?” I asked. “We’re trapped here. There’s no way out. But, hey, good news. It’s not permanent!”

She scowled at me. “You’re testing my patience.”

“I hope not, because you’re going to need a lot of it. I think this spell lasts about a thousand years.”

Expressions flashed across her face. She didn’t call me a liar or refute the facts. I saw her working through the implications with cold logic. She’d already spent two hundred years sleeping through the worst era in Equestria’s history.

“A thousand years,” she repeated. “I see. I remember when I was the head of Celestia’s Belles we had access to information nopony else did about the Crystal Empire. Nightmare Moon. Discord. It always came down to a thousand years. Do you know why?”

It was a sudden change of topic I wasn’t entirely prepared for. “Not really? Is there going to be a written test on this later?”

“Ah, I thought you might be more of a scholar. Your father was, before his untimely death,” Cozy Glow said. “It was never literally ‘a thousand years’. That was a metaphor, the same way we might say it’s raining cats and dogs. Maybe in a few centuries, they’ll think housepets literally fell out of the sky.”

“What’s your point?” I asked. I felt a surge of anger. She wanted ponies to nod and smile and let her talk, not question her while she was speaking.

“My point is that a thousand years is only as long as we let it be. If you have a method that banished us here, we can reverse it and leave,” Cozy Glow gave me a smile that would have been a glowing, winning smile of benevolence if I couldn’t sense her emotions. She wanted to strangle me with her bare hooves. “I realize we’ve been at odds. It wouldn’t be wrong to say we’re enemies, but we don’t have to be.”

“You had Rain Shadow stab me in the heart!”

“I couldn’t stop him from trying to kill you. He wanted that more than anything else. He was a broken pony in more ways than one. It’s what this world does to ponies. They lose friends and family and parts of themselves along with it. You know, before the war and all this darkness and hate, you never even saw ponies with scars. It wasn’t that kind of world. Ponies didn’t live in a meat grinder tearing at them from all sides. That’s all I want, Chamomile. I want to take us all back to the real world. A place where we’re safe. A place with softer edges.”

“That sounds nice,” I admitted. “I’m not going to stand here and say the things you’re talking about are wrong. I do know the first thing you did was have a bunch of ponies killed, launch an orbital strike, and chain a monster up in your basement to make you more guns to shoot at us.”

“Nopony’s perfect,” Cozy Glow sighed. “The world needs a strong pony in charge. A pony with ideals.”

“You mean you should be in charge.”

“I mean you should be thankful I’m taking the time to speak to you,” she said. “I have enough power to bring what’s left of the world crashing down on you.”

Cozy Glow clapped her hooves. The deck rumbled. Behind her, the floor exploded apart, and a monster ascended from below, only half of it even fitting into the corridor. It was that thing that was built from spare Grandus parts with the Heaven’s Sword strapped to its back.

“The Queen is my personal Assault Armor,” Cozy Glow said. “I want to save all these ponies from a terrible fate. I might be willing to let them evacuate onto my ship, if they swear to serve me. It’s the best offer they’re going to get. Serving somepony who wants to save them, instead of somepony who got them banished.”

She extended a hoof to the shivering, scared ponies. They backed away from her.

“We serve the dark mistress of the night!” one of them squeaked. It sounded like the same voice I’d heard on the intercom. “We’ll never follow a pawn of Celestia!”

Cozy Glow’s expression twisted into a scowl.

“You’re rejecting me? I’m the only pony offering you a chance! I’m the rightful ruler of Equestria! I deserve this and you’re treating me like a failure?!” Cozy Glow’s eye twitched. “I’m not a failure! I’m the most important pony who ever lived! I’m the pony that’s going to bring everything back! I’m the pony that’s going to be loved and remembered forever!”

Somepony threw a loose bolt at her. It hit her chest. I saw the tiniest scuff on her barding. Cozy Glow erupted.

“You don’t deserve to live in the paradise I’m making,” she growled. The shadows behind her flickered. I could feel the psychic energy in the air shifting. “I’ll kill you all!”

Comments

[Thought Prism]

This chapter was very funny until Cozy Glow showed up. Then she turned up her megalomania dial to 11.

[Reese]

"had done significantly worse in the exchange"
"had come off significantly worse in the exchange"?

"If it goes critical…"
"If it goes prompt critical…"?

"Ponies had rigger up ropes and scaffolding"
"Ponies had rigged up ropes and scaffolding"?

"just from from being pointed"
"just from being pointed"?

"Or at least I’m sure that’s the impression I’m sure I was supposed to have."
"Or at least I’m sure that’s the impression I was supposed to have."?

Thanks for writing!

11618355
"Then she turned up her megalomania dial to 11."
Well, I'm not entirely sure that, in this case, she was the only one turning that dial up...