Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 131: Welcome Home Great Slayer

I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff in my life, but nothing really compared to how stupid it was to walk into the most obvious trap I’d ever seen. I don’t know how she was doing it but Mom had taken complete control of the inside of the Exodus Red and I couldn’t recognize anything from the last time I’d been onboard.

It had been opulent in the way ritzy hotels had been back before the war. Gold trim on everything to make ponies think they were in Canterlot, marble, artistic vases and landscape paintings everywhere. It had been comfortable and, for ponies like me that didn’t grow up surrounded by wealth and luxury, it had been a vision of what could be. Better times. Plenty. Peace. As long as ponies bent the knee to Cozy Glow.

Now, things were different.

“This is so weird,” Cube said. She put a hoof on the wall. It was flat grey, like perfectly smooth concrete formed into square blocks, but where there should have been mortar between them, there was a gap filled with light, almost like recessed lighting but without a visible source. I couldn’t feel the crack when I tried, even though I could feel it.

“It’s a combination of illusion spells, force fields, and minor space manipulation,” Destiny said. “It’s highly advanced spellcasting, despite how simple the environment looks.”

“There was a virtual environment in Gator Land,” I said. “It looked a little like this, but platforms over the ocean instead of a broom closet.”

“Depending on how that was done, she might have been able to export some of the code. Like saving a template to reuse later.” Destiny’s horn flared red, and part of the wall glowed along with it for a few seconds before fading. “I can’t dispel it.”

“We’ll have to go through it the old fashioned way,” Cozy Glow said.

“Woah, woah, let’s think for a second,” Quattro cut in. “If this is some kind of giant illusion, doesn’t that mean it could change at any moment? What if we just get stuck in a box? Or a loop?”

“What choice do we have?” Cube asked.

“We can turn around and--” Quattro motioned to the back wall of the small room, where the airlock had been. Had been, past tense. It was a blank wall now. “Well, buck. I didn’t even see that happen.”

“That proves she can change things,” Destiny said. “We need to be extremely careful. It would be too easy to get separated in here.”

“And splitting up would be insane,” Cube agreed. “Chamomile, you’ve actually fought monsters like Mom, right? What do we need to know?”

“Oh, now we’re doing a briefing, when we’re inside her lair?” Quattro sighed.

I cleared my throat. “I’ve killed two dragons and a third one helped me with a giant changeling queen. They’re extremely powerful and dangerous. The green one was the weakest, and I had a special weapon at the time.”

“The Valkyrie,” Destiny said, nodding along. “It was a weapon designed for that explicit purpose by Kulaas.”

“Yeah, but it was still huge and breathed poison gas,” I said. “Even with the Exodus Armor, it was eating through the environmental seals. Mom ate its heart so she can probably make the same stuff. It’s bad stuff to get caught in.”

“I think it was some form of concentrated chlorine gas,” Destiny said. “We were a little busy trying to kill it and I never ran a full spectrographic analysis.”

“Anyway, regular weapons didn’t work. It just regenerates too fast. The black dragon was even worse. That one was part vampire. I got lucky and it got stunned by sunlight while it was trying to murder me. Even that didn’t completely kill it. It had acid for blood and when it was too badly hurt, its blood ate through the whole ship, top to bottom.”

“And then?” Cozy asked.

“She escaped to heal and Mom hacked her. That was probably my fault. I pulled a Valkyrie out of its body by getting into its micromachine network and… Mom’s apparently been able to keep track of everything I’ve been doing remotely because we’re both infected with the same batch of SIVA.”

Cozy Glow eyed me suspiciously “Can she still do that?”

“I don’t think so. Not since, uh, I had an update.” I shuffled my wings awkwardly. I still wasn’t sure what it all meant. That was the problem with being unique.

“It doesn’t matter much either way,” Cube said. “Think about where we are. Forget security cameras, she’s probably aware of everything happening.”

I swallowed nervously and looked around at the walls. They rippled.

“I was letting you get comfortable,” a voice said, coming right out of the shimmering air. The lights in the wall pulsed, moving like blood flowing in veins. “Welcome to my magnificence.”

“Mom,” I said.

“Chamomile. No matter how far we come, you keep crawling back to me. I hope you enjoy your stay. It will be permanent.”

The shimmer disappeared, along with the chill running down my spine.

“She was waiting for a dramatic moment to reveal herself,” Destiny sighed.

“Mom always was that kind of mare,” Cube admitted. “But she also hasn’t smashed the walls together to crush us into paste, so no matter what else, we know she’s not omnipotent.”

“At least some of the constraints we put on her are holding,” Cozy Glow assured us. “That means she’s crippled. No matter how strong you think she might be, she’s in chains. All she might be able to do is use party tricks to distract us. Does everypony remember what we’re here to do?”

“Find one of the terminals that can activate the fail safe,” I said.

“Exactly. If she’s still bound, that means the deadmare’s switch is still there too. We can drown her in boiling sulfuric acid and seal what’s left in epoxy. She sounds smug right now because she wants us to give up. She’s scared. And if she’s not scared, she should be! You’re the most talented and dangerous bunch of ponies we could hope for. I’m glad to have you at my back, even you, Quattro.”

“Thanks, I think,” the golden mare replied.

“We’re probably in more danger staying here than we are moving,” Destiny said. “I don’t know how many ponies she has under her control, but she was able to swarm us with them last time.”

“Hundreds of ponies are unaccounted for,” Cozy Glow agreed. “She could bury us in bodies. Here’s the plan - we’re going to try going in what should be the right direction. Even if she redecorated, the terminals can’t have moved much. If she disconnected them, she’d activate the system herself. Be ready for anything.”

I have to give her credit, she didn’t immediately turn around and tell me to take point. Cozy Glow touched the panel next to door, and when it flashed red she produced a red plastic card and swiped it. The terminal flickered between green and red before settling on green and opening with a distorted chime.

“Nopony locks me out of my ship,” she said. “I made sure I had secure access to everything on the Exodus Red. She disabled my biometrics, but not the backdoor.”

When the door opened I half-expected we’d be swarmed by hypnotized pony drones, but the corridor was open and empty, the air oddly thick and hazy. In combination with the neon lights in the walls it meant visibility was terrible. I looked at DRACO but it wasn’t able to scan much further than we could see. The smart rifle beeped, flashing a sad emoji.

“I know, buddy,” I said. I gave him a pat. “Don’t worry. You’re doing your best. Keep track of where we’ve been so we can find our way back.”

It beeped an affirmative at me.

“We might be able to use DRACO to tell if she changes anything around us,” Destiny suggested. “DRACO, sound an alert if there’s a significant discrepancy between local topography scans.”

It happily flashed an emoji, the rifle obviously glad to be useful. It reminded me of a particularly smart and well-trained dog. With anti-tank rounds and flares.

“This is more than just a little ominous, isn’t it?” I asked. The hallway was fairly wide and tall, which was great for those of us with wings and rifles. It was also lined with about the least subtle metaphor for mortality I’d ever seen. Coffin-shaped boxes were stood up against the neon-lit walls, each of them glowing faintly.

“Think she’s trying to scare us?” Quattro asked. She stopped in front of one of the coffins and looked at it, keeping her distance.

“Maybe she’s just got the same kind of interior design sense as Destiny,” I suggested.

“Hey!” Destiny huffed.

“I’ve been onboard the Exodus Black,” Cozy Glow noted. “I distinctly remember having to assure the ponies with me that the skulls in the walls were only Nightmare Night decorations.”

Destiny looked over at her. “But Nightmare Night is months away!”

“It’s a lot easier to tell yourself somepony really enjoys celebrating a holiday early than it is to come to terms with the idea that they keep their ancestors in the hallway as an artistic statement.”

“What is this?” Cube asked. She stopped in front of a floating polygon made of a few triangles arranged into a stretched-out octahedron. It had been hidden between two of the coffins, hovering in the air and bobbing slightly.

“Dangerous,” Quattro said. “Don’t touch it.”

“You have no idea if it’s dangerous,” Cube scoffed.

“Oh, you want to roll the dice on that one?” Quattro asked, lowering her sunglasses. “Then be my guest.” She turned her back on Cube, looking into the mist. Cube reluctantly backed away from the floating polygon.

“What’s wrong?” Cozy Glow asked, following Quattro’s gaze.

“Nothing. That’s what worries me. We know she has a bunch of ponies under her control, right? So where are they?”

“Keep your eyes peeled,” Cube said.

I nodded in agreement and took up the rear. I followed the others past the big shiny diamond. I admit. I was a little curious. It was shiny, it had to have some purpose, right? I let everypony else get a few steps away in case it blew up in my face and I poked the floating shape.

I was almost disappointed when it didn’t react. It spun a little faster, but that was just because I’d given it a little extra momentum. I shrugged and turned to catch up with the others. Just as the thought that it might not be all that dangerous crossed my mind, a shard of unreal material as long as a combat knife slammed into my back.

“Gah!” I yelped, spinning around.

The polygon was unfolding in impossible directions. It twisted through a dimension I couldn’t usually see but part of me could understand, something I’d seen before when I was fighting mom in the digital realm.

Hooves and a head like twisted origami designed by somepony with only a vague idea of how anatomy worked and a big appreciation for modern art formed, the virtual soldier multiple times larger than the shape it had unfolded from.

“That’s not physically possible,” Quattro said helpfully.

“It’s made out of the same light and force fields as everything else around us. It’s not real!” Cube declared.

I flexed one wing, feeling the stab wound in my back.

“I don’t think that makes it any less deadly,” I said. I pulled the trigger, firing DRACO at point-blank range for the long gun. The mess of angles and intersecting planes blurred for a moment when the shell ripped through it, freezing for a few seconds, then resumed motion. “Uh,” I said, taking a step back.

“Right, my turn,” Cube said. Her pistols floated around her like a flock of deadly pets. She fired a burst of beams at it, the magical attacks having only slightly more effect than my shell had. The deadly illusion or projection or whatever it was only froze up for a second with each hit. It wasn’t even regenerating, it wasn’t being hurt at all, and worse than that the delay was getting smaller every time.

“Book it!” Cozy shouted. “We don’t need to fight it to win! We need to get to that terminal!” She bolted, bravely running away from the danger. I mean, she was also taking point and leading the way, but still. She didn’t even look back to make sure we were following her!

“Go!” I shouted, pushing Destiny ahead of me. I was worried she’d be slow and out of shape like most academics, but she moved like a machine. She caught my look.

“Synthetic body, remember? I’m almost as tough as you are!” She glanced back and fired a magical bolt from her horn, catching the pursuing killer and freezing it in its tracks while it adapted to the new form of attack.

“She’ll send those after us but not ponies?” I asked.

“She must be using them for something else,” Destiny said. We skidded to a halt. Cozy Glow was standing in the hallway, looking at a wall.

“This isn’t supposed to be here!” she yelled, kicking it.

“Adding walls in a virtual environment like this is easier than taking real ones away,” Destiny said. “We’ll have to go around.”

“Is there going to be a way in at all? If I knew I had a weakness I’d block it off entirely,” Quattro pointed out.

“Maybe we can do something with these to slow it down,” I suggested. I grabbed one of the coffins on the wall and tugged. The front panel came off, hitting the ground and blinking a few times before disappearing, though none of us really watched it go once we saw what was inside.

A pony stood on their hind legs, their forehooves folded over their chest. I thought for a moment that they were dead, but a close look revealed a slow rise and fall of their chest. Lights flashed around their head, a crown of neon lines like circuitry that ended in his skull, embedded deep inside.

“What is this?” Destiny whispered.

“I think I know,” I said after a moment. “Mom was doing… something to ponies back in Gator Land. She was eating their minds up from inside. Maybe she was using them like, like… extra computer power.”

“That would explain how she was able to start hacking Kulaas,” Destiny agreed reluctantly. “A distributed network made of biological computers. She controls their minds and then rewrites them into slaves.”

“So she’s maintaining this space using their minds and magic?” Cozy Glow asked to confirm. When Destiny nodded, Cozy Glow nodded back and turned to the entombed pony. Before any of us could ask what she was thinking, Cozy shot him. A beam bolt hit him in the center of his chest, and he screamed faintly, a chain reaction burning him into cinders in a terrible disintegration.

The wall blocking off the corridor blurred, turned into a chaos of overlapping squares and rectangles, then vanished, the neon light and virtual wall panels fading away from a short stretch of the path to show the real corridor underneath.

“What’s wrong with you?!” Cube gasped.

“A leader has to be ready to make sacrifices,” Cozy said firmly. “There’s no way of knowing if we can save them at all. More lives are at stake. If you can’t make good decisions, turn around now and go hide in the broom closet we were stuck in when we came here!”

“We don’t have time to argue,” Quattro said. The virtual assassin lurched towards us, triangles twisting through the air. It was almost as if there were triangles painted invisibly in the air and they were lighting up in sequence to show where it was rather than the shapes actually moving through space.

“We’re near one of the terminals,” Destiny said. She’d stopped to look at one of the real wall panels the disruption had revealed and pointed at a serial number on it that was clearly important to her even if it didn’t mean anything to me. “This is the right way.”

We ran. The thing chasing us hit the intersection between the real world and the simulated one. It was like it slammed into a glass wall, and it came to an instant halt. I stopped to watch it for a moment. The air shimmered, and part of the hallway disappeared again behind the illusion. It was clear the disruption was only going to last a short time.

“How far do we have to go?” I asked, chasing the others.

Something familiar tickled at the back of my mind while we ran. I’d never been here, in this bizarre half-real space, but somehow it was also very familiar. When we ran out of the hallway and into a wide, open area with two levels, a word came to mind.

Atrium. A Stable Atrium. That’s why the dimensions of the corridors, only partly disguised by the coffins standing at attention in them, seemed familiar.

“We’re in a Stable,” I said. The others looked at me. “The layout is exactly the same as the Stable that Mom came from! I went to school there for a few years!”

“That makes sense,” Destiny said. “This place is made from her memories. She might not even be conscious that she used the Stable as a template!”

“That’s good news,” Cozy Glow said, smiling. “That means you know where we need to go, Chamomile. I thought we’d have to explore blindly, but we’ve got a guide.”

I nodded. “We should go to the Overmare’s office.”

“Why?” Quattro asked.

Cube scoffed. “Because Mom has an ego, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“It’s also one of the most secure places in the Stable and the real thing had the main maneframe terminal. If she’s blurred reality and memory together, we might be able to find what we’re looking for there.”

“Excellent,” Cozy Glow said. She put a hoof on my shoulder. “You’ll have to lead the way for a little while. Can you take point? I know it’s dangerous, and I wouldn’t ask if there was another way.”

“I almost believe you care,” I said. The worst part was, even though she was a monster she was still right. I needed to take point. “This way. I got taken up there a lot to get yelled at by grown-ups so I remember the way pretty well from here.”

It was down a hallway, up two levels, and then immediately to the right into the Overmare’s waiting room. I flashed back to when I was a filly. It hadn’t looked exactly like this, but it had been almost as scary. The long walk up the stairwell was a reminder I didn’t belong there - they hadn’t built it wide enough for flying. Nothing was open enough except in the atrium, and I got in trouble when I tried to fly there.

I hadn’t been sorry to leave, even if I’d been sorry about the reason.

“Be ready for anything,” Quattro warned. “I’m not sure we actually went up any stairs. It might be part of the illusion, like we’re trotting on a treadmill.”

“Are you sure?” Cozy Glow asked.

“No. Usually my sense of direction is excellent, but this place makes me feel dizzy.”

“Stay behind me and get ready to move if something jumps out at us,” I warned. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

The floor should have vibrated. It should have been jumping under my hooves like there was an oncoming train, because as soon as those words left my mouth, something the size of a train hit me. I barely had time to look at it before I was battered back and slammed into the wall, which was totally unyielding, as solid as concrete and without the rugged industrial character.

“You know, I think Mom took that as a request to make something terrible happen,” I groaned, getting up. Part of me hoped that the thing wouldn’t keep charging at me, but there was no such luck. It looked like a rhinoceros with one of those coffins lining the virtual Stable’s walls as a head, a thick crust of spike growing from it in a thicket of pain.

I would have been forced back after grabbing it by the horns if there was any back to be forced into. I was up against the wall and it was arbitrarily strong, not bound by any physics except the ones my mom’s imagination wrote into the world.

“Buck!” I groaned.

“Hold on, I’m helping!” Cube shouted. Tiny beam blasts from pistols pattered against the polygons of the thing’s hide, doing absolutely nothing to it. I don’t think she even got its attention.

“It’s wrapped around one of the sleepers!” Destiny shouted. “They’re controlling it like a robot’s CPU!”

“What do I do about it?!” I asked, trying to shove the thing back.

“This,” Quattro said. She dropped down on it from above, kicking the coffin open. The door exploded into polygonal shrapnel before dissolving into nothingness, revealing the pony inside, riding inside the beast like it was a tank.

“I’m not going to shoot an innocent mare!” I yelled.

“I know,” Quattro said. She fired. It was entirely unnecessary. Unlike Cozy Glow, who was at least using beam rifles for a quick and easy kill, Quattro had a rocket launcher strapped into her battle saddle, and it was neither quick nor clean. Blood splattered against my face along with smoke and fire from the blast.

The monster roared one more time, then fell apart, the polygons making up its body simply coming apart at the seams and blinking into non-existence. The pressure holding me to the wall vanished instantly.

I looked up at her. “What the buck is wrong with you?!”

“I knew you wouldn’t do it,” Quattro said. “You’ve made too many hard decisions already. Let us make some mistakes too. I’ll be sure to regret it later if we somehow live through all this.”

She trotted back towards a door.

“So is this the office?” she asked. I glared at her, but couldn’t get really mad when I knew she was mostly right. I stomped past her, wiping blood from my face. Destiny looked like she wanted to say something but, maybe because she was smarter than I was, just stayed quiet.

“Yes,” I confirmed.

I opened the door, and the simplified panel slid into the geometry of the wall. Inside, one real desk in an island of reality sat where the Overmare’s terminal should have been, the rest of the horseshoe-shaped desk made of blank cubes. The desk looked like it was under a spotlight chasing the grey and neon away, the edges fizzing and blurry with static.

“That’s what we’re looking for,” Cozy confirmed. “Good work, Chamomile.”

“Why did she leave it like that?” I asked, carefully easing into the room and looking for trouble. “Why not hide it?”

“She might have been afraid that she’d trigger the fail-deadly system and kill herself in the process,” Cozy suggested. “If she was really afraid, she should have tried a little harder to keep ponies out.”

“Yes, she should have,” Destiny mumbled, looking worried. We all walked into the office once it was clear there wasn’t a hammer ready to slam down on us.

Cozy Glow walked confidently over to the terminal, reached for the keyboard, and her hoof went right through it like she was trying to grab a sunbeam. The desk and terminal flickered and vanished, the spotlight of reality vanishing.

“An illusion?!” Cozy growled. “She’s making a fool out of me!”

The door slammed shut behind us, and the air got heavy. It felt like ozone and storms.

The walls peeled away from us, the flat grey fading to black and the neon grout lingering for a few moments longer, hanging exposed in the empty space around us like the bars of a cage in an abyss.

“Are you afraid?” asked my mother’s voice from all around us in the darkness. There was something wrong with it, an echo that made me think of a chorus all speaking at once, with a background blur of noise as if a crowd was watching us from the shadows. “What is it you fear? The end of your trivial existence? You will only be a footnote in history, a mention along the path to my glorious ascension.”

Shapes rose out of the dark beyond, a massive beast in the impossible distance. I knew it wasn’t really there. We were inside a small office room. I couldn’t see what was really there because illusions had been plastered over everything. Nothing was real. It was a trick.

“Give it up!” Cozy Glow shouted. She was totally unafraid, despite seeing the same thing I was. “There’s only room for one pony to rebuild the world, and that pony is me!”

“You have no conception of what it takes to rebuild the world. You are small, in body, mind, and spirit.” The shape lunged forward. I flinched. Instead of smashing through the walls that still had to be there, a pane appeared in the air, showing my mother’s face, barely still recognizable as anything that had once been a pony. The edges faded into red, blue, and green scales that spread out to cover the edges of the image. The scales got smaller and smaller with each layer until they were individual pixels on the virtual screens, blurring into a rainbow haze.

“I think we might have underestimated how much she can change,” Cube whispered.

“I am not an unkind goddess, let me grant you a gift.”

The virtual screens around us faded, walls seeming to slide back into place until we were standing in the Overmare’s office again. The back wall lit up and parted, splitting down the middle with a release of static-edged mist. The temperature of the air dropped a few degrees, and the lights dramatically focused on what was inside.

It was one of the Exodus cryopods. I’d seen a bunch of them so they weren’t exactly surprising. I thought Mom was going to reveal that she was holding somepony I cared about hostage. It’s the kind of evil thing I could see her doing. Maybe even something worse, like a cute puppy or a bag of kittens and a demand we surrender.

I’ll be perfectly honest, that might have worked better than what she did have.

A defog cycle clicked on, and the frost over the viewport of the cryopod melted away to reveal the contents.

“Say hello to an old friend,” Mom said.

Inside was about the last pony I ever expected to see. Rain Shadow. The pony that had tried to kill me an order of magnitude more times than anypony else, who carried a grudge so large that it was truly legendary.

“That’s impossible,” I said. I wasn’t even surprised. What could shock me at this point? Of course he was here, somehow.

“We retrieved his body after the launch site debacle,” Cozy said. “Unfortunately, he was already dead.”

Rain Shadow was a mess, supported by wires and cables. He wasn’t breathing, and the frost on his face and exposed skin made it clear. This wasn’t a pony on life support, this was a corpse being preserved.

“What did you do to him?” Cube asked, scowling.

“We used a lot of experimental procedures on him, at his request. Some of them might have been medically useful. We put him in a cryopod so it could be studied later.” Cozy shrugged. “I was hoping we’d find a way to enhance ponies to the same level he’d been enhanced, but without as much trauma or pain.”

“You were keeping him on ice to use him for spare parts,” Quattro corrected.

“It was explicitly what he wanted!” Cozy said defensively. “When he first agreed to the procedures to enhance him into Tetra, Rain Shadow wanted his body donated to science if he died. He wanted to make sure he helped other ponies.”

“No, he wanted to murder me,” I corrected.

“Okay, yes, that’s fair,” Cozy Glow admitted. “He did want to murder you. I already said several times that it was a mistake to use him. I underestimated how unstable his mental state was.”

“And you’re sure he’s dead?” I asked. “I’ve thought he was dead before and it didn’t stick.”

“He was declared dead weeks ago and he was frozen in a block of ice ever since,” Cozy assured me. “He isn’t going to get up.”

All of us, very aware of the world we lived in, looked at Rain Shadow. For some reason, that line didn’t tempt him to suddenly draw breath and rise from the grave.

“Oh, I’m sorry, was that my cue?” Mom asked, her echoing, godlike voice dripping with sarcasm. “Let me get that for you, dear.”

The pod door cracked open with a pneumatic hiss. I hadn’t been prepared for Rain Shadow to smell like rotting meat. The stink filled the air around me, and it was one of the most unpleasant things I’d experienced in weeks. It was old body odor and disease and rot and rusting metal all at once.

“Whew, I think he’s gone off,” I said. I could almost see the stink lines.

“I told you, he’s already dead,” Cozy said. “He was ripe when we found him and hasn’t improved with age. Freezing him only kept it from getting worse, it didn’t make him any fresher.”

“I think he’s even more rotten than he smells,” Cube said. “He’s melting!”

Rain Shadow’s body was drooping, the muscles sliding away from bone and even the bone starting to erode around the edges like a sandcastle at high tide. It was happening so quickly I’d compare it to a wax sculpture in front of a blowtorch.

“That’s not normal,” Destiny said. “He’s not rotting. Bone doesn’t decay like that!”

“An illusion?” Quattro asked. “It smells real.”

“Worse, I think it’s SIVA!”

Where the drops of Rain Shadow’s flesh hit the ground, they turned grey, then the silver color of mercury. The rotting corpse shivered, impossibly lurching into motion. Lightning crackled around the tiny bit of remaining flesh.

“C-c-c-” he struggled to say something through lips that had already bloated and turned to ragged-edged jelly. “Chamomile!”

“I should have known this was too easy,” I groaned.

Comments

[Reese]

"I couldn’t feel the crack when I tried, even though I could feel it."
Was that deliberate?

"panel next to door, and when"
"panel next to the door, and when"?

Thanks for writing!

[Just a tree]

Chamomile never considered Rain Shadow a challenge. Is this where the mini boss gets to have a real boss fight?