Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 134: Alapu Upala

I’m going to be honest, the whole situation was like something out of one of my worst nightmares. Worse, it was one of those weird symbolic ones that means the pony having it needs therapy. I know I need therapy. I promised myself in that moment that if I somehow made it out alive I’d see if anypony knew how to fix a broken brain.

My point is, I was trapped inside my own mother. That’s awful, right? The second I say it like that you get the wrong idea, but it’s also not entirely wrong because I wasn’t sure if the core containment chamber was more like a heart or a womb or maybe a brain? It was definitely part of her, though, and I was surrounded by enough almost-organic pipes and veins to prove it.

Maybe it was mostly like the stomach, since we were in a constant rain of acid, sort of like that one myth about the Titan who ate all his foals because he was afraid he’d be replaced.

Anyway, on top of that Mom was standing in the room with me, holding a gun, and I could see through her like she was a ghost because she’d grown a new shell out of glass to resist the acidfall. Most guns don’t scare me, but that one did. Partly that was because it had punched a hole right through me like I wasn’t made entirely out of armor tough enough for a pony-sized tank, but mostly it was because of the look on Mom’s face while she held it in her magic.

And on top of all that, just like in the worst nightmares, there was a test and I’d shown up naked! The Exodus Armor was good stuff but it simply wasn’t designed to survive this kind of abuse. The constant rain of acid didn’t hurt me thanks to being mostly made out of the Black Dragon, but the blue hexagonal cells of the armor were fragile test-bench things, and it was amazing they’d even survived this long wrapped around my stupid meat.

The last of the thaumoframe cells failed, and what was left of the armor fell off, the circuitry in the cells simply unable to repair itself fast enough. I was left naked, bleeding, and afraid on the floor.

“Someday, I’m going to look back at this moment and I’ll realize where I went wrong,” Mom said. “I’ll be in the middle of ruling Equestria and it’ll hit me like a ton of bricks, whatever I could have said to keep you from making such poor decisions.”

“It was all those birthday parties,” I said.

“Birthday parties?” she frowned. “Your father and I disagreed on a lot but we both agreed those were silly.”

“I know,” I retorted. “It totally warped me as a foal. If I’d just had cake a little more often--”

She fired before I could finish my inane statement. The bullet leapt out of the gun with a combination of roaring fire and cracking thunder. I tried to dodge it with my wired reflexes but that only half-worked. I avoided a hit to my face and took it in the left forehoof instead. The shot moved at impossible velocity, obviously propelled by some combination of gunpowder and magnetism.

It ripped through my leg and left a clean hole. A flesh wound, straight through and through. The aftershock from the round hitting me felt like my whole body tried to evert through the exit hole.

“You aren’t funny,” Mom said. “I don’t know if you can’t stop talking or if you simply think it’s a valuable strategy to buy time.”

“You know what you said a minute ago, about finding the exact right thing to say? It’s sort of like that. Part of me sort of hoped I could talk you down.”

“To what end? To beg me to spare your life?” she grinned madly. Despite the fact that this glass-shelled form resembled her original living body, if it had been filled with pulsing neon-colored gummy worms, her teeth were still long fangs. She levitated the gun up higher, holding it close to her body. “Or maybe to allow your friends to escape? You’re not going to get either of those wishes granted today, Chamomile. I’m going to kill you, then I’m going to kill all your friends. So what if I don’t have the command codes I need? I’m immortal! I’ll brute-force them for a thousand years if I have to!”

The hammer on the gun drew back in slow motion. Without my armor, half-crippled from the two shots I’d taken from that hoof cannon already, I couldn’t close the distance between us in time to do anything. I felt helpless for one instant until I remembered my greatest weapon.

I spat glue at the gun. It hit the end of the barrel just before it fired, the expanding concrete-hard form getting into the complex mechanism. Mom looked shocked.

“I forgot you could do that,” she admitted, a moment before something inside the gun went terribly wrong. It backfired, and black powder and capacitors met in a grand eruption that exploded like a grenade. Shrapnel ripped through the air, fragments cutting into my chest, face, and neck, splinters burrowing deep inside.

For me that was enough to sting really badly - the shrapnel hadn’t hit my eyes and the rest of me was so dense it hadn’t managed to dig deep. The SIVA in my body was already eating the shrapnel before I got back to my hooves.

Mom, on the other hoof, didn’t fare as well. The problem was the glass shell. My skin was backed with a composite fiber layer, like the kind of light body armor security ponies use, along with heavy metals that blocked a lot of radiation. Tempered glass was tough and all but it was also very brittle.

She cracked, the shrapnel blasting into her and sending a spiderweb of breaks across her shell. Maybe if she’d had a few moments to think, it wouldn’t be a big deal, but she was in the middle of a rain of acid, and that cracked shell was all that was protecting her. It got inside through all those new tiny gaps, worming inside and burning away the SIVA coming to repair her own damage.

Mom screamed. She took a step, and her body fractured more. It hadn’t just been protecting her, it had been an exoskeleton like a crab’s. Broken this badly, her limbs weren’t working properly. Fragments of broken glass fell to the floor around her as she stumbled, trying to catch herself and only making it worse. Every hole let more aqua regia inside her, and I saw the tangle of fake organs and mechanisms inside starting to burn.

“No!” she yelled. I got up. She wasn’t as intimidating without the gun. In fact, when I got close enough, I could see just how much taller I was.

“Go to your room,” I said, because I didn’t have a great line prepared for the express purpose of smashing my mother. It sort of works, right? It’s the kind of thing a parent tells a foal when they’ve been bad and-- I should have said something about a spanking! No, wait, that would have been weird and sexual.

So I punched her in the snout to establish dominance. Her whole skull shattered, and her scream trailed off into static and electronic noise. The acid raining down broke her apart, and she collapsed into a heap of what looked like melting plastic spaghetti.

“I did it,” I panted. My left forehoof and my shoulder felt awful, very much like I’d had big holes punched in them.

The room rumbled. I looked up at what hung in the center of the room like the most malignant forbidden fruit in the universe. Outer layers were peeling away from it, rotten rind made of gold plating and micromachines being eaten away by the rain. A swarm of flying SIVA was struggling to make repairs, but they couldn’t avoid every raindrop, resulting in a shower of sparks whenever one of the tiny robots was struck and failed almost instantly.

“Oh right, that was an avatar.” The blood loss and exhaustion had almost made me forget. It seemed like it had at least broken her concentration, so I wasn’t going to have to worry about another copy showing up until I had a chance to figure out what to do. Maybe start cutting lines holding the big pulsing tumor up?

The room rumbled again under my hooves, and this time I was absolutely sure it wasn’t just me being unsteady on my hooves and a little woozy. Some of the junk that had fallen out of my armor rattled across the floor, coffee cups and empty novelty glasses and other stuff that hadn’t melted yet in the rain.

The moment I saw the stuff I remembered something very, very important. My mom had been holding back the constant stream of acid with a vector trap system, something that was somewhat fragile and required a constant input of magic and mental effort from her. And I’d just broken her avatar and her concentration along with it.

The air opened up, and a flood of acid rushed out. It was knee-deep in the first second, chest deep the next, and I was floating a moment later. The aqua regia was already stained goldenrod yellow from the gold it had dissolved, and that was a terrible sign - yellow chemistry was the worst. If a huge flood of acid wasn’t enough of a sign, the color told me that things had definitely gone sideways.

I struggled and splashed. You know one instinct I still had? Drowning was bad! I’d drowned before and I’d had a bad time! I definitely didn’t have any Sparkle-Tuna or hagfish slime or anything else that would let me breathe water and even if I did I was pretty sure breathing acid was significantly different. And maybe impossible.

I sucked down a deep breath and dove for the door. I had to fight back my fear every moment. Going out that way wasn’t going to be great for anypony immediately on the other side, but I was worried about myself right at the moment. The junk that had been blocking off passage, the growth of plastic pipes and veins Mom had used to keep me from escaping, was all melting away. I should have been able to get out easily.

Or at least that would have been the case if the entire door mechanism hadn’t melted by being drowned in strong acid. I had a faint hope that the door seal might blow, then I remembered how paranoid Cozy Glow was. There was no way the door was designed to do anything except lock itself down forever and damn whoever was on the wrong side of it.

I struggled with the hatch for another few moments until it disintegrated in my hooves. I’d been braced against the door at the time, so I accidentally kicked off, and used the motion to swim back to the surface, gasping for air. It stank worse than you can imagine. There was no way all those fumes were healthy, even if my body wasn’t going to melt.

“There has to be some way out,” I gasped. I pony-paddled over to where the acid was coming from, the big pipes dumping acid down on the mechanical sprinklers that had turned it into rain to make sure there were no safe spots in the room.

I flew up and kicked one of the sprinklers, breaking it off. The spray turned into a solid stream. Worse, I found that the revealed pipe was just a little too narrow for big, clumsy ponies. It was almost like it had been designed for industrial use and not for somepony to sneak through it, which seemed extremely inconsiderate.

“There has to be a way,” I whispered. Could I burrow out? The black dragon had burrowed through the ground, and I had plenty of claw action going on. All I had to do was outpace a tidal surge of acid before I drowned.

I was hanging from the ceiling and trying to decide where to start when a flash of light blipped into the room. A pony in a yellow hazardous environment suit was hovering in midair, surrounded by a magical aura. I squinted, and recognized them a moment later.

“Cube?” I asked.

“I’m here to rescue you!” she shouted. “You idiot!”

I had a million questions but they could wait. Her suit was already starting to degrade. I grabbed for her hoof. She snatched me up with magic, and I was careful not to wiggle myself free. The universe inverted around us in a burst of light and my first question was answered immediately.

I’d been under the impression that teleporting in Limbo was extremely dangerous, and clearly I’d been right. I didn’t know the physics of Limbo or teleport spells well enough, but the warped space did not lend itself to instantaneous travel. Our passage felt like being thrown into a rock tumbler and bounced around until we came out of the other side of that long timeless instant and exploded into the hallway with sideways speed we hadn’t had on entering. We both slammed into an antique table and a vase filled with plastic flowers, shattering both.

“Oh that sucked eggs,” Cube groaned. She laid there for a moment, then scrambled to rip the environment suit off. Several layers of insulation had already burned through. She tossed it as far as she could to one side.

“That did suck, but it was really impressive,” I told her, helping her rip the acid-soaked suit away before it could burn her skin. “I didn’t think it was even possible to teleport here!”

“It’s not,” Cube said. “Not without teleport enhancers. That’s how I got in there. I got them off the Juniper before we got here. They stabilized space enough to get me from there to the inside of that chamber once Mom’s weird landscaping spell went down.”

“You didn’t have any and still got me out,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, and it really sucked, like I said.” Cube paused in the middle getting one of the rubber boots off and coughed, spitting up blood. “We only went as far as a blink and I’m going to be sore from transcription errors for the next bucking month, so you better thank me now.”

“Thanks,” I mumbled. I waited for a wave of agony to hit me and nothing did. “Um…”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “They’re little things, like a hair on the film appearing for a frame during the movie, or a single page in a book being printed off-center. They happen all the time when you’re learning to teleport, and most of them aren’t seriously dangerous. You heal them like any other cut or bruise.”

“I feel okay,” I said with a shrug.

“That’s because you’re weird,” Cube huffed. “And you heal faster than I do.”

“I do heal quickly,” I agreed. I sat up so I could look at the holes through me. “Did you bring a first-aid kit?”

“Lucky for you, yes,” Cube said. “Here.”

She’d had saddlebags on under the suit, and pulled a butterfly-marked kit out of her pack. I opened it up and wrapped up my shoulder and forehoof with bandages and gauze. There was only one mostly-expired healing potion and I made Cube drink it. I’d lived with much worse injuries but I wasn’t sure I trusted that a rough trip like that had only banged her around.

Besides, she was my half-sister. I had to take care of her. We were the only family each of us had left.

The ship rumbled, and I realized I wasn’t quite right.

“We need to get out of here,” I said. “There’s SIVA everywhere in this place and I don’t know what’s gonna happen after I dunked mom in acid. She might try and hack you again. Or I might get eaten. Again. Terrible things keep happening to both of us and I’d like to leave before giving them the opportunity.”

Cube nodded and we started running. I didn’t ask why we didn’t teleport out. We’d barely gone more than a dozen paces and the trip had been rough. Trying to pop out of the ship entirely would probably end with us never arriving on the other side, and that’s the good possibility where we didn’t end up buried inside the wall.

We hadn’t gone far before a mare stumbled into the corridor ahead of us. For a second I thought they were going to try and kill us. Cube stopped me before I could pounce, a hoof across my chest.

“You feel that?” she asked.

I squinted. “They’re confused? And their head hurts? I might be projecting because that’s how I feel right now too.”

“I’d call it hung over, but yeah. I’ll teach you to be a decent psychic yet.”

We stopped for them. The mare was wearing the ship’s uniform. She wasn’t just hung over, she looked like she’d been awake for a week. The circles under her eyes were practically engraved there, and she was drawn and weak in a way that suggested she needed a good meal and a lot of water.

“What happened?” the mare asked. Her voice was rough, and she had to stop to cough. “The last thing I remember clearly was going to sleep, then my dreams were this horrible blur of… math! Like I was back in school!”

“Congratulations, you were being mind controlled,” Cube said.

“You’re out of it now and you’re going to be okay,” I promised her. “But we need to get out of this ship. It’s not safe and we’re evacuating. Can you walk?”

“I’m weak but I can move. I just don’t know what’s going on. Everypony’s just as confused as I am!” she said.

“Everypony?” I asked. She glanced back. More ponies were in the hallway behind her. I hadn’t even noticed them for a moment. They were so weak and mentally exhausted that the little trickle of psychic sense I had was practically treating them as invisible, just part of the scenery. There had to be a couple dozen of them.

All of them looked sick. Really, they looked exhausted. It was just like Gator Land in that way - none of the ponies who’d been controlled there had been taken care of. They were used and discarded. Everypony here needed food, water, and real sleep without having their brains used as extra memory. They had to have been the ponies I saw in those standing coffins in the simulation world Mom had created.

“Is this a rescue mission now?” Cube asked. She sounded resigned, because she already knew the answer.

“Gotta prioritize,” I shrugged. I drew myself up to my full height. “Okay! Everypony listen up! We’re going to evacuate the ship! I want all of you to follow me, and if you can’t keep up, tell somepony and we’ll figure it out!” I looked at Cube. “You know a fast way out, right?”

Cube scoffed. “Duh, I lived here, that’s why I was leading the way. We’ll hit Marecross City. There’s a big hatch there we can use. It was designed for public transit so there are ways out of the ship.”

“Marecross City?” I whispered.

“It’s a few faux city streets and shopfronts to give ponies a place to feel normal,” Cube whispered back. “It’s not really a city, it’s more like a shopping mall, but…”

“Like a Stable atrium or one of the parks I’ve seen. Except… urban.”

“Some ponies don’t like nature,” Cube shrugged.

---

The good thing was, even that minimal direction was enough to motivate ponies. They really just needed to know somepony was in charge and working to help them. More than that, all of them had been crew here, so they knew where they were going. Cube and I led the way, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“This could be a trick,” Cube whispered. She looked back at the ponies following us.

“They’re real,” I assured her.

“I know that, but it’s convenient that they got released all at once.”

“They got released because I dropped Mom in acid. For all we know she’s actually dead for real. It definitely shocked her enough that it could have broken the connection.”

“Or she could be using them to slow us down,” Cube pointed out. “We’re moving at a fraction of the speed we would be if we were alone. We can’t even run because half of these ponies will pass out if we move at more than a trot!”

“We haven’t had any monsters show up yet.”

“But the floor keeps vibrating,” Cube said. She looked down at her hooves. “You didn’t grow up on ships, Chamomile. There are normal feelings in a ship and abnormal feelings and I’m telling you right now that whatever’s going on, it’s not normal.”

“You think the reactor is getting unstable? Or maybe the engines?”

“I don’t know. It’s only a little shaking, but think about it, Chamomile. What does it take to make something this big shake, even a little?”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t get worse,” I said, which was the wrong thing to say in a corner of the universe that operated entirely on the rule of ‘things get worse’.

The floor shuddered again. Something caught my attention. I skidded to a halt and braced myself, a bulkhead door coming down from above and almost cutting the corridor off. I grunted and held it back, straining under the weight. I very consciously didn’t think about how much I was holding. If I put a number to it, my body was going to realize how stupid this was and punish me for it.

“Chamomile!” Cube yelled. She tried to take some of the weight with her magic, but she’d trained mostly for precision and control. Neither one was a big help.

“Keep them moving!” I shouted back. I repositioned my hooves, forcing the steel plate back a tiny bit. It felt like it was going to slice me in half if it tried just a little harder. The rest of the ponies following us bolted through, the stragglers picked up and carried by Cube’s magic and thrown at the others to save a few precious seconds.

“You’re clear!” she yelled.

I rolled my shoulders, and only just managed to avoid catching myself with the edge of the panel when it slammed home, the strained systems holding it unhappy with being denied for so long. Cube caught me when I stumbled, a blob of telekinesis pressing against my chest and keeping me upright. She wasn’t strong enough to help with the door, but it was nice to lean into it and give my aching body a chance to recover from the sprint.

“Thanks,” I panted. “I’m okay. It wasn’t as heavy as it looked. It was actually way heavier.”

I looked around. We were in an enclosed city. It reminded me of the underwater stable I’d been stuck in. Or maybe part of Gator Land’s main street. A facade trying to replicate a world that didn’t exist anymore, a playset for grown-up ponies to pretend to be normal.

A shop selling extremely fancy hats shook and shot into the ceiling on a pillar of machinery, the entire store smashing flat. Hats rained down from the sky in the wake of the hatastrophe. Two stores next to it smashed together as machinery grew in the space they were arrogantly trying to occupy.

“What the buck is happening to this place?” I asked.

“Do I look like an engineer?” Cube asked. “I think it’s… reconfiguring. Like one of those toys that turns from a robo-pony into a truck when you fold it up. They’re great for practicing precise telekinesis. I had a whole collection of Decevitrons.”

“Only we’re inside the truck while it’s being folded?” I grimaced. “I don’t think I like the idea of being an easily marketable toy.”

“It’s less fun from this side!” Cube agreed. We ran after the refugees. The street opened up along a hidden seam. Electric scooters that had been parked at a charging station fell into the new canyon. I sensed sudden danger and grabbed up a foal while we ran, just ahead of falling glass and steel beams from a building collapsing after failing to fold neatly like a book.

“Where’s the way out?!” I put the foal on my back between my shoulders and shouted over the increasing destruction. Pipes sprayed steam into the air as they erupted from the deck, venting before they’d even joined with their opposites emerging from the sky-painted ceiling above us.

“Here!” Cube motioned. I found the last thing I expected. A bus station. A half-dozen Skywagons were parked neatly at a depot. Ponies were disconnecting them from the recharging stations and helping each other in, working together. The strongest ponies had already volunteered for the hardest part, strapping themselves in the front.

A stallion ran over to me in tears. The foal on my back called out for him, so I passed them off, reuniting father and daughter. He didn’t stop to say thank you, just running back to the skywagons and trying to find a place to squeeze in. The filly on his back waved to me. That was enough thanks. I gave her a quick wave back.

Beyond it, I saw the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Open sky. Or at least open air. Limbo was a little weird in that way.

“Next stop, anywhere but here!” Cube yelled. “Everypony move! Get onboard!”

“Pick up the pace!” I warned. I saw something I didn’t like. Movement at that open hatch. Not ponies checking what was outside, armor plates starting to shift.

The first few skywagons got out with no problems. Cube and I were riding in the last two, because she wasn’t leaving without me and I wasn’t leaving ponies behind. We just barely made it. The armor that I’d seen snapped shut like a jaw just after we left, sliding sideways to shut off the depot.

---

A few minutes later, we’d jumped off at what was something like a minimum safe distance. The skywagons were pointed in the right direction to catch up with the rest of the refugees. My hooves hadn’t even hit the stone of the broken length of bridge my friends were waiting on before Destiny pulled me into a hug.

“You’re not dead!” she said. She squeezed for a moment, then regained control. “But you stink. And where’s my armor?”

“It melted,” I said apologetically. “Turns out it doesn’t hold up to a billion gallons of aqua regia. Stuff even melts gold, you know.”

“But not Chamomile,” Cube said. “I told all of you she was still alive.”

“And all of us agreed with you,” Cozy Glow agreed.

“You wanted to leave her anyway,” Quattro accused. “Here, Chamomile. We saved this for you.”

She presented me with a very welcome and familiar face. Well, face was the wrong word. It was a gun, with a big reflex scope, small monochrome screen, and a shocking amount of network and computing equipment wrapped up in a small boxy package around the mechanism. Best of all, it came with a pleasant personality.

“DRACO!” I cheered. “You saved him!”

The gun beeped, the screen showing a smiley face. I hugged it. It was the only weapon I’d ever had that made me feel like a sharpshooter instead of a thug.

“He’s happy to see you too,” Destiny told me.

“DRACO was setting off a radio SOS beacon,” Quattro said. “Cube and I split up to figure out how to get out, I followed the signal, and found him in the middle of a lot of property damage.”

“That checks out,” I agreed.

“He helped us find our way out,” Cube said. “I admit, it’s a great gun.”

“Meanwhile, I was organizing something useful,” Cozy Glow said. “I established this forward operating position.”

Destiny rolled her eyes. “And I went to the detached reactor room from the Exodus Black to make sure everypony left, in case we need to do something drastic. We got what supplies we could, like the transport enhancers, environment suit, and some spare parts and rations.” She held up a bulky radio. “I have the Arcana core wired up to this, we were waiting for news from you.”

“I messed up Mom pretty good, so we might just need to wait,” I assured Destiny. “I think the whole ship is falling apart with her… I don’t a hundred percent know she’s dead, but she’s definitely messed up.”

“Are you sure about that?” Cozy Glow said, her voice tight. “Did you get a look at what’s actually happening to my ship? There’s a reason we had to retreat all the way out here.”

“I was a little busy saving everypony!” I pointed out. I stepped over to the edge to peek around the stone, already knowing I wasn’t going to like what I was going to see.

Most of the ship was obscured by clouds, big puffy thunderclouds that were a definite sign that whatever pegasus magic Destiny had replicated to make the ships fly, it was spiraling out of control in a way only matched by a teenaged filly having a temper tantrum. Flashes of golden lightning cut through the haze and fog, and every glimpse I had was worse and worse. The entire shape of the Exodus Red was changing, the massive city-sized ship twisting, metal bending in impossible ways.

“That’s not good, is it?” I asked.

“The acid should have completely destabilized her core,” Destiny said. “She shouldn’t even be alive.”

“She might not be,” I said. “Destiny, you remember what happened to me when I drowned? Even while I was dead, SIVA tried to preserve what it could and find some way to fix the rest.”

“It used your body like a puppet and kept you moving,” Destiny mumbled. “You don’t think…?”

“In Gator Land, I had to fight part of the Black Dragon that fell off after it was badly hurt. Every single part of it had the ability to become a monster. With how much SIVA got used rebuilding the ship, it was all part of her body.”

“And the only reason it was quiet was because we had the brain locked up,” Destiny realized. “A brain that you just turned to mush.”

In the midst of the stormcloud, around that changing shape, I heard roaring. A high-pitched wailing roar, like screaming crossed with laughing, coming from multiple throats. Silhouetted against the clouds by the lighting streaming around them, I saw three long necks topped with menacing, draconic heads.

“I think things are getting worse,” I said.