Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 29 - Dreams of Death

After I’d broken the bone circle, things got worse. For a while the skeletons hadn’t really been threatening. No, really they just hadn’t been focused. They’d been wandering like lost, blind animals, not even really trying to attack unless I got too close to them. I’d started ignoring them because there wasn’t much point in going out of my way to break them apart.

That changed.

I wrenched open a door and got dogpiled by a half-dozen grinning ivory idiots. They grabbed my legs and scrabbled their little bony hooves all over me.

“I am getting tired of all this Nightmare Night bullcrap!” I yelled, trying to throw them off. The things clung to me, and I only managed to toss one of them aside. The pile of bones smacked into the wall and exploded like a grenade, erupting with a blast of shrapnel and purple-green fire.

The other five still attached to me started chattering, their jaws clacking like they were laughing silently. Points of light like stars burned in their empty eye sockets.

If they wanted to stay attached to me they were going to have to work for it. I flapped hard and launched myself into the ceiling hard enough to break through the tiles and into the dusty space above them. Dust erupted around us in a blinding cloud and I felt two of the skeletons fall off and burst apart on the ground.

I got my hooves around another one and tore it in half, vertebrae scattering. I tossed the halves to the side, and only the one with the skull actually erupted into fire. I guess I should have expected that. Whoever cursed the place really seemed to like skulls.

The last two fought to stay attached, the clacking getting louder and faster. One was on a back leg, and I slammed down on the floor butt-first to knock it free, the edge of the blast catching me before I could get away and leaving my back end feeling like I’d sat down on a live thundercloud with a bad attitude.

“Get off me, you undead freak!” I yelled, trying to twist my head to look at the last skeleton. It had already lost everything below the ribs from the rough treatment, but it was hanging onto my back in that spot you can’t quite reach.

The chattering stopped.

“Oh no,” I said, at practically the same moment it exploded. I got launched forwards and down into the tile floor. The filthy tiles cracked under me, and for a long moment all I could feel was the pain in my back.

I tried to get up, and my legs refused to cooperate. I risked a glance back. They were still attached. There were warning notifications up in my vision. I didn’t know what any of them meant. It’s not like I couldn’t read them but that didn’t mean I could understand them. Destiny had mentioned before that the operating system for the Exodus Armor hadn’t really been finished, and that was the only explanation for useful error messages like ‘0x00000121 CRASH’.

Some of the pictures were more helpful, but I didn’t need a flashing red picture of my lower back. I could tell I was hurt without the helpful commentary.

The radio crackled, adding another distraction to my HUD. “Unknown fireteam, this is Squiddles, you still with me up there?”

“Yeah,” I groaned. I tried to get up again, but I couldn’t get my stupid legs to work. They were fine. They were still attached. I just had to move! If I knew how to work the armor correctly I could hit myself with another healing potion.

Something popped in my back. And when I say popped, I don’t want you to imagine a joint popping into place like you might get if you crack your neck or stretch your shoulder. What I mean is more like the sensation of having a circuit breaker pop, a crackle of electricity and energy crossing an airgap.

My leg kicked, mostly on its own.

“You don’t sound so good,” Squiddles said.

“I don’t know if the things here are getting smarter or they just weren’t taking me seriously before or what,” I said. I focused on moving my legs. They started to respond, and I felt a little of the fear I’d been bottling up dissolve.

“They’re smarter than they look,” she agreed.

Everything flashed hot and cold when I did it, but I managed to stand up, and my legs were holding my weight. I still felt a little fragile, but it was better than nothing. I stumbled into the room where the skeletons had been waiting in ambush. I should have known, it was some kind of old hospital ward, with a few beds separated by the tattered remnants of curtains.

“How did you end up here?” I asked, trying to keep her talking. I needed to hear a friendly voice. Destiny hadn’t said anything in a while now, and I was getting more and more worried about her. I didn’t realize how much it helped having another pony there with me, at least in spirit. That’s a ghost pun.

“We came here to scavenge for supplies,” Squiddles said. “Medical stuff is always good because even if you can’t sell it you can use it yourself. Had the bright idea to check the basement since the rest had been picked over. We thought the locked door meant nopony else had been here.”

“But you were wrong?”

She laughed bitterly. “Yes and no. We just weren’t alone. We came down here as a squad of nine. Got picked off one by one.”

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly.

“So am I.”

I started going though the cabinets. Most of them were empty aside from old paperwork and cotton swabs. The last one was locked. I kicked it open, breaking the lock. I winced at the sound of breaking glass from the other side. There had been three healing potions inside in glass vials. The broken glass still held a little of the potion. I carefully drank the dregs, and felt the pain in my back fade. It wasn’t enough to fix it entirely but I felt less like I was going to shatter like the potions had.

“Anything you can do to help me rescue you?” I asked.

“Sure!” she pepped up at the mention of a rescue. “Where are you right now?”

“Uh…” I looked at the sign outside the door. “Room 106.”

“Okay, I think I can lead you to the basement door from there. The elevators are out so you’ll have to use the back way. When you walk out of the room, go to your left.”

Squiddles talked me through the next few turns before it went wrong.

“What do you mean you can’t go that way?” she asked, confused. “There should be a corridor there going straight to the stairs down.”

“There’s a hallway,” I agreed. I tapped a hoof against the rubble blocking it. Concrete and steel. I didn’t know how many stories worth of floor had collapsed down into the space. “It’s blocked.”

“Blocked? It wasn’t like that before…”

I frowned. “Are you sure? This looks like it’s been here a while.” The black growth was already starting to cover it, and there was no sign it was fresh.

“I’ll take you another way,” Squiddles decided. “We’ll just go the long way around. Sorry. I was hoping we could do this quickly.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll get you out of there,” I said. “I wouldn’t leave a pony stuck in a place like this.”

“Thank you,” she said quietly. "I wish other ponies felt the same way you did."

I nodded and turned to leave. And then saw the sign on the wall. This place really must have been near the basement stairs, because it was pointing the way there. And it listed the only department down there.

The morgue.

“Uh, Squiddles, if I’m reading this right… the basement is a morgue?”

“Morgue and machine room,” Squiddles said. “Some machine parts are worth a lot if they’re in good condition.”

“Oh. Right. That makes sense.” It was still creepy, though. I wouldn’t want to be in a morgue with all the undead around. She must have had nerves of steel.

The hospital was a maze. It hadn’t been originally, but rubble and time had turned it into one. And then when I finally found a clear path forward, I walked right into another magical barrier. This one left a taste in my mouth like electric lime cucumber when I slammed into it face-first.

The radio washed out with hard static for a few seconds. “Woah, what was that?” Squiddles asked. “I almost lost you there. Getting a lot of interference.”

“It’s another magic barrier,” I groaned. I turned around, looking for the trap. What was it going to be? Exploding skeletons that were also on fire? A giant monster made out of all the skeletons fused together into a really big skeleton?

Everything was just quiet. I frowned. That was weird. The hallway didn’t really feel trapped. The oppressive feeling of death was actually a little lighter in here for some reason.

“Chamomile?” Destiny whispered. “Be… careful… there’s… something… wrong with…”

“Destiny?” I blinked. “Hey, you there?”

She went quiet again. The radio’s static hum picked up again, Squiddles’ voice barely coming through.

“Look for a talisman!” she yelled, shouting to be heard through the interference. “It should look like a big gem!”

I nodded and stepped back, scanning the walls carefully. It wasn’t that hard to find. I was worried it would be buried in the black muck crawling all over things like greasy barnacles but it was mounted to the wall in a wooden frame, twisted in a spider-web of cords and beads, the ends trailing down from the frame. There wasn’t any of the weird growth around it anywhere, making it easy to spot.

“Found it,” I said loudly.

“Great! Break it and you should be good!”

I nodded. There was no time to argue. Destiny sounded like she was still in pain. Being here must be as bad for her as the cyber-jungle had been for me, a constant oppressive force trying to tear her apart. We had to be finished with this fast. If it wasn’t for Squiddles, I’d already have left, but I wasn’t going to leave a pony behind.

I tore the gem out of the tangle of threads, and the barrier vanished. That feeling of dread started creeping back in around the edges, though.

“Huh,” I muttered.

A huge cleaver made of bone and battered steel slammed through the wall right in front of me, the tip scraping my armor and cutting right through where it passed, almost all the way to my skin. I could feel the sharpness just from its passage.

The Steel Ranger holding it barreled through the wall. The plaster only slowed it down enough for me to scamper back and start to panic. I was starting to think I should have taken the sword from the first Ranger I’d fought, even if it was definitely super cursed.

“What’s going on? I heard that on my end!” Squiddles was coming through more clearly now. I ducked under a wide swing as the Ranger stumbled into the hallway. There wasn’t much room to maneuver here.

“Somepony’s unhappy that I’m intruding!” I shouted, backing off.

Getting in close was a really bad idea. I was pretty sure I was stronger than it was, but that sword was on a whole other level. It’d cut right through me! I needed a really clever plan. Unfortunately Destiny was still out of it and Squiddles was only a voice on the radio. The buzzing lights overhead flickered as he stomped towards me, unhurried and inevitable.

Wait! That was it!

The hallway was too narrow for me to really spread my wings, but I could still get a little lift. I jumped for the ceiling and grabbed the edge of the nearest light fixture, yanking it down and pointing the fluorescent bulbs at the oncoming undead. It seemed annoyed at the light and tried to bat it aside, slicing through it and, just as planned, hitting the ballast.

A surge of electricity ran through the blade and right into the Ranger, knocking him off his hooves and knocking the sword away. I grabbed it before he could recover and swung just as he sat up, taking his head off at the neck. I didn’t even feel resistance. The edge went through steel armor and bone with the same ease that it cut through air.

A sickly-sweet feeling surged up my hoof and I dropped the cleaver, the blade sinking a hoof-width into the floor.

“Super cursed,” I muttered, rubbing my fetlock.

The radio came back to life. “I hope you’re still alive up there,” Squiddles said. “Don’t break my heart, here. I’m counting on a rescue.”

“I’m here,” I said. “Just had to kill a big monster. Or re-kill it? What’s the word you use for getting rid of something undead?”

“Tartarus if I know,” Squiddles sighed. She sounded relieved. “Glad you’re still there!”

“It’s not the biggest thing I’ve fought,” I said. I stepped over the corpse gingerly. I probably should have checked to see if there was anything useful in the armor but I wasn’t really sure where to start. Destiny would have known how to open it up and look for goodies, but with my luck I’d end up reanimating it somehow.

“Really? What was the biggest one?”

I thought for a second. The dragons didn’t really count. I hadn’t really fought them. “It was back home,” I decided. “It was a pony I’d met once before. He got infected with something really bad, and it turned him into a monster. It kept growing and changing… it probably would have gotten even bigger if we hadn’t taken it down when we did.”

“We?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I… had friends with me then. They did most of the real work. I was just kind of a distraction.”

“Sorry. Sounds like that’s in the past tense.”

“They’re still alive. Probably. We just got separated.” I shouldn’t have thought about it. Now I really was feeling lonely. Even if I knew there were friendly zebras back in the canyon and I’d be meeting up with Squiddles soon, it wasn’t the same.

“That’s rough,” she said. “I know what it’s like.”

“If your directions were right, the basement should be right around here…” She’d taken me on a wide loop around the damaged parts of the hospital. My sense of direction wasn’t amazing, but one thing I did know how to use in the armor was the compass, and I was sure we’d done almost a complete circuit.

“Good. I can’t wait to see you,” Squiddle said. She sounded a little pensive. She was probably worried I was going to be some kind of crazy pony.

“How’d you get stuck down there, anyway?” I asked.

“Went down to take a look around and got stuck behind a magic shield. The talisman controlling it is on your side, so all we’ve been able to do is wait for rescue. I wasn’t sure anypony would ever come around.”

“It’s your lucky day,” I said.

“Hah! That’s one way to put it,” she mumbled. I couldn’t blame her. There was nothing lucky about what had happened to her, even if she’d probably survive it. I just had to get to her before anything else did.

Sure enough, the next corner took me past the broken elevators and to the stairway. And this time I could see the barrier before I walked into it. I tossed a loose rock at the stairway doors and they bounced off a barrier that shimmered white and gold.

My radio was acting up again, to boot.

“...can’t ...basement ...careful!” Squiddles said, barely audible through the interference.

“If you can hear me, I can’t make out what you’re saying,” I said. “I think being too close to this magic is doing something to the signal!”

The only reply was more static.

“Great,” I mumbled. “I’ll figure it out on my own.”

“Chamomile…” Destiny groaned. If she was alive I’d think she was feverish. She sounded like a pony talking in her sleep. “...need to leave…”

“We’ll be gone soon,” I said. “We just have to take care of one last thing.”

I knew what I was looking for this time and found the talisman on the far wall, opposite the barrier. It looked just like the last one I’d torn down, a tangle of wood and beads stretched out in a circular frame. I ripped the crystal out of the center and after a moment of thought, jammed it into the Junk Jet. It was a big hunk of rock, so it wasn’t the worst thing to shoot at somepony.

The static started to fade. “...need to turn back!”

“Squiddles?” I ran towards the doors. “Hey! What’s wrong?!”

“You need to get out of here! Don’t come down into the basement! It was a--” her voice was cut off by echoing screams and the radio went dead.

“Squiddles? Squiddles!” I bolted down the stairs and kicked the doors open.

I followed my instincts and slammed right through the next set of doors without looking at where I was going.

My instincts were bucking stupid.

A tall form in ragged, ancient robes floated above the ground like a wraith, three eyes burning from its withered face. It raised a staff in its hooves, the end tipped with a skull.

“I’m sorry. I tried to warn you,” Squiddles said, her voice echoing from the staff and my radio. “It made me do this. It was sealed down here a long time ago. It needed you to free it.”

“Oh buck no,” I said. “I am not going to be responsible for unleashing ancient evil again!”

The robed horror gestured with its skull-staff and six forms rose up around it, ghouls that still had scraps of flesh clinging to their bones, with the remains of their barding and weapons still strapped to them.

I spun and kicked the one closest to me before it could attack, and the guns attached to its battle saddle sprayed bullets into the air. I grabbed them before they could react and spun them around, getting them in a headlock and forcing them to bite down on the trigger, pointing their whole body at the other undead, blasting two of them apart before they ran out of ammo. I twisted the ghoul’s head off and tossed the body down.

“What I wouldn’t give for some explosives right now,” I muttered. I snapped my hoofblade to the ready. “Well? I don’t have all night.”

“We came down here as a squad of nine,” Squiddle said dully, like a recording.

Two ghouls dropped down on top of me. Like an idiot I hadn’t looked up. One grabbed my left wing and tried to twist it. The other one held onto my right foreleg, keeping me from bringing the knife to bear.

They were a lot stronger than the skeletons that had dogpiled me. The one on my wing yanked, and I yelped. That set off the Junk Jet because I hadn’t been careful with the trigger, and the big gem I’d stuffed in it went flying. The floating zebra dodged to the side, but it went right into the middle of the three ghouls on the far side of it, smacking into the one in the center and shattering, releasing a pulse of white light.

The flying zebra shrieked and covered its eyes, and the ghoul I’d hit collapsed, the remaining flesh turning to ash and dust. The two standing near it were stunned, their flesh flaking like it was drying up.

I slammed my head into the skull of the ghoul stuck to my leg, and, well, I was wearing a metal helmet and he wasn’t. There was a solid crunch and his grip loosened enough for me to tear my hoof free and finish the job with a quick slash.

Next I needed to get the one off my wing.

“Okay, you stupid--”

There was a dull thump, and an apple-shaped metal ball hit the ground next to me. I didn’t have time to react to the grenade before it went off. The blast knocked me aside, and I felt shrapnel slice through seams in the armor and into my flesh.

I coughed up blood and tried to get up. The ghoul on my wing twisted, and I was back down on the filthy tiles of the morgue floor. It either knew what it was doing or it had stumbled into a pretty decent winglock. From the way it was gnawing on my armor hungrily I was pretty sure it wasn’t intentional.

“Get off me!” I shouted. I’d landed weird and my back legs were acting up again, all pins and needles and barely working, like I’d been sitting on them wrong for hours. I didn’t have the leverage I needed to shove him off, and with my face pressed against the ground I couldn’t reach the ghoul with my hoofblade.

The floating zebra wizard, or shaman, or whatever the thing was raised his staff and a wave of darkness pulsed out of it. The ghoul biting me suddenly redoubled in strength, and at the same time my armor’s HUD blinked and started flickering. Warning windows popped up, and there was something about an antimagic field but I didn’t have time to think about that because the talismans negating the armor’s bulk sputtered out and whatever protection it had failed at the same time. The ghoul’s teeth tore at the armor and into my wing.

I screamed. I was going to be eaten alive and there was nothing I could do. I felt helpless. Part of me just wanted to give up.

“I’m… sorry…” Squiddles said, her voice strained.

I shook like a leaf, blood pooling and dripping from my chest, and roared with anger and frustration. I pushed myself, trying to dig deep down for strength, and I found it. Ice flooded my nerves and I bullied my way back to my hooves, forcing my back legs to work. It felt less like they were really working and more like I was driving them, making them do what I wanted by force of will.

Everything slowed down. The zebra looked surprised, even with its face a three-eyed skull with scraps of striped flesh hanging to it. The ghouls were barely moving, caught in a moment in time. I pulled my wing free with the sudden burst of strength and brought both forehooves down on the ghoul that had been chewing on me, slamming him into the floor hard enough to make him bounce.

In that stillness I flung the knife from my hoof, the blade flying through the air with almost supernatural accuracy and slamming into the floating horror’s third eye.

Time resumed, and the ice in my veins was replaced with burning sick like I’d been drinking jet fuel. Exhaustion washed over me, and my right forehoof ached with the empty socket feeling of a missing tooth.

The zebra fell to the ground, and the ghouls lost whatever force was animating them, going still. I stumbled over to the robed thing and yanked the blade free from its face, my vision wavering and doubling. The armor started to come back online, the weight literally lifting from my shoulders.

“I didn’t… want to…” Squiddles’ voice whispered from the staff.

“I promised I’d save you,” I said.

She laughed and the light in the skull’s eyes faded, her voice going quiet forever. I stumbled out of the room, trailing blood, and collapsed against the wall right outside, panting for breath. I felt awful. Really awful. I had that feeling you get when you just know it’s time to go to the hospital, but here I was already in one and nothing was helping.

“Chamomile?” Destiny asked, sounding like she was waking up from a long nap. “I don’t know what happened back there, but it feels like whatever was causing that necrotic field is fading-- Chamomile? Hey! Are you okay?!”

“Not really,” I mumbled.

“Hold on. We can--” I felt the healing potion flush through me, pushing out some of the shrapnel in my side. A second hiss, and the pain in my wing faded. “That’s the last healing potion we picked up.”

I nodded and tried to stand up. My back half still felt wrong, and my head was pounding.

“What happened?” Destiny asked.

“The usual,” I groaned through gritted teeth. “I did a lot of stupid stuff. I got rid of magic seals that somepony put there for a good reason, found something that wanted to kill me, and barely survived.”

“Again?”

“I didn’t learn my lesson the first time,” I admitted. I forced myself into motion. If I was still walking it meant I wasn’t going to die. Probably. I was too out of it to notice that I was going the wrong way. I’d meant to go back to the stairs, but I ended up pushing open the doors to the maintenance room instead.

I looked around dully. Even the colors in my vision didn’t seem right. Everything was sort of washed out. The hazard stripes looked too pale, the red of the rust was fading to black, even the Auto-Doc in the middle of the room just looked like dull metal.

I started to turn around, because I’d gone the wrong way. I’d taken two steps before I realized what I’d found.

I rushed back over to it, ignoring the feeling of very recently closed wounds trying to re-open.

“Is this thing working?!” I asked Destiny.

“Hold on, let me see.” Her crimson aura flashed across the keys, and a diagnostic screen popped up, status bars crawling across the Auto-Doc’s display. “I can’t believe it. It’s showing as fully operational! It must have been brought down here for maintenance and whoever ripped out the ones upstairs totally missed it!”

“But if it’s down here… does that mean it’s still broken somehow?”

I tilted my head and picked up a note taped to the side of the pod. It was a maintenance report, written two centuries ago. The ink was faded, but I could still make out the rough hoofwriting.

“Added updated zebra biometrics,” I read. “Transfer to POW Camp once clearance is granted by the Ministry of Peace.”

I lowered the paper.

“This is exactly what we needed. I guess that old stallion didn’t scam me after--” A wave of dizziness washed over me, and I had to steady myself on the Auto-Doc, everything going all wavy and black.

“It is exactly what you needed,” Destiny agreed. “Let’s get you in there.”

She pressed one of the buttons on the panel, and the pod swung open, revealing a reclining bed with a worrying number of restraints and an even more worrying number of delicate mechanical arms tipped with knives, tubes, nozzles, clamps, and things I couldn’t even start to identify.

“Are you sure it’s safe?” I asked. The restraints didn’t look all that sturdy. I could probably tear my way free if I wanted. That didn’t mean I wanted to be stabbed a bunch with a knife by a malfunctioning robot doctor.

“You can’t get back to the zebras like you are now,” Destiny said. “And don’t you want to make sure it actually works before you put someone else in there? It seems like that kind of stupid risk you’d take.”

It was the kind of stupid risk I’d take. I couldn’t let somepony else go first just because I was afraid.

“I’ll be out here monitoring it the whole time,” Destiny promised.

“Fine,” I groaned, starting the complicated process of actually getting the armor off.

---

It’s probably for the best that I don’t remember anything after that for a while. Destiny said it was because of the general anesthesia. One of the drugs had a side effect of wiping out short-term memory. Since it also meant I didn’t remember anything that happened inside the Auto-Doc, I’m not too unhappy about it.

The first thing I remember is coming out of a daze and getting out of the Auto-Doc. I felt weird, all floaty and light. The first thing I did was look at myself, to make sure all the parts were still there. Three legs, one insect-like horror, check. Two wings, check.

“Hey! You’re finally awake!” Destiny said, floating in front of me. From her tone, she was feeling better too. “You were in there for a while. You needed some serious work done.”

“What kind of serious work?” I asked, not sure if I really wanted to know.

“Pulled a bunch of shrapnel out of you, filtered most of the SIVA out of your blood - I had to rig a bypass on that to make sure it wouldn’t infect the Auto-Doc, so you should praise me for having amazing mechanical talents - repaired your spine…”

“My spine? What was wrong with my spine?”

“Your back was broken. Twice. Once when you fell down here, then again at some point when I was out of it.”

I winced. “I was lucky my spinal cord--”

“Was also busted up. SIVA rewired around the damage, so I had to leave some of that in place. Your brain is already used to the new pathing, and it’s easier than traumatizing you again and having to put you through physical therapy.”

I looked back, trying to see my own spine. “There’s no scar or anything…”

“Of course not. Auto-Docs are good about cleaning up. It dug a bunch of scar tissue out of you, actually. You’re practically a new mare!”

“How long before there’s nothing left of the old me?”

“Don’t be so negative. You’re not dying anymore.”

“My leg feels better,” I admitted. “So does my shoulder.”

“We got something else that might be useful. Look at this!” Destiny floated up a glass tube capped with metal at both ends. Inside was a fine black sand.

“Is that what I think it is?” I took it from her and tilted it from side to side, watching the grains fall, as fine as dust.

“It’s the SIVA that was in your bloodstream. I couldn’t leave it in the machine. Remember how we were trying to find a way to actually build the weapon Kulaas gave us? SIVA can build anything!”

“So you can tell it to build that crazy weapon? That’s great!”

“There is one tiny, little, insignificant problem. I… don’t have a way to program it.”

“What you mean is, it’s not actually useful at all.”

“It isn’t useful yet! I’ve got a brilliant plan!”

Comments

[Starlight Nova]

How soon until Discord appears?

[FridayPie]

10931502
He is supposedly not free yet if Cauterize wasn't approved and this is Horizons continuity.. all bets off otherwise.