Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 70: Beyond The Sea

I gasped for breath. Everything was dark and cold. Pain surged through every inch of my body in the most unpleasant wake-up call of all time, the kind of agony that took you right from asleep and into blind animal panic with your instincts kicking in every direction before your brain even had time to decide what was happening.

My hooves hit sheet metal. I was in a tight place. I couldn’t breathe. The metal under my rear hooves moved. I’d either dented something or popped a hatch or something, but the only important thing in that blind confusion was that I’d found some direction to panic into and try to escape. I needed to get out in the open. I kicked harder, and light flooded in. The cold metal under me started to move, sliding, and a moment later, I was out in the open.

The smell of alcohol and antiseptic flooded my nostrils. I rolled, trying to get up, and fell off the metal shelf I’d been lying on and onto the tile floor. It was slick with saltwater and soap, and my legs ached when I tried to stand up. Everything was half-asleep like I’d been lying wrong on my whole body at once.

“What in the fish--” somepony gasped. My attention came to a sharp point.

A mare was staring at me. She was terrified. I could sense it coming off her in waves. I took a step and my hooves almost collapsed under me, slipping on the linoleum.

“Where--” I tried to say. It came out as a croak. My throat was totally dry. I coughed, trying to get control. “--where… am I?”

She looked torn between rushing over to me to help and running away. From the way she was dressed, she must have been a doctor. She was wearing scrubs, and her mane was tied back in the kind of rough bun that was professional but meant she wasn’t expecting to actually be seen by anypony else.

“This is the Stable morgue,” she said.

“Why am I in a bucking morgue?” I rasped. I practically sounded like a ghoul. That was a disturbing thought. I glanced to the side and caught my reflection in the polished metal of the steel drawers. My skin was still smooth and alive, at least over most of my body. My right hoof didn’t count. That was still the same gunmetal composite that I’d had to get used to.

She started to back away.

“Water,” I barked. “I need--”

“Right, of course, yes,” she said, circling around me to a sink and grabbing a plastic cup, filling it up and offering it to me. I took it and gulped it down, then motioned for another. I was so thirsty I couldn’t even feel it properly until I had the first drink inside me, and then all I wanted was to down a gallon or two all at once.

“How did I get here?” I asked. My voice was starting to sound more like me and less like a monster.

“You were brought in. You were found in the undercity.” She swallowed. “You’re, um. You’re looking much better?”

“The undercity? The last thing I remember, I was…” I trailed off. I remembered the airlock. How had I gotten from there to here? How many hours had I lost? “I had armor with me. A talking helmet. Where is it?”

“You didn’t have anything with you when you were brought in,” she said, holding up her hooves defensively. “Please, whatever you want, whatever you are, don’t hurt me!”

“I’m not…” I coughed, wiping my lips. “I need to find Destiny.”

It couldn’t be that hard. I’d spent a while in a Stable. They weren’t big places, and power armor wasn’t the kind of thing that could be hidden easily. The chill in the air made me shiver. My entire body felt freezing and bloodless. Whatever had happened, SIVA had taken its sweet time getting me back on my hooves.

I stumbled past the mare and grabbed a white coat that was hanging next to the door.

“Sorry for the trouble,” I said, limping out.

---

I leaned against a steel wall painted to look like wood and plaster and tried to catch my breath. Getting out of the morgue hadn’t been difficult. I don’t think anypony designed it with the thought that they might have to keep somepony from escaping, and a lab coat makes ponies think you belong there.

Once the adrenaline from my escape completely faded and the water I’d chugged down had started soothing some of the feeling of being pickled and preserved in salt, I found myself not being able to find myself. In other words, I felt lost as buck.

Even the street wasn’t like anything I’d seen before. Stables were generally built like metal boxes. Cloud houses were loose, elaborate structures that could ignore gravity and ended up like every foal’s playhouse writ large. This street was totally different than either.

Imagine the sort of pre-war main street that they had before the balefire bombs dropped, stores and shops lined up on both sides of a long road. Then make it all fake. The stores were built into the walls, but shaped and painted like they were separate buildings with facades of painted wood or wallpaper bricks with just enough depth and decor to nearly sell the illusion to anypony not looking closely. Three stories up, they abruptly stopped, and steel arches reached from one side of the street to the other, supporting a glass roof holding back the weight of the ocean and making it seem like we were nearly outside.

The street itself was cut through the middle with a canal. Sidewalks joined it on both sides, and bridges reached from one side to the other once or twice every ‘block’. It was lively, with ponies just living their lives and laughing and talking. Inoffensive piano music played softly from hidden speakers, and overhead lights kept everything at a comfortable glow.

One thing that seemed a little odd was how few ponies were wearing Stable suits. They weren’t exactly high fashion, but I knew they lasted basically forever and Stables usually had machines to make more. More than that, everypony I saw wearing the blue uniform jumpsuits was working. Mopping the sidewalk. Cleaning walls. Taking orders at the cafe. Most of them lingered near service tunnels-slash-alleyways that stretched between the storefronts.

That shouldn’t have been the first strange thing to catch my attention, but I was exhausted and slow to really recognize what I was looking at, so maybe I can be forgiven for not seeing it right away. There were ponies swimming in the canal. I didn’t even notice them until one of them jumped into the air and burst into soft light, fins turning into legs and wings forming and beating at the air.

They landed on lanky talons and brushed their mane back before folding their wings neatly and walking into a tavern and out of sight.

“What the buck was that?” I whispered. Destiny probably would have known. It had to be some kind of pre-war thing. We were-- I was in a Stable. Alone. I couldn’t count on her to figure things out for me. I had to use my own brain or whatever was left in my skull.

Or did I? I looked around the streets and spotted what I was looking for. Ponies in light, padded armor and wearing badges. Security officers. I wasn’t a criminal, I needed help, and even though I’d probably have to sit down with them and answer a whole buckload of questions about how I got here and what I was doing, they were my best bet for getting help. I just had to present myself as being a normal pony who needed some help.

“Um… excuse me,” I started. My throat was still a little rough, but I didn’t sound like I was gargling jagged rocks. “This is going to sound really weird, but I’m not from around here and I need some help.”

The two officers I’d approached looked at each other. I couldn’t see much beyond the reflective visors of their helmets, but they were obviously annoyed instead of surprised.

“Not another one,” the first one said.

The second officer sighed. “Okay, miss. Let me guess. You’ve come up from the undercity looking for a better life and someone stole your paperwork.”

“That’s not good,” the first cop noted. “Without your papers you’re not allowed to be here. I hope you’ve got a Citizen who’s willing to vouch for you.”

“I don’t have any identification--”

“Really not good,” the second cop said. “Tell you what, we might be able to help you, but there’s a big fee for replacing lost papers, especially since you don’t seem to have a Citizen around to let us know you’re on the up and up.”

That made me take a step back. Were they trying to shake me down? I was expecting them to freak out about me being a pony they’d never met before, not immediately try to get a bribe out of me.

“Of course... if you don’t have the shells, we can work something out,” the second cop continued.

“Are you kidding?” the first officer scoffed. “You got some weird taste, Billy. She’s built like a sack of oats.”

“Maybe, but I’m sure she’ll be appreciative of the way we’re protecting her from the Ripper. They say he does terrible things to ponies. Just carves them up and eats some parts for fun. You’d make a big meal for a monster like that.”

They reached for me.

“Back off!” I warned, bristling up. I wasn’t going to let these perverted little buckheads take me anywhere. I couldn’t even stand the smell of them. Being this close was enough to make me sick. One of them reached for a club, and that was enough. I won’t bore you with the details. I don’t even remember them myself. One moment he was getting ready to swing, and the next thing I knew, they were both on the ground. They were lucky they had helmets, because otherwise they’d have graduated from having lumps to going to take my place in the morgue.

I tried to catch my breath. I just hated them so much. I don’t even know where it all came from, the blind rage and anger. They had barely done more than make a bad pass at me, but I felt like a decade of corruption and abuse had just hit me all at once.

Ponies were staring at me. Two cops were bleeding in the street because of me. I wasn’t the good guy here. I was a dangerous criminal, and the silence around me was even louder with that damn piano music playing in my ears.

I bolted.

---

It was a dream. I was just aware enough to know it wasn’t real, even if it felt like it was happening.

Everything was hazy and heavy. My breath was ragged and out of my control, like a machine was breathing for me. In and out. In and out. It was all the fun of feeling like you needed to breathe manually with none of the ability to control it. Just an awful awareness of it at every moment.

That barely mattered. It was a distraction, trying to find something else to think about to block out the hunger. It was a rolling, overwhelming feeling. It drove me in the same way a pony with their hoof over an open flame was driven to pull away from the pain. Every thought circled around that pit and threatened to fall in.

I had to find something to eat. I stumbled through the dark, burning and freezing at the same time, trying to find anything. A dented can. I crunched into it with jaws that were full of jagged, sharp teeth. Inside was something unpleasant, something that wasn’t really food. It was some kind of industrial oil or solvent, but I still drank it down greedily. Anything would do to fill my stomach, even if it burned like acid and made me retch with the poison of it.

It might as well have been nothing. It didn’t quench my hunger. It just made it sharper.

If I had been really in control I might have wept from the hopelessness of it. But I wasn’t in control. In the dream, my body kept moving, hunting. And it found somepony else in those endless, dim corridors. Somepony prying at a rusting doorframe and dragging along overfull saddlebags stuffed with trash.

I watched in horror through my own eyes as I stalked up to them, held up a bloated, diseased claw, and brought it down on their spine. They screamed, babbled words at me I couldn’t make out, and it only got louder when I leaned down and started to feed.

---

I was moving before I was even aware of it, grabbing the hoof touching my shoulder and yanking it back, holding the pony in place and shoving them into the shelves along the wall hard enough to knock ancient plastic bottles and boxes of detergent to the ground around us.

“Woah there!” the pony gasped. He didn’t struggle, which was probably the only reason I didn’t end up shaking him apart while I was dazed from sleep. “I come in peace.”

He was a pretty nondescript-looking stallion. Familiar somehow, like I’d seen a picture of him somewhere. The stallion was wearing Stable barding augmented with a set of saddlebags and smaller pouches. His horn was glowing, and I saw something floating in his aura.

“Drop it,” I warned.

“Okay, okay,” he said softly. “It’s just some tools.” The stallion carefully put them down. They were just little bits of metal, one of them bent in a right angle and the other with a shallow hook at the end.

“What do you want?” I demanded.

“Nothing! I was just checking on you. When I saw you, I thought you might be another one of those Ripper victims, but I can see you’re not the kind of pony who gets victimized. It’s entirely my fault. I apologize profusely.”

I narrowed my eyes. “I locked the door when I went to sleep.”

“And that explains why I had to pick it open,” he said. “I was hoping I’d found a storage closet nopony had scavenged yet. I’m a bit of a treasure hunter, you see.”

“A treasure hunter. With lockpicks.” I shoved him into the shelves again, rattling an ancient wrench out of the nest of dust it had lived in for the last century and sending it clattering to the floor. “You mean a thief. You were going to rob me!”

“First, it’s extremely rude to call somepony a thief when you’ve just met them. Second, by my guess you don’t have anything worth stealing. You’re sleeping rough in a supply closet with nothing to eat and a long way from the last time you had a chance to get cleaned up.”

“You must be a wizard,” I retorted. “Next are you going to guess what number I’m thinking of?”

“No, I’m going to offer you a job,” he said. “You’re not from around here.” He looked significantly at my right forehoof. “You might not know it yet, but you need a lot of clams to make it in this place. Some parts of the city, it costs three shells just to use the toilet!”

“Are there… other ponies not from around here?” I asked carefully.

“Sure,” he said. “You’re looking at one of them! I’m a refugee like you, and by my guess you’re from the Enclave. That accent is rare in the wasteland but I’ve heard it before. The wings are sort of a dead giveaway, too.” He smiled brightly, pleased by my surprised expression.

“Okay, maybe you’re smarter than you look,” I said. “But I’m not going to kill anypony. I got tricked into some of that before and I don’t like doing it, especially for other ponies.”

“Good,” he said. “I wouldn’t trust you if you were ready to say yes if somepony asked you to shiv somepony else. I prefer victimless crimes. Sort of treasure hunting, right? Except the treasure is being held by some greedy ponies and I hunt it out of their shops where they have it on display.”

He was looking at my expression and must have known immediately just how I felt about that proposition.

“If you want to line your saddlebags with shells, some light work like this is the best way,” he said. “And whatever you want, a shower, a meal, a real bed, all that means clams need to pass from one hoof to another.”

“One job,” I said. “And nopony gets hurt, and then I’m going to use those bits--”

“Clams. Or shells. They don’t use bits down here.”

“Whatever. I’m going to use those bits to get information. I’m looking for somepony.” I needed to find Destiny.

“If you help me with this, I’ll even introduce you to the right sort of ponies who might be able to help with your questions,” he said. “Speaking of which, I should introduce myself. I’m Chum Buddy. I’m guessing you’re…” he glanced back at my cutie mark. “Daisy?”

“Chamomile.”

“Ah, I was close! So, can I offer you a snack while I explain my plan?”

My stomach rumbled.

---

“This stuff is terrible,” I said through the mush I was eating.

“It’s reconstituted protein paste. It’s got all the vitamins and minerals you need,” Chum said. “None of the flavor. That costs extra, and so far we haven’t earned ourselves enough clams to splurge.”

It had come out of a pipe in the wall and I could have mistaken it for some kind of industrial waste or sewage line if it wasn’t for the line of ponies getting bowls full of the stuff. It hadn’t cost us anything, and tasted exactly the way you’d expect something to taste if you wanted to keep ponies alive but motivate them to get to work and earn enough to eat anything else.

We’d moved to the mouth of an alleyway across from a jeweler, which was a little weird to see only a stairway and a few hundred feet of corridor away from the line of destitute ponies in Stable barding. It was like moving that one layer up took us into a completely different world.

“So here’s what we’re going to do,” Chum Buddy explained. “There’s a certain ring I want to liberate from that shop. You can see it in the window there.” He pointed subtly. I was pretty sure he meant the understated, jeweled ring in the middle of the case, resting on a velvet pillow.

“Uh-huh,” I confirmed. “The ring just sitting right there behind glass.”

“What we’re going to do is, I’m going to go inside and get the jeweler’s attention, and dressed the way I am, he’s naturally going to think I’m up to something, so you’re going to…” I stopped listening at that point. He had a really good, detailed plan, but it’s not important. I already wasn’t jazzed about the idea of doing a bunch of crime and while his plan was clever, I had a headache and I wasn’t in the mood for complicated plans.

I missed having quest markers in my HUD. I didn’t have to think so hard when I had them to follow.

“Hold this,” I said, giving him the empty bowl. I wiped the traces of paste from my lips and walked out into the streets. There were some scenic potted plants around the central canal, and I grabbed one on my way. I think Chum Buddy must have realized at some point that I was about to do something stupid, judging from the strangled noise behind me of a pony trying to yell for me to stop and also avoid being noticed.

I threw the pot into the window, smashing right through it. An alarm instantly went off, blaring over the speakers and accompanied by red warning lights. Somepony screamed. I ignored the chaos I was causing and reached through the broken window, grabbing the one ring and trotting back to Chum Buddy. I tossed him the ring and he caught it in his hooves, fumbling for a moment before actually holding it in his magic.

“There,” I said. “We done here?”

“You are completely insane,” Chum said. He managed to keep a straight face for a few moments before breaking out into a genuine laugh and a smile. “I love it! You’re going to fit right in!”

“I’m glad I fit in with whatever group of criminals and killers you represent,” I said flatly.

He raised a hoof. “Never killers. The Guild doesn’t kill anypony. That’s one of our only laws. We support each other and fight for the little pony, but not with lethal force.”

I tilted my head. The last time I joined a motley crew of underground ponies breaking the law, they’d been terrorists who were just being used for some grand master plan of revenge. “I am okay with the idea of not killing anypony,” I said quietly.

He must have seen something in my eyes, because Chum patted my shoulder. “We’ve all made mistakes in the past, love. Killing erodes your soul, but the soul can heal if you let it.”

I hoped he was right.

“Holy buck, it’s her!” somepony yelled behind me. I heard the snap of an expandable baton, and a crackle of static. I turned to see the two beat cops who had made the mistake of annoying me on a bad day. They were bruised, and one had a cast on his foreleg.

“Oh, you two,” I said. They had shock batons but I didn’t exactly feel threatened. Having a little food in me, combined with some sleep, I was in much better condition than the first time I’d stomped a hole in them.

“She’s resisting arrest!” the one in the cast yelled over his shoulder.

“That’s rude to assume, but I was going to resist,” I admitted. “Hey, Bud? You get out of here and I’ll catch up after I deal with this.”

“Same place we met,” he agreed. “I’ll be waiting but, uh, don’t kill them, okay?”

“Right, right, one of your rules,” I nodded. “No killing. I promise. They might have to go to the hospital. Is that okay?”

“Have some fun with it,” he said, patting my shoulder again before bolting away. I cracked my neck and rolled my shoulders, mostly making sure everything was still attached.

“So, who wants to have their legs twisted off first?” I asked.

“You made a big mistake, little miss,” the other cop said. “We got backup on the way, and you aren’t gonna be able to marehandle him.”

That ‘him’ sounded significant. The way he said it, I knew it wasn’t just another security officer compensating for something with a shock baton. It was somepony in particular, and they had high expectations of him.

“Cool,” I said. “It’s been a while since I had a fair fight.”

The water in the canal crashed up in a huge wave, something glowing inside it and changing shape from a fish into a winged almost-pony shape. I’d already seen this once before, and changelings were better at it, so the shapeshifting didn’t faze me. It was the other thing, what the thing was wearing, that made my jaw drop.

Titanium blue armor. Small hexagonal panels that I’d seen a million times before. A sheen of magic across it that made it glimmer faintly in the light.

It was my armor. Somepony else was wearing my armor. Not the helmet, though. Destiny was nowhere to be seen. Instead, there was a full-face iron mask taking her place.

“Sentinel! Sir! We’ve cornered the criminal, but she’s resisting arrest!” one of the cops said. “You got here just in time!”

“She looks dangerous,” the masked pony wearing my bucking armor said. “You were right to alert me.” He landed next to them. Then I saw the guns. He had some kind of light revolving cannon paired with something that had to be a missile launcher. Or were they torpedoes since we were underwater?

“Nice outfit,” I said. “It doesn’t belong to you.”

He either didn’t hear me or didn’t care. “I am ordering you to surrender. This is your last chance before I use lethal force.”

“No problem, I’ll help you get undressed,” I hissed. I flicked my hoof, readying my knife. I wasn’t all that afraid of somepony wearing power armor. I’d killed a bunch of undead Steel Rangers, and they’d been entirely within my wheelhouse. I’d told Chum Buddy I wouldn’t kill anypony, but this was an exception.

I charged. Getting in close was important. He was quick on the draw, the cannon barking with a pop and hiss that didn’t fit gunpowder. Pain exploded in my left foreleg and I ignored it because I didn’t have time to bleed.

He caught my forehoof in his talons, the tip of my knife scraping against his helmet. I pushed harder, and it slid a fraction of an inch more, carving a shallow cut through the metal in a shower of sparks. I felt him struggling. More than that, I felt his surprise. He hadn’t been ready for a real fight.

The field around him shifted, and he was abruptly pushing me back and overpowering me. I hadn’t ever thought of the Exodus Armor as being particularly strong, but maybe I’d been underestimating just how much Destiny’s creation had been helping me all along. He didn’t even seem like he was struggling.

“You aren’t the usual kind of scum we have to clean off the streets,” he said, holding firm. “Who are you?”

I was starting to feel like I’d made a mistake. I was at less than half strength, with no healing potions, almost unarmed, and naked. He had heavy weapons, power armor, and presumably hadn’t woken up in a morgue this morning. It was possible that I was somewhat outmatched.

I tried to take to the air and break his grip on me, and he let it happen, letting go and shoving me back. I got some distance between us and realized just how much of a mistake that was. I had a knife. He had guns.

The rocket launcher at his side roared to life. I knew it was going to wreck my body even worse than it already was, but I activated the wired reflexes that had saved me so many times before and dropped into the cold place between seconds.

The missile crawled through the air, the close quarters giving me a chance before it could get up to full speed.

I swiped, catching it midway along its length. Fuel spilled out. Time came back to life. The engine half of the missile hit the ground at my hooves and burst into flames, the warhead tumbling overhead before detonating. Something in the rusting deck plates gave way between the sudden heat and the shockwave, and they gave way under my hooves, sending me through the floor and out of consciousness.

---

I wasn’t dead. I half-expected to wake up in the morgue again, but I was disappointed to find the cold metal surface under my back wasn’t an exam table. It was the floor of an ancient and disused electrical closet. The ceiling above me dripped, water leaking around debris that was blocking up a hole large enough to, say, get blasted through.

“Okay. That didn’t go well,” I admitted to myself. I wanted to lie there and maybe soothe my head trauma with another light nap. The only problem was, I knew the security team was eventually going to either break through the debris cap above me or find another way to me, and I didn’t even know how long I’d been out.

No friends. No gear. I needed to start fixing things, because the one thing I could have was a plan. I winced, looked at my left foreleg, and mentally adjusted the list. I had one other thing. I had a harpoon going through my leg. I gingerly tugged on the end with my teeth and immediately regretted it. It wasn’t coming out right now.

“I need to meet up with Chum Buddy,” I decided, getting up on my hooves and pushing the pain back. It was like riding a bicycle -- as long as you kept moving and nothing went wrong, it was as smooth as silk, and the moment things went wrong you crashed and broke your leg and your parents yelled at you for riding a garbage bike you found half-buried on the dig site.

I looked up. Maybe it was just my imagination, but I’d swear that pony who’d kicked my flank -- Sentinel or whatever his name was -- I’d swear he was looking down at me right then, meeting my gaze through a foot of rotting steel and aluminum

“I’m coming for you,” I promised. “I’m going to get my armor back. I’m going to find Destiny. And I don’t care how much of this place I have to tear down to get it done.”

I paused. Did this mean I was going to be using the otherwise principled group of rebels as pawns for my own personal revenge scheme? Was I the bad mare?

This is why I needed some kind of external moral compass. Telling good from bad was really hard on the surface when everything was shades of grey and brown. Mostly brown. I hesitated, feeling like I was looking away when I turned to leave. It was like I’d lost a staring contest using X-ray vision.

My stomach rumbled again. I groaned. Using it always crashed my blood sugar. When I found Chum Buddy, he owed me another snack.

Comments

[Thought Prism]

Chamomile could have launched her knife into Sentinel's face point-blank there, but then he would've surely died, so he should be glad she's trying to be the good mare here.

[FridayPie]

Now it's Bioshock Infinite :P

[Friendly Lurker]

“No, I’m going to offer you a job,” he said. “You’re not from around here.” He looked significantly at my right forehoof. “You might not know it yet, but you need a lot of clams to make it in this place. Some parts of the city, it costs three shells just to use the toilet!”

quickmeme.com/img/07/0742089defd4ae2b4b09d69224a869a9de8609d22f566c7f8a79f8bd0af201a9.jpg

[Ahsoka Tano]

2nd respawn of the arc :P