Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 75: The Skeleton in the Closet

“You understand that by all rights, I should be kicking you out of the Cantina?” Fabula asked. “Actually, I shouldn’t just be putting you on the street, I should turn you over to Stable security and earn a bounty along with a few favors!”

“You’re not going to do that,” I said confidently.

“Why shouldn’t I?” Fabula asked, sitting back. “Do you even have one good reason?”

I bit my lip and looked down. “Honestly I was hoping you’d say something like ‘you’re right, but only because something something’ so I wouldn’t have to come up with an answer myself.”

“Mmm.” Fabula raised an eyebrow.

“I’m having brain problems,” I explained. “New ones. Not just my usual brain issues that are because I’m stupid. Can I get a hint?”

Fabula groaned. “I think I have a blind spot trying to predict you.”

“Yeah, my half-sister said it was impossible to read my mind,” I agreed. “And I’m pretty sure I can talk to ghosts. I mean, I can definitely talk to one ghost but she’s not here right now. I used to know a pony who could talk to ghosts and she was really nice but she died.”

Fabula tilted her head slowly.

“I’ve had a really weird time ever since I left the Enclave,” I said more quietly.

“One thing is clear,” Fabula said. “You’re extraordinarily dangerous. A loose cannon. A mad dog. I could continue with more metaphors but I think you get the point. If I turn you loose, ponies will die. If I let things continue as they are, ponies will die. The only way to avoid another disaster is for me to assign you a handler who can control you.”

“That’s not a sex thing, is it?”

“No,” Fabula said, colder than a windigo. “I’m going to take personal responsibility and watch you myself. Congratulations! You’ve done such a fine job disrupting my operations that I’m going to give you all the special attention you could ask for.”

I grumbled at that, but she had a point. “Doesn’t it count for anything that I helped out Lady Thresher?” I asked.

“You mean when you went off on your own and took a job from her without asking me, and without the Guild getting a cut?” Fabula asked, narrowing her eyes.

“But nothing went wrong and she was happy and I fixed the mistake from the Briney job!” I protested, groaning. “I don’t even know why I’m bothering.”

“What you mean is, you have your own lead and don’t care about getting help from the Guild,” Fabula corrected. “What you don’t appreciate is how much I’ve had to manipulate things to keep you out of trouble.”

“You didn’t even know about the prisoner transport,” I pointed out.

“I found out about it at the last minute,” Fabula agreed. “And I was able to keep a general alarm from being raised. They could have sent a small army after you while you were finding a place to dock that old transport. Then I had to pay off the dockmaster so he wouldn’t report you the instant you arrived. Then I needed to find somewhere to stow your prisoner…”

She sighed, waving her hoof in small circles.

“This isn’t the wasteland, Chamomile. You can’t just kill somepony and walk away! A body gets investigated. A stolen prisoner transport gets found. Injured security ponies make reports. Seaquestrian official policy is that nopony leaves, to preserve the security of the nation, so you can’t even skip town.”

“What, are they afraid of raiders?” I joked.

“Yes. It happened before, just after the bombs fell and this place was more common knowledge. Refugees and criminals followed the ponies who’d bought a place in the Stable and they were allowed entry, and chaos reigned for years. Everything almost fell apart. That’s why the Riots were stomped down so hard. The hippogriffs remembered what happened last time ponies got out of control and won’t let it happen again.”

“I get it,” I said. “Back home, things are pretty similar. There’s law and order and ponies have to work together to keep things going.”

“Then you understand why standing out is a bad idea.”

“I understand it needs to be for the right reasons,” I said. “Look, when I talked to my informant, I found out he sold my armor, along with Destiny, to the head of Stable Security.”

“Marshall Law?”

“Yeah. I was thinking about it, and he must be Sentinel! He bought the armor himself, and now he’s setting himself up as a big hero!”

Fabula rubbed her chin. “I know before the Riots, he was out of favor politically. Senator Seascape, Quiet’s father, was the rising star of the Seaquestrian Senate. Sentinel showing up and restoring order was a big part of undoing that.”

“See? He’s got a motive,” I said. “I need to break into his place. He can’t wear the armor twenty-four hours a day. Trust me, I know it gets uncomfortable after a while. If I can get there, I can take the Exodus Armor back, find Destiny, and then… well, then I can get out of your mane, but I’ll be getting rid of Sentinel in the process, and I know that would be doing you a favor.”

“I suppose it would be to our advantage,” Fabula said. “But I can’t let you go.”

“I’m not asking for permission. I can find his address without your help.”

“I won’t let you turn this city into a bloodbath! Maybe the ponies up in the rich parts of the city deserve it, but the blood trickles down here and they return every hurt tenfold! If you tear up Marshall Law’s house, the response will be a slaughter!”

I stood up. “You can’t actually stop me,” I reminded her. “You can scold me. You can tell me all about the consequences. You can’t force me to listen. You’re not even as intimidating as a fake alicorn, let alone the real thing. If I have to fight my way through an army, that’s fine. If I have to fight Sentinel one on one, that’s great because I’m literally asking for it.”

“You’re insane,” Fabula muttered.

“And you’re a small fish in a big ocean,” I retorted.

“Do you know what’s going to happen if you leave on your little mission?” Fabula asked. She pulled out her deck of cards and shuffled them. “I do.”

I put my hoof on the deck before she could stop me and flipped over the top card.

It showed a skeleton in a black robe, holding a scythe and looming over a tranquil scene of ponies going about their business.

“The Death card,” she said. “It means--”

“Spare me,” I said. “I’d be more impressed if you dealt me a three of spades.”

“My foretellings are authentic,” Fabula said. “I don’t force a draw. Ever.”

“Can your cards tell me if Destiny is at Marshall Law’s house?” I asked.

She frowned. “No.”

“Then I’m going to go take a look for myself. If you want to stop that bloodbath you’re worried about, I’m willing to accept some help, because right now my plan is to walk in the front door and deal with the consequences as they come.”

Fabula put the Death card back in her deck, shuffled them again, and put the cards away.

“I’ll go with you,” she said. “I have a responsibility to these ponies. I can’t let them get killed following you.” She stood up. “You might doubt my powers right now, but you won’t when you see them in action.”

---

“Stop,” Fabula said, putting a hoof on my chest and pushing me further into the shadow cast by a trellis of roses. She closed her eyes, ears twitching, and a pony in a black suit trotted past, pausing for a moment so close to where we were hiding that I could have reached out and touched him. He touched his ear.

“Call clear at Checkpoint E,” he reported to somepony on the other side of the radio, then moved on.

The Law estate was massive. It was still Stable-tec if you looked closely, but they’d blocked off something big enough to be a mansion in the Enclave and turned it into a gated community. The floor was shaggy green carpet that resembled grass if you didn’t think about it, and the walls were painted to look like the daytime sky from just above head height, giving the impression we were in a wide-open space and not just creeping along the edges of an atrium.

“Next we wait here for fifteen seconds,” Fabula said.

I had to admit her ability to predict the future was starting to seem more legitimate. She’d maneuvered us around a few guards, slipped through locked doors by waiting for the right moment when ponies were coming and going, and she’d made it look effortless. If I’d seen this side of her first and not just a pony giving orders in a bar, maybe I’d have been a little more respectful.

“Now,” she said, walking out into the open and through a Stable hatch redecorated to look like a stone archway. I followed closely behind her, and the whirring of an electric motor got my attention. I glanced up to see a camera pointed in the other direction, slowly working its way back to where we were coming in. At the pace we were walking, we were staying in the blind spot.

“You’re pretty good,” I admitted.

“I didn’t become head of the Guild just because somepony died and left it to me,” she said quietly. “I made friends. Worked my way up. Got good at the job.”

“And then the Riots happened,” I said, trying to give it that same emphasis everypony else did. She nodded tersely and led me through a door painted to look like it was wood instead of steel. Past it, the room was clearly ‘inside’, all dark wood panels and rugs over the tiled floor instead of faux grass.

She put a hoof to her lips and we crept inside. We didn’t get far before I bumped into something, a twitch of a wing hitting a vase. Fabula caught it before it hit the ground and glared at me while she put it back in place.

“Sorry,” I mouthed silently. I wasn’t good at all the sneaking stuff. I had a little time to think in the silence while I followed her. There weren’t nearly as many guards as I was expecting for the head of Stable security forces. I had to assume there were plenty of ponies ready to respond to any disturbance, but unless there were literally a dozen ponies hiding in a barracks somewhere nearby, it wasn’t any more dangerous than a fight anywhere else in Seaquestria.

A feeling shot through me like a spark of static electricity.

“He’s here,” I said. I could feel him. Sentinel was close by.

Fabula nodded, understanding instantly. I took a moment to check my weapon. I still had the Hearse, the combination rapid-fire flechette gun and harpoon launcher that Chum Buddy had given me. It might be just what I needed. The Exodus armor had been awful at stopping physical rounds, even if the magic fields powering it deflected energy weapons pretty well.

We made our way up a wide staircase decorated with a massive portrait of who I had to assume was Marshall Law rearing up and looking heroic. Assuming the artist had taken some liberties, he would still be a pretty impressive Earth Pony.

I stopped and gave it a second look, thought about the first time I’d seen Sentinel, then followed Fabula more slowly, narrowing my eyes. Fabula stopped outside a door, hesitating. I wondered if she could feel the same thing I did. A sense of pressure, a looming threat. Doom.

I stepped past her and reached for the door control. Why was I afraid? I could take Sentinel in a fight. I wasn’t half-dead and starving. I was armed and ready. That magic pressure, though. It reminded me of standing in front of Flurry Heart, that oppressive force broadcasting out and into the air.

Buck it. I punched the door and ran in without waiting for Fabula to tell me it was safe. I knew it definitely wasn’t safe at all, and that was confirmed when I saw Marshall Law holding a rifle and sitting placidly in a chair, nursing a glass of whiskey. Sentinel stood next to him, the armored hippogriff glaring at me through his iron mask, weapons bared and ready to fire.

“Welcome to my home,” Marshall Law said. “I’ve been expecting you.”

“If you were expecting me, you should have brought more ponies,” I said. “Your security team seems a little light.”

“It’s enough to deal with one oversized brat who thinks she can take on the world all on her own,” Marshall Law said.

“Because Fabula’s going to betray me?” I asked.

Marshall Law raised an eyebrow.

“I figured it out when I saw the portrait out there. You couldn’t be Sentinel. You’re entirely the wrong species. I didn’t know that until I saw your picture.” I motioned to the armored hippogriff pointing heavy weapons at me. “Fabula should have known. She knows who you are, but she just went along with my idea that you might be Sentinel.”

“You’re not as stupid as you look,” Fabula said.

“If I was smarter I would have clocked that something was wrong when you came here with me yourself. I drew the Death card, and you seemed genuinely offended when I said you stacked the deck. The fact you still came along means you had an out all along.”

Fabula shrugged and walked over to the others, standing next to Sentinel.

“I just can’t figure out why,” I said.

“It’s quite simple, really,” Sentinel said, his voice echoing. He reached up with a talon and unlatched a hidden catch along the jawline of his iron mask. With a puff of escaping vapor, it opened up and he removed it. He was a middle-aged hippogriff, with an ugly scar across his face. “It’s a pleasure to meet you face to face. My real name is Shore Leave.”

“The former guildmaster?”

He gave me a crooked smile. “I got a new job.”

“When the Riots started, we knew things had to change,” Fabula said. “The elites were going to do whatever it took to stop them, even if it meant flooding the entire Stable. It wouldn’t bother the hippogriffs, but it would wipe out the ponies. We cut a deal with them.”

Shore Leave looked at his helmet, wiping a scuffmark from the cheek. “Crime was always going to happen, but we could control it and make sure bad things only happened to the right ponies. I’d work inside Security and put down ponies who tried coloring outside the lines, and Fabula would work inside the Guild and hand out missions approved by Security.”

“And you’d back it up with fortune-telling,” I said, looking at Fabula. “You’d rat ponies out if they were becoming a problem, and if they were following orders you’d make sure Stable Security was coincidentally ignoring what was going on.”

“It’s better for everypony this way,” Fabula said. “It’s fair. There’s only enough crime to make the average citizen really appreciate Security, and if somepony thinks funding should be cut, like Senator Seascape…”

“His daughter ends up kidnapped,” I said slowly. “In a big, public, scary display.”

“Even a blunt object like you has some use,” Fabula said. “But you’re getting too unpredictable, even for me. I’m afraid you’re going to have to become a lesson to the other ponies in the Guild that they need to follow orders and stay on the straight and narrow. Otherwise, something terrible might happen to them!”

“Something like this?” I asked, pulling the trigger on my gun. It clicked and made a very sad sound.

“I wasn’t going to let you walk in here with live ammunition,” Fabula said. “I switched it before we even left the Cantina.”

“Nuts.”

I still had one chance. I was only a few paces away from Sentinel. Or Shore Leave. Whatever he wanted to call himself. I forced my wired reflexes into motion and the world slowed to a near-stop, my body burning with an instant fever and the air turning as cold as ice. I lunged for Sentinel. He was the biggest threat by a huge margin.

The speargun at his side burped, a spear sliding down through my shoulder and into my chest. I couldn’t feel it, not yet. A second shot made when I reared up tore into my gut and out the other side. I brought my knife down towards his neck.

A magical shield stopped me. Fabula had seen the attack coming. A third spear hit my side and scraped along my spine. I lost the strength in my back legs, and the world came rushing back just in time to meet me on the floor, dark blood spreading around me.

“You should have run the other direction,” Fabula sighed.

I gasped. I couldn’t talk. Or breathe, really. That first spear had hit something important. A lung? I coughed up blood.

“She wasn’t nearly as impressive as I was expecting,” Sentinel said. “I thought I'd need explosives.”

“And ruin half my estate?” Marshall Law scoffed.

“We’ll need to do something about Lady Thresher as well,” Fabula said. “She’s getting too big for her britches. If she finds out too much, she could be a problem for the project.”

“One thing at a time,” Marshall Law said. “One of you make sure this trash is dead. I’ll call the usual cleaners to take care of the mess.”

“Of course,” Sentinel said. He stepped over me. I looked up at him, still gasping. My vision was going dark around the edges. The pain was really starting to edge its way around the shock now, an awful tearing pain that got worse with every heartbeat. I took a swipe at him, so slow and clumsy a foal could have stopped it.

He caught my fetlock and bent my foreleg, bringing my own knife to my throat. Without showing even a hint of emotion, Shore Leave stabbed it into my jugular and tore it to the side, slicing through tendons and muscle and veins and opening up my neck. Blood washed out of me in a torrent. Everything went black.

---

Things were getting bad. Not just for me. If it was just me, it would have been no problem. I’d be long gone and out of the sector even if it meant sleeping in the undercity. I had a gun, I had ammunition, and I knew how to use a weapon.

The problem was my daughter.

She’d been attacked early into the riots, before they’d even locked the sector down, before we knew how bad it was. One of the crazies had bitten her, like they were a wild animal or a feral ghoul. I thought it wasn’t serious.

I sighed. I heard her banging on the locked door to the supply closet, growling and hungry and in terrible pain. Whatever had happened to the rioters, it was happening to her. It wasn’t just a revolution. It wasn’t about unpaid wages or bad food or living space.

She scratched at the door with claws she hadn’t had before, slowly scraping away at the metal. The Stable-tech hatch was tough, and she was just a filly, but she knew I was in here and she was determined to get in.

I couldn’t leave without her.

I couldn’t leave with her.

I checked my gun. Two bullets.

---

I gasped, pain erupting through my body. I clutched at my neck and-- there wasn’t a massive, gaping wound there. I could feel a swollen line, an edge of bare skin around a scar. The air was cold, refrigerated and humming with white noise. My whole body ached. I tried to get up and slipped, falling to a tiled floor that smelled like rubbing alcohol.

I looked up. I’d been asleep on a steel table. An autopsy table.

“You really did wake up again,” a pony said quietly. I hadn’t noticed there was anypony else in the room until that moment. I was still dazed, struggling to identify even the simple things around me, like somepony who’d come out of the deepest of deep sleeps. Shapes around me resolved into lights, rolling carts, a wall full of small hatches.

I flopped around in blind panic.

And a mare in a labcoat. She looked vaguely familiar. She knelt down next to me.

“Take it easy,” she said quietly. “You’ve been through a lot, at least twice now. I thought the first time was just a fluke, but…”

“This is the morgue?” I asked. My voice felt off, weak. Maybe because I’d had my windpipe slashed open. I tried to clear my throat and coughed up clots of dried blood. “Again?”

“You took my coat the last time you came through here.” She offered me a cup of water. I took it and slowly sipped. “I decided not to put you in a drawer after you broke the last one. Technically I’m supposed to be off-duty, but I thought you might come back and…”

“Thanks,” I croaked. I took another long sip of water.

“If you’re curious, they brought you in here three days ago,” she said. “It was… really strange watching you heal. I hope you don’t mind, but I took some samples and studied what was going on. Did you know your body is full of--”

“It’s called SIVA,” I said. “They’re micromachines.”

“So you did know about it already!” the doctor said. “I thought so! I mean, obviously, you had to know something was up. It seems like it put most of your body in metabolic stasis and used a form of microsurgery to repair the damage. You must have finally been in good enough shape to… restart, for lack of a better term.”

“I don’t feel like I’m in great shape,” I groaned. “You didn’t tell anypony about this, did you?”

“No, of course not,” she said, looking mildly offended. “Consider it doctor-patient confidentiality if you want, but…” she looked away from me. “I’ve seen too many ponies get dragged in here by Stable Security with orders attached for me to explain their cause of death as an accident. Young ponies that mysteriously fall onto bullets.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

“I’m Manzana Flor,” she said, offering me a hoof. I shook it gingerly. Not that I had the strength to shake it roughly.

“Chamomile,” I replied. “Sorry for messing up your paperwork.”

“It’s all fake anyway,” Manzana said. “You want something to eat? It’s just stuff from the corner store, but I thought when you woke up you might be hungry.”

My stomach growled like a terrible beast was living next to my liver and demanded tribute. I nodded quickly, and she came back with bags of chips and cookies and something tough and fishy that I only found out was fish jerky after I’d already started eating it.

“Even for healthy ponies, healing is hard on the body,” she said. “It takes a lot of energy for the body to fix a broken bone or… the things that happened to you.”

“No kidding,” I mumbled through a mouth full of kale chips. They tasted like iodine and sadness, but they were filling my stomach, which was slowly calming down and no longer demanding I just eat the packaging along with the food inside. “Thanks for keeping my body safe. And for the food.”

“I had this idea that if I helped you, I could expose all the corruption in Security,” Manzana sighed. “I guess that’s probably stupid, huh? I don’t even know who I’d tell, or who’d believe me. I just want it to stop.”

I sighed, coughed, took another glug of water, and looked at her. “I don’t suppose they brought in anything with me?”

“You mean an unregistered firearm with all the serial numbers removed and a set of Stable utility barding in awful condition?”

“That’d be it, yeah,” I confirmed.

Manzana opened up one of the drawers and produced a set of barding stiff with blood, along with my flechette gun.

“Come to think of it, maybe I don’t need the barding,” I said. “It might be easier to just get a new set at this point…”

“What are you going to do?” Manzana asked.

“I…” I looked down at my mismatched hooves. “I don’t know. Everypony thinks I’m dead, so I’ve got some time to figure things out. I think this time I need to spend a little while finding a plan that’s actually going to work.”

“And then?” she pressed.

“I’m going to get my friend back, expose everypony involved in the big stupid conspiracy, and probably cause a massive amount of property damage,” I said. “But if I do it right, I won’t drag anypony innocent into it.”

“Okay,” Manzana nodded. “You can’t stay here. One of the other doctors would notice and report you.”

“I can find something,” I grunted, standing up. I still felt weak. I could barely feel my back legs again. The spinal damage had never entirely gone away. “There are plenty of places in the undercity nopony will look for me.”

“I’ve got a better idea.” Manzana smiled. “Why don’t you come back to my place?”

---

I looked around the apartment suspiciously. It reminded me a lot of the room I’d had when I’d lived in Mom’s Stable a long time ago. It was almost nostalgic, but Manzana actually lived here, and she’d decorated. There was even a small tree in the corner.

“You can sleep on the couch,” she said. “I don’t have a guest room, and I’m nice, but not that nice.”

“I’ll take it,” I said. “It’s a lot better than my plan of sleeping in a utility closet or behind some pipes.” I was already out of breath after the walk. Breathing was harder when I was tired, and I just felt listless and weak. It probably had something to do with all the blood loss.

I trotted over to the tree to look at it. There were tiny apples growing on it.

“Don’t eat those,” Manzana warned. “They’re crab apples. They’re basically poison. It’s just for decoration.”

“I wasn’t gonna!” I protested. I definitely would have eaten them if they weren’t poison. I might still try one, just to see how poisonous they were.

Manzana rolled her eyes and put her lab coat on a coat rack next to the door, then switched on the radio, the apartment filling with soft music.

“You can shower first,” she offered. “You… sort of need it. I hosed you down while you were on the slab, but you still sort of…”

“Have corpse-stink all over me?” I suggested.

“I was looking for a more polite way to say it,” the doctor said. “Let me know if you need anything. You just came back from the dead, so there’s no telling what might happen.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I sighed. “Thanks again.”

I found my way into the bathroom and stepped into the shower, turning it on at full blast and letting the ice-cold water hit me in the face. As it slowly warmed up, I leaned against the wall, struggling to breathe.

I’d died.

Again.

I didn’t even have a chance. Sentinel had taken my own knife and used it to…

I looked at my right foreleg. In the cascade of water, it still gleamed like oil, dark and metallic and skeletally thin. I barely had feeling in it most of the time. It was barely a part of me. I let the knife pop free, like the scythe of some giant mantis. Manzana had missed a spot when she’d hosed me down. I watched the dried blood slowly flake off under the shower.

What was I supposed to do now? How was I supposed to rescue Destiny, or get the Exodus armor back? How was I even supposed to survive? Fabula had agents everywhere. Any of them could spot me and report me to her. There could be a team of security ponies just waiting to--

I heard a crash and jumped out of the water, slipping and falling and hitting my head in a mad scramble. I rushed out into the main room, trailing dripping water, knife at the ready and my heart beating a million miles an hour.

Manzana looked up at me in surprise, picking up the pot lid she’d dropped.

“I was just making some soup,” she said slowly. “Are you okay?”

“I just… I thought…” I started to feel woozy. I sat down, panting and trying to catch my breath. “I thought something happened.”

She rushed over and looked at me. “Your pupils are unevenly dilated. You need to sit down.”

“I hit my head,” I mumbled.

Manzana ran into the bathroom and yelped. “This water is boiling hot!” I heard the shower turn off, and she rushed back out with a towel, rubbing me down and helping me dry off. “I knew you weren’t feeling well. You must have gotten faint from the heat.”

“Yeah,” I agreed weakly. More like I’d had a panic attack. She dried me off a little more, then gave me the kind of worried look that made me extra worried.

“Lay down here,” she said softly. “I’m going to get some ice for that bruise. Then we’ll get some hot soup into you. One of the first things I learned about being a doctor is that something hot and easy to digest does a lot to help a pony heal.”

“Okay,” I whispered. I laid down in front of the radio and listened to a recording from two hundred years ago, from before the world lost all its hope.

Comments

[star1wars3]

Man, Star Swirl really knows how to pick the worst things ever huh? Hopefully Chamomile can catch a break soon.

[Reese]

"“Lay down here"
"“Lie down here"?

"I laid down in front of the radio"
"I lay down in front of the radio"?

[Ahsoka Tano]

I hate Fabula hope she dies a horrible death.

But i bet its gonna be this new Doc that that happens too.