Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 89: Weight of the World

I fell through chaotic, twisting space, and I felt my body twisting to fit it. Everything around me was a psychedelic mess, full of every color I knew and more that I didn’t. I saw glimpses of other places. Ponies running across a wasteland. Others under an open, blue sky, singing a song too distorted by the time and space between us for me to make out as more than a burst of sound. An open grave with somepony kneeling next to it, gagged and helpless. Somewhere dark and oppressive, with a red sun hanging overhead made of countless constellations of connected dots in fractal shapes.

The storm of images came faster and faster and turned into a blur that turned into static that turned into sudden total sensory deprivation. I couldn’t see anything, feel anything, hear anything. And then it all surged back in fast-forward and my whole body stretched like taffy as I shot through a hole in space and out the other side.

---

I gasped, pawing at the ground. Something was terribly, horribly wrong. My legs weren’t connected right. I couldn’t feel my wings. My hooves were… my hooves were… I opened small eyes set in a flat face and saw a talon where my forehoof should have been. No, not a talon, more like what a minotaur had. What did they call it? A hand?

“What the buck?” I asked, coughing. Dust filled the air around me, stirred up by my arrival. “What is this?”

I tried to stand, but all my joints were wrong. Getting up on all fours was basically impossible, as if my limbs weren’t meant for it. I looked over myself, trying to figure it out. I wasn’t a pony. Going through the portal had turned me into some kind of alien, inequine thing with hairless, pale skin.

“This is really weird,” someone said. By the voice, it sounded like Emma, but she didn’t look like the pony I knew. Well, no, that wasn't entirely true. I looked over to the voice and saw an alien like me, if a little smaller and with Emma’s distinct dark green mane of hair. “Is that you, Chamomile?”

“Yeah,” I confirmed. “Before you ask, Limbo wasn’t like this. This is new.”

“Do you think--” Emma started. A surprised alien popped out of the portal, tumbling head over heels and coming to a stop flat on his back.

“That was unpleasant,” It groaned in Zonda's voice. “Good thing I don’t get motion sick-- ah! What happened to me?!”

“Get over it, you baby,” Midnight said, exiting the portal like everything in the universe was conspiring to give her a dramatic entrance. She walked confidently on her hind legs or, I guess, her only legs. It probably helped that she was wearing something that raised her legs into something like a more natural hoof-ish shape, with high heels and leather going up to her thighs.

“Have you been here before?” I asked, trying to copy her stance and standing up. For the first time, I thought about what I was wearing instead of just my strange body. My power armor was gone, and I was wearing something that suggested a uniform augmented with blue steel plates.

I flexed the fingers on my right hand. They whirred. I guess some things hadn’t changed.

“Sunset told me about this,” called out a tinny voice. I looked around and spotted a glowing rectangle on the ground. I stepped over and saw a pony on a tiny screen.

“Destiny?” I asked. The rainbow-freckled unicorn sure looked like the body in the simulation Alpha had created for her.

“Star Swirl used this portal as a way to explore other worlds,” she explained. “Part of the enchantment on it is supposed to alter your body and what you’re carrying to make sure you fit in with locals.”

“The natives here look like this?” Emma asked. I helped her up and she looked back at her bare spine, at least as much as she could. “Where are my wings?!”

“Don’t worry, the process reverses when you go back through,” Destiny said. “Everything will come back when you return. This effect made things really difficult in the early days. There are some work-arounds but… fitting in is a good idea for now. Everything here is designed for bodies like the ones you have at the moment.”

“It’s not nearly as difficult as getting used to being a cloud of bats,” Midnight said, stretching. She was as pale as marble, with glowing red eyes and fangs and an aura of predatory attraction even in this form.

“You can turn into a cloud of bats?” Zonda asked. “That sounds like an incredibly useful trick.”

“It’s great, except when you lose a few bats,” Midi agreed, with a small giggle. She folded her arms. “Looks like Destiny has a harder time than any of us.”

“Pick me up,” Destiny said. I picked up the small tablet. It felt like a mix of metal and plastic, with a small BrayTech logo and an outer layer made of interlocking blue hexagons, just like my armor. “It must have decided to turn me into some kind of haunted device. It’s not inaccurate, but it’s annoying not being able to levitate myself.”

“It’s going to take some getting used to,” Zonda said. He hefted a rifle. Only one beam rifle had made it through with him, and he had to hold it in both hands. “I’m used to a battle saddle and using my whole body to aim.”

“If we’re lucky we won’t need to learn,” Destiny said. “Without knowing the situation, it would be unwise to engage in combat.”

“Yeah, we won’t know how to tell the good guys and the bad guys apart,” I agreed.

Emma nodded. Midi was looking up at where we’d come from. The mirror had deposited us at the base of a big statue of a pegasus with the kind of proportions a pony only had when they were being sculpted by somepony trying to flatter them. She touched the base of the statue, and her hand went through the stone like it wasn’t there. She waved it around for a moment and pulled back, flexing her hand and turning to give me a shrug.

“Why a statue?” I asked. I glanced around. Now that my mind and body were starting to align, and the afterimages of the psychedelic storm faded, I was able to get a good look around us. The statue seemed to be in the middle of a warehouse, with dusty boxes set off to the sides and safety railings leading up to the marble plinth.

“Good question,” Destiny asked. “Nopony knows. Well, that’s not true. I’m sure Star Swirl knows, but I didn’t think to ask him about it.”

I looked down at her tiny animated image. It was like she was on the other side of a window. “Any idea how we find Sunset?”

“Step one is finding a way out of this room,” Midnight said. “Maybe we can just find somepony, or something out there and just ask them. Just because our world is a giant mess doesn’t mean this one is.”

She confidently followed the railings to a set of double doors and yanked them open, shattering a rusty lock holding them shut. Dim light shone in from outside, and Midnight winced on reflex, holding up a hand to cover her face before slowly lowering it when the pain she must have been expecting didn’t come.

Outside, the sky was a sea of grey mist, fog that trailed down to the ground in thick, lazy tendrils like the clouds were lacerated and bleeding out. Impossible rainbows dotted the sky, shining dimly and curving the wrong way, up into the sky, with the colors jumbled in the wrong order like the local weather teams were both lazy and incompetent.

None of this really mattered compared to what hung higher above, just barely visible. Huge triangles of black, only visible in flashes of pale lightning through the fog. They were everywhere up there.

“Never mind,” Midnight said. “This place is bucked.”

She quietly pulled the door closed so we could all stop looking at the apocalypse outside.

“What happened here?” Emma whispered. She’d found a pistol at her side and held it, watching the door with obvious fear.

“I think this is what the Darkness would have done to Equestria if it hadn’t been stopped,” Destiny said quietly. It was suddenly like we were hiding from the dark shapes outside, and making too much noise would alert them. I found myself taking every step carefully and quietly and trying to be silent.

“I’m starting to think coming here wasn’t the best plan we ever had,” I conceded.

“We’ve barely got any weapons, our power armor is gone, and we’re stuck in bodies we don’t really know how to use,” Emma pointed out. “Even if things were normal, this would be bad. We should go back and consider our options.”

“We were under attack on the other side,” Zonda reminded her. “As bad as things are, we’ve been here a good few minutes now and nothing has tried to kill us yet.”

“He’s right,” Midnight agreed. “Plus, the things on the other side haven’t followed us through. Maybe they can’t.”

Emma closed her eyes and took a deep breath, centering herself. “That doesn’t make me very confident about our immediate future.”

“I don’t like it either,” I said. “That said, I have a lot of experience with this kind of stuff. This is only like a six out of ten in terms of badness!”

“What rates as a ten?” Emma asked.

“I think Queen Chrysalis was the worst,” I said after a moment of contemplation. “She totally wrecked me and almost killed thousands of ponies in a giant explosion.”

“Special forces really keeps busy,” Zonda sighed, shaking his head. “At least we have an expert! I’ve been on too many missions where ponies dropped the ball and nopony knew what was happening.”

Emma pushed the door open and peeked outside, letting in a sliver of that unsteady grey light. There was something oddly stark about it, like it forgot how to make any shade between full illumination and total shadow. “Even in the worst circumstances, ponies find ways to survive. It’s probably the same here.”

“Good point,” Midnight agreed. “Plagues, wars, disasters, there’s always somepony hanging on. The plan to find survivors and ask around could still work, we might just be in the middle of a disaster zone and things are perfectly fine over the next hill.”

“Without wings, scouting is going to be hard,” I pointed out.

“More importantly, there could be hazards we can’t detect,” Destiny said. I held up the screen to look at the tablet. She’d moved to the side and was picking up square icons in the background and opening them like books, flipping through them. “I don’t think this thing has a radiological detector. It does have a really great camera, though.”

She held up a cartoon icon of a camera.

“Say cheese!” She clicked the button, and the flash went off, blinding me for a second. Destiny pulled up a second icon and showed me a picture of myself. It was a very strange experience seeing the weird, flat, alien face and knowing it was somehow me. Then she picked up a paintbrush and added pony ears to the photo and that was a little better. “Decent photo editing, too. This probably would have been a hit product on the civilian market. No tiny buttons that make things impossible to use for ponies!”

“So if it’s radioactive out there, we can’t tell?” Emma asked, looking almost as pale as Midnight.

“Not until you start to get sick,” Destiny replied. “And then we won’t know which direction is safe.”

I rubbed my chin, then did it again because the sensation was novel and weird. “Okay,” I said. “Here’s the plan. If I’ve still got this--” I held up my right arm and flexed the carbide-covered limb. “--I’ve probably got the rest of what SIVA did to me, so I’m not too worried about radiation. Destiny is stuck in this thing, so she probably won’t get hurt by it either. Midnight?”

“I know what you’re going to ask,” Midnight said, putting her hands on her hips. She’d very quickly learned to swing her hips even in the alien body and it was almost as good as when she did it in her natural shape. “Radiation won’t hurt me directly, but it does make me hungry faster. I know one of the science-ponies back home said something about it degrading the living blood inside me or something like that.” She waved a hand dismissively.

“That works. So Midnight, Destiny, and I will go out,” I said. “Emma, you stay here with Zonda. You can make sure we’ve still got a way home. If you start to get sick, or if things get bad, go back through the portal.”

“I understand,” Zonda nodded, saluting. “I’ll watch your back, Warrant Officer.”

“Thanks,” I said, returning his salute with a handshake that took both of us a few seconds to figure out how to do.

---

“This place is just absolutely bucked,” Midnight said, looking around annoyed at everything. She shielded her glowing eyes and looked through the thin fog coming from the bleeding sky. “If you close your eyes and think about a place that’s ultra-cursed, you’d be thinking about this disaster.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. I’d found a shirt pocket to shove Destiny into, though only the top part of the tablet protruded, so she ended up just sort of peeking over the edge of my pocket, her face half-visible. “I might upgrade this from a six to an eight.”

My foot slipped, and I looked down at the ground, fearing something nasty. There was black glass there, glossy and smooth and showing hints of infinite depth. It spread in a wide circle from a depression in the earth like lightning had fused asphalt and stone into obsidian. The ashes and dirt making a thick layer of dirty snow everywhere else didn’t stick to it, sliding off like it was being repelled.

“Movement,” Destiny warned.

“Where?” I asked, looking around.

“I can only look in one direction, Chamomile.”

I narrowed my gaze, and saw dark shapes in the mist. Thin forms moving with a kind of slow, deliberate motion. It was the way a pony moved when they were sleepwalking or exhausted.

Midnight pulled a knife from a hidden sheath, the glass blade catching the light. “I don’t smell anything living.”

“Good.” I rotated my shoulder, stretching my rebuilt arm. “That means I don’t have to hold back while I figure out what I can do.”

I stepped forward. Stealth was going to be all but impossible anyway, so I figured it’d be a good idea to be a distraction so Midnight could do her thing. The mist peeled away as I walked, parting more like curtains instead of simply fading.

Rough stone obelisks protruded from the ground in a random scatter of waist-high cairns, looking more like they’d grown, twisted and bulbous, from the stone instead of being placed there. The shapes lurching through them barely seemed aware of their surroundings, swerving at the last moment around the stones.

One of them turned to look at me, a grinning skull with glowing blue stars in the empty eye sockets, a skeleton with blackened bones surrounded by smoky mist, like it had been pulled from a pyre and never quite stopped smoldering.

I realized I still didn’t have a cool battle-cry, which was a shame because it probably would have impressed Midnight. I clenched my brand-new hand as tight as I could and punched the first skeleton in the snout to establish dominance. It jerked back, the force cracking its jaw and making it hang loose from one side of the ebony skull.

It rattled, sounding like creaking hinges and straining unseen ligaments when it lunged, bony fingers twisted into claws. I tried to dodge, but I was already clumsy at my best and now I was getting tangled up by having too few legs and not enough wings. A burst of pain drew a yelp of alarm from me, and I fell back on my ass, the undead stalking towards me, hunched over.

On instinct, or really, in a panic, I kicked it. My armored boot shattered its ribs, and the black smoke rising from the bones exploded out for a moment in a puff like a mushroom releasing its spores before the whole thing fell over, the light in its eyes going out.

“Shoot, this isn’t as easy as it used to be,” I panted.

“You’re not allowed to complain to me about getting old,” Destiny said.

“Yeah, yeah,” I sighed, getting up. Two more skeletons were creaking their way over, moving with a bizarre pace that seemed out-of-sync with the world, like instead of moving smoothly they were snapping into position moment by moment, sort of the way the second hand of some clocks went around in a circle in a jerking sixty-part motion instead of a smooth glide.

“Maybe try not falling over?” Destiny suggested.

“Good plan.” I’d grabbed a rock from the ground when I was getting up, and chucked it at one of the skeletons. The motion felt somehow natural, despite the alien body, and the hoof-sized rock glanced off its head, cracking the bone and releasing a thicker haze from the wound. That might have been a mistake, because it seemed angry now.

Midnight dropped out of the mist right on top of it, planting both feet on its head and riding it down to the ground, the cracked skull exploding on impact.

“Come on, Chamomile,” she joked, smirking wide enough to show a long incisor. “You can do better than that!”

I scoffed and put my hands on one of the tombstones growing out of the blasted earth, grunting and twisting the glassy black rock. With a crack like thunder, it came out of the ground, just in time for me to swing around with it and club the last skeleton with it, the massive rock carrying straight through it and shattering every bone between its shoulders and waist. I let go at the apex, tossing the stone aside and wiping my hands clean.

“Better?” I asked.

“Much,” Midnight said with a pleased nod. “I need a big, strong bodyguard, you know. I can’t be the one responsible for protecting you.” She slapped me on the back and we kept walking, passing buildings half-seen through the mist.

“I don’t like to brag, but I do use brute force irresponsibly.” I flexed my muscles.

“You’re great at it.” Midnight winked, and we followed the road a little further, because a little further was all we could go.

The field of tombstones growing out of the street was bad, but you could walk around those. That wasn’t true of what we found at the literal end of the road. The asphalt and concrete fell away into a deep rift, a subsidence in the street too wide to jump across and deep enough that I couldn’t see the bottom, mist turning anything below into just a suggestion of infinite depth and blackness.

“That’s going to make it difficult to explore,” I mumbled. I kicked a loose pebble into it, and the mist swallowed it up. There wasn’t even a sound of it bouncing on the walls of the rift, just silence as soon as it was out of sight.

“So the sky is falling, the ground is crumbling, what next?” Midnight asked. “We find out the sea is still and fire doesn’t burn?”

“Don’t give the Darkness any ideas, those triangles up there are probably watching us,” Destiny warned quietly. I glanced up at the polygons hovering in the sky where the sun, moon, and stars should have been.

“I sure hope they don’t recognize us,” I mumbled. “Hey, if you hear any weird voices asking if you want to sell your soul--”

Midnight waved a hand dismissively. “Nightmare Moon still has mine on loan. Or maybe I got it back since she died? Wow, I didn’t think I’d need to worry about that kind of thing anymore, it was the whole point of becoming an immortal horror.” She rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “Know any good priests?”

“I’ll hook you up with a great church when we get back,” I joked. “They’ve got excellent coffee.” We started walking back to try and find a side street to avoid the crack in the world when the tablet in my pocket beeped.

“Hold on a second,” Destiny said.

“What is it?” I asked. “More skeletons?”

“No, on your right. I think it’s a corner store.” I looked over in that direction. There was a big sign out front advertising a sale on something called a ‘slushie’. “We can’t access the vector trap’s inventory right now, so it might be worth looking for basic medical supplies.”

“Good idea,” I said.

---

“Chamomile, those aren’t medicine,” Destiny sighed. “They’re a snack.”

“These aren’t just any potato chips, Destiny,” I said. “They’re alien potato chips from another universe! I owe it to myself to try them. And all the other snacks. I’ll literally never get another chance!”

“She’s not wrong,” Midi agreed. “Life is short. Take what pleasure you can while you can. If you can’t enjoy yourself, what’s the point of living?”

“Can we at least try to find something more useful while we’re here?” Destiny asked with a resigned sigh.

“I’ll look around,” Midnight said. “I don’t eat… chips.” She winked at me and hopped behind the counter, presumably looking for a first-aid kit.

I picked up one of the chip bags. It had a strange cartoon mascot on it. Back home it probably would have been a Princess or one of the Ministry Mares -- the Ministry of Image loved making sure their faces were everywhere a pony looked in the old world -- but here it was some kind of potato with a wide-brimmed hat and a friendly face.

“You know, it’s weird,” I said.

“What is?” Destiny asked.

“I didn’t even think about it before, but I’m holding an alien snack from another world, and I can read everything on the bag. Why is it written in Equestrian?” I tugged at the bag and managed to pop it open. To be honest I half-expected it to be rancid, but it smelled fine, and the chips looked pristine.

“That’s a good question, and one Sunset herself was concerned about,” Destiny replied. “It’s not just language, this world and ours share a suspicious number of things. Names of places, entire families that seemed to be duplicated, similar points in history. Unfortunately most of the research was under wraps in Canterlot.”

“Where she couldn’t go?” I guessed.

“Not after her falling out,” Destiny confirmed. “Our best guess is that when the worlds were first connected by the mirror, they synched up somehow. Do you know much about cutie marks and dooms?”

“Dooms? That’s ominous.”

“It’s just an old word for fate,” Destiny said. “An inescapable, predetermined fate. Everypony with a cutie mark has felt that kind of thing at least once, when they got their mark. It suggests there’s some kind of magic background field that leads ponies to finding their special talent. We theorized that the fields somehow became intertwined and both this world and ours shared similar fates.”

I looked outside through cracked windows at the ruin the world had become, mist and dust and darkness. “Did we cause this, or did they do it to us?”

“It’s impossible to say. Maybe both at once, maybe it depends on frame of reference, maybe it’s a coincidence. We still don’t know what happened here.”

I nodded and popped a chip into my mouth. It was crispy and fresh. “Oh wow, these are pretty good!”

“You know what else is pretty good?” Midnight asked. I looked back at her. She was holding something behind her back. “Me! Look at what I found.”

She revealed the newspaper she was holding, spreading it out on the counter in front of her. I walked over, munching on the chips.

“Good thing we can read this stuff,” I said, putting a hand on the page to smooth it out. The ink hadn’t faded as much as I would have expected with how much dust was covering everything outside.

EVACUATION ANNOUNCED

President Willow today announced a temporary evacuation of the west coast in order to prevent the spread of Mutagenic Wasting Disease reported in the area after the test-detonation of a thaumo-nuclear weapon by the Yuktobanian military in international waters in violation of the test-ban treaty.

The disease, characterized by distinctive skin lesions, is known to be spread in the fallout of thaumo-nuclear devices and waste from the production of thaumatic materials. The use of these weapons has been condemned by an international coalition and calls for sanctions against Yuktoban have been made by many prominent politicians.

Thaumatic waste is extremely dangerous and has a distinctive rainbow sheen. The bureau of health would like to remind citizens to report any chemical spills and not to approach or touch any unidentified substances. Only a trained expert can remove thaumatic waste safely!

A picture of a mushroom cloud accompanied the article, which was from a weapons test in Osea, according to the caption.
“Things must have gotten really bad really quickly,” I said.

“Their thaumo-nuclear weapon must be similar in design to a megaspell,” Destiny replied. “I’d almost like to see one but I think I’ve had my fill of weapons of mass destruction.”

“Could a weapon cause all that stuff outside? Or the shadows?” Midnight asked. “Because that seems a lot more like some kind of curse.”

“Maybe,” Destiny said. “I don’t have the Dimension Pliers to prove my theory, but everything we’re seeing here? It’s very similar to Limbo. This whole world might be about to fall into it. It would be like the floor of a house rotting until everything collapses into the basement.”

“It does all feel rotten,” I agreed. “If we kick too hard we might break reality.”

“I’d almost like to try just to see what happens,” Midnight admitted. “But only after we find Sunset. Which seems increasingly unlikely. I haven’t seen anything alive at all. No animals, no plants, nothing.”

“Kinda weird,” I agreed, finishing the rest of the chips. “But the snacks are still okay, and that paper looks almost brand-new.”

Midnight shrugged.

“Are there any maps back there?” Destiny asked.

“I didn’t see one,” Midnight replied. “I don’t think it would help very much even if there was one. We don’t even know where to go!” She kicked the counter in frustration. “This sucks, and not in the cool way with blood.”

“Sunset had to be based somewhere close to the portal,” Destiny said. “She was too paranoid not to keep it under tight control. If there’s a copy of her personal passcode anywhere in this entire world, it’s within walking distance.”

Midnight sighed and folded her arms, trying to calm down. “You’re right.”

“I’ve got an idea,” I said. “This building has a roof.”

“And I saw a fire escape on the side!” Midnight said, perking up. “If we have higher ground we might see something interesting! I’m a little embarrassed. Destiny is a genius, but I’m so distracted by all this I’m not even thinking as clearly as you, Chamomile.”

“I’m only half as dumb as people think,” I said. “Wait. Is half as dumb worse or better?”

“It’s definitely more you, either way,” Midnight giggled. She vaulted the counter and gave my flank a firm slap. “Come on! I’m excited to see how bad this place is when we can see more of it!”

---

“I was wrong!” Midnight said cheerfully. “It looks even worse from up here!”

“It’s not that bad,” I said, not meaning it. I’d seen living cities and dying ones and ones somewhere in-between, but I’d never seen a city like this. The architecture was so similar to Equestria that it looked like ponies had built it. But they hadn’t built a city, they’d built a grand mausoleum, a necropolis. It had the concrete and marble look of a graveyard built for titans who demanded office buildings as headstones.

“There’s no way we can check all of those on foot,” I mumbled. “Which one would Sunset use?” I scanned the skyline. I didn’t know anything about the pony except that she was Destiny’s boss, and apparently ambitious. Maybe that meant she’d have the tallest building?

Midnight tapped my shoulder. I looked at her, and she pointed behind us.

It stood taller than any other building in the city, but height is only a number. It can’t capture everything about a place. It wasn’t just the scale of the skyscraper that was awe-inspiring, it was the audacity of the designer, because they hadn’t just built a tower, they’d built it and then added an entire castle on top of it like adding a tier to a cake. It was so high that the bleeding clouds had to part around it.

“How much do you want to bet that the castle on top of that building is just a tiny bit higher than Princess Celestia’s place in Canterlot?” Midnight asked.

“No bet,” Destiny said. “I think we found what we were looking for.”

A voice hissed from all around us. “No. You have found only death.”

The mist swirled around the building, pulling up into a thick wall around us. The dim light from the grey sky above darkened a few shades. Something half-stepped, half-floated out of the mist on the edge of the roof.

It was cloaked in tattered robes, clutching a staff, an alien shape made of bone and mummified flesh that even like this still showed traces of stripes, like it hadn’t finished changing from the zebra it had been.

“Oh,” I said. “You’re one of the necromancers! How've you been? How did you even get here?”

“Our wrath is inescapable,” it intoned, voice echoing. “This world belongs to the Darkness. Coming here was foolish! It only put you in my hooves!”

“Hands,” I corrected. “We’ve all got hands right now.”

It was silent for a long moment, then pointed its staff at me, launching a bolt of sickly green energy that hit me in the gut and flung me to the edge of the roof, almost over the edge.

“Okay, I deserved that,” I groaned, rolling over to all fours and getting back up. “Ow.”

“You will see the shape of my wrath!” it screamed. “Behold your doom, a horror imprisoned here and left to rot, a terror Equestrians forced on another world!”

It raised its staff, and lightning shot from it in all directions, reaching into the mist. Thunder echoed, and something else replaced the silence that should have been in its wake. It was faint at first, growing louder by the second. In the first moments it was just a wall of sound like whalesong, but it changed, pitches changing and joining into chords.

I backed away from the edge. There was something swimming through the mist out there, a huge shape. It was suddenly like we were on a tiny boat, surrounded by sea monsters.

“Why can’t things ever be easy?” I whispered.

Comments

[Reese]

"She confidently followed the railings to a set of double doors and yanked them open"
"She quietly pulled the door closed so we could all stop looking at the apocalypse outside."
The first line sounds to me like she pulls on them to open them, but then the second sounds to me like, from the same side, she pulls on them to close them. What's going on there?

[Thought Prism]

Ah, the parallel world has a parallel apocalypse. Where Equus experienced the chaotic heat of radiation, Earth succumbed to the cold stillness of death in its purest form. Neat.

[FridayPie]

11372615
Very massive doors

[Reese]

11372787
...I don't follow, sorry?
What does the mass of the doors have to do with it?

[AcerSpacer]

A picture of a mushroom cloud accompanied the article, which was from a weapons test in Osea, according to the caption. “Things must have gotten really bad really quickly,” I said.

The Belkans are responsible for this, somehow.

[Just a tree]

Looks like SciTwi's work ended up becoming a military application with international development.
Hope Sunset and SciTwi are still together after all of this.

[Ahsoka Tano]

Nothing can ever just be peaceful can it