Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 92: Before Concession

“I think something’s wrong with me,” Midnight groaned, half-hanging over the side of the ship. She managed to look even more pale than usual. “I threw up blood!”

Emma, Destiny, and I all sighed. It had been quiet all day, and Midnight had come up on deck the second the sun started setting just so she could be dramatic and needy.

“You’re a vampire!” Destiny blurted out, sounding even more annoyed than I felt. “Of course you threw up blood! What else would you throw up?!”

“It’s a serious medical condition,” Midnight whined. “What if I die? Well, not die, but, you know. Stop moving permanently.”

“At least you’d stop complaining,” Emma said under her breath.

“You told us yourself it’s not a weird vampire curse thing,” I said. “I distinctly remember you saying ocean travel was fine.”

“She's just seasick,” Emma sighed.

“We should have brought a coffin.” I folded my hooves. “We could have locked her inside for the trip.”

“Don’t make fun of me.” Midnight collapsed onto her side in a very conspicuously artistic way, raising a hoof to her forehead like she might faint. “I’m so weak. I can’t even feel my own pulse!”

“You’re a vampire! You don’t have a pulse!” Destiny snapped.

“Please, my health is a serious concern,” Midnight said, her eyes full of alligator tears. “Maybe I’d feel better if I had some fresh blood instead of drinking those awful blood bags you bought at the port…”

“No,” Emma stated. She was the sole pony on the ship Midnight could even potentially feed from. The ship had exactly one crew member, an old sailor named Salty Dog who’d been running the ship for longer than he could remember. The rest of us had been press-ganged into doing the odd jobs around the boat as part of our fare. Even Destiny had kept busy fixing up the old steam engine that powered the Waverider.

Midnight groaned loudly, pouting and laying flat on her back on the deck. “I hate this trip!”

“How can she be almost two thousand years old and still act like a child?” Emma mumbled.

Midnight sniffled, sounding like she was on the verge of tears. “It’s because I stayed young at heart and didn’t let this cruel world twist me into an old salty hag.”

Emma’s eyes narrowed.

“No offense,” Midnight added.

“I’m going to shoot her,” Emma said. “I’m getting my gun!”

“Land-ho!” interrupted the captain. The ship’s foghorn bellowed three short bursts. Salty Dog kicked open the bridge hatch and trotted out on deck on three legs and one jagged piece of rebar and angle iron welded together into a rusty peg leg.

He pointed with the peg, and I could just see it on the horizon, the dim light of sunset washing out the details and leaving just a black shape like a lump of coal against the firey sky.

“It’s not far off now,” he said. “I don’t know about reefs in the area, though. Could be dangerous at night.”

“If you get us a little closer we can fly the rest of the way,” I suggested. “We probably need to land at night anyway or else Midnight will be dead weight.”

“Undead weight,” the vampire corrected.

Salty Dog nodded. “I can do that.”

“Reefs might not be the worst danger,” Destiny cautioned. “It’s possible the approach could be mined. Both sides had reason to come here, so both sides had reason to set traps.”

“Is it safe to even fly there?” I asked.

“That’s an excellent question!” Destiny said cheerfully. I waited for a follow-up. One did not appear.

“Chamomile,” Emma said, putting a hoof on my shoulder. “If I survive this you are never allowed to plan a mission ever again.”

“That’s fair,” I agreed.

“So who’s up for finding out if they have anti-air defenses?” Midnight asked cheerfully.

---

Saltwater drained out of the seams of my armor as I stomped towards the shore. I’d gotten a great look at Isla Soleada, briefly. It was a tropical island, a maze of volcanic valleys and jungle with buildings peeking through the foliage. I hadn’t been able to get more than a few impressions before the flak finally found me and knocked me out of the sky.

“You’re better at swimming than I thought,” Destiny said. She’d done a good job keeping me calm after I’d hit the water. Having a voice literally in my ear had let me avoid a panic attack when the water rushed into the armor through the brand-new holes.

“It’d be easier if I’d learned it some other way.” I rubbed my back legs together for a second. “I keep thinking I’m missing fins that I never had to begin with.”

“Any serious injuries?” Emma asked. She offered me a hoof up onto the concrete pier. I grunted and let her give me a boost out of the ocean.

“I’m fine,” I sighed. I picked a piece of shrapnel out of my chest, tossing it aside. “It only winged me.”

I spread one wing. Half of my primaries were gone. I wasn’t going to be flying anywhere for a while. Even with her helmet on, I saw Emma wince.

“They’ll grow back, but plucking the broken ones isn’t gonna be fun,” I sighed.

“I’m starting to think somepony doesn’t want us here,” Midnight said. She was lounging on the pier, looking unruffled in her ornate magical armor.

“Thank you for the stunning observation,” Emma growled.

“We should get to cover,” Destiny suggested. She opened a menu in my vision, the helmet’s augmented vision software kicking in and outlining the shapes of some half-collapsed warehouses and shacks along the docks. “We don’t want to be out here if somepony comes to see what they shot down.”

“Let me give you a healing potion,” Emma said.

I shook my head and walked past a collapsed crane gantry. There were a few shipping containers, already open and empty. “Save them. We don’t know when we can get more.”

“If you’re sure,” Emma said, following me into the shadow of an old warehouse, and I stopped at what we found there.

“A campsite?” I asked. A circle of sleeping bags was set around an improvised fire pit made of concrete blocks.

“We’re not the first ones to come here,” Midnight said. She picked up one of the bedrolls and sniffed it. “I don’t know why I did that. I’m not a dog. I can’t tell how old this stuff is by smelling it.”

“I found something,” Emma said. She held up a set of old saddlebags. The patch sewn on the side of the faded burlap had the old Equestrian flag, picked out in dull earth tones. “Special forces. They must have come here during the war.”

“That’s a bad sign,” Destiny noted. “If there was a battle here, what we’re looking for might have been moved or destroyed.”

“Ugh,” Midnight groaned. “I really don’t want another wild goose chase. It took long enough to track down the parts for the Exodus Black’s power system. I really, really don’t want to spend the next century trying to find out where some idiots buried their treasure.”

“Oh no, I assure you, there aren’t any goose here,” said a voice from the shadows. I kept DRACO trained at the darkness while a thin figure stepped out into the light coming through the broken ceiling tiles.

He had been thin and tall in life, and had gotten only thinner afterwards. The figure was nearly a pony, but had two horns on its head, one like a unicorn’s and the other further down its snout. The leather-like skin looked like clotted honey, and remnants of a faded mane hung down around its face.

“I’m so sorry if I scared you,” he said. His voice was unsteady and shaking. The creature sounded like a friendly, slightly slow grandfather, and despite being a lanky undead horror there was more of a sense of deep sadness than fear around him. “I was picking through the old supplies looking for a spot of tea and heard you walk in.”

“You’re… an abada?” I guessed, trying to remember.

He smiled kindly. “That’s right, young lady! Even when we were friends, most ponies didn’t recognize us.”

“I saw pictures in a book once,” I said. “The Abada lived with the Zebras but they were almost all conscientious objectors to the war.”

He nodded. “Quite true. I’ve never been much of a fighter myself, and my knees were going bad long before the war.” He sat down with a soft grunt. “Maybe we’ll all feel a bit better if we introduce ourselves, hm? I’ll go first. I’m Professor Heirloom Tomato, formerly of the University of Farasi.”

“Chamomile Zinger,” I said, offering a hoof to shake. His thin hoof felt fragile enough that it might snap like a twig if I squeezed too hard. “I, uh, don’t have any credentials. Sorry.”

“That’s all right. Truth be told, mine were rather overblown even a few centuries ago.” He winked.

“Midnight Shadow Sun, the Death of Obsidian Butterflies, daughter of the Lady of Dark Tides Who Dresses in Sorrowful Shawls, second-in-command of the Exodus Black, and all-time high score holder in Ms. Pac-Mare.” Midnight raised her snout haughtily.

“Ms. Pac-Mare?” Emma raised an eyebrow.

Midnight nodded proudly. “It was a lot harder than the original! They fixed the code so you couldn’t hide in safe spots.”

Emma rolled her eyes. “Emerald Gleam. I’m with the Enclave.”

“I’m not sure what that is, but it sounds very official!” Heirloom smiled. “I thought I heard one more of you, but…”

“Here,” Destiny said. She floated off my head. I shook out my mane. I was going to have to cut it soon. It was really getting longer than I liked. “I’m Destiny Bray. We’re here looking for something.”

“Ah well! You’re in luck!” Heirloom Tomato stood up, his joints popping. “I happen to be an excellent guide!” After a moment, his expression fell. “Oh, wait, no. I nearly forgot. I apologize. It’s my age and condition, you see. Sometimes details just slip away. Isla Soleada is on total lockdown. I’ve been stuck out here for… I’m not sure how long it’s been. Long enough that I can’t remember the last time I had a nice warm cup of tea.”

“Maybe we can do something about the lockdown,” Emma said. “Then you can show us, ah, whatever you were working on here.”

“That is an excellent idea!” Heirloom agreed. “I’m a bit hopeless with technical things, I’m more of an idea person than an engineer, you know! Tried for ages to get the security field down, but no such luck I’m afraid.”

“You’ve got some luck now,” Destiny said. “I happen to be a genius. I’ll have the security down before you even know it.”

---

“How’s it going?” I asked an hour later. We’d walked up from the beach along an access road. Heirloom Tomato assured us several times that there were no dangers on the island, and after we killed an entire nest of giant mutant crabs that statement actually became true and the abada ghoul became extremely apologetic.

“You remember how I said this was going to be easy?” Destiny said quietly. She was working on an open panel full of wiring. The security field, as it turned out, was a set of pylons projecting a force-field that went up high enough that we’d trigger the anti-air defenses before we got over it.

Going around was an even more difficult prospect. Sheer rock walls surrounded us on both sides, with the security gate at a choke point in the narrow canyon.

I nodded. Destiny was too busy poking at wires to see it, but both of us felt the silence drawing a little long.

“I might not be as good at this as I thought,” Destiny continued. “The security scanner is here outside the field, but it’s just an RFID sensor and some very long wires. They put all the guts of the machine inside the field itself!”

“That seems pretty smart.”

“It is really smart!” Destiny slammed the panel shut. “We need to figure out something else. Something that won’t make me seem stupid, if possible.”

“I can’t cut through it,” I said. “If we had Rockhoof here he could dig around it, but…”

I walked over to the shimmering shield across the valley and pressed my hoof against it. It wasn’t exactly the same as a solid wall. There was some weird give and tension to it that made me think of a really thick bubble.

“We did break through a forcefield a while back,” I said. “Remember when we went to that bombed-out mall with Cube?”

“There was that weird alicorn,” Destiny replied.

“Yeah. And we used the magical field the Exodus Armor used to get through.” I rapped my hoof against the field, feeling it bounce back. “Think we can do it again?”

“I don’t have a better idea yet,” Destiny admitted. She floated over and I helped pull her into place on my head. The usual heads-up display appeared, and then a few extra windows joined it.

“What are these?” I asked.

“We’ll need to keep careful track of the drain on your fusion core and the structural integrity field.” Destiny explained. “We’re just going to test this. We can’t bring the others through this way but maybe we can get to the control box.”

“Sounds good.” I pressed my right hoof against the shield. “Give me all the power we’ve got.”

I could feel the magical field around me. When it ramped up to full power, it was like being swaddled in a blanket, comfortable but a little tight and slightly itchy. The aura around my hoof glowed to life the same way steel did in a furnace. A dull red glow building up and then blazing to incandescent gold.

The force field started to ripple. I pushed my hoof forward. The webbing of the spell, filaments of force and sorcery, tangled and started tearing apart against the interference. My hoof slipped forwards.

“I think it’s working!” I pressed harder, getting up to my elbow, and then something started to go wrong.

“The fusion core drain is going up fast,” Destiny said. “This might not--”

I yelped before she finished saying whatever she was going to say. Warning alarms popped up all over my vision, red letters and warning signs about field collapse. It felt like my hoof was stuck in a vice. I tried to yank myself back but my fetlock was held firmly, the force field crushing down on it.

“Destiny!” I yelled.

“Hold on, I’m trying to-- shoot, the energy circuits are starting to fracture!”

It wasn’t the only thing. I could see the tiny blue hexagons of the armor plating coming apart at the seams, the force field starting to press inside the way water flooded a sinking ship.

“This is really starting to hurt!” I grunted. I could feel the force vibrating my bones, trying to tear me apart. If my right hoof had been flesh and blood it would have crunched like a tin can full of tomatoes by now.

“Hold on!” A warning alarm popped up, and a surge of power shot up my hoof, blasting the force field away for a fraction of a second, just long enough that my attempts to pull myself free finally found success. I fell back, slamming my spine into rocky volcanic dirt. I held my hoof tight against my chest, just trying to catch my breath.

“We’re not trying that again,” I said.

“No,” Destiny concurred. “If you’d been much further inside before it failed, that would have cut you in half.”

“Any chance we can try doing this by working smarter instead of harder?”

“We don’t exactly have a lot of tools. We’ve got a rifle, a speargun, a mass driver that fires garbage, a liquid nitrogen sprayer, and the Dimension Pliers.”

“I doubt freezing the force field will do much,” I sighed. “And you forgot that really cool gun I picked up that’s made out of like four other guns!”

“I didn’t forget it, no matter how hard I try. No. The only thing we have that might even start to work… well, it’s a long shot. It might not do anything.”

“Will it get me crushed?” I asked.

“If it does, something has really gone wrong.”

“Good enough.” I stood up. “So what are we doing?”

“Hold out your hoof.” Destiny said. I did, and a familiar boxy piece of technology appeared. “I almost forgot we even had this thing!”

“The Telebuck,” I groaned. I’d forgotten about it too. The prototype personal teleportation

“These are ideal conditions to use it! We’re not under time pressure, there are no weird space distortions, and we’ve only got to go from here to the other side of the force field. I’m absolutely sure it’ll work.”

“Should we get the others--”

“Nah, it’s fine. We’ll just pop over there, then we can use the control panel on the inside to bring the field down, and I’ll still look like a genius.” Destiny adjusted the controls on the Telebuck, flipping DIP switches and twisting knobs. “Here we go!”

“Wait, I should--”

The world twisted around me, and I was suddenly somewhere else. For a moment, so short it might have been a hallucination, I thought I saw myself standing on the other side of the force field, staring at myself, in two places at once. I didn’t have time to think about it and immediately started retching.

“No, no!” Destiny yelped, popping off my head without a moment to spare. I half-collapsed and vomited all over the sandy soil, narrowly avoiding getting it inside Destiny.

“That was even worse than having my sister teleport me,” I gasped.

“Half-sister,” Destiny corrected. She floated over to the now-exposed control panel and opened it up, finding circuit boards and capacitors.

“I’m going to promote her to full sister if it means I don’t have to use the Telebuck again,” I groaned.

“I don’t know if family works that way,” Destiny said. She worked for a few seconds, and the force field shimmered and came down. “Hah! I still got it. Let’s get the others and see what’s so important here.”

---

“Oh yes, it was a wonderful place to work,” Heirloom Tomato said. “Before things went poorly, I mean. The worse things got outside of here, the more problems leaked in. All the ponies I worked with were wonderful creatures. Most of them were rather brilliant, and the rest made up for it by putting in a tremendous amount of work. It was enough to make me almost ashamed of my rather modest contributions.”

“What did you work on?” Emma asked, walking alongside the abada as we made our way through the canyon. We had to keep our pace sort of slow to accommodate him.

The canyon itself was wide enough that it was clear the access road we were following was designed for construction equipment. Wild plants and flowers grew in patches around the trampled path, a chaotic mix of common weeds, exotic flowers, and a lot of plants I’d simply never seen before.

I stopped to smell a flower with red and yellow spots. It smelled like freshly ground black pepper. I sneezed loudly.

“It’s going to sound silly, but I was actually researching new plant cultivars. I’d always been interested in rediscovering old and rare plants and finding ways to effectively farm them, but my real passion was in making something new! We even developed a rather interesting and potentially unique way to do so! Developed it myself, with a lot of help from some rather brilliant engineers. Spared no expense.”

“Plants don’t sound very useful,” Midnight said to herself. “Why would Kulaas send us here?”

“Plants also don’t get anti-air defenses and the tightest security I’ve seen anywhere,” Destiny retorted. “Kulaas was built to be smarter than any pony. It must know something about the projects here that we don’t.”

“That’s a good point,” Emma said, looking back over her shoulder at us. “Not the part with your computer, but this security is beyond top-tier and still running.”

“Yes, it all got tripped when…” Heirloom stopped, scrunching his eyebrows and thinking. “There was a reason. It was something important. It’s so hard to remember anything from those days, it all blurs together and I was so thirsty when I woke up…”

“Take it slow,” I said. I put a hoof on his back. “You know, I’ve actually died a few times myself. It’s really rough.”

“Oh my, yes. If I had something to jog my memory…”

There was a sharp crack, and a bullet whistled past my head, sparking against the rock. A second shot bounced off of one of Destiny’s shields. It looked more solid than usual, just like she did.

“Who’s shooting at us?” I asked, aiming my weapons in the general direction of forward, but with the tall walls of the canyon, it was impossible to tell where the sounds actually came from. DRACO beeped, and I looked at the small screen. “I forgot how much I love having you around, buddy,” I told the gun. It had triangulated them with its own parabolic microphone.

I took the shot where DRACO suggested, letting the smart gun guide the bullet. A patch of the canyon wall halfway up the rocks shifted and fell, tumbling down the slope and rolling to a stop. Even then, the outline was hard to see. It was wearing a cloak that shifted to match the terrain around it, colors changing like a chameleon.

Midnight walked up to it and pulled the cloak away to reveal a corpse, almost as dried out as Heirloom Tomato. It was a zebra ghoul, wearing the remnants of some kind of tactical gear.

“Oh right,” Heirloom said quietly. “The assassins.”

“Are you working with them?” Destiny accused. “You had something to do with this!”

A war cry echoed down the canyon. More zebra rose out of the low plants where they’d been hiding and ran for us, holding long, jagged blades. A few had guns and took shots with the rusty weapons.

A bullet hit Heirloom in the shoulder and sent him to the ground. More bounced off of Destiny’s shield.

“I’m afraid they’re here for me,” Heirloom Tomato said. “And I do mean afraid. I’m quite sure they’re the ones who killed me the first time around!” He started shivering. “I tried to get away but they called me a traitor when I wouldn’t fight!”

“This was easier when I just assumed all the zebra were evil,” Destiny sighed.

Midnight turned into a blur, cutting through the first few assassins.

“Emma, keep them off our guide!” I yelled back. I didn’t wait for her to respond. I knew she was better at that than I was. If I wanted to help, I’d be better off doing it by being too loud and annoying to ignore. “Flares!” I called out.

DRACO beeped and launched a barrage of flares, the red and green stars trailing clouds of smoke. I barreled past the first line of zebras with knives and went for the shooters. They’d already stopped, their aim spoiled until they saw me and opened up fire again at point blank range. One shot grazed my shoulder, most of it going wide.

I trampled one, getting on top and stomping down until it stopped moving. A second turned to fire, and I reacted on reflex, pulling the first trigger my mouth found. The Dimension Pliers hummed, and space distorted around the zebra, every molecule vibrating in place. It moved like it was caught in a windstorm, raised the rifle-- and something went terribly wrong inside the gun. The rifle exploded and the chamber turned into shrapnel that tore apart the zebra ghoul’s hoof.

I threw my blade at it to finish it off, the knife flipping end-over-end and slicing through its neck before boomeranging back to me on its magnetic tether.

“Neat trick,” Midnight said. “You’re just full of surprises.”

“The good thing about being basically unkillable is you get to learn all sorts of ways to be deadly at people,” I said.

“Darn right!” Midnight winked and bumped her flank against mine. “Did we get all of them? It’s hard for me to spot them when they’re cold and dead to start with.”

“I think so--” I said, immediately before laser light pierced the clouds of smoke. “But I wouldn’t put money on it!”

I ran back towards Emma and Destiny, and found Emma standing over the body of a zebra ghoul. She was panting and holding her foreleg against her chest. There was a cut through the elbow joint.

“I’m okay,” she assured me. “He barely nicked me through the armor. It’s not even enough for a healing potion. I’ll walk it off.”

I relaxed and let out a breath.

“I think that might be premature,” Destiny said. She levitated one of the jagged blades up to inspect it. Grooves covered the surface, and there was a disgusting grease over the entire surface. “I’m not entirely sure, but this could be, ah--”

“Poison,” Heirloom confirmed. “Rather fast-acting. I know from experience, I’m afraid.”

“If they have poison, they’ll have an antidote!” I said.

“Right!” Destiny agreed. I knelt down, and with her help, started going through the tactical gear the zebra was wearing. His pouches were stuffed full of useless trinkets and garbage. Spent shell casings. A whetstone. A mess kit.

“What about this?” I asked, holding up a bottle with some small white pills.

“Let me see-- no,” Destiny said, after reading the label. “I don’t think the situation calls for a cyanide pill.”

“They won’t have an antidote,” Heirloom said. He examined the knife. “I’m afraid my people’s military was rather fanatical. Death before failure type of thing. You can understand why I didn’t want to sign up.”

“You’re gonna say no, but I have an idea,” Midnight said.

“You want to suck out the poison,” Emma guessed.

“Would you rather have me try to suck it out, or have Chamomile cut off your hoof?” Midnight asked. Emma was quiet for a long few seconds. “Well?”

“I’m thinking!” Emma snapped. “Fine.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be gentle,” Midnight promised. “Can you all give us a little privacy?”

“We should at least see what’s around the next bend,” Destiny said. “Chamomile?”

“Right, leading the way,” I said. Heirloom followed after me, looking at the knife for a little longer before putting it away carefully.

“I don’t want to promise anything, but there’s a chance we might be able to help her,” Heirloom whispered. “One of my field stations is just ahead. You remember I told you I was studying plant cultivars? Our most successful field of research was into healing herbs. If it wasn’t for my work, mass-production of healing potions might not have been possible!”

“Do you have anything that might work as an antidote?” I asked.

“I hope so,” he said. “It’s been so long, we have to pray that the automatic systems kept the crops alive. This environment isn’t terribly well suited for them, which is why we were trying to grow them here in the first place.”

I looked around. We were out of sight of Midnight and Emma.

“I guess we should wait here,” I said, sitting down. “Are you okay? You got shot back there.”

“It does sting a bit,” Heirloom admitted. “Unfortunately for me, not as badly as my knees will hurt in the morning after all this walking. Getting old really does a number on a creature!” He laughed a little. “Thank you for being worried.”

“Do you know if there are more assassins?” Destiny asked.

“They’re rather better at not being seen than I am at seeing them,” Heirloom apologized.

“DRACO was able to spot them,” I said. Destiny floated over to manipulate the controls, going through a few menus.

“He’s got better optics than a pony’s eyes,” Destiny said. “It seems like he could pick up the distortions from those stealth cloaks. That’s a neat trick. I’ll set him up to automatically alert us if he sees that again.”

I let her get to work, sitting on my flank and waiting.

“You don’t think Midnight might have gone blood-crazy and drained Emma dry, do you?” I asked.

“No such luck,” Emma groaned. She limped around the corner. “She did make it really weird, though.” The armor on her right foreleg was all gone, replaced by bandages. She looked more pale than usual.

“Come on, it wasn’t that bad,” Midnight teased. “I got out at least some of the poison, then topped her off with a healing potion.”

“I still feel like garbage,” Emma said.

“You probably will until we get a proper antidote,” Heirloom said. “I’m not an expert on poison, but I’ve accidentally envenomed myself too many times to count. Medicinal plants can be rather dangerous when handled improperly.”

“Any chance we can find medicinal plants somewhere around here?” I asked, trying to get us back on track.

“Ah, yes!” Heirloom smiled and patted my shoulder. “I did want to show off my work, and if it can do some good, more the better! Down this road.”

He led us down a side path, the road partly washed out by rainfall to the point we had to climb over rock falls that had, at least, taken out one security gate. The steel pylons lay where they’d fallen, power cables dangling loose and occasionally sparking.

“My project wasn’t dangerous, but we did need to keep creatures from wandering in,” Heirloom explained while I helped him over the chest-high barricade the fallen gate had formed. “Because of the radiation and effluence, you see.”

“I thought you were working with plants?” I asked, confused.

We walked out into a wide valley. It was big enough for a small town, but instead it was home to something between a chemical plant and a farm. Three fields studded the ground, each one a circle around a central steel tower. Pipes and ductwork picked out paths around ditches and spraying equipment.

“I was, I was!” Heirloom assured me. “As I said, we were creating new cultivars here. As you know, radiation sources can cause mutations. By intentionally exposing crops, we could mutate a great many new varieties in a short time. The circular fields are arranged around the sources, so the inner rings get the most radiation and the amount decreases as you move outward. It’s a bit of a shotgun approach, more failures than successes, but we only needed a few successes and expanding to scale like this ensured the bets paid off.”

“Clever,” Destiny said. “Totally random mutations mean some percentage will be beneficial.”

“One thing we discovered early on was how to breed crops for radiation resistance!” Heirloom joked. “Not terribly useful.”

“More useful than you might think,” Emma said. “There are ponies that could use crops like that.”

“I’ll be happy to share. It would be good to have my work out in the world.” He pointed to a greenhouse. “The control room is in the effluence building. It was where we worked with this unusual waste product from Equestria. Ended up being all but useless in the end. Almost impossible to reproduce any effects, you see.”

“I bet,” Emma said. She leaned on the railing as we worked our way through the catwalks above the dry, once-tilled soil. “At least most of the plants seem to be--” she stopped and vomited over the side.

“Let’s find that antidote,” Destiny prompted. “Quickly.”

Comments

[Just a tree]

Cute, that the chapter began and ended with vomiting. Or ... maybe not cute.

I heard sucking out the poison is a bad idea in real life, but it probably works better with magic.

[Reese]

"there aren’t any goose here"
"there aren’t any geese here"?

"used the magical field the Exodus Armor used to get through"
"used the magical field the Exodus Armor uses to get through"?

"The prototype personal teleportation"
The end of this sentence appears to have gone missing.

For anyone wondering, by the way, and happening to see this comment, the deliberate exposure of plants to radiation to make new varieties is a real thing.