Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 93: Reincarnated Echoes

“Gleamblossom?” I asked.

“Good for rashes, but not for poison,” Heirloom said. The inside of the greenhouse was a messy, abandoned workspace, with half the plants dead and the rest growing out of control. Thick vines with distressingly colored veins running through their leaves crawled along the walls. Some of the crawling was literal. Apparently, some of the carnivorous plants were now highly carnivorous.

I poked through the drawers, turning bottles around to look at faded labels, the markings both in Equestrian and Zebrican. I only recognized about half of what I was looking at. Destiny was floating next to me, helping get some of the jammed locks open with telekinesis and some thin lab tools. The one cabinet I’d opened on my own had entirely shattered along with everything inside it.

“Do you have any datura?” I asked. “That stuff worked really well for me.”

“Of course. It’s a bit of a wonder plant,” Heirloom Tomato agreed. The abada had been setting up some basic glassware and cleaning it with what solvents remained after two hundred years of rot. “Blue datura is a universal antidote. It was a bit dangerous to have around, actually. It spoils almost any alchemy you put it in. Sort of like dumping baking soda into acid. Neutralizes the whole thing.”

“This is an impressive lab,” Destiny said.

“Thank you. I put a lot of it together myself. We had to invent all sorts of tests to check for the presence of useful chemical compounds, the presence of toxins, growth rates… It was all very exciting! Essentially an unlimited budget, and as long as I was reporting progress, I could ask for almost anything.”

Heirloom opened a cabinet and found a plastic box. He opened it and frowned when he saw what was inside it. I looked over his shoulder and saw dead, dried leaves that had turned to brown dust.

“Except for sample containers that would keep things fresh, apparently.” The abada ghoul glanced outside across the fields. Half of the grow lights had broken down over time, leaving the circular plots a maze of shadows. “I hate to suggest it, but you might need to gather some supplies. These weren’t packaged to last, and there’s nothing left.”

“I can do that,” I said. “What am I looking for?”

“You know what datura looks like?” he confirmed. I nodded and he returned the gesture. “Good, good. Most ponies don’t and I’m a poor artist so my drawings wouldn’t be very helpful. There should be some out in the fields. With the automatic systems, there’s a good chance it’s still alive and growing.”

“Want me to grab some?”

“Yes. If you can, get samples of red, green, and blue datura. It should all be growing out there somewhere. I didn’t plant the fields myself, I can’t remember where the interns put them. Blue is the most important, but the others will make it more effective.”

“I’ll stay here and get the rest of these unlocked,” Destiny said. “I might be able to get some of the old equipment running, too.”

“That would be lovely,” Heirloom said. “We should focus on the auto-cauldron. If we feed it the right ingredients, it should do most of the work for us! Practically like having the interns back!”

I waved to him and trotted out, stopping by where Emma was. She seemed to be sleeping uneasily, sweating and tossing and turning on the cot in the back room.

“How is she?” I whispered.

Midnight shrugged. “I’m not a doctor. All I can tell you is her blood is tasting worse instead of better.”

“So draining it out isn’t helping?” I asked.

“It’s not enough,” Midnight said. “I’m bailing out a sinking ship, and it tastes terrible! We’re either going to run out of healing potions or her body is going to just give up, and I can’t tell you which one is gonna happen first.”

“We’re not going to let her die,” I promised.

“She’s rude and probably terrible in bed, but that’s no reason to let her go,” Midnight agreed with a dramatic sigh. “Try and hurry, okay? I don’t know what’s gonna happen if I keep feeding on her.”

“You wanna come with?” I asked. “Maybe a walk would do you some good.”

“Thanks, but I feel like crap,” Midnight groaned. “The poison can’t kill me, but it can give me some serious upset tummy issues, and that is a very unpleasant sight when the upset tummy is full of blood. By the way? Don’t go into the bathroom.”

---

“This would be easier in the daytime,” I mumbled, walking through the field. I was going to have to go all the way around to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Every one of the circular plots was broken up into slices like a pie, with different plants growing on each slice, and most of them were out of control and huge to the point there were jungles of eggplants and bamboo thickets taller than some buildings.

I was making my way through the choked path cutting across a field of what might have been melons at one point and now looked and smelled distressingly like sausages as big as my head when the plants shifted and I felt a surge of danger crawl down my back. I spun around in alarm.

I was looking down the barrel of an assault rifle, being held by a pony in a gasmask and ragged uniform, almost invisible in the field until he’d moved -- not even because of intentional camouflage, but because the burlap and cotton hadn’t been cleaned in so long that it had turned the same color as the mud and dirt caking the ground.

Another pony waited behind him, standing in the shadows where the broken lights couldn’t reach and watching me carefully.

“I come in peace?” I tried, holding up my hooves.

“Put down that gun, Private,” the pony lingering in the back said. “She’s a pegasus, not a zeke.”

The pony holding the gun on me lowered the rifle with a guttural growl. He sounded more like an animal than a pony. He turned and saluted, moving with wobbly, exhausted movements. He could have been sleepwalking or just so tired that it blurred the lines between awake and asleep.

“Are you with reinforcements?” the pony in back asked. They stepped forward. They’d clearly been here a long time. Centuries. “We ran into a lot of trouble. We weren’t supposed to meet real resistance and we’re heavily under-equipped. I was starting to think our messages didn’t get out!”

I looked at the two of them, and I could sense that cloud of confusion and timeless looping that I’d felt before. They were like the ghosts onboard the dead Cloudsdale Defense Force cloudships.

“You mean the zebra special forces?” I asked. “We ran into them too.”

“Damn, I knew they were still out there!” the officer cursed, kicking the dirt. “The rest of the platoon is feeling too sick to fight. We’ve bunked up ahead in the field.”

I nodded, and they led the way to the center of the field. The plants here were a tangle of dead leaves and deformed survivors, with blotchy, puffy stems and strange grows. The few living plants were massive and halfway rotting even while they grew.

There were more sleeping bags, like the ones we’d found on the beach. Most of these were occupied. Or had been. It depended on if you counted the skeletons of long-dead ponies. The ghoul in the gas mask curled up next to the tall metal pylon at the very center of the field, going so totally limp I wasn’t sure he’d get up again.

“The equipment in the middle stays warm, so we’re using it to keep the cold off without starting a fire the zekes might spot. It’s a good thing, too. They must have used some kind of chemical weapon because everypony has been feeling awful. I’m letting them sleep it off until they recover.”

I nodded. “That’s good thinking,” I said quietly. I looked at the equipment they were resting around. I could see something glowing between jammed-open lead shielding. I could practically taste the radiation. Even for me, this place was probably unsafe to linger in.

“Do you have any orders from the outside?” the officer asked.

“You’ll get relief soon,” I lied. It wasn’t a good lie. It didn’t really matter. The ghoul couldn’t even tell which century it was, much less if I was telling the truth. “I’m on a retrieval op. We’re checking what’s being grown here for, uh, national security reasons.”

“I understand,” the officer said, saluting. “Is there anything I can help with?”

“Have you seen any plants with blue leaves?”

“Yes, ma’am!” the officer said. “I’ll escort you myself. You never know when one of those damn zekes might pop up.”

“I’d appreciate it,” I said. The ghoul nodded over her shoulder and I followed her across the farm. She was quiet and careful, clearly expecting an attack at any moment. She was so on edge she could cut herself with it. I couldn’t imagine spending years or decades stuck like that. It would be like being stuck in Tartarus.

“We can’t be too careful,” she whispered. “Intel says this whole island is one crazy experiment after another.”

“Do you know what they were working on?” I asked.

“Not for sure,” the officer said. “We grunts don’t get the same quality reports you special forces types do. I hear it’s supposed to be some kind of weapon to kill Celestia. That can’t be true, can it?”

She stopped and looked back at me with fear in her dead eyes. She was delusional, walking through a dream and it was about to turn into the sort of night terror that made a pony wake up in the middle of the night not sure where the nightmare ended and reality began.

“Not in a million years,” I lied. “You remember what they always used to say about the Royal Guard?”

The ghoul shook her head. “No, Ma’am.”

“They were never really there to protect the Princess. She can take care of herself. Their duty, and ours, is to protect everypony else.”

She relaxed a little, nodding along. I’d read it in one of the many history books my dad had made me practically memorize to try and live up to his standards. It had never been good enough for him, but I was starting to think his standards hadn’t been average. Maybe I really wasn’t as stupid as I thought I was.

Then again, I was thinking that while sporting a frankly shocking amount of brain damage and I was pretty sure I’d be drooling in a hospital bed if I didn’t have a computer jammed into my grey matter.

“Here we are,” the ghoul said, nodding ahead of us. The brush was lower here, without the tall and overgrown plots of the other fields. I’d spent enough time with the zebras to know what datura looked like while it was growing, and I was looking right at it.

“Oh, great!” I smiled. “This is perfect!”

The officer saluted, radiating happiness from being praised. I returned the salute and trotted into the field, poking at the line of datura. I’d learned the right way to harvest it while I was recovering from the fight against the green SIVA dragon, which was shockingly different from the way ponies harvest cloud crops. Of course, I’m sure you already know all about cloud farming, so there’s no reason to go over the details.

Most of the datura was the normal green kind, but there were smaller, sparser plots of the other kinds as well. Closer to the radiation source in the middle of the field it looked really weird. I’d swear the leaves were glowing a little in the light, moving on their own despite a lack of a real breeze.

I was able to get decent-looking green and red datura, but the blue was more troubling. I had to choose between withered and dried-up leaves that could have been dead for a decade or the too-large and ragged-edged leaves near the center. If Emma didn’t need it so badly I’d just tell them that there wasn’t anything I could use, but going back empty-hooved would be sentencing her to slow death.

Being a little mutated was probably better than dead when it came to ingredients. For all I knew the mutant datura was perfectly safe and just looked weird. I grabbed a few bunches. If it wasn’t good enough…

I couldn’t think like that. It had to be good enough.

“Thanks again,” I said. “I’m going to get this where it needs to go.”

“Do you need an escort?” the ghoul offered.

“No, it’ll be fine.” I gave her a pat on the foreleg. “You should take care of your soldiers. They need somepony with a level head on their shoulders.”

She nodded. “Thank you, Ma’am!”

---

“You found it?” Heirloom Tomato asked, pleased. I put the samples of the datura down on the bench. “Excellent!”

He looked over the plants, using a hoof tool to check the leaves for something. It looked like a hole punch for paper, taking small square samples of the leaves. A paper strip changed color with every sample, shifting through the rainbow before settling down to a single shade.

“Hmmm…” he mumbled.

“Is it okay?” I asked.

“The green and red datura are fine. A little weak because they haven’t been fertilized, a bit like how food crops don’t have enough nutrients if the plants themselves are starved while they’re growing.”

“And the blue?” I looked at the mutant leaves.

“Well…” he tilted his head, concentrating. “I think it’ll still work. It has the antitoxin compound. More than the original variety! If we had the time I’d run some studies on it and see what the rest of these results mean. There are other enzymes that I haven’t seen before, and these tools are a bit crude to isolate them.”

“Is it safe?” Destiny asked. She looked at the strip of paper. “I never liked analog tests like this. These materials are older than I am. Are you even getting an accurate reading?”

“It’s old but reliable. A bit like me!” Heirloom said. He shrugged. “Well, there’s nothing for it! Sometimes in science you just have to try your best and see what happens. If we already knew the results, we wouldn’t call it an experiment!”

“I’d prefer not to experiment on a friend,” I said.

“It’s just a figure of speech,” Heirloom said, waving away my concerns. “You did well getting these so quickly. I doubt I could have found them so quickly!”

“I had some help,” I said. “It’s a good thing you didn’t go out there yourself. There are ponies out in the fields. It seems like both sides attacked this place at the same time.”

“It was probably because of whatever they were working on in the Solar Center,” Heirloom said dismissively. He started plucking leaves, crushing them into a paste in a mortar and pestle. “I doubt they’d have been interested in what we were doing here. The worst we ever did was help ponies lie on some reports.”

“What kind of reports?” Destiny asked.

“It’s a bit embarrassing, really,” Heirloom said. He scraped the paste into a flask and opened a panel on the auto-cauldron, inserting it and turning the machine on. It started humming and vibrating. “I assume you’re not familiar with the state of medical care before the war?”

“Not really,” I said.

“I was too young to really remember,” Destiny added.

Heirloom Tomato nodded. “Before we learned how to cultivate the ingredients for healing potion in large enough amounts for mass production, healing was a long, painful process. Healing spells are difficult to cast, and most ponies just had to rest and wait and use antibiotics to keep infections at bay.”

He stepped over to a first-aid kit and opened it, pulling out a length of old, dirty bandages.

“The charm on this has faded to nothing, but these used to be very expensive healing bandages. They had to be applied to a wound directly and kept in place while they worked. Good enough for small flesh wounds, rubbish for more than that. And these are spoiled, to boot. Spared no expense on the facility and it all went to trash so quickly!” He sighed in frustration.

“Did you do… reports on bandages?” I guessed.

The ghoul laughed. “No, no. It’s… hm. How to put it… from a certain perspective, having healing potions being so common was a problem.”

“The Battle of Stalliongrad problem,” Destiny said.

“Indeed. In most battles, one side would retreat when it suffered too many casualties, but only a fraction of those would be fatalities. With every soldier carrying a healing potion or two with them, they were expected to get shot, get back up, and keep fighting. The amount of what ponies called Wartime Stress Disorder went through the roof, but it was easier to hide from the public than crippled soldiers coming home with life-changing injuries.”

“In Equestria, they put them in private wards so the public didn’t get to see that part of it, either,” Destiny said quietly.

“Ah well, you still treated them with kindness. I’m afraid my people weren’t as understanding. We had only a fraction of the resources of Equestria, and so soldiers were sent back to the front again and again and executed for cowardice if they refused. A waste in all senses of the word.”

“Sounds rough,” I said. “I mean, I sort of get it. Morale is a big problem even in the Enclave. There are always shortages and stuff, and ponies who complain too much sometimes get brought in for a long talk and mandatory community service. I had to do it twice, and it sucked eggs. They made me listen to a lecture about how lucky I was to be in real civilization and how complaining doesn't help anypony. That kind of thing.”

That had been back home. A place that didn’t exist anymore, buried alive by Polar Orbit. I still didn’t know what his real agenda was. It was on my very long list of things I needed to figure out.

The auto-cauldron beeped. Heirloom Tomato walked over to it, opening a panel and extracting a pear-shaped flask. He swirled it around for a moment, looking at it closely.

“I’d have to say you’ve got this old girl working better than when she was brand new,” Heirloom said happily. He nodded to Destiny. “You really are quite an engineer!”

“Oh, it’s no big deal,” Destiny said, trying to sound modest. I could feel how much being praised pleased her. “You still had everything on the factory settings. I’ve worked with enough lab equipment to know how to tweak things.”

A rattle of gunfire shattered the greenhouse’s glass panes, shards of glass raining down and bullets slamming into the dusty cabinets. Heirloom yelped and almost dropped the flask, fumbling with it before grabbing it in both front hooves and ducking down as low as he could.

“We see you in there, zebra scum!” somepony shouted from outside.

“Buck, those soldiers must have followed me!” I yelled over another burst of gunfire. “They think the war is still on!”

“Maybe if I surrender myself to them--” Heirloom suggested.

“You’re going to go to the back room and feed that potion to Emerald Gleam,” Destiny corrected. “Chamomile and I can deal with this. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it's that no number of regular soldiers is enough to take her down.”

Destiny flew over and I nodded to her. She settled into place, the helmet sealing with a hiss. I stood up and stepped out, wings spread and showing myself as obviously as I could while I walked through the door.

A bullet pinged off the armor’s collar. I tried not to wince at the sound.

“What the buck do you think you’re doing?!” I yelled. There were more ghouls than I expected, most of them in even worse shape than the private with the gas mask pointing his rifle at me from the edge of the field. They were barely holding together, rotting and probably only avoiding total collapse because of the radiation in the fields.

“Stop shooting!” the officer from before shouted. “Look! It’s one of the Princesses!”

I glanced behind me, half-expecting to see Flurry Heart.

“She means you,” Destiny prompted quietly. “With my horn and your wings… well, they’re already delusional to start with. Think you can do a good Royal Canterlot Voice?”

“What’s that?” I hissed.

“Shouting and saying ‘thee’ and ‘thy’ a lot, mostly.”

“I can try.” I cleared my throat, trying to sound loud and authoritative. I didn’t have the sheer force and power a real alicorn like Flurry Heart did, so I was going to have to fake it with confidence instead. “LISTEN! HEAR ME AND OBEY! Uh…” I coughed, stalling for time.

The ghouls saluted, not all quite at the same time or in the same way. One of them was missing their right forehoof and didn’t get very far with the left before falling on their snout and staying there.

“What do I do?” I hissed.

“Try telling them the war is over?” Destiny suggested.

It couldn’t hurt to try. “THE DARKNESS OF, uh, THY LONG WAR HAS PASSED! LAY DOWN THY ARMS!”

The ghouls looked at each other and started grumbling “Princess Luna would never say that!” one of them shouted.

“It must be some kind of zebra trick! Open fire!” the officer ordered.

I swore and dove for cover, jumping into a ditch. Gunfire rattled overhead, keeping me pinned down. “I don’t think it worked. Great idea, Destiny.”

“I’m a doctor of thaumatic engineering, not psychology!” she snapped. “You didn’t have a better idea!”

“I did not, no,” I agreed. “So we’re going with the usual--”

Two ghouls jumped over the edge, snarling and hissing. The bottom half of their gas masks had been torn apart by gnashing jaws full of broken teeth. I caught one in midair and punted it straight back up, its legs flailing at the air.

The second ghoul latched onto my wing with its teeth, trying to yank it apart. It was almost smart -- my wings were one of the only things still exposed with the armor on. They were also the strongest part of my body. I flicked my wing out and tossed the ghoul away, and it hit the dirt at the same time the first ghoul slammed into the mud next to it.

“Give me the speargun,” I said. Destiny obliged, and the sleek whate-like shape of the HEARSE popped onto my left shoulder in place of the Dimension Pliers. A burst of spears nailed the two fallen ghouls in place permanently.

The rest started piling into the trench, and I was soon looking at a dozen ghouls surrounding me on both sides, all of them drooling and ravenous.

“Looks like they’ve all gone feral,” Destiny said. “I think when we broke up their routine we broke them, too.”

One of them held out a shaky hoof with a rifle, spraying the area with bullets. Most of them went wide, hitting everything around me. The ghoul was firing the assault rifle on instinct, pulling the trigger as a reflex. I ducked, a burst going over me and hitting the ghouls on the other side.

A glint of metal on one of the fallen ghouls caught my eye, and I launched the anchor line from the HEARSE, grabbing a ghoul and reeling him back in like a rotting, zombie fish. I grabbed at his side and pulled the grenade free from his bandolier. Destiny yanked the pin with telekinesis and I tossed it into the larger group.

“Should I say something cool and dramatic?” I asked. The grenade went off, tossing bodies everywhere.

“I don’t think they’d appreciate it,” Destiny replied.

---

“How’s Emma doing?” I asked.

“I think she’s-- oh sands, what happened to you?!” Heirloom gasped. “You’re covered in mud and blood!”

“Almost none of it is hers,” Midnight sighed. She wasn’t even looking at me. “I can tell that and my nose is all stuffed up from--” She started to retch. “This is really the worst trip ever,” she said, once she could speak again. Her voice was weak and wavering.

“She’s always getting covered in other people’s blood,” Emma agreed. “Help me sit up.”

Heirloom reached over and helped her sit up on the cot. Emma looked pale and wasted, and probably needed another solid week of bed rest in a real hospital back home.

“Feeling any better?” I asked.

“I feel awful, but that’s an improvement over dying,” Emma said. “Thanks.”

I nodded and sat down. Destiny popped off my head and floated over to Emma, tugging at her eyelids with telekinesis and checking her pupils.

“Maybe you should go back to the boat,” I suggested. “You could rest there and wait for us.”

“In case you forgot, we got shot down by anti-air defenses once already,” Emma said. “If I go back alone I won’t have your flank to draw all the fire. Until we get the systems shut down, I’m stuck here.”

“Right,” I sighed. “Heirloom, any idea on how to shut everything down?”

“You’d need to go to the Solar Center,” Heirloom said. He stood up and rummaged around, pulling out some old papers. One of them had an evacuation plan, and while the details on where to find fire extinguishers and life jackets weren’t going to help, it detailed something even more important -- it had a map of the island.

“I’ll have DRACO take a scan of that,” Destiny said. “This could be a huge help.”

“The maneframe and power supplies were all centralized there,” Heirloom explained. “I’m not sure what kind of research they were doing, exactly. It was all a bit need-to-know hush-hush, as you can imagine. Of course, there were always rumors.”

“What kind of rumors?” Midnight asked, looking over her shoulder and raising an eyebrow.

“Nothing dangerous, I assure you. We were only focused on safe, non-violent projects. Like my experiments with crop growth -- this kind of experimentation is too dangerous to do anywhere near civilization, what with the radiation and thaumatic effluence. Too much of a chance that some foal or animal would wander in and get hurt. New crops help everypony, though, like our experiments with healing potions.”

I nodded. “Not dangerous is good.”

“Now the rumors are -- and understand I can’t confirm this -- that there was a concern that Princess Celestia and Princess Luna would use their abilities to control the sun and moon to simply end our ability to grow crops. Ensure the sun no longer rose over the Zebrican Empire and starve us out within a few weeks or months.”

“They wouldn’t do that,” Destiny protested. “Even the most paranoid pony I know wouldn’t have believed that. Celestia considered her duty to be sacred!”

“I would tend to agree with you,” Heirloom Tomato said, nodding slowly. “But there was an event that made some people very worried about the future.”

“Oh, that would be when Nightmare Moon returned, huh?” Midnight asked. “It was really a huge disappointment. She finally comes back, we’re all super excited, we have the biggest Black Lunar Mass planned, and what happens? Everything blows up in a big cloud of rainbow sparkles!”

“Are you seriously complaining that Nightmare Moon didn’t end the world?” Emma asked.

“She wouldn’t have ended the world! There was totally a plan. It… probably wouldn’t have been great for the average pony.” Midnight smiled to herself. “But it would have been a lot of fun for the rest of us.”

“The rumor is that the Solar Center was investigating plans on how to manage in case something similar happened again.”

“In case something similar happened,” Destiny repeated. “Do you mean in case Nightmare Moon took over, or in case your assassins finally managed to get rid of Princess Celestia?”

Heirloom held up his forehooves for mercy. “I would never wish for harm to come to anyone, pony or zebra or otherwise. That’s why I came here.” He smiled sadly.

“I believe you,” I said. I could sense it. There was regret, but the kind a person learned from and grew with.

“We still need to get to the Solar Center,” Midnight put in. She got up and groaned. “Ugh. Food poisoning is the worst. No offense, food.”

“Offense taken,” Emma huffed. “You’re lucky I’m too weak to smack you.”

“We’ve only got a few hours until sunrise,” Midnight said. “I don’t want to be stuck here all day. I don’t even have a proper coffin to recuperate in!”

“I’m not going to be ready to go anywhere in just a few hours,” Emma sighed.

“I can watch over her,” Heirloom offered. “I’m not a medical doctor but I can make sure she drinks water and gets something to eat once her stomach is settled.”

“There might be more of those ghouls out there,” I warned.

“I’ll protect Miss Gleam with my life,” Heirloom assured me. “Or my unlife, perhaps.” He looked at his thin, skeletal hoof. “After spending so long on that beach, it’s the least I can do to repay you for helping me get back here to check on my work.”

“I’ll be fine,” Emma promised. “Just please remember to listen to Destiny. She’s the only one of you that’s responsible at all.”

“That’s fair,” Midnight agreed. “Let’s go, Chamomile. We’ve found zebra special forces, pony soldiers, maybe next we’ll see a dragon!”

---

“Kinda small for a dragon,” Midnight mumbled, poking the lizard.

“Are you going to eat it or not?” I asked.

“I told you, most animal blood doesn’t work,” Midnight sighed. She poked it more until it ran away. “Besides, it was barely even big enough for a sip. I don’t like killing anything I drink from.”

“I have literally seen you murder multiple ponies by draining their blood.”

Midnight rolled her eyes. “That was self-defense predation, not regular predation! It doesn’t count if they shot at me first. And you aren’t allowed to say anything because you justify your murders exactly the same way!”

“I really try hard not to call them murders,” I said.

“Maybe I’m more honest about it than you are,” Midnight huffed. “And for the record it also doesn’t count if they were living sacrifices to Nightmare Moon.”

“Princess Luna would never allow that!” Destiny snapped.

“Yeah she got really upset when she found out about them,” Midnight mumbled. “It seemed like it would be a cool idea at the time.”

“How old were you when you got turned into a vampire?” I asked.

“Seventeen, I think? You stop worrying about it after a while.”

I nodded. “A teenager. That checks out.”

“Hey! What’s that supposed to mean?!”

“Wow, look at this,” Destiny interrupted. “The solar center must be just up ahead.”

“Is it on the map?” I asked, peering at DRACO’s small screen.

“I’m basing the observation on this, actually.” She lit up her horn, revealing a wooden sign with an arrow and the words ‘Solar Center’ written in both Equestrian and Zebrican. It felt a little weird to see the Zebrican written first with my native language underneath. It was a reminder that I was pretty far from home.

Comments

[Thought Prism]

In before the mutant datura gives Emma some sort of weird new power.