Chapter 94: No Mortals Allowed
I’d sort of expected a fortress or military base when we got to the Solar Center. I wasn’t expecting it to look like something between a hotel and a tourist trap. It was a compound built with precast slabs of concrete that had been hidden behind a facade of fake stone and faded wood veneers. Dried-out planters only hosted weeds now, but the dead remnants of bushes suggested a topiary garden.
“This really doesn’t look like a secret lab,” I said. I held the door open, inviting Midnight inside. She walked past me, sniffing at the air. “Something wrong?” I asked.
“I donno,” she said. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
I followed her in, looking around. It was almost pitch-black inside. There were big skylights and windows, but they weren’t doing much now except showing just the faintest hint of grey and a warning that dawn was going to arrive soon.
“Think the lights work?” Destiny asked. I saw a glimmer of her magic on a wall panel, and the overhead lights buzzed to life, one broken bulb raining down sparks for a moment before quieting, the rest shining spotlights down around us into the expansive foyer.
“Are we in the right place?” Midnight asked.
The lights went to glass cases, some of them still intact. They showed rocks, odd machines, and even some detailed miniatures with villages and towns. More lights flickered on, recessed lighting revealing murals and diagrams on the walls.
“This one has the Solar Center,” I said, recognizing the squat, ziggurat shape of the compound. It was highly stylized, like a foal’s cartoon, and focused more on what was below the building, a long shaft going down to the hot volcanic rock, accompanied by dusty notes on steam turbines and water pumps.
“They must have been researching geothermal power,” Destiny said.
“I sure hope that doesn’t mean what I think it means,” I mumbled.
“Stable 83 was a unique set of circumstances. Probably. It seemed like that was a result of some kind of interaction between Balefire and the coal seam around the stable, rather than a problem with geothermal energy as a whole.”
“I hope you’re right,” I said. “Because if I see one of those gloop monsters, I’m leaving and not coming back.”
“Fair enough,” Destiny agreed.
“Gloop monsters, huh?” Midnight asked. “Sounds like some Bad Stuff.”
“This whole place looks like a museum,” I said, trotting around the exhibits. “Look at this!”
I leaned in to look closely at one of the miniature villages. Some of the buildings had walls cut away like a dollhouse so I could see inside, where tiny quadruped figures - totally unpainted and anonymously abstracted so they could be any kind of pony or zebra - worked on long tables and racks of mushrooms, farming them indoors. In another building, the villagers raised rabbits in an indoor farm. The few that were outside the buildings all wore wide hats and loose clothing that covered their entire bodies.
“They said this place was researching contingencies if something happened to Celestia, right?” Midnight asked. “I think this is a model village for a world without her.”
“Why the big hats, then?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” Midnight said.
“I think I know,” Destiny said. “There was an assassination attempt on Celestia at one point, pretty early on in the war, when ponies thought we could still talk things over. After it happened, there were a lot of what-ifs about what would happen if she did die. One of the big theories was highly irregular periods of sunlight. Maybe it would even get stuck in the sky and we’d have an endless day.”
“That sounds awful,” Midnight mumbled.
“Worse than you think. I read a few abstracts, and it seemed like it would eventually end all life on the planet except maybe in a narrow habitable band. The Boss Mare said it was a stupid thing to worry about.”
“Sunset thought things would work out?” I asked.
“No, she thought Celestia was invincible. I guess she got that one wrong.”
“Mmm,” I grunted. “Think we can find the gift shop if we look around?”
“There’s not going to be a gift shop,” Destiny sighed. “It’s a secret joint research base. This isn’t a museum for the public, it’s probably a way for the researchers to show off their project proposals and repurpose props made for grant funding.”
Midnight snapped her head to the side.
“Quiet,” she hissed. “I think I smell something.”
“What is it?”
“Shhhhh!” she hushed me and sniffed the air. “That’s definitely blood.”
“Are you sure?” I whispered. “Why do I have to be quiet for you to smell things?”
She pointed through the set of doors leading deeper into the complex. I saw a crumpled, dried-out corpse surrounded by a splatter of brown, flaking stains. Blood that had been sitting in the dark for almost two centuries.
“That doesn’t explain anything, even if you’re right,” I mumbled to myself. Her ears twitched, so I know she heard me.
I walked up to the body to check it out. The uniform looked more like what the undead ponies in the fields had been wearing. I braced myself, ready for it to reanimate the second I touched it. That was just how these things worked, right? I tapped it with a hoof.
It didn’t jump up and attack me. I touched it a little more firmly, and it cracked like old wood.
“Looks like he’s not getting up,” Destiny said. I nodded and flipped the corpse over. It was stiff, the joints frozen in place by time and rot. If I hadn’t already been mentally prepared for stuff that was like a hundred times worse, the empty eye sockets and toothy rictus grin would have been really freaky.
“Looks like bullet holes,” I said, examining the uniform. “I guess there was a gunfight in here.”
“Must have been pretty accurate,” Midnight said. “I don’t see any holes in the walls, and there’s no trail of blood. He died here and there weren’t any wasted shots.”
“You’re really good at this investigation stuff,” I said.
“When you’re a pony-eating monster, it pays to know how to do a perfect murder,” she teased, running the tip of her bat wing along my side when she walked past me. The hallway led around a few bathrooms and to an office area, a small huddle of cubicles and terminals. Everything was torn apart, most of the screens shattered and cubicle walls punched full of holes. Skeletal remains littered the floor along with ruined papers.
“Whoever hit this place was less perfect,” Destiny said. “They must have sprayed this whole room on full auto.”
A light caught my eye, and I walked around the chest-high cubicle walls to find one terminal still turned on, the screen flickering and occasionally rolling, but still showing a login prompt.
“Maybe we can find something useful here,” I said. “Think you can crack it?”
“I’ll try,” Destiny said. She started tapping keys, rebooting the terminal and bringing things up in the BIOS. I just barely understood most of what she was doing, watching along without interrupting. After a few tries, the screen flickered and froze, then the login box appeared and Destiny bypassed it with two quick taps on the enter key.
“Nice work,” I said.
“It seemed a little too easy for a secret military site,” she said. “I hope I didn’t miss something.”
Midnight shrugged. “If your enemy has hooves on your terminal in a place like this, there’s no point worrying about your lewd emails.”
“Normally, yes,” Destiny agreed. “That’s true most of the time, but not here, where you could expect Zebras and Ponies to share office space. There are too many chances for a spy to get a look without anyone knowing. This is exactly the time you’d want good computer security.”
I started scrolling through the list of files. Most of them were corrupted or threw an error about connection to other terminals being broken. One of the saved emails finally opened up, and red flashing text popped up on the screen.
“A general alert?” I asked, reading it over.
“Looks like it was sent automatically by the security system,” Destiny said. “We already knew there was an attack here, and we ran into automated security. This isn’t much of a surprise.”
“There are a lot more of these,” I said. “Half of them say it was an attack by zebras, the other half say ponies are attacking.”
“Which one came first?” Midnight asked. “I’ll put money on the Zebra!”
I finally tabbed down to the first alert in the series. “It just says unknown attackers,” I said. “Could be either side.”
Midnight clicked her tongue. “Dang.”
A chill ran down my spine. I threw myself to the ground, and the terminal exploded in a shower of sparks. A moment later, and the desk blew apart with a second bang. Midnight moved in a blur, ducking to the side and avoiding a third shot.
Zebra ghouls stumbled into the room, wearing ragged, tattered cloaks that shifted color randomly like they carried patches of broken terminal screens filled with static. They carried short weapons, rattling off shots on automatic fire and spraying the room down, either aiming at something only in their memory or just holding the triggers down at random.
Destiny popped a shield in front of me, blocking a few stray shots as the undead shuffled in. Maybe it was my imagination but they seemed even more out of it than the average ghoul.
“I got them,” Midnight said, moving in a blur that stopped by each of the ghouls for a fraction of a second, a line of neon light tracing her jagged path and hanging in the air as a ghostly contrail before she stopped, the trail fading and the ghouls falling apart, heads separating from necks.
They landed with distinct cracks, and Midnight turned back to look at them again.
“Wait a minute…” she mumbled, grabbing one fallen head and lifting it. “Look at this!”
She tossed it over to me, and Destiny caught it before it could smack me in the face and make me look like an idiot.
“What am I looking for?” Destiny asked.
“It just looks like a ghoul,” I said. They were all the same, in the way every corpse was the same. Unique, but with patterns of rot and ruin that seemed universal.
“The neck. It was bitten,” Midnight said. “And you see how the skin is all dried out and mummified? A vampire did this.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. She gave me a look. “Okay, yeah, you’re the expert.”
“The really gross part is that they had to be drained after they died,” Midnight said. “That’s like… you can’t even imagine how bad that is. It’s like eating rotten food at the bottom of a dumpster. Whatever vampire did this is sick in the head.”
“Or it was the only thing left to drink,” Destiny said quietly. “Ponies do crazy things when they’re desperate to survive.”
“Like Wind That Shreds Ashen Petals,” Midnight sighed. “Crazy.”
“It might be worth finding them,” Destiny said.
“Why?” Midnight asked. “If they’re that hungry, they’ll probably try and jump Chamomile. Which, I admit, would be hilarious, like feeding chickens to foxes. Don’t worry, Chamomile, you’re the fox in this metaphor.”
“Because they either came here looking for the same thing we are, whatever that is, or else they might be talkative,” I said, understanding what Destiny was getting at. “Seems like a bizarre coincidence otherwise.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Midnight said quietly, sitting down and folding her hooves. “Lady of Dark Waters might be my mother, but she’s also sort of a manipulative monster that really enjoys treachery and secret plans.”
“Know any cool vampire tricks that can help?” I asked.
Midnight looked pained. “I wish you hadn’t asked that.”
“Why?”
“Because I do know a vampire trick that would work, but…” she shivered. “I’d have to take a taste of this garbage myself.”
“Is it really that bad?” I asked.
“Yes! Absolutely! And I haven’t had good blood in so long that I’m starting to forget what it’s like! Once we’re back in civilization I am going to absolutely indulge myself for a week straight.”
I held up one of the corpses helpfully. “I think this one’s still got some juice left in him.”
She groaned and motioned for me to pass him over. Midnight lifted her visor and sank her fangs into the zebra who was, at this point, as extremely dead as dead could be. She took the tiniest sip and gagged, tossing the body aside and retching, struggling to keep even that tiny taste down.
“It’s worse than I could have imagined!” she gasped. “Oh, Endless Night, I’ll never be clean again! I’m a ruined mare!”
She pulled on her own tongue dramatically, making awful sounds. A moment later, she swooned and fell softly onto her side, fluttering her wings to land with the graceful posing of a portrait of a mare reclining on a sofa. After a few moments without a reaction from me or Destiny, she opened one eye and looked up at us.
“Not feeling a lot of sympathy here,” she pouted.
“This one time I ate a ration bar that was so old the best-by date wrapped around to being good again because it was only printed with two digits for the year,” I said.
Midnight sighed. “This apocalypse is just the worst thing ever for gourmets.”
“Can you track the vampire or not?” Destiny prompted.
“Yeaaah,” Midnight groaned, standing up. She closed her eyes and focused, then pointed. “That way.”
She was pointing in the direction the zebra ghouls had come from.
“Probably should have been able to guess that myself,” I mumbled.
“Yeah, yeah.” Midnight huffed. I could hear the flush of embarrassment. “You could thank me, you know!”
“Flirt later, please, when I can go into another room and not hear it,” Destiny begged.
“Is she flirting?” I asked.
Midnight scoffed. “Denser than lead.”
“In here,” Midnight said. “He’s pretty close.”
I nodded and carefully opened the door, staying low to the ground. It was dark inside. If there had been lights in the room, they’d all broken or been disconnected a long time ago. I peered into the gloom, trying to spot danger.
A glance directly above me, just in case, but nothing was poised to drop down on me.
“I see you, crawling along like little spiders,” hissed a voice in the dark. “You finally came to finish the job, servants of the Tyrant Sun and Shadow Moon!”
“What is he talking about?” I mumbled. Destiny sighed and turned on her light spell, abandoning the pretense of stealth.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know!” the voice shouted. I followed the sound deeper into what must have been some kind of massive lab space. It was pitch-black, with the floor-to-ceiling windows covered by closed blinds and the only light coming from Destiny’s spell.
In the circle of light around me, tables were overturned and chairs littered the ground. Broken crystals for talismans glittered on the ground everywhere like gemstone gravel. There was enough room to fly but- I looked at my wing. The feathers were still growing back. Trying to take to the air was going to result in a quick crash back down to earth.
“We’re not really servants of anyone,” I said, trying to spot whoever had been shouting. “My name’s Chamomile. It’s sort of a long story how we got here. It sounds like you might be in trouble. Maybe we can help?”
“Do you really think that’s going to work?” Midnight whispered to me.
“It’s worth trying since he already knows we’re here,” I whispered back.
“I’ll sneak around the side while you distract him,” Midnight said, bumping me silently before stalking off.
“Help. Help! Ponies always say they want to help,” the speaker said. I figured out where he was after a moment. The gloom inside the dark lab started to lessen to a dusty grey. The sun was starting to rise outside, the first rays of the sun clawing at the blinds and worming their way through to draw lines of light across the wide space.
“There’s nothing wrong with getting help,” I said. “The war ended, we’re all just trying to survive. It sounds like you’ve been trapped here a while. Maybe we can get you out of here and take you somewhere you won’t be alone.”
“Alone? No, no, never alone. Little pockets of war. Ponies and zebras and zebras and ponies and do they care about me?”
He leaned forward, into one of the streaks of dim light. He was an abada, like Heirloom Tomato, but instead of being a terribly thin, wasted ghoul reduced nearly to a skeleton, he was healthy and young and as pale as moonlight, with burning red eyes.
“Definitely a vampire,” Midnight said. “Hey, dude! According to ancient vampire code, I demand parley!”
“Is that a thing?” I whispered.
“No, absolutely not.” Midnight shrugged. “But he’s gone all silly for Sugar Apple Bombs, so he might not know that.”
She stepped out into the open, trotting casually towards the vampire abada.
“Maybe we can get you something decent to eat?” Midnight suggested. “There’s a farm down the road that has some crops that have got to taste better than whatever you’ve got here. It’s not blood, but a melon or two--”
“Not one step closer!” the vampire warned. He grabbed the edge of a tarp in the gloom next to him and yanked it away, revealing something from nowhere like a magician doing a trick. Two stricken, bruised ponies were abruptly at his hooves. Well, one pony and one other abada.
Emerald Gleam looked worse than the last time I’d seen her. She’d obviously put up a fight despite being hurt, and it had cost her. Her armor had been half-ruined and she looked like she’d rolled down a mountain and hit every rock along the way.
Heirloom Tomato was almost as bad, I think. It was a lot harder to tell with a ghoul, but he’d been fragile-looking already and any amount of rough treatment seemed like it was enough to shatter him.
“Emma!” I shouted. She raised her head to look, and the abada grabbed her chin and forced her to stand.
“Did you really think I wouldn’t notice you?” the pale creature hissed. He glared through the darkness at us, eyes glowing. “Servants of the Tyrant Sun, here to try and steal and destroy my research! My research! Not yours! I have eyes everywhere on the island, and even more hooves!”
He jerked Emma around while he screamed. She winced in pain.
“You killed some of my servants, but I can get more. Always more. Just have to lure them here and make them mine!”
“DRACO can’t get a clear shot with him holding her like that,” Destiny said quietly. “Try and stall him. I’ll figure something out.”
“Let her go,” I warned. “If you don’t, you’ll regret it.”
“She’s right, Calabash,” Heirloom said, his voice weak. “Please, they’re not here to hurt anyone.”
“Shut up!” the vampire snapped.
Heirloom sighed. “This isn’t like you. Let her go. They’re not here to hurt anyone.”
“You were working with them, Heirloom! I saw it on the cameras! I have eyes everywhere, and all of them saw you, playing along with the ponies! Ponies that killed everyone!”
“Please, calm down and listen. You can trust me, can’t you?”
The pale abada standing over him snarled and kicked Heirloom in the ribs. “Trust?! You’re a liar! A cheat! You rode my coattails and I let you! And now you’re working with them! Liar and traitor! Both things!” He kicked again, distracted just for a moment.
DRACO beeped. I glanced at the display, then pulled the trigger. A shell went past the abada and bounced off of the metal wall behind him, rebounding and striking him in the back. He yelped in pain, falling back while still holding Emma by the neck.
“Got him!” Destiny cheered. “I love those ricochet rounds.”
“It’s not enough,” Midnight said. “He’s a vampire. A hit like that is only going to annoy him!”
The abada struggled to his hooves, a bullet hole clearly going through his back and out just under his ribs, tearing apart shriveled, black organs. He winced in pain with every motion, dragging Emma behind him.
Midnight bolted after him, but he reacted in a second, kicking her and letting himself get knocked away from the recoil, throwing him back down the hallway and Midnight in the other direction. Emma gasped in pain when she landed, still in the monster’s grip, and the abada vampire hit a switch on the wall. With a whoop of alarms blaring, a security door slammed shut.
“Not again!” I charged at the door and slammed into it. A shower of sparks forced me back, my vision blurring and my legs giving out from the discharge.
“Electrified!” Destiny yelped. “Careful! You know that kind of thing messes with you!”
“Maybe we can find a way around it,” I said quickly. “I’ll check back the other way!”
“There’s only one way through there,” Heirloom Tomato said, from where he was lying in pain on the ground. “That leads to one of the secure test areas.”
I punched the door and got shocked again for my trouble. My heart skipped a beat, and I felt the disconcerting sensation of something like a turbine in my chest before it faded.
“Don’t hurt yourself. I can get it open,” Heirloom said, grunting in pain. “Help me over to the door.” He tried to stand, but one of his legs hung loose. It was clearly broken, the thin bones shattered after the abuse he’d suffered.
I helped him up and we limped to the door. He pointed to a keypad next to the security shutter and then sat down with a pained huff to breathe for a moment before starting to tap at the keys.
“I’m sorry about all this,” Heirloom said, once he could speak.
“It’s not your fault,” I said.
“That’s kind of you to say. Calabash is my family. That means I have to bear some of his sins, even if he’s finally gone over the deep end with this ‘Tyrant Sun’ rubbish.”
“What’s that all about anyway?” Midnight asked.
“To those of us who live in a desert, the sun is not a friend,” Heirloom said. “And once one finds out that there is a real person, or pony, in control?” Heirloom shrugged. “It’s even easier to blame a distant force for your troubles when they have a name and face.”
He tapped a few last keys, and the door popped open.
“There we go,” he said, trying to sound cheerful through obvious agony. “These old doors have one major security flaw, you see. Vulnerable to a superpermutation attack. If you memorize the right combination you can enter every possible code quite quickly.”
Heirloom Tomato leaned against the wall as he spoke, every word coming more faintly. I put a hoof on his shoulder and he took it, squeezing softly.
“You go on ahead,” he said. “I need to rest for a while. I’m quite tired.”
I nodded and let go, walking ahead.
“We’re definitely killing his brother, right?” Midnight asked.
I kept nodding.
The hallway only went one place, so there wasn’t a lot of guesswork about where he went. Midnight started to rush ahead of me, but I held up a wing to stop her.
“Something’s off,” I said. “Destiny, can you feel that?”
“An extremely powerful magical field,” she replied. “Yeah. It’s an order of magnitude stronger than the armor can output. He didn’t run this way just for fun. It’s a trap.”
“I hate traps,” Midnight said.
“Yeah, especially when we have to run into them,” I said.
“I’ll go first.” Midnight gave me a pat on the shoulder. “Vampires are pretty tough to kill without the right prepwork. Whatever he’s got waiting for us, I’ll probably shrug it off.”
I nodded. She ran ahead, faster than I could follow, but not using the crazy speed that would have left me far in the dust. The hallway opened up into a huge circular space, with a segmented crystal dome on top of it, a massive skylight that gave the impression that we were standing in the middle of a giant diamond.
Across the room, standing near a bank of terminals, I spotted them.
The abada’s fangs were deep in her neck, and Emma’s gaze met mine. She reached for me with a shaking hoof. I could see the fear in her eyes before they glazed over, going lifeless a moment after her hoof fell, the strength leaving it.
“No!” I yelled. Midnight ran even faster than my own reaction, bolting into the center of the huge hoofball-field-sized open space.
He tossed Emma aside and laughed, kicking a big red button on the wall behind him. The crystal dome above us sparkled and suddenly blazed with light. Midnight screamed in pain, fleeing for the dark corners of the room.
The heat was like standing in the middle of a bonfire, and the light was beyond blinding. Filters slammed shut, the armor’s visor going dark in an instant. I was still seeing stars, the sudden shock of light making me stumble, and in a moment I was running blindly the same way I’d seen Midnight going to avoid the heat, only stopping when I slammed into cardboard boxes and through them to the shade on the other side.
My vision slowly returned, and Midnight was next to me, breathing heavily and shivering in pain.
“Sunlight!” she yelled, smoke pouring from the joints of her armor. “Oh buck that hurts!”
Midnight tried to get back up, but collapsed.
“Are you going to be okay?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she gasped. “Not if that hits me again. Do you--”
“Here,” Destiny said, popping a blood bag out of our inventory along with one of our few healing potions. Midnight took them gratefully. When she raised her visor, I could see her skin was drawn and parchment-like, like recently healed burns. She tore into the bag, drinking it down before the potion.
“Stay back here. I’ll try and stop that light,” I said. Midnight nodded. Her complexion was improving, but only slowly.
“That’s right!” Calabash screamed. “Here, we work to tame the Tyrant, and that means knowing just how to use it properly!” He held up a control box and started pressing buttons, the stream of concentrated sunlight splitting into three pillars of laser-like light, sweeping through arcs and spiraling towards our hiding spot.
“I can take him,” I said.
“That light knocked out DRACO’s sensors,” Destiny said. “It needs time to reboot!”
“I don’t want to shoot blindly. Emma might still be alive if we can get a healing potion into her quickly enough. Give me a bearing on him and I’ll figure something out.”
“I’m on it,” Destiny said, and an arrow popped up on my heads-up display. I bolted out of the shadows and into the open space in the center of the room. A ray of light swept across my back and the heat raised blisters on my skin, the exodus armor burning like a brand in the wake of the beam.
“So it doesn’t work on you, hm?” Calabash asked. “That’s fine! I’ve got thirty-one flavors!” He pressed another button on his controller.
It suddenly felt like a mountain dropped on my back. My knees buckled, and I barely avoided collapsing entirely. More weight dropped onto my shoulders, doubling what was already a load heavy enough to make my whole body creak.
“What the buck?” I gasped, my forward progress halted in an instant.
“This is a megaspell test chamber!” Calabash laughed. “I have plenty of ways to squash a pony like you. A gravity bomb is just the thing for a pegasus. You with your heads in the clouds, thinking you’re better than the rest of us! How are those hollow bird bones holding up now?!”
“Just fine,” I grunted, forcing myself to take a step. My hoof dug into the floor, the tile starting to crack.
“Chamomile, we’re getting at least 5Gs and it’s going up!”
“I noticed!” I took another step. The weight doubled again, and I went down to one knee, every muscle in my body screaming at me to stop.
“You’re tougher than you look, stupid little bird! Stinky bird!” Calabash laughed. “Let’s see how you fly!”
The direction of gravity reversed, and I flew into the air, rising almost to the crystal ceiling before the world flipped around again. I slammed back into the floor and the concrete shattered under my weight. I couldn’t breathe. My chest was trapped in a vice.
And if I kept quitting and complaining, Emma was definitely dead for real. My body burned with effort, but I crawled just a little further. The weight vanished, and I sucked in a breath before I was picked up and slammed down again, spitting up blood. The display in the armor was almost blocking out my vision with all the errors it was showing.
Destiny was yelling in my ear. Even the words sounded heavy and thick, like the gravity was distorting her tone.
“Chamomile, you can’t--”
“Don’t tell me what I can’t do!” I snapped. “Give me the Junk Jet!”
The armor was slow to respond, the whirring turbine appearing in DRACO’s place. I told Destiny what to load, and she did it without questioning me. The armor struggled to give a targeting reticle. I ignored it, aimed up, and fired.
The healing potion sailed through the air, the increased gravity tugging it into a sharp rainbow curve. It went past Calabash, and he laughed.
“Idiot pony! You missed! Missed with your last shot!”
“I wasn’t aiming for you,” I grunted.
Emma lurched to her hooves and grabbed him, the cuts from the broken potion bottle already healing and the magical liquid seeping into her skin.
“Hah! It worked!” I cheered. “Get him, Emma!”
She hissed and bared long fangs, tearing into the abada’s throat.
“Oh shit that’s not what I wanted to happen,” I corrected. “Destiny I think I’m an idiot pony!”
Emma let go and blinked twice, looking around the room in confusion.
“Where am I?” she asked. “W-what happened?”
“There’s a remote next to your hoof--” I grunted, trying to point.
Emma looked down and found it, picking up the controller and pressing something on it. The weight crushing me to the ground let go, and I sucked in a deep breath.
“Thank you,” I wheezed. “Oh, that’s some major organ damage in there.”
“I’m administering a healing potion,” Destiny said. The cool relief surged through me, taking some of the edge off the deep ache through my whole body, even if it didn’t stop it entirely. Was it because I’d been that badly hurt, or because-- it wasn’t worth worrying about. I stood up on wobbly legs.
“Chamomile, what’s going on?” Emma asked. She sounded terrified. “I feel…”
“It’s not my fault!” Midnight yelled, from the other side of the room. “I’m gonna stay over here until we all agree on that part, okay?”
Emma wiped a hoof across her lips. I watched her open her mouth slightly, tongue feeling her teeth. She was already pale. She found room to get paler.
“What the buck is going on?!” Emma demanded again. “I got the tar kicked out of me by a bunch of ghouls, then they dragged me here, and then--” she touched her neck.
“This is only a guess,” I prefaced. “But… this is definitely Midnight’s fault.”
“It is not my fault!” Midnight protested from where she was hiding. She peeked around the edge of the boxes she was using as cover. “It shouldn’t even have happened! You can only turn into a vampony if a vampire feeds on you for a bunch of nights in a row!”
“Maybe feeding on her a lot in one night counts?” Destiny suggested.
“I was saving her life by sucking poison out of her!” Midnight protested. “It had to be that guy!” She pointed to the fallen form of Calabash. “It’s his fault!”
“I think I need to sit down,” Emma said, swaying on her hooves. I caught her before she fell, helping her down gently. She held onto my hoof, squeezing and looking up at me. “Chamomile…”
“It’s going to be okay,” I promised.
“I could teach you some really cool vampire tricks,” Midnight offered.
Emma growled at the batpony. “I don’t want cool vampire tricks! I want to not be a vampire!”
Midnight walked up next to me and looked down at Emma, thinking for a long moment. “Say something nice to her,” she whispered. “You gotta keep her from freaking out! New vampires are really emotionally unstable. So are old vampires. Say something nice to me too.”
“Emma,” I said, forcing myself to sound confident. “You have a great butt.”
Emma blinked, caught totally off guard. “What?”
“You know what, not what I had in mind, but that works too.” Midnight nodded. “Now we just need to figure out why we’re here.”
“He mentioned cameras,” Destiny pointed out. “Maybe we can find something if we look at the recordings.”
“You look for something juicy, the rest of us will… look for something juicy,” Midnight said. “Got any more blood bags, Chamomile? I think Emma and I could use another top-up.”
The recording started with alarms already blaring. It snapped between security cameras, the sound of klaxons echoing in shadow-filled hallways. A group of scientists fled, the slowest being taken one at a time. The hunter followed at what seemed like a sedate pace. I recognized the pony there.
It was Midnight Shadow Sun’s mother, Lady of Dark Tides. She trotted without apparent haste, but the fleeing ponies and zebras couldn’t get ahead of her. I couldn’t see how she was doing it, but she kept getting ahead of them, cutting them off from escape and leading them in circles.
Eventually, there was only one left. An abada, the same one Emma had just killed. Heirloom’s brother. Lady cornered him in a dead-end hallway. He stared at the wall in disbelief, touching it like he was sure it couldn’t be real.
“Where is it?” Lady of Dark Tides demanded, her powerful voice carrying over the alarms. She motioned at the abada and he floated off the ground, held in a grip made of wavering shadows. “Where is the Eclipse Megaspell?”
“You- you can’t have it,” Calabash gasped. “You’ll use it to blot out the sun!”
“You zebra made it to stop Celestia, didn’t you? You should be thankful. I’m going to show everyone how clever you are. Give it to me.”
“Somepony bought it. The data is encrypted!”
“Un-encrypt it!” Lady demanded. “I might let you live if you cooperate.”
“I can’t! I don’t have the key!”
“You’re either lying or useless. Let’s see which it is.”
She stalked towards him, her jaw unhinging like a snake’s, showing fangs as long as my fetlock. The feed cut out just as the screaming started.
“Oh,” Midnight said quietly. “Maybe I misjudged my mom.”
“You didn’t notice she was an evil monster?” I asked.
“I didn’t think she’d be crazy enough to try blotting out the sun on her own! It would be one thing if Nightmare Moon was here and we had a plan and-- and she tricked us into thinking Kuulas sent the data. She had it this whole time and just couldn’t get it open.”
Midnight groaned and pressed her hooves into her face.
“We’re all idiot ponies,” Midnight mumbled.
“We’ve got to stop her,” Emma said.
“Not before we help you,” I countered. “We can find a cure.”
Emma shook her head. Actually, her whole body was shaking, like a pony about to crash from exhaustion and low blood sugar. “This is more important and you know it. We sent her the file and the key to open it. If she created that storm, she has the ability to cast megaspell rituals already, she just needed the right one.”
“If we can find her ritual chamber, I can disrupt the megaspell,” Destiny said. “I know how to rewire an incantation lens.”
“Cool,” I said. “Let’s go stop the end of the world.”
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Well then.
So, Emma's a vampire, and will have to deal with that. Hopefully Midnight and Camomile can help keep her sane, given they've both also already died previously. Also, the queen vampire was evil the whole time, who could have guessed? Not me, I was too busy worrying what Lemon was doing. Still, looks like they have to pull an S1E1 and stop the madmare from ushering in eternal night. And if they can't, well, maybe Star Swirl can fix it.
Well, on the bright side, Emma won't have to worry about her life being in danger anymore.
Chapter 93:
"puffy stems and strange grows. The few living"
"puffy stems and strange growths. The few living"?
"and the sleek whate-like shape of the"
"and the sleek whale-like shape of the"?
Chapter 94:
Well, that was a twist!
Thank you for writing!
of course wouldnt be a fallout equestria story if there wasnt Disappointing twist towards the end. :P