Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 96 - I Might Survive

“Are you sure this is the right place?” I asked, stepping off the tram. “She could have gone anywhere. Why here?”

Emma flew past me, landing silently and looking down at her own hooves in surprise at the graceful landing. She made a few deliberate stomps as if making sure she wasn’t somehow silenced or deaf.

“Good question,” she said, slipping into the engineer’s booth on the platform. She started tapping the keys and looking at a pale screen, the green light flickering across her features. “This is definitely where her tram stopped. We’re only a minute behind her.”

“She’s still bleeding,” Midnight noted. She lowered her nose to the deck, sniffing. “It’s not much, but it’s persistent. That means it’s a really serious wound. Vampires aren’t exactly bleeders.”

“What’s this deck for?” Emma asked. “The tram system has it labeled as Engineering Core Containment.”

“I’ve never come down here,” Midnight said. “I’m not really great with all this new tech stuff and, no offense, all the maintenance was supposed to be done by the servants.”

A too-familiar feeling pulsed through me. It felt like a distant engine starting up with the drive shaft connected directly to my heart. I touched my chest.

“I think I might know,” I said. “But I hope I’m wrong.”

Emma frowned. “Chamomile, we don't have time for vague and ominous statements!”

“Oh, right. Sorry. I think this is where the SIVA core is contained.” I walked past Midnight, following a growing throb in my body. It was slow and radiative, the tide going in and out and forcing my blood to surge with it.

“She could use it to scuttle the ship!” Emma gasped.

“If that’s all she wanted, she could have gone to the bridge or engineering and done it faster,” I said. I could almost picture the blueprints in my head. More of Destiny’s memories leaking in. She’d spent so much of her life thinking only about the Exodus Arks that it was bleeding through from the memory orbs and brain implant and just how much time we’d spent together.

“Is it too late to get Destiny to help with the technical stuff?” Midnight joked. “I know, I know. I just hate having to deal with multiple disasters at the same time.”

“You get used to it when you spend time around Chamomile,” Emma retorted. “She’s the world’s most powerful magnet for trouble.”

I shrugged mildly. “If it makes you feel better, Star Swirl told me in most timelines I’ve died by now.”

We came to a security door, and the manual release had been twisted and broken by some great force. The steel looked almost melted by the shearing forces, and the door’s lock blared an unhappy red.

“Oh no!” Midnight gasped. “We’re locked out! Whatever shall we do?”

I rolled my eyes and stabbed the door, cutting through the locks with a shower of sparks. The red light flickered and went out as I murdered the little machine. A swift kick bent it out of the frame enough to yank it open wide enough for us to get into the next room.

“That was a little crude, wasn’t it?” Lady of Dark Tides called out. She was on the other side of the roughly cubical room. It was absurdly large, at least twenty meters to a side, with armored walls and a catwalk around the center, where something like a forge or reactor stood, thrumming with intent.

“Whatever you’re planning, don’t do it,” I warned.

She glanced up at me. “You know, for a mortal, you really impressed me, Chamomile. I admire the way you’ve struggled to overcome your limitations! Using SIVA to rebuild your body from the inside out! I admit, it had never occurred to me to use it like that!”

The containment vessel hissed, steam erupting from a widening crack splitting it in two.

“Be flattered! I’m taking some inspiration from you!” she shouted. The steel doorway opened, revealing a swirling mass of dark and light. From where I stood, it looked like a black hole, an event horizon warped around a dense central mass, energy spiraling toward the center in a torrent.

Lady of Dark Tides jumped into it, laughing maniacally. The well of energy ate into her body, a school of piranha peeling her body away until it vanished in the swarm.

“That was anticlimactic,” Midnight said. “I wasn’t expecting her to commit suicide, even if she was a dramatic bitch about everything.”

Pain hit me, hard enough to knock me to my knees. My bones felt red-hot, every inch of wire in my body burning and electric.

“What’s wrong?!” Emma asked, kneeling down next to me. “Chamomile!”

“Massive SIVA reaction!” I gasped. “I haven’t felt this since the bucking Exodus Green!”

“What can I do to help?” Emma asked.

I shook my head, forcing myself up. “I’m okay. I’m okay.” I had to repeat it a few more times. If I said it enough it would come true. That’s how wishes work. The pain kept throbbing. I had to push past it, even if it was hissing around my whole body.

The dark mass twisted, the air around it distorting. At first, it was formless and shapeless, just a blob pulsing and shifting liquidy.

“Shoot it!” Midnight yelled back at us. “Maybe you can kill it!”

Emma nodded and fired, launching beams from her single rifle. They vanished into the dark swarm.

“Stop. You’re just feeding it,” I said, putting a hoof on her shoulder.

“What else are we supposed to do?” Emma asked. “We have to try something!”

“I’ve got a weapon that can hurt it,” I said.

“Great!” Midnight exclaimed, clapping me on the back. “Go get her, Chamomile!”

“The only problem is I need some live SIVA to make it.”

Midnight thought for a second, then clapped me on the back harder. “Right! So, like I said, get in there and do your thing, disaster pony!”

She wasn’t technically wrong. That was a big pool of active, living SIVA. I’d also just watched somepony jump into it and get torn apart. I didn’t get a chance to make a bad decision, though. The shapeless blob reformed into a screaming face. The wail started at a pitch too low to hear and slowly became a roar of pain and rage, the features made of molten metal, a sea of micromachines trying to remember what a pony looked like.

The head started to tear itself free, bursting out of the floating swarm halfway before stopping, the SIVA sea shifting. It happened so quickly I only caught it in flashes, a movie in fast-forward of cells dividing and specializing. A scaffolding of steel bone and carbon-fiber muscle started building on itself, the SIVA tearing apart the containment unit in search of fuel.

Emma shot at it again, the beams sinking into the growing cancer of machinery to no effect. It reacted almost instantly, the spine lengthening into a long tail and lashing out, segments of metal bone crushing through the bulkheads and narrowly missing us.

It resembled an embryo now, but with Lady of Dark Tides’ screaming face biting at the air and emerging from its ribs. The creature’s second head lengthened, stretching out like a distorted dragon’s face, too unformed to even open its eyes, but it could open its mouth, already filled with fangs only seconds after birth. A deep green light grew in its throat.

“Get out of here!” I yelled, shoving Emma back through the damaged doorway. Midnight jumped over my back in her scramble to leave.

The awful baby thing screeched and threw up a spray of gummy blobs. The green gel splattered across the bulkheads and deck, barely missing us. The metal dissolved everywhere it touched, melting into a foul sludge. The segmented, skeletal tail smashed through the weakened wall.

“That thing can’t fit into these hallways,” Emma said. “It might be able to wreck everything around it, but it’s trapped in there!”

“You’re right,” I agreed. “We should back off to the tram station and get Destiny. We’ll actually make a plan instead of going at this thing half--”

The corridor crumpled around me, collapsing like a can being crushed. The walls and floor pinned me tight, and it was like being in an avalanche. Up, down, left, right, all of it got mixed up. I was tumbling and moving and I couldn’t tell how or where or what direction I was going in.

My right hoof was solidly pinned, metal crimped around it like a hoofcuff. I struggled to free it, then let the blade inside it swing free, the awkward angle meaning the tip cut into my side as it deployed, going through the Exodus Armor and the crystal-fiber undersuit before digging a painful cut almost all the way down to my ribs. It was able to cut through the steel burying me alive even more easily, and with a few twists I was able to free my hoof and start getting myself loose.

Almost all the pressure was around my hips. I couldn’t see back there in the tight space, so I carefully felt with my left hoof, finding a pipe acting like a ridge and applying extra pressure. I carefully cut one end of the pipe blindly, and everything slipped. It took a moment in the darkness for me to realize forward was down and I’d been hanging by my hips, my fat butt stuck in place.

I fell, breaking out of the metal and into a torrent of wind and cold air. My wings spread on pure instinct, nearly quickly enough to keep me from falling on my face on the wet steel deck under me.

“I’m outside?” I asked, confused, coughing and looking around in the crimson-red light of the eclipse above us. Destiny was apparently still struggling with that spell. I checked behind me. It looked like whole decks of the ship had been caught in a geological event, strata of rooms and corridors caught in a volcanic eruption.

“THERE YOU ARE!” The roar rattled my bones. It was full of energy in more ways than one, like a command to die being shot straight into my limbic system.

Talons slammed into the deck, all smooth black carbon and steel. Armored panels crumpled under the force, enough to shake me off my hooves. I stumbled back and tripped over debris exactly the way a pony shouldn’t when they were already up to their necks in trouble, ending up on my back and looking up at a biomechanical horror.

“Aw buck,” I muttered.

Lady of Dark Tides chuckled. Her voice sounded amplified, with the echoing tone of a powerful sound system. She was still growing, gunmetal-blue steel and black wrought iron twisting into a slim, agile form almost entirely covered in serrated-edged carbon-fiber scales. Horns curled forward around the thing’s head and fanged, lipless maw. A distorted, enlarged version of Lady’s face still emerged from between its ribs, like she’d taken the place of the great beast’s heart.

“NOT A BAD LOOK!” Lady roared, cackling. She lifted one talon and looked at it like she was checking her hooficure. “I COULD GET USED TO THIS!”

“DRACO, give me whatever you’ve got for armor-piercing,” I whispered. The gun beeped and flashed a green light. I pulled the trigger. It fired with more kickback than usual, the sound hard and high and reminding me of a blacksmith’s hammer hitting hot metal. The shell hit the dragon between the eyes and broke through the carbon-fiber scales, burrowing inside.

“RUDE!” Lady snapped. She swiped at me with the back of her talon, batting me across the Exodus Black’s hull. “THAT STUNG!”

She was regenerating so quickly I could see the bullet hole closing, broken scales falling away to be replaced by new ones and then immediately being reinforced by a second layer, a crown of jagged-edged carbon plates doubling and redoubling the armor.

“Okay, that’s going to become a problem,” I said to myself. The impact hadn’t really hurt me, but only because Lady hadn’t intended it to kill. She was a predator playing with prey.

“I CAN SEE YOU TRYING TO COME UP WITH A PLAN!” Lady teased. “WHY DON’T YOU TRY ANOTHER WOODEN STAKE?” She posed, exposing her chest. The skeletal head of the dragon was cast in a permanent smirk, somehow even the bone structure looking smug.

“Stop being a creep, Mom!”

Midnight crashed into the dragon’s back, hitting its neck halfway down and latching on, stabbing at the underside with her glass blade, the runes inside the crystalline edge glowing red and green. The blade penetrated deeply, but I couldn’t tell if Midnight was hitting anything critical. Was there even anything there to hit?

“Chamomile, are you okay?” Emma asked, landing next to me. “You got cut off from us when the decks collapsed!”

“I’m not dead yet,” I said. “I can’t say that’s gonna keep being true unless we find a way to be really clever really quickly.”

“STOP THAT!” Lady snarled, trying to grab Midnight. She was too slow, the vampire dodging her clumsy grabs and finding a new place to stab. “GET OFF ME!”

The dragon spread her wings, the scalloped edges ragged and uneven. She started beating her wings, kicking up a hurricane-force wind out of nowhere. Dozens of her scales came loose, shattering and turning into carbon-fiber needles that were carried by the storm in a tornado of razor-sharp edges.

I covered my face and yelped, turning away and trying to shield Emma with my body. The slim stiletto needles sliced into me, a dozen long splinters painfully finding my flesh. I lost my footing on the deck and tumbled in the wind, carried hundreds of feet and rolling on steel and then glass, coming to a rest and bleeding from way too many tiny cuts.

“Okay, that sucked,” I groaned, into the cold glass under me, my own blood making it slick under my hooves. I looked down into a familiar room. I was standing on the cathedral roof. Destiny looked up at me from far below. I waved.

“That wasn’t great,” Emma groaned. I turned around. She was right behind me, also lying on the glass, and she was in even worse shape than I was. I’d blocked some of the shrapnel but not all of it. A small forest of splinters had gotten into her flank, turning her cutie mark into a pin cushion.

Midnight landed next to me, hitting the glass back-first hard enough to crack the thick panes of supposedly unbreakable glass. Apparently that warranty had expired at some point between the end of the world and the dragon attack. The entire roof of the cathedral groaned. Midnight opened her visor and tried to get up, stopped, groaned, then pulled her entire sword out of her stomach, the glass blade impaling her all the way through.

“You know, in stories heroes always kill these things with magic swords,” she said, tossing her blade aside. “Fucking thing is absolutely useless! Bae Wolf killing monsters with his bare hooves, more like my fat flank!”

“HOW CUTE! ALL OF YOU ARE GOING TO GET TO DIE TOGETHER!” Lady cackled, flying above us. “I SHOULD HAVE DONE THIS AGES AGO!”

“Killed me or turned into a monster?!” Midnight shouted up at her, coughing up blood with the effort.

The massive dragon delicately put a talon to its maw. “ARA ARA~ I WAS ALWAYS A MONSTER!” A green light started glowing somewhere deep inside it, moving up through its body and the long neck, fangs parting to reveal glowing liquid plasma inside, flowing and surging and acting like energy and oil at the same time.

The color of the sky changed. I thought I was just blacking out or about to die. The red turned to bright blue. The world tilted. I could feel the magic working, and for an instant I was connected to the celestial mechanisms, a glimpse inside the biggest and most complex clockwork in the universe. Something was stuck, held in place. The obstruction shattered, and the gears started turning again.

The noonday sun was blinding and warm and welcoming. The cold glass under me started to warm up. It would have been pleasant, if not for the screaming.

“Aw buck! Buck!” Emma yelled. “Ow! Ow!” Smoke poured from her body, a slow fire crawling across her body along with the bright sunlight.

“Emma!” I yelled, getting up and having absolutely no idea how to help.

“I got her!” Midnight yelled, stumbling over and shielding Emma’s body with outstretched wings.

Above us, the great black dragon screeched. The carbon scales flaked away and burned in the bright sunlight. Lady of Dark Tides’ outstretched wings exploded in a burst that reminded me of flash paper, sending her down to the deck and impacting right at the edge of the cathedral’s roof. The metal frame twisted with her weight and the already-cracked glass shattered, half of Lady’s massive body flopping down inside the ship. I had to roll to my hooves, ignoring the pain of the shrapnel inside me and diving clear of the collapse. Midnight swept Emma up in her hooves and intentionally let herself fall, carrying her down into the shadows.

Lady groaned, the dragon’s body smoldering, smoke rising from the surface.

“Why did that work?” I mumbled.

“I see you’ve let things get out of hoof again,” Destiny said, floating up next to me. The ghost looked at Lady, then me. “It seems with a vampire as the SIVA core, it inherits their weaknesses. Interesting. The curse must get transmitted along the thaumatic near-field matrix.”

Lady started to move, slowly. I could see SIVA healing over the wounds with great scabs of reclaimed, puffy carbon and steel.

“It only stunned her,” I said. “We need to put her down. Can you give me the Valkyrie specs when I touch her? The healing parts should still be active SIVA, so…”

“It’s controlled SIVA, it might infect you or just tear you apart to grow!”

“Can’t know until we try!” I grabbed her and pulled the helmet over my head before she could protest. I flew up and dove down onto the dragon’s back, plunging both forehooves into the healing, cancerous mass. Destiny played the data file, and I let it flow through me, trying not to focus on it, but just to see it, to let the complex multidimensional image talk to the micromachines. The more I saw it the more I thought I could almost understand it. I caught bits and pieces of it that connected. Imagine a book written on a three-dimensional page, with each word having depth that extended down into another space, and trying to read it from two-dimensional slices.

I felt something solid, and pulled my hooves back, dragging two glowing spears with me, the edges still firming up. The Exodus Armor had been eaten away all the way to my fetlocks, and I could see erosion around my hooves where the black dragon’s SIVA had started corroding my body. I jumped away into the air, holding one Valkyrie in each forehoof.

“That almost went very badly,” Destiny said. “I think everything in contact with your body was co-opted by your override signal.”

“I got lucky,” I sighed.

“Remember to thank Raven for her extra command codes if we ever see the Exodus White again,” Destiny said. “They’re what made that mess work.”

“I’ll thank her after I take care of this.” I hefted one of the javelins.

Lady of Dark Tides moved faster than I thought something that size could, the tip of her tail hitting me like a flanged mace almost as big as my whole body. One of the javelins flew out of my grip, and I only barely held onto the other one when I went down into the deck.

“Ow,” I gasped. It was a severe understatement. The armor was crushed in on my side, and something was horribly wrong with my right wing. Every tendon felt like it had snapped, and it hung loose at my side. The only reason I knew it was still attached was the sheer amount of pain it was still in. Everything was black around the edges. I needed to find the dragon, but it was so hard to see anything. I knew my eyes were working, I just couldn’t focus. I couldn’t think properly.

“Chamomile--”

“Tell me later!” I groaned. Relief flowed through me. I recognized the hazy, warm feeling. “Med-X?” My vision immediately started to clear up, taking me down from that edge of unconsciousness.

“Double dose. Until we can get the armor off and set that correctly you don’t want a healing potion.”

The deck creaked under me. I had to force myself up again. My body knew it should have been allowed to stay down at least twice now, and it wasn’t happy about being forced into motion. Every step probably meant another day resting in a hospital bed.

The black dragon stood up on its hind legs, tearing itself free from the hull. It was clearly still in pain, every motion coming with scales cracking and creaking in the sun.

“YOU RUINED EVERYTHING!” Lady of Dark Tides roared. I took aim at the dragon’s skeletal head, then thought better of it and adjusted down at the face emerging from the dragon’s chest. It was flattened and twisted, the rest of the dragon encroaching on it.

“It’s what I’m good at,” I said quietly, unable to get enough breath for a louder quip with the armor crumpled in on my side and trying to squeeze my liver and kidneys.

I threw the Valkyrie. Lady didn’t try to dodge. I don’t know if the sunlight was blinding or if she just didn’t think a spear would be dangerous. The glowing tip of the spear hit just to the left of her face and shattered, releasing its payload.

Lady’s twisted expression changed to shock, then terror. She screamed through two throats. Orange embers ate through her body, working deep into her core and rending metal apart.

“NO!” she screeched, the dragon falling back, clutching at its chest with a talon, and trying to take to the air. It stumbled and fell, vomiting up thick green acid that smoked and ate into the Exodus Black’s hull. The smell was horrible, burning the hair inside my nostrils before Destiny could shut off air circulation.

The dragon hacked up more of that awful brew all over itself, acrid clouds surrounding it in a purple haze.

“Spectral analysis says it’s some kind of molecular acid. I’m seeing fluorine and sulfur and Celestia knows what else!”

“It spat that stuff at us before in the containment room,” I said, taking a step back. I could see the deck turning into a slurry of tar and slag under the dragon’s flailing form. With a loud, wet crack, the dragon fell through, tumbling down inside the ship. The constant itch and pulse of the SIVA reaction faded to nothing.

“Buck!” Destiny swore. “We need to go after her!”

“Right,” I sighed. I felt things starting to go dark around the edges again. A wave of relief hit me, and I shook it off, grabbing the second Valkyrie from where it had fallen and staying clear-headed enough not to walk over to the hole full of acid and angry dragons, but instead to the cathedral roof, bracing myself and jumping down.

I spread my one good wing and tried to slow my fall. I only succeeded in going into a tight, dizzying spiral and felt my lunch start to rise up in my throat before--

“Woah!” Midnight intercepted me halfway down, catching me and helping me the rest of the way. “Are you okay?”

“No, not really,” I admitted. “How’s Emma?” I winced when we landed, limping on the deck with the spear tucked under my good wing.

“I’m okay,” Emma said weakly, from the shadows at the edge of the room. She waved. In the half-light I could tell she was pinker than usual. “Did you get her?”

“I think so, but I want to see the body myself,” I said, pointing. “That way.”

“Hold on,” Destiny said, popping free. “I’ll get the doors. I think I know where she would have landed.

Destiny took us down a side corridor, distracting me by talking about the Exodus Black’s design and how it differed from the other ships. My body felt hot and messed up and I was only half-listening to what she said. Even though I’d felt the SIVA reaction die, dread was still making my skin crawl without the help of any micromachines.

The ghost opened one final door, and revealed a black, smoking pit leading deeper into the ship. She hesitated and peered over the edge. “Oh no,” she groaned.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I’m pretty sure I see sunlight at the bottom of the hole,” she said.

“You’re telling me it ate through the entire Exodus Black?” Midnight asked. “How?”

“It must not have just been acid,” Destiny said. “If it contained a thaumatic charge and SIVA programmed to rebuild the solvent after it reacted… it’s possible.”

“What’s it going to do, eat all the way to the core of the planet?” I grumbled.

“Maybe,” Destiny said. “At least until it hits magma. We know SIVA can’t survive that from experience.”

I nodded. “We should still--” I gasped and fell to my knees, Midnight not even able to keep me from hitting the deck. Everything started going black, and this time it didn’t stop until I was completely out.

---

I groaned and rolled over in bed. A few timeless, thoughtless minutes later, I rolled over again. I started to wake up enough to realize I hadn’t been awake and managed to sit up.

“Where…?” I mumbled. It was dark. Not so dark I was worried I was blind or anything, just the regular darkness of a room with most of the lights off.

“Sickbay on the Exodus Black,” somepony said, glowing eyes peering out of the shadows.

“Hey, Midnight.” I waved to her.

Midnight groaned and turned on the lights. She was standing on a chair to make herself look taller and loom more. “You were supposed to freak out and think I was scary!” She huffed and hopped down, opening the door. “Hey, girls! She’s awake!”

Emma ran in and hugged me, squeezing tight. Destiny floated in behind her, nodding to me.

“How long was I out?” I asked.

“Three days,” Emma said, letting me go. “I was worried about you. It’s good to see you awake.”

“That’s longer than usual.”

“We kept you sedated so you could heal,” Emma explained. “No offense, but everypony was sure you’d do something stupid, and since they had to sedate you anyway for surgery and you looked so peaceful…” she trailed off.

“Surgery?” I asked.

“They had to do some minor surgery,” Destiny said. “It was… touch and go. It should have been simple, but your body is…” she trailed off.

“A mess?” I guessed.

“No, it’s fairly well-organized. It’s not that you’re falling apart.” She floated from side to side, and now that she had that ghostly veil on, I could see the suggestion of her neck and back that made it more clear she was pacing. “It’s more like… the insides of a rockodile and a chimera are different, right?”

I nodded. I’d seen diagrams.

“It’s the same thing. It means a lot more digging around and some surprise arteries and veins, and vampire doctors get very distracted by unexpected sprays of blood. It took longer than expected to reattach the tendons in your wing so we could give you healing potions.”

I carefully extended my right wing now that I knew I could, and found it in surprisingly good shape. It was a little stiff, but I’d also been lying down on it.

“Thanks,” I said. “And thank you, Midnight, for not letting anypony drain me dry while I was down.”

“I’d never let anypony else do that,” Midnight joked. “I’m claiming you for myself if your blood ever becomes palatable. With my mom gone, I’m the new Captain, so nopony else is going to risk my awesome wrath.”

“Good to know. So does the Captain have any big plans?” I asked.

“Just one,” Midnight said. “Keep far away from Equestria.”

“Until they’re ready,” Emma said quickly. “Most of the vampires will go back into stasis. There aren’t really enough servants to keep them active.”

“Especially not after all the ones my Mom killed,” Midnight growled. “She was so short-sighted! It’s not like we have an infinite number of them!” She sighed and clapped her hooves. “So! The only thing to do is wait out the lean years. I’m not going to unleash vampires on the wasteland until they’re ready.”

“And I’m going to help with that,” Emma said. “I need to learn how to be… what I am now.”

“What about a cure?” I asked.

“There probably isn’t one,” Emma sighed. “And… it’s not so bad.” She gave me a weak smile with just a little fangyness to it.

“Sorry,” I mumbed. I pulled her into a second hug.

“It’s not goodbye, it’s just until later,” she reminded me. “I know all I have to do to find you is look for trouble and you’ll be in the middle of it.”

I laughed and nodded. “That’s true.”

“You’re making it sound like I’m gonna force her to leave,” Midnight groused. “Chamomile, you could stay if you want. We’ve got plenty of bunk space. We also have some bunks big enough for two or three ponies!” She winked.

“Nah,” I sighed. “It’s gonna bug me if I don’t find out what happened to the Black Dragon, and somepony has to go back and tell everypony what happened. Plus…” I shrugged. “I have family out there somewhere. I need to make sure my Dad and Cube know I’m alive.”

“You’ll find them,” Emma said.

“Er… speaking of getting back,” I said. “How am I supposed to do that? We lost the VertiBuck.”

“I’ve got a great idea!” Midnight said.

---

“Never riding in one of those again,” I mumbled.

They’d strapped me into a waverider glider and shot me and Destiny out of a torpedo tube at something approaching five times the speed of sound. It was the kind of ride a pony technically recovering from surgery should not have taken.

I’d left it with the military as a bad replacement for the VertiBuck. General Ravioli wasn’t happy with what had happened, but I hadn’t actually signed for the transport, and Emerald Gleam wasn’t here for him to chew out. Not that he would. He’d said a few things about how we were irresponsible and how all the clocks had to be adjusted everywhere in the Enclave after our stunt, but he’d also said we were the bravest ponies he’d met in a generation.

There’d been talk of a medal. Emma was getting some kind of promotion, which might have been posthumous -- nopony was sure how it worked if you got turned into a vampire. It was one of the few cases where there wasn’t already a form for it.

Eventually, the paperwork and forms and debriefing had ended. Everything had been stamped classified and top secret, and I was given very explicit orders not to talk about what happened to anypony.

It had taken a few days, and it had been long enough that I was really starting to feel alone.

Emma was gone. I’d really bucked up her life. I probably wasn’t going to get to see Midnight again either, and both of us knew it.

I downed the glass of vodka in front of me. I was thirsty, and even if it was caused by a vampire, it wasn’t the kind of thirst blood would fix.

The bartender, who had the gruff look of a retired drill sergeant, put another glass in front of me. I took a sip without looking and gagged.

“What the buck was that?” I coughed. “It’s the worst drink I ever had!”

“Rye whisky, lemon juice, bitters, and ginger beer,” the bartender growled. “Don’t blame me, the mare down there ordered it special for you.”

“Huh?” I sat up and looked, just as the golden-coated mare sat down next to me. She adjusted her visor sunglasses and smirked.

“Hello there, Chamomile,” Quattro said. “It’s been a while. Let me buy you a drink.”

Comments

[Thought Prism]

I suppose after all that, the resident vampires do neat a break. But alas, no time to rest for our pair of MCs, it seems. At this point I have no clue what's going to happen next, and it's great.

[Ahsoka Tano]

Nice to see Quattro back.

[Reese]

"just a blob pulsing and shifting liquidy."
"just a blob pulsing and shifting liquidly."?

I continue to enjoy this story; thank you for writing!