01 - Loonjoos
Chapter 1 – Loonjoos
The sunrise of the dawning world was, all things considered, a pretty dusty thing. At least on the Plains of Freedom, it was. The young woman coughed slightly as she turned about, twisting her bedroll to block out the light best she could. Sadly, her efforts to remain asleep were eluded by the interruption of that buzzing, ringing thing called sound.“Oy, Zee. You betta come take a look a' this.”
She yawned. Mikko's nasal, accented voice was just as annoying as ever, but thankfully Zee now had a few months of practice enduring the rubbit's annoying perks. Of which there were a good number, all things said. For one, he was a rubbit; to most Pyrians, they were nothing but a more or less deadly annoyance most of the time. The rest of it they spent switching between being an actual contender for the military dominance over the Plains of Freedom, and being turned into stew. If it wasn't for the fact that they were a vegetarian species, Zee was fairly sure they wouldn't have had any qualms with returning that treatment. Relations between the Pyri Communion and the rubbits weren't exactly cordial.
She'd eaten rubbit on several occasions before. During the months she'd spent in Pirit's shadier districts, she'd frequented a number of few seedy taverns that were known to pay members of the special military unit dedicated to fighting the long-eared threat in their own subterranean territory – the Tunnel Foxes – for bringing back their kills to town. One night she'd even seen a live one being shuffled into the backyard slaughterhouse, bound and gagged among corpse-reeking black bodybags containing the rest of the “haul”.
Naturally, she had not informed her companion of that particular part of her past. Rubbits were well known to be extremely stingy about it, and she preferred to not be hunted by both sovereign states present on the Plains of Freedom if she could avoid it. She may have been a murderer, but at least she hadn't defected to Gotland – or worse, the Great Enemy to the south, the Wolfreich – and turned traitor completely. She had some dignity left, after all.
“Oy! Wake up, Zee, ya lazy stagbeetle-cocksucking twit!”
She groaned loudly. For another, Mikko was extremely foul-mouthed, and – like all rubbits – had a temper just as short as he was. A meter or so, and not much more – unless you included the ears, which she didn't. That was just cheating. You didn't count the ears on humans, after all. Not that that particular method would've helped the rather diminutive Zee to appear any larger, of course, but damn her if she'd allow the rubbit that luxury. Unlike her long-eared companion's blistering cuss words, height was a precious commodity.
Zee had managed to rid herself of most of the habits from her old life, but fifteen years of cloistered pampering by one of the richest noble families in all of the Pyri Communion was just a bit too much to stamp out in twenty-odd months. She'd dined with the mök-damned Kaiser himself, and spent more days lounging in the bloody Dawn Palace than she could count. Even now, her situation seemed a bit too absurd to be true.
Zee's full name was Solvigg Zenith Silfverhiessa, niece to Pyri's eminent Lord Historiographer, Jeremias. She'd grown up as an unimportant yet potentially powerful chess piece in the games of the imperial court, raised solely by the family's servants after her mother's mysterious death not two years after Zee's birth. Her father Ivar couldn't possibly be asked to do anything, of course. He was busy doing things, as all highborn men always were.
And because of that it took several years before anyone but her personal butler realized something was off. Just as something had most definitely been off with her mother, Zee had started to manifest decidedly non-human abilities not long after puberty. Walk on walls, jump impossible distances, and such. Her kindly mutant butler had done his best to conceal her increasingly obvious inhumanity from the rest of the household, but when her father finally returned home...
There wasn't much that could've been done. Her mother, it turned out, had been a sneakheir – a mutant posing as a pureblooded human. Which her father had eventually found out, and proceeded to do the only responsible thing for a noble of his standing; namely, have her killed. Likely he'd hoped all he could that his daughter wouldn't be a freak as well, but he'd obviously not wanted to get all too close with someone he'd possibly be forced to kill later on.
But like all dirty family secrets, this one had come back to bite Ivar right where it hurt the most. Not only had he, one of the greatest noblemen in all of Pyri, copulated with a lowly mutant; not only had he fathered a daughter that shared her mother's inhuman taint. Zee's abilities were not of the ordinary kind, those that defied human possibility by simply being stronger and faster or otherwise physically different from how a normal human could be. She defied the laws of nature themselves, by sheer force of will.
Ivar Silvferhiessa had fathered a psi-mutant. The invisible, impossible threat that had loomed over Pyri ever since the days of Maximilian himself, when the dreaded trinity of mutants known as the Hydra had come ever so close to crushing humanity's last hope in the dawning world at its birth.
Her father had locked her in her room and told the court she was deathly ill, planning to starve her out; she had walked through the mansion walls and sauntered off to the other mansions to dine with young noblemen and fool around. He'd confiscated every single credit there was to her name; she'd simply sauntered into the family's bank vault one night and taken them back, with interest. Finally he'd snapped and tried to beat her with a cane; she'd drained all the strength from his body and thrown him out of the window.
For which he'd disinherited her and reported her to the coppers for attempted murder, and she'd been forced to skip town for good.
The two months that followed her escape from Hindenburg were the worst of her entire life. Not only was she wanted, but she was also being constantly hunted by a growing cadre of hired guns funded by her father. She'd been driven further and further south, away from the capital, simply trying to escape; living in the wilds with nothing but her extremely meager knowledge of the uncounted ways she could die for company. And her growing powers, of course, alongside a vast number of potential targets to practice them on.
Once she'd grown strong enough to actually fight back, rather than just run away, the bounty hunters had actually become a welcome addition to her daily life. They gave her a much-needed source of weapons and ammunition, and other gear that helped her survive out in the hostile countryside. They gave her food; their provisions, for one, but soon enough she'd been forced to realized she couldn't afford letting the bounty hunters themselves go to waste either.
Morbid as it was, the taste of non-mutant human flesh was one that practically made her mouth water, thinking back on it. Rubbit was good enough – better than most of the mutant species out there, in fact – but it just didn't compare. In a way, it was a twisted reflection of her old family ideals of human supremacy. If nothing else, they did taste better. Once she'd actually managed to keep one alive for a while, draining his strength and tying him up just to make sure the meat wouldn't go bad as fast.
Still, she didn't like to think of herself as a cannibal. She'd never eaten another psi-mutant, after all.
Sometime after that incident the bounty hunters had stopped coming, and she'd been forced to turn elsewhere for her supplies; she still hadn't learned to forage for shit. In the south as she were, there hadn't been much choice; she spent that winter in the vast shady parts of Pirit, and quickly earned the fear and respects of the city's lawmen and mobsters alike. Al-Ralph Cappucino himself had finally seen fit to drive the infamous Nightthief out of “his” town, and soon every single door and cubbyhole in the city was closed to her.
So she'd made her way towards the Plains of Freedom, where motor marauders roamed alongside straggling lizans and other beastlike mutants, sentient or not. And rubbits, of course. Some of the lands around Pirit were rumored to be completely hollowed out by their subterranean cities and countless tunnels dug by their ceaseless workers.
That part had turned out to actually work in her favor, as things went. The lawmen of Pirit had been obviously eager to take on something that wouldn't seat them in trouble with the city's shadow king, and had thus chased her a fair distance outside the city borders. When they finally did stop, it was because they ran into a team of rubbit soldiers setting up camp practically within firing distance of most of the major roads out of Pirit. To nobody's surprise, there weren't exactly any attempts at negotiation made before the guns went up and off.
However, both rubbits and lawmen alike had been baffled when she'd burst out of her hiding place and started shooting at the humans. She honestly had been, as well; but after breaking the bloody stalemate and helping the tiny herbivores chase the coppers off, there wasn't much else to do than simply throw her cards in with their lot and hope for the best. The ensuing alliance had been uneasy at first, but tenacity and hard work had solidified it as far as she figured she could manage. Mikko Hoppare was a knowmaker, a seeker and researcher of the lore and tech of the old world; for the last four months of her half-year liaison with the rubbits, they'd been looking for a lead on a supposedly undiscovered Enclave somewhere on the Eastsea coast.
This morning Mikko had, as per usual, found something completely irrelevant to their mission; but just as surprising nonetheless. Their camp was situated on a large hill, with a good overview of the surrounding lands. The vast, flat, empty nature of the Plains of Freedom ensured nothing would be able to approach them without them noticing.
At least, that's how it had been yesterday. To the east, where yesterday you could've spotted the distant coastline if you waited for the duststorms to settle, there now was a huge, dark forest. It was as if the endless mards of the north had decided to march right across all Pyri and settle down right on her metaphorical doorstep.
And right at its edge, there at the foot of the hill, stood the unmistakable carcass of an old building. Ruins were the life of the dawning world as much as its new-built cities were; they held the secrets of the Olden Age, and provided the heirs of the apocalypse with a much-needed supply of tech, ammunition and materials. It was a strange ruin, sure, a lot whiter than she was used to; but even that only served to make it seem more majestic. Indeed, somehow its crumbling visage reminded her a great deal of the Dawn Palace itself.
There wasn't many doubts in either of their hearts about what actions had to be taken. In the end, all she asked the rubbit knowmaker – who, she would admit, was a fair deal more knowledgeable on ruins and the Olden Age as a whole than herself – was one simple question.
“How many guns are we bringing?”
Mikko gave her a grim stare, and grabbed his favorite grenade launcher from their stash. It was almost comically large in comparison to his diminutive frame, but any village idiot knew that uniformed rubbits with big guns were, without exception, frighteningly good with them. Mikko was a knowmaker, true, but rubbit knowmakers weren't like their adventurous yet bookish Pyrian counterparts. To call rubbit society “militaristic” would be like calling a full troop of Avenger-class Terrorbots “dangerous”, or describing a Worldworm as “big with large teeth”. Every rubbit that left the warrens was a soldier born and bred; and for that reason Mikko's answer was just the one she'd expected, and just as simple as the inquiry.
“All of 'em, Zee. All of them.”
-/-/-/
Warning. Warning. Active EMP shielding program damaged. Forced reboot thirty percent complete. Initiating core modules of unit EXAN-0000XC/N. Forced reboot forty percent complete. Initiating Alpha Personality protocol-
Exan gasped loudly and jumped to his feet with a fluid dexterity that nobody would've associated with an automaton. Damn this stupid program layering, he cursed to himself as he felt the more superfluous parts of his programming come back online. Thankfully he'd been mostly unaware – fainted, to use a more human term – before his personality module started up. Humans could drink as much loonjoos – alcohol, his databank insisted, but he was well accustomed to disregarding that annoying part of himself – as they wanted, and all they'd get was headaches and a few dizzy spells. He could lose everything that made him who he was, if he wasn't careful – and that blast had scared the living crap out of him, regardless of the fact that he had neither life nor crap in his body.
“Speaking of blast...” he murmured, and opened his eyes, activating his various sensor suites. He'd somehow neglected doing that while he got up; another of those obvious mistakes that he couldn't afford to make.
Especially when, as it turned out, he was surrounded by a vast, colorful array of mutants, the likes of which he'd never seen before.
“Swine-eat-me, I hate mornings,” Exan growled.
-/-/-/
“Whaddy'all reckon it is, Twi? Ah've sure never seen anythin' like it before.”
“I don't know, girls. I think it's alive, at least, but it's hard to get a grip of it with my magic. I've never had that happen to me before.”
“And what about all the rest of this schmuck? Canterlot's gone! Cloudsdale too! Where the heck are we?”
“I don't know, Rainbow. I don't know.”
“Geez. How many times have you said that today, anyway?”
Twilight Sparkle smiled, but it was a thin, anxious smile that soon faded into a mask of worry and distant thought. “I don't know. I don't know anything anymore.”