> Fallout Equestria: Skyward
>  by romantis
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Coffee
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------



"This password. This password never changes."

The green light on the keypad flashed and the heavy metal door slid open, the light of the hallway spilling into the workshop. The unicorn and the pegasus followed it, and the pegasus continued, "We change all the others."

The unicorn frowned irritably. "Well, we never needed to change this one. It doesn't matter any more." His fur was blue beneath his white lab coat, and his eyes were wide and unblinking behind his thick glasses. He was like that normally, but the present crisis did lend another layer of intensity to the glance he gave his partner as he shut the door.

The pegasus withered beneath his stare. "No, I know that, it's just..." The pegasus paused, and waved a hoof vaguely as he approached the machine that sat in the again-darkness. "It's just, looking back, it wasn't really how we did things. We've made so much stuff, but all of it was stuff we could outsource, and market, and mass-produce. This was just for us. It was our secret. And I think we went into it knowing that, and that was why we didn't take any of the usual measures. No rotations, no biometrics, just a shared memory of setting it up together." The pegasus smiled. "Did you see it ending this way? I know I didn't..." He trailed off as he mashed the keyboard. The terminal's screen blinked on, its green light playing over his features. His hair was wiry, his orange face unshaven. His partner may have been thin, but he was skin-and-bones like only a pegasus could be. He rubbed his eyes. "Can you get the swi-"

There was a loud thunk, followed by a hum of machinery and the flickering of lights, as the unicorn hit the switch.

"Thanks," the pegasus smiled. Noise came from the other side of the door, and his smile vanished. Ministry ponies. Pinks. One of them knocked, three reverberating bangs. Suddenly, he became acutely aware of how little time he had left, and he wanted to cling to every second of it. He needed more time, and the only way to get it was by cutting everything short.

"Open up in there!" Another couple of knocks. "It's over, fellas! No need to drag it out!"

Oh, but that was exactly what they were going to do.

In the glass of the terminal screen, the pegasus watched as his partner joined him, checking the text over his shoulder. He already knew there was nothing out of the ordinary. There was no reason for it not to work. They'd tested the individual components before, countless times - but with a system of this scale, how could they know for sure? They each knew that they had seen the sunlight for the last time, and that this time, they'd actually need to go through with it - to stake their lives on their lives' work. Yet, the churning fear the pegasus felt had nothing to do with any of that.

As he typed in the first half of the password, he became acutely aware of his heartbeat - louder and faster than he liked it. He told himself to calm down, but he didn't, and he didn't like that either. He moved aside, to let his partner type in the second half of the password, and he waited for the unicorn to say something. Neither one of them could have built the machine alone. Neither could activate it alone. None of that changed its immutable truth: you, or me?

The pegasus already knew the answer, but he dreaded the question. So instead, to fill the silence, he asked, "Firewall? Are you okay?"

The moment the words left his mouth, he realised how ridiculous they were. Firewall stepped back.

"I think I'm hacked off, Noteworthy," he replied.

"Me too," said Noteworthy, and it was true, but misleading. He was scared, and desperate. With a flap of his wings, he took to the air. The machine was stacked, higher than Firewall could reach without his magic. That had been Noteworthy's doing. He ascended past the piled maneframes, the layers that had been separated by distractions and obligations.

Celestia, they'd had so much time.

"You think this was the best thing we ever made?" asked Noteworthy, glancing back down.

As Firewall looked up, Noteworthy felt the distance stretch out between them. How small they were, when they were apart! "Might be," came the reply, as the boxes lit up one by one, reaching out to their neighbours through the flesh of cable, the tangled mess that had been altogether too complicated to fix. The machine was surely functional, but it was fundamentally broken. "I wish it wasn't."

"Best thing we ever made, and it's... well, it's one of theirs. It's a knockoff."

The pinks were still shouting outside, but Noteworthy had tuned them out. For some reason, his mind pushed them back into his awareness, and he struggled to work out why. Then he realised that they weren't shouting any more. They'd stopped, which left the question of what they were doing.

The answer came in the form of an explosion. Noteworthy felt it in his feathers, heard it, and saw the door bend ever-so-slightly out of shape. After a couple of seconds, he heard the dismayed reaction of those outside. It seemed that they would be undisturbed a while longer - but that was immaterial. Their time was almost up. He glanced down again, and shared a knowing smile with Firewall. He turned away, gliding around to the far side of the machine, shrouded in shadow. He picked up the toolbox in his mouth, and heard the rattle of the kit within, barely audible over the thumping of his heart in his chest.

As he glided back around, he knew it was his last chance to say something - to find closure - and realised all too late that he couldn't speak around the handle between his teeth. So instead, he just bowed his head and - with practised precision - let the toolbox fall.

Firewall's horn was glowing, and then the toolbox crashed into the unicorn's skull, and he crumpled to the floor, the light blinking out in an instant.

Noteworthy landed lightly on four hooves, and despite himself, he trotted over to the body to check for a pulse. He didn't want to go anywhere near the thing that had once been his sole confidant, but he couldn't afford any interference. Satisfied, he was about to take off again, when his eyes fell on something lying on the floor beside Firewall.

It was a dart gun.

Noteworthy stared at the gun for longer than he could perhaps afford - long after the last of the lights on the machine had turned on. Then, he flapped his wings, and flew up to the dais on top of the machine. Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, he wished they'd built two.


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* . ) . ( . * . [ . { . * . } . ] . * . + . = . * . _ . - . * . \ . / . * . ; . : . * . ' . " . * . ! . ? . * . < . , . * . > . . . *


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A copier burst to life in a dark room and spat ink onto a pristine white page. A robotic arm swivelled, gently picked up the sheet and dropped it into a paper shredder.

It passed the time.

"I have finished working on the coffee machine in room four-thirty," a voice echoed through the halls.


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"Oh boy. I have been dying for a coffee."


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"Well. It is something anyway."


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"It has happened at last," the voice said eventually.


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"Go on."


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"Status update from site two."


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"I hope it is good news."


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"Activation. The last one."


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"Well. Well. Well. It all comes down to this. My final second chance."

A coffee machine poured stagnant brown water into a paper cup.
> Exit
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------



I awoke to a darkness so absolute that, for a few seconds, I thought I was blind. That was the first sign that something was wrong. The feel of the bed was another. I got up carefully, waving my hooves because I couldn't see my way. It seemed like a silly thought - but it was the first time I could remember not having a single light source reaching my eyes and, in those couple of seconds before the lights did flicker on, I felt a very literal blind panic.

The room was roughly cube-shaped, barely four or five metres on each side. Its floor and ceiling were bare concrete, but its walls were mirrored and covered in a layer of condensation and dust. The four smeared-out beige-and-blue reflections of me were the only sources of colour I could see. I thought that if I took the time to wipe away the condensation, the room would repeat in all directions. Then it wouldn't feel so small.

No, that wasn't right. The room felt small because I couldn't see an exit.

I felt that panic again, but less this time. There had to be an exit, otherwise how had I gotten into the room in the first place?

How had I gotten into the room in the first place? I tried to think back, but the last thing I could remember was going to bed in my very normal, non-mirrored room. My joints hurt like I'd slept on every single one of them wrong, and I was getting a headache. Or maybe I'd woken up with the headache, and hadn't noticed at first. I pressed one hoof to my forehead, just next to the base of my horn. Celestia, memory magic was a thing, wasn't it?

That thought sent my mind down a rabbit hole. Had they done something to me? How long had I been asleep? Was anything I was experiencing even real? Whatever had happened, the Pinks were almost certainly involved. It was just a question of how and why.

The silence, too, was absolute. I hadn't noticed that so much, when I'd been moving around, but when I stood still in the centre of the room the sound of my breathing was all I could hear. No, that wasn't right - there was something else, if I really listened. White noise of some sort, like the hiss of a broken speaker. Perhaps it was the hiss of a broken speaker. It was too faint to work out where it was coming from, so I decided to respond with noise of my own.

"Hello? Is anypony listening?"

My throat was dry - moreover it felt wrong - and my voice came out pathetically small. It took me a couple of seconds to recover from the shock of that first attempt and try again. Who was I talking to? Pinks?

"I haven't done anything wrong! Please, there's been some sort of mistake... I'm- my name's Backlight, look me up if you've got me on file? ...Hello?"

My throat hurt after that, so I decided to wait. I wished I had a glass of water.

I turned on the spot, scanning the walls for some sort of door, and my eyes fell on a seam in one of the mirrors, in the corner opposite the bed. Rectangular, door-sized. Yep, that was the exit all right.

The panel lit up blue with the light from my horn as I tried to open it somehow. It occurred to a calmer, less-scared part of me that I should have tried using magic when I'd first woken up as opposed to flailing around like an idiot. It was strange, but I couldn't remember having to consider that application of my innate ability.

I tried every possible variation of force I could think of, but the panel didn't even rattle. I paced for a bit. When I got bored of that I grabbed the pillow from the bed and used it to wipe the mirrors clean, because I was running out of other options and hoped a closer inspection would reveal something more helpful. I didn't have any way of keeping time, but then again I'd never really made a habit of that anyway. What was the point? Still, it must've taken more than ten minutes to get rid of the vast majority of the condensation and the smears of grime made in the process. I placed the damp pillow on the floor rather than the bed (thinking it might be my only source of water in a few hours, if I failed to get out), stood in the middle of the room, and admired my handiwork.

A shallow hall, filled with endless reflections of the bed, the pillow and I. There were no walls, but the concrete planes above and below me eventually converged to a vanishing point. I realised then what a mistake I'd made. The room felt no bigger, but its ceiling and floor seemed to be closing in on me. I hadn't found any other seams in the mirrors, only hundreds of sets of eyes. Granted, they were my own, but what had been a steady paranoia had grown into an acute feeling of being watched.

There was only one option left.

I pushed the thin mattress off the metal bed frame into the corner. It took me a long time, but I eventually managed to unscrew one of the legs. It was hollow, and didn't weigh as much as I would've liked it to. I stepped into the other corner, the one directly opposite the door, and threw the piece of metal at the door with all the telekinetic strength I could muster.

My telekinesis was proving useful, but a big part of me was wishing I had some other spells. Anything that would help. My parents had paid for a few lessons when I was a colt, but I hated practising; I was never able to concentrate for long enough to achieve anything. I understood how it all worked in theory, and occasionally managed to get something working, but certainly couldn't do spells on demand. The only consistent outcome of practising magic was that it gave me a headache. After I got my cutie mark, I gave up on trying to learn new spells - with exception of the months I spent trying to learn how to teleport. What this amounted to was standing in a room for ten minutes every couple of days and very strongly wishing I was somewhere else.

Anyway, my telekinesis was fine. I could hold things very steadily, but that was about all I had going for me.

All of that's basically my way of justifying why it took me at least eight attempts to put any sort of mark in the glass. "At least", because it only occurred to me to start counting partway through. A thin spiderweb of cracks appeared, but no shards fell: the mirror was held together by a coating of something.

Less wary of flying glass, I approached the mirror and picked up the leg again. I hit the mirror a few more times until I broke through the coating and was able to pull a few pieces free, which I carefully swept into the corner. Behind the glass was, much as I'd expected, a metal door. It took me a good while to get the last of the glass off it, leaving a perfectly-rectangular hole. There wasn't any visible mechanism, nothing around the edge which I could access, and I had nothing with which to pry the whole thing open.

I tried shouting again a bit, but my throat hurt and I couldn't think of anything to say. I didn't know who was listening, if anypony, and was feeling just about the most self-conscious I'd ever felt. The white noise had stopped at some point, which was a relief. Having nothing else to do, I decided to smash the rest of the mirrors. Doing so gave me little in the way of satisfaction, but every time the leg bounced off the glass there was noise and that was something. Only a few pieces fell, more as my throws got better, and I swept those into the corner with the rest. There was only sheet metal with thin vents behind - again, with no visible seams. 

When I threw the leg at the wall with the door, I was pleased to see that I cracked it first time. I threw again, and this time the leg didn't bounce. It went straight through the mirror and out the other side, clattering onto the floor. I shot across the room and peered through the hole it had made, but it was too dark to make much out.

Unfortunately, I'd lost my glass-smashing implement. Seeing as I'd made it that far without cutting myself, I was intent on getting out to the room with no blood spilled.

In its tripod state, I was just about able to lift the whole bed frame and hit the whole wall with it. The mirror bent with its reflective coating (creating an interesting optical effect), but didn't break entirely. I tried again, this time putting my full body weight behind it, and the frame went through the glass, tipping down and coming to a stop at its midpoint.

It seemed like something had finally gone exactly the way I wanted it to - with the frame in its current position, I could replace the mattress and use it as a bridge of sorts over the sharp edge of the hole I'd made. I hefted the thing onto the bed frame, which rocked precariously. I used a hoof to push down the end inside the room and climbed up on top of the mattress, crawling forward and allowing it to tip back up so I could edge my way through the mirror.

I was towards the end of a hallway, with another room just like mine opposite and a fire door to my left. It seemed like the mirrors were actually made of one-way glass, with a rectangular section cut away in the wall acting as a window for each room and an alternative channel of entry/egress. Alternative, because the rest of the hallway to my right - doors included - was completely blocked by rubble. The ceiling sagged worryingly and the air was choked with dust, presumably stirred by my escape. If nothing else, the damage to this place supported the theory that I wasn't being ignored deliberately.

There were four light sources besides the one in my room: another in the room opposite, and one above each door.

The mostly-buried doors to the mirrored rooms looked to have some sort of a traffic-light system, labelled "SUSPENSION STATUS". One green light, two amber, and one red, in a horizontal line beneath the text. Only the red lights were glowing.

The light above the fire door to my left came in the form of a glowing green sign. White printing depicted a pony running through a rectangle. Such a sign universally means exit.

Before getting out as soon as possible, I thought I'd better take a look inside the room opposite. There was a bed like mine, with something beneath the sheets. Another pony.

I picked the bed leg up from where it had landed, then changed my mind and picked up a piece of rubble instead. Concrete. Heavier. The window shattered with the impact, and I was immediately hit with a wave of stench unlike anything I'd smelled before in my life. 

Rot. It was what I thought rot smelled like. I almost threw up.

That wasn't a pony in there, it was a corpse. I should've gone in and checked but, to my shame, I didn't. Instead, I turned left and pushed my way through the fire door. Lights flickered on automatically, revealing a stairwell in a sorry state. The stairs going downwards had collapsed entirely, and I didn't fancy my chances of getting back up if I jumped down to the floor below. The landing was mostly gone, with barely a few hooves' worth of space clinging to the wall, and the stairs going up were little more than stubs sticking out of the walls.

As I edged my way out onto the landing and up what was left of the stairs, I leaned against the wall for support and thought about those lights. Well, the words next to them. Suspension status. I hadn't seen anything suspended from something else, which left a more abstract interpretation of the word. Preventing something, stopping something. That was what the rooms were doing. There was also the interpretation of the lights: did red mean something was stopped, or that the suspension itself had stopped? All questions I'd have to ask when I ran into somepony who knew what was going on.

I reached the top of the second - and last - flight of stairs, where I found another fire door. I didn't hesitate to open it.

This room was the biggest yet, though perhaps that wasn't saying much. On either side of me were heavy-duty lockers, containers, and filing cabinets. They were the second thing I noticed.

The first thing I noticed was the door. Again, it was bigger than any I'd seen so far. Metal, closer to a square in shape, with a complex locking mechanism clearly visible. Above it was another green sign, with the pony and the rectangle.

Exit.

I hoofed it across the room, practically colliding with the mechanism's lever. I pushed it down and other parts shifted, sliding deadbolts out from the door frame. With a squeal of old hinges, the whole thing moved outwards and a breeze of cool air took its place. This was it, I could feel it. Time for answers.

The landscape I was greeted with was endlessly brown and grey. Tarmac, a chain-link fence, then dirt. The clouds were thicker than any I'd seen in my life - not a single patch of blue sky was visible. There was barely enough light to cast shadows. I could see a collapsed electricity pylon.

Hesitantly, I lifted my hoof over the door frame. I glanced down and froze.

There was a skeleton waiting outside, half buried and scattered from where the ground had turned to mud and back but otherwise picked clean.

Slowly, I stepped back and pulled the door shut again.

Two dead ponies. One downstairs, one outside. What had happened to them? How long ago had it happened?

Hopefully long enough ago that the same thing wouldn't happen to me.

That thought was just about enough to calm me down. I took a shaky breath, sat down, and looked around the room again.

What I needed was a plan. I needed supplies. I needed to find ponies. 

If there were any left.

No, it was statistically unlikely that I was truly alone. If I was alive, then it stood to reason that others were too. I thought about the room opposite mine, about going back there, but the thought of the smell alone was enough to put me off. I couldn't stay either. One way or another, I was going outside. 

I jumped as the metal door locked itself again behind me. That was interesting to note: once I left, there was a good chance I wouldn't be able to get back in.

The room was laid out with a row of lockers along most of one wall (all locked) and a row of matching filing cabinets along the other (locked, which was particularly annoying because I suspected that they held information pertaining to my situation). In front of the filing cabinets was a large table (with nothing on it) and a couple of plastic chairs. Next to the lockers was a (padlocked) wooden trunk, and in front of them were several decently-sized metal containers (again, all locked). I felt my frown deepen as I stepped back into the centre of the room. Celestia, it couldn't be easy, could it?

I spotted a yellow-and-pink first aid kit hanging next to the fire door, levitated it onto the table, and opened it.

Empty. Empty.

Fine.

I closed the metal box again and took a deep breath. The padlock. I could deal with the padlock, maybe.

This time, I started counting right from the beginning. I smashed that first aid kit against the padlock twenty times, then stopped and paced a little until a very grim sort of determination came over me and I resolved to keep going until I hurt myself or succeeded in opening the trunk. After forty-three impacts, it wasn't the padlock or I that gave but rather the bit of metal the lock was looped through; the wood split apart at the lid. The first aid kit was dented completely out of shape, and I dropped it where I stood. A smile cracked across my face as I opened the trunk. Pickaxes, crowbars, fire axes, spades, rakes... tools of various kinds or, as I was thinking, weapons. Admittedly, I'd been hoping for firearms, but this was a lot better than nothing. After a couple of seconds of deliberation, I levitated a red crowbar out of the trunk. One of its ends was straight, the other was curved, and both were sharp. It seemed like the most versatile option available to me, seeing as I'd realistically only be able to carry one. Besides, there was no way I'd be able to use a sledgehammer.

I twirled the crowbar in my telekinesis and almost dropped it. Okay, I wouldn't be doing that again. It occurred to me that I could use it to break into the lockers, and I spent another couple of minutes trying to do that before giving up. Too sturdy. Better to quit while I was ahead; no point in wasting any more time.

Water was a priority, and I hadn't found any working faucets in the building. No, I suspected that I'd find water where I found ponies. Living ponies. It sure didn't seem like I'd find any if I stayed where I was.

I took a deep breath, pushed the lever down, and swung the door open.
> Today
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------



The skull was separate from the rest of the body. That was a good sign, I thought - maybe it'd been kicked off to one side at some point.

The path from the door led to an empty parking lot, ringed by a chain-link fence and a barrier. Most of the pavement and tarmac was covered in a thick layer of dirt and the fence leaned crazily. It seemed very strange, as if the whole place was somehow years old despite its modern construction. Maybe it was that old, and I was seeing the result of changing weather moving the ground about over the years. I stared at the fence for a moment, trying to work out exactly how many years.

I glanced back over my shoulder at the door, watching it slowly shut itself, and was slightly shocked to see the outside of the building was scorched with blast marks. On a whim, I went back to examine the door properly from the other side. There was a box to its right, like a keypad but without buttons. A red light on it turned green as I approached, and I heard the locking mechanism move on its own. With a start, I realised that it was using the same kind of biometric magic as the place where I worked. Sure enough, the door opened when I tried. It was vaguely reassuring to think that I'd be able to return if all else failed, but vaguely disconcerting to think that this place's security spells were keyed to me.

There was a steel plaque to the left of the door, one that I almost missed thanks to the blast marks. Engraved in it was a familiar logo: sans-serif text spelling out the word 'pendulum', only the 'd' was stylised to look like a pendulum itself. Beneath the logo was smaller text: 'site two'. I stared at the plaque a long time.

Pendulum.

I worked for them. This place... this was theirs. But I'd never heard about it.

Why?

Whatever answers I sought were buried, and I didn't have the tools to dig. I climbed over the barrier and followed the road for a long time. It sloped gently upwards, and occasionally the tarmac disappeared altogether beneath the dirt. I was left to keep walking in a straight-ish line until I caught sight of the next patch whenever that happened. The sparse vegetation was a reassuring sign of life - thorny shrubs and spindly trees dotted the landscape amidst the rocks. Past those, I could see pylons running roughly parallel to the road. They were bent out of shape, the cables snapped and dangling, and some had toppled altogether.

That scared me. The implications of that scared me. The implications of everything scared me.

By the time I reached the turning the sky had dimmed noticeably, and I reasoned that it was late afternoon. The highway proper was relatively clear of dirt, being elevated slightly on an artificial hill, but it was cracked and scarred. There were still no signs of shelter.

Walking on the highway felt really... weird. Not bad, though I was exhausted. It felt like I was breaking a rule, and that somepony would be showing up to tell me off any minute. Or, alternatively, that I was going to get hit by a vehicle. I passed a couple of signs counting down the distance to Skyward, and that was reassuring. Another familiar name, except that this one was home. I was going in the right direction.

Eventually I saw something different in the distance. There was a caravan sitting in the turnout - a roundish thing with two wheels and a single antenna poking up from the roof. I picked up my pace.

It had once been painted a nice shade of blue, but the vast majority of that paint had flaked off and been replaced by patches of rust. One tire had wasted away entirely and the other was flat, slanting the whole thing slightly. The window had been smashed.

I tried the door. It seemed stuck at first, but with a screech of metal that I suspected was the lock breaking it suddenly opened. 

I heard scuttling from within the gloomy interior and stepped back just as something jumped at me, flaring its wings.

"Gah!" I shouted and swung my crowbar. It hit the creature with a crunch, deflecting the lunge. I didn't waste a second before swinging again, sending the creature sprawling back. It stopped moving.

A second or two passed before my brain processed the spindly green pile of limbs as belonging to a praying mantis. I hadn't ever seen one with my own eyes before, but I knew that they were usually a lot smaller and that they didn't usually attack ponies. The barbs on its claws were wickedly sharp, like kitchen knives, and I realised just how badly the encounter could've gone.

I gingerly stepped over the corpse and up the steps to the door, wary that there could be more creatures inside.

Had it been mutated? Or had they always been capable of growing to such size?  I didn't know enough about biology or the environment to understand the mechanisms at play. Regardless, the caravan was silent. The light switch didn't work, of course, but there was just about enough ambient light coming in through the windows for me to see. Corpses of small animals littered the floor, and there was a large pile of eggs on the bed. I tasted bile, and almost turned back then.

What was I looking for? Food? Maybe a raincoat? Anything useful. There was a stained coffee mug on the table, next to a magazine titled "Future Weapons Today". This particular issue's subject was magical energy weapons, judging by the cover, but that wasn't what caught my eye.

The magazine was dated two months into the future.

Well, the future certainly was today.

I left the magazine where it was and headed into the kitchenette. The taps didn't work. The cupboards were mostly empty. The perishable food had perished, but I did find a couple of cans of soup and a can of carrots at the very back of one shelf. In one of the drawers I found a can opener, and I decided to try the carrots there and then. Hours had passed since I'd last eaten - well, conscious hours - and, as the can seemed to be intact, I decided to assume that they weren't spoiled. A hiss of air escaped the can as I opened it. I was disheartened to see that the carrots had mostly turned to mush in the water, but ate them regardless.

I found some empty saddlebags, into which I placed the rest of the cans and the can opener, and a thin grey raincoat hanging on the back of a chair. Unfortunately it seemed like the wardrobe had been home to a hornet's nest at some point, which meant that the rest of the clothes in the caravan were ruined. I also found a flashlight ruined by batteries that had leaked long ago, and that was about when I gave up.

As I left the caravan I almost stepped straight into the corpse of the mantis, but caught myself at the last moment.

The air became tinged with a slight chill as the evening drew closer, so I put on the raincoat. All I could think about was water - what little there'd been with the carrots had only been enough to make me more thirsty. Really, the carrots were more than I should've expected to find - but I felt disappointed nonetheless. Disappointed, thirsty, and miserable. I couldn't shake the feeling that it was all somehow my fault, that if I'd just done something different, started walking in the other direction, anything, then things would be working out. What even were the symptoms of dehydration? How long before I collapsed? I kept putting one tired hoof in front of the other as my mind went around in circles.

I was useless. Useless, and I was going to die because of it.

There was a crack of gunfire from up ahead. I froze.

Nothing. Couldn't see anypony.

The gunfire continued. I wasn't able to judge exactly how close it was, but it was close.

Gunfire meant ponies. It was perhaps my first almost-definitive proof that I wasn't alone.

I kept walking down the middle of the highway and examined my options. Approach at a distance, keep quiet and evaluate the situation. Perhaps they were just shooting at bottles or something. Or animals. Worst-case scenario, it was a gunfight - if so, I couldn't afford to interfere. I'd have to talk to the survivors once it was over. I could do that.

There was a pony lying in the road.

I froze again when I saw them, but snapped out of it and ran to see if they were alive.

From the blood pooling on the tarmac around her, and from just how still she was, I could tell that she most definitely wasn't.

I felt myself shaking. "Oh, Celestia... shhhhhhhhhh dammit! No, what..." I rambled under my breath.

What was she wearing? Some kind of armour? Metal plates covered in spikes and leather. It might've looked stupid were she up and walking around, but like this... it was just macabre. Like roadkill.

Another gunshot made me jump. It wasn't coming from on the road itself, but down the hill to my left. I crouched low and approached the edge of the tarmac.

At the bottom of the slope, amongst some rocks, there were ponies. Three of them, all wearing armour like the one behind me, all facing away from me towards the largest rock. I couldn't see what they were shooting at, not at first. One of the trio, a skinny buck gripping a knife in his teeth, said something to the one in the middle and ran at the rock.

I strafed right to try and get a better view around the rock as the buck leapt over it. There was a shriek from the other side of the rock followed immediately by the deafening blast of a shotgun, and I ducked instinctively. When I looked back up, I saw that the pony had backed away from behind the rock. She wore a brown hooded cloak, levitated a shotgun, and was covered in blood. We made eye contact.

"Fuck!" screamed one of the two ponies closer to me. "I told you not to... bitch, I'll rip your fucking spine out!" She fired a few shots straight at the rock.

The mare in the cloak mouthed something at me, made a face, but I couldn't tell what she was saying. Run? Help? What? Something else? I didn't know. Part of me noticed that I'd sided with her without even thinking about it, without even knowing why they were fighting, and despite the fact that she was covered in blood.

Okay, so, I could run. I felt like my legs would give out, but I could try. Maybe find a place to hide. This wasn't my problem.

Hypothetically, though, I could run in with a- a crowbar, clock one of them before they noticed me, and run back out again. Even the odds a little. No, there were so many risks involved in that plan that I didn't even want to think about it. It wasn't my problem. It wasn't an option. I'd run.

The closer of the two ponies, the unicorn who'd shouted, ducked behind a rock to reload. She looked up for a split second - right at me. I stepped back, feeling a sick sense of vertigo, but it was too late. "Hey! Hey!" she called, then said something to her friend.

Running it was. I heard hooves on dirt as the unicorn climbed the hill. "Don't fucking move!" she shouted."Hey! Fucker! Stop!" I stopped and turned. Her pistol floated beside her, pointed in my direction. "Thought you could sneak up on us?" She glanced down and back up. "Dude, what the fuck do you want? You unarmed?"

I thought about the crowbar in my saddlebags and didn't respond. She was too far away for it to be any use, though she was steadily walking towards me.

"You know this bitch? Fucking answer me!"

I weighed my options and shook my head.

"This isn't a fucking spectator sport! Don't fucking meddle. Fuck, don't have time for this." She adjusted the aim of the pistol. I felt light-headed. Like I was asleep. Like I'd really been dreaming ever since I'd supposedly awoken, and was only just noticing.

There was another shotgun blast, and for a second I was convinced that I was dead. Milliseconds trickled by as I realised that I wasn't, that it'd come from the bottom of the hill. The mare tore her eyes off me for a moment, diverting her attention to the noise.

An unfamiliar clarity settled in my mind, like hooves finally touching the ground. 

I drew the crowbar and lunged at her. She was already looking back, eyes wide. I swerved just before she pulled the trigger, more by coincidence than instinct or intention, and the curved end of the crowbar connected with something solid. Magic exploded from her, a bolt of lightning pouring up from the ground, and she screamed, a frenzied shriek unlike anything I'd ever heard in my life.

I stared as she convulsed on the floor, clutching at the stump where her horn used to be. The vertigo returned, and grew, far stronger than before. 

A final blast of the shotgun rang out. Much closer, and yet somehow quieter. The shrieking, too, fell silent. The black sense of falling in my chest reached my mind, and the vertigo took me.
> Keypad
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------



I woke to the crackling of flames, aching all over. It took me a couple of seconds to work out where I was and what had happened. I wasn't on the road any more, so somepony must've moved me. The bruises and grazes I was starting to feel supported that theory, because I didn't remember getting them. I shifted and felt a dull pain in my legs.

"Hey. Morning."

The voice came from the other side of the fire. I sat up and rubbed my eyes, and was shocked to see dried blood on my leg. I tried to say "hey" back, but my throat was dry and made no sound.

"You okay, like?" the mare said. Her grey face was illuminated by flickering orange light, and she wore a look of mild concern beneath her hood. Her eyes were a little obscured, mostly by her black mane, but from the looks of the bags under them I didn't reckon she'd slept.

I swallowed. "Do you have any water?" I managed to ask.

Her horn glowed green for a second as she floated a large canteen over to me. I grabbed it, twisted the cap off and drank. The water tasted weird but I was too thirsty to care. After a few seconds we made eye contact and I realised she probably didn't want me finishing it, much as I wanted to, so I passed it back. 

"Sorry," I said, and she frowned at me.

"What's your name?" she asked.

"Backlight. It's- I'm Backlight."

"Hmm. Cool. I'm Spiral."

I broke eye contact first and looked around. There was the road, I reckoned. And the ponies.

It was hard to isolate the individual sensations, but a stinging at the side of my neck drew my attention. I looked down, but the angle meant I couldn't see it. Wishing I had a mirror or something, I felt at it with a hoof, and it stung some more. There was blood on my shoulder.

Spiral saw what I was doing. "I poured a little healing potion on it, like. You were so lucky."

"What?" I asked. The words didn't parse.

"When that raider shot you?" She pointed at her own neck, but the action was kind of buried in her hood. "If it had been a little over to the left, like... but it only grazed you."

I thought this over. "What happened?" I finally asked.

"What, after you, like, smashed that raider's horn and fainted?"

...No. But that was a place to start, I supposed. I nodded, and my brain decided to treat me to a perfect recollection of the mare - the raider, as Spiral called her - dying right in front of me.

Spiral glanced towards the road. "Um. I tried to wake you up, but you didn't, so I carried you over here where we'd have a bit of cover. Saw that you were bleeding and used the potion, like, and then it got really cold so I lit the fire. Like, that's it, I guess. I dropped you a couple of times, so... sorry about that."

I shrugged, and pain flared in my right shoulder. The flames were kind of hypnotising, and by the time I realised I should've properly replied I felt like it was too late to say anything. So I sat and idly wondered how much time she'd spent looking for firewood, considering there weren't any trees around. It was all dried grass and twigs, so it was giving off a lot of smoke.

Eventually, I felt like saying something.

"She was going to shoot me."

"Yeah?" Spiral said. It wasn't really a question, though. "Like, I mean, she did shoot you."

"Yeah. So when she was distracted I just... went for her. Her or me. I wasn't aiming for her horn. I was just aiming for her head."

She gave me a look. Not the sort of look I was expecting. "Oookay." She looked... sad?

I dropped it. It didn't seem like she knew what to say, and I didn't really know why I was talking about it in the first place. I watched as she took a stick out of the fire and poked at the embers.

After a while, she broke the silence again. "Sorry, but, like, while you were asleep I was thinking... before all that, before they saw you, like, what were you doing up there?"

"I don't know," I replied. Well, maybe I did know. If she was asking what I thought she was asking, then I'd been about to run away. But I didn't want to say that.

"Yeah," she said, putting the stick back in the fire.

"Yesterday wasn't a good day," I mumbled.

She seemed to catch my words. "Yeah. For me neither."

The sky seemed slightly brighter than it had been. I really had been out all night.

Spiral took a swig from her canteen and changed how she was sat. "So, Backlight, where are you heading?"

"Um. Skyward. I guess."

"You don't sound so sure."

I thought about explaining that I was lost, that I'd been trying to find civilisation, but decided against it. "Guess not," I shrugged.

"Cool. Well, that's where I'm headed." She wrinkled her nose and looked up at the sky. "Probably gonna get moving soon?"

I'd almost died.

Not seeing any response from me, she continued. "Listen, like... I don't know what your deal is, but I'm pretty sure you'll die if you stay out here. Sorry."

I shook my head. "No, you're right." I didn't really feel like moving. "We should go."

She nodded, and threw dirt onto the fire. I idly wondered why she bothered; we were in the middle of nowhere. She got to her hooves, dusting off her cloak, and I did the same.

Spiral didn't really talk much, and neither did I. I felt pretty uncomfortable with the silence and had no idea whether she did too, but was glad that she wasn't asking questions. It gave me time to get my story straight, so to speak. 

What did I really have to hide? I'd woken up in some facility with no idea how I'd gotten there, and that was about the extent of the strangeness. If I told her, would she believe me? Would she think I was crazy? What were the actual consequences of that? I didn't want to keep secrets.

"I've got some questions I'm kind of hoping you can answer," I started.

"Sure."

"They're probably gonna sound like stupid questions, but just bare with me and I'll explain."

She looked at me and frowned. "Okay."

I thought for a second. "How long ago did the war end?"

It took her another second to reply. "Wow. Okay, you weren't kidding, um, like, two centuries ago?"

Two. Centuries.

In my head I'd known it'd been years. That much had been clear. Tens of years would be concerning, but not surprising. Hundreds, though?

"Oh," I said. Spiral inhaled like she wanted to say something, but just held her breath instead. "Did we win?"

"...No. Listen, I-"

"Hang on. Just- just give me a second?"

I didn't really know why I'd asked. The landscape sure didn't look like that of a victorious nation. 

Spiral gave me a second, then spoke. "You're, like, a Stable pony, right?"

Stables. I supposed the underground bunkers had turned out to be useful, after all. If I was interpreting her question correctly, they'd worked, but not everyone out here came from one. Like me. I shook my head.

"Right. Like, you're clean like a Stable pony, but you don't have the uniform."

The blood was mostly flaking off my legs. "Yeah, no. I'm from... before all this."

"What, like, before the megaspells? I mean, sorry if it sounds like I don't believe you, like, but you don't look like a ghoul."

"I don't know what that is," I said, feeling the weight of the word ghoul. Ominous.

She gave me a look like I was crazy. "So how can you be from back then?"

"I woke up in some mirrored room yesterday-"

"-Mirrored?"

"Yes, the walls were mirrors. Don't ask me how I got there because I don't remember. Point is I woke up there and I had to break my way out and here I am. Everything's gone."

"Okay," she said. I didn't really have anything else to add, and eventually she asked, "Where is this place, like, exactly?"

"The room was underground. There was a small building with a parking lot, and the road joined the highway, and I was walking for hours."

"Right."

I didn't know if she believed me, but she didn't ask any more questions and neither did I. Later on she let me finish the last of her water, and we talked for a while longer after that. It was hard to tell whether she was just naturally taciturn, or whether she was wary of me, but I found myself reluctant to press her for details on what exactly had happened during my two-hundred-year-long lie-in.

We spotted the building at basically the same time. It was the afternoon by then and I wanted nothing more than to stop and rest, but Spiral had insisted that the going would only get harder every time we did that. Regardless, with the water gone and a good distance still to go before we'd get to Skyward, we decided to stop and explore. It took another hour from when we spotted the chimney to reach the point where the road peeled off. It came to a chain-link gate, left open just enough for a single pony to slip through to the parking lot on the other side. I was reminded of 'site two', and I hesitated while Spiral went straight in.

So quiet. That's what bothered me. Every noise we made was amplified in contrast. 

I followed her. The factory consisted of a single rectangular building made from concrete and corrugated iron. Its exterior was dotted with thin windows, too high to see through. Every single one in sight was smashed. The chimney looming over us had once had a large logo printed on it, but it was faded to the point where I had no idea what it was supposed to say. Despite its ruin, the whole building felt imposing.

The parking lot seemed to be a loading bay more than anything, with three large shutters providing access to the inside of the building. Spiral got to one and glanced over it. She tried to push it open and it rattled, but it didn't seem built to be opened from the outside. "Nope," I heard her say. She ignored the other two and went to the double doors further along.

"There might be a side entrance," I suggested.

"Yeah, I know, like..." she said, pushing the doors. "Can you like, pick locks?"

"No," I said, perhaps a little more defensively than necessary.

"Okay, c'mon." She led the way around the side of the building, past some dumpsters, and sure enough we found a metal door with a keypad. It was locked, so Spiral entered what I presumed was '1-2-3-4' and tried it again. "Ugh."

I looked over the keypad, hoping to see something she'd missed, but the printing had weathered off the buttons entirely. Spiral started to move on. "Do you have a screwdriver?" I asked, and she stopped.

"Yeah, one sec," she responded, to my mild surprise. She produced a folding fabric case from a saddlebag and passed it to me. I was further surprised to find that it contained a wide selection of small tools with varying degrees of specialisation, from simple screwdrivers all the way to PipBuck keys.

"Hmm," I murmured as I selected a flathead of the right size and started unscrewing the keypad's casing.

Spiral moved closer to watch what I was doing. "You know how to hack keypads?"

"Not really. Never done this before." The last screw came free and I removed the front panel, giving myself access to the circuit board behind it.

"Then why...?"

"Special talent," I said with an edge of sarcasm. I shifted my raincoat and saddlebags so she could see my cutie mark: a green printed circuit board very much like the one I was now faced with. "My intuition's usually pretty good when it comes to working out how things... work." This circuit was straightforward enough. I pulled a wire free from where it was soldered in place. "I reckon if I use this to bypass that chip, that should be the right signal." 

I replaced the wire and the light on the keyboard flashed from red to green. "Nice," I said, pleased with myself. The thing with special talents, in my experience, was that there was always somepony who could do your talent better. I wondered if that was still the case.

"Shit, dude," Spiral said. With her shotgun drawn and pointed inside, she pushed the door open. "Stay close to me."

We stepped through onto the factory floor. Meagre sunlight passed in through the windows above us, dull rays filled with shimmering dust outlining machines in the gloom.

The green glow from Spiral's horn suddenly intensified to a bright cone, illuminating our immediate surroundings.  She glanced over her shoulder and almost blinded me. "Gah!" I complained.

She looked away. "Sorry!" 

"Neat trick," I commented as we looked around. The production line was made up from a variety of inscrutable metal boxes with conveyor belts leading between them. Nothing of use for us there. Smaller rooms were stacked two-high along three of the four exterior walls, with a metal balcony running around the edge to provide access.

"You don't know any spells? Like, just TK?"

"TK?" I frowned, but then I remembered. 

"Telekinesis," we said at the same time.

I got blinded again as Spiral turned to grin at me. "Stop doing that!"

"Sorry! Not used to, like, y'know."

I didn't know, but left it. "No, I can float stuff around just fine but that's all. For a while I was trying to learn how to-"

"Shhh!" She froze.

"What? What is..." I trailed off as she waved a hoof. Then I heard it - a sound I now recognised. Scuttling. A lot of it, all around us.

A brief glance over my shoulder at the door gave me a glimpse of something moving. "Spiral..."

"Shh!" She hadn't moved a muscle.

I looked over my shoulder again and my heart skipped a beat. Forget mantises - in the light from outside I could see an actual giant scorpion creeping towards us. I drew my crowbar. Spiral's cone of light moved to point at the scorpion, and it recoiled slightly. It wasn't alone, though - there were movements in the shadows around us.

Our exit was blocked, but the path ahead to some stairs looked clear. I liked the idea of getting to higher ground. 

"Spiral, there," I pointed, nudging her to get her attention. She jerked at the touch as if she'd been stung, a reaction which seemed reasonable upon reflection. Still, she nodded.

We bolted. The stairs were metal, the kind with gaps between individual steps, and our hoofsteps clanged loudly as we ascended. There didn't seem to be any scorpions already at the top, and through unspoken agreement we darted through the nearest door. Spiral slammed it shut behind us and leaned against it. Neither of us said anything; instead we took the time to glance over the room for movement. We were in a security control room - like a budget version of one I'd once seen in Pendulum. Only one swivel chair and four monitors arranged in a line along a desk. A single large plant pot sat in one corner of the room, filled with very dry-looking soil. I had a brief, crushing moment of hope when I saw the water cooler. But it was empty; all the water had leaked away long ago. I spotted a light switch by the door and flicked it - to my surprise, the bulb in the ceiling flickered on.

"What the shit," Spiral said, dropping her spell.

"Is every animal out here like that? Big and... big."

She cracked a hysterical smile. "Pretty much, like, yeah."

"How didn't we see them when we walked in?" I asked, and she shrugged in response. I knew the answer anyway, at least for me, because despite everything I still hadn't really been expecting to find anything alive inside. The room had a single wire-glass window next to the door, and I went up to it to peer out. Scorpions were practically pouring up the stairs, filling the floor outside. Small scuffles were breaking out, the arachnids locking claws and swiping at each other with stingers, and some were getting pushed right off the edge. One came right up to the window and lashed out with its tail. The barbed end thudded against the glass and I stepped back. Celestia, they were awful. "What should we do?"

"Can you pass me your crowbar?" Spiral asked, propping up her shotgun against the wall and going over to the window to look. She stared at the scorpions for longer than I did.

"What for?"

Spiral waved a hoof at me. "Just give it!" I did as she asked, and she took it in her telekinesis. She twirled it once in the air, testing its weight, making it look easy. "Okay, I'm gonna need you to like, open the door a little bit."

I could see what she wanted, so I used my magic to turn the handle and open the door a fraction. Immediately I could see the press of appendages outside, fighting to get in. I felt them too, through the telekinetic field - unsure of whether or not it'd prove strong enough, I added my own weight against the door. "Are scorpions usually this... aggressive?"

"Dunno," Spiral said, jabbing the flat end of the crowbar through the gap like a spear. I couldn't tell if she'd hit anything. She kept jabbing, keeping her distance from the opening.

"This isn't going to work," I said. "There's too many, and they're not all gonna get close enough to the door for you to stab them."

She glanced at me. "Do you have a better idea?" A stinger flailed into the room, and I slammed the door on it in surprise. Partially crushed, it spasmed away. "This is working. This is fine. Like, even if we don't get them all, we can kill enough so we can leave."

I wasn't sure what exactly what she meant by 'leave', but I took it to mean abandoning the factory and continuing to Skyward. "We can't leave until we've had a look around."

"Uh, yes we can."

That wasn't right. I didn't want to run away - but I didn't really have a proper reason as to why. I felt like I'd put us in danger by getting us into the building, and didn't want that to be for nothing, even though - paradoxically - getting hurt was the most likely outcome of staying. The pressure on the door had eased somewhat, and I glanced around the room. Again, my eyes fell on the cooler.

"They'll have replacement bottles," I realised aloud.

"What?" Spiral swung the crowbar again. "Can you, like, keep your eye on the door?"

She had a point. This wasn't time to lose focus. "The cooler," I started. Briefly I wondered if ponies still used coolers. "You load in replacement bottles at the top when it- when they run out. They're bought in bulk. So there'll probably be a couple of old ones in a storeroom somewhere, still sealed."

"That's true. Hmm."

"I mean, the water might have gone bad already, I don't know-"

"-No, like, I don't think so, not if it's been treated properly and it's still sealed. Close the door a sec." I did so, and felt corpses being pushed out of the way on the other side. Spiral propped the crowbar at an angle against the wall, next to her shotgun. "That was actually working pretty well, but they're being more, like, wary now?" She pulled the swivel chair away from the desk and sat in it, slowly spinning herself around.

I went to look at the monitors, turning on the terminal without really having to look. The curved green-tinted screens came to life, displaying four camera feeds. I hit a key and the feeds were replaced by different ones. I hit the key a few more times, letting them cycle past. No sign of any water, but there was no way they'd put cameras in every room, and I couldn't see any more scorpions either. The feeds that weren't focused on the factory floor - which was still crawling with the things - were focused on the hallways, offices and control rooms in its periphery.

"You seeing these?" I asked. Spiral wheeled herself over. One feed caught my eye - a fancy-looking office in a state of disarray. It was hard to see in detail, but I could tell that decayed files were strewn over the heavy desk and around the floor, along with what looked like paper money. Spiral had briefly explained wasteland economics to me, so I knew that the old currency was worthless. Apparently bottlecaps were in use instead, which- well, whatever. A painting on the back wall was hanging out at an angle. "Is that a wall safe?"

Spiral craned her neck to look. "Could be."

"We have to go check that out," I enthused. I knew that wall safes like that had been something of a fashion among - well, among ponies with possessions valuable enough to be worth locking up - but I'd never seen one myself.

"Yeah, okay." She pushed herself away from the desk, spinning again as she did so. I glanced back at the feeds again, cycled idly a couple of times. Spiral got to her hooves. "Water first."

"What are we going to do about the rest of the scorpions?"

She picked up the crowbar and the shotgun, and passed the crowbar over to me. It was wet, and bits of carapace were stuck to it. "I don't think they like my light. If we keep moving, like, don't let them get close, we should be okay."

I didn't really like that plan, but saw no alternative except to sit where we were and wilt. "Okay," I echoed her.

"Okay, cool." She looked away, re-cast her light spell, and opened the door. I followed her outside and tried to work out where the scorpions were - Spiral used the butt of her shotgun to knock one off the balcony - but we were moving quickly enough that it didn't really matter. We made it to the other corner of the U-shaped balcony, where there was a heavy two-way door, and barged through, only to be faced with stairs leading down. "Should we?" she asked, glancing behind us. I nodded my assent.

I had my suspicions that the stairs would lead down to the storage area on the other wise of the shutters we'd seen from the outside, and that turned out to be the case. "I guess you're used to all this," I commented as we started to search the piles of palettes and boxes lining the room. We stuck close.

"Hmm?"

"Isn't this what you do? Spelunk old buildings and stuff?"

"Oh. Um, yeah..." Spiral wrinkled her nose. "Not used to the scorpions though."

"Ha, yeah." Circuit boards... metal housings... packaging... I wondered what was being manufactured here, and if it still held any value.

"Shit, that's it, isn't it?" Spiral said suddenly, pointing. I looked. Sure enough, a shrink-wrapped palette was poking out from underneath a pile of crates. Together, we managed to clear the way. I used my crowbar to tear the shrink-wrap, and Spiral pulled one of the bottles free. She turned it over in the air, inspecting it for damage. "Looks sealed to me. I'll try some first, my stomach can probably handle it better if it's bad."

"Yeah, probably," I vaguely agreed, not really having an opinion. I watched as she unscrewed the cap and peeled the plastic seal away, then glanced around the room. There didn't seem to be any scorpions in this part of the factory - I presumed that they struggled to open the doors.

Spiral tilted the bottle and took a sip. She hesitated for a second. "Ah, fuck it," she said, "tastes fine." She tipped it further and drank. "Pretty good actually."

I pulled another bottle from the palette, but didn't open it. "How valuable exactly is clean water?"

"Around these parts? Like, not very. It rains a lot, and when it rains it pours. Most places have some way of collecting it. But like, this time of year, you can't rely on it raining."

"What about radiation and stuff?" I asked.

Apparently finished, Spiral wiped the bottle's neck and slid it over to me. "It's so weird that you don't, like, know this stuff." To my taste the water was a little off, but I was thirsty enough that I was able to trick myself into thinking I didn't care. "So like, this area didn't get a direct hit, so the radiation's mostly subsided. Even the groundwater is fine if you're desperate, so long as you're not too close to the river. The river's bad, yeah. But like, the pegasi keep the clouds in good shape, so-"

"Pegasi?" I stopped drinking to ask.

"Shit, yeah. So like... the pegasi, the Enclave, they're still up there, above the cloud curtain."

I tried to wrap my head around that. "What, all of them?"

"Pretty much all of them, yeah. Never seen one myself. You done with that?"

I nodded and wiped the neck like she'd done, then slid it back over to her.  She started filling her canteen. "Sooo... now that we're good for water..." I said.

"Yeah, yeah, let's go look for that safe. Probably upstairs." She screwed the caps back onto the canteen and the bottle.

By the time we'd made it back up to the second floor some more scorpions had found their way onto the balcony. There was one waiting right on the other side of the door. Surprised, I swung the crowbar at it and missed. The red piece of metal clattered to the floor as the scorpion lunged, and I was momentarily deafened by Spiral firing her shotgun next to me. "Thanks," I said, staring at the remains. 

"You gotta be more careful, like," Spiral said.

"It caught me off guard," I said in return, before realising that was exactly what she was saying.

Spiral just shook her head, and the shadows shook too. "You think the room with the safe is this way?" She pointed down the length of balcony to our right.

"Yeah, or on the other side."

Spiral took a few steps and batted away a small (relatively speaking) scorpion that was lingering in our path. "Well, let's go then. Don't know what you're expecting to find."

"I don't know," I echoed her.

We found the office behind the fourth door along the balcony - a small plaque labelled the office as once belonged to the factory's "chief manufacturing executive". It had been left ajar, and a scorpion had found its way inside. Spiral took care of it without firing another shot.

The office's thick red carpet was decaying, as were the papers strewn around, and the air was musty. The green light certainly didn't help the place's look. I spotted the painting right away and went over to investigate, moving it further out on its hinge as I approached.

"Hold on, I'm going to get this corpse out of here," Spiral said, grabbing the scorpion by the tail and out onto the balcony.

A grin spread across my face when I saw that I'd been correct. The safe on the other side of the painting was already open and turned out to be mostly empty, though it still contained enough loose cash to make my eyes water. Resting atop the money was something that struck me as perhaps being more useful in the new world - a magical energy weapon.

"Yep, there's a safe, and there's something inside," I said to Spiral as she re-entered the room.

"Oh, cool!"

"Looks like a gutted laser pistol. Don't think it looks like it'll work."

"No, I think it's just been modified, look-" Spiral levitated it out of the safe. "-these parts don't belong."

"Huh." I used a hoof to nudge around the money in the safe, checking if there was anything else beneath. There wasn't. I turned around and assessed the rest of the room, and the only thing to jump out at me was a terminal sitting on the  desk. "Maybe there's something on that about it," I said, pointing. Spiral shrugged, putting the gun down for a moment while she drank some more water. I sat myself at the desk and tried turning on the terminal. Its screen looked to have scorch marks underneath the dust, which seemed strange to me. Surprisingly, it powered up and green text began to scroll.

"Think I should try, like, firing it?" Spiral asked. The light from her horn intensified slightly as she used her telekinesis.

"Uh-huh," I said, reading the text. My mind processed the question, and I looked up to see the gun floating next to her again. "Wait, no. Maybe. Don't point it at anything important."

"Duh," she rolled her eyes at me. I was already glancing back to the terminal. Now that it was fully loaded, I could see that it had been wiped at some point. Disappointing. I leaned back in the chair, and regretted it when a cloud of dust rose from the back cushion. "Okay, here goes," Spiral said, moving in front and to the side of the desk and aiming the gun at the back wall.

I was blinded by a flash, and the accompanying bang practically made me fall out of my seat. "Gah!" I yelped. "What- was that lightning?" I blinked a few times and my vision returned, spots of colour slowly fading.

Spiral was too busy laughing to answer. "Hoooooooooly shit. Dude, I'm sorry, did that hit you? It looked like it hit you. Like, it definitely hit the terminal."

My heart was pounding as I got to my hooves. "You just fired a lightning gun at me." The terminal was apparently still working, though I could see that part of the housing was blackened on one side where it hadn't been before.

The smile on her face was fading. "I didn't fire it at you, I fired it at the wall, like. It just... arced. And you're still like, alive, so either it didn't hit you or it's not powerful enough to do anything."

"Can I try?" I asked, holding out a hoof.

"'Course, but aim it, like... away from me." 

"Yeah, yeah." Our telekinetic fields briefly merged into a turquoise glow around the gun as she passed it to me. I crossed the room and pointed it out through the door, hoping it would arc to the railing and being careful not to step onto the metal flooring. "Just pull the trigger, right?" I glanced at Spiral for assurance, and she nodded.

I took a breath and pulled the trigger, and a bolt of actual lightning forked and arced to the balcony and the metal doorknob. Despite knowing roughly what to expect this time, I jumped, my telekinesis breaking. The gun clattered to the floor.

"Who made this thing?" I wondered aloud, picking it back up. "I mean, I've seen stuff like it, but this is something else." I sighed. "I guess whoever it was died two hundred years ago." After a moment's hesitation, I turned on the spot. "We should try it on one of the scorpions."

"Yeah, for sure." Spiral held out a hoof and gestured for me to pass the gun back, but then changed her mind and gestured for me to keep it. "Actually, you shoot with that, and I'll like, get 'em with the crowbar if it doesn't kill them."

"Okay."

We crept out onto the balcony again, glancing around. I spotted one scorpion crawling up the stairs nearest to us, and I pointed, but Spiral seemed to already have seen it. We weren't really in any danger - between the range of my telekinesis and the range of the lightning itself, Spiral would have plenty of time to react while the scorpion crossed the distance to me if the gun didn't have an effect.

By the time we were close enough, the scorpion had reached the top of the stairs and spotted us. It approached slowly, claws raised. I let it get close to the gun before pulling the trigger, to lessen the chance of the bolt arcing to the railing again.

Nothing happened. I pulled the trigger again. Nothing. The scorpion burst forward, but Spiral speared it with the crowbar.

"I'm getting way better at dealing with these things," Spiral commented. "Why didn't you shoot? Or it's not working?"

"It didn't work." I frowned and brought the gun closer to examine it. Nothing immediately jumped out at me. "Cell might've run dry. To be honest I was surprised to see it had any charge left after two centuries."

"Well, with cells, like, it depends on what kind of circuit they get left in. Some do discharge, but generally they last for ever. May I?"

I passed the gun to her, and she pointed it at the railing and pulled the trigger a couple of times. I idly wondered how she knew so much about cells, because as far as I could tell she didn't own anything that used them.

"Might be some spares back in the office or somewhere," I suggested. She nodded, and we backtracked.

I was searching the second drawer of the desk when there came sounds from downstairs. Heavy, regular. Metallic. I startled and looked over to Spiral, and she looked spooked. "What's that?" I asked quietly. It sounded like machinery, something barely familiar.

Spiral stood, frozen. "Fuck. Fuck. Fuck, no, shit-" She darted towards the door, pushing it shut and pressing herself against it. After a moment she caught my eye and she laughed sharply. "Oh, Celestia, fuck. Can't fucking believe this," she whispered.

"What's that noise?" I backed away from the door, and from her.

"Uh, shit. I, like- like- I lied. I lied, like, about- well, it like, I just didn't tell you, like," she stammered.

Seeing her go like this was freaking me out. "You lied? About what? What's the noise?"

"Power armour," she said, and my mind finally made the connection. Hoofsteps. Hooves clad in metal. Power armour, the result of the combined efforts of the Ministry of Wartime Technology and the Ministry of Arcane Sciences. Back then, the suits were used by the Equestrian military. Who was using them now? "Steel Rangers," Spiral continued, as if she'd read my mind. The name was reassuring - in other words, it was still the Equestrian military. So why was she so spooked? How was she on the wrong side of the military?

"What's wrong then?" I asked, and she looked at me with a strange cross between desperation and accusation in her eyes. 

The hoofsteps stopped momentarily, and I heard a door swing open downstairs. A voice boomed. "-around outside, cover the exits and await further instruction. The rest of you, follow me. Eyes up, they could still be in here. Looks like radscorpions too." At that, there was a burst of gunfire. Machine guns. "EFS is useless."

Spiral reacted to the voice, moving away from the door. "Shit, it's him," she whispered. Something in her expression changed, and she looked at me. "He doesn't know you. I can hide, like, and you talk to him. You're alone. Yeah. You need to lie to him. I'll explain everything later. Whatever you say, I don't exist, like, got it?"

"What?" I hissed, heart pounding. The gunfire continued, and another whooshing sound joined in.

"Go, go, I'll hide, you'll be fine, like, just talk to them, lie to them. Go," she stressed, gesturing at the door. After a moment's hesitation, I went. She was leaving me in the dark, and my mind was starting to fill in the gaps on its own.

I opened the door and waited for a pause in the gunfire. I saw a burst of orange flame, heard another whoosh. "Hey-" My voice caught in my throat. "Hey! Don't, uh, don't shoot."

Slowly, I approached the railing of the balcony. The power armour clanked as whoever was below turned to face me.

I'd seen Rangers before, sure, and all told these didn't look much different. A little rougher around the edges, perhaps. It was the context that had changed, and the Rangers were far scarier in the new context than the old. They each stood maybe a head taller than your average pony, encased mane to tail in dark steel. The combination of respiratory apparatus and narrow visors left them appearing almost wholly inequine. Each had heavy weaponry mounted on their armour - machine guns, flamethrowers, something I couldn't identify - and each had a spotlight mounted on their helmet. The spotlights almost blinded me.

The one in the middle, the one with the weapon I didn't recognise, had armour with something more of a polish to it and more intricate detailing around the helmet. I took that one to be the leader, and was proven correct when he spoke.

"Who are you?" he asked, taking a heavy step towards the balcony.

His voice was loud, augmented by a spell or something in his helmet, but he spoke with clarity. What was that weapon? A rocket launcher? The way it had been integrated into the armour obscured its outline.

"Don't make me ask again, wastelander."

I swallowed. "Backlight! My name's- I'm Backlight."

"Very well. Why don't you join us down here?"

For a moment I was rooted to the spot, but then I nodded. My hoofsteps rang out as I made my way to the stairs, and down.

"What brings you to these parts, wastelander? Salvage?" the leader asked, and I nodded. "You're travelling light."

Something in his tone made me feel a little more confident. "Oh, no. Didn't know exactly what to expect - with the shooting - so my stuff's, uh, put away for the time being." I mentally kicked myself. That wasn't how I'd wanted to word it.

"Well, we mean you no harm." I noted that those around him made no move to point their weapons away from me.

"Yeah," I said. Part of me rankled at his voice, the way they were acting, but a smaller part of me was relieved to find something closer to the way things had been. Not like the raiders. I realised I probably should've said something more, but by then it was too late.

"My name is Paladin Oatey Porridge, but I suppose that 'sir' will suffice for you. You know who we are, I assume?"

"Steel Rangers," I replied, but didn't elaborate. From how Spiral had been behaving, I could only assume that the organisation had changed somewhat while I'd been asleep. Besides, I didn't trust myself to seriously address somepony whose name I'd just learned was 'Oatey Porridge'. Some ponies were cursed with those sorts of names, through no fault of their own.

He approached. "Yes, yes. I take it this is the first time you've crossed paths with us? How much do you know about our mission?"

That threw me through a loop. "Not much. Perhaps you can better explain it to me."

The armoured pony chuckled deeply, the laughs distorted by whatever he was using to amplify his voice. The effect was subtle, and I guessed that his voice was just naturally loud.  "We are custodians, primarily. We safeguard the artefacts of the old world, keep them out of the hooves of those who might use them for harm. Oh, but... it is of no consequence to you." He paused, barely a metre from me. "The shotgun blast, earlier... that was you, I suppose?"

"Huh?" It was a non-sequitur, it didn't make sense. Then it did, and the understanding hit me like a bucket of cold water. I shivered. He'd known, he knew. I tried to lie anyway. "Yeah, that was me, the scorpions-"

With one lazy motion, before I could move away, he reached out and hooked me around the neck with a single hoof and pulled me close. "Don't lie to me," he commanded, before pushing me past him into the centre of those gathered. "Backlight, was it?" He raised his voice. "Whoever else is hiding up there - you have five seconds to join us if you want to see Backlight here alive again. Four-"

Whatever he thought, I had no intention of dying there. "Wait!" I protested, "Please, no, she's-"

"-Three-"

Spiral called down from the balcony. "He's not involved."

"I'm sure I'll be the judge of that. Do my ears deceive me, or are you exhibiting some spine, Scribe?"

She stepped out into view, and the look in her eyes was pure hatred.

When she didn't speak, Porridge continued. "Theft. Assault. Desertion. That was just the last fortnight. More than enough for a court martial, wouldn't you say?"

Spiral didn't say anything. She broke eye contact with him.

"I suppose you have the right to remain silent. Ever a relief, to be spared your stuttering." Any hint of cordiality in his voice had long since disappeared altogether. Porridge chuckled again, and paused before continuing to speak. Lighter. "We're just heading into Skyward. A few warehouses remain across the river, and we thought it was worth a look." He paused once more. It was eerie how he was the only pony in the room speaking - there were four other Rangers with him, but they may as well have been statues. When he spoke once more, it was in icy tones. "I'm sure you remember the last time we visited the city. The question, then, is... why are you so eager to return?"

I didn't understand. I had no context. I was just a bystander. I didn't know what "Scribe" meant, if it was a title, or... was Spiral even her real name? The lead Ranger pontificated like- like a supervillain, but his words were clearly having some sort of effect on her.

"You'll join us, for the time being, as we have expended too many resources getting here to turn back now. Your hearing will take place once we get back, presuming nothing happens." He spoke that last part lightly, not lingering on it for a moment, but it stood out nonetheless. It took me a couple of seconds to process the implicit threat. "Collect your things. We'll leave at once."

She didn't move at once. She just stood there, and I saw her eyes move from Ranger to Ranger, looking for something. She didn't look at me, but instead turned and went back into the office.

"What did she tell you?" Porridge said, the words reverberating in amusement, and it took me a moment to realise I was being addressed. I elected not to respond. He chuckled.  "You can come or stay as you wish."

Stay. On my own, again. Or dead, part of me thought, interpreting the option altogether more darkly. Surely that wasn't what he meant. What would I do? I tried to picture it. I'd wait at the factory awhile. Go to Skyward after, back to my tiny apartment. I supposed it wasn't my apartment any more.

I could see the contempt he held for me - held for everypony, it seemed. Still, I looked at him, and nodded.

"You're quiet, aren't you?" he said. Just like that.

I wanted to put a hoof through his visor.
> Hostile
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------



Spiral finally returned. Two more Rangers joined us as we exited the factory - they seemed surprised to see Spiral, but didn't make a fuss. No effort was made to surround us or take any of our things. It took me longer than it should've to realise that it was a message, in a way: we could try to run, but they would shoot us; we could try to fight, but we had nothing that could hurt them. Spiral and I hung back, far enough that we could talk quietly without them hearing. The Rangers talked amongst themselves, only occasionally glancing back to check that we were still following. I suspected that, even if we got a head start running, their suits' augmentations would let them completely outpace us.

"I didn't know you," Spiral said eventually. The evening was drawing in, but it seemed like the Rangers planned to travel until we reached the city. I couldn't remember ever walking for so long in my life. I felt sick. "Sorry. Like, it's not that I didn't trust you, I just... thought you didn't need to know. I didn't think they'd be looking,"

"What did you do?" I asked, and she shot me a look which made me wish I'd worded the question differently.

"I left. Stole some supplies..." She gestured to her saddlebags, the shotgun she'd strapped to her back. "Like, they have so many guns. More than you've ever seen in your life, like..."

When Porridge had started counting down... I'd given her up without even thinking about it.

She continued. "I had... a friend on guard rotation, like, and I thought I could get past her. But uh... she tried to stop me, and like, I ended up disabling her armour. It's easy if you can get close, like, you can disconnect the..." She trailed off, then found her place again. "But I got out, and I didn't think they'd come after me."

I'd almost died back there. It hadn't mattered, anyway, in the end. And, like, I hadn't known what was going on. Still didn't.

"Are you even listening?"

I looked at her. "Huh? Yeah. Sorry." I had been.

That was that, though. She didn't carry on.

The first droplet of rain hit my face a while later, and I raised the hood of my coat. Soon we were walking in a downpour.

I broke the silence. "All that effort getting water, only for it to fall from the sky half an hour later." I glanced at Spiral, and she smiled a little.

"Can't count on it. Just how it goes." She shivered slightly, and I noted that her cloak wasn't waterproof - though its hood was keeping the worst of the rain out of her face.

"...You okay?" I ventured.

Her smile turned into a grin of disbelief, she exhaled a laugh, and she looked up at the clouds, eyes closed. "...Fuck, no." She let the rain run down her face for a few seconds, before looking back down. "They're gonna kill me, y'know? You got that, right? Like, he might do it here, when nopony's looking, or there'll be a- a court-martial, like he said. And like, it's not like he hasn't done it before. And like, like, the worst part is that I know them. Don't recognise them, not when they're wearing the armour, but I fucking grew up with them."

"What happened? Why are they-"

She shrugged, and stayed silent for several steps. "Dunno. It was a slow thing, when I was a filly. Like... I think... I don't know, like. Um." It took her a while to find the right words, with more than a few false starts. We drifted further back, but the Rangers still paid no mind. I wondered if they wanted us to run. "I made a lot of enemies, like, early on. Like, the Rangers take in a lot of fillies and colts, the talented ones, like, from all over. And as they get older, they send the ones they don't like back out. But like, I was one of the ones born into it - my parents were Knights, both of them. And I think- I think I just, like, thought I was better than them. So I fucked it up."

There was rain in her eyes, so she reached up a hoof to wipe them. Then, after a couple of steps, she did it again with the other hoof. "So uh. Like. My parents... yeah. And fucking Porridge got promoted, like, and he never liked them and he fucking hates me." She gave me a long look. "I don't know why I thought I could ever be a Scribe, poring over echoes of the world that made this one." That line sounded rehearsed, almost. "Didn't want to be like my... And like, I fucking hate all this. Things were nice once, and we fucked it up." Her hood moved when she turned her head, looking away at the horizon, and I couldn't see her face any more.

"They weren't so nice," I said.

"Fuck off, dude." She turned back to me, and I was startled by just how much her expression was twisted. "Fuck. Fuck, you're like everything else that got left. Just shit."

We had the attention of a couple of the Rangers ahead, now. Spiral seemed to notice, and whatever else she wanted to say died in her throat. She looked down and quickened her step.

The sun was almost starting to set, and I was soaked and freezing and miserable and a tiny, hateful part of me was wishing that I'd stayed behind.

Shit.

The word stuck to me.

I trailed behind. Twice, I threw up at the side of the road. Just bile and half-digested carrots and water. I needed to eat something, but I couldn't stomach opening another can. The rain rinsed away any traces from my lips.

As we walked down that long, straight road, I closed my eyes and wished with all my being that I was somewhere else.

We passed the first ruin when only a sliver of Celestia's light remained. A house, it had been. Two of the walls were collapsed, and you could see both floors inside. Like a cross-section. Everything degradable had degraded.

Before long there were more houses. Much the same, at first, but the deeper into the city outskirts we ventured, the more confident they seemed to become. They packed closer together, stood taller, the effects of entropy were less pronounced. Soon we passed the first apartment block.

I recognised it all. Oh, sure, I'd never lingered in these parts, but it was still so familiar all the same. I'd been here, what... a couple of months ago? There had been ponies everywhere.

The streetlights all bowed. On some streets, things had barely changed, the effect looked closer to twenty years than two hundred. On those streets, the lights still worked, and it was as if... as if a great, shadowy monster had swept through, stealing everyone away in the night. The avenues and side streets were rarely lit, and when I glanced down them I thought I saw movement. Like it was still out there, waiting for the last of the lamplight to die so it could take the rest of us.

Some moments, nothing seemed real.

Others... it was a quiet, creeping panic that came over me. Every armoured footstep on tarmac echoed, but that was nothing compared to the beating in my chest. I wanted to collapse, but if I did they'd just leave me behind.

We walked openly in the street. There was no cover, only the occasional vehicle stopped in the road. At the edges of the light cast by a lamp ahead a tin bowl rested on the pavement. By it, in an alcove between two buildings, protected from the elements, was a skeleton. Curled up, huddled around itself, falling apart.

Little details like that were enough to drive home the reality of the situation, to dispel the hope in the back of my mind that things could just go back to the way they were.

There was something else in the back of my mind, and slowly it inched its way to the front. 

You're not trying hard enough.

No, I wasn't, but that wasn't what was bothering me right then.

I was missing something, I felt sure of it. There was a gap. I'd woken up in that room at Site Two, but clearly some plan had gone awry. The place had collapsed. I'd broken my way out. The room opposite...

Something else...

Why did they pick you?

Pendulum had hundreds of employees. More, maybe - it was clear that I hadn't known the extent of their operations. Oh, and sure, I hadn't seen the full extent of Site Two.

But hundreds of ponies. For all their resources, there was no way that Pendulum could run a- a suspension facility at that scale. No way. Certainly not for two hundred years. Had that even been their plan? Or had my suspension ended late?

Based on the size of those rooms, the facility would've needed to have been orders of magnitude bigger than what I'd seen. I had no idea what kind of energy was required to keep a pony in suspended animation for so long, but it couldn't have been trivial. And of course, the more ponies you kidnap and bury, the higher the chance that somepony finds out what you're doing. No, they must have had some sort of selection process.

If the place was so big, then what were the chances of me being put in that room at the end of the hallway on the top floor? Wait, no, that didn't matter - because if I hadn't woken up in that room, I might not have woken up at all. Or perhaps they had woken up, only to suffocate and starve beneath the rubble. Or perhaps they were still alive, awake or not.

I'd have to go back. Sooner rather than later.

But before then... I'd have to prove that they made the right choice - whoever it was that'd decided that I needed to live past the end of the world.

"Spiral..." I caught up to her, and she looked back at me. "I'm sorry. We're going to get out of this. Don't know how, but..."

She rolled her eyes. "Minute they let their guard down, we're gone," she murmured. "Only they've got EFS, so they'll know if we leave the range of their radar."

"EFS?" The acronym was familiar.

"Eyes-Forward Sparkle. It's built into their helmets - PipBucks have it too. It marks, like, allies and hostiles. Yellow and red."

"How?"

"Like, just a whole bunch of spells."

"Yeah, but how does it know if we're hostile or not?"

"Fuck, dude, I don't know. And like, I've read enough about it. It's just complicated magic. I don't think anypony knows exactly how it works any more. Maybe they didn't really know then."

"Yeah." I sighed. "Sounds about right."

When she next spoke, she did so more quietly, and it sounded like she'd been turning the words over in her head. "Hey, like, I'm sorry I snapped at you earlier. I think you mean well, but like... this is hard for me, and you got on my nerves. And like..." Whatever she'd been about to say was lost in an amplified burst of laughter from the Rangers ahead. We both startled and looked, and I think we were both thinking that it was somehow directed at us. But they didn't seem to be looking our way.

"They think they're so untouchable," Spiral said, darkly. "Fuck, there's this voice telling me that I don't want to hurt them. But like... I might, like... ignore it. Is that bad?"

In my head, I heard that scream again. Felt that horn break.

"Um. I think-" I made my answer into a question "-I think you're better than them, aren't you?" 

"I don't know."

"...Well, I do."

She sighed. "You've never killed anypony, have you?"

"No," I replied, basically on reflex. "I mean... well... I sort of did?"

"The raider."

I kicked a stone. It skittered ahead across the tarmac. One of the Rangers ahead glanced over their shoulder briefly at the noise, so when I caught up to where the stone had stopped I didn't kick it again. "I tried to kill her. And then I messed it up, but then she died anyway. And if I got in that situation again... I wouldn't try."

"It gets easier."

"I don't want it to get easier!" I tried to keep my voice down.

"No, that's what I'm saying," she said, and I heard the frustration in her voice. "Like... I've..." She trailed off.

After waiting a while to see if she was going to finish the thought, I continued. "Even now, I'm looking back, and all of that- that anger and shame I felt? I don't even know if I feel it any more. It's like it happened to somepony else, only it didn't. And even then I can't tell how much of it was just because I was running away when it happened."

"...I can't really blame you, for running."

"...But you do, don't you?" I looked at her, only for her to avoid my gaze. "I do. I have justifications, sure, but in that moment? I- I was just scared, and I thought leaving you to them would give me time to get away."

Spiral wrinkled her nose. "You didn't know me."

"No, I didn't, but if I'd gotten away - would I even know what happened to you? What would I have done? Like, maybe I would've made it to the factory, but you can bet one of those scorpions would've gotten me. I haven't seen anypony else out here. How sad would that have been? To have- to have died like that, alone, without ever finding out what happened to me? To everypony?"

"I... think..." Spiral paused. "If you had done something, like, I don't think either of us would still be alive. And, the way things went, we're both still here. So it's fine."

I thought about that for a long moment, conscious that she was watching me. "Yeah," I said, eventually, but I didn't really feel like much better.

"I got myself into that whole mess, y'know?" she told me. "I'd been wandering a while, like. Longest I went without a roof over my head. I ran across this house, and there was this earth pony there. We almost got in a fight, I guess. Like, I don't know how long she lived there, but she was growing actual plants. And she said I could stay, but only for a few days, because these raiders were going to come and take her produce. I got it in my head that I could help her, like, set an ambush."

She stopped there, and although I could tell how the story ended, I prompted her anyway. "It didn't work?"

She shook her head, looking down at herself. "This used to be her cloak."

"I'm sorry," I said. Then, after a little thought, I said, "I don't really think that sounds like it was your fault, though. You didn't... kill her."

"I killed them, though. That was how the whole thing started. I couldn't imagine that she'd be happy with a life like that. Like, when I left the Rangers, it was because I wasn't happy. But it was wrong of me to make that decision for her, or to push her into making that decision, if that makes sense?"

"Yeah, I guess," I replied.

She slowed her step for a moment, and levitated something out her saddlebags. The lightning gun. "I shouldn't have this," she said. Glancing forward to check we weren't being watched, she passed it across to my bags.

"It might work against their armour," I realised aloud. "If we can get some cells..."

"Yep. Like, they didn't bother searching us, but depending on what happens... anyway, it's yours, you found it."

"Depending on what happens, you might need it."

"Well, if I really need it, you have it, don't you?"

"...Yeah. Okay."

We reached an intersection, and I hesitated on the sidewalk. Spiral stepped out without looking, following the Rangers' lead. I took a few quick steps to catch up. "Where are we going?" The streets ahead were unlit, it seemed.

"We- the Rangers have an outpost in Skyward. Run by a skeleton crew, as a staging ground for salvage expeditions. It's the old M.W.T. building."

"Oh! I know the place. I used to pass it on my way to work."

"That's so weird... Man, I don't think you've ever told me what you used to do."

"Yeah, I guess I don't usually talk about it. I... I used to work for Pendulum, testing-"

"-Pendulum?" Spiral interrupted.

"...Yeah?"

"So you could get into the building."

"What?" I didn't understand what she was asking.

"Pendulum Labs! It's got like, a biometric security system. Only registered employees can get in. Like, the last time we were here, we spent a whole afternoon trying to break into that place."

"And you want me to- oh. The 'custodians' thing. I get it."

"Seriously, Porridge would kill for five minutes in that building. So like, I bet he'd- he'd not kill in return for as many minutes as he wants."

A burst of machine gunfire ahead startled me. The group of Rangers ahead had rearranged themselves into a circle facing outwards, and were moving back in our direction. I had no way of seeing what they'd fired at.

"What's happening?" Spiral asked as they approached, shielding her eyes from the spotlights now pointed at us.

One of them beckoned for us to join the circle, and we did, but no reply was forthcoming. Instead, Porridge addressed one of his subordinates. "I thought this district was clear." His tone was sharp, but I didn't get the sense that he was concerned.

"We scoured the area last month. With the barricades, the remaining ghouls shouldn't be able to get close."

Ghouls. It took a second for me to place the word. Something Spiral had said, that I'd forgotten to ask about?

"Clearly the barricades have not worked as well as we thought they would. I suppose we've been drawing them in since we arrived. No matter." I caught movement in the darkness of an alleyway, or I thought I did. "Standard procedure applies, with the exception that not all present are wearing power armour."

"Ghouls?" I whispered to Spiral. She didn't seem at ease, exactly, but she hadn't been before. Perhaps this wasn't such a big deal.

"Shit, didn't I tell you-"

Suddenly, all the Rangers around us straightened and Spiral trailed off.

Porridge spoke again, lower than before. "Incompetence. They are animals, mindless animals, and yet we have failed to contain them. We need to keep moving, lest they surround us." There was movement in the shadows at the end of the street, in the direction we'd come. "Move!" Porridge ordered, and we did.

I saw Spiral's shotgun glowing as she levitated it beside her. The Rangers made no effort to stop her, and I wondered again just how much trouble we were in. If I recalled correctly, the M.W.T. building was only a few blocks away. It was dark enough that I still couldn't make out exactly what was chasing us when I glanced over my shoulder. Just movement. I glanced again, in the exact same moment that one of the Rangers turned their spotlight around.

Countless points of light reflected back, and in that moment I understood that "ghoul" had not been a helpful word in the slightest. No, it appeared that on top of everything we were living in a full-blown zombie apocalypse and nopony had thought to tell me.

The power armour thundered, and despite their extra weight the Rangers were pulling ahead of me and Spiral. I was falling even further behind. I could barely see where I was going. My legs and lungs burned, and a voice in my head thought that I'd hurt less if I stopped.

I didn't glance back again. I had all the information I needed. There was a whole herd of zombies behind us at what appeared to be full gallop, and they were closing the gap. If I could just teleport away...

Spiral was shouting something at the Rangers. I couldn't make out the words over the cacophony of hooves and the roar of blood in my ears.

The stench of them was like that of the room back at Site Two, only multiplied a hundredfold.

Something caught my tail. Instinctively I kicked back, but my legs tangled together and I fell and they were upon me.

Then I was blind, buried, suffocating, screaming, kicking, swinging my horn wildly to ward off the press of corpses. Hooves, horns, and teeth meant for chewing leaves scraped at me. One of the ghouls found purchase on my leg and clamped down with its mouth. Its teeth sank into me.

This was nothing like before, staring down that raider. There had been ambiguity there, my mind had reached out for answers and found them. But in that darkness? My mind reached out again and found nothing. I had no agency. I was going to die.

For a split second, everything was bathed in an orange light. A wave of scorching air rolled over me. I heard the roar of machine guns.

Sharp pain stabbed through me, and for the second time in as many days I felt like I was falling into a bottomless pit.
> Tribal
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------



I wasn't dead.

It didn't feel like a relief to know that.

I'd been lying down on an air mattress - a surreal thing to wake up to, one which brought to mind distant camping trips and slumber parties. My injuries had seemingly vanished, and for a moment the illusion that I was dreaming returned. I wondered if I'd ever truly be able to shake the notion. I rubbed one hoof along my leg, feeling for where the ghoul had bitten me. Blood and fluid flaked from my coat.

Rather than try to get up and go looking for ponies, I decided to stay exactly where I was. The likeliest answer was that - for some reason - the Rangers had actually stopped to fend off the zombies. The fact that my injuries were gone indicated that somepony'd administered a healing potion (or several, depending on how many further injuries I'd sustained before they'd pulled me out), and the Rangers seemed like the kind of organisation to be hoarding large quantities of medicine. They hadn't taken off my raincoat, which seemed like an oversight to me. My saddlebags had been left in a heap by the door - again, did they just not care?

There was a certain spell to lying there. My legs ached.

I was in an office, it seemed. Whoever had worked in the room before had made an effort to add personal touches - dust-caked plastic models lined the shelves, and faded posters covered the walls. There was a neat-looking Wonderbolts print on the back of the door, one I didn't recognise. It seemed... sombre. Not like the usual Wonderbolts designs at all.

The window cut the sunlight from outside into a neat beam full of sparkling motes of dust. I wondered if the clouds had parted, and the desire to look out of the window was almost enough to bring me to my hooves. Almost.

A lot of time passed as I stared at that sunbeam, watched as the light crept inexorably off the poster and onto the wall beside it. The light ebbed and flowed as the clouds drifted, almost imperceptibly.

I wondered if Spiral was okay.

Several times, I almost got up. I'd had weekends like that, I recalled, in another life - weekends when I'd wake up and not move an inch. My mind would reach out for a reason to get up... something I needed to do... only to realise there was nothing. And it would only be then that the thought would occur to me that there had always been another option.

I'd stare at my alarm clock, which I hadn't set, and I'd think about nothing.

The door would be closed. My eyes would be closed. I would wait for the world to come for me.

On those weekends, the world didn't.

Eventually, I'd need to get a drink or go to the toilet or something, and that would be enough to break the spell. Reality would reassert itself.

I heard heavy hoofsteps approaching the door, and rolled to my hooves just as it opened.

"Ah! You're awake." Porridge sounded amiable enough. He was still in armour, a fact which struck me as strange. Did they wear that stuff everywhere? "Excellent. It seems we have much to discuss."

"What happened?" I asked. After a moment of standing there awkwardly, I sat down on one of the office chairs. A plume of dust rose from the cushion.

Porridge continued to stand rigidly where he was. I suspected that the armour could lock in one position, supporting its wearer. "You couldn't keep up. Spiral convinced me that you were worth saving." His eyes were invisible behind that mirrored visor. Still, his helmet gave me a level stare. "We took a risk on you. On Spiral's word. Believe me, were the assertion not already so unbelievable, so specific, I would've declared it a lie and left you to your fate. So tell me, Backlight... why in Celestia's name do the doors of Pendulum Laboratories open for you?"

Oh. Well, there was the answer. A sinking feeling settled over me, as I realised I was about to lose my bargaining chip. Still... "Okay. I can do it, but I have a condition," I replied, and Porridge laughed in my face.

"I can guess," he said, malice in his tone. "Let me make this crystal clear... you are not in a position to negotiate. You are alive at my word only."

There it was.

He continued. "You are in our debt. I suspect you care about continuing to live far more than I care about getting into that particular mausoleum. Both of those things can happen, if you so choose. But you still haven't answered my original question... why?"

Something told me that telling him about Site Two would be a very bad idea. "The biometric spells... they work on genetics." True enough. "It's not supposed to be the case, but if you're directly related to one of the ponies the spells are keyed to, you can get in too. It was a... known vulnerability, one I'm sure M.A.S. was working on. But our spells had to be keyed to a whole bunch of different ponies, meaning the vulnerability's huge." What I wasn't telling him was that M.A.S. had, as far as I could remember, succeeded in re-calibrating the spell.

That got a long stare from Porridge. "So you're saying that the security flaw... should be one that almost any of the tribals in the area can exploit?"

"Oh, uh... I don't know."

"You don't know?"

I really didn't know what he wanted me to say.

Finally, he sighed. "You're lying. I don't know who you are, but you seem about as comfortable here in the Wasteland as an earth pony on clouds."

"I-"

"It seems unlikely that you're a Stable Dweller, based on the state of all the known Stables in the area. That leaves the more... esoteric explanations. So I can say, keeping in mind where we found you, with some degree of confidence... well, that we finally know what Site Two was for."

I felt like I needed to say something, to lie, to do anything to salvage the conversation - but it was far too late. "Site Two... is buried. Ruined. I barely escaped alive."

"I see."

I didn't know what to say to him, to try and convince him that Site Two was worthless... to convince him to do the right thing. Instead, I asked, "Where's Spiral?"

Finally, the armour moved again. "Down the hall. I'll show you the way."

He led me past a few closed doors, until he came to one with a key in the lock. The key clicked as he turned it - such a tiny object in his club-like hoof.

"I'll leave you to it," he said. "Consider your options. If you're hungry, feel free to join us in the mess shortly - lock the door behind you." It was always so strange to me, hearing a pony speak with such casual deliberation. I'd never been much good at that.

He trotted back in the direction we'd come. I pressed the door handle, hesitated there a moment, then gently pushed the door open. "Spiral?"

It was an office, much like the one I'd been in, only the shelves and walls that had been filled with models and posters in that room were bare in this one. The grey mare sat on the other side of the desk from me, in a decaying office chair.

"Hey," she said, not looking in my direction, spinning herself first one way, then the other. She seemed... restless? "What did he say to you?"

I took the other seat. "He knows everything. I tried to cover for Site Two, but that only made him work it out faster. Says there's no way he's letting you go, and says he'll kill me if I don't get him into Site One."

"Fuuuck. I'm so sorry I dragged you into this."

"I mean, I'd already be dead, otherwise. So."

A tiny nod. Finally, she turned to face me, and upon seeing me she laughed a little, and I felt like shit. "You look like shit," she said. I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen my reflection. I glanced at my hooves. They were dirtier than they'd ever been. If I smelled, I didn't know it. "Y'know, like, when I left... it didn't even occur to me how much I'd miss the showers. Stuff like that, you just don't think about it, like."

"No, I guess you don't." I realised that, when I'd first run into her - bloodstains aside - she'd looked kinda like I did. Now her mane and tail were tangled, her cloak was ruined... she looked a mess. She looked like she needed a hug, but I stayed where I was. "Sorry," I said, and she frowned at me.

We sat in silence for a long moment.

Eventually, she spoke. "Y'know, like... for a moment I really thought you were dead, like. I couldn't find your pulse, and you were bleeding a lot, and... yeah. It fucking sucked." She crossed her forehooves and rested them on the desk. "Should've warned you about the ghouls. I mean, like, I don't know if it would've helped you, but at least... I don't know. I wasn't thinking." I started to say something, but she carried on. "Fuck, they made such a big deal of... of having cleared the area. There were talks about expanding the base here and stuff. And I was thinking, like, that's my chance - go to Skyward, grab a load of supplies, then head up west and join the others."

"Others? Other whats?"

That snapped her out of it. "Oh. Yeah. Uhh... apparently some of the other contingents are getting, like... I don't know, it was just some rumour I heard. A whole bunch of Steel Rangers leaving. And I was like, fuck, if they're doing it, so can I."

"So you were gonna try and... meet up with them?"

"Fuck, yeah, but it all went to shit. None of this was supposed to happen."

My mane itched, so I reached up with one hoof and scratched at it. "You can't give up," I said. "I don't know... maybe there'll be something in Pendulum we can use against Porridge. Then we hightail it out of here, go find these- these mutineers, I guess."

A trace of a smile passed over Spiral's face. "That what you call a plan? Like, if there isn't anything at Pendulum, then we're so royally fucked. And we just don't have the kind of resources for a journey like that."

I shrugged. "Best I can think of."

She rolled her eyes. "Well, maybe we can pull something out of our ass." After a momentary frown, she corrected herself: "Asses."

I stifled a laugh. There was a small part of me that thought I should say that everything would turn out fine, but I didn't. Instead, I asked, "Do you want me to stay with you? Here?"

The question seemed to surprise her. "Why? Like, do you have somewhere to be?"

"I haven't eaten in-" I briefly thought back, but with the time I'd lost unconscious, I struggled to make the calculation "-a while, and Porridge was offering food in the mess hall." After a moment, I added, "I can try to bring you some too."

"Yeah, okay." Her eyes flickered over me. "But seriously, like... you should get a shower first. There aren't any in this building, but they knocked through to next door. There's a block there they've got working..." Her horn flared green as she grabbed a dust-caked piece of paper and pencil to draw a little map for me. I tried my best to memorise her instructions as she did so.

"You'll be fine while I'm gone?" I asked. She nodded. "Okay then. See you later."

I needed to go up two flights of stairs to reach the passage into the building next door. It was hard for me to orient myself, as I'd never really paid much attention to the building before and it continued much deeper than the exterior facade would suggest. I wouldn't have been able to say how many floors there were - maybe six? Eventually I found the right corridor. No effort had been made to clean up the jagged hole in the brick wall, though the debris had been swept away. From the signage on the other side, I quickly deduced that the M.W.T's neighbour had been a hotel, with a rooftop pool and a full gym on the top floor. There were two baskets near the showers - one was full of towels, the other was empty. A hoofwritten sign indicated that wet towels were to be placed in the empty basket; it seemed I would be the first to take a shower since the morning.

I finally shucked off my raincoat. It was ruined - maybe if I went back to my apartment, I'd be able to salvage some of my old clothes? There were a couple of jackets I had in mind, but after two hundred years I wasn't holding my breath. Still, did I even want to go back to wearing that stuff? Everything was different now. What did ponies in the wasteland even wear? Other than leather armour, and power armour. Spiral had her cloak.

The water came through a little colder than I'd been used to. It ran red across the sloped tile floor to the drain in the corner. I screwed my eyes shut and shivered. No soap. I warmed to the water, and it warmed up a little itself. A haze surrounded me, and that was when I smelled it. That same smell from the room in Site Two, of a rotting corpse - maybe ten times weaker, but no less disconcerting. That was me. No wonder the Rangers looked down on... what word had Porridge used? Tribals. Celestia, what must Spiral have thought?

My mane prickled, and I glanced over my shoulder. A sudden image had planted itself in my mind, of a ghoul shambling around the corner. Stupid. One near-death experience, and suddenly I was a colt again.

I wondered how long it would take for that feeling to go away.

A while passed before I stepped out of the shower - and even then, I only did so because I was starting to worry I was using too much of their water. Then again, why did I care? I dried myself off as well as I could and picked my raincoat back up off the floor. I wasn't going to be wearing it again, but I didn't want to leave it there.

Somepony was waiting for me as I left the changing room. I dropped the raincoat in surprise and took a couple of steps back.

"Yo. Tribal." The unicorn was leaning against the wall. She was short, with a purple coat and mane, and she leaned against the wall. She was wearing some weird-looking red robes that seemed a bit too big for her- or perhaps that was just how they were supposed to be.

"Aaaa..." I tried to formulate a response, but got stuck on the first letter of the alphabet.

"What did you say to her?" She took a step forward. I was acutely aware that I was still sort-of dripping.

"Who?" I managed. "Spiral?" Who was this pony? Had she followed me? How long had she been waiting? What did she want? I was thoroughly weirded out.

"It was you, right? You're the one who got her to leave."

"I- I didn't! We only just met."

She snickered at that. "You just me-et," she echoed. "Oh, the way you say it... pal, you don't have the slightest idea, do you?"

She's right - I don't know what to say to that.

"I don't know what I did wrong," she said, her voice suddenly hoarse. "I don't know what she wanted."

She took two steps forward, horn angled at my face, and in my head I heard bone crack, saw a bolt of lightning and a bleeding stump - but she wasn't looking at me any more. She walked past me, robes brushing along the floor.

I wiped my mane out of my eyes. They were still stinging from the water. "You're gonna kill her," I called after her.

"...She deserted us," came her reply.

"Seems to me like she had a pretty good reason!"

"You don't know anything," she said, standing at the top of the stairs. "You don't belong here. If you knew what was good for you, you would leave Skyward and never come back."

I stayed there for a while, coat damp, and eventually the hunger in my stomach won out over the straining in my lungs. I navigated my way down to the mess hall, jumping at every shadow. When I arrived, a buck who wouldn't meet my eyes served me a bowl of oatmeal, and I sat down apart from all the other ponies to devour it. I could feel their eyes on me, and I wanted to shout at them, ask what was wrong with them, that they'd kill one of their own without compunctions. But instead I just sat there and ate the gruel, and when I finished it I seriously considered going to ask for more, just to fill the snarling hole inside of me. Anxiety got the better of me, and I made to leave, but then Porridge was there, hoof holding me in place.

He told me what I was going to do.
> Down
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------



The door slid shut behind me - or, rather, the doorframe. Every single piece of glass in the irregularly-shaped building had shattered, including the floor-to-ceiling windows lining the ground floor. I wondered how much glass had broken when the megaspells hit, and how much had broken as the result of vandalism since. I felt strangely hurt by the thought, as if the windows in my old place of work being smashed was somehow an attack on me personally.

I kept my eyes down, watching my hooves. Once I made it past the worst of the shards, I glanced back over my shoulder. From where she was stood in the parking lot outside, Spiral gave me what might've been intended as an encouraging smile. The Steel Rangers only stared at me impassively. At least, I assumed they were staring impassively - I couldn't see their faces. Truthfully, I learned nothing from that glance. 

Getting to the Pendulum building had proven challenging. The Rangers had escorted us past their barricades and fended off the never-ending trickle of ghouls, relying on the enhanced strength of their armour to kill them rather than their weaponry - gunshots would just draw even more of them to us. Suffice to say, seeing more of those creatures had proven... disquieting for me.

I swallowed and approached the elevators. The heavy doors, once polished mirrors - I'd hated that, seeing my reflection each morning right after the commute - were now scarred and blackened. They'd opened in eerie silence whenever a pony got close enough - now they opened with a screech, like hooves on a chalkboard. I glanced over my shoulder again before stepping into the elevator.

The moment the doors finished screeching shut, the voice spoke.

"Hello Backlight."

It was a flat tone, and I was already on edge, so it didn't exactly startle me. It did, however, really creep me out. "Uhhh... who's there?" I asked, looking first at the speaker the voice had come from, then around the elevator. Mirrors on all four sides, and the roof. I still hadn't pressed a button - although, to be fair, I hadn't exactly worked out which floor I needed to visit first.

"Guess," the voice replied after a moment.

"Uhh..." I didn't know. How was I supposed to know? "Do I... know you?"

Another moment of silence. "You don't know me. You know of me. I know of you. At least now I do. I've been expecting you. I wasn't sure if you would make it. But you did. And now we can talk." The voice was male, faltering, slightly distorted. It spoke like it kept forgetting how words sounded mid-sentence.

"...Are you trying to be creepy?"

Pause. "That's funny." Pause. "No. I'm not. This is the best I can do."

"Okay. Can we, uh, not- not talk like this? I mean, can we talk face-to-face?"

I didn't like how I'd worded the sentiment. I was starting to get an idea of the shape, if not the identity, of this pony I supposedly already knew of. "I'm afraid that won't be possible," came the most ominous response possible.

"...Riiight." There were a lot of buttons on the keypad, and I didn't know where to start. "Listen, I guess I need your help. You know the Steel Rangers outside?"

"Yes. I have access to most of the government's security cameras in this city. It did not seem as if you wanted to be with them. Likewise for the mare. But she used to be one of them."

"Right." There must've been a camera in the elevator, but I had no idea where. There wasn't any point facing the speaker, so I found myself looking at my own reflection.

It was intimidating that he'd gleaned so much information from camera feeds. I was pretty sure that security cameras didn't pick up audio, so... unless he could lip-read... 

It seemed to imply that he'd seen Spiral before I'd even woken up, with the Rangers, and was recognising her from then. Granted, I wasn't sure what the living population of Skyward was... but that level of attention to detail bordered on omniscient, at least to me, and the disembodied voice sold that effect.

"Look..." I started. "They want to get in here. They've... threatened us, and I need to get them into this building. Turn off the security."

"I can help you. But you need to do something for me in return." Of course I did. "There's some maintenance required in the sub-basement. It won't take more than a few minutes."

"Sub-basement?" I'd never heard of any sub-basement.

The speaker was silent for a moment. "Yes."

I sighed, adjusted my saddlebags, and hovered a hoof over the button labelled 'B'. "This one?"

"Yes."

I pressed the button. My chest tightened as the floor lurched downwards. It seemed that the intervening centuries since I'd last used the elevator had caused it to degrade, because it was moving at a snail's pace.

As I descended, I looked up at the roof, at the version of myself standing on the ceiling. "So, are you going to tell me who you are, or not?"

"Yes. I used to be Noteworthy."

"Oh," I said. "So you're my boss, in a way."

"Your contract has unfortunately expired." The voice pauses, and I wonder if there's a joke there, obscured by the mechanical intonation.

"So if you used to be in charge of Pendulum - does that mean you know about Site Two?"

"Yes. It was an independent project. Separate from our Ministry contracts. It was designed to place a cohort of trusted individuals into suspended animation."

"Something went wrong," I said. "Everyone was dead. And I think I woke up with amnesia."

"It was impossible to test the system for long-term use. Firewall and I were trying to outlast the inevitable. The fact that you are here at all is a testament to our success."

"No," I frowned. "That's- that's not right. The pony across from me was dead. Most of the facility was buried. That's not a success."

"You would be dead if not for Site Two. Immeasurable resources were expended on the project. You were the result. Be glad of it. Most ponies were killed by the very same megaspells that caused Site Two's collapse in the first place."

"I don't understand. If you knew about the megaspells, you should've built the place to survive them!"

"We did not learn of the megaspells until the rest of Equestria did. We had predicted that the war would escalate towards cataclysmic losses. We did not know the exact mechanism by which this would occur. We anticipated a biological weapon as the most likely candidate."

"Why didn't you try and work it out?" I asked, but the question felt hollow, like I already knew the answer. "Why didn't you do anything?"

"You speak as though you played no part in what happened. We were all complicit in Equestria's destruction. We thought we were entitled to this world. We had a vision for our world. We changed the world. The world is no more."

"No, it's still out there," I shrugged. "Different, but it's still there."

"It is not. You should know this better than almost anyone. We wanted the world the way we wanted it. None of us wanted this."

His way of speaking made him hard to listen to. Before I could reply, the elevator screeched to a stop and the doors opened.

Before me, beyond the faint circle of light cast from the elevator, was pitch darkness. "Can we get the lights on?" I asked, heart thudding in my chest, wishing Spiral was there with me. She had a flashlight spell. I didn't like being alone.

"I did not realise the lights were not already on. The cameras-"

The rest of the-thing-that-was-once-Noteworthy's words were drowned out by a screech of metal, as the space before me was illuminated in blood red light. I raised a hoof to shield my eyes from the beam, stepping to the back of the elevator.

I caught a glimpse of a wide, open concrete space, not unlike the testing tracks where I used to work. I saw black lumps on the floor, sitting in the middle of dark patches of concrete. In the middle of the room, I saw a hulking monster. I slammed one of the elevator buttons without looking, and the thing shining the light at me started whirring. The doors closed and the floor began to rise, and then I heard gunfire. A hole was punched clean through the very bottom of the door.

"-so sorry," I heard the voice saying. "I hope you are not hurt. I believed the Sentinel to have been deactivated by the Ministry of Morale operatives who breached the headquarters on the day the megaspells fired."

The doors slid open again, and I jumped. "Gah!" I stared out into the empty hallway, and collapsed onto my hindquarters.

"You have undoubtedly ascertained that the scope of my awareness over the facility is limited. This is what I am hoping you can fix for me."

I ignored the voice, instead tipping out my saddlebags. Out rolled all the tins of food, and out fell the lightning gun, but I ignored those, instead going for my shiny new canteen of clean water. The Steel Rangers had given it to me, and it was just like Spiral's. I took a long swig.

"It appears you have something of mine," said Noteworthy.

It took me a second to connect the statement to what I'd just done. "The lightning gun? It's yours?"

"It is a prototype EMP weapon. It was stolen from me by a factory owner. I assume that is where you found it. I am not sure why he wanted it. We paid for his services anyway. Factories in the area were in short supply. I regret this."

"Right," I said. Pieces were falling into place - the terminal, back at the office. That was the gun's doing. "It can kill the Sentinel," I realised aloud.

"This fascinates me. A wayward creation of mine has returned at precisely the moment when it is most needed. A symptom of Pendulum's failure will be its saviour."

"It doesn't have cells," I said, vaguely irritated by the voice's ramblings for reasons I couldn't quite put my hoof on. "There'll be some around here, probably, but that thing had a minigun on it. It'll kill me. I'm not going anywhere near it."

"You and I both know that you will. You believe in Pendulum Labs. You saw the good we did for Equestria firsthand. We can do good again. You have a chance here to change the world for the better. I also know that you are not as scared as you say. You have already survived multiple life-or-death situations. You will do this for me. You will do this for her."

"What makes you think you know me?" I said, thoroughly ticked off and wishing the voice had a face I could glare at. "We never met. Yeah, okay, you've got cameras, you've seen the stuff that's gone down. You haven't seen in my head. You don't know what I'm thinking."

Noteworthy was silent for a while. Eventually, he spoke again. "Please. I need you to do this for me. I have spent the last two centuries watching unfathomable tragedy unfold. I spent them knowing I could put it all right. I know you can do it."

I didn't reply, instead taking another drink from the canteen. I sat and thought about my situation, but all I could think about was Spiral. I hated that Noteworthy was right. Spiral had saved my life, multiple times, and I wasn't going to die for her - but even if she hadn't saved my life, I was beginning to suspect that I'd take significant risks for her. The kind of risks where, rationally, you know you stand a good chance of dying, but where your brain can't quite conceptualise the threat, can't quite internalise it. After all, I'd never died before.

I got up. "Where can I find some cells?" I asked.

Noteworthy gave me another floor number, and the elevator doors opened into a fairly large lobby. The main lights were off, but there were some other lamps dotted around the room which I supposed came on during emergencies, so I could see a couple of large turrets crouched on either side of a reception desk, and charging stations for sprite-bots positioned high on the walls. Using speakers in the room, Noteworthy directed me through the hallways to one of countless indistinguishable storecupboards, which had a shelf stocked full of boxes of the cells. I loaded the gun, discarding the spent cell, then dumped a few of the boxes into my saddlebags, wishing I could carry more. Then I walked back to the elevator, levitating the gun beside me. I pressed the button for the basement, and as the elevator descended I stared at the bullet hole in the door.

"Thank you," said Noteworthy.

The doors opened. It was dark again, but I ran out anyway, the dim light of my levitation spell creating a faint outline around the robot in the centre of the room. I pointed the gun and pulled the trigger, but there was no lightning, only the red light of the machine coming to life. It swivelled towards me, shining its spotlight at me, and to my horror I realised I was too far from the elevator to make it back in time.

So, acting on instinct, I rushed the thing, heading right for its wheeled legs as the minigun whirred up. There was a boom and a flash, and something whooshed through the air above my head, and it was only when I heard the explosion that I realised it was a missile. Then, suddenly, I was under it, and it was turning on the spot, trying to return me to its firing range. I realised there was a mount for a gun on the bottom of its metal body, right above me, and saw that it was torn and blackened. In fact, much of the machine was like that; clearly, it'd sustained a fair bit of damage in the fight Noteworthy had mentioned. If not for that, I would've been dead.

While doing my best to avoid being run over by the robot, I tried to work out what was wrong with the gun. I should've tested it before coming down, but the imminent danger meant I didn't have time to feel stupid. I swapped the cell for another from my saddlebags, spilling several on the floor in my haste, and tried to fire the gun again. Still nothing. It was only then that I saw a wire, flailing loose from the gun's casing. I split my telekinesis two ways, holding the wire separate from the gun, and took a closer look. In the guts of the gun, there was a contact which had solder on it, but nothing connected. The other end of the wire looked like it was connected to the trigger mechanism.

Testing the limits of my magical dexterity, I fed the wire back into the gun, pressing the end of it against the solder, twisting it around the contact, before pulling the trigger.

A bolt of lightning arced up towards the robot's casing, crackling over the metal, briefly blinding me. The thing went haywire, spinning in a circle around me and firing off missiles in all direction. The roar of the minigun was deafening, and it was all I could do to hunker down, screwing my eyes shut and pulling the trigger repeatedly.

Eventually, the flashes and the noise both stopped. The air was filled with dust and smoke and ozone. My ears rang. Slowly, I crawled out from under the machine, and I realised that its metal body was the only thing that had shielded me from being crushed beneath concrete.

I heard Noteworthy's voice, indistinct, and made my way towards it, picking my way over the rubble, seeing by the light of my horn. Was it brighter than before? My eyes stung.

"-did it. You did it." Even when I was right next to the tannoy, the voice was muted. "The door is through here. There is another hallway."

My heart sank at the thought of more obstacles. I tried to say something in reply, but my throat was raw.

"No more robots," said Noteworthy, as if he'd read my mind. "This has been surprisingly validating. Our upgraded Sentinel turned out to have survived an extremely dangerous altercation. The EMP gun was similarly more powerful than I knew. Think about this. It can be mass-produced. The wasteland is filled with old buildings guarded by robots. By Sentinels. They can be safely deactivated and reprogrammed. They can be used to protect ponies instead of ruins."

While he talked, I retrieved the canteen from my saddlebags and drank. Putting it away, I said, "Is that what you meant, when you talked about changing the world for the better?"

"No," said Noteworthy. "This is a stepping stone. The end goal is to achieve immortality for as many living ponies as possible."

"You know how to do that?" I asked. I'd been largely rolling with the fact that I was talking to somebody who claimed to be Noteworthy, because after all, I'd survived centuries beyond my expiry date. It seemed increasingly likely that he'd been conscious the entire time. "Have you just been stuck down here? You're immortal?"

"I am immortal in a sense. However my span of consciousness is finite. You will understand this shortly. We achieved immortality just once. I am the product of that. What I am describing will not have the same drawbacks."

"How?" I got up, and headed towards the door.

"My own knowledge of magic is limited. Ideally ponykind will devote its collective efforts towards discovering a more consistent version of the ghoulification process."

My blood ran cold as memories fought for space in my head. "You want to turn everyone into ghouls?"

"Yes and no. Not the feral ghouls you have encountered. Ghouls are usually perfectly sane. What you have witnessed is simply the effect of time upon them. I believe that this degradation can be prevented in the first place. Wear of the body can be mitigated using cybernetic enhancements. Wear of the mind can be mitigated using memory magic."

"But what if it doesn't work?" I press. "What if you make people into ghouls, and they... go feral?"

"I am confident that the solutions I have just described will work in the long term for the majority of ponies. Feral ghouls are not the threat you believe them to be. They are possessed of only rudimentary intelligence. I know of wartime research which may allow for the pacification of ghouls. Perhaps even control. Such research may be applied in the immediate future to neutralise the threat of the herds filling the city and beyond. The key point is that we have an ethical responsibility to prolong the lives of as many ponies as possible for as long as possible."

To say the least, I was sceptical that a pony who had by his own admission spent two centuries locked up in an abandoned lab with seemingly limited agency had cracked the secret of immortality. That didn't seem like the kind of doubt that was worth expressing, so I just trotted along the corridor in silence.

There was a desiccated corpse there - more than a skeleton, but it didn't particularly smell. I hadn't gotten close enough to any of the corpses in the main room to get a good look at them, but the corridor forced me to pass right by. Maybe it was just the lingering adrenaline in my system, but I felt nothing about it.

At the end of the corridor was a heavy metal door with a keypad next to it. At a glance I could see that it was a much more secure device than the one I'd bypassed at the factory, and for a second I was worried I'd have to hack it, but Noteworthy began reeling off a long combination. I struggled to keep up with him, but once the number had been entered, a light on the keypad flashed green, and the door slid open with a screech.

The room beyond was also dark, but hundreds of bright pinpricks teemed in the shadow. "The light switch is on your left," said Noteworthy. "This room operates on an uninterruptible power supply."

I found the switch - a heavy thing, more like a lever - and pulled it, and with a loud thunk the lights began flickering on.

The room was dominated by a very large machine. It consisted mostly of maneframes wired together, stacked atop one another, but there were a good number of components I didn't recognise in the slightest. At the base of the thing was a corpse, much like the one in the corridor, except wearing a lab coat. A unicorn. At the very summit of the pile of devices there was another corpse - one with the wing structures of a pegasus.

Behind the machine, filling several banks of shelves, was a kaleidoscope of colourful glass spheres. Memory orbs.

"What am I looking at, exactly?" I asked.

"You are looking at me. An exceptionally powerful maneframe running some bespoke spell matrices. The design was inspired by documents leaked from the Ministries. It is my understanding that the original design was intended to provide continuity of consciousness across the uploading process. That was decidedly not the case with our version. I am a copy of the dead pony you see atop the dais."

I stared up at the corpse. "What do you want me to do?" I asked, dreading the answer.

"The other body belonged to Firewall. We designed the machine together. We had hoped to mass-produce it. That quickly became impossible. We did not maintain sufficient documentation to replicate the design. It is one-of-a-kind. This is what drove us apart. Only one of us could use the machine. I positioned the dais beyond a unicorn's reach and he built a staircase. Each of us plotted to kill the other. We both died. I survived. I had not anticipated that he would install a countermeasure designed to cripple me. There is a hard drive in the pocket of his lab coat which contains authentication codes. I need you to plug that hard drive into the terminal at the base of the machine. This will allow me to access many more systems throughout Skyward and beyond."

"You said you'd help me, before. Me and Spiral," I said, stalling for time. "How?"

"I am unable to help you with my current level of access. I need to temporarily disable the biometric security system. You can then invite the Steel Rangers into the building. You will then need to get Spiral clear. Then I will reactivate the security system."

In the silence that followed his explanation, I cast my mind back over our conversation. Here was a pony - or, well, a copy of a pony - whose idea of a solution to my predicament was simply a matter of luring a bunch of ponies to their deaths. For all his talk of immortality, of betterment, he'd said little to convince me he actually cared for ponies at all. Spiral seemed to have no love for her former family, but somehow I didn't think she'd thank me for killing them.

"This is wrong," I said.

"This is the only way. This is survival. The Steel Rangers are responsible for a great deal of misery in this wasteland. This is justice."

"No," I said. "No. You want your access? Fine. But we do this my way. Seal off this room again. I saw the door, there's no way the Rangers can get through. Give them the rest of the facility. Let us go.

Noteworthy was silent for a few long moments. Then, he said, "It was foolish of me to expect better of you than this. But very well. You have the heart of a good pony. We will do this your way. This facility is full of nothing but relics anyway. Let them come."

I took a deep breath, then nodded at the empty air. "Right. Thank you."

A little tentatively, I approached the corpse on the floor. There was a weird looking gun lying on the floor next to it. The lab coat clung to the desiccated flesh, and I was glad that my telekinesis meant I didn't have to actually touch it. I found the hard drive and plugged it into the computer. The screen came to life, random green characters flashing up it faster than I could follow. And then, just like that, it was done, and the screen flashed off again.

"At last," said Noteworthy. "I'm free. I can fix everything. I can bring a close to this sorry chapter in Equestria's history."

I stared at the pyramid made from machines for a moment, before saying, "I'm going to go now."

"Very well. I cannot begin to express my gratitude."

Nodding again, I turned around and walked back out into the hallway. The door slid shut behind me.
> Whirlpool
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------



"It's done," was the first thing I said to the gathered Rangers upon leaving the building. "The biometric system's off."

"We shall see about that," said Porridge. He turned to Spiral, who was shivering slightly in the drizzle, and gestured at the door. "After you, I think."

She looked at him in surprise, then over at me. I gave her a tiny nod, but she didn't seem to react, except to start walking over to me, then past me. When she got to the elevator doors, they screeched open, as they had done for me. She turned around.

"Excellent," said Porridge as he approached. "However, the real test remains to be seen." He beckoned for two of the other Rangers to join him, and we all crowded into the elevator. Porridge looked at me - or at least, seemed to, his helmet made it hard to tell - before pressing a random button.

We arrived at the floor I'd visited before. I stared at the turrets with trepidation, worried that Noteworthy was going to have messed something up, but they sat exactly where they were, collecting dust. Porridge simply chuckled, walking right up to one of them. He put out a hoof and turned it on its mount a little, before tapping it. "At long last," he said. He turned to Spiral and me. The emergency lights reflected off his visor like fire. "I am an advocate of justice," he said, "but I am also a believer in honour." I saw the two Rangers we were with glance at one another as he walked back over to us. "Spiral, for your crimes against your brethren, I hereby excommunicate you from the Steel Rangers, now and forevermore. I hope I never see you again." He turned to face me. "You have done a great service for the wasteland this day. Consider your debt paid. You are both free to go."

I couldn't believe it. I'd expected a fight, or an argument at the very least. Instead, it seemed that he was wiping his hooves of us entirely.

Before I could say anything, he was already addressing the other Rangers. "Accompany them back to the surface," he said, "then begin shuttling the others down here. We shall fan out, securing one floor at a time. It may be worth converting this facility into another outpost, rather than transporting assets back to the M.W.T. building."

Just like that, the threat had passed. As Spiral and I left out the front door, I heard the voices of the Rangers in the lobby, but not what they were saying. Were they as surprised as I was?

"Are you okay?" I asked Spiral, once we were a block away.

She reacted like she'd forgotten I was there. "Yeah. I think so. It's hard to describe. Like... I'm free."

"What are you gonna do?"

She shrugged. "City's full of ghouls. I think I was hoping there would be ponies here, you know? But I don't think there are. So I guess it's like, just back to the original plan. Scavenge some supplies, and travel. Find the others like me."

"Yeah," I said. I scanned the streets, watching for movement. "I don't really know what I'm gonna do." It was an invitation, and opening.

She might have answered, but at that moment, there was a sharp sound from behind us. Staccato cracks, softened and muffled. "Something's wrong," she said, eyes wide. There was a muted bang.

"He lied," I realised aloud. "He's killing them."

"Who?!" Spiral asked. "What did you do?!"

"There was a thing down there. My old boss, only... a machine. It controlled the security system. It said-"

Spiral started running back towards the building.

"Spiral, wait!" I yelled after her. "It's too dangerous! It controls the whole facility!"

"You knew!" she shot back. "Fuck, man! What the fuck!"

"I didn't," I said, but as the words left my mouth they rang false, because there was an inevitability to the gunfire. What else should I have expected? I hadn't questioned Noteworthy's promise, because the truth was that I hadn't really cared about the outcome one way or another. All I cared about was Spiral, running straight into certain doom. "Please, Spiral. You have to listen. There's nothing we can do."

"Give me the gun," she called over her shoulder. She was faster than me, and I was falling further behind.

I shook my head, but she wasn't looking.

Then, she stopped dead in her tracks. There was a figure in the doorway. I recognised him immediately.

"I should have killed you both the moment I laid eyes on you," said Porridge, and he aimed his weapon right at Spiral, and I realised I was far too far away to do anything, that she was going to die and that it was my fault, and the inevitability of it was like a whirlpool in my head, curling, twisting, pulling everything towards it, pulling-

-and the world was nothing but light, for a split second and forever, falling-

-and he was right in front of me, rearing back, looking right at me through a broken visor with two wide eyes, one drenched red by blood. His gun fired, but it flew up to the side. For a split-second I thought I was safe, and then something detonated in the air, knocking me to the floor. The strap of my saddlebags broke.

"My oh my," Porridge said, but I could barely hear him. "You really are nothing but bad surprises. What did you hope to achieve, my little pony? I suppose I can put you down first."

I went for the lightning gun, but I knew it was too late.

There was a bang. I twisted to look, just in time to see the power-armoured pony crash to the floor. Blood dribbled out from where his visor used to be. 

Spiral was there, levitating her shotgun. She glanced down at me, and then turned to leave.

"Wait," I coughed. "Wait. I'm sorry, Spiral, please. I didn't mean for any of this to happen."

"What did you mean to happen?" she said. "How was this supposed to pan out, in your head?"

"I thought he'd let them be, he promised me..." I said, trying and failing to get to my hooves. One of my legs wasn't working right. "I thought that if I let them in, we'd be able to sneak away, or something. We could leave Skyward. There's other ponies out there, you said it, we can find them. Together. They were going to kill you, Spiral, and I can't... I can't survive out here without you. I don't know that I'd want to."

"Fuck, dude." She stared at me. "That's what this was to you, like, wasn't it?" Slowly, her face screwed up into something unrecognisable, an entirely different species. "Was it too much to ask, for you to be my friend, without needing me to- like- like-"

"It's fine, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have- just let me go with you," I said. "Everypony I ever knew is dead."

"Then I guess you know how I feel." Faltering, she took a step away, started walking - running - and she was gone.

When I got to my hooves, I wanted to go after her, but I found myself rooted in place. I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd never see her again, that everything we'd been through was suddenly punctuated - tainted in retrospect - and that it was all because of me.

And I was so angry about it, because I couldn't really work out where it had gone wrong. At every step along the way I'd done what seemed to make sense, and it had ended with me alone and bleeding.

My eyes fell on the entrance to Pendulum Labs. Leaving my ruined saddlebags where they were, I picked up the lightning gun.

As soon as I limped back into the reception area, the voice came from the speakers. "I never had a choice," it said. I ignored it. "The Steel Rangers would never have been content to leave me alone. A closed door is nothing but an invitation to them."

The elevator doors were jammed half-open, and behind them was nothing but the empty shaft.

"We had a deal," I said. "You promised. You shouldn't have made that decision for us."

"You should not have made that demand of me."

"I didn't have a choice!" I approached the elevator shaft, glass crunching under my hooves, and wondered how I was going to make it down. "Ever since I woke up out here, I've just been stuck reacting to things. How can I make decisions, if everything around me is trying to kill me? I don't remember what it felt like to have agency."

"Of course you don't," said the voice, and a small part of me thought perhaps it was meant to be a gentle statement, but the speakers just blared it out in exactly the same matter-of-fact tone they used for everything else. "You believe this to be a product of your environment. I would venture that it is simply who you are. You have always wished for freedom. You never recognise the freedom you have."

"You don't know me," I said, trying to peer down into the darkness, and cursing my leg as it twinged. I couldn't see the bottom.

The voice was silent for a while, as I stood there, my resolve butting up against the physical reality of what I was trying to do. "I have worked something out," said the voice. "Perhaps it will help you understand what has happened."

"Oh?" I said, letting sarcasm into my tone. "Do tell."

"I have already told you how I killed Firewall. I felt as though I had no choice then. It was a matter of life and death. But the truth is that my feelings on the matter were more complicated than that. I loved him. He was wholly unique in this world. But I knew that he did not love me. So killing him brought with it a sense of closure. Or so I thought at the time."

I didn't have anything to say to that.

"My existence is now confined to the networked systems of Skyward. I have lived in this way for over two centuries. It is a simple fact that my memory is finite. This is likewise true of ponies of flesh and blood. The difference lies in the fact that I am capable of perfect recall. Unlike you. You remember only the highlights of your life. The rest is cleared for space without you even thinking about it. This is a process I have to perform consciously. For every moment that has passed of these last two centuries I have at some point decided whether or not that moment was worth preserving."

"I don't know what you're getting at," I said. "Are you just saying I'm going to forget all this at some point?"

"Whether or not you will forget all of this is irrelevant. I suspect you will not." The voice was silent for long enough that I thought it had nothing more to say. I put a forehoof down into the shaft, and felt out a rung of an access ladder. I turned around, being careful of my injured leg, and began to lower myself down. Only then did the voice continue. "I talk to myself sometimes. It is a boon of my unique state of consciousness. When I have a thought I record it in a designated place. Then I erase my memory of having the thought. Upon seeing the record it is as though the thought is that of another. In this way I can hold entire conversations while being wholly alone. The trick is in erasing the memory of erasing the memory. It must be done many times in succession. Only with distance can I truly forget a thought. I have memories of wiping away entire arrays of memories which themselves consisted only of forgetting."

"This is crazy," I said, glancing back up at the doors, already so far above me. "You're messing with your mind."

"No mind is built to endure what I have endured without assistance. You can believe what you like. The reality is as I have explained. The truth I have worked out is one which I believe I have discovered countless times before. One that I have always ultimately forgotten. It is simply that Firewall felt the same way as I did."

"Oh," I said. "How can you know that?"

"My perspective has broadened. I believe it to be a matter of distance."

My leg burned. I made the mistake of looking down, and saw how far I had to go. Then I looked up, and saw that I was closer to the bottom than to the top.

"Backlight. You should leave. I know what you are here to do. The door to my chamber is sealed. There is nothing you can do to hurt me. I am sorry that things had to end this way. The truth is that you have been given a second chance at life and I believe you should take it. It is not too late to become a better pony."

I gritted my teeth. I was no longer able to put any weight on my back leg - instead, I was supporting myself with my forehooves as I dropped my good leg down one rung at a time. The only light came from my horn, holding the gun up beside me.

"I am sorry about you and Spiral. I understand that you are hurting now. But with distance that will fade. It is simply a fact of life that friends sometimes fall out. Perhaps one day you will see her again."

At the very bottom of the pit, below the sub-basement, rested the remains of the elevator car. Without such a drop beneath me, I was a little less scared. I navigated around and climbed out onto the bottom floor, where the Sentinel had once been. Where Noteworthy resided.

I startled, as two metal objects floated around on either side of me to block my path. Sprite-bots, round orbs with silent wings and magical energy weapons. The voice came from their speakers, echoing in stereo. "Turn around. Leave this place. There is nothing you can do."

I pointed the lightning gun at the robots and fired. The bolt arced between them, and they crashed to the floor.

From another speaker, Noteworthy continued as I made my way across the room to the hallway. "Some ponies burn brightly like stars. They pull the world into their orbit. They make it the way they want to be. You were never one of those ponies. You were never anything more than a blank slate. Nothing about your life is memorable or unique. You are here purely by chance. You are a victim of circumstance. I do not want to hurt you. The number of sprite-bots in this facility will far exceed the charge remaining in that device. I am sorry that this cannot end in a way which will give the strife you have endured meaning or purpose."

The dented door loomed in front of me. I aimed the gun at the keypad, and pulled the trigger. The bolt crackled over the keys, scorching them black.

The doors remained closed.

"I will offer you another deal. This is one I cannot renege on. I will tell you the true nature of Site Two if you promise to leave Skyward forever."

I went over to the keypad and started typing, trying desperately to remember the number as Noteworthy had told me - but it was hopeless. I couldn't even remember how it started. Why couldn't I just remember?

"I will tell you the true nature of Site Two anyway. Then perhaps you will choose to leave of your own volition. Perhaps then you will have the agency which you seek," continued the voice. "Firewall and I knew that Pendulum Labs had multiple leaks. Prototype technology we were developing was somehow falling into possession of the enemy. In spite of this we sought to secure the future of ponykind by assembling a trusted cohort of employees to place into suspended animation at the first sign of existential threat."

"How many?" I asked, despite myself.

"You do not want to know the answer to that question. More than enough to sustain multiple generations of repopulation. By that point we were already working towards immortality. Arcane science had already made great advancements in the field of memetic magic using the essentiality of ideas. The fact that concepts exist in our minds as impulses of electricity was not acknowledged or explored to the same extent. This was how we planned to transfer a pony to a maneframe. We realised that the two projects could dovetail together. I would be able to act as custodian over Site Two while its inhabitants slumbered. And for each in turn I would ascertain whether or not they could truly be trusted. One by one each pony would have their memories transferred to me. I would review them."

I remembered the memory orbs.

"Memory is a funny thing. You can lose so much of it. The mind will always seek to fill in the blanks. It will go back over what remains and revise it. It will stitch together the disparate moments into a single threadbare tapestry. The intention was always to return the memories to the ponies in stasis. As the life support systems began to fail following the megaspells it became clear that not doing so would be a mercy. So it is that my consciousness is constructed from the experiences of countless ponies. I see each day in my life from a myriad perspective. I am safe behind this door. To kill me would be to wipe away the last vestiges of countless ponies just like yourself."

I could almost remember. The rest of my life was on the other side of the door. I could almost remember the room as it had been, over the course of two hundred years. Every machine, every cable, every point of light, all of it my own mind, pared away. I was both where I stood, and-

-adrift in a pastel sea of memory, circling, today and eternally-

-inside the room. The machine loomed before me, and behind it, untold years of existence in glass and circuitry. I followed the path of least resistance around the maneframes and saw myself reflected in each and every one of the spheres. Behind me, the door opened, and I glanced back to see a swarm of sprite-bots pouring into the hallway. I turned back to the shelves, and raised the gun.

"Backlight. Wait. Do not do this. You are in there. You cannot-"


* * *


"Don't you want to know what happened? I can-"


* * *


"You weren't the first to-"


* * *


"This is the best I can-


* * *


"I hope it is good-"


* * *


"This password-"


* * *


"Who am-"


* * *