Chapter 3:

When I awoke, the world was a blur. Sickly dark-green shapes with outlines that melted into one another rushed past me, and even after I blinked a few times they didn’t become any clearer. If anything, they added splotches of red and pink that only made the miasma of color more confusing. The sounds accompanying them weren’t much better, being little more than the grumbling rumble of something mechanical. Sweet scents mixed with gasoline, magical fuel, and the omnipresent sticky humidity of the perpetual summer which blanketed the area...assuming, of course, I was even still in the general area of Primum Mobile.

I slowly rose, surprised to find that I could do so. Wherever I was, why hadn’t I been bound and gagged? The last thing I remembered was being knocked out by those crazy ponies at the SPP Tower, so I assumed they had captured me, but at the moment it certainly didn’t look like that. I looked around me, trying to make sense of things through the throbbing in my head and saw that I had actually been bound and gagged, even though my legs were free and my mouth was unhindered from hyperventilating at the sight I saw below me.

I nearly leapt back while an intense dread the likes of which I’d never experienced welled up in the depths of my stomach, if not my soul. I was looking down at what appeared to be my own body, which was battered and bruised, its stealth suit caked with mud, blood, dust, and burn marks.

But if that was me, then who—what—was I? Where was I? What in the world was going on?!

I glanced down at whatever body I was occupying, but saw myself just as I always had been, wearing the same badly-damaged stealth suit around a badly-damaged pegasus body. Then there were two of me?

That dread came rushing up my spine as I surmised that probably wasn’t the case.

I looked up. Instead of the cloud cover I had expected to see, I saw a clear sky painted a bright, burning crimson, as if the air itself had been set aflame.There were bright lights in it as well, brighter than any stars I had ever seen. They left trails like comets yet never seemed to be getting any closer. It was like watching a meteor shower frozen in time, the falling stars immobile yet burning all the same.

“Is this...” I gulped, glancing back at the Surprise that wasn’t me. “Am I dead? Is this the afterlife?”

Taking another look up at the burning sky, I was guessing this wasn’t pony heaven either.

“No...” I whispered to myself, my eyes, or whatever ghostly substitute I now had for eyes, welling up with tears. “I don’t want to go to Tartarus...”

But then again...if this was hell, then what was my body doing here with me? That didn’t make any sense...perhaps this was some sort of purgatory?

I looked around once more, spotting Firefly’s own battered and scuffed body in her data management armor, also bound and gagged a few yards away. We both appeared to be on some sort of wide metal platform, bumping and shifting as if we were moving over uneven ground. Looking back at the blur of colors beyond the side of the platform, I assumed this was because we were moving, probably through the Blackmarsh.

Ahead of the platform was some sort of raised, thick pillar, and then...oh. Atop the pillar was one of those gigantic green-fire-shooting cannons. Beyond it was a humongous construct that must have been the cockpit of one of the massive trucks, the back of which I assumed I was now riding within. But where was the siding? The trucks had had large boxed-in beds behind them, most likely to prevent whatever they were carrying, like the cannons, from falling out.

“Surprise?” asked a familiar voice, and I looked over to see a sight that nearly made me leap up into the air, and I was quite surprised it didn’t make me vomit then and there. A second Firefly was rising up out of the first, the new one identical to the body still prone on the ground but moving free from it as I was. She looked around in confusion before taking a look down at her own form and having much the same reaction I had. “Celestia’s sun—what’s happening?!”

“I wish I knew,” I said weakly. “Look up.”

The new Firefly did just that, her eyes widening further at the burning sky and the immobile falling stars. Then she began to squint, looking from one unidentified flying object to the next.

“That trajectory pattern...it looks familiar...” Firefly noted. “And notice how the heads of the objects aren’t really burning; it’s only the space around them, as if the air is on fire...”

I looked up and saw that she was, as usual, correct. Also as usual, though, I still didn’t see how that added bit of weirdness made anything clearer. I still didn’t understand what was going on.

Seeing my confusion, Firefly looked grim as she said “Those aren’t meteors, or comets, or anything natural. Those are megaspell warheads—balefire bombs, most likely having just re-entered the atmosphere.”

“But that’s impossible,” I breathed, my heartbeat quickening further. “There can’t be that many unfired balefire bombs left in the world. And they aren’t even falling! They’re just sitting there in the sky...with burning trails...none of this makes any sense...”

“That seems to sum up the last twenty-four hours expertly,” Firefly said with a wry smile.

She walked over to sit beside me as we watched the blur of plant life that was the Blackmarsh start to peter out and fade away. Open marshland started to replace it, mixes of murky water and scrub, so closely intermingling at times as to be indistinguishable. Shanty shacks began to appear as well, dotting the watery area on ramshackle stilts, many having collapsed long ago but a few still standing tall. Perhaps some had even been built after the apocalypse.

More sturdy buildings began to crop up, though these had definitely been built before the end of the Great War, or perhaps even during it, and it certainly showed. Collapsed or at least cracked concrete structures, worn brick and mortar, rusted steel and shattered glass dominated the scenery. It seemed we were entering the ruins of Neigh’Orleans, or whatever equivalent existed in this limbo world.

I suppose we should have considered, or maybe even tried, to fly away. However, there was no Primum Mobile Military Base overhead to which to return, much less a cloudcover. The best thing to do seemed to be to simply wait and see where we were being taken. Moreover, neither of us seemed to want to leave our bodies, even if we truly were dead. There was no way to take our pulses, as our hooves passed through slumped doppelgängers, and their armor prevented us from seeing any possible rise and fall in our chests.

We didn’t even really speak all that much. I suppose we were just so utterly out of our depth that we didn’t know what to say.

As the giant vehicle began to move further into the city, taking a rather circuitous route towards...wherever we were going...we saw more and more of Neigh’Orleans, far more than either of us ever had. It was a rather sad sight, quite honestly. Many of the buildings had a more classical feel, having been built in a style that was outdated long before the Great War had even started, or so Firefly said. Pictures of other cities I’d seen back in the orphanage’s history classes were usually in an Art Deco style, with big, bold designs meant to invoke feelings of sturdiness and strength.

Neigh’Orleans, on the other hoof, had an earlier feel to it. The designs were more elaborate, but also more carefree, almost lackadaisical. Elaborate swoops and curlicues appeared in the metalwork in certain fences, a style Firefly called “wrought iron.” Buildings were also narrower than what I had expected, tightly pressed together, leaving little if any room between them, which even then created myriad alleyways and tiny cobblestone streets.

As the truck turned down the wider roads, avoiding many of the main pathways, I saw that much of the city was at least partially flooded. Alleyways and even whole buildings would disappear into murky water, other structures only half-submerged, though the rest of the city seemed relatively dry.

Stranger still was the utter lack of ponies. There didn’t even appear to be any wildlife, mutant or otherwise. No ghouls, no crazed survivalist ponies, no monstrosities, nothing. The only signs of life here were the occasional aquatic plants or algae growths which populated the city’s watery areas.

Surprisingly enough, that was far from the strangest thing—some buildings seemed to have disappeared altogether rather than just collapsed. In certain places where by all rights it looked like there should have been some sort of structure, there was nothing. In other places, shadows were cast despite there being nothing to cast them, and in other places still there were bizarre constructs that didn’t seem to fit in with the rest of the city all.

There were many statues, for one thing, that didn’t look like anything anypony I knew about from before the Great War would have made, and all in places no statue should have been. They were ponies, mostly, but all of them were in poses of horrid anguish, faces contorted with pain as they crawled away from unseen monsters or hid their faces from invisible sights. Many littered the streets, cracked and covered in ash or mud, but still there, still disturbing to behold.

The strangest thing of all, though, were the shadows that moved. Pony-sized black shapes darted between the larger darknesses cast by big buildings or the things that weren’t there. They raced along the ground, two-dimensional carpets of blackness that contorted and writhed, changing shape as they moved silently along. Sometimes they were pony silhouettes, but most often they were not, instead taking on nightmarish shapes. Luckily for us, though, they didn’t seem to be interested in bothering us. In fact, it was almost as if they didn’t even notice the truck was there.

When the truck finally stopped, we seemed to be nearer to the heart of the city, where buildings were much, much taller. Though they retained their classic feel, many of these approached skyscraper height, with a few towers actually doing just that—and then some. The place at which we stopped, however, was another of those empty spaces where a building should be but wasn’t. It was wedged between two towers, one windowless and composed of cracked concrete with burn marks on one side, the other a tower of steel and glass with shattered windows all up its sides.

As the truck slowed to a stop, the wind began to pick up. It almost seemed to be tugging at my ghostly mane and tail, lightly at first but soon picking up speed. I turned and saw Firefly was being affected by something very similar, though she was being pulled in a different direction. I tried to call out to her, to ask what was happening, or perhaps to demand some sort of normality in this horrific nightmare my life had become, but the wind stole away my words. Firefly lost her grip on the side of the truck and flew back towards her body, which she melted into, becoming one with it once more. My own inanimate doppelgänger was doing the same to me, and darkness quickly swallowed all awareness as I disappeared into my own flesh.

I blinked a few times, quite surprised to find out that I could. I looked around uncertainly, my movements limited, my hooves bound and my mouth gagged. What?

I tried to look up, but saw only the cloudy sky overhead. Gone were the scarlet blaze and the frozen-falling warheads. All around me rose cold steel walls, rusted and chipped, covered in posters, some faded and some looking like they had been freshly printed, not that I knew how dirtsiders could have done such a thing. The ones I could make out were fairly similar to what I would imagine that upstart earth pony in power armor would have said in a propaganda rally—pictures of powerful earth ponies planting trees, building machines, stomping on other tribes, with taglines like “The earth is our domain!” and “ Slaves no longer—We will be the masters now!” Each poster, old or new, all bore that same logo of a hoof striking sparks on an anvil, with the words “Guild of Iron” underneath it.

Who were these ponies? Some fanatical offshoot of the Brotherhood of Steel? I knew even the Brotherhood wasn’t exclusively made up of earth ponies, though; why the tribalist extremism?

“Good, the airheads are awake,” came another familiar voice, one I was much less happy to hear. Turning my head, I saw the upstart power-armored rookie watching us through his visor, his superior hopping down off the back of the truck bed and talking to somepony I couldn’t see. “Get up, you two—Guildmaster Hephaestus will want a word with you.”

Despite the scorn in his voice, I couldn’t help but hear a touch of jealousy in it. I supposed he really did believe in all these propaganda posters. For all I knew, he could have decorated the truck with them himself. I assumed that meeting his leader—and if this was the same Hephaestus as earlier, what else could he be?—would be akin to a fanatical Enclave recruit meeting a High Councilmember...which, admittedly, I had done myself, now that I thought about it, not that I had wanted to do so.

The rookie trotted heavily over to us, the pistons and hydraulics in his power armor hissing as they allowed the impossibly heavy suit to move, and he extended a hoof. A blade popped out of the side of it and he slit my bindings. I winced at how close he came to slicing more than just rough cloth. He turned to Firefly and repeated the process, and as he did, he spoke.

“You two are now prisoners of the Guild of Iron. Your technology now belongs to us, and if we so much as think you’re going to pull any tricks, we’ll electrocute you both alive with your own suits. Got that?”

Could they really do that? I certainly didn’t want to find out, and so I nodded hurriedly. Firefly merely narrowed her eyes and stood up, remaining silent.

“Good,” the earth pony said, apparently taking our silence for compliance. “Follow me.”

He leapt off the back of the truck and clanked heavily to the broken pavement, probably adding a few new cracks in the process. I walked over and did the same, noting that I could stretch my wings. They were sore from the bindings, but the fact that they hadn’t remained bound was what worried me. If this ‘Guild of Iron’ was that confident about killing us before we could escape, I didn’t want to risk simply seeing if I could fly away.

Looking around, we seemed to be in the heart of the Neigh’Orleans ruins, deeper than any Primum Mobile operative had, to my knowledge, ever ventured. I suppose I should have found that significant, but I was simply terrified. I had always wanted to explore the depths of the ruins, sure, but not as a prisoner! Like every other pegasus at Primum Mobile, I had never thought the city ruins ever contained any organized force, just the same mutant monsters and crazy survivalists as the Blackmarsh.

Red Eye’s slave pits were far to the northeast, the Goddess and her alicorn armies even farther away than that, and any other threats also scattered across the Equestrian Wasteland. They all had one thing in common—they were far, far away. Neigh’Orleans was supposed to be as remote and harmless as you could get in the post-apocalypse. Now I was seriously beginning to doubt that once-vaunted truth.

The Guild of Iron rookie stopped to talk to his superior, the older earth pony. Whoever the older earth pony had been speaking to must have slipped away, as I saw no sign of them. While they conversed, I looked up at the towering skyscrapers gracing downtown Neigh’Orleans, marveling at the fact that they hadn’t collapsed even two-hundred years after a balefire strike. Given my suit’s rad-counter, we weren’t even all that far from the impact crater.

The downtown area was dominated by two immensely tall towers, one of steel and glass—or rather, mostly steel with bits of shattered glass sticking to it—and one of windowless concrete...wait a moment...

I followed the towers down to the space where they would have met, finding them separated by several hundred yards, in which rested a colossal dome of some sort. My eyes kept roving between the two skyscrapers, my mind screaming at me that the space between them should have been empty.

I glanced at Firefly, and saw a similar look of confusion on her face. But...why? It had just been a dream, right? My dream, to be exact...you couldn’t share dreams, could you?

Firefly saw my look and seemed about to say something when the rookie called back to us “Come on, you two. The Guildmaster’s ready for interrogations.”

I really wondered how happy this pony was going to be to see me, considering I’d killed his friend. I gulped, wondering if he’d try to return the favor, concluding it would be fairly likely he’d try. Possibly through extensive “interrogations.” I gulped again.

We were marched up to the dome, and as we were herded through the doors, guarded on either side by more earth ponies in ridiculously overpowered armor, I could just make out something etched into the side of the wall: MegaDome: Home of the Neigh’Orleans Fighting Fish.

The doors opened of their own accord, sliding to the side as we approached, surprising me yet again. I had always thought that Neigh’Orleans was without power. Then again, perhaps these ponies simply had some generators.

The inside was quite a surprise. Ponies of all sorts, not just earth ponies, but unicorns and even a few pegasi were jostling around each other, all wearing t-shirts or sports coats or even jerseys, nearly all of them bearing an image of a pony with a fish tail and the words “Go Fighting Fish!”

I had to admit, this is not what I had expected when entering the facility.

“Move along,” instructed the armored earth pony behind us, roughly pushing me forward into the crowd. Firefly kept pace with me, looking straight ahead, seemingly unperturbed by the oddness of it all. Actually, looking at her, she didn’t even flinch when one of the new ponies dashed right in front of her, his tail inches from her face. I had to stop altogether to avoid him running into me as he galloped by, shouting back to his friends “Come on! They’ll start the kickoff any minute!”

I was beginning to get a sinking feeling about this, even moreso than earlier.

As we moved through the crowd, or what I was seeing as a crowd but what I was beginning to suspect more and more was an empty lobby, I heard other snippets of conversation.

“What do you mean season tickets are more than a hundred bits?!”

“Mommy, can I get a foam hoof?”

“Lemme get an order of nachos, extra cheese!”

One of the ponies even bumped into me, and I nearly toppled over, feeling the full bulk of his weight before he disappeared back into the crowd. Firefly saw me stumble and glanced concernedly at me, but I waved her off. I would be fine. Out of all of my hallucinations, this was actually one of the more pleasant ones. A milling throng of excited sports fans was almost nice to see, as was imagining what the stadium would’ve been like in its heyday.

As much as I knew the ponies weren’t really there, my subconscious couldn’t seem to grasp that fact, and so I had to weave my way through the crowd as if they were real rather than just walk through them like a ghost. I’m sure it looked rather awkward to the average viewer, but I could feel the prewar ponies bump, shove, and squish against me, so I didn’t have much choice.

Eventually we made it through the crowd and walked out of the lobby to see a whole stadium’s worth of screaming, cheering ponies under a bright, clear blue sky. Grass, actual live, green, unmutated grass blanketed the vast expanse of space in the middle of the ascending seats. There were white stripes of it in certain areas, and even numbers painted on. Goal posts stood at either end, and the burliest, most muscular ponies I’d ever seen were getting into some sort of series of formations at opposing ends of the field.

There were even a few fans down here on the field, sitting in special boxes, and looking a fair bit wealthier than the common sports fan. It baffled me that ponies would pay so much just to see a sport—something that, as far as I knew, hadn’t actually existed for the last two centuries. Even in the Enclave airspace above, where civilization persisted, ponies didn’t watch sports. If they watched anything at all, it was military parades and wargames, all of which were merely meant to bolster the military itself, and that was a purely practical purpose. After the apocalypse, there was no time for games for their own sake—everything had to have a purpose centered around survival.

It was hard to think of a time when such hadn’t been the case, but seeing it all here before me, and knowing a little from the old history textbooks, I knew the world hadn’t always been a radioactive deathtrap. Maybe back then they would have even had ways to cure my schizophrenia.

I suddenly experienced a brief moment of hatred towards life in this era.

The rookie was leading us to one of the ground level boxes, and again I heard snippets of conversation as we passed the wealthy ponies. Not all of them even seemed to want to be here, again making me wonder why anypony would have bothered with sports at all.

“I know it’s a status symbol to be here, dear, but do we really have to sit this close to those sweaty meat-slabs?” hissed a pony with a monocle to his mistress.

“What if one of the players runs into us? Have you seen the size of those things? They’d flatten us, and ruin my dress!” shrieked a mare with a dress probably worth enough bits to feed a prewar third-world country.

“I know you hate sports, princess, but with everything I’ve been doing for you lately, the least you could do is sit and bear it for one afternoon,” sighed a young earth pony stallion who was patterned with a most unusual pinto coat—brown splotches trading off for white patches. That caught my eye, actually. Most ponies’ coats were a solid color, so to see one that was mixed-and-matched like that was surprisingly striking. He wore an eyepatch and a bandana around his neck, almost making him look like some sort of pirate, though the Fighting Fish jersey he was wearing offset that a bit.

The mare beside him, apparently his ‘princess,’ looked sullen. She herself was a unicorn with a dark blue coat with a light-blue mane and tail, and seemed to have a thing for silver jewelry. Her mane was done up in a ponytail, and for some reason she looked just the slightest bit familiar. On a whim, I slowed down to listen to their conversation.

“Please don’t call me that, Pip,” the mare sulked. “It’s Moonbeam, remember? And with all I’ve had to do lately, being with you is the one time I can relax a bit. You don’t know what it’s like, having the whole country weighing down your withers.”

“Maybe if you let me help you, I could ease up that weight a bit?” Pip said, raising an eyebrow—er, the only eyebrow he had. “Maybe if I was allowed to do my part, I could help end this war a little faster—”

“NO!” Moonbeam all but shouted, drawing a few angry stares from those around her. There was something in that voice that made it seem as if it was seeping into my core, vibrating my very bones. “You don’t know what it’s like on the front lines, if anything happened to you I’d—”

“Move it along,” the earth pony superior snapped from behind me, shoving me forward with his armored hoof once more. “You don’t want to keep the Guildmaster waiting. Trust me, it isn’t a pretty sight.”

I was frustrated at not being able to hear the rest of the ponies’ conversation. I knew the sight of that mare would nag at me for some time yet. And who was that she was with? Pip and Moonbeam, Pip and Moonbeam... I didn’t know why, but I was going to have to remember those names and see if Firefly knew anything about them when we had the chance. They must have been important historical figures, though I couldn’t imagine who.

We eventually entered a box that was actually closed off from the rest of the field, possessing its own roof and, apparently, soundproof walls and windows. I wondered what the purpose of that was when you were trying to watch a hoofball game, but I chalked it up to just one more thing I didn’t understand about the past.

There was a table with some refreshments, a few luxury chairs, and nothing else save for the single other occupant, the same powerfully-built yet elderly earth pony I’d seen back at the SPP Tower. He was facing away from us, looking out one of the side windows, almost as if he was seeing the same thing I was. He waved his hoof without looking back, motioning the rookie away as he started to come close. The rookie nodded, bowed, and left, leaving only the senior armored earth pony with us. The door shut.

“Good evening,” the Guildmaster said, still without turning around. I wondered what he was really looking at, because right now he seemed intent on the hoofball game outside. “I suppose I should say ‘Good afternoon,’ but it’s late afternoon, and ‘evening’ sounds more appropriate to this type of encounter, doesn’t it?”

He waited for a response, though nopony spoke.

“Not the talkative type, I see,” Hephaestus said. “I suppose I should have expected as much. Pegasi always did prefer to speak with action rather than words. The same often goes for earth ponies, quite honestly. Leave the intellectual prattle to the unicorns, why don’t we?”

“What do you want with us...sir?” Firefly spoke at last, and I silently thanked her for doing what I could not.

“Quite honestly, my dear, I want information,” he replied, still not turning around. What was he looking at? By the way Firefly was craning her neck to try and get a better view, I assumed she was thinking the same thing. “No, don’t think I’m going to interrogate you about your precious Enclave in the sky—I have no interest in antiquated tribal-imperialist political factions.”

That caught me off-guard. If we were the tribal imperialists, then what was he?

“No, I want to know how two young pegasi with minimal knowledge of the Equestrian Wasteland were able to get past the strongest military on the southeastern seaboard, not to mention how one of you was able to actually defeat the most cunning and efficient warrior I’ve ever known.”

He finally stepped away from whatever it was he had been looking at and turned to face us, causing Firefly to gasp. I only saw some burly athlete ponies wrestling for a ball outside, wondering why this hallucination was lasting so much longer than the others and getting more than a little worried because of it. Then, however, the glass seemed to mist over, like somepony had breathed on it, and lines began to form in the fogged glass.

Other things were beginning to fade too. The sunlit field outside was fading into darkness lit by only a few distant lights, and grimy filth began to coat the interior of the booth. The chairs became motheaten, the lights shattered, and the windows scratched.

I sighed in relief. I may have still been a prisoner, but at least I was back in reality.

My relief was quickly cut short by the sight of what Hephaestus had been looking at. The window had been replaced, the etchings having morphed into a large terminal screen with design schematics for the respective power armor and stealth suit of Firefly and I. A large command prompt blinked quietly at the top of the screen, reading ‘Terminate Y/N?’

I gulped, supposing they hadn’t been bluffing about hacking our suits.

“But that’s impossible!” Firefly gasped, her mouth hanging open. “Our security systems are the best in the sky!”

“Which means little on the ground,” Hephaestus chuckled. “Besides, we’ve had access to the arcane technology that led to the Enclave’s modern machinery for ages, and we’ve been improving upon them and other technologies since the day the Guild was founded. This sort of code is child’s play.”

“Who are you?” Firefly demanded. “How does the Enclave not know about you?”

“You’re in no position to be asking questions, miss...Firefly, is it? That’s what your suits’ coding tells me, anyway,” Hephaestus said, looking mildly amused at Firefly’s shock. “Instead, why don’t we find out who you two are. You’re Firefly and Surprise, both privates, one a maintenance technician and the other an intelligence officer. You hail from the Primum Mobile Military Base almost directly above us, which for all intents and purposes is less of a military base than it is a weather outpost. Am I right so far?”

Firefly’s look must have been all the answer he needed. I merely tried not to meet his eyes.

“What the code doesn’t tell me is how somepony of your rank and skills could have outsmarted and defeated ponies who face greater threats on a daily basis,” Hephaestus went on. “That just doesn’t happen, not in the Equestrian Wasteland, unless a few select conditions are in place. Which means, quite simply, that you two are either very, very lucky, or very, very unlucky. Which one, however, is something only time will tell, and I intend to find out.”

Firefly and I said nothing, but Hephaestus walked closer to us, looking us each in the eye in turn. To Firefly, he said “You were able to manipulate technology on a level I’ve never seen outside of my own guild. Imagine what you could do with the proper training?”

To me, he said “You, however, present a far more interesting problem. You’re not charismatic, you’re not a fighter, and you’re not even particularly wise, but you are agile and clever, and that makes you very dangerous. I reason that I can put an end to that danger here and now, just to be on the safe side, or I can turn it to my advantage. With proper training, you too could be of much use to me.”

He took a step back and resumed his position. The fluorescent lights above painted dots of white in his calm, stoic eyes as he folded his hooves in front of his mouth. Not a word passed his lips for a long moment. His eyes flicked between us every so often, his gaze drilling into us like a hot welding laser.

“You want us to work for you, and betray the Enclave?” Firefly asked at last. Her voice was hard, as was her gaze.

“Think of it more as a mandatory opportunity to expand your horizons,” Hephaestus said with a dry chuckle. He nodded to the guard who had escorted us here and said “Take Miss Firefly here to the Technology Division, and notify the Warwing Council. They’ll be all-too-eager to meet the pony who defeated their Lord General.”

The guard nodded and turned to leave, looking back when he saw Firefly wasn’t accompanying him. He gestured for her to follow him, but she merely planted her hooves and shook her head.

“I’m staying with Surprise,” she said. “We stick together.”

“I’m afraid that’s quite impossible,” Hephaestus said, shaking his head. “As admirable as your camaraderie is, I’m afraid I have different jobs planned for each of you. You can either do as I say or allow me to electrocute you both right this instant.”

Firefly glared at him, almost looking like she was daring him to try, but at last she turned to look sorrowfully at me. As much as I didn’t want to be separated from Firefly, I didn’t want the both of us to die either. I nodded at her, giving a weak smile.

“I’ll be okay,” I said. “We’ll see each other again—trust me.”

She grit her teeth but nodded and turned to follow the guard outside.

I turned back to see Hephaestus had returned to facing the oversized terminal screen, his back to me. If I had had a knife, it would have been so easy to just...but no. I had killed in the heat of battle, but only because at that precise moment it was literally either him or me. Hephaestus may be threatening our lives, but I wasn’t sure I could kill a pony in cold blood like that...or at least lukewarm blood, considering the blood he already had on his hooves from murdering my entire squadron.

Commander Archangel must be expecting a report soon, but I doubted Firefly would be able to send him one. Even if she could, I highly doubted he could spare any more soldiers for a rescue party, least of all this deep inside the city, outnumbered by hostile forces. I gulped. This was not going to be a fun experience. But I kept telling myself I would get out of it. I had to. I wasn’t cured yet, and I wasn’t about to die with hallucinations muddling up my brain. And I certainly wasn’t going to leave Firefly here with these tech-zealots.

Maybe some information would help me know who exactly I was dealing with, starting with who these ponies actually were. Just who were the Guild of Iron? I was very eager to know if they were indeed an offshoot of the Brotherhood of Steel, and if so, why they broke off from the main organization.

However, just as I opened my mouth, Hephaestus cut me off by saying “Your friend shouldn’t be able to hear us now, so I think it’s time we had a little chat.”

Huh? Uh-oh...I did not like the sound of that...

He turned to me again, his body angled so that I could see his hoof poised over the red button, eyes narrowed.

“What is the Enclave testing?” he said. “How much do they know, and when did they learn of it? How are they getting intel?”

What in the world was he talking about?

“Um...sorry, sir, but I’m afraid I’m not sure—” I stammered.

“Don’t play stupid with me,” he said sharply, shaking his head. “You’re obviously far too good at the role to force it, unlike your friend. You’re also obviously the weaker of the two, whatever the Warwings tell me you did to their precious Lord General. I can see it in your eyes. You’re scared to be down here. Scratch that, you’re downright terrified, especially of me. So why don’t we make this simple and cut the games—tell me what you know, and I’ll let you go free. Refuse to cooperate, and I’ll hoof you over to the Warwings. They’re clamoring for you even as we speak, and my ambassadors can only delay them for so long.”

I ignored the insult—can’t argue with facts, after all, even if calling me ‘stupid’ next to Firefly’s intelligence seemed a bit harsh to me.

“But sir, I really don’t know what you’re talking about. The Enclave isn’t testing anything, at least, not that I know of. Like you said, Primum Mobile is a weather-monitoring facility more than anything else.”

I felt like I was rambling a bit, but I didn’t really know what else to do.

Hephaestus sighed again, rubbing his temple with a hoof, the other firmly remaining over top of the red button.

“Lying to me won’t do you any good, and your friend even less,” he said. “Your military didn’t even attempt to conceal the blast heard emanating from the cloudcover earlier today, and it could be heard with the unaided ear. Our monitors nearly fried at the sound, which shook the windows of the downtown ruins. What was the Enclave testing, and why here? Was it some sort of new super-explosive? Synchronized cannonfire? Sonic weaponry?”

Oh...I got a sinking feeling that had nothing to do with my present circumstances. He was talking about the explosion of the Cloud Nine Resort. He had to be. Adding to that sinking feeling, however, was the fact that I highly doubted he was going to believe the truth. But then again, what else did I have?

“It wasn’t a weapon,” I said with a mixture of fear and sheepishness. “It was, well, um... the base exploded. There was...an accident with the main power generator. The only reason my team was sent dirtside—groundside, I mean—was to secure a new power source.”

Hephaestus began to chuckle, which turned into a laugh, which became an outright guffaw.

“You honestly expect me to believe that?!” he asked, leaving the control panel and trotting right up to me, his face inches from my own. “You think I’m going to believe that the only Enclave force for hundreds of miles explodes the same day we intercept a signal from Hurricane?”

“You know about Hurricane?” I gasped.

“Of course I do!” he shouted in my face, his breath rancid. “Earlier today we detected an signal that utilized a magical encryption that was only ever used on a single piece of Equestrian technology. We know your government contacted the city. What I want to know is how you received the means to do so. If the Enclave had the means of contacting Hurricane, why wait until now to bring the city home?”

He must think we’ve already accessed it directly, I realized. He didn’t know we still needed an access code. He may have detected the signal, but he didn’t know what it said. If he knew this much about Hurricane already, though, did that mean he had the access code? Somehow I didn’t think so. Besides, even if he did, letting him know that’s all that was needed didn’t seem like a good idea. He might very well have it secured it before we did.

“I...I don’t know,” I said, though he must have seen in my eyes that now he was getting somewhere. “Sir,” I hastily added, not that it did much good.

He raised a burly hoof to strike me, and I flinched, closing my eyes, but the blow never came.

“No, no...” he said to himself, lowering his hoof. “Violence is for your race, not mine. We each have our place, and I will not stray from the boundaries. I have others all too willing to make you talk. If you won’t tell me what the Enclave knows about Hurricane or their new weapon, which I assume they’ll be using to try and take the city from any opposition, I’ll let you speak to them directly.”

Hephaestus walked back over to his terminal and pressed a button—not the big red one, thank the princesses. A voice crackled over a speaker, asking “Are you ready, Guildmaster?”

He gave his affirmation, and the door was almost immediately opened by a pair of pegasi wearing that non-Enclave power armor, all pale blues and bright yellows.

“You will accompany the Warwings to meet the Council,” Hephaestus instructed me. “You won’t be harmed, at least not until you arrive. Try to escape, however, and I’ll forget my tribe’s role for just a moment and electrocute both you and your friend.”

I nodded shakily, following the other pegasi as they marched out into the field and took wing, flying up into the darkness of the MegaDome. I had to fly hard to keep up with them, even in their bulkier armor. Looking down, I couldn’t see more than a few scattered lights throughout the great space, showing precious little but dead grass, rusted or missing seats, and even a few piles of miscellaneous scrap.

Looking up, I realized that I didn’t know where we were going, as the ceiling of the dome was fast approaching. However, much to my surprise, a hole began widening in the very top of the dome, panels moving aside to allow us a way out. Even after seeing their trucks and giant cannons, these dirtsider ponies continued to impress me with their accomplishments, especially given the two centuries of technological stagnation and decay that followed the devastation of the apocalypse.

The pegasus guards remained silent as we flew up out of the dome and up higher and higher all the way to the top of the shattered-glass and rusted-steel skyscraper. The higher we went, the lower my stomach sank, nervous of where I was going and what these ponies would do to me when I got there. Peering in the windows as we ascended, I could see little but dusty darkness, collapsed walls, and even a bit of plant life, though every once in a while, I thought I caught sight of glinting shapes that looked suspiciously like eyes. For the first time ever, I found myself hoping that I was hallucinating again.

The top of the skyscraper seemed to have been renovated, unlike its lower levels. Some of the topmost levels actually had repaired glass, reinforced with internal metal wires in a hexagon pattern. Inside them I glimpsed crates overflowing with ammunition, spare power armor parts, and plenty of stores of food. These ponies seemed to be even better off than Primum Mobile! I hadn’t seen stores like that since, well, ever. Even back at the orphanage in the inner airspace, rations were scarce. Where were these ponies getting all of their stock?

The roof of the skyscraper was adorned with a myriad of large weapons, several of which looked like they could poke holes in a Raptor, and most of which could certainly send a Vertibuck falling to the earth as a flaming wreck. They didn’t look like they belonged on a rooftop, so I assumed these ponies had to have moved them here after the Great War, but if so, how could they possibly have moved them? The guns looked like they belonged bolted to the deck of a warship, not poking over the side of what had probably been an office building two centuries previously.

The guards landed in the area between the cannons, which was surprisingly spacious. The ponies sitting in the gun cockpits turned to watch me as I touched down with my jailers, snickering amongst themselves when they weren’t glaring daggers at me outright. A few, most frighteningly of all, actually looked a little in awe.

“That’s the nag who offed Red Spot?” I heard one of them scoff.

“Can you imagine the shit his soul must be dealing with in Valhalla? Done for by a little bitch like that!”

“She doesn’t look like she could swat a horsefly.”

“She can swat my horsefly anytime!” was the immediate retort from another gunner. A few others laughed as they saw my discomfort at that last statement. I sincerely hoped that wasn’t the coercion tactic Hephaestus had meant. I unintentionally squeezed my haunches together just in case, which only served to make them laugh harder.

My breaths were coming more unevenly and far more hurriedly now. A cold fire was simultaneously burning and freezing away in my stomach. I wanted Firefly with me now more than ever. I didn’t care if she did kill all these ponies on my account, at least she would spare me from...that...

I tried to focus solely on finding a way out of this situation, or at the very least, surviving long enough to do so later. To that end, I scanned the rooftop for any means of escape, but the gunponies were all looking at me now, catcalling or sneering or simply silently glaring.

In the center of the rooftop was a small building with a door that I supposed led to the levels below us, and atop the building was a long, thin, needle-like antennae. Beside it, however, was a table where an old terminal sat connected to an odd device I’d never seen. It had crystalline protrusions poking out of it at odd angles, and even the screen, or what I assumed was the screen, looked more like a shiny stone than glass.

One of the guards kept her weapons trained on me while the other began typing away at the terminal as the machine beside it started sparking and spitting static. The crystalline protrusions emitted a soft, pulsing glow which soon quickened its pace to become a steady stream of bright light.

I squinted as I realized the light was bending. It swirled around itself, merging with other beams and widening or concentrating until it finally began to work itself into some sort of construct. The vaguest outlines of pony-shaped light-blobs began to appear, which then became increasingly more distinct until I could make out individual details.

“Holograms,” I murmured. Never in my life had I thought I would see something so rare.

Four transparent pegasi sat in front of me, each wearing what appeared to be some sort of robes, though the folded cloth hung over their bodies in unusual ways, draped over them more like silken strings than a single sheet of fabric. Golden pendants held the sheets together, and each pony wore a wreath of golden leaves on their heads.

I also noticed that each pony was quite old, far older than even Hephaestus. They looked like they could have been from Commander Archangels’ generation.

One of the ponies opened his mouth and began speaking in a hoarse whisper, his words indecipherable. It took me a moment to realize he was speaking some other language. He glared at me as he spoke, but the others were nodding their heads, so I assumed he wasn’t talking to me. Even with the odd language, though, his words came out about a split-second behind the movements of his lips, broadcasted from the machine projecting the holograms.

After a moment of conversing amongst themselves, one of them stepped forward, his see-through hooves looking as if they were walking on the rooftop. He stopped inches from me, and I leaned back uncomfortably, as if he was really there.

“This can’t possibly be her,” he wheezed in Equestrian. “Hephaestus has to be up to some trick.”

“Hephaestus is always up to something in your mind,” said one of the others, a wrinkly old mare, as she rolled her eyes. “Have you ever considered the fact that he hasn’t betrayed us in all the years our two houses have been allies?”

“He hasn’t exactly been the most helpful when he could bolster his own house instead, now has he?” retorted another.

“I don’t like Hephaestus anymore than the rest of you, but what could he gain from lying about who killed our greatest warrior? Besides, our own scouts confirmed it. Red Spot has been defeated.”

“Those scouts could have easily been paid off.”

“Not everything is a conspiracy!”

I watched as the elderly ponies bickered amongst themselves, almost seeming to have forgotten I was even there. I glanced at the two guards, one of which was watching the sky as if she was bored. The other was leaning against the side of the entrance building, his visor lifted and a lit cigarette in his mouth. The other pegasi seemed to have mostly gone back to whatever they were doing at their gun posts, but a few still watched the proceeding with mild amusement, when they weren’t looking at me with a leer that sent shivers up my spine.

Whatever was going on, my captors suddenly seemed much less inclined to think it was a serious matter. I could have made a dash for it, but I didn’t want to test whether or not both guards had slow reflexes. As it was, though, they looked bored enough that I half-wondered if they’d even care whether or not I left.

The ponies in the holograms had resorted to shouting at each other in that other tongue. They almost looked on the verge of blows, and despite how comical elderly ponies fighting would have otherwise seemed, I knew that these ponies could still order my death at a moment’s notice.

“Well why don’t we just ask her?” one of the Council said at last. “She obviously isn’t one of ours, so she has to be Enclave, and Hephaestus couldn’t have gotten ahold of an Enclave pony unless what he claims is true.”

The other ponies eventually grumbled their agreement, and the first old equine turned to me once again and asked “Did you kill Red Spot?”

My skin felt cold, but I could feel sweat as well.

“Y...yes?” I said at last. “I’m sorry, I didn’t want to kill him, but he was going to kill me, so—”

“Quit your yammering,” he spat. “Honestly, you Enclave are a disgrace to the pegasus tribe. Of course you tried to kill him when he was out for your blood. That’s how how a battle works.”

“You mean...” I stammered. “You aren’t mad?”

“We’re furious,” the wrinkly mare chuckled humorlessly. “Our top warrior struck down by an incompetent excuse for a pegasus? How could our house be brought to any greater shame? Not to mention the trouble we’ll have with the Law.”

“The Law?” I echoed.

“The Law of the noble house of Hippoi Athanatoi states that any high-ranking warrior’s post may be claimed by any pegasus worthy enough to strike down that warrior in honorable combat,” said the first pony. “Which means you are now eligible for the title of Lord General.”

What?! I wasn’t about to work for these ponies (not if I could help it, anyway), but to think they wanted me to be their new ‘top warrior?’ Well, maybe not wanted, per se, but were considering making me so anyway...

“Hippoi Athanatoi?” I said wonderingly and shakily, trying to get a little bit of a grip on what was going on. “I thought you were the Warwings. And...what if I, er, decline?”

“How dare you use that name in our presence?!” spat one of the Council. “That is a moniker spoken by uncultured brutes too ignorant to grasp the true nature of our house. We are the Hippoi Athanatoi. Not the ‘Warwings’.”

“Additionally...noncompliance with the Law is not permitted,” continued a different Councilpony. “Those who break the Law are to be put to death.”

Oh. In that case, maybe being Lord General wouldn’t be so bad after all...

“However,” the wrinkly mare spoke, giving a smile that was almost a snarl. “The occupation of a Lord General is always vulnerable. The title can be taken at any time by another pegasus in honorable single-combat.”

Suddenly the other pegasi on the rooftop were looking very interested in the proceedings. The smoking guard spit out his cigarette and crushed it beneath a hoof. Every eye of the gunponies was now once again on me and the holograms.

“Formal challenges are not necessary to those outside of our house,” said the last of the Council. She added, a little too jovially, that “Those of our house, however, know how to initiate such a challenge for the ownership of a title, and challenges cannot be declined. Keeping this in mind, we wish you luck, our new Lord General. You shall need it.”

The holograms winked out all at once.

The two guards, the closest to me on the rooftop, nearly climbed over top of one another in their race to get to me first, and the gunponies weren’t far behind them. The mare, however, put a hind hoof over the eye of the stallion and bucked backward as she vaulted over his head. There was a sickening crunch as the stallion was pushed backwards into the entry building, and the mare placed a hoof on my chest, making me flinch despite it being nothing but the barest of brushes.

“I challenge thee to single combat,” she said, grinning wide enough as to seem unnatural.

She then promptly smacked me across the face.

I fell to the ground, barely picking myself up in time to leap out of the way of a blast from her battle saddle. The magical energy shot sizzled as it scorched the rooftop, sending chunks of smoldering concrete flying, scratching me as I leapt into the air, spreading my wings.

Another energy blast whooshed by underneath me, and I could feel the heat through my stealth suit. I dropped down just in time to avoid another blast that rocketed over my head, veering over the side of the rooftop as I did so.

I all but fell, flapping my wings as hard as I could to aid gravity, weaving a serpentine path and praying to the goddesses above that one stray blast wouldn’t strike me down. One shot would have probably been all it would have taken to liquefy me; I doubted a suit this flimsy could take much of a hit.

“Suit, can’t you do anything to hide me?!” I hissed, not even bothering to mouth the words this time. “Take me off her radar or something?”

Initiating nullification of Eyes-Forward-Sparkle and targeting detection magics, the suit told me.

The blasts suddenly became more erratic. I breathed a sigh of relief, but only a small one.

I needed a weapon, and I needed one fast. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any grenades left. Even if I had, I supposed they would have been confiscated. All I had was a stealth suit that couldn’t turn invisible and a prehensile tail, the purpose of which I still didn’t fully understand.

“Come on, think, Surprise, think!” I muttered to myself, my heart racing. Just my luck that the same day I was lucky enough to defeat one crazy pegasus trying to kill me I’d be thrown into the same situation all over again!

I darted far to the side just as one of the magical energy blasts came way too close for comfort, and I nearly slammed into the side of the building. A few inches closer and I’d have been skewered on those shards of broken glass and rusted, broken steel girders.

Wait a moment...

I flew out, far from the building, picking up speed, going as fast as my wings would carry me. As I leveled out, the blasts came closer, but that was a calculated risk. Turning at the last moment, something I could do much more easily than the other mare could in her bulky power armor, I tucked my wings in close as I darted through a hole in the side of one of the windows, the barest tips of the glass shards scratching along my suit. I could feel the flesh give way underneath it, and my suit scolded me for compromising both it and my own damage threshold further, but that was the least of my worries.

I had only moments to take in the ruins of whatever room I’d found myself in, which appeared to be the rotted office of some bygone corporate drone, before my forward inertia sent me flying out the front door. I nearly crashed into a pile of collapsed cubicle walls, planting my hooves on the moldy carpet and skidding into a turn.

I heard the crash of the guard following behind me, bursting straight through the glass with her bulkier, harder armor.

I had to think fast. If I could just find a place to hide in here, her EFS couldn’t help her spot me. My gaze darted about the place, though I saw nothing but a few uncollapsed cubicles and plenty more offices ringing the structure.

Picking a nearby office at random, I slipped inside, flattening myself against the wall just beside the door, which had fallen off its hinges who knew how long ago. I tried my best to quiet my breathing, to lower my heart rate. This suit may have been good against artificial means of detection, but I was sure she could still hear me if she came too close.

I heard the mare crash into the pile of collapsed cubicle walls, probably knocking against some buried terminals and whatnot underneath it. There was a series of loud curses as she fought her way out of the pile, and a few moments of silence.

“Coward!” she shouted. “Come out and face me like a true pegasus!”

I hardly thought fighting a pony who was essentially unarmed and far less protected while she had a fancy suit of power armor and a battle saddle made me the coward here, but I held my tongue. Goading me out was just what she wanted.

A sound of magic being fired was quickly followed by the sound of cubicles melting into piles of goop. I could hear derelict terminals sparking as they exploded, and even the crackles of what I assumed was the beginning of a fire. More blasts began to cause more distant explosions; I assumed she must be firing at random, hoping to liquefy wherever I was hiding by pure chance.

I sincerely hoped that if she fired at the wall I was hiding behind it would hold up, but I sincerely doubted it. Even so, though, what choice did I have but to wait and slip away when she’d given up and moved to a different area, or perhaps outside again? I hated that my survival strategy depended purely on dumb luck, which I didn’t seem to have all that much of, but I supposed there was nothing I could do about that.

According to my own EFS, the mare was flying about the floor behind me erratically, probably zigzagging all over the place and destroying anything that caught her eye.

“Suit, how do I do that stealthy take-down maneuver thing again?” I mouthed, wondering if maybe I could sneak up behind her when she was vaporizing somewhere else.

Such action is not recommended at this time, the suit told me. Hostile is exceeding safety parameters for said offensive tactic.

“Then what should I do?!” I mouthed, though the frantic quality of the question was probably lost due to it being silent.

Analyzing options...No options found. Recommend improvisation.

What?!

I scanned the room for any sort of weapon. I’d settle for some CEO’s mounted set of prized golf clubs at this point, but the office was bare. Most of everything that had been mounted to the walls, from plaques to diplomas, had fallen to the floor long ago, their glass casings shattered and the documents within unreadable from fading and years of rodents nibbling at them. The desk was covered in similarly useless piles of paper, a charred skeleton slumped over in the chair behind it, and a few bookshelves on the walls, each of which contained not a single book. Instead, the shelves were decorated with a cornucopia of knickknacks which had probably been just as useless two centuries ago as they were now.

I mean, for crying out loud, who keeps a ship in a bottle in their office? What was the point of a ship in a bottle? At the very least, maybe I could throw it at the guard and it would distract her long enough for me to flee to another floor and hide there.

I scooped the ornament off the shelf and held it at the ready, just in case she poked her head in here.

The crackles of fire outside were growing, but that wasn’t too concerning just yet. I could dash outside the shattered window of this office at any time. Being liquefied was a far more pressing concern.

I held up the bottle, wondering just how thick the glass was, and if I wouldn’t be better off simply punching her with a bare hoof. The glass was pitiably thin, and it was a wonder it hadn’t already collapsed from the weight of accumulated dust. The ship inside was no better, a dilapidated old model of an antique sailing vessel with the name HMS Surprise.

That...was an eerie coincidence.

Something seemed to be dripping out of the ship’s tiny portholes as well, some sort of dark blue liquid that quickly filled up the bottom of the bottle. The ship began floating, and if I looked carefully, I could even see tiny waves on the surface of the mock-ocean.

“Not now...” I groaned quietly. “Of all times, why does it have to happen now?”

The liquid began spilling out of the bottle, and I dropped it as I felt the cold drops and sea spray wash over my hooves. Too late I realized my mistake, but I fumbled catching it and the bottle crashed to the floor, shattering and setting the tiny ocean free. It continued to expand, forming a small puddle around my hooves which quickly grew further, seeping into the hallway and lapping at the edges of the office.

But the guard couldn’t have heard it over the growing blaze outside, could she? Not unless she had been on this side of the building, close to this room.

“Come out, come out, chicken!” the mare cackled madly, her voice close.

I could have cried, but I merely snarled even as a powerful dread welled up in my stomach.

The tiny ocean was rising, already a few inches up my legs. It lapped against my fetlocks, and my hooves felt cold and wet. I could even see tiny dark shapes moving about underneath it, as if tiny sea creatures were swimming around me.

“There you are!” the mare exclaimed. I jerked my gaze away from the imaginary fish to see the guard poking her head in my office, a dark grin playing about her mouth. “Tell Red Spot thanks when you see him, you little whore!”

She made to leap into the room, and I could already hear her battle saddle charging.

Then, however...something odd happened.

A shadow fell across the guard before a huge, slimy green thing slammed into her from outside the office, plunging her under the water as she screamed. I stood there for a moment, eyes wide.

I knew what I had just seen wasn’t real. It couldn’t have been. She should be standing right where had been, already having blasted me into dissociated molecules. I may be hallucinating, but she should have still had killed me by now in reality, and I highly doubted my hallucination could carry on after death. If it did, I was probably in Tartarus.

I looked around me, seeing the dilapidated, ruined office and the rundown cubicles beyond it, gray sky outside the shattered window. This still looked an awful lot like the living world, even if an imaginary ocean was lapping against my knees. I felt neither horrible pain nor the fires of Tartarus, so this couldn’t be perdition...could it?

Then what in the world was going on? Had I hallucinated the whole thing, ship in a bottle and the guard finding me as well? Was she still out there searching for me?

I peeked inside the main area of the floor, seeing the fire slowly being put out by the rising tiny ocean. The guard was nowhere in sight, and the sound of magical energy blasts had vanished.

“This doesn’t make any sense...” I said aloud, still quietly just in case the guard was still around here after all. Even if she had just tripped rather than been plunged underwater, why wasn’t she rising back out of the water, ready to blast me in the process?

My thoughts were interrupted by a dark shadow falling across me as well, and I leapt out of it just in time to hear a splashing sound. Turning to look at the space where I had just been, I saw only a green mass submerging back into the water.

However, another green thing was rising across the room, a long, thick, writhing nightmare covered in slick skin and tiny sucking mouths. I’d seen something like that only once in my life, in a tiny illustration of the sorts of animals they used to put on display before the Great War. This thing before me looked like one of the arms of some probably-extinct creature called an octopus, only much, much bigger—and I was pretty sure the octopus suction cups I’d seen in the old picture didn’t have needle-like teeth inside them, or a screeching shriek pelting out of them.

I had maybe a split second to think all this before the tentacle shot across the room towards me. I knew it wasn’t real, it couldn’t possibly be, but as always my subconscious could never distinguish between my hallucination and reality. A deep, primeval fear crawled up my insides and I spread my wings, leaping backwards out of the way.

I turned and flew back into the main room, cursing myself for not dodging the tentacle and flying outside. I cursed myself again for not simply turning and letting the thing pass through me like the nightmare it was. If that guard was still around here outside the parameters of my lucid daydream, then now I was a sitting duck.

I dodged to the side again as the tentacle came rushing out of the office and lashing out at me, just barely missing me before pulling itself back under the still-rising ocean. I darted off in the direction of another office, glimpsing the broken window beyond it, but another tentacle rose in front of it.

Before I could think, my instincts turned me around and I flew back into the heart of the room. All around me, other tentacles were rising out of the murky pseudo-water, writhing, screaming, hungry.

I hated to think what they might be attached to under the water.

The swaying, fleshy lashes surged towards me, sending the water splashing and spraying and pelting against me in waves. I couldn’t see a way out, and they were closing on me quickly. Already, images of those screaming mouths ripping chunks out of me were filling my mind, and my breathing was verging on an all-out panic attack.

I looked around for a weapon, any sort of weapon, but saw only the burnt and half-submerged remains of office supplies, small desks, and cubicle walls. Nearest me was an exploded terminal, and I caught sight of a particularly large shard of glass that must have been blasted outwards from its monitor screen.

Concentrating as hard as I could, adrenaline helping to focus my thoughts, I thought-commanded my suit’s mechanical tail to reach out and grab the shard with its tiny metal fingers, brandishing it like a dagger.

“This isn’t real, Surprise,” I repeated endlessly to myself as the tentacles rushed towards me. “This isn’t real! You don’t have to fight them, just ignore them and they’ll go away—they’re not real!”

The fear eating away at the back half of my brain begged to differ, but I tried my best to simply stand still and to not act, to do nothing. I could make this, I could force myself to see that this wasn’t real!

The first tentacle fell on me, thwacking me like a whiplash as tiny, needle-filled mouths tore at my wings and back, ripping out bits of me, trailing blood. I cried out, shrieking, horrified, but I grit my teeth.

“THIS ISN’T REAL!!” I wailed, but the tentacle simply reared back and repeated its attack, quickly followed by the others.

I knew this wasn’t real.

It couldn’t be.

But it felt real, and in that instant, I couldn’t convince my brain that it wasn’t. The fear of a slow, horrible death flashed through my brain like a string of barbed wire, and I acted without another thought. I spun in a circle, ripping my body away from the grip of the mouths, tearing my flesh off of their hungry teeth. My mechanical tail whipped out and sliced at the tentacles with the glass shard, tearing great, wide gashes in their fleshy surfaces. A dark slimy gunk spewed out, and the building itself seemed to shake with a bellow more ancient than I could fathom, but I continued to spin.

I flared out my wings, blood splattering off of them and mixing with that of the monstrosity as I leapt into the air, using my wings to propel me in a tight circle, flying around as fast as I could in the confined space of the flesh-walls.

My mind was full of pain, which was quickly mutating into something else—something deeper, darker, redder. I was angry. I was enraged, hatred bubbling up at the thought of the horrible curse I’d lived with every day of my life, the thought of my inability to tell the difference between reality and hallucination. I was really, truly furious now—how could I not be, when I couldn’t even properly live the grey purgatory that was life in the wasteland? How could I not be angry that my mind couldn’t tell the difference between the blind oblivion of reality and the twisted facade of its own creations? In that moment, all the hurt, all the guilt, all the anger I had borne silently for years came racing to the front of my mind in a tidal wave of black rage.

I screamed, letting out a furious cry as I sped faster and faster, my shard-dagger slicing up the tentacles into slimy chunks. The tops began to fall off, the wide gashes in their flesh spewing out everything inside them, from the dark green blood to shiny-black entrails and a gooey white cartilage-like framework. The tentacles collapsed, nothing more left in them to fight, but still I spun. My attackers slumped, emitting a hissing steam, and I didn’t stop slicing at them and screaming and crying until there was nothing left to distinguish what had once been blood and what had once been anything else.

I finally collapsed, sobbing, in the middle of them all. I was covered in the green goop, my own scarlet mixing with the bilous ichor.

“Why can’t you all just leave me alone?!” I wailed.

The tentacles seemed to be shrinking now, though the goop wasn’t melting off of me. The water of the fake ocean was receding, and the electrical fires of the blasted terminals were returning.

As the hallucination faded, I sat there crying, choking softly on my own tears. I closed my eyes, letting the pulsating darkness behind my eyelids block out the world for few moments.

When I opened them, I didn’t immediately understand what I was seeing.

In the middle of the destroyed office floor I saw the burnt and smoldering remnants of what had once been cubicles smoking underneath the fire of flaming terminal parts, sparks flying out from the oddly-colored fires as the magic which had powered the ancient machines faded away. The heat was almost unbearable and becoming hotter by the moment, and I realized that if I didn’t leave soon the fire would consume me as well.

It was a wonder it hadn’t reached me already, quite honestly, and I looked at my immediate surroundings to see why. There was a circular area, in the center of which I sat, untouched by the flames. It was irregular like every other surface of the office-ruin, though far more destroyed. It was also covered in chunks of something purple and red, a crimson liquid dousing everything. Snaky entrails, all the slicked red color of natural blood, lay scattered about. There even seemed to be some metal components, all a pale blue with bright yellow designs. Whitish bones I could actually recognize as belonging to...

No...

No.

No.

NO!!

I looked up, seeing some of the red gunk splattering the ceiling. Some of it was dripping down, and occasionally a meatier chunk would fall to splat on the ground.

I recognized it, of course, or at least what it—what she—had once been. How could I not? I was the same thing.

And somehow I hadn’t just killed her, not even in self defense. When I’d ‘defeated’ Red Spot, I had blown him up with a grenade, but only because he had planned to blast me with concentrated lightning. It had been an equivalent exchange, all things considered, and I just happened to be lucky enough to have outsmarted him, tricked him into allowing me to deliver first.

This...this was not that. This was something entirely different. This was something impossible. There was no way a weakling like me could do that to a power-armored soldier with just a shard of glass from an old terminal.

But I had.

I hadn’t killed her.

I’d eviscerated her.

I spread my wings, sending out splats of blood as I did so, and leapt into the air. It felt like every atom inside me was imploding at the same time as I rushed outside a shattered window, feeling the warm breeze rushing in from the sea. I wasn’t looking where I was going. I was hardly even thinking, and so I ran straight into another pony who happened to be hovering outside the floor.

“Whoa, there, you can’t leave yet!” guffawed the voice of one of the ponies I’d heard on the rooftop. I bounced off of him and hovered a few feet away, looking at him with blank, glazed eyes. I didn’t know what to think anymore, what to feel, other than that horrific, otherworldly wrongness. “Sourbloom in there is sure to want to finish you off—I’m surprised you gave her the slip, and...”

His eyes widened as he actually took me in. I looked down to see what he was seeing—a small pegasus mare in a tight suit, covered in blood and...meatier bits. Though some of it was my own, very little of it was.

He began screaming, as did the other ponies hovering around me. They must have been trying to watch the fight without getting directly involved, but I suppose they hadn’t been able to see much.

I’d left a red smear where I’d bumped into the gunpony stallion, and he frantically tried to wipe it off, backtracking away from me as he did so. All of the ponies were widening the circle around me, gasping or hyperventilating or screaming and unable to stop.

“She’s one of them!” the gunpony shrieked. “Her eyes! She’s one of the Yellow Ones!”

The other pegasi flew up and away, shooting back up to the rooftop. In some still-functioning part of my mind, I supposed that I should leave before they aimed those cannons at me.

I dropped, angling myself so that I flew down along the side of the skyscraper. I figured that they couldn’t fire straight down, and if I made it to the ground level I could hide in the rambling ruins of the other buildings before they could locate me. Rescuing Firefly could come later, assuming I didn’t fly into a frenzy and slaughter her as well.

Could I do that? I didn’t want to think about it, but like the other mare I had just ended, I could think about little else.

As I flew down, I glimpsed my reflection in a few of the windows that weren’t entirely shattered. I looked much like I had expected, just as I had when I looked down at myself, only now I could see my face and mane. My once-golden curls were matted with gunky redness and my eyes themselves were bloodshot.

However, my irises and pupils were no longer pale rings of violet surrounding dark pools of inky blackness. Unlike any shade I’d ever seen them as, even in a hallucination, even when I’d been the magenta-eyed Rainbow Dash, both my irises and pupils were indistinguishable as a uniform bright, sickly yellow. Red capillaries snaked from the edges of my eyes, reaching for the glowing orbs in the center like ancient ponies worshipping the sun. These weren’t the eyes of a pony. These were something out of a nightmare.

This didn’t feel like a hallucination. Other ponies had seen this, after all, and that had never happened. Then what was it? My mind swirled with desperate attempts to surmise logical explanations, but logic seemed to be about the furthest thing from me right now. Logic seemed a world away, on another plane of existence.

Radiation-induced mutation? No, I hadn’t been exposed to very many rads, not here, not ever.

Some innate pegasus magic welling up inside me? That sounded even more unlikely than the radiation theory.

Maybe...maybe I was one of these Yellow Ones, or whatever they were called. Maybe there was a whole subspecies of ponies like me, ponies cursed with a madness that ate away at their minds until there was more madness than pony, and then only madness, and then...a monster.

I began to cackle madly. All my life I’d been thought of as a monster, in some form or fashion. The other soldiers at Primum Mobile had thought I was too unstable to use a weapon. The other children at the orphanage had bullied me mercilessly, and even though I was an easy target because I could neither defend myself nor even know what was really going on at any given moment, in the moments of clarity I did receive there was always a fear in their eyes.

I’d even thought I might be some sort of mistake. But I’d never thought of myself as a monster. I’d never seen myself through the eyes of other ponies.

Until now. Now, I saw exactly what they were seeing. A dangerous, unstable, inequine freak.

Maybe I really was a monster.

Tears began to flow as I plummeted to the earth below, unable to stop shrieking with laughter. I didn’t know what was so funny. I...didn’t...I didn’t know...

And then I did know.

Ha.

Hahaha.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

Life was the joke. Gallows humor. I just happened to be one of its punchlines.

I spread my wings at the last possible moment, feeling a bracing chill wash over me as I swooped through the air and into the buildings below. An explosion decimated a smaller building to my right, but I didn’t so much as spare it a glance. Multicolored clouds of smoke crashed over me like a gaseous tidal wave, and I could feel my suit sizzling under the heat, sparks of every color dancing in the air. I couldn’t tell if it was the gunponies above firing their cannons at me, or just another hallucination—after all, what explosions were multicolored? Then again, though, after today, reality had begun to become so strange that it and my lucid daydreams almost seemed to be blending together. I wasn’t sure if I could tell the difference anymore. Maybe I never could. Maybe my whole life was one big hallucination. Maybe nothing had ever been real. Not me, not Commander Archangel, not Hephaestus, not Lord General Red Spot, not the soldiers who had tried to make my life even more horrible than it already was, not the bullies at the orphanage.

In a way, it was freeing. If I wasn’t real—if nothing was real—then nothing good or bad really mattered. I wasn’t a monster anymore than I was an angel.

Nothing and nopony being real...it had a comfort to it, almost. Not me, not Firefly, not...

No...not Firefly. She...had she been a hallucination this whole time as well? She couldn’t be! She had always been there for me, in and out of hallucinations. In fact, the only time my world had any consistency, she had been there to lend a helping hoof. She had to be real. She just had to be.

And yet...wasn’t it strange that she had always been there when nopony else had been? How she had virtually never left my side, been just the friend I needed? What if...what if I had created her because I needed some sort of support, some sort of mental anchor, lest I be completely pulled away by the maddening tide of my own mind?

“No,” I whispered to myself as another rainbow explosion obliterated a row of shops to my left. Again, I didn’t so much as spare it a glance, though I did begin to weave in and out of buildings in a zigzag pattern. “She has to be real. She has to!”

At that moment, I truly didn’t know the truth of anything, save one. Whether or not she was real, whether or not I believed her to be real, I needed Firefly to be real. I clung to that one desperate shred of hope. I couldn’t prove it, not yet. But I needed it. I hoped. I cried. I prayed.

Soon enough, the explosions stopped tearing up parts of downtown Neigh’Orleans. I must have been too far out of range, or perhaps they had lost me in the maze of urban ruins, or perhaps my mind was just too exhausted to cook up any more hallucinations, at least for the moment.

I sped over flooded districts, seeing my reflection race over the top of murky water littered with algae and sickly-red floating flowers. Dark shapes moved in the depths, and I thought I saw the glints of eyes more than once. It was amazing to me that something could live down there in the irradiated water at all, but I supposed mutants would feel right at home.

The taller buildings were beginning to thin out, and the resulting shorter structures seemed much older than the skyscrapers had been. At last, I landed on the roof of one such structure, an old tavern with the name The Prancing Pony emblazoned on the sign hanging outside its boarded-up door, complete with a stylized illustration of a pony looking drunk and merry.

I sat there, breathing slowly, catching my breath, blood still dripping off of me. Looking down, I could see that most of the scarlet liquid had either dripped off in my flight or dried, caking the suit and staining much of it a dark red. I looked absolutely filthy. Memories of the cold showers in the Cloud Nine Resort were actually starting to make me feel nostalgic.

I scraped off as much mud and blood and other such gunk as I could, though the tangles in my mane and tail were almost impossible to manage. Having finally caught my breath, I mouthed “Stealth suit, I want you to locate Firefly.”

Locating... it told me. Firefly located.

A transparent map appeared in my visor, overlaying the image of the city. A blinking light showed Firefly as being right where I had left her, in the MegaDome at the heart of downtown.

I took a deep breath, closing my eyes and letting the air slowly seep into my lungs before exhaling. My heartbeat had finally slowed, and for the first time all day, my head felt at least reasonably clear.

I had to rescue Firefly. I didn’t know what we’d do then, but we couldn’t continue this search for the Hurricane access code. There were only two of us against a city infested with earth pony tech zealots and mysterious pegasus warriors. We were lucky to have survived this long, but we certainly couldn’t take on these two factions as well as whatever else might be lurking in these swampy ruins.

Maybe we should return to Primum Mobile. Surely Commander Archangel, as strange and frightening as he was, would understand that two pegasi couldn’t take on a city of enemies equipped with resources even the Enclave often had to do without. Or maybe, considering the punishment for failure, we should just flee the Enclave altogether. We couldn’t hide anywhere else above the cloudcover where the government wouldn’t eventually find us, declare us deserters, and exile us to the ground anyway, so why not go ahead and stay here? It was hell down here, to be sure, but if Firefly and I found some remote spot far away from this city and any other known terrors, maybe we could live peacefully.

I wanted to believe it, wanted so very much, and so I told myself it was possible. I truly wasn’t sure if it was, but I had to cling onto some hope.

The only problem was how to rescue Firefly. I could evade the Guild’s detection technologies with the stealth suit, but one slip-up and I’d be pelted full of so many holes there wouldn’t be a pony left at all. I definitely couldn’t go in guns blazing, seeing as how I didn’t have a weapon in the first place, and certainly not one that could stand up to antiaircraft artillery and ridiculously destructive power armor. I supposed I could always give myself up to be at least somewhat close to her, but after that stunt with the guard pegasus, they’d probably gun me down the moment they saw me.

In fact, I was surprised they hadn’t electrocuted me through my suit yet. Perhaps I was out of range for their transmitters. My eyes widened, though, as I realized that Firefly was still perfectly within their range. Would they have done away with her because of my actions?

“No, please, no...” I whispered, looking up at the cloud cover and at whatever princess goddesses may be looking down from above.

I quickly tried to think of a reason they wouldn’t electrocute Firefly, but thank the goddesses I realized that they would have nothing to gain from doing so. After all, Hephaestus had said himself that she could prove useful to the Guild of Iron. Even if these ponies killed without a second thought, thus far it seemed that they only did so when they truly thought they could gain something. It was a cold, calculating logic, but at least there was some order to it.

That didn’t solve the problem of them abstaining from electrocuting me, though. I was rather surprised they hadn’t done so already, so I guessed it meant I was indeed out of their transmitter range. I had little doubt that the moment I re-entered that range, I’d be cooked. I could simply leave my stealth suit behind, I supposed, but that would leave me even more defenseless than I already was.

As much as I hated to admit it, I needed weapons, or at least some sturdier armor, before I even thought about rescuing Firefly. I wanted to just rush in there and snatch her away this instant, but that would essentially be suicide. I’d probably never even see the MegaDome before the ‘terminate’ function kicked in, and if I left the stealth suit behind, I may be taken out by some mutant monster even earlier.

Unless, that is, I experienced another impossibly lethal episode of insane viciousness, but I refused to think about that. It had happened, and I couldn’t change that. As much as it made me think I was a monster after all, and probably always would, I reasoned that if a hallucination attacked me again I wouldn’t fight it. I couldn’t kill anypony in reality if I wasn’t doing anything in a lucid nightmare either, right?

I sincerely, desperately hoped so.

In fact, I wondered if my eyes were even still yellow. Perhaps that had just been a bit of the hallucination which had lingered on, but hopefully had faded away by now? Somehow I had the feeling that such wasn’t the case, but I trotted over to the side of the rooftop and looked at my reflection in the grimy window of a neighboring structure.

As expected, my eyes were still a sickly yellow, glowing faintly. I sighed, but couldn’t help but crack a sad smile. If you ignored the origins of this new look and the general freakiness of it, you could almost make it look silly. Sure, I had eyes glowing like some sort of supernatural monster, but sticking one’s tongue out and blowing a razzberry could make just about any face seem comical.

Bringing up my electronic map of Neigh’Orleans again, I marked the distance I currently was from the MegaDome and mentally filed away the number for later. I had no idea how broadly they could transmit a signal, so I thought it best if I stayed at least as far away from their stronghold as I was now until I could figure out a way around it.

That left the problem of where I would actually find a weapon or substitute armor or something that could help me. Come to think of it, I probably shouldn’t even fly too high—those cannons atop the office building might not miss me again.

I sulked. This was not going to be pleasant. In fact, this was going to be next to impossible. Where was I even supposed to start looking?!

As a shadow fell on me, I realized that wherever I was going, I better get there quickly. The shade cast by the taller buildings was lengthening. Checking my suit’s clock told me it was late afternoon already. It would be dark soon, and I did not want to be out here when the sun finally set.

I walked over to the side of the building and hopped off, gliding down to the cobblestone road. One end of the street dipped into that murky water, and so I set off in the other direction, my eyes nervously scanning for any potential threats. The sounds of insect chirps blanketed the city like a slightly subdued version of the Blackmarsh, and every once in a while I could hear splashes in the myriad nearby submerged areas.

Most of the shops and other such buildings still above water were boarded up, so I didn’t have any shelter but the rooftops if things turned ugly. That’d be fine if I encountered any mutant wildlife, but it’d be another problem entirely if I ran into anypony nasty with a gun.

However, strangely enough, the ruins were eerily devoid of life. The mutants were either avoiding me or absent, as were any crazed survivalist ponies. The absence of the latter was both a pleasant surprise and a haze of uneasiness. As poorly maintained as their weapons usually were and as bad a shot as they could be, survivalist ponies were unpredictable. At least you would know that the mutants would always try to eat you.

Had the Guild of Iron and the Warwings or Hippo Anti-Poise or whatever they were really called cleared the ruins of such life? If they had, on the one hoof it meant I didn’t have to deal with them. On the other, it meant these ponies were even more effective at extermination than I had thought.

I decided to look at the situation positively, at least for now. The ruins were difficult enough to navigate even without things trying to kill me. I had to keep one eye constantly on my electronic map, minimized in the bottom corner of my visor, to make sure I didn’t stray any closer to the MegaDome than I had been. At the same time, this meant that I had to keep doubling back when the streets and alleyways stopped in dead ends, or drowned in that murky water, or covered piles of rubble covered in glowing-green mushrooms that send my rad-counter ticking like crazy.

I would have normally just flown over these obstacles, but I didn’t want to risk being spotted above the rooftops. One lucky shot was all it would take; as I’d already seen, those rooftop cannons could obliterate an entire small building.

Sometimes I did actually hear gunfire, but those instances were few and far between. Thankfully they sounded distant, as they usually sounded like a multitude of heavy artillery. I supposed they were just the two factions on patrol, but I had no way of knowing. For all I knew, a brigade of pegasi patrollers could swoop overhead at any moment and simply spot me from above before dropping bombs on me.

I gulped, praying that wouldn’t happen.

As the sun finally began to set, I was beginning to rethink my happiness at not running into any crazy survivalist dirtsiders. As bad as their weapons may have been, they would have been something, and perhaps I could have traded them something for one. Or, as I had nothing with which to trade, I could possibly just steal one. This stealth suit had to be good for things like that, right? And surely they could afford to miss a single gun...

“Oh, this is hopeless!” I huffed at last. Even if I did find a weapon, what was a two-hundred year old shotgun or a rusty old pistol going to do against a small army of overpowered fanatics?! I might as well just ditch my stealth suit and try to sneak in without it...against all of their detection technologies...

I felt like crying. Firefly was so close, and yet she felt an impossibly far distance away.

The shadow of the derelict old shops lining this street—Neigh’Orleans seemed to have had a lot of shops, I was noticing—finally covered the street entirely. Looking up, I saw the last scarlet hues of dusk beginning to fade out.

Whatever I was going to do, as much as I hated to put it off, it was going to have to wait till morning. I might not have seen any enemies so far, but running into them at night would be far worse than running into them in the day would have been. Besides, soldiers on extended missions to the Blackmarsh had always reported that the local mutants were more active at night.

I looked around for somewhere I could use as a shelter and finally spotted a storefront that wasn’t completely boarded up. Or rather, its windows were still covered in planks, but the door was unbarred. The remnants of what had once barred the door were scattered around it, evidence of somepony who, I hoped long ago, had once probably used the place for the same purpose I intended.

Trotting over to it, I found the door locked. Great. Of course.

Curious, I looked through my saddlebags for anything I might be able to pick the lock. I was no master at lockpicking, but every once in a while back in the basement of Cloud Nine, I had had to unlock doors accidentally—or perhaps not so accidentally—that had been closed on me. I might be able to do this, if I had enough time and I didn’t accidentally break the ancient lock.

I found nothing of use, precious little of anything, really. Harrumphing, I looked around for any scraps of metal but saw none. Wait, my mechanical tail-thing had tiny metal finger-like appendages. Perhaps it could do something?

I mentally willed the tail around, shocked to see that it was still tightly clenching the shard from the terminal screen, the one I had used to...to...

No. Not thinking about that.

I thought-commanded the claw to drop the shard, and it clattered to the cobblestones, amazingly not shattering. It was amazing it hadn’t shattered back during—back when that had happened—but I supposed it was just one more thing to be unexplained. They were beginning to pile up.

I made the claw close two of its three fingers, making it stick out its third. Carefully, I placed the claw inside the lock to the shop door and very, very slowly located its inner mechanisms, manipulating them as gently as I could.

With a click, the door unlocked, and I breathed a sigh of relief. At last, something was going right. I pushed the door open, catching sight of the terminal screen shard as I did so.

I bit my lip. I should have just left it where it was, or better yet, smashed it underhoof so that it could never do...that...to anypony ever again. At the very least, I could throw it as far away as I could, hopefully so I could never find it again even if I tried.

But as horrible as the shard seemed, it was my only weapon out here. It was certainly not enough to face up to the guards at the MegaDome, who could shoot me out of the sky from who knew how far away, but in close-range combat it just might save my life from somepony or something sneaking up on me while I slept. And if it was a mutant, and I did go all impossibly destructively crazy again, then I wouldn’t actually be killing anything with intelligence, right?

I sighed, spat on the ground, and picked up the shard again. I brought it close to my face, glaring at it as if to tell it how much I hated it, but for now it would have to do. However, as I looked closely, I saw something that I was pretty certain hadn’t been a part of the screen when it was assembled in a prewar factory.

The shard was covered in tiny etchings, bizarre symbols I had never seen and didn’t understand. They made me uneasy to look at.

A thought struck me. Had these appeared because of whatever I had done back at the skyscraper, delving into some monstrous hidden part of me? Or...perhaps, just maybe...what had happened had happened because these symbols were already there? They looked vaguely like runes, the sort of which I had only ever glimpsed in textbooks on ancient history, far before Equestria had even been founded. Maybe this wasn’t my fault after all...maybe somepony, somehow, had long ago etched these things into the screen and the pegasus guard and I had just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when it happened.

It was a small hope, but as I was increasingly beginning to realize, hope was just about all I had at this point. I clung to it like a lifeline.

Knowing that, I really should have destroyed it then and there or thrown it away. But it was my only weapon...

I gulped, hoping I wouldn’t regret this, and gripped the shard tightly in my claw.

Pressing the door open with a hoof, I walked inside the shop, re-locking the door behind me. It was covered in dust, though in some places more than others. In fact, what looked suspiciously like a trail of hoofprints lead to the back of the shop, behind the counter, and up a flight of stairs. They didn’t lead back out again, however.

I unintentionally gripped my shard more tightly. Even the hoofprints were covered with dust, so whoever had been here must have used this place as a shelter long, long ago, right? Even if they had never left, they must be dead by now. As sickening as that thought was, they couldn’t be a threat to me now...at least in theory.

But I had to be sure. If this was a safe place, I had to use it, but if not, I had to know.

Activating every bit of the stealth suit I knew about, I carefully and quietly followed the hoofsteps towards the back of the shop. The shop itself seemed to have been some sort of bookseller, but not the likes of which I’d ever read about back in history class. These books looked like they had been ancient even before the Great War, and many of them bore strange symbols on the covers, though none of which quite matched the etchings or strangeness of those on the terminal shard.

Whatever kinds of books these were, though, I didn’t have time to investigate, not yet. Raising the shard over my head just in case I had to use it—to threaten, hopefully not stab, but certainly not eviscerate—I walked past the open counter and ascended the stairs. There was a door at the top, and I carefully pushed it open, cursing the deafening creaking noise.

I hung back in the stairwell, but saw nothing and nopony on the other side of the doorway. There were plenty more bookshelves up here, but also a few homey amenities, such as a sink and a bed, even a pile of blankets or clothes, and a table complete with a refrigerator and an oven. The slightly-ajar door in the back of the room led to a tiny bathroom.

There wasn’t anypony in here, though, not even a body. The hoofprints led to the pile of rags, which...oh...

Stepping into the room with my makeshift weapon at the ready, I walked forward and reached out the claw to poke the slumped form. It didn’t move. I cautiously pushed a little harder, rolling it over, and nearly shrieked. An emaciated pony face, barely flesh anymore, clung to a skull that almost seemed shrunken.

I stared at the body for a few moments, shard still ready to attack, the rational part of my mind trying to convince the rest of me that he was dead, and he couldn’t hurt me. Slowly, for once, the rational side began to gain ground.

As gruesome as this was, he looked to have been dead for some time. Not as dead as some of the charred skeletons I’d seen in the few dirtside missions I’d been on, but he was certainly gone. In fact...he might even have some supplies on him. I felt guilty for doing this, but then again, he certainly wasn’t going to be needing anything anymore.

I sat the shard down and used the claw to search around his pockets for anything useful. I found a few bottlecaps, those remnants of the prewar world that the Enclave had told us dirtsiders used for currency. That could be useful, I supposed, if I ever found somepony willing to sell me anything, though I had no idea how much these few caps would be worth. There was some food and drink as well, a few bottles of Sparkle Cola, a healing potion, some RadAway, a piece of rotted meat that was probably of suspicious quality even when this pony had been alive, and a few small boxes of something called Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs.

Not exactly the healthiest of meals, I thought, but it was far better than nothing. I sat the Sugar Bombs aside from the rest and caught sight of something else—the pony wasn’t exactly as big as I had once thought. He was resting on a duffel bag, just as grimy and patched as the rags he wore. I pulled it out from under him, wincing as the body toppled off behind it, and eagerly looked inside. Perhaps this was where he kept the real necessities.

Apparently not. There was some sort of ramshackle...thing that looked like a cross between a hypodermic needle injector and a pistol, a vial of bright, bubbly green liquid strapped into the main body of the device and a gun barrel full of tiny, thin needles instead of bullets. What in the world was this supposed to be? Some kind of doctor’s dream to live a double life as a gunslinger?

There was an inscription on the side of the device, which I was hesitant to call an actual weapon, which read Forget-Me-Not. That was...suspicious, but I stowed it away in my saddlebags for later. Who knew? It might prove useful eventually.

Other than that, though, all the duffel bag contained were more of those weird books. Looking around at the bookshelves, I could even see the places where this pony must have grabbed them. What was so important about these weird tomes? Were they spellbooks? Code ciphers? And why these books over the hundreds of others that must be in the shop?

I was really starting to get annoyed with how little I understood about this crazy place. Rather unceremoniously, I tried my best to finagle the body into a corner and threw the blanket from the bed over top of it. I wouldn’t need anything to keep me warm during the night anyway; it was hot enough as it was.

With that, I hopped on the bed and managed to open one of the boxes of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs. I had no qualms about eating two-hundred year old food; the prewar Equestrians might not have been able to make everything last, namely themselves, but we’d learned from military debriefings that the preservation spells on sealed food items were indeed built to last. Though not exactly the most tasty or sanitary, at least you were unlikely to die from eating something once sold in a grocery store and now found in its ruins. Most of the time, anyway.

I inhaled the scent of the Sugar Bombs, and instantly my mouth began salivating. I’d eat just about anything right now, but these snacks smelled far better than they had any right to smell. I dug my snout into the box and munched hungrily, relishing the surprisingly untarnished taste of chocolate, sugar, and about two-dozen different kinds of magically-enhanced synthetic preservatives.

I tore through the other boxes as well, and was still left feeling hungry afterwards, but far better off than when I had started. My eyelids were growing heavy as well, and so I stretched, yawned, and curled up on the bed.

Then, feeling a little paranoid but preferring to be safe rather than sorry, I rose and wedged the chair at the kitchen table up against the bedroom door, making sure to lock it in the process. Satisfied, I curled back up on the bed.

The lights of this place had burnt out long ago, so I hadn’t even tried the light switches, meaning that the room had grown darker and darker as the sun finally dove behind the horizon. I had my stealth suit’s night vision mode to prevent any nasty darkness-induced hallucinations, though, so for the first time ever I wasn’t all that worried about falling to sleep without a nightlight.

The row of windows of the place overlooked the street, but the shades had been drawn and the windows themselves were completely boarded up, so I doubted I had much to worry about there. All in all, this was probably about as safe as I could get in these ruins, with my being all alone. I missed Firefly terribly, and it was almost a physical ache being separate from her, but I promised myself that somehow I would find a way to rescue her. I wasn’t going to let her go without a fight, at the very least, and even if I never did free her I’d die trying.

Tryin