I think I remember reading somewhere that you have to discount the obvious to get to good solutions. Get rid of the first thing that comes to mind, then the second, third, fourth, and so on. The first thing on my mind was 'well this is a dud, let's go home', then there was 'I wonder what Full House has in his pockets, maybe I should just blast him and take his hat', 'that pony in the corner might work as a rain shelter but she wouldn't be very happy about it' and 'maybe we should just make a run for the tower through the rain, it can't be that much radiation, can it'.

"You're a pegasus," Full House said, interrupting my increasingly pointless train of thought. "Shouldn't you be able to do something about the rain?"

"Uh, sure! Hahah, of course!" I stepped out under the awning and reared up on my hind legs, using my wings to keep balance. I spread my forelegs and took a deep breath. "Back, rain! Back I say!" There are times when I get so invested in my own bullshit that I can't tell when it's about to bite me. This is not one of those times.

A flash of lightning ripped across the sky, close enough that the accompanying rumble was almost instantaneous. I didn't see what it hit, but it was something just behind the tower. Clearly something with much less structural integrity, or else it hit an explosives stockpile. A smokestack tipped in our direction from behind the shadow of the tower. It creaked at first, like it wasn't sure if it wanted to fall, and then it passed a tipping point, after which it was just timber!

It clattered on the ground with a resonant thud, and the chop of concrete hitting water sent walls of water in both directions to the side. One end of the chimney was neatly parked on the steps of the station, a few feet in front of me. I shimmied to the left to make it look like it was right in front of me. The other end had broken through the first two floors of the tower. I clapped, and hopped into the chimney to start walking. "See? Easy!" House might have sighed, I couldn't hear over the rain. He probably did though.

The end of the chimney was flooded, but I was able to fish some scrap wood from inside the building to let House climb up without going for a swim. Where would he be without me? Inside the building was the same predictably bombed-out mess as outside, just not as wet. I got shoved before I could zone out and start internally monologuing about the rain, the constant oppressor of the land, the watery contact poison falling from the sky in unpredictable bursts, always when you least expect it, spreading like a virus until it claims your very being...

He shoved me again. "Get out of the window, this plank isn't gonna hold forever!"

The room we'd breached looked like an old hotel room. Mould and fungus had claimed a lot of the furniture here, so I didn't fancy picking through them. Stupid incessant rain, ruining my loot for me. House went for the door, which was soft enough to just lightly push through. I followed out into the corridor.

House stopped, and I bumped into him from behind. Ew, my head went kinda near his ass (even if the duster was in the way)! He sat back and threw a hoof back to silence my flailing. Now that I was listening, I could hear heavy steps too. He brushed his coat aside, and let his forelegs hang either side of him, like he was reaching for six-shooters that weren't there.

Thump, thump, thump. The steps of heavy armour on carpet drew closer. They were coming from around the corner, where our corridor joined another. Crack. "Careful, all these beams are rotten!"

"And we're still coming down here in power armour? Fantastic idea. Quit snickering and help me." There was another crack, and the ominous thumping resumed. A leg of clean metal armour rounded the corner, painted up in deep blue. A slightly less clean leg followed, smeared with rotten wood. Then came its owner, a pegasus with a brow flat enough to put a spirit level on. Her eyes widened when she saw us. "State your business!"

House, with his hat lowered over his face in a way that should probably preclude you from seeing anything, just smirked. The second mook poked his head from behind his superior. The first one made a particular shrug that made the laser cannons on her saddle click. "Last warning!"

House turned to left, drawing his right foreleg across himself, and then flung it back. A spinning square of yellow light zipped down the hallway, hitting the Enclave soldier in the nose, just as she was reaching for her mouth trigger. She growled and rubbed her bleeding face. House did the same motion but mirrored, throwing a red glowing square at her. It stuck in her forehead and pushed her to her haunches, and blood started spurting out around it. She crumpled to the floor, where it joined her companion's jaw. Before he could reach his trigger, House had thrown two more tiles of luminous doom his way, sticking in his eye and the side of his face. He went down screaming. After a couple of seconds, the glow of the shapes faded. I pushed past House to get a look at them. Still stuck in their faces were...

"Playing cards?"

"You betcha." He held out his forelegs, showing two packs of playing cards mounted in chunky gold-looking wristbands. "They've got talismans. Picked 'em up from some travelling zebra junk seller. Turns anything you throw into a magic missile, but I've got them loaded with something more my style." He threw another one down the hallway. I made a louder yelp than I'd care to admit and ducked. It went right past me and got stuck halfway through the metal case of an ice machine mounted on the wall. "No-one ever sees it coming." He gave a hollow chuckle, and carried on past me. I heard him whisper something when he passed the two soldiers. I huffed, replaced my shades, and hurried after him.

The corridor led to an atrium that went up the entire height of the building. The floor below was flooded, and pipes were set up alongside the elevators. Based on the damage to the glass of the elevator shafts, some bright spark had already tried cutting the cords to have the counterweight pull them to the top, and based on the brown splatters here and there, it backfired. In the upper distance, there were a few Enclave milling around the top-most floors.

"Hang on, I've got an idea." I double-backed to the two dead soldiers. I didn't have to even look at House to know he was rolling his eyes. I went to the first one and nudged her. I rolled her over to her back and started poking at bits of the armour. She was still twitching. I gave her a whack on the head to be sure, and went back to poking the armour.

House came in a minute later. He stared and frowned. "You have no idea how to remove power armour, do you?"

"Of course I do, look, there's just a catch around here somewhere..."

"It doesn't have a catch."

"Yeah, no, it's a button, like, under the..."

He sighed and shoved me out of the way, and twisted parts of the forelegs. Similarly, wings and part of the waist had twisting rings, and the front legs, wings, and back half of the armour just pulled off. The battle saddle came off next, and the front pulled off over the head. He stood back from the pile of disassembled barding. "Y'know, I thought you were going to go in all guns blazing, but this plan might actually get you killed quicker."

"Relax, I got this..." I slid my bags, armour, jumpsuit and not-quite-PipBuck off, putting the latter three in the first one, and started putting on the power armour. House grabbed my shades off me and stuffed them in my bag. I pouted before continuing.

"I'll just wait around here for an hour, and if you don't come back I'll assume you're dead and I can just go home?"

I stuck out my tongue while I was screwing on the last bits. "Your endless support never ceases to amaze me."

Back in the atrium, I looked up at where the other soldiers were floating around. I gave my wings a beat. The armour gave me a boost, but it still felt like I was hauling around a pair of car doors. I got two or three beats into the air before I couldn't manage another, and I just fell and cracked the tiles on landing. I grumbled and picked myself up. How does anyone move in these things? I tried again, peaking even lower, and mashing the previous landing rubble. I was panting when I got up the second time.

"Fuck it. I'm taking the stairs."

"Really?"

"There's no way I'm flying up there in one go."

"Won't they think it's a little odd that a pegasus is taking the stairs?"

"Why would they use them in the first place?"

House was struck with thought long enough for me to get away.

I was halfway up the second flight of stairs when I was starting to think that this plan may have been equally bad. By the fourth, I was panting, and by the sixth I had to just flop on the ground and rest, a trend that continued for every level thereafter. Except for number seven, which for reasons that are beyond me, was thick with murky fog. I decided that stopping there was unwise.

On the tenth floor, I rolled to a stop under a schematic of the building. Forty-seven floors. I groaned. I looked at the shattered window and contemplated jumping. Knowing my luck I'd probably accidentally glide and end up being irradiated to death by the rain. Eventually I decided that pressing on would be mildly less painful. It took me twenty minutes to get to the forty-third floor, by which time I could hear activity. I crawled under a table to catch my breath, might have fallen asleep for five or ten minutes, and then I poked my head out into the atrium. I was still a level or two below where most of the soldiers were, and I didn't want to be caught completely failing to fly, so I took another few flights of stairs (and took my time about it).

This floor was lined with makeshift cells. Rooms had had their doors replaced with laser barriers, and there were terminals in the walls next to them. I peered in one, and some filthy wretch was curled up in the corner. The faint smell of burning and sheer science from the laser barrier must have been keeping out the fetid stench of what the cell must have been like. Sucks to be them!

I switched up into 'look busy' mode, purposefully striding down the corridor and out to the atrium. I did my best to copy the expression of my armour's previous owner: bored, irritable, impatient. It seemed to do the trick, with a patrol just passing right by me. I snapped something incoherent at them for good measure, and a helmeted grunt fell back on his haunches in fright. I allowed myself a smirk and carried on.

I passed the atrium, feigning patrol, and went into another wing of the place. The walls around the windows had been knocked through, and the corridor continued into the clouds outside the building. I didn't dare stop to look all curious, so I just kept walking. I mean, it looked like that was how it worked, right? I held my breath deep when I approached the edge, and sighed in relief when my hoof squidged on the cloud. I had no idea clouds were solid. They look so insubstantial and they blow away in strong winds, but here I was standing on one. Eat shit, Aunt Spanner, pegasi can so stand on clouds!

I kept my serious face on and barked at another skittish-looking patrol as I explored. The layout of this place was harder to memorise because all the clouds looked the same. I walked into the same broom cupboard twice, prompting some ensign to ask if I was lost. I slapped him.

While backtracking a corridor for the third time, I caught a static squeal. There was a smack, an 'ow', and the sound died off again. I moved toward the source - a direction I hadn't been yet. There was a tinny rendition of some warbly bitch belting out a marching tune over an orchestra. I must have been too far away to hear that before.

"What was that for?"

"Don't change it!"

"Oh come on, are you seriously telling me that you'd prefer to listen to endless repeats of Rule Braytannia and messages from the 'Queen'..." His sarcastic emphasis, not mine. "... than like, anything else..."

"If they caught us listening to RFM we'd be shot."

"Well duh, but there's bound to be at least one other station that's more tolerable than this..."

I poked my head through the wall. Good ol' clouds, solid when you need floors, malleable when you need doors. "Who said RFM?" I had no idea what that was.

"Nobody, sir-ma'am-sir!" Both of them had put-on grins and cheeks red as the lights outside a brothel. I stared at them for a little while to make them really sweat. Though, truth be told, I was just savouring the feel of clouds around my neck. They're like an infinitely soft, freshly-turned cool pillow, and completely frictionless. I made an 'I'm watching you' gesture, and slowly backed out of the wall, letting my face melt through it. The clouds closing around my face made me feel all tingly, so I had to stand there until the feeling passed.

Then I turned to face their wall and bit the trigger. The lasers shredded the wall, and the wavering aim peppered them and the furniture around them with burn-marks. The shots on their armour seemed to be more of an inconvenience than anything else, but enough hit their faces that they wouldn't be getting up. Some stray shots hit the back wall so I could see right through to the office behind them. Some old fart with a trench coat looked at me like he was going to have an aneurysm.

"What is the meaning of this, sergeant?"

"I heard them discussing RFM, sir." Still not a clue what that was.

He paused, looked at me, then the radio, then the two dead soldiers, and then back at me. "Very good. Carry on." I saluted and pocketed their radio.

I milled around the Thunderhead for another fifteen minutes, pretending to be an irritable officer, witnessing acts of cartoonish villainy to the point of inefficiency, occasionally participating in such, and generally being lost. I caught a glimpse of the outside. It was completely unhelpful for timekeeping, because I couldn't see the sun when we went into the tower, but the sun was getting pretty low in the sky anyway. I got the opportunity to snap at the corporal that disturbed me from staring at the sunset. I came away from that encounter walking kinda funny. Note to self: staring at sun, bad.

As fun as it was to mess with these guys, they were going to find me out sooner or later, so I set about finding a way to tear them a new ass. When I found an armoury, I went to the corridor behind the room. I tuned the radio to something that wasn't the Enclave's shitty propaganda loop, and pushed it through the wall. Then I strode in, made a show of pricking my ears and strode up to the clerk, snorting like a bull.

"What the fuck is that I'm hearing?" I forced my head through the window. He jumped out of his sleep and started gibbering. "Give me that radio right now!" He shook in his seat, looking around for where the sound was coming from. I squinted, and took the trigger in my teeth. He finally located the radio, fumbled it around, and tossed it to me with a yelp. I caught it in my teeth. I clicked it off and stuffed it in the neck of my armour. He was curled up in the foetal position in his chair. "Now don't let me catch you playing at insubordination again!" I barked. He squeaked some pitiful attempt at 'yes ma'am', and peeled his foreleg off enough to manage a trembling salute. I nodded and turned around, taking my pick of the stock before I left. Some frag grenades, some fancy tech looking grenades, and on the top shelf there were two menacing looking optical illusions that caught my eye. They looked like egg-shaped holes in reality. The label said 'balefire eggs', followed by a list of warnings. Too long, didn't read.

Now I had to find out where best to deploy my newly purloined ordinance. The schematics of a Thunderhead were just beyond me, so it was a case of following the wall on my right until I found something that looked volatile. I went up a level, then down two more, and up and down the ship for ten minutes, before finding something that looked like an engineering room. My hair started going 'fuck you!' to gravity as soon as I entered the room - made sense that all of the techies in there were wearing hats and helmets. Sets of tubes ran through the middle of the room, some going under a transparent section of the floor, some curving up to the ceiling, but all of them constantly crackled with lightning. There was none of the weird omnipresent light in the hallways - all the light in this room was from small lights on the floor, terminals, and the lightning cloud tubes. A chamber behind the wall they emerged from rumbled and flashed. Some of the ponies milling around had white coats and were talking to each other with long words. If anything was going to go kaboom on this thing, this would be it.

On my first pass of the control decks, I pretended to look at a terminal, while I pulled the pin on a frag grenade. I let it tumble discreetly into a wastepaper basket, and with step just a little quicker than normal, I walked away. I jumped just as high as everyone around me when it went off. Someone got thrown into one of the tubes, knocking a section out it. She got fried in a snap, and lightning started sparking off nearby surfaces. Someone else took a zap, but just seemed to be stunned. That made me feel a little more comfortable about being a walking lightning rod.

"Everyone out! Security alert!" I yelled. I reared up and fired a few shots into the air. The nerdy types started rushing out. Someone hit an alarm on their way out, and sirens started blaring. Actual guards would probably be here soon. As soon as the doors shut, I whipped out both the balefire eggs and hurled them into the thunder chamber. They got whisked along the tubes and disappeared through the ceiling. Not sure why, but I didn't want to stick around to find out. I pulled the pin from another couple of grenades and let them sit on the ground near the volatile-looking pile of machinery, and belted for the door. I went to charge through the wall, but I just bounced off it and dazed myself. Solid clouds? Blasphemy! Grumbling and rubbing my head, I went for the door instead.

I exaggerated my stumble out of the doors, with the grenades going off behind me. The thunder intensified. A technician raised a hoof to speak. Spotting approaching guards behind him, I turned the other way and opened fire, mowing down boffins to make my escape. I got about ten feet before I realised that escaping this place should be the easiest thing ever. I bounced once, twice (striking something with lightning), and dove at the floor the third time.

I fell through cloud for a couple of seconds - a feeling kind of like diving into bed, only the bed is ten feet deep - and then I hit concrete and crumpled. I was in a substantial amount of pain, and took a second to unfurl myself. I limped around and nearly fell through a hole in the floor. I was on the roof of the tower, with the clouds forming a mist around me. The hole was a skylight into the atrium, with the glass long gone. I jumped through and stretched out my wings, and started to circle the elevator shafts. I saw prisoners descending the tower in a hurry (or, as much of a hurry as their malnourished state would permit them), and Enclave mooks rushing around in a panic.

"See ya, nerds!" I yelled, and I let myself dive. I saw lasers zap some of the walls around me, but they were wildly off. A splash of water hit my face - I looked back to see one of the pipes had been shot out. Makes sense in hindsight - they must have been piping up the floodwater to keep the rain going. I eased up my path and braced for a rough landing. I ended up landing on the third floor, two above where Full House... might have been. I grunted - the landing wasn't as bad as the one on the roof, but I landed on my limp. I turned around started backing up. The two soldiers following me obviously made much more skilled landings than me, but I was ahead enough that I just gunned them down while they were taking aim. While I was aiming that way, I shot out the rest of the pipes. Might as well, y'know?

I was making my way through the corridors when the ground started shaking, and the air filled with a crescendo of rumbling. It was enough to knock me over while I was running. It spiked, then died off for a few seconds. My attempt at getting up was thwarted by a second spike. I shouted "FUCK" out loud. That must have been the balefire eggs, and I missed them. I kicked a window out and bailed. I was mostly covered in power armour and the parts of me that weren't were already wet, so it's not like it would change much. I glided to the steps of the station and hurried inside.

Lo and behold, House was waiting at the station with my bags. The pony at the station was blearily looking up at the tower. I looked up, and the clouds around the tower had been blasted away, punching a hole through to the dusk sky. There were fragments of denser cloud drifting through the layer of raincloud, still crackling with cloud-to-cloud lightning, with parts of them on fire. Could clouds even catch fire? That just confused the shit out of me. The pyrotechnics silhouetted some of the ponies fluttering around in a panic, trying to salvage whatever they could. I sighed and smiled. I closed my eyes, and the thunder of secondary explosions cut through the rattle of the rain. I love it when a plan comes together.

"All aboard for Picca-... Picca-... Picca-..." Everyone wheeled around. House bolted for Tramway with my bags. He stopped with a leg against the door to keep it from closing. The other pony took her blanket and followed.

I frowned. "Is she..."

"I'm not sticking around with that going on!"

House shrugged, and made way for her. I took one last look at the carnage, before hurrying back to the tram. Tramway garbled something in a cheery tone about how obstructing the door will result in vaporisation. House let the door close as soon as he could.

Level up! [muffled ignoring in the distance] New perk: Gentlemen?

You deal sneak attack criticals when disguised as an ally of your target.