There was a soft splash. Much quieter than you'd expect from a fall that high. In fact it was more of a wet slap into liquid. The surface tension took considerable force to break, and the impact winded her. Shooting Stars wanted to scream. She'd just fallen twenty feet in the dark from a rusty catwalk into something cold and wet and she didn't want to know what it was. Before she could process it, she was already fully submerged, and it was getting everywhere. It seeped into her eyes, into the gashes and gouges from her fall, and she gulped it down and inhaled it in her panic to find air. She knew she was as good as dead.

She cursed her stupidity as she waited for death to come. She should have known better than to take up this offer. Go get this doodad from Saddlefield, they said. Pre-war arcane waste treatment facilities aren't that dangerous, they said. When she'd heard that even Atom Smasher had turned the job down, she should have known the notion was indescribably insane. Patently suicidal. But then her new travelling companions just had to get the idea that this was reasonable.

She felt the pressure drop on her back. She was at the surface. Of course - whatever it was, it must have been denser than flesh, and her robes weren't caught on bits of falling catwalk, so she floated. She rotated herself back so her head was free, and began to tread water.

Her eyes felt like they were full of nettles, but she kept them open anyway. Zephyr Rush hovered a short way away, only visible by a little red emergency light above a nearby doorway. Stars went to say something, but she first had to cough up the fluid in her lungs and battle the delirium of oxygen deprivation. Zephyr continued to hover a safe distance away.

Eventually Stars managed to gurgle something audible above her own thrashing. "Help me, you fuck!"

"Uhm..." was the only thing that made it out of Zephyr's stupid mouth.

The metal door below the red light flew off its hinges. Zephyr narrowly avoided it, and shot at the doorway a couple of times. Stars didn't duck, because she figured getting decked in the face by a sub-sonic metal door and dying instantly was preferable to drowning in industrial runoff. To her chagrin, it made a dent in the vat and carried on past it.

"Put those things down, birdbrain! There's just us here." Zephyr made a noise like an injured puppy and dropped to the platform by the door at Peach Liqueur's scolding. At least that was probably what Peach said, because her northern accent was so thick that even Stars had trouble understanding her sometimes. For your benefit and my sanity, the accent has not been transcribed. Though for the sake of immersion, when reading Peach's dialogue, ignore every consonant that doesn't require you to close your lips or teeth, and stretch the shape of each vowel until it mildly aches to do so.

Tongueslix, still wary of these personal fire-powered catapults, took a moment to step in after Peach. He'd managed to figure out a light spell, which was an infinite improvement of his utility. Peach brought a ladder from somewhere outside, and Canary held on to it, because that was helping. He was sure of it.

Stars flipped a coin in her head, and it turned up tails, so she reluctantly decided to keep on living. She swam to the end of the ladder that had been lowered to the edge of the vat and she crawled on to it. Her body felt heavy coming out of the liquid. She stopped climbing, like she was having a sudden change of heart about the path of self-preservation. The others used the one brain cell they had between them and pulled the ladder up.

Once the ladder was up, Stars sprawled on the platform by the door, and coughed and hacked to get the rest of the fluid out of her system. Everyone else kept a good ten feet away. Canary didn't do this by choice, he had to be pulled back and slapped on the nose for trying to go up to Stars and lick her.

"What..." Not quite there. Another cough or two, and she had everything out. "Why are all you idiots just standing there? No towels? Not even an 'are you okay?'"

Tongueslix grimaced. "I'm not quite sure how to put this." Canary jumped at Peach's leg, and she slapped his nose again. She muttered something about retarded wild children.

"The wordmancer struck dumb? Oh this is rich. What's the problem?"

Zephyr lowered a little to get a better look at Stars. "I think the problem is that you need some ice cream and a spoon."

"What?"

"Take... take a look at yourself."

She looked down. The light from Tongueslix's spell wasn't great, but it was enough to spot the dancing colours on the liquid dripping off her. She gulped. She knew of two things in liquid form that looked like rainbows, and only one of them was likely to be in a hazard factory like Saddlefield. She pulled her foreleg over to look at it. It took her a minute to figure out where it was, because it certainly didn't look like it did five minutes ago. It was still a greyish lavender, but now it was also glossy, translucent, and wobbled.

Tongueslix squealed when Stars levitated the vanity mirror from his breast pocket. He tried to play it off coolly, smoothing down his cravat and combing back his mane again. Being the more competent mage, Stars was able to hold the mirror and provide more light than the other unicorn at the same time. She gawped as she took in her reflection. She ignored the liquid still running off her. Of more urgent notice was the see-through nature of her head. She reluctantly tilted it. Her mane was still attached, but it had congealed into six thick strands around the front, and a solid mass at the back with her two plaits sticking out. Her ears responded to movement, but when she closed her eyes, it made no difference. Her eyelids were too thin to block any light.

"Well, it coulda been worse, going for a taint bath..." Zephyr's cracked, nonchalant tones were the last thing Stars wanted to hear about now. It was a heroic feat of willpower not to smash the mirror and jam it into her eyes. Instead she shoved it back in Tongueslix's general direction. It smeared on his nose. He spent the next minute wiping it clean, and the minute after that admiring himself in it, and lamenting what this foul wasteland was doing to his complexion and coiffure.

"Then why don't you take a dip?"

"Stars, I know it's a bit of a shock, but- AY." Peach slapped Canary on the nose again and whistled. He yelped, and lay on the floor to brood. Tongueslix stared.

"I'm just saying, you're really lucky to be alive right now. Stuff is nasty."

"I guess you're right... I..." Stars took a deep breath. "I need a minute."

Zephyr frowned and looked around. "I don't think we have a minute. This place is just waiting to collapse, and from what I've heard, vats of taint are pretty low on the danger rating here."

Stars shuddered. "Look, maybe we should just turn back. It's too dangerous. We all got half a lethal dose of radiation in the courtyard on the way in, if we hurry we should be able to make it out with just under the whole dose." She knew that wasn't how radiation worked, but Zephyr hadn't exactly shown herself to be an expert in balefire physics either, and she was a wasteland genius next to the rest of the party.

"No, we can't." That's exactly what she was afraid of. "We have to finish this job. I mean, how would the Steel Rangers feel about a breach of contract like that?"

"We don't make contracts, usually. We’re self-sufficient. Maybe it's because my brain is now made of dessert, but I can't really remember why I went on this one with you."

Zephyr inspected her hooves, and then the barrels of her guns. "You sign on the dotted line, you do what you're paid for. Simple as that."

"If I'm dead, it doesn't make a difference whether I get paid, does it?"

"Easy for you to say, you can just run back to your buddies in Warry Tow-"

"Warreington."

"... and you get food and shelter for doing whatever the hell it is you do in there. If I don't get paid, I might as well be dead."

Stars grumbled, then sighed. "Fine then. You lot can go and die horribly in this industrial death trap, I'm out of here."

"You can't!" Was that panic in Zephyr's voice? "We need you!"

On any other day, this would be the part where Stars cocked a smug grin and thought something like, I told you so, or how the mighty have fallen. However, on any other day, she probably would not have been made entirely out of gelatin. "No. Fuck off. If I stay with you guys, Canary will probably try to eat me." He perked up his ears at the mention of his name and dragged at the floor with his forehooves. Stars stood up and started walking away, still dripping taint after her.

"No! Wait!" Zephyr flew in front of her and tried to physically stop her from leaving. Only on the squelch of unprotected forehooves on taint-smeared jelly did she realise what she'd done. The urgent grimace on her face remained, but her gaze shifted from Stars' eyes to the point of contact. Stars remained blank and looked down. Zephyr slowly pulled her hooves away. The ends of her hooves were no longer the same pale gold as the rest of her. Instead, they were now white, cold, and starting to drip. Her jaw hung slack as she brought them up to her face to inspect them.

Stars allowed herself a smile. "Now we just need a spoon."

Zephyr took a deep breath and winced. A lump of hoof slid off her leg like melting ice cream and left a white splat on the floor. It smelled faintly of sugar and vanilla. "Y-yeah... let's get out of here."