Fallout Equestria: Homelands

By Somber

Chapter 21: Broken Oracles

Not knowing… sucked.

Rampage had said that once, and Scotch had been dismayed to learn how right she was. When she’d escaped 99, everything seemed wondrous and terrible all at once. Blackjack had gassed her home, killing everyone she knew. Knowing that was almost surreal. It was easier to just think of them all doomed in some cruel but blameless twist of fate than to deal with the fact that she was travelling with the executioner of all the ponies she had ever known.

Not that it had been a wonderful home to begin with. To her, it had been her whole world, and she hadn’t understood what the place was. What it did to people. That things could have been different.

One rainy night while Blackjack was running all over the Wasteland, laying batponies and blowing up prisons, Scotch asked her father if he’d ever loved her mother.

“Love?” he said as he stared out into the dark. “No. To be honest, she wasn’t that different from the Overmare to me. To her, I was a thing. Her fantasy stallion in her fantasy dream. She used me, just like everypony else there did, to suit her needs,” he’d told her. “But she wasn’t any worse than any of the others. They were all bad.”

She hadn’t had the guts then to ask if he included her in that thought.

It’d been hard learning that about her home and her father. Knowing what went on in her stable, knowing what they’d done to her father and so many other stallions… It was a feeling she didn’t think she’d ever be able to fully wrap her head around… Torn between what she learned from her father and how she’d grown up… how did anyone deal with that?! But before she’d even had a chance to try and understand it, they’d gone underground, and something had happened… Something bad.

A room had tried to eat her; eat all of them, actually. That’s what she’d been told. But Blackjack had excised the memory, along with several others that left not-quite-empty holes in the depths of her mind. She’d taken those memories from her in a futile, idiotic attempt to make her happy. The specifics had vanished into the aether, but the terror remained, formless, hungry, and waiting. Every now and then she might see a gaping maw in a rusted panel and pause, or hear the shriek of rending metal as its integrity failed, and feel her heart race. Because something would break through the Threshold of Not Knowing from that void in her mind, and the Thing would begin its soul-rending wail.

If she knew, maybe she could have dealt with it. What was the phrase the smart ponies used? ‘Contextualized’ it? ‘Processed’ it? She was starting to sound like Pythia. She had to make it make sense. But how could she make sense out of memories she didn’t have? It was a broken part of her, a shameful part, made all the worse for its unfairness. Who could be condemned for simply not remembering something? Now she woke with a splitting headache and the hollowness of failure in her gut.

She was on a bed at least, and as she stirred she felt a claw on her shoulder. Precious, or Skylord? She peeked back at Precious.

“Hey, you okay?” the dragonfilly asked.

“I passed out, didn’t I? That sound like I’m okay?” Scotch grumbled. They were in a sort of barracks, with a dozen bunk beds arrayed in two rows. The dim bulbs on the ceiling flickered from age, and mildew lingered in the air. It reminded her of home. While this might not be a stable, it felt the same. From how similar the stale air smelled to 99, she guessed the circulation system was in poor repair. Doctor Xandros’s zebras might have been good with terminals, but it seemed other fundamentals were lacking. “How long was I out?” She swallowed, realizing her throat ached. “And why is my throat sore?”

“A few hours. And probably from all the screaming.” Precious rubbed her budding horns. “There was some sobbing too.”

“Great. From the Green Menace to the pony basket case,” Scotch grumbled, grabbing the pillow and pulling it over her head. “I quit. You’re in charge now.”

“Sweet!” Precious cheered. “Okay, we’re going to take this place over and make it my new dragonpony fortress! We’ll have my hoard over there. A fighting pit over there! Ohhh! And a giant polished gold statue of me right… there!” Scotch pulled her head out from beneath the pillow and saw Precious grinning as she pointed off to one side, then the dragonfilly glanced back down at her before scoffing. “Seriously, you can’t quit. I don’t think you know how. What would you do if you did? Hang out here? Try to go back to the Hoof? It’s not like you’ve got a lot of options.”

Scotch sighed and rolled on to her back, hugging the pillow to her chest. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I’m spirit touched, but I don’t know why. We’re going to Roam to find out something, but I don’t even know if it matters. There’s a whole frigging ‘New Empire’ trying to kill me for reasons.”

“Wanna swap? You can be the freak of nature and I’ll be spirit molested?” Scotch couldn’t help but chuckle. She rarely got to just talk with Precious like this, and it was helping her put her breakdown out of mind.

“You’re not a freak of nature.” Scotch smirked. “In fact… you’re a cutie.” She’d expected a snort and a roll of Precious’s eyes, but instead got an actual blush from the dragonfilly!

“Freak of science then,” Precious tried again. “A freaky mishmash of pony and dragon. Hideous in my abominationness. Hideous!” She twisted her lips. “I think Majina’s rubbing off on me.”

“You aren’t hideous, or a freak, or an abomination,” Scotch said, reaching up to boop Precious on the nose, but missed and got her cheek instead. Precious turned her face into the touch, closing her eyes with a smile that jolted Scotch’s train of thought. She needed to switch onto smoother tracks before it jumped the rails. “Where’s Pythia now?” Scotch glanced around the barracks. “Actually, where is everyone?”

“Majina’s geeking out about that Twelve guy. Sky’s probably trying to figure out how to kill everyone in here with a paperclip and his own badassitude. Charity’s trying to buy the whole place with some old rations and a block of salt. And Pythia’s going nuts over their maps, trying to make sense of where we’re going next.”

“Good luck,” Scotch muttered. “Nothing makes sense anymore.”

Precious flopped down beside her, close. Really close. “Well, so what? Nothing in my life makes sense either. According to doctor dipshit, I was a weapon. Some dragon pony super soldier crap. I felt like one too. You were the first friend I ever had. The first person that actually talked to me like I was a person. Like… like I could be a person with you.” Precious snuggled up to her. The scales felt strange against Scotch’s fur, but not unpleasant. “I’ll never forget that.”

Scotch didn’t recall the precise details of how they’d met. She’d been too terrified of getting burned or eaten, but they’d been trying to save Priest and the Crusaders of Chapel from Sanguine. She reached back into her memories, around that hole. She’d gotten Precious away, asking her if she wanted to play. They’d gone to one of the old houses… The exchange came like an old PipBuck recording.

‘I’m a monster.’

‘I don’t think you’re a monster.’

‘Look at me! I’m a freak. I’m ugly!’

‘I don’t think you’re ugly at all. I think you’re really pretty.’

‘You think so? You’re not just lying so I won’t eat you, are you?’

‘No. I think you’re really cute, Precious.’

Suddenly, Scotch’s mind gave a lurch, like a tablecloth being yanked… only instead of being pulled out flawlessly, all the dishes went crashing to the floor. “Um… Precious?” she murmured as the dragonfilly snuggled up against her. “Are you okay?”

“Are any of us?” she muttered with a frown. Scotch stared at her for a moment, then carefully shifted on her side to hold her. Precious’s frown subsided with a sigh. “I get it. I know you and Pythia are a special thing. I dunno what kind of thing, but I get it. You like her. Like her, like her. Special. I get it,” she repeated, dejected.

Scotch held her close and finally asked in a voice that cracked, “Do you… like me? Like… like me like me?”

Precious let out a sigh, closing her eyes with a sigh. “Oh, sweet shiny, you actually asked me. Finally.” She pressed her face into Scotch’s chest. “You know, I used to dream you’d ask me something like this, and I’d say something and then… well… I dunno, but I kinda assumed it’d be good. Now it’s just… ugh…” Her tail weakly thumped the mattress beside Scotch. “Why couldn’t you have asked a year ago?”

“Um, because Vicious would have killed me,” Scotch muttered weakly. “But you do… like me?”

“Like you? Pfft,” she snorted, trying to maintain her shield of scorn, but it crumbled as Scotch looked on. “I dunno. Kinda. You’re nice to me. Like… really nice to me. Do you think anyone’s ever called me cute before? But I get that you and Pythia have that thing.” She let out a soft huff, shaking her head a little. “I was hoping that, maybe, you’d just… get over it. Or get bored with her. Or have a fight and I’d be there, your dashing dragon knight to swoop in and save the day. But that never happened. I couldn’t ever get you alone to just… talk.” She turned her face away. “Not that I’d know what to say if we did.”

Scotch wanted to say she’d been busy, but knew that was a lie. When she did have time, she spent it more with Pythia talking about spirit things and, more recently, that damned book. “Sorry,” she murmured. “I just thought you were more interested in Skylord.”

Precious laughed, then let out a long sigh. “Sky’s… weird. Good weird. We’re a lot alike, and I think that’s kind of the problem. When we’re together it’s always a fight. That’s good. I like a fight. But…” She rubbed her temples. “I don’t think he knows what he wants. I’ve never heard him call me cute or anything. I just know that whatever I want to feel from him… I don’t. I want to wrestle Sky, tweak his beak, and give him a noogie. I don’t want to… you know… stuff.” She tapped her claws together, blushing horribly.

“And you want stuff from me?”

Precious bit her lip. “I don’t know. Maybe? I think?” She turned her eyes away again. “I don’t know.” She rubbed her face. “I don’t know how to talk about this. Let me sink my fangs into something meaty and I’m good. Talking about feelings is all… squishy.”

“I didn’t think you’d… like fillies,” Scotch confessed.

“Oh sweet silver, this is it, isn’t it? The Talk.” Precious groaned again, tightening up and squirming a little. “I have no idea. I didn’t even start thinking about it before Rice River. Most of us didn’t grow up in a stable where you just did that. I just… I don’t know. I’d like to know, but I’m also terrified that I’ll screw something up and you’ll hate me and… I don’t think I could survive you hating me. And there’s the thing with you and Pythia.” She closed her eyes. “Did you have a special somepony back in your stable?”

Scotch had been trying not to think that far back. It was full of pain and regret that she couldn’t do anything about. “Kinda. I mean, mom was a maintenance mare, and I was a maintenance foal. There were a dozen or so of us. We’d take things apart because we got bored, and then panic if we couldn’t put them back together. Once, we rigged a talisman to put out helium, and everypony in security and the Overmare’s office were yelling with these crazy squeaky voices. Sometimes we’d slip to a utility room and make a bed. Be nice to each other. Do stuff. It was… just what ponies did there.” She closed her eyes. It’d only been two years, but they were already fuzzy. “I wouldn’t call any of them special. If you called someone your special pony, they’d look at you funny and Text Book would warn about getting ‘overly attached.’ We made each other feel good. It was nice, but that’s all it ever was.” That was the best you got in 99.

“The thing you have with Pythia is special though,” Precious said. “Right?”

Scotch let out a long sigh. “I don’t know what our thing is, Precious. I’m interested in her. She’s interested in me, I think. I’m spirit touched and she’s… got some really weird stuff going on. Then there’s the fact she won’t admit she’s a shaman when she did shaman things… I mean, I know she says it’s to avoid the spirits noticing her or something. That’s fine! Don’t do shaman stuff! But I still don’t know why she has to stay under the radar like that. Why can’t she just be honest and explain it all to me? Why does she have to make it all a… a secret?” Scotch stared at the underside of the bed above her, but it had as many answers for her as Pythia. “It’s like this big convoluted thing and every time she gives that excuse… Sometimes it’s so mystifying it drives me mad.” She rubbed her face with a hoof. “I’m not sure if we’ll ever get over it.”

“You could have me,” Precious whispered, “in the meantime. I could be special for you.”

There was a part of her that wanted that. It would just be… convenient. A good way to scratch an itch that hadn’t been attended to since Rice River. Blackjack, she knew, would have gone for it instantly, both for fun and to give comfort. But she wasn’t Blackjack. She’d just be using her friend, and she… didn’t like doing it just to try to feel better. She’d learned that in a rocket, where trying to be Blackjack had just left her awfully sore and embarrassed.

“Sorry,” Scotch murmured. “You deserve better than just ‘in the meantime.’”

Precious hid her face and started to tremble, then emitted tiny, soft sobs. Scotch couldn’t say anything but just hold her and wait, and try not to wince. Her tears were almost painfully hot. The snot was like hot wax soaking into her coat, but she bore it as stoically as possible. Finally, Precious lifted her face enough to wipe away the tears. “I feel so stupid,” she grumbled. “I just… you were here and alone and… I’m an idiot.”

“We all are,” Scotch sighed, nuzzling her brow. “One crazy wagonload of kids on a quest in the zebra lands.”

She rubbed away the tears as she gave her a half smile. Scotch took a second to try to wipe some of the dragon mucus elsewhere as Precious said, “Kids? Scotch, have you looked in a mirror lately?” Precious asked. “We’re, like, practically adults.”

“No!” Scotch protested, then frowned and looked down at herself, her eyes widening with revelation. “Wait. When did that happen?” How old was she exactly? Her brain tried to put numbers to it, but with shock she realized she was almost the same age as Blackjack when she’d gone running all over the Hoof! “That’s why the wagon’s been so snug, huh?”

“Had to happen sooner or later,” Precious said, scrubbing her face of any sign of her previous sorrow. “We’ll be fine. If I know Charity, she’s probably gotten a second tractor by now. Or three.” Her eyes widened. “Ooh. Or one for each of us! Can you imagine cruising all over the Wasteland in a convoy armed to the teeth? I’m going to paint flames on mine! Purple flames,” she said with a grin, all evidence of her confession neatly suppressed. She’d put herself out there, let Scotch see something special, and had been rejected. Now it was back to pretending like she didn’t care.

“Yeah. Purple flames. It’ll be awesome,” Scotch agreed, trying hard to smile to keep up the illusion.

Precious took a deep breath. “Come on. Let’s find the others.” She rolled off the stiff bed and onto her feet. “You good with that?” she asked a moment later, her brow furrowed.

Well, she wasn’t going to get much better. “Yeah. Sure.”

Precious walked to the door and paused, claw on the frame, looking back at her. “And… um… what I said?”

Scotch balked, giving a sickly little smile. “Yeah. No. Don’t worry. I won’t say anything. Even to Pythia.” Precious nodded and rolled out, and she followed behind.

Out in the hall there were a number of zebras, but none of them met her eye for more than a moment. “What’s up with them?” Scotch asked as they rapidly trotted away from her.

“They’re trying not to get your curse all over them, or some junk. They make it sound like a nasty flu or something,” Precious said with a snort.

Scotch wasn’t so sure of that. How could a spirit touch curse be spread? “Where’s everyone?”

They weren’t far. After a stop in a bathroom, where Scotch thanked the unappreciated spirits of good plumbing, Precious led her to a cafeteria where Charity seemed to be in earnest negotiations to trade a tub of axle grease for a chunk of salt. From the pile of loot beside her and the predatory glint in her eye, Scotch thought it best not to throw her off her game. Majina and Skylord were talking, and the zebra waved them both over.

“Hey! How are you doing?” she asked Scotch, slipping out of her seat to run up and give her a hug. “You were really bad there for a while. What happened?”

“Oh, just some serious psychological trauma,” Scotch said with a strained little laugh. “Nothing major. What about you? What are you up to?”

“Finally. You can talk their ears off instead,” Skylord said as he vacated his seat.

“You don’t have any ears,” Precious replied.

“Case in point!” he snapped, then trotted past Scotch towards Charity and the merchant. “I’m going to make sure she’s getting the right caliber.”

“He’s relieved too. Said you were shell shocked or something,” Majina said, before looking at her. “And there’s a Tremendous Twelve here. Like, and actual one of the Twelve! Eeee!” She danced on her hooves in glee before pausing. “Okay, a brain damaged member, but still!”

“He’s the real deal?” Precious asked. “I mean, he looks like a corpse with wires in his brain but–” She glanced at Scotch and fell silent.

“Oh, he’s real. And if he’s not, then he’s as close as I’ll probably get to one. He couldn’t exactly answer all my questions but he knew enough details that I’m convinced. Even if his answers were incoherent at times.”

“But who was he? Xiegfried?” Scotch asked, having to wrack her brains for the name.

“Oh, he was the youngest colt on the team. Some sort of wonder child prodigy with terminals and networks and everything. He reverse-engineered like half of pony technology on his own without even thinking about it. And came up with quite a few tricks on his own,” Majina rattled off with a cocky waggle of her brows. “He’d trip up pony surveillance networks, plant all kinds of false data, and once even took over a pony Thunderhead with a model plane remote!” Majina said with a laugh. Scotch wasn’t so sure of all that, but didn’t care enough to argue.

“So, when did he become a shaman?”

Majina’s eyes widened. “He wasn’t a shaman. Only Ignatia was a shaman on the team. With her fire spirits!”

“Sounds like my kind of mare,” Precious chuckled. Majina arched a brow at the dragonfilly in surprise and she stumbled. “What? What’s wrong with fire?”

“Huh,” Majina muttered, squirming, as Precious scrunched up her mouth.

Scotch approached Majina with a frown. “But the stuff he did in Rice River… the way he is now… are you saying none of it has anything to do with spirits?”

“Of course it does,” came the reedy voice of Doctor Xandros as he approached. “He’s spirit touched,” he announced gravely. The old stallion’s television face mask turned to that of the cartoony blue striped zebra, who gave a soundless laugh before flickering away into static.

“Spirit touched?” Scotch’s eyes jumped to the screen. Every now and then Xiegfried flickered in with his face contorted in some strange way, only to disappear a moment later. “What spirit? How?”

The old zebra pushed his mask back, looking down at her with pale blue eyes. “Walk with me. This isn’t a casual conversation for the cafeteria.”

Scotch looked at the others, but rose. “I’ll be back in a bit.” Together they trotted out to the hall.

“Sorry if my people are standoffish, but after what happened to Xiegfried, I don’t want to take any chances.”

“You act as if being spirit touched is a disease,” Scotch groused, a touch defensively.

“Ha. I wish. Then we could just cure it, or quarantine you,” Doctor Xandros said with a disapproving shake of his head. “No, when it comes to spirits, nothing is certain, or even predictable. Just talking to you might curse me, but if so, perhaps I can keep it to myself.”

“I’m not cursing anyone!”

“No?” he countered. “Xiegfried was already cursed before he crossed paths with you. Then he had a chance to peek into Rice River’s secrets. Boy was always too curious for his own good. But having the building brought down while he was still in its infosphere broke him. Granted, he was a bit cracked before, but now…”

A cartoon zebra appeared, cracks ran through him, and he shattered like glass. The shards grinned at her before disappearing.

“Well, we’ll be on our way then,” Scotch muttered.

“It’s more complicated than that. If Xiegfried wanted you here, it has to be for a reason. And since you are here–” He paused and pushed up his mask to regard her with his limpid eyes. “–well, I might as well use your freakish pony powers to try and help put him back to normal.”

“You want me to fix him? I don’t even know what he is!” Scotch objected. Still, she had once known a stallion trapped in a PipBuck. He’d been called the Dealer, and his soul had been bound to a megaspell. While Blackjack had never told her the details, she suspected it couldn’t have been a stable storage medium for a soul… or maybe the soul was the medium and the megaspell was recorded on it?

“When I was a colt, he was a young stallion just trying to help people survive by broadcasting observations of the legions fighting each other. I didn’t know he was one of the Twelve. Then we met.” He gave a tiny smile. “Anyway, while I aged he… changed. Mutated. He grew those wires straight from his brain. His eyes changed into screens. One day, he just stopped being able to walk. We put him in that tank simply to anesthetize him.” He sighed deeply. “I don’t know if he could survive outside it. It would be agony.”

“I don’t know what you expect me to do. I can’t even look at him like that,” Scotch confessed. “What spirit touched him?”

“I don’t know. He never confided in me, but it was a doozy. Not aging was the first change. He could operate terminals with his mind. Just think at them and they’d do what he said. I think it was a data spirit of some kind, but I’m not certain.” Doctor Xandros paused to rub the bridge of his muzzle with a hoof. “He’s annoying, impulsive, and immature, but I’ve lived eighty years with him. I’d like to help him get better if I can.”

“So he can keep digging up secrets for your show?” Scotch asked archly.

“So he doesn’t fall apart completely, but yes. Him being more consistent and reliable would do wonders for Z TV. And I’m not sure if you noticed, but for most of the Empire we’re the closest thing many people have to objective news. There’s no lack of legions that’d be happy if we permanently went off the air.”

Scotch took a deep breath. “Okay. I’ll try. I think I’m getting better at this spirit stuff, so maybe I can figure something out.” She twisted her lips thoughtfully around a sour thought. “You wouldn’t happen to know where the Eye of the World is, off hoof?”

“Of course,” Doctor Xandros said with a note of bored certainty that made Scotch’s spirits lift immediately. “It resides in all of us, as we see the world, the world sees us. It’s a metaphor.”

Scotch winced. “Right. A metaphor. ‘Course. Why didn’t we think of that? One second,” she said and turned, pressed her face to the wall, buried her face between her forehooves, and screamed her frustration into the concrete in an unmitigated howl of rage. Then she pulled her face away, brushed back her mane, and commented lightly, “I’m fine. I’m fine. Everything’s fine. You were saying?” Of course he stared at her as if she were properly deranged. On the television screen on his brow, Xiegfried was eating popcorn out of a bowl as he watched her. She just smiled, ignoring her momentary outburst.

“Are you well?” the zebra asked, sliding off the mask to regard Scotch with worry.

She almost unloaded with a sarcastic quip, but his concern was so clear that she couldn’t get it out. “It’s just… we’ve come all this way to find this Eye place and even after being here a year, we’re no closer to it.” She shook her head. “I remember Blackjack whining about her own trying to find stuff and thinking that it was… I dunno. I didn’t think it’d be so hard.”

His pale eyes took her in, and then he chuckled. “Ah, to be young and impatient,” he muttered with a wry smile. “The Eye of the World has always been elusive. To be honest, I was joking a bit about the metaphor. The Eye is a place, but special and unclear. No two tribes agree precisely on where it is or what it is. I’ve heard a Tappahani and a Roamani argue for days that the Eye was in their lands and no other. Others that the Eye exists in the world of spirits or ghosts, or that it never existed at all. You’re chasing a myth even for shamans.”

“The Caesar seemed to think for certain it existed. Why else would he order it blinded?” She was surprised when he didn’t seem too bothered by the question.

“I have no idea. Perhaps he was using the Eye as a term for some other project, and blinding it was simply a code phrase.” He reached out and put a hoof on her shoulder. “Please, don’t be frustrated just because you haven’t found it in a year. There are shamans that never found it in a lifetime.”

Scotch took several slow breaths. “You’re right. You’re right. We’re doing the best we can and… yeah. I guess that’s all we can do.” She took one more breath to steady herself, aware of an ache smoldering to life in her chest from her impetuous scream. Was that all it took to wind her now? “Where’s Pythia?”

He set the mask in place, the video screen showing the cartoon zebra lurching as if his whole world had been shaken by his movement. They walked together in silence a while before Scotch asked, “Is it possible there’s more than one Eye? I mean, we all have two eyes, right?”

He gave another wry smile. “You’re spirit touched. Stop making me like you,” the old zebra said. “There’s a whole school of theory about that. Multiple eyes. Eyes that open and close. It was a major schism in shamanistic thought for five hundred years, before the eightieth Caesar proclaimed the monocular theory as canon.”

“Caesars can just do that? Say ‘This is true because I say so’? Seems like a bad way to do science.”

“But an excellent way to curtail the Eschatiks, Atoli, and Mendi who challenge your rule,” he said with a sigh. “To be honest, the Propoli have no strong convictions either way. To us, the Eye is an idea. It could be a singular place, or multiple, but it is still an idea. Until we have definitive proof, we’re not going to commit absolutely. To be honest, we’d be more interested in how to exploit such a place than understanding its being.”

“Really?” Scotch asked, finding the thought rather sad.

“Propoli are all about results. Perhaps excessively so. It’s our greatest strength and weakness,” Doctor Xandros mused. “You might guess, but we’re not the biggest artists in the Empire. In fact, the Sahaani once waged a war to get us to consider architectural aspects at all. If it were left up to us, every city would be a Bastion, and considering I fled from there, that’s not high commendation.”

“I keep hearing that place more and more, lately. More than Roam, even.”

“It is our greatest city today. A twentieth the size of Roam at its height, but it stands while Roam is now a colossal, perpetually burning ruin,” he replied, an odd note of pride in his voice.

“If it’s so great then why isn’t it helping restore the zebra lands?”

“Why would they want to?”

Scotch started, trying to detect if he was serious or not. “Uh, because the zebra lands are a mess?”

“And Bastion is the apex of that mess,” he replied grimly. “Don’t misunderstand. Bastion calls continuously for a stable and restored Empire, but it’s superficial. They send out exiles to ‘found civilization’ with every intent of hunting them down and reclaiming the equipment later. If they helped Rice River with their grass problem, it would only strengthen their greatest competitor. Zebras might try to find refuge there rather than Bastion. If they kept the legions in check, more free cities might have a chance to rise. Better to watch Roam burn and do nothing than to help. If the Empire were restored, and Roam reclaimed, Bastion would once again become an insignificant city on our border, guarding a canal that has no use. It would shrink. Decline. And the city’s masters guard against this future with fervent determination.” He tapped his chest. “I should know. I was once one myself.”

“You were?”

“Another life,” he said with a wry smile. “When I was young, impatient, and assumed many things.”

Was that a dig at her? “What happened?”

“I met Xiegfried back when he was a wandering nuisance. I challenged him to prove his claims. He did. He showed me the numbers. Numbers of what our people would be if Bastion had been destroyed in the war. He provided me evidence that Bastion wasn’t the shining pinnacle of zebra survival, but a weight around the necks of all our people.” The cartoon zebra gave a bow. “Today he’s more of a statuary nuisance.” That got a large raspberry blown at the screen.

They reached the doorway to the chamber with all the screens that she had seen earlier. Thankfully, they’d wrapped a sheet around the tank. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen a pony in a jar, apparently. The first time was in that memory hole. Sometimes she wondered what else might have fallen in. Still, she hesitated… but not out of fear. Mostly.

Pythia sat there, one hoof on the glass, while the screens flickered and played clips or showed images from the war. Headlines of ‘Terrific Twelve Stops Equestrian Raid’ and ‘Starkatteri Sorceress Trumps Unicorn Magic!’ Images of Pythia… but not Pythia… during the war. The mane cut was a little different. Shorter. The eyes had a bit more sharpness to them. Eagerness. Confidence.

“I’m telling you I don’t remember any of it,” Pythia said loudly in annoyance. “I’m not Tanit, Xiggy.”

A video clip immediately played of a younger ‘Tanit’ saying, “I don’t have the same memories as my mother. Just… impressions. Feelings. Like regrets when you can’t exactly remember what you’re sorry for.” The clip froze on that image of a softer and more vulnerable looking Pythia.

“Right. Exactly!”

Then another clip of Tanit in a hallway at a door, hitting the buttons 04510. A stallion asked, “How did you know the code?”

A haunted look on Tanit’s face was followed by an insincere “Lucky guess?” She stared at the door. “I guess there’s more of Mom in me than I like to admit.” That statement repeated three times.

“Okay! Yes. Spirits, you are so annoying, Xiggy.” Pythia protested.

At least a dozen more clips of Tanit saying the same thing on an equal number of screens. Suddenly Pythia whirled away, clenching her eyes shut. “Stop it!” Scotch lurched forward towards the doorway but Pythia repeated. “Just… please stop. I know I’m old. I look at Scotch and it feels like I’m looking at a sister, a daughter, and a granddaughter all at once.” Scotch froze, then shifted behind a server as Pythia continued. “I don’t know if I am Tanit or not. I don’t know if I’m my own mother or not. I look at this world and nothing looks like it should be. Especially when I look back.”

Scotch leaned forward to stare at Pythia’s back as she looked up at the screens of the cartoon zebra with the neon blue stripes. “I know you want me to be Tanit, Xiegfried. You want your friend back. I just don’t know if I’m that person.” Scotch took a deep breath and Pythia said, “Cue Scotch.”

The green pony’s lunge discombobulated and she landed, sprawling on the floor behind Pythia. “How’d you know?”

“About the time I said you reminded me of a sister. Or a kid from grade school, maybe,” she said, turning to Scotch. “That was about the moment the future turned all grim and bloody.” Her eyes twitched over to Scotch’s saddlebags and back up to her face. “Are you feeling better?”

Scotch glanced at the sheet covered vat. “A little. Yeah. Sorry I freaked out like that. I don’t know what causes it.” As calm as she was trying to be, she couldn’t help but notice the layout of the terminal screens looked like a face. She felt a bead of sweat roll down her neck. “I’m guessing that you brought me here to help you?”

The cartoon blinked and gave an almost comical shrug. “I’m hoping you can help him,” Doctor Xandros said calmly as he approached them from behind. “Since you tend to do the impossible.”

Scotch looked at Pythia, who gave a little smile and stepped back from the cylinder. “Do the impossible. Right.”

Scotch slipped on her Propoli mask. She didn’t think that Xiegfried would hurt her, but she’d already been attacked by a rock monster today… was it still today? Ugh, her brain was already lapsing back to stable time. “Okay, so if I see something that freaks me out, try to keep me from…. I dunno. I have no idea, honestly.”

She closed her eyes, relaxed, let out a long breath, and opened them.

The room had vanished.

Instead, she sat on an infinite expanse of featureless white before a large pillar wrapped in a thin cloth. Something black was staining the fabric slowly, like ink. She glanced down at the end of her hooves, where dark stains still lingered, even after all this time. Black equaled bad… but why?

In the air just above her head whirled a thousand shards of golden glass, whizzing about like a hurricane so fast that she could only pick out indistinct glimpses of the scattered images they reflected. A young stallion breaking into the Imperial network. The Caesar himself coming to praise his ingenuity. A crowd of hangers-on expecting great things. But no real friends. Then meeting the Tremendous Twelve. Twelve wonderful friends the young zebra would go on adventures with. Twelve friends that stopped being friends. Trying to simply take in one before the next displaced it made her head whirl.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” she confessed, not sure if she was speaking to her friends in the real world or not. “I see a big cylinder covered by a sheet there.” She pointed at the pillar. “Something’s staining the sheet black. And there’s gold sparkly stuff up here.” She paused. “And that’s it.”

Tied up with a sheet. If she was seeing the spirit, why was there still a sheet? Black continued to stain the fabric. Did this represent something else? Something he didn’t want to see, or that she didn’t? Denial? Shame? Rejection? Scotch started to move forward and–

Froze. Something inside her was screaming. She knew whatever was behind that sheet was bad. Horrible. Horrible in ways that her mind refused to see. Horrible in ways she couldn’t understand. She clenched her eyes shut, felt her stomach seize. Bile bubbled in the back of her throat.

A hoof touched her shoulder. “That’s enough. You don’t have to do more,” Doctor Xandros said calmly. She closed her eyes and raised the mask, grimacing in frustration.

“He’s broken. Separated completely from his body,” she muttered. “Like Echo.”

“Echo?”

“A pony. His mind and soul were locked in a machine too. I met him briefly when I had Blackjack’s PipBuck,” she said, touching her own for a moment. “He said… he said he was dying in that state. Fading away.” She pulled off her mask and the world reverted. Staring up at the screens, she murmured, “I’m sorry.”

A screen flashed and showed a stallion with mustard on his cloak and a horrified-looking mare. “That’s okay, just use Three Stripe stain remover and it’ll come right out.” There was a tinkling chime, three stripes whisking over the stain, and it disappeared with sparkles. “Thank the spirits for Three Stripes!” they cried in unison. The video disappeared.

She glared at the mundane sheet wrapped around the jar. “I could help him! I’m sure of it. If I just…” And she darted forward, pulling the sheet from the–

The same bed as before. Her head ached, she tasted vomit in her mouth, and her body had the very distinct feel of having been washed. “So, rough day?” Charity said from a seat next to her in the bedroom. She was examining some sort of gadget. “In case you’re wondering, you screamed, puked, shat yourself, and ran face first into a closed door. I cleaned you up. I’ll add the laundry and service charge to your invoice.”

Scotch put all that information in a mental drawer marked ‘nope’ and closed it, focusing on what she’d been trying to do before all that. “I can help him. I just… I just need to get back what’s missing from this stupid… nothing in my head,” she muttered softly.

“You mean your brain?” Charity quipped.

Scotch groaned, covering her head in her hooves. “I am not in the mood for you, Charity.”

“Sucks for you I drew the short straw,” she replied. “You know what your problem is?”

Scotch sat up and fixed her with the flattest, most annoyed glare she could manage. “What?”

“You’re doing the exact same thing as Blackjack.” Scotch lifted her face and tried to pull off Blackjack’s shooty look, but the yellow unicorn simply rolled on. “You’re making the mistake of thinking everything can be fixed.”

“I’m not trying to fix everything,” Scotch muttered, flopping back on the bed. “Just one thing.”

“Lying surcharge. You never just fix one thing. Because there’s always another thing. And another. You fix anything you think is wrong, and when you can’t, it’s always your fault.”

“Well it is!” Scotch glared at the underside of the bunk overhead. “I’m the one that’s spirit touched! I’m the one that’s special! I’m the one that all this crap keeps happening to.”

“It’s not always about you, Scotch,” Charity said with a sigh. “Sometimes, things just don’t get fixed.”

“Really not in the mood for cynicism 101 for dummies,” Scotch snapped. “I can do this. I have to believe I can.”

“Let’s say you can. Sometimes, you just don’t have the parts to fix a thing. Sometimes, you can’t even make a replacement part. Sometimes you just have to accept things are the way they are,” Charity said, lifting a tub of grease and examining the label. “I think they got the better deal,” she commented sourly as she lay there. She lowered it and regarded Scotch, then sighed. “Listen. I know you want to help him, but it’s pretty clear that whatever’s in your head isn’t going to let that happen. You need to fix that first, and if you can’t, work around the problem. Find another avenue of attack.”

“I can’t think of anything,” Scotch said, rubbing her face. “He’s spirit touched. I’m spirit touched.” Her voice trailed off a moment. “I have to believe he can be helped.”

“Right. ‘Cause there’s no personal stakes there.” Charity scoffed. “Just learn to roll with it and stop freaking out. Freaking out helps exactly nopony.”

“I can’t help it!” Scotch blurted. “Am I going to turn into… something else?” she said as her mind gibbered visions of twisted flesh at her. “Something like him? I don’t want to change…”

“Well, too bad. Everything changes. Markets fluctuate. Nothing ever stays the same. Blackjack turned into a cyberpony. Sorry, a cyber alicorn pony Princess.” Charity stopped short. “I still can’t say that with a straight face,” she commented, rolling her eyes with a smirk. “You’re changing into… whatever. You’ll deal with it. If you can manage the five of us, you’ll be fine.”

Scotch hardly felt better for all this, but decided Charity had a point about not angsting over things she couldn’t change. “Right. Right,” she said as she rose, bolstered by the young businessmare’s callous confidence. “Okay. I hear what you’re saying.” She examined the tub. “Is that for the Whiskey Express?” Charity responded with a flat stare and Scotch picked it up. “Right.”

“Is it the right kind? I didn’t know if it needed to be a specific kind of grease,” Charity confessed. “I might get my trade back if it’s the wrong sort. Just needed you to confirm.”

Scotch nodded. “Yeah. Multi-purpose axle grease. Half a tub will get us five hundred kilometers.” It seemed silly how much their travels depended on things like this. Grease. Scale remover. Parts. Spirits help them if they ever ran out. Impulsively she set the tub aside and lunged forward, hugging the unicorn, who went stiff. “Thank you, Charity. I know you’re not happy to be here, but I am so glad you are.”

After a moment, she recovered and pushed Scotch off. “Yeah, well. Thanks. But save the touchy stuff if you don’t mind,” she replied, taking the grease back. “Anyway, when are we leaving? And where are we going?”

Scotch furrowed her brow. “That’s… a good question.” Accept what you can’t change. Ugh, she didn’t want to accept it. She wanted to fix it! She was sure she could if she could just see what was under that sheet! “I need to talk to Xiegfried again.”

“No touching the sheet this time. Next time someone has to wash you it’s going to be the turkey,” she warned before walking out of the room.

Scotch managed to find her way back to the main chamber on her own. On a second pass, she realized the facility wasn’t really all that large. Four levels and enough space for two dozen zebras. It didn’t even have a large scale hydroponics, which meant bringing in food from time to time. She could only guess where it came from.

She walked in to find Majina and Pythia together. The former gushed a flurry of questions while the latter kept writing down notes on her cards. “But what about Ignatius and Hiroto? They’re supposed to be lovers. Are you saying they never–” Majina cut herself short as Scotch trotted in and immediately interposed herself between Scotch and the tube that held the zebra. Someone had found a tarp to cover it completely. “No peeking! If you have another attack, I think they might just kick us out.” She then paused and gave a shaky smile. “How are you feeling?”

Scotch’s ears wilted. “How do you think I’m feeling? I crapped myself all because my brain is stupid.”

“Yeah. Hysterical panic attacks will do that,” Pythia said evenly as she continued filling out her card. “Seriously. How are you feeling?”

Scotch sat down hard. “I feel frustrated. I think I can help you if I just could see…” She stretched a hoof towards the tarp and then let it fall to her side. “You’re broken up into all these little bits and something is keeping them here but I can’t see how to get them to stick together again!” she blurted, waving her hooves at the giant blue zebra cartoon watching her. “I feel like I’m letting everyone down ’cause I got a hole full of stupid and terror in my head!”

A clip played of a beefy zebra stallion in sunglasses saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! No zebra’s saying that!”

“Doctor Z hoped you could help him now that you’re here, but Xiggy here contacted you himself,” Pythia said as she tucked her cards into her cloak.

“You call him Xiggy now?” Scotch asked, a little perturbed, but she wasn’t sure why.

“He insisted,” Pythia muttered, rolling her eyes. The enormous blue striped zebra grinned far wider than anyone else could.

“Okay. What did you want to tell me?”

A map appeared on the screen, and since Pythia wasn’t scribbling it down, Scotch assumed she had copied it already. It showed a white blob up top that she assumed was the Empty, some hatches beneath it that had to be mountains, a brown blob in the center than she thought was the Badlands, with green to the sides and beneath the brown blob. A coastline of blue lay beyond the green. Two red dots appeared, one to the west of the Badlands marked ‘Bastion’ and the other to the southeast marked ‘Roam’. A tiny blue grinning zebra head popped into existence on the eastern edge of the brown blob. ‘You are here’ was written next to it.

“So we’re nearly out of the Badlands?” Scotch smiled.

Xiegfried held up a cautionary hoof. A crackly voice started to speak. “You sure about this?” a stallion said.

“Green pony. Yellow unicorn. A Zencori and a fucking Starkatteri. Oh, and a dragon thing that looks like a pony and a chained griffon. Seriously, you’ll know them when you see them. All we have to do is tell the Golds where they are and you’re fucking rich.” The mare sounded familiar, and she guessed it was Xara, the Propoli who had tried to convince her to join up with her.

“Yeah, but how do I know the Golds will pay me?” the stallion asked.

“I’m paying you. You just have to tell them. I’ll give you the frequency they’re using and their encryption key.”

“Okay, what is it?”

Scotch’s heart leapt.

“I’m not telling you it over an unsecured broadcast, dipshit! It’ll be included with your next payment. Get the word out to all your pickers, vultures, and anyone else who wants to be my best friend. You don’t have to kill them. You don’t have to lock them up. Just contact the Golds. They’ve got three rings tasked on this.” A paused. “And Xolio? Don’t fuck this up. I don’t want the Golds chasing rumors and bad tips.”

“Okay! Okay! Sheesh. I’ll put the word out. Green and yellow pony. Starkatteri… fuck. What are they doing together? A Zencori. A dragonthingy and a griffon in chains. Can’t be that hard to spot.”

The mare laughed a short and ragged laugh. “Xolio, you have no fucking idea. Just find them and let the Golds handle it.” There was a crackle and the sound clip ended.

Xiegfried played three more just like it. Three more descriptions of Scotch and her friends, and Scotch’s stomach sank as she realized just how conspicuous they all were. Scotch could paint herself white and striped, and a zebra wig might hide Charity’s horn, at least from a distance, but what about Skylord’s chains? And what could be done for Precious? How did you make a dragonfilly anything other than a dragonfilly?

“How many are there?” Majina asked in a small voice.

A ring of red dots appeared around the Badlands, and more than a few were already inside its borders. Scotch’s butt hit the floor, again.

How were they supposed to get through all that?

“That’s why you tried to contact me directly,” Scotch Tape said weakly. “If you broadcast the warning, they just would have moved to something else. And it would have been super obvious to the people hunting me that you were helping me. They’d come after you.”

Xiegfried’s cartoon gave a sober nod. A video started to play, showing strange cat headed bugs with six legs scurrying over a huge carcass. “While a single antlion isn’t much of a threat, in concert they can turn a bull elephant into a pile of bones in less than an hour,” a female said in a calm, informative voice.

Scotch looked at Pythia and Majina. “Oh, crap…”

“How dangerous are these Golds?” Precious asked as they met in the cafeteria. “I mean, they’re called Gold. Gold is good. IED.” She said as she tapped a claw on the table top. A large printout of the red dots and golden circles surrounding the Badlands rested in the middle of the table.

“QED,” Charity corrected as she consulted a list of her purchases. Rocky sat next to her at the far end of the table, watching them all with his unblinking stare. Majina sat with her chin resting on top of the small boulder.

Skylord grumbled from his seat opposite Charity. “I told you. The Golds are the legion with all the toys. Best power armor. Best transportation. Best weapons. There’re only a few dozen of them, because that’s all they need. They’re the best mercenaries in the world.”

“Better than the Iron Legion?” Charity asked.

Skylord rubbed his beak as he grimaced. “Yes,” he admitted. “In a straight up fight, without a firing solution, they are. The only reason we don’t have a problem is they operate out of Bastion and we’re up north with the Bloods. We don’t step on each other’s tails.”

“Wow. That had to be hard,” Precious commented.

Skylord sighed. “We’ve got artillery. They’ve got mobility. We can control territory. They don’t need to as long as they have Bastion backing them. It’s completely different arrangement. If we located one of their bases, we could wipe it off the map, which is why they don’t make bases. It makes any contracts they might take against us much more expensive.”

“So we’ve got a ton of people looking for the six of us. If any of them see us, they’ll radio the Golds and the Golds will send soldiers against us?”

“Worse. Golds operate in ‘rings’. If one ring can’t intercept us in time, another ring will. The first ring gets paid, but the ring that caught us gets a favor. It means you can’t play one unit against the other like you can with Bloods.” He rubbed his chains. “They’re really going all out looking for us.” He then glowered at Scotch. “Wait, no. Not us, you! Why the hell are you this important? No shaman or spirit touched pony or whatever you are is worth the amount of money it takes to hire the Golds.”

“Believe me, I want to know worse than you! Apparently they seem to think I’m going to undo their New Empire!” Scotch retorted. “And let’s not forget they’re not the only ones! I’ve got a monster after me that seems to act as if I killed her mother or something! You’re not the only one having a bad time of this!” Scotch thrust her hoof at him. “I should probably just turn myself in! It’d be worth it to get some answers. Oh, wait. Then they’d just kill me!”

“There’s a reason, Scotch. You’re probably the only living person who’s gone to the moon,” Pythia pointed out.

“No, I’m not,” she countered sourly. “Bastard did too.” She furrowed her brow, wondering if the stallion was being hunted by this New Empire as well. She honestly hadn’t given him much thought. He’d been her stupid attempt to solve her pain ‘Blackjack style.’ Her cheeks burned in a flash of embarrassment. “Anyway, why should going to the moon matter at all? I went. I came back. End of story.”

“Something had to have happened there,” Pythia insisted.

“Yeah. My dad died! Stabbed through by a dozen pieces of metal! That’s what happened! Okay? That’s the great mystery of the moon! I went, he died, that’s all. It was stupid and horrible and I wish it had never happened!” Scotch snapped back at Pythia. “That’s why I don’t talk about it. It’s why I try not to even think about it! Okay? Are you happy!?” Her chest ached, and it wasn’t just from the shouting. “You don’t talk about being a shaman, and I don’t talk about the moon!”

Pythia pulled her cloak over her face and said nothing else. A terrible silence fell as Scotch felt the ache in her chest flare into gut-wrenching nauseation. It had to be her censuring… right?

Charity coughed loudly. “Getting back on track, please,” she said, pointing at the map. “We’re in crap up to our nostrils. How do we get out of it? Can we split up?”

“That wouldn’t make you any less of a unicorn, Precious a dragonfilly, or Pythia a Starkatteri. There’s some things we just can’t hide,” Majina pointed out as Scotch struggled to shove everything that had happened on the moon back into its vault.

“Pythia could paint her stripes,” Charity pointed out.

“And you could saw off your horn. But we’re not going to do that,” Majina quipped back sharply. Charity rose to her feet, a look of incensed disgust on her face. She thrust a hoof accusatively at Majina across the table and began drawing in a large breath.

Precious intercepted the leg, pushing it back down. “Whoa, everyone! Calm down.” She waved a claw at the filly. “You know when Sky and me are the voices of reason that we’re in big trouble.”

“Probably just a hormonal thing,” Skylord said.

“Excuse me?” the other five said in unison. Despite everything, a few irritated smiles did appear on her friends’ faces.

He immediately coughed into a fist and plowed ahead. “Alone we’d just be an intelligence asset to the Golds waiting to be snapped up,” Skylord said implacably. “So splitting up is a bad choice. After all, if one of us was captured you’d do something dumb and try to give yourself up, wouldn’t you?” he asked Scotch.

“Yeah. I could totally see her doing that,” Precious echoed and there were a few nods. Scotch tried to fight the urge to point out that sacrificing yourself for your friends was supposed to be a good thing! Right?

“So… what are we going to do?” Majina asked.

Scotch stared at the map. At all those people arrayed between them and their goals. Go back? After a month in the Badlands? And where from there? Plus, the source of that tarry gravel creature they’d fought in the train yard seemed to be in the direction of ‘back.’ Stay? There was only so long they could do that before someone found her, and Scotch had an inkling the longer the ‘cursed’ pony stayed the sooner someone here would tell the Golds where she was. Xiegfried might be willing to help her, but Doctor Xandros made it clear he didn’t want her here.

Maybe she really was cursed. Maybe she really was cursing her friends too. Maybe just handing herself over to Xara and letting everyone else go would be better?

She pressed her eyes shut a moment. No. There had to be a way. In the pool, she’d found a way to placate the spirits. She’d gone… somewhere else. Maybe others could too.

“Is there a way to go through the spirit world?” Scotch asked in a small voice. “Like… teleporting?”

“No!” Pythia blurted, eyes wide. Then she suddenly let out a cry and doubled over at the table, her face contorting in pain. Scotch immediately moved to her side. “It’s a bad idea. It’s just a bad idea. That’s all! I just sounds bad–” She arched her back in pain and screamed, “I’m not a shaman!” Scotch rushed to hold Pythia, now panting, up. Then Scotch felt something warm on her hooves. Pulling them back, she stared at the crimson dripping out from under Pythia’s cloak. “I’m fine! Everything is fine! I’m not a shaman! I’m not!” she declared, eyes wide and panicked. Slowly she relaxed a little, weeping.

“The hay you are! What the fuck just happened?!” Scotch demanded, pulling up her cloak and looking for the wound.

“It’s nothing. I’m fine! I’m completely fine!” Pythia blurted, trying to pull the cloak down.

“Bleeding is the opposite of fine!”

Pythia grabbed her hooves and stared into Scotch’s eyes. “I am fine. This is why I am not a shaman,” she stated firmly, her eyes wide and shimmering with tears. “I am not. I am not.”

Scotch stared at her a moment, then murmured, “You’re censured, aren’t you? Like my lungs.”

Pythia clenched her eyes closed. “I am not censured,” she gasped, “because I am not a shaman.” She paused a moment, trembling. “I am not a shaman. I’m not.” She pulled away from Scotch, hugging her cloak to her small frame. “Please don’t say I am.”

Scotch stared in horror at the small spots of blood slowly dripping on the floor beneath her friend.

The rest of her friends mostly appeared concerned but completely baffled, and Scotch didn’t know what to do, either. Take Pythia to a doctor? Was there even a doctor here? Give her a healing potion? That seemed obvious, but when Scotch dug one out of her bags, Pythia just shook her head, as if she was trying to deny she was hurt at all. But that was just crazy, right?

Charity, however, apparently uninterested in Pythia’s… condition… asked Majina. “Do you know anything about this travelling through the spirit world junk?”

For once, the filly appeared stumped. “Well, there’s stories. Like Hoppinhotch the Very Irritable Stallion travelling through the sky. Or Lorlean’s Requiem, where she travels into the underworld to find her foal, but they’re super vague. They don’t really say how they did it. Not really. Hoppinhotch was so angry he jumped up into the clouds for raining on him. I’m not sure that’s something that’s an actual thing we can try.”

“It most certainly is a thing,” Doctor Xandros said as he approached, without his mask. He glanced over at Pythia. “We saw you in distress. Do you need aid?”

“I’m fine. I’m just fine. I’m not a shaman. I’m not,” she said quietly. She was nearly whimpering in pain.

“She’s not fine!” Scotch persisted. “Something is hurting her.”

“Yes, you are,” he replied flatly. “You are not a shaman,” he said in softer tones as he put a hoof to her shoulder, then looked at the rest of them. It was the stern look of a parent who didn’t care their age, if they called Pythia a shaman again, flanks would be thumped. “It is certainly possible to travel via the spirits, but I would recommend against it.”

Scotch looked at Pythia, then at him. She opened her mouth, gesturing to the blood dripping from the inside of Pythia’s cloak, but received such a furious glare that her mouth closed with a pop. She suppressed the urge to scream ‘Just explain it, for crying out loud!’ Give her a text book! A manual! A frigging pamphlet just explaining what was going on! How was talking about her friend spontaneously generating wounds drawing the attention of spirits at the table? She shifted her gaze just to check, hoping to see something on Pythia that might explain it. There was nothing. No gold. No black. Just the vague shadow of the spirit world covering them all.

Fortunately, Majina jumped in and asked, “How?” Grudgingly, Scotch let it drop. Getting the attention off Pythia seemed best for now. They’d have to talk about this later. Carefully…

“There is a ritual to create a passage called a nhill, trod, or the Low Road. It doesn’t allow one to travel through the spirit world directly. Entering the spirit realm is called death, and is generally only one way, but a shaman can convince the spirits to make a bridge through the spirit world, that the living may cross.” He raised a hoof. “It is not safe, easy, or reliable. It is typically done with the assistance of dozens of shamans, with weeks of devotion to the spirit making the bridge, copious sacrifices, and significant peril.”

“And it lets people travel from one place to another?” Scotch asked.

Doctor Xandros groaned as if she’d completely missed the point. “Yes. But it is not done lightly, ever. Any nhill is perilous. I would advise strongly against it,” he pronounced gravely. “But you are young and foolish and I’m sure will jump at the idea.”

“Hey, just because we’re young doesn’t mean we’re idiots!” Precious snapped, then turned to the others. “That said, this sounds like a winner to me.”

“It might work,” Majina said, rubbing her chin. “I mean, I doubt they’ll be expecting it.”

“No, they wouldn’t, because to do so abruptly would be utterly suicidal, which is why I will not be telling you how to do it,” he replied. “You will find no book anywhere that contains this knowledge. However you depart from here, your blood will not be on my hooves.”

Scotch felt kicked. “But then why did you tell us about it?”

His disappointment only grew. “Because I am a shaman, and it is my responsibility to tell you so if you do trip over the knowledge, then your deaths will be due to your own foolishness, not ignorance.”

“I can handle it!” Scotch insisted.

But her outburst seemed to cement Doctor Xandros’s determination. “You are a foal who has dissected your first frog and think yourself ready to perform brain surgery. This is why you are censured. This is why you hurt your friend. This is why you are not a shaman,” he pronounced. She wanted to grab him and shake him till knowledge tumbled out of him like a pinata. Then he turned to Pythia, who still hadn’t said anything since her attack. “Why don’t we have some tea and talk?”

Pythia said nothing but rose and followed him, limping.

Scotch jumped to her hooves and started after them, but Doctor Xandros gave her another glare of utter disgust, even hostility. In desperation, Scotch yelled after him, “Don’t you have traditions about helping kids or something?!”

He paused and looked at her with an expression of hard regret. “Aren’t you a little old to claim to be a child?” He then turned and faced her. “Xiegfried brought you here to warn you. You have been warned. I allowed you to stay in the hope you could help him. You cannot. I suggest you use your time to plan your departure. Good day.” And with that, he turned away and left, with Pythia following after him.

“That’s bullshit!” Skylord snapped. “You can’t tell us the way to go, say we can’t, then tell us to leave! What is that?” Doctor Xandros paused and just gave them a withering glower that spoke of leaving sooner rather than later. Scotch grabbed Skylord’s chains and pulled him back into his seat. It wouldn’t take much, she feared, to switch from the Doctor from doing nothing to telling Xara where to find them. Doctor Xandros and Pythia walked slowly out.

“What… what the hay just happened?” Precious asked.

“Maturity. Sucks. Deal with it,” Charity replied as she stared at the map. “Can we bribe someone in the Golds to look the other way?”

“Doubt it,” Skylord replied, but as they talked their voices sounded more and more distant. Scotch scooped up Rocky, setting him on her back and carrying the stone from the cafeteria. Majina watched her go as the other three argued. Scotch didn’t know where she was going, but that was always the case, wasn’t it?

Finding an empty hall, she sat down hard and pulled Rocky onto her lap. “Can you do this nhill thing? Or trod? Or whatever?” Maybe she should have put on a mask or something, but she just felt so very… tired. And frustrated. A lot was coming at her and she felt like she was drowning all at once. She needed to get moving again. Like Blackjack…

Blackjack…

Back in the Hoof, things just worked out for Blackjack. Never well, of course, but as Scotch Tape followed, Blackjack was always moving. Maybe charging straight ahead into a wood chipper, but at least she was charging and not sitting around talking about how boned they were. Blackjack always won, no matter the cost. And Scotch… didn’t. She might not lose, but that wasn’t the same thing.

“Yes,” Rocky said, and then a moment later said, “No.”

Scotch banged the back of her head against the wall behind her. “Yes or no… can you or can’t you?”

“I can and I can’t.”

Scotch fought the urge to scream hard. “Can you make a nhill?”

Rocky didn’t respond for a moment. Then answered, “Yes.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Because I can’t.”

Scotch clenched her eyes shut. Rocky was a rock. He wasn’t stupid, but he also wasn’t exactly forthcoming. “Can you make a nhill for me?”

“Yes.”

“Can you make a nhill for me now?”

“No.”

Thoughts clicked. That was the reason for the can and can’t. In other circumstances he could, but he couldn’t now. “What do you need to make a nhill for me now?”

“Being.”

And back into obscure answers. She closed her eyes again, trying to work through it. Being? Be-ing. To be was… a verb. A state of existence. “You need to exist?”

“Yes.”

But things either existed or didn’t exist. How did you make something exist? That’s the power Doctor Xandros was talking about, wasn’t it? Existence. Making rock exist as something… special. “Like me carrying you to a new place. Without enough power you can’t make the trod thing.”

“Yes.”

Scotch gave a soft grunt. “You made an earthquake.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because you are touched by the creators.”

This was new. “Who are they?” she asked, sitting up.

“The originators of being.”

“What being?”

“Stuff.”

That was at once fascinating and maddeningly vague.

“And one of these ‘creators’ touched me?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

No answer. She’d almost thought he wasn’t going to when he said, “I do not know” For some reason it sounded almost… scared.

“But it did? How can you tell?”

“It is in your being,” Rocky said.

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and suppressed the urge to groan. That didn’t help much. “Do you know who this creator was?”

“One that came not long ago.”

“From where?”

“I do not know.”

“Why?”

“I do not know.”

“Is there anything you can tell me?”

“I wish to be marble…”

Scotch bit her forehoof and screamed into it.

Scotch marched her way into Xiegfried’s sanctum, strode right up to the glass jar, yanked off the covering, and–

Scotch walked into Xiegfried’s sanctum, took several deep breaths, and pulled off the covering and–

Running into the sanctum, screaming like a mad mare, she charged right up to the jar and tore the covering free, and–

“I can’t do it,” Scotch whimpered as she hugged Rocky in an empty hallway, sitting on her haunches, shaking her head back and forth. Every scenario she ran through her head ran to the same ending. The sheet fell, and she knew the sight beneath, and even thinking about it now made her shake. The thing in the hole in her memory wouldn’t let her even think about it! “I can’t look at him. I can’t fix him. I can’t get my friends out of here. I can’t do the nhill thingy. I can’t figure out a way forward. I don’t know what to do!”

“Yes.”

She stopped rocking and glared at it.

“No?”

“You are not helping!”

“I can’t.”

Scotch whined as she buried her face in her forehooves. Why did it have to be so difficult? Tell her how to make a nhill. Let her see Xiegfried. Just let her go to frigging Roam! Or at this point, back to Equestria! She’d tied her brain so far into a knot that the knots were getting knotted! Knot squared! Cubed even!

“Why can’t I look at him? Why does it terrify me so much?” she murmured.

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you don’t.” Scotch muttered. “You’re a rock. Nothing scares you.”

“I get scared.”

Scotch blinked and looked at it.

“I get scared of not existing.”

Scotch sighed. “Everyone is scared of dying, Rocky.”

“I am not scared of dying. I am scared of not existing.” Scotch blinked as she looked at it, mentally willing it to say more. Slowly, haltingly, it grumbled more words, as if it itself wasn’t used to this. “Once I was not. Then I was lots of small pieces of mud and dead things. More mud and dead things piled atop me. Some became me. I went from mud to rock, but I wasn’t real. I was seabed. But the world changed. I was pushed up. Exposed. Parts of me broke away. I changed from mountain to boulder, but I was no different than any other boulder.

“Then one day a zebra sat on me. He appreciated my size. My shape. My height. I let him see farther. To feel bigger. Many times he came, and for a time I was more than just mass. I existed. He brought his children, and their children. They saw me. Touched me. Put their marks on me. Regarded me as special. So I was that rock. But one day I was broken by others who did not like me existing. I was just an odd rock in a field of pebbles. One day I will be something else. Ground down to sand. Swept aside as rubble. Discarded. Worthless. I fear when that happens, and I hope it will not happen for some time.”

Scotch sniffed and rubbed her eyes. “And I make you special?”

Rocky didn’t answer a moment, then said, “You make me important.”

Scotch closed her eyes. Blackjack said that Scotch had seen a monster down in those tunnels, but Scotch had seen plenty of monsters growing up in 99. She’d helped feed the corpses of the dead, many of them murdered under the euphemism of ‘retirement,’ into recyclers to be ground into protein. She could remember with nauseating clarity cleaning out the processor when it frequently jammed with equine remains. She’d watched friends and coworkers torn limb from limb and eaten by friends gone mad. But somehow something she’d seen in the underground, and the hole it’d left when those memories had been robbed from her, had damaged her far more than any other horror she could bring to mind. She could remember the terror of the night Blackjack was raped on the Seahorse almost minute by minute, but none of those memories broke her.

So why did the absence of a memory hurt so much? What about Xiegfried so terrible that she just… broke?

What had she seen on that day?

“Rocky. You said I was touched by ‘the creators,’ right?”

“Yes.”

“Was I touched by anything else?”

Rocky didn’t answer a moment, and she had to be patient. Finally, he said, “I think so, yes.”

“Something bad?”

“Yes.”

As he spoke, a hole formed in her mind. It was a silhouette of a memory, but it was round. Silver. It screamed. Her lips moved of their own accord. “Give it to me,” she whispered, as if in prayer. “Let me live.” No. Not the words. Behind the words. The noise. The scream. The scream inside her head. The scream of the Hoof.

A soft thap broke her concentration, and she looked down at the black book.

“No,” she said flatly. “You had your chance on the train. You decided to be jerks. You don’t get another chance.”

We can take you there. Roam. The book’s pages fluttered in an intangible breeze, like it was breathing.

“You can tell me how to make a nhill?” Scotch asked.

We can do better. The book flipped open, its pages flashing past horrible images of eyes and warped skeletons to land on a page dominated by a spiral of bones, connected by fleshy tendons. As she stared, the spiral started to twist.

“What are you doing?” Scotch said in alarm. The lights at the far end of the hallway went dark. Scotch snatched up the book, trying to squeeze it closed, but the next light failed, and the next. Scotch was enough of an electrician to know that wasn’t how circuits failed, and turned the other way… but then those lights went out too. Not just failed. It was as if existence itself was winking out with each light that died. She found the illumination failing in front and behind her, till only a sole light remained. It flickered and she picked up Rocky, holding him to her chest as she clenched her eyes shut.

The book let out a dusty chuckle that reminded her all too much of the Dealer.

She cracked open an eye. The light remained on, but now it illuminated a door that hadn’t been there before. On it was stenciled ‘Emergency escape route: Southern Star, Roam. Restricted access. Do not enter. Alarm will sound.’

Then the door cracked open an inch.

“This is a nhill?” Scotch asked, scooting forward and touching the door. It just seemed like an ordinary door, albeit one that hadn’t been there… or had it been and she’d just missed it? She pushed it shut, but it opened again and let forth a soft, sepulchral draft. The book didn’t answer.

“Careful,” Rocky advised in a low rumble.

Scotch hooked the handle with her hoof and pulled it open. The stairway went down into the dark, and she rubbed a wall with her hoof. The concrete had an unwholesome texture to it, as if it’d cured wrong. Her hoof found a light switch, and she bumped it on. A light in the stairwell flickered to life. Then a second. A third. A sign next to the switch said ‘Roam emergency tram’ and an arrow pointing down. It seemed ridiculous. A rail line going all the way to Roam? But who knew if the zebras could have actually built such a thing.

She tested the first step. It held. A second. Then she felt the door against her flanks and paused. She set Rocky down in the door jamb, propping it open. “Keep it open for me,” she said as the door banged against it.

“I will try,” he replied.

She took one step after the next going down, careful to keep the black book in her mouth. She hated the feel of the hide, and hoped it was equally disgusted by her slobber. The steps seemed just like any concrete steps she’d seen in the bunker, the walls the usual concrete. Overhead, the lights were steady. She even passed a map showing lines connecting Bastion to Roam. Was it possible? She learned that a lot of engineering feats she thought impossible had actually been done as she travelled the Wasteland with her father and Blackjack.

Blackjack…

Scotch sat down hard, dropping the book out of her mouth. “Sweet Celestia, what am I doing?” She looked up the stairs at where Rocky held the door ajar. “Nopony knows where I am or what I’m doing! This is Blackjack level dumb! I need to get my friends and–” She wheeled around to climb back up the slope.

The step crumbled under her hoof, dissolving in a cloud of dust. From within the step tumbled countless leg bones tumbling down the steps behind her. The concrete walls popped and crackled, snowflaking before her eyes to expose staring eye sockets from entombed skulls. She tried to rise, but another step gave way, and another, as if they were made of caked ash and bone rather than concrete. The lights flickered, swinging wildly above her and the world somehow grew steeper. And all the while the book laughed.

She snatched it up in her teeth and scrambled up, sliding back two steps for every three she climbed. More than once she had to grab a dangling length of wire and use it just to keep from backsliding. The walls had completely dissolved, as if abandoning the pretense of being anything mundane, and revealing a carefully packed ossuary where countless bony grins watched her struggle with amusement. Femurs, ulnas, and ribs slipped out from under her feet as she struggled to make progress.

When she was a scant few meters away, she stared up at the sight of the door trying to close. In fact, it had closed. The top corner of the door had closed completely, but the bottom corner remained open, the metal warped as a tremendous force tried to crush the stone. Rocky’s eyes were clenched tight, and she saw hairline fractures creeping across his surface. That she was about to get herself killed was bad, but Rocky had done nothing but help her! She let out a little roar of rage, trying to push back the sudden pain in her chest from the dust filling her nostrils.

With a final leap, she launched herself at the wall of skulls and managed to get enough purchase to make it to Rocky. She hooked one hoof over him and hung there, the steps under her hooves giving way and collapsing into the inky darkness below. “I am trying…” he said as the door pressed ever harder.

We will take you. We shall close the door. We will take you down the Low Road. Forever! The black book’s cackling filled her ears. She looked below, but aside from the dangling wire with its few bulbs, she could see nothing but inky abyss. She could barely get her head through the gap in the door, let alone her body. When Rocky broke, her leg was going to be cut right off. It wasn’t invulnerable like…

So it wanted to close that door so bad? She got a second hoof on top of Rocky and strained, lifting her head till she could extend the book as well. What are you doing? Stop! She took its alarm as a good sign as she gripped Rocky tight and set her rear feet against the wall of skulls.

“You want to close the door?” Scotch yelled as she looked at the book above her where door and doorjamb met, wedged in tight. “Be my guest!” And she pulled against Rocky with all her strength.

There was a pop of dust and Rocky flew free as the door slammed shut on the book. She couldn’t do anything but clutch the stone to her chest as she fell into the void, the screaming following her.

Then she struck the floor hard, air blasting from her lungs as she found herself on her back in the hallway where this all started. She sucked in gulps of air and broke into rasping hacks. Rocky seemed alright, missing only a chip or two. Then she spotted the black book lying on the floor next to her. Invulnerable or not, it did show a heavy crease going halfway across its cover. In a fit, she lay on her back and smacked the cover repeatedly with her hoof. It was probably as effective as peeing on it, but it made her feel better.

And she was laughing. Coughing and laughing, but laughing. Her body was covered in dust and scratches, and she’d nearly died from her own stupidity, but she couldn’t stop. Eventually she gave up pummeling the book and just lay there, chuckling between coughs. She covered her eyes with one foreleg.

“Are you okay?” came Majina’s voice.

Scotch pulled her leg away, looking at her friend watching her with worried bafflement. Somehow, that just made her laugh more. When she finally got control, she sat up, crossing her hind legs and setting Rocky in her lap. Majina’s eyes shifted over to the black book, and Scotch covered it with her tail. “I can’t get us out of here. I can't do anything.” Yet she still gave a small smile.

Majina sighed as she walked next to her and sat down. “You can do plenty. You just haven’t thought of it yet.”

“Nope,” Scotch said, shaking her head slowly back and forth. “I think I’ve hit every wall I can. We’re screwed. We got a monster chasing me. We’ve worn out our welcome here. I can’t help Xiegfried. I can’t do a shamany trick to escape. We. Are. Screwed.”

“So are you giving up?” Majina looked down at her.

Scotch closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “No.” She reached over for the black book.

“What’s that?”

“Just an old book I can’t get rid of,” Scotch shoved it back in her saddlebags. She hoped it stayed put. Finally rising to her hooves, she checked the wall, but the door had disappeared. “I don’t suppose you know of any stories about underground tunnels from Bastion to Roam, do you?”

“There’s secret tunnels?” Majina’s eyes widened a moment. “Wait. That’s like a thousand kilometers or something. I’m pretty sure no one builds tunnels that big, Scotch Tape.”

“‘Course. Was just asking,” she said as she ran a hoof along the wall where the door had been.

“I was thinking…” Majina began, then shook her head. “Nevermind.”

“What?” Scotch asked with a little frown.

“It’s a dumb idea,” Majina said with a little pout.

“I just took a stroll into a tunnel made by the evilest book of zebrakind without a second thought. Trust me, I’ve had worse ones. What are you thinking?”

“Well, this is Z TV and they have all these broadcasting things.” Majina tapped her hooves together. “What if we… um… asked for help?”

“Ask for help?” Scotch said with a frown.

“Yeah! I don’t know who exactly but… well… it never hurts to ask, does it?” Majina suggested, her smile strained, then it failed as she hung her head. “Never mind. It’s a stupid idea.”

Scotch leaned forward and gave her friend a fierce hug. “It’s not. I don’t know if there’s anyone out there who could help us, but we can try.”

“This is a bad idea,” Doctor Xandros said, his mask down as a half dozen zebras worked equipment. “Normally a wide spectrum broadcast like this takes weeks to set up. It might be traced.”

The stage seemed oddly boring. Three cameras. A green sheet. Some lights set in the ceiling. She really imagined it would all be bigger. Off stage there was a glass booth with more zebras working terminals. She had no idea how difficult what they were attempting was, but from the work going on, she suspected it was significant.

“Well, we’re bouncing it off of every proxy we have so unless they know exactly what they’re looking for–” one of the zebra technicians began before Doctor Xandros turned to look at him. The stallion coughed and went back to working his terminal.

“Xiegfried is going to help,” Pythia said as she sat by the rest of her friends. Whatever caused her attack, they didn’t say. Scotch didn’t know if she should ask, and Pythia wasn’t offering. The blue striped cartoon appeared on a half dozen screens with a cheeky smile and a salute.

“Do you think this setup could reach Equestria? I’d love to get a message back to the Hoof,” Charity asked as she stared at the cameras.

“Only if they were a zebra operative with a communication array with our encryption keys,” said another technician. Doctor Xandros gave her a frown, but she pointed a hoof at Charity. “What? This isn’t the spirit touched one, is she?”

“You’d think there’d be an aura or something. I always imagined there’d be this green, throbbing aura of evil,” said another technician.

“You should regard them all as cursed for your own safety,” Doctor Xandros said.

“Right but where’s the ooze and pus? Like, curses should have some kind of discharge,” the first technician quipped. Xiegfried’s avatar transformed into oozing blue gunk surrounded by a cloud of flies.

“Or at least an odor!” the technician mare said as she worked her terminal. “Then you could say they smell like evil.” The avatar gave a sniff under one leg and instantly turned green, cheeks bulging.

“Maybe it’s radioactive. I’m sure I have a scanner somewhere,” the first said, and he started searching his desk. Now the avatar’s eyes glowed green like a ghoul.

“Stop it,” Doctor Xandros said, but whether it was to the technicians, Scotch, or Xiegfried, she couldn’t tell.

“We got this, Doc,” one of the technicians assured him, then asked Scotch, “Do you want this live or in post?”

“Post?” Scotch frowned.

“Where we clean it up, tighten up the voice, and put it out afterwards,” the mare explained. “It looks better, but a lot of people think it’s a fake if we do that. ‘Cause shaky camera is realistic or some junk. Live, we only get one take.”

“Post,” said Charity and Skylord in unison.

“Live,” Majina and Precious said at the same time.

Scotch looked at Pythia, who shrugged. “Don’t look at me. This is your bag. I trust you.”

Scotch squeezed her eyes closed. “Live,” she chose, and the feeling of dread welled up inside her. Oh, spirits, what was she doing.

“Famous last words,” Charity muttered.

“You’ll be fine. Just go up there. Say what you planned, and it’ll go awesome,” Pythia assured her.

“You’ve seen that?”

“I saw you tripping on a cable, breaking your neck, getting crushed by a light, electrocuted, and bursting into flame. I know you’ll be fine, Scotch.”

Scotch swallowed. “Pythia… about your–” She was silenced by a hoof to her mouth.

“I am not a shaman,” she repeated. “I wasn’t hurt, because I am not a shaman.”

Something in Scotch wanted to scream ‘Yes you are!’ but she wrestled it back. She’d pin Doctor Xandros do the wall if it’d get her answers! She had a dragonfilly and she wasn’t afraid to use her!

Maybe it was that irritation, but when Scotch stepped onto the stage, she did so with a roiling ball of anger in her gut that burned away sense and fear. If Pythia could pretend she wasn’t a shaman, then Scotch could pretend that this wasn’t gut twistingly terrifying. Her friends were ushered out and that fire guttered a little as she stared at the camera. She’d only have one shot at this. It had to be real. It had to be true. Doctor Xandros was talking in a little booth off to the sides. Scotch could do this. She could!

The zebra mare suddenly rushed the stage, yelling, “Stall, shit, stall!” She grabbed the lime green backdrop and pulled with all her strength. The cloth pulled free, falling to the ground behind her. “Why’d you have to be green?” the mare wailed. “You almost ended up a mouth, floating eyes, and a mane!” she said as she returned to her camera. Numbers started counting down on a large digital screen from 30. Scotch felt the fear nibbling at her guts, and looked behind her at the wall that had sat behind the tarp.

On it was a massive, four pointed star superimposed over a moon. She remembered her father. Remembered being ripped away from him. Remembered screaming for him as she was dragged to safety.

The feeble fire of indignation was fed the pure hydrazine fuel of repressed rage as the numbers reached zero. A green light went red. A ‘broadcasting’ sign lit up next to it.

“Hi. My name is Scotch. You might know me as ‘The Traveller’ or ‘The Lone Wanderer’ or ‘The Green Menace.’ Or you probably don’t have a clue who I am, and probably don’t care. And you know what, that’s fine. I didn’t come here to be famous, or to cause problems. I came here with my friend Pythia to answer a simple question about something that happened during the war here in your lands. That’s it.”

On a boat travelling along the coast, Mahealani smiled as she turned up the volume on the old radio.

“That question is one that seems to be a big deal to every shaman I meet. ‘Was the Eye of the World blinded?’ That’s it. That’s why I’m here. That’s all we’re trying to figure out. But since I set hoof on the zebra lands, I’ve had everyone trying to kill me! Riptide, the deadliest pirate on the seas, chased us down and would have killed us if it hadn’t been for a megaspell getting in the way.”

“You should be dead!” Riptide screamed at the television with a smoking bullet hole in the center. In a glass tank, a sharkfilly curled up tighter.

“And you know what? I’m fine with that too. When I was running all over the Hoof back in Equestria, plenty of things were trying to kill me. I’m not whining. And you want to know something else? A lot of what I’ve seen here is pretty amazing. I got to live in an actual city. Rice River. Incredible. I’ve only seen one other place like it, and it got blown apart by a war in the skies. It’s a place that’s going to get blown apart any second if the legions can’t work their damned shit out!”

In a business office, normally neat, now filled with papers and documents stacked high, Cecilio paused for a moment to look from the pony speaking on his television out at the sight of the city split in two by the river and the still broken remains of the bridge spanning the two halves.

“I’ve seen a village where people put on plays and pretend to be heroes. And it’s not weird. It’s not strange. It’s something the tribe does, and it’s awesome. It’s something I’d never seen before and I wish I’d seen anything like it in Equestria!”

Master Baruti, the zebra stage director, gave a tired smile as he sipped his tea. Across from him, Historian Jahi’s pen worked furiously as he scribbled down the words coming over the radio.

“And I’ve seen some messed up things too. I’ve almost died to the legions, but I also get why they’re a thing. They don’t all have to be murderous bastards like the Bloods. They once stood for something better. They can do something better. All they have to do is try. Skylord showed me that. Morrow too. They choose who they want to be. They can choose to be better.”

“Skylord? Why is that name so familiar?” Adolpha muttered as she scowled at the maps before her.

“But there seems to be one group of bastards determined to make everything worse for everyone. They call themselves the New Empire. They were behind the fighting in Rice River. Riptide and Haimon both worked for them. They’ve been doing everything they can to kill me. I don’t know why. I only know that they will stop at nothing to see me dead. And to that I say,” she steeled herself and screamed at the camera, like she was screaming at the world that had taken her father from her, “bring it on!”

Haimon furiously scribbled a dispatch, hissing through his teeth. He’d need to act on this. Now. Even if it was going to be bloody and stupid, he’d have to show the paranoid beast that he was loyal. All because a stupid pony got on the television!

“You want to hire the Gold Legion to come after me, Xara? You want to get people like Xolio to rat me out? If you’ve heard from her in the last week, you know what I’m talking about. Well let me make it fucking easier for you! I’m going to Roam. I’m going to find out the truth! I’m going to find out whatever it is you don’t want me to know! And then I am going to tell every person in the damned world what you don’t want them to know! Because you have fucking pissed me off!”

Xara stared at her television in her office. Her phone started to ring. Then a second line. A third. Soon the entire thing flashed wildly on her desk. She didn’t move a muscle, her eyes locked on the screen.

She had tears of fury now, and didn’t give a shit. “So send the Golds if you want! Bring it on! Put money on my head! Do whatever you fucking can to stop me, because it won’t be enough. I am cursed. Cursed by the fucking stars and moon and everything in-between. I am your curse! Your fucking abomination! And nothing you do is going to stop me! Understand?! Nothing!” And she screamed as she charged the camera. The zebra immediately left it to intercept her, and the red light and sign winked off.

“Whoa! Not the camera,” the mare shouted as she held back a struggling Scotch.

The booth in the back opened up. Charity and Skylord regarded her with silent surprise while Pythia clapped her hooves. Some of the others did as well, with even Doctor Xandros nodding, albeit begrudgingly.

“And that’s why we do it live!” one of the technicians cheered. “You just can’t get that kind of raw presentation in post!”

Scotch’s friends rushed to her, embracing her and holding her close as she still jerked in anger, breath wheezing and lungs burning, even though she’d only stood on stage and talked for a minute. Well, Charity and Skylord more spectated coolly, but even they seemed impressed.

“That was so awesome, Scotch! Pure gold!” Precious squeezed Scotch tight. Enough that it compressed a lot of her rage right out of her.

“I’m just sick of it. I’m just sick of everything messing with me. With us.” Scotch looked at Pythia. “I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” Pythia replied, giving her a squeeze of her own.

“I can’t wait to hear the numbers. This might be our biggest broadcast in fifty years. Millions heard that!” crowed one of the technicians.

Doctor Xandros wasn’t cheering though. He was staring at a screen. Suddenly an alarm cut through the celebration, echoing down the concrete halls.

“What’s going on?” Scotch called out, echoing many of the technicians.

A screen showed a black skyscraper with golden lines decorating the front, and a large ring. The image went to a second camera where a dozen zebras in power armor were storming into one of the flying vehicles.

“You told them to bring it on,” Doctor Xandros said dryly. “I believe your challenge is accepted.”

Author's Notes:

See? Told you the story wasn't dead yet.

Hopefully by the next chapter we can finally get everyone to Roam. It's like Xeno's paradox. Every chapter gets halfway there without ever getting there.

So thanks as always to Kkat for making Fallout Equestria in the first place. And huge thanks as always to Icyshake, Heartshine, and Bro. All three are priceless with their help to get this story out. Thanks for my patreons for their support ( And if you want to join them the link is here) and finally thanks to every reader who's stuck with the trip. Here's hoping the next chapter is out before Christmas...

Oh God, I jinxed it, didn't I?