Freezuary 31st, EoH 47

“I don’t want to go back in the tank. Please don’t put me back in the tank.”

“We will not put you back in the Z-CORE tank,” said BON-80n, laying Lyra gently in a clinic gurney. “You are very sick, and need to rest.”

“No! If you put me in the tank, I’ll lose you all. And I don’t want to lose you all.”

“That is very sweet,” said BON-80n. “Do not worry. We will not put you back in the tank.”

Delirious with fever, Lyra felt she knew better. She imagined new friends were going to trick her. She didn’t know why they’d do that; she’d been nothing but good to them. She just knew they were going to. “You’re all I have left, and…” Lyra felt a prick in her left foreleg. She lashed out with her magic. “Oh no you don’t. I said no tank!”

“I am inserting an IV. You are very dehydrated and unable to keep down your food. I am not attempting to harm you, and have already promised not to return you to the Z-CORE tank. Please try to calm down.”

“CALM DOWN? YOU WANT ME TO CALM DOWN, YOU COLD HEARTED, UNFEELING METAL HUSK? WELL LET ME TELL YOU…” Lyra felt another sharp prick in her flank. “Tell you… what was I going to tell you?”

“I have applied sedation,” said BON-80n, drawing back a sneaky tentacle tipped with a hypodermic syringe. “You will rest now, no?”

Lyra blinked several times. Her eyelids felt very heavy. Each blink lasted longer than the last. “Not gonna sleep. Just gonna close my eyes.”

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

Lyra swam up through a shimmering purple ocean. Strange fish like hollow tubes of jelly as long as dragons danced around her. One clung to her arm, embracing her. She looked again, and it was an IV tube. She was in a hospital bed, surrounded by drawn blue curtains. Crispy sat on a stool next to her.

“Hey. You’re up,” he said, putting down his book.

“Where are we?” said Lyra, rubbing her eyes.

“In stable 93!”

“Really? It’s awfully clean.” Lyra couldn’t see much, but the curtains were laundered, the steel and plastic were polished, and the air smelled like cleaning fluid, not pukwudgie shit.

“You’ve been out for about a week. We’ve been busy. Some of us even took baths.

“Our plan worked. We killed all the pukwudgies. Everypony’s vaccinated—except for you; you had to go and get immune the hard way.” He grinned and bopped her gently on the shoulder. “This is our home now. All thanks to you.”

Lyra grunted. “You and Bon Bon had something to do with it. So, are we just gonna hole up here for the rest of eternity?”

“The answer to that’s pretty complicated, and we’re not gonna go into it until you’re feeling better. All you need to know is all of us are safe for now.”

“Safe for now.” Lyra looked up at the ceiling. Gleaming stainless steel. They’d even scrubbed up there. “I guess that’s the best I can hope for. So now what?”

“Now everypony has a job to do. And your job right now is to get better.”

Lyra grunted. “I’m fine. I’ll get up right now.” She sat up in bed. It took longer than she’d expected and proved to be a very tiring endeavor. The room spun around her. She lay right back down.

“Don’t worry,” said Crispy, hopping off his stool.”If you’re scared of being bored, I’ve got you covered.” He began moving books and pamphlets from the floor to her bedside table. “These are all the technical manuals for stable stuff we’ve been able to find. You probably wanna go through those while you have time because when you’re up and about, we’re gonna have a lot of questions for you.”

“Lovely,” deadpanned Lyra.

“Then there’s this. We found these at the base of your zebra tank. You must’ve missed them when you woke up.” He lifted a tall stack of loose papers onto her bedsheets, topped with a high-quality toy of Somambula in a dramatic pose: wings spread, blindfold on, one foot reaching bravely out in front of her. She recognized this pile—she’d seen it at the base of the Z-CORE tank and taken it for a pile of junk. She picked up a folded piece of orange construction paper with Happy Birthday Mom and a crude but very technically accurate drawing of a suit of power armor holding a birthday cake scrawled on it in crayon.

“Oh,” said Lyra, her voice cracking and her eyes welling up with tears. “Oh Harmony.”

“Yeah, I’m just gonna leave you alone with those,” said Crispy. “Bon Bon says you can call her on your PipBuck if you need her. Get well soon, okay? We need you.”

Lyra spent the next several hours sobbing and reading every single note her family had left her comatose body over the last two decades. Notes and drawings from Little Bean, and long letters from Beanpole. Photos in the pile showed Little Been growing into a gangly teenager, then into a strong, handsome young stallion.

The photos showed Beanpole getting older. By the last of them, he had a salt and pepper mane and deep lines around his eyes. Had Lyra aged? Illness aside, she didn’t feel much different from the twenty-nine-year-old mare who’d taken a megaspell blast to the face a few subjective days ago.

She rubbed the tears off her cheeks and opened the last letter in the pile.

Dear Lyra

I’m so sorry. I’m so very, very sorry.

We have to leave. Everyone is getting sick, here. The robot says we can’t take you out of the tank. I’ve tried, but I can’t figure out how. I’ve waited for you for so long. There are so many things I have to tell you. I don’t know where to start.

Bean sends his love. He left with the reconnaissance team, trying to find us a new place to live. We were going to wait for them, but it’s not safe here anymore. The pukwudgies are everywhere, and now the water isn’t working. We can’t get to the maintenance room anymore. The Overmare got bitten, and she’s dead now, so we’ve been voting. I voted to stay here until the reconnaissance team gets back, but almost everyone else voted to leave immediately. I wish we could tell you where we’re going, but I don’t know what things are like up there anymore.

I miss you, and I’ll never forget our time together.

Please be safe.

Beanstalk

Lyra crumpled the note against her chest, tears streaming down her cheeks. She felt grief, loss, anger, pity, abandonment, resentment—almost any negative feeling she could think of. Worst of all, there was what the note didn’t say—I’ve stayed faithful to you, we’re still married, there isn’t anypony else in my life. She riffled back through Beanpole’s notes, looking for clues. She wanted him to have waited for her. For twenty years, give or take. Twenty years of loneliness.

She flipped through the photos, looking at the ponies in the background, searching for recurring characters, and there was one. A sea-green pegasus mare whose coat clashed with the blue of her stable suit. Sturdily built, with an impish look in her eyes. That was bad news: Beanpole had a type.

In Little Bean’s graduation party photo (no longer Little Bean; he was as tall as his father but thick-necked and muscular like the stallions of Lyra’s family), the green mare leaned familiarly against his side, laughing. Lyra’s horn glowed, and she slowly, carefully, seared her face from the photograph.

She let her head fall back on the pillow. Fuck. Fuck everything. She wished BON-80n had let the nitrogen take her. She wished she’d died in any of the other dozen ways she could have, so that she didn’t have to feel like this, right here. Right now. She was shit. She was worthless. A burden on her family. Not worth waiting for.

A small, hard weight bumped against her hip. She levitated it up—the Somambula toy. Words written around the edge of the base read “Never abandon hope.”

Lyra chucked it into the curtains around her bed and went to sleep.

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

“Good morning, mon petit fromage!” said BON-80n, pulling open the curtains.

“Fuck off, Bon Bon,” groaned Lyra.

“I have good news! Your vitals have returned to normal! And do you know what that means?” BON-80n began removing the IV from Lyra’s foreleg.

“That I have to get out of bed?”

“I would think you would want to,” said BON-80n. “Having been cooped up for so long.”

“I was delirious for most of it,” Lyra sat up, and rubbed at her back. It hurt — in a stiff and uncomfortable way, not in a ‘something horrible is about to happen’ way, she hoped. Her hips hurt, her knees hurt, her neck hurt. “But yeah, I could use a walk. Do you have a robe or something? This hospital johnny shows my entire butt.”

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

Everywhere she went, ponies were hard at work, cleaning things, fixing things, organizing things. They sang a variant on an old earth pony spiritual as they labored:

Though months of winter’s cruelty
And awful horrid days
We’ve traveled far to find a home
But there’s no time to play.
‘Cause the food we brought is running out
And we can’t grow in this hole.
And even though we love our guns
Scavenging’s getting old!

Stable fix up! Stable fix up!
We’ll make our new home here!
Stable fix up! Stable fix up!
We’ll make it safe from fear;
We’ll make it safe from fear!

Every one of them stopped what they were doing to praise her and thank her and ask her how she was doing. Many of them wanted to hug her; which was awkward, both because she didn’t know them well, and because no matter what Crispy had said about baths, they didn’t smell very good.

But she shouldn’t judge. She smelled even worse.

BON-80n took her to a cafeteria where a pony cook — luckily not Vindaloo — was serving porridge. She’d cooked it in a steel pot hung over an improvised fire pit; apparently, they hadn’t figured out the StableTec ovens yet. Blue Note lounged on a threadbare couch at the end of a cafeteria table like a gravid queen, stirring sugar into a double portion of porridge.

“The Stable Dweller lives!” she shouted, raising one hoof in the air. “All hail the Stable Dweller!” She smirked when Lyra cringed in embarrassment as if she thought this was a great joke.

“ALL HAIL THE STABLE DWELLER!” Cheering ponies herded her onto a cafeteria stool, gave her sweet porridge and moonshine, slapped her on the back.

BON-80n hovered over her like a mother hen. “Please not so much food! And she is not ready for alcohol! Please be gentle in your displays of affection, she has been very ill!”

Lyra ignored her. She tucked into the porridge ravenously and knocked back two shots of the moonshine, both of which vastly improved her mood. She found she very much wanted to talk to Blue Note. Fuck her cheating scumbag of a husband. She could cheat too. She hopped up on the couch next to her, grinning like a fool. “Hi!”

Blue Note smiled a fangy smile. The way she lay emphasized her round belly. Her swollen teats nestled enticingly between her lean thighs. Blue Note could tell Lyra was staring and didn’t mind; in fact, she lifted one thigh to give her a better look at those lush teats. “Blue Note is happy you lived.”

“I’m happy I lived too!” said Lyra. She scooted over to rest her hip against Blue Note’s small round flank. Blue Note pressed her thigh hard against Lyra’s

This was wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. She didn’t know Beanpole had cheated. The sea-green mare might just be a friend. It’s not like she could forbid Beanpole female friends because he might want to have sex with them; by that logic, Lyra shouldn’t be friends with anypony! But she very much enjoyed how soft and firm Blue Note’s leg felt against hers. “It would have sucked to have died. Dead people can’t do anything.”

Oh, fuck her with a bloatfly, she was babbling like an idiot. Blue Note was going to think she was stupid.

“But there are lots of things live ponies can do,” said Blue Note, rubbing her hoof against Lyra’s.

“Oh, Il n'y en aura pas!!” said BON-80n, wrapping her tentacle around Lyra and herding her away from the thestral “Sexual activity is not recommended at this stage of recovery!”

Blue Note giggled. “Blue Note was just teasing her, you old nanny.”

“’There will be none?’ Where did you learn to speak Prench?” Lyra tugged at the tentacles separating her from Blue Note. “Let me go, I’m an adult. I can take care of myself.”

“Perhaps now would be a good time to show you your workshop,” suggested BON-80n.

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

“Oh my Harmony,” Lyra gasped.

The sign outside the door said ‘PipBuck maintenance’, and all three of their PipBucks were lined up on the work table. Two terminals graced the desk on the far side of the room; one of the standard RoanCo models she’d seen elsewhere in the stable, and an unfamiliar design with two monitors and a hoofpad. A second, larger workbench filled the far wall, with a wide range of tools hung on a pegboard over it — both her own from the car and her saddlebags, and a lot more they must’ve scavenged for her. Bookshelves held the stable technical manuals, the books from her saddlebags, and the notes from her family, topped by that damn Somambula figurine.

“What do you think?” said BON-80n

Lyra spun open the big C-clamp attached to the larger workbench. “I never thought I’d have anything like this ever again,” she said, lifting a power drill with dewy eyes. She looked around the room. Her saddlebags rested on a small cot in the back. A locker contained her stable suit, T-shirt and shorts, plus her pistols. The useless raider armor was gone, nowhere to be seen, and good riddance.

She’d need a new towel.

BON-80n’s chassis lights turned yellow. “That is excellent. I am about to close the door for your privacy. I need you to understand that you are not trapped in here with me—you are free to leave, or to ask me to leave, at any time.”

Lyra’s jaw fell open. “What?”

BON-80n floated over to a corner and drifted down so that her torso was only a few feet over the floor, presumably in order to appear less intimidating. “Please make yourself comfortable. We need to discuss your suicide attempt.”

“I didn’t make a suicide attempt. I was stuck.”

“When I removed you from the crawlspace, you were not struggling, and your heart rate was as low as could be expected, given the circumstances. I can only conclude that you were deliberately attempting to suffocate yourself. While I am not programed as a psychological robot, I do have basic triage functions, and may at least attempt a diagnosis. On a scale of one to five, on being ‘I completely disagree’ and five being ‘I completely agree’: ‘Over the past two weeks, I have felt sad, unhappy, or...”

Lyra plopped her butt down in a rolly office chair and kicked herself over to the terminal desk. “I’m depressed. Of course, I’m fucking depressed. The only reason I’m not on the floor crying all the time is that everything that happened is too much to process. I just feel numb. Empty.”

“Have you ever been depressed before?”

Lyra nodded. “After I had Little Bean. Normal postpartum. I got over it.”

“Do you have any idea why you feel depressed now?”

Lyra tapped out the commands to bypass the login. She used her hooves instead of her magic; it felt good to bang on something. “Are you shitting me?”

“I apologize, my programming is, how do you say, very limited in this regard. I am led to understand that ponies can find talking about their problems therapeutic.”

Lyra pulled over an inch thick pile of mixed types of paper and a pencil. Every sheet was covered in notes in a variety of mouthwriting styles. Trouble tickets. She might need to delegate some of this. “Fine. I had a decent life, you know? It wasn’t perfect, but it was mine and it was good. Now all of sudden all of that is gone, and I’m in the worst of all possible worlds.” Lyra found a blank spot on the back of one page and started noting down passwords.

“It could be worse,” suggested BON-80n.

“How?”

BON-80n paused. “Well, for example, you are not being tortured right now.”

“No, but it’s likely if I leave the stable again.”

“A fair assessment,” admitted BON-80n

Into the maneframe now, Lyra hunted around for census data. The hoofpad felt nice to use; took some of the load off her magic. “But you know what’s worse? I used to think I was a good pony. Now I know I’m not.”

“How so?”

“I’ve killed. And not just shot a few ponies—I’m not a good fighter, so I’ve had to be clever to survive. ‘Clever’ means tricks. Cruel, dirty tricks. Plus I’ve helped other ponies kill. You can say the ponies I killed were bad ponies. But what kind of pony knocks another pony into a pit to be eaten alive by pukwudgies?

“And even worse—I think my husband might’ve cheated on me. Fine. I was in a coma for twenty fucking years. I imagine he got lonely. But I’ve been conscious for three or four days of subjective time, and I already want to cheat on him. I’m a fucking whore.”

“With Blue Note?”

Lyra remembered BON-80n’s padded tentacles wrapping around her and felt a pleasant shiver. That was a stupid feeling and she pushed it away. BON-80n was a robot. A very kind, gentle robot. “Yeah. Blue Note.”

“She is flirting with you. It is a common social bonding behavior that does not always lead to sexual activity.”

“It’s intent. The point is I’m thinking about it.”

“Thinking is not the same as doing.”

“I guess.” Where the hell were Bean and Beanpole? She knew for a fact they’d been in the stable, but she couldn’t find anything under Beanpole’s surname. A modern stallion, he’d kept his own name, and Little Bean’s surname had been hyphenated in alphabetical order, Beanpole’s name first. “My point is, what do I have to live for?”

“What will it benefit you to die?”

Lyra sighed. She’d read Luna’s Book of the Dead; it had been required reading at GSGU. It was a cryptic book that raised more questions than it answered, but the overall plan of the afterlife was clear. “I go to the realm of the dead atone for my misdeeds and await rebirth. It’s not great there, but it’s better than this.”

“And then you are reborn into what world?”

Lyra slammed her head down on her keyboard. “The same one I left. Harmony damn it.”

“So dying will not solve any of your problems.”

“Thank you. Now I’m more depressed.” She mainly felt annoyed. She’d done therapy the first time she’d been depressed, and found it useless. Just a lot of talking around the same problems over and over without really solving anything. But talking to BON-80n had raised a stubborn resistance to the temptation to just laying down to die. There were things she wanted to do very badly. She wanted to find out what had happened to her family, even if the news was bad. She wanted to fix some things and make some things. She wanted to suck on Blue Note’s teats. She wanted to see what BON-80n’s tentacles could do. Those might not all be positive goals, but they were something. “I’m done with this, okay? You’re a very sweet robot, but this isn’t helping.”

“I am very sorry,” said BON-80n. Her chassis light turned blue. “If you like, I can review the stable’s stock of psychiatric medications, and see if there is anything that would help you.”

Lyra nodded. “That’d be nice, actually. Meds helped me last time.”

Bon Bon saw herself out, and Lyra lost herself in the task of looking for her family. She sorted by tribe and scrolled through. If what Vindaloo had said about the pegasi buggering off behind the clouds was true, there wouldn’t be a lot of them. Something immediately jumped out at her—she was though the earth ponies in a scroll or two. Then it was a long list of pegasi and an even longer list of unicorns. That couldn’t be right— She didn’t know the numbers, but before the war earth ponies had made up more than half the population. But in the stable, unicorns dominated. She went back to sorting by surname. “Unicorn, unicorn, unicorn, pegasus, pegasus, earth pony. Fuck my nuts, Vindaloo was right.” It could just be a demographic anomaly in this particular stable, but if it wasn’t, then why?

Well, it wasn’t her problem right now.

On a whim, she looked under ‘H’ and found her family almost instantly. They’d identified themselves as Heartstrings—maybe so they wouldn’t be separated from her, maybe as a show of solidarity, maybe because she’d been the one who signed them up for the StableTec account. Whatever the cause, it made her throat feel tight. Why had she stayed up top to help strangers and not gone down into the stable with her family? Why had she had to be such a fucking hero when there were ponies that needed her in her life already? She was an idiot and she didn’t deserve them.

She pulled up Little Bean’s files, briskly sweeping aside his privacy protections. Medical records showed some minor foalhood illnesses and minor injuries. School records were interesting—his grades were excellent, especially in science and magic. There were numerous behavior complaints from his teachers, which wasn’t surprising given what he’d been through. What were these? Lots of fighting, though looking at the individual complaints it looked like he just liked to stick up for other ponies. Tardiness, not doing homework, not paying attention in class, ‘editing and distributing a seditious publication’ whatever that meant.

“Good for you, kid. Your teachers were full of shit,” said Lyra. Started a cornu marega club, started a board game club, salutatorian. Lyra had to stop to rub the tears out of her eyes. “I’m proud of you,” she said, and went to have a look at her husband.

His files were boring and unhelpful. His marital status was still listed as ‘widower’; whatever relationship he had with the sea green mare it hadn’t been formalized in any way. He’d had… oh, Harmony, he’d had a bout with stomach cancer. In full remission thanks to an experimental treatment.

Lyra slouched in her chair. “I guess there’s an upside to being used for medical experiments. Unless those experiments were what gave him cancer.” She wondered if any StableTec staff were still alive? She’d like to murder some of them. That was fair, right? Your company experiments on me and my family, I kill you even if you weren’t directly involved.

Somepony knocked on her door.

“It’s unlocked!” she said.

The door slid open, and Paneer stepped in. To Lyra’s surprise, she was wearing a stable suit cut into a little cape, with 93s resting over her flanks where her cutie mark would come in.

“Nice look,” said Lyra, spinning around in her chair to face her.

“Thanks! I made it myself! I had a hard time, though. My magic isn’t very good.”

The cloak was, in fact, unevenly cut, with giant stitches and dangling threads. “Better than I could do,” said Lyra. This was the truth. “Your magic isn’t bad for your age. You just need practice.” This was a huge lie, but she didn’t want to discourage her.

Paneer pronked excitedly. “Yes! Exactly! But just practicing isn’t enough! My magic isn’t going to improve very fast if I don’t know what I’m doing!”

Lyra tilted her head to one side. There was something stilted about Paneer’s words like she was reciting from a practiced script. “Yeah, that’s a good insight, I guess. Don’t be too hard on yourself, though. You’re still young.”

Paneer looked away towards the ceiling and dramatically extended her flipper leg. “If only I knew another unicorn! An older, amazingly powerful, really cool unicorn who could teach me everything she knows about magic!”

Lyra smiled. “If only.”

Paneer gave Lyra an exasperated look. “That’s you. I’m talking about you. I want to be your apprentice.”

“I was getting that feeling. The subtext was subtle, but it came through.”

“So what do you say? I’ll chop wood, carry water, mediate, wax your car, whatever you want. You can ride around my back while I do obstacle courses. Whatever it takes, I’m in. I want to be an important wizard like you!”

“I’m not an important wizard, I’m tech support.”

“That sounds cool too!” Paneer sat down and made begging motions with her foreleg and flipper. “Please?”

Lyra tilted her head to one side, feeling puzzled. She’d had a run of good luck and given these refugee ponies an inflated idea of what she was capable of. She didn’t know what she could do to bring their expectations back down to reality. “What does your mother think of all this?”

Paneer’s expression fell. “I didn’t ask her. She kind of hates you.”

“I’m willing to try to teach you, but you need her permission.”

“Why? That’s not fair. She’s not the boss of me!”

“She is the boss of you because she’s your mother. Ask her.” Vindaloo being overly jealous of Paneer was what had gotten the two of them off on the wrong hoof, to begin with. Taking her as an apprentice without her mom’s consent would look like she was trying to steal her, and Lyra wasn’t about to prove Vindaloo right.

“Aw, come on!”

Lyra shook her head. “Nope. I know you’re scared of your mom…”

Paneer stomped a hind hoof. “Am not!”

“Then prove it. Go ask. Think of it as your first lesson. A wizard has to be brave.”

Paneer narrowed her eyes. “What about a tech support pony?”

Lyra glanced over at her massive pile of trouble tickets. “That takes a certain kind of bravery, too.”

“Ugh fine. I’ll be right back.”

Paneer turned and strutted out of the room.

Lyra sighed. She really could use an assistant. She levitated up the pile of trouble tickets and started trying to sort them. Fifteen minutes later, she was halfway into developing a grid matrix to categorize the requests by urgency and complexity when there was another knock on the door. Lyra rolled her eyes. How was she going to get anything done if ponies kept interrupting her? “Come in!”

It was Paneer again. “Mom wants to talk to you,” she said smugly.

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

The storage room was large, at least by stable standards, and disturbingly bare. Row after row of empty shelves stretched almost to the back wall. A half dozen ponies with ladders were going through the few shelves that had anything on them, watched over by Vindaloo, who had a clipboard fitted into her shoulder rifle mount and a pen sticking out of the corner of her mouth. They were sorting boxes and cans of food into two piles—one for intact items, the other for gnawed-on ones. The gnawed-on pile was much larger.

“How’s it’ going?” said Lyra.

“Bad,” said Vindaloo around the base of her pen. “The stable dwellers took most of the food with them when they left, and the pukwudgies ate almost all of the rest. We’re left with a few things that were on high shelves. That’s not going to see us very long.”

“Are there any other storerooms?”

“Yes, and they’re worse than this.” Vindaloo nestled her pen on the clipboard’s clasp and turned to face Lyra. “So. Are you settling in okay?”

“Yeah,” said Lyra, surprised at her concern. Not that her manner was anything but cold and professional, but cold and professional was a definite improvement in their relationship. “I noticed a note from you that there was some kind of problem with the water?”

“The problem is that there is no water.”

“No water?” said Lyra.

VIndaloo looked down her snout at Lyra like she thought she was the stupidest pony in the universe. “That’s what I said. We can get a trickle out of the pipes. It’s clean, cleanest I’ve ever seen, but we can barely get three buckets a day. We’re boiling snow for drinking water, cooking, and hygiene, and hauling waste out through the entrance. I never before realized how much thirty-three ponies shit in one day.”

Lyra groaned internally. This was very bad news—She was thirsty, she had to pee, and she needed a shower worse than she ever had before. “Okay. I’ll get on that immediately. Anything else?”

“Not unless you know where we can get some food.”

Lyra shook her head. “I’m new here.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m logistics, Crispy is handling security. He has a bunch of things he wants help with, but he agrees water is first priority.” She smiled. “He’s not completely stupid, that one.”

Lyra narrowed her eyes. That was high praise, from Vindaloo. And that was an awfully syrupy smile. She and Crispy weren’t… No. No. They couldn’t be. She’d seen them fighting. And ponies in relationships never fought, right? “Well, if that’s all, I’ll get right on it.” She turned to go.

Vindaloo took a deep breath as if steeling herself. “I had a little talk with Paneer.”

Lyra turned back around and raised an eyebrow. “Yeah? What did she say?”

Vindaloo was suddenly very interested in the pile of ruined food. “She looks up to you. And she should. You’ve done a lot for us.”

“Thank you,” said Lyra. She hadn’t, really, but the Minutemares’ belief that she had was her meal ticket, so she kept her mouth shut.

“She has a lot of questions I don’t have the answers to. I’m proud of my unicorn baby, but I don’t know anything about magic. Not even earth pony magic.”

Lyra felt an urge to be helpful and explain that earth pony magic was mainly intuitive, but she knew that Vindaloo was probably just being self-effacing and she’d get her head torn off for her trouble. She willed herself to keep her trap shut and let Vindaloo finish.

“Would you…” She shuffled a dented metal container of rice over to the ‘good pile’. “Would you be willing to teach her magic?”

“I would,” said Lyra. “If she’d willing to help me with my work around the stable, she can start immediately.”

“Thank you,” said Vindaloo.

Lyra left the storeroom feeling strangely light.

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

“Okay, now try the valve,” said Lyra

“Nothing!” said Paneer’s voice from amongst the water pipes in the environmental control room. There was all that water right there, and for some reason, it wouldn’t come out. The control valves were rusty and hard to turn, and it was giving Paneer good telekinesis practice, but that was all they were accomplishing.

Lyra glared at the terminal. Flow control: ON. Water supply: 99.89%. Purification: CRITICAL Was it shutting off the water flow because the purification wasn’t working? Where could she adjust that?

“I found something, Miss Lyra!” said Paneer, followed by a wrenching noise from deep within the pipes. She wriggled out butt first, pale yellow fur in disarray, and smudged with grease. She levitated a complicated technomagical device out behind her. “What’s this?”

The terminal immediately lost its shit. WARNING WATER TALISMAN DISCONNECTED. WATER SUPPLY DEACTIVATED. PLEASE CONTACT STABLETEC ADMINISTRATOR.

“That’s a water talisman, apparently,” said Lyra.

Paneer placed it on the table next to the terminal. It consisted of a large circuit board about a hoof on a side, connected to what had once been a large greenish-blue crystal. What was left of the crystal had distinctive fang marks on it. “What does it do?”

“I don’t know. But I know the administrator’s password. So let’s see what happens when we convince the environmental control system it’s still there.” It took ten minutes—much of it spent trying to explain what she was doing to a filly who’d seen a working computer five times before this week. She seemed to follow what she was saying all right, and of course, she’d need to know all of this.

Flow control: ON. Water supply: 99.89%. Purification: 100% said the terminal in bright green letters.

“All right. Let’s do this,” said Lyra, smacking her hooves together.

Paneer excitedly wiggled back under the pipes. Lyra heard the sound of the valve creaking open, followed by the sound of running water.

“We did it!” squealed Paneer, wiggling back out.

“We did it,” squealed Lyra, picking up Paneer in her forehooves and spinning her around.

An ominous groan echoed from somewhere amongst the tangle of pipes, followed by a metallic tearing noise. Icy cold water sprayed out across Lyra, soaking right through her stable suit. Lyra gasped. After the initial shock of the impact… well. The water was freezing. But she needed a shower so badly that it felt great against her coat. Paneer capered around Lyra in circles, laughing and splashing water at her. For the first time since the Bad Day, she felt completely, totally, and genuinely happy. Things were going to be okay!

Then she noticed her PipBuck was clicking. She looked at it, worried that the damn thing wasn’t waterproof. On the screen, Littlepip waved her forelegs at her. DANGER! Extreme radiation warning! GET OUT NOW!.

Paneer’s hooves didn’t touch the floor again until she was safe out in the corridor. Then Lyra had to charge back into the environmental control room to shut the water off, holding Paneer back with a force field because she didn’t have time to explain why she couldn’t go back in.

“What happened? What’s wrong?” said Paneer, confused, drenched, frightened.

“Am I interrupting something?” said BON-80n, floating cheerfully down the corridor towards them.

“Radioactive water!” cried Lyra. “Anti-radiation meds! Now!”

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

Lyra sat on an infirmary bed, wrapped in towels, and clutching a cup of hot coffee. She felt queasy from the meds, and her fur smelled strange from the emergency shower. Paneer, too young to be afraid of something as ephemeral as radiation, seemed to be in a fine mood, kicking her hind legs against the edge of her bed and enjoying her heavily sugared coffee.

“Hey Paneer?” said Lyra.

“Yeah?” said Paneer.

“When you tell your mom about this, try to avoid mentioning the bit where I soaked you in radioactive water.”

Paneer nodded. “What mom doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”

BON-80n floated over. “How are you two feeling?”

“I’m feeling lucky that you were there,” said Lyra.

“I was coming to check on you. To see if you were doing well,” said BON-80n

Lyra scowled and looked down at the light gleaming on the surface of her coffee. “You know, I was almost feeling all right. Then this happened.”

“You could not have known that the pipes were damaged. Or that the stable’s water supply was radioactive.” BON-80n draped a padded tentacle consolingly over Lyra’s shoulder. “No serious harm was done.”

Lyra hooked a hoof over Bon Bon’s tentacle to keep it there. “Except that now we need to decontaminate the environmental control room. And the water situation is even worse than I thought.” She looked at the broken water talisman resting on the bed next to her. “I don’t know where we’re going to find one of these.”

“I have found meds for you. Euphorazine. It is a selective smiletonin reuptake inhibitor, which means…”

“I know what it means,” said Lyra. “And I’ll take it. I’m not sure if it can overcome how horrible things are, but I’ll try.”

BON-80n bobbed in midair in sort of a curtsy. “Perhaps we could schedule a time next week to talk?”

Lyra sighed. “Listen, I’ll talk to somepony if you think it’s important, but not to you.”

BON-80n’s chassis lights blinked. “Why not?”

“Because I think I like you,” said Lyra. “And you can’t be friends with your therapist.”

“Why thank you. I admit I am hesitant to accept your offer of friendship—the last time I had friends, I euthanized them.”

Lyra smiled wryly. “I don’t wanna say they had it coming, but they had it coming. You saved my family, so I’ll give you a pass.”

“Very well. But if you need somebot to talk to, do not hesitate to ask.”

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

Lyra lay huddled in the cot in the dark, trying not to think. Her brain wouldn’t stop.

What did she have to worry about? Getting cancer from radiation exposure had suddenly moved to the top of the list. Or Paneer getting cancer because of Lyra’s mistake. Getting along with the Minutemares and the refugees; especially Vindaloo. It wasn’t impossible they’d come to blows again, though that was less likely if Lyra kept her mouth shut. Cheating with Blue Note. Making a fool of herself assuming Blue Note’s advances were serious when they weren’t. Getting killed by raiders. Getting captured and tortured by raiders. The list never ended.

The refugees had been talking about monsters over dinner. The wasteland was like the Everfree Forest on steroids. She wasn’t sure what a diamondclaw was, but they sounded awful. Radgators, yogis, manticores—apparently manticores loved radiation, thrived on it, and were common as rats these days. And bloatflies apparently shot their fucking maggots at you. They burrowed into your skin at projectile velocities and started eating you immediately! Which was a novel reproductive strategy and she hoped it never happened to her. She couldn’t believe she’d eaten one of those things.

She rolled back and forth on the bed. Too hot, she stripped off her T-shirt and shorts. Then she was too cold. She pulled her thin blanket over her, but it got tangled in her legs. At last, she threw the blanket across the room, pulled on her shorts for decency’s sake (she still couldn’t believe wasteland ponies went naked in the middle of pegasus winter), and stalked to her work desk. No more dicking around with work projects—she was going to investigate her PipBuck some more. There was a radio on it—very useful if she could get the other two set up for Crispy and Vindaloo. She rotated through the dial. There were signals out there, including at least one playing music! She couldn’t pick it up well enough to even tell what songs were playing, but she could build the stable an unobtrusive antenna, no problem. Then they could at least have some music down here.

Poking around the radio made her think of Fizzlepop’s message. She took her PipBuck over to the big terminal and copied the audio file over.

“Let’s see if we can pick this thing apart,” she muttered to herself. “Find some signal in the noise.”

It was a slow process, but the StableTec playback utility wasn’t bad. She went over the garbled portion a little bit at a time, cleaning out the noise and slowing down the playback. She wasn’t getting anything useful out of it, but the process was making her sleepy, so that was a win.

Her eyes were drooping and her nose was drifting towards the keyboard when Fizzlepop’s slowed down voice burst into her ears. “…cipality Ration Stockpile, 42.431387, -71.351…”

Lyra’s eyes snapped open. She sat straight up in her chair, suddenly wide awake. She had to replay the clip three times before she was sure it wasn’t a dream. Fumbling for her PipBuck, she pulled up the map and found those coordinates. They were less than three miles south of the stable entrance.

She pulled on her T-shirt and ran out into the corridor, hooves skidding on rubber anti-slip mats. Crispy had to know this right away!

LEVEL UP:
New Perk: Bi Invisibility. Your sexuality is so confusing that many ponies prefer to pretend you don’t exist. You have a base 20% chance for all sneak attempts, even in the open and in broad daylight.

Next Chapter: Chapter 9: Who Raids the Raiders? Estimated time remaining: 6 Hours, 34 Minutes