Burrburrary 9th, EoH 47

Lyra sat by Blue Note’s cot, their hooves hooked together. The blue thestral’s wing was cranked out in traction, and she stared at the ceiling with a bitter expression on her face.

“Is your foal okay?”

“Yes. And Bon Bon says that the wing will heal well. But she also says that Blue Note is confined to bed rest for the remainder of her term. Two months! It is absurd. Blue Note is not a fragile flower, and neither is her foal.”

Lyra squeezed Blue Note’s hoof. “You should do what she says. You scared me.”

Blue Note tilted her head towards Lyra. “You care for Blue Note. She appreciates that. And she cares for you. But she is not going to get to keep you, is she? Soon Lyra will go looking for her husband. Blue Note supposes it is her destiny.”

Lyra looked away. Her throat felt dry. “I have to go. I’m going to talk to Crispy about it today.”

Blue Note reached out to stroke Lyra’s cheek. “You have to find your family. Blue Note wouldn’t take that away from you if she could. She would like to come with you, but…” she waved in the direction of her gravid belly.

“I’m sure it will be a beautiful foal.”

“Of course it will be. It will bring whatever parents Blue Note picks for it great joy.”

“Definitely.” She leaned up to kiss her, and the kiss went on for rather a long time. The kiss lighted a fire deep in Lyra’s belly, and they might’ve done more, but the infirmary was crowded after the battle, and BON-80n was giving Paneer physical therapy not ten hooves away. They talked a while longer after that, then Lyra went to check in on BON-80n and Paneer.

“I’m doing great!” said Paneer, pronking in place. “And the scar looks so badass!”

“Please,” said BON-80n, restraining Paneer with a padded tentacle. “Exercise caution. You have no legs to spare.”

“How’s Haymaker?” said Lyra.

“Depressed,” said BON-80n, chassis lights flickering in a complex pattern of blue and orange. “As one might expect. I was able to save his leg. But the will to recover, it must be present as well, no? And what has he to live for?”

“What a wimp. Who even needs four legs?” said Paneer, waving her flipper.

BON-80n’s chassis lights flashed red. “Torture and the execution of prisoners are war crimes. Such things would not have been allowed in the old world.”

Lyra blew out through her nose and stomped her hoof. “I’m glad somepony feels the way I do about this.”

Paneer narrowed her eyes. “I don’t even know what you two are talking about. Raiders are the bad guys. What does it matter what we do to them?”

“The impression Crispy has created in the minds of the young may be irreparable,” said BON-80n.

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

Lyra fled across the stable, and Littlepip followed.

“Where are you going?” called Littlepip, “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Leave me alone. You’re not real,” said Lyra.

“You’re leaving. Why are you leaving? You have to stay here. You need to help these ponies!”

Lyra ignored her and picked up her pace, trotting into the atrium, where ponies were trying to scrub away yesterday’s bloodstains with sponges and buckets of soapy water.

“Don’t ignore me!” screamed Littlepip, following after her. Littlepip was a tiny pony, little taller than Paneer if a bit heavier, and had to gallop to keep up with Lyra’s trot. Lyra was impressed with her subconscious mind’s attention to detail.

Lyra reached the relative shelter of the maintenance corridor before rounding on her imaginary frenemy. “Can anypony but me see you?”

Littlepip grimaced. “No, but I’m really real, I promise.”

“A real hallucination, sure. And if ponies see me talking to empty air, what are they going to think?”

“That you’re crazy. But Harmony doesn’t care about that. Harmony cares that you do the right thing. You have to stay here. To fight raiders. To fight ponies that are worse than raiders. The Minutmares are the only ponies who can bring order and real peace to the Commonwealth wasteland, and they need your help to do that.”

“Did you see what Crispy did?” growled Lyra, struggling to keep her voice low.

Littlepip held her tongue, fire gleaming in her green eyes. Lyra stepped close to Littlepip, leaning down so they were nose to nose. “You did. And even you can’t defend it.” Lyra’s heart fluttered at having her lips so close to Littlepip’s. She was beautiful, despite the ugly scar on her neck and the hard, hollow look in her eyes. Maybe because of those things. She felt a wild impulse to kiss her, and a brief catch in the little gray mare’s breath made Lyra suspect she might reciprocate. Lyra buried the urge — making out with her own hallucination was a bit much, even for her.

“Y-you always have to do what’s right,” stammered Littlepip. “Even if it means becoming the villain of the piece.”

“You make me sick. Stay away from me.” Lyra turned and stomped away. “And stay out of my PipBuck, too!”

When she got to the foyer, the ponies working on the elevator-slash-door stared at her, and she realized she’d shouted those last words. Well. It didn’t matter if the Minutemares thought she was crazy. She’d be gone soon.

A moment later she realized these ponies weren’t trying to fix the door. They were fumbling to build a staircase out of scrap metal with hammers and wood nails. She groaned internally. How were these fools going to survive without her?

Two hours later, she had them sorted out, and the stable door back in working order. She showed them how to use the scrap metal to fix the damaged bolts and reinforce the piston in case it’d incurred any hidden structural damage when the power armor pony had jumped on it.

“Thanks, Lyra,” said one of the ponies. “We don’t know what we’d do without you.”

I don’t know what you’d do without me either, thought Lyra. But all she said was “I do my best.” She couldn’t procrastinate any longer. She could see that Crispy was in the security office. The door was open. Time to go talk to him.

“Can you at least understand why I did it?” he said, without turning from the security monitor to look at her. She noticed that one of the feeds showed the atrium.

“Have you changed your mind about monitoring inside the stable?”

Crispy flipped out to an outside feed. “I don’t know. Horse Teeth and the other founding Minutemares never had time to write a constitution. They had principals. Freedom. Security. Privacy. Self-determination. Ponies sharing their stuff. And I’m behind all those things. But sometimes they contradict each other. Like what happened yesterday. I did what I had to do. I don’t want it to be a secret. It’s good that there’s a record of it. But keeping track of things like that requires the cameras being on.”

“They were on because we needed them for the battle,” said Lyra.

“We need them so the government can be liable to the law.” Crispy rubbed his face. “But we don’t have any laws. We’ve been too busy fighting for our lives to make them. Damn. I wasn’t cut out for this. I just wanted to be a writer.” He looked over his shoulder at Lyra and waved a hoof towards a chair. “You want to talk, right? Sit down.”

Lyra’s throat felt dry. She swallowed. She felt like saying, ‘I prefer to stand’, but she didn’t feel like being a righteous prick about this, so she took a seat.

“You sit weird. No offense,” said Crispy.

“I do.” Lyra sat with her butt on the seat and her hind legs hanging over the edge, instead of hind legs curled up and all four hooves on the chair like most ponies did. But if that’s how ponies were meant to sit why did chairs even have backs? “I have to leave the stable,” said Lyra, looking Crispy in the eyes.

“Do you understand why I did what I did?” said Crispy.

“I think I do,” said Lyra. “But I’d like to hear it from your mouth.”

“I decimated them. When the ancient Pegasopolans conquered a city, they’d line up the inhabitants and kill every tenth pony. They did it to set an example. To show they meant business. To show they weren’t to be fucked with.”

“They did it so often they had a word for it.”

Crispy nodded. “Yes. There aren’t many Minutemares. This stable protects us, but we can be trapped in here so easily. We beat Haymaker because he was an idiot. We can’t count on the next one being so stupid. We need to make the raiders too afraid of us to come after us.” He sighed. “To tell you the truth, I was angry too.”

“Because you found out Paneer got shot?”

He nodded, mouth set in a hard line.

“I’m sorry I let that happen.”

He shook his head. “We knew it was a risk. Vindaloo and I knowingly used her as bait. The raiders would think we wouldn’t risk a foal in a trap — not with how rare healthy foals are these days.”

Lyra tilted her head to one side. “Healthy? I mean I feel bad asking, but…”

“You haven’t seen what most foals come out like these days. Paneer’s our golden child.”

Lyra’s throat tightened. “Blue Note?”

“We’ve treated her as carefully as she’ll let us. We can only hope. Anyway, we risked Paneer and you to win the battle, and I feel way worse about that than anything I did to the raiders.”

“Are you Paneer’s father?”

“That’s still up in the air. Vindaloo and I are pretty new.” He smiled. “I’d like to be, though. She deserves better. But what foal doesn’t deserve a better world than this?” He waved around him, the gesture notionally encompassing both the stable and the wasteland at large. “You deserve better, too. I can’t keep you here, and I wouldn’t even if I could.”

Lyra raised an eyebrow. “You can’t?”

“You’d find a way out. Anyway, you should go and find your family. We like you here, and you’ve been a lot of help to us. You’re welcome back any time.”

Lyra blinked several times. “Really?” She hadn’t expected it to be that easy.

“But I can’t send you out alone. You’ll die.”

“That’s what ponies tell me.”

Crispy tapped his chin. “Vindaloo and I were thinking about sending a trading expedition to Triple Diamond City. You should go along. You’ll be safe there, and somepony may know about your family.”

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

Burrburrary 23rd, EoH 47

They marched down through Sanctuary Hills to the old path of Route 2. Snow covered whatever was left of the old highway so deeply Lyra’s hooves never touched asphalt, and the twisted, brown-needled mutant conifers that dominated the wasteland’s forests had wormed their way in along its course, but Lyra had driven that way often enough that she still recognized it. Their party, a dozen strong, armed with a fine selection of captured raider weapons, and escorted by a difficult-to-identify and possibly (not actually) deadly Mr. Hoofsies model intimidated raider and monster alike, counterbalancing any attention their three sleds loaded down with valuable stable scrap might have earned them. Lyra walked near the end, escorting the sled that Paneer had to sit on, accompanied by BON-80n.

They ought to have been pleasant enough company, but the morning’s conversation mainly revolved around how bored Paneer felt.

“I wanna get off and walk!” Paneer would say, sulking in her little nest of pillows and blankets.

“Non, mon lapin. The exercise would be too vigorous, given your recent injury.” BON-80n would say.

“It’s been two weeks! I’m fine!”

“As your physician, I judge this walk to be beyond your current physical capabilities You may play when we reach Triple Diamond City.”

“I’m gonna tell my mom you won’t let me exercise.”

“Your mother instructed me that I am to ‘treat her child as if she were a priceless glass figurine’, minus an entirely unnecessary number of expletives. Rest assured that we are on the same page in this matter.”

“I hate you.”

Fifteen minutes of silence.

Conversation repeats.

Lyra might’ve tried to steer the conversation in a more productive direction, but she couldn’t stop thinking about her family — from unrealistic fantasies about them rushing to meet her at the gates of Triple Diamond City, to regrets about missing Bean’s entire foalhood, to agonizing guilt fantasies about Beanpole heartbrokenly sobbing over her adultery.

At noon, they rested at a farm on the top of a hill overlooking the junction with Route 95. Lyra, Paneer, and BON-80n waited by a sign advertising pies for sale while Vindaloo led the Minutemares in clearing the buildings. Vindaloo’s sharp criticism of the raw recruits’ tactics floated on the clear and frosty air. Lyra was puzzled to discover that she found Vindaloo’s hostility comforting in this context — if it was unpleasant to be on the receiving end of it, then so much worse for their enemies.

After Vindaloo gave the all-clear they set up in one of the more intact buildings to get out of the cold, rest, and give Vindaloo a chance to cook. The Minutimares had, of course, stripped the Principality Stockpile to the boards by now, and the had plenty of field rations available, but the Minutemare major preferred to cook with fresh foods whenever possible and save the preserved stuff for emergencies. ‘Fresh’ was relative in the Wasteland, but lunch today was a quick casserole of biscuit mix, chili paste, and dried vegetables that had Lyra wishing there was enough for seconds.

When they moved out again, Lyra took a moment to look down towards Buckstone. She could see the jagged tops of Chickenhoof Tower and the Careful Building poking over the hilltops, and paused to wonder where they were going.

“So are we going to take Route 2 all the way into Canterbridge?” she asked as Vindaloo walked by, heading for the front of the column.

“No. There’s a big princess compound at Fresh Pond. We’re gonna swing south down the old interstate for a while and then pick our way east through the suburbs to Triple Diamond City.”

Lyra frowned thoughtfully, consulting her mental map of the city. “It’s at Swampway Park. Triple Diamond City is at Swampway Park. Like a Boopball Diamond.”

“I see you you’ve shifted from idiot mode to savant mode,” said Vindaloo, looking slyly over her shoulder at Lyra as she walked away.

“Okay, but why Triple Diamond City?”

“And back to idiot mode.”

Lyra glared at Vindaloo’s retreating red butt. Then the light dawned. “Wait. It is her? It can’t be her! She’s still alive?” She raced downhill after Vindaloo.

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

“So… um… that was Thunderdash with their version of I Will Fly, which makes me cry every time.” Dead air. “Not that that’s hard to make me cry.”

Lyra sighed as the radio drifted into another stretch of dead air. Bored and needing distraction from the cold and wet, Lyra had taken to listening to the radio from Triple Diamond City on her PipBuck. The music selection was pretty good — mostly pre-war grunge and punk; had nopony had time to record any new music since she fell asleep? — but the DJ left a lot to be desired.

“So…” the DJ shuffled some papers, “Absolutely Everything is having a sale on brooms, I guess? I can’t read this note. And at Artillery’s Firearms Emporium every seventh customer gets… um… an incendiary grenade free?” Dead air. “That doesn’t seem like a good idea. Anyway, this is DJ mumble mumble for 88.9 WRAR, the Wasteland’s Alternative. The alternative to… like… one classical music station with secret codes hidden in it. CIM, you’re nor fooling anycreature.” Dead air. “I didn’t name the station. Anyway, I’m… um… going to play music for about an hour so I don’t have to talk any more. Next up are Sweetie Belle and the Crusaders singing You Know I’m No Good.”

Lyra hummed along as she listened to Sweetie Belle sing about how in the end she’d only cheated herself, and she felt so bad, but in a good way. It was hard to explain.

It was a pretty good station.

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

It was late in the day, and it was clear to Lyra they weren’t going to make Triple Diamond City before nightfall. They were deep into the suburbs by now, and Lyra didn’t like it here. Abandoned houses slumped and loomed on either side of the road, still marked with evidence of the families that had lived there. Tattered Nightmare Night decorations. Ruined cars parked in driveways. Lawnmower yokes poking up through the snow.

She kept seeing movement out of the corners of her eye; flickers of motion in windows shadows looming behind sheds. The snow on the road was more packed down here, churned brown with hoofprints that didn’t belong to the Minutemares.

Lamp posts still stood here. They were the battlefield for a level of warfare Lyra hadn’t expected to see in the wasteland: propaganda war. Banners hung from the signs, freshly printed on weather-resistant vinyl, touting the benefits of either Triple Diamond City or… the Ponysmith? Having heard so many awful things about him, Lyra hadn’t expected to see posters of hard-working unicorns thriving under his enlightened rule — though the fact that Scattershot and Skull Splitter had wanted to sell her to him made her doubt that his demesne was such a great place to be a unicorn.

Other factions participated in the propaganda war on a low-effort level. Many of the banners had been defaced with drawings of genitals — by raiders, most likely. Others had graffiti reading “Ha ha ha, Super Alicorns will destroy you all!” Lyra was still giggling at that when she saw something that stopped her in her tracks.

An image of the Ponysmith. He loomed protectively over smiling unicorns harvesting a green field, cyclopean in contrast of scale, resplendent in gleaming red power armor. His helmet was decorated with curving horns like those of a bull.

She’d seen him before! But where? She stood, staring at him, trying to remember, until the Mintuemare column had passed her by, and Paneer — finally allowed to run in the shallower snow — came pelting back towards her in her hopping, three-legged run. “Mom said ‘Go tell Lyra to get her ass in gear. This is ghoul country.’”

Lyra blinked. “What’s a ghoul?”

Paneer reared up on her hind legs, hooked her foreleg, and made a zombie face. “They’re horrible, gross ponies who got all wrinkly and mutated because of radiation!”

“Necrification,” said BON-80n, hovering up behind Paneer. “I have observed several ponies suffering from this condition stalking us. Is it very widespread? The condition was theorized, pre-war, but I have little experience with it. To see it in the field is quite fascinating.”

Lyra gasped. “Necrification! That was what I had! Before you put me in the tank!”

Paneer blinked. “You’re a ghoul? Wow, you look really good.”

“Non. The Z-core tank cured her. Sadly, we only had enough of the alchemical solution for one treatment, and without the formula, I cannot provide this treatment to others.”

Lyra sighed. “Also it took twenty years; that’s a pretty big downside.” Was being a ghoul worse than missing Bean’s foalhood? Lyra doubted it.

“Well anyway,” said Paneer, rolling her eyes, “Come on and catch up with the group before they eat us alive.”

“Oh!” said BON-80n as they hurried towards the rear guard. “So the condition does in fact lead to aggression and reduced cognitive function?”

“Sometimes!” said Paneer. “A lot of ghouls are fine; a bunch lived with us at Breeder’s Hill. But some of ‘em are zombies!”

Lyra sighed. Zombie ponies. Great.

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

Darkness came early. Vindaloo picked a one-story house whose bones were still solid after twenty years of neglect, and they’d spent the last few hours of twilight knocking down the inside walls and fortifying it.

“Ghouls tend to be nocturnal; if we can hold out until daylight we should be fine,” said VIndaloo.

“Mgh hmm?” said Lyra around the hammer in her mouth. Her magic was starting to come back, but telekinesis hurt, and she’d had to learn to do things earth pony style.

“Unless they’re extra hungry.” Vindaloo turned to shout at the Minutemares not working on the back door. “Why don’t I hear hammering?” she shouted.

“We’re done!” said Trail Mix, slouching resentfully.

“You call that done? Who taught you to build a barricade, a hungry diamondclaw?”

Lyra went back to boarding shut her window, glad Vindaloo wasn’t yelling at her for once.

She was so tired and sore from walking through deep snow all day and hammering into the night that when bedtime came she crawled into her sleeping bag the wrong way still wearing her clothes and passed out in seconds.

Almost instantly, she was awakened by the roar of gunfire.

She backed out of her sleeping bag to a room lit by muzzle flashes. Minutemares crouched in front of the firing ports they’d built into the door and window barricades, pouring round after round into something outside.

“Single shots, Minutemares! Aim for the center of pony mass!” Said Vindaloo from the center of the room. Paneer hid under her, shaking, forehoof and flipper over her eyes. BON-80n hovered behind her, syringes ready at the end of two of her tentacles. A small reserve — Trail Mix and three other ponies whose names Lyra couldn’t remember — hung back with them, weapons ready.

“But there are so many of them!” said one of the Minutemares.

“Which means we can’t waste ammo!” said Vindaloo. “Make every shot count!”

Lyra drew her 10mm pistol by the mouth grip and looked around for something to do. Nothing. Without her magic, she felt like a third wheel. Or a fourteenth wheel — just an out of place horse mom with one month’s combat experience, stuck at the end of the world and trying not to get in the way.

The gunfire made her ears ring. It was so bad that she was starting to imagine she heard hoofsteps overhead.

Lyra felt a tingle at the base of her spine. Those really were hoofsteps. She dropped her gun so she could yell. “They’re in the attic!”

Vindaloo shot a furious glance at her and opened her mouth for verbal decapitation. But then her ears perked up. She heard it too. She gave her reserve a series of quick military hoof gestures, indicating they should aim at the ceiling.

Damp plaster exploded overhead. Disfigured ponies fell like heavy, hungry rain. One landed on Lyra as she was reaching down to take her gun back in her mouth. It was naked, furless, its skin whorled in horrible burn scars. The soft flesh of its face had withered away to almost nothing, leaving a skull-like visage. Bared, flat incisors lunged for her throat. No time to bite her gun. Razor blades scored the inside of her horn as she levitated her .38 from its holster and emptied the cylinder in the ghoul pony’s general direction. At least some of the rounds found their marks. The light in its eyes — literal, green, glowing — dimmed and it tumbled in a heap on top of her.

She dropped the empty .38 like a hot rock, grabbed her 10mm in her mouth, and entered SATS. She stayed hidden under the dead ghoul pony — she’d been hanging around Crispy and Vindaloo long enough to have picked up the concept of ‘cover’. All she could see from this vantage were legs, but wrinkly ghoul legs were easy to pick out, and SATS let her kneecap them with ruthless efficiency.

More and more ghouls kept jumping down from holes in the ceiling. Where were they all coming from? How were there so many?

She felt teeth sink into her hind leg, tearing through the fabric of her jumpsuit. They’d found her! Lyra shrieked and tugged her leg away. She couldn’t tell if the bite had broken her skin or not; she could be grateful that pony teeth weren’t as sharp as pukwudgie teeth. But why did everything in the wasteland want to take a bite out of her? She couldn’t possibly taste that good. She slammed a fresh clip into her pistol and rolled out from under the dead ghoul and found her hooves.

The flanks and shoulders of a half dozen ponies surrounded her. For a second, she felt comforted to be surrounded by comrades. Then they all turned glowing eyes and noseless faces to look at her. Lyra stepped back, firing wildly. A board under her hind hoof cracked, and the floor gave way beneath her.

She and her new feral ghoul friends tumbled through the hole into the basement.

She landed on top of a refrigerator. The ghouls landed in the dark around her with splashing impacts.

Her eyes watered and her nose itched — this damp basement must harbor colonies, whole empires of black mold. Wrinkling up her snout in anaphylactic anguish, she kicked into SATS and targeted the zombie ponies already climbing up the sides of the fridge.

SATS gave her 95% headshots on five of the ghouls before it ran out of juice. That left one for her to deal with in real-time. It would have to do. Five 10mm slugs tore five scarred heads into beef tartar with eyeball garnish. The fifth one lunged over the top of the fridge for her pastern. She exited SATS and kicked it in the face. It began to fall and grabbed the door of the fridge. The door swung open, spilling out an avalanche of slightly glowing hour-glass shaped bottles.

Lyra bit down on her pistol’s trigger. It bucked in her mouth, making her teeth ache. But she couldn’t hit a moving target without SATS’ help. She fired, missing every time until her EFS told her she had one bullet left.

The fridge door reached the end of its hinges’ range and bounced back, bringing the slavering ghoul with it. Come on, SATS, come on! She kicked the ghoul in the face, and it bit down on her hoof, teeth digging into her hoof wall. She aimed her pistol with its iron sights, but if she missed she might blow off her own hoof! She kicked the ghoul in the eyes with her other forehoof, and it let go of her hoof, swinging away on the door again. SATS pinged, letting her know its spell had refreshed. She activated it, targeted the ghoul’s head with 95% accuracy, and fired.

The bullet missed.

“Mother fucker!” screamed Lyra, spitting out the empty pistol.

A howl filled the room, cold and affectless, the howl of a dead wolf. The ghoul perked its ears and looked towards the sound. Then she dropped from the fridge door and darted into the darkness. Above her, on the ground floor, Lyra heard the pounding of retreating hoofsteps. She turned on her PipBuck light, and swept the basement with it, looking for the vanished ghoul.

“Are you all right down there?” said Vindaloo, poking her head over the rotten floorboards that had caved in under Lyra.

“There’s still one left!” said Lyra, trembling on top of the fridge.

“It’ll be gone by now,” said Vindaloo. “Their herd leader sounded retreat. Decided we weren’t worth the meal.”

“So they’re organized. There’s still a little pony left in them?” said Lyra.

“Well, they’re smarter than raiders.”

“A concussed frog is smarter than a raider.”

“You’re not wrong.” Vindaloo’s eyes drifted to the orange glow of the bottles scattered across the basement floor. “What did you find?”

“Just a cache of Sparkle Cola. Nothing special.”

Vindaloo leaped down into the basement and fished a bottle out of the brackish water between her hooves. “Nothing special? This is a goldmine!” Vindaloo twisted off the cap with her back teeth and drained half the bottle in on big gulp.

“Those are radioactive, you know. Like, on purpose. Before they spent twenty years soaking up megaspell fallout.”

Vindaloo shrugged, still drinking.

“You’re going to get cancer.”

Vindaloo burped. “Yeah, like any of us is going to live long enough to die of cancer.” She turned the bottle around to show Lyra the nutritional information. “These things have calories. Just look at all those fucking calories! I’m lucky to get that many calories in a week! And then when you can save the bottlecaps for money.”

“You mean you sell the bottlecaps for money?”

“No the bottlecaps are money,” said Vindaloo, tossing the empty bottle over her shoulder and stuffing the cap in her coat pocket.

Lyra stared at her blankly. “Are you making fun of me?”

Vinaldoo tilted her head to one side. “No. They’re real money. Why is that strange to you?”

Lyra huffed, shivered, and stomped on the top of the fridge. This was outrageous. “They’re not money! Money has to be made out of something that has innate value, like precious metal or a jewel, or it has to be backed by a government or a bank or something. Bottle caps aren’t either of those things!”

Vindaloo raised an eyebrow. “So you’re an economics expert, then?”

Lyra waved her forehooves vaguely “No. That’s all I know about money. But it’s how money works. You can’t just pick some arbitrary type of trash and declare it money!”

“Spends like money.”

Lyra swung her bottom over the edge of the fridge, kicking for purchase against its side. “You know what? Never mind. Using bottlecaps for money is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, but if it’s what you do, it’s what you do.”

“Great,” said Vindaloo, helping her down the side of the fridge. “Now help me collect these bottles. The Minutemares have been neglecting their religious duties for far too long.”

Lyra’s jaw fell open. “Religious?”

Level Up
New Perk: Soda Jerk. You are twice as likely to find bottles of Sparkle Cola in containers. You hate Sparkle Cola, and this perk is wasted on you. Jerk.

Next Chapter: Chapter 13: Monster Mayor Estimated time remaining: 5 Hours, 20 Minutes