Lyra floated in a haze of pain. Lights seared her eyes, orange and white, glowing through her eyelids. She felt like she’d rolled around on hot iron. Every breath lit bonfires in her lungs.

“Oh, this is very bad. This is very very bad,” said a stallion’s voice hovering somewhere over her head. Lyra couldn’t see anything. The lights were too bright. She tried to turn her head away from them, and the motion made her skin feel like it was tearing open.

Lyra screamed. Screaming burned, but she couldn’t stop.

“Harmony, how is she still conscious? Bonnie! More Med-X, stat!”

“We have already exceeded the maximum recommended clinical dose, no? More could do her irreparable harm.” A mare’s voice, lilting and musical.

“She’s already suffered irreparable harm, you unfeeling metal octopus! Give her the drug.”

“As you say, Doctor Cocksure,” said Bonnie. A dragonfly stung Lyra on the shoulder. It felt like a dagger piercing her flesh, but numbness followed the pain like flowing water.

“Let’s see. Severe radiation burns over seventy-three percent of her body,” said Doctor Cocksure. “No idea what the damage to her lungs is."

“The megaspell was of the type balefire, non?”

“The damage has all the hallmarks of balefire.”

“Then we must also consider the risk of necrification.”

Doctor Cocksure’s tone became grim. “We have to ask ourselves—is maintaining her life worth the drain on the Stable’s resources? And as much as I’d like an opportunity to study one of these so-called ‘ghouls’ close up, we don’t know what they’re capable of. Nor are we sure the condition isn’t contagious. Letting her live could pose a risk to the entire Stable.”

“Are you recommending euthanasia, doctor?”

‘Euthanasia’. Even in her drugged stupor, Lyra felt vaguely concerned by that word. Medical professionals were talking about her life. Did she want to live? If living was going to cause her as much pain as she felt right now, she wasn’t sure she wanted to. But it wasn’t fair that other creatures might make that choice for her. She remembered a music video where a wounded soldier had tried to communicate with his doctors by shaking his head in Morse code. Lyra knew Morse code. But she couldn’t quite feel where her head was. Must be all the Med-X.

“I think we might have to make that call. Tell the family she died of her wounds.”

A brief flickering of joy in her chest—Bean and Beanpole were safe! But the joy was quickly replaced by rage. They were going to take her away from them! She tried to scream, tried to thrash, tried to shake out ‘fuck you I want to live’ in Morse code with her whole body. Short short long short short short long…

“She’s going into convulsions!”

“Restrain her, before she injures herself!”

Come to think of it that trick hadn’t worked in the music video, either.

“There is another option,” said Bonnie. “This Stable is intended for medical research. This would be an excellent test case for the Z-CORE tank.”

Medical research? What? She hadn’t seen anything like that when she’d signed her family up with StableTec! Lyra tried to thrash again, to tell them they didn’t have the right to experiment on her or her family, but either the deepening effects of the Med-X or those restraints they’d mentioned kept her from moving.

“I don’t know. We only have one of those things. I’d prefer to begin this kind of experiment under controlled circumstances,” said Doctor Cocksure.

“Our circumstances are difficult, and our mission rife with complexities that are, frankly beyond my programming to interpret, but we must always strive to make ethical choices,” said Bonnie.

“Did StableTec really code you?” said Cocksure.

Everything was getting dark. Lyra felt very calm, which frankly didn’t make much sense, given the circumstances, She felt like she needed some sleep. If she slept, everything would make more sense.

“I’m sorry, I do not understand,” said Bonnie. “But may I also add that we are unlikely to encounter such severe injuries in a controlled environment such as Stable 93?”

The lights, much dimmer now, split into a thousand shards and began to dance around Lyra. She felt so free. She didn’t need to be here. She could just… go elsewhere.

“Doctor?” said Bonnie. “Are you all right?”

“Fine. Fine. The last thing I need is a robot revolt right off the bat. Prep her for immersion, and move her out to the medical bay in the main Stable. We’ll hide the experiment in plain sight.”

Lyra felt a vertiginous sensation of motion. She realized she was hovering over a vast purple ocean. Strange, glowing creatures danced in its depths—an octopus with needles in its tentacles, an eagle with a hundred mouths, a kelpie with the wings of a swan. Two knights, one red, one bronze, beckoned to her. The red one had the horns of a bull. She descended into the ocean. Its waves felt cool against her tortured skin.

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

Lyra’s eyes snapped open. She was in the dark, and she was drowning. All four legs flailed, trying to swim. They slammed against metal. She was trapped in some sort of tank! She bucked in the dark, slowed by the thick liquid enveloping her, kicking out at the container that held her. It moved. She kicked again. Something gave way and fell, clanging as it landed on an unseen floor. Light— dim purple-tinted light, barely enough to see by—trickled in.

Lyra lunged upwards, gasping for air. Her head broke free, dripping viscous fluid, but her lungs were still full! She found the edge of the tank, and hung over it, coughing and retching until she could breathe again. Then she raised her head and looked around, trying to get an idea of where she was.

Her impression that she’d been in some sort of tank had been correct—cylindrical, slightly larger than a pony, one end elevated over the other. The upwards-facing side of the cylinder had a hatch, which she’d kicked open.

The tank rested perpendicular to the wall of what looked like a doctor's examining room—examining tables, lockers, a sink with cabinets, a desk with a terminal. It was lit only by the green glow of emergency lighting in the hallway outside the door. Dust coated everything. Debris and what looked—and smelled—like animal droppings littered the floor.

Lyra tried to climb out of the tank, but her limbs felt weak. She had to slither down the slide like a slug, and it took her several minutes of struggle to find her hooves. Her legs shook uncontrollably—not just from the effort of standing, but because it was freaking cold in here!

“Hello? Hello? Is anypony there?” Lyra waited for a response. Nothing. “Hello? Is anypony there?”

This last was followed by a slithering shuffle from somewhere down the hall. Lyra decided that she should be as quiet as possible from here on out. Here chattering teeth weren’t helping with that, so she darted for the lockers and started searching them for something to dry off with and maybe some clothes.

The first one was full of hospital johnnies; she scrubbed the slime off her body as best she could. The next had… Oh! It was the CSGU t-shirt and shorts she’d been wearing when… well. On the Bad Day. The StableTec ponies had saved them! Hadn’t she been burned? She was surprised they hadn’t had to cut them off her body. Then again what could see and feel of her body seemed fine. Maybe that had been a nightmare?

Maybe all of this was a nightmare. The whole Bad Day, just one long stupid nightmare and if she tried hard enough she could wake up right now.

Lyra clenched her eyes shut. “Wake up, wake up, wake up!”

Nope. Still here. She pulled on her T-shirt and shorts. There were several blue jumpsuits with the Stable number on the flanks; they looked warm so she put one on. Very comfortable.

Now what? There wasn’t anything else in the room except a pile of junk in front of the tank she’d been in and the terminal on the desk. The terminal seemed intact, so she punched the power button. The monitor flickered to life.

“Come on, RoanCo reliability,” whispered Lyra, shaking her forehooves excitedly. If she could get into the Stable maneframe, it would answer a lot of her questions. Why was she in that tank? Why was the stable empty? How had the Bad Day turned out? Most of all, what had happened to her family?

She repressed a ‘yipee’ as the login prompt appeared. Perfect. You could soak a RoanCo system in mud and then dry it off in the microwave and it’d still boot up, but in terms of security, they were a joke. She held down the keystrokes to go into admin mode and dumped the user records into a text file. The passwords weren’t so much ‘encrypted’ as hidden in a bunch of garbage characters. She was into the system in a couple of tries.

The results were disappointing. Whatever connection the terminal had with the maneframe was broken; all she could find were a few patient records—none for Bean or her husband; she guessed that was good?—and some personal emails. Even the date and time were wrong—it said 0:00, Freezeuary 1, 0 EOH. Lyra didn’t think she’d gone backward in time while she was in that tank.

Lyra flipped through the emails. A lot of them were corrupted. She found one from 45 EOH—eighteen years after the Bad Day. Her stomach sank. Had she been out that long? Bean would be old enough to drink! She’d have missed his whole childhood!

That was impossible. The dates on these things were all out of whack, probably, and anyway she was still convinced this was a nightmare.

Oh! This email was about her.

How long is she going to be in here, taking up space? I swear, I bang my cannon on that big stupid tank at least once a day. If it were up to me, I’d kick her out of there and free up space for a couple of beds. It would be awful if something were to go wrong with the tank, wouldn’t it? Don’t think I haven’t tried to stage a little ‘accident’, but the controls are incomprehensible. I found the manual the other day, but it’s written in iambic fucking pentameter. Looks like the project lead was some kind of eccentric zebra alchemist. One of ours, I hope, but how do we know? It would be just like those fucking stripes to sneak spies into StableTec.

“Fuck you, you creaturist cunt,” muttered Lyra. She skimmed down to the reply.

Careful, Brightree. If the Overmare hears you talking like that you’re going to earn another round of friendship training.

I hear you about the space Nip Van Wrinkle’s taking up, though. With all the accidents and ponies getting sick around here, we could use the extra space.

Lyra tabbed out of the email to go look at the medical records again and make double-sure Bean and Beanpole weren’t listed. But the screen went dark. Everything went dark, even the emergency lighting. The background hum of the environment control systems faded and died. Lyra held her breath, ears ringing in the sudden silence. She heard more of that scuttling sound. And… was it her imagination? Somewhere far away, the sound of a mare weeping.

Lyra was an intelligent, highly educated mare—she knew the truth about ghosts. The truth was that they were real, and they could mess you up. Time to get out of this place.

The emergency lights flickered back on. Lyra headed for the door as quickly as she could. The hallway outside led to a T-intersection. Conveniently, there were signs.

“Engineering, Atrium, Residential,” Muttered Lyra. “That’s not helpful. How about ‘exit’?” She guessed the atrium would be closer to the surface than engineering and went that way. Even with the air circulation fans back on, she imagined she could still hear that mare crying. Maybe it wasn’t a ghost. Maybe somepony else was lost in here and needed help? Well, if she ran into them, she’d help them out, but she had to get herself safe, first.

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

Those scuttling sounds were louder in the atrium. It was a two-level open space about the size of a hoofball field, with rooms for various amenities and public services around the edges. Lyra crouched on the second-floor balcony. Nocreature else was on the second level, that she could see. She crept to the railing and pressed a hoof over her mouth to suppress a gasp at what she saw there.

A dead pony lay sprayed in the middle of the floor, its flesh mummified by the dry cold air. Some dried dark substance, blood or vomit, darkened the textured rubber floor around its head. Parts of its leathery skin and blue jumpsuit had been eaten away, revealing patches of smooth white bone. Not everypony had made it out alive.

As she watched, a naked, leathery creature crawled into view. Low to the ground, wide-mouthed, thick-tailed, it resembled nothing so much as a naked pukwudgie. This one had lost the bristling spines they used to immobilize their prey, which was a blessing, but they’d traded it for an increase in size and a whole bucket full of ugly. It sniffed at the pony corpse, nudged it, and wandered away. There were no good bits left.

Her easy payments of thirty-three ninety-five a month had gotten her this? She wanted her money back.

Moving slowly so as not to attract that naked pukwudgie’s attention, Lyra explored the second floor of the atrium. The commissary had been stripped of anything useful, though she found a can of Dressage Horse apples in a display case. She didn’t feel hungry, but she would soon and she didn’t have anything to carry it in, so she ate them anyway. They were sickeningly sweet and tasted like chemicals.

There were three more corridors off this floor, one labeled residential, one administrative, and one labeled ‘Stable Staff Only’. Still no exit signs, but really, exiting wasn’t something you’d want to do if you were in a Stable, would you? Lyra tried to remember how the model Stable here and Bean had toured when they’d signed up had been laid out. They’d looked at the residential area after they’d seen the atrium, so maybe ‘Staff Only’ was the way to go?

Lyra hesitated outside the door to residential. Perhaps her family was still in there? But she’d only seen one dead pony so far. If everypony had died here, then the atrium would have been heaped with corpses. It stood to reason that something had gone wrong, and they’d all left. And yet… what if they were down here, and Lyra got out of the Stable and couldn’t get back in?

She wavered, standing in front of the corridor, swaying from side to side in her indecision. The pukwudgies made up her mind for her—a small passel of four of them lumbered into view at the far end of the corridor, sniffing and scraping for something to eat. Lyra bit back a shriek; only a quiet squeak escaped her lips. But it was enough. Eight beady black eyes looked up at her. Four pairs of lips peeled back slowly from four sets of long, jagged fangs.

Lyra ran. ’Staff Only’ it was. She outpaced the pukwudgies easily, their stumpy little digging legs being no match for long pony running legs. Or so she thought. Halfway down the hallway, a section of broken flooring exploded into another passel of pukwudgies, this one at least half a dozen strong. Lyra skidded to a halt and raised shields in both directions. Soft bodies thudded into the shields; every impact made the base of her horn twinge with pain. She still wasn’t completely recovered from that megaspell-shielding stunt she’d pulled earlier.

Several of the pukwudgies burrowed back down through the floor. Lyra felt suddenly sure about the corridor sections under her hooves. There was a door to her left; she made a wedge-shaped shield to pry it open and dove inside. The doors—which opened top to bottom for some reason—snapped down behind her of their own accord.

Now she was in the dark. Lovely. Holding her breath, she made a small light, ready to be body-slammed by horrible mutants.

She was in a locker room—it reeked of mold and mildew, so much so that it made Lyra’s sinuses itch, but it was empty. the pukwudgies didn’t seem to have found their way in here, yet. To judge from the gnawing sounds outside, though, they would soon. It didn’t seem like metal was enough to stop those jagged gnawing teeth.

Lyra began opening lockers, looking for something to protect herself with. Towels, sweat socks, underwear, more of those stupid blue jumpsuits. Were they all ponies wore in the vault? Her son was going to grow up severely fashion deficient. She considered layering them for extra padding, but the one she was wearing was already tight. She found a first aid kit emblazoned with the triple butterfly emblem of the Ministry of Peace and tugged at the lid enthusiastically with her magic, but it was locked.

“Augh! What kind of psychopath locks a first aid kit?” She considered ripping it open with her magic, but she didn’t know how solid the lock was, and she wanted to save her energy in case she needed to try to blast her way through the pukwudgies with magic bolts. Not an optimal scenario; the only combat spell she knew besides the shields was a basic one meant to incapacitate a mugger, not mow down a horde of ravenous mutant wildlife.

She moved on. Another locker contained a sturdy set of saddlebags. “Score!” said Lyra, extending the straps to fit around her belly. “Now I have someplace to put things!” They had two books in them, clean mare’s underwear, some sanitary pads—Lyra didn’t think she’d go into heat for months yet considering how cold it felt down here but they would be nice to have when she did—a granola bar, and a multi-tool. She noticed a tag next to the Pommelwear label; ‘this bag belongs to Soft Sounds’ stitched in the same black sans serif font as the logo.

The showers were disgusting—somepony had been working on the pipes and left the job undone when they skedaddled from the vault. Only a trickle of water escaped from the wide-open pipes, but it was enough to grow a terrifying colony of mold and fungus. Lyra levitated over a clean-ish towel, wrapped it around her snout, and backed away until she bumped into a row of lockers. Well, This place had been a wash in terms of loot. There didn’t seem to be any other exits, either. She drew in a deep breath and emotionally readied herself for battle.

When she turned towards the door, however, she noticed another case. This one was much larger than the first aid kit. Blocky sans serif letters on the door read ‘PipBuck storage; authorized personnel only!’

Lyra squinted at it. “What’s a ‘PipBuck’?” She tried the case’s door and found it unlocked.

A PipBuck seemed to be some sort of pocket computer. The case contained slots for ten, but only three were filled. She levitated one out. They’d seemed bulky at first glance, but most of that was a bracelet so that it could be worn around a foreleg. The actual computer part was very small, barely half the size of a pocket computer. “Well this looks cool,” said Lyra softly, She summoned a pair of ghostly hands and turned it around slowly, poking at the various buttons and turning the various knobs and the large dial on the side. The holotape player popped open (nothing in it). All very interesting, but she couldn’t see how to turn it on. “Maybe the battery’s dead,” she said to herself.

Bricked or not, she liked the look of it. She slid it over her pastern and onto her cannon to see how it felt. That did the trick. The bracelet tightened like a blood pressure cuff. The screen flickered and came to life with a green-on-black RoanCo logo that was quickly replaced with an infographic of a small unicorn mare and a lot of biometric information. From the high fatigue levels and the fact that she was mostly but not entirely in good health, Lyra assumed these stats were hers. It rated her magic level at about fifty percent, which felt about right.

Her heart rate quickened. “This is incredible,” she whispered, fear, loss, pain, and exhaustion all falling away for a moment in the joy of a cool new toy.⁶ She flipped through its various functions. It had an inventory system that seemed to automatically sync with those saddlebags she’d just found. She giggled at ‘feminine hygiene products (4)’ and flicked to the next screen, which was a map. This corridor did, in fact, lead to the exit, which was good. There was a day planner application; it looked like it could store and edit text, video, and audio files, and…

Lyra flipped to the device settings and froze. Activate Eyes Forward Sparkle (EFS)? “Yes. Yes, I would like to do that. Very yes.” She checked the box, and text and images popped up in her vision. An estimation of her overall health expressed as a bar graph. A compass dial that filled with little red dots when she looked at the door out. An ammo indicator for the firearm she didn’t have, which she was able to switch to an estimation of her remaining magic charge. “Holy. Fucking. Shit. Hey, I wonder what Stable Assisted Targeting System (SATS) does?”

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

Lyra charged through the locker room door in slow motion, screaming like a banshee. The pukwudgies looked up in surprise, eyes widening like a time-lapse video in a nature documentary. Lyra angled a shield across the corridor to block off all but three of the pukwudgies from attacking her. The remaining three she selected for magic bolts. SATS gave her a 95% chance for blasts to the center of body mass, which she felt was optimistic given her lack of combat training, so she targeted each of them twice. The bolts all hit, knocking them back and bouncing their fat, hairless bodies off the corridor wall.

Then SATS wore off, dropping Lyra back into real-time. The spell had its own magic charge, but it didn’t last long—but that didn’t matter, the few seconds advantage had been all Lyra needed. Following her memory of the PipBuck’s map, she galloped down the corridor and headed right at the next intersection. She levered the door at the end of the hall open. The pukwudgies came around the corner and waddled after her, but Lyra slammed the door in their ugly pug-nosed faces.

She collapsed back against the door, gasping for breath. “Thank Harmony that’s over.”

She was in the stable foyer, a large open area with a security station off to one side, a scattering of broken and disassembled equipment, the machinery to raise and lower the stable door, and an entire army of foraging pukwudgies.

They looked up at her, bared their teeth, and charged toward the only source of food in the room. Lyra kicked into SATS to give herself a second to think. There were way, way too many pukwudgies to blast. She could teleport over to the exit controls, but she wouldn’t have time to figure out how to operate them, let alone time to wait for the elevator-cum-door to come down. There wasn’t much else in the foyer to work with—storage lockers, an array of angled panels that were probably decontamination zappers, and the barred window into the security station.

Lyra teleported into the security room, aiming a few feet over the floor so that she didn’t accidentally merge herself with any stray junk. She dropped to a crawling stance, hoping the pukwudgies would be confused enough that they wouldn’t start trying to gnaw through the walls right away.

Her PipBuck let out a loud, melodic ping. Lyra nearly shat her jumpsuit.

“Shut up, shut up!” she whispered, pounding at the screen with a disembodied fingertip.

That tiny cartoon unicorn popped up on the screen and spread her forelegs. Hi! I’m Littlepip! I’m here to help you understand your new PipBuck!”

“Die in a fire, Littlepip,” muttered Lyra. She needed to get to the options screen and find the setting to disable sound before the piece of trash on her wrist made another noise and brought the rabid mutant pukwudgie nation down on her. But no, the fucking cartoon mascot had to have her say.

“I noticed you’ve been using a lot of magic lately! Overuse of magic can lead to a variety of health issues, including headaches, exhaustion, magical burnout, and even neurological problems!”

“You know what also causes health issues? Being eaten by pukwudgies.” Lyra hurried to the options screen and turned ‘sound’ off. There was also a vibrate setting, which she set to minimum.

She did have a killer headache from the teleport, of course, but she was a CSGU grad, she knew what she was doing. She had a look around the security room. She had no time to poke at the terminals. The weapons locker—marked with the Ministry of Wartime Production’s three apples—hung open and empty, as did the first aid kit. A photo of the unicorn brothers who’d founded StableTec hung over a bank of monitors at the far wall.

Lyra searched the security room some more. There was an explosives case that was still locked. The lock looked pretty cheap, though; Lyra jammed the screwdriver from the multitool from her saddlebags into it, twisted, and it came open. A single metal apple lay inside. Lyra scooped it out with worshipful telekinetic palms. She’d never seen a real hand grenade before.

“How do these work?” she said, twisting the metal apple and fiddling with it. “You pull out the pin, and…”

The pin was a lot easier to remove than she’d realized. She stared in horror at what she’d done—grenade in one telekinetic hand, pin in the other. With a squeal, she dived under a desk, covering her ears. Her magic hands zoomed to the door; a third appeared to punch the open button. She shoved the grenade through the crack in the door as soon as it was wide enough and hammered the close button.

Outside in the foyer, there was an earth-shattering kaboom. Chunky tomato soup spattered the windows. A soft, viscous splattering noise, like a gentle rain shower, lasted for two or three seconds afterward. Lyra peeked through a clear spot on the window.

The pukwudgies who had come to investigate the opening door had been pulped. Several more had been killed or crippled by the explosion. The rest were high-tailing it for their bolt holes, convinced this meal wasn’t worth dying for.

Lyra opened the security room door and ran for the exit controls. She figured out how to connect her PipBuck to the panels, and mashed ‘yes’ when Littlepip asked her if she was sure she wanted to leave to Stable. The door machinery hissed and clanked. It lowered with the same infuriating slowness that it had on the way in.

She thought it was odd that this one opened vertically. The model vault her and Beanpole had visited opened frontwards. Which alignment was more common?

A faint shuffling noise came from behind her. She turned. Across the foyer, three big pukwudgies, braver than their companions, advanced toward her. Muscle rippled beneath her leathery hides. “Good pukwudgies,” said Lyra. “Just let me out of here. I’ll stop bothering you, and you can go back to doing pukwudgie things.” Which was a stupid thing to say; even normal, non-mutated pukwudgies spent most of their time being mean and eating things.

Behind her, the elevator clanged into position. The pukwudgies charged. Lyra shrieked like a little filly, turned, and ran. She had to go down a set of stairs and through a chain-link gate to get in. Pukwudgie claws skittered on non-slip rubber flooring. Lyra slammed and locked the gate, plugged her PipBuck into the elevator controls, and hammered on the ‘up’ button.

The elevator groaned, shuddered, and began to rise.

One of the pukwudgies tore open the chain link with its teeth; the edge of the elevator caught its face and speared its neck on the jagged metal wires. Lyra winced; that was a grim fate even for a pukwudgie.

The other two were smarter, climbing the fence for the gap at the top. One wiggled through and landed on the platform; the other was too late—the relentless metal platform cut it in half, spraying a fan of blood and organs across the blue and yellow metal.

Lyra’s gut struggled to throw up that one can of apples she’d eaten. She held it back, jaw gripped tight, horn glowing. She and the remaining pukwudgie circled each other, eyes locked.

The platform shuddered as it clicked into the top of its route. Lyra lost her footing, then slipped on a puddle of gore and fell to her back knees.

The pukwudgie lunged, mouth open, bloodshot eyes wide. Lyra tried to blast it with a magic bolt, but she wasn’t a good enough shot out of SATS and she missed. It piled into her, and they rolled end over end into deep, cold snow. They landed with Lyra on her back and the pukwudgie on top. It reared back its head, ready to strike Lyra’s exposed throat.

Fumbling with her telekinesis, she found the button to activate SATS. The pukwudgie’s lunge slowed to a crawl. She aimed for its head, and put all the magic power she could into the attack. The allegedly non-lethal magic bolt knocked the creature’s head back, snapping its neck, and carried it away, flipping it end over end into the next area code.

Lyra lay gasping in the snow. Cold and damp began to seep into her blue jumpsuit, so she pushed herself to her hooves as soon as she could, and climbed back up on top of the elevator platform to have a look around.

Freezing tears welled up in Lyra’s eyes and blew away in the bitter wind as she beheld what had become of Buckstone. The city and its many suburbs had been her home for over ten years, but now its skyline was jagged with broken skyscrapers. The area to the south, where the megaspell had it, glowed a sickly green even in daylight, its light reflected in the solid blanket of clouds that covered the sky from horizon to horizon.

Lyra’s whole world, changed forever, all because of fucking Twilight Sparkle and her fucking ‘friendship interventions’. If Lyra had known what Twilight would turn into when they’d been in school together, she’d have smothered that bitch in her sleep.

Lyra felt like she could collapse sobbing right where she was. None of this had felt real while it was happening. It still didn’t feel real. But the awareness that it was real was creeping up on her slowly. But she just didn’t have the energy to break down. She was too cold, too tired, too afraid that if she lay down now, she might not find the will to get up again before she died of exposure.

Instead, she turned her attention to her immediate environment. A forest of sickly, winter-naked deciduous and scraggly evergreens covered the hill around her. Strange mushrooms clung to their sides. The bushes and scrub plants that poked through the snow were marred with bubbles of purple blight.

The StableTech station around the Stable entrance was a wreck of twisted debris; metal and wooden wreckage blown away in the direction of the blast.

One mobile trailer still stood; it offered a place to get out of the wind so she climbed inside. She unwound the towel she’s wrapped around her face back in the locker room and began to rub herself clean of spattered gore and melted snow. “Well this is useful to have,” she said, draping it over the melted wreckage of an office chair. She had a quick look around the place—looting everything was already becoming second nature. This was probably a good instinct if the world at large was in as bad shape as it looked like it was.

She scored a surprisingly well-preserved wooden pencil and a roll of duct tape and sat down in that chair to have a think, hind hooves up on the desk. What was she going to do now? She had to find her family. Where had they gone? What had happened? Had she actually been in the tank for eighteen years? She was tempted to confirm the date and time on her PipBuck, but she wasn’t ready for the hard light of truth right now.

Option one was to go back into Stable 93 and scour all the terminals for information about where all the ponies had gone. She’d only seen one dead body, so it was logical to assume that most of them had escaped whatever disaster had befallen the vault alive. Were the pukwudgies that disaster? Or were they a symptom of a deeper problem with the stable?
Lyra sighed. It would have been nice if they’d woken her up and taken her with them. She had a hard time believing Bean and Beanpole would have left her of their own free will.

Anyway. No point brooding about that. Option one was impossible because there was no way for her to fight all those pukwudgies, alone and unarmed. That left option two—find somepony who either knew where the stable dwellers had gone or wanted to help her fight the pukwudgies.

“Make some friends!” she said sarcastically, levitating up a desk fan and spinning the blades like a pinwheel. That thought almost made Lyra happy—her life as a house mom and delivery driver had been rather isolating. It would be nice to have some new friends. Maybe ponies had banded together after the Bad Day. Maybe there was a new spirit of camaraderie in the balefire-blasted wasteland.

Lyra, bored with her fan, chucked it out the door of the trailer. She wasn’t feeling optimistic right now. So. Were there any other options?

She could lie down and die. In an environment like this, she could commit suicide just by sitting still—if hypothermia didn’t finish her off then the mutated wildlife probably would. The idea had its appeal; In less than twenty-four hours of subjective time, she’d gone from a mostly happy suburban mom to a refugee whose most valuable possessions were an excessively user-friendly portable computer and a blood-stained towel. She’d lost everything, suddenly, traumatically, and due to no fault of her own. She’d busted her ass to keep her family together in the crisis, and then lost it all because she’d been stupid enough to do a good deed.

Burning rage flooded her chest. She pulled back her hind legs and kicked the desk, bending its top and knocking it across the trailer door. She hopped down from the chair and kicked the desk again, splitting it along the bend. “You cheap piece of crap!” She yelled, throwing half of it out into the snow.

She grabbed her towel and charged out after the chunk of broken desk. She kicked it a few more times for good measure, then stood, breathing hard in the cold, white clouds puffing out of her flaring nostrils. “That settles it. Too pissed off to die. Make some friends it is.”

Level 2
New perk: Irradiated. You have survived massive radiation exposure, and your tissues have built up a tolerance. You gain 10% radiation resistance and are immune to ghoulification.

Next Chapter: Chapter 3: Nightmare Night+ Estimated time remaining: 8 Hours, 28 Minutes