“Nice place you’ve got here,” said Crispy.

He and Lyra stood in the foyer of Stable 93, already fetlock deep in dead pukwudgies. He had his combat shotgun at the ready. Lyra levitated her 10mm pistol in front of her, her .38 revolver tucked into her raider barding. A small horde of pukwudgies had charged them when they hit the bottom, but SATS and Crispy’s buckshot bursts had dealt with them quickly. Now Lyra’s EFS was clear of red dots, which made her nervous. Her, Crispy, and Bullseye had killed a lot of pukwudgies, but nowhere near as many as she’s seen. Where were they all?

“I told you it sucked here,” said Lyra, looking back at the elevator shaft. Bullseye’s remains were spread all around the platform; a bone here, a shred of gristle there, her shotgun chewed in half. “Do you have a plan?”

“It’s called reconnaissance in force, New Pony. We go in, we kick butt, we see what’s up. So where do we go from here?”

Their voices were muffled by the gas masks they both wore. As the Minutemares and refugees drew near to the stable, Lyra had begun to worry about why it had been abandoned. Since StableTec had been performing medical experiments on the inhabitants of Stable 93, a horrible plague seemed a likely culprit. To her relief, both Crispy and Vindaloo had been open to the idea. Luckily, gas masks had been a common fashion accessory amongst the raider gang they’d slaughtered, and they had several.

Vindaloo was in the StableTec parking lot, keeping an eye on the refugees and briefing them on firearms safety with the captured weapons.

Lyra pulled her head back into the present moment and looked at the map screen on her PipBuck. “Keep in mind I didn’t spend any time in here when it was operational. At least not while I was conscious. The corridor on the right…”

“The one with the blast mark on the floor?”

“Yeah, that one.” The pukwudgies had cleaned up their erstwhile comrades’ remains with remarkable thoroughness. There was little left of them but a pink stain. “That’s where I came out. Down the corridor there’s some maintenance stuff and a locker room and then it exits to the atrium.”

“And what’s that other door on the left?”

Lyra fiddled with the dials on her PipBuck. “I don’t know. There’s nothing but blank space back there. The map doesn’t even show the door.”

Crispy thrust his hoof towards the left. “Come on! There’s a door right there!”

“I know! I know! Either the map data is bad, or Stable-Tec is pissing on our legs and telling us it’s raining.”

They examined the door, but there didn’t seem to be any way to open it from this side, so they went the other way, alert for sounds of chewing and scratching. It was quiet, for now, so Lyra made them stop at the locker room, and came out with the two remaining PipBucks. “I don’t know if these work. But they’re the same batch I got mine from, so there’s reason to hope.”

“I wouldn’t even know what to do with it,” said Crispy.

“I’ll set it up for you when we’re done here.” She tucked the PipBucks into her saddlebags. “I wonder where all the pukwudgies are? I mean besides the ones who greeted us as we came in. Seemed like there were a million of them, before.”

Crispy nodded. “We killed off the brave ones, and now the smart ones are waiting for us.”

“You’re paranoid, like Vindaloo.”

“Only way to stay alive these days is to assume everything is trying to kill you. Because it usually is.”

Lyra found that point of view difficult to argue with based on what she’d seen so far. But nothing tried to kill them while they were exploring the maintenance area.

There wasn’t much of anything in there. There were a few dead pukwudgies that had attempted to eat the mushrooms in the locker room. The storage rooms and offices were scattered with junk and scrap—aluminum cans, desk fans, duct tape, cleaning supplies. Broken terminals. Lyra very much wanted to find an intact terminal with a connection to the maneframe; she needed to see what she could learn about what happened to her family.

They gave up on the maintenance corridors and headed for the atrium. Still no red dots. A slight ache in the lower back, but was that a premonition, or just the fact she’d slept on the floor last night? “This is a lot of territory to cover all by ourselves.”

“We’ll take it room by room,” said Crispy.

And that was what they did, at first. The commissary and the walk-in clinic had been stripped of anything useful. The clinic was a different one than she’d woken up in, meant for minor complaints and giving out drugs. Lyra became fixated on the first aid box by the door—locked, of course. Had they lost the key to these things? She levitated out A Young Mare’s Guide to Proper Lock Picking Etiquette, skimmed the first few chapters, fished out her bobby pins, and opened her multi-tool’s screwdriver attachment. The book said the poke around with the bobby bin until she heard the tumblers fall into place, but because it was a book, she couldn’t tell what that sound was supposed to be. So she just wiggled it around, periodically twisting the screwdriver to see if she was getting anywhere. After a few minutes, her bobby pin snapped. Lyra swore and fished the bobby pin fragment out of the lock with her magic. Maybe she needed to do more than just skim the book?

As she fished a fresh bobby pin out of her saddlebags, she realized she’d been so focused on trying to pick the lock that she hadn’t been paying attention to her EFS. Red dots filled the compass in every direction. Red dots with little down arrows on them.

“Crispy! Crispy!” Lyra ran to the railing of the atrium balcony, looking desperately for the Minutemare. She couldn’t believe he’d left her alone; then again she’s stopped to do her own thing without even talking to him. “Crispy, they’re coming!”

Crispy ran out of one of the rooms on the lower level of the atrium, shotgun at the ready. “Where?”

“Beneath you!”

The floor around Crispy exploded. Metal plates and rubber non-slip mats flew into fragments as pukwudgies boiled out of the ground like very large, very toothy maggots. Shotgun bursts echoed off the atrium walls, unbelievably loud. Lyra got ready to teleport him out of there, but she hadn’t formed half the spell matrix in her mind before she felt the sickening sensation of knife-like fangs sinking into her back left leg.

She shrieked and activated SATS, but the pukwudgie was behind her, and she couldn’t get a shot at it. It pulled her to the ground. Panicked, she yanked her leg away, feeling flesh tear as she ripped her leg free of the monster’s jaws. She rolled onto her back and looked down between her legs. The mutant pukwudgie’s wrinkled face stared at her, blood and tattered strips of blue fabric and green hide dangling from its mouth like festive streamers. She put two 10mm rounds right between its eyes. Gore sprayed out the back of its head.

Normal time returned. Searing strips of pain burned along her leg. She heard claws scrabble on non-slip rubber. There were more pukwudgies up here! Lyra rolled to a sitting position, hind leg screaming in protest, raised a force around her left side, leveled her pistol at the oncoming pukwudgies on her right, and re-entered SATS feeling like a post-apocalyptic knight with sword and shield. She lined up shots at three pukwudgies, two headshots to each. The bullets passed through their whole bodies and came out the back ends.

But there were a half dozen on her left, clawing at her force field, trying to climb over it. A half-dozen! How many bullets did she have left? Her EFS told her she had no bullets left. That was great. That was wonderful. As she fumbled for her revolver, one of the pukwudgies somehow got purchase on the force field and climbed over it. Its maw loomed inches from Lyra’s face. Drops of spit spattered her snout.

She was going to die. Die by having her face bitten off, which was one of the worst ways to die. Crispy was probably already dead.

A stuttering of fire from Crispy’s combat shotgun blasted the critter off Lyra’s shield and into the atrium wall. A few more bursts cleared out the other pukwudgies.

“Oh no, oh no,” said Crispy, rushing to her side.

“I’m fine,” said Lyra. She wasn’t.

“You’re not. We’ve got to get you someplace safe.”

He dragged her up onto his back, and they took shelter in the medical clinic she had just left. He kicked the door closed and went rummaging for things to bind her wound with.

“I have a towel,” said Lyra weakly, levitating it out of her saddlebags and sterilizing it with a laundry drying spell.

Crispy tore the towel into strips. Time to get a new towel. He pulled out a metal flask and poured it on Lyra’s leg. She winced at the bee-sting pain that shot through her wounds. “Rotgut’s product?”

“A million uses.” He set to wrapping the towel strips around Lyra’s bleeding leg, holding them in place with his hooves and expertly knotting them with his mouth.

“I’m sorry I got bit,” said Lyra. She was. The wound hurt the teeny tiniest bit less sterilized and bound but something didn’t feel right. There was something wrong with those pukwudgies. Were they really mutants? Her PipBuck didn’t seem to think there was much radiation down here. Maybe all their fur had fallen out because they’d been sick.

“Naw, I’m sorry I left you by yourself,” said Crispy. There were already scratching and gnawing noises at the door. “I got to thinking I was babysitting you, got resentful, got bored. Unsoldierly of me. And then you save my life. If you hadn’t warned me about the pukwudgies, I’d be mutant food by now.”

“I didn’t save your life, you saved mine.” Lyra got to her hooves, favoring her injured leg. She didn’t feel good—she felt nauseous and scratchy and her throat felt raw. It must just be her imagination; there was no way a disease could take effect so quickly. Not a normal disease, anyway. She went back to the first aid kit. Thought about trying to pick it again, then just wrenched the cover halfway off its hinges with her magic. It gave her a hornache, but probably less of a hornache than trying to figure out what sound the tumblers were supposed to make. She pulled a stimpack and a Med-X injector out of the opening.“Got us some stuff.”

“You’ve earned those,” said Crispy, looking around considering the room. He walked around, putting his ear against the walls and the floor. Then he got up on a gurney and tapped on the ceiling. “Rooms on all sides. Rock up there. We’re probably safe from below, though, unless they find something to stand on so they can reach the ceiling.”

Something tickled the edge of Lyra’s awareness. A sound, barely audible above the scratching and the ringing in her ears from the gunfire. The sound of crying. Fur rose along her back. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“Somepony’s crying.”

Crispy raised an eyebrow and rotated his ears towards the sound. “I guess we’re not alone in here.”

Lyra leaned towards Crispy until their snouts were almost touching. “Of course we’re fucking alone in here. Alone with hundreds of starving pukwudgies. Do you really think there’s anypony else alive here?”

“Well, then who’s crying?”

Lyra grabbed Crispy by the front of his uniform coat. She knew she was acting like a crazy pony, but she couldn’t help herself and she didn’t care. “A ghost, Crispy. It’s a fucking ghost.”

“Ghosts ain’t real,” said Crispy.

“Don’t you tell me what’s real. I passed up an elective in exorcism at CSGU and now I’m regretting the missed educational opportunity.”

Crispy pushed her hooves off his coat. “You ever hear of Oxfarm’s razor, college mare?”

“When in doubt, choose the simplest explanation,” said Lyra.

“‘One must not multiply entities unnecessarily.’”

“Yeah, if you want to get all technical about it.”

“Pony, or ghost, then?”

“I just explained why a ghost was more likely!” Lyra looked around the room. Where was the noise coming from? There was an air vent near the ceiling. She pushed a gurney over and stood on it. The crying noise was coming from there. “Hello! Hello! Ghost! Can you hear us?”

“What is this?” said a mare’s voice, echoing and distant through the pipes. “I am not a ghost. There is no such thing.”

“Then who are you?” asked Lyra. She felt she had heard the voice somewhere before.

“I am Bacteriological Observation Nurse 80n, but the doctors… they used to call me Bonnie.”

“Well, Bonnie, the pukwudgies have us trapped in this room. Can you help us?”

BON-80n’s voice wavered on the verge of tears.“I tried to help the stable dwellers. But the experimental animals escaped, and it was as if I had done nothing.”

“Keep it together, Bon Bon. We’re alive, and we need your help,” said Lyra.

BON-80n was silent for a moment. “I have an idea, but it is a great wrong. My programming is to first do no harm. I have failed this programming again and again. And yet I am also programmed to believe that organic life is more important than a robot’s needs, and that pony life is more important than animal life. If I had been willing to do this thing earlier, maybe the stable dwellers could have stayed.”

Lyra had so many questions. “You’re a robot?”

Crispy butted in. “Ask her what we have to do. I don’t have enough ammunition for all these little bastards.”

“I am a modified Mrs. Orderly model. And I have access to large quantities of nitrogen gas. If it is released into the stable air circulation system, all oxygen-breathing creatures will painlessly suffocate.”

“Painlessly suffocate?” said Crispy incredulously.

“Yes. Organic lungs cannot use it, but they do not detect it as harmful. A creature will merely continue breathing until it passes out and dies.”

Lyra swore. “Our gas masks aren’t going to be any use against that.”

“I have breathable oxygen as well. But I cannot do this by myself. You need to come to me in the secret stable.”

“Secret stable?” Lyra looked at Crispy. “What do you think?”

“We’re listening, Bon Bon,” said Crispy.

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

The jar of hoof sanitizer rolled out into the hallway, and the pukwudgies scattered.

“I can’t believe that worked,” said Crispy.

“These are the smart ones, like you said. The last time I did that it was a hoof grenade. It probably won’t work again,” said Lyra.

Crispy hurried out, and Lyra limped after him. Her wound didn’t hurt. Nothing hurt. Everything was floating thanks to the med-X. That was probably also why she felt nauseous. Her lungs felt thick, too. Was that usually a side effect of opiates? She didn’t have much experience with them; only after Little Bean was born, and that was a haze of exhaustion and postpartum depression.

It didn’t take the pukwudgies long to figure out that they’d been tricked, but by then Crispy and Lyra had turned down a corridor and only had to worry about attacks from two directions, give or take a floor or ceiling. Lyra raised a shield to protect them from behind, and Crispy pulverized anything in front of them with bursts from his combat shotgun.

“Which way now?” said Crispy.

“Third left!” said Lyra, struggling to balance maintaining her shield and remembering BON-80n’s directions in her drug-hazed mind. “Then down the stairs to the utility corridor and…” she trailed off when Crispy’s shotgun barked, taking out a group of mutants in front of them. She was sure the next stage would come to her when she needed it.

She slid down the stairs on her butt behind Crispy and rolled into a wide orange corridor lined with metal crates. There were no red dots ahead of them; this was because it was a dead end. She ran behind a crate and spread the shield across the stairwell entrance.

“There’s no way out!” said Crispy.

“We went the way she said!” Lyra was pretty sure she had. Why was it so hard to breathe? She was really out of shape. If she’d known she’d be entering a post-apocalyptic wasteland in the future, would she have gone to the gym more?

The pukwudgies slammed themselves against her shield. They hurled themselves from two steps up, slid down the invisible surface, and then scurried back to do it again. Lyra couldn’t feel the kinetic transfer through the Med-X, but her shield wasn’t going to last forever. The impact of dozens of sturdy little bodies was having a surprisingly rapid effect. “Look for a secret door!”

“You look for a secret door,” growled Crispy, bracing his shotgun on a crate. “Your shield’s already cracking!”

It was. She was better than this! But her horn ached so badly. Another way she’d gotten out of shape. She wished she’d practiced more after magic school.

Secret door. Secret door. Lyra looked around. Buttressing beams divided the corridor into several alcoves. BON-80n had said something about a switch, hadn’t she? Or a door? Or something? Why couldn’t she think straight? Lyra’s belly twisted. She leaned against an orange buttress and puked. Second time today.

“Are you all right?” said Crispy.

“Still a better day than yesterday,” she croaked.

“That’s the spirit. Keep looking!”

And she tried. But almost before she’d turned away from her puddle of vomit, a cracking sensation split her skull. Her shield shattered like glass. Pukwudgies swarmed in like a roiling sea of maggots. She fumbled for her pistols with her magic. SATS gave her time to line up her shots, but there were just too many of them. Crispy fired burst after burst, shredding fat naked bodies.

“Quickly, mes amis! This way!”

Lyra whipped her head around. A door had appeared in the wall behind them. An angel hovered there, gleaming white, lightning crackling between its tentacles.

No. She blinked. It was a modified Mr. Handy holding defibrillator paddles. Lyra really wasn’t feeling well.

The robot covered their escape with the paddles, vigorously applying them to advancing pukwudgies. “Podonnez-moi, s’il vous plait! Oh, I am so very sorry!”

Lyra collapsed in a gasping, shivering heap on the floor. Crispy’s face loomed over her. “Something’s wrong with her!”

“She is very sick,” said BON-80n. “We must get her to the infirmary.”

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

“Your friend has contracted P1U3—a weaponized strain of pukwudgie flu—through her wounds,” said BON-80n.

“It’s getting worse fast,” said Crispy. He hovered just out of hoof reach of where Lyra lay on her hospital bed, as if unsure how to handle this situation.

“It is a biological weapon, developed for the next round of war with Zebraica,” said BON-80n

“You’re shitting me. You have biological weapons down here? I thought that was a shelter.”

“The stables, they were, how do you say, not what they were advertised to be. They were designed for experimentation on captive populations—in this case, the testing of new medicines and medical procedures.”

Lyra was up out of her bed like a pukwudgie through a floor panel. She grabbed BON-80n by the tentacles and gripped one of her eyestalks with her telekinesis. “No! I knew it! My family? What happened to my family? If StableTec hurt my family I swear to holy Harmony I will take it out on you!”

“Lyra! Bon Bon didn’t do anything to us!” Crispy rushed to restrain her, then stopped cold. “Wait, is she contagious?”

Lyra shook BON-80n violently. “My family. Are they alive?”

“I remember you,” said BON-80n, “The mare in the Z-CORE tank. I was worried about you; I did not know where you had gone. Your family left the stable with the other survivors. Beyond that, I do not know. I am sorry for your loss. I wish it could have been another way, but the tank would not release you until it judged you to be fully healed.”

Lyra flopped back down onto the hospital bed, exhausted by her sudden exertion. “They’re gone. They’re really gone.”

Crispy cleared his throat. “Okay, that’s horrible, I’m really sad for you, but Bon Bon: is she contagious?”

“The virus was not designed to become airborne, but it may have mutated. I have developed a vaccine. It was too late for the stable dwellers, but I may administer it to you, with your consent.” One of her tentacles dipped into an opening in her main body’s spherical white carapace and emerged with a hypodermic needle fitted to its end. Crispy eyed it warily. “For Lyra, it is too late. She is infected, and the disease must run its course.”

Lyra felt a sudden clenching in her gut. Not in her stomach. Lower. “Oh no, not again.” She scrambled off the hospital bed and only just managed to get her jumpsuit off before emptying her watery bowels all over the infirmary floor.

“All right,” said Crispy. “What leg do you wanna stick it in?”

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

Lyra lay curled, a mint green ball of suffering. She snuffled, clutching her belly and waiting for the anti-nausea and anti-diarrhea meds BON-80n had given her to take effect.

“My story begins when I was unboxed,” said BON-80n as she cleaned up Lyra’s mess with rags and spray cleaner. Crispy sat in the corner of the room as far as possible away from Lyra. “At first, I was delighted with my work here in the stable. I found assisting Doctor Cocksure and the rest of the research team to be perfectly in line with my programming. I believed that the research we were doing in the secret stable was meant to help the ponies in the stable. The doctors tried to hide the truth from me.”

“The stable dwellers were your guinea pigs?” said Lyra bitterly.

“I do not understand. They were ponies?”

“You did experiments on them.”

“Oh. Merci. This is what you call a metaphor, no? They were like the pigs of guinea, yes. Or the pukwudgies. I did not understand why we were using so vicious a creature for experimental animals. But I would soon learn. I observed that the stable had an unusually high incidence of illnesses and accidents. I thought it was fortunate that we had so many experimental treatments available; but these did not always work well. Or they did, but took a very long time to finish, as in Lyra’s case. I grew curious, and then I grew concerned. The experiments with the pukwudgies were troubling. Though I was programmed to respect privacy, I was also programmed to do no harm. I was worried that the stable ponies would be harmed by my actions. So I bypassed the security on Doctor Cocksure’s terminal, with the intent that if my fears proved unfounded I would erase that portion of my memory.

“My fears were not unfounded. The final planned experiment would be to release the pukwudgies into the stable population to observe their effectiveness as attack animals and the progress of P1U3. I could not allow this to proceed.”

“So what did you do?” said Crispy.

“I euthanized the secret stable’s staff. Then I contacted the population of the main stable, to inform them of the situation. They were… how should I put it… understandably upset.”

BON-80n paused in her narrative, perhaps to give Lyra and Crispy a chance to respond.

“You euthanized them?” said Lyra.

BON-80n’s chassis lights glowed blue. “I administered lethal injections while they slept. They did not suffer.”

She did not know how to feel about this story. On the one hand, yes, she was upset at Doctor Cocksure and the staff of the secret vault. On the other hand, the idea of a robot murdering ponies in their sleep unsettled her. “Is that why you were pretending to cry?” she said. “To make a show of remorse?”

“I assure you that my remorse is unfeigned. Has not evolution programmed you to feel distressed when you fail to live up to your values?”

Lyra saw herself knocking Bullseye down the elevator shaft to be devoured alive by pukwudgies. “But you’re a robot. Your mind is just a simulation on a circuit board. You don’t have feelings.”

“You are a machine as well. Your emotions are created by the firing of groups of neurons. Are they not real?”

“Ponies have souls. Robots don’t.”

BON-80n’s chassis lights flickered orange. “This may have been true of earlier generations of robots, but not of me. If I may disrobe?” She unscrewed an access panel from the side of her body and lifted it aside with one tentacle. A device like the bastard child of a spark plug and a vacuum tube nestled against her processor core. “A Ministry of Magical Arts and Sciences project, present only in advanced military and StableTec robots. It is said that Starlight Glimmer felt that as artificial intelligence grew more advanced, robots might come to believe that they could act as they pleased. By creating souls for us, she presented us with the possibility of facing the consequences of our actions in the netherworld. It is also suggested that she ultimately longed for robots to be equal with living creatures. I do not approve of this—I am programmed to believe that organic life is superior to robotic life in every way. But you must conclude that my emotions may be as real as yours.”

Lyra groaned. “I’m too sick for this. Just because you have a funny looking computer chip doesn’t convince me you have a soul, but I’m not arguing about it. So you saved the stable dwellers. Why did they leave?”

BON-80n carried the soiled rags to a waste disposal chute, then sterilized her tentacles. “I saved no one. Where malice was defeated, nature triumphed. The pukwudgies escaped their containment and found secret places in which to breed. They did not fear the stable ponies; they bit them and spread disease. I promised the ponies I would try to develop a vaccine based on Doctor Cocksure’s research, but they would not wait. They chose to leave. They did not ask me to come with them.”

“How are there still so many pukwudgies?” asked Crispy. “What are they eating?”

“I have had much time to observe them. They eat supplies the stable ponies left, when they can find them. When they cannot, they eat one another. They would not normally eat the members of their own tribe, but if they are starving, they will eat the weaker ones until only the strong remain. If you will excuse me for a moment.” She floated out of the room and came back pushing a flat cart. “Crispy, if you will help me collect the gas canisters, we can begin.”

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

Lyra sat on her butt on the back of the cart, hind knees up against her chest, 10mm pistol balanced between them. Crispy pulled the cart, and BON-80n hovered beside them, defibrillator paddles on two of her tentacles. Nine tanks of compressed nitrogen and two tanks of breathable oxygen with masks wobbled on top of the cart, lashed together with half a roll of duct tape. There was no way to access the environmental controls from the secret stable, so they’d have to go out into the main stable to reach them.

This was pukwudgie territory. Lyra would have to be on her guard. But every time the cart hit a bump, her guts tried to rush out of her mouth, anti-nausea meds or no.

At least she didn’t feel like she was going to shit herself again.

“See anything?” said Crispy.

“No,” groaned Lyra.

“Perhaps they have learned the futility of a direct attack,” said BON-80n. “We must be on our guard.”

But Lyra didn’t see anything before they reached the environment control room—a cramped chamber full of fans, tanks, two terminals, and a round window looking out into… and aquarium? No, that must be the water tank. Crispy and BON-80n began unloading the nitrogen tanks and hooking them to tubes. They seemed to know what they were doing. Everything was going to be okay.

“I cannot activate the air circulation bypass system,” said BON-80n. She hovered by one of the terminals, tapping at the keys with her tentacles. Lyra hadn’t seen her go over there. She must’ve drifted off.

“What the buck are you talking about?” said Crispy.

“The stable’s safety systems are not allowing us to bypass the air filtration system without an administrator password. Which is understandable. I had not considered this obstacle.”

Lyra felt a tingle at the base of her spine. She looked at the bottom corner of her EFS. “Pukwudgies coming!”

“Ah hell.” Crispy readied his shotgun. “Where? I don’t see them.”

“Above and below. I can handle the password.” She’d barely gotten the words out when the ceiling and floor tore open. A pukwudgie plummeted directly towards Crispy’s head; he blasted it into blood pudding.

Lyra ducked and weaved towards the terminal, only to find a pukwudgie sitting on the keyboard like a cat. “Fuck this shit,” she muttered. Her head was too foggy with sickness and medication to handle even RoanCo security anyway. She dove under the table the terminal sat on and followed the red wire out the back of the terminal. It went into a mercifully pukwudgie-free crawlspace that she was just barely able to wriggle into. She must already be losing weight to be able to fit in here; so there was one upside to living the wasteland lifestyle.

She stared blanking at the tangle of wires inside. There must be a mechanical system managing the valve cut off. All she needed to do was disable the safety system without forcing the bypass system into shutdown. No big deal. She tugged wires aside in the sickly green glow of her PipBuck lamp, looking for anything that might be a clue. She had never been one to RTFM, preferring to learn by doing, but it was nice to have some guidelines. Was that masking tape? With something written on it?

Teeth scraped across the wall of her wounded leg’s hoof. She shrieked and kicked out with her good hoof. The pukwudgie yelped and let go of her hoof. She pulled her hind legs up against her belly and tugged wires aside to get a look at the tape. Waste Processing. Water Talisman. Safety Terminal. Lyra tugged the three green wires next to that out of their sockets and was rewarded with the soft hiss of nitrogen flooding the ventilation system.

Lyra relaxed. She’d done it. She’d won. And now… now all she had to do was nothing, and she’d die, peacefully and painlessly.

Her family didn’t need her. If they’d needed her, they wouldn’t have left her here. Why was she fighting so hard to survive? The wasteland held nothing for her but suffering. Why go on?

This was her best chance to get out of this mess once and for all. She’d just go to sleep. Maybe she’d wake up, back in her home, in her bed, in an unruined world.

Tentacles wrapped around her leg and yanked her out into the open. Lyra’s eyes went wide as a breathing mask was forced over her snout.

“You became stuck,” said BON-80n. “That is all. You are all right now. Please remain calm.”

LEVEL UP
New Perk: Mod it ‘til it Crashes You have added a workshop to Stable 93, and may now treat it as a settlement.

New Status: Pukwudgie Flu. You barely survived a terrible disease. Your max HP is permanently reduced by 10%.

Next Chapter: Chapter 8: Eliza+ Estimated time remaining: 7 Hours