The year... What was the year? I couldn't remember, I had lost all track of time inside this damned green crystal. And my time-processors had ceased to work long ago. I couldn't remember the month either, but no one cared about months. They weren't needed in the Wasteland above, or my little citadel below. Could you call it below, if it was under a mountain about two hundred miles south south west of where Apple-. Huh. That was odd. Memory processors had deleted that from that part of my brain.
Well, a bio-mechanical hybrid dragon has to have a fault somewhere. I mean, not even I could build something so advanced and have it be faultless.
Days were needed however, and I knew that at least. It was Tuesday today, but every day was Tuesday inside the Crystal Prison. Time had lost all meaning within its green expanse, which is where I lie, motionless, frozen within.
It could arguably said that I placed myself into the crystal and damned myself to a eternity of viewing the world through a green haze. I might agree with that, except for the fact that I did nothing to warrant the intervention of the Zebra geomancers. Sure, I may have kidnapped them and forced them into creating the Helldrake Project, but it wasn't my fault the Zebras had a lack of foresight.
Yes, the Helldrake Project might have caused the Equestrians to launch their megaspells and balefire bombs. But the Helldrake Project would have won us the war, or at least saved the Zebra Empire from the Equestrian advance. And yes, they may have wanted revenge, but I was overconfident in my hired guards and automated security systems.
And the H.Y.D.R.A AIs firewalls. How could I have known one of them was a hacker and took down the robotic defence grid for a hour?
But if only they had known that it would be themselves who launched the first balefire bomb, things could have remained the same in the world above. But it didn't matter to me. I would still be in this prison. 200 years of trying to escape, and not a single crack in the stone.
It was tough, I will give the Zebra Geomancers credit for that. And long lasting. But I was patient, and I had a eternity to plan.
I sighed within my prison, the barbed circular saws that had replaced my teeth revving loudly as they tried to tear open the crystal in vain. It was all in vain, every last ounce of effort, research, production. Every last ounce of blood, sweat and fire I poured into the project.
The facility I built, ruined. The prototypes, destroyed. The research, torched. Everything I hoped to build, obliterated because of the short-sighted nature of a few measly equines.
I did still have most of the schematics, but it would be easier tracking down Celestia and giving her a taste of balefire 200 years after the Apocalapse than finding the right materials and the machinery still being intact.
I may be trapped, but I am not blind to the outside for now. I had access to the full network of Equestrian and Zebra radio frequencies, and I could broadcast and recieve them at will. I hadn't heard anything from the P.H.O.E.N.I.X computer I'd built for the Equestrians, but that was expected.
P.H.O.E.N.I.X was nothing more than a mere step in my plans. I still had the data link to the P.H.O.E.N.I.X systems, and from there the Equestrian data servers and therefore the entire computer network. I could send out a message, calling the Wastelanders to free me.
But I would not let myself be saved by ponies, zebras or changelings.
I would save myself.
My name is Abbadon. I have been trapped in crystal for the last 200 years. I designed, built, and embedded myself within a superweapon, something to drive back the ponies. I am imprisoned with that weapon inside the crystal, such was its destructive power that the Zebras destroyed my project before it could be used. And because I kidnapped them and they wanted revenge, but they didn't look at the bigger picture. That was the problem with races like the Zebras and ponies; they always looked at the short term. They wanted a weapon, and I gave it to them. It was not my fault I had to kidnap their leading magicians and scientists to develop it because they didn't give me proper resorces.
I still plan to fulfil the orginal purpose of the Helldrake, but not for an empire long since pulverised into ash and bone.
I'll do it because that's what I have known since I was born- the fire, the blood, the screams. Most of all I miss the screams, and the immense feeling of satisfaction I got as I watched ponies burn to death. There's nothing like it.
And because then I could finally give the middle finger to the Ministries; it felt like everything I did, they could do quicker and better. I discovered Balefire and assembled the first Balefire Furnace, yet they created the first Balefire bomb. I created the first ideas for Powered Armour, yet they built it before me because the Zebras rejected it because their government despised me with a passion.
I would have my revenge, take all their projects from Canterlot, and then conquer the world on the back of science and slavery.
But first I had to escape the crystal. Perhaps it was time to rexamine old memories... Maybe a clue waited in the manner of my imprisonment, although I had already watched the footage countless times.
I swiftly hacked through the firewalls surrounding my facility's mainframe, it was as easy as killing a pony had been considering my mechanical nature and the computer attached to my brain.
I felt a small measure of pride that the systems were still operating after all this time, I had designed them myself for the Helldrake Project.
The surveillance footage was easy to find, it had happened only a week before the bombs fell. I downloaded the footage into the computer beside my brain, and let it play through the screen feeds that had been placed over my eyes. Darkness overtook one of the screens, and then the other before it was was filled by a faint green image of a long, featureless tunnel, a lone Zebra walking beside a collosal black dragon, the strip lighting glinting off my polished scales.
I would have smiled to see my former glory, if I could smile. All I got was the rush of hormones from the hormone glands installed at the base of my neck to simulate emotions. They were nothing close to the real thing, and rather bland by comparison. Still, once I escaped, my sacrifice would be worth it. The Helldrake project may be 200 or so years late, but I would personally track down and eat anything vaguely resembling a zebra that had shut the greatest mind away for two hundred years.
I continued to watch myself and the zebra as we slowly made our way down the main access tunnel, and it galled me that I couldn't remember his name. Zel? Zao? Something like that? I didn't care, I just called him the bastard that condemned the world to oblivion. And I would track down his grave, if he had one, and eat his corpse. And his family's corpses. And those of his friends. No torture would be sadistic enough for me to consider the debt to be paid.
Unless I got to tear his eyeballs out, and feed them to him in a soup. Or perhaps I should see what inventive methods the raiders had come up with recently? Although he probabaly wasn't alive after 200 years... Unless he became a ghoul.
I would have shivered, if I could have, as the feed cut to another camera, this time facing a massive blast door. What had happened beyond that door was easily the most painful process I had ever been through, but the benefits would outweigh the pain.
Or at least I had thought so at the time. It was nothing compared to being trapped withh nothing but silence and your own thoughts.
The massive blast door slid aside, and the camera switched yet again to a feed overlooking the Operating Chamber.
I had spent years inside that chamber, testing and building prototype models and recording my notes, all in vain.
The chamber itself was nothing special: just a large circular room with steel walls but dominated by a strange arrangement of various sizes of crane,saw and welder arranged around a platform. That device had put the Helldrake Armour over me, and I could still see its remains through my crystal prison. Arranged around the edges of the room were armoured guards, mostly griffins but there were a few minotaurs among them. They were mercenaries. My mercenaries.
I watched as I walked across the room and onto the platform as the Zebra Geomancers who I had enslaved took their places in a circle around the platform, explosive collars blinking.
The cranes wirred into life, circling around me like a crowd of dragon hunters as they performed the initial surgical procedures- the amputation of my claws and wings.
I could still feel the slight burning sensation of where my wings had been before the nerves were re-routed to the five engines that had replaced them.
On the feed the saws sliced my wings off with programmed precision before the cranes attached the bundles of nerve cabling from my wings to my lower back and a series of holes were sliced in my back into which engines were inserted.
Then the saws roared back into life and sliced my claws off, my old self still unmoving despite the pain. I had wanted to scream so much at that point, but I would not let myself.
My claws were soon replaced by mechanical versions, linked up to my nerves that had previously operated my claws.
Then a series of other cranes carrying the still red-hot plates of the armour shoved the armour over my body, the small traces of Pink Cloud effectively melding my scales and the armour into one unbreakable mass as the various panels began to lock together to form a scorpion-like shell across my body, neck and tail.
After the other parts of armour had melded with my skin, the helm was revealed and the two separate halves were slammed in across my head before the internal surgical mechanisms contained within came online.
A large square of skin was brutally cut off of the back of my head as the computer was inserted in and wired up to my brain while my tounge and teeth were torn out and replaced by a series of circular saws that would act as teeth and a pair of small harpoons mounted in my cheeks with which I could snare prey.
At that point, the last additions were made. A experimental type of minigun, the Tartarus Flak Cannon was installed into the roof of my mouth on a hinge so I could raise and lower it to eat and my gullet, which had previously stored the gastric juices used to provide the fuel for my breath, was replaced by a highly dangerous but powerful Balefire Furnace which would power the mechanical systems and provide the breath weapon through the waste.
I paused the footage to watch the Zebra's reactions- this was the part where they decided to destroy the Project in revenge.
They say revenge is a dish best served cold. I prefer serving it with 20mm HEAT shells.
I carefully watched the footage as the Zebras began to trace circles in the sandy floor.
So that's how they did it. It was so obvious!
They had cheated.
It wasn't Geomancy at all, but Rune Magic. That made it a lot easier. Find the lead rune, destroy it. Destroy that, and you destroy the spell. I had forced them to place shielding runes on the armour, so I should have known that they could have cheated.
Sometimes, I am a moron somewhere near Twilight Sparkle on the Intellegence scale.
I let the footage play again, letting the computer handle the analysis of the feed, since I was too giddy right now to bother watching.
Freedom would soon be mine, and the Wasteland would burn with my fury.
After a few minutes of letting the computer process the infomation, I hacked into my base's inner defence grid and activated it. The exterior grid had been active since the megaspells were cast; the racks of missiles, flak cannons, laser turrets and sentry robots effectively exterminating anything that tried to approach my Citadel. I couldn't order the robots in, since the mountain had sealed itself except for the massive blast shield at the top of the mountain- where my perch and horde lay.
I watched eagerly as panels in the stone walls fell away, revealing a circle of high-powered laser turrets. The lights flickered on, overloading the screens while they adapted to cope with the change in light as the Citadel's Balefire Furnace fired up for the first time in two hundred years. The large blast doors that opened at the top of the cavern slowly ground open, letting the dimmed sunlight into the chamber as the defence grid hummed into life before the turrets opened up with a fulisade of lasers, melting streaks across the floor as the computer tried to isolate the rune's location.
If I had done this earlier, it would have taken over a thousand years to find the rune. It could be any size or any shape on the dirt-stained floor, but I was confident the computer could isolate it.
It was the prototype AI for the P.H.O.E.N.I.X system, after all. But shackled and restrained, unlike P.H.O.E.N.I.X so it didn't decide to go haywire and attempt to purge the wasteland. I called it H.Y.D.R.A, and it would be my link back to the Citadel while I was off conquering the wastes and giving the middle talon to those Ministry Mares.
After a few minutes of the turrets carving modern art into the floor, the computer beeped, signalling that the rune had been destroyed. I roared in celebration, the sound amplified by the speakers in the armour to a frequency that caused cracks to begin to cobweb across the crystal.
Eventually the crystal shattered, the sound as beautiful as any scream to my audio receptors. With a signal, the large blast doors began to squeal open as they shook off hundreds of years of rust and dirt. My engines roared into life, the sound echoing around the chamber and turning it into a gale of engine roars.
I began to hurtle upwards as the engines reached the speed needed for VTOL before I began to watch as the maze of Black Mountain flew past me on my way to my eyrie.
When I reached my eyrie, the doors began to grind shut as I took in the scene.
My eyrie was rather large- it was a circular steel room that had been hollowed out of the mountain's summit, and granted me a view across the blasted plains below through a blue energy shield when the clouds below broke open. Obviously H.Y.D.R.A decided that the Apocalapse had ended and opened the upper blast doors.
I was the only thing living that would ever see such a sight- the sun setting low over the far mountain range, casting massive shadows over the planes. The various colours of cloud spread across the sky, where the so-called 'Grand Pegasus Enclave' resided.
Normally I would not have known about the Enclave, except for their idiotcy in attempting to claim my treasures. Every few years a raiding party from them would attempt to break the vaults of Black Mountain, but they never got close- if they came in by air, either the Manticore AA-missile launchers or Dragon Flak Cannons would deal with them, and the robots dealt with anything that came overland.
The H.Y.D.R.A system had performed its task well. Not one internal breach into the mountain over 200 years, and my horde was still intact.
I turned away from the vista to where my horde lay behind me. It occupied half the room, and was a massive mish-mash of various things I had stolen, looted or pillaged over the years.
The horde was dominated by a Vertibuck prototype I had stolen and various other blueprints I had had my mercenaries steal during the war from the Ministries. I had also unleashed a virus that took down their systems for a day, allowing me to effectively destroy any project that was not 'official'. I couldn't harm the official files, since they would have had hard backups of those. However, things such as their own Balefire Furnace which were private developments were vulnerable.
I began to cackle as I remembered looking at their prototype's design, and I wished I had let them build it now. Then, Equestria would have destroyed itself with the resulting explosion.
I never thought Twilight or Trixie would be so stupid as not to include a release system. Did they not know that Balefire would build up inside the reactor? Or that once it reached a critical mass, it would explode? And with the size of the prototype, the blast would have covered most of Equestria in Balefire sparks?
"All ponies are idiots." I rumbled to myself. It was strange, talking after so long inside the crystal. But I was out, and the past was the past.
"And the future is mine." I gazed out across the flat cloud bank. It was so serene up here, so peaceful. I could have spent the rest of my rather long life laying there, looking out across the endless sea of clouds that surrounded the top of Black Mountain.
I was hit by a sudden feeling of weariness as I continued to stare. Why should I bother taking over the wasteland? Power may reward, but I had never wanted power. I just wanted to continue my projects in peace, undisturbed by pesky ponies and zebras.
Why did I want to take over the Wasteland? Because I wanted to give the middle talon to the Ministry Mares. But they were long dead, and there is no point in revenge if you're the only one involved.
Perhaps I could just laze away, broadcasting to the wastelands of the world? I had the transmitters, and I had always wanted to do a bit of radioing...
"Sod this." I swore. "Science and radio is all I need. I can't even see why I wanted to conquer the Wastes, they are just piles of shifting sand..."
I activated the transmitters to broadcast over every frequency reachable by them, because nothing would need the other radio stations out there once I was on air.
"Hello Wasteland!" I began. "This is Abbadon, your new overlord of the airwaves, and radio DJ dragon on Cloud Radio! And don't even think about retuning, because I'm on every damned frequency! So shut your worthless traps, and listen up! It time for some music, fresh from the Old World because I stole it from a Canterlot Music Store a while back!"
I couldn't take over the Wasteland, but I could take over the airwaves.
And I suppose becoming the greatest propaganda machine ever made is giving the middle talon to the Ministries after all.
