Introduction
“For every good story has an equally good intro. Don’t you think?”
The crisp fresh morning was the same as all the rest before it as golden sun climbed lazily into the unending blue sky over the shimmering San Palomino harbor. Upon the harbor’s crystal blue surface sat a huge and mighty ship that exhumed the grace and power of Luna, the H.M.S. Catalyst a powerful battleship sat anchored off the coast of the bustling Salt Lick city (SLC). As smoke rose from the titanic smoke stacks and the whistle bellowed the ship’s departure.
There suddenly was a flash, a flash that out matched even the glory of the sun. Followed by a sudden wave of burning heat that made the ship uncomfortably warm to the touch followed shortly by a mighty shock-wave evaporating glass into dust and shards, and shunting the ship slightly in the water by an unseen hand. The flash instantly set everything in the city on fire burning hundreds right to the bone before they could even scream or blink, then the shock-wave eradicated every window and shunted the huge towers and skyscrapers like card houses under a misplaced breath, some toppled to the ground in a smoking pile of mutilated rubble and disemboweled steel. while others fell upon their still standing neighbors, standing tall against the mighty blast and yet still more had their tops sheared clean off and tumbled to the pony filled streets below, burying those below in an instant. Yet before the buildings stopped falling and the fires stopped burning, up from the flaming depths of the dyeing city bloomed forth a sickly black and green mushroom, it climbed into the sky with a distant rumble of thunder within its wicked black and churning depths flashed the neon blue glimmer of lightning.
The Catalyst sliced the anchor chain and the smoke stack belched black smoke and the ship suddenly jumped forward as crew members rushed on deck to see the sight unfolding in the dying city as fires fed the sickly black and green tower of smoke that harbored lightning and thunder within its churning black core. The ship started to steam to the nearest coastal guardian, the battleship HMS Phobius. Together they steamed for the city, but with their backs turned an object the size of a telephone pole flew through the air and into the water behind them, an eye blink later another explosion erupted where they had just been not several moments ago. However this explosion sent forth a huge tower of water and smoke that threw the mighty battleships like toys in a bathtub.
The wave pushed the ships till the waves rolled under them and broke Catalyst’s back with a screeching of metal and a screaming of sailors caught in between the jagged metal and sparking electricity. The wave then snapped away the stern of Phobius, the stern still clinging by a few strands of steel as the momentum slammed the Phobius into the coast jarring off everything what wasn't tied down.
Catalyst had crashed into a shallow shoal and stopped suddenly. The atomic waters washed over the decks dousing everything in deathly radiation. The sailors screamed and writhed in excruciating pain as their cells mutated and warped till an agonizing death smothered their cries. Their ears, mouth, even their eyes bled tears of pain as the ship groaned and began to sink into the muddy bottom of the bay. Some sailors tried jumping into the harbor to escape the hell on deck only to be greeted by the even more heavily irradiated water, the poor stallions screamed till their lungs bled and their hearts burst hushing their screams. Their twisted and ruined body’s floated silently on the water joined by the hundreds of fish and other plant life that the wicked hand of radiation had strangled.
Most the ship was above water, but the stern had sunk and rolled off the shoal before coming to rest upside down completely submerged. The stern slowly filled with water as crews still fought for their lives within the mass tomb as the atomic batteries burned killing most crew in a most brutal way, their bodies melting and merging with the molten steel like some manifestation from hell.
But as the ship died, a few compartments were not doused in death and radiation. The back of the ship had landed so that the top compartment just under the deck was sealed away by the mountain of steel above and the muddy silt below. Clara, had been spared and sealed in a tomb of her own. But as the fires burned the last of the oxygen, the power to the stern shutout as the lights flickered and fell dark.
The ship was silent for what seemed forever, as the valley around her was smothered under a blanket of radiation that claimed many and twisted many more till they were no longer pony but something far worse to then envy those still pure and pray upon them.
The valley itself had taken a hit that it could not recover. Under atomic rain and with poisoned coasts the once lush grasses withered and died, the beautiful tree lined lanes and homey towns became dry and haunting roads to nowhere, populated by phantasms and ruins. The once shimmering bay had become an empty and dry desert, spotted with the rusting hulks of civilian and navy ships. The water had receded to the point that even the once mighty river that fed the harbor had become a barren canyon crossed with ancient bridges and warships snagged in between.
The Catalyst sat on a dune in the middle of the desert for almost 200 years, a bleached and rusting hulk starting to fall apart on its own accord. It was here Clara sat undisturbed for all that time in her quiet room and she might stay for another 200 years more, But it is here that the odd hand of fate once more manifested itself in the form of curious ponies doing curious things.
Footnote: level up!
New perk: know-it-all
-your base intelligence is much higher than most ponies. Dumber ponies are easy to fool or dazzle with special dialogue options.
Quest perk added: baptism by fire
-your main frame was damaged in the fires of the apocalypse, you have lost 65% memory. But your body is now able to take much more damage. Your base resistance to fire damage is set to 6.
