Prologue: Retrieving the Device, getting captured
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Prologue: Retrieving the Device, getting captured
Primary Colors: Act 1
Prologue: Retrieving the Device, getting captured
I glared at what I had done through the lens of a sniper rifle. Three ponies lay dead in the street and several others scampered off into the ruins. One of the thieves was paralyzed in fear, her legs barely managing to support her quaking body. The soft glitter of tears on her green face was barely visible over the dozens of noses which separated us.
I took a moment to observe her clothing, hoping to discover if she claimed any particular political allegiance. She wore a pile of filthy rags that barely managed to cling to her sweat-dampened fur. They struck me as horribly impoverished and under a different set of circumstances, I may have felt sorry for her.
I surmised that she was a bandit. How an object of such incredible value had ended up in the hooves of a pathetic, starving creature such as this was beyond me. The Reds kept their copy under lock and key; the one which the Blues possessed was buried in a concrete bunker, surrounded by hundreds of miles of empty wastes.
Remembering the target, I ended her suffering with a swift blast to the chest, sending her sprawling to the pavement.
Suddenly, one of the fleeing ponies whipped around, a rifle levitated to his side. My spotter barely had time to speak before the barrel of his gun lit up, spraying a hail of bullets towards me. One of his shots came so close as to strike the wall on my left before I focused my aim, holding the orange earth pony in my sights for a solid second. It could mean death if I missed. Sucking in a quick gulp of air, I held the sniper rifle steady and fired. My shot struck him between the eyes.
That threat eliminated, I quickly swept over the area surrounding my work and saw nothing, save for the silhouettes of retreating ponies as they galloped off into the clouds of ash which swirled about the streets. Just to be careful, I made a few more sweeps before I looked up from my rifle’s sight and took a long, shaky breath.
“That’s everypony. Good job, I guess.” I looked over to Unit 3, my spotter. Her head swayed methodically back and forth, a pair of binoculars clenched between her hooves. She lowered them and turned her shaggy, brown head to face me, her golden mane swaying about her as she turned.
“You sure? Remember, last time-”
“I remember ‘last time’. Don’t remind me.”
She paused for a second, her eyes hanging heavily in their sockets. Her facial expression was one of a dismal bleakness that I couldn’t find words to describe. At once, she looked both depressed and bored, as if she had failed at some mundane task.
She motioned her hoof towards the space behind us. I followed the movement to lay my eyes on a hollowed room, its walls and flooring tinted black.What little furniture had survived was shoved against the back wall, serving to brace a door that lay loose on its hinges. The outer wall, which I was perched on, had been blown away by some archaic explosion.
The only thing that caught my eye was a body lying in the center of the room, its skin mummified in a peculiar, waxy substance. The body stirred a feeling deep inside of me that I can’t quite explain. I suppose that it may be akin to what an old stallion wandering through his fillyhood house feels. It was an eerie feeling of both disconnection and familiarity. Here was a pony who, in some ancient era of the world, had once breathed as I did. The metaphorical tear strayed from my eye and I could not bring myself to feel any sense of grief for the nameless corpse.
Unit 3 interrupted my observation. “Not that way, silly pony.” She made a sharp thrust downwards. I once again traced the bobbing movement of her hoof to see a black abyss, the monotony of its darkness broken only by faint spasms of light that refracted from a metal ladder.
I let out a tense laugh that felt awkward in my throat. “You can call me anything you want. I deserve it.” I’ve never been an observant pony, but I must have been trying pretty hard to ignore the gaping chasm literally a few noses below me.
Unit 3 had barely opened her mouth before a sharp report of automatic gunfire cut her off. She quickly raised her binoculars as I crouched behind a loose beam. I could feel my heart pounding against my chest,before she gave me the all-clear.
“What was it?” The words flowed from my mouth like water seeping through cracks in a dam.
“Nothing near us.”
“As in, there’s not somepony down there with a gun?”
Her brow furrowed. “Did you not hear what I just said? Are you deaf?”
This was not the time for her to act like this. “Look, I-”
Another burst of gunfire cut our argument off prematurely. In a single, fluid motion she tip-hoofed from the edge of the ledge and scampered through the hole like a centipede. I quickly followed suit, after making certain that my rifle was securely fashioned against the right side of my body. Before I descended into the hole, I jerked the oiled strip of leather that fastened the rifle to me, ensuring that it wouldn’t slip and break against whatever lay below. I wasn’t keen on the prospect of hoof to hoof combat.
We came down into a defunct atrium of some sort. Gutted furniture lay across the room in pieces that were constantly strewn up and whipped around us by the shockwaves of distant explosions. Several decayed corpses covered in the same mold I had seen on the body above me littered the room. What looked like a chandelier had collapsed over a pool table, ripping it in two. A couple of its lights winked on and off periodically, throwing up webbed shadows which danced with the bright flashes of light that occasionally invaded the room from the streets.
Unit 3 suddenly spoke up.“Okay, you’re clearly the smartest pony out of the two of us. Where to next?”
“Away from here.” It was a precise instruction that she hopefully wouldn’t be able to mock.
Nevertheless, she started on a tirade. “Then why didn’t you just say so? What’s the point in gibbering?” Before I could respond, she quickly added “That’s a rhetorical question, by the way…”
I sighed. As I did so,I could feel the insanity of the battle leaving my mind, as if it had been exhaled from my body. “You should know where we need to go, unless you want to trade positions with me and be the sniper.” Her eyes narrowed, but she held her tongue. “I’ll get the map.” I reached my left hoof to my side, and set to work on undoing a brass zipper that was woven into a leather saddlebag. I plunged my hoof into the bag’s interior and shoved my way around ammo boxes and flares before my hoof fell upon a piece of wrinkled paper. After tugging it out of the bag, I pressed it against the floor, smoothing it with my muzzle until it resembled something readable.
I was greeted with a tangle of lines and rectangular boxes that were in turn labeled with microscopic lettering. Letters reading ‘Downtown Canterlot: City Section 17’ dominated the top of the faded yellow map. I only had to glance upwards to see a sign that read: ‘Big Shots Casino Royale Grande’. Printed under the sign in bold, golden text were the words: ‘Why bother leaving, when there’s more to win?’.
I re-focused my attention to the map and began to search. My eyes scanned through dozens of lines of text before they managed to find the needle in the haystack; a little dot, marked with a line of its own that read ‘Big Shots Casino Royal Grande’. I took note of the area surrounding the casino. Dozens of other commercial venues surrounded the place like flies brooding over a corpse. Far too many locations dotted the map for me to memorize them in the few precious minutes we had and to compensate for our lack of time, I committed the best local routes to memory before I folded the map back up.
“Just shut up and follow me.” Unit 3 nodded in response. With a few flicks of my hoof, the map was back in the bottom of the bag and I was out the door, Unit 3 in tow.
The outside air was filled with the stench of decay; an indescribable, penetrating aura that wafted from every building along the forlorn street. In front of me, I could see a few corpses lying motionless in the dust, looking for all the world as if they were asleep. Had I not seen their faces, I could have lied to myself that I hadn’t used live ammunition on a bunch of stupid transients.
The green one’s face was contorted into a death scream that left flaring nostrils and a mouth brimming with blood permanently stamped on its face. Of the orange one, who had just a few minutes ago been trying to kill me, there was no face to observe. My shot had cratered his head in. One amber eye gazed at me from the pavement, demanding an answer.
I had forgotten that Unit 3 was behind me and I jumped when she started up. “How do you think they acted when we first started shooting at them? I bet this one started bawling his eyes out!” she said with a smirk, idly pawing through the bag of the pony with no face. Trying to push my gut instincts down, I started hoofing through the pack of the corpse on my left. She didn’t have much except for a few moldy apples, a clip for her rifle…
And a white slab of rock engraved with runes.
*****
It had become almost routine for me to kill.
Routine. Now, there’s a word you don’t usually hear in connection with murder. Routine is the type of word you might use to describe how a well tuned machine works, or the monotony of one’s daily habits. Come to think of it, I had incorporated both definitions of the word ‘routine’ into my lifestyle.
I was a slick, oiled machine of war. Memories of my kills soared through my mind in an instant and I felt nearly nauseous at the wave of blood and gore that trickled over my brain. Each one of the murders I had committed were instantaneous, virtually painless on the behalf of the dead pony. I never wasted a bullet and I almost never missed. There was, truth be told, the occasional fluke; every once in a blue moon, my shot may not sail true. Somepony may live, because I made a mistake. It was like some form of perverse clockwork. Here, with the movement of some divine gear, a pony would live. With the shifting of the hour to twelve o’clock noon, a pony would die. The clock may sometimes break apart completely, sending fragments of destiny and memories of wasted lives scattering across the floor, to be forgotten forever.
It devastated me that I had no shoulder to cry on, nopony save for myself to vent my cares and concerns to. True, there was Unit 3, but at best she was nothing more than a loud cry in the midst of battle, an invisible voice whispering words of damnation and destruction into my ear. At her worst, she was an enemy, intentionally misleading my shots to annoy and endanger me.
More than anything, she was distant. Despite the fact that she was the only mare in my life who wasn’t actively trying to kill me, I felt no love for her. I couldn’t possibly hope to guess at her inner emotions, though I failed to see how her constant hostility could possibly shelter anything in the way of romantic affection towards me.
Some years had passed since I had dwelt in any relative safety. Out of the three factions that fought and continue to fight over what pathetic parcels of land remain intact, the one to which I held allegiance is undoubtedly the smallest and most pathetic of the trio, both in terms of size and strategic success. I deserted from the Red army a while ago, after a brief stint around the City. Something about the army just really ticked me and Unit 3 off, so we just up and left one night, while the other members of our platoon were sleeping. Okay, there may have been a little more to my desertion than mere boredom, but I've never been one to elaborate on the finer details of life.
I really wouldn’t have minded being a Blue. The Blues are best describe as a somewhat timid breed of ponies, who wear a dark blue armor and fight for a cause known to nopony but themselves. I have some conception of their ferocity in combat, of the way they sweep down from the sky and stain the earth a sanguine red with the boiled guts of hapless Reds and Yellows. Between them and the Yellows, there’s barely a nose of territory left for the Reds to fester upon.
Of the Yellows, I can say next to nothing, having never seen one in person. I know that they hold vast swathes of territory in the northern lands and that they lay claim to the barren hole that was once the Crystal Kingdom. They possess chemical weapons and are the only faction, to my knowledge, that have nuclear weapons in their arsenal. I have seen their mushroom clouds rising over the battlefields, silencing all that lies under the awful spread of that evil, black cloud. What the Yellows are willing to sacrifice for even the most marginal of victories is enough to keep me awake through a thousand nights.
Nights such as this one. No matter how hard I tossed and turned in my sleeping bag, I
couldn’t fall asleep. “U3?”
“What do you want?” She lifted her head from a moldy pillow, one of her eyelids lazily fluttering upwards. The opalescent pearl underneath bore heavily into my right eyeball.
“I want to know why we’re fighting this war. What’s the point in fighting?”
Her ears drooped, holes in the walls of the tent throwing a dazzling display of moonlight over her slender body as she sat up. “This is the first sleep we’ve gotten in weeks, and you’re still whining about the war?”
“So I’m curious.” I spoke softly, but she wouldn’t have any of it.
She groaned, rolling her eyes as she answered. “You want to know what I think? I think you need to shut up and let me sleep.” She turned her back to me, and before long, the perturbing melody of her snores filled the tent.
Content with her answer, I let my eyelids fall close, a sweet release that lasted an eternity.
****
It may have been months, or years since that night had passed. Then, had it been a single day, it would not have made much of a difference in my life. Time meant nothing to me; all I knew was that I had to keep moving forwards, lest the ghosts of my past consumed me.
I found myself lying in the back of an armored stagecoach, gazing upwards. The sky above me gave no traces as to whether day or night lay above it. The squalor above me resembled the grayness of a dead pony’s eyeball, rolled up in its socket and rotted by bacterial decay. Staring into it, I wanted to weep, but I could no longer find it within myself to cry.
My eye caught several pebbles of light far above me. After staring for a while, I gradually distinguished the odd shapes as a group of pegasi clad in cyan armor. As I gazed out towards the distant figures, a sense of longing filled me. I wanted to stretch my wings and soar as they did, far in the deceased heavens above me, though I knew that to do so would be to risk my life. To my knowledge, the Reds had erected anti-air defenses and flying of any sort, vehicular or otherwise, was a great way to get blown to bits.
Even as I watched the ponies fly, a missile popped out from a distant point in the horizon. Like an angel ascending into the Celestial plane, it crawled slowly into the sky, to eventually burst some distance away from the pegasi. Its light consumed them, and I watched as the damned ponies slowly tumbled to the ground, fire leaping out from their burning corpses into the surrounding sky. They looked like shooting stars as they fell, streaking towards the earth with all the ferocity of wingless moths. After some time, the plumes of light vanished, and darkness returned to the sky.
Before long, the excitement that their deaths had provided me with vanished and my mind began to sink back into its comforting shell of monotony.
The burnt wrecks of buildings loomed over me like a hole-strewn cliffside as I watched the scenery go by. I was almost sleepy from the bobbing movement of the stagecoach, though I perked awake at every auditory phantasm that rung from the deadness about me. As time marched onwards, I found it increasingly easy to fall backwards and relax. Thankfully, this forlorn pit was too irradiated by decades of magical warfare for anypony but the likes of me and Unit 3 to travel through. Though there was evidently some luck to be found in flying over, I doubted that there was any real threat to be found from the sky.
For once, I was barely in any danger.
The Red army had possessed the logic and perhaps the foresight to clad its soldiers in suits of red armor. There were slight variations to be found across different forms of this armor; for example, my set had pitch-black legs to interrupt the smooth flow of red across every other part of its surface. From what I’ve observed, the armor is virtually useless in conventional warfare. I doubt that it could stop a hoof-ball, much less a bullet. Admittedly, it has saved my life more than once when I’ve had the luck, or lack thereof, to stumble into some godforsaken bastion of radiation like the one I was traveling through. Evidently, the Reds had wished to account for the radioactive fallout of atomic blasts, back when the War was still in its nuclear infancy.
Lacking anything else to think about besides the monotony of my sad little world, I began to grow bored. The long and uneventful hours merged together to form a dismal hum that rang throughout the very core of my existence.
“U3?”
The stagecoach slowed for a second. “What?”
“Where are we going?”
“Out.”
“What do you mean by that?” My eyes once again swept my surroundings.
“I’m trying to find a way out of this city,” she responded, her voice tainted with malice.
“There’s no way out of the city.”
She groaned. “You have a map, don’t you?”
“I’ve already told you, it doesn’t cover the entire city.”
“What am I walking for, then?” Her reply didn’t seem as angry as I had expected. Rather, she seemed almost miserable.
“Exercise?”
“Just shut up and let me walk, or I’ll leave you out here.” The thought of being trapped in this pit inside a pit was enough to quiet me, though I knew she was joking. I thought of wandering around the blasted ruins until my suit failed me, leaving my body to slowly decay as I succumbed to radiation poisoning before dying. In a way, it was comforting; to die would mean to ascend to a place beyond the shattered glass and cracked stone of this blackened realm. Even if there was no heaven above the scorched clouds, the idea of a neverending abyss was pleasing in comparison to a lifetime spent amongst...this.
“You need to chill out, you know?” Nothing greeted me in reply.
Probably the only reason why Unit 3 hadn’t snapped by that point was because she still had this dream of a vast, natural expanse that lay just beyond the borders of Industrial Canterlot, the city built by my ancestors that filled all of the Earth. I don’t know where she gathered such a foolish idea from. It was all I could do to support her fantasies, if only for the sake of her rapidly fading sanity.
As we talked, a sphere of light appeared from deep within the ruins. It was roughly the size of a baseball and I could do nothing but look on as it approached me. The contracting ball weaved its way through the thick fences and walls of the desolate moor that entombed me before arriving at its destination.
I could feel my my mane sharply tensing as it approached. Suddenly, a piercing scream echoed out from in front of the stagecoach before the ghastly shriek of the RPG round ripped the air into pieces all around me.
Before I could grab my gun, flecks of molten metal spewed in front of my face. Ignoring their sting, I reached to my side in a desperate bid to grab my rifle. Holstering it to my side, I aimed it out of the side of the melting stagecoach and squeezed off a few short bursts into the shifting darkness that had seemingly appeared from nowhere. My unseen enemy returned fire, their erratic shots thankfully missing.
More urgent things came to my mind than killing as the shots came faster and harder.
“Unit 3? Where are you?” My voice was surely lost in the cacophony of gunfire rocketing around me, so I pushed my body over towards the edge of the stagecoach, only to find a set of slackened reins. Looking forwards, I could see a brown lump that might have been her body lying motionlessly in the dust.
I cowered in the carriage for a fleeting moment, when its armor finally gave way in a geyser of liquid steel and rusted cogs that shot up into the air like a volcanic eruption, sending me soaring through the air to crumple against the concrete. The sound of roaring flame overtook my sense of hearing, overpowering the shrieks of gunshots booming around me.
I hastily scampered across the ground for whatever cover I could find, which happened to be an upset piece of tarmac. More shots streaked past me like vertical lightning, searing the air around their trajectory. I felt as if I were inside of an oven set to the highest temperature.
An infinite parade of shots rocketed against my weak cover, breaking large shards over my head. My lungs threatened to burst and I could no longer scream, nor could I cry. I was reduced to a puddle of animate water, twisting and turning as raindrops brewed from a thunderstorm fell against it.
Part of me wanted to leap up and flee from my assailants, yet my brain overpowered that instinct and kept me firmly planted behind cover. Another part of me desperately wanted to see that Unit 3 was safe. I couldn’t block that out.
I risked a quick look at my surroundings, only to see an opaque veil of smoke that hid any sign of her.
After what felt like an eternity spent in the midst of a firing range, there was silence. In that fragile moment, I took a risky glance over the chunk of tarmac and saw what looked like a bunch of silhouettes pasted onto a cloud of smoke. For a terrifying millisecond, I made eye contact with one of the figures, causing a chorus of hushed whispers to break out amongst the crowd.
I rapidly pulled my head back down, only to feel a tidal wave of pain smash against my neck. I tenderly raised a hoof to my neck to gently probe a soft, mushy pit that curved away from the rest of my flesh.
A voice floated to me over the sound of burning wood. “We most dearly apologize for shooting at you, my dear sir or madam! Come before us and we will surely treat you with only the most gentlest of graces, yes, the most gentle, caressing stroke which can be afforded by us unto your dying corpse. We-”
“Shut up, Unit 65.” A far saner, more masculine voice made itself apparent. “I am Unit 47, of D company, squad 99, of the Lordess of Opulence. You are ordered to make yourself apparent, under threat of immediate execution.”
Lordess of Opulence… where have I heard of that before? The name had a very odd ring to it that stirred a distant memory.
Pushing out my recollections for the sake of survival, I risked another glance over the concrete. I saw a group of ponies clad from tail to muzzle in dull, yellow armor standing in a loose half circle. Several of them had weapons clenched in between their teeth, smoke trailing from the tips of their barrels. At least one of them was brandishing some sort of rocket launcher with what looked like a laser sight taped to the end of its barrel. Another one had a long, cylindrical device prodding out from a set of cast-iron tanks strapped to his backside that was slung haphazardly across its body. The whole assembly looked absolutely ridiculous and I probably would have laughed, had the circumstances not been so dire.
My hoof dashed instinctively to my side, but I felt nothing save for the smooth leather of the rifle’s holster. I awkwardly managed to position my head so that I was looking at my side and I groaned when I saw only a leather band tapered in strips about my armor, in place of anything resembling the gun. My eyes scanned the dirt around me, searching furiously for anything that could save me. They found nothing.
Out of fear and anger, I began to furiously curse at myself. Tears were streaming down my cheeks when I found that my silken saddlebag was no longer against my left side, after another brief moment of investigation. It was official: I was out of options, and out of luck. The tablet was gone, possibly destroyed, and that meant the end of my life.
“Identify yourself or we will kill you,” stated the voice, floating to me out of the darkness
In a pathetic bid to save my soul, I called out my rank. “U-unit 7, of, uh, B company.” Hopefully, seven really is a magic number.
“Unit 7...I can’t believe it. You’re alive!” My ears perked up at the sound of that.
“Depends on your definition of alive, I guess.” I called back over the barrier. My fear vanished as a perverse feeling of friendliness overcame me.
“Come here. I want to see your face again.” I managed to pull myself up and start a lazy, painful trot in the general direction of the voices. My head drunkenly swayed about, but nothing met my eyes save for blackness and swimming white lights.
An acute whistling sound soared through my eardrums. Seconds later, I could feel something tearing into my chest.
I barely had time to be thankful for a quick death before my vision swayed. Everywhere, everywhere there was red. Voices cut through my hallucinations, pounding against my bleeding ears. I was melting. No, I was reformed, flying over a forest filled with trees, trees! Could this freedom have any precursor? It was so beautiful, so tantalizing in the mere fact of its existence that my entire life was, in a moment, fulfilled. For the beauty of this one moment, the despair of the next was soon to come and I was cast into the briny waters of a piteous despair, thrown about the waves and currents of a stormy ocean. Like a parade did these sensations intrude through the most private recesses of my mind, with their advance coming the flutists of solitude and tranquility, the angry trumpet-blower of pain to break apart the melody of the flute’s whistle and finally the great cymbal crash of unconsciousness, sending me into a realm through which no parade could ever hope to march.
