Lyra's World

The next few days were a bit of a blur. Dragons were running around frantically telling me to do things, and shooting at each other and hiding in sewers and abandoned basements and things, although I suppose they weren’t really abandoned since they had camps of escaped synths hiding in them. But hardly anypony tried to kill me, and most of the people I talked to were willing to talk and didn’t seem to be ridiculous caricatures of evil, so even with all the running around and fighting it was a definite improvement.

Apparently the world had really gone to Tartarus since X-Com lost and/or won the war. The aliens were mostly dead, but so were the native earth dragons, and the remnants of both sides were living in the ruins of the old cities and not really doing a very good job of rebuilding civilization since half of them would rather blow things up.

The important thing was that there was somepony who could erase my cutie mark.

“Not a lot of synths bother with her services,” Desdemona told me. She was the leader of a group called the Railroad that was running the whole system of safehouses. She’d spent a lot of time talking with me because I was the first synth to escape who hadn’t had her memory of the time inside automatically erased. “Humans can’t get new purpose marks if you remove the old one. But you’re the first unicorn synth we’ve seen.”

“If she really is a synth,” sneered her second in command. “You trust people too easily.”

Desdemona ignored him. She ignored him a lot. They didn’t really have a good working relationship, and I can only imagine he put up with her crap because he was secretly in love with her or something. “The only problem is that she’s holed up in Goodneighbor, and the Gunners and Super-Mutons have been fighting over the surrounding territory. It’s going to take a lot of work to put together a team –“

“Just show me where it is on the map,” I said. “I’ll find my way there.”

“I don’t think you understand how dangerous that area is.”

“Trust me, I’ll be fine.”

===

The area was really dangerous. The Gunners mostly used disintegrating fire-beams like the Institute’s, and the Super-Mutons loved their explosions. They had giant tubes to make things explode at a distance, little beeping trays that blew up if you stepped on them, and even handheld things that they used to blow themselves up. There were also rapid-fire crossbow golems, trained attack-dogs, and I even saw a bear!

This was all in the ruins of a city as built up as Manehattan, so it was a maze of streets and buildings. That worked to my advantage, since I could usually get around a corner before taking enough fire to actually disintegrate or bleed to death, and the area was dangerous enough that most of the attackers wouldn’t chase me very far. The Super-Mutons’ explosions tended to kill me in one hit, but the pile of meat left behind was what they were really after, so after I’d left behind a corpse or three they’d stop to eat and let me run for it.

I was tempted to see what would happen if I surrendered to them. Would they put me in a cage and keep eating me alive? Because that’s always been one of my fantasies…

But I was so close. I couldn’t stop to play around, not when the solution to my problem was finally in sight.

Eventually, I made it to the gate. Or, well, the door. It wasn’t locked or anything, although I assume that somepony was watching the approach since it was suspiciously quiet, and there was a random corpse just lying there in the street about ten feet away, with no obvious cause of death. I opened the door, and stepped inside.

“Hey!” shouted somepony, and I flinched a bit as the door swung closed behind me. “You’re new here, aren’t you?”

I looked over the aggressive little dragon who was swaggering towards me across the market square I found myself in. He looked like an idiot. Other dragons idly watched him approach, but nopony made any move to interfere.

“First timers have to pay the toll,” he said. “Just hand over everything you own.”

I stared at him. I wasn’t wearing any saddlebags or clothing. Des had offered to give me some weapons and armor for the trip, but I’d turned her down. It would have all been left behind when I disintegrated anyway.

It took him a bit, but he eventually noticed that I wasn’t carrying anything. “Or maybe you can come with me back to my room, and pay the toll a different way, if you know what I mean.” He leered at me and licked his lips.

“How about I give you a wish?” I offered. “One wish, anything you want.”

“What, like a genie?” he asked. When I nodded, he scoffed. “Fine, then I want a powerful scoped 10mm pistol with a marksman grip and a snub barrel, and one of those magic magazines that never runs out of ammo.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but I fed the request into the timelessness, and with a ‘pop’ a little silver crossbow appeared in front of him. He caught it before it hit the ground, and played with it a bit, checking it out and making sure it was loaded.

“Huh. Thanks,” he said, aiming it at my head. I perked an ear at him, and he lowered it and stuck it in his pants.

“Do you know where I can find the Memory Den?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s just back there and around the corner. Can’t miss it.”

As I walked off, I waited for the crossbow to explode, or go off on its own and shoot him, or something, but apparently he got exactly what he wished for without anything bad happening. Can’t win ‘em all.

===

“Doctor Amadi? Are you – oh!” I said, as I entered the basement lab. It was suspiciously well-lit, much better lit than the rest of the Memory Den, and much cleaner than anything I’d seen since leaving the Institute. That wasn’t the part that surprised me.

“Oh!” said the little white unicorn, turning to face me as I came in. “How did you find me?” She looked terrified, glancing around as if she’d suddenly spot a secret escape route from her basement lab.

“Desdemona sent me,” I told her. “It’s okay, I’m a synth.”

“A unicorn synth?” she said, her eyes wide. “How – why?”

“It’s a long story,” I told her, “but I’m not in any particular hurry. Would you like to hear it?”

She tittered nervously. “It would go faster if you let me copy your memories onto a holotape.”

“Okay,” I said. I looked around at the equipment, which was fairly sparse as mad scientist lairs go. “Do I just sit in one of the pods?”

She blinked. “Are you sure?”

“What? Isn’t that what you wanted? I know that they’re not built for unicorns, but I think I can squeeze in.” The pod had a reclining chair, so I squirmed inside and rolled onto my back. “Like this, see?”

“Right,” she said. “Let’s get started!”

The lid closed, a hypnotic pattern played on the screen, and everything went white. Then I lived out my entire life from birth until that point all over again, only with a strange feeling of dissociation that I could never put into words. It was actually pretty frustrating, especially when I could see my really stupid mistakes coming, but was powerless to change anything, and had to just sit there screaming inside my own head as my body went through the same motions it did the first time.

“Oops,” she said, as she opened the pod. “I was supposed to sedate you before I started. You didn’t go insane, did you?”

“Blargle,” I said. I mean, what else could I possibly say?

===

At least it saved me from having to explain myself. “I’m not sure I can help you,” she said. “That is, I can definitely take away your purpose mark, but it won’t restore you to a ‘blank flank’ state. You’ll be markless forever. I could try to swap your cutie mark for one of the ones I have on file, but most of them are pretty dull. Did you ever wish that your special talent was mopping floors? Or having sex?”

“Yes to the second one,” I said, “but I got better. Can you show me what you have?”

She showed me her cabinet full of cutie marks floating in little glass jars, each of them labeled with an explanation of what it meant. There was a lyre cutie mark in there, but it was apparently a mark for the rote memorization of historical dates.

I played around with the idea of taking the ‘sex’ one. After all, not everyone has a cutie mark in their job – having one for a hobby is perfectly respectable! The little pink hearts would have looked pretty awful against my mint green, though.

Then I had a thought. “Could you bottle up somepony’s blank flank, and swap me with that?”

“Maybe,” she said. “But how many blank-flank unicorns have you seen? The Institute doesn’t transform people until they’re fairly certain of what their specialty is going to be.”

“No no,” I said, waving a hoof at the cabinet. “These all came from dragons, right?”

“No, most of them are from humans,” she said, then had a thoughtful look. “Or is it all of them? Yes, all of them. Virgil turned me down.”

“Right right,” I said. “And there are plenty of blank-flank earth dragons around. I’m sure one of them would want a cutie mark for weather!”

“What would they do with it?” she asked.

“Fine, fine, tell them it’s a cutie mark for sex. It is Cloud Kicker’s after all.”

===

She sent me out to find a volunteer, which I thought was completely unfair because I didn’t know anypony. I wasn’t going to let that stop me, of course.

The first person I met wasn’t interested. “The last thing I need is for people to start thinking I’m a synth.”

The second had some sort of social dysfunction. I could barely get a word in edgewise, between his long, enthusiastic babbling about fictional superheroes.

“Weather control is a kind of superpower, right?”

“It’s more of a villain superpower, though, isn’t it? The Silver Shroud never needed magic powers over the weather to bring the evil to justice. The only time he ever got close to magic was in part sixteen of ‘The Curse of Rah Rah Tutenkamen’. That one ended on a cliffhanger, actually, and I was never able to find part seventeen. But in eighteen he was already –“

“Wait!” I said. “Can I just… I don’t know, bribe you? I give you all your missing superhero tapes, and you come downstairs and sit in a pod and let us do science at you.”

“You could really do that? For me?” he looked skeptical. “I’m not even sure where you’d start looking for something like that. They were doing recording for a new series over at Hubris Comics, but –“

I made a wish, and ‘pop’! The room was suddenly full of holotapes.

It took a long time to dig ourselves out, but it turns out that being buried in little hoof-sized mostly-hollow doodads is a lot less fatal than being buried in molten gold.

And it made him really happy. “With this many – wow! With this I could start my own radio station! All I’d need is a military-grade circuit board and –“

“No,” I said, tugging him out of the pile with my magic and floating him across the room. “Downstairs, now. Science.”