‘I get the feeling that we’re being total cocks Beef,’
‘Ignore that feeling Stone. Think on it. Once our work is done they’re better off, and what’s the harm if we have ourselves a bit of fun in between?’
There they go again, fucking around on ministry time. It seemed that half of the ponies working here couldn’t care less about the war effort and were only worried about getting their pay, and getting their families into stables. Not that Pink Delta cared any more about the war. what he did care about however, was work ethic, and it seemed nopony around here had any to spare lately. The labs always seemed dusty and disorganised, test-tubes in disarray and machines ever in need of repair. Sometimes he felt that he honestly hadn’t seen anypony else around for years. Obviously that was just an illusion, probably perpetuated by Delta’s loner status and his distaste for his coworkers. Clearly there were others around, for example this unruly pair, making noise near his space and distracting him from his experiments.
‘Look at this one here Stone. Still busy with his science shit like nothing’s changed,’
‘Maybe we should leave him alone. He seems fine, and he’s not bothering anyone.’
‘Ah you got no balls Stone, none to speak of. Come on let’s fuck him up, it's gonna be so funny.’
He thought to just ignore them. They’d probably leave him alone soon enough once they found he wouldn’t join them in their slackery. The leading one, he seemed to recall his name was Beef, came up next to him and his voice reached Delta’s mind as if from a far away place.
‘Hey buddyyy, whatcha doin’ theeere?’
What an idiot. He wouldn’t give this “Beef” the time of day.
‘Oi I’m talking to you buddy, are you deaf? I asked you what you were doing.’
Still getting no response, the intruder lifted a hoof and knocked it semi-hard on Delta’s head. This was getting ridiculous. The annoyed scientist turned to confront this pony antagonising him but found it hard to focus on him for some reason. He couldn’t get his eyes to stay put on the stallion, as if his brain didn’t want to acknowledge that he was there at all. The other one, “Stone”, had the same effect. When he did manage to keep his eyes on him for longer than a split second, he almost wanted to vomit. This invader didn’t seem to fit into his surroundings, and gave him a incredibly unsettling feeling, as if either this pony or the world he stood in, was not real. Either way, Delta was being deceived and he was not used to feeling so unsure about anything. He suppressed the urge to retch and struggled to look Beef directly in the eyes.
‘What do you want, loafer? I can understand you wanting to waste your time and the ministry’s, but must you waste mine as well?’
Once again the interloper’s voice sounded like it was coming from a forgotten dream.
’Well I don’t know about all that. I’m just trying to help you out,’
Delta couldn’t imagine what kind of help a pony like this could possibly offer him.
‘I’m going to snap you out of this dream,’ Beef continued in a calm voice. ’I want you to do something very simple buddy. I want you to look around this room you’re in. Look closely. Look under your hooves. Do you see clean tiles? Or do you see decades of shit and garbage? Look at the ceiling. Do you see anything out of place? A massive fucking hole perhaps? You’ve been living in a fake world buddy for a long, long time, and it’s time to wake up. Take in your surroundings, your real surroundings and understand what I’m saying. And once your eyes have focused on the shit on the floor, the fucked ceiling, the clouded air, and the general buggered appearance of everything around you, I want you to look at ME, and tell me what you see.’
Despite the idiocy of Beef and his strange suggestions, Delta found himself entranced by the strange pony. He found himself following the instructions. He looked down, up, and all around himself. He tried to see the room around him, really see it, and what his eyes found sent him reeling.
He was standing... on rubble? He could barely tell what the floor used to be like. you could only see a few cracked tiles past the assorted rocks and garbage strewn across the ground. The room had clearly once been a lab of some sort, but could hardly be called so now. Any scientific apparatus that could still be found was broken, or seemed to be... melted? Yes, he could see microscopes fused to benches, warped sinks and what he could only just make out as a arcanometer melted in a pile in a corner. Just as Beef had supposed, there was a huge gap in the ceiling, allowing him to see up to the ground level. It didn’t seem to be in any better shape than where he was standing. Looking up through the hole, he could see that the ground floor windows were the only real source of light down here, and it was not a very good one. The light was filtered through dusty air, air rife with some kind of... pink mist.
Yes he could see it all around him now. Everywhere he looked, he saw through the pink haze. It was a disgusting colour, a colour of putrid decay and exuberance all at once. It was his colour. The colour of his hide since birth now seeped into every wall, every place, into his very self.
Pink Delta could not deal with this. What could it mean? How long had he been trapped in his clean illusion? What had destroyed his place of work, or did he even work there to begin with? Everything was in question. If he could not trust his own senses, his own memories, what was real? Was he really who he thought he was? Had he lived his whole life in this Pink-lit disaster of reality, or was this world fake too? In a matter of seconds, he was a pony falling apart at the seams.
Finally, having completed his visual tour of the room, and perceivably shaking, Delta brought his eyes back to bear on Beef himself, the cause of all his distress. Big mistake. Before him stood a pony who appeared to be dead. There was really know other way to put it. Now that he could see what was real, he could see his tormentor as well.
Beef was green with a hacked short brown mane, but his eyes were glassed over, his skin was rippled and gray-ish on his gaunt frame, looking almost like a full body scar. He had no apparent injuries, but he had absolutely none of the look of a living breathing pony. And he had a very wide cracked-teeth grin on his face.
‘Boo!’
Pink Delta ran screaming from the room.
‘I can see what you were named for Beef Jerky. You’re getting way too good at this.’
‘You know you love it too,’ Beef replied, after he had finished laughing. ‘Come on, let’s go find that poor pink bastard and explain some things to him.’
Delta's mind had stopped doing somersaults when he heard Beef and Stone approaching again. He had been quite quick to calculate the situation. Once he had stopped running in fright, he sat down on his haunches and considered what he knew. His first concrete decision was to trust his own memories, and perceptions. Though they had been proven false, they were really all he had, all anypony had, and if one couldn't trust their own reality what could they trust? He couldn't start questioning everything his own senses told him. Innocent until proven guilty. Real until proven fake. However he did not forget the fact that his mind could be tricked, and vowed to be more calm if his view of the world was ever destroyed again.
He judged by the state of the facility, that there had been some kind of attack. An attack on Canterlot itself seemed impossible, a successful one blasphemous to even suggest, but it seemed to be the only answer for the sight of this place. He could have been knocked unconscious by some kind of blast and dreamed of the lab until he was found. No, that didn't work because he never felt like he was asleep. He had been awake when Beef had arrived, he just hadn't been aware. But why weren't army ponies the ones down here helping survivors? Who were these two ponies? And how could anything possibly explain Beef's... appearance? It just didn't make sense.
Suddenly, he had a terrible thought. But it made all too much sense to forget. Slowly he looked down. Towards his own hooves. But he already knew what he would see. As he beheld his own clearly dead legs, he barely registered any emotion. It was all he could do to stare, his mouth agape. It all made sense in the logical part of his mind. The whole city must have been attacked and the princesses must have failed to defend it. Whatever the attack was- probably this pink stuff- must have this affect on ponies. He had been like Beef all along, but unable to accept the truth, he had repeated what he knew. He ran experiments in his lab until Beef and Stone had arrived to snap him out of his trance like state.
And that was how they found him, sitting in the dim corridor, staring at his grayed skin, trying to accept the fact that he had somehow been turned into a monster.
'Aw man, did you already figure out you're dead? That's my favourite part!' Beef Jerky quipped, running up to where Delta was sitting.
'Give him a break,'
'Yeah yeah,' he dismissed her, 'How you feelin' buddy? getting a good look at that bumpy hide of yours?' He continued in the condescending voice he had been using before, talking to Delta like he was a child. It took him a moment to tear his eyes away from his legs and turn towards Beef.
'Thank you,' he said calmly, before standing up.
'What?'
'Thank you for helping me to see the real world again.' He really meant it. From what he had heard so far, he understood that there were more ponies like him, and Beef Jerky got some kind of sick amusement from watching them realise their fate. And as annoying and sadistic Beef may be, he was right about one thing, Delta was better off now. Living in this world may be less comfortable than the state he was in before, but it was real, and that was what mattered. So he felt bound to thank him, no matter how much he may personally dislike him. Not that his thanks were appreciated by Beef. To the contrary, he looked extremely disappointed to find such a collected pony before him. His fun was clearly over.
'How are you so... ok? Why aren't you still going nuts?' Obviously most of the dead ponies he found were not at peace so soon.
'I took some time to think about things. Can you tell me what's happened? What caused all this destruction, and why are we like... this?' Regardless of how "ok" he seemed, he still felt sick at the thought of what he had become.
'Stone?' Beef said, still quite put out.
For the first time, he got a good look at Beef's female companion. She was a pale grey with a flat blue mane. It looked like she did not approve of Beef's antics, and her eyes showed pity.
'This may take a while.' she said. 'Let's start heading back to the surface, and I'll explain on the way.' She looked at Beef.
'Alright.'
'I'm Stone Serenity, What's your name?' she asked, as they started walking.
'Delta' he replied.
'Well nice to meet you, Delta.'
The three headed back up to the ground floor, in what seemed to be an extremely roundabout fashion to Delta. He almost told them as much, but he soon realised that all the routes he would have taken were caved in, melted shut or "Generally buggered" as Beef had put it earlier. Even if he had retained his senses during the attack, he definitely wouldn't have been able to find his own way out without these ponies, yet another reason he owed them sincere thanks. Stone Serenity was telling him something about a Stable or something but (understandably) Delta was still very shaken and not entirely paying attention. Every now and then he have to look down to navigate uneven floors and see his legs, which made him shudder. He tried to focus more on what could possibly have done such damage to his place of work. Two things were very clear:
- This was the work of a megaspell.
- The spell had something to do with this pink gas.
It was probably a creation matrix, built to produce a constant stream of the stuff. That was the only explanation for how it permeates every corridor and room, every nook and cranny. Well if that were the case then all this damage must be done by the work of the gas alone! Well... he supposed that wasn't necessarily true, The creation matrix could have been combined with some kind of explosive force magic, that would make sense. Yes, he thought. In fact there's no way the Pink gas could have spread so completely without some kind of force pushing it outwards, not with the most powerful creation matrix ever conceived. Even something that advanced would take decades to achieve this level of saturation.
But by Luna- they were taking a convoluted path through the building! They were ducking under some wires hanging from a ruptured ceiling, when Delta interrupted Stone's verbal river to comment.
'And ever since then, the clouds have been -'
'Are you sure this is the fastest way out?' he queried.
'Oh sure,' Beef threw back, while smirking at the interrupted Stone's upset look. 'I mean, it's the way we came in.'
'But this place is such a mess! How did you ever find me?'
'As I was just getting to,' Stone replied, 'Beef and I have been exploring these buildings for ages, looking for ghouls who are stuck in a routine, to help them out of it and give them their lives back.' She paused, 'So to speak.'
'Is that what we're called? Really? You're- I'm a ghoul?'
'Haven't you been listening at all?' She whined as they finally reached the main entrance hall of the MAS headquarters in Canterlot. 'You, me and Beef are all ghouls, at least that's what live ponies call us. A ghoul is what sometimes happens when a pony is exposed to a load of magical radiation. Radiation from a Balefire bomb, in most cases, but in ours it was the pink cloud.'
Delta's words jumped over each other. 'Balefire bomb!? M- Most cases!? Just how many of us are there? Did this attack hit more than just the MAS?' Without waiting for an answer he looked around frantically for a passable door and ran out onto Ministry walk. Greeting him was a view of uniform destruction, all of the ministry buildings were in upright ruin, still intact on a large scale, but clearly abandoned and in shambles. And the pink, PINK. The pink cloud as Stone called it was everywhere, in any direction he looked it seemed to continue forever. But Luna be damned the haze wasn't strong enough to prevent him from seeing the rest of the city in the distance. Houses had collapsed, trees were dead, streets ran pink with PINK. It was impossible to escape: Canterlot had fallen.
He ran on his legs, his dead legs, his dead PINK legs. To the next logical observation. The rest of Equestria. The lookout at the end of the street would give a view from Ponyville to the distant mountains. His PINK hooves clattered on the PINK stone of the street until he came to the end. The lookout retained no beauty, the hedges and other plants were gone. There were no other ponies around, and even if there were they would be PINK. He stepped slowly to the edge. His heart did not race, for it could not. Only PINK magic kept him running now. He looked upon the land in dismay. What was once green was now brown was now PINK due to the atmosphere of his vantage. It is not easy to tell the state of a city or town from far away, but he knew that they were all like Canterlot. Cloudsdale was completely out of sight due to an impenetrable cloud ceiling. He felt he could almost smell the decay from Ponyville. And everwhere, not a sight of a healthy tree. Damn it all. The war was lost.
For the second time that day Stone Serenity caught up to the runaway. Beef lagged behind. Delta turned to her, far too calm.
'How long?'
'Delta you need to slow down. This is all a lot to take- '
'How long was I in that state Stone? You can't ruin an entire country in a single attack. This isn't war this is the fallout. How long has it been? Just tell me.'
'It- It's been about 90 years.'
'Luna and Celestia?'
'Dead or missing.'
In a whisper, 'The ministries?'
'It's all over Delta.'
There are only a certain amount of earth shattering revelations a pony can experience at one time and still remain functional, even a pony of reason and science such as Pink Delta. And in that moment, upon cracked stone overlooking the once bright land of his upbringing, Delta had reached that limit. His legs collapsed under him and he thumped inanimately to the floor. The last thing he saw was Equestria through the withered limbs of a dying weed rooted in the cracks of the pavement. The last thing he heard was the voice of Stone Serenity beside him.
She sighed, a sigh worthy of a fellow 100 year dead pony and delivered to Delta a welcome he would not soon forget.
'Welcome to the Wasteland Delta.' She said over the corpse.
That was what she said. But it sounded like she was apologising.
