Fallout: Equestria - The Spark of Life

Chapter 9: The Tragedy of Seaquestria

Hold on now. Lemme get this straight. When the Storm King came, you just abandoned your entire city and fled?

The gleaming red eyes of the seapony ghouls gazed upon us hungrily as they swam ever closer. They appeared from all angles, growling and snarling. Escape seemed impossible. We had very little weapons and very little understanding of our new bodies enough to fight underwater.

My thoughts turned to immediately trying to discover where the portal was before the first line of ghouls reached us. Queen Novo hadn’t mentioned the portal in her final recording. Did that mean something? If the seaponies had access to the portal, could they have used it without the pearl’s magic to transform them back into hippogriffs? The most likely outcome there would have been wherever the pearl put them would have possibly been certain death if it was inside of Equestria. The other outcome had to be that Queen Novo didn’t know about the existence of the portal at all.

“Tempest…” I whispered. “She didn’t know about the portal. Did she?”

Tempest looked up at me and nodded solemnly. “The seaponies weren’t told,” she said. “It was hidden in plain sight.”

My gaze drifted back to the throne where the queen’s bones lay. My eyes widened as I realized where the portal was. It was below the throne itself! The queen would have never known.

“The throne?” I said quizzically to Tempest.

“Yes, but we’ll never get it working before these things overtake us,” she replied. “We have to flee.”

“Fleeing might invoke that giant shark thing outside the palace,” Violet said. “We’re stuck.”

“We’ve been in worse situations, sweetie,” I said with a grin. “Tempest, you see if you can make the portal work. We’ll cover you.”

The other unicorn nodded succinctly, swimming up towards the throne. I turned as the first line of ghouls got ever closer to us, their gait speeding up slightly like an alligator launching itself at its prey. The first one lunged, growling and snapping. I reached out with my magic and took a hold of it, breaking its neck. There was no resistance and it simply sank out of view. Magic from the others appeared in my side-view, blasting away as many of the ghouls as they could. There were more coming, and we couldn’t fend them all off no matter how skilled we were. They would overrun us within seconds.

I pulled together as much magical power as I could, reaching into the recesses of my mind for Shining Armor’s shield spell. A massive bubble of pink shimmered into existence as a nearby grouping of ghouls lunged at us. One of them was cut in half by the shield, making a gurgling sound as it sank to the bottom of the shield.

“I don’t know how long I can hold this!” I shouted back to Tempest. I glanced up at her and saw the look on her face.

The other mare had shoved the throne off to the side, the bones of Queen Novo unceremoniously sinking to the steps below it. Her eyes looked fearful. Something was wrong.

“The portal device is here but there’s no power!” she cried out. “There’s no way to activate it!”

“Violet, see if you can help her!” I called over to my marefriend.

“On it!” Violet called back. She turned and swam up to where Tempest was trying to work. “Shit. She’s right. There’s absolutely no power to this system at all.”

All around us the ghouls swarmed the shield, wearing at it from every conceivable angle, so that I couldn’t even see the palace walls anymore. Once the shield failed, that was it. It was over. We were done for. No way out and no plan.

Violet swam back next to me. “The power to the device has been cut. The only way to possibly restore power is to do so at the source. Tempest says there is an energy plant in the city below,” she said.

“I don’t know if you noticed or not, sweetie, but I’m not sure this situation is better than I initially estimated,” I said, gritting my teeth against the pressure of holding the shield. “As soon as this shield comes down they’re all going to be on top of us.”

“What if… what if you teleport us?” Violet replied with a grin. “If you could get us down to the city below, it would give us a chance to hide from the ghouls.”

“Are you crazy? I’d have to drop the shield spell to cast it,” I said. “I don’t know if I can do it, Vi. I really don’t.”

Violet reached in and kissed me on the cheek. “I believe in you. Like you said, we’ve been in worse situations before,” she said before looking at the others. “Form up on Star! We’ve got a crazy ass plan!”

“All you ponies ever do is crazy plans, it seems,” Bright Ember said as he swam next to us. “It’s a wonder they don’t all fail.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said with a chuckle. “Tempest, come on. We’re going to blow this popsicle stand… I hope.”

The other mare nodded. “Start casting, I’ll do what I can to hold off the ghouls while you do,” she said, her horn sparking.

I replied by allowing my magical energies to let the shield dissipate and quickly began diving into charging up magic for casting a teleportation spell. The ghouls wasted no time, zeroing in on us. The first wave of these suddenly lit up in a sparking wave of magical energy that erupted from Tempest’s horn. It halted the ghouls just long enough that I was able to finish casting. In a pop we disappeared as the ghouls slammed into each other and reappeared at the bottom of the sea bed next to the city.

* * *

We hunkered down in a nearby building as several ghouls swam by. Several long moments of quiet silence passed by before they disappeared. My E.F.S. was still not picking up any of these creatures, and definitely wasn’t working on the creature swimming above throughout the cavern.

We’d picked it up here or there on the way through the ruined city, darting from building to building and trying to stay low. The giant shark weaved in and out of the crags of the cavern with great ease. The ghoul seaponies seemed to be aware of the fact that it was there, avoiding it like the plague. Any who strayed from the city were quickly picked off and devoured by the creature. The only thing that had kept it at bay from the city below it seemed had been the fact that it was intelligent enough to not provoke all of the seapony ghouls at once.

“They’re gone,” I said under my breath. “Let’s go. One more block until we are at the entrance to the plant.”

The others nodded. It had been hours since the escape from the palace throne room, and we were all feeling worse for wear. My horn screamed at the use of the magic needed to teleport us all and maintain Shining Armor’s shield spell. Whatever I’d been affected by had not fully worn off just yet.

Most of all I worried about Tempest. She appeared to be feeling the worst of it all, and I couldn’t blame her. She’d woken up out of nowhere over two hundred years after the end of everything and found out that her best friend was dead, and not to mention losing Trick Shot. On top of all of that, finding out that her ancient enemy had returned and that a magical pearl had been embedded inside of her body? I’d feel like shit.

Still, she soldiered on. It was what she had been trained to do by the military. She moved quickly with us, leading us towards the power plant. She knew instinctively where to go, presumably from having been here many many years before.

We had found ourselves deep in the city, having realized it was much larger than the cavern initially made it seem like. The city extended deep into the bowl shaped cavern, filled with buildings as tall as Equestrian skyscrapers from cities like Fillydelphia. It was almost as if there was an entire civilization down here, but it was in fact completely and utterly dead.

The power plant itself sat centrally within the city. We glanced up at it as we approached it, keeping an eye out for any ghouls as we did. The words HIPPOCAMPUS were proudly emblazoned on the side of the plant itself. I grimaced. Of course Hippocampus was involved here. They had created the entire power network in general feeding the power to the Mount Aris project, so it tracked that they had created the power grid down here as well.

“Come on, before anything sees us,” Tempest said, moving to the door to the plant. She pulled it open and motioned for us to go inside.

We swam through into the main lobby of the offices connected to the plant. It was incredibly interesting to see how Equestrian logistics had been applied to Seaquestrian technology. Or rather vice versa.

It turns out… lots of coral. Coral everywhere. And shells. Keyboards made of shells. Entire terminals made of shells. The cubicles themselves were made entirely out of coral and not only that they floated in the middle of the central room. There were no ghouls here. It was very curious that there weren’t even any bodies or skeletons, yet there were offices and terminals. None of them seemed to be functional.

“There’s nopony here,” Violet said, commenting on the obvious. “We have to find the main power controls.”

“Usually they’re in the power control office,” Sunshine said, pointing up to the center office in the middle of the array of cubicles above us. “That should be it.”

I swam up to the door and pulled it open. Inside was an array of terminal banks and a power terminal made entirely out of coral. A row of coral cabinets lined the back wall. A central terminal sat in the middle of the room on a coral desk, looking like it controlled the entire array. I moved up to it and tapped a key. A holographic image appeared in the center of the room above us… of a unicorn seapony?

“If you’re looking to turn on the power to the city… I’m sorry,” the mare in the hologram said. “I disabled all of the controls. Turning on the power could be catastrophic and release the creature trapped here into wider Equestrian waters.”

Tempest’s eyes widened. “Spring… Spring Rain?” she uttered.

“The creature is a creation by the seapony scientists here. It was intended to be used as a defensive mechanism for the city, but it got loose. In order to prevent it from escaping, the city was shut down at the source. I did what I could to help… but the water has grown sickly. Ponies are dying,” the mare said. “I tried contacting Glitter Drops up in the tower, but the comm system is out too. I hope she and Tempest survived whatever the fuck is happening above, because we sure aren’t. The beast seems to be held at bay by the city’s latent energy field, but who knows how long that will last.”

My heart sank into my chest as the hologram flickered out of existence. With the city powered off and the controls disabled, there was no way through the portal and out of the city. We were trapped, and who knows how long the magic of the pearl would keep the radiation at bay. I looked over at Tempest. It was clear by her reaction and the mare’s statement that this was another one of her friends. The other mare swam up to the terminal and began looking through the documents there.

“Well, you never did anything half assed in your life, did you Spring Rain?” Tempest muttered under her breath. “She’s right about one thing. The entire grid’s controls are completely disabled. There’s no way to bring the power back online.”

“So we’re stuck here?” Bright Ember said, his ears pinning back.

“Between a rock and a hard place, unfortunately,” Tempest replied, scowling. “Without the portal we’re left finding a different path out of the city… but if what Spring Rain said is correct the city itself is sealed shut from the rest of the ocean, and we can’t go back the way we came…”

“And the radiation in the water, despite being kept at bay by the pearl’s magic, will eventually kill us,” I said. “Well… it will kill everyone except me I guess. Yay.”

“There has to be a way to bring the power back online or some form of bypass,” Violet said. She lit her horn and began opening the cabinets in the room. Her eyes lit up when she pulled out a shiny transparent orb. “A memory orb? Maybe there’s something useful there. I’m going to keep looking through these. Star? Do you want to…?”

I grimaced, nodding. I had more experience with old memories than anypony here, and we seemed safe enough for the moment holed up in this power plant. I gingerly took the orb from her and reached out with my magic, letting the past take hold of me into blackness.

ooooOOOOooooOOOOoooo

My entire body felt… gross. I realized very quickly that I was a seapony and based on the office I was in I had to assume that I was Spring Rain. My host hovered in the water in front of one of the most glorious beings I had ever seen. Based on the images I’d seen of her… this was Queen Novo. The queen of the seaponies reclined regally against her throne. I could tell however that she was not doing well. Her eyes were baggy and her flesh looked pallid. The poisoned water was affecting her as well.

“Mother, you have to listen,” a seapony next to the queen was saying. She had a pale yellow coat with a brilliant blue mane. “It’s not safe down here anymore. We need to leave.”

“Skystar, this is our home and we must defend it,” Queen Novo said calmly. “We can’t leave. Where would we go? The poison is everywhere.”

“There has to be somepony who survived,” Skystar pleaded. “Spring Rain, can’t you talk some sense into her? If we stay here we will all die.”

“Your daughter does raise an interesting point,” my host replied. “But the comm devices aren’t getting through to anypony. I don’t know if anypony survived up above. We may be the sole survivors of Equestria down here.”

Queen Novo coughed. “The pearl survived,” she said solemnly. “I can feel its magic above on the island, but it’s diminished. If we could reach it… I could use it to save the others.”

“You know as well as I do that the possibility the facility was attacked is exceptionally high, your Majesty,” my host said with a scowl. “We may not be able to reach the pearl, and the poison could be greater up there.”

Queen Novo looked down at her fins, a deep sadness coming over here. She sighed loudly. “I guess there is no hope then,” she said.

Skystar grimaced. “Mother… there is always hope. I want to formally request a team to go up and investigate the ruins and see if we can locate the pearl. Even if you cannot go, I will,” she said.

Queen Novo locked eyes with my host. I could feel the intensity of that stare. Somehow I knew that even though it seemed utterly logical not to pursue this course of action that Queen Novo would allow it anyways. My host tried shaking her head, but the Queen had already decided.

“Agreed. Take two of your finest guardseaponies and head up the tunnel,” she said. “See if you can get through and… and be careful.”

Skystar smiled softly and floated towards her mother, giving her a hug and a kiss. “Thanks, Mom. I won’t let you down.” She swam off in search of her guards.

Spring Rain sighed loudly. “This is a fool’s errand,” she said. “Even if they can get back up the tunnel there’s no way they can breathe in the air without the pearl’s magic.”

“She needs something to do, Spring,” Novo said. “She needs hope. This is all I can give her.”

“We need to discuss what’s going to happen if things go even further south. We’re holding up, but this sickness in the water is eventually going to kill all of us,” my host said. “We need to discuss the project and what could happen if it gets out, and if we leave the city eventually that is going to happen.”

Queen Novo’s eyes closed and she groaned for a few moments audibly. “That creature was a mistake. It’s too dangerous and the chances of it getting free get higher by the day. The scientists designed it to be unkillable, but there has to be a way to dispose of it.”

“Theoretically, a massive electrical charge would do the trick… but the resulting charge would also fry every other seapony within the city,” my host said. “The only way we could do that is to overload the power grid.”

The power grid? But the power grid was completely disabled by Spring Rain herself. She did it intentionally to keep that thing in. My mind went wild trying to sort this one out.

“The amount of power needed to generate a charge that powerful would be massive,” Queen Novo said. “Even with our grid in the shape it is right now there’s no way we could ever kill that thing.”

“What if… what if we shut the power down? Turned the controls inward and started storing energy in the power coils? If we stored enough energy we could lure it into containment there and…” my host trailed off.

“We could fry it and the power plant would contain most of the electricity… but not sure how much that would affect the rest of the population,” Queen Novo said. “Interesting plan, but it could kill many ponies.”

“The chances are high that anypony inside their homes could be just fine,” my host replied instantly. “If we do nothing at all, we’ll never be able to leave here and we’ll all die. We have to take this chance.”

Queen Novo mulled over the decision for a few moments before nodding. “Put it into action immediately. I’ll notify the subjects of the loss of power. It will be hard, but we survived without electricity down here for many many years following the attacks by the Storm King, so we will get through this.”

“I’ll get on it right away,” my host said. “I’m going to have to be very thorough or else someone could just turn the power back on. I’ll have to completely disable all of the controls. We may never get it back.”

“I’m willing to accept that loss,” Queen Novo said. “We must be strong, Spring Rain. The next few days are going to be… trying.”

ooooOOOOooooOOOOoooo

I awoke from the memory orb, feeling quite disoriented, still floating inside of Spring Rain’s office. My mind immediately buzzed with what I’d witnessed. The plan to shut the power down hadn’t been implemented to keep the creature inside the cavern… it had been done to kill it. The beast must have gotten loose before then, but with no way to get out it just roamed the cavern instead. I reasoned inside my mind that it was more than likely the thing had been ghoulified in some fashion otherwise it would have not have survived as long as it had. A ghoulified super shark. Great. Just what I needed to ruin my day.

“Star? You alright? You’ve just been kind of staring for like two minutes now,” Bright Ember said from beside me.

I blinked. “Yeah… I’m fine. Well… sort of. We have a much bigger problem on our hooves now,” I said. “This whole place is functionally a bomb.”

“A what?!” Sunshine said.

I locked eyes with Tempest and scowled. “You were definitely right about Spring Rain not half-assing any of this. She did fully disable the entire power controls, but not to keep that thing in. They did it so they could store enough energy to kill it with a concentrated blast of electricity. It was apparently the only way they could dispose of it.”

“But the creature got out before they could implement the plan. Either that or…” Tempest started to puzzle out. “Or the seaponies became ghouls or outright died to the radiation in the water.”

“Regardless, this presents a real problem. If we can’t turn the power on, we can’t leave,” Sunshine said. “We have to figure out what to do here.”

I sighed. The plan I had fermenting in my mind was the absolute worst, but it would have to work in order for us to leave. It was the dumbest plan and could likely result in the imminent death of everypony.

“We uh… we have to kill the shark,” I said.

Violet’s eyes widened. “You want to try to kill the giant indestructible super shark? Are you absolutely fucking crazy?” she said, lifting a hoof before I could respond. “Wait, no don’t answer that. This is absolutely right in line with something you would say.”

I smiled softly. “You know me too well, sweetie,” I said before turning my head to the others. “We have to follow through on Spring Rain’s plan to electrocute the damn thing. If we can kill it, we can leave through the gate to the outside.”

“Didn’t Spring Rain say that it could potentially electrocute everypony in the city? Like… kill everypony here?” Tempest said, raising an eyebrow.

“She did say that, yes… that’s kind of the dumb part of the plan,” I said. “We’d need to create a space that’s completely dry somehow, and keep it that way. There’s no telling how well we would be able to breathe in that type of environment like this.”

“I suspect that won’t be an issue,” Tempest said. “The seaponies could easily move from water to land without breathing issues. Something to do with the magic inherent to their form.”

“So we should be able to breathe, but how can we create a space that’s dry that the water can’t reach?” Sunshine said, scowling. “The entire place is filled with water. We’d need a room that is somehow sealed from the rest of the place that can be drained.”

“Let’s start looking around. I think we’ve got some time here before the radiation really gets past the pearl’s magic, but we need to get back to Equestria soon,” I said. “If we can find some way, the plan would be to lure the creature into here and set off the power coils… and then we’d have to make sure everypony is inside the safe room. It’s crazy as fuck, I know.”

“It would kill the creature and then also probably fry all of the remaining ghouls in the city at the same time,” Ember replied.

“We’d be giving them mercy in a sense,” Violet said. “They’re feral now. They could finally rest.”

I grimaced, nodding. I didn’t enjoy the prospect of dooming potentially innocent lives to death, but Violet was right. The ghouls in this place had lost themselves to the feral nature that all ghouls eventually did, and we would be giving them a kindness in a sense. I swam away from the group intent on figuring out a way that we could contain some form of air pocket.

Utilizing the power plant made the most sense as a place to have a safe room in, but the construction of something like that would be difficult. Maybe Spring Rain had thought of that? It seemed like Queen Novo had been very hesitant that many of her ponies would die, but at that moment they were already dying anyway. Maybe she felt that to be an acceptable sacrifice. I wasn’t sure. Spring Rain had definitely pushed for the project though, so was she on the up and up?

I couldn’t help but think about Tempest’s statement about Spring Rain. She never did anything half-assed. She would have had a contingency plan. While the others swam about the office looking as well, I made my way into the central power grid chamber to check it out. Massive power coils extended across the entire room on each side, with a giant glowing battery array in the middle. Following the lines, the battery array would supply power to the coils, but how would the electricity be released?

Underwater power systems confused me. I made my way up towards the ceiling, scowling. This plan really was stupid. There was just no way we were going to get this to work. We were going to need a miracle.

A flicker caught my eye at the far end of the power chamber. Figuring that I had yet to cover the entire chamber, I swam over to that end. A tiny office sat embedded in the wall overlooking the entire power grid. Inside was a desk and a terminal that I could see through a tiny window. The door was locked. With a grin, I employed the lockpicking method I was best known for and used my magic to rip the lock apart. I smiled deeply because it felt like my magic was feeling better. Was that the influence of the pearl? I couldn’t be sure.

I sat down at the desk and tapped at the device and connected my PipBuck to it in order to find out the password, which happened to be coral. Very original. There were some audio files still left on the terminal. I tapped the first one to play and not very surprisingly heard Spring Rain’s voice come through.

“Queen Novo thinks we’re all dead, so she doesn’t care,” Spring Rain said, coughing. She seemed to breathe heavily for a second before continuing. “But I’m not going to die here. I’m going to get out. The trap is set for the creature. This terminal can be used to initiate the battery mechanism release into the city, it’s just getting the thing to chomp on it that’s going to be the problem. Well… at least it will be Queen Novo’s problem. Not mine. I’m going to be here because I have something the Queen doesn’t have…”

Spring Rain coughed some more before starting to speak again. “Damn cough. Radiation poisoning is really getting to me. I need to get out of this water soon. Where was I…? Oh right… the plan. Queen Novo is going to draw the creature out of its containment and lead it to the battery mechanism where I’m going to release it and the power coils connected to it. This is where things go a little sideways. The resulting electrical discharge will indeed kill everypony in Seaquestria. They’re all dead. There’s no saving them. I can’t even begin to say how sorry I am for that, but the Queen is more to blame. She led us down here when we should have stayed on Mount Aris. She’s a coward.”

There was a shuffling sound in the background. A stallion’s voice came through.

“Ma’am, the power controls are disabled like you asked,” a male voice said.

“Excellent, thank you. Could I get a moment alone? I have some work I need to do here,” Spring Rain said.

“Of course, ma’am,” the male voice replied.

“Those poor souls, they just don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said with a loud sigh. “Anyways… I have developed a safety mechanism, something that will keep the discharge away while the beast takes the bait. It’s ingenious really… once the battery mechanism is deployed, the entire facility will seal itself up and drain all of the water. Nopony will know. Once the dust has settled, I should be able to refill the facility and leave through the gates.”

Spring Rain’s voice flickered off as my eyes widened. She really didn’t half ass anything. She had an entire plan to escape Seaquestria that would have saved her and only her. It was then that my eyes settled on the one thing in the room I’d forgotten to check for… a skeleton. Sure enough, a skeleton of what appeared to be a seapony with a horn lay in the corner along the back wall.

Spring Rain hadn’t made it out of here of course. She had never gotten to put her plan into place, because something important had happened. What was it? What had put a kink into her plans to escape?

My eyes turned back to the terminal. Perhaps the second message would reveal something. I hit play. Spring Rain’s voice reappeared in my ears and instead of just audio… a video hologram appeared on the screen.

“The damn drainage mechanism is not functioning like I need it to. I can’t figure out why, but it seems like the mechanism itself is stuck and needs to be repaired. I wish I’d have been able to get an earth pony to do all this work. Having to do it myself sucks,” she said, with another cough. “Fuck, I just wish Tempest were here. She’d know what to do… or even Glitter Drops. I miss those two. I’m sure they’re dead by now… but still… I miss them.”

Spring Rain sighed heavily once more. “Alright, I’ve got to figure out how to make this mechanism work. Let me pull up the schematics again and see where I went wrong… well this says this should be functional. Why is this not working?”

“Spring Rain,” a voice came from in the background. A voice I knew all too well.

“Queen Novo? What are you doing here?”

“I found out about your little plan,” the Queen said softly. “Why would you do this? If you could save all of our subjects… why would you not do so?”

“It isn’t that simple,” Spring Rain replied. “You’ve said over and over that the radiation is too great. There’s no saving hundreds of ponies dealing with radiation sickness. It’s simple mathematics. Even if I did bring everypony into this facility, there wouldn’t be enough room for everypony, and then who would be chosen to leave out? Who would choose? If they did escape, who’s going to help heal hundreds of cases of sickness? How would we move everypony? There’s too many questions to be answered.”

“But you thought that you could survive, that you would betray the trust we placed in you,” Queen Novo said. I could hear the sadness in her voice. “You wanted to leave our city for dead.”

“Your city is already dead,” Spring Rain said bitingly. “Your daughter hasn’t been heard from since she left, and the ponies are barely holding on. The ones that are alive are becoming something different, something new. There’s no saving anypony. Wait… it was you wasn’t it? You broke the drainage mechanism.”

Silence passed between the two before Queen Novo spoke again.

“I… I didn’t want to believe it, but when I found out what your plan was… I had to stop you. Can’t you see what you’re doing is wrong? We have an opportunity here to fix this. We can bring the best and brightest and we can figure this out together. We don’t have to be at odds,” she said.

“You don’t understand,” Spring Rain said. “The drainage system can’t drain all the water that fast. It can only drain one room… a specialized safe room built into this very office. Only I have the key to get in. There’s no way that anypony can access it without me and it isn’t big enough for a hundred ponies.”

Queen Novo’s eyes flashed and she growled under her breath. “Foolish child. You have doomed an entire civilization to death or worse. No worry though, you will never enact your master plan at this point. Guards! Assist me!”

Two seapony guards decked out in coral armor appeared from either side, pointing sharp tridents towards Spring Rain. The unicorn seapony scowled.

“You take me out of the picture, then you will rot here,” she said, pulling a remote from behind her back. “I’m not letting that happen.”

“Stop –” Queen Novo started to say before Spring Rain pushed the button. A flash of light erupted in the room and the Queen’s guards were instantly vaporized.

Queen Novo herself was flung from the room into the main power grid room. Spring Rain herself stood at the edge of the doorway and the hologram’s edge. Her sides were slowly burning as an alarm began going off in the background.

“Look what you made me do… You’ve killed all of us,” Spring Rain said as she slumped backwards into the corner and died.

The video message flickered off and I couldn’t really believe what I had just seen. Spring Rain had likely been the cause of the Queen’s death, even if she had somehow survived the initial blast. All because Spring Rain could not figure out a way to save everyone else. It was an utterly terrifying concept to me, as somepony who sought to do all she could to save others.

Spring Rain however made some points that despite all her flaws… I found myself sort of agreeing with if only on basic principle. The amount of medicine and the amount of food to feed that many hungry ponies was fairly astronomical in nature and there was no guarantee that any of them could have been saved in the first place. I scowled and started digging into the terminal further. Schematics of what must have been the drainage mechanism populated on my screen. The design was rather straightforward, or would have been if I could actually read schematics well. I made a note to download them and give them to Sunshine to peruse.

The only other mystery at hoof here was the key to the secret room, and where the secret room was located. My first inkling was to go look through the skeletal remains in the back of the room. Spring Rain was certainly clever enough, as she had on her several small items and tools, but there was one that stood out. It looked a bit like a wrench with a six sided end. I glanced around the room, wondering if there was a hole that matched up to this.

After about several long minutes of searching, I found a hole that appeared to match. I took the wrench and inserted it as far as it would go and turned hard. A groan shuddered from in front of me and I glanced into Spring Rain’s safe room.

My first impression of the safe room is that it was ultimately designed to be just that. A shelf unit of food items was on the far side and what appeared to be a filtration system for water. Spring must have assumed that it was possible for the creature to either not die off or the electricity in the water to not leave as quickly. Perhaps this was merely her stocking up before she headed back out. There were two saddlebags floating around, so that seemed to track.

My second impression was that no matter what… I was not going to fit inside of this room.

“Fuck.”

* * *

“So… the drainage system exists, but it’s broken,” Sunshine said, a scowl on her face. “How extensive is the damage?”

“I swam down to where the system is embedded into the wall, and it looks fixable,” Violet replied. “We can make it work. The problem is the size of the room.”

“The room is not big enough for all of us,” Tempest said. Her eyes narrowed. “Spring Rain… she wasn’t planning on saving anypony. That’s not like her.”

“She knew that it was impossible to save the city,” I said sullenly. “She made a choice. Admittedly, it was a bad fucking choice, but it was the only decision she saw.”

Tempest scowled. “She doomed the entire city and lost her own life in the process. I can’t agree with that decision. It wasn’t right,” she argued. “And now… we have to what, sacrifice you to get out?”

“I was always going to be the logical decision to lure the thing here anyways,” I said with a grimace. “I can withstand the radiation better and my magic will protect me… I hope.”

“Do you really think you can generate a shield that will push back the electricity?” Violet said, looking up at me with sad eyes. “Your magic has been acting funny still.”

I sighed. Could I do it? Probably. Did I know that I could do it right then? Maybe not. Instead of trying to put on a brave face I shrugged and shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said. “But if we do nothing we’re stuck here. We have to try.”

“Try and hope that the electrical charge actually kills that thing,” Bright Ember interjected. “When you say it out loud, it sounds incredibly crazy.”

“Let’s focus on one thing at a time here, like getting the drainage system functional,” I said. “Once that’s finished, then we’ll work out a plan for luring that thing here. Spring Rain’s terminal should allow you to do everything we need right?” I glanced over at Sunshine.

The pink mare nodded. “She had everything all ready to go, including the release of the power grid batteries,” she said. “We can handle everything from there. In fact we can even move the terminal into the safe room and manage it there.”

“Good. Ember, work with Violet and Sunshine on the repairs of the drainage system if you could,” I said before moving to swim away. I felt movement to my left as Tempest appeared next to me.

“You saw much more than you let on,” she said softly. “I want to know everything.”

“Why? Spring Rain made a bad decision, just as you said,” I replied. “She fucked up.”

“Spring Rain was one of my close friends alongside Glitter Drops. She must have had a reason,” Tempest said. “I want to know. I need to know.”

I scowled for a moment, before motioning for her to follow me. I led her to Spring Rain’s terminal across from the safe room. I played the audio and hologram files for her, allowing Tempest to see everything that Spring Rain had done. Her eyes narrowed as Spring Rain expired on the hologram.

“Spring Rain was a fool,” she said after several long moments of silence. “She could have worked with Novo. It was stupid. She lost her way.”

“Could she have made any other decision? It seems like the Wasteland did what the Wasteland does best, even under the sea…” I said. “It forces you to make the worst possible decisions. To become jaded to the reality of the world.”

“Is that what happened to you?” Tempest asked.

“Almost,” I said softly. “I tried to rise above it as best as I could. It wasn’t pretty. But… I had good friends that brought me back from the brink.”

“You almost sound like Twilight,” Tempest said.

“Oh please. I don’t ever want to sound like her,” I said with a derisive snort. “Twilight was fucking crazy.”

“Maybe so, but her heart was always in the right place,” Tempest said. “She saved me, once. Showed me a better path. I was hurting, and she helped me find myself.”

“What was she like?” I asked.

“Nerdy… too into the friendship stuff. She was very awkward, even when she became a Ministry Mare. But she was…. She was nice. She brought out the best in others,” Tempest mused. “It was because of her guidance that I chose to join the effort to study the magic of the pearl. If Twilight thought it was worthwhile, then it was.”

“All of this jives with my own experience with her,” I said with a sigh. “Still… fucking crazy.”

Tempest chuckled softly. “I’ll take your word for it,” she said. “You know… it was Twilight and her friends that I first told my real name to. She encouraged me to use it more.”

“Fizzlepop Berrytwist?” I said with a soft laugh. “That’s one heck of a mouthful.”

“Kind of like Tempest Shadow and Radiant Star?” Tempest replied wryly.

“Point taken.”

A knock came at the door. I looked up to see Sunshine.

“It’s ready,” she said. “The drainage system should be functional now. We should probably test it first, but it should be working. The sabotage on it wasn’t that good.”

I nodded, grimacing. It was now or never, and there was only one way forward. It was the craziest fucking thing I had ever done, but it had to be done.

“Let’s test it, and then let’s get ready to go kill one big fucking shark, shall we?”

Author's Note

Let's get ready to kill a SHARK GOD.

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