Adrift: Storyteller, chapter one
Now, My Little Ponies. I’m going to tell you a story. Not many ponies actually remember the day, and of those, few want to, the day equestria went up in balefire.
I was alone that day, out on my yacht, sailing and trying to get my mind off things. For me the world was dead. My best friend had died in battle fighting the zebra hordes. I really was alone. Worse, our last words were in heated argument, she wanted to adopt a child, I was too busy with my work to make the time. Marriage is a difficult choice in life, and I really wasnt ready for it. That night as I lay on the couch, already half alone, a call came in. Her platoon was recalled immediately for deployment.
Our intelligence said that the zebra were planning one great last push on hoofington before our own troops reached their capital. All available forces were needed to deflect the threat. My wife, moreover, the best pony I had ever known, died protecting the very science that brought about the end of the world.
Then I got word, she was dead and I was alone. I told my boss I needed to take time off to grieve. In truth, I just wanted to sail out of hoofington bay and gaze upon the city I had traded my happiness and joy to help build. Thinking back all those years, it seems so foolish to have desired to produce deadly weapons more than to settle down and raise a family.
Back then, that was all we thought about, the war, how to better kill the living and destroy each other. It consumed my life, researching and developing weapons. I was on the team with trottenhiemer that developed megaspells, I think it is a just punishment that I live on in this putrid form, surrounded by the world I doomed us all to live in. But I digress, the world ended in balefire, and it is time I tell you of it.
That day on the yacht, I was out on the open ocean, adrift in the wind. I had no home, nothing real to return to ashore. The project I had been working on was canceled, by order of princess luna. Goldenblood was locked away somewhere and my love was dead. Nothing left but a black abyss sinking in my heart.
I looked up at the core of hoofington, black towering silhouettes, soulless concrete fortresses built to outlast any attack. The sun was setting, the last rays of which bounced back at my from the sparking crests of the open bay before me. It was ominous and twistedly beautiful at the same time. I didn’t deserve to life in this world anymore.
As celestia’s star fell below the horizon and the moon crested into the sky, I pulled my custom made Nano-sPell hyperbreeder pistol out of its emerald encrusted carrying case. Funny, how a gun with virtually limitless ammunition was only going to be used this once. Being an earthpony in the employ of stabletech R&D has its perks, for instance, my pipbuck is a prototype model, designed specifically with earthponies in mind. The advanced inventory spell can manipulate objects with precision telepathic magic. So here I was, watching the moonrise, a prototype weapon floating by my head, green stabletech magic holding it to my temple while i contemplated the meaning of life.
I dropped into SATS and targeted myself, into the head... 95% chance to hit. The world flashed bright as a rainbow as I commanded my pipbuck to fire. From the silent zen of SATS I watched as one, two then three megaspells erupted over hoofington. From my vantage point out at sea I could see with perfect clarity as thousands of lives were eradicated in one second of slow motion destruction. My work, and to work of many others ended any remaining vestige of home this world had for me.
SATS ended, I was still alive. The prototype miss fired. I put the weapon under my chin and pulled the trigger with my own desperate hooves, nothing. The hyperbreeding reaction had never started, the weapon was a dud until a could send a powerful jolt of magic through the energy chambers. A shockwave of magical balefire energy spread out from the shore, wishing away the scarce automated cloud cover created by the SPP towers to either side of me. The powerful blast reached out to my vessel, tearing the sails from the mast and shattering every window. A demonic rainbow glow covered the skeleton of hoofington in its eerie, deadly twisted light.
I sat there and watched for an hour as fires spread and ponies on the shore died, their screams merging with the howling storm as clouds formed into an impenetrable barrier over my head and across the star strewn sky above me. That fateful night would be the last time I saw the night sky. Never again would luna’s moon to lay me to rest, nor the twinkling stars light my way home late at night, for the world was now shrouded in a black fog of war, as the pegasi shielded themselves from further attack. My world was more than gone.
Finally I stirred, it was morning and I had been adrift for the entire night, blown about on the whims of a rising storm. I looked down at my hooves, there lay the hyperbreeder charged and ready to fire. Zebra balefire coursing through its Nano-Spell matrix. But while I didnt deserve to life, I had no right to take my own life out of this misery that equestria had become. Not while ponies much purer of spirit than I suffered a horrible fate in the dispassionate embrace of tainted balefire radiation.
There was nothing of the old world left untouched by balefire, but I knew in my heart that it was my duty to luna and celestia to help save anything that was still left. Ponies needed my help, and despite the tragedy in my soul, I was going to make myself help them...
