"I’d rather not talk about it. She’s dead. I’ve escaped. I don’t want to remember that place."

After about an hour of the Taurox charging across the barren, smog-shrouded landscape at a pace that made Jurgen seem like a sane and reasonable driver, the vehicle screeched to a halt. Once I was reasonably certain it wouldn’t come to life again, I took a peek through the window.

Once again, I was pleasantly surprised by the banality of our surroundings. No ruins, no mobs of vengeful chaos cultists on our tail, nothing trying to murder me. It seemed that I’d hit a lull in all the horrific predicaments fate seemed hellbent on dragging me through, but I knew, from hard-earned experience, that such lulls never lasted long.

But that didn’t mean I couldn’t make the most of it while it lasted.

I started by taking stock of the foodstuffs we had on hand, tossing out all the rotten, discolored, or otherwise visibly corrupted provisions but keeping the rest. I’d have tossed them all out, but I wasn’t sure when we’d find any provisions that we could safely eat; the risk of chaos mutation would be a risk we’d have to take.

Next, I found a blowtorch, and set about getting rid of all the Chaos Cult iconography on the Taurox. Every time I found a Star of Chaos, blue flame sigil, or anything else that looked even remotely like a symbol of Chaos, I took the blowtorch to it, melting it off and searing the surface until not the slightest trace of the icon remained, and then using the blowtorch to deface the surface with a crude graffiti-esqué declaration of “not on my watch”, just to be thorough.1 In response to the odd looks my companions were giving me, I explained to them, in no uncertain terms, that those occult symbols have actual power and potential corrupting influence, and the less exposure we had to said influence, the better.

Naturally, this explanation and warning ended up segwaying into an extended conversation with my companions, from which I gleaned several exceedingly uncomfortable facts;

1. The name of the Daemon World I was stranded on, or at least the name of this particular continent of it, is Equestria.
2. These xenos were pre-warp, at least if the incredulous looks they were giving me in response to my questions about what ‘segmentum’ or ‘sector’ this world was in were any indication. So hitching a ride on one of their starships was out of the question, on account of the fact that they didn’t have any.
3. Surprisingly enough, they did have a passing familiarity with Chaos despite this, though not quite enough familiarity that they didn’t immediately comprehend why I was melting every last chaos sigil I could find off the Taurox’s hull. Apparently, their civilization had gotten into a protracted war with some kind of conglomerate of various Chaos Cults and Warbands, and had managed to hold out against them for over 25 years. Gotta say, they did better than most unsupported worlds on the receiving end of a Chaos Incursion…
4. As you can probably guess from the state of the world, the war didn’t exactly end favorably for the ponies. Fortunately, a sizable number of ponies had taken shelter in underground ‘stables’ shielded from the ravages of Chaos Corruption and the need to prostrate themselves before incomprehensible manifestations of all of sapienkind’s worst traits in order to not die.
5. Unfortunately, these ponies were from one such stable, and had been there up until three days ago, when a group of Heretic Astartes (not associated with the Chaos Cultists who’d tried to enslave us, apparently) broke in. Their sole experience with the ‘Outside’ consisted of fleeing for their lives from said Heretic Astartes, and then wandering aimlessly until they stumbled ass-first into the same bunch of Chaos Cultists that I would also stumble ass-first into a few hours later. Ergo, they had just as much of a clue how to survive on this Daemon World as I did.
6. Those Heretic Astartes were after something called “KTE-06”. Apparently it’s some kind of piece of software that Blackjack had on her Pipbuck. I say “had” because apparently it now resides in my Pipbuck. In other words, on top of being stuck with these two ponies now, I also have something Chaos-worshipping transhuman super soldiers were willing to break into a heavily fortified bunker to get their hands on strapped to my arm.
7. One of the ponies, Blackjack, is self-described as the “worst security mare in the stable”. She was the pony equivalent of an arbites… in job title and job title alone, largely on account of having none of the skills or ‘spells’ that were necessary for that job. Apparently she was born into the job; from what I could gather, jobs in her stable were inherited instead of being assigned by merit, stupidly enough.2
8. P-21 wasn’t much better. He hadn’t stopped shivering, kept dodging all my questions about what life was like in the stable for him with assorted variations of “I don’t want to talk about/think about/remember it.” And unlike Blackjack, he was smart enough to pick up on the fact that there was something undeniably different about me. He wasn’t asking pointed questions like he was before, but that would almost certainly change in the future.
9. Oh, and on top of all that, I’m apparently an ‘alicorn’, which is basically the pony equivalent of a primarch.3
10. All things considered, I was still well and truly frakked.

On the plus side, I did learn that using my telekinesis didn’t attract daemons,4 and that I could use my telekinesis to manipulate the Taurox’s controls.

*** *** ***

“…am I the only one who wants nothing to do with this place?” My rhetorical question was punctuated by a shower of sparks from a busted panel on the side of the building, briefly illuminating the left side of a large sign; “Fluttershy Medical Research Center”.

“Nope.” P-21 commented as I turned theTaurox’s steering wheel, the vehicle swinging around in response to my telekinetic inputs and driving away from the creepy-looking building at a relatively reasonable speed, at least compared to whatever had hijacked the Taurox during our escape from its previous owners.

“Good to know.” I deadpanned, pushing the gas pedal a bit harder. For a long, long minute, we drove in silence, Blackjack and I scanning our surroundings for anything of note. So far, nothing caught our eyes beside the everpresent orange smog and the occasional dead tree.

Eventually, the Taurox’s fuel gauge dipping into the red forced us to stop, right next to a small crop of dead trees. I was running low on (figurative) fuel as well, and the same could be said of Blackjack and P-21, so we stopped for the ‘night’ (insofar as night can even be a thing on a Daemon World with two perpetually-eclipsed suns that are always visible in the sky no matter where on the planet you are) and ate a quick, carefully-rationed meal.

Once that was done, P-21 began shuffling through whatever was in the Taurox in hopes of setting up some proper bedding, I’d found a fancy new use for my chainsword in the form of using it to cut down the dead trees and chop them up into logs as fuel for our vehicle,5 and Blackjack…

“So… do you want to have sex?”

May Him on Terra have mercy upon my poor, beleaguered soul; Blackjack was hitting on me. I’m not ashamed to admit the question made my jaw drop and my chainsword drop from my finger-feathers and tumble to the ground. “...what?”

“Y’know, get laid and all that?” Blackjack asked casually, as if having sex with someone she barely knew was something she did on a daily basis. Which, as I would soon learn, it was.

For what felt like an eternity, I stared at Blackjack as if she had suddenly sprouted two hundred extra heads, each and every one of which had independently yet simultaneously come to the conclusion that I was the illegitimate love-child of the God-Emperor of Mankind and Khrone, Slaanesh was my wet nurse, and I’d been raised by Tzeentch. “...no,” I responded, once I’d recovered enough from the shock of having Blackjack announce her desire to get down and dirty with me the way one might make a reservation for dinner at a restaurant with a newfound friend. “Just… No.”

Blackjack gave me a bewildered look. “…why not?”

“Look, I don’t know about where you come from, but where I come from, sexual intercourse is something you normally do only with a very specific special somebody.” I snapped, struggling to keep my tone even. “And it is never something you do with near-total strangers you met less than a few days ago. Besides, I’m pretty sure my special somebody will murder me if she finds out that I slept with you.”6

Blackjack returned the ‘you’ve sprouted a hundred extra heads’ look I’d given her a few seconds ago. “Where you’re from, not all stallions want sex?” She asked, as if the concept was as alien to her as walking on four legs had been to me a few days ago.

“I’ll bet where he’s from, not all stallions are breeding equipment either.” P-21 grumbled as he limped past the two of us. My heart skipped a few beats as two words he said stuck in my mind. …Breeding equipment?!

…

All of a sudden, I was very, very, very glad I hadn’t woken up in Stable 99.

Fortunately, my mind was pried from the dark, dark places it was going by another question from Blackjack, this time directed at P-21. “Umm… where are you going?” I shook the nightmarish mental images out of my head and glanced over at P-21, noting how he was hobbling away from us, his braced leg sticking out to the side as he moved toward the smog. “Shouldn’t we stick with the vehicle?”

P-21 looked back, fixing the two of us with a searing glare. “You want to do that? Go right ahead. I’m not going anywhere with her.”

“...really?” I countered, responding with Authoritative Glare #7 (good for not-so-subtly hinting at someone that you consider something they’re about to do to be immensely stupid). “Ditching the fastest means of transportation you’ll likely find for miles and a good inch or two of metal between yourself and anything that might be wandering around out here… just because you don’t want to share it with a certain pony?”

“I’ll be fiYAUGH!” Midway through P-21’s response, the brace he’d found for his bad leg popped loose, and he fell hard on his bad leg.

I let loose a tired sigh, stepping forward as I snatched up the brace with my telekinesis. “You think you’ll be ‘fine’ on your own, with a bad leg, on the surface of a Daemon World? Do you have a death wish or something?”

P-21 took a long, slow breath. “What should I do?” He whispered softly to himself. “What would he want me to do?” He? Oh frak, he’s angry at Blackjack for being complicit in the loss of a loved one, isn’t he? “Fine. Untill I can go on my own, I’ll stick with you and Blackjack.”

“Sounds like a plan.” I responded, using my telekinesis to reattach the brace. Hopefully by then, I reasoned to myself, I’d have found whatever passed for civilization on this warp-damned planet, and maybe a clue as to where the Valhallan 597th was and how to get back to them.

*** *** ***

“OUCH!”

“Sorry! Your leg-”

“Oh don’t worry, I’m not blaming you. I’m blaming the idiot alicorn who decided that sleeping in a big-ass heap was a good idea!”

“...you’re an alicorn? But you’re a stall-”

“Can we not talk about this right now?” I asked, pressing myself into the walls of the crate a bit in an attempt to give P-21 a little more space to stretch out. I had to admit, having all three of us sleeping in a crate with the lid on top and my oversized clothes serving as bedding was far from the most comfortable sleeping arrangement I could’ve come up with, especially considering my size.7 But it was the safest, and according to my personal creed, my safety (and by extension the safety of any human, or in this case equine shields in my company) comes before my (or their) comfort.

Next to me, I felt P-21 slide in next to me, pressing himself into my side. I could feel tremors shooting through his muscles; it was obvious the prospect of sleeping with a mare in close proximity did not sit well with him. “Umm, P-21? Are you okay?” Blackjack asked.

“I told you, I’m fine-”

“No. You’re not. And not just because you have a broken leg.” I interjected. Part of me wanted to have nothing to do with the upcoming conversation, but there was a not-insignificant chance that I’d be stuck with these ponies for weeks or even months, and the last thing I wanted was interpersonal issues driving a wedge between my companions. And such issues are best dealt with when those who have them are willing to talk about them.

Even in the near-total darkness of the crate, I could tell that P-21 was giving me a withering glare. “For the thousandth time-” He started to snarl.

“You don’t want to talk about it, you don’t want to think about it, you don’t want to remember it. I heard you the first thousand times” I cut him off, draping one wing over him in an attempt to comfort him. “I get that whatever happened to you in Stable 99 hurt you badly, and that you don't want to revisit that pain by talking about it. But that doesn’t change the fact that it still happened to you. Trying to pretend it didn’t won’t change that.”

“And you think making me dredge all that shit up by talking about it will?”

“No, but even I know that it’ll be healthier than keeping it all bottled up.” Hey, say what you want about the Schola, but they did force each and every commissar to get some rudimentary psychotherapy training. Not that most of us actually use that training…8

“...fine.” P-21 finally growled. “The ‘porn stash’ Tentacles stumbled across? Why don’t you take a look though it for me?”

“Wait… what?” Blackjack asked, sounding bewildered. “You wanna listen to some bumping flanks? Here? Now?”

“Yes. Specifically the bumping flanks in Audio Log BJ#1.” P-21 growled.

“…what are you talking about?” Blackjack asked as her Pipbuck lit up, the amber glow of its screen illuminating her face. “I’m pretty sure I’d remembe-” The alabaster unicorn abruptly fell silent, the words seeming to die on her tongue. For a long, long second, a pregnant pause filled the crate. And then, Blackjack’s Pipbuck emitted a click.

Some kind of mix between march and choir music erupted from the Pipbuck’s speakers, accompanied by the babble of many voices. It sounded like some kind of social gathering; probably something that had happened in Blackjack’s stable.

“Let’s go play with the stallions,” I heard a mare’s voice shriek. “Dibs on the unicorn!”

“Daisy! At least give me the unicorn. You take the blue one,” Blackjack’s voice whined, growing clearer. Blue one? Oh frak… “I mean, look at him! He looks defective. And he’s just P-1.”

“Too bad. I called the unicorn,” she laughed, and I heard hoofsteps on metal receding into the distance.

“Ugh, mule...” Blackjack’s voice whined in my ears. She sounded younger, more petulant. “Well, come on, you.”

“Please…” P-21 whispered softly, so quietly that I could barely hear his voice through the Pipbuck’s speakers. The sounds of the social gathering dimmed. A door closed.

“Help me get out of this party dress. I don’t want a work detail to cover a stain.”

“I…” P-21 stammered in a tiny, terrified voice.

“Huh?”

“I don’t want to do this… please don’t make me do this…” he whimpered. The despair in his voice called to mind the expression he’d been wearing, Emperor only knows how many years later, when Tentacles walked into our cage and made his intentions toward him clear.

“Ugh, are you actually talking?” I heard Blackjack grumble.

“I…”

“Look! Here’s the plan. You’re going to make me feel good. That’s your job. If you can’t do that, then get to medical and have them fix you till you can.” I gave a little annoyed sigh. “You don’t actually do anything here except breed, so the least you should do is be happy about it—“

Blackjack pressed her hoof to something next to the screen, cutting the recording off with another click. For a long, long second, dead silence reigned. Not that Blackjack needed to say anything. The expression on the pale unicorn’s face said it all.

“...it had been a horrible party. Daisy got the unicorn stallion. I got the P-1. The one who’d cried… the… whole… time…” Blackjack spoke softly and slowly, her tone calling to mind someone who’d blindly signed a form only to find out decades later that said form was the death warrant for her loved one. “That was all I remembered.”

P-21’s eyes went wide. “You didn’t recognize me?! At all?!”

“...no.”

*** *** ***

“Merciful Omnissiah, what are those things?!”

“It came through the wall! It came through the wall!!!”

“Regroup! Reform at once, you sons of-AAAUGH!”

I awoke with a jolt, shaking and breathing heavily, my fur utterly drenched in sweat. I reached over with a shaking hoof, for the bottle of amasec that I always kept on my nightstand… and my hoof ended up groping uselessly along the wall I was pressed up against, and I was reminded that amasec was not among the limited supplies in the Taurox.

Stripped of the familiar burning sensation in my throat accompanied by a swig of amasec that I usually took after a nightmare like that, I attempted to replace it with something else. I grabbed the coat draped over the three of us with my telekinesis, pulling it tightly over me and wrapping the side of it around myself tightly, hugging P-21’s shivering form close to me for comfort. “Just a nightmare…” I whimpered softly to myself, hating how . “Just a nightmare…”

It wasn't the first time I had that exact nightmare, and unfortunately, it almost certainly wouldn't be the last. Decades past my encounter with those soulless killing machines, and I still periodically woke up in a cold sweat; evidently being transformed into a five-foot tall pony didn’t change that.9

I was stirred from my thoughts once again by a pained groan from the furry mass next to me. It's only then that I noticed how much P-21 is shivering, how cold his body felt.

“P-21?” Blackjack exclaimed, alarm creeping into her voice as the two of us scrambled to our hooves. “What’s wrong?”

“Hurts…” The blue Earth Pony whispered, his voice raspy and weak. Using my telekinesis, I threw the lid off the crate… and Blackjack sucked in a shock breath.

To say his condition had worsened from last night would be an understatement. His fur had somehow gone even more pale, his half-lidded eyes were sunken and bloodshot, and his whole body was twitching in what looked for all the world like a prolonged, subdued epileptic seizure. He looked like someone from a drug-addict penal legion who was experiencing withdrawal…

…

…oh. “Oh, frak. He’s chem-dependent.”

“...chem-dependent?” Blackjack glanced up at me, her expression caught between terror and hope. It was an expression I’d seen plenty of times before, an expression whose meaning basically boiled down to “I don’t have a single frakking clue what’s happening, thank the Emperor you do!” Some things never change, do they?10

“It’s something that happens to habitual chem users,” I explained. “In a nutshell, chems do what they do by forcing parts of the body to temporarily function in ways they weren’t meant to. Use a chem enough, and your brain chemistry starts to adjust to the changes it induces, which leads to withdrawal symptoms when the chem runs its course and the body is left operating around the effects of a chem that’s worn off. And if you use the wrong sort of chem long enough, you can get to the point where your body literally doesn’t know how to function without it, and the withdrawal symptoms become lethal.”

“...whuh?”

I sighed. Apparently, she’d never been educated on the risks associated with out-of-control chem usage. “In layman’s terms, if you use certain chems too much, you can get to the point where if you stop getting regular doses of those chems, you die. And based on how he’s looking right now, P-21’s been getting shots of some kind of powerful opioid at least once a day. Maybe even more frequently than that, depending on how reckless the ponies in Stable 99 were with their usage of chems on him. If we don’t get our hands on a few doses of whatever he was getting in your stable, he’s probably going to die.”

Blackjack stared at me, taking a moment to process the info. “The very thing he’s been taking that’s made him this way could kill him if he stops taking it?!”

“Yes.” I responded. “Which means if we want him to survive, we should start looking for a dose of whatever he’s been getting in the stable. Now.”

Blackjack nodded as I spun around, heading toward the Taurox’s driver seat. “Got it. I’ll search the truck for Med-X…”

I didn’t catch the rest of what Blackjack was saying; my mind was too busy trying to figure out how the frak what I was seeing was possible. “...you have got to be kidding me…”

“No Med-X in…” Blackjack fell silent as she charged into the Taurox’s cockpit, her pupils and irises somehow shrinking to the size of pinpricks as she beheld the flagrant violation of euclidean geometry that sat before us.

Right outside the Taurox’s front windshield, in the space once occupied by nothing but flat ground and empty air, was a massive, vaguely rectangular building, it’s shape all too familiar. Almost as if the structure was actively trying to shove it’s identity in my face, a shower of sparks erupted from the exact same busted panel on the exact same side of the building, the brief light illuminating the “Fluttershy Medical Research Center” sign once again.

I glanced back toward where the stumps that my chainsword had reduced the dead trees to had been. Sure enough, they were still there; the Taurox hadn’t moved an inch.

In hindsight, I really shouldn’t have been surprised; this was a Daemon World, after all. Sure, a Daemon World that has waited until this exact moment to toss all laws of causality and physics right out the window, but a Daemon World none-the-less.11

“The sign says it’s a Medical Research Center…” Blackjack commented, and I stole a look at her.

“In my experience, if something looks too good to be true, it’s almost certainly exactly that, and then some. A hundred times over.” I shot back, hoping to nip the thought I thought she was having in the bud before it took root.

“Yeah, and even I can tell that this is too good to be true. I may be an idiot, but I’m not that much of an idiot.”12 Blackjack admitted. “But it’s not like we can just hop down to the Stable Infirmiary and ask for a couple Med-X syringes. This place might be the only place where we’ll be able to find some, and if we pass it up and it moves again while we’re gone…”

I was tempted to just ignore Blackjack, spin the Taurox around, and power away at maximum speed. My hooves were itching so badly they almost hurt, and it was pretty obvious where that sensation was coming from. And even if they weren’t, this place was screaming “I’M A TRAP!” so loud even Blackjack could tell that going inside might be a bad idea, to say nothing of the fact that it teleported in front of us after we’d ditched it for being way to creepy, right when we desperately needed something it might just have on offer.

But then again… Blackjack did have a point. P-21 needed a dose of this ‘Med-X’ stuff, and the Medical Reseach Center was the best place to find one. And if we passed it up, and P-21 died because of it… I didn’t think Blackjack would forgive me. I’d thought wrong, of course, but I didn’t know that at the time.

“Fine.” I muttered, turning and heading for the Taurox’s back doors. Call me a heretic, but the thought of Blackjack abandoning me and leaving me without any company—even xeno company—on this Daemon World terrified me far more than the thought of going inside the Medical Research Center did.

Apparently some of my trepidation had crept into my voice. Blackjack sidled up to me, pressing herself into my side in an attempt to comfort me. “Relax. It’s just a creepy building that teleports. How bad could it be?”

*** *** ***

The double front doors opened with a screech at Blackjack’s hoof, and the alabaster unicorn promptly stumbled backward, gagging on the coppery stench that billowed out from beyond.

A hallway stretched out before us, illuminated by light fixtures that glowed an unnatural shade of green, the color calling to mind the nightmare I had last night. The hallway ended in a T-intersection, and on the intersection’s singular wall, in flaking letters painted jet black by the unnatural green light, four words had been written as if by a paintbrush; ‘The Mechanism Must Endure’. The coppery stench and the equally-black stains splattered all around the message left absolutely no doubt in my mind as to precisely what sort of ‘paint’ the writer had used.

“You were saying?” I asked, attempting to distract myself from the disturbing sight.

LEVEL UP!

New Perk Added: Inspirational — You’re charming, charismatic, and possessed of a magnetic personality, whether you like it or not! Any allies in your presence deal 20% more damage while taking 20% less damage. Also, weirdly enough, your allies cannot hurt you unless they are actively trying to do so; stray friendly fire never seems to do any harm to you outside of superficial scratches and harmless scorch marks.

Level 6, +11 to base Special

SPECIAL Stats
Strength: 4
Perception: 5
Endurance: 3
Charisma: 8
Intelligence: 4
Agility: 5
Luck: 10

1: Normally, Inquisition operatives don’t even touch wargear used by Chaos Cultists, due to the risk of Chaos Corruption. In the event that repurposing such wargear becomes essential for survival and/or mission success, however, the procedures for doing so are impressively similar to Cain’s approach to repurposing the Taurox. They're not a perfect match; we're supposed to replace symbols of chaos with the Imperial Aquilla, not a piece of “crude graffiti”, but then again it often doesn’t occur to most commissars and coronels to strip equipment reclaimed from a Chaos Cult of chaos-related iconography.

2: Not that certain corners of the Imperium are much better…

3: To elaborate further on this comment, there are three common subspecies of ponies: unicorns, which possess the ability to use their horn to actively alter reality the way a trained Primaris psyker can, pegasi, which can fly, and earth ponies, which have neither but compensate with above-average physical capabilities. An ‘alicorn’ is a very rare fourth subspecies that has the abilities of all three, on top of usually being given a leadership position of some kind by other ponies.

4: About time…

5: While the engines of the vast majority of Imperial Guard Vehicles were designed to run on promethium, they can run on pretty much anything flammable in emergency situations, including firewood from chopped-down trees. The Techpriests on Mars still haven’t figured out how they do that.

6: Ciaphas is mistaken here. Putting aside the fact that several brief conversations and a singular drunken fling in the aftermath of the Gravalax incident do not an engagement make, I’d never dream of killing him over something as petty as sleeping with someone else, even if we were married… though the look intense enough to wither an Astartes’ bones I’d give him, my raised eyebrow to end all raised eyebrows, and the exterminatus-grade sigh I’d unleash upon learning of what he’d done might just cause him to have a heart attack anyway.

7: Cain was always significantly taller and stronger than average, and his transformation into a pony did not change that. His alicorn body is a good head taller than most ponies even without considering the horn, and has musculature to match its size. I’ve heard other ponies compare his stature to that of a certain pre-war pony by the name of ‘Big Macintosh’ once or twice…

8: Ciaphas Cain is correct on both points here, unfortunately…

9: As stated earlier, humans ‘ponified’ like Ciaphas Cain are still human in mind and quite possibly soul as well, if not body.

10: Nope!

11: As spaces deeply entangled with the Warp, Daemon Worlds are under no obligation to adhere to the laws of physics, causality, or basic common sense.

12: I believe the technical term for individuals like Blackjack is ‘Idiot Savant’.

Author's Note

Another chapter goes up, and Ciaphas makes headway towards an issue it takes Blackjack 8 more chapters to notice in the original Project Horizons. Though another issue with a solution that isn't so readily available rears its head 36 Chapters ahead of schedule, and as the nightmare indicates, Ciaphas has issues of his own he'll have to grapple with...