Lord of the Foals[Closed]

Starry was bombarded by the spines. She wasn't expecting to get off easy, and while it did hurt, it was nothing compared to having your stomach pierced by a massive drill and having your innards scrambled. That thing still gave her nightmares.

The point is, Starry had dealt with worse pain, and could certainly deal with this. She was also fairly well trained in basic nursing, and knew that the proper response to deal with a barbed hook or spine was not to yank it out carefully! Starry grasped the spines with her magic, and snapped off the tips so that they couldn't accidentally be pushed deeper. Starry would do some basic surgery later to remove the barbs, when she had the necessary surgical tools.

Starry wanted to get over to the terminals and figure out what was going on, or more appropriately, ask what Sky, Arc and Jasmine were doing in the reactor, but what seemed more immediately concerning was Sky about to aggravate Jasmine's wound.

"No! Sky! Wait!" Starry interrupted, dashing between her and Jasmine. "You're not supposed to just pull barbs out of flesh, you need some light surgery to remove them without causing additional damage! For now, we should all just snap off the tips. We can remove the spines later."

Sky looked at Starry Stumped, what was she talking about? But for Starry's sake, She would rather not ask whats it about and leave the situation alone. "Umm alright starry? I'll just go help out Arc with what he is doing." Sky said as she ran off to Arc's location in the reactor, to see is he needed further assistance.

"need any help or are you good?" Sky asked Arc in the room, Still tried to be helpful when she was only good at killing stuff.

Tears flooded Jasmine's eyes, her face underneath her coat started to turn white at the mention of light surgery.

"You're going to amputate my leg?! Noooo". Jasmine turned hysterical as she clutched her wounded hoof. "Thky, don't let Thtarry take my leg!" Jasmine began to try and crawl away out of the corner.

While he stung pretty bad from the multiple spines stuck in him, Shutter would have been thinking more about everything that had happened...Bloatsprites in the Stable? Sure, the occasional Radroach was nothing surprising, those things can get into anywhere. But a Bloatsprite infestation like this? Things only seemed to be getting worse...who knew what other surprises littered the Stable?
However, he was broken out of his thinking by Jasmine's screaming about the small spine in her hoof, and that screaming getting even louder when Starry mentioned surgery.

"Jasmine! Calm down! Do you really think Starry is going to cut off your leg?!"

He said sternly, as he trotted over to the mare, taking the time to brush and snap off his own spines, at Starry's suggestion.

"Those were just Bloatsprites. No big threat, and those spines are pretty harmless so long as they don't catch you in a vulnerable spot. They sure don't require amputation...it's more like how you dig out a splinter..."

Violet frowned when Jack’s next announcement came over the intercom. Sundae was one of the other foals she actually didn’t have a desire to distill death to, blunt force trauma or otherwise. The other pony she didn’t know or care about, however given his name (Who names their foal ‘Trigger Happy’ anyway?) she doubted he...or she, was a sweet pony.

Regardless, she was actually a bit worried, from what she saw Sundae is pretty much the only nice foal in the entire stable, if naive. She’d need to find out what happened to her, and pray that she didn’t get murdered by a misguided adult.

That would have to wait though, they had two major things to deal with first. One being the injured and wounded ponies sprawled out all over the meeting room. Suffice to say they were a slightly higher priority.

“Oh! That’s a lot of injured ponies! Quick, give me those!”

Violet quickly took the medical supplies Lightning wasn’t using on his parents. Glowing eyes scanning the room, she quickly identified the ponies needing the most medical attention and put her skills to work, pouring potion down their throats and helping it down, along with giving med-x to those in obvious pain. She didn’t have many supplies though, so there wasn’t much she could do. She even used up the last of her own supplies, a paltry few potions and syringes of med-x. She kept the Rad-Away though, as nopony had any signs of radiation poisoning and wouldn’t need them.

In fact, she’d probably need it for the ponies at the reactor. They had a much higher chance needing some radiation treatment once they were all done.

“Aaaalright. That should do it.” she said as she injected the last of her med-x, throwing it over her shoulder. She turned to the others. “I did all I can, and I’m pretty sure all these ponies are good. For now. They’ll need more medical attention eventually, but they aren’t going to spontaneously die anytime soon.” she glanced over at one of the worse-off ponies. “Probably. Might want to keep an eye on him though.”

She trotted over to the others, usually bright smile on her face. “So, we’re talking about killing the other foals? That’s good. I have been planning on doing that for awhile. I’m pretty good at killing mean ponies. OH! But not any like Sundae, I’m pretty sure there must be a few other nice ponies that just got wrapped up in this and don’t need to be shoved off the nearest cliff like the others...Hmm...shame there isn’t any cliffs here, that would be a fitting and easy end for Jack...Anyway, yes, lets kill most of them, especially Jack and Mean-Zebra-Lady that SOMEPONIES forgot to take with us, but not any nice ones. If there are any besides Sundae. Speaking of which, we should probably find out what happened to her. I am a bit worried about her, she seems like one of the only nice foals I’ve met here.”

Somehow, she managed to deliver all of that in a deceptively sweet tone.

Lightning could see Bakewell's hesitation and he couldn't blame her. She had probably just heard what his father told him. Kill the foals...the question was, could he really do that? Is he really justified to order death over these foals? The pegasus would look over at Violet as she expressed her desire to...kill most of the foals. The pegasus sighed slightly and motioned silently to the two to follow them out to the hall. He would turn back for only a second and say, "Just hang on, Dad...we're going to stop them and I promise...I'll come back for you..."

Lightning quickly walked out of the room and began heading down the hallway. He would wait until the mare and the filly were following him down before speaking. "Violet, I appreciate your enthusiasm...but we're not going to kill the foals. Not these foals at least. I know my father asked me to kill them but...I don't have the right to call for the death of these ponies just as much as Jack does. If there is a way you can stop them without killing them, do it. But, I won't take killing out as an option. If you feel that you have to do it in order to save yourself or each other...then...do it." The blue pegasus would then draw out his 10mm pistol and turn around suddenly, handing it over to Bakewell. "Take it. Just in case. Try to hit non-vital areas of the body such as the hoof, leg, or shoulder. Hopefully, with a little pain, they'll surrender."

Arc studied the dials and control lights of the reactor, oblivious to the world around him. The readings were in the red, most of them, but since he doubted that anyone here even knew how to calibrate those sensors, they were more of a pointers to the situation that actual reports. His concentration broke when Sky asked him something. He turned his head her way and hissed when the muscles shifting his neck let out a pain. Looking down, his coat there was turning darker and more into crimson colour.

"Oh dear, those things must have done more damage that I though. Anyway, sorry Sky, what were you asking?"

"Yeah!" Starry agreed with Shutter, "Just like a splinter! Don't worry, we'll just- uh oh." Starry couldn't finish her sentence, as suddenly, the alarm sounded in the reactor room, and the lights began flashing red.

"I've got no idea what the alarm means, but it can't be good!" Starry exclaimed, as she darted toward a terminal to check what was going on, and apply her expertise toward fixing it. "Jasmine, find a terminal, we're gonna need every brilliant mind we have right now!"

Sky sighed as she was asked by Arc, to distracted by the reactor to remember her offer for help. But yeah he would remember it after he was done examining the reactor, leaving her to repeat her question.

"I was asking if you need any help with anything, if you need it?" Sky asked to Arc, as she tried to be as helpful as before.

The lights started to blink even more vigorously and the dials seemed to have a stroke. Every damned alarm apparently went off at the same moment.

Oh horseapples.

"Ok Sky, please, please, please don't take this badly, but just go to the door and guard them from any incursions, it's going to get hectic around here and anypony who's not helping with the reactor is going to only hinder us. Sorry."

Arc turned back to the console with dials and lights.

"Allright Starry, what's the plan? Seems we have few minutes before the steam goes over the pressure the system can still contain. I think we could get it down if the cooling system has still some kicking in it, or we can vent it!"

Bakewell bit down on the gun with her mouth, silently accepting the instrument of murder from Flash. The mare knew almost nothing about proper handling or maintaining of guns but even so the few times the cook had ever fired a weapon at somepony ended in killing the targets. Hopefully this time the shots would be less fatal.

She was relieved that the buck was against murdering the foals, but her concern was scarcely lifted before being dropped right back onto her. Violet was in favor of murdering the foals. The tales and mental images of slavers and raiders that Violet had fed Bakewell back in the Mohoofe suddenly came crashing back to the front of the mare’s mind. The older pony had claimed that no pony, not even scum like slavers, deserved to die by Violet’s obscenely cruel methods. She still maintained her claim and the thought of ponies she knew even slightly being removed from the world in such torturous ways disturbed her more than Flash's father's orders. That super sweet tone that Violet used only made things worse.

Bakewell’s legs had actually begun to quake slightly, but thankfully she managed to calm herself down enough to stop them. Everything would be fine. She just had to… keep an eye on Violet. Yeah. Violet wouldn’t just up and hurt her for no reason. So if Bakewell got in the way of any potential horrors, Violet would break off. Right?

Bakewell's accelerating hoofsteps began taking her towards the foals they were after.

Sky could only smile and nod to Arc, Back to guarding the others. Was just something she was good at, and being back in the stable reminded her of how good she was good at it. Sky got the hunting rifle ready, fully loaded, And walked back to the door. making sure no pony else tries to interfere and help guard the rest of the ponies here, since she was the most experienced of the bunch.

Lightning, Bakewell and Violet were dashing down the corridors toward the reactor room, when they heard the sound of gunfire erupting a few corridors ahead of them, echoing loudly off the walls of the stable. It was assault rifle fire, the type that the foals carried. As they would approach the noise, they would hear a foal begin to scream.

Turning the corner, the three would find a group of three foals, all wielding assault rifles, being attacked by a small swarm of bloatsprites. There were at least twenty of them, and they must have eaten recently, because one of them split into two before their very eyes.

There were two unicorn colts and one earth pony filly, all of them younger than ten. The filly was named 'Lemon Drop', she was a yellow-coat, blue-maned filly who's mother had worked in the kitchens with Bakewell, before she died in the violence. The two colts were brothers, 'Moon Beam' and 'Moon Shine'. The two were minor magical prodigies, and even at their young age had already learned to levitate objects, such as their weapons. Moon Shine already had a cutie mark. It was quite an uproar when he got it, a keg of moonshine, after sipping some alcohol out of Hotrod's cup. Moon Shine's parents never spoke to Hotrod again, and he was actually reprimanded for drinking on the job. The Moon twins both had purple coats and dark-blue manes.

The foals looked to be in pretty bad shape. There was a stark absence of bloatsprite corpses on the floor, and the foals had blood trickling all across their bodies, a result of the many spines had stung them. One of the spines had hit Moon Beam in the eye. There was blood pouring from between his shut eyelids, as he tried shooting with only one eye.

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Starry and Arc both tapped away at the terminals, trying to assess the situation and get things under control. Arc clearly knew what he was doing, and while Starry hadn't worked on the reactor before, both of them were knowledgeable enough to get an accurate assessment of the reactor's condition.

The reactor was, evidently, on course for another surge. A quick readout of the magical safeguards would reveal that the arcane defenses would not hold back such an event again. Evidently, there had been several surges in the past, and the arcane failsafe had been intended as a last resort measure, it was never meant to withstand repeated meltdown. The next time the reactor overheated, which it was on course to any hour, a lethal dose of radiation would break through the arcane safeguard and flood the stable, presumably killing or ghoulifying everypony instantly.

The two worked quickly to asses their options. Obviously, they would want to turn the cooling rods back on, but those wouldn't work with the reactor at it's current temperature. They really only had two reliable options in the meantime.

The first option was to vent massive quantities of radiation into the atmosphere surrounding the stable. That would essentially kill everything within an hour's trot from the stable, which wasn't shielded with either rad-x or some sort of radiation suit. Worst of all, though, the radiation would be permanent. While the radiation would not leak into the stable(which was designed to keep out radiation), there would always be a thick cloud of radiation outside. The stable would be safe, but any sort of evacuation would be out of the question. There was not enough rad-x to distribute to all the stable's residents, few aside from the recent arrivals would be able to escape.

The second option would be to slowly vent the radiation into the stable itself. While it certainly didn't sound appealing, the effects of radiation poisoning wouldn't begin to appear for at least several days, though the radiation level would slowly rise, until after maybe a week the entire stable would contain lethal doses of radiation. That would give the residents enough time to evacuate the stable, but nopony would be able to return.

Violet gazed at the fight with her glowing silver eyes, she could easily tell the foals were getting pretty beat up. Nothing major yet, mostly cuts and stings from the sprites, with the worst being one of the purple unicorns that got hit in the eye. He’d probably never see out of that one again, if he survived this.

The question was, would they let them survive this? Right now would be the perfect time to attack, hit them when they were distracted or vulnerable. They could even just take their weapons and leave them to get torn apart by the bloatsprites. But should they? Violet hadn’t met these foals yet, and she had no idea if they were the really mean ones here that deserved death-by-bulkhead, or ones who just followed Jack because they simply had no other choice. She would really prefer to just kill the former.

“Hey, you two know these foals are?” she whispered to Lightning and Bakewell. “Are they the kind who would get really mean when hooved an Assault Carbine? Would be nice to know, wouldn’t want to smash somepony’s head in if they didn’t deserve it.”

Sitting among the blinking lights and dials slowly leaving sane numbers, Arc reached his decision on what to do now.

"Starry! We have to vent it inside, I'm sure as fuck not staying here, we have to let it went here as slowly as we can allow and get to digging, we don't even know how long the reactor will survive before another tantrum! I'm voting for venting it inside!"

Jasmine meanwhile flew over put the cooling system back online. Sure she was badly injured, but she tried to suck up the pain and help her team. At first she couldn't remember the steps to interact with the controls properly. However after repeating the procedures her memory began to kick in after her final attempt she was under the impression that she had set it correctly. Thank the gods her sister and Arc were there. Two more brilliant minds would make the responses to the reactor much faster.

"Ok guyth, I think that the cooling thythtem should be back on. That's. Less power for the rest of the thtable, but venting the reactor tho often can get quite botherthome. Anywayth I'm under the imprethhion that after we lower the futhion chamber prethhure thith minor malfunction will be corrected!

Jasmine watched the cooling system waiting for it to roar to life.

(Int 4, Science 40, Luck 5...Luck 5...Luck 5)

Starry could barely cope with what she was hearing. Stable 113 was their home, she couldn't possibly force everypony in the stable to give up their home. "Wh-what?! Arc, this is our home! We can't abandon Stable 113! We've gotta vent the radiation outside the stable. Sure, we won't be able to escape with everypony else, but if we can end Jack's reign of terror, then we won't have to! I'm sure we could scrounge up enough rad-x or radiation suits after this is over to make our own personal escape, anyway."

Lightning tensed up as he heard the sound of gunfire echo through the halls. This is not good. Hopefully, they weren't too late yet. However, when they arrived, they saw the foals not shooting at their friends but at bloatflies. And alot of them. The foals were young. Very young. And they appeared to be losing the battle badly. He could hear Violet inquire about the foals and he knew that the two were waiting for his command. The pegasus knew that he could easily leave them to their fate and have them get killed by the bloatflies. Or he could rush in to their rescue and hopefully convince them that they weren't as bad as Jack were making them sound.

Lightning let out a light sigh and he knew that he couldn't just leave these foals fighting alone like this. In one swift motion, his SMG would be up and ready in his mouth, "Bakewell, Violet, let's take the bloatflies down. Help the foals but keep your eye on them...let's try to get them to see our side of the story. Let's move!" His wings would unfold from his body as he leaped out from the corner, using his wings to speed quickly to the foals and firing his SMG at the bloatflies at the same time.

(Guns 80, 10mm SMG, Trigger Discipline, Firing at three bloatflies, AP 9)

"And just leave the others here? Yeah, it was our home, but now it's dead, we have another one, we MADE another one! Look at the bloody reactor Starry! That there "he pointed his hoof " is the heart of the Stable. Not Overmare, not her office, THIS is where the Stable lives and dies, and what I see is something beyond reapair or saving, we might deal with this surge, but what about another one, will you stay here to service it? And even if you will, this thing has half the systems dead or unstable, it won't survive for long anyway."

Arc took a deep breath.

"113 is over Starry, not today maybe, but soon."

"But we can keep the reactor stable, this time! It doesn't have to malfunction again, it hasn't malfunctioned for over two hundred years, and we can keep it from doing so again!" Starry glanced back at Jasmine, Sky and Shutter.

"Come on, guys, back me up here!" she asked, trying to get input from the others.

"Do you realize why it got unstable in the first place? There is noone here who can oparate that thing, not anymore, since both of us are going to return back home, you said it yourself. I do not understand why we, if we plan to leave, should impose this place onto others without their consent. If we vent it outside, we'll be lucky to leave, but they'll be trapped here forever with noone to keep the reactor stable or preventing another incident happening again. It just isn't fair to them Starry Night."

Bakewell heard Violet’s question, but didn’t answer it. Her time at the stable hadn’t been spent getting to know everypony perfectly. The mare had no idea how these foals would react to anything! Somewhere deep down a part of her hoped that at the very least Lemon Drop would be safe and willing to talk things out; the yellow foal had a slightly thicker connection to Bakewell than the Moon brothers and the beige earth pony had already lost what felt like oh so much from her past.

It was a really good thing that Flash decided to help, because Bakewell had turned the corner and entered S.A.T.s before the buck had even started his sentence. There were familiar wounded ponies in front of her, so she was going to try to save them. It didn’t take commands, it didn’t take careful planning, it didn’t even take conscious thought. Here was the problem. Here was how she was going to fix it.

The mare pulled the trigger upon Flash’s 10mm and winced slightly from the unfamiliar recoil of the weapon as it jerked within her mouth with each fired shot. Various numbers spread across her vision with statistics and percentages but she paid them no mind. They didn’t matter. All that mattered was trying.

(Guns 20. Luck 6. 1 AP- Aim. 6 AP- Fire six bullets from 10mm pistol at Bloatsprite, swapping targets if current target dies.)

Sky stared on as the two began to argue, Arc being the voice of reason. But Starry being one of her best friends, Arc was right. This place is dead, nothing more that stop it or save it. Sky sighed and looked over to Starry and Arc,

"Starry im sorry but, Arc is right. This place cant be saved, its better to save whos left and leave for home. Our home, the one we built, Stableton."

Sky said as she looked away and to the ground, She felt bad about doing that to Starry. But it was the only way to make sense in a time like this, no else could save the stable if it failed again.

Shutter was quiet for a moment, as he thought. It was a hard choice, but after a few moments...he was pretty sure he knew what they had to do.

"...As much as it pains me to say this...We need to vent it inside the stable, Starry..."

He said slowly, like it was hard for him to force the words out.

"Even if we stop Jack and escaped...then what? Let the Stable continue on with the few residents it has left? If we vented it outside, then We have doomed everyone that lives here, or would ever be born here to a metal prison...the supplies can't last, eventually the residents would be forced to inbreed... I can't do that to them, Starry."

Slowly, he trotted over to Starry's side, and rested a comforting hoof on her shoulder.

"Stable 113 WAS our home...but that was practically a lifetime ago. None of us here are the same pony that escaped the stable the first time, and chances are, none of the residents still living here are the same either, after the horrors they've had to endure themselves...all this place is anymore is a den of nightmarish memories..."

With that, he turned back to the others.

"If we vent inside the Stable, then we won't have much time. Jack won't take kindly to us trying to evacuate his 'citizens', and chances are he won't listen to reason either...but we can't stay here long with the radiation either...I'd say we need to wrap this all up before tomorrow ends, if we want to get everyone out of here unharmed. Might not be a bad idea to loot as much Rad medication from the supplies as we can too before we head out, to help those who seem to be suffering slight radiation poisoning.

Fortunately...I might have a plan...but we need to get everyone together first...does anyone have an idea where flash and the others are?"

Violet turned towards the bloatsprites. Seemed the plan was to help the foals for now, and see what happened after the sprites were squished. She was fine with this, if they showed that they were mean ‘Shoot Ponies for Fun’ ponies, she’d squish their heads next. Or smash them against stuff at least.

Grinning, Violet started targeting the sprites with her magic as her horn started to glow. Magic flaring, she started squishing the sprites one after another, hopefully reducing several to crushed blobs of ichor laying on the floor.

[Magic 50, AP 9, squish as many bloatsprites as possible]