Today was a day in the life of the Pinnacle of Pony Achievement, Comet Kicker!

I missed a session during my walkabout, but on the upshot it had been primarily memory orb adventures. Apparently Cirrus Kicker, a distant relative of Comet's, was palling around with the Priestess before the world ended. May become relevant later, I don't know.

We'd just rocked up at Petraville, which was an incredibly well-armed griffon fort that was doing plenty well at keeping the area surrounding free of hatecrystals. While we were there, we met up with an old acquaintance of the party's, before my time - Mania, the earth pony doctor, who was exceedingly evasive about if she was an actual doctor. Now, I'm not a pony to judge another's medical qualifications, but when Fasanoma decided to offer her services as a medic to the town during her spare time she got a line out the door instantly.

Anyway, Mania was pretty generous as wasteland psychopaths went, and she happily furnished us with twenty "megadrugs" ("what do they do?" "I'll let you have them for free if you find out the answer to that question for me!") and a portable x-ray machine that'll hopefully be a useful alternative to surprise elective surgery on local power figures. Comet Kicker then had a deep and involved conversation with Mania on combat drugs and proper dosages (to justify a purchase of the Chem Resistant perk).

See, mechanically Comet Kicker's more or less hit her peak. She's never going to get better at damage output than she is now - anything from this point onwards is going to be making her skillset broader rather than taller. However, because I'm a game system theorist I identified that the best way to enhance my potential was to increase my training with combat drugs, which can enhance my survivability drastically in ways that I wouldn't be able to achieve otherwise.

Or, as Poppyfields summarised: "So, because you've reached the limits of your natural ability you turned to illegal drugs to push yourself further? Just like a real athlete I guess."

Anyway, later Poppyfields made a killing by using her powers of INFINITE CLEAN WATER to sell hot baths to the townsfolk and made a bundle. It was a good evening.

*

So following this we started heading south to finally get to the Ministry of Awesome base. It's a super long walk so we went from town to town to make sure everypony on our way there was holding up fine. We had a montage of fight scenes toppling evil crystal monoliths and saving townsfolk.

And then we arrived at a lumberyard that was infested with evil hatecrystals. A dozen ponies were trapped inside these hatecrystals in crystalline cocoons, the life being drained out of them by evil necromantic magic! However, Comet Kicker quite reasonably assumed that a giant fight was likely to happen here and while everypony else was poking around with the trapped ponies, she was rigging the place with C4 just in case.

Sure enough, just after we'd cut one pony out of the crystal shell, the lumberyard exploded and something emerged - a two storey high animate statue of King Sombra.

"You know, this is creepy," said Comet Kicker. "If it was, like, a giant spider or wasp or something I'd be so over that. But this is weird because it's a giant pony. Something about that just doesn't sit right with me."

"JUST BLOW IT UP!" screamed Fasanoma.

"Oh, okay," said Comet, coming to and setting off her C4. Damn near blows the bastard's head off, but it kept coming and combat was joined.

Comet Kicker immediately decided to open by hitting herself with a Megadrug. How these things work is that the GM rolls a bunch of times on the 'random drugs' table and gives us those effects. Comet Kicker got Party Time Mint-Als, Med-X and Rage. This gave Comet Kicker an intelligence of 10 (normal max is 10, so that's 'super genius' level) charisma of fifteen. So she's semi-divine, beyond intelligent, immune to pain and psychotically angry.

However, as Comet Kicker started bringing the lightning and Poppyfields' scintillating Arcane Knives tore into it we noticed something terrible happening - the captured slaves were having their life force torn from them and used to regenerate the monster. Poppyfields, showing her usual insane approach to magic science, tried to grab the evil necromantic tendrils with her telekinisis to see what happened. Turns out that she managed to stop it, but she got a brainful of horrible despair nightmare.

Comet, who's brain was running at a billion cycles a second, figured that she needed a way to one-shot the giant Sombra golem before it drained the rest of it's slaves. Fortunately, super genius helps with this - she flew down into one of the lumberyard sheds, activated the huge rusting industrial saw, and then flew up above it and launched a scathing critique of King Sombra's socioeconomic model and empire building skills. Successfully baited, the abomination charged right at her.

And then Comet and Poppyfields focused fire on it's leg right as it was above the sawhouse. The limb blew out, it fell face-first into the saw, and was basically instantly destroyed in the process. Killing with mentats!

*

After the battle, we performed a bunch of experimental surgery with the surviving captives, replicating more-or-less the process we'd performed on Rock to remove the hatecrystals from their hearts by using the soul-sucking stone Solid Steel had given us. In the process we discovered that if there was an exposed soul in the vicinity of the soul stone it sucked it in and ate it. Bad news. But we managed to save about half of the dozen captives, so we did pretty well.

However, in the process the unicorns had an insightful discussion with supergenius Comet Kicker about the principles of necromancy and learned enough from the process to begin taking Necromancy perks. Comet Kicker then immediately crashed off her Mentats - "I'm - I'm not - aw. Aw. I was just getting to like being smart. I... guess I'll go fly around really fast, I think I used to like that for some reason."

So, that's us! Poppyfields, embarking down the path of necromancy, Comet Kicker down the path of drug abuse, and Rock Solid down the path of unnecessary cybersurgery. We're the best heroes ever!