Fallout Equestria: Medicine & Mail

Prologue

“Your word is all you have.

Don’t pry, it’s bad for business.

And perhaps most importantly, always play close to the vest.

The caravan survives because of these laws.”

There is a growing sentiment along the trade routes—the kind of thing a traveling pony can take to heart and find some measure of comfort in. Supposedly it started to the east, all the way out in Hoofington, this idea of trade being able to save the Wasteland. Of course, there are many out there who disagree. An ideal doesn’t put caps in the bag and food in the belly, after all.

Some caravans are perfectly willing to sell you your mother’s family heirloom, right after scavenging it off her corpse. Hell, they’d probably even sell you into slavery if they could get away with it.

My name’s Bit Flip, by the way. I’d say pleased to make your acquaintance, but I’m kind of staring down the barrel of a botched negotiation. And besides, a proper story’s supposed to start at the beginning.

Names and cutie marks have a strange tendency to be prophetic in some ways, but just as often they turn out to be completely against what is expected. Those are the kind of connections that a pony never really figures out until they happen upon their talent. Luckily as young fillies and colts we were, in a way, guided towards our cutie mark. While I can’t always say the caravan had the most altruistic of reasons, we were all trained to effectively barter and bargain in the Wasteland regardless of what part of the caravan we were from or where we wanted to end up.

They always taught us that trading in the Wasteland was two parts skill and one part luck, so you can imagine their surprise when my first deal was two parts luck and one part skill. I swear you could almost hear the collective groan across the Marejave when I got the twin coin cutie mark to match.

I’m just glad they didn’t try to rename me something like Coin Toss.

Our small caravan mostly worked the trade and courier routes, either contracted out through the Carmine Convoy Company or working freelance, running deliveries. To that end we were led to believe that scavenging and Stable looting was beneath us. Well, most of us anyway. My mother, having not been born into the caravan, had a different opinion on the matter. My father tried to do right by me by impressing upon the dangers that existed outside the routes whenever her stories of beyond the clouds came up, but he was just an earth pony that didn’t know anything beyond the caravan, not that I could ever hold it against him. Honestly, I couldn’t blame her if she missed it. It sounded right cozy up there without all the dust storms and desert heat, but I wasn’t so naïve in my age that I couldn’t hazard a guess at her reason to come down here, and I never pressed the issue.

The reality is that the trade and courier business was just the safest path out here in the desert, but when you grow up in the caravan life hearing tales of places beyond our meager existence, it tends to leave a lasting impression.

It’s because of those stories that I took to the courier side of the business in the first place.