Fallout Equestria: Begin Again

Fallout Equestria: Begin Again

Chapter 3: Sinnerman

“If you aren’t getting your hands dirty, you aren’t making a difference. Welcome to the World.”

|*|          Blaspheme Quarantine           |*|

Terrible sounds came spilling out of the spaces between their misshapen teeth, as the creatures sang a song of chewed words and swallowed harmonies, like a choir with its mouth full. I hadn’t taken a dozen steps into the seamy underbelly of Equestria before stumbling onto these overgrown maggots, and the sight of them would have been enough to send me running back into the arms of the night, had the fleshy, naked denizens of the subway paid me any attention. But they could only eat, all pushing up against the corpse like surgeons around a body turned inside out, making a meal of it under the same sterile light.

After staring for a while, watching as the dirty corpse was carved into so many pieces between them, I couldn't help thinking that it might still be saved. The dead buck had clearly tried to fight these small, mammalian beasts away, as a bloody baseball bat rocked itself from side to side within a broken circle of limp, pink mounds. As if I had to finish his fight, as if he could still win, I swept up the hickory cudgel, and stepped into the ring with a cry that was more likely to have come from a baby than a barbarian.

My first swing caught one of the rats from the belly up, and even as the little horror started to tear at the bat in a mad panic, I dashed it against the metro wall, and a left a stain over the face of an otherwise gleeful filly, stealing away the joy that she had found in her freshly opened box of Fancy Foal's Snack Cakes. My Pipbuck had counted them off with white bars, but its screen was soon streaked as if I had been crushing berries underhoof, as an octet of beady eyes turned to glare at me over gaping, wet lips.

Their little claws dug into a carpeting of flyers, metro tickets and worn out advertisements, and a trail of blood followed them in wild splotches, as if paper faces could bleed.

The closest of them, who might have passed for a grub, had me skipping over my hooves in a girlish panic. I arced the bat down ahead of me, already cringing, and followed the sound of the rodent's hissing more than I did the sight of its nearly hairless body. As I shut my eyes, and lifted a hoof daintily across my chest, there was a wet splat, and I knew that it had burst: its hide broken like the mantle of a mollusk.

Soon enough, I felt something cold pressing into my flank, and looked back to see a bin set between two bathrooms, over which a mare and a buck stood like a faceless king and his silhouette queen. I let the steel silo of bunched up newspaper and ticket stubs topple to its side, as I batted the third rodent away with limp swings. I was shivering - as I imagined rounded red teeth pressing into me, as filthy, fat bellies rubbed up against my legs - and the baseball bat bobbed in my magic, like ice in children’s champagne.

After dancing back into the ladies' room, I swung the buck’s weapon forward like a battering ram, and slammed the emerald door shut, hoping to hammer in their already blunted snouts. It caught the fourth creature when it closed, and split its body in two like it was a stick of warm butter, leaving me to watch as stubby front legs clawed at the air, and a naked heart painted the tiles red.

I could hear the last rodent clawing at the steel frame between us, and after shutting the squealing foal inside me into her own little filly's room, I helped her turn our panic on its head, and threw myself towards the door, like a mare charging into the orange mouth of a burning building.

The rat seemed a little startled, but I wasted no time before lining up my third strike. The bat came plowing through the mote-dappled air with all the violence that I could cast into it, only to turn up under the neck of our hapless victim. It struck the life out of that naked rodent, and sent a carcass whirling off towards the far wall, which it met with a satisfyingly wet slap, like a trophy fish against a dock.

When my breaths became even, and the walls stopped bleeding, I turned to the bathroom and ducked back into it in search of water, with the baseball bat quivering at my side like a divining rod.

I couldn't hope to wash away all their thick, stagnant blood, but I could tear down the posters that I had spoiled, and bunch them up into crumpled red balls. I could run irradiated water over my inherited cudgel, as if that would make up for the ruin that was left of its old master.

I tore down the cleanest sheet of paper I could find, and used it to cover his swollen, and still so hollow, face. I couldn't make him clean, or put him back together again, unless I were to burn his scattered pieces and sweep them into a single pile of ash. But that too, was beyond me. As even though my magic would hunch over me, with the weight of the darkness of its back, I'd never taught it to play with fire.

                                                               ***                ***             ***

After one last light, which enflamed all my colors as I passed through it, the passage opened out to a tunnel that might have been left behind by an immense worm, burrowing between either pole of a concrete planet. A crosshatched pattern ran along the ceiling, though it was broken up by more than a few pillars of moonlight, which looked to have punched their way through both soil and storm.

Escalators, which had been demoted to stairs by some irreparable motor malfunction, tied the platform that had taken me in to a dissected terminal below. Cluttered railway lines broke apart its fields of cement, and a round wound – a hole in the middle of the terminal - showed off even deeper spaces below.

The southern wall was hidden behind a pastoral mural, whose star was the white silhouette of an alicorn, skipping across a plane of sunrise gold. Her mane was streaked in the colors of a candy store, and a line of smaller figures followed, looking like children for the size of their leader. They waddled along like baby ducks, far clumsier than their mother, and though they had no faces: I knew that they were smiling.

There was no writing on the wall, and even though the air and its silvery dust had left their stains, I found myself feeling very grateful for this masterwork in undiluted patriotism. I was even tempted to salute its featureless Celestia, but instead, I hurried down the steps of the nearest dead machine, as if treating her as a Princess, so much as a Goddess, would be to forever check the box after history of mental illness?

The reason behind the chamber’s atmosphere of discord, had to be the train that lay like the skin of great snake, folded over itself along the terminal’s northern banks. I came to walk alongside it, and searched for what was left of each carriage’s colors, picking flowers after a wildfire.

I could only imagine the train in all its glory, as it rode the country’s untamed landscapes, passing by as a streak of color and steam. It might’ve visited Equestria’s greatest cities - from the capital to those bold installations that straddled the frontier – or bridged settlements like Ponyville and Appleloosa, to see the stiches of a family drawn tighter by the season, all while carrying a market and a circus on its back.

Our six most legendary heroes might even have used it to visit in with the north, to explore the empty relics of that first civilization, now hidden away behind so many masks of stone and pine.

The other set of tracks, which had been buried under a wave of pale rubble, was bare, unfilled by the noisy bustle of cars and their conductor's engines. Still, if I'd wanted to, I could have followed it north, to find the crater into which the sun had tucked itself for the night. I decided that I would walk that way, after paging through all the tunnels and terminals below me, if only so that I might catch up to the day.

There was a map, built into a fat obelisk that pierced the middle of the platform, and it shone out in different colors for every branch of the subway, for each wire across the heart of our country. It didn't make much sense to me, but I found myself easily enough, though it was mostly thanks to a bright, if overexcited, arrow that said: You are here!

Strangely enough, the blue vein that ran from east to west, only met my circuit at the next station up - where it made a cross, as if to say that this was where some great treasure could be found. And I had to wonder what, if not more railway lines, were waiting at the bottom of that second set of frozen staircases.

What might they have buried there, under in this lonely station, whose crown was made of wood, and whose hair was full of worms? Maybe this silent atlas had been wrong to so proudly have declared You are here! Maybe, despite how loudly and how brightly it had said it, I was somewhere else entirely.

                                                               ***                ***             ***

Beams of light, through which stellar clouds were stirred as sugar into a drink, cut down into the dark, bursting out in blossoms of mesh, to which rubble clung like autumn leaves to a branch, though they did little but put a shine to the rubble, making white diamonds out of concrete. Silvery, electric eyes stared down at me from the walls and the pillars that shaped these low and quiet places, almost as if winter itself had followed me like some immense animal, whose steps made no sound and left no paw prints.

I lit my horn, wishing for some heat behind the light, and made out rows of uncomfortable looking benches, some of which had buckled under the weight of concrete boulders. Another skeleton, which looked far happier than that old king in the mountains, made me jump back, startled, as my ring of gold lapped over its hollow face. More of them appeared over the edge of my light, and I crept away as if they were passengers who had fallen asleep, and would only wake for the whistle of a train.

Suitcases lay scattered around them, bleeding old country clothes across the floor, as if the Stable's vultures had taken to sticking their beaks so far under the earth, to pick at Equestria’s gut.

The southern wall was dotted by a parade of bars and newsstands, promising everything from foreign coffee to local gossip. Instead of looking for food, to fuel a body that I had almost forgotten, I followed a trail of words, as if they could be eaten clean off their pages. The world before the war might have been trying to share its secrets from beyond the veil of balefire, for the feast it had laid out for me.

Scrappy blockades of woodwork and wire broke up the terminal, all spreading out from a single restaurant that leaned against the far wall. And I wove around these brief stretched of yellowwood and barbed fencing, making my way towards a colorful magazine stand. But, to my disappointment, there was little that could be learned from the ranks of outrageous headlines, pulp magazines and soft pornography.

Princess Incest: The Bluebloods' Illicit Origins Revealed!

Shining Armor Pregnant: Magical Boosters in the Bedroom Go Awry!

King Sombra Voted Sexiest Monarch: Celestia Outraged!

The flocks of mares who, despite the lascivious names they all straddled, wore more than your average pony on their average day, were really very pretty. And I found myself wanting a mirror, if only to see if, when thrown onto a runway after the old world, I could keep the beat of the crowd’s hooves going. I was sure that I could get my mane like the Mareheat! covergirl’s, if I really put my back into it.

I was surprised, though, to see such a large number of effeminately sprawled bucks, and counted more copies of Inches than any other backshelf magazine. Homosexuality was sometimes discouraged in the Stable, though it might even be called heroic, for how often it had kept us steady. For example, it had never been more popular with the Commissary than after Niagara Foals, the great population explosion whose bulge in the birthrate had set down the groundwork for my parent's bloated generation.

I didn't know the story by heart, but from what I could remember, some kids down in maintenance had started up their own homemade birth control stand - calling it Family Depreciation Day, I think - which boasted: Contraception Guaranteed! When they were caught, it was discovered that they had simply stolen some sugar pills from the hospital, making ashes of their tickets to the new Equestria.

After making sure that there was truly nothing to gain from the other stands, I made my way over to the impoverished estate around which this near industrial hedge maze had been raised.

Circular tables lay scatted around the heart of the terminal, like so many primitive wheels, and I looked over the patched up bar, only to discover that it had once sold milkshakes. There were some cases of ammunition on one of the tables, but after sweeping up a box of shotgun shells, and counting three rounds that were already loaded into my automatic pistol, I left the rest of them be.

It was hard enough for me to imagine pulling the trigger of my pistol so many times, but with the baseball bat, the grenades and the sky devil's laser pistol, I was starting to feel like a walking armory.

A pattern of syringes had been strewn across a nearby counter, as if the ponies of this later day era would come to settle down on the tall, spinning stools and corrupt their bodies with something far more dangerous, and far harder to escape, than sugar. My Pipbuck named two of them Stimpacks, after their insignia of pink butterflies convinced me to take a closer look at them.

The liquid inside them looked so much like healing potion, that I packed them into my saddlebags, but not before making sure that I was alone, as if some tabloid journalist might have been crouching behind the counter since the before war, waiting for some poor pony that he could slap the label Junkie! over.

Over the counter of the milkshake bar, a bear trap had closed up tight around the chocolate, and now shapeless, body of a radroach, and a fine green fluid had come to stain its teeth.

After climbing over the counter, I froze up, as my light fell over the stains across the small structure's farthest wall. As they started to shine, the petals of crimson became tongues of fire; a red mushroom clouds that licked at the bar's ceiling, and stained a glossy menu and a frozen clock as it rose. Like an autumn tree, it took root, though it was not in the earth, but a crater at the end of a corpse's neck.

I felt my stomach churn, and I started to back away towards the counter. The buck lay against a checkered wall, whose pattern of black and white squares had been ruined, with a short, and crudely shorn, shotgun resting along his belly. It was aimed right at the space where - in a time that was any less cruel than this darkest hour before the dawn - his head would have been, and a string had been laced around the weapon's stock, levering the trigger to the buck's hoof in two hastily tied knots.

I threw myself out of the milkshake bar, and retched over the metro terminal's grimy floor.  But this sickness hadn't only come for the gaping hole, which was red and wet and bottomless, that had stared me down in the place of a buck. It came from knowing what he had done to himself, knowing that somepony could have thought to throw it all away.

And though shallow tears came to my eyes, for the sharp smell of my own sickness: I couldn't defend him; I couldn't fight for this khaki buck as I had for that feast before the rats. He had done this to himself. And there was nothing I could do to make up for it, to put things right, or pay his debts. And knowing that almost made me bitter, almost made me blame this headless buck for taking the easy way out.

I took his weapon. And even as my Pipbuck named it Sawed-Off Shotgun, I felt no guilt for having it cradled in my magic. I had to take it, as if it wasn't too late to stop him. As if I had to fill his body with buckshot, to punish it just as I had those pink, naked rats, as if some devil might still be pulling its strings, and had to be chased out - exorcised - in a storm of shrapnel over whispered prayers of deliverance.

Just when I had run out of places to hide, of demons to blame, I caught the light of a terminal tucked into the far corner milkshake bar. And seeing it almost made me want to laugh, like a mare stranded on a maddening island watching a spotlight roll towards her over the sea, if only because I had found my chance to justify this, to build a story behind the buck's painting on the wall.

***                ***             ***

I met a girl today. Over by the big machines. She was {~}nice to me. She {~} so beautiful.

She was blue. Her mane, her coat {~} eyes. Pale like the stars up north. Where the sky is naked.

I think I'm in love. How long has it been [love] Since any of us wiped the dust off that old word [world]?

-

I am. [ really am] But I'm afraid of it. What if she won't feel the same way?

I go to her {~} every day. Sometimes more. The clock has stopped. So I can't tell for sure.

By the time the light is flushed down to this place. I know the sun is rolling over us. And I go to her.

But {~} never changes. Not even in the dark. If anything, the night makes her brighter. [starlight]

I need to see her. I always do. I can't remember {~} food. It's like I don't need it anymore.

She is my water [my wine]. And I'm drowning in her. I'm choking on her.

But it scares me. [don't tell her]

-

She got angry {~} can't go back.

She's still so close. If it weren't for the escalator, I could still watch her. I can't sleep without seeing her.

I should tear it down. [blow it up] . Trap us here. [together] .

Can one prisoner refuse {~} forgive another?

-

I broke away from the stilted words - which would have fit the frayed edges of a threadbare scroll far better than they did the uniform of a keyboard: the marches of this whispering terminal - and looked back to their writer's corpse. I almost wanted to apologize for blaming him, for thinking he was selfish, as if he'd killed himself just to spite the world. The mind written on the wall was damaged, obsessed, it was sick.

And I could blame a sickness.

-

She's going to forgive me. [of course]

Everything {~} back to the way it was. [perfect] . I know what I did.

She has her own machines. [friends] . And I upset them. I brought violence {~} their doorstep.

The lights started spinning. She was yelling at me {~} I ran.

Home again, home again. Like the little coward that I am.

I don't deserve a mare like her.

But I won't let her go.

-

Something's wrong. The siren called them. It [You] brought them here [there].

I watched {~}. Limping, dragging themselves around her machines. I was so angry. [afraid]

They didn't find me. And they didn't find her. Thank {~}, they didn't find her. [yet]

I think I'll leave my {~} here. Maybe she'll show me around the glass [kingdom] places.

She might be angry. But we're running out of time. [the walls are folding in on themselves]

-

No! [yes] NO! [YES!] nonononooo{~}ooooo...

They found her. They took her. Oh {~}, I think they [ate] took her.

I have to go back. [ north north north ] . To the circles.

But it wasn't my fault. I didn't have my gun. What was I supposed to do?

How could they expect me to save her? She wouldn't {~} with me! She wouldn't listen!

They [You] have to understand! She wouldn't run!

-

What if {~}? What if they change her? What if they peel off her skin and pull out her hair?

What if they blow out the starlight in her eyes? [like candles]

They could [they will] make her like them... [ dead dead dead ]

-

I am a coward.

-

She was {~} good to me. She was so innocent [clean].

But I can't [won't] go after her. This whole installation is sick. Except for her.

I can't go there. Not without [keys to the kingdom] a gun. And that would make her angry {~}.

Even if I saved her. She might not want me.

But it won't be {~} long now.

I don't know what to do.

But I know what I am.

[Coward]

Coward.

-

I've been here for days [years]. I think I'm dying. {~}, I [know] think I'm really dying.

She was the only thing keeping it away. But I ran {~} and never went back.

I left her. Because I was afraid of the dead.

Soon {~} I'll be just like them. But I'm not afraid of that.

I'm not too much of a coward to die.

[Prove it]

                                                               ***                ***             ***

I set a course for the sunset, as if I could see it through all that rock and metal and ash. It was past time that I threw myself into the mud, to be challenged with all that this headless and heartbroken buck had faced, and win. I had to do better, for his sake, her sake, and my own.

I could make things right. I could save her. I could fight the devil and the sickness that was Death, even though its bony fingers were bent around every trigger, and had never coiled tighter than they did around the gun pointed at the head of the world.

A tall highway, which almost looked like a beacon for the white light spilling out of it, had been cut into the northern wall of the metro terminal, far beyond the benches and boutiques alike. And, no matter how feverishly I insisted that the Stable was fading to a blur behind me, stepping into that world of cleanliness and order, and out of Equestria's quiet anarchy, felt like coming home.

A maze of velvet ropes slowed me down, as I was forced to weave around the borders at my shoulder. Just ahead, was a cabal of breathing, untarnished machines. One promised to swallow up anything placed on its long, black tongue, while another took on the shape of a hollow doorway, though it offered no invitations, and blinked down at me with red-eyed derision.

Beyond these two royal guards, built into the hallway's far wall, wearing a clear visor that caught the ceiling's lights in an alien blue sheen, was some kind of reception booth. And between us, there ran a river of glassy tile, with benches at its banks and a narrow islet - which might once have had bouquets of flowers tucked in between its stones - carved out of its middle.

Every surface was firm, and wore steel where others might have their faults to bear, as if the promised kingdom beyond this blockade was a place left unshaken, even as the world spun out of control.

I hurried along, skipping around the velvet, as the need to discover what these guardians might be hiding made my heart dance to a faster beat. A new light came to life at the end of the line, though it only managed to stay my hooves by taking on the shape of a mare. She wore the silvery blue coat of a galaxy, and looked as if she might be a closer cousin to an Ursa Minor than she was to the Crystal Empire.

A hologram.

"Hello, and welcome to the Installation.” I shook my head, like a dog trying to dry itself off, as the digital mare went on. "Ma'am." She added, after staring me down through sparkling eyes.

"As this is your -" I almost shrank away from the two stars that pierced her face, as they spun over me again. "First visit. I will need to escort you through the necessary security protocols before you move on."

All the life in her voice was wasted, for the hollow in the heart of her eyes, and the smile that had been carved so deeply across her face. "If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to raise them at any time during your visit, and I’ll be there: Whenever you need me." But, for a moment, I stared up at the digital mare in wonder, as if I was trying to remember her name. I met a girl today.

But this wasn't her. It couldn't be. This was a program; a million lines of code molded into our image, and could inspire no more love than a toy soldier or a ragged old doll. But to a child, or even a buck lost in the throes of some delirium... couldn't that be enough?

No. I decided. Nopony could throw themselves into the dark, and lose so much, for the love of a machine.

“Please place your wallets, belts, horseshoes, electronics, hair clips, hoof trimmers and spare bits in one or more of the allocated bins.” Her eyes flickered back to one of the machines, telling me to let it swallow away every piece of Equestria that I'd picked up on my way here. "Alert. You may be chosen to embark on an intensive cavity search with one of our security officers." She added, as if it would be an adventure, or at least a chance to make a friend. "They can be very gentle. Or not. It really depends on you."

I frowned right through her big, covergirl smile, and then stripped myself of everything that might anger this syndicate of machines, as if I was planning to cooperate. Instead, I floated a parade of silver over the security gate, making sure to keep it well out of the sightlines of the machine's cavalier eyes.

                                                               ***                ***             ***

“Please don’t fire live rounds inside the Installation.” She said, without losing the sugar in her voice. It seemed like all the world's wealth might be hidden behind these grandiose blast doors, and I had been trying to break through the blue-shifted glass of the reception booth beside them, as if the keys to this kingdom might still be hanging from a hook somewhere. My baseball bat, turned battering ram, hadn't left so much as a scratch, and now I fired the penultimate round left to my father's automatic pistol.

"Please don't fire live rounds inside the Installation." She said, wringing all of the magic out of that magic word. "It's not that we don't trust you, of course. It's really just the bullets that we have a problem with." She let out a nervous laugh, and, for a moment, had me believing that she was real. "This wouldn't be the safest facility in all of Equestria if we let those angry little things have the run of the place."

I had to imagine that, before the bombs, I would have been buried under a few heavily armored guards by now, as even the digital mare seemed to be tapping her hooves together, waiting for someone big and strong and less concerned about good manners to come and grab me by the collar. I turned to her, with the automatic's barrel pointed up to the ceiling, and asked: "Program, is this glass bulletproof?"

"Security!" She hissed, through the corner of her smile. She had done a good job of making me feel like I wasn't breaking any laws, but as the lights began to spin and an alarm came blaring out to match them, a little surge of guilt kept me from firing the last automatic round. As if to break the window now would leave a sad title branded just after my name, to christen me Grace: A Disappointing Equestrian.

The western wall suddenly started to sing, but only managed to string together a melody of clunky, metallic notes, which sank towards me as if some clumsy windup toy was marching through the ventilation shafts. There was a terrible crunch, as steel met concrete, and the payload that had been so violently launched into the hallway from some discreet hole in the wall finally came to rest.

"Monitor unit unresponsive." I had almost forgotten for how easily the hologram came and went, like a magician leaving behind a trail of starlight instead of smoke. "Monitor unit unresponsive!" She bleated, as if I were a barbarian horde, and not just a mare who'd tried to make a key of her father's pistol.

I hurried over to the battered little thing, which the facility had spit out like the seed of a grape, thinking that I could treat it no differently to something of flesh and blood. A small pool of blue glass shards were all that remained of what, before shattering in the impact, might have been called wings. Now, an array of needlelike antennae poked out of the sphere's back, naked as a plucked bird, and bent out of shape for passing through the Installation's innards. They almost made the thing look like some kind of satellite.

A strange kind of compassion, usually reserved to medical wings rather than garages, came over me as I looked at the machine as a subject of triage. Its body was covered in what might have been called armor, from framework plating to a small satellite poking out like a shield over its brow.

I had taken the wide gap across its front to be some sort of eye, though there was nothing to see in the cavity but an empty heart, as steel rings encircled its lifeless core.

"Unit call sign - Okavango Delta - has suffered a complete loss of motor function." Her voice lost all its character as she gave the little thing a name, and I was almost surprised by how little she seemed to care for it, as if all machines were supposed to get along. "Please dispatch another unit if hostilities continue."

As far as vital signs went: the machine was dead. But as far as machine's went: death was relative. So I fished around in my saddlebags, hoping to make some kind of medicine out of all the parts I'd picked from Acheron's supermarket. "Would you like to talk through these feelings of aggression you're having?" The projected mare asked, as I jammed my screwdriver into something that resembled the hood on a jalopy.

"Please remember that this is not a government facility, and if you are looking to work out any issues you may have with the state of Equestria, or would like to protest the war, you may be in the wrong place." I made out a name through the wires and scavenged battery ports of my patient, even as she spoke it out loud. "Cerberus should not be held responsible for: recent breakups, the deaths of any beloved animals, houseplants and family members, or the decisions of Princess Luna. If you are waiting for your train, I should also remind you that we do not have anything to do with the trains. Please stop asking."

I slid the sensor module and fission battery into place as best I could, and patched everything over with the scrap electronics, treating the procedure exactly like Doctor Cross had her surgeries. I had no particular skill for mechanics - or experience with organ transplants, for that matter - but with no blood, so much as an electric current, pumping through Okavango Delta's system, the operation turned out to be clean, even therapeutic, work: More like solving a puzzle than saving a life.

There was a hum, and the same galactic light that had stitched itself into a mare began to shine out from the sphere, like the fire of a rum lantern. I rolled the little machine around in my hooves, searching for some kind of output, so that I could tap into the spritebot, and change its mind about me. After all, it wouldn't do to have it treating me like some window-hating gunslinger.

After I'd hooked it up to the back console, just as I had to the terminal in my quarters, the screen on my Pipbuck changed, and a long scroll of angry, electric blue runes flashed by like headlights along a highway, or a thousand falling stars after some intergalactic apocalypse.

I saw the word Cerberus blink by a few times, and thanks to what I knew of old mythology, I made sure to count the name in pairs of three.

Call Sign: Okavango Delta

Protocol: Monitor

Operation Permissions: Skeleton Key, Selective Incapacitating, Flightpaths I-VII, Recording

Directive: Suppress Hostilities using Nonlethal Force Self-Preservation: Optional

Known Transgressors: Female, Repeat Offender, Otherwise Undocumented *Database Offline*

Reset Local Data? Tempted by the thought that I might earn myself a monitor, a watcher at my side, I dialed over the option, and washed all of my sins out of the spritebot's databanks. I was expecting to find the servants of death somewhere ahead, all crowded around the crush, the stolen princess, of a headless buck, and I felt a sudden, desperate need to tame Okavango Delta, to have him hanging over me, like a mobile over a crib, as I stayed the trigger finger of Death.

With a jolt, it lifted itself out of my hooves, despite broken wings. From between the broken circles that spun around it, as if in orbit around a pale sun, the machine's starlit heart rolled over to me, and I lit my horn to greet it.  The alarms stopped, and suddenly, I knew that I had been forgiven. "Hostiles neutralized." The mare chirped, before breaking up into a storm of windswept constellations.

I stepped away from the floating orb, and it followed, with its light washing over me in waves. "So... did you two ever... hang out?" It tilted over to one side, examining me. "Oh right!" I cried, if only to send a ripple through the spritebot's undivided focus on me. "I'm Grace." I said, as if I'd only just remembered. "From the Stable... The Last Light of Equestria."

Okavango Delta let out a burst of static, and then broke into a song of bold horns and swirling orchestras. I nearly started skipping in place once I'd realized what it was. "That's a Circle of Friends!" There were no voices, but the melody was the very same that had once bound together a nation. "You're a patriot too, huh?" I giggled, as it let out a quick sentence of agreeable beeps.

The gleam of its eye turned away from me, and the spritebot bobbed its way over to those stern-faced castle doors. Suddenly, one of the antenna running across its southern pole cast a beam between them, which fell over itself as if made of sand. "Wait... can you get that open?" I asked, even as Okavango's lion colored light followed the fault between the doors, and parted them like a silver sea.

A corridor of glass opened out before us, and I couldn't help feeling enormously small, as the way ahead had been carved into the shape of a keyhole. And we came into the kingdom as if it were wonderland.

                                                               ***                ***             ***

Are you lonesome tonight?

After a few streams of static, which passed me by like the very trains that had once roared their way through the tunnels above, Okavango Delta stumbled onto Galaxy News Radio, which even my Pipbuck had given up for lost in this deep, guarded place.

Do you miss me tonight?

The wordless croons of so many backups singers and violins echoed around the corners ahead, and I noticed the spritebot swaying, bobbing through the air as if it were water.

Are you sorry, we drifted, apart?

He was taking me to The Circles. Or, at least that's what I had to hope. The old, and somehow babyish, security officer didn't seem all that worried about the mare, and even as I'd tried to tell him her story, he had only gone on digging through the static, looking for this song. If anything, I felt a little jealous of GNR, as it had driven Okavango into the arms of swing music, and away from any interest he'd had in me.

The floor had a thick vein of glass running through its middle, and until the spritebot had dipped down to graze its surface, I had mistaken it for some kind of mirror, though it could only catch the thin lines of light that ran along the walls. Now, as if to make me feel even smaller, I saw another of these magnificent hallways stretching on below us. The two were almost identical, but for the mare and the machine, who were so loud and so bright, that they might have been mistaken for the pathfinders of an astral parade.

After we'd come to a small, circular room, which seemed to have come out of nowhere as another set of blast doors parted before us, the digital mare appeared as a beacon that pierced even the chambers below, like a star to all those trapped inside this labyrinthine place.

"Hello again." Even her voice shone, as if we'd never been anything but the best of friends. "We'd like to perform one last scan before moving on to The Circles. If you would please move to the center of the room, and try to keep at least one of your hooves beneath you at all times." She laughed, and though I had no idea why, as her body stayed eerily still, I caught myself laughing right along with her.

The walls here were often braced by thick bulwarks of steel, but now, the four pillars that had divided this circular room into quarters began to spin around me. And as the mare thanked me, I saw that they were bound together far above us, like the petals of a gilded flower. I held Okavango Delta to my chest, as the roar died down, and the lights fell over us just as they might through the windows of a passing train.

"Congratulations!" The mare cheered, though she'd been blended into strips of code only moments ago. "You are extraordinarily fertile." Okavango wriggled loose, but I let a hoof linger over my stomach, feeling as if I'd just been invaded. "And appear to be in an - acceptable - physical condition."

"...Thank you." I murmured, as the panels behind her slid away, and started to pull her apart.

"Please step out of the Diagnostician. There may be other Cerberus employees waiting to be processed." I did as she asked, though my hooves had become numb for what waited ahead: A chamber, far greater than I had ever seen. A cavity, more hollow than the open sky. "Thank you." She said, even as the walls came hissing down behind me, as if to make a full circle of this place. "And have a great night!"

I didn't see her go, as my eyes couldn't escape the distant circle of glass that looked to be all that remained of a ceiling, for the shadows that lapped over all else. Light, which was threadbare and gold, drew three scars along its face, all laced with what could easily have been scripture, cut into the glass.

To either side, were two bowing giants that might have passed for subterranean mountains, were it not for the geometric designs followed by some ancient architect, the pulsing lines of lights that ran around their feet like discarded crowns, and a voice in my ear that was somehow sure they had been cut out of a primordial metal. Another pair of them sat, far apart from one another, across the chamber, though the distance between us might as well have draped a black curtain across their shoulders.

In truth, the figures looked more like buckled pillars than they did the bodies of any animal; any ancient civilization's entombed kings, but something about the way they had been posed - even through the simplicity of it - Had me seeing giants in a place where even a mouse could not have come.

I froze up again, as I saw everything fall away at the center of the chamber, as if these four colossi had gathered around a firepit, long since stamped out. Remembering the hallways that had run below our own, I looked up to that ring of glass, wondering what could be hidden behind it. "How many circles are there?" I asked, though Okavango had taken to roaming the open meadows of glass and gray.

I heard him beep once, and shivered for every one that followed, until the spritebot had counted to nine. "Celestia..." I said, after realizing that I might as well have remained still, for how far my hoofsteps could take me. To walk into this place, was to paddle into the ocean. "We couldn't possibly have built this."

While staring up at the ring, and feeling only a little reassured to know that, if brought out into the open world, it could not hope to pass over the mountains, I felt movement at my side. “Hey!” I shouted, at first only in panic, but then to call after the closest thing I had to a guide: to an anchor. “Where are you going?”

He had taken off towards the great figure, built from a metal that was not unlike either stone or steel, to our left, and was rising away from the ground as if he planned to fly over its stooped form. “Come back!” I shouted, even as his silvery blue light was washed out. “Don’t leave me here…”

And then, it all came falling in on me, as a thousand devils crept through the shadows, and those four giants looked down on us through scattered eyes, to see the blackness closing in around me, like ants swarming over something sweet - too sweet - something chewed up and spat out.

But, even as I closed my eyes - wishing for sirens and bells to roll through this glass kingdom, and wash away all the brittle insects that I'd imagined - I didn't think of Celestia, or Luna, or the country they had once fought for the love of. I didn't pretend that my mother could be there, about to rock me back to sleep after some misremembered nightmare. All I wanted: was her. I met a girl today.

Pale like the stars up north. Where the sky is naked.

It was her. She is my water [my wine]. And I'm drowning in her. I'm choking on her.

It had always been her. But it scares me.

A crush that could never be crushed. That could never be spoken, one that could never be heard. They would have gone on like that forever, with one loving, and the other caught in a loop. And I had to wonder if It wasn't the finger of death that had killed him, but love: a sickness, a consumption. What if it was Love, smothering him like a hospital pillow under familiar hooves, hooves that he had held, that he had kissed?

And, for being buried in this place, in the lonely underbelly of Equestria, could I really blame him? Be it for painting the wall red, or for throwing his heart before her starlight hooves. How long might it take me? To see this creature - She was {~} good to me. She was so innocent [clean] - as something real?

I don't deserve a mare like her.

But I won't let her go.

I was starting to feel so much like him, as if the weight of Acheron had molded us into the same shape. But there was one thing that still set us apart.

What if {~}? What if they change her? What if they peel off her skin and pull out her hair?

What if they blow out the starlight in her eyes? [like candles]

They could [they will] make her like them... [ dead dead dead ]

The dead, the only hole in his story, in history, that had yet to be filled. The villain of the piece.

How long would it be - before it all fell together - how long would it be.... before they came?

Soon {~} I'll be just like them.

But I was afraid. I was terrified. And my knees buckled, like those of a King, whose cape was torn and whose crown was broken, as a crippled and alien army built a circle of spears around him, all pointed down from a pedestal of trampled bodies: quiet and still as his favorite toy soldiers.

We were, all of us, cowards. And as a single, ivory bar came to spoil the face of my Pipbuck, I started to cry, and had never wanted anything more than to bury my tears in the chest of our digital mare.

But it won't be {~} long now.

I don't know what to do.

But I know what I am.

We were, all of us, cowards. But I was different. I was afraid to die.

"Get up." The words came out flayed, carrying a hundred years of violence and pain with them, as if the body that spoke them had been beaten, abused until even its voice was left with deep, incurable wounds.

I had to look up, for this was not the voice of a demon, or even a machine, this was the voice of a stubborn patient, so proud that he would hoard up his pain as if it were a precious and personal treasure.

But, for seeing what had come to stand over me, I might have let the sickness of the mad dig itself a little deeper into the back of my neck. The body that had spoken could not be fixed, and would find no place in any medical wing or operating table, unless as the subject of an autopsy, as a tool to reinvent our understanding of physical trauma. It was a patchwork pony, a long and sordid medical history flooding a single page, a thousand ugly words made into a picture.

And, like a machine stripped of its casing, it was almost impossible to look away from, as ragged canopies of skin covered its toiling anatomy like torn curtains over the greatest show on earth.

Leather armor, bandoliers and holsters stained in washed out colors, kept me from watching lungs swelling inside its chest. And, if I was any less disgusted, if my vision hadn't begun to blur before the bilious waves of nausea, I might have asked the thing to show me its beating heart.

But its face, its terrible, naked face, was enough to dry my eyes as if by drought. One side of its muzzle was entirely skinless, and a skeleton's smile, covered over by rippling red tendons, wore down on me. What remained of a copper colored mane did little to hide the space between its raw and unchaste temples, where a skull looked to have been excavated like the ruins of some precedent civilization.

Worst of all, were its eyes. Pupil and iris had washed over one another, and a black lake was spoiled by irascible clouds of dirty green, as if the iris had been pierced, left to spill its sickly and radioactive waste into the water. But I still knew this: There was life somewhere under the surface, and it was drowning.

I wanted to run. But my hooves might as well have been sinking into the steel meadow, as if those four giants spit new life into the firepit between them, to bring an incredible heat to The Circles. I was shivering like a sick dog, knowing that all my weapons were useless now, as none could do more damage than had so clearly been done before. I wished it was dead, truly, but the sour light in its eyes took even that from me, and as it stepped in a little closer, I could only will the bones in its leg to snap.

The Faith had their demons on the hide of damnation, their monsters on the dark side of the moon, and a thought started to gather strength, and fought through the confusion from the back of my mind: They were right. I shut my eyes, as if I could block out these dungeons to a glass kingdom, this library to our sins.

My hunger, my fear and the sickness began to circle around one another, like three predators envying all that they saw in the others, or three caustic tribes planting their stakes into my heart. They pooled inside of me, and all their colors mixed together - to gray. As if to aid in my escape. I was going to faint, and I couldn't shake the feeling, even as consciousness fell into a shambles, that I had found the easy way out.

***                ***             ***

"Talk to Damascus." I opened my eyes even as I was dropped, and saw the world fall away beneath us. With a swift kick, as if to fight off the panic that this great height sent screaming through me, I realized that I had been thrown onto a glass surface, and almost found a sense of calm in the rings of scripture that laced its far edge. The pain in my hoof had already started to fade, but I found myself clutching on to the only solid thing that I could find: a disfigured leg. "Talk. To. Damascus."

I couldn't be sure whether the voice's master had shaken me off, as if I were some overloyal pet, or if I had pulled myself away in a fit of girlish disgust.  I knew better than to look up - than to submit myself to the sight of that living cadaver - and so lay still until the scent of death had left the air.

The weight of that tricephalic sickness didn't leave me so easily, but I managed to climb onto uncertain hooves, and found my place in the middle vein of three, like rivers of ice that were clear enough to reveal the impossible depths below. I recognized the strikingly wide ring of glass then, as the very face that I'd looked up to from that nameless underworld, and as I rose, I saw another beast of the same blood.

An enormous window had been cut out of the ringroom's plated walls. It was wounded, and let in a tide of rich, primordial light, as deep scars ran around its edge and caught the colors of whatever bygone world had been shut away behind it. And even on my hooves, with my head held high, I felt like a beggar.

"Hell doesn't offer welcome to its visitors with any kindness. But the time for introductions, so much as kindness, is already running out. Yours is not a position that I would wish on anyone, as even on escaping this place, you will carry precious little in the way of answers. But for now... here you are."

His voice took root somewhere deep within the Stable, and every deliberate word it spoke didn't seem to fit with the leering threats and fearful cries, the wild gunfire and the howling cities, of this great Equestrian storm. It sounded so collected, so controlled, so unlike them.

I found the buck, standing near the edge of both windows, beyond that which opened out to the darkness below, and before that which held a flood of light at bay. His stance was firm, and I followed wounds that rose to coil around his body, as if sprouting from the seeds of damnation beneath us.

Much of his coat had been peeled away, almost as if the buck was more scars than he was skin. They ruled him, taking everything but the remains of his sandy, and now discolored, coat, to leave him standing before me as something long since burned away: A desert put to the torch, buckling before a season of plagues, stripped bare by a hundred passing locusts, trampled under a thousand hooves in exodus.

The shadows falling over his body only seemed to hide what little he had left, but, despite it all, I felt safe before his blue, atmospheric eyes. Flecks of that all too familiar starlight shone out of his irises like scattered diamonds, though even beside that digital mare, they might seem alien, as if plucked from the empty spaces beyond the edge of the sky.

"If I could give you anything: it would be time. But with the Slavers bound for this very station, and how close we've come to the end of our peace with them, I cannot even offer you that. We need to begin." This kingdom, for all its lies and labyrinths, was his. And, as I listened to his firm, familiar voice, I knew that he had tamed it. "Dies Irae venient, per verbum Deae."

"You're from the Stable." I said, as if our steel door had been the only thing to keep that dead language from being stamped out. "The days of wrath are coming, by the word of the Goddess." I couldn't make anything of the old words alone, as I knew them in pieces, but that phrase had left its mark on history.

"Very good." I might have felt like a filly again, standing in front of the class or before the pages of a hymnbook, if it weren't so hard to leave this place, to imagine myself away from him. "You still wear that place across your chest, over your heart. But I didn't think it could be found so easily in me." He lifted his hoof without flourish or flair, and I saw that he wore no Pipbuck. It didn't take me long to understand why.

The symbol on his flank looked like a brand, as it was black and burnt, and it was possible that it had been seared into his skin. It was a cross. The same cross that lay tilted across my father's coat, that the Faith would piece together out of scrap so that it might bear witness to their sermons. And then, a thought injected itself into my mind: A terrible, mad thought. And it left me so hollow, so afraid, that the buck, this sinner who could have beaten the path to my own exile, saw it, gathering like a storm around me.

"How long has it been?" He asked coolly. "How many years have passed since he was damned?" Damascus tilted his head, leaving me little to see but for the microcosms in his eyes. "Unless you're following old hoofsteps, unless they still remember me in there: I'm not the one you're looking for."

"My father." The words slipped out of my mouth, like pieces of hard candy, and I felt a desperate need to gather them up: to get them out of sight. "He stitched your cutie mark, the cross, into the side of his coat." But in truth, it had been Faith that left the mark on both of them.

"You aren't interested in finding him." I could feel him reading me and, for a moment, wished that the light might turn, like sunset to sunrise, so that it could be my face that was hidden, and his that lay bare. "That's good. History will leave more than its share of dirt on your hooves. Better to keep them clean..."

"For now." He added, as the window's light met the shine of his eyes, falling over a cheek that had been left shallow and purple by an unevenly stacked cairn of scars. "The Stable has already left us to this dead valley, forgotten our names as they have with all the damned. But, for you, to become a killer before the eye of the world, in the name of the Goddesses, is something that remains to be done. To them, your soul is white. And for them, it must be stained." I almost took a step back, as if frightened by the turn he'd taken. "This country will be clean again. Even if we must carry the weight of its filth on our own bodies."

It almost sounded like he was talking about the dawn, about Equestria's new beginning, though I had to work through the Faith that wove around his words, as if they were all drawn from that dead lexicon.

"There is too much that you need to know, things that you might not find out in time." I saw him glance back at the window, as if it had begun to groan for the weight of the light. "There is an evil that is pressing its teeth into the earth. And we have no choice but to face it. That your arrival so closely matches their own should not be ignored. You were meant to be used against them."

I could see his mane now, as the window lit up a neat wave of gray, whose breakers had lost their color. It might even have been combed, and I had to hope that my own hair looked half as well put together. After seeing so much of his face, I couldn't help thinking that Damascus was the old world, dragged through the new. The buck would have been very handsome, with the good looks that had become timeless when time stopped, just as Equestria would have been very beautiful.

Neither had lost their charm. It had just been changed, reshaped by the hands of Fallout.

"I wouldn't have left without trying to help." I said, like a mare poking fun at herself. "What can I do?"

"There is a train, the Coltilde, that runs a ring from here to Equestria's heart." To hear him call the country by its name, to hear it spoken in this glass kingdom, almost made me feel homesick. "It crosses the hinterlands of the North, carrying ponies, stolen from every settlement that is subject to its cycles. Those who fall victim to the disease and abuse that have poisoned the train's belly, are thrown from it, left to litter the earth along the rails. The rest are taken to a place called The Pens, in the west, and are hoarded in flea-ridden barracks and chain-link hostels. Kept as animals in the shadow of a crippled machine."

Slavery was an industry now, as if some sovereign had thrown our trains from the tracks, only to replace them with beasts of metal and chain and smoke. I didn't know what I felt then. If it was anger, I couldn't harness it. If it was despair, it wouldn't slow me down. But both sides agreed: this train, this Coltilde could not be left to leech of our country, like a dark haired monkey picking food off the bodies of its sleeping parents, stealing ponies to satisfy its ugly hunger.

"There are secrets buried here," He ran a hoof around the great, glass ring - almost lovingly - tracing the scripture. "Secrets that I have only kept safe with hired guns and scavenged power, that I must stop them from discovering. We came to a shallow sort of peace, the Slavers and I. We made a deal. But the time to put an end to their rule over the North, to take back the reins, has come." I shivered, thinking myself lucky for stumbling onto this young revolution. "And no tools are too foul to aid in paving our way to the dawn."

But for now, as the Faith so often said, luck looked to have very little power in the world. "Tools?" I found myself ready to take orders from Damascus, ready to look at this great chamber as a throne room. As one thing was clear: He was not the King bending his knee in that circle of spears. "You mean... killing?"

"When the Goddesses can be so dejected, when they can have fallen so far, as to need our help... we must be ready to do everything, and anything, just as they once did for us. The coming train would have sown its evil without me, but to house it, to feed it.... to use it: That takes another kind of strength." The light behind him seemed to grow brighter, and colder, as if its gold was wearing away.

"When the dawn comes, and it will come, it will not be as it was in the beginning.  When a new sun rises as the carriage to a returning Goddess, it's face will not be white. The light at the end of this will be as the bodies and the hearts that it is cast over, as the country it will wake. Even the light - will be dirty."

The Kingdom of Glass came full circle then, as I followed the patterns of naked flesh, of lavender bruises, along Damascus' body like burnt sand. This place was not only his throne room, but his prison. And it occurred to me that, in the eyes of any doctor, his was a frame that would wear bandages in the place of skin, that could not be left so bare, except in a place like this.

Except in a place whose air was sterile, and whose architects might have built a thousand other holy cities in rehearsal: A place whose gates were guarded by machines and the standing dead, and whose light was galactic. “Just point me in the right direction.”

“I wonder if I am.” He came to where he had begun, where I imagined a throne might stand. "We all go through periods of darkness. In such times we can always turn to the Goddesses, but it is good to have friends.” He recited, turning away from the aureate wall of glass. “Friendship... There is a tool that can tend the soil, that can steer storms and pull the constellations across the sky, a tool that might truly be clean.  And for that, to see us wielding that sword and that shield of a thing, you will serve."

I heard it then, like a panting animal, a sound that fell over itself as if it were a river swollen with debris. And over it, came the scream of a whistle, which might have shattered all these ancient faces of glass, to bring the kingdom tumbling down, like a castle made of sand.

"Charon will guide you to the surface." And then, all at once, I knew the sound, and felt it pressing against his window like a palm. I could only imagine the Coltilde as that enormous worm, tearing through the planet like an apple, following the tunnels that it had carved so many years ago. The train was coming. "When he leaves you, make your way along the highway. Follow it East. There is a gateway across the road. Go there. And, though it is a wild and unwelcoming place, it will be your Temple of Trials."

The turn of its wheels grew louder in swells, as if a narrow army were marching through the tunnel, with every soldier chanting the name of their King, raising their voices together, so that the sound of the front line hit us first, even as the others came rolling after it.

"But wars aren't won by diplomacy." At a gesture from Damascus, I felt death come to plant itself beside me, to prove that it would not pass like any other nightmare. "There is a church on the far side of Hell, and in it are all that I have to call allies: though they are only with me for their own avarice. Speak to the Quartermaster. He can prepare you for what must be done."

“Follow me.” Its voice said, bringing a threadbare muzzle close enough to send shivers down my spine.

“Wait." I managed, though I couldn't know if I had spoken only so that Damascus wouldn't turn his back, leaving me to the servant that I had named Death. "What's down there?" I asked, with one hoof tapping at the scriptured glass, and the chamber that it revealed below us.

"I don't know anymore." The damned of some primeval generation answered. "The Circles are too irradiated for anyone but the ghouls, and even they will only venture there when the path has been paved with gold. You barely made it out with your life, and had not yet strayed from its rim." I couldn't remember if my Pipbuck had been ticking, and if the majesty of it all was enough to leave me deaf to its warnings. "But the Goddesses would not have left it to us, they would not have steered us here, if its gates weren't meant to be guarded. This place cannot be surrendered: it cannot be lost."

With another, desperate scream, which sounded eerily like an animal trying to speak, a mist began to rise around the window's edges, and cast great, billowing shadows across the glass throne room.

The howl of the whistle, with its chorus of metallic chugging, spun down into silence. It almost felt like this bestial machine had brought all the cold and the dark of the night with it, as if it carried a part of that great storm on its back, and an inconsolable sense of dread took root somewhere deep inside of me.

The Coltilde was unlike any other Equestrian machine, any other Equestrian animal, and though I couldn't see it: I knew that it was black, as it drained the color in the air, and left us with white lights and choleric pillars of smoke. I found myself stepping back into the palm of death, and looking at him like a friend.

“We’re out of time.”

Footnote: Level Up!

Perk Added: My Little Leaguer: +5 Melee Weapons, +5 Explosives, +10 Damage when using Equestrian Baseball Bats