Prologue:
Once upon a time in the magical land of Equestria-
Oh fuck this shit! Equestria’s a piece of shit now and from my knowledge it wasn’t exactly a dreamland before any of this shit.
Not every part of Equestria was hit equally as hard by the bombs, those areas that remained relatively undestroyed would soon wish they had been burnt from this world though.
The Grain Grinder region being an unremarkable farming community wasn’t hit at all, but the area surrounding it was.
In a single night so much changed. In the blink of an eye the entire region was cut off from the rest of the world. In the following days radiation poisoned the water and killed the crops. Crops that would never be re-grown due to the sky being closed by a curtain maintained by pegasi many of the locals had once called friends. When the farmers emerged from their makeshift shelters they found a new world awaiting them. Their livelihoods were destroyed, many had lost friends or family, and worst of all they were trapped.
While much changed a few ancient rules re-emerged from the depths of obscurity.
In any situation a Pony can only survive:
-3 minutes with out air
-3 hours with out shelter
-3 days with out water
-3 weeks with out food
and if you can’t find your own, you take somepony else’s.
In the earliest days the Grain Grinder Logistics Base provided order and food from it’s grain reserves. However when it became apparent that their wasn’t enough food to last until this entire ‘apocalypse thing’ blows over.
That caused dissent, and one fateful day when the ponies in the base thought it was a good idea to shoot down an enclave raptor passing over above the clouds, the dissenters became very well armed. That’s how the raiders started, a bunch of staving farmers with guns.
When the fort proved impenetrable the first raiders turned to the weak to satisfy their needs. That’s how the cannibalism, rape, and mutilation started, ponies simply following the renewed laws of the land.
When it became apparent that this wouldn’t just ‘blow over’ the madness started, and it never stopped.
Flash forward two hundred years and the rest of Equestria has healed to the point where regional factions have developed enough to begin in the pursuit of order. Two of these factions specifically seek to create a new Equestrian Union and have both the following and firepower to pursue this goal.
In the east a new player in the wasteland, Red Eye has built a slave empire and has begun rebuilding the Fillydelphia factories to supply his empire for conquest.
In the west an older faction with an even older set of ideals rose from the ash. Made from the Unicorn remnants of Equestria’s military they call themselves the Black Sun, and they aim to create apartheid Equestria with no non-ponies, and all Pegasus and earth ponies put into the servitude of their unicorn overlords.
This has caused what those out side of the equestrian heartland have called the “decline of the raiders”. However the raiders retreating from the east meet the raiders retreating from the west in Grain Grinder, which after 200 years of constant bloodshed has be renamed Meat Grinder.
Here they have combined their forces under the strong leadership of Meat Grinder’s raider group “the Forgotten Ones’” leader known only as “the Lost One”.
It is here they seek to gain control of the region, to secure it for them selves and to force out any “order seekers” to create a strong hold for the continuation for the raider way of life.
In Meat Grinder the line between good and evil is not just blurred, it is entirely washed away by the waves of blood that wash over it.
This is how our story starts. In grim violence, from which there is no shelter.
Fallout Equestria:
Gimme Shelter
(cue title music)
Chapter 1: Pilot
“What are these rumors of you and the other pegasi abandoning base?”
“General, these aren’t rumors. Cloudsdale is gone and our leader-”
“Luna is your leader!”
“Not anymore, and you can’t stop us.”
“Have you no honor?!”
I sputtered and coughed back to the land of the living. I couldn’t hear anything except the sharp ringing in my ears. I had awoken face down in a puddle of rainwater; in it I saw my reflection, messy red mane, beige coat, and gold irises. Above me the stormy sky was obscured by smoke, and crisscrossed by tracer rounds. For a moment I felt at piece, then I coughed, and the reflection was obscured by blood, at that moment my senses came rushing back to me, pain mostly centered around my stomach shot through my body, and more importantly hearing; gunfire filled my ears, but from behind me, came the distinct sound of a pony trotting up.
“Heh… boss says we gots ta burn down the place, then we can do as we please, but since when have I given a fuck what that dumb cunt says. You’re a unicorn, well I got something to remedy that.” I turned to face the stallion; he wore raider barding similar to mine, and carried a large sledgehammer in his mouth, a hammer that as I turned, slammed into my horn. Once again I was sprawled on the ground, in the reflection given off by my rapidly pooling blood I could see him position himself overtop of me. “Well now you’re a pretty fine mare, you should be a decent victim.” He moved my tail aside with a hoof- No. Never again! With a rush of adrenaline I twisted my body around to face him, and rammed the sharp stump of what had been my horn into his neck.
“Bet you didn’t expect to be the one penetrated!” I sadistically yelled, as I swept my head to one side dragging my horn across his neck slitting it in a very rough way. His blood pored out on to me, and I quickly bucked him off before he could fall on me. I took my first good look at my surroundings since waking up and I remembered how I was knocked out in the first place; Meat Grinder was under attack, a very successful attack, and I had been shot off a roof. Which reminds me, “Fuck! Goddam that hurt! When I find that fucking raider I will shove Inheritance up his asshole and… now where did I drop Inheritance?” I scoured the ground looking for that golden grenade rifle, and of course it was the last place I thought to look, what would have been directly under me when I landed/woke up. There I also had the fortune of finding my other weapons of choice, an SMG, and my box cutter, I slipped them into the holsters on my forelegs. I clumsily managed to get Inheritance into its holster, how the fuck can an earth pony use a grenade rifle?
I heard a male voice from the opposite direction and I took cover behind some crumbled concrete. “I swear I heard her yelling about pain, Inheritance, and ass.”
“Yeah that sounds like Orphan… we really should have checked to see if she was alive before running off.” A second voice said. The sources where revealed as a white coated earth pony with a blonde mane, and a muscular grey and black pegasus rounded the corner.
“What?! You didn’t even check… You guys suck!” I called over to them.
“Oh fuck she’s mad!” Controversy, the earth pony armed with a railroad rifle said. As he said it he tried to avoid eye contact. Odd, he faces death everyday, but he can’t face me?
“Oh… hey babe… yeah heat of the battle and all that.” Steel Wind, the pegasus armed with a minigun said. “Well long story short, this is only the first wave of the assault, so the Meat Grinder Authorities have said we should abandon the place now, we are using the main westward road to essentially haul ass out of here before it becomes a shooting gallery with us as targets.” Well… that’s better than I expected.
“Ok let’s get going!” I said through the mouth grip of my smg, so it probably sounded more like ‘mOkay let’st geth gooing.’
My friends stared at me. “Orphan… what happened to your horn?” Steel Wind asked, more that a little shocked that I was in such bad condition.
“Raider, sledgehammer, better than getting raped.” I said, and even more shock and rage filled his face.
“Don’t worry this is all her coma dream! Everything is a coma dream!” Controversy said and he stared expectantly at the sky. “Ok I guess not…”
“What the… never mind. Let’s just get back to escaping from here.” I suggested, because raiders really suck.
We rushed through a side alleyway of the torn up remains of what we had once called home, and out into a large street fight. On one side there where the raiders, and on the other was the Meat Grinder guard and our fellow scalpers. I aimed the SMG as best as I could with out telekinesis and sprayed down the four or so raiders who where holding up the evacuation. It merely distracted them and pinged of their armor. How the hell do earth ponies do this?
However that distraction was all that needed to happen as my fellow scalpers, yes that’s the proper term for myself and the other 45 or so mercenaries hired by Meat Grinder to hunt raiders. Any way back on topic, the distracted raiders had let one thing through there wall of bullets, the Zebra ghoul armed with a fully auto zebra rifle with a bayonet mounted on the bottom rushed forward in one swift movement slashed a raider’s throat, and in another stabbed him in the heart. This gave the others behind him a gap in the enemy’s fire, which they flooded through and then proceeded to maul the remaining raiders. Most of the other scalpers ran ahead in their rush to escape, however the Zebra ghoul held back. “Orphan, what happened?” he asked in his raspy voice.
“I got in a fight, don’t worry the other guy got off worse.” I said to the ghoul who was my adoptive father. He really needs to stop treating me like the weak little filly he first found me as… A loud crack resounded through the air assuring he wouldn’t think of me as that again, or even think ever again. I watched his body fall limp to the ground and followed the bullet’s angle of trajectory to a sniper tower that must have been captured, those things are supposed to protect us dam it! I would have stared at the body, carried it away, given it a proper burial, but not while there was a sniper right there. I ran, and I didn’t look back. There is no place for mourning in Meat Grinder, when you die no one will mourn for you, right away at least. Hell you’ll be lucky if your loved ones don’t cannibalize your corpse to keep them selves alive.
Any further thought was interrupted when a bang followed by a relatively large explosion shattered my eardrums. I looked up and immediately had to shelter my eyes from the falling shrapnel. I reached a conclusion, Steel Wind, while flying ahead had just been the target of that flak round. Steel Wind’s absence and the look on Controversy’s face confirmed my conclusion. Once again, this is Meat Grinder stop and stare, and you’ll lose your head, quite literally as the sniper chose this moment to take another shot, this one putting a round clear through my armor. My armor was pretty much just modified raider armor, so it not being able to stop a .308 round was no surprise, however being shot is something one never really comes to expect.
“Fuck!” I hissed under my breath and put my hoof over my new wound on my shoulder. Fortunately Controversy managed to yank me out of the way before the next shot impacted where my head would have been.
“Come on! We need to haul ass on out of here before more of these ass hats show up!” He yelled over the partial deafness induced by the shots and explosions. I nodded and raced after him. As we ran through the street flanked on either side by dilapidated homes made of rusted sheet metal my hearing returned, and from the greater volume of gunshots I deduced that those “ass hats” had gotten their reinforcements.
Suddenly Controversy stopped running and stared at a shack on his right. Once I caught up I realized why he had stopped. From the shack came a low noise that grew louder and more insane the more it continued. “heh… heh, heh heh heh heh heheheheheh” the giggling sent a chill up my spine, she was here. Of course she was here, the raiders were attacking, so why shouldn’t their most psychotic fucked up member join them.
“Orphan, you go on ahead, I need to take care of unfinished business.” He growled menacingly. We had a run in with her before, it did end well, the type of didn’t end well. The kind of didn’t end well that results in Controversy developing a psychopathic revenge fixation, and me borderline suicidal for a few weeks. One look at him told me he wasn’t going to back down. So I continued, and not 6 seconds latter I heard the unique sound of that one of a kind heavy pistol bark out 3 shots. I glanced over my shoulder to se controversy trying to crawl out of the shack. “Orphan Run!” He yelled in desperation. I did so and after a few paces heard a final shot from the pistol.
I kept running, along the way I saw many ponies I had know for a good bit of my life. Some were wounded, others still fighting in vain believing they could still save Meat Grinder, and others still lay on the ground, dripping blood and contorted in to positions all too familiar to anyone familiar with the region. I reached the gate to the town that had once been the Grain Grinder Logistics Base. I noticed who the defenders of the gate were. The Meat Grinder Security Service, we had never seen eye to eye before, they looked down at Scalpers, and we in turn looked down at them. Of course they would be the last ones to give up on the defense of the Meat Grinder, despite being heavily outnumbered, they continued to fight like what I imagined the knights of the pre Celestia and Luna days would to defend their castles. I passed them by with out a second thought, all that matters in the waste is survival and everything else is just bonus.
The military base that had become the town of Meat Grinder was on a hill, in the riven between it’s hill and the next flowed a river, naturally this made it the opportune place for holding out, and it did for over two hundred years. There was a single bridge leading to the nearest hill, and that bridge was the site of a large firefight between a group of scalpers and a larger force of raiders. Despite four of the six scalpers being the all too heavily armed Recoilless Quadruplets (damn I felt bad for their mother), the shear number of raiders would soon overwhelm them. Between the Riot Shotgun, the LMG and of course that Recoilless Rifle, they made a formidable defense. However that defense would fall if a single raider got through. The defense was missing something a little more… me. So since they had yet to learn it, I demonstrated the effective use of offence for defense.
I rushed in to the mass of raiders with my SMG pelleting them from my mouth, and my somewhat signature call of “AAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWW YYYYEEEEEAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!” I slammed into the first, knocking him to the ground and stopped on his neck, all the other raiders backed off. Odd they never back off, ever. I looked down and realized why: A dead mare’s trigger. Essentially a wire that starts the count down on some explosive upon the cease of the wearer’s heart beat. I acted out of instinct and kicked the body towards the still retreating raider hoard. Before I could get away however it detonated, and I was thrown off the bridge. I hit the water hard, it may have slowed me slightly but I hit the bottom almost just as hard, my head meeting a nice blunt rock at the bottom, ok maybe not nice but better than a sharp jagged one. My vision darkened as the current pulled me along underwater and I lost my SMG. My vision fully blackened just before I reached the rapids.
“Corporal!”
“Yes General?”
“The pegasi must not be allowed to get away with this.”
“What are you suggesting? Sir?”
“That engagement last month already got us labeled ‘Meat Grinder’, so if we must done that title again then so be it.”
“But! These are our friends! Our comrades! Can’t we just lock ‘em up? Until they give up on this ‘independent pegasi’ notion?”
“If it were so simple I there wouldn’t be this issue. I’ll have some earth ponies and unicorns try to detain a few, but until further notice you are to have the technicians prep the anti-air guns.”
“…”
“That’s an order.”
I awoke on a gravelly beach. My body felt like it was on fire, but I knew that couldn’t be true, I was soaking wet. I willed my self up, thank the heavens that I didn’t get some form of spinal injury. I got a better look at my surroundings, there was a sign on the cliff wall I faced “Grain Grinder Gem Mine” it read, and bellow it was what could only be and entrance to said mine. Behind me on the hill across the river a formation of sand bags that I was fairly familiar with was overlooking my small beach. It was the preferred siege method of the faction called the Black Suns, but the lack of their red, white and black banner suggested that it was long since abandoned. Finally to my right was a rusty not at all interesting antenna, my gut told me to climb it and my mind in response bitch slapped my gun into submission. I looked over my options: A) Stay here and wait to die, no thanks. B) Climb the antenna, why was this even an option? C) The hill across the river, I just had a swim, it wasn’t fun. D) Check the mine for stuff to help make me somewhat better, fuck it YOLO.
I pulled up the piece of sheet metal that had for the past two hundred years acted as the door, and crawled under. On the other side a lone power panel sat in the off position, with my mouth I switched it on and the lights flickered on, then a few exploded, but whatever better then total darkness. The place had a musty sent, the wooden beams that made up the place hadn’t exactly aged well. The entranceway to the mine split into three paths, the center ending abruptly at a giant cog shaped door. The path on the left was pitch black, and the one on my right was seemingly in goodish condition. Now I couldn’t tell how many hostile entities the right path may or may not hold, that would be silly, but I knew that light is better than darkness. I limped down the right path and found my self at an office like set up labeled “mining operational management”. Hopefully that meant that it had some healing items, a healing potion might not fix my horn but it should help my headache.
After booting down the door I found my self in a single office like room, with four cubicals, a management looking desk with a terminal, a couch, and oh hell fuckin’ yeah, a medical case mounted on the wall. I made my way to the medical case and opened it to find a healing potion, a healing bandage, normal bandages, and a needle of med-X. I administered everything, and decided that I might as well ransack the place for other items before trying to get some rest on that couch. My looting got me a pack of cigs which I saved for latter, and… score somepony had a cap collection! (no like not just a pile of them, but labeled and everything with “special edition” caps) but I discovered the terminal had been left logged on, and better yet with a message open.
To: Stable Tech Headquarters
We would like to thank you for lending our mining staff the resources and expertise to retro fit our now depleted mineshaft into a stable of sorts. You have the thanks of the whole Grain Grinder Region for this.
From: The Ponies of Grain Grinder
My first reaction was “so that was a stable?” Then “Why would Grain Grinder need a stable? We’re so far away from everywhere that most ponies survived just by hanging out in their basements for a few months.” Then finally “Fuck pre bomb shit I’m going to sleep.” Then I walked over to the couch and did just that.
--
Only to be awoken 2 hours latter by the sound of metal grinding against metal. I rolled of my couch and fumbled my Box Cutter into my mouth; damn I want my horn back! Once the hellish grinding noise died down I listened.
“Guys I don’t like this…” a male voice said.
“Quit being a baby, we just have to find a pony and grab them.” Another male voice said and my mind jumped to Raiders.
“No that would be uncivilized, we’ll talk to them then if they don’t co-operate we grab them.” A female voice stated. Civilized raiders?! This truly is my worst nightmare.
There was no way in hell my knife could handle a group of them while I was in this state, and before I could stop my self I telekinetically grabbed Inheritance, no horn. A jolt of pain ripped through my head, I screamed, and then I was on the floor my horn spouting blood and darkness closing in rapidly.
“Sir we have pegasi through out the region going skywards.”
“Open fire.”
That day was the single bloodiest day in Equestrian history. No, Grain Grinder’s first step towards becoming Meat Grinder was only a drop in the bucket, for that was the day the bombs fell, the sky was closed, and the Grain Grinder Demi-Stable sealed for more than two hundred years.
