FALLOUT EQUESTRIA
WELCOME TO OZ
By SecondSeraphim
My name is Gale. Windy Gale. I will now pause for laughter. But Gale, you say, you’re an Earth Pony! What were your parents thinking?
I don’t know. I’d ask them, but they’ve been dead since before I can remember.
Not laughing now are you?
Instead of living with my folks, I was raised by my Aunt Eb and Uncle Rai. Of course, I just call them my aunt and uncle. In reality they’re just the lucky couple that the Overmare stuck me with all those years ago when I was orphaned. At least I’m pretty sure we’re not related, on account of them being Zebras and all.
That’s right. I’m from one of those mixed stables. What did you expect? I’m a proud citizen of the Crystal Empire after all, not one of those Equestrian savages. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning.
Once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria-
Wait, never mind that. You’ve probably heard all that before. Let me paraphrase.
A long long LONG time ago, Equestria was ruled by two sisters by the name of Celestia and Luna. The two were supposed to be equal but everypony loved Celestia more. Something about her bringing the day while Luna just brought the night. Living in a tomb for my first seventeen years left me unable to appreciate what the sun meant so I never really got that. So anyway, little sister Luna got mad and then went mad, started calling herself Nightmare Moon. Tried to take over, got banished for her trouble, and was released 1000 years later. A group of six ponies got together and used some ancient mumbo jumbo to blast her back to goodness. The two immortal sisters reconciled and everyone lived happily ever after, minus a few hiccups every now and then.
And then the war happened.
War. A fearsome word, full of pain and death and such such misery. But even that word doesn’t properly represent just how bucked up everything got during and after the “Great Equestria/Zebra Conflict”. Otherwise known as “The World War”, “The Last War” or even simply as “The War”, it was a fight that ended pretty much all life on the planet.
Luckily, the life under the planet survived.
Stables. Massive metal complexes built by Stable-Tec to safeguard the remains of civilization. Which civilization? Well, depends on the stable. My stable, dear old Stable 34,
was built with the sole purpose of protecting…agriculture. That’s right, agriculture. Specifically our stable is full of all the plants you could possibly want to eat, including apples, carrots, celery stalks, and beautiful flowers too. Plenty to eat, and dozens more kept in a specially designed seed vault, waiting to be rotated out (planted, grown, and replaced) every decade or so. Somebody’s gonna hafta replant the planet someday.
Of course, operating a farm that large is no easy business and requires the constant attention of hundreds of Earth Ponies, unicorns, and Zebras. Even the hundred or so Pegasi make themselves useful, though there’s not much call for weather managing underground. What there were calls for were unicorns to charge up the artificial suns that adorned the roofs of our fields, strong bodied Earth Ponies and Zebras to harvest the crop, and clever hooves to maintain our stables vast network and interconnecting pipes and the Water Reclamation and Recycler that they led to.
And that is where I come in. You see not everypony can work the fields. The stable has other needs. Ponies to fill out paperwork. Ponies to cook the food. Ponies to work security, to teach, doctors and nurses for the clinic, ponies working the seed storage unit, ponies working in the bottling plant…and ponies working maintenance. In my case, water maintenance. You see that many plants take a lot of water, which is why our stable is stocked with not one but two water talismans. Can’t have all those plants dying just because a talisman broke. In fact to keep either of those from being overworked and thus minimizing the chance of one breaking, the two talismans are swapped out every twelve hours. And guess what lucky mare that job belong to?
Yeah. Me.
What’s that? Your name is Windy and you work with water? Boy, you just don’t get any breaks do you? No, no I don’t.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate the job. I love helping the stable, in any way that I can. But I don’t like being taken off farm duty just because I’m ‘not strong enough’, especially when it’s not true! My section supervisor Lucky Stripe just didn’t like me for some reason. A couple of reasons actually. One, I’m stronger than him. And two, I’m a girl. He most likely would have been fine if either one of those had been true but both of them were just too hard for the poor stallion to take. Loser.
So yeah, I’m kind of bitter. That doesn’t mean I’m not gonna do the job I do have poorly, now does it?
…So why in Tarturus does the Overmare want to see me this time?
==
KNOCK KNOCK
“Enter.”
I did so, crossing my heart and praying to Cadence one more time beforehoof. I was surprised to see the Overmare’s office much cleaner than I was used to seeing it, the floor spotless, all the paperwork divided into two neat little stacks on her desk. The various file cabinets surrounding the room sparkled as if someone had taken a rag to them with a great fury.
Oh oh. The Overmare only cleaned her office when she was really angry. I eyed the chair sitting across from her desk for a moment before opting to stand; you don’t sit unless the Overmare asks you to sit.
“Sit”
You also don’t stand when the Overmare tells you to sit. My butt hit that chair so fast I swear I grew a horn and teleported. The chair let out a loud groin at being manhandled in such a way, and there was even a momentary pause in the scribbling of the Overmare’s pencil before movement returned to it a moment later.
I tried not to fidget. I really did! But it’s really hard just sitting somewhere and waiting. I swear she was writing extra slowly on purpose just to keep me waiting. Waiting means thinking. Thinking means worrying. Worrying means panicking. Panicking means sitting here and wondering what in Cadence’s name did I do wrong this time how much longer is she going to make me wait here oh by the stars I think I have to pee-
I was broken from my panicked inner musings by the sound of the Overmare’s pencil being laid on her desk. Sitting up straight as I could, I did my best not to appear guilty of anything. Across the polished mahogany surface she stared at me.
“You’re late. I called you three quarters of an hour ago.”
You leave me sitting here for ten minutes and complain about tardiness? I push down the thought and answered. “I uh, couldn’t come right away ma’am. I had to switch out the talismans.”
“Ah. So you do know your job, and the time at which you are supposed to do it?”
Oh crap. “Oh. You know about that.” Then flinched; that had been a stupid thing to say.
She apparently thought so too. “Yes Gale. Surprisingly enough my job involves knowing when other ponies aren’t doing their jobs. Their very important jobs.”
“Ma’am I swear, it was only the one time-”
“Twenty-two minutes. You were twenty-two minutes late to work. Twenty-two minutes late changing out the water talisman. Do you have any idea what could go wrong in twenty-two minutes?”
“Day-lights savings time threw me off. I forgot to set my clock forward. How does it even make sense for us to have that? We live underground!”
“That is neither here nor there. Regardless of your opinion toward the practice it exists, and regardless of its existence you were late to work. By twenty-two minutes. And in that twenty-two minutes everypony in this stable could have died.”
“The stable can run on only one talisman. I’ve seen the specs.”
“Yes it can. But not the entire stable. With only one talisman 60% of the stable’s farmland would have to be sacrificed. The remaining farmland, plus the extra food in storage, would be enough to feed the stable for an additional twenty years. But eventually the food would run out, and everypony would starve.”
“We could always go outside at that point…”
“And what makes you so sure there is food to be found up there?” she demanded, her voice rising slightly. I flinched, and fidgeted. “I’m waiting.”
“Er, I may have read a surface scan or two…”
“…those require a level 3 clearance to get to. Only I or one of the department heads have access.”
Oh now you’ve done it. “I may have…guessed your password.”
“…You guessed it.”
“Yes.”
“…and how many tries did it take you to guess it.”
“Oh it was real easy once I used the proper sequencing algorithm and I shouldn’t have said that.”
The Overmare sighed and began rubbing the bridge of her nose and I relaxed slightly. She only did that when she was frustrated, and her being frustrated meant she wasn’t angry anymore. At least not “get demoted to sewage maintenance” angry.
I shudder. That had not been a fun week, and I would make sure to never accidently turn the sun off again. Though to be fair I was twelve at the time, and controls didn’t look that complicated.
“It’s true,” she finally admitted after a pause, “that the surface can currently support rudimentary life. Mostly plants with a few basic animals such as insects. All living things up there however have been exposed to radiation throughout their lives and have built up a natural resistance; no pony, especially a pony from a stable, could survive the surface for longer than a few hours. Even a pony exposed for only a few minutes would become incurably sick and die within a few short weeks. It will most likely be centuries before the radiation levels have dropped low enough for an exploratory mission. As such it would be better if you didn’t tell anybody what you found. Don’t want to get any hopes up.”
“Understood ma’am,” I answered quietly. A moment later she dismissed me (whoo hoo! No punishment!) and I stood to leave, pausing as I reached the door. “Ma’am?”
“Yes Gale?”
“Auntie wants to know if you want to come over for dinner. Lasagna night at 8.”
“I’ll be there. And Gale? I’ll be changing my password. Try not to accidently guess it again please?”
“Yes ma’am,” I reply and step out the door. Just as the door is about to shut behind me I heard the Overmare whisper.
“Someday you’ll understand.”
I paused outside the door for a moment before continuing one, rather sure that the Overmare neither knew nor meant for me to hear that. Understand what?
==
For those of you confused about why I would invite the Overmare to dinner when I was so clearly terrified of her I’ll provide a bit of backstory. When my mom croaked pushing me out and my dad vamoosed the Overmare was left with the sad duty of finding me some parents. After what I can only assume were months of diligent searching and filtering through the stable’s piles of prospective parents…she decided to just leave me with the zebra who had been watching over me so far; the Overmare’s best friend. And her husband. Seventeen years later and here we are, sitting at the dinner table eating my aunt’s exquisite lasagna. I swear, eating this stuff has made me orgasm in the past.
Don’t tell her I said that. I don’t want to be grounded.
Growing up the adopted daughter of the Overmare’s best friend has had both its advantages and disadvantages. On the one hoof, I have the ear of the most powerful pony in the stable. On the other hoof when I get in trouble I really get in trouble. Hard to sneak out from being grounded when the entire stable in on the lookout for you. Not that I get in trouble often, or with intent! Just that most equines take offense to someone being both smarter and stronger than they are; especially when said equines are older than me. Some of those equines then get it in their thick heads to go causing fights. And those same equines then go running to mama and daddy when they end up kicked upside their plots. No fault of mine.
Both the Overmare and my aunt and uncle are of a different mind though, and as I spent most of my young life in fights I spent most of the rest of it in one form of trouble or another. It wasn’t until I entered the workforce at fourteen that I realized the extent of the damage I done caused; most of the supervisors were related to those I showed up in one form or another, or had heard that I was a trouble maker from one pony or another. The end result was that I couldn’t keep a job; no one wanted me.
Their loss; they don’t know what they’re missing. Still the lack of opportunities is what landed me in the water department in the first place, working one of the most boring most thankless jobs in the whole of the stable. Thirteen grueling hour days, seven days a week. With a half-hour crossing over with the shift of the other guy so we’ll both be available for the talisman switching. That was the reason why I didn’t see me being late to my shift as that big a deal; the other guy was still there wasn’t he? The switch happened just when it should have. The remaining twelve hours is just me staring at a bunch of gauges and making sure nothing overloaded.
Boooring. I don’t know why they don’t just switch the talismans out three times a day and make it a nine hour shift, but I guess if they did that it wouldn’t be so bad and the Overmare would have to find a new punishment job. Luckily I only had talisman duty for another couple of months, then I could reapply to one of the farming units. In the meantime though the thirteen hour days combined with eight hours a night of sleep didn’t leave me with much free time. Stick a couple of hours for meals in, and I got maybe an hour to my lonesome a day.
My own damn fault for breaking my supervisor’s nose when he called me a ‘little filly’. I’m not little damn it! I’m compact. Lot of muscle in a tiny package.
It was after dinner and the ‘rents were making small take with the Overmare while I was trying to politely find way to excuse myself for bed when something the Overmare said caught my attention. “What was that?”
She glanced at me. “The Anniversary. It’s tomorrow.”
I groaned. How could I have forgotten that? It was only the biggest and best party ever held in the Stable-practically a holiday! Except, you know, I had to work. I said as such in a voice that was totally not a whine.
“Well, then I guess you’ll just have to miss it. You can always catch next years.”
I grunted and excused myself, no longer interested in being polite.
==
Those not from my stable might not know what the Anniversary referred to. A long time ago when the Crystal Empire was still technically part of Equestria Cadence of course committed her forces to the war effort. But being the goddess of love and all her heart wasn’t entirely in it, so when Celestia stepped down from the Equestrian throne she took the chance to succeed along with her entire nation. Luna, having not the resources to fight two wars let them, and all was good. The war continued for a while after that but the Empire was safely natural and safe from both sides.
Or so everypony thought. No equine was sure why the bombs fell on the empire, whether they were targeted by mistake or by some zebra’s intention, but on the day Equestria fell the Empire fell with it. Were it not for the stables that Cadence allowed built as a precaution, the Empire would be naught but ashes, and it is this forethought that we celebrate.
A celebration I wouldn’t be able to attend. Damn it!
==
The Central Water Chamber was an impressive sight. Two large pipes filled most of the available space, one pumping used water into the purification chamber where it where it was magically purified of any contaminants before resuming out of the second pipe as clean, usable water. The control room, full of gauges and readouts aplenty, contained the primary and emergency controls for switching out the water talisman, as well as controls to set the active talisman to produce water rather than just filter it. This function, which relied on ambient and active magic to produce something out of nothing, was to be only used in emergencies and only been used twice in the history of the stable; and then only for a few minutes each time. Underneath and slightly in front of the purification chamber was the emergency storage chamber; a vast box composed of unbreakable glass capable of holding several tons of water in case of overflow. And should even that fail emergency controls stationed in the control room would unleash a hatch whereby the flood would be pumped into the stable entryway where it would (hopefully) be let out.
Needless to say none of this vast mound of redundant safety measures had ever been used, but on the off chance something did go catastrophically wrong, it was the duty and responsibility of none other than myself to wield the controls, seeing my stable to safety. After all, water maintenance, while boring, was technically one of the most important jobs in the entire stable.
Which is why it was one of the only jobs not left off for the festival. Which means I would be one of the few ponies not attending.
Not though lack of trying on my part.
“Please?”
“No.”
“Please?”
“No!”
“Pretty please? With cherries?”
“NO! I will not work late so you can attend the festival!”
I whimpered cutely again, but it seemed like Pine was having none of it.
Winter Pine was ‘the other guy’, the worker of the shift before me. He wasn’t someone I would really call a friend as we each only saw each other for two half hour periods a day, but we did technically work together so I tried to be civil. And in return, he was civil back. And older stallion around the same age as my aunt, we really didn’t have that much in common other than the bad luck of getting stuck with water-duty. Still, I thought that we were close enough for one tiny favor!
I told him as such.
“Gale, I like you. You’re a good kid. Misguided sometimes, but a hard worker. But I just finished a thirteen hour shift and I’m tired. I’m only going to be attending for a little while, and then I’m getting some sleep. If it means that much to you I’ll ask the Overmare to send someone to relieve you for a little bit, so you can at least go for a little while,” he ruffled my mane, and I stuck my tongue out at him. He laughed. “You need to learn some patience kid.” And with that he left me to my prison sentence.
==
“Having fun?” came the most annoying voice I knew. I closed my eyes and counted to ten before turning.
“Hello Lucky. How’s the nose?”
Lucky Stripe was the biggest ass in the entire stable, which was doubly funny when you considered there wasn’t a drop of donkey in him; rather, he was a Zebroid. Near two decades ago a stallion got drunk and hopped into bed with a zebra,
and 11 months later Lucky popped out. Luckily the stallion’s wife was a good enough mare to agree to adopt the brat.
She may have been a bit bitter about it though. Hence the name.
Still, Lucky was a bastard in every sense of the word. He was also the reason Windy was stuck doing water duty. And while I may moan about the punishment, I don’t regret the crime.
Lucky scowled. “Better, no thanks to you. Doc fixed it right up.”
“Then you’d better leave, if you want it to stay that way,” I said as I stood to move toward him. He backed away, shaking his head.
“Whoa whoa whoa hold on a sec. I come in peace.”
“Oh really?” I asked, my voice clearly full of skepticism. He could apparently hear it for he hurried to explain.
“I was just wondering if you were tired of working down here is all. I’ve thought about it, and it seems to me we were both at fault that day. And it was just a broken nose. No permanent hard done, and it hardly seems bad enough to justify getting stuck down here of all places.”
“So what? You offering to drop the charges? Getting the Overmare to reinstate me?”
“Sure sure, eventually. But don’t you think we should talk it over first, get to know each other better so we can have a…closer, relationship. Maybe over dinner?”
I step back, shocked. “Lucky! It’s, it’s a miracle! Quick, get the doctor in here, we need to document this! The thought of going out with you! It…it turned me gay!”
At once his smarmy smile fell to a look of annoyance and anger. “You’re gonna regret saying no to me. I was so looking forward you being under me,” he leaned against the wall and regarded me a moment. “Go on, get out of here.”
“Wait, what?”
“Did you think I came just for the pleasantries? Overmare sent me to relieve you. You’ve got an hour to party your fill and get back here cause if I have to stay a second longer..”
I didn’t hear the rest of what he had to say because I was already out the door, my feet pounding down the familiar path to the atrium as fast as I could go. “I get to go to the party I get to go to the party” was the only thought passing through my head.
Author's Note
Ok, here's the deal. I started this story WAY back months ago but never got past the first chapter as a result of procrastination. I ended up shelving it. There are two things I hear about that made me decide to pick it back up: The September Pony Write Off and this little software I heard of called Write Or Die. So yeah, I'm going to try and use these two things to force write this story. As such keep in my the following things: The story will be rush written. That means no editing. I already have a general outline for the whole thing written out but if I take time to edit it I'll never get it done. Sides, I'm not trying to write the great American novel here; it's an experiment. That being said everything you have read so far is what was written prior to my shelving the story, and everything from this point on will be brand new material. I hope you all enjoy reading it as much I a (hopefully) will enjoy writing it.
