Fallout Equestria: The Isle of Hope

by cavepony1509

Rating: mature
Tags: Adventure, Crossover, Dark
Length: 46691

Caught between the plans of ponies and entities beyond the earth, Starwind Solace struggles to make her life mean more than her studies while also learning about a role that she has been set apart to play since before she was even born.

From a forgotten library, deep within a mountain, to the oceans that swarm with irradiated life, Starwind Solace, an arcane researcher who has always fought to find the best in ponies, finds herself out of her element as she is thrust out into the harsh wasteland by an enemy she can't hope to understand and is too afraid to face. Her story of the discovery of truths long misunderstood unfolds through struggles that only her allies and friends can help her through as they learn the meanings of their lives and the power of friendship.

Published 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC
Last updated 2014-11-11 04:01:58 UTC

Chapter 1: Starwind

Chapter 1: Starwind

Flip. Skim. Flip again.

        Through the royal blue haze of magic that, too often, crept its way down into my vision from my horn, and the pale yellow incandescent glow of the bulbs above, I was turning dull page after dull page in the thousandth book of my steadily growing collection of literature that I had no interest in.

“Such is the life of us, the lowly bookworms,” my fellow arcane researchers would say.

“Worms. Is that all we are?” I often caught myself thinking out loud before burrowing deeper into some discourse on climate change that spoke of the merits of appreciating your vegetables while we still have them or a politically edited dialogue on pony superiority that was probably written in near illegible cursive by an academic, like myself, who was worming their own way through other books for information to satisfy their superiors.

“Yep,” I’d repeat to myself under my breath. “Worms.”

Honestly, I loved the work at first, with its promise of new truths unfurling on scrolls written by Twilight Sparkle herself before me, but, when one has read enough that they dream about escaping an onslaught of wild, carnivorous textbooks, one tends to start hating the monotony.

“Why do the Steel Rangers even need some of these texts? Aren’t they tough enough as is? Do they really need to know ten ways to magically enhance the taste of stew or understand the secrets of complex astronomical magic? Bah.” I often whined to the stifling library air as dust particles settled on the shelves surrounding me.

This was the last great, secret library created by Twilight Sparkle and the Ministry of Arcane Science — which she ran as an emergency repository for all of modern knowledge — during the last years before the megaspells. This was my home.

Well, this was as close to one as I could find in the last six or so years, and what I considered my room was the smallest nook within it, just off of the cozy, welcoming atrium and front desk area.

One of my piles of books answered after a few moments from across the small area of free walkway left in the room. Loudly, it began chiding “Tsk! Tsk! Starwind Solace, you ought to know by now that Roux and the rest of our Ranger friends are trying to make the world a better place with what we give them, so don’t be discour—Ah!” A scream accompanies the collapse of said pile as I magically tossed my, now finished, thousandth book atop its towering bulk.

Out of the rubble, from below a particularly boring set of novels written by one Corkscrew Brew, a small, chestnut colored mare rose up and fixed me with a burning stare that only motherhood or war can endow upon a pony from the most brilliant green eyes as I momentarily paused from book one thousand and one to greet Dulcet Tones, another researcher who happened to pass through on his way to his lab.

“Star, how can you be so lazy, talkative, and intelligent simultaneously? I wish you would at least try to put your books away properly when you finish them. You are talented as any mare I have ever met, friendly to everyone, and a great researcher, dear, but really buzz, hum, and bzzz.” Dusty Tome’s gentle voice always managed to somehow blend perfectly with the background noises of the generators, so I hardly even noticed the transition as I fell into my thoughts.

I would like to say here that, when I fell into daydreams, I let my thoughts drift to a new design for spark battery efficiency or a new spell, but, more often than not, I was too thick to pay attention to my surroundings and my mind directed me to memories. In this instance, I found myself staring at a decaying magical energy station with a smiling silver pony extending a hoof bump to me from behind scratched glass on a bent sign post as a cold wind drilled into the skin on my nose before I could cover it with the meager scarf that I requisitioned from mom’s old stuff in the closet that daddy never checked anymore.

“Big 52 snack and magic emp… empori – shop,” I struggled to say through my half frozen jaw muscles to the bundle of fabric hugging the ground behind me as we walked into the forgotten way station.

“Sis, don’t ya think Daddy wouldn’t want us out here?” The bundle that hid my little sister questioned flatly.

“Absolutely he would! He is always telling us to seek new horizons, draw conclusions on factual evidence, and be scientists in all aspects of our life because knowledge is our greatest weapon, and blah, blah, blah. Look, just take my word for it, little sis, we are gonna see something amazing today!” I stated, jittering with a mixture of cold and excitement.

I was not to be stopped! Daddy always told me that I should never leave New Commons because of some big bullies that live around our town called Riders or Raidees er, well, bad guys, whatever their names are. Anyway, I learned from Judicial and Marzipan that their father was told by a friend of the mayor who overheard a meeting with somepony that there was a thing called a “terminal” out here that is some kind of super advanced piece of technology, like our radios, which holds the secrets of ponies from years back!

Ever the precocious, curious, head in the clouds thinker, I was not willing to let the winter season, the silly words about some kind of danger, or my downer of a sister stop me as I trekked all afternoon in the snow to find this place. I had to know what this mystery would hold!

The door, rusted by time and the endless rains and snow that blanketed the northern coast year in and year out, required quite an effort as I huffed and puffed my meager kinetic magic on its handle before it simply snapped off and the door fell inward with a dull thud that was quickly absorbed by the thick cold.

“You never listen to me,” I heard my sister angrily whisper to herself in a half-hearted attempt to hide her contempt at the present situation. “I could be by the great hearth in the town hall with Marzipan playing blind stallion, deaf stallion, but noooo, I get forced to walk for miles on one of the coldest days of the year!” She emphasized the final few words with an attempted stomp that turned into her tripping on her baggy clothing, much to her chagrin.

I wasn’t one to sweat the small things like her complaining, so, instead, I trotted my way through the storefront, finding absolutely nothing that resembled what was described to me. I did, however, note the obvious that, if I were a nifty device, I would most definitely be behind the large, probably locked, door that was behind the bar with the register on it.

“How much force do you think I could throw that cash register with?” I asked openly.

“How am I supposed to know? YOU are supposed to be the genius, righ-”

“Alright, sounds like enough force to me!” With more effort than was necessary, I lobbed the mostly metal money machine at the wooden door which promptly slammed open. Sis usually got a little too long winded.

Stepping forward, observing the now cracked frame, the bundle of joy in every circumstance filled me in with some news that was only entirely embarrassing. “Did you, in your wisdom, know that you could’ve checked to see if it was unlocked? It was.”

Biting my bottom lip with anticipation while fighting the urge to magically muffle my sister’s constant commentary, I pushed past the moment and my companion to peer into the darkened office that had rested, untouched, as far as I knew, since before the megaspells! There, on a desk that had a thin film of dust sleeping on its surface, a soft green glow emerged from a monitor that held a single blinking, white rectangle awaiting its master’s commands.

Computer, meet master!

With a speed that I reserved only for the last snack cake in the meal line and specialized technology, I pushed a rubbish pile that was sitting in the chair out of the way, hopped up into the seat, and began following prompts as they flew at me from the heart of the device.

Do you have a password?

No.

New user access?

Yes, please!

The last session of this computer did not close properly. Would you like to rebuild the files from that session?

Sure? Um, I mean yes!

This pattern continued for what seemed an eternity until I gained access to three glistening, beautiful files with funny names like Journal Entry 66: The World is Going Downhill Fast, Journal Entry 120: The Snow is Green…, and one that I couldn’t access at all that was called Island of the Lost Sea.PBM.

Frustrated at this ridiculous information that was terribly boring, I turned from the desk with the swivel motion that the chair allowed me in order to announce our departure from this lackluster bust of an adventure only to find a shiny piece of metal reflecting red light from a fire I hadn’t noticed in the main room pressed to the small, light blue, throat of my sister as a drop of crimson fell to splash silently on the grimy floor at her hooves.

“Oh. Hi, I am Starwind Solace, and this is -” My naïve words were cut off by the muzzle of a black revolver which was forced into my mouth by a large earth stallion wearing a grin behind the grip of the weapon that spoke volumes of his intent.

I knew guns as well as anypony, I suppose. For instance, I knew that that gun, in particular, had a six chambered revolving loader that would fire between .22 and .45 caliber rounds, and that they were a huge pain to clean after shooting at the range. None of that knowledge really could help me, though, as I merely grinned awkwardly over the unyielding metal.

I sometimes regretted not paying much attention to the practical aspects of survival training.

“Bring ‘em to the fire. I like my meat hot!” A laughing, gravel filled jar of a voice from the main room shouted to the two stallions that proceeded to kick my hooves from under me and drag me by my tail into the heat of a circular fire pit made of the old newspapers that littered the floor.

Pulling the weapon away from me, the large one turned to face the third stallion closest to the fire. “Hm. Not much meat on these two, boss, I can’t see them lasting us very long. You get first dibs, ‘course, but you know how awful hungry the cold makes me!”

A small whimper escaped from my sister as a puddle of yellow ran from her spot next to me to the huddle of the three ponies a few paces away.

“Trust me. I can make them come around,” I whispered to her in the minuscule comfort of our distance from the ones I assumed were the Raidees, raidoos… whatever. “You know how I got Skyrocket to quit throwing rocks at us after school? Well, I figure these stallions must be just bigger versions of her, sort of, so I am sure I can smooth things out between us!”

Dusty really was right about one thing. I was a little too overly friendly sometimes.

“Excuse me, sirs?” I paused, awaiting a response.

“We could make a stake out of something here and make kebabs, surely,” the small, knife wielding unicorn hissed to his comrades between broken, jagged front teeth.

“Excuse me, sirs!” Another pause filled the space between us as they weren’t daunted.

“No! The wood in these parts is too rotted! They’d taste shitty. No doubt in my mind about it,” the boss replied quickly to the suggestion.

“EXCUSE ME!” It is hard to miss a verbose and excessively loud filly, and I was the queen of them all at that point.

“Shut up, foal!” The boss demanded as he snapped his head in my direction. “I don’t usually take the time to talk to my meals, so I will make this brief because you are one of the more annoying ponies I have had the displeasure of bringing to dinner.”

As I waited for him to continue, the light of realization caused my ears to droop as his words fell like hail over us.

“You see my associates and me? We have certain palates that can only be satisfied by a certain nuance unique to a particular type of food,” he said while chuckling, “and that, my dear little steaks, would be ponies like you two who are young, fresh, and absolutely dripping with naiveté and optimism!”

A laugh as dry as the noise made when crumping a sheet of paper rolled throughout the room, my body, and my very soul as I tasted the second bite of the terrible reality that the wasteland of the world had served up to me.

“Switchblade, come here,” the boss pony called out. “I want the usual bits first as an appetizer, and make sure you get it from the mouthy one with the dark fur.”

I could only watch his mouth move in sync with those final sounds that slowly faded from audible range as a flash of steel found its way into my line of vision. During the act, it actually didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would as I craned my head towards sharp tooth to see the white orb on the end of the knife.

My little sister reacted before I did.

A scream erupted from her body in a muted burst of agonizing muscle spasms that I could not hear but only see through my eye rotating her direction. I collapsed, noticing a slick spot on the ground below me that wasn’t there the last time I checked and which was thick enough that I could draw funny faces in its sticky red. What vision I had left had already begun to blur as an airy feeling of floating began its journey from my hooves to my ears.

This wouldn’t be so hard.

“Sure, I can fall asleep now, daddy. I am a big girl after all,” I think I said to the new stallion that had just entered the room after my head it the floor. “What pretty lights you brought tonight, daddy. I didn’t know we even had fireworks in New Commons.”

A flash of orange, heavy rhythmic vibrations from the pulsating cylinder daddy was carrying, and the steady hum of my little sister’s odd singing began lulling me to close my eyelids.

The pulse stopped, daddy walked over to me.

Why is he covered in such shiny metal plates? He looks so cool!

“Hey, shwait, you aren’t daddy,” I disappointedly murmured through the bubbles forming in the froth that had appeared around my mouth. “Well, hi, mishter. I am Shtarwinda Sholace. Can wesh be friends? You sheem really neat.”

The lights and feeling of being present faded as I found myself sliding toward the unknown.

Black.

That’s all there was after that point. There was just black and a slow, sad melody that seemed to fill the void for what could have been minutes, hours, days, months, or years to my lack of awareness until a deep, sympathetic voice began calling my name from miles away.

“Starwind?”

Eyelid fluttering open, I found that only half of my vision was present as everything came into focus.

“Yes? Hello? You called?” I managed through a pained smile.

“You will be safe now,” the deep voiced unicorn stallion in cool armor said as he lifted my head to rest a bundle of our clothes under it before continuing. “I am a steel ranger from the Baltimare Chapter, and you should be glad I happened to be on my way here.”

“Yeah, thanks, mister!” I replied weakly. "What brought you all the way out here?"

With a brief, deliberative pause, he answered. "I was sent to check an alarm that went off about some of our technology in the area."

"Oh!" I exclaimed before biting my lip in agony from an attempt at lifting myself up to get closer to the unknown stallion. "You like all of these gadgets and tech too? I love them! It is why we came out here too! Isn't that right, sis?"

I waited for a grunt in response, or, at least, some sort of spiteful acknowledgement, but I heard nothing except a small, breathy snore beside me, where I used to be able to see.

"Oh, right..." I raised a hoof to feel a small patch of cloth covering where my right eye should have been.

"I did the best I could with what little supplies I brought along," he said quietly with remorse. "I am afraid you probably won't ever see the same again."

A glance in his direction revealed that he was a strong pony, built with fortitude and resolve, and he saved me, so I was not going to let him see me be weak. Besides, crying right now might just make it hurt worse.

“I don't mind. It is better than what was going to happen, I think... and, well," I paused to stare up at the stallion. “Did you also get a chance to help out my sister? I think those guys may have cut her worse…”

I craned my neck around the top of my bundle pillow to be able to catch sight of her, but my eye only found the image of red drops falling to the floor from a shiny blade as it bit into her neck.

A spasm of muscle weakness and the throbbing of heat near my bandaged eye brought me back around quickly.

“Yes, I did. You really should be more careful, and worry less about her and more about yourself,” he said sternly. His gruff demeanor couldn’t shake my feeling of worry.

“Did you really bandage her up?” I pressed him. “I mean, properly bandaged. I worked with nurse Bubble before, and I learned a thing or two about it, so I could check for you, if you don’t feel confident in it.”

His cocked eyebrow brought a small smile to my face as he managed to look a lot like dad after I created a bit of rainbow gas in his lab with some chemicals that were lying around.

With an internal buck to my wandering thoughts to right them again, I pressed forward because she may have been sleeping with a concussion, bleeding internally, or worse!

“I don’t mean to be rude mister, but I could really use your help to look after my sister because I can’t just take your word for it,” I stated bluntly “and I am not in the best state to move, it seems.”

“You…” He chuckled lightly. “You… really are something.”

I just gave a small shrug that hurt far more than I was comfortable with.

His horn began to glow. “Look, I took care of her too, alright?”

My sister was suspended in an amber colored field above me, and, he was right, she was fine.

“You saved us both,” I whispered quietly up to him, our silver champion, as he set her back down. Our gazes met for a long while before either of us spoke.

“I don’t know what I can do to repay you for this,” I said, “but I think it earns you a spot as my new best friend, so, hold on.”

I fished around in my saddle bag that had been brought in from the office since I passed out, and I pulled out a small scrap of paper which I proceeded to write on using a pen that I floated over from the front desk.

“Here,” I said, “this is the password for the terminal in the office. It isn’t as awesome as I was hoping it would be, but it is the best I can offer as a gift for my new best friend right now.”

“You were the one who activated that terminal?” He gravely asked as his face dropped to a frown and he raised a hoof to point into the office.

“Yes, of course!” I replied proudly.

Rising to his full height upon his large, metal coated hooves to tower above me and the sleeping form of my sister that was on my blind side, my new best friend began speaking with deliberate, slowly chosen words. “My… my mandate, as decided by…” a pause wafted through as he turned his head from me to have a shudder pass through his visible body before he continued. “As decided by Elder Custard, I am required to eliminate anyone with knowledge of our MoAS security terminals and or their associated contents… I… I’m sorry.”

A tear slid down his face as he turned to face me directly again.

“I don’t understand, sir,” I stated truthfully. “Somepony named Custard said we couldn’t be friends? I don’t know any Custards, and I certainly don’t want to not be friends with you… So, if I have to, I guess I can give you something better than that silly, old terminal code to earn your friendship.”

I took a moment to undo the clasp of the chain that I had hidden under my scarf before I pulled out the tiny locket that I had taken along with the clothes from my mother’s things.

“Here, you can have this,” I said softly as I levitated the jewelry to the stallion. “It is a locket that belonged to my mother. It is her favorite saying that comes from some old Star lore of the pre-war days.”

“There is hope out there, little one. You just have to see through the pain and suffering of now to see it clearly, and, when you do, you’ll be able to love with the same love that gave us first breath.” His measured words flowed gently as he read the inscription on the locket.

“I can’t take this from you. It… It wouldn’t be right,” he said abruptly as he tossed the locket back into my saddle bag with his own magic before facing toward the doorway to the outside, stoic in the wind flowing through the portal still lacking the barrier that once stood so firm.

He closed his eyes, speaking a few words under his breath heatedly, as he looked poised between a cliff’s edge and a steep hill.

After this pause for consideration, he began to speak. “Starwind, you are a good pony. That is far too rare to waste in the blighted day in which we live, so, I will accept your friendship with no charge but this: If we run into each other again, you can never act like you know me, never mention this place or what happened here, and I will act as if I newly met you as well. It has to be this way, and I am sorry I could not be the friend that a decent filly like you deserves, but I know you’ll do great things if you are good enough to suffer all of this while caring more for your sister and a stranger’s friendship than even your own wellbeing."

He lost his words with a fading voice, thick with emotion before being able to finish his statement. "Thank you.”

With all of that said, the nameless steel pony trotted his way out into the snow storm that had begun to slow. My sister began to stir with the clicking of his hooves on the ground, and in the time used to turn to look at her, the outline of the stallion had all but faded into the distance outside the station.

“We need to get back to New Commons to tell daddy what happened, and to get you checked out, you stupid idiot,” my sister said in the husky voice that ought to belong to a mare twice her age, and which I had grown so used to from her. “Hey, stand up and turn to your left.”

“But I won’t be able to see you! I am having a rough time in the right eye area, in case you can’t tell by the bandage,” I dryly said as I stuck my tongue out.

“Just do it,” she replied without an ounce of humor in her tone, “I need to see something.”

I did so to satisfy her, and an audible gasp brought me spinning back around to see her running from the left of me to my right, staring at my flank.

“What is it? A bug?! Did I sit in radroach poop again? GET IT OFF!” I stammered out rapidly in one solid line of words.

“No, none of those,” she spat out in discreet annoyance. “Just look for yourself.”

I picked up a shard of a mirror that used to be pinned to the wall above the front desk and magically turned it in the air to see what the commotion was about.

Nope, not radroach poop.

What was there, however, was the symbol of maturity that I had both anticipated for years and not expected to occur in a situation like this one that turned out so poorly. On both flanks, I could see the image of a large book opening above a crystal clear ocean as stars, comets, and light pour from its pages.

I had earned my cutie mark.

I don’t remember much of what it was like to only have one eye, since that problem worked itself out over time, but that sight, that shard of glass, suspended in air by a familiar creeping aura, had managed to chisel itself into the marble of my mind.

A hoof frantically waved through the dust of that memory as the sensations faded to the past once again, and I sighed at where all of that adventurous, youthful spirit lead me in the end.

“Starwind, you never listen to a word I say, do you?”

Dusty always could hit the nail on the head.

“Sorry, Dusty, I just don’t know what goes on up here.” I tapped my head to direct the statement. “I just get lost in here sometimes.”

“Well, we need to get back to work before Scribe Logic arrives with the new second in command for their monthly inspection!” Dusty warned, as motherly as ever.

“I’d rather not,” I replied as I reached under a pyramid of books to my left to pull out a patchwork radio that I pieced together with scrap from the old offices in the complex. I flipped a switch to boost the reception of the homemade device, and began fine tuning it to pick up the talk of the day from DJ Pon3 on one of the few remaining stations available in the wasteland. The knob gets stuck a bit on the last little incremental adjustment and the sultry voice of Pon3 on the radio mixed with a vibrato of static is the best I am able to manage without more energy than I am willing to expend.

“Folks, I know we all agree that we have had our fair share of would-be-heroes in the past, but my sources in the field are giving me some fantastic news! Listen up, children, ‘cause this is fresh off of the presses. Apparently, somepony found the urge to play as a true hero, for once, and cleared out the raider nest that has been plaguing the area around Ponyville for years!”

With a sad chuckle, I began a dialogue with the radio personality in the confines of my mind as the news passes through.

“I learned by my own stupid mistakes that places like Ponyville, those raider nests in the wastes, should be avoided, regardless of how I may feel about being able to redeem those deemed lost to evil. How can anyone sane truly believe they can make an impact in the world by taking these smaller bands of ill intent head on? I mean, sure, I have always thought that everypony could be saved, that everypony deserves a chance at life and happiness, but how could someone be so headstrong as to think themselves above the reaching power of the wasteland?”

A moment passes and a small voice answered from far away, saying “you know you would do the same if you were in their situation…”

Returning to listening, the voice was still going strong.

“If you happen to run across said raider hunter, feel free to pass them along a little something for their trouble because, and this is the kicker kids, I am hearing reports that this pony may be from a stable."

“Fresh from the can!"

“She or he could probably use as much help as we can give them out there in the wasteland, so keep a watch out. That’s all for now kids. Now time for some music from –“

Click.

The radio was shut off by a very perturbed Dusty. A passing thought ran through my mind that, perhaps, Dusty only knew how to use this facial expression that seems to constantly disapprove of whatever I am doing. I laughed as she began to speak, cutting her off.

Jumping from my spot on the floor, I began to leap with faux grace and poise, striking dramatic poses at the shadows cast by the mountainous stacks of books as I played the superhero fighting off the shadowy evils of the world like that raider fighter.

I parried!

I ducked and rolled!

I bucked my hind legs out and struck down my foe!

I, with a flourish and a very lackluster landing, attempted to barrel roll my way to standing eye to eye with Dusty before falling, face first, into the concrete.

“Honestly, what am I supposed to do with you?” She said with only a hint of amusement at my childish antics. “Now, can we get back to work?”

I nodded.

“Good! Before this mess began, I came in here for something… I can’t remember what it was now though, for the life of me.” She pouted as she fell into deep thought. “OH! Yes, of course, the notes on relativistic travel through space and time from Twilight Sparkles private collection! Were you able to find that information?”

With a wave of my hoof, I responded. “Yes, I did. That old book is around the library somewhere.”

A pregnant pause filled the room, awkwardly pressing into the two of us, as two other junior researchers walked by the doorway to the main atrium, discussing the novelty of a magazine they had found called “Scientific Equestria.”

“Well?” she asked, pressing the question. “Where in the library is it? This place is huge, so I imagine you at least stuck it somewhere close?”

I shook my head. “No, I think I read it all the way through and just set it down to move on to the next book on the list…”

Putting on a shocked face, Dusty’s body tensed up for the verbal missiles she was about to volley.

“Starwind, we absolutely MUST find that book again! You know that we have deadlines to meet, and Elder Roux is not the most patient of stallions!”

“But, I…“ I attempted to start.

“Furthermore,” she continued, “you are constantly creating a mess by not looking after your own materials as you read them. You may be able to retain the information quickly as you read it, but you must follow the procedure that I created if you are to maintain a healthy relationship with the Steel Rangers.”

I scrunched up my face with a slight amount of bemusement. “Dusty, I can just rewrite them, you know that, and –“

“I worry about you, Star,” she said as she cut me off again, “I do. I see in you the greatest potential of anypony I have ever met, but you won’t make it very far if you can’t start being a little more proactive.”

“I –“

BOOM!

Cement rained from the ceiling as every one of the piles of books surrounding us fell to the ground and a large tremor shook our portion of the complex from the secondary access hatch in the side of the mountain where the library was hidden.

Our conversation now summarily executed, the two of us began running out of the small nook and into the broad, spacious chamber that made up the welcoming center for pre-war scholars. The two researchers from earlier were huddled in fear against a support beam across from the large blast door entrance, as they were taught by the safety crew instructors.

“Star, those weren’t earthquakes,” Is all Dusty could darkly say before a second ringing blast brought the statement into stark clarity in its own way.

BOOM! SLAM!

The blast door that was supposed to stop most military grade weaponry exploded inward, flattening itself against the wall, and creating a tomb of twisted metal for the poor researchers who expected safety there.

Two.

“Star, with me! Now!” Dusty shouted as she began sprinting down an adjacent corridor that headed to the offices of the upper echelon research leads.

Turning to follow her at my fastest speed, feeling the familiar sinking feeling in my stomach, I looked back over my shoulder, my eyes zeroing in on the now vacant doorway with sunlight streaming through it.

Stepping up to create a silhouette of herself, a mare, clad in silvery white armor from head to hoof that seemed to shift hue with every passing moment, stared down her nose hidden in a pointed helmet with black eyes that were more vacant and cold than any grave. A cloud of pink began to spread from within her armor and from behind her, to obscure the entirety of her form, save for those eyes, as she, with a voice that reminded me of things I dare not think of, spoke chaos into being.

“Seek.”

A chattering of teeth, a gnashing of half decayed jaws with flaking skin barely covering bone, and the familiar shuffle of rabid ghoul ponies’ hooves heralded the arrival of the mob.

Taking a turn as we reached the end of the first hallway, I lost sight of the scene, but I knew all too well what was about to occur, and I had no real means of stopping it.

“Feral ghouls,” I panted out to Dusty in our haste, “from…from Canterlot!”

We took a few flights of stairs from behind a small access door, three steps at a time, as Dusty replied.

“How could you tell? Was it the smoke? They would have remnants of Littlehorn agent active around them if they were.”

I replied, hardly keeping a stable pace with my words as I fumble for breath. “Littlehorn… yes!”

We burst through another access door, four flights up, and Dusty immediately barged into a room with a large sign above its entrance which read “Alert Station 1.” Over the intercom, as I came in behind her, I heard Dusty’s voice resounding from the hidden speakers in the walls as she pressed a hoof against the large button marked “Emergency Response Alert System.”

“This is head researcher, Dusty Tome. All staff and associated personal must vacate the facility immediately. This is a code 42. I repeat. This is a code 42, and the main entrance is no longer a viable means of escape. All staff should be prepared for engagement and keep at least twenty feet from the intruders due to biohazard exposure risks. LIttlehorn Agent protocol is in effect. Goddesses’ speed, everyone.”

With that done, Dusty magically released the microphone, typed a few quick lines of code into the small terminal nearby, and directed me to a panel in the wall that was painted a very obvious red for reinforcement of the nature of its content.

“Here, take this. You have had some experience in firearms training, so I know you can handle it,” Dusty said as she levitated a 9mm pistol and two full magazines into the bag that I had strapped to my right side.

I nod, hiding my shaking limbs as best I could as we returned to the hallway to follow our own level’s escape route that was helpfully marked in fluorescent green on the wall.  As we rounded the corner, taking a left to head towards a service lift that would bring us to the surface, the double doors on its face opened to reveal two of the ghouls with teeth barred in anticipation.

I froze.

Without a second passing, Dusty pulled out her own pistol and pumped three rounds into the eye sockets of each, downing them both as their pink smoke began to fill the small hallway on its journey towards us. I cringed at the sight, my heart hurting, but not from physical strain.

“We can’t take this route,” Dusty quickly stated. “We will have to head to level three to try that.”

I began to question why as the two ghouls started to find their way to their hooves as a mixture of pink light and the smoke seemed to stitch the holes in their heads back together.

We sprinted down a flight of stairs, and into a mirror image of the hallways in the floor above, where we just were. Running into three ponies from a branch of the project I had never met before, we, again, started following the directions provided by the guide arrows in an attempt to catch the lift on this floor.

Dusty furiously began punching the call button with the upward facing icon, punctuating each strike with a curse under her breath. The doors to the lift opened, as she reached a point that made it seem as if she would resort to prying them open, only to catch a brief glimpse of sparks, the passing call of squealing metal, and the blood curdling screams of the three ponies who had entered the cage before us facing their demise as the metal box descended to crash into the inevitable bottom.

Five.

Dusty took three steps back, her eyes clenched as she repeated three silent words under her breath.

“That… that was our only way out,” she said, a bit dumbfounded. “When I alerted the rest of the complex, I sealed off all auxiliary access from this cell of the facility to the others to prevent the attackers from infiltrating the rest of the areas easily and… that was our only way.”

I knew as well as she that the Ministry of Arcane Science’s library was just one of the many “cells” that made up this facility in a honeycomb pattern that took up most of the interior of the mountain, and this meant that there were only as many exits into the other cells as I could count on my hooves. During emergencies, each cell leader was supposed to access the security station for their section and quarantine themselves in order to cut losses, leaving only one viable means of safe escape through an underground short distance tram line that ran to a small station hidden beneath a nearby sewer hub. Each cell had one exception to this rule, however, and I feared that we would have no other choice than to head toward it.

Finding my soul pealing from the heat of the fire we had found ourselves in, I swallowed, took a breath, and replied. “You know there is one other way, but it may require a bit of thinking and courage on our part.”

She looked deep into me, seeing beyond the purple and white of my eyes, and said “right.”

In a blur of motion and sore muscles from the effort, we made it down the flights of stairs, quietly, secretly, and without any altercations with the intent to get out of this place together.

“Okay, Star, what do you see?” Dusty asked as I peered around the bend of a hallway that came out into the atrium across from my book filled nook.

“There are three ghouls and the mare that came inside with them,” I responded in a whisper. “They are just standing there, in the area in front of the hatch, as if they are waiting for something.

As the last word left my mouth, a band of ten ponies began sprinting from the long corridor we had escaped into earlier, making a straight line to the late afternoon daylight as a couple of them took poorly aimed potshots at the four intruders to act as an obvious covering maneuver that was probably read about in some military history book.

Worms.

This tactic seemed to work as the ghouls backed up in hesitation, but within half of a second, the group was being torn to shreds by sharp teeth, and crushing hooves.

Poor, poor worms are all we are to hungry birds.

Their torn bodies began to bubble in places as they died, screaming. The pink smoke from the pores of the ghouls kissed parts of their bodies and I saw legs melt and fuse with concrete and steel, necks bend and ooze together with the torsos of their deformed counterparts, and eyes full of life turn into puddles on the ground.

Fifteen.

Resisting the urge to vomit right then and there, I covered my mouth with my left hoof as I couldn’t tear my eyes from the action unfolding. The ghouls, backing off after all the noises had died away, let the mare in the armor through to stand at the edge of the mass of bodies as she hummed a tune I could hardly make out, but that felt so oddly familiar. Golden flecks of light began to rise from the puddles of ponies, forming a ball above the mare’s head, as her gaze rose to meet the sight. Then, as fast as the light had formed, it was gone, absorbed or dissipated or something by the mare who slowly just turned and walked back into the position she had vacated seconds prior to stare at the wall with her three cohorts.

I began to grow weak in the hooves as I found it harder and harder to resist the itch clawing its way up from inside my body, and I felt my balance start to give way as I tipped forward, my vision growing slightly blurry with the pull of gravity.

Puddles. They… they were once ponies!

Dusty pulled me back by my mane as my limbs gave way and I landed, sprawled out, on the hard ground. Speaking gently through my muted ears as I touched a hoof to my face to feel the wet, she was still making that face.

A ringing in my ears signals reality’s return as I sat up, breathing for the first time in what felt like decades, and calming down with every beat of my heart.

“They melted,” I repeated to her far too loud in my urgency.  “They melted and she sucked some gold stuff out of them. They melted, Dusty!”

“Gold stuff?” She replied. “I saw no such thing, but, Star, we must –“ She quieted me with a fetlock held up and her ears cocked to the atrium.

Click. Click. Click.

A flash of orange and the rhythms of a shiny pony, coated in blood played in my periphery.

Behind us, I also heard a heavy breathing that sounded like multiple creatures sucking in water in an attempt to not drown.

Click. Gasp. Click. Gasp. Click.

“Okay, Star, look at me,” Dusty’s voice was razor sharp and full of some kind of emotion that escaped my understanding. She pulled out a small box with a single button and a microphone attached to its top from her saddlebag. “If I don’t make it out of here, I want you to take this recording to my daughter in Sweetwater Vista. She has to know that I didn’t leave her alone in this world.”

I nodded, wondering, dumbly, how she managed to make a recording during all of this.

“But, Dusty, how can you expect me to make it out of here without you?” I asked, losing heart. “Even if I knew a way out that you didn’t, why would I just leave you here? I never would…”

Dusty pulled her pistol, using her impeccable aim to put down, at least for the time being, the small group of ghouls behind us before she took a moment to reload.

“You read Twilight’s notes,” she intensely said while mentally squeezing the trigger of her magically lofted gun. “I was never kidding when I said that you were the brightest and best pony I have ever met, and I know that you probably learned her magic for teleportation on your first read of the spell book.”

She was cut off by the visual connection of the wicked looking mare approaching the gap to our only means of escape.

We began running toward the armored mare as Dusty took down two of the three ghouls flanking the black eyed mare while the third hid since her shielding seemed to resist every bullet without so much as a scratch. Attempting to duck out of the way of a raised, spike covered hoof that came before a blindingly fast charge to beat us to the door, Dusty quickly cut left to stop herself from running head first into the blades. Having noticed this, I followed suit with a wider roll out of the way, careening into the wall in the process.

We were cornered.

The ghouls, having healed and returned to their master, circled around and pressed us into the sharp meeting of the two walls. Dusty, limping from damage I had not noticed until now on the flank that must have just scraped the tips of the deadly hooves of the mare, struggled to remain standing as her wounds begin to fester before my eyes, revealing flesh and bone and the lifeblood underneath. Despite this, Dusty’s accuracy was dead on as she burned through round after round, magazine after magazine until the firing pin clicked an empty response to her urging.

The little chestnut mare with the greenest eyes I had ever known turned to me with an expression I truly had never seen on her face before.

“You know,” she weakly managed after magically pressing the single button on the recorder that I had forgotten I had left aloft in my aura, “I don’t ever regret my life choice. I made damn good ones. Sure, there were pitfalls and pain, but I never regretted anything because I have her, I have my happy ending, my sweet little filly.”

Dusty turned to throw her pistol at an approaching ghoul with such force that it sounded an audible crunch before she raised a barrier of a few feet in any direction around us made up of her magic’s bright yellow light.

Turning back, her shield already flashing under the strain, she continued.

“When you hear this, little one, know that Mommy will always be with you. No matter how far away you or I may be divided.” She paused to squeeze her eyes tightly closed as a layer of overcharge appeared around her horn and she pushed through her weary state.

I couldn’t help but stand stock still as Dusty Tome uttered words that never should have belonged to me. “I love you… I…” A groan escaped her lips and she fell to the floor before elevating herself up on one hoof to speak into the hovering microphone. “I will always love you, and you must always try to be the best you can be, better than whatever this tough world will try to twist you into. I know you will have a bright future, and…”

A breath.

“And you will be fantastic.”

Tapping the button with my hoof, I slid the device back into my bag as Dusty took another long look at me. Regret is not what I saw, no. She may have regretted not seeing her filly grow up or regretted not being there for her as long as she possibly could have, but I think she actually just felt sorry for me having to carry such a burden.

Her eyes fluttered once, twice, and on the third closure Dusty Tome’s eyes stayed shut, never to give that motherly look again.  Inside my soul, I feel a fissure form, small and shallow, but vitally present.

Sixteen.

In an instant, her shield failed and my eyes were fixed on my last friend, awaiting the hooves of the ghouls who would most certainly be making me a puddle on the ground soon.

A voice, louder than any I had ever heard, but as gentle as a whisper made me kneel in pain. This voice was hard and sharp and I felt it scraping at my mind as if it were a direct feed into my head from her mouth. I couldn’t comprehend what she was saying as it was a word too powerful and dangerous for my already fractured mind to comprehend at the moment, but as I peered up at the endless void in her pupils, beckoning me to submit, surrounded by the pressing pink haze that was obscuring the marbled columns, inlaid gold, and fragrant, aging books of the place I had called my home for the past six years, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of longing. Longing not for salvation, not for this place to persist as it was, but for Dusty and every one of those sixteen ponies I saw pass away today to return, to live the lives they, at one time, had ahead of them.

In the din I heard a small call above the noise and activity as the pink and the brown and the silvery white began to blend into one, my doom closing in, nearer and nearer.

“Hope and take a leap of faith!”

Whether it was insanity or something far stranger, I can’t know, but those words, formed in the last moments of opportunity gave me the strength to stand, and with one last look at Dusty and a tear sliding onto her still form, I leapt.

In a flash of magical energy and disorienting color, I felt air whoosh by my head as I fell a few feet and landed on my rump with a sharp creaking from the wood floor below me. My eyes, having not yet adjusted to the fact that it was twilight outside and that there were no lights on in this place, wherever I was, forced me to feel blindly around until I found a candle resting on what I assumed was a simple shelf mounted on the wall. Using a fire spark spell I typically reserved for campfire starting or cooking food, I exerted a little too much force and accidently set a nearby tapestry ablaze.

I scrambled for the closest source of water which, by chance, rested nearby in a cistern on top of a small pillar in the middle of a raised stage. I tossed the water to quickly put out the tapestry, sighing with the sudden expenditure of energy after the day’s stresses. In the corner of my eye, reflecting the light of the small candle, I spotted a flash of emerald and turned on the spot.

“Dusty!?” The room was empty, and my query was met with silence.

“Of course, it couldn’t be her. You just saw her die,” the fissure in my soul reminded me mockingly.

Staggering, weak and lightheaded, toward the reflecting green, I found that it was merely a piece of green colored glass hidden behind a long sheet which had been hastily draped over this particular part of the wall. Something eerie and reminiscent of my past stirred within me, and I couldn’t help but pull off the covering, allowing the fading sunlight to flow through.

A flashing image of a weeping purple stallion with deep blue coat, a small black filly, and a brief chill caused my breath to catch in my throat as I realized where I was. The filly, standing directly in front of me was crying too, saying “Daddy! Daddy, where is momma? Where!?” I felt my own mouth forming those words as she said them before I blinked and the scene had vanished along with my sense of security.

Miles from New Commons, my old home, stood an old, abandoned church which had survived the test of wars, time, and nature, despite all their best efforts to bring it down. This church was dedicated to the worship of the Stars as directed by an ancient Zebra sect who taught that the Stars were the creators of all things, and that the stars were both our greatest benefactors and our greatest enemies. Essentially, the belief in the kind of religious hoodoo that I had never really found practical, rational, or necessary to anypony because it tended to lead to crusades masked in the guise of religious charity. Prior to the megaspells wiping out anyone who could stop such a thing, the government of Equestria shut this place down on suspicion that the Followers of the Star Maiden, as they were called, were “striped, zebra colluders” or some such thing. Despite this, the building, and its famous stained glass depicting the Star Maiden, remained, and it had been home to a few organizations, families, and refugees in times of trouble on more than one occasion since.

“Where else can I go now?” I asked to the unmoving, regally posed image in the glass above me. “You have seen me at nearly all the lowest points of my life somehow, so I can’t say I am surprised to have come up with this place as the destination for my spell.  It seems only fucking fitting.”

I felt my blood began to boil as the rage of pent up frustrations started pulsing from my heart.

“All of the ponies I’ve come to know, befriend, and love have come and gone in death or just the passing of time, but you, you ridiculous, misleading icon of my failures, remain!” I frantically shouted while pointing an accusing hoof.

“You may have once been the symbol of peace, of goodness, and of unity, as those deluded, passed on ponies thought, but, now, just look at you! All you are is a simple reflection of me: cold, alone, and worn at your edges!”

I paused, falling to sit on my haunches, tired, and I let my emotions crest and fall as they flowed out of me from their hidden reservoir.

“They said you created our souls to make us creatures of virtue, but I cannot believe that now,” I whispered in the crescendo of feelings that my long past had orchestrated.  “How can I? How can anypony have a soul anymore on this wreck of a planet? HOW!?”

“Well, duh, silly, they just keep up a happy attitude and take the time to enjoy a good laugh,” a soprano, bell of a voice said from the darkness.

“Wait, wha –“

A bouncing, dark colored mare who giggled as we tumbled into a padded pew a few feet away with my head striking the blunt wooden corner of the seat, cut me off.

“Who… are you?” I asked in a daze as my vision began to blur, and I reached up with a hoof to feel a sticky spot near my right ear.

“Oopsie!” The mare said from beside me. “I think I surprised her a little too well, Papa!”

The charcoal mare and a shotgun toting, green, aging stallion leaned over me, speaking gibberish and making gestures at myself and each other. I spoke inwardly to myself that they were taking this way too seriously, and they should relax on this sweet concrete bed, like I was.

“Speaking of which,” I said aloud, “I just want to take a nap, so forget my questions. I’ll just ask again tomor –“

Sleep never comes easy when you’re broken hearted, but it does somehow manage to become a very simple task when you have a serious concussion.

Footnote:

Character Selected: Starwind Solace

S.P.E.C.I.A.L: Strength – 3 Perception – 5 Endurance – 5 Charisma – 7 Intelligence – 8 Agility – 4 Luck – 5

Level 1 –

You are an egghead, so your Science skill is already at 75! However, you did not earn enough experience to level up. Sorry about that, but you ran from battle… On the positive side, due to your powerful studying abilities you’ve gained the power to teleport from some of Twilight Sparkle’s Notes! This spell has a pretty long recharge time though, so be careful and teleport somewhere safe!

Author’s Note:

Thanks to KKat for the fantastic work of fanfiction that allows everyone who aspires to develop the universe more to do so with ridiculously good source material.

Thanks also to Somber for FoE: Project Horizons which is wickedly good in its own right and adds tons of depth to the FoE universe.

Thanks also to Cirrus and Wr3nch for their great editing and keeping me grounded to my story!

Cheers, everyone, and be sure to check out the original Fallout Equestria on EQD or FIMFiction and all associated work!

Chapter 2: Library Fees

Chapter 2: Library Fees

 “You know, I really can imagine your plan not working,” the figure to the left of the small, round table said to the one on the right.

“Yes, well, it is much better than yours, filly-snatcher!” The amorphous figure on the right replied. “At least I did not put all of my eggs in the basket dependent on a single little foal realizing the nature of her bleak situation when she is more naïve than nearly any other pony in the entirety of history!”

They both paused, imperceptible eyes locking in a form of conflict that reached beyond words. I just found this all to be fascinating as I sat across the circular table from them, riveted, to hear these non-creatures’ heated debate.

“Also,” the figure on the left continued with a smug color to her tone, “what kind of name is Nightmare Moon, anyway? Why not just The Nightmare? Doesn’t that just have a more powerful ring to it?”

“No, I need a name befitting my regal aims, and what is more majestic than the moon?” The figure on the right replied.

Huh, super powerful evil egos in my dreams. That’s new.

“Regality is a waste of time if you can’t even be successful for more than a few hours when given a second chance!” The figure on the left exasperatedly said. “At least you managed to find a second wind! Most of us get tossed aside and are stuck with the consequences.”

I started getting the feeling that they do this often because they paused again, measuring their respective opposite up, and, since I was the one dreaming, I got bored of the silence and stood to stretch my legs and make this more interesting by telling them, with their lack of awareness of me, how I felt.

“You two are boring, you know?” I rhetorically asked. “How could a couple of centuries old evil beings sink as low as this? Pfft, couldn’t I be dreaming of something a little more present and realistic, like being a superpony or something?”

I laughed at their lack of reaction and my ability to freely mock what history told me was one of the most vicious and powerful magic users in the entire world.

“Hello? Hello!” I shouted repeatedly, moving directly next to where the vaguely pony shaped shadowy figures’ ear would be while waving my legs in between them.

I adopted a pose much like talking into a microphone as a talk show host and tapped the invisible receiver before continuing. “This is your daily news report, and this information just came in!"

I figured it best to throw in a dramatic silence to sell this.

"Wait, never mind, apparently my sources tell me that you are actually a has-been, all washed up, and old news after all... Sorry for the confusion!”

I paused, admiring my joke crafting which, admittedly, was most certainly lacking in hindsight.

I inhaled deeply and leaned forward even farther in preparation, placing my hooves around my mouth for a focusing effect to make myself as perfectly clear as a crystal pony.

“I greatly grow tired of this,” the figure on the right grumbles between what sounds like gritted teeth.

My mouth was caught, inches from the creature, half open, and I felt sweat beginning to form on my forehead. Quickly, I jumped back, landing on my hooves with a deftness I can only seem to manage in dreamland, unsure of what just happened.

They couldn’t mean me, could they?

The heads of the figures rotated faster than I thought this question, revealing slits of what ought to have been eyes that were, instead, burning with a blazing red light. I took a step back as the two began making a noise akin to a laugh but terrible, choppy, and inequine. My hoof sank into something soft and much more giving than the unforgiving, tiled floor. A part of me screamed to not take my eyes off of the two horrors in front of me, but morbid curiosity called and I had to answer.

“Oh,” I said as I took in the puddle forming around my hooves.

Lifting the one that lead to the discovery, I saw the cause of the squishy feeling. There, half stuck and half dangling, a single white, round mass with an iris of a pleading, pure green in its center bobbed while giving me an accusing glare.

“Don’t you just hate when that happens?” A wickedly jolly mare’s voice hisses from directly behind me.

My mane stood on end as I whirled on the spot, face to face with a new black figure of much greater definition and clarity. I closed my eyes and held up a hoof in defense against the malicious intent on those razor edged words.

“Hey, woah! Watch where you swing that thing!” Another new voice said, half chortling.

“Huh?” I said as I barely cracked one eye open, still defensively keeping my limb shield lifted.

I snapped my eyes wide open and took in the sudden transformation.

What had been a room that seemed to stretch infinitely in all directions with cruel stone artwork and the air of a mortuary had turned into a fairly cozy shack with a scrap metal roof and old, driftwood floors. In front of me, sitting near to my right side on the edge of the bed, holding between her fetlocks what seemed to me to be a cross between an old, small, shapely wooden wine cask with strings and a rigid bow with an old piece of cloth stretched along its length, was a charcoal earth pony mare with a short, curly, scarlet mane, and giggling green eyes that I could have easily mistaken for Dusty’s if only they had carried some semblance of emotional weight in them.

“Why am I tied down?” I asked while realizing I could not sit up or move any limb except the one I had managed to pull free in my sleep. “What is this place and who are you?”

“Ah! You know, just the realm of shadows and spookey-ookie creatures, to which I am their queen!” She replies while she sets her things down against the wall behind her and raises both forehooves to wave them in a mock threatening manner.

She giggled, and I sat resigned, stone faced without an ounce of humor left in me as I noticed the pounding headache that just decided to introduce itself as well.

“Oh, you sourpuss, I am Cerulean Joy, but all my friends call me Cerul!” She said with an airy tone that was the closest to serious that I could imagine her using. “And, since I try to make everyone my friend, you can call me that!”

“Okay… Cerul, is it?” I asked, a bit dryly.

She vigorously nodded, smiling in her happy oblivion.

“Well, I am Starwind Solace, and, now that we are acquainted, can you tell me why I am tied to this bed?” I asked.

“It ish because you broke into our Shtar Church and tried to burn it down, you little arshonist!” A slurred, older, male voice erupted from a green stallion with a filthy, slicked back, black mane who I noticed was in the opposite corner of the room. “You know how hard it ish for Cerulean to clean it alone?” He points to the charcoal mare with the laughing eyes, hiccupping openly.

“Not really that hard, papa,” she replied in an earnest tone. “Actually, it was kinda fun because the tapestry she charred always did have this nasty little habit of being boring, and I got to repaint it with my classic flair. I’d be willing to bet it is, at least, twenty percent cuter!”

Her grin pointed to us both in turn, and the grizzled stallion just growled in response before he continued his overly loud tirade.

“Sho, why are you here in the firsht place?”

“Well, sir, I don’t know who you are or what is going on here, so I can’t say why I was in the area without you telling me why I should trust you,” I replied with ice forming on every syllable.

I don’t like the kind of pony the world was turning me into.

“I have thish.” He pointed out a shotgun hidden behind an end table next to the wall he was leaning against. “And I have little patience for people who don’t ansher my questions!”

“Alright, alright.” I held up my freed hoof and waved it in his general direction.

“I am a researcher who was studying old book repositories when my group was attacked by ghouls and wiped out,” I answered with most of the truth. “After managing to escape using a new form of magic I had just picked up, I wound up in the church since it was the first place I could think of in the rush.”

Squinting quizzically at him I paused to allow myself time to discern a more careful route through this conversation. “Speaking of which, did you say earlier that it was your Star Church?”

“Mhmm! Papa and his organization claimed Star Church years ago and –“

“Be quiet, girl!” A hoof strike to the cheek and this sobering statement from her father silenced Cerul. “She is not one of us, and so she doesn’t need to know any of that!”

Drip. Drip.

There went the drops, falling into the bucket one by one.

“A researcher of booksh, huh?” He asked me. “Do you think you could find a particular book if I told you where it wash, and that it was written in ancient equestrian?”

Clearing the rising red from the corners of my sight, I replied slowly. “Yes, I could easily do that, but only if you let me go without any trouble and give me all of my belongings back.”

“How would I know you wouldn’t try to run away or worsh?" He asked, raising an eyebrow. “How 'bout I give you your belongingsh back after the trade ish done?”

“Fine,” I answered quickly as the stench of blood and filth and old books wafted through my memories to remind me of my burden.

“Good." He directed my path with the pointing of a hoof. "The book was lasht known to be in the library of an old shchool seven miles that way, and they should be black bound and written in red ink.”

“Could I, at least, know why you would want this archaic book?” I asked as Cerul began freeing my limbs in her silence.

“No,” he coldly replied as he stumbled from the room, slamming the door behind him.

“What would a drunk with an abusive tendency need with some old religious book in a language he probably can’t even read?” I asked, internally.

I never have good answers for my own questions, it seems, as I shrugged outwardly.

With my limbs freed, I rolled out of the old, stiff bed, and turned towards the wall to stretch before turning back around to ask Cerul a few things, but, as my eyes swept the room, I found that she had somehow vacated the room in the second or two in which she was out of sight without any audible indicators of her exit.

“Wow,” I said, impressed with her magic free feat as I headed towards the door which lead to the outside, pausing to pick up a comb in front of a very old and scarred mirror.

My magic faltered a bit, causing the comb to fall from its grasp as I attempted to run it through my tangled mass of a mane.  I never did much like how new, high level spells drained my stamina so quickly, and this new teleportation magic was a doozy.

I lifted the comb more carefully this time and began straightening out my bed hair while closing my eyes to attempt to hear a few small sounds from in the distance. I could make out the scuffle of hooves on polished tile, the low voices of gossiping mares passing by, and the slow patter of the community showers as Polish and Ivory twitter on about Dusty’s new policies on shampoo rationing. A prodding thought ran through my mind, and I realized that it is most likely true. Opening my eyes, the sounds faded and dried up in the stale air as I saw a mare with dirt on her nose and chips of concrete in her slightly realigned hair.

All the companionship I would know for the foreseeable future was just there, staring back at me from the stained, glossy surface.

Truthfully, I always thought this mare was plain to see at an average height and weight with purple eyes, a black coat and a silver mane that carried a few streaks of gold, purple, and black in the layers beneath. Daddy always said they named me after a strong wind that cleared the sky for a short time as I was born, and that I reminded them of the nebulas, galaxies, and Stars they were astonished to see for the first time in their lives. I couldn’t see much of that in me, so I tended to just think I looked astonishingly ordinary.

Shaking out the shudders that passed through me at memories threatening to make their home in my waking, aching mind again, I decided it best to just get a move on with the task at hoof. As I walked out of the shack, the daylight caused me to squint to see Cerul drawing water from an old, partially rusted well spigot in order to carry it to a plot of tilled land that contained wheat and small sections of other crops that were almost matured, and I figured it best for her if I didn’t cause her any more trouble with her father. She seemed like a nice enough pony, so I decided to be careful about how I interacted with her around that old drunk.

I checked my surroundings to better know the area for my return and found my way to an old, dirt road that ran the length of the route, starting from the small farm and church and began the trek with the morning humidity promptly dashing my efforts at looking decent.

“Lovely, frizz,” I complained quietly. The day was already too long.

After a mile or two of quiet, headache riddled steps over hilly, nondescript terrain I decided to take a rest under the shade of a small, dead tree that had been blown into a diagonal resting position by some storm in its lifetime.

“You and I are a lot alike, tree,” I said to its branches. “You couldn’t stop the winds of change and neither could I, it seems.”

I paused, watching the shadows of its thin branches play on the surface of my coat before continuing.

“Of course, you are a little luckier than me in that, at least, you aren’t being driven insane enough by all of this to start talking to inanimate objects.”

I sighed as a breeze caught something loose nearby, and a noise like that of collapsing wood drew my attention to the side of the tree opposite of me. I jumped to my hooves and magically struggled to lift a loose rock about the size of my head from the ground as I slowly walked a large arc around the perimeter to spot the source.

Nothing.

Well, mostly nothing.

On the ground, about twenty feet from the base of the tree and over a small hill, was a large, wooden crate, a little larger than the average pony, and on its face in bold, white, fading print the three letters “MMM” smiled back at me.

My breath was swept away like the dust swirling at my hooves. MMM brand snack cakes, known as the pre-war epitome of culinary artistry in portable form, were my one Achilles heel.

It was one of them, anyway.

I flung the rock away without care for its direction and attempted to scale the side of the box in less time than should have been possible for my worn down body. This was met with poor results. The box began to tilt as I scrambled for footing on the smooth sided frame, my weight too much for it to stay upright, and I fell, rolling down the slight embankment. The object of my desires was visibly following my lead as I got my eyes cleared of the debris that had found their new home in them. As the lip of the lidless crate hit the earth, a plume of red and brown was created, obscuring the opening, and, with the grace of a bowling ball, a messy, gray blur rolled out. My hooves couldn’t find traction as they dug into the loose sediment in an attempt to dodge the oncoming creature, and I felt the full weight of another pony land solidly on my back before collapsing under the strain.

“Thanks for the catch, Starry!” Cerul’s cheerful voice announced from above me.

I could only manage a muffled grunt due to my mouth being full of dead grass, dirt, and an annoyed beetle that had not managed to escape in time.

She responded while shaking off the red dust that had settled in her fur. “Oh, I followed you because I know the lay of the land better and felt bad about having my papa put you into this situation, silly!”

I glared at her, spitting out the horrible tasting concoction.

How did she understand what I was trying to say from just that very unattractive noise I made?

“I am just good at interpreting people and what they are trying to say, even when they can’t really talk very well! It’s why I am so good at making friends!” She replied, again baffling me.

“In any case,” I interjected before she can get to speaking again, “you should head back because if it is dangerous, I would rather not put you in harm’s way.”

A small rustling of the weeds between us, accompanied with a rising, strangled hissing noise caused us to jump apart, Cerul landed in a very fluid attack stance, fore hooves low and ready, while I landed in the awkward stance of a pony whose idea of combat consisted of how long I could fight off sleep while reading. That is to say, I caught my descent with my face.

“A radsnake!” I said to Cerul. “Watch, here is a great example. I can take care of this type of thing!”

I flared my magic up, just barely managing to lift a small boulder from nearby and brought it down, hard, upon the location of where I thought the snake was.

“There!” I said happily. “I knew I could take care of whatever comes my way! Hahaha hawa –“

The head of a radiation infused adder, as broad as my hoof, rose from below the rock, shrugging off the weight of the stone with little trouble. Its yellow and green eyes with split pupils bored into me as I realized I had no idea what I was doing out in the wastes with weakened magic and nonexistent combat prowess. Having pulled the length of its body out, the snake began to coil, preparing for a strike on the creature that inconvenienced its life today. I turned to run, and the snake leapt with a greater speed, fangs bared.

A flash of scarlet and gray, the meaty thud of flesh on flesh, and a small whirlwind of sand and pebbles brought my attention back around to see that Cerulean had not only managed to cut the snake off in mid strike with a well-placed hoof blow, but that she was circling the snake at her top speed to dizzy him. With unnaturally agile legs, Cerul became a streak through the cloud as she was steadily herding the snake toward a nearby sinkhole.

“Don’t worry Star!” I heard her say over the pounding of her hooves. “This is a piece of cake!”

The radsnake was neatly deposited into the deep hole with a hiss as it fell, and Cerul began to slow in order to skid to a stop with a small wobble in front of me.

“You can close your mouth now, Starwind. I know I have gotten slow since I had to stop running this season to tend the crops,” she said with a serious face and a drooping of her ears.

“No, I am not saying that!” I protested. “That… I… I don’t even… What are you?”

She laughed as a mischievous shadow fell over her face.

“Speaking of cake,” she continued in her natural timbre while ignoring me. “I never did find any MMM in that crate back there. Is that not just THE WORST POSSIBLE THING?”

I stared dumbly. One minute she is a speed demon pony who could create literal tornados to kill snakes, and the next she is mourning the lack of snack cakes.

“Actually, I feel pretty bad about that snake too,” she replied to my expression with a frown. “He was just upset that we disturbed his sleep, the poor little guy.”

“Hm. Well, I can’t say he was really all that little, but I get your point,” I admitted.

“You know the way better than I do, and I will cause less trouble with you around to keep me from any situations like this.” I spread my hooves in defeat. “So… I suppose you can tag along.”

“YAY!” Cerul yelled while bouncing on her hooves back towards the road, waiting there for me to follow her.

Shaking my head in a mixture of confusion and suppression of my own laughter, I headed back and the two of us continued our walk to cover the last few miles.

After a few minutes of silence, which I could only assume must be like being near comatose for her, Cerulean began a conversation to pass the time.

“It isn’t a wine cask with strings, by the way,” she said from in front of me, turning her head. “It’s a violin. The only one I could manage to come up with out of spare parts, anyway!” She smiled at the last word.

“I made the violin and bow myself from an old textbook that I found in the church’s small library,” she continued. “It is hard to keep in tune, and probably would frighten an old Equestria player to death to even call it an instrument, but that’s what it is to me.”

“You made a violin?” I asked incredulously. “That’s… really impressive, actually! I have come across musical lore and fabrication methods a few times while reading, and I can’t say that I could manage to make something that sounded legitimate from those objects, let alone while having read only a single book on the subject!”

I smiled back at her, my curiosity peaking a bit at new knowledge I didn’t have... yet!

“Yeah… well, papa doesn’t let me play much,” she said while turning away quickly. “He thinks it’s a waste of time.”

“I bet he does,” I said with a touch of frustration in my tone.

“You know…” I started to say out loud, but, on a second thought, finished in my head while hoping she couldn’t read my mind without looking at me.

You don’t have to let him treat you so poorly…

Silence fell between us as the moment passed like the ragged breath of a dying pony.

Feeling bad about the awkwardness I helped to create again, I tried to strike up some stronger dialogue.

“You said there was a library in the church? I never knew that, and I have been there a few times! Is that what this is all about, filling out the library?”

“No, it…” Cerul stopped walking for a moment to stare at the dirt with her full focus. “It’s complicated. My father, Shepard, he was once a leader of an organization that believed something similar to the Star Church’s originating system of beliefs, and, for the time, they were helping ponies and doing true, honest to the goddesses, good.”

She released a pent up sigh.

“But, there was a split in the highest leaders’ opinions over time, and, long story short, they all went their own ways, leaving my father nothing but a little filly to raise on his own and a closet’s worth of dreams that he doesn’t believe he will ever see come to be. This book is just one of a few relics from his past that he wants back, to give him a little more strength to hold on to the good in this world. He may not look it, but my father is a strong, good stallion, and he loves me more than it seems.”

She turned to look into my eyes and I looked into her’s as they lightly glistened in the midday heat.

“I… I didn’t realize,” I stammered. “I’m sorry I brought up something so personal. I didn’t intend to do that.”

She shook her head, picking up that smile that she almost always carried, making me smile in return as she said “It’s alright. He is rough around the edges, but he is my dad, and I love him despite how he may sometimes act.”

I nodded and she turned back to pick up our pace.

 “The book, itself? I only know that it is one of the last remaining texts on ancient zebra legend after some government book destruction thingy wiped out most of their history in Equestria except for the stuff that made them out to be wicked and scaryrific. Ya know, the enemies of our Equestria and all that stuff that the posters and billboards still say after all these years? That is mostly all that is left.”

Zebra lore? I may be tempted to keep that for myself since it is as rare as she says! She doesn’t know much of her own country’s history if she can’t recall that it was the Ministry of Image, under the leadership of Rarity herself that purged practically all academic material in Equestria to the tailored needs of the country. A terrible loss, to be sure, but, what is past has passed, and it hardly matters now. It is up to ponies like me, who care about our past and our future to take care of such things, so why shouldn’t I find a way to keep it? It isn’t like Shepard will know…

I really don’t like the pony I am turning into.

I shook my head to clear out the deceitful thinking.

I had a promise to keep, and that meant more than any book.

 I smiled, content with the higher road, and I realized that Cerul had been talking continuously while I was lost in thought.

“… and that is why I think I know how Equestria was really created! Don’t you think that’s just the bee’s knees, Star?” She asked me, giddy with herself.

“Uh… yeah, sure! You hit the nail on the head with that one!” I  lied with an awkward chuckle and the hope that she wouldn't question me further.

She didn’t and I released my held breath as we started seeing the outskirts of an old, half destroyed town with a plot of four or five buildings and little else except for a large billboard rising above the landscape. On it, where “Pinkie Pie is Watching… Forever!” would normally be written alongside her large, watchful, creepy face, a new coat of green paint had created a sort of free canvas space where, in white lettering, somepony had written “Reconcile yourselves and find the Truth!”

An uncomfortable feeling arose from within me as I was compelled to start drifting through ideas on this, but I pushed that to the back of my mind as Cerulean announced our proximity to the school.

“We’ll be there in a minute or two!” She said. “It is just on the opposite side of this little village. I like to imagine that little hedgehogs and critters from before the war still live here because, otherwise, this place gives me the spooks!”

She laughed and half sighed, making me shiver, and rightfully so since the dilapidated buildings did not really give the slightest hint of hospitality or welcome. Most of the four standing structure had, at least, one fallen wall, and all of them were lacking roofs entirely. The fifth, with an old coat of peeling blue and brown paint, still had the main components of a decent structure, but, for a reason unknown to me, the front, and only, door was chained, triple locked, and boarded over as if whoever left the place didn’t want to keep ponies out so much as keep something else inside. The air in the place certainly didn’t help either since it carried with it a twang of copper and salt which made me feel slightly sick to my stomach.

I could definitely see Cerul’s point. Damn spooky, indeed.

“Hold on a second,” Cerul whispered with a swift raising of her hoof to keep me from advancing any farther. “There it is, and it looks like there may be a raider nest inside.”

Peering around her leg, I spotted the blackened two story structure. It wasn’t a very large school by any means, but that was probably why the ministry glossed over its library as an unlikely place to find rare books. Above the main entrance to the building, a ladder held a sickly orange colored pony aloft as he painted words in red where once there was the name of the school in off-white.

“How can you tell there is a raider nest?” I asked. “Couldn’t it just be somepony putting up graffiti like on the sign before we came into town? They don’t have to be malicious.”

She tightened up her face and squinted a bit as she began to read the text he had just written.

“Bloodbucket’s Place! If you aren’t selling dash, apple off or banana die!”

“Apple off or banana die?” I puzzled, concerned that her reading skills may be far worse than I could have expected.

“They don’t actually say that, Starry, but I think some words are just plain rude and make ponies sour, so I like to substitute them for sweet things, like candy and fruit!” Cerul replied. “Nothing sweeter than the surprise of kind words!”

I, once again, stared at her for a slack jawed eternity.

“Alright… well, no sense waiting around,” I said, pushing past her hoof and trotting towards the distant stallion. “Let’s go see if we can at least make a friend of this ‘Bloodbucket’, and maybe make his life a little sweeter.”

“Star!” Cerul loudly whispered. “What are you doing? You are going to get yourself banana killed!”

She used her speed advantage over me to catch up, nervously pulling me back with gentle tugs on my tail.

“Just trust me,” I urged, “I won’t let myself fall prey to the assumption that everyone in the wasteland is inherently bad. I will not let myself be brought down by this place more so than I already have been!” Her face contorted in confusion as she continued with more gusto to try and pull me back.

I magically opened her mouth against her will and began running toward the figure.

“Hey, you!” I called to the orange stallion standing on a small platform above the doorway. “Can you come down here? I have a few questions to ask!”

The stallion dropped his brush and spun around in place only to lose his balance as one of his hooves slid of the edge of the narrow ledge, and he proceeded to flail his limbs as he fell the remaining fifteen or so feet to the ground.

Between his groans I used a mending spell to patch a few cuts he sustained from the journey to the ground.

“You should be more careful, sir,” I said with a confined giggle.

“What do you fuckin’ care?” The stallion replied as he tried to stand to dust himself off. “Haven’t you and the rest of Bloodbucket’s gang had enough of messing with me?”

Cerul stepped forward from her place of hiding behind me, which I had not noticed until then, and replied to this before I could open my mouth.

“Hi, mister! I’m Cerulean Joy and this is Starwind Solace, and we most certainly are not gang members.”

She stuck her tongue out at him as he lifted a weary pair of eyes to size us up.

“You’re right about that,” he said. “Two ponies as cute as you probably would have been used up and spent long ago in this joint. What are you doin’ around here? You should get away if ya know what’s good for you.”

“We’re here to check out the library. Why don’t you get away if it is so bad to be around this place?” I asked.

“Bloodbucket,” He replied simply. “He took my family and trapped them inside the blue house in town. Says he will only keep them alive as long as I work for him, the disgusting bastard. That’s why I am out here painting with… well, look for yourselves.”

Levitating down the bucket from its perch above, the stench of it arrived before the sight, and I finally figured out why the town smelled as badly as it does.

“Blood in a bucket…” Cerul said quietly, holding a hoof to her mouth.

“Yeah, how fitting, right?” The orange stallion asked. “A bucket full of blood to mark the territory of Bloodbucket. It’s sick, if you ask me, but no one around here cares what Toothpick has to say.”

“Well, Toothpick, I think I might try my hand at talking this Bloodbucket into two trades today,” I stated, no doubt clouding my confidence.

“Yeah, and if she doesn’t I will definitely put an end to… whatever this is.” Cerul said boldly while pointing at the bucket and at the blue and mold colored house.

“Look, you two can get yourselves killed if you want, and I won’t stop ya, but please don’t get my family killed,” he pleaded. “Just leave me and them out of your conversation, and go your own way. I think you’re nice ponies, so I hope you can find a way to make it out of there alright, but I hope you know that it is somethin’ awful through those doors. Far worse than out here, and it’s probably suicide to even try what you’re planning.”

Cerulean and I solemnly nodded in unison, sure.

“Here,” Toothpick said with a rustle of his saddlebag and a tossing of something metallic. “Take these keys. They should get you inside most any room in there, so, if I were you, I would just sneak in and sneak out without causing any trouble or alerting a soul. Otherwise you may find your blood in the bucket I have to paint with tomorrow.”

With that said, Toothpick began a brisk walk toward the town to leave us to our fate.

Cerul pulled me over and looked deep into my eyes, the jovial light that usually was in her’s was replaced with something I couldn’t name.

“You sure you want to do this, Star?” She asked a little too seriously. “I can fare pretty well on my own in a fight, but I know you haven’t had to fend for your life out here before. I think we’re doing good by that pony, Toothpick, and giving his family justice by helping them out, but I could probably do this alone. You don’t have to put yourself at risk!”

“Look,” I replied slowly. “I owe it to a lot of ponies to start being proactive and seeking out the best of others in the world, and if that means getting my hooves a little dirty, I will wade through any amount of muck.”

Cerul continued her stare, measuring my honesty and intentions. I felt confusion, guilt, and a little twinge of fear creeping into my thoughts as her unwavering gaze pinned me to the spot. A moment passed as a small gust kicked up the loose chaff at our hooves. She let go of my shoulders, took a step back, and grinned as a look of certainty and some form of satisfaction played on her face.

My thoughts raced at the whiplash of emotion Cerul managed to just create.

Who was this mare, really?

“Alright!” She cheered. “Let’s go free us some prisoners and grab a book!”

I smiled at this and turned to try the small ring of four keys on the outer door until the dirtiest of them finds its home and turned to allow us entry to the next step of our heroic crusade.

Small intestine, a liver, half of a lung, and the head of some young, smiling stallion with a bloody grimace sat in the center of the rounded room on the stained, ceramic front desk of the old school. Above the gore, on the level of our eyes, like streamers of a welcome party to hell, strands of sinew and flesh dripped the fluids of decay and age, and I felt the pressing sense that Toothpick might have been underselling the truth of this place.

My medical texts came to me in flashes.

The liver filters the toxins of the body, and, in modern ponykind, is irreplaceable without an assisted dialysis machine or clarification talisman.

I tripped, catching myself at the last moment before my nose became one with the pools around the two of us, my limbs stiffening from a lack of oxygen as I found my stomach churning.

Your brain has enough electricity in its synapse pathways to power a small alarm clock. Modern medical researchers have concluded that ponies as batteries would be a terrible idea as millions of ponies would be needed to power anything significant, and that is quite impractical.

Cerulean’s head fell to my level, a face full of terror and anguish playing a moving picture show of how a sane pony ought to react to all of this, as she slowly lifted me to my hooves.

Death is defined as the decay of every active cell in the body. In this manner, we are all dying since birth.

With six quiet, long steps, the two of us found our ragged way past the sights and smells of murder and into the lone, long hallway, lined with lockers and the old pasted up posters of the popular crowd of days long gone

“How… those were once a pony or… ponies,” Cerul whispered from beside me, keeping her composure together by a thread.

“Bloodbucket,” I gasped out in between the retching. “It looks like he really likes to live up to his name.”

We stopped, calming down while scrutinizing the stretches of paper on the walls, hoping for some sense of direction in their shallow words, but found the interior light inadequate for this purpose. We continued with our heartbeats and breathing becoming more arrhythmic and muffled, as we spotted a hanging sign above an open entryway to an unknown room with an orange light coming from inside allowing us a glimpse into its nature. Staring, wide eyed, into the dim, dead head-space, I made out the words “Library: Expand Your Mind!” in smudged, purple and white text as we approach at a crawl.

“Buckets and buckets and buckets of blood!” A frantic male voice chanted in a grinding monotone. “All of this blood must be cleansed from your bodies and I will find a place for it all!”

I felt my limbs moving at the pace of my racing thoughts, rounding the corner into the room with a small skid, taking in the executions before me.

A lone, sweat stained unicorn stallion was sitting with mountains of books surrounding him and a small barrel funneling smoke from the contained fire up into a hole in the ceiling. He was pulling page after page out and throwing them into the blaze, cackling with delight as he continued his chant to the sacrificed literature.

“Well, that is…not what I expected,” I stated earnestly.

Cerul’s hoof, flying with stinging force, clamped my mouth closed before I realized my folly.

“YOU CAN’T HAVE THEM. THESE BEAUTIFUL BLEEDING ONES ARE MINE AND VOLT’S!” The insane pony shouted as he cast off the loose paper covering his resting body in a cloud of white and red text.

Reacting to the flurry of energy, stress, and the dull burn of a receding headache, the blue bleeding into my vision captured the head of the rushing stallion and I felt the medical texts again as they emptied my magic into him. The final fifteen feet, his ragdoll of a body solidly slammed to the linoleum and slid to a rest inches from our point of entry.

Cerul quickly jumped in front of me and jabbed a hoof into my chest. “What was that? You said you wanted to try and talk it out with him, not kill him! Starry, I thought I read you as a better pony than that!”

Her loudly whispered words and the sudden heart rate spike from the last few minutes left me feeling a bit woozy.

“Anesthesia,” I murmured quickly in hushed tones. “I haven’t had to touch that spell since I made a few rounds on the medical circuit for my hometown’s clinic years ago. He isn’t dead. He’s just knocked out. I don’t murder ponies.”

Those last few words were meant more for my own introspection than for Cerulean.

Cerul elevated the stallions head in her hooves, sensing his slow breathing. “You are full of surprises, Star. I thought you went and killed him, but this is a way better option!”

If only she knew that he was probably suffering withdrawals from a dash addiction, and that he would probably die in this sleep or wake to suffer until his end in a day or two.

Again, the crack within my heart widened.

“Let’s just get to seeing if we saved the book we came to find,” I said with the precise words of a surgeon at work. “I’ll check his pockets and baggage for the access keys to the blue house while you get started on that.”

Cerul used her usual speed to pour through the books closest to the fire while I inspected the disgusting pile of wasted potential lying before me. I used my magic to save myself the filth of the task, and in searching his jacket pockets found a bundle of wet rags, a pencil, and three empty inhalers.

No dice.

The only other container of sufficient size to merit checking rested around his neck on a string, and, gently, I lifted this free to dump its contents into the same area as the other hidden items.

With a small gasp of anticipation, a single key bounced twice with a hollow ringing sound.

Thinking back, I mentally counted the size and sheer number of the restraining bolts, chained locks, and other devices to come up with a large disparity that would require many more than just that key.

I frowned in frustration, glancing up to see how far Cerul had come in her pursuits, and I noted that she had found her way to the final book tower before she would move on to the ten shelves spanning the rectangular space. Looking around for any point at which I could continue my search, I spotted a small glass window hidden behind a row of shelves in the back left corner that looked into what could be the librarian’s office.

“A more secure space would make sense as a hiding spot for more valuable items,” I reasoned to myself under my breath.

With the ease of someone who has waded through a large number of book storage facilities in the past, I manipulated my way through all of the clutter to find a metal door with a rusted keyhole keeping me from the contents within.

A small sign, scotch taped loosely to the exterior drew my interest briefly.

Gone to Manehattan for conference! Be back soon!

-Head Librarian PB

Good ponies caught in the chaos of a war greater than themselves, suffering the consequences of thrones and fools. What a pity it is to know what we lost for pride.

Shaking off the ghosts and choosing to hope that it was left unlocked, I tried the handle and found it stuck fast with the security bolt acting as my only deterrent.

Key chain, don’t fail me now!

The first key, a failure.

The second, a bust.

The third, another waste of time.

The fourth just added to the pure agitation.

My mind was spinning with possibilities, ranging from breaking the glass to attempting to use a little elbow grease and the information from the copies of Locks and Locks: Flufflepuff’s Guide to All Things Security that I had read, to gain entrance when I remembered the lonesome key I gained from the knocked out Bloodbucket.

It slid in tantalizingly, and the glee I felt extended further than should have been possible for unlocking a door as it caught firmly and opened.

Since a coat of dust was thick to the touch on all of the furniture and floor except for a small business drawer and a line of hoofsteps leading up to it, I assumed it was the most likely candidate in which to check for recent additions.

Feeling a light feeling that toyed with my unstable state, I can’t say that I didn’t feel a little bit like Daring Do raiding an ancient treasure trove as I walked the ten, one foot long square tiles towards the sliding file container, expecting a trapdoor or planned ambush.

A latch, magically pulled free, and a small amount of force applied to drag the box out revealed a larger ring of keys, similar to the one I already had, a bottle of sparkle cola, a few more spent inhaler cartridges, and, buried beneath all of this, a wallet sized book with a note attached matched with a brace like device that looks to be intended to be worn on the leg.

Gathering the items and putting them to one side of me, I set to the other side the book with the note and the wearable device for curiosity’s sake.

The note, unfolded and read, went something like this:

I came today to deliver your knew toy from RD, but I saw that you had left to Manehattan! Now, I know you are aware of how to use this, but, just to be sure there isn’t a repeat of the whole incident with the cheesecake, I have installed an easy to follow guide to basic maintenance and control for you. All of TS’s dialogues on those books you were wanting to research are also included. You’re welcome for that. It really wasn’t an easy task to gather just that little bit of information on the subject, so I hope you are content with it all. Anyway, I’ll leave this short to keep from rambling more than usual.

Hope to hear from you soon!

Sincerely,

Volt

After carefully folding the note back up and placing it in a small zipper pocket inside my saddle bag, I opened the wallet sized case to find five tools that looked to be made for very specific purposes, and my suspicions were sated when I spied a small emblem with the initials “S.T” in one corner.

If I believed in gods and goddesses, I would have fallen to my face to thank the technology deities for the gift as I dropped everything else to pick up and rotate over the brace in order to see the flat surface hidden from view.

In bold print, traditional for Stable Tech and their branding strategies, the word PipBuck and the number 6000 were clearly present above a four inch screen which was mounted with a few buttons surrounding it in the middle of the device.

PipBucks, what many considered the height of arcane technological innovation pre-war and up to today, were some of the most coveted and underutilized pieces of tech out in the wild. This was mostly because organizations, like the Steel Rangers, held the majority of them for use by those who couldn’t use power armor, but, on the rare occasion when one was free to be used by a normal creature in the wasteland, it was typically short lived due to a lack of understanding of how rare and powerful an advantage and risk just one can be.

I was no fool, and I felt that I had a fair amount of knowledge about them, so this worry about what kind of target I would become was present, but intrigue trumps worry every time.

With immeasurable glee, I found the seam and junctions of the PipBuck and quickly matched up the screws with the correct tool in the wallet-sized pouch.

Three pops and a whir of invisible mechanical components later, I had an open, willing PipBuck awaiting its orders, asking me if I was ready for the taste of beautiful, matte painted majesty.

Oh, yes, please!

The cold, dense weight of the sturdy contraption rested naturally on my left foreleg as the screen came to life with a bright blue tone welcoming me to the next generation of augmented living.

It has been 77380 days since last boot. New User Detected.

Connecting Neural Web and Syncing Profile…

Success! Your PipBuck 6000 Limited Edition Black is ready for use!

Afterwards, the screen displayed a long stream of code as a batch file ran prior to the interface being fully useful.

Once the formalities of the boot process had passed, I noticed a bouncing audio tape covering most of the screen with the text “Twilight’s Opinion” flashing alongside it.

From what I remembered of PipBuck maintenance, I found the accept button and opened the urgent message to let it play over the external speaker.

“Zebra history?” An older mare’s voice echoed in the small space as she paused nervously. “I don’t know much about their magic, its origin, or use other than a bit of training I had to have to help fix a few problems in Ponyville, and those books you asked about are not common anymore…due to a few choices by our ministries.

“Truthfully, Zecora was the only one who would know enough about this to be helpful since she was able to handle the poison joke and Trixie with the alicorn amulet, but… well, you know…” she paused somberly. “Anyway, I know that there are particular books of zebra magic that are some of the most dangerous objects one can hold, and extreme caution should be had with them.

“However, if you want to find out more about these books, I suggest you take a look in the Manehattan public library,” she whispered, conspiratorially. “I hear that those who aren’t tardy to the conference will get some special access to the restricted collection.”

Static began to bleed through and the audio cut off.

A beep drew my attention to the screen of the PipBuck, and I saw a small topographical map with a dotted line leading from an arrow to a destination that looked like a large city where a line of text read “Manehattan Conference.”

Manehattan? Zebra magic and lore? What an odd librarian.

“Did you say you heard voices from Bloodbucket’s room?” A voice cut through the small library from the hall outside like a blade through my chest.

My heartbeat picked up, and I lifted my eyes to look through the glass of the office in order to place the voices. Red bars were floating in my vision and I blinked quickly to get whatever they were out of the way, so I could see the full breadth of the situation. The bars remained as they moved toward the doorway, but I ignored them as best I could as I spotted Cerul bouncing slowly through the shelving aisles on her way to the center.

My hooves kicked up the dust on the floor as I sprinted, measuring the distance to her and the distance from the voices to the doorway, and time slowed as I saw the red bars turning into the room to become five black leather clad, armed ponies.

“Fuckers killed ‘im!”

I had twenty feet, a turn, and ten feet to get to her first.

Their guns rose, some in magic and some in mouth.

I turned the corner.

Cerul’s head broke into their lines of sight, and their weapons angled crosshairs onto her.

I had ten feet, and their triggers only had to travel two centimeters. I was out of time.

Between Cerul and I, a chestnut mare walked out during the second of reaction, and I felt her melting emerald eyes boring into me. I was frozen again. I heard the screams and could taste the copper and feel the familiar uselessness preparing me for a new burden. Ten thousand pounds of guilt, regret, and death was preparing to fall onto my shoulders, a yoke to bear as the earth ceased its rotation, but I saw through the instant fear.

Red mist on an invisible breeze blew the melting figure of the mare away, and I felt my body become rigid.

“NO!” My horn lit up and the five leather covered ponies became a second sun. “I WILL NOT LET YOU DO THIS TO ME AGAIN!”

Twenty-one.

By the time Cerulean turned to gape at me, I was beside her and lifting my horn to tap her and fill our world with darkness and flashes of color before I sensed my hooves collide with the ground as Cerul and I collapsed to the earth and rolled down a small hill in the fading twilight.

This dirt tasted familiar. Worms remember such things.

I raced to seek my new destination, recalling the area as best I could, and managed to control the rising pressure until I found the old sinkhole, retched, and vomited into the chasm.

I was empty.

The fissure gained five more gouges to increase its depth and chipped off the decaying bits around it piece by piece as I kept my eyes clenched. If the world were to actually end right at that moment, I doubted it would feel worse than this.

You idiot.

You little fool!

You murderer…

“You saved me…” Cerul’s voice broke into my vault. “I don’t know what you did just now or when you set them on fire, but you saved my life, so thank you so much! Are you okay? You look sick!”

I shook my head and opened my eyes before standing to look at her.

“I’m… I’m okay,” I lied. “I just need to get out of here.”

“I got the book,” Cerul chimed in with a smile, “and we stopped Toothpick from being forced to stay there anymore since we took care of those baddies, so we should celebrate!”

“That’s great.” I forced a smile, and began walking to get away from the town that smelled of blood. “Let’s just get it back to Shepard.”

Cerul tossed me the book, and I levitated it into my bag. A book, if Twilight was to be believed, that was rarer than many I had ever read, and I could not have cared less.

“It was super awesome how you zapped us out of there and to here!” She lifted my head up with a hoof to see her making an awed face while prancing in place in front of me as we kept a slow pace. “And you weren’t kidding when you said you could handle yourself! Those raiders were there for one second and then, poof, they were toast! They were incredibly disgusting and burned toast, but toast nonetheless!”

Toast really wasn’t too far off.

I frowned and clenched my stomach at the thought of what that spell was originally intended to be used for and shot a glare at her. She went wide eyed and just turned back to face forward, and we stayed this way the entirety of the trip.

The sun was completely set behind the ever-present clouds by the time we quietly came back into the farm, and Cerul picked up her hooves more quickly to get into the small shack prior to my arrival.

She was inside the building for a minute before I saw the only lights in the area coming from the church. I trotted to the building, and peered into the open double doors to see a green stallion resting his head against the far wall.

“Shepard, I’m back with your book,” I said as I walked towards him.

He stirred, and I met his bloodshot eyes. “You came back? Didn’t you take enough from me!?”

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“You tried to burn my church,” he shouted while standing, “you lied, and then you took my filly!”

“What? I –“

“You shut your damn mouth!” He cut me off, approaching with a long step for every word. “I lost my family. I lost my wife. I lost my daughter.”

I could smell the moonshine on his lips as his nosed pressed to mine, and his swaying steps left no doubt about what had transpired while we were away. “I’m sorry, but I had nothing to do with any of that, and Cerul isn’t gone!”

Backtracking, he stumbled to find his way atop the raised platform where the cistern was and began to pace back and forth. “YOU LIE! I am so tired of ponies like you... liars and thieves and killers!”

I felt the stares of twenty one ponies.

“You took her, and I will never see her again…” His hooves caught on the lip of the stair, and, as he tripped, he fell into the pew closest to the front. “We are all lost now.”

Walking forward with careful steps, I approached his curled up form and heard the sound of settling into despair.

“Really, Shepard, Cerul is fine, and you don’t have to cry…”I pleaded. “Look, I’ll just go get her from the house, and show you.”

I turned around to head out and do so, but half way down the aisle Shepard called my name with a rising cackle carried by the alcohol fueled air in his lungs.

“Starwind.”

I began turning to face him once more and heard the sound of a latch falling into place.

“I won’t let you do this,” he whispered. "Heh...hehe...I will end you here and now, so no one else has to be lost again.”

With the echo of a gunshot filling my head from the resonance in the chamber, a burning sensation spread from my chest outward, and I caught myself weakly in mid fall with my hoof on a small barrel which was placed once upon a time as a donation bin. It seemed as if it was poised to collect a more personal offering, and I was almost happy to give it.

“You can go to sleep now, little lost sheep.” He said through a muffled ringing in my ears. “Shepard is here to take care of you.”

My head bounced against the ground and I raised a hoof at Shepard who had split into six since I last looked at him. Every one of him had the same stretched grin which reminded me of a scar, a mark made permanent and filled with pain.

A series of charcoal blurs tackled the many Shepard-like blurry figures to the ground, and a single violent cry filled the hall before a supporting pair of hooves lifted me up to rest on their back, away from my death, and out into the night.

“No, take me back,” I begged with unstable emphasis on every other word. “I… I need this. I have nothing. I am nothing. The water there… it can … it can put it out, the fire. It is just so hot…”

The lights went dim in the distance and I closed my eyes.

When they opened, I was unable to move as I saw a heap of books, a small fire, and a library with a roof on the verge of falling in upon itself. I was in a heap just through the entryway and was watching a dark gray pony search through the books.

My books.

Five sets of hooves stepped over me, and I could feel their hot breath as they looked closely at me and spoke soundless words that I couldn’t make out. They turned, and, with a nudge from the pony farthest to the back, pulled out a series of poorly maintained rifles that looked like they wouldn’t hold up to firing a single shot, let alone many. I could smell their fear as the youngest, a colt that couldn’t be more than about the age of earning one’s cutie mark, visibly quaked and fumbled with the loose mouth grip he had on his single barreled shotgun.

 Hot shot. I think that's what they nicknamed him after his first raid a couple of nights back.

A dark gray mare, who seemed a little too happy for where we were, came into view from the section she seemed to be looking through, and a black pony quickly turned into the same common area just after her with determination and fear in her eyes. I knew those traits well, and I also knew where they would lead.

The group with the guns, my family, held them in place, rooted by the calm before violence. The words passed between the groups, shouted, whispered, or otherwise were empty, hollow, and devoid of meaning as they reverberated in the room. All of them lost to the air except for one.

"NO!"

 A half of a second passed and the five went from controlling the confused situation, holding the lives of those two in their hooves as they figured out what to do with them, to screaming, colliding into each other, and becoming flame and smoke. I attempted to reach out and help him, the little, scared soldier of fortune, but my body was still unresponsive as his mane burned down to his coat and his tongue fell, severed in the heat, from his open, begging mouth. The duo, not letting a moment pass before doing so, disappeared in a deep blue explosion of magic. The screams from the colt as flesh separated from bone were etched into the granite of my heart.

I knew from that moment that I hated the black mare.

Twenty-three seconds was all it took; twenty-three seconds of writhing, pain, and the acrid smell of life passing. Smoke from their death pyre blackened my vision, and all that was left visible were the six inches of litter covered floor next to me and piles of ash.

They were once ponies.

My eyes closed again as they began to water from the strain and fumes.

Ash. Worms. Dirt. Life. Blood. Copper. Books. Keys. Evil. Stars.

Death.

What a senseless waste.

Footnote:

New Companion Gained!

Cerulean Joy

S.P.E.C.I.A.L: Strength – 5 Perception – 5 Endurance – 4 Charisma – 7 Intelligence – 4 Agility – 9 Luck – 5

Level Up!

Level 2 –

Magical Energy Attacks 25

Medicine 15

Perk Gained – Is it Hot in Here? You figured out how to cook food and… other things… over a distance without needing to start a fire by hoof! You now have the chance to cause fire damage once to all enemies while in combat when outnumbered by at least twice as many as are in your party.

Writers Note:

 Thanks to KKat for the fantastic work of fanfiction that allows everyone who aspires to develop the universe more to do so with ridiculously good source material.

Thanks also to Somber for FoE: Project Horizons which is wickedly good in its own right and adds tons of depth to the FoE universe.

Thanks also to Mixermike622 for creating Fluffle Puff and all associated, lovely content. Go check out his tumblr pages, animations, comics, and buy his products! They are all fantastic and, personally, have gotten me through a few sour patches in my life.

Thanks also go to mimezinga for FoE: Pink Eyes which gave us a lot of great characters, and a new area of the wasteland to play in.

And, last, but certainly not least, thanks to Cirrus and Wr3nch for challenging me with their editing prowess! (In the future, I am going to abridge the “thanks” section for brevity)

Cheers, everyone, and be sure to check out the original Fallout Equestria on EQD and all associated work!

Chapter 4: Crimson and Gold

As the sun was setting behind the sickly viridian clouds that clung to the sky indefinitely, Cerul and I found ourselves staring up at the black muzzle of a semi-automatic rifle clenched in the teeth of a very stoic, very confused guard perched on top of a wall made of sheet metal riveted to the side of an old train car.

“Ah don’t recognize ya from these parts,” He drawled slowly. “State yer business or git gone.” His final word was emphasized with a globule of spit being shot from his mouth to the hard earth at our hooves.

I shuffled my hooves awkwardly, unsure of what to say since I tended to just get myself into trouble with talking when my tired mind didn’t play along well. Cerul picked up on this and pranced in a circle around me while speaking to the guard. “What my somber friend here is trying to say is that we have walked from the Big 52 all day, and we would be oh so thankful if you would let us in to catch ourselves some Z’s, my good sir!”

The guard simply narrowed his eyes to the point that one would find it hard to tell if they were open at all. I never could understand how she stayed so energetic and charged up either.

“We are just two young fillies out to rest our weary hooves,” she continued. “Won’t you please let us in?” With that she stopped and gave the guard her best darling eyes.

“Well, ah s’pose ya aint raiders from Ponyville, seein as they all got shot a few days back, and ya do look as ya say,” The guard trailed off in thought before pointing a hoof at me and continuing again. “Ah need ta hear from that one first, though, a‘for ah make mah decision.”

I opened my mouth for a few moments and raised a hoof. Rethinking my words, I closed it again and placed my hoof on the ground. This activity repeated a few times before the guard, nonplussed, pulled back the safety of his weapon with a click. The sound jarred me, and I managed to squeak out the few words my tired mind could compose through my cringing.

“Do you enjoy the works of Corkscrew Brew or A.K. Yearling?”

A few moments of silence passed between us as a gust blew a small dust tornado across the landscape.

With a small wrinkle of a smile slowly breaking out across his face, the guard began to laugh heartily. “Shoot, young lady, ah aint never heard that as an introduction a‘for! Ah can’t say ya aint an egghead or a bit crazy, but ah know tha two’a you aint like no raiders er bandits ah ever seen. If’n you’ll head over ta the gate around this way,” he directed us with a hoof. “Ah’ll get Brandybuck to open it up.”

We did as we were told and walked alongside the guard on the wall who would cackle every few steps to himself. Brandybuck was a small, red maned earth pony with alluring features and a warm smile, and, as we approached, she exited a small scrap lean-to next to a gate controlled by a tall winch and conversed softly enough with the guard from before that I could not pick out what was said. Regardless, she looked at us as she did so and waved us toward the gate. With a sultry saunter, she entered the lean-to again and punched a button which started the wench to lift the barrier out of the way.

As we walked underneath the bulk of the gate, which looked to also be a train car, Brandy spoke down to us from her shack. “Have a nice stay in New Appleoosa, and don’t cause no trouble!” With that, she winked at us and turned back to lower the gate back into place.

I paused to take in the lay of the land in the waning light and noticed that it was based on a radial system of railroads all meeting at a central point in the middle of the town square. I knew that Old Appleoosa was a trading town, so I had to suppose that the second version was of similar origin. But this, this was a city made of train parts. A caboose there, an engine here, and flat cars used as walls nearly everywhere. A neon blue sign flashed at us from a nearby building, if it could be called that, which read Browncoat Inn and Tavern, and with a nod passed between us, we began to trot in its direction.

The ground below our hooves was a bit muddied by the liquid flowing from a drainpipe which emptied into a nearby cistern, so we had to shake the muck off before we entered the structure. A small bell rang as the door was pushed open, and a scruffy stallion behind the dented metal bar waved us over.

“Welcome ta Browncoat! Mah name’s Lager. What’ll ya have?”

I began to open my mouth, but thought against it since Cerul would probably jump in first.

I was right.

“We just want to rent a room, sir. Oh… and a cake, if you have one! I love cake.”

Cerul’s mouth hung open a bit and a little bit of drool began to appear on her lips as she drifted off into her thoughts. I tapped her shoulder and she just teetered a bit in place before I took over the conversation for her.

“I suppose she’s a bit more tired than she lets on. Anyway, I realize you probably don’t have cake, but if you have a room available, we would really be grateful if you’d rent it to us.”

Lager rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Hmmm, Ah think we do, but it ain’t nothin special. Come on, follow me.”

I shook Cerul until she was alert again, and she frowned when I told her there was no cake to be had. “Come on, Cerulean, it’s time to get some sleep.”

She nodded and yawned as we began to follow Lager up to the second story hallway where four rooms from what looked to be old passenger cars branched off of it. We were led to the last room which faced the edge of town where we entered from, and Lager turned to face us.

“Ya both look dead tired, so get some sleep. It’ll be thirty caps, but don’t worry ‘bout that tonight. Ya can pay me in the mornin.”

I smiled at him. “You don’t have to do that.” I pulled out fifteen caps. “Here, a down payment so you don’t put us up for the night for no reason.”

He nodded once at us and gave a crooked smile in return before walking back down the stairs.

“Hey, you’re falling asleep standing up,” I whispered softly to Cerul as we dropped our things on a table near the door. Both of us chose a side and collapsed onto the hard mattress, probably asleep before hitting the surface.

The smell of gunpowder always was distinctive.

I felt the tang of it on my tongue, and heard the dull thwup thwup thwup of a discharging rifle coming from outside the train car. I only had a few minutes before one of the slavers returned with wounded for me to tend, but I knew that I needed to go look after the fillies and colts kept in the cages.

I felt the metal saddlebags chaffing my flanks as I scrounged around with my magic to organize some bandages and sap salve —they were helpful for medical purposes and safer than fabric, but they hurt something awful sometimes.

The scraping metal of the door hinge struck me as I began to finalize my preparations and close my saddlebags. The silhouette of a pony shone in stark relief to the yellow lights in the night on the wall in front of me. I assumed it was Nail Biter, here to bring me to the others as she closed the door behind her.

“Nail, it’s about time!” I closed my saddlebags and turned to face her.

I think I began to pester her about leaving me in here while others were outside being injured since I wouldn’t be any help inside this car, but I was struck by what I saw as my eyes adjusted to the petite newcomer in the dark.

Was that a PipBuck on her leg?

“Oh… no…”

Everything began to blur into an unnatural pace as lines of light and dark, gold and purple and black, raced across my vision as images flashed and my head spun. Dirt and blood flew everywhere as land mines exploded and bullets drilled new holes into shoulders, chests, and heads. I felt a great, green goddess shouting in my mind while I tried to comfort the little ones. I saw her crushed. There was running and fighting and killing and stress. Then the train was racing, barreling down a mountain, and I was certain that it was the end.

I felt the crash and my head struck the ground with a thud.

“Ouch…” I whispered as I opened my eyes to peer into darkness. I felt my body shaking, fearful that I may have broken a limb or worse. I flexed each of my legs slowly, one at a time, and realized that I could only feel the small sting in my shoulder from where Shepard shot me.

It took me a few moments, but I stood up in the silence and knew that there was no train, no crash, and I had to focus my eyes on the sleeping form of Cerulean on the bed in front of me to convince me that what I was seeing was real.

I stared at the ceiling, tracing lines in the wood and nails as if they were the constellations of old my father always spoke about. “They’re getting more vivid, Cerul.”

She just snored softly in reply.

It seemed to be a comforting sleep she was having, so I decided not to wake her with any more talk. I crept into the hallway and shut the door as silently as I could. I needed to take a walk to shake off the heavy cloud hovering in my mind, and I knew that sleep would only make it worse at that point. I stopped at the bar again and rummaged around in my saddle bags to pull out another fifteen caps which I set near the old register that I had seen Lager using that prior evening.

The small bell chimed again as I walked out into the early dawn, and I saw red and pink streaked clouds from the East welcoming me to town once more. It always baffled me how the sun setting could be so full of revulsion, green and sickly, but that the same sun could rise with such beauty that would last but for a few minutes before the cloud’s sickness of green returned. I supposed that it was just the world reflecting what we had done to her; we had taken the beauty and twisted it up into something fit only for terror and hate and disease.

The colors began to change from their palette of happiness to that of disgust, and I figured it was time I moved on. I started my walk by following the road the Inn was on toward the center of the wheel shaped town, stopping along the way to read the few signs that dangled from the various train cars and buildings. One in particular caught my eye, so I decided to head inside in order to browse a bit.

I shook the damp air out of my coat as I came to a front desk of the small store. On the desk was a small bell mounted to the wood which I struck a few times, assuming its purpose.

“Hello? Sorry if it is a bit early in the day, but I’m just here to check out your shop.”

I waited to see if there would be a reply, but all I heard was some shuffling and what sounded like a box full of tools hitting the floor.

“Um, I guess I can just go if it’s a problem,” I said as I turned back towards the door.

A hoof grabbed my shoulder and stopped me before I could even take a step. I turned and my eyes grew wide as I found myself face to face with a gray ghoul, grinning from ear to ear.

I fumbled to pull out a weapon of some kind, but the ghoul was too fast as she knocked the weapon away and reached behind her to pull out… a small chalk board?

I stared, slack jawed at what I was seeing as the ghoul, which I now noticed was a Pegasus, began to write with her mouth.

“I’m Ditzy Doo! A friend!”

I read this out loud, more for my benefit than for her, and realized how blind I had become if I was so quick to jump to violence. I knew very well that there were plenty of ghouls who weren’t feral, and some were even accepted into society freely, like, I supposed, Ditzy here, but I had tried to kill her anyway.

“I... I’m so sorry,” I managed to squeak. “It has been a long few days and… oh, there really isn’t a good excuse.”

I frowned and dropped my head.

“You can report me to a sheriff or someone if you like. I know I deserve nothing else.”

The fissure hissed and boiled mocking me in such a way that I felt a heat welling up.

Ditzy tapped my shoulder and pointed to her board again.

“It’s okay. Happens a lot.”

“You sure?” I questioned sadly.

She nodded rapidly, still giving me that ridiculously endearing smile.

I noticed that one of her eyes was slowly rotating off center to point at the wall, and I began to tilt my head to follow it before I caught myself and blinked to try and cover up what I had done.

She laughed silently, covering up her mouth with her hooves as she did so. I only knew it was laughter because of the way her shoulders bounced as her wings lifted her a few inches from the floor, but the silence made me realize that she had not spoken a word since I had arrived.

“Ditzy,” I intoned cautiously. “Can’t you speak?”

Her laughter stopped abruptly and then her body slowly came to rest on the ground again. She sighed and began writing, stopping to let me read what she had written before erasing it to start the process over.

“No. Can’t talk. No Tongue. Was taken from me. Long time ago now.”

I was at a loss and could only frown and apologize for what some terrible pony had done.

She tapped me again and shook her head vigorously.

“No. Don’t be sad! I’m fine now. Being a Ghoul. It has some use. You know? Quick healing. I’m a tough. Old bird.”

I laughed with her this time as I felt some relief returning to me.

She continued scribbling.

“Welcome! To Absolutely Everything!” She waved her hoof proudly around her in a semicircle, letting me take in the scene.

“Do you actually have absolutely everything here?” I said with a bit of a giggle caught in my voice.

She nodded, somehow more quickly than before, then flew off into a back room to return a few seconds later with a large, bound book that would have given even Twilight Sparkle a run for her money in terms of speed reading. She placed it on the main counter and waved me over.

“This is. My Inventory. I have lived. A long time. So I know. How to get things. Trust me.”

She peeled open the cover and let me peruse the tiny scratch like writing on the first page.

“Apples, ant hides, anchovies, axes…” I turned the pages and kept reading. “Spark batteries, Mogar plushies, radio dials, tooth paste? You really weren’t exaggerating, huh?”

I looked up at her and she had coolly been leaning back against the wall and tilting her head slightly, as if to say, “Yeah, I’m awesome.” And I had to admit that it was very impressive!

A few flakes of skin fell from her crossed hooves as she began to move again, directing me to sit at a stool she pulled from her side of the counter. I did and she lifted the chalk board from the table top and placed it around her neck like a necklace before starting to write at me again.

“I’ve been busy. Been gathering. For the team to return. With the little mare. And the others. Sorry for mess.”

“Team?” I asked. “Who are you talking about?”

She used a hoof to erase the board and began to reply.

“Right. You’re new! Sorry. Forgot. A few left. A day or so back. Went to old town. Some mission. Calamity got supplies. Haven’t heard back since.”

“Calamity?” I exclaimed. “What? Something awful happened? Why are you so calm if your supplies were destroyed by some terrible event?”

She laughed again, surprising me. As she continued, I noted how her demeanor reminded me of Cerul more so than anypony I had ever met. I made a mental checklist box to remind myself to bring those two together at some point since it would probably be hilarious.

“Not A Calamity. The stallion. His name is. Calamity. He was helping. Little Pip.”

My head begin to spin again as I heard a scream building. I closed my eyes and began pressing my hooves against my ears. I knew that name.

Why did I know that name!?

Then as quickly as the rush of pain and sound began, it was sucked away with a touch of a hoof from Ditzy.

I opened my eyes and saw the chalk board waiting for me.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, Ditzy,” I replied. “I… I just have a small headache. Sorry about that.”

She nodded slowly, dubiously.

“I know what. Memories can do. I’ve seen it. Long lives do that.”

I flicked a small figure of a pony on a spring that was resting on the desk and watched it bounce around. I supposed she would understand how memory affects a pony better than most ponies alive today.

“If you don’t mind me asking, Ditzy, how old are you? How have you stayed so cheerful with such adversity in your life?”

She smiled in return, bringing up her board.

“I lost count. Of the years. A few decades back. My story is long. I’m not always. Happy. I just try. To remember. What’s important.”

“And what’s important to you, Ditzy?” I leaned in closer.

“All life is. Everypony. We all just need. Friendship. I have been lucky. In my life. To know many ponies. As my friends. Some of them. Were the best. The best in Equestria… They’re gone now. That broke me. A few times. But I always. Rebounded. Remembering that. Even in death. They are with me. In memory.”

I sat back and tried to take in what she had said.

“You seem like you would have such great stories to tell, Miss Doo. Have you ever thought of writing a book?”

She managed to smile even wider, causing the lines of her mouth to wrinkle and the skin to grow tight where her coat had disappeared on her face.

“Yes. Memoirs. I’ve kept a journal. For years. Never compiled them. You think I should?”

“Of course!” I replied with a slap of my hoof on the desk. “The Ditzy Doo Chronicles! I could see it now, and, trust me, because if I know anything, I know books. Researched them for a long time with the Rangers out of Baltimare…”

I swallowed as I felt an unsettling in my stomach to keep myself from getting that sickening feeling again.

“Baltimare?” Ditzy wrote rapidly. “Best Muffins. In the Wasteland. There! A place run. By brothers. From Germaneigh. Ever been?”

She seemed elated to talk about muffins, so I chuckled a little.

“No, sorry, never got to really explore the city since we mainly just stuck to the outskirts and the research cove.”

She shrugged with her hooves slightly angled out and returned to writing.

A cuckoo clock somewhere in the shop counted seven, and she stopped abruptly as something came to her mind. She erased what she had started to say and scribbled hastily.

“Sorry. Gotta go finish. Preparations for. Checking on. The team who. Went to Old Town. Thanks for listening! I don’t get. To tell stories often. Feel free to. Come by again anytime!”

She began to fly off to the room she had come from originally, but stopped in the doorway to turn back to look at me. She lifted the board again to her mouth.

“By the way. Never got your name!”

“Starwind Solace.” I responded. “Wonderful to meet you Ditzy.”

“Pleasure is. Mine. See you later?”

“Yes,” I smiled. “Of course! I’ll come by before we leave town, if you’re around.”

She zoomed over in a blur and I found myself wrapped in a very squishy hug. Pressed against her clammy body, I heard her steady heartbeat, a more healthy and comforting sound than anything I had heard in a long while. Ghoul or not, Ditzy Doo seemed like one of the most alive ponies I had ever known.

“Always good,” Ditzy scratched. “To make new friends.”

I nodded and mimicked her wide grin, and she left the room to return to work.

Turning toward the door, I caught sight of a bobbing set of books precariously resting on top of the head of a stallion walking past the dirty window.

“Where there are books,” I said to myself. “A library or bookstore there may also be…”

I trotted at a leisurely pace out of the shop to see the book carrying stallion turning a corner. I moved a little more quickly, hoping to catch up with him, but as I came to the street where he had turned, I was met with another empty lane.

I huffed and scowled before continuing my walk down the street. I kept glancing into the small train car buildings in hopes that I might find the elusive book pony, but it was not to be as I came to the end of the path with the city wall keeping me from moving forward.

I rolled my eyes and turned back around.

“Maybe one of these other places will have somepony in them to help me out.”

I proceeded to walk into the nearest building which had the emblem of a raging Pegasus emblazoned above its doorframe. Music was pouring out of the room as soon as I opened the door, and a hoof grabbed mine before yanking me into the fray.

I spun and spun as colors and sounds became a single blur. I couldn’t keep up with what was happening as I scrambled to get a hold of something, anything to let me have some stability. My eyes spotted purple, red, blue, and green bars flashing here and there as if the E.F.S couldn’t decide what was going on either. Through it all I saw a barstool hurtling in my direction, clearing a path through the mass of ponies around me.

“Get back ‘ya varmints!” A hard voice yelled over the din.

“Awh, come on Crane,” another voice yelled back. “Can’t you see she just wants in on the fun too?”

The stool, hovering in the air, cleared the last remnants of the crowd around me and a bulky unicorn stallion appeared behind it.

“Follow me outta’ this mess.”

I nodded and gulped before we walked through the crowd and up to a bar with spots of dirt and rust mottling its surface – certainly not as clean as the Browncoat’s.

I looked back as I sat at a stool next to the unicorn who helped me out and realized that I had been pulled into a mixture of a dancing and fighting that was as savagely beautiful as it was dangerous.

“What are they doing?” I asked the stallion as I cringed at a particularly painful looking pirouette.

“Dash heads from a Saddle Arabian caravan passin’ through.” He responded. “They’re really only trouble for themselves as long as you stay outta’ their way.”

“Yeah,” another voice chimed in from a stallion behind the bar to my right. “and they may make a hell of a mess, but them's is good business.” The stallion chuckled as he went back to cleaning a glass with an oil stained rag.

I dropped one eye and cocked my head as I stared back at the rumble behind me.

“Huh… if you say so.”

A glass was planted on the bar behind me and I turned to see the barpony with a bottle in his mouth, pouring a tall glass of something.

He put the bottle down before pushing the glass to me.

“It’s on me. I know that that crowd can be a hoof full.”

I nodded and realized that I hadn’t really caught my breath since coming in.

I took a deep breath.

With no hesitation I lifted the drink to my mouth and drank all of its contents in one gulp, not thinking about the taste or…

I gasped for air as a stinging in my throat and mouth caused me to start coughing uncontrollably.

“What…” I practically died coughing, “Was that!?”

The unicorn from before just smirked at me. “Wild Pegasus. And damn if you ain’t the bravest little filly this side of the 52 for takin’ the whole glass in one go.”

My right eye was twitching as I rocked in place for a few moments to somewhat compose myself.

The stallion gave a chuckle and extended a hoof to me. “Name’s Crane, lifter o' freight, and friend o’ anyone who can drink like that.”

I weakly hoof bumped him. “Ni… nice to meet you. Mine is Starwind.”

“What’re you in town fer, missy?” Crane asked as he swirled the contents of his glass.

“Just passing through on our way to the Manehattan area,” I replied with a sigh. “Though, at this rate, I may get killed here and never make it!”

“Manehattan?” Crane asked. “You see this,” he gestured with a sweep of his hoof. “And think that it’s dangerous, but want to head to Manehattan? You really must be even braver than ah thought... That or crazy.”

“Well, psychosis is likely a part of most ponies’ psychology, if you believe the studies of the psychologists in the MoAS.”

Before he could reply, I pulled out an old book that I had little interest in and a pencil and began sketching out the design of a helmet with a space in the crown for an orb on its blank title fly.

“This is a recollector. They used these to record memories and, in some experiments, to analyze dreams and emotions, and they often would catch glimpses of murderous intent and other tendencies which they originally passed off as anomalies. Some arcane researchers had another opinion– though there is contention in nearly every field, so that isn’t surprising – and it was that we all were essentially standing on a razor of stability that could quickly cause a pony to fall into insanity. I always thought their methodology was a bit overreaching, but it is fascinating research, really.”

Crane looked as if he had fallen out of the pages of a pre-historic picture book as he was discovering fire.

“Um, sure,” he replied dully.

He shook his head and glanced up at an old standing clock on near the wall behind me.

A startled look crossed his face.

“Is it that time already? Damn. Alright, ah gotta get to work, miss Starwind. Thanks for the drink, Apple Whiskey, ah’ll pay you when the caps come in tonight.”

Crane was up and out of the door before the barkeep could reply. I just shrugged at the puzzled pony.

“Thanks for the kindness, mister, but I think I may stick to water in the morning next time,” I said to him as I began to follow Crane’s way out.

“Yeah, yeah,” he replied. “Hey, if you see Crane again, tell him that next time I’ll be chargin’ double!”

I laughed and edged my way past the brawl and back out to the street.

I had to nearly run to keep pace with Crane’s surprising quickness. “Hey, Crane, could you slow down a bit? I was curious about the book situation in the town. Crane!”

The fifty or so feet between us was slowly growing as I realized why he didn’t respond. The clash of a loud whistling, the sound of shouting ponies, and the whine whirring machinery slapped me across the face as we made our way onto the street where I found Absolutely Everything.

As we neared the center of the town, I began to spot ponies wandering about, carrying bundles and boxes and bags of various kinds to their businesses and homes. A large line of freight cars pulled by a group of stallions in overalls had just pulled in, so I guessed that work must start for everypony in this town around the time trains run through. It would explain the lack of presence before now.

I stopped to take in the life around me. There were ponies laughing and ponies shouting and ponies sweating under the weight of burdens they carried. I loved the sound of it –the feel of it. This was the way that Equestria should’ve been; this was the way it was before. I basked in the sounds of little colts playing in the mud, the mares gossiping about this and that, and the general atmosphere abuzz with motion and vibrancy.

As I looked forward again, I realized that I had lost track of Crane, but I didn’t really care about that so much now. I thought of waking Cerul to take it in with me, but she did seem incredibly comfortable in her sleep, and, besides, we had all day to do this, so I decided to just continue on.

I wandered closer to the train and saw the crowd surrounding the ponies who were unloading the crates. I supposed I should help them out since I was there, so I began pushing my way into the least clustered area to help a filly struggling with a small satchel.

“Here, let me help you with those straps,” I said to her before tightening the small latches tying the bag to her back. She just smiled and scampered off to catch up with her family who were carrying bags of their own.

I made my way closer to the large group and found myself stuck in the middle of a jumble of new arrivals waiting for their duties.

“Don’t turn around,” A warm, mare’s voice from just behind me whispered into my ear.

I froze, wide eyed at whatever could be happening. “What do you want?”

“I just have a proposal for you,” Responded the sultry sounding pony. “In the bar, I couldn’t help but hear that you know a lot about technology and arcane science, and, well, I think that you may exactly who we are looking for in our particular situation.”

“And… what is that?” I ask dubiously. “If you say it has to do with a school or library, I may have to just say no right now.”

“No, none of that. We need you to help us out with a small… energy flow predicament at a nearby power station that hasn’t been raided or picked over yet. If you are interested in tech untouched by any ponies since the megaspells, I suggest you head to the hills you see over the wall in front of you. Bring your peppy friend with you, if you think she will help, but she may just cause you trouble, so I suggest you just head out now.”

As I turned to ask her about how she knew about Cerul, I was unable to speak as a pair of golden eyes flashed underneath a crimson hood at me – I swear I could feel them piercing me like a knife.

Shouts from nearby drew my attention back to in front of me. A large crate was careening on the edge of the flatcar as one of the earth stallions had accidentally dropped the load on his forehooves.

Without much thought, I pushed to the front, next to the train, and strained myself to levitate the large box off of him. I felt sweat beading at my forehead as I held the weight aloft in my magic.

I turned my eyes on a group of stallions near me and aggressively whispered at them through gritted teeth. “Get him out from under there. Right. Now!”

They scrambled to pull the pony out, and I slowly put the box on the ground to my right.

I gasped for breath. “What’s in this thing? Anvils?” I looked around and all of the ponies just looked as confused as me.

I whinnied softly and just turned to walk back the way I came since there didn’t seem to be any more immediate peril. “No matter, I suppose.”

The injured stallion called out as I was walking away. “Thank you, miss!”

I waved back at him and smiled, and then I turned to look back down the street with a more serious face on to see where that hooded mare could’ve gone. I couldn’t be so foolish as to just run off and venture into a place I had no real answers about…

Or could I?

I handled myself fine today and yesterday, and my wound was feeling better since I got to rest a bit, so why couldn’t I?

I sat at the intersection of the path to the Browncoat and the gate out of town, and just began taking stock of everything.

On one hoof, I thought, there would be chances for technology and new knowledge, but with no real certainty of safety or making it back in time to leave for our trip today. On the other, I could be missing out on something amazing in simply staying here to relax with Cerul before leaving.

I bit my bottom lip and scratched at the dirt.

“It couldn’t hurt to just see how far the station is from here could it?” I asked myself softly.

I lifted my PipBuck to my eyes and turned the dials to find the world map. I traced the line that had been created at some point to a marker on my map marked as Sub-Station Delta, and I realized that it was only a couple of miles away; I could be back before Cerul even wakes up! I could just go, take care of their problems, play with some new tech, and be back in time for us to get out of town and on our way to Manehattan…

As I came to, realizing what was happening outside of my thoughts, I found myself walking away from the closing gate, which was still being watched over by Brandy, headed in the direction indicated by the mare.

The power of my curiosity would likely be the death of me.

I crept slowly up a dusty hill covered in prickly, red, dead grass to peer down into the small valley which contained the old plant. As I had come within a few hundred feet of the direct area around it, my E.F.S had been picking up red markers in growing numbers, so I had decided to approach as quietly and secretly as possible in order to see what was happening.

The black building with an array of power lines running into its rear and out of its front seemed desolate of any life as I could not spot any movement around or within. Still, I knew better than to trust my sight or my E.F.S for all things, so I planned to look for another way into the facility rather than using the doors leading in directly.

These places typically had drainage systems for their crystal cooling vats, and at this point they would probably be dry as a bone and passible as a secondary entrance, so I began to skirt in a circle around the perimeter, looking for such a place.

It sometimes paid to actually have to read those dusty manuals that ponies usually threw out, and, in that case, it could not have been more true as I went about one hundred feet in an arc before nearly falling into a hole in the earth filled with dry bits of crystal and bone fragments that was hidden underneath a small alcove that housed a pipe with a diameter greater than my height.

I whistled to myself, impressed. “You don’t often see outflows that large on anything less than a Class A reactor… What the hell do they have in you?”

I used my forehooves to propel me to eye level with the tube, and I saw that it was barren, which, in this case, was a great sign. Since there were no markers on my E.F.S at my eyelevel, I climbed the rest of the way into the drainage system and began a short trek up an incline and into the dark.

As I walked with unsure steps, I began hearing a low melodic hum echoing from the far end of the tunnel. Feeling a slight bend in the system as I continued, I also began to see a thin, orange glow floating its way from a distant exit. A few more steps and a blue marker popped to life in my vision. The hum resonated more deeply with every step, an amber tone with subtle lifts and falls that both filled me with hope and dread as I felt this music from somewhere within myself and from the surroundings. Nearing the opening, I crept more and more slowly towards the lip of the pipe, expecting a weapon discharge or a melee to ensue, but as I peeped over the edge and down into the spacious concrete chamber, I was met only with the sight of a reclining, mottled brown and gray stallion with a hoof rolled cigarette drooping casually from the edge of his mouth. I paused for a few moments for the last few notes of the first verse to be set free.

Instead, the humming stopped.

“Ya don’t have to creep like that, missy.” I nearly fell the fifteen or so feet onto the chamber floor as his raspy words caught me off balance and off guard. “Iff’n you were gonna shoot me or steal from me, I imagine you would’ve been a might more clever or aggressive than that, so go ahead, come on down. I don’t bite.”

With that last statement, he chuckled dryly to himself and pulled his loose Stetson a little closer down to his eyes.

I slowly levitated myself down to the floor to take the extra pain on my wounds out of the equation before dusting myself off and timidly walking into the small sphere of light given off by his burning cigarette.

I rubbed the back of my head. “Um… hi?”

He narrowed his eyes a bit. “Hi.”

There was a pause as we both just stared at each other. He was a ghoul, I could tell that much pretty easily, but both I and my E.F.S had yet to determine if he was to be friend or foe. I supposed I would have to push it one way or the other, so I took a few steps closer and rigidly stuck out a hoof.

“I’m Starwind, and it is a pleasure to meet you, mister…?”

“Sand,” he replied. “Sand Stone, really. All muh friends called me that… course, ah ain’t got many of them left, ah s’pose, so call me what you want.”

“Well, Sand, I am glad to meet a friendly face in this place. If you don’t mind me asking… why are you alone in the dark down here?

His cigarette was beginning to burn out so he rubbed the butt onto the wall beside him before pulling out a second and lighting it with dented lighter emblazoned with the symbol of six crystals arranged around an atom.

“It’s muh home these days. Ah ain’t got much use for company, and, in muh experience, most normal ponies ain’t got any need fer me neither, if you get what ah mean.”

“Oh… yeah, I know what you mean,” I gently replied in the stillness. “I hate very little in this world because I know everything can get better in time, but I think I hate the intolerance that ghouls like you face most of all. Sorry, I know that it may seem a bit forward for me to say, but I was raised to accept ponies for who they are, not what they look like or seem to be on the surface.”

Sand grunted softly. “So, it seems decency hasn’t left all folks so far. Ah used to work here, ya know? Ah was s’posed to become head engineer fer this plant after the refit, but then the government and those… those zebras destroyed us all. Ah used to hate the zebras before that day– hell, ah thought they were the lowest bastards on the face of the planet. Ah figured they were worse than Sombra, himself, since the mad king never considered detonatin’ everythin', but muh mind changed after that day. All of us creatures are equally despicable, and ah think realizing that has kept me sane to this day. But ah guess that ain’t muh point, sorry. Ah meant to say that it’s nice to see that it doesn’t take atrocities to bring out the best in everypony else.”

I pondered what he said for a moment before replying. I couldn’t tell what it was about this stallion, but he felt like someone I could open up to about things that I usually never thought about– he reminded me of someone I lost. I figured it wouldn’t hurt anypony to bring it up, so I walked a bit closer and sat against the wall.

“I thank my mom for that, you know? See, she and my father lived in the commonwealth once upon a time, but when my mother began noticing the lack of empathy for those outside the commonwealth as well as the segregation and hate spewed towards ponies there that broke the mold a bit, she decided to take it upon herself to make things better. So, with my father and a few others backing her, she picked up and broke away from the Commonwealth to travel from the rad pits of Saddle Arabia to the Shimmering Oceans seeking out a new home and ways to help out those in need. In their travels, she had me and taught me much about the world and her studies, but she died during the birth of my sister… She was likely the best pony I ever had the chance to know, and I regret every day that my sister had never gotten the chance to know her too, but…  I think what I was getting at was that her death was the catalyst for the formation of New Commons, my father’s intense teachings to me and my sister, and my attitude today. It may not be that I was formed by an atrocity, but I think the best lessons are those we learn in the hardest times.”

“You have a story teller’s heart, Starwind,” Sand said with a brief chuckle. “Ah guess muh only possible reply is to ask you the same question you asked me: what are you doin’ down here?”

“Well, I was asked to by some mare who was there one second and gone the next. I guess that sounds ridiculous, but that is my only explanation.”

Sand gritted his teeth to the point that I figured he would bite his cigarette in half, but somehow he managed to keep it in place.

“She wouldn’t happen to have been wearing a hood and a dark red cloak, did she?”

I thought back. “Yeah, I guess she did, why?”

He shook his head slowly. “Good thing you are smarter than most in comin’ through here, ‘cause her and her ilk have taken up a small roost in this place. They made traps out of the security system ah built!”

I quickly scanned the room for red markers.

“Traps? What!? Why would they do that? And how did they not manage to get you too?”

Sand waved his hooves in front of me.

“Whoa, whoa whoa, miss Starwind! Look here. We’re in the cooling tank, and it is sealed from the inside by yours truly. No one knows this system better than me, so you don’t have nothin’ to worry about. Plus, those foals couldn’t secure a system if they were zip tied to a megaspell missile and their lives depended on it. Ah would suggest you turn right around and leave after we get done talkin’ though, ‘cause while they aren’t a danger to you here, ah wouldn’t try to get up there into the main complex unless you happen to have a portable terminal or somethin’ crazy like that.

I smiled to myself and raised my hoof into the light near his face.

“What, you got somethin’ wrong with your hoof or… oh… oh!”

“That’s right!” I grinned. “Beautiful tech is it not?”

“Ah haven’t seen a PipBuck in… a lot longer than ah care to think about, but that’ll do it! Course… ah still think you should leave though. Those folk upstairs ain’t known for bein’ the kind and welcomin' type, regardless of their security systems.”

“But…” I looked down while muttering to myself. “I need answers! They must have had a reason for sending me all this way just to try and ambush me.”

Since when did I start being paranoid? I made a mental note to check that out later.

“Hmmm,” he rubbed under his hat in thought. “Ah s’pose ah might be able to rig up a proxy so you can access their terminal systems from here, and there may be some information on there, but ah won’t, in good conscience, help you go up there, so that’s all ah can do to help you.”

A wave of relief passed over me as I didn’t really want to get shot at or attacked today, if I could help it.

Within a few minutes of me following and adapting his instructions on how to work this particular maneframe from a virtual machine, I found my way into the directories of the administrator’s main computer. There were many hundreds of records, receipts, journal entries, and business documents of all kinds, but it seemed as if the longer I was scrolling through the list, the farther back the dates went. Sand suggested I query for all files made in the last three to four years since that is about the time the group moved in. With that done, the results were down to five files, so I just decided I would arbitrarily open one to see if it was even remotely useful.

“Sand, pick a number between zero and six.” I murmured as I mulled over the cryptic file names.

Sand raised an eyebrow. “Uh… three, ah guess.”

I opened the third file and it turned out to be an audio diary.

“Oh, Wake, you know I hate recording these things,” a young mare’s voice spoke over the air.

“I know, but life is so short and we have to leave a mark somehow, baby,” a husky stallion voice replied.

“You always make life here out to be so dark, but we have each other!” The mare insisted. “That should be enough to give you hope.”

“It is baby, it is, but… with Jupiter breathing down our necks about setting up camp here for the big guy… he says there may have to be dead weight cut. He says –”

There is a loud blaring alarm and a shuffling of papers.

“These drills are driving me crazy! We’ll talk again later, okay?”

There was a click and the recording died away.

Sand coughed before laughing a bit.

“Well, ah guess you never know what’ll end up on those things, huh?”

I didn’t reply as I opened the next entry.

“Eight, nine… where is number ten?” The husky voiced Wake urgently asked. “Baby, can you find number ten? We have to get this fully active to meet their deadline tonight or there might be – oh… heh, hey, Merc, what are you doing here? “

“Sally-Mae, get out. Now.” A gravelly voice cut through.

A door closed and a chair scraped across the floor.

“You said you’d have all ten crystals ready to be placed in the array, Wake.”

“Well, yeah, we had them around here… somewhere. Sally-Mae and I were just gathering them up when you came in. I –“

“No, you either have them or you don’t,” the dark voice edged in. “We know about you and her, Wake. We know what you two have been hiding, and the hand is never fooled. You may want to cut off your recording now because this next part is not something you’ll want to remember.”

Another click.

This time Sand didn’t make a sound, and I couldn’t blame him. Slowly, I clicked the fifth, and final, entry.

“Sally… sally, I’ll be following you soon, babe,” wake slurred. There was a clinking of glass and what sounded like a thick bottle shattering on the floor. “The hand has the array nearly ready to go. Seems like Merc found the tenth, afterall. Isn’t that HILARIOUS?!”

Another crash of glass was accompanied with a grunt and what sounded like dry sobbing.

“But I’ll show them… Yeah… Yes. They set up all of this security for their methods, and they think that you’re the only one who was smart enough to see what they were wanting to do, Sally, but… but… you and I, we’re gonna show them. See this? Course you don’t… anyway, this is gonna put them back three months at least.”

There was a silence on the air as cold as death.

A metallic click filled the void. “They set all these traps up to protect their work, they say, but I know better, sally. The Hand of Omega was behind it all. The trappings, the deaths, your… yeah. They say that we’re getting prepared for some visitors who need special attention – some mares who are on their way to New Appleoosa. Heh. A shame I won’t get to hit on ‘em, you know, sally; the way I used to do to make you jealous.”

The sound of stifled gasps escapes my PipBuck once more.

“Now, I won’t give them the satisfaction of doing it, and I told you I would be following you soon, so there’s no time like the pres –“

A gunshot echoed in the spacious chamber and for a few minutes Sand and I just sat and looked at one another, a passing moment of repose. The wheels in my mind were turning over to digest what I just heard.

I stopped the playback and began to tap my hoof on the concrete. “Two mares.”

“Huh?” Sand snapped out of his quiet. “What did you say?”

I quickly skimmed into the metadata of the last recording and noticed that it had been created in the last two days.

I felt the blood drain from my face. “Two mares who were just coming into New Appleoosa! Cerul!”

Sand’s eyes were wide.

“Sorry, Sand, I have to go now. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I have the nagging feeling that something terrible is going on, and I just might’ve made it worse.”

I sprinted back toward the pipe and used my levitation spell to boost my steps up a magically manifested staircase until I was level with the tube floor without missing a single step. I was sometimes impressed with how coordinated I could be when I wasn’t surrounding my head with too many clouds.

I had 3.5 miles to go, and I knew how to shorten it by at least half of that.

I concentrated as I was nearing the wasteland side of the tunnel and in a blinding flash of white and blue, I was sprinting toward Brandy’s gate into New Appleoosa. Perhaps I underestimated how good I was at teleporting these days.

“Oomph!”

Brandy’s head popped over the edge of the wall. “Need in, darlin’? You didn’t have to try and break down mah gate – just ask.” With a batting of her lovely eyelashes, she disappeared into her shack. I shook my head and tenderly felt the small bump forming just behind my horn.

At least I didn’t hit the wall horn on because horn sprain is... Well, let’s say it’s not a friendly sort of pain.

The gate wench rumbled to life, and dust shook off of the train car as it was hoisted up. When it was open enough for me to squeeze under, I wiggled underneath and burst at full speed toward The Browncoat.

I slowed as I neared the door’s stoop and nothing seemed amiss.

“Maybe I was overanalyzing things,” I whispered to the wood paneling as I turned the knob and pushed the door inward.

There was no chime.

There wasn’t anything missing. No damaged chairs or tables or anything of the sort, but…

There was no chime!

I began sprinting again up the stairs. “No chime. No Bell. No Lager. No…” I careened into the room at the far end and skidded to a stop just inside the threshold.

“No cerul.”

I took small steps around to where there was still an imprint of a curled up mare in the sheets and sat back on to my haunches.

“No… no, no, no, no, NO! Not again…” I felt somepony speak but couldn’t pick out the voice from the din of the fissure’s laughter.

My eyes blurred with my feelings welling up, but as I dropped my head to let them fall, I managed to spot a flash of blood red in my last moment of clarity.

I used my magic to lift the small piece of fabric to a few inches from my face.

I knew this color. I knew this cloth.

The golden eyed mare.

I pushed the feelings back down and stuffed them into the smallest box in the back of my mind before shoving it into a closet full of condensed fears next to a few skeletons.

Cerul needed me, and I wasn’t going to let myself stop again – not this time.

Packing the piece of cloth into my saddlebag, I grabbed the rest of our stuff and ran back downstairs.

“Lager! LAGER!”

A bleary eyed Lager walked out from a door beneath the bar. “Wha…?”

“Lager! Someone broke in and ransacked our room and Cerul was taken! I don’t know where, but I need to find her. I just have this,” I pulled out the cloth and waved it in front of his eyes. “Have you seen anyone wearing a cloak made of this? Please, please say yes…”

Lager slowly narrowed his eyes at the fabric before sighing. “Miss, Starwind, I’m sorry, but–“

I figure he said that he didn’t know anything, but I was too far out of the building to hear how he finished his statement.

The interactions flew by as pony after pony blended into one in memory because no one in the street that I could ask had any knowledge of the cloth or the golden eyed mare. After an amount of time I can’t recall, I was asking one particularly flustered flour courier with a missing ear about the possible correlation between the fabric swatch and the granularity of his flour. Without a single word, he just turned and ran off into a nearby train car building.

“Hey! Come back here, you ground wheat carting cad!”

I frowned and wiped the sweat off of my brow before pulling back my hair and tying it off with a small ribbon I found earlier while searching Cerul’s bag for any more clues. The street was empty due to news that a crazy mare was in town to shake people down or something, so I was about to resort to knocking on doors to question ponies when a white dust covered baker with a half scorched chef’s hat resting just off center on his balding head approached me from the same building the courier just ran into.

With a hoof prod into my chest with each word, the stallion angrily pushed me into the wall immediately behind me. “Hey. Hey, hey, hey what’re you doin’ to my assistants?! You out to ruin my business? Did the syndicate send you?! I swear if you don’t answer me soon, I will bake you into a damn pie!”

I felt my muscles tense and a bit of heat flushed into my face. “You shut your mouth! If your little flour foal had just answered my questions, everything would be fine, but no! Some ponies just have to scurry away and hide. Some ponies just have to be obstinate and disregard common courtesy! SOME ponies think themselves better than those in need! I just want somepony to tell me what this fabric leads to, who the golden eyed mare is, and where my friend is!”

Red was pressing into my vision as I felt like I was on the verge of hyperventilating. I pressed a hoof to my chest and sat down hard onto the ground with a small sob.

“Golden eyes…” The chef crouched to my level and a grin as crooked as a scar in the earth after an earthquake formed across his face. “I may have an answer for you, you crazy mare.”

I rose to my hooves and clutched at his shoulders, nearly nose to nose. “What!? I’m not crazy! I… Wait… Oh! Tell me! I… I… Please, please tell me as fast as you can, Mr. Chef.”

“Tsk tsk tsk,” the chef pushed me away and waved a hoof to chide me like a teacher would to a conceited child. “Firstly, the name’s Hard Roll. Secondly, you need to calm down because folks ‘round here are on the verge of tossing you out. And thirdly, yes, I have an answer for you, but… I am of the opinion that if you are good at something, or know something somepony wants to know, never ever do it for free.”

I sniffled and felt a bit of something irritating my eyes. “What are you saying?”

“I’m only being a good businesspony. You help me… I help you. A fair trade, don’t you think? For your end? Two hundred caps– I need a more powerful oven to get my bakery off the ground, and Absolutely Everything has a nice little one on hold for me. For that you’ll have your answer. Seems to me to be fair.”

I felt the finality in the air, so I levitated out the pouch I kept the caps from my research grant money in, and counted out two hundred. After the thirty I had given Lager and this, I would only have a few left to get by on, but I wasn’t going to let such a small thing deter me when I could finally get my Cerul back.

The chef held out his hat to collect the caps and I dropped them in neatly.

“There’s your caps. Now. Tell. Me. What. You. Know.”

The edge of my voice was perhaps a bit too hard as the stallion frowned at me, but the brief shadow on his visage passed and he continued. “There’s a large complex nearby where the ponies you are looking for meet up. I know because I get orders to send bread out there to feed them when there are larger meetings. I’ve never been myself because I know it is a terribly stupid decision to go anywhere outside of a secure place like this alone, but that’s why I have my couriers here– they send theirs to order from me, and I send mine to deliver to them. On occasion my boys have reported delivering to some pretty menacing figures… some of which, they say, have eyes of gold. If you have a piece of paper and something to write with, I can draw you a rough map.”

I quickly whipped out the same sheet of paper I drew the recollecter on and a pen. Hard Roll had surprisingly good writing skills for a wastelander, likely due to icing cakes or piping in his work, but I hardly had any time to consider this as I ripped the finished map from his hooves and sprinted back towards Brandy’s gate while holding the map in front of me with magic so I could plan my route.

Judging by the dimensions, I had approximately a mile to go before I would run across a large set of conjoined buildings called Gallopfrey Point Mall.

I looked up to see the gate drawing near. “Brandy! Could you please open up? I need to get going… quick!”

She must have heard me as the wench responded and I was able to lower myself slightly but still remain at full speed. I had a heading, but I knew that every second which passed would be one more second those ponies could be doing something terrible to Cerulean. I strained my legs to a limit I hadn’t known before, pumping them with more force than any out of shape pony like myself should, but I didn’t care. I covered the first three fourths of a mile in a few minutes, and as I crested a hill I spotted the tops of a few rose colored buildings in the distance. They were easily another half a mile or more away.

“Damn that Baker and his shoddy map scaling!”

I felt deep within me that they were my targets, though, so I closed my eyes and let my magic do the rest of the work.

Poof!

I swayed in place as I forced myself to a stop before I collided with a doorframe to a concealed entryway of one of the buildings that were much farther away mere moments before. I gulped quietly as I realized how stupid it would’ve been to give myself away by breaking into the dangerous ponies’ base, or, even worse, ending up cut in half by a wall that I happened to teleport into, screaming because I had no idea where I was going to end up when casting the spell.

A shudder passed through me, but I shook it off. I somehow made it without raising any alarms to my knowledge, and evening was falling so it would be the best time to attempt this as long as they didn’t have any large light emitters inside. I was happy to just have gotten as far as I had.

I tried the reinforced glass door in front of me first, but it was locked– not unexpected, but certainly not as simple as I was hoping. Next, I walked back a bit and observed what I could without walking into the open. There were quite a few ponies about if my E.F.S was to believed, and I only managed to see a few who weren’t hostile.

“Fifty seven…” My ears drooped as I imagined having to face them all.

I felt the squeezing pressure inside me pushing me to despair and give up before I had to become a killer again, but… it’s Cerul, and I couldn’t be bothered to think about that at the moment, while her life wasn’t guaranteed. I looked up, noticing for the first time that there were banners draped from the tops of the roofs which were the same color as the cloth, but these bore a red hand on a black, circular field of starscape. One such banner reached nearly to the ground near me. I pondered the significance of this symbol, but pushed that aside as an idea struck me.

Within a minute, I was attempting to scale the side of the building, utilizing the banner’s mounts as counters to my weight and the banner itself as my safety rope.

What? Too absurd? I read a lot of Daring Do when I was a filly, and I got bored and tried to reenact a few of my favorite scenes once upon a time! Believe me, this was foal’s play next to attempting this with a bit of twine and a nagging sister. Plus… it helped that I could use my telekinesis to lighten my weight to nearly nothing in order to make it simpler.

Regardless, I managed to crest the top and threw the banner back into position so nopony would be any wiser of what was going on.

I noticed after being atop the building that there were skylights dotting the surface every twenty five feet or so.

“Perfect!” I rubbed my hooves together smugly, and mused to myself as I walked quickly up to the first one nearest to me. “If this weren’t so dire, I might be acting the part of a spy in one my books.”

Peeking into the dimly lit space below, I noticed that there were ponies in familiar cloaks resting and speaking with one another around small trashcan contained bond fires. This was great news as it meant that many were too busy conversing to notice a mare’s head obscuring the remnants of the waning light from above them.

“Nothing.”

I moved to the next.

“Nope.”

And then the next.

“Come on…”

Six skylights later, I decided that I needed to get down to be able to spot Cerul since none of the prior vantage points had opened up into anywhere but the main avenue through the dilapidated shopping center, and this particular one at least had a blue bar near it. The area below seemed to be an old cinema foyer complete with tall sign lettering that extended to within a few feet below me.

I grinned and tossed my head back. “Cerul, you would laugh if you saw what I am about to do… Well, I suppose you laugh at nearly everything anypony does, so that isn’t saying much, but… well, yeah.”

I used a cauterizing spell to cut out a hole in the glass large enough for me to easily fit through and gently levitated the loose piece to rest on the rooftop. “Now for the hard part…”

I felt a nagging pull in the back of my mind as a small tinge of vertigo took hold, but I just held my breath and began to lower myself by my forehooves onto the lettering below. I managed to quietly find a balance point on the “A” of the sign, and I took a breather to find my next foothold and plot the rest of my route down. The simplest seemed to be to use the bridge of the A to get one level lower, and then I would have to make a leap for the top of the ticket booth which looked to have a roof hatch.

It was rare for me to despise storytelling, but it was points like these, after performing stunts that I only ever read about, that ever made me feel that way since they put such insane thoughts into my head. In stretching with my lower hooves to reach the bridge of the letter, I found that I didn’t have reach enough to even touch the surface, so I was just dangling by a pair of weak hooves, which were half wounded, above nearly fifty feet of free space.

“Urgh… Need… to… swing… and…” I let myself take whatever vector my swing lead me to, and found that I overshot the bridge. As panic gripped me, I kicked out with my hind legs and caught it firmly enough that I managed to give myself another few feet of horizontal coverage. I felt the air rushing below me as if I were a Pegasus who had lost their wings. I knew I had a gamble running, so I braced myself for impact and curled into a ball, hoping to lessen whatever was going to hit me. In flash of pain I hit the ground hard and sprawled out as my momentum subsided.

I was alive. That was always a good sign.

I glanced around in the dark to see that I had just barely managed to make it to the roof of the booth after all. I was not the most graceful mare by any means, but, by the Goddesses, was I ever lucky sometimes.

I stood, wobbled, but managed to stay standing as I felt a resurgence of throbbing in my shoulder. I really hoped that it would get better before tomorrow because my days seemed to be getting more and more physical.

I mean, physical activity could be fun, but what happened to the bookworm?

I shrugged it off and crouched low as I heard muffled voices coming from somewhere nearby. I strained and realized that they were emanating from within the theater itself. I crawled over to the hatch and popped it open with the smallest of winces as the hinges were rusty and squeaked a bit. After taking the flight of stairs down from that point, I saw that I had ended up in the display booth line for the various theaters.  I glanced around, noting that there were no bars on my level, and I followed my ears to the projectionist window that let in the sound from a theater marked “3.” Looking through the window, I spotted an ancient looking yellow stallion and a light red old mare in their blood red cloaks speaking into a cage placed in front of the screen in the theater. The lights in the room distorted my ability to see anything beyond that though, so I couldn’t make myself known, even if it was Cerul inside its confines.

With a powerful baritone that seemed to catch at unnatural intervals in his speech pattern, the stallion spoke while the mare just looked on with a face that could’ve been made of stone. “We know you, little filly. Omega always knows. Now… why don’t you tell us about your connection to those blue box cultists, hm? No? Well, that’s fine. We know you’ve had hours to stew here, and, trust me, we have all the time in the world to wait for you to come around.”

The filly in the cage apparently spoke, but not loud enough for me to catch what she said as the stallion began to laugh wickedly. “You think anyone is going to believe that you have no idea what we’re talking about?! Omega remembers you from the explosion. You remember that, surely. Yes, yes, of course you do. Hard to forget such a tragic event in a young filly’s life, right? Hahahaha!”

Something chilled me about this duo more so than anypony I had ever met, but I couldn’t dwell on it because I knew that I needed to find out who was in that cell without alerting anypony to something being out of the ordinary. I frantically racked my mind for a spell or trick that would work as the stallion continued.

“What’s that? Water? You are thirsty? Awh… poor thing. Shall I fetch it for you? Perhaps with a squeeze of lemon? HAH! Only a fool would ask me for such things, given your circumstances, but… I admit that you have spirit, and I like that in a mare– just ask Jupiter here. Isn’t that right, darling?”

I stopped my planning to watch as the mare simply nodded ever so slowly, but in that nod I was overcome with a wave of power and absurd arrogance that could only come from somepony who had viciously found their way to the top of a food chain.

“Right. Well, you seem to be of no use to us now, and I would rather not waste my time here. Let’s go, dear. We have plenty to tend to elsewhere.”

The pair turned and began leaving the theater. I sighed in relief as they took the burden off of me to find a way to distract them, but a part of me was a bit sad that I didn’t get a chance to put one of my mad hatter schemes to the test.

When I heard the door below me shut, I quickly jumped through the window and caught myself in my magic before I hit the floor. I dropped a little more heavily than I intended and I froze to make sure nopony was going to barge into the place and begin firing. A moment passed and nothing occurred.

“I really should be more careful to not use my magic so much…” I whispered to myself. I knew I had limits, and I had pushed them beyond what I expected myself to be capable of today already.

I quickly and quietly trotted up to the bars of the cage to peer in. There, curled in a ball in the farthest corner away from me, was my charcoal colored mare with the laughing eyes.

“Cerul!” I hastily whispered. “Come on, I’m gonna get this cage open and get you out!”

One of her eyes popped open before the rest of her reacted as if she couldn’t trust her senses to tell her I was real. When I saw realization in her eyes, she bounced to her hooves and began to speak, but I magically clamped her mouth shut as I took a look at the lock.

“Shhhh! We don’t want to draw undue attention.” I winked at her and let her mouth go free.

She giggled softly and walked up to me. “You are a crazy mare, Starry. You shouldn’t be here, though! These ponies are baaaaad news, and I don’t want to see you get mixed up in–“

The door to the theater opened with a crash and I turned to face whatever the scarlet cloaks, these “Hand of Omega” minions, had sent at me and Cerul. To my surprise, a single stallion, bearing the same striking golden eyes as the mare from before, sauntered in, grinning from one side of his mouth.

“Why helloooo, my long lost silly filly. Crazy to see you here after all these years! I… Well! You should’ve let me know that we were going to have company for dinner! I would've made more for all of us to share!”

This stallion couldn’t be real could he? I mean, he had the bravado, the irritatingly smug grin, the amazing hair, and the typical suave super-villain air about him! There was no way!

I held up a hoof. “Now look here, I don’t know what you all are doing with my friend, but I can’t let you–“

“YOU!” Cerul shouted louder than I thought possible of anypony.

I turned around in time to see my friend standing with her forehooves around the steel bars, bearing the shadow of something horrible, terrifying, and unexpected. Without a second thought or even an instance to let the air settle in her lungs after the shout, Cerul pulled the bars she was holding apart as if they were no more resilient than warm clay, and in even less time she was a blur of destruction, rending a hole into her cage, exploding outward with inequine force, and running with her blinding speed to come face to face with the stallion. In her mouth she held a piece of the cage, a jagged, glinting blade crafted from her enclosure’s demise, and in even less time she was on the stallion, stabbing, and stabbing, and stabbing some more until the blood and gore from the stallion’s punctured chest poured out like a fountain of death. She didn’t touch his face though, and as he looked down, his brain not yet caught up with the rest of him, his face revealed a series of emotions.

Shock

Confusion.

Revulsion.

Fear.

Cerul tossed away the makeshift weapon and stared into the eyes of the stallion as an unrelenting force of nature, unforgiving, and full of a powerful hate that was almost divine in its wrathful utterance, but as he collapsed, too weak to stand, Cerul fell onto her haunches and let the blood run around her and down the aisle.

Without warning, Cerul began to laugh and sob. This laugh was not of mirth or embarrassment as would be so typical of her, but of hatred, of loathing, and of anguish.

I sprinted up to her to pull her away from the dying stallion and his flowing lifeblood, but she wouldn’t budge as she continued her loud wailing and hideous laughter. “Cerul… we… we need to go. Come on… Cerul? Hey, darling, it’s me, come on we need to get out of here before anypony comes back. Cerul!”

She was deaf to anything except for whatever emotions were filling her.

My talking must have pushed speech into the stallion, though, as he coughed up a slurry of blood and bile before whispering at me. “That… that mare… she… what is she?”

“I would love to know that myself, but right now she is just my hurt friend, and you… you are dying. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry, but–“

“Save it, you bitch!” The stallion spat. “I don’t need your–“ The stallion let out a gasp and a rasping cough mixed with what fluid was left in him. “Your filthy pity!”

“No,” I walked toward him as my friend wallowed behind me. “I suppose you don’t. But you are going to get it anyway. Peace is what you need now. Rest.”

I conjured up a charge of electrical energy to my horn, a spell designed to overpower the synapses and create a euphoria in the recipient for use as an anesthesia, but this was the most powerful I would ever administer. If he didn’t want rest or peace or forgiveness than I wouldn’t give him a choice.

I cast the bolt of magical energy square into his pincushion chest, and I saw the light leave his eyes.

I felt nothing.

Not loathing, not fear, not the fissure even. Just the cold emptiness of a void opening up inside me to glut the maw of death.

Turning back to Cerul, I walked to her and knelt down, not caring about the pool of pony excrement and blood that would cake into my fur.

“Shhhh, shhh, it’ll be okay, Cerul. I’m here.”

I wrapped my hooves around her and felt her writhing as sobs wracked her body.

“But… but… I don’t… I can’t… you don’t understand, I…” Cerul couldn’t articulate anything beyond this.

“Don’t worry about it, darling. I know. I understand. Whatever this was, whatever happened to you, whatever happens after this, doesn’t matter. Let’s just move on together. It isn’t easy to accept what happened here. Trust me… I know. But, you have to be able to pick yourself up and move on. This is a cold wasteland, filled with destruction and the pitfalls of those that came before us, but we can’t sit here and let it take us down with it.”

“But… I….” Cerul paused for what seemed to be an eternity as I just let her cry into my shoulder, which had started bleeding again at some point. “Okay.”

She looked up at me for the first time since this began, and I saw through the red streaks of blood on her face and in her bloodshot eyes, into her laughing soul where she was picking up the pieces.

At that moment the entire building shook as a roar came from outside accompanied by shouts and gunfire.

I picked Cerul up off of the ground and we began to sprint toward a door marked emergency exit in the theater, but as we rounded into the space in front of all the seats that led there, an explosion threw us back against the far wall causing my vision to go spotty with black specks flying in every conceivable direction.

Through the smoke I caught sight of a glint of steel and flesh and fire. For a moment I thought I saw black eyes breaking into my mind through my own, but it must have been an illusion or some trick of the light as a unicorn stallion covered from neck to hoof in steel armor that carried a red mark on its flank walked forward from the debris.

“So, we found you at last, Starwind Solace.”

Cerul was out cold and I worried she may have a concussion, so I began to try and spark up my magic one more time to check her out, but my magic faltered and sparked to nothing as I felt my reserves run out.

The steel pony rushed over to us and kicked me with one massive hoof so that I flew into the front row of seats. I felt my ribs aching and was left coughing until a few spots of blood flew from my mouth. A cold, heavy weight pressed against my temple as I lay there, unable move or speak.

“Awh… did that hurt? Good! Traitors like you should suffer. Alas, I need you alive to bring back to base for… trial.” He spat that last word out as if it was a piece of lodged corn. “Get up, you pathetic excuse for a ranger. We’ll see you patched up enough to ensure that you can make it to Baltimare.”

“No!” I croaked. “Cerul! I won’t go without–“Another fit of coughing struck me. “Not without her.”

The stallion looked back at my passed out friend and chuckled. “Sure. Bring her too. I so love to have more meat to grind into submission when the trials come to fruition!”

The steel clad stallion walked back the way he came, but as he reached the exit his horn lit up and our bodies began to be dragged after him.

I felt my blood and the blood of the stallion I effectively killed, but none of that mattered as much as the fact that Cerul was safe.

Whatever happened from this point… we would at least face it together.

Footnote:

Level Up!

Level 4 –

Sneak 45

Companion Power Gained! – Cerulean Smash! Cerul will occasionally gain a +5 to Strength in a fit of rage if she is confronted with senseless cruelty or some mystery of her past.

Author’s Note:

This was... a doozy. I've been sitting on this chapter for a few months now on accident since I got so caught up in the new work coming my way. I have started working with the team making the FoE game as a composer and music producer as well as just recently picking up a music gig with the team working on Fallout Lonestar (non-pony) and a job scoring a Rooster Teeth community film. I'm not sure why life is throwing me fallout related work out of the woodwork, but I can't complain!

I will likely not post until at least 2015 since I have little time between school, work, and all my side projects and music, but this is still a living thread! The bible for the whole story is written, but it may be a couple of years before I actually get the chapters out there.

Starwind has a lot left to do, and I really want to tell her story. Oh, and sorry for the cliffhanger...

Until next time,

Go check out the original FoE as well as the FoE game being made!

Preface

Preface

Before dust formed itself into shapes of ponies, planets, and blood, the universe spun around and around with little regard for what or who would come to exist within it. In time, as some would have you to believe, some great intelligence or divine being had a passing thought, spoke some words, and out popped us, the insignificant creatures that are walking on a boundless earth. Today, theories of contentious nature, which say that there were plots and plans, and actions from entities ranging from malevolent stars to omnipotent cilantro exist, but, personally, I found the truth rather more simple than any of those, but we’ll get to that a little later. With the introduction of life, there came tribes, societies, nations, and troubles beyond number that eventually translated into what we know, today, to be Equestria, the land of joy, peace, ponies, friendship, and the lies hidden behind these things which nearly negated that life which was given to us all.

About two hundred years ago, when some foals with god complexes decided it would be hilarious to press a couple of shiny, red buttons and see which of their megaspells killed first, the world, as it was, was supposed to burn in the green fires of hell. Needless to say, it did not go well or according to plan. Despite this significant setback, created in the diminished purity of the hearts of those who suffered under the dark wills of leaders twisted by progress, our little ball in space kept spinning, and life sauntered on through the muck and mire that ponies, zebras, and a number of others, who are long dead, helped create.

Every soul has suffered.

Every soul has become corrupted.

Every soul is now subject to the outcome of millions of smaller decision made “for the greater good,” and the, seemingly, inevitable demise of all seems to be grasping for us with a haste that once was unimaginable when virtues of harmonious friendship thrived.

How can this creation be saved from devouring itself?

How can higher beings, if they exist, allow this evil to go unchecked?

If, dear reader, you see these words and find interest in the truth behind heroes and champions, heroines and legends, stars and the elements of our very souls, I have a story that may interest you.

With that groundwork laid, let’s begin, shall we?

Chapter 3: Direction

Chapter 3: Direction

Sweat and the sheen of a morning mist covered the half folded blanket acting as my pillow as I found myself lying on a blackened mattress in a dark, cramped space with a few beams of unplanned light piercing the veil at sporadic intervals. I simmered in my thoughts and the relatively lackadaisical morning feeling that was blanketed by absurd amounts of humidity.

The ocean.

At least, my memories told me that this was what being near the massive body of water felt like.

Chilled, damp, and miserable are three very good words to describe how I felt, but they may actually understate just how uncomfortable this whole new life thing was with all its running around, fighting invincible ghouls, and…

Well, it was not a life I found particularly pleasant.

I tried to lift my body from the ground with slow effort only to drop down again with a dull thud from a pain that stretched its tendrils to the very ends of my hooves, originating just to the right of my chest, near my shoulder.

“Shit…” Last night’s events played back in my head as if somepony had left the fast forward button pressed in.

Fire. Murder. Walking. Twilight. The Church. Shepard. A shot. Blackout.

Well, that about summed it up, I figured. I ground my head into the blanket, fighting the minutes which passed as I put off the inevitable trial of attempting to stand again. In the silence that filled the room, I could hear a steady breathing that I hadn’t noticed in my thoughtful state.

I forgot my injuries and attempted to quickly roll over towards the noise only to wind up neatly nose to nose with Cerulean who, as per her usual self, seemed to be oblivious to everything. I swallowed gently in nervousness that I may be a prisoner and turned back over. Gathering my strength as best I could in order to stand, I wavered a bit with a few stumbling steps that nearly caused me to fall over her still form. Regardless, I found my balance and made it safely to a shelf nearby where I could lean for a few seconds.

I made my cautious journey with an obvious “I’m wounded" swagger toward a loose piece of driftwood, which was acting as a makeshift door, and pushed it aside to see that my suspicions about being near the ocean were not unfounded. I began walking — limping — away from the sheer cliff edge barely four feet away when a strong gust came from the slope on the other side of the shack. Panic gripped me as I began to slide backward, toward the edge of the drop, but I chose to not fight and just let my muscles give out again to allow my body’s friction to stop me from going any farther. My body rotated 180 degrees and skidded to a stop with a rush of pebbles and sand.

 I had not realized that my eyes were squeezed shut for the last few seconds.

With trepidation, I lightly lifted my stronger eyelid.

“I have made a terrible mistake…” My heart raced as I found my nose just over the lip of the sheer cliff, and I just lay there, petrified, staring out over the vast expanse of black and blue that stretched before me, rolling, surging, and just generally living out a violent existence.

If Shepard and Cerul had attempted to foalnap me, they sure chose a very proper spot; the intimidation factor was off the scale.

It also did not help that I had an insatiable itch on my left foreleg that would not quit! I found the source of the annoyance as I glared down at my stubborn limb, and another wave of remembrance took me.

I had a PipBuck!

 I had a PipBuck and a job to do, if its identifying quest counter still meant anything. I found on its map that I was present near a building which was named Cranky’s Bungalow and, after I clicked into the quest labeled “Main,” that my goal was inside of it.

“Bungalow?” I mouthed silently to myself as I stared up at the shack I had just exited with a raised eyebrow. I guessed that, in the correct light, and with a substantial amount of TLC, and an intense head cold, the old, beaten up structure could somewhat be considered a decent place to relax, but what kind of pony would want to do that in such a lonely location?

I started the process of convincing myself to stand and walk again, even more slowly than before, with a shake of my head. Once I found my way back up to the shack, I stopped just inside of the threshold. I had not really looked to see what my goal was, and, to be honest, I also had not really considered what I would do other than follow the general guideline. Luckily for me, my focus was not long lost as a groan came from where I was resting before. As I turned toward the noise, a blue bar flashed over Cerul’s dark form on the floor.

“No, I… I can’t, papa,” a small filly’s voice floated from her resting mouth. “She’s gone, and you know she is!” Her body began to spasm and thrash under the effects of a nightmare as though she were struck by the blows of some hidden figure. I knew that feeling all too well, and it took a few seconds for me to even lift a hoof as I observed somepony else suffering with dreams that couldn’t be shaken.

A dreamless sleep was one thing I was not gifted with from birth, and it has been both a blessing and a curse ever since. Something about the dreams I have had lately, though, made me wonder if they could be getting more vivid for some reason.

“You even think your dreams are special?!” my little sister used to mock me accusingly. I never thought any such thing and would not wish my dreams upon anyone. No matter how much I argued or how thoroughly I described the condition I often was afflicted with in my sleep, she would not hear a word of it without thinking me selfish or self-serving. Dusty always would hear me out, though. In fact, that is why we became friends on my first night of research duty under her instruction.

Dusty…

“Dusty!” I urgently said with worry sharpening my tone. I quickly scanned the room as best I could in the dim light for any sign of my saddlebags or the recording device I had tucked away within them but got no result.

I hurried over as best I could and dug into the few cabinets in the single room building, wantonly tossing their contents behind me, but every nook and cranny I searched revealed nothing worth my while.

“Oh, goddesses…” I sat on my haunches and began staring at the floor. “I couldn’t even give you what you requested of me, Dusty… I … I never did come through for you when you needed me to most, after all.” So much for the best pony Dusty had ever known. I was no better than the black eyed mare who murdered her if all I managed to do since leaving the library was lose the one redeeming light in my life.

“And don’t forget that you are a murderer too, now” an icy spike of a voice jabbed from within my soul.

Murderer. I really was not that different from the black eyed mare after all...

I had murdered. I slayed others to save someone, but who? Myself? Cerul?  Can there really be any good reason to take the life of a pony?

I felt Black Eyes’s words began to pour into my head again with their tenacity and cruel intent unsheathed like the blades of some would-be assassin bent to slay my hope, but I shut them out before I chose to listen and comprehend what they meant. Words, with what I knew, were supposed to be the most powerful weapon ever wielded, and I was not about to let the mare who took my best friend’s life end up poisoning me with her filth.

Regardless, despair was still resting hot and heavy upon my head as I felt the welling of tears in the corners of my eyes. Oceans washed the world with the cycle of water that brought rain, but tears, tears created from an ocean of grief, were washing over me at this moment. Silently, I let them flow again as I felt the resurgence of the grip of sorrow that had recently become the closest thing to a tether to reality as I could manage. My PipBuck beeped at me, but I ignored its beckoning because it had chosen to lead me back into this shack, back into the world that both my dreams and my waking eyes loved to show me in stunning detail.

“Star?” Cerul’s meek voice cracked my shell and peeled open my ears. “Are you alright? I really did try my best to patch you up… I know I am not very good with herbs and poultices, and such, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt so much that it would cause you to cry!”

Everyone always seemed to worry about me after I received a wound or two.

Between the small gasps for air I managed to get out a meager reply. “I’m okay.”

“You sure don’t look okay, Starry,” Cerul’s concerned voice rose with her standard cheer slightly muffled.

“Really,” I said meekly while I attempted to regain composure, “I’m fine.”

“If you say so…” Cerulean’s voice trailed off.

She stood and approached me from behind with her head slightly lowered to try and get a better look at my face. I dropped it farther towards the floor to block her out.

“Hey, why all the tears?” Her voice had an almost honey like sweetness. “I promise I don’t hate you, and I know my father doesn’t either… he just… got a little carried away, so please don’t cry!”

I just sniffled and continued picking out the grains in the floor one by one with my eyes.

A hoof gently lifted my head by raising my chin until I was looking into Cerul’s laughing eyes. “You know, I can tell when somepony has lost somepony. It shows in the lines around their eyes or the slight hitch in their step or the smallest of things, despite how hard they try to hide it. You? You don’t hide it a bit. I can see right to the heart of you, Star, and you carry something far too heavy to be burdened with it alone.”

She paused, her face showing lines of concern as she gathered her thoughts.

“I am still your friend, no matter what you may think of me after what my Papa did back there, so… so share it with me? You don’t have to say a word, but just let me help you carry it, and we can move out of this old, smelly shed to whatever lies ahead.”

She spoke words that resonated within me somewhere.

“Besides, being sad is no fun, and we deserve some fun after yesterday, I think!”

I smiled. A little at a time, I felt her infectious nature spreading as laughter bubbled up from my hooves. It felt a little like breathing for the first time after having to hold your breath a minute longer than expected while under the water.

I let her mirth wash over me for a moment before I continued.

“You know,” I let my voice start softly to adjust to talking again. “I really think I could use some fun.”

A thought came to me. “You wouldn’t happen to have grabbed my stuff before we came here did you?”

She lifted her eyes in thought. “Oh, right. Yes, I did do that!”

She bounced over to a board in the floor near where she was sleeping and tapped on one end to cause it to pop loose on the other. Out of the hole she pulled my saddlebags, a few cans of food, a bag of her own, and a few bundles of what looked to be corn.

I picked myself up again, more confident this time, and took a few more cautious steps toward the articles she piled near us. I poked my saddlebags once with my hoof to verify I wasn’t seeing things that weren’t there, and then lifted them to rest them on my back. The weight of them made my wound sting, but with them on I felt a little bit more like myself again.

“What happened yesterday?” I asked after a sigh of relief. “And how am I already able to walk around and maneuver my leg? I shouldn’t be able to do that…”

Now that I thought about it, I was very curious how somepony with little scientific, arcane, or medical knowledge could manage healing of this magnitude.

“Well,” she began while loading the various items before us into a saddlebag of her own, “Papa thought you filly-napped me, so he got… a little out of control and shot you. I rushed you out of there, grabbed what I could and came here since it was the closest thing to a hiding spot I know about. Like I said earlier, I used a poultice and some bandages to wrap you up with, and this is how it turned out. It isn’t as good as what Mama used to be able to do, but she always said that she was only very good at it because she had some zebra blood in her. I guess I just don’t have as much of that blood.”

I tried to interject since my curiosity was piqued about the chances of getting to understand a new type of medicine, but she couldn’t be stopped once started.

“… Anyway, I went back after I was sure you would make it, and I tried to talk to Papa about letting us come back so you can rest more comfortably, but he reacted, um... badly.”

Her lower lip began to quiver as she continued. “I don’t know what happened. My father was once a loving stallion, but it’s as if the wasteland has just sapped it from him over the years, and he just forgot himself... He told me that ‘if I would help out a filly-napper and keep him from dealing out justice…’ then I should just leave because I was already gone. I begged him to let me stay, to remember that he has a bad knee and can’t work the crops alone, and to remember that I really am his daughter… but, he… he didn’t say a word. Not a single word. He just picked up the closest thing to him and smashed it against the wall near me.”

Now it was Cerul’s turn to cry.

“He destroyed it, Star. He knew that I cared for it more than any other thing I own, so he broke it to bits. My violin…”

I felt that something greater than her violin had been broken given that Shepard seemed to only care for his daughter when I had met him first, and he just gave her up. Something picked at me about this, but I couldn’t let it bother me any longer since there was just far too much sadness in the room.

“Okay!” I stomped my hoof on the ground to reinforce my point and the subtle beeping began again. “We have a bit too much pity going on here, don’t you think? I think it is time we go find that ‘fun’ that you spoke of since it seems, I dunno…exotic for these parts!”

I reared up and tried to show off my best adventurer pose with a hoof over my eyes as I scanned the horizon and a sly grin to hide the pain that it was causing.

Her demeanor cracked a bit as I lost my balance and she caught me before I hurt myself further.

She giggled as she set me upright again. “Okay, Daring Don’t, where to?”

I opened my mouth to reply, but remembered that I still had no clue other than what my PipBuck was directing me to. Closing it, I looked down at the device and finally noticed the beeping that was coming from the tiny speakers built into its casing. It was a rapid, rhythmic pattern that seemed to loop with some beeps being short and some long.

“Horse code?” I asked the device. “You really are spelling things out over the radio in Horse Code? Well, it looks like someone is stuck in the stone ages.”

I scoffed at my humor before realizing that I was talking to an inanimate object.

Slowly, I raised my wide eyes to see Cerul turning blue as she covered her mouth with her hooves to hold back what she was feeling, but she was about to burst and in a passing second she erupted into hoof pounding laughter. “You are such an egghead! Bahahahaha! Horse" — a gasp for air — "code? Haha! What in Equestria are you talking about?!”

I kicked at the ground bashfully before replying. “Horse was an inventor and well-known scientist— the head of Robronco, actually— who lived before the megaspells and made the first of his fortunes on telegraph machines that used his proprietary Horse Code.”

Cerul was rolling on the ground while she wrapped her forehooves around her sides to try and contain herself as she continued her raucous giggling.

“Really, Cerul,” I said indignantly. “It isn’t that funny! It was his name and that’s what this beeping is! Look, I can translate it for you, so maybe we can move past this.”

I used my magic to turn the volume up, and tried to make out the pattern through Cerulean’s loud cackling. “P – L – E – A – S – E — Stop — H – E – L – P”

Cerul stopped abruptly and zoomed to my side, peering over my shoulder at the PipBuck Screen. “Help? Is somepony in trouble?”

“It seems so,” I replied softly.

With my eyes squinted in an attempt to organize my thoughts, I magically pulled out the small, wallet shaped pouch that I kept from the school, and began opening a small panel near the button marked “radio.” “I think, if I remember correctly, PipBuck’s have radios that function much like a common radio receiver, so, theoretically, I should be able to take the signal and route it through the mapping protocol to create a sort of tracking system.”

“And that means…” Cerul struggled with the notion.

“That it should beep louder, the closer we are to the source.” I finished her statement.

“Oh… neat!” She grinned.

A minute passed as I rewired the crystal lattice a bit, and I began to understand how the pieces fit together, what some of the circuitry functioned as, and that it all was a lot like the radio I built back at the library.

“This should… about… do it,” I whispered in concentration. “There!”

The beeping altered volume slightly as I calibrated the device by walking in the four cardinal directions.

“I think we have a heading, Cap’n Starry, Mam!” Cerul saluted me and I stuck my tongue out at her. However, she wasn’t wrong since I saw that the direction towards which the beeping was strongest was the one heading along the Big 52, the longest stretch of continuous highway in all of Equestria.

“This could be quite a long trip,” I warned. “The Big 52 isn’t named that way as a joke.”

“Oh, I know! I expected a long trip when we left the farm, so I zipped back a few times after I dropped you off here to gather the essentials. See? Food, some water, a package of gum, and three of my favorite trading cards from the old cereal boxes!”

I gaped at her. “Right… well, let’s get going then. No time like the present!”

Cerul took the time to clean up the mess I had made and politely closed the door after we left the bungalow saying, “I would be a little cranky if some random ponies stayed in my house without asking and didn’t even bother to make sure everything was as they found it!”

Decency was still there in the wasteland, but I guess that it was just hidden in the smallest of moments.

Afterwards, we took a gravel path I had not noticed before that wound up the hill, and, as we crested the top, I saw the distance we would have to travel very clearly. There were smaller roads winding from where we were towards, around, and through dilapidated, small towns and villages on their way to a greater place much like tributaries to a mighty river; to the Big 52. I trembled a bit as Cerul and I took a long look toward the signal. Somehow, I knew that if I took one more step, I would be committing myself to a path I could not back away from.  I took a deep breath and held it as I felt my hoof rise and then fall, a step forward amongst the dead grass.

Hours passed and nothing had happened or changed except for the steady increase in volume of the beeping as we approached the Big 52 and the selection of songs that Cerulean used to keep herself from boredom as we traveled.

"That last one was from my favorite old recording that we had stored at the church! It was about your favorite things, how they can make you happy to think about when you’re sad, and all of that. Sorry, I guess you just heard me sing it, but I just love that one! Do you wanna hear another?"

"What?" I responded abruptly after realizing I hadn't really been actively listening.

"Another song," she sighed. "Do you want to hear another?"

I looked back at her, and her winning grin almost convinced me, but the long walk and lack of danger almost had me bored, and I was too caught up in the confusing fact that normal, safe life had become boring to want more noise muddling up my thoughts.

"Sorry, Cerul, no," I replied. “I just have this bad feeling that everything is going too well, and I’m staying ready to teleport us away if we run into danger. It's a really difficult thing to concentrate on, so the quiet helps."

That was a lie, but I figured it was better than being rude.

"Oh, I forgot you could do that!" Cerulean bounced to my side, easily matching my pace. "Can you tell me how you learned to poof around like that?"

"Cerul..." I was about to repeat how I wanted some quiet, but I caught myself as I realized that she deserved some kind of answers from me after being forced out of her home and family for saving my life. "Well, I learned it from a book, an old book, which Twilight Sparkle wrote."

"Who's Twilly Sparkle?" She asked.

My hoofsteps faltered for half of a second as I snapped my head to the side to stare at her in disbelief. "You... you don't know who Twilight Sparkle, the greatest of all pre-megaspell unicorns, was? The very pony who was so regarded by Celestia herself that she earned wings to become an alicorn? I... you... I don't have any words."

I really didn't.

"Whatdya mean?" She smirked at the face I was unknowingly making. "Should I?"

"YES!" I shouted at the ground as I dropped my head in shame for her.

"Well, whatever, go on!" She cut in.

"Fine." I flatly said as I lifted my head up again. "I read a journal entry from when she was a younger mare living in Ponyville and I just imitated her methods for casting the spell. It really wasn't too hard, now that I think about it."

"Ooooooooh, someone thinks she is becoming the greatest of all post-megaspell unicorns, huh?" She shook her head as she began to laugh lightly.

"No, I don't!" I said with a flurry of somewhat painful hoof waving. "I just think that it is interesting for... you know... science-y reasons!"

That just made her laugh harder, but, as we covered another twenty yards, approaching a white, weatherworn structure of three stories with faded pink and blue trim from a side street that split around it, the beeping began to reach earsplitting levels.

"Ow ow ow!" Cerul shouted. "Turn it off!"

She slapped at my PipBuck with a free hoof and missed, causing both of our legs to become tangled.

My body did not catch on to this until I tried to take one more step, and both Cerul and I tripped, knocked heads, and came to rest upon our backs as the beeping continued.

I slowly tapped the mute button as I felt the tension associated with my fresh wound in my tendons. "Just ask next time. I can handle the technology stuff."

"Will do, 'Cap," she replied.

As we began to stand, I dusted myself off.

"I think," I pointed a hoof at the building, "we're here."

"Really?" Cerul asked. "This place looks pretty tame for someone needing to call for help. Are you sure we aren’t looking for a building covered in blood paint?"

I tapped the mute button again and the attack on our ears resumed until the sight of Cerul's twitching eye in reaction to it made me laugh and convinced me to turn the mute on again.

"Yes."

As I got that word out, a pair of red bars floated from behind the structure and began to patrol around the side of the building we were facing. They were flashing and indistinct, but these bars, the last time they showed up, meant terrible things, and I wasn't about to let a repeat of the library in Bloodbucket’s place to occur.

"Cerul!" I whispered intensely. "We need to get behind something and out of sight. Fast!"

Taking the lead, Cerulean began a quick, crouched trot to a crashed wagon between the red bars and us that bore signs which read "VOTE HANDY FOR MAYOR!" The wagon had long since lost its wheels, but the large, wooden signs resisted the erosion of time and kept the wagon propped far enough off of the ground for us to wriggle into hiding beneath it.

“What are we hiding from, Star?” Cerul whispered.

“Didn’t you see them?” I replied just as softly.

Cerul attempted to turn in the small space to face me. “No! See who?”

“There were these red bars, and they were kind of floating back and forth in front of the building!” I spoke all of that too quickly to realize how it probably sounded to somepony else.

Cerul paused, eyes wandering, with a look of mental searching on her face. “Uh… I don’t know if it’s a smart pony thing, but I have no idea what you are talking about…”

“Like back in the old school, those ponies, there were these red bars that floated above their heads…“ I trailed off, attempting to come up with a better explanation.  “They started showing up after I picked up the … PipBuck. Oh… E.F.S.”

I bumped a hoof against my forehead in frustration at myself.

E.F.S, or Eyes Forward Sparkle for those not familiar, was a technology derived from spells originally created for psychologists who needed to determine the hostility of patients when they were given questions about certain topics, and it was one of the first spells ever added to the arcane matrices within the first generation PipBucks. The functionality of this typically resulted in a small blip in the bottom of the user’s vision which would have a color associated with the temperament of the pony towards the wearer. Having those displayed as bars above their heads was something I had never known could be possible, but this PipBuck was a model I had little knowledge about.

I tapped a hoof against my chin. “I can’t believe I never thought about that before now.”

“Really, do I even need to ask what E.F.S is, Starry?” Cerul asked.

“It lets a PipBuck wearer see how other creatures will react to you based on the color they are associated with.” I replied simply.

Cerul squirmed forward a bit to get into my line of sight. “What color am I?”

I looked at her and nothing was there. I wondered if it was possible that the E.F.S system was flawed with this edition, but as I kept staring a bar popped above her head with a line of text under it which read “Cerulean.”

“Blue,” I replied. “I guess this PipBuck reacts to the thoughts of the user! Nifty…”

I may have had a little drool fall from my mouth as I stared lovingly at the device on my foreleg.

“Star?” Cerul waved a hoof at my face. “Staaaaaaaaaaar!”

“Huh?” I asked from my behind a haze of technological love.

Cerulean bumped my nose with her hoof. “This is cool and all, but we are still stuck under a wagon and you said there are two baddies out there.”

“Right!” I said.

Looking back out toward where they were before, the bars were nowhere to be found, and all that was really out of the ordinary was an old Sparkle Cola machine near to the front doors which had a dying battery causing it to flicker intermittently.

“Looks like they’re gone.” I said.

“What if they can fly or are able to poof away like you, and they are above us?” She asked in an even lower whisper.

“E.F.S isn’t affected by height, so if they are within the bubble of the spells effect, they will show up on the level of my sight.” I replied.

“And they aren’t around?” Cerul asked.

I glanced in all directions around us and shook my head.

“Let’s get going and help these ponies out!”

Going forward, there was only room for one of us at a time to wiggle out from the hiding spot, so Cerul took the lead and waited for me as I followed her out.

We galloped forward, covering the open distance in a few seconds. The cola machine kept one side of us covered as I kept my eyes focused on the side open for attack.

“What do you see?” Cerul asked.

I scanned in a circle, but no bars appeared.

“Nothing,” I was slightly astonished. “There isn’t anything showing up in the building or nearby.”

“That’s good, right?” Cerulean asked. “Doesn’t that mean the ponies inside won’t be in any danger?”

“Maybe” was all I could say as I began to analyze the double doors that opened into a small rotunda. I knew that all ponies, neutral, friendly, or otherwise, should show up in E.F.S, but nothing, not even a flash of a bar, was showing up. The area under my PipBuck itched terribly, and I couldn’t shake the feeling of uncomfortableness.

“We should probably get inside quick, Starry,” Cerulean urged.

I nodded, and, with a pull of my magic, the two doors opened very slowly.  I leaned over enough to peer into the dim space inside.

“Okay, it looks clear inside,” I said to Cerul. “It doesn’t seem like anypony is going to be coming after us today, Cerul.”

A look of concern flashed across Cerul’s face, and I was reminded of the conversation we had before going into the old school in the town that smelled like blood. “You are absolutely certain it’s safe?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I’ll be fine,” I promised, “and we were coming here expecting to have to save somepony anyway, so it’ll be alright!”

Cerul shrugged and smiled. “If you say so, I’m gonna stay down here for a bit to keep watch and try to get us some Sparkle Cola from this machine.”

I laughed. “Alright! That walk we took did make me thirsty… Save me two?”

Cerul exhaled with a noise similar to that of a deflating balloon. “Hm. We’ll see, madam Starry! I may have to drink them all before you get back if you are too slow! Just go find those ponies, so we can get out of here.”

I scoffed and stuck my nose up into the air as I walked in, faking a disposition of haughty displeasure. “Very well! I shall return shortly!”

As my eyes adjusted to the lower light of the interior I picked out the remnants of a banner, still clinging to one side of a second floor bannister, which read “Election Day!” in bold, black letters above a destroyed lift that had debris spilling out of its empty shaft. My stately, façade faded as I glanced to my left to see that the wall was lined with cheaply created booths with a few punch cards randomly dropped in places, and, to my right, that there was a staircase with a door below it which was partially blocked by a fallen light fixture. A bygone era’s attempt at civilization was destroyed and decaying as a corpse of a good idea.

“Hello?” I asked just soft enough that the room absorbed the resonance.

I felt a cold chill pass through my body, and the silence was reply enough for me to move on. I took a look at the fallen lighting blocking the door, and decided that it had wedged itself so thoroughly that it wouldn’t move without taking out the staircase above it. Left with one route forward, I began taking the stairs to the second floor where there was a row of four doors and another paneled entryway for the dilapidated lift. I trotted over to where the elevator was between the two pairs of doors on that floor and took a long look at the small layout diagram of the building which was on the wall, per the fairly standard design for pre-megaspell Equestrian buildings.

Chivalry Courthouse, the diagram read, had a series of offices on this floor connected internally, by small hallways, to a maneframe area at the rear of the building with a third floor that had a large courtroom and a set of small, symmetrical meeting areas. A small chirping sounded from my PipBuck, and I lifted my leg gingerly to read the message that was now being displayed.

Local Map Update Complete!

I switched to the map view and saw that the diagram I had been previously looking at had been copied into the memory of the PipBuck. On the map, a small blinking arrow was placed at my location, and a dotted line was drawn from it to a location within the maneframe room. Taking the hint, I tried to open the closest office door and found it was blocked from within. The next two I tried were inaccessible as well, but the last door on the floor, closest to the side of the building from where I came in, opened to allow me into a once cozy office with a couple file cabinets, a few cushioned chairs that looked like that wouldn’t hold up to a touch, let alone being sat on by a full grown mare, and a sturdy hard wood desk with a dead terminal on its surface. The door on the far wall was dented with the handle missing, and when I tried to force it open with my magic, it would not budge an inch. I sighed and closed my eyes, thinking deeply about where there could be another way into the room beyond.

I heard a small sound from behind me that sounded like something heavy sliding across the floor and spun to see nothing. There was only the open door, the decayed, old furniture, and the dead screen reflecting my image on top of the desk. It was the reflection that first caught my eye, but as I looked more closely at the desk, I noticed that all of the drawers were gone except for three of them which had been forcefully replaced, causing them to sit awkwardly in their slots. I pulled one of them open as curiosity beckoned, and inside were a few bottle caps, which I pocketed for later, and a bobby pin next to a comb. The second drawer was empty. I had to bend the metal railing inside the desk to be able to remove the third, and, as I did, the bottom of the container fell out, and a metallic object clattered to the floor underneath a pile of legal documents.

I pushed the papers to the side, and the sight of a black cylinder hastened my work so I could levitate up the whole of the item. A jet black 10mm pistol with a silencer attached to its muzzle rotated lazily in my aura along with a few small boxes of bullets a couple of full magazines.

I felt hot breath on my neck from behind me. “You have had some experience in firearms training, so I know you can handle it…”

I turned and, again, I was met with nothing but the stuck door and a calendar of the six, smiling ministry mares.

I hadn’t even shot my 9mm. Dusty did all the fighting, and I just stood there. I couldn’t even remember if I still had that weapon, but a part of me felt that I would be happier if I didn’t.

I don’t murder ponies.

I don’t.

But, if I did have to, I would only do it to save ponies.

And, if I did have to, it would be better if I did it kindly, quietly, so… I should keep this pistol.

“But, if you do keep it,” I felt the fissure pressing on me from inside, “you’ll probably have to use it, and that means killing. It will be easier next time, I’m sure. You already did it once, after all.”

It would probably be easier, but I told myself I would only do it if I had to, if it was between my life and theirs or between the lives of others and those who would take them.

I slid the weapon into my saddlebag and felt the weight which I would have to learn to live with.

They taught us how to handle weapons in New Commons when I was a filly, but they never prepared us to handle the burden which having to use them created.

My PipBuck displayed a ratio in my vision that indicated the weight of the items I was carrying to how much I could carry easily and then said that I had added an item named “Dust.”

“Appropriate” I murmured. The old adage was that all creatures went from dust to dust, and I supposed that this was the weapon’s prior owner’s way of paying it homage.

The old office had nothing else of interest to me and I felt that if I didn’t move I might be inclined to give into the past, so I figured that I would try the next floor to see if I could find a way down into the maneframe room from there or, at least, to be able to run into the pony that sent the message out.

I took the stairs slowly, feeling the echoes of my hoofsteps in my chest. I came out of the stairwell and was met with a long hallway with three doors on each side of me, and a set of doors at the farthest end. The clatter of a falling ceiling tile from somewhere downstairs drew my, but the sound was absorbed like every other noise in the place. The air was stale, old, and I felt a small itch from behind my right eye that I couldn’t sate as I paused for a moment to attempt to rub it away with a hoof.

The overhead lights hummed softly as I picked the first door on my right as the place to start my search. A growing sense of unease caused me to hold my breath and take lighter steps in order to not draw undue attention, and I attempted to minimize the sound of the rusty hinges squealing as I pushed it open. A bare bulb hung, flickering, above an overturned conference table, and in the dim light I could pick out a shadow-cloaked figure sitting with their head resting against the left corner across the room.

“Hello?” I whispered just loud enough so that, hopefully, only the other pony would hear. “I’m here to help, like you asked.”

I always read that silence could be deafening, but I had never experienced it first hoof up until that moment as I took slow, small steps toward the figure. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

A few seconds of silence passed as I ended up only a few feet from the shadow. I reached out a hoof to touch their shoulder. I prodded the figure once, twice, and on the third time I felt a shift in the folds of the fabric, and something hard and resonant bounced away from us to stop against the table, beneath the small lit area with a few sharp impacts. A toothy grin of a skull, tarnished yellow by time, beamed up at me as I took in the bare spine sticking out of the black cloak before me. I felt a warm tickle on the back of my neck again and my mane prickled with the feeling of static cling. I slowly pulled out Dust with my magic and began creeping back toward the door while keeping my eyes locked on the skeleton in the corner; I didn’t want to turn away to see if something was behind me as I had before. My ears perked up at the slightest sound, but I heard nothing except my ragged breath as I hit something solid behind me which kept me from backing away any farther. I clenched my eyes shut and felt my magic tense up around the trigger of the gun in its grasp as time seemed to slow.

I hopped left as far as I could, spun around, and lifted Dust before opening my left eye to stare down the length of the weapon. The charred hide of a full grown stallion, draped in what was once a satin sash of grayish white, stood before me, a low rumble emanating from his chest in the form of a guttural growl. His eyes were bloodshot and slightly milky with a thin film covering them underneath the flaking skin of his eyelids as they lazily wandered from side to side as though he were searching. I levitated the weapon to line it up with his head as he snorted in the air around him with the vigor of a bull ready to charge, but he did not move an inch.

My mind raced as I attempted to calculate what the ghoul stallion was up to since any common feral would have attacked by that point. "Perhaps," I thought to myself, "he isn't feral and is just a bit ragged after staying in this wreck for so long. Maybe he is the one calling for help. I mean, he isn't showing up on my Eyes Forward Sparkle as an enemy... Of course, if the PipBuck hasn't been activated since the bombs fell, it wouldn't be able to tell of a threat so new to the world, would it?”

I scolded myself. “Don't be a foal, Starwind. You always trust too easily."

Did I trust too easily?

The struggle I was having internally must have bubbled to the surface as a small, exasperated huff broke the silence as it escaped from me.

The growl of the ghoul erupted into a bellowing howl and the sinews in his body visibly tightened as he lowered his body to charge me.

My heart stilled and everything around us seemed to slow and blur except for me.

A thin outline of green light surrounded the stallion as his body began moving at an imperceptible pace toward me with a mouth full of sharpened teeth agape. I aimed my sights toward his chest as I recalled my firearm instruction to direct all shots toward the target’s largest vulnerable spot, and the light surrounding the stallion focused on the chest in response.

Now is the time, murderer.

I swallowed and narrowed my eyes as I felt the trigger squeezed, releasing a dull thwump, thwump, thwump as the I fired the silenced pistol until the magazine was emptied.

Time regained its momentum and the stallion’s body collapsed under its dead weight as small wisps of smoke rose from the new holes in his chest and a few in his head. I felt the heat of the barrel of the weapon as I released the newly empty magazine and loaded in a fresh one, but I was surprised that I felt so little about the passing of this ghoul. I couldn’t understand if it was because he was essentially already dead in his feral insanity or because I had become so cold to the feeling of ending a life, but I knew that this was cleaner, quicker, better than the alternative. Dust would be an instrument of release and of ending pain, and I would merely be the one who would bear the burden of distributing its peace when it was required.

I walked quietly over to the corpse and arranged his legs into a position so that anyone who would come across him might mistake him for being asleep. While levitating him next to the skeleton in the corner, to get him out of the way, a small piece of metal fell from one of his remaining pockets. After depositing him there, I picked up the item, a dirtied, odd shaped key baring a falcon insignia with two gold bits in its beak, and placed it into my saddle bag since I figured that I may have a need for it later.

Stepping lightly out of the room, I quickly made my way to the next room down the hall which also was accessible. Ghouls in the building were a real threat, I knew, so I peeked around the corner with Dust in my teeth so as to keep the light of my horn from giving away my presence. The room was full of piles of leaflets bearing a similar symbol to the one on the key I picked up and two small check boxes with faded text next to them. I levitated one over to me to try and read what they said.

Mayoral Election

Candidates:

Pretty Handy & Milk Dud

Elective ballots that were never cast on that terrible day.

The symbol also had text in it along with the falcon which read Chivalry City: Home of Security and of Wealth

The irony was not lost on me, but it brought a poor taste to my mouth as I dwelled on it, so I gently put the paper back down and turned back into the hallway to continue my search.

My E.F.S was still not showing any signs of danger, but I did not remember a bar above the head of the ghoul in the first room, so I couldn’t trust it as a good indicator of safety.

“Damn, I wish I could get you a firmware upgrade,” I whispered to the device on my leg.

Across the way, I tried the opposite doors to the first two I tried, but both of them were locked. I attempted to unlock them with the key but to no avail. The final two doors before the one at the end of the hallway were unlocked, but they also just had piles of ballots and some old chairs similar to those I had seen in the office on the floor below, so I pressed onward and found myself staring up at bold lettering above the double doors that was missing most of the characters that once would have made it legible.

This should be the courtroom if the map downstairs was to be believed, so if there were to be survivors anywhere, I assumed they would be here. I paused, took a deep breath, and tried the doors. They creaked with age as I pushed them slowly open, and a small cloud of dust fell from its rest on top of the old frame. A small hum was emanating from within the room, and I could only faintly see through the darkness that filled the room. Somepony had kept the shades drawn and the bulbs that once hung in the room had long since died out, so I could only just pick out a small jury stand with a few chairs that were overturned and a pair of tables that acted as the judge’s podium and the councilors’ positions which were resting, crooked, on the black floor.

I moved into the room slowly since each step created a sharp creak or snap from below, stopping just before the open area between the judge and councilors’ stands, and used my magic to raise one of the shades to let in some light. The shade rebounded from its casing and made a loud knocking noise as I released it slightly too quickly.

Hissssss

The noise drew my eyes downwards as a chorus of similar sounds blended together.

The black of the floor begin to twist and shift as if it were made of velvet or some similar fabric that was too supple to be held within your hooves, and every four feet or so, a head or leg or torso would begin to rise from within the blackness.

“Oh…” I breathed out as silently as possible.

Film covered eyes peered around the room from within deep sockets as the ghouls in judge’s robes drooled and gnashed their teeth at the slightest movement of sound. The ghouls wandered aimlessly, and a pair of them blocked the isle that I had walked through previously. By my count, there were eighteen of the ghouls, and none of them seemed friendly. I recognized that I had plenty of bullets to handle them, but if I missed once I could have easily became ghoul bait. I looked around quickly, looking for a new route and, just before I gave up and begin trying my hoof at pistol sharp shooting, my eye was caught by a few flashing lights through a series of cracks in the tiled floor that ran from behind the judge’s stand to the middle of the room.

I closed my eyes, judging the hoofsteps I took to get to this point on this level, calculating.

I snapped my eyes open and lightly tapped my hoof at various points near me until I found a spot that sounded more hollow and weak than the rest. A few of the ferals began shuffling toward me as I double checked the floor at that spot, making more noise than I intended, and they started to growl as I pulled out Dust. I shot the ghoul closest to me in the eye to put her down before she could reach me and, after a careful moment of aiming down the sights, turned the weapon down to point at the spot I had found in the cracked tile. I emptied the rest of the magazine in a circle around the spot and stepped over it as the rest of the ghouls got the hint and began to quickly head my direction.

I only had ten or fifteen feet free in any direction as I began to jump and jump again to slam my hooves onto the fractured flooring, hoping that this film antic would work. With each excruciatingly painful attempt, I felt the mass beneath me shift and heard a series of cracks and groans from metal and wood, and, with one final leap, as the horde pinpointed my location in their blindness, I felt my stomach lurch upwards, into my throat, as the ground fell out from beneath me. In that moment of weightlessness, I ground my teeth together and concentrated to wrap the table closest to me in my magic before yanking sharply.

I collapsed in a heap of destroyed metal shavings, wood splinters, and tile dust on the floor of the room beneath the court, a jolt of pain stabbing through my chest and leg as my wound took the shock. The room was darkened quickly as light was cut off by the flipped table. I sighed and put my head down on the ground for a brief respite. A second passed before I heard the clopping of hooves on the wood above and smiled.

        “See, I can handle myself, Cerul,” I mumbled to the air.

After a few minutes of steadying my heart and breath, I tried getting to my hooves and managed to do so as long as I favored the hurt hoof.

The hum from before had grown in intensity since I had landed into my new hiding place, so I had to assume my calculations were correct, and that I had found the source of the broadcasting distress signal.

“Hello?” I asked openly, not expecting an answer.

I waited, but there was only a few beeps and whirs from machinery in the walls of the room.

I rolled my eyes. “Figures.”

A bright light lit the room and momentarily blinded me from the far side of the room. I squinted into it and raised a hoof to try and see the source.

“What the hell?”

A screen flickered with a pale green hue as small group of batch code continually scrolled across the screen. I walked up to the screen and noted that this was the maneframe I had tried to access earlier.

“Lucky me,” I mused. “Let’s see what this help request is all about.”

I attached my PipBuck to the terminal in the wall with a cable that ran from a recessed port next to the screen, and began the process to download the source code running currently.

“You clever boy,” I whispered to the computer before me. “An access through this backdoor, and… oh, I see… so, if I reroute the signal through the PipBuck and… yes, yes… YES!”

A loud, digital squeal pealed through the room from my PipBuck that caused me to cringe.

“He… hello?” I asked cautiously. “This is Starwind Solace at the Chivalry City Courthouse calling whoever created this distress signal. I know that you are using this maneframe as a proxy terminal to boost your original signal for the area, and that you have some really impressive access rights to the municipal grids in the area, so I think I can trust you. The fact that I know all of this shows that I am not some random raider or greedy scavenger, so I hope you can think you can trust me… Sorry, I may be a little forward. Can I start over? So I –“

“Woah, slow down, miss Solace!” A tinny, metallic voice cut me off. “I never figured anyone could break the MoAS Encryption. You must either be a ghoul with the access codes from long ago, or a really brilliant pony. Either way, I think I can trust you, yes.”

I blushed a little and then realized that I was reacting physically to the equivalent of a cold call. “Um… thanks! I am not a ghoul, but I have had extensive experience with MoAS computers in my work, and I just used a similar search algorithm to one I picked up from that to access the index of passwords in the central database before routing that through the sprite bot network you are using as a puddle jumping system to the central hub near the Cloudsdale Desolation and then –“

“I think I get the picture!” The small voice cut me off again, and I couldn’t help but blush even more deeply as I laughed awkwardly. “Okay, I get that you know I can access the sprite bots, and that I have a pretty wide control of the computers in Equestria, but that doesn’t really clarify who I am to you.”

“Right!” I tapped the screen as if it was a door. “Yes, what is your name, friend?”

“Watcher,” the voice replied simply.

“Oh, how cryptic!” I replied melodramatically. “I suppose it is because you use the visualization protocols of the sprite bots as eyes to watch the wasteland from some undisclosed location, right?”

I laughed in the silence, waiting for a response.

“How did you know that?” The voice seemed a bit too curt with that statement. Well, as curt as a synthesized voice could sound.

“Oh, I was just guessing based on the methods in the subroutines in the –“

The voice wouldn’t have any more of my technobabble.

“Alright, alright! Sorry I asked. Look, I trust you because you helped me like I asked. I was blind in the sector that close to the coastal side of the Big 52 and your intrusion fixed my control scheme there, so I thank you for that, but I need to get going to catch up with a filly in the area around Canterlot and this call is eating up my bandwidth. I’ll keep a look out for you. Stay safe, Starwind Solace.”

There was a click and then the line seemed to go dead.

“Hey, watcher!” I yelled to the mic in the PipBuck. “Hey!”

There was no reply as I continued to grumble to myself that someponies are just rude during phone calls.

I sighed and flipped over to the radio station that the signal was broadcasting on, but there was only silence.

I took a few minutes to search the room for anything of value, and I managed to turn up a few bottlecaps, a box of Blam-Os, a few energy cells, another box of bullets for Dust, and a faded photo of a handsome stallion wearing a silvery sash which read “Handy, first mayor of Chivalry.” I stowed everything but the photo, but I took care to place it on a high shelf where it would hopefully lie undisturbed, as the dead deserved.  One last look around me revealed that there was nothing here worth sticking around for anymore except for the ghosts of memory and a darkened world, but I did notice that there were solid red bars beginning to pop up in my vision in all directions around me.

A glance down at my PipBuck screen verified my suspicions as I saw that a text box alert was dancing on the screen saying that an update had completed since the connection to the PipNetwork had been repaired. I supposed that connecting to watcher had opened up the network long enough to download an essential update that this version of the PipBuck never received since it was powered down by Volt for the Librarian. The index of locations and creatures had been updated and it seemed to now be recognizing threats throughout the building.

I took time to count the bars out of curiosity and realized how lucky I had been to not get into some of the places I had been trying to enter since there were far more than just the small group above me in the building. At least five of these were milling about behind the one door that connected to the maneframe room I was currently standing in, and I wasn’t about to take any more life than I already had that day. Ghoul or otherwise, I was not going to be a killer if I knew I had another way out of this place.

Closing my eyes, I calmed myself and focused on the blinking red light of a dying Sparkle Cola machine, the beautiful curly, short mane of a charcoal mare, and the peeling whitewash of a small town courthouse before imagining myself standing among them and sending a pulse of magic to my horn to give the spell form.

In an instant I went from the cold dark of the maneframe room to the midday brightness and humidity with a small snap.

Spells always got easier with practice, and I was proficient enough now with this new  spell that Cerul had not noticed my arrival as I walked up behind her as she was eying up the cola machine with a glimmer of gluttony in her eyes. She bashed the side of the machine with a hoof, denting its surface and causing the machine to rock in place, but nothing was released from the slot on its face. I sat there a moment, a hoof tapping my chin in thought as I took in her brutal fight with the distribution device, and an idea struck me.

I walked up to Cerul and tapped her on the shoulder. She froze and turned her head slowly, a fearful grimace etched into her lips. Her features melted into a smile as she realized who I was and she swung her hooves around my neck and laugh lightly.

“Star, your back!” She said happily. “You didn’t die!”

“Yep, I am a tank of a mare,” I replied flatly. “Anyway, I think I can get into this machine for us.”

I stepped up to the machine and, with a flourish, pulled out the dirty key I had picked up inside. It fit perfectly into the slot near the payment port, and, with a turn, the door-like front swung open to reveal its treasures. Cerul rushed up and gasped.

“No way…”

She reached up a pulled out a bottle of Sparkle Cola that caused me to recoil in disgust.

“Cerul, don’t drink that! It’s radioactive!”

“I know, silly,” Cerul responded. “It’s Sparkle Cola Quantum, its super rare, and, from what I have heard, super delicious…”

“Okay… “I droned. “I guess that makes as much sense as some of the other things that we Equestrians came up with back in the day.”

Cerul pulled out and stored five other colas while I collected loose bottle caps and some pre-war bits that might have carried some value still, and when that was done we split a cola to celebrate our successful looting venture.

Laughing, Cerul smacked her lips in satisfaction while sitting against a wall. “So, what’s next, miss Smart Pony?”

 I didn’t really know. I knew that I had to find out where the signal lead, and that I had to, eventually, figure out where to go to give Dusty’s daughter the message I carried, but I didn’t have a job or any other aim or place to start searching to accomplish that one remaining goal. I answered with the only answer I had.

“I don’t… know.”

“Are you alright, Starry?” Cerul asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

“Yes, I’m fine,” I reassured her. “It just hit me that for the first time in a long time I don’t have any home to return to or any goal to aim for to keep me in the right direction.”

Cerulean rocked her head side to side and looked at me quizzically. “Couldn’t you just go back to your researcher buddies wherever they are from? I know you said that they were attacked, but didn’t you have a base somewhere or something that you could return to?”

I thought about my answer carefully as I tried to push back thoughts of Dusty and the library in the mountain. “No, it’s just me now. All of those books and scrolls and things that my benefactors wanted were burned up or destroyed, I’m sure, and I haven’t had a true home in years. I relied on the Rangers to give me purpose and something to keep me going…”

I suppose my expression must have given away my feelings because Cerul didn’t verbally reply as she scooted over to where I was sitting and rested a hoof around my shoulders. “Hey, don’t worry about it then. We can find somewhere new to call home on this journey, I bet!”

I tried to smile but I felt a pressure on my ears and eyes as if I was thousands of feet underwater. “I don’t have any direction to give us though. No ideas. No map markers. No signals.” Not to mention the fact that I had to kill another two ponies today, even if they were ghouls. I felt the fissure beaming in pride.

I frowned and shook my head before continuing. “I… I don’t think I will be of any use or help, and… well, I don’t know why you would want to stick with me anyway. Couldn’t you just return home? You know, make up to Shepard and tell him I tried to steal you away or something else he would expect so he wouldn’t disown you anymore?”

Cerul gave me a stern look. “No! I won’t leave you like this, and I couldn’t even if I did want to since he has never been the type of pony capable of being so forgiving. He was kinder once, a good pony at heart, I promise, but after mom died he just wasn’t the same. I mean, he drank so much that I couldn’t ever leave him alone because he might have died on his own, but now, as much as I hate it, he has gotten so used to it that I feel that he will be better off without me as a reminder. I wish I could return, but I think that a hero is not someone who swoops in to save the day all of the time, and is, instead, someone who lives and teaches many others to live good lives in order to save someone else’s life one day. I earned my cutie mark the day I learned about how cold the world could be, you know? It looks happy because I learned then that everypony has to be a hero in their daily lives to really turn this world around, and that I would be able to do that through happiness that I can help create and laughter that I can help spread. So, yes, maybe I could try and return, but I know that there is something great in you, Star, something that will let me be a better pony for all of those who need help. It isn’t that I can’t leave, but that I will not.”

She drew a deep breath, so I assumed she was done.

“Wow, I had no idea, Cerul…”

Her ears perked up and a smile returned to her face quickly. “No worries, Cap’n! All I’m trying to say is that we all can’t be happy twenty-four seven, but we should all have reasons to move forward. For instance, you see any kind of shiny technology and you just get this light about you! We all have our passions, and I know that sometimes we need to spread the joy around.”

I felt so stupid.

“Starwind, you idiot!” I slapped my hoof against the ground to emphasize my words.

“It isn’t a big deal, Star!” Cerul pleaded with me. “Please don’t get upset again…”

“No, I’m not upset.” I replied through a smile. “I just realized I didn’t check the most obvious place to look for directions!”

I peered down at my PipBuck and toggled over to the map section of the menu. There, following a newly placed dotted line was a heading.

“Ohhhhh!” Cerul said in mock awe. “What super-duper, awesome mission is on that gizmo?”

I stuck my tongue out at her and then winked when she made an even more ridiculous face back at me. “This PipBuck was supposed to have a specific owner, and we’re going to take it to her!”

“Wouldn’t she be, you know, dead?” Cerul deadpanned.

“Yes, but she was researching something to do with Twilight Sparkle and ancient Zebra history, which I think we should follow up with, and we need a direction, so Manehatten seems as good a place as any to head to at this point.” I supposed that the idea ran away from me a bit, but it was true that I had no better options and I was curious.

Cerul seemed nonplussed. “Um… Okay then, I guess. Onward to Manehattan! So, uh, what is Manehattan?”

My mouth dropped and hung open.

“What?!”

“What?” She responded.

“First you don’t know Twilight, and now Manehattan?” I asked rapidly. “Did you learn nothing when you were a filly?”

Cerul blushed and turned her head away. “No…”

I wrapped my hooves around Cerul this time despite the pain. “Sorry, sorry! That was a stupid thing to ask, and I am a bit insensitive sometimes. Don’t be mad, please?”

Cerul slowly turned back around and the heat in her cheeks subsided a bit. “I wasn’t mad. I know I’m not the smartest pony. If anything, I need you to teach me all of this stuff I don’t know, so it is okay. Go ahead, tell me all about what we’re headed towards, if you don’t mind.”

“Alright, but let’s get walking as I do,” I replied as I started the process of getting off the ground. “The light is starting to dwindle, and we don’t want to be caught out here at night.”

As I pointed out the direction of the city across the width of the Big 52 and we began to walk, I told Cerul about the ministry mares, the war, and how it all ended, but Cerul took particular interest in one story I learned from a few of my colleagues whose focus was history.

“You said that Pinkie Pie was the ministry mare of parties?!”

I laughed and nodded. “Yeah, kind of! She did a whole lot of other things too, but parties were Pinkie’s favorite things, for sure. A party for every foal on their birthday was her motto.”

“Wow! What happened to her in all of the mess on the last day?” Cerul asked in rapt attention.

The sun was a few hours from setting as I paused our pace to look her in the eyes. “No one knows what happened to the ministry mares for sure, but many historians I know believe that she died somewhere in Manehattan due to some transit records, terminal codes, and other stuff that they found in their studies.”

“Which way is Manehattan again?” Cerul asked using hurried words while stretching in place.

I pointed a hoof. “That way, wh–“

Cerul, using inequine strength, tossed me onto her back, told me to hold on, and began a full sprint in the direction I indicated.

“If anypony is throwing parties like those still, I want in!”

Footnote:

Level Up!

Level 3 –

Sneak 25

Guns 20

Perk Gained! Teleportation level 2