Chapter 2: Not So Much Where, but When, and How

Jester had some splainin' to do.

I'll spare the minor details, but apparently the wasteland had been created by the bombs I saw fall. Equestria had been annihilated by the balefire bombs, Celestia and Luna and the ministry mares had been killed, and the war ended with mutual destruction. Tens, hundreds of thousands of ponies and zebras lost their lives that day. Those cities that hadn't been instantaneously wiped off the map succumbed to radiation fallout, necrotic (but pink!) gas, or worse. Everypony lost. Hooray for us.

The kicker? Those bombs fell two hundred years ago.

Two hundred. Fucking. Years ago.

It's not every day you find out you'll be celebrating your two hundred and twentieth birthday this year. I mean, apparently I was really, really, really, really old, but at least I still looked pretty damn good.

Naturally I didn't believe Jester, and he didn't believe I was a two century old undying super-pony from the past. We shared a large bottle of Buck Daniels (you can't believe how excited I was to find out alcohol survived) as I tried to convince myself I hit my head harder than I thought and he tried to convince himself I was a thunderingly stupid Stable pony, or a terrible liar.

He went over the major surviving groups for me (apparently Pegasi still lived, now seated above the clouds as the Enclave), giving me a rough version of the Wasteland's Who's Who. I tried my best to explain to him about Adams Apple, about how we used to fly Vertibucks around, about how the world used to be before the bombs, but his look was skeptical to the point of suspicious.

I mean, honestly, I wouldn't believe me either. There's a very real chance I was dead. Or crazy. But there is no way in hell two hundred years passed from the time I conked out in the flowers to the moment I woke up in Jester's shack. It just didn't add up. Ponies don't even live far past one hundred, and those are the lucky (unlucky?) ones. When I pressed Jester for some proof, he told me very few records survived from that period. Convenient. But the computer he used to keep track of my heartbeat had a calendar program on it. A rudimentary one, one that would have already been obsolete when I took off from Adams Apple, but one that apparently corroborated his story. I saw the dates he showed me, but I still couldn't believe him. I knew how easy those computers were to hack.

And that's where I was at now. Drunk, alone, holding a near empty and getting emptier bottle of Buck Daniels, hunched over on my hospital gurney/bed and listening to Jester snore from his room. The lights were off and the wind howled outside, and I couldn't get my brain to shut down. I was scared out of my mind and couldn't decide what was crazier: that I had died and was now living out my own personal hell, or that Jester was telling the truth. I had no clue how in hell I was still alive.

I took another swig of whiskey, allowing myself some small comfort from the burn of the alcohol and the mild glow of my Pipbuck screen.

I sat upright with a jolt. The Pipbuck. The Pipbuck had a calendar, one that, as far as I knew, couldn't be messed with.

I twisted the knobs until I reached the status screen. Two menu clicks over and I'd be on the calendar.

Moment of truth, Collateral. My stomach was doing flip flops and my hooves shook as I pushed the button twice in drunken succession.

*click* *click*

He wasn't lying.

I was old. And I had no idea how it happened.

I swirled the last couple shots of whiskey unconsciously and then downed them without a second thought. The alcohol finally started fuzzing out my thoughts, so I rolled onto my cot as the room swirled, allowing my eyes to close and dreamless sleep to overtake me.

Jester slammed a heavy pack down on the floor next to my bed. "You can walk now. Let's get you outside and see if you can shoot."

Thanks, Jester. Wasn't sleeping or anything. I must have been doing yoga in my dreams, because my mouth tasted like I'd been sucking on my hooves all night. With a curse and a heave, I landed upright on the floor, trying to blink away the sleep from my eyes and keep away the shadows from last night.

"It's... really early, Jester. Sun's not even out," I grumbled.

"Sun's never out, haven't you noticed? Damn ol' cloud cover, Enclave's got us locked down tight down here. Damn Pegasi."

I hate Pegasi too, hooray! Maybe Jester isn't such a terrible pony after all. I stifled a yawn.

"You say something about shooting? I can do that, but I'm hungry as hell."

He threw me a sideways glance. "You ate the last of the meat, remember? Next part of paying me back: let's go hunt us up some radigators."

He threw a pair of saddlebags over my back, nearly knocking me to the floor. I saw several different caliber gun barrels poking out, and the bag felt like the next best thing to 50 pounds. My back muscles started to seize.

"Hey man, this is ridiculously heavy! Help me out here," I gasped, legs burning from the weight.

"Nope. You want to help, you're going to need to shoot, so you get to carry the guns."

This was just unfair. I glared at him.

He sighed. "I'll be straight with you. This world's not a forgiving place anymore, and you're as weak as a kitten. If I'm going to get my money back out of you, I need you to be strong enough to survive the trip back to your base. You're useless to me like this. So you get to do some heavy lifting." His eyes hardened. "We've got a long, dangerous hike coming up soon, and you better pray the money's there when we get there, because I sure as shit ain't doing this out of the goodness of my heart."

Gulp. I put a little more effort into my legs and stumbled through the door. The hot wind hit me square in the face, kicking dust into my eyes. I coughed, looking back at Jester as he wrapped his muzzle in a ragged red plaid cloth and pulled on old leather goggles for protection. I wished I still had my helmet.

We headed over to a small wooden fence by the side of the house, me with my eyes squinted, Jester striding with purpose as his eyes searched the plains for Celestia-knows-what.

"Set your bags down here. Time to see what you're capable of."

I dropped the saddlebags as Jester lined up empty Sarsaparilla bottles along the top of the weather-beaten wood fence. After ensuring they weren't going to get blown over, Jester started rummaging through the bags I was carrying and came out with a little mouth-grip pistol.

"We'll start you with this and see what you can do." He trotted off to a safe distance. C'mon, I'm not that bad of a shot.

The first shot kicked the pistol so hard back into my mouth that I accidentally fired off a second shot as I fell backwards. I grimaced as I heard glass shatter, rubbing my tongue across my teeth to see if I broke anything. Jester moaned in disbelief.

"Damnit Collateral, how the hell'd you manage to hit one of my windows?! You're not even facing the right damn way." He looked up at the sky, pleading for patience, then walked off, grumbling as he lay behind a small hill for cover. "Looks like you're going to have to hit up the woods to get something to cover it up too, unless you like sleeping in irradiated dust."

Round 2. I planted my hooves better this time and squeezed off four shots, managing to hit two bottles. Not too shabby, seeing as we never shot pistols up at Adams Apple. I was more of a rifle mare myself, though I had also had a bit of shotgun training. I told Jester as much.

He hesitated for a minute, then hopped over to the bags. "Well, lemme see if I packed it..." He pawed through the bags some more. "Nope, hang on a sec and let me run in real quick. I think I've got something right up your alley."

As he headed back inside, I pulled out pistol after pistol from the bag. Very few were mouth-ready, and the triggers were too small for my hooves. Unicorn only, apparently. I found a single-barrel shotgun and some ammo, so I loaded it up, sat on my haunches, and braced it with my shoulder. The trigger guard was large enough for me to get the tip of my hoof in, and with careful aim, I was able to destroy a couple more bottles before Jester came back out.

He was floating a long-barreled gun of some sort covered in greasy canvas. I reloaded the shotgun as he approached, making sure to not accidentally fire some buckshot into some buck's ass.

"I've got something a little special for you. I don't use it anymore since I've found better weapons, but this li'l girl saw me through my early days. Here, maybe this will work better for you." He handed me the wrapped package.

Oh boy, it felt like Hearth's Warming Day all over again. I unwrapped my present: a beat-up Cowbuck Repeater. It had definitely seen its fair share of action, but for all the weathering and wear on the stock and barrel, she looked beautiful. Capable. Hungry, even.

I exhaled with reverence as I slowly lifted up the rifle from the canvas. I could swear I felt it purring in my hooves as I gently started loading it up. For the briefest of seconds, all thoughts about the past and questions about the present went away, leaving just a mare and her gun. I sat back on my haunches again, levered a bullet into the chamber, and raised the rifle to my cheek, nestling the butt in the crook of my shoulder. The sights were plain: a simple circle punched out of a piece of metal rising from the stock, with the front sight set on the muzzle tip. Ages ago, someone had etched a smiling pony's face on the metal plate of the rear sight, her bright smile a reminder of memories long past.

I felt a subdued sense of voyeuristic shame seeing the etching. After the gentle way Jester treated this gun and the way he spoke of it, I knew this gun and that etching meant something to him, something more than he wanted to let on. Letting me use it was a bigger moment for him than the mundane act of handing one gun to another should normally be.

I slowly lowered the gun and looked at him. "Hey, Jester. You sure it's alright that I use this gun?" I made sure to emphasize "this".

He stared off out over the empty plains, silent for a moment. It seemed for a second he was preparing to tell me something, but instead he responded with, "Sure. I want to see if you can hit those bottles."

Again I raised the rifle, sighting down the barrel and lining up the first bottle. The pony's face beamed at me, and I gave her a brief smile as I pulled the trigger. The bullet flew true, smashing the bottle to pieces with a resounding crack. I said a silent thank-you to the smiling pony as I sighted bottle after bottle, each meeting its demise at the business end of the rifle. Within seconds, all that remained was a pile of jagged pieces of glass, the acrid smell of gunpowder, and the last few echoes of the final shot.

I blew the smoke from the barrel and set the rifle down gently on the oiled canvas.

Jester sat down next to me, a small but fierce flicker of pride in his eyes. "Magnolia," he said, pointing at the rifle, "meet Collateral."

And that's how Magnolia and I became friends.

Jester had scrounged me up a pair of goggles and allowed me to tear up some canvas to fashion my own dust mask. He had been pleasantly surprised by my abilities with the rifle and shotgun, and had gifted me the shotgun for my own (I had a sneaking suspicion this "gift" was being added to my overall tab, but beggars and choosers and the like).

He had also, after a lot of hemming and hawing and a little bit of grumbling and a lot of promise-making, allowed me to use Magnolia for our radigator hunt. Jester's shack sat on the southern tip of the Whitetail Woods, and we hoofed it over to the west side, where Jester spoke of a small lake teeming with radigators. Apparently, the water flowed through the forest and came out completely irradiated, creating the perfect breeding grounds for the gators.

Jester made sure to keep well wide of the tree-line, and I did my best to follow in his footsteps, my Pipbuck ticking at me whenever I strayed too far. We made it to the edge of the lake with little in the way of adventure, the only hiccup coming when I tripped over a rocky outcropping and almost shot Jester in the ass. I'd been demoted to all-bag carrier after that, carrying both Jester's saddlebags and my own. At least we got rid of most of the weapons back at the shack.

The lake was plenty big, much larger than I remembered from my fly-overs. Small scrub brushes lined its sandy shores, and the tributary that came through the Woods flowed from the east as the water flowed out to the south. Honestly, it looked more like a river than a lake, because, duh (I just remembered), it WAS a river, or at least one of the offshoots that led to the great Ponytomac River. I let Jester know, and he didn't give one shit.

We sat behind a sickly bush blind, me panting and trying to catch my breath as Jester pulled a large wooden box from his bags (which I had unceremoniously dumped on the ground once we reached the lake, earning another reproachful look from Jester). The lake smelled... wrong. Even from the distance we were at, my Pipbuck ticked steadily as my radiation levels slowly increased. I was about to ask Jester if we should worry about it when he held a hoof to his lips and continued working on the gun. Within minutes, he held up a gleaming sniper rifle, outfitted with a suppressor and a massive scope.

I'll admit. I had a bit of gun jealousy. It was just so long and so dangerous and so black and... well, you get the drift. But hey, I could use my two guns well enough, and ponies always said size didn't matter; it was all about how you used it.

He pushed the barrel through the bush and assumed a prone firing position, using his horn to manually adjust the gun position by millimeters. He whispered, "Ok, Collateral. I've got a good bead on a gator, but we're a lot closer than I normally like to be, and I've run across a few raiders in these parts, so I need you to watch my six."

I unstrapped Magnolia from my saddlebag and loaded her up. I also grabbed a small pouch of bullets and took my position facing away from Jester, sitting on my rump, and started slowly casting my eyes back and forth.

I was bored within minutes. Groaning mentally, I kept myself busy by seeing how far I could shuffle my butt without Jester noticing. I had moved a good three feet before a sound like a harsh cough burst from the blind, and then Jester was on his feet, sprinting towards the lake. I dutifully followed his movements through my gun sights, tracing back and forth across the lake as he dove head first at a bloody and still-thrashing monster lizard.

Holy shit, so that was a radigator. The damn thing had to be at least ten feet long, and bigger wide than I was tall. From the looks of it, Jester had put a bullet right in its neck. He grappled with its back as a hunting knife, levitated by his magic, plunged multiple times into its throat, finally puncturing the tough leather skin. With a massive, rattling sigh, the gator thumped once more and finally fell silent.

I let out a whoop of joy. That was probably the coolest thing I had ever seen in my life, what with the neckshot snipe, and the wrestling, and the sheer balls of diving headfirst onto the biggest lizard I had ever seen, and... Jester was looking at me with a mixture of alarm and fury, trying to wrest the gator up the shore with his hooves and magic as fast as he could while throwing panicked looks over his shoulder at two rather large shadows in the water. Two fast-moving, ridiculously large oh fuck those are two more radigators. Fuck me and my big mouth.

"Goddamnit Collateral, we need this radigator!"

Oh shit oh shit oh shit. The radigators were already on land and had encircled Jester, reminding me unsettlingly of vultures circling a fresh kill. Jester had pulled the knife out again, but he was horrendously outmatched by two healthy, pissed off radigators, and he knew it. He ducked and weaved, trying to pull either off balance, but they didn't bite (no pun intended) on his feints. Jester only had seconds, and it was all my fault.

I wanted to run. Hey, maybe this way I wouldn't have to pay him back. I could get the heck out of Dodge, still have my guns, maybe ransack his shack for more (and those delicious Sarsaparillas). I could probably fend for myself now without any issues. Besides, I didn't know him. He was just some other pony who meant nothing to me. I wouldn't cry at his funeral.

Celestia, what the hell was wrong with me? This guy had saved my ass, had taken me in and nursed me back to health, goddamnit he had fed me. I owed him big time, and not just money. I couldn't just leave him be, especially when I had caused this. What a time to start growing a conscience.

I assumed my shooting position once more, bringing Magnolia to my cheek as I swiftly honed in on one of the radigators. One breath in, one breath out, and the smiling etched pony and I double tapped that radigator right in its fat fucking skull. Ploop, said the skull as it became radigator mush. The gator's legs took two more steps before they got the message that their brain was now all down its back, and then collapsed onto the sandy shore.

Before the echoes had died away, I had already swept across Jester's body to the other radigator as it took a snap at him. He danced backwards, keeping the knife floating between him and the jaws of the gator. They both kept moving in and out of my sightline, not giving me a clear shot, and Jester's legs were slowly giving out. One wrestle with a gator and a deadly dance with two toothy partners, and he was ready to call it quits. Couldn't blame him. Finally, with a vicious stab of the knife and a quick hop backwards, Jester created a split-second opening for me. And that was all I needed.

We both sat huffing, gunpowder hanging in the air as my Pipbuck kept informing me I was well on my way towards become a glowing pony. I turned to smile at Jester and found his knife at my throat.

"Next time," he whispered furiously, "you do what I fucking tell you, or Celestia help me they will never find your body. Do you understand me? Do you fucking understand?"

I sat there, shocked and scared. A blood-red glow glinted at the back of his eyes as he ground his teeth and pressed the knife tighter. Neither of us spoke, and I was afraid to nod my agreement for fear of slicing my own throat open.

After a tense couple seconds, the pressure eased and Jester turned away from me. I slumped to the ground, shaking and holding Magnolia close. Jester pawed over the three radigators, his breathing slowly easing up as he slid his knife back into its sheath. They were massive lizards. As I regained my composure, I realized I had just killed two of those bad boys. However badly I had pissed Jester off, we still managed to snag three prime gators.

Jester let out a long sigh and trotted up next to me. "Collateral, you need to be smarter than that. You knew I had been whispering this whole time and had been as silent as possible when setting up our blind. Maybe it's my fault for assuming I wouldn't have to tell you every little step, but you're going to need to catch on and catch up immediately."

He gave me a steady look. "We got lucky this time. Thankfully only two more showed up and we didn't run across any raiders. But make that mistake again and it could cost us both our lives. I didn't save yours to lose mine in turn."

I hung my head shamefully. It seemed the proper thing to do, considering I had almost gotten him killed (and with an unpleasant lurch in my stomach, I remembered that I had almost convinced myself to leave him to his death too).

"You shot well," he added grudgingly. "Even though the targets were pretty close, you were still under pressure and had to make a snap decision and a good shot. Only thing I ask is next time you don't track across my body when you go from target to target. Don't want to have to worry about you putting a bullet in this old buck's hide, among everything else I have to worry about."

He walked back over to the radigators. "Here, gimme a hoof and help me push these behind the blind. It's time I teach you how to butcher up some meat."

It was disgusting work. He threw out words like quarter, render, chuck, and tenderloin, but all I saw was blood, guts, bones and meat. I nearly threw up multiple times and got blood all down my hooves, but by the time we were done we had filled a sack with a sizable stack of steaks. Jester looked pleased.

"Alright, let's wash this blood off and throw what's left into the lake."

"River," I interjected.

"Whatever. That way we'll continue being able to get radigators when we come back."

I washed the blood off my hooves as he dumped bones and viscera back into the lake. My Pipbuck continued ticking at me, so I showed Jester our radiation levels.

"Ah. Let's pack it up and split a couple RadAways on the hike back. That should take care of it."

He helped me load the packs back up (I was still, apparently, on all-bag duty), but he mercifully carried the sack of meat.

On the way back, he asked, "I'm a bit surprised though. How come you didn't use S.A.T.S to take care of the gators?"

"Sats? I was already sitting, man." I pounded the RadAway. Ech, that's a taste I could do without. Imagine oranges that had been left in the sun for a few years, fell into a pit of garbage, and then were harvested by the love child of sulfur and bad gas. I needed a shot of whiskey.

Jester sighed. "Stable-Assisted Targeting Spell: S.A.T.S. All Pipbucks have it. It's a spell that helps speed you up or slows down time or something, and allows you to pick your targets and in what order you want to hit them."

"Oh of course, a special time-altering combat spell. I totally forgot to use that. Because it exists and all." I said sarcastically, because at that moment, sarcasm was the only thing keeping me from keeling over. "I was going to, but I was already using my +10 aiming spell and +3 stability charm, and I figured that would have been overkill."

"You really are a dumb one, aren't you. When we get back to the shack, I'll show you how to use it. I promise it's in there."

I rolled my eyes and kept putting one hoof in front of the other. After all the excitement over the radigators, I was left bone-weary. The wasteland was getting darker and the shadows longer as we turned up the home stretch towards the shack. I longed for my dirty, blood-stained hospital cot so I could rustle up some snoozes. I was so deep in thoughts about sleeping and maybe eating that I almost walked straight up Jester's stopped ass. He had his hoof up and was making some sort of sign for me, so I figured he probably meant for me to keep my mouth shut. See, I can learn.

The door to the shack hung open loosely on its hinges. Ah.

Jester floated out a silenced pistol from one of my bags as I set them down quietly. I followed his lead and unwrapped Magnolia, but he shook his head and pointed to the shotgun. I didn't want to leave my rifle alone, so using one of the bag straps, I fashioned a rudimentary back holster and tucked Magnolia in, grabbing the shotgun in my teeth while I did. Jester nodded approvingly, and we started slowly towards the shack.

As we inched closer, we heard a couple crashes followed by weird, high pitched giggling. Several different pony voices floated out of the door, followed by more crashing and more giggling. The laugh sounded like the time one of our pilots snapped after a close call over Zebra territory. She had crashed and was pulled from her Vert with her hooves covering her mouth, giggling hysterically as she soiled herself, her eyes wide and panicked. She was shipped off to a mental rehabilitation center and we never heard from her again. I shook my head to rid myself of that memory. Whoever was in Jester's shack sounded a few cheese slices short of a sandwich.

A deafening shotgun blast took out one of the windows on the side of the shack, drowning out the insane cackles, forcing us to take cover behind the small hill Jester used earlier. My hooves were trembling a bit as I loaded up the shotgun, but I promised myself I wouldn't get Jester in trouble this time.

He put a hoof on mine to calm me down. A fire raged deep in his eyes, his black pupils twin torrid pools of hatred as he stared at the broken window. I could almost feel the waves of fury radiating out from him. This wasn't normal anger; this was personal. Whether this was because someone had violated his house, his sanctuary, or something much older and deeper, I didn't know.

But when he turned and whispered to me, venom dripping out of every syllable, I knew I did not want to be the pony on the receiving end of that unchecked rage. He was a loaded gun, safety off and hair-triggered.

His vision never strayed from the shack as he bent down to my ear and whispered, "Raiders."

Author's Note

Again, if you are rereading this chapter and notice that Neighless AFB has been changed to Adams Apple AFB, that was my mistake and subsequent fix. When you spend too much time playing Fallout NV while writing chapters that should be true to Fallout 3, you sometimes accidentally flip air force bases (Nellis for Adams, in this case).

I also changed Bigomac to Ponytomac, since that was the name I came across in Fallout: Equestria. These changes have been made across the whole story and will stay changed for subsequent releases.

Love,
The DeciMayhem