Fallout:Equestria - Wish Machines

Chapters

Introduction
Prologue
Chapter One - Hit the road, wrack!

Introduction

Introduction

Imagine a long and lonesome road cramped with deception and obsession; a life of adventure we can all relate to. All the ordeals we struggle through to get to its end forge us, mold us to a unique behavior, and teach us who we really are. Yet, the question whether this trail is ours or not is what breaks us all in the end.

“You okay, boss?” a mare’s voice echoed, probably calling from the bottom of a wishing well.

If an era of constant wars showed me something, it’s that only one thing always remains the same; Pain. Atrocious and unwavering pain… and the blade in my chest, piercing through my back and pinning me to the ground, agreed with me. Yeah, she was nodding, that fucking bitch. Take your time fucking me… you weren’t even patient enough to go through the right angle….

My eyes jerked open, blurry with blood, mud, and motes of dust. A dark grey ceiling seven feet above my head from which dangled roughly torn wires cracked with electricity. Sparks burst from tapered tips, lighting the vision of apocalypse around me. It had all gone briskly... broken furniture, disemboweled bodies, broken machines, loose wires, and blood… lots of fresh and ugly blood, steaming in the cold air.

I focused, my mind fighting back in all the thoughts pouring out of my bleeding wounds. My skin and flesh was flapping around the blade, small jets of dark red spitting out at regular intervals.

“I-…” I gasped. Blood flowed out of my mouth, bubbling with my raspy and hurting breath. “I-…”

“Oh, shit…” the mare appearing in my range of vision hiccupped, hauling herself over my body.

Her old and teary eyes shook, oh come on… they never blended well with her tanned fur and red-wine mane. Oh… low shivers writhed in the tips of my hindquarters, gaining momentum as they crawled in my backbone up to my neck. My fur raised on my wrinkled skin as something dripped on my face. It couldn’t rain inside, could it? Were those tears?

“Are… are you crying?” I hissed at the frightened mare.

“You’ll survive,” The promise flew out of her quivering lips, unconvincing. “You’ll-!”

I put a hoof on her shoulder and gave her the broadest smile I could muster… damn it was hard to smile with the pain…

“It’s too late,” I confessed with a broken gurgling voice, my eyes blinking haphazardly. “Where’s Lil’Filly?”

“Why do you care?” the mare cried at me. “She killed you.”

“How’s she?!”

“She killed you…” She blurted, her confidence slowly fading away under my repeated assault.

“’Cause she’s mah daughter!!” I screamed with authority.

I felt the mare tensing, whining, fighting back… But in the end she would give in. She had to….

“How’s she?” I breathed smoothly. “You don’t want me to call Gate, do you?”

The mare petrified on her legs, her eyes bloodshot in the terror the name represented. She looked at me with those now pinprick-sized pupils, pleading and bending at the same time. I smiled, showing teeth that I’d guess were broken. Damn, it hurt.

“How is she going?” I asked again, getting on my nerves.

“She’s passed out…” the mare blubbered, growing sobs hacking her speech.

Inhaling slowly, I tried to lower my heartbeats. With time, my eyes adjusted and met my friend’s. Her expression, a stirring mix of fear, stupor, disgust, and obedience, struck me in my retching guts. Friends weren’t supposed to act like that…

“I want to hug her…” I paused, thoughtful. “Ah… and don’t try to take the blade out. It’s good where it is now…”

It was difficult to speak, or to breathe. I contemplate the mare as she complied and disappeared beneath this eerie fog of war thrust over me… was that it, dying? Being slowly swallowed in darkness… gulped by an endless sleep. Close to the mare… I pictured shadows… many angry, teary, or shocked eyes. I heard whimpers… damn bunch of sissies… what had I taught y’all?

Like a ghost, a stallion slithered out from beyond my vision. In response to his step forward, ponies gasped in terror around me, muttering as they backed away. His flaming blue eyeballs stared down at me, contrasting with his pale grey blue skin and his dark grey locks. He had once worn a pair of sunglasses, but the tainted glass had shattered away a long time ago, leaving only a broken frame behind. Over his shoulders stood a long, torn, and bleached coat, falling over his hooves smeared with mud. Snickering at me, he walked further, tilting his head until our two noses nearly touch.

“You’re always waiting,” I complained.

“I’ve just always been there,” he claimed smoothly.

“I’d have preferred to see that damn old buck, personally.”

“Well, let’s say that I’m far better being here than Gate.”

I sighed a giggle, the sword rubbing my chest shooting down my mood with explosion of pain. “Yeah… guess you’re right.” I paused. “Well, seems it’s the end of the trip. I failed.”

“Are you so sure?”

I raised my eyes to the ceiling, my tears falling down my cheeks.

“Don’t ramble that fate thingy discourse of yours… it’s sooo boring.”

He laughed, “What I mean is that your objective is fulfilled. As intended.”

I shook my head dismissively, “You’ll never change,” and coughed over my bloody lumps.

“Because you never did.”

“Stop trying to speak,” the mare came back to me talking in my ringing ears, avoiding to glance at the stallion… my head was all fuzzy. “Here’s your daughter.”

My chest jolted. Spits of blood splattered the crying mare’s tired face. Some found their way to her eyes and. Shrieking, she dropped the young mare right onto me. A massive series of cough wrestled out of my shredded lungs. My legs hacked aimlessly, shushing me again in a stupefied stance of utter pain.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry…” The mare fell back, fearing a retaliation that was never to come.

Calming myself with only scared ponies trying to hide around in the shadows of the corners, I slowly glanced at the young mare resting onto me. Petting her mane, I studied her features, thrown in stark relief by the fires and sparks decorating the room. She was so beautiful; an indigo fur and a light blue mane, covered in scars, burns, and wounds… Her eyes closed tight… a star among the swine. Her lips, stuck into a half grin of disgust and joy, remained unwavering. I spectated that unconscious face, magnified with a pure and unaltered disgust of myself and a beaming joy of the earlier fight. I taught her very well. She was magnificent.

I smirked. It had been a hell of a battle; and I had lost. But now that it was over, why should I care?

“Because you’ve still got something to do,” the stallion weaved his words in my mind, his two pairs of hooves stomping the cold metal used to build the floor.

I growled, trying to stretch my hooves. The blade stopped my attempts, excruciating claws of pain wracking my body from the inside… I staggered and let my head fall on my side. My hoof, or was it my prosthetics, slowly crawled to my torn out saddlebag. Piercing in, I grappled out a pack of med-X, a healing potion, and a tin of mint-als. Well, not that risking an overdose was of any importance now.

The sudden lucidity and feeling of restoration invaded my body, battling back the dolor the alien sword rubbed in my wound. In a softened hiss, I called back the tanned mare, now closely followed by four other ponies… just mere shadows to my eyes.

A PipBuck was still attached to Lil’Filly’s leg, eh… Nice. It’d be easier. Tapping clumsily on its broken screen, I switched on the recorder. My jaded eyes moved between the mare, the shadows, and the stallion, slowly gathering around me. I chuckled. Those dumbstruck faces… priceless. I lied in my own blood, my skin ripped apart and my bones crushed by my own thoughts, remorse, and wounds. I might suffocate, but I would talk. You needed to experience what I’d done, and why I did so. I just hoped you would approve my choice, or maybe lack of choices. Just… don’t be too hard on me. History had always been its own judge and executioner.

“You’ll listen to me carefully, for I will tell the tales of my life… only once. It'll be your lesson and binding. You will maybe… probably hate me after that. But I will be long dead before you shut my mouth up. But if you understand why I did it, and why I had to, I hope you’ll continue the duty I’ve put in each one of you. Because we’re needed. Because we’re are the smugglers of a bridge Equestria has to go through... And this is why that once I’m done, you won’t kill Filly… and you will leave this room and me behind to never return. You will leave me with her.

And if you don’t catch my point yet… You will. And if you still refuse to see the truth, then you’ll accept it… whether you like it or not. Because it’s the only thing you truly have left as your own. You’ve lost everything… but my words.

If I am to narrate you my tale, to show you what I had to do… was forced to do… I hope you’ll find a way to make yours the reasons behind all the mess that happened recently. There won’t be any ‘Once upon a time in the magical land of Equestria’ with me. I’m sorry. We’re just ponies who gave in the abyss.

My name is Vault Skin, and I’ll show you how I fucked up the Wasteland.”

ⱴ ⱷ ꜠ Ω ꜡ ⱷ ⱴ

Footnotes; Vault Skin, Class: Wanderer

Specials:

Strength, 6

Perception, 4

Endurance, 10

Charisma, 5

Intelligence, 5

Agility, 6

Luck, 4

[Welcome to Fallout:Equestria – Wish Machines]

[Enjoy your stay]

Prologue

Prologue

How does it feel trying not to fall asleep while being in the most precarious situation? Well, from my expert point of view, it’s slightly annoying…

‘Snip’

I jerked my head aside, a dull spike of pain shivering down my left ear.

“Ouch! Careful with scissors! You jerk!” I spat at my manedresser, struggling onto the largest shop’s angled chair, a large fabric thrust over me and a hot humid towel on my eyes, for security he had said.

I was just afraid of scissors… and knives… and needles… and files… everything that able to slice and cut through a pony’s hide. Dammit, my life had been threatened to end at the tip of an edge so much I had developed repulsion to anything enough sharp to kill. Somehow, I was glad I was a mare… I wouldn’t be able to shave myself if I had been gifted… well... that testosterone factory between a male’s legs.

“Oh sorry, Vault,” a stallion chuckled. “But with that shock of hair you’ve got, I can’t really see where your ears fall. How long has it been since the last time?”

“Two years,” I grumbled, feeling clumps of dirty and disheveled hairs fall onto the canvas covering me.

“See,” he snickered. “If you were to come here more often, you wouldn’t have suffered from my little misdemeanor.”

Well… big words. I was used to them with that poor rump of a stallion he was. Damn, memorizing names had never been my talent. Another shameful weakness he had remind me the second I had stepped in his shop. It wasn’t my fault, I traveled. I had never been able to come back here since the last time. It wasn’t even more my fault if caps didn’t flow out of my wallet to get a proper haircut regularly. Trading was a daily struggle in the wasteland.

“You shouldn’t be so cheap,” he admonished me. “You would gain to be beautiful.”

“Ain’t my job to be a pretty mare,” I growled.

“Suit yourself,” he playfully acknowledged my complaint.

I huffed. I wasn’t penny-pinching with that lad, I swear!

“You really ain’t easy to deal with, you know,” he neighed, struggling with the smelly tangled locks he combed and cut, paying no care to my whining.

“Ouch…” I sighed. “If you were kinder… Ouch! …With me.”

“What don’t you get rid of that big tiara of yours?” Did I have to go through that question every time I needed to socialize with somepony? “Because, it’s not making my job any easier.”

He was a clever boy, he had kept in mind how I had reacted to the sight of scissors flying over my head the last time. In this position, the towel over my eyes, I wasn’t given to see the mirror in front of me. But it didn’t matter. I had looked at my face so many times and shoveled down that constant headache to get that my ‘tiara’ wasn’t gone. It would never be.

“For a hundredth time… it’s rigged to my head. Like screwed, riveted, stuck, glued…”

He heard him shrug. The jewel, if you could call it so, was a one-centimeter thick strap of black metal circling my forehead. It stretched behind my ears until its two ends met above my backbone where my mane stopped growing. Across the years, time had attacked it, leaving a dark, almost wrecked, tiara. Once completely plain, the diadem was marred with indents that had stripped the paint away.

This item followed me everywhere with its constant, nearly invisible migraine. It was my own stupid, ugly crown, which ponies were used to giving me names, fearful stares, or curious glances from. In the Wasteland, differences were despised on, marks of the alien. And to be honest, I often felt like a stranger to myself.

I had been teased so much throughout the years I never stuck with any group, settlement, or pony. I wasn’t an outcast though. I referred to myself more like a mercenary, an escort, and sometimes a factotum. I was bound to side with nopony. A sad life in perspective. But I was given to travel and do something different from just surviving, scavenging the rotten remains of a society dead eighteen years ago.

“So Vault, whatcha gonna do?” my manedresser told me. “Heard you finished your job with the Talons.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I sighed, waving away his coming questions. “Had to help a group of Steel Rangers through the Wasteland’s northern regions. Happened that an Equestrian Army’s wrecked warship had ran aground in South Québeak. I wasn’t expecting they would ask me to escort back their finding to Baltimare.”

“Baltimare, that’s quite a long run,” he snorted back in surprise. “Haven’t they finally cleared a path to Tenpony Tower? After eighteen years?”

I grumbled. I had heard stories of Tenpony Tower… The mega spell that had hit Manehattan during the Last Day had been so disruptive thick greyish clouds of radiation had plunged the whole coastal region into a deadly darkness. Worse, the fallouts had stayed so concentrated and intense it even messed with the spell matrixes and regenerative talismans of the Steel Rangers’ power armors. Manehattan had had been a pit of silence, cut from the remains of civilization wandering about Equestria since. Yet, every status-quo was to change one day.

The rumor had spread like wildfire. A courageous group of Steel Ranger initiates, commanded by a paladin, had pierced through the crumbled city’s metro and found its way to Tenpony Tower. What they had found were survivors. Real survivors! Not the feral ghouls that commonly roamed inside those no pony’s lands. How they had survived for eighteen years was still unknown to me… Rumors were rumors, but the fact remained that over the five Steel Rangers that had roved in Manehattan’s deadlands, only three had come back. Apparently the survivors had reacted with violence to the group of heavily armored scavengers.

Many ponies had been laughing under cover to this half-failure. During the maybe six or five last years, the surviving rangers had gathered into cohorts and started a gory crusade, wrestling out of the dust the technologies lost after the apocalypse. A noble quest if you ask me… But kind words weren’t an excuse to the massacres they had originated. ‘Technologies over ponies’ were their motto from now on.

“Baltimare is a safe place,” I retorted. “But heck… we moved a warship cannon on more than seven hundred miles… a real pain in the ass.”

“A… cannon?” he pondered, hardly finding any truth my statement.

“Not any kind of gun,” I added. “A monster that shot rounds of sixteenth. Kinda something capable to saw off a skyscraper.”

“You just had to roll it down the hills,” he teased me with a sarcastic tone.

I glared daggers at him, the towel on my face blocking the way though.

“They just wanted to take the loading system out,” I grunted. “They didn’t expect it to be worth seventy tons. The operation lasted four months instead of one…” Feeling the sore muscles in my back and legs I let a long breath slither through my teeth. “At least I got a humongous pay.”

The stylist’s ears flapped happily at the thought that I was indeed going to pay for his services. He didn’t even hide his glee… Had I built such a reputation about being a bad customer? It wasn’t my fault if my wallet had nothing but dust and moths inside most of the time.

I groaned, completely exhausted by the journey. My job had been to scout around southern Québeak, making sure no random scavenger was going to disturb the operations. Some skirmishes with bandits and Talon’s remnants had happened, but that was all. Those four months had gone languidly, nearly boring me to death.

“Why did the Steel Rangers recruit you? They never rely on an external help.”

He was right. The rangers were notorious for their chauvinism, preferring to go naked into radiation rather than asking for help from wanderers like me.

“I have… had a debt toward a paladin,” I dropped.

“Oh…”

I wasn’t really answering the question, but at last it was better than just pissing the real reason out. Yeah, I was indebted toward one of the Steel Rangers’ paladins, but I hadn’t paid it back yet. The real reason was far less appealing.

A long silence settled between the two of us, only broken by the snips and snaps of his scissors over my messy locks. I could hear a few ponies walking outside of the shop, talking loudly as they passed by. Conversations were all about Tenpony Tower. Rumors indeed spread like wildfire. He took a long and muffled breath.

“So, how much do you weigh now?” he ‘subtly’ asked.

I snorted. And he said I was picky on money...

“A lot of caps and...”

The doorbell rang as somepony stepped into the shop, his horseshoes thundering on the creaking parquet. A coat flapped on the pony’s side as breeze engulfed the room, until he slammed the door shut.

“Sorry. I already have a customer, please come back in thirty min-”

The rattling of a weapon being unstrapped shushed my manedresser. His hooves started fidgeting and he deliberately fall back behind my chair...

“Don’t you dare move,” a stallion barked at him.

A clip being loaded in a chamber pinged on my far right, the newcomer’s hoofsteps echoing on the floor as he contoured my chair.

“Keep doing your job, wrinkled balls,” he spat.

Now cursed with irrepressible quivers, the scissors summed up their activity over my head. I bit my lips, he was going to needle me with the tips, again. Did I told you I feared pointy things?

I tried to hide my own tremor, to no avail. At least I benefited from that canvas to dissimulate my train of thought. Unfortunately, my hooves dwelled on the chair’s armrests and I couldn’t move properly. Enough said the wet towel on my eyes blinded me as well.

Chair legs screeched on the wooden floor as the aggressive stallion pulled a stool one or two pony’s lengths in front of me, somewhere a bit on the right.

‘Snip’

I gritted my teeth at the scissors, feeling their movements as they tickled the top of my mane. The security of his weapon tinged off and I slightly ducked my head between my shoulders. A drop of sweat trickled down my neck and I swallowed.

“What do you want?” I croaked.

The intruder pulled his chair closer and the cold bite of a barrel stung my cheek. Cogwheels whizzed and turned and… A power armor… he had a fucking power armor, even if it sounded scrapped and lighter.

‘Snip’

“Please stop,” I requested my manedresser, pleading his messy hooves and tools would stop touching the skin under my mane.

“Keep going,” he was ordered.

I was dead if I couldn’t find a way out of this situation. And those damn scissors! Stop.

“You stole something from the rangers, didn’t you?”

My ears perked up. My breath died. I would have vented my innocence but the tip of a gun pressed painfully into my skin. My heartbeat raced up and sweat moistened my face. His hoof petted mine on the armrest.

“Good,” he cracked. “You’re not going to fuck me up on this argument.”

“Why do you think I would?” I chatted, trying to gain time to think straight.

‘Snip’

If only that scissors could stop.

“In Baltimare, you’ve dealt with us. We paid you a lot of caps but still, you stole something in the archives.”

“You really think I would smuggle something out of the Ministry of Wartime Technology’s hub?” I sneered. “I’m not that dumb, you know. I wouldn’t fuck with an employer that pay me three times the common price for my services.”

He snickered. “Yet you still took something away from us. Vault the trespasser ain’t a pony that messes with the Steel Rangers. So now you’ve got two choices. First one, you give us back what you stole and the caps we paid you, and we won’t talk about it ever again. Or, I just have to kill you and justice will be served. For my brothers you’ve deceived.”

The hammer of his revolver clicked back, now armed and ready to fire a big caliber bullet right into my face and skull. The cold maw of the weapon ran across my skin, weaving to my right ear, then wandering to my eyes until it reached my forehead, stopping only under my leaded crown.

My face was burning, the tip of my hooves quaking imperceptibly under the cape collecting the fallen hairs.

‘Snip’

Oh, please… made that sound stop.

“I don’t have all my day, Vault Skin,” the ranger bleated. “I would dislike to kill you, you’re a good pony, helping. Just a shame you’re a little thief.”

Under the swab, my eyes shot open, aiming in the direction I thought he was. his gun waved around my head in an impossible way, resounding with the twinkle of telekinesis. So he was a unicorn.

“Comply, Vault,” he averted.

I would have paid to see his face as my grin grew onto my own, revealing teeth I knew were yellow, some missing, loose, or decayed by time and a lack of hygiene. Casually, I turned my head right. I had dealt with bandits before, this one was a poor bum trying to get some food in his stomach. He had tried to bluff me with something I never did.

“You’re not a Steel Ranger,” I emphasized and licked my lips. “First because Steel Rangers don’t give power armor to unicorns. Second, because the Steel Rangers don’t refer to me with my real name.”

His hoof hit my face and the towel jolted away, leaving a trail of water as it twisted in the air. It hurt but I was now able to see. I looked aside and met the eyes of a young brown male unicorn with a muddy yellow mane. His horn flared a buttery white glimmer which clenched onto his massive revolver. He indeed possessed a power armor. However, it was a downward wreck of shit, a wreckage of what I had been used to see back with the Steel Rangers, the real ones. The armor’s joints were pierced, its wires and tubes leaked, and whole plaques of metal had been torn away by bullets. He even seemed ill-at-ease in this cage of metal.

“Where did you find that crap gear?” I coughed out small splatters of blood. “On a cadaver?”

“Stop playing that game, cunt!” he cursed. “Just give me your caps, I know they paid you well.”

I gave him one of my exhausted looks. I was tired. If he had asked me my spare change I would have given him. Heck, I was rich! But not for long, though. Yet, he willed to take my life and my caps. The gun quit its position aiming at my head and descended toward my chest. He wouldn’t dare, killing him was out of question, he would have done so the moment he had entered the shop. My guess was that he wasn’t a killer, not a yet-to-be murderer. Just a poor err...

‘Snip’

He was still here… My really dedicated manedresser. Or he was just scared to hell to move any further. Yep... his drumming teeth were enough to know he had pissed himself. The odor was just another proof.

Grimacing with disgust at the stylist, the unicorn drifted his attention back to me and jabbed my neck with the cold embrace of his gun.

“Where’re the caps?” he insisted.

I tried to stand up but one powerful blow in the face shoveled me back in my sitting position.

“Stay where you are, with your hooves on the armrest.”

“If you want them, I’ll have to take you there,” I noted. “You really think I would keep all my stuff on me? I ain’t silly. It would be uncomfortable.”

“Don’t be so cocky, bitch!”

The swish of a knife being pulled out of its sheath petrified me in my sloping chair. I saw the glint of the blade passing over me, enveloped in a magical aura. Though he didn’t move, the unicorn swapped his gun with the short sword, aiming at the poor manedresser who curled up, dropping his scissors on the ground. My attention was all aimed on the short blade, rusty, smeared with coagulated blood, and broken at its tip.

“You, colt cuddler,” the robber intoned at my stylist. “Get me her stuff, or I blow up your sorry head.”

“You threaten bunnies with that tooth-pick?” I ironized.

The blade suddenly dropped at an inch of my neck. Screaming, I jerked and kicked in my defenseless position. My breath reached its maximum. My heart pumped haphazardly, it was going to jumped out of my chest. My eyes watered. I could see my reflection on the sharpened edge beyond the filth. A pale green mare with a black mane broken with tiny streaks of greenish white. Age had taken a toll on me since the last time I had encountered a mirror. For a second I even forget the mirror was an epée meant to cut open my carotids. I looked in my green eyes, dark rings of fatigue circling them. My jaw was shivering at the sight of the sword. Please, I hate them so much.

“You’re less chatty, eh?” he grinned at me before turning back to the stylist. “Hurry up, gimme the caps or I kill you.”

“D-...” I began.

The sword dropped and I froze. The feeling of the edge on my skin was pregnant. No blood was running out. That bastard had swiveled it to its unsharpened side in his movement. I saw myself crying as I met back my reflect in the rising blade’s body. I also caught fear and anger, teeth gritted to a point I thought they would shatter. Yet, I calmly hung my head, defeated. Or not… Nopony threatened me like that. No pony.

Fighting through my tears, my instinct crying at me that survival mattered, I stared aside at the unicorn, gathering all my spirit to muster a fine answer.

“Let him go,” I stumbled upon my words.

Well, it wasn’t like I had wasted a chance for an epic line… He chuckled back at me, finding reassurance in my hurried and stuttering speech.

“Otherwise what?” he spat at me. “I can see your two hooves. If you’re not growing a horn or a pair of wings in the seconds to come, I don’t know what an old runt like you can do.”

That burned. An earth pony in this situation was pretty useless. In fact, in my leisure time I had often wondered why earth ponies hadn’t run extinct in the Wasteland. Unicorn were far more useful in a daily survival, and today unicorns monopolized the few remaining job in the wasteland. I had to admit unicorns proved themselves far more efficient than us earth ponies. Even a unicorn bandit was scarier than his earth pony counterpart. To be honest, only the Steel Rangers were tipping the weights back to a balance.

The roof started drumming and ponies sought for shelters outside. Rain, and with its acid and radioactive droplets, forced ponies away, throwing the shop into a stark silence and chiaroscuro ambience. It only needed a lightning bolt and… Here was a flash… one, two, three, four… and the loud crack rammed on the walls, vibrating in unison. The wasteland, so chaotic but predictable at the same time.

I focused back on the stallion, my breath loud and heavy, my eyes wobbling back and forth on the blade and the pony waving it at me.

“Otherwise I’ll kill you,” I proclaimed, gulping down the lump in my throat. I could still feel the touch of the knife on my neck. “As sheriff of Hollow Shades.”

I tensed. Looking in his eyes was a difficult exercise, I was the one nearly strapped onto the chair, my hooves empty and seeable by everypony smart enough to look at them. And it I who was at the wrong end of a knife. My belly growled from the stress and my head had a hard time not to reel. Messing around in a tilted chair wasn’t among my qualifications.

Yet, I obtained a little respite. My statement sparked a bribe of fear in the stallion’s mind. I had expected he would laugh at me, and I would have shared in the laughter with him. But he simply glared at me with blank empty eyes. The silence overwhelmed the shop, the drumming of the rain and the dripping of water falling through a crack in the roof counting the time for us. Watches had stopped functioning a while ago.

The unicorn’s nose was sizzling as he inhaled slowly, probably broken in the past in a tug fight. Given to see him under a better light, suspense building up between the two of us, sweat hurtled down the wrinkles cast upon his young frowning face.

My heart clenched, giving place to a strange void feeling I could only fill with fear. My stomach retched as I struggled to maintain a decent poker face. His eyes riveted on mine, goggling me with a blend of unbelief and incomprehension.

“Hollow… Shades… ?” he hesitated.

“Yes,” I prompted with a hissing voice, aware his knife was lazily dropping over me in his lack of attention. “That’s my city.”

I breathed out in an effort to erase this impression of deafness in my ears. Blood rang in my eardrums, hassling my concentration.

“I’ve…”

‘BANG!’

The rumble was followed with the gargles of a body dropping on the floor, the stylist’s.

‘BANG!’

The unicorn’s eyes met mine.

“No, I…”

His magic flailed. His smoking gun and short sword fell on the ground. His stare slowly looked down at my hooves, still on their armrests, only a small hole was visible in the cap covering me, giving fumes. He lifted his hooves to his neck, groping clumsily where his Adam’s apple should have been. He only found a jetting open wound, smearing his brown fur with loads of dark red. His legs darkened with the blood’s color. His hindquarters staggered and failed him. Crumbling on his back, he didn’t even fight back the pain. His eyes vomited anger and bewilderment at me. Those eyes… gradually fading to a shade of black.

“The Steel Rangers didn’t only give me caps.”

I rose from my innate stance, my back giving cracking pops under the effort. I shake myself, letting my sore and asleep limbs drop on the ground. Chills ran beneath my skin as my fur rose on its root. The unicorn gunning me down with his crying eyes, I tapped the cape put on my body with my hoof. He followed me to the small hole where fumes still billowed through. His mouth was formulating one deaf question… why… or how…

“I’m a one trick pony,” I conceded. “You don’t teach a monkey how to make funny faces, though.”

I pulled off me the canvas. The expression of stupor on his face broke a sad smile on mine. For the whole duration of his crazed conversation, I had slowly moved beneath the cover. Only my two hooves unmoving on the armrests had lured him away from the true threat.

“You’ve never seen a powered work loader saddle?” I mused sadly. “Don’t worry. You’re not the first one… You won’t be the last.”

Turning my head back at my rump, a dusty battle saddle welcomed my sight. The two rivets where should have stood weapons gave their space to large hydraulic joints powering two humming mechanical prosthetics which wrists ended with four-finger claws. The right one seized up one large revolver stamped with the Ministry of Wartime Technology’s symbol, giving fumes from its bore. The other limb however was folded on my side, occupying the place of a would-be saddlebag. A laser beam handgun was clipped beneath, ready to be draw out as the limb would telescope. Completely built in metal, its edges were cushioned with a worn out leather that would irritate my skin. Maintained onto my back with locks easily distinguishable under the metal limbs, the saddle fitted closely with my starved curves. A keyhole was constructed in each side of the item, ready to welcome a terminal key to discharge the magical locking system that managed the fixation. Too bad I had lost the key years ago… I didn’t always take the largest chairs for no reason, and I wasn’t fat! The upper part of the saddle covering my back was occupied with a zooming spell matrix allowing me to control the machine. It was a beautiful piece of magic and technology, a property of the M.W.T. I hadn’t stolen, I swear!

The unicorn hiccupped before me, tapping onto my front hooves with his. Pleading eyes that refused to accept it was the end of the trail for him. Biting my bottom lip, I stepped closer and looked at the heavy tears rolling off his cheeks, melting with the blood for those which trickled from his neck. I sighed.

“I’m sorry,” I apologize. “I can’t do anything for you. It’s too late.”

A moan of pain erupted from behind the chair. I peered an eye beyond and saw the manedresser jerking and yapping about his shoulder. He might be a wimp, but he would survive. The other stallion however...

Watching over a dying pony was never easy. Especially if it was one you’ve just shot. I sat next to him and scanned his body. His blood expanding under his body was soon almost like a red lake. My fur soaked in the fluid, warm and smelly. Exhaling, I hunched over him and slipped my hooves beyond his shoulders. Straining on my muscles, I lifted him up to my chest, sporting the most motherly face I could draft. I sang a lullaby for the dying.

"Little filly, why are you weeping

While I'm watching over you?

Tell me, little filly, why are you crying

While I'm staying with you?

My thought are all for you,

Caring for every moment

For my girl I have and will pursue

Each simple enjoyment

There is a train, Little Filly

Heading to heaven’s gate

Crying freedom with mighty glee

Ready to take away the hate

Dry those tears, Lil’ Filly

The dark nights soon will end

Though the storm is chilly

The sun will surely ascend

Sadness is common load, Filly

I just hope you’ll find laughter

While everypony gonna knee

To the reaper mare’s cold brazier

Thank the time you will spend

to walk life with beaten cleats

Just be careful Filly where you wend

Be careful with the rails down the streets

Lil’ Filly, the train takes blindly

As long as you can, away from its tracks

Let the heart run ablaze in your thorax

The train awaits ildy, brashly... bluntly

Little filly, why are you sobbing

Remember I’ll always be right here

Little filly, stop your mourning

For you, I’ll never… disappear...”

Glassy and teary eyes dropped in their sockets, witnessing a nether I couldn’t fathom. With the same sorrowful smile, I leaned my head to his ear.

“I’m sorry,” I begged. “Hope the Ever-After will treat you well.”

I hauled him out of the puddle of blood, hearing it dripping off my kneecaps and belly. Scrapping the armor off his starving limbs, I laid him on the cape. Something as simple as a piece of fabric which had served to hide the slow movements of my prosthetic arm, an extension of myself that had, in the end, dealt him the final blow. Leaving him there, not like he was going to move anyway, I paced toward the stylist and put him right back on his three remaining working legs.

“You okay?” I eyed him with those ironic moves of my brows.

He was bleeding and grunting, but it was not something that would kill him. The glare he shot back at me said it all, he’d survive. I chuckled. He just stared back at me with scared, shaky eyes.

“I’m sorry I messed up your shop… and your shoulder,” I panted, feeling all the stress I had ducked back in my chest pour out of each of my pores.

Breathing loudly, I let my bum hit the floor in a crack. My coccyx and tail would hurt me for a few days. On his own, the stallion was wincing, sweating heavily as he bit on his tongue and lips to lower the pain. The tendons of his neck flapped under the rush of adrenaline, his eyelids shivered uncontrollably.

“And you,” he called, looking at me like I was a ghost. “You sure it’s okay. I’m just hurt. But you… Don’t you fear the blood.”

I laughed, a cackling which died in the instant as I raised slowly my head up to him, seeking for an excuse, and any kind of redemption in his look.

“Not the first time I killed,” I mourned. “It won’t be the last. And I’ve seen worse.”

I sighed at that painful truth. The wasteland was harsh on everypony. Few were given to live long and even if eighteen years only separated ourselves from the last day of civilization, it was far enough for challenging the spark of a pony we all were, remnants of the old world. I was more worried for the generations to come. Such acknowledgments as Celestia or Luna’s reign and visions would soon be forgotten, or would become forlorn myths. And like many ponies, I was wondering what was going to happen after this tipping point.

“And the song?” he found the courage to ask.

I would have preferred he didn’t.

“A song I wrote for my daughter… a long time ago,” I blubbered, feeling tears I couldn’t fight back crawling up to my eyes.

“Where is she now?” he brought forth.

“I don’t know… I don’t know anymore.”

Hiding my mood, I passed by his side and went to the stock room behind his stall where I knew he had stored my gear. I found a small torn brown coat, a cowmare’s hat, a heavy purse, and two pairs of leathered and metal reinforced horseshoes, worn out by endless walks. Putting the coat, the hat, and the shoes on, I hesitated to throw the purse upon my flank. My eyes met my bloodied side, hiding under a thick and glued layer a good half of my Cutie Mark. I caught the curious stylist’s look.

Even I often failed on how to properly describe it. A pitch black shield of a rectangular shape which bottom side was tapered into a point, slit open in its middle and closing on a strange dark green circle engulfed in imperceptible green flame. I concede it was a pretty badass Cutie Mark.

“Could I borrow a towel?” I chipped in, eager to waive away the topic. “Just to wipe off the blood.”

He hoofed me one. The next few minutes stretched to eternity trying to erase the red shade off my greenish hide, to no avail. I will need a bath. I chided myself, I lacked time for such a fancy leisure. It was time to hit the road again. I sadly looked at the stylist, waiting, observing me. I hung my head. I opened my purse and put a hoof full of caps in his. If we would have been in a cartoon, his eyes would have blasted with two equestrian notes, too bad we weren’t in one and that bits had fallen into disuse. You couldn’t hold value in something that wasn’t built to last.

“I’ll take care of the body,” I offered. “I don’t want that on your shoulders, nor on any of the ponies from that town. Just use my money for cleaning everything, and get a healing potion. The wound is superficial, but you know, infections come fast.”

“You sure you want to do it?” he demanded after a short nod. “I could get the undertaker.”

Walking to the corpse, I caught the ponies giving us fascinated looks through the windows of the shop. The rain had imperceptibly stopped and the gunshot had attracted passers-by like crows to a fresh carcass. Many were fillies and foals, dirty and malnourished, eyeing me with devouring eyes. Crows. I glared daggers in their direction and they fled.

I leaned toward the cadaver, eyes closed and the blood already clotting in his open throat. Somehow, a slight smile was drawn his lips. I closed his front hooves over his chest, folded his hind legs over him.

“Sorry I didn’t know you name,” I murmured.

Using the same absorbent towel, I washed off as much blood I could before closing the stylist’s cape over him. Working as an undertaker I supposed was a pretty grim vocation. But somepony needed to take the shift.

“How you’re going to move it?”

“Him,” I corrected. “I have a brahmane outside.”

“Wait, you’ve got one of those two-headed cows?”

I laughed.

“Don’t be silly. Those are legends. I have yet to see some of those mutated creeps that ponies say graze the wastes. I turned off toward here when I reached Fillydelphia’s borders. I just found that brahmane hanging around, and it was a tamed one.”

“Well, I’ve seen some big cockroaches in the region.”

“Radiation kills,” I stated. “And if it doesn’t, well… Celestia has mercy of your soul.”

I didn’t leave him the time to answer. I would be glad to avoid talking about ghouls. I pulled the packed body out, leaving a bloody trail in its stead. The cow was there, standing idly next to a bucket of murky water I had bargained at the saloon. The sky was bleeding out, aching and choking, the air drenched with thick reddish clouds that blocked the sun’s light, its slivers struggling to pierce through. The wind whizzed over my head, making the brass sun sculpture hung onto the top of the nearby church spin in an endless screech. The ground was moistened with rain, small rivers was weaving in the cracks, and soon my horseshoes would be covered in mud.

Throw in stark relief, the town was marred by a layer of red and sickened orange descending from the sky. Ugly and rotting houses creaked around me, and yet ponies survived here. It was a rather enjoyable sight, if not purely depressing. But as I’d just said, they outlived the many ordeals of a merciless daily life, barely. Skin over bones, sunken cheeks, and bulged out eyes struck my sight. Seeking for something more reassuring, I looked up beyond the decaying roofs that populated the small city. Beyond the distant I found my eyes stuck on the sharp steep of a massive mountain… Foal Mountain, going straight from Canterlot’s peak to the outskirts of Fillydelphia. The Western part of the chain was delimited by the bed of a dried river that had evaporated with the balefire. I also nurtured memories of the tips of Foal Mountain being covered by the white embrace of snow. Today it was just an ugly shade of brown, grey, and red sprouting like a bad pimple toward the blocused sky. My hometown was beyond that mountain, but it was dangerous to clamber it, ponies have disappeared on its slopes. The cold hacked them away, or something else might have. My way was to hike around the mountain to finish my journey. The city I was in marked the location where the ancient river forked toward the south. Junction was its name.

I hoisted the wrapped body over the brahmane’s back which snorted at the new and disturbing load.

“Do this for me,” I gently asked the creature, rubbing its chin. “It won’t be long.”

The cow carried a large saddlebag I had darned back to a rather good shape. I had emptied though, I hadn’t been trustful in leaving it unattended with food and supplies while being given a haircut… haircut… I growled. I hadn’t finished the session. Turning around, the stylist was waiting in the threshold of the door. With the dim sunlight, I was finally given a proper view on his traits. He was a grey turquoise unicorn with a brownish orange mane falling behind his ears. His thin legs looked even slender, a long lasting lack of nutriments was to blame. His flank sported white and grey open scissors. He smiled at me.

“My name is Snips by the way.” He blinked at me, setting my cheeks on fire.

His hoof on his shoulder, blocking the blood from flowing out too quickly, he trotted to the nearest medical centre, leaving small smears of blood behind. I hung my head low and took my only cattle to the nearby food shop. I had a long way to go back home.

Finally, I went my own way and stepped out of the city, lonesome and battered by those time of wrongness. The brahmane humming in the air, I cast a last glance at the old isolated town of Junction. Everything was a shade of yellow, orange, and red… An atmosphere of death and reclusion.

Days passed as I walked along the waterless bed of the Foal Mountain’s river, each one of them making the high slopes of Canterlot’s peak bigger and bigger in the horizon. The sky above the ancient capital was swamped with pinkish clouds, which forced ponies to avoid that place like the plague. Strange stories circulated about monsters and inventions of the devil hiding among the ruins. I wasn’t enough brave enough to check it by myself.

A week had flown by when I reached the end of foal mountain’s ridges. Canterlot was only twenty miles from there. Its look only was sufficient to wash me with a retching impression of emptiness. I had visited Canterlot in the past, before the bombs. I wasn’t ready to excavate the past from the ruins. The past… I had been told once that a beautiful architecture is what makes beautiful ruins. I didn’t remember who had said that, a wise pony for sure, and he was right. The world was deeply ugly to my eyes; the truth was the world had always been ugly to begin with. Even in the wasteland there was a kind of continuity.

Contouring Foal Mountain, I headed toward the East in Manehattan’s direction and soon I followed the tracks of an old rusty railway, which had connected the big metropolis with Canterlot. The railway was not a single straight trip toward the coastal city. The tracks forked after their detour near of Neighagra Falls toward the South, a large forest hung to the north face of Foal Mountain. There, deep beneath a once green ocean, ponies could find a medium-sized city wearing the sweet name of Hollow Shades. My hometown. The city I was responsible for as a sheriff.

From Junction it took me two weeks to reach the border of the Hollow Forest. The trip had been spent lonely with a wasteland and a cow for some companions. I was used to it though, at least since the bombs had dropped. Trees had been scrapped off their leaves. Birds died long ago and their chirping, long forgotten. Even the color green was something eerie today. And without my own pale green hide, I would have thrown that piece of basic knowledge into oblivion. It was amazing how ponies could forget such basics if they weren’t used to deal with them on a daily basis.

Cracks splitted the road in the Wasteland, giving space to a yellowish weed growing among the fissures in the asphalt. The white paint of the marking had been scratched away and the blackness of the coating had turned grey and brown with dirt and sand.

The road… The road stopped at the border of the forest, leaving a narrow beaten path next to the disused railway.

The Hollow Forest itself had once bore the leaves of the deepest green. But today, it was nothing but a gigantesque orchard of burnt black, crooked, and disgusting trunks which branches pointed at the absent sky, imploring mercy to the princesses. Maybe they were howling at the hidden sun, the excruciating pain the Last Day had spread across Equestria. I would never know. I just stepped on the path with my brahmane, alone with those blackened ribs of long gone life.

Like many things in the wasteland, the Hollow Forest was stuck in a bubble of time and utter silence during the day. Unsettling and mind-wrecking, the forest was cast in shadows that fought back the weak sunlight. Wandering deep in its meanderings was an ordeal, similar to moving through the dusk during the few minutes before all light had died in the horizon. By night, I was huddling myself close to the cow, both seeking for the little warmth we could snatch out of each other. I was afraid of lighting a fire in such a place. I did once. If the forest was creepy by day… The night was the nest of my deepest fears. The hot embers rising in the air blasted across the field of dead trees relentless and mangling shadows that twisted, turning into improbable shapes that gave my mind terrific hallucinations to chew on. Never again I would use my lighter here. You didn’t light a torch in the Hollow Forest. You just keep your rank, hiding, waiting immobile for the sun to rise again behind the cloud cover.

If the forest was dreadfully silent by day, the night was a nightmare of low, recurring sounds. Trunk cracked in heavy thumps, their dead black fossilised branches waving under an absent wind. I always closed my eyes during those moments, when your superstitious brain rambled on that the night was going to swallow you whole like a nameless god’s mouth, crunching your bones apart and sucking your blood out. I was curling up, putting my hooves onto my ears, waiting for sleep to take over me.

It was the last night before I finally made my way back home and it was as dark as ever. Stars had deserted my nocturnal life since eighteen years and the light pouring out of the moon was not strong enough to carry a glitter through the cloud cover. The trees moaned and their darker than black shadows tweaked and hacked in my eyes. I could feel the shivers running through the cow. It sought for a refuge under my shoulder. A root cracked within a stone’s throw, and I perked my head low, sniffing. My trembling hoof reached the cow’s saddle. I ransacked its bottom and stopped on the object of my thoughts. Pulling it out, I skidded on the pocket’s leather strap and the item bounced off me, bashing over the top of my head until it hit the ground in a bone crack.

Fearing a forest and shadows that I knew couldn’t hear or smell us, I stretched my hooves and caught the thing. Protective, I curled over the round object. It was a cold curvy ball with two large gaps encasing a smaller triangular shaped one. The whole stood over an articulated part which edge tickled my skin beneath my fur. A skull...

Rolling over, encasing between my hooves the thing, I coiled myself against the cow’s smelly belly and it did the same with its head. Whistling softly, I waited for the night to eat me away. Sleep only came one of two hours later.

The morning struck me like a punch in the gut. Sipping some poorly purified water, I chewed and swallowed some preservative-soaked cereals. Everything was bought from a store back in Junction, even the food for the cow though it could sustain itself with the grass along the way.

Taking one of the leather straps of the Brahmane’s saddle bag, I tied the skull to it and hit the road once again. Drizzle was raining from the sky as the sun reached noon. We passed by an antique plaque marking two miles before Hollow Shades. Grass and mangled thorns wrapped the rails, pointing out that no train had rolled down this track for two decades.

The more I moved forward, the more the land slowly lost its cover of dead trees, giving on a dust-saturated ground devoid of relief, eerily plane and sloping toward a city that could welcome thirty thousand souls. I smiled. I was back home.

As always, foals played next to the walls of the cottages, their soccer ball thrust in the air. As always an atmosphere of decay glowed out of the houses. Many had their roofs destroyed, knocked off walls and the doors and other wooden infrastructures bore the marks of flames and time.

“Hi, Munchkins,” I greeted the foals with their balloon, who didn’t looked at me, absorbed in their game.

I shrugged. I passed by the bakery and saluted the old mare standing idly behind her stall, always waiting for a client. Among the many habitations where ponies hung around the terraces or the inner yards, many shops still showed off their logos.

The first was Brewy’s Emporium with its rows of jars behind dusty windows. Behind the door stood the shadow of the tenant. The poor old buck managing the place was kinda paranoid, spying on everypony entering the city. At least, I was a known face. Silly Snake’s shop was built between two massive ten stories high council housings which ruined facades watched upon me with as many eyes as they had windows. The buildings’ white paint had washed away with a thick cover of grey and brown. Silly Snake was a joke shop like many, its pediment once a bright green had stripped off the roughcast.

“Howdy?” I asked the tenant, keeping my path down the road.

I waved at her but she never answered, occupied with customers. I could see their silhouettes being deflated balloons. I would need to ask the next traders to bring back some tubed helium. I walked by and reached one of the many squares of the city. A large pond gifted with a magnificent fountain sculpted in Luna’s traits was standing by its center, jetting a continuous dash of murky water. Moribund moss covered Luna’s brass features, leaking from its rivets a greenish goo that oozed over her perfect body. The repair pony hadn’t come for years. I sighed and passed by.

The square was covered by the unique shadow of a massive building, a monolith of black metal bearing the symbol of the Ministry of Wartime Technology, a set of gears surrounded by an apple-shaped box, with a sword bisecting through the middle. Standing solely with its one hundred feet tall size, it was an intimidating sight. No windows gave on the inside. It always left me the feeling of a scar in the middle of Hollow Shades. It had helped Equestria in the war effort, though.

Before the main entrance stood a statue of her minister, Apple Jack. The sculpture who’d been five ponies tall had slopped on its side, crumbled, and shattered into bits over the dusty marble stairs of the entrance. The guilty mechanism was still visible, an intertwining of rails and pistons that had pushed the construction aside, revealing a massive and dark deep missile silo. The hub had been a launch facility during the war, holding on a megaspell missile aimed at the far away lands of the Zebras. The silo was now empty. I had never been inside the facility. I was curious but not insane. I guessed the basement of the hub would remain an abstraction to me.

After a moment of sad contemplation, I fell back to the fountain, touring it to reach the other side of the square. I saw the candy store, with its usual queue of greedy ponies. The comic book shop was next. Foals used to stay inside, reading idly all the pages they could before their mothers exited the market store nearby, ready to go back home.

Everypony was acting silent, respecting their order as always. Waiting stoic, as always. Taking off the saddle of the brahmane, I slapped its butt and it ran away.

“Make sure you’re not eaten by a rad monster,” I cried out in laughter.

Wiping a tear off my face, I swiveled on my hooves and finally faced the end of my journey. I stepped on the creaking wood stairs of a famous place of mine. Built in concrete, stamped with a balloon triangle, one yellow and two blue, the sheriff office of Hollow Shades stood proud with its sole ground floor, constructed plain pied with my cottage behind. Two rocking chairs awaited under the office porch. One was already occupied.

“Thanks for taking care of my badge, dude,” I smiled, taking the six dusty golden star off the wobbling armrest.

I pinned the insignia on my brown trench coat, pushed the office door, and threw the cow saddle into the room. I sneezed. Dust was everywhere, covering every piece of furniture and items strewn over the place. With a swing of my hindquarters, I bucked a lever on and a humming noise engulfed the police office as the light slowly brightened over my head. One flared and exploded in a small rain of glass.

“At least water’s still running,” I cheered.

Before the war, the city was fueled with a coal power plant located outside of the Hollow Forest. The Balefire striking Equestria had put an end to that and Hollow Shades had to go back to its ancient way. Before this time of necessity, I had barely been taught that an underground river was running below the city. In fact it was that geographic wealth that had permitted the city’s erection. With the industrial revolution, the first electric power brought to the city had come from a turbine built in the cavities hundreds of feet below the surface. Apparently, it was still turning. One by one, electronics woke up behind a desk set up at the back of the office, next to a row of cells.

“So, bandit, you still there?” I sniggered, tapping my hoof against the bars. His silhouette waited in the back of the last cell, curled up above a pitiful bed. “I hope the others treated you well.”

No answer… I sat in the chair in front of my desk and tapped the tip of my hoof on the ‘enter’ key of the terminal’s board. I unsheathed my two hoof guns and put them aside on my bureau and took a comfortable position in the seat. I spread the content of my purse next to them and a few caps fell off the desk’s edges. I dropped my shoulders, feeling all the tension in my muscles stiffening my movements. Time was to be lazy.

Today was a good day.

The radio burst out cracks, eighteen years it had stayed silent, only barking static at me. I had kept it switched on, no matter what, ponies might call for help. Typing on the terminal, a series of small screens displayed on my left attracted my attention. Hitting the same key repeatedly, I checked Hollow Shades’s CCTV. Some had died during my absence and over the ten sprite-bots I once had, only four still worked, floating right out in the streets, searching for proof of sedition among the population.

I saw the same foals, mares, and stallions in the streets, deformed into black silhouettes by the old and expired cameras of the town. Bored, I looked at the cow saddle and took it on my laps. Stretching a hoof to its bottom, I wrestled out the skull. Diligently, I laid it on the keyboard, for it to face me.

“I already told you I was sorry,” I argued. “You were the first to attack me, and you were threatening that stallion… what was his name alr… Snips! You could have just asked me and I would have shared some bits with you, but noooo… you had to make all that mess.”

I sighed, the skull looking at me with those two deep pits of black.

“Oh, don’t give me that look,” I scolded him, grabbing it between my legs. “oh fuck you, go with your brothers.”

I took the skull off the keyboard and leaned on my right. It would fit with the others, all assembled in a small pile. I was far too lazy to count, but that wasn’t a problem. I saluted them all.

Tilting my body back toward the saddle, I found inside a small rectangular plaque of plastic and metal. I play amusedly with the cassette between my hooves for a minute or two. Clumsy, I messed up one of my juggling and the tape bounced off my hooves and fell on my right. Growling, I spread to reach it. It had tucked the skull, left on the top of the pile. I looked at it with wide eyes.

“Oh, come on,” I pouted. “I know, you gonna bash me ‘cause I lied.”

Yes, sort of. Back in the warship’s remains, I had forced open the captain’s cabin and took out one of its records. Steel Rangers disregarded remnants of the past that differed from valuable technology. They never knew, they wouldn’t have to. It was my secret with the skull.

“Hey, it’s just a radio record,” I snorted. “The wasteland is just so silent… Hollow Shade’s so dead it’s deafening.”

And it was, really. I put the tape in the radio station. A rising crescendo followed by a unison of stallions and mares cracked out of the old speaker. The sweet rhythm in my ears, I left my sitting and wandered to the nearby kitchen. My prosthetics extended and snatched a sealed bottle of hooch and a dusty glass. On the brink of leaving the room, I caught the grizzling counter on the table, ticking toward the red. In a spiteful huff I pushed it off the edge; it broke when it reached the ground. I walked out, the bottle and the glass twinkling in each of my metal claws.

“Across the Equestrian’s borders

Are creatures which roam, roam, roam...”

Sitting in the empty rocking chair, I glanced at my close neighbour.

“Want some?” I asked, expecting no answer.

The rocking chair was just reeling with the wind. My stare bore on the distance. Far away, beyond the children’s silhouettes, the mares’ shapes, and the stallions’ shades, the border of the city stood lonely.

“Afar from places where the sun glows

Are wonders nopony saw, saw, saw...”

There, one large pole carried a long, shredded, and pitch black standard whipping in the wind, alone just like me.

“From the deepest caves to the highest peaks

Are ghosts of the past wai- aiting.”

Next to the pole was a large slab of metal printed with the name of the city, Hollow Shades. Beneath, the number thirty thousand five hundred seventy two was crossed, replaced by one single digit, as lonely as I.

I was finally back in Hollow Shades. A city of damned. A city of black contours cast onto the walls. A city of many winds moaning prayers from the past. A city bearing the eternal ashes of the dead. A city of still standing screaming corpses, blackened but vigilant. A city of countless smiles, eyes, and shapes carved into the vitrified dirt.

I turned my head to the other rocking chair and stared at the ashy shape of a stallion blasted into the carbonized wood. I smiled.

Hollow Shades, a city of children’s shadows burnt into the brickrock. I was finally back home…

“Home. Sweet. Home...”

ⱴ ⱷ ꜠ Ω ꜡ ⱷ ⱴ

Footnotes; Vault Skin, Class: Wanderer, Level Up

New Perk: “Good to be back home”

Could it be a feeling of déjà-vu or memories, this place keeps a special room in your ablaze heart.

You gain +5% in Speech and Survival in the places you’ve already visited.

Chapter One - Hit the road, wrack!

Chapter One: Hit the road, wrack!

“Every road beckons. No matter where they lead, each has a distinct story to tell.”

Growling with a grisly pout cast on my face, my left prosthetic arm grabbed the last of my rooks and slid it aside the chessboard between my defeated ranks of pawns, knights, and bishops. They were already too many to count as I gave a sigh.

“Damn it!” I rasped, struggling not to hack my hoof through the remaining standing pieces to end the mock game and the humiliation.

“Check,” a stallion’s voice chuckled, picking my ears through a receiver stretched off behind the chessboard, crackling with static.

Built into one of the remaining wall sockets, the military radio sent whirring noises in fits and starts; the only interruption in a series of long unnerving silences.

“Your move,” he mentioned with a teasing and slurring voice.

“Oh, come on!” I shouted to the idle piece of scrap metal. “How can you be so strong at chess? You’re not even looking at the board!”

“Not my fault if I have a good memory,” he giggled. “And maybe… I say maybe… I have my own chessboard to keep track of the challenge… well… if you could call that a challenge.”

His laughter set my cheeks ablaze. I bit my lower lip and swept the sweat of my forehead, my hoof joints popping out as I glared daggers at the receiver. With a victorious grin, I moved forward one of my pawns, the tips of my metallic claw biting in the dirty plastic of the piece.

“Bishop, e, two,” he claimed so quickly I hadn’t had the time to lay the pawn down the wooden plaque.

I studied the chessboard with dumbfounded narrow eyes, eyeing my pieces sternly, eagerly searching for the motives behind his choice. My eyes followed the path of a knight toward my line of scattered pawns and found my king was trapped, again.

“Check,” he snickered.

My ears burning, I roared and threw the pawn across the room, turning my back to the board. I heard the piece bounce on a wall and roll under a nearby furniture, grating over the parquet. I slapped my face.

“Really?!” I grumbled. “How can you do that? I haven’t told you what I was going to play.”

I rose my eyes, the seeping smirk reeking off the receiver throbbing in my mind. Staring at the ceiling was not that bad after all… At least better than looking dumbstruck at my defeat. The greyish lintels had bent under the weight of the years, struck with slithering fissures, their dark brown varnish trickling into layers with slivers of dust.

“Not my fault you’re that bad at chess,” he huffed. “Even more if you’re that predictable.”

Chewing on the inside of my lips, bulging my cheeks with air, I sighed and focused back on the game.

“I’m sorry, Monsieur Moebius, if it’s the only game I have.”

Couldn’t he just stop laughing at me? It was… just humiliating.

Moebius, also known as ‘the little fucking trickster’, was an abrasive annoyance for many, but I knew he could be a kind pony. I had met him a long time ago, back during one mission I had signed for hadn’t turned quite well. His help had taken me out of a faux-pas. The guy was a pure genius as a scavenger and stealthy throat-slicer, a fucking bastard if you ask me. But, if I had one advice for anypony, it would have been not to trust him on a daily basis.

The bad sportmare I was wondered why I was still talking with him. Well, I hadn’t seen anypony else in Hollow Shades to play with in a long while… The question: “How had the stallion gotten my number?” was still vivid in my head. I wasn’t mad at him for breaking into my private life... finding the right number and a line that still worked was amazing.

“You want to play another round?” he asked, probably grinning at me from the other side of the receiver. “It’s a guessing game.”

“I don’t like that kind of stupid,” I grunted. “Spit it out.”

“You’ve got some visitors.”

The connection broke, leaving the room silent, empty. Prostrated, I sit unwaveringly for a few minutes, my breath and heartbeats the only sounds reaching my ears. I looked at my desk in the back of my office, next to its emptied cells, an orange light was glowing from behind my monitors.

“Oh, fuck me,” I gurgled, forcing my shaky, achy hooves to stand up.

I hopped to my desk. Its many screens were flaring a painful muddy green at my eyes as I sat in my wheeled comfy chair, one larger and not meant for ponies in the first place. But, as I couldn’t pull my strange battle saddle off, thanks to the fact that I had lost the key a while ago, I was deemed to sit in an uncomfortable position that made me jerk and twist more than often. Snaking in the chair, I listened to the terminal’s speakers, bipping stridently in unison, a reddish diode glowing over my keyboard. Nothing good was coming out of this.

I glared back at the radio, troubled that Moebius had hinted something was ahoof before I did. Anxious, my heart clenched at the idea the radio dissimulated a camera, spying on each of my movements from the shadows. Heck, call it a Ministry of Morale complex, but eighteen years after the end of the world I was still afraid of the sprite-bots eyeballing me from the next street corner, at least when I was not in control. Those little balls of metal creeped me when they were wandering about, whether silent or blasting a thousand times rewinded pre-war music.

I stared at my monitors, their degraded quality making me want to bulge my screwed eyes out. Many pixels had died throughout the years, their happy green light melted into a murky and painful glow. I focused. Pressing repeatedly over my keyboard, I narrowed my eyes to picture shapes out of the pixelated images, seeking for an intruder inside the city. Maybe Moebius had just messed with my paranoia…?

The night wrapped Hollow Shades into a thick dark blanket, the wind’s roars flinging the remaining shutters on their creaking and jolting hinges; a torture through my terminal’s obsolete speakers. Gritting my teeth, I forced myself to listen to the low and discordant cacophony.

A series of pushed keys later while fighting my head throbbing, the screens switched to the western entrance of the town. There, the black tapestry was still whipping over and over again on its pole, the violent breeze blasting the contours of the lonely fabric. Sole passer-by, the dust swept past across the two walk-paths of the alleys, weaving between the cracks of the road. As usual, shadows were carved into the walls and asphalt, beaming off a reeking, darker than black sludge that spiked jerks and sweat down my spine. Hoofmarks stamped the ground, tracing a trail toward the inner parts of the city. A moment of victory later where I believed I had found a burglar, I grumbled my dissatisfaction out. Those were just mine.

Getting bored faster than ever, I zapped between different scenes like I did decades ago with my old TV, searching for a camera displaying a useful angle. That many were long dead wasn’t helping at all. Yet, one caught my attention. It monitored a large boulevard of the eastern part of the city I had always been reluctant to wander in, an industrial area cast into a lid of creeping shadows, teasing my heart in discomfort. The ruins were as terrifying as a ghost city could be in an era of world’s ending. The area had always bore the traces of the apocalypse more than the western side of the city. I winced, the wind moaning on top of the chimneys and through the scrapped metallic façades made my speakers grunt despicably. Phantoms’ pleads in my ears. I zapped and… I blinked at my monitors with blurry eyes. A zoomed in, carbonized, toothless, cracking, and dangling open mouth welcomed me.

“Aaaah!” I jerked out of my chair, my bum and head hitting the floor with a huff of dust.

My breath uneasy, I looked at the ceiling for a moment that stretched to eternity. I hauled my hoof to my ribcage, feeling my heart trying to rip it open and fly away out of fear. Damn it, I hated when a cadaver was hanging in front of my CCTV…

“You sure somepony lives here,” a feminine voice beckoned, muffled by something covering her mouth. “Who would stay in such… hole?”

Struggling to get my breath under control, I crawled to my seat and rolled my hoof onto the keyboard, seeking for a better view. Between abandoned rusty delivery carts, two ponies in heavy barding were hitting the street toward the Hollow Shades’s center, drawing large circles around the mummified corpses strewn across the roads. Slow and uneven, their pace suffered from sore hooves that came from a probably long walk. I forced my eyes to catch their worn out features despite my screens and the darkness outside, leaving me nearly stranded. It wasn’t my night.

“Well, a pony does inhabit the place,” a stallion noted with a deep voice, rolling his tongue with a characteristic pop before he looked asides, checking the crossroad before him. “I guess we have to trust the paladin, she was not really happy to tell us where her old friend was living. But it was necessary. What we’ve been charged to do is of the utmost importance. We can’t fail.”

My ears perked up at the mention of the Steel Rangers’ rank, they had talked to the Paladin I owed, and she gave them my location. The mention of a quest or whatever was also… disturbing. I licked my lips and craved for a better point of view.

Activating a sleeping sprite-bot with my terminal’s override code, I forced it to float over a nearby factory’s crumbled roof, opening over a chain production line that hadn’t moved for a long time. Maneuvering clumsily, it stationed stealthily over the duo. Willing to take a broader look, I turned its zoom to its maximum. Though the green shaded computer screens blew any sense of color, I could still see their cloths and equipment. Heavy, ragged, and dusty.

The mare’s long and disheveled mane fell on her face as she was struggling with a bulky gas mask, its strap falling loose on her temples. Holding the protection with her left front hoof, she was hopping with difficulty on her three other legs, striving to catch upon her companion.

“Stupid. Earth. Pony. Gear!” she grunted.

Two steps ahead, the stallion granted her with a scowl and a wink. “Well, if you hadn’t been a dick to the merchant, he would have provided you some better stuff. Like, you know… something useful for a unicorn.”

She smirked back, shielding herself with a laughable pride.

“He tried to rob us!”

“That’s called business.”

“Yeah, I still…” her right forehoof tripped in a bump of the asphalt. Muzzle first, her face hit the dirt in a loud thump. Butt toward the sky and hoof sprawled over the road, she swore inaudibly, her mouth forced shut by her own weight forcing on her jaw. Breathing puffs of dirt over her mask, its glass protection shattered, she eyed her companion in silence. He hoofed her a small IV bag filled with RadAway, a straw piercing its top, offering her a single raised eyebrow from behind his own glass helmet.

“Want some?” he said, grimacing over the rancid and horrid taste of the orange liquid in its plastic pack.

I chuckled, my voice echoing in the sprite-bot’s speaker.

And a long, long… very long silence followed.

I blinked at my monitor, the duo slowly looking up at the hovering sprite bot one or two pony-length over their head. I scrunched my nose at my screen as the three of us spent an unsettling pause scanning each other, well… my robotic emissary. Only my teeth biting on my lips kept me from laughing. Yet, I couldn’t stop my recurring snorts. The stallion screwed his eyes at the bot with curiosity. The mare however glared daggers at it, keeping her proctologist examination stance up, her eyes cursing it for her bad luck.

“Wasn’t me,” I blurted through my microphone, pressing on the bot’s retreat command.

“Catch it!” the mare blared at her stooge, pointing at the metallic parasprite with a hoof. Her mask fell in response and she roared her rage out.

Losing no time, the stallion flashed forward in the robot’s tow through the Hollow Shades’ streets. Making it fly by the pipes and pass under the bridges, I sometimes found the time to cast a glance back. Sweating over his leathered gear, the stallion wasn’t inclined to give space to me. The hopping mare, on her own, had nearly disappeared far behind. Not so comfortably seated in my chair, I found the mouse and cat game enjoyable. It could go on for hours. But like everything, it had to have an end…

A bell rang out across Hollow Shades, sending shudders through the concrete, walls, and cracked windows. The glass twinkled and shattered, the doors flung shut, and one or two standing cadavers slopped down the dirt in a retching flopping noise. City roaring under Midnight’s beckon. A call from outer space echoing to the underworld. The stallion and I gradually slowed down until we stopped, looking away toward the darkest alleys of the town. A chill crawled over the city, blanketing everything with a cold feeling of emptiness. Void.

The bell clattered once again. Vibration through my bones.

Eyes wide, I jumped out of my chair. My knee tangled in my keyboard cable. My installation crumbled on the ground as I fell head first, my chin hitting the parquet rather violently. Fear shooting quivers down my spine, I grappled a large blanket, wiping the sweat off my forehead at the same time, took my guns, and ran outside. I hoped I wasn’t already too late.

“Ah, ha! Gotcha!” the stallion mocked in the interphone far behind me as I left, his hooves tinkling onto the sprite-bot.

The bell gave another tremor. I rushed through the threshold of my office door. Its clock hung on its wall over the three balloons heraldic, dead for eighteen years. I couldn’t slack. My hooves stomped the ground, cracking the thin layer of vitrified mud beneath the dirt and scraps scattered around. The distant bell boomed in my ears. I was already late.

The bell tolled a ninth time as I reached a crossroad, the one the duo had passed by earlier. Deserted.

“Fuck,” I spat.

A sound of rumble in my back forced my head to jerk.

“There’s a pony right here!” a crystalline voice pealled.

The mare faced me, her features and colors broken by the darkness, the stallion standing behind her, a hoof hung around my sprite-bot. I cringed back as a sliver of starlight briefly illuminated the city block through a hole in the cloudy sky. Running with sweat, spitting loads of steam with my raucous breath, two bloodshot eyes maring my face, I glared death at them. They stepped backward as my two mechanical arms stretched out of my sides and grabbed them by the collars.

The tenth bell modulated the sharp cold of the night.

I kicked the robot out the stallion’s grasp and pulled both of them toward the nearest building while they vainly bit down on the metal limbs to free themselves. The mare shrieked, the cold embrace of my prosthetics needling on her skin. I bucked the entrance door open with my earth pony’s strength. It fell into pieces as two decades of caring disdain had rotten it away. The eleventh bell clacked as I found a narrow storage room, pushed the two rash intruders inside and closed the trail behind. I locked the door as the twelfth bell ring zoomed and I stared back at the two bemused ponies, my guns dangling on my sides, my two additional limbs whizzing on their cogwheels, and a siren’s howl rising from the depths of hell around the city. A world’s ending appetizer.

The mare opened her mouth and I stuck my hoof in.

“Hush!” I ordered through a whisper. “Fools!”

“What’s…?”

“Shush!”

I flung my blanket over the three of us, curled up, forcing my two stooges down with my cold steel claws.

“No move, no sound, and we might survive,” I whispered, tears breaking off my eyes before I began my pleading, the siren muffling my voice. “Please maketh them go away, Celestia. That in thy beaming embrace the death flies over us but does not stop.”

“Who?” The mare fidgeted on her hooves.

“That thy eyes keep the shadows at bay… Those of the unrests. Maketh them go away, that they absent hooves leave no crack in the house, that their breath does no sound, and that their missing eyeballs do not stare at us, for it means to die. Please, Celestia, giveth us hope, keepeth the shadows away, for dead must not blend with the livings.”

I closed my eyes, listening to the deafening siren blasting through the house bricks and foundations, attentive to the creeping cracks of the walls, caring about the crawling winds weaving through the unwatched fissures. The locked door slammed and jerked on its hinges and lock, an eerie storm roaring behind. The three of us snuggled in each other’s shoulders. The room was unbearably cold.

“The shadows,” I whispered. “Don’t look at them. They will eat your hearts.”

I felt the mare shiver in my hug. Whimpers, hiccups, and tears.

“Soon they will away,” I concede.

“Mom…” the stallion muttered.

Humming over the roofs of the town, the wind twisted and turned outside, wobbling the door like a maddened pony eager to break in. I kept us below the blanket, the warming air slowly impregnating the makeshift hideout with our own stench of fear and stress, a spicy reek added to the whole. Minutes flew past, and the siren finally began to die in the distance. I rose my head from under the blanket and stared into the two pairs of twinkles before me, the duo’s eyes. One of them had peed all over the place and I felt my skin soaking bit by bit.

I licked my lips, pushed the cover aside, groped the wall with my hoof and switched the light on. The lamp exploded in light, showering us with glass. Gasping, the mare sought for a refuge below the stallion’s powerful shoulder, undoubtedly an earth pony. A chuckle grew stronger deep within me as I let the silence between the three of us sink in like a rusty knife in a wound. I took a long and deep inhalation, stared at them and giggled with a wide grin that presented a range of yellow teeth.

“Well, hope you enjoyed the thrill ride and the big drops on Stallion Mountain. The attraction opens once a day at midnight when the bell rings across Hollow Shades,” I said with a low snicker. “The first ride is always free. The direction refuses to pay for your cleaning.”

“What?” they shrieked in unison.

I dodged the febrile mare’s hooves, trying to strangle me in the dark. Clumsy, ashamed by the pee splattering her hindquarters, she dropped by my side, her back hooves intertwining in my wet blanket. I raised a brow at her exposed bum, her horn suddenly glowing orange. I walked away from her disincarnated grasp and my rump hit the stallion’s forelegs. A sudden flash of light lit on his face. An electric torch between his hooves. The room suddenly thrown into stark relief, the two peers laid an eye on me as much as I eyed them back with a low playful smile, happy they had gone so far in the joke.

Yet, something caught me off-guard. Air inflated my warming cheeks until they swelled to the point they were about to blow up like balloons. To be short, I failed controlling my burst and I rolled down my left side, a harsh and teasing laugh breaking through me.

“What?” the stallion growled. “It’s my coat that disturb you?”

I waved my brows, ducking my lips in a funny grin. “Now that you say it.” I fell back on the ground, cackling as I held my sides, the stallion trying to set me on fire with his glare. “Did Pinkie Pie drop you in Cloudsdale’s paint factory?”

I laughed, wiping a tear off my cheek.

The stallion’s bright pink hide shone in his torch’s chiaroscuro light, his violet mane streaked with indigo tied into a ponytail falling behind his left shoulder. It was too awesome, amazing, not to laugh at, I only knew one kind of pony with such set of colors, at least until now: mares. A big muscled oiled earth pony male piñata. The sight was eerie, unreal in a world where green and pastel colors had been blasted away to leave behind just their darker and moodier tones. If not for moving to kick me around, swearing at me, he would have made a magnificent Fillydelphia Fun Farm’s statutes from before the Last Day.

“Stop it,” he hissed, to no avail. “Celestia dammit, stop that.”

My laughter slowly spread to the mare who’d been looking back and forth between the two of us, a hoof in front of her mouth as she tried not to mock her friend. The dirty orange fur on her shoulders was covered by long disheveled brownish locks, falling all over her head and hiding half of her eyes with only her glowing horn sprouting out of the mess.

“Stop what?” I rolled over my back.

“Just stop it,” he mumbled, his face turning red as he hunched over, hanging his head low out of shyness. “It’s already difficult to bear on itself. So don’t make it harder to take.”

A few low hues and cries later, I sat over my flanks, massaging my achy cheeks and ribs. Little compared to her companion, the mare shook her head, her eyes craving to set me on fire after she had calmed herself. I could see her barding humid with pee. Laughing time was over.

“Sorry for… that,” I apologized.

She threw a hoof at me with enough delay to shield myself with one of my prosthetics. A moment of stupor later spent staring down at my mechanical barding, she hissed, “Do this once more and I swear I’m gonna break your mouth.”

“Oh come on,” I countered. “It was fun.”

“No!” both the mare and the stallion spat at me.

Smiling, my eyes wandered on their equipment, eager to get a closer look on what I’d already witness through my CCTV. Both wore a thick leathered armor peppered with scraps of CBRN-proof yellow suits and metal plaques that clicked and clanged over their shoulders with each step. The stallion carried a massive black shotgun on his left side, tied to a brown light battle saddle, its trigger extension folded behind his neck. The mare on her own seemed to take a great care of a bolt action wooden precision rifle strapped to her back, displaying a metal support that had stripped off its scope. A mask dangled around the stallion’s neck while the mare’s counterpart was nowhere to be found, probably lost in the chase. I pointed my hoof at her missing item.

“I’ll replace it for you,” I proposed.

She patted her face with widened eyes and gazed sternly at the pink stallion, whose hoof stretched in his saddlebag to pull out another small medical bag of RadAway. Quickly, he hoofed it to her, gave me another, and sucked on a third little glowing orange bag, disgust tearing up their faces. I stared down at the bag with disdain. I sighed and pushed it back to him.

“Don’t need it,” I stated.

He screwed up his eyes to a knife blade’s width and raised an eyebrow. “You’ve already taken some?”

“Eh… sort of,” I chuckled. “Don’t waste one for me,...eh...” I suddenly realized I didn’t know their names.

I drew my hoof out to them and gave the weird couple the best smile I could muster.

“Name’s Vault Skin,” I presented. “Sheriff of Hollow Shades.”

They eyed each other with that look of surprise and suspicion. My lips shut close as they glared back at me. The hoofshake that followed went overwhelmingly formal.

“I’m Lozenge.” the stallion insisted with a not-at-all mistrustful pout. “But call me Loz.”

My playful grin wasn’t going to fade soon. Loz’s sight was giving me cuteness diabete all by itself. He was young, maybe not old enough to remember the days from before. Yet, his skin was already marred with scars of past skirmishes, usual between groups of survivors fighting over the scraps of the big cities’ peripheral towns. His Cutie Mark was a pulley with a red rope sliding in. I tilted my head to the mare who wiped a narrow stream of glowing orange running off her lips.

“I’m Blast,” she grunted, grimacing as she caught me looking at her flank, marked with a large black rectangle shattered in the middle.

“You hate geometry?” I teased like hot embers on a bare skin.

“Yeah, maybe.” She giggled and shrugged, falling back to a more serious look. She wasn’t going to forgive me soon for my joke. “I’m not gonna stay here without a gas protection. I don’t wanna die.”

“Follow me,” I said, waving a hoof toward me. “I’ve got a house.”

We walked out of the lonesome building we had taken refuge in, the wind chill stinging my skin. The town was now eerily calm, the breeze the only rustle in the air. Loz followed me close, lighting the road with the sliver of his torch, seeking to unveil with the light every piece of shadow that appeared darker than black in his eyes. Was he afraid of the dark…? I didn’t know. But I could see him looking with disgust and fear at the grim shadows cast around the walls. I even saw him wince at the look of one little foal, its dark silhouette cast in some falling pebbledash, his smile strangely white in that all black face. Welcome to Hollow Shades.

While he was agitating around, I couldn’t stop but looking at his hilarious fur and mane. Poor boy, he should have had a hard life with other colts. He was an earth pony granted with a bulky frame that even seemed alien in my eyes, bigger by two heads than Blast or me. His shotgun was clattering on the buckles tying his barding to his sides. What beamed from him was an impression of cleanliness. His mane and hide were properly tied and brushed, and even if the fragrance of sweat and labor reeked off him, I could see his care for his own person. I even put myself to shame. Loz wrestled a large and rusty rad-counter out of a pocket, waving it around. It cracked back and fro, up and down. Not a good sign I guessed, his eyes flickering and his lips closing tight. He gulped, his head slowly leaning next to me.

“You’ve been living here for a long time?” he asked with a low grave voice, his eyes riveted on my Cutie Mark exposed to the light of his lamp. That was a question I was eager to sweep away.

“Since ever,” I answered.

“How are you not…”

“We’re here,” I cut him off hastily, pointing the entrance of the sheriff office.

We contoured the massive fountain that borrowed Princess Luna’s traits, built to open on the central square of Hollow Shades, and walked toward my office. The building stood fiercely, a muffled green light glowing through its cracked windows. Caring about Loz and Blast, I watched dumbfounded the nastiness of my hideout. It needed to be scrubbed, to have its furniture dusted, its hinges oiled, its walls repainted, its shutters replaced, maybe its canalizations redone, and finally some ponies to populate the city around. Similarly, it reeked off the fact that I was a messy, oblivious, and often disorganized mare. My yet-to-come guests would dislike having me as a tenant. I caught my two guests staring at the camera hung onto my office walls.

“Just my camera system,” I explained to them, afraid to walk into a deadly trap.

I put a hoof on the wood stairs leading to the swinging doors of my office, ready to pass by the old buck and his burnt rocking chair when somepony coughed behind me.

“Vault,” Blast initiated with a whimper, her eyes avoiding mine. I looked upon her hide, smeared with her own fluids. I pinched my lips in comprehension.

“I’ll get you something to… wipe it off,” I said. “I’m sorry if I went too f…”

“No, no… It’s not about… that,” Blast cut me off then asked dubiously: “It’s just… Where did the bell ring come from?”

I raised my eyebrows, thought about it and frowned.

“Oh that? No fucking clue. There’s no church in Hollow Shades.” A hoof through the door, hiding my smirk behind a flat face, I welcomed her. “Après vous, Madame.”

Blast’s terrorized face made me smile on the inside. She huffed past me, her chin overly pointed up.

“The RadAway’s in the kitchen,” I shouted at her as her flanks disappeared in the dark. My ears flicked at the creaks Loz’s hooves wrestled from the porch stairs. I winked at him. “Make yourself at home. You two must be tired from the walk. Long time I haven’t got visitors… Heck, it’s even my first time.”

I pinkie-smiled and pushed him inside. Slowly, I raised my head and I fixed the other side of the Luna’s fountain in the middle of the square fronting the office. There was nothing but somber shadows distorted by the night and my accumulated fatigue… For a second I thought… nevermind.

Sighing, I jerked my head away from whatever fading vision my spirit could come up with in such damned city.Swallowing my saliva, I walked in my office, the swinging door creaking as they closed behind my rump. My eyes wandered in the large hall, searching for the presence of my visitants under the dim light of the dying lamps above our heads.

Blast had already found a gas mask in my storage. Both she and Loz had readjusted their suits to be exposed to as less radiation as possible. I was certain radiation here wasn’t that deadly… I should investigate that. Her bag leaning against my desk, I saw the myriads of orange medical packs within. How many had they bought to reach me? I didn’t even know where they came from. I looked behind her, my eyes riveting onto the stallion’s face, his jaw chewing on the space between his clenched teeth. I was sat comfortably in from of my screen. lowly, his head rose and two picky, glaring, and hurt eyes struck me with questionable motives.

“You’ve enjoyed spying on us?” he grunted.

“My duty as sheriff,” I replied, looking down to dodge his stare.

“You’re a kinda loyal mare if you’ve been doing that job for eighteen years,” Blast chuckled, letting her voice drop to a scary growl. “Not that keeping an uninhabited city is of any interest.” She let a long silence set in like a knife in a wound. “Unless you’ve got something to hide...”

I tensed, a little frown on my face. My mouth opened, dangling silent for a second or two as I ransacked my memories. Why I was dedicating myself to Hollow Shades was eerie for anypony else. I wasn’t on a quest or anything that would influence the world. I just… loved my city. I loved the anonymous prisoner blasted asunder in his cell, the old buck sitting still in his rocking chair… the playing children…. and of course, the... shadows. So why was I staying here, or more likely always coming back here? It was a good question. I bubbled with my lips, staring into thin air before Blast waved a hoof before my eyes.

“Hey? You okay?”

I blinked. “It’s just my home,” I confessed. It was the truth, Hollow Shades was what I could call home. A small radioactive island lost in the middle of an ocean of radiations, away from the daily survival, sometimes violent, that plagued the ‘outside’.

“How long have you been living here?” Loz asked,looking at me with pecky eyes, betraying distrust.

“Oh, the pinkie plushie isn’t confident?” I teased, making him growl. I smiled, remembering my time past at the local school playing along with classmates I had long forgotten the names. Soccer, hoof wrestling, or some hide and seek. “I’ve always been here. Good memories.”

We eyed each other for a short but unsettlingly silent pause. I coughed exaggeratedly, clearing my throat to make myself heard. It was time to reverse the conversation.

“Why did you come here? If my guesses are right, a long trip such as yours isn’t for chocolate treats.”

Loz sighed, throwing his violet ponytail over his right shoulder, twitching his hoof around his chin, ill-at-ease with my recurrent teasing. He gave Blast companion a stern look. She breathed out, and shrugged disappointedly.

“You’ve heard about Tenpony Tower?” she began, unsure about me being a trustable pony. I looked up to the ceiling, giving them an obvious answer.

“Who didn’t?” I said, tapping my hoof on the dusty parquet.

“So you know the Steel Rangers tried to break in lately but failed.”

“With casualties,” I added, Loz acknowledged the truth with a silent nod. Was he sad? “So what?”

“The Steel Rangers’re gathering a small squad to break into the tower’s defenses, again. They want to check on the tech’ kept inside the tower’s protection shields.” She broke her speech and looked at Loz, waiting for a sign of approval. “The first encounter wasn’t very well handled from both sides.”

“Tell her.”

Rubbing an absent beard, pensive, Blast looked at me with sad little eyes.

“The Steel Rangers’ main force might break everything inside if a skirmish with the surviving inhabitant happens. Needless to say that those survivors would be stomped to death.” She shook her head, probably thinking about the countless dead it meant. I was more eager to balance her last statement. Rangers had been killed apparently. “I’m gathering a team to go in and see for ourselves what’s going on inside.”

“You’re from the Steel Rangers?” I brought forth.

Both looked at each other, and after a short moment spent staring at each other, they both went through their saddlebags and hoofed out a strange round piece of leather; its contours were shredded. Puffing a haze on the inside of her mask, Blast showed me an insignia I couldn’t forget. Etched on a leather canvas, a pair of phoenix wings enclosed an apple-shaped box circling three uneven cogwheels, the whole cut into two symmetrical halves by an sword. Steel Rangers. Eyes widened, I gulped my saliva. I was picturing power armors, embracing their sunken and starved curves.

I swept the ‘we’re Steel Rangers so follow us’ argument away with a swift lateral movement of my hoof.

“Why me?”

Loz fidgeted on his hooves, probably thinking about how to phrase his demand.

“You’ve worked for the Ministry of Morale,” he stated to my stupor.

“How do you know?” I hiccupped, my tongue forcing flickers through my voice, turning in an awful lisp. “Who’re you working for?”

“We’re initiates,” Blast cut Loz and me off. “And we’re the last hope before the paladins decide to bust in Tenpony Tower’s doors. We have ten days to find a team, go in, and negotiate a peaceful way out.”

I growled, closing my eyes and holding my temples between my hooves. I sat down the dust and parquet beneath. Volutes of smoke flew off from under my rump.

“Why can’t the Steel Rangers give me some rest?” I groaned. “I’ve just finished a mission with them and they already want me back.”

“You do a good job apparently for a… mere wastelander,” she smirked at me.

Our eyes met, my left eyelid twitching under the fatigue.

“Why me?” I repeated.

“You’re a former Ministry of Morale’s agent,” she said so neutral it shot spikes of shivers down my limbs. She pinched her lips, and gave a grave look. “You know… unconventional technologies.”

I shook my head in disapproval. I was too old for that kind of things, and I had left that past behind me. I had even forgotten a lot of my training. Thinking about Tenpony Tower, the truth unveiled.

“You want me to hack through the Tenpony Tower’s computer defenses,” I wailed, my hooves giving two steps back out of Blast’s reach, now dangerously far too close to me. “Why?”

Loz put his right hoof in front of his partner.

“Tenpony Tower is a Ministry of Arcane Science Hub. There must be a shitlot of tech inside, which means a lot of defenses we can’t go through without an expert’s help. And the previous engineer had been killed by the Tenpony Tower’s occupants.” I smirked at that. “However, many remains have… probably suffered of the balefire bomb that exploded near the city center,” Loz finally hummed. “And surviving agents from the MoM are rare today.”

“Why can’t you contract an engineer from the M.A.S. or from the M.W.T., you’re Steel Rangers after all. You must have got plenty of them after eighteen years making a bad reputation!” I fought back.

“Well, Paladin Seed was right about you,” Loz sighed. “Half-hearted as a mule!”

“Wait, she gave you my location!” I will have to spank that overconfident mare the next time I’d meet her.

Loz gave me an eyebrow. “But she asked you to consider this as a favour from you to her. You owe her, is that it?”

This was bad played from her. I was indebted with a mare from the Steel Rangers, a paladin. And today, she had to ask me to fulfill a promise I had made years ago. I hated that feeling, being trapped in a deal that was more about stealing that paying back some debt was unnerving. It was also involving killing ponies, starving, probably badly trained, and maddened by isolation. I was maybe a mercenary, but not a murderer.

“Because… well...” Blast started laughing. “Steel Rangers are soldiers, not Doctors in Computer Science. We lack of proper engineers and ponies around Manehattan that can handle tech properly. The competent personal is located elsewhere at the moment…”

I’d have asked where this ‘elsewhere’ was but knew I would get no answer.

Blast’s glare shot untold threats at her friend who ashamedly smiled and shrugged in response.

“Hey,” Loz cackled. “Don’t look at me like that, not my fault if you made me trip over the keyboard last time. You sent the wrong order.”

Blast face changed from a stern stoic look to a wrinkled vexed face. “Don’t talk about that,” she hissed.

I laughed at those co-workers putting sticks in the other’s wheels. I rubbed my left hoof with the other, pondering the implications of the mission I was given. It was extremely dangerous. That a few Rangers had already lost their lives in the process was more than a needed evidence for me to refuse… But Seed… damn! First I was forced in this trade. And I wasn’t talking about being required to show off what I had quickly forgotten eighteen ago. With the balefire had indeed come unemployment.

“I’m not suited for the job, not anymore,” I confessed. “I –“

“You are,” she insisted. “We need somepony like you. And well, you’ve signed for this before looking at the bottom of the contract.” She smiled.

Grunting, I facehoofed, holding my head my hoof pressing on the metal strap stuck in my skin; my elbows resting on my akimbo knees.

“We can’t stay here,” Loz peered in the conversation. “I don’t know about your… condition, but Hollow Shades is radioactive… on a deadly level. Blast and I can’t stay here. We’ll wait for you beyond the Eastern border of the Hollow Forest, tomorrow. If you miss the appointment, we’ll find a more suited pony.” This hurt like a knife on a fresh scar.

Still hanging my head, I stared at the inside of my hooves. In the low light I could still see the smears of blood from the poor stallion from Junction, blackened, dirtied, and washed away by two weeks of travel. How could those two young ponies stand my company? I was pathetic. Biting my tongue, shoveling back tears I didn’t understand the origin, I looked up. Both were waiting impatiently a positive answer… or negative. I couldn’t tell whether they really wanted me or they were just following orders.

“Tell me,” I sliced in the building silence. “Even if I have to respect a promise, what’s my reward? I don’t work for crumbs.”

The businessmare she was smiled as if she was signing a fruitful contract. Trying to fit in, I shared her grin. With difficulty, though.

“A full-time position within the Steel Rangers,” she brought forth.

For anypony that wandered the wasteland, such offer was a chance of a lifetime, for it meant being sure not to starve and live a longer and healthier life among the rumbles. However, I wasn’t feeling like leaving Hollow Shades… definitely.

“You’re lonely, Vault,” Blast whispered, triggering quivers along my backbone. “I can see it on your face. Why not come on an adventure. It’s better than waiting to rot in a dark rat hole such as Hollow Shades. I may be rude, but being the sheriff of a city with nopony to defend is rather cynical. You could save life going with us. There are ponies outside that need help of ponies like you.”

“I know,” I murmured. “I’m just…”

“Old?” Loz finally teased, grinning as he finally balance the score between him and me.

I was forty five years old, fuck him! In Wasteland’s standard it was a rather long life indeed. But.

“I. Am. Not. Old!”

Some ponies had died unborn., though. I got to leave several lives through peace, war, and apocalypse. I clenched my eyes, hunching over my shoulders as I cracked the joints of my hooves together, hurting myself to make the hurting questions go away.

Blast sighed and smacked her hoof on my desk, wrestling a jolt out of my legs. The screens flickered and wobbled softly. “You’re wasting our time, and health.”

“I’m sorry,” I blubbered. “It’s just…”

“We’ll wait outside the eastern Hollow Forest’s border tomorrow,” Loz comforted me, hauling himself out of my chair to walk up to me, giving me a hoof on my shoulder and a warm smile. “Agent, it’s your choice.”

My mane crawled and my fur itched along the way to the border of Hollow Shades as I followed them to make sure they went out without a problem. My belly churned at the thought of leaving once again my native city and ached by the silence that had followed Loz’s last words. I didn’t know what I wanted.

“Tomorrow,” Blast repeated, her voice seeping care. “We need you. We’ll be waiting for you, don’t worry.”

Yet I did.

Once back to my office, I sat in my rocking chair under the cracking porch, wobbling back and forth under the freezing windchill. Drums started over my head as rain flowed down the city from the sky. The dirt melted and washed away in torrents through the cracks in the asphalt under my eyes. Light streaked the sky, its rumble following close. What should I do?

In abrupt bursts, bolts of lightning showered the city. The lights cast shadows over the black buildings, moving and living eerily. As the headrest of my chair ascended, I peeked a look at the walls closing on the square. Darkness was seeping out of the carvings, shadows and undead getting back to life. The black silhouettes crawled numbly around, my eyelids unbeatably heavy. Was my mind failing me? Ranks of anonymous featureless shadows crawled forward around Hollow Shades, entering, leaving, waiting in my range of vision, seeking for some incomprehensible things that I couldn’t even fathom. I heard the laughter of children playing soccer, the humming of an old buck puffing through his pipe, a mare welcoming clients, another eyeing passers-by, and screams… lots and lots of tortured shallow howls.

Cold trickles of sweat rolled from the top of my neck to my left flank, stinging me along its way with unbearable shakes. Wind blowing through my mane, the night loomed its darkness over me, the rain its maiden. I fought back tears, biting my lips in resignation. Blinking to wash away the achy dark waters, I screamed the vision for the vision to disappear. But it wasn’t my choice to do. He… it, or she wouldn’t go… Through the raindrops, one specific child’s shadow lurked out of the night from beyond the occupied Luna’s fountain as a drowned foal out of black and murky abysses. Her two dull green glowing eyes punctured my coat, pain ripping off my soul. My fur raised on its root. Lightning bolted through the watery sky, cracking off the dark dissimulating veil masking the… thing’s smile. A monstrously wide grin. Saw-shaped green-glowing white teeth. Smiling, waiting, teasing. The blackness bubbled around its traits, popping and sprawling so its shape was never really defined… or simply redefining throughout its wavy movements, like a primordial darkness from where life was going to birth and die for the first time. Sometimes edgy. Sometimes only a simple overzealous and devouring smile in the nether.

“Go away,” my lips articulated, my throat deprived of air and sound. “No pony will be yours tonight. Go away, ghost lost in darkness. Remain far away from them.”

I blinked. It disappeared. My stomach churned and growled. Fear crawling in my mind, clamping my thoughts with alien desires. Freedom, escape, destruction, oblivion.

“Vault…” Just a murmur.

I gulped.

“Vault!” A mere scream.

I whimpered.

“Vault.” A simple order.

I looked aside at the old buck rocking chair, now completely black and reeking off darkness. Above the carved black shape moved a mass of shadows, slowly materializing. A head, two… no four hooves, snatching off the furniture’s forms. Lightning boomed. Its smile, through melted, holed, and rubbery, bubbled lips. A tail weaving like a snake around the wood of the chair. A darker than black, light-devouring, and dropping mane. And finally white eyes ripped off their pupils staring into me.

“Why are you leaving, Vault? Why’re you leaving *if you alwa*ys come back,” it tore through his throat.

“It’s my home,” I answered. “My place is here.”

“So, why do you even leave?* You thrive to flee. Pathethic! You don’t deserve noth**ing o*f this.”

Yes, I was pathetic, a mare that didn’t even know what she wanted, hesitating between many possibilities and offers until those opportunities had long run dry. Incapable of choice. Incapable of thought. Incapable of living.

“Do you remember the day the bom**bs* fell*?”

The creature’s head hung on the side toward me, giving me tearing black puppy eyes. I nodded, thinking about the many screams, shouts, and cries… Incapable of forgetting. Pain flowed down the back of my hooves as the apparition touched me. But the pain came from where my teeth had bitten deep, imperceptibly at first. Blood dripped down, melting with the rain splashing over me, the wind rendering the porch useless. Eyes burst open, I looked at the shadowy square, hazing with the flashes, rumbles, and drumming.

“Yes, I do,” I muttered.

“it still*** burns, eh?” it teased. “The screams, the heat, the pain.* But* you lived against *all *od****d*s!”

“I…” I whimpered. “Everypony keeps disturbing me, I want to rest.”

It smirked at me with such jealousy it reeked off her pitch-black swallowing hide.

“Who are you?” I was fed up repeating that question at each of our encounter. It wasn’t the first time I had that argument.

“Stupid question as always,” it retorted. “I’m what you’ve sto***len from!* From everypony that died here.”

I breathed in and found myself unable to exhale, my head turning red, burning. The thing stood over me from her fragile stature, scowling down at me.

“I…”

“What is good is forever forgotten, and it’s bad,” she howled. “What is bad is worshipped on an altar, an*d it’s* bad too.” She giggled. “So, what** ca*n* you be *sure **of*?”

“Of what I do!” I spat back mechanically. “That I must survive.”

“So, why are you coming back her*e again and* again? You’ve stolen *lives.* Now you’re offered freed*om but you’re* stealing *it from* yourself?”

“Because you can’t leave Hollow Shades,” I hissed. “Ponies hurt, but I can forgive them. You! You hurt more. You cannot leave.”

“YetI will!” It neared its head toward mine. It kissed my closed lips and I felt my breath taken away. Her voice rose once again. But it wasn’t hers… It was… mine. “One way… or another.” She… it gave me a little challenging nod, its smile ripping off its cheeks from ear to ear and beyond. An open maw.

It dropped his… its head on the side and drifted away for what seemed to be an eternity, hopping on legs shaped into slicing cones. Hooves sent through an oversized pen sharpener, sinking slightly in the mud, cracking the layer beneath. A nearly inaudible feminine laugh fell in its stead as it merged away in the pitch-black rain. It took effort not to faint on the spot, knowing it would come back stabbing me.

I cried under the muffling wind, the deafening thunder, and the horrid howls that had gobbled up my town. I crawled my poor body to my desk, crumbled down in my chair, curled up, and the good hoof of Morpheus welcomed me in a nightmarish sleep as I wept myself until my tears would dry. But they never had.

Ø VƱ ϵ α Ħ E!α ϵ Ʊ Ø

Outside Hollow Forest, once travelers had crossed the border, a makeshift encampment stood still, soaked in the rain that had watered down the region the whole night long. The sun had peered over the hill and clouds in the eastern horizon, nibbling the wasteland with cold tendril of grey light through the grey lid over my head.

“She won’t come,” Loz rambled, focused on scrubbing off the mud splattered onto his shiny black shotgun, his battle saddle suspended next to him on a low branch of a carbonized tree. “We shouldn’t have come here. Used too much stuff for nothin’.”

His pink coat had turned violent with the rain, his ponytail was now a disheveled mass of hair falling on his shoulders. around him was scattered emptied RadAways.

“We said we’ll wait in the morning. And morning ends at noon,” she condescended. “We stay.”

“Smartass,” he grunted.

I had awaited long behind a tree nearing the end of the forest, trying to catch anything from the duo. Minutes spent doing so taught me they were kinda boring.

“I’m here,” I bellowed, slowly walking out of the Hollow Forest, a small saddlebag hanging over my loader barding and my two guns shining below. “Sorry for making you wait.”

Surprisingly, Blast hugged me tight, giving me a bright warm smile. “Thanks. I was sure you’d make the right decision. Staying alone there is not healthy, ponies are meant to band together.”

“Yeah.” I wasn’t so sure about the band-thing. I had heard grim things happened in the south, near the Bad Lands.

“So, are we going?” Loz asked, loading his gun with large twelve millimeters cartridges. Grinning at each crystalline and smooth click his shotgun gave in response. Damn scary pink buck.

I looked down at the box of cartridges between his hooves. My eyes grew wide. The gauge cartridges were transparent, leaving the slugs exposed… Well, first there were only one slug per cartridge, similar to a sabot if it was the name. One large heavy sharp slug with fins filling each gauge entirely made my mane crawl. How deadly were those bullets, if you could still call them that?

“Brenneke slugs,” Loz called out, smirking at my sudden fear of his arsenal. “Meant for deep penetration, extreme crippling, and wall breaking.” He aimed at me and pulled the trigger. I ‘eeped, until I understood the safety was still on. “...you don’t want to be on the trajectory.”

“Fuck you with a metal bar,” I shouted.

He clacked the pump back and forth in his mouth, loading in the last slug.

“An eye for an eye, a tease for a tease,” he cackled.

Blast whacked the back of his head with a hoof.

“Stop scaring people with your gun, dumbass. You already do with your color,” she mocked.

“Don’t start with that too,” he muttered. “You promised me”

She raised her eyes to the sky. “Of course.” Then looked at me. “You’re ready to go?”

“Yes. But we aren’t going straight to Manehattan.”

The two pairs of glaring eyes that rammed through me after that creeped me out. I had to pull out an explanation, quick. I sweated, stuttering. “Don’t worry, we’ll just need help. I know a buck. Name’s Moebius.”

“Where does he live?” Blast asked, not reassured. “We’re running out of time.”

“It’s on the way. There’s just a short detour to make. He lives in Fillydelphia.”

I had never seen pupils shrink so fast and veins burst red around irises.

“Filly… delphia?” they both trembled.

“Yes, why?”

“…” They both stared silently at each other. They looked back at me like I was some kind of autistic-aggravated idiot that hadn’t crawled out of an isolation chamber for two decades. People often gave me this look. Never understood why.

“You’re crazy!” they cried out. “It’s a death hole!”

“You’ll see, he’s a funny stallion!” I laughed.

“You’re twigged.”

And I laughed even more.

ⱴ ⱷ ꜠ Ω ꜡ ⱷ ⱴ

Footnotes; Vault Skin, Class: Wanderer, Level Up

New Perk: “’You saw that?’ ‘Saw what?’”

Maybe you are a parapsychic mare, or maybe you’re just plain crazy. However it seems that you nurture a deep connection with the past. Be careful it doesn’t trap you in a thought reality that isn’t real.

Maybe… just Maybe...