Chaos Rules in the Wasteland

"GAURGH."

Twilight looked up instantly. She made out the form of John slumped over against the wall. She sat frozen to the spot.

"Never...," she heard him say. She listened with all her might. "ever... ever... shoot me... EVER... again." His voice had lost its fury, but Twilight could only stare, then nodded after several seconds.

"Now get this damned bullet out of me!"

Twilight got to her feet as quickly as she could. "This is going to hurt," she said in a strained, barely audible whisper.

John nodded and clenched his eyes closed as tight as he could. Purple magic enveloped the wound on his back.

"ARGH! ARGHGHHHHHGH" he screamed, biting into his vault suit in an attempt to muffle it.

The bullet clattered to the floor.

"Twilight," he said hoarsely after releasing his jaws from the suit, which he had ripped wide open.

He received no answer.

"The vault has collapsed on itself, Twilight. I can't get any further in.

Twilight stared at the pile of rubble that filled the room that John had led her to. They had come all the way here, but for nothing.

"There MUST be another way down!" whispered Twilight.

John held up a finger and shook it back and forth and said weakly, "Yeah, there's just gotta be. Come on."

He walked to the wall and put his hand on it, then walked toward the doorway with his hand sliding along the wall.

"You check the other side," he whispered.

Twilight did not hesitate to follow the order. She walked out of the room and trotted along the wall in the opposite direction. She walked into the first doorway she came across. The room inside was as scavenged and rusty as every other part of the vault. She walked through the room and confirmed that there was nothing that she had missed.

She checked the next room and got the same results. The third room she was about to come to the same conclusion when her eye settled upon an irregularity: a couple of locker in the corner. They rattled when she tried to open it.

"John!" she said in a loud whisper.

The man came running to Twilight. She said nothing, but indicated the lockers. He let a sigh, then dropped his bag to the ground. He pulled out a lock picking kit, which Twilight had come across when she had searched the bag before for medical supplies, but forgotten about. She did not dare ask John any questions.

John took removed a lock pick from the kit and slipped it into the lock. He fumbled with it for three whole minutes, and then, without warning, the lock unceremoniously clicked open. John flung the locker open.

Inside was a coil of rope and a leather jacket. John let out a sigh. He shoved the rope into the bag without attempting to keep it neat. Then he removed the jacket from the hook and looked at it closely.

"This is going to be hot out there..." he mumbled. "But it beats being shot." Twilight flinched, even though John had not looked at her or moved in any other way. He put one arm through a sleeve, and then the other. "How do I look?" he asked suddenly, whirling around to face Twilight. He stuck his arms out as though he were keeping his hands as far apart as possible.

"Messing with you would be a bad idea," said Twilight grimly.

"Yeah..."

He picked the other locker open. When the door swung open, he maintained his hard expression and withdrew the some unidentified objects from the locker. Two were round and grey, the other was a red box shape. He crammed these into the bag as well. It was starting to truly bulge. In one smooth movement he swooped up his bag and let it land with the strap over his shoulder.

He walked out of the room with Twilight following warrily. He looked around once, and then looked down at the floor. Twilight didn't need to ask to know that they had already checked every available room.

John said nothing. Instead he walked back into the room with the rubble.

"AAARGHHHHH!" he screamed, smashing into the piles of concrete with the sledgehammer. A shocked Twilight backed into the wall.

John let out burst after burst of screams and continued smashing the rubble with the sledgehammer wildly. Somehow, the weapon didn't receive any visible damage.

As quickly as it had started, John stopped swinging and set the head of the hammer on the ground with the handle pointing straight up. He rested his forhead on the end of the handle and his back heaved as he took in deep breaths.

"Let's get out of here, Twilight. There's nothing left for us here."

The next two days consisted of almost nothing but silent travel, only broken by their stopping to get some sleep, at which point John would suddenly stop and hold his hand up and then proceed to get comfortable in a suitable spot he had found.

"What is that over there?" asked John, stopping in his tracked. It was the first time he had spoken since they had left the vault.

Twilight had jumped slightly at the unexpected sound. She followed his pointing finger and squinted into the distance.

"I think that's a group of people." she said, slightly interested.

"Hmm. Let's go see what they're up to."

As they came closer, they heard a lot of angry shouting. Twilight motioned for John to follow her into cover behind one of the numerous giant stones jutting out of the ground of the wasteland. They peeked around the sides and watched the scene.

Two of the people were kneeling down, and the others were clearly shouting awful things at them. One of the shouting men made a gesture, and both of the kneeling figures stood up.

Suddenly one of them started to run as fast as they could. The shouts of the other men became much louder, loud enough that Twilight and John could hear the air filled with excessive overlapping cursing, most predominantly, a particularly loud raider was bellowing "FUCK YOU BITCH!"

One of the men fell onto one knee and whipped out a rifle.

A BANG echoed through the air at the same moment as a bloodcurdling female scream, and Twilight and John watched in horror as the fleeing woman fell to the ground.

Another BANG cracked through the air. The rifleman then got back to his feet.

Twilight and John looked at each other in utter shock. Twilight recovered first. "RUN!" she cried to him in her loudest whisper.

Twilight immediately took her own advice. She became aware that John had had come to be right behind her, and she looked back at him.

The mere sight of the raiders shrinking away in the distance made her wish that she had not.

Twilight collapsed into the ground when she couldn't stand to run any further.

"We're safe," said John his voice filled with hatred. "I'm sure they never saw us."

Twilight couldn't take the tension anymore.

"John," she said softly to him, half hoping that he would ignore her.

"I'm sorry," he replied immediately.

"What?" asked Twilight.

"I really exploded back in the vault Twilight. I shouldn't have let that happen."

"But I-"

"You have to start shooting in less than a second if you want to stay alive out here, Twilight. You know that by now. It was only a matter of time. Hell, if I was the one with that thing, I would have shot you at least ten times by now."

Twilight listened in silence and did not say anything when John stopped talking, so he continued.

"But seriously, if you ever shoot me again, I might just lose it. Just so you know."

"It wont happen again," said Twilight in a determined tone.

John's face softened. "Good, good," he said, petting her mane. Twilight didn't seem to mind.

He tensed up again suddenly, and Twilight silently winced as his still fist tugged on her mane.

John saw her look of fear and immediately let go.

"Sorry, Twilight." he said as apologetically as he could while angry. "Those raiders..."

They both remained silent for a long time.

Finally John spoke again. "I wish I had never have had to experience this- this disgrace! Mankind is more civil than this! We don't kill each other anymore! Humanity learned its lesson a hundred years ago!" He cried in despair. He paused before he said "In fact, those things are not human. The next time I catch any of those raider SHITS off guard, they're dead. They're so dead."

He turned to Twilight and asked her as gently as he could, "Are you going to stop me?"

Twilight burst out into tears, which she had been trying very hard to avoid doing ever since stopping. Even though her face was an out of control waterfall, her brain was working very hard.

If we all don't protect ourselves from those murderers, their crimes will continue unpunished, and they will continue to claim lives, she thought. And if we destroy them all before they can kill us, ultimately more lives are saved, good lives. But we will not become murders.

"No, John. I wont."

But we will become man-killers.

"John!" shouted Twilight excited from somewhere above him. John stopped opening ancient cabinets and stood up, looking up at the ceiling in surprise.

Twilight came trotting down a set of stairs and gave him a huge smile. "You won't believe what I found under the bed!"

She levitated the thickest book John had ever seen in front of his face, a little too close for his comfort.

"Really?" he said, taking a step back. "How could something like that have possibly survived for all these years?"

"I was wondering that too. There was a whole bookshelf in that room actually, but sadly-" Twilight's tone started reflecting her words. "They were all completely ruined and indecipherable. Maybe people have been here before and took the surviving books away. If so, they didn't look hard enough."

"So what book is that then?" asked John, who had not read the title.

"Its called the Big Book of SCIENCE!" squealed Twilight in delight, squeezing the book to her chest with her hooves. "This will be so cool to learn from a human's point of view!"

Even John was smiling now. "Wow, Twilight. I didn't know that it would mean so much to you. I always found it so boring."

"Boring?" asked Twilight in shock.

"I'm more comfortable with sticking with what I know."

"Bah," said Twilight playfully. "You really are just like my friend Rainbow Dash.

John was already wondering whether it had been a good thing that Twilight had discovered the old world science book. Of course it's a good thing, he thought immediately afterward. I haven't seen Twilight this happy, in... ever.

Twilight had been spending the last two hours sharing details about the book with John every three minutes or so. He had quickly tuned her voice out, and he had just been nodding as she talked. This seemed to work. However, his neck was getting a little sore.

Suddenly he heard her say the word "Equestria". He felt certain that she hadn't gotten that from the book.

"Wait, say that last thing again?" he said.

"I said, 'I can't believe that we've come so close to discovering these things in Equestria!"

"What do you mean?" asked John. As soon as he had asked the question he was sure that he would regret it.

"Because all it would take would be improving the magnification levels on microscopes! Weren't you listening?" Fortunately Twilight didn't wait for an answer. "I can't believe we've never realized that there was such learning to be found in the microscopic world! Did you know that everything is made up of really, really small things called atoms?"

Suddenly John's expression went dark, causing Twilight to recoil in confusion.

"Yeah, I've heard of them. They're what made the nukes so very bad!"

"What?"

"If you don't believe me, I'm sure that your book will tell you the same thing.

Twilight's shocked expression disappeared behind the pages of the book again. John relaxed in the silence while it lasted.

It didn't last long. After a while, Twilight started speaking to herself quietly, and John couldn't help but listen to her, even though he knew it wouldn't make any sense.

"Energy is equal to mass times... three hundred million...? meters per second..."

"SQUARED?" she screamed.

"Twilight!" shouted John. "What the hell?"

"Sorry!" cried Twilight in a near hyperventilating voice. "This is unbelievably... unbelievable!"

"What is?" asked John, annoyed.

"Do you have any clue how much energy a block of uranium with the same weight as me would give off if it undergoes 'nuclear fission'?"

"No?"

"It's... It's..." Twilight searched her mind for anything remotely of the same scale.

"It's way too much, I can't even begin to tell you how huge it is," said Twilight in frustration. "The things you could do if that much energy were able to be converted into magic..."

Suddenly it occurred to her. "It's enough power," she said, suddenly much quieter, "to destroy all life in the world..."

"Oh." said John surprised. "Well, yeah. Look around you."

"I am, John," she said with new awe in her voice. But it was awe of something terrible. "I am."

Her face buried itself behind the book once again.

"Twilight," said John. "Let me ask you something."

Her head leaned out from behind the book. "Of course, John. What would you like to know?"

"Your home, Equestria. You said that it's a perfect world, where nopony hates anypony?"

Twilight looked at him in great surprise at his use of those words, but she said, "Well, that's usually that's the case. I've never known a pony to ever kill anything on purpose. The dragons do, and a few other things, but they are rather violent by nature, and are carnivorous besides, so we can hardly blame them. Why are you asking?" she finished, concerned.

"And you do not have all of the 'scientific wonders' of the old world, correct? And you're friends, their lives are completely happy and care free?"

"Well, compared to life out here, absolutely. They wouldn't agree with me, but like you said yourself, they don't know what life is like in the wasteland," Twilight said worryingly. "But you said that it was the same case in your vault, right?"

"Not quite," said John with a sigh. "People in the vault sometimes die very strange deaths. The people who used to maintain our reactor lost their lives to radiation poisoning when there was some kind of leak. They died making sure that it wouldn't destroy the whole vault."

Twilight regarded John's words with grief, but he wasn't done.

"And then there was somebody who was killed by a malfunctioning robot when I was really small. And there are the rats that somehow get into the vault all of the time. Security gets to stay in practice by shooting the damn things, but sometimes people get bitten. And sometimes those bites lead to infections. And the rats are a result of the fallout from the nukes. You'll read all about that in the book too.

Twilight stared at him, not knowing what to say.

"And so my question is this, Twilight. Would you really want to give Equestria access to all this technology, when obviously everybody's lives would have been so much better without it?"

Twilight stood dumbstruck.

Finally she whispered to him, "I don't want to use knowledge to hurt anypony."

"And I know that you wouldn't. You won't have to. There are always evil ponies that, once they have it, they will abuse it."

"Holy shit Psycho! Those Junktown fuckers killed almost everyone!"

Around the raiders were the bodies of four other raiders and three guards from Junktown. They were all wearing leather armor, although the guard's armor was dyed a faded green. Around the bodies lay various weapons ranging from spears to a hunting rifle.

The raider named "Psycho" rolled his eyes in annoyance. "Shut the fuck up, I can see that."

"What the fuck are we supposed to do now? Hey, what the fuck is-"

BANG

The raider crumpled to the ground without making a sound, blood pooling around his head immediately.

"More for me," said Psycho snidely as he lowered his magnum. He walked over to a former companion and inspected the hunting rifle that he had dropped.

Without warning, he let out a pitiful scream as all of the air was expelled from his lungs with extreme violence and he fell face first into the dust. He was in even worse pain than he had ever been in in his life. He desperately struggled to get to his feet.

"You'll... pay... for... that..." he wheezed out. He stood up uneasily and saw the man right in front of him smash a sledgehammer into his chest.