Author's Note
Warning: This story contains spoilers for Fallout: Equestria thoughout. It is not necessary to read Fallout: Equestria for this story to make sense, but if you were saving it for a rainy day, this story will spoil it.
Chapter 1: Steel Rain
“The study of history has always been, at it’s heart, learning from the past. Learning what lead to triumph, and what lead to failure; where heros beat all odds, and when those odds consumed them. We ponies have a long and rich history, but every day new discoveries flumox this historical learning. How do ancient pegasi battle clouds affect airbus timetables? How can an earth pony lean from the Luna famine, when tractors are taking over the farms? What knowledge can be gleaned from ancient tomes, when we work with forces not even imagined three generations ago?
“No matter how hard we try, we can not apply the past to the modern world. But nor can we allow ourselves to misstep in the present, the consequences would be too great. There is then, only avenue to turn to. We must learn from the future--”
Somepony hammered on my door.
“Twilight, are you in there?” Rainbow Dash hollered. “Your eggheads are getting angsty. It’s time to go!”
I slammed my head against my desk, my horn adding another small divot to the polished mahogany. My new secretary, Ivy... something, gave me a curious look, but I waved her off. One of the nice advantages of being the boss was getting away with more than my fair share of eccentricities.
“Looks like we’re going to have to come back to this,” I told her. The forest green mare nodded hurriedly, tapping away at the terminal as she saved the file and shutdown the machine. Only when she smiled did I leave the dampening ring of runes around my desk. Technology and I have a love/hate relationship; I love it, it hates me, or at least the high levels of ambient magic that surrounds me.
The office itself was large and richly appointed, with bookshelves crowding each other for space against the walls. Everywhere I went I seemed to accumulate books, so the titles themselves were mostly unread and more of a random assortment of titles than an actual collection. A large window and balcony gave a fantastic view of the Cantervale, and Ponyville beyond. Canterlot itself could be seen from the opposite side of the building, though I’d refused point blank to have my view marred by it.
“Come on! You still talking to your fanclub in there?” Dash continued, rapping her hooves against the door again. I trotted across the plush, sky blue carpet to the double doors and wrenched them open with my magic.
“Finally!” she exclaimed, the pegasus bursting in and hovering at my eye level. “You know, when you said dangerous unknown world to explore, I pictured more fighting giant mutant brezzies, less waiting around and getting physicals.”
I cocked an eyebrow at her. “Giant mutant brezzies?” I said at last.
“I had to take a test!” Rainbow Dash exclaimed, clasping her face. “A Test! It was so BORING!”
I shook my head. In the thirty or so years I’d known Rainbow Dash I’d seen her sit still for seven minutes in total. Maybe an hour if you didn’t count that hoof jiggle when she does while reading as motion. “That’ll be the mental stability and wellbeing test then,” I said, smiling. “Did you pass with flying colours?”
She gave me a flat look. “Don’t use that line on me, I invented flying colours.”
“Fair point. Shall we get started then?” I gestured out at the hall.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to do!” Dash snapped, leading the way. I shook my head and sighed, as I followed her through the broad corridors of The Twilight Sparkle Arcane Research Institute (Lower Canterlot branch). Sometimes I feel the Wonderbolts must despair to have Dash leading them, while still the fastest mare in Equestria and showing no sign of slowing down in her middle years, she got on with paperwork like a house on fire. With all the screaming, terror, and ponies fleeing in all directions implied therein.
“So what was all that yammering to you fans about?” Rainbow demanded after a short distance. Ponies stepped smartly out of the ways as we swept past, most bowing in reverence, despite my long standing policies.
“I was dictating a report for the Equestria Journal of Mystical Sciences,” I told her, with a tiny frown. “They are not my fanclub.” If they were my fanclub they would have responded to my letters about the increasingly archaic use of the word ‘Mystic’.
“Right... and you’re working on time travel, again?”
My eye twitched, though I was able to withhold my irritation until we stepped into the executive elevator and out of the public halls. Dash finally landed, her hooves sinking into the plush carpet.
“Yes,” I replied, tersely, as we began to descend. “As I explained at length in the documents that I sent you--” which I should have known she’d ignore “--I’ve been working on extracting information from the future.”
Dash shot me a look. “Didn’t you prove you can’t change the future with the whole timeloop years ago?”
I sighed, that had not been my finest hour. “Yes, while it is possible to travel backwards in time, you are trapped by the fact that everything you are trying to change has already happened. Extracting information from the future is theoretically bound by the same problem; anything you learn will be based on a future shaped by your future actions, which occur due to knowledge gained from travelling. You can’t fix the mistakes of the past, and you can’t avoid future dooms.”
Rolling her eyes Dash drawled. “That’s why I like hanging with you Twilight. You’re a regular barrel of rainbows. So I take it you’ve got a half baked scheme to fix this?”
There was a soft ding as the elevator opened onto the factory floor. The grand experiment sprawled outward, lit by harsh noon light streaming in through the windows. A hundred ponies, mostly unicorns hurried about their tasks, some at the many control stations, others powering the huge arcane engines that dotted the room, or checking the calibrations on a dozen machines. At the very center of the room was a vast summoning circle, a six pointed star cast in solid silver touching the ring at the points. It thrummed with barely contained energy, so much that I could feel my teeth vibrating even at a distance.
“Well, full baked maybe,” I said with a grin.
Rainbow Dash whistled. “Okay, that was a good reveal. Seven out of ten.”
“Seven!” I exclaimed, my wings flying out. “I just revealed a gigantic arcane machine poised to smash through the dimensional barrier! I think that deserves more than a seven.”
Dash gave me a flat look. “You lost two points for mentioning baked goods. You should read some more Daring Doo, there’s some great mad scientist monologues for you to crib.”
She trotted into my lab and I hurried to keep up. “I am not a mad scientist,” I pointed out, with what was definitely not a pout.
“Sane science does not use the term ‘smashing dimensional barriers’,” Rainbow Dash shot back. I didn’t have a response for that. Instead I lengthened my stride and swept past her, abusing my height to it’s fullest. There were some advantages to being an alicorn beyond the obvious.
“Princes!” Silver Note called out, waving a hoof. “Good to see you, we’re almost ready for the transfer.”
Silver Note was a elderly unicorn, grey coated and somehow going greyer with alarming speed. He was distantly related to the Ponyville Silvers, though I had the vague recollection that they didn’t get along. That wasn’t however, something that came up very often in his role as one of my finest research scientists.
“Excelent, is the team assembled?”
“Just waiting on you and Commander Dash, step up onto the dais and we’ll run through the final checks.”
I gave my most regal nod and resisted the urge to squeal like a schoolfilly. This was it. Five minutes till I had all four hooves on the alien soil of another Equestria. Sure, explaining just how incredible crossing the dimensional barriers was to the average pony in the street would take me a lecture series; but I could present that series as the first pony to step beyond her home reality.
It was a historic moment.
“So, you going to explain what we’re doing here?” Dash cut in.
My ear twitched, as my lecture fantasy dissolved away into the ether. Once, just once, I’d like my friends to do their homework before they see me. Is a five thousand word summary that much bedtime reading?
I unfurled my wings and hopped over the chaos of the factory floor with a single graceful flap. Three ponies were waiting for us on the teleportation dias, two unicorns, one a grizzled ex-guard with a speciality in shields and another, far younger who’d volunteered for the sheer adventure, a stallion after my own heart. The final member of our quintet was an Earth pony, laden with armour and supplies; he regarded Rainbow Dash and I with a weary stare.
“We going on a trip?” Dash enquired, meeting the stallion's look with her own drill master's glare. He blinked first.
“Ideally no,” I explained, surveying the magic filling the air around us. “If all goes as planned, we’ll just be projected into the alternate reality. There will be interaction, but we should not be able to stay more than thirty eight minutes and nothing that happens there should affect your real body in any way.”
“Right, and the supplies are there for when that inevitably goes wrong and we get trapped,” Dash concluded, quite correctly. She crossed her forehooves across her chest, balancing with lazy flaps of her wings. “What’s the point of this whole exercise anyway, what’s so exciting about another Equestria?”
My ear twitched again. “It’s all about time, Rainbow Dash. We can't gain from traveling forward in time within our universe, so we’ve found a similar universe and intend to visit it’s future. If our calculations are correct, we’ll end up six months ahead of ourselves. Once there we’ll be able to find out... well...”
“We’ll be able to find out why it’s exploding,” the ex-guard stallion cut in.
Dash’s eyes lit up. “Explosions are cool,” she agreed.
“In this case it may be a world ending explosion,” I cut in, shooting the stallion a glare. “Something has happened that is so devastating that it has weakened the very walls of reality enough for us to gain access. I’d like to know what the event was, and whether it’s going to happen here.”
“Heh, just like old times then. World’s going to end and only the Elements of--”
She cut off suddenly, as she saw my murderous glower.
“--’k. Not like old times then.”
With a terrifying crash the arcane energies tore the world around us apart, and then the screaming started.
Canterlot was in ruins. I had half expected the transport to bring us into a mirror of my own Institute, but reality was far worse. We stood in a cleared ring in the center of a shattered apartment block; bodies of ponies had been dashed against the walls by our arrival, though judging by the rotting flesh and shattered bones, none had been alive to be inconvenienced.
Beyond the ruined walls the city was burning. The place and heart of the city had been wrapped in a gigantic shield but... there was a cloying pink fog that filled the dome and even a mile away I could feel the necrotic energies bleeding through. A clawing, hungry type of magic that turned my stomach. There was no safety within that shield, only the dead, and those still busy dying. The rest of the city fared no better, whole districts were aflame, or shattered by spellwork bombs, or simply gone, blasted off the mountainside by some divine hoof. Even where we stood the very air was toxic, burning and freezing my lungs, the dark magic creeping through my bones, trying to kill me by inches.
The earth pony trailspony ran, accelerating away from our group and following the sound of a foal’s wails to where a mare and her child huddled beneath a flight of broken and blackened stairs. How they’d survived the holocaust of spellfire for so long was a mystery I would never solve. Whatever miraculous wing that had shielded them lasted no more than an instant longer. A thunderous roar, like every manticore in the world all in chorus, slammed into us, lifting the very stones of the building into the air in a deadly rain.
The ex-guard (I should have known his name but didn’t) brought up a shield just in time, a white hemisphere sealing us away from the rest of the building. Shards of concrete and brick slammed into it, followed by a maelstrom of necrotic energy and for a moment he held strong against the killing storm. It was only a moment though, and with a sickening crack his horn detonated, shards of rot flying away from the dying unicorn.
At last I managed to rouse myself from my stupefied haze and acted. I caught the shield with my magic, holding the flimsy spell so firm not even light entered our bubble of serenity.
“Sweet Celestia, sweet Celestia, sweet Celestia,” the researcher babbled, backing away from the fading corpse of the ex-guard. The guard, of course, was not truly gone, our bodies were stood safely on the factory floor a full universe away, but from when I was standing he looked dead enough.
“Twilight!” Rainbow Dash yelled, right in my face. I realised that she had been calling my name for some time. “What in tartarus’ name is happening?”
“... I don’t know,” I whispered. It wasn’t supposed to be like this; I’d expected to find a triumphant Discord, or the return of a lost, mad alicorn, or if we were very luck myself discovering a new form of magic. We were never supposed to find this nightmare.
“Well don’t just stand there like an overpriced hunk of marble!” Dash roared, clapping her hooves together in front of my eyes. “We’ve got to save Canterlot!”
Canterlot was dead. Only Rainbow would be brave and stupid enough to think of saving anything from the horror of the ruined city. It was something I’d always admired about her.
“You’re right,” I agreed, shaking my head. My horn shone as I bombarded us with spells. Elemental resistance, wards against disintegration, magical sinks, boosts to speed, thought and will, and finally I purged the necrotic energies that clung to us, weaving new resistance spells to keep us safe from further harm. As I was working, Rainbow Dash grabbed the researcher stallion and dragged him back onto his hooves.
“Come on soldier, buck up,” she snapped, getting right up in his face. “We’ve got a world to save.”
He shook his head, scrambling back till his rump was pressed against the ink black edge of the shield. “No, no, no, no, no,” he muttered. “This wasn’t supposed to be like this. This was supposed to be a science mission.”
Rainbow Dash and I shared a look. Civilians. I cut the magic binding the stallion to this world and with a faint pop he vanished.
“Well, that’s one less problem to deal with,” Dash sighed, leaping into a hover. “What’s the plan Twilight?”
I frowned. “See if we can find any survivors, if not in Canterlot then somewhere in Equestria. If we can get to Ponyville and find our alternate selves before thirty eight minute time limit runs out we can figure out what happened here. Our absolute priority is stopping this happening at home.”
Rainbow Dash cocked an eyebrow at me. “Not saving ponies?”
“If you can, do,” I sighed. “But we can’t take them with us. We have to find out what happened here above all else.”
She snorted. “Okay.” Dash flared her wings out, beating up a storm in the little bubble. “Let’s do this.”
I spread my own wings and dropped the shield.
The neighborhood had been devastated, what few walls had stood moments before had been leveled and nothing remained of the mare and her foal, nor the brave stallion who’d tried foolishly to save them. He would be home by now; if the mother was lucky, both she and her child would have died instantly.
Dash took to the sky like a rocket and I hurled myself after her, pumping my heavy wings and spinning flight boosting spells just to keep up. The clouds above us were heavy and dark, lit by the green fire of the dying city below us, thick with poison and the reek of burning flesh. A dozen strange objects streaked through the air towards us and Dash hung a right, going into an evasive roll. That should have been my warning to follow suit, but I was distracted by the sudden bone rattling thrum of solar magic.
Celestia was never been subtle with her sorcery. A beam of solid sunlight tore the air apart just feet from me as it reached out and smashed the strange objects from the sky. I hurled myself into a steep dive far too late; a small red hot sphere bounced off of my flank as I doubled and redoubled my personal shield and then the infernal device detonated, a wave of balefire (a particularly nasty and very forbidden form of dark magic) slammed into me.
I screamed in pain as the necrotic blast tore through my hasty protections, the deathly energies tearing apart my flank and left wing. For a moment, everything but agony vanished. My spells failed, my wings stayed glued to my side and even the world vanished in a haze of black and red as I plummeted.
Rainbow Dash caught me, eliciting more screams of pain as her hooves dug into my ruined side. We landed hard not a moment later, in an open park at the very edge of the city, and Dash laid me tenderly on the ground.
“Come on, Twilight!” she roared, her voice tinny and distant. “Stay with me! You need to cast a healing spell, or anesthetic or something!”
I wondered if she realised just how hard it was to cast a spell while you could see your cared hip bone through the ruins of what was once a cutie mark. Drawing on an ancient Zebradian meditation technique and a lifetime of near death experiences, I centered myself for an instant. There was a crack as I forced mana into my horn and, like the sunrise, the pain became a mere irritant. I breathed a deep sigh of relief, that turned into a rattling cough.
“Awesome,” Dash continued. “Now the healing spell.”
“This is very dark magic Dash,” I croaked, fighting down the urge to fall into another coughing fit. My lifeblood was forming a sticky pool beneath me and the world was going grey, there was no time to waste coughing. “I’m going to be dea... home in five minutes without a air-bus full of medicine. Get to Ponyville. Find out what went wrong!”
For a moment I thought Rainbow Dash was going to stay by my side, then she leapt into the air, accelerating away into the tormented sky. The world was lit momentarily by a rainboom and I began to cough in earnest, staining my fetlocks red with bloody phlegm.
A traitorous part of my mind wished she’d stayed. The necrotic energies coursing through me were making it hard to concentrate on, well anything, and the supercharged anesthetic wasn’t helping matters. I couldn’t quite reach out to grasp the spell that kept me bound to that dying body and so lay there. Struggling to breathe. Counting every heartbeat as I slowly bleed to death. It was almost peaceful.
Pounding hooves woke me from my stupor. Trying to ignore the rising pain I raised my head and saw... well, I have no words beyond an ‘iron pony’, charging towards me. It was a monstrosity of steel and servos, easily the size of Big Mac and it bore a single searchlight upon it’s head.
“Twilight Sparkle!” it boomed, thundering to a stop next to me. It had a stallion’s voice. “Are you still with me?”
My eyes widened in shock. The creature was a pony? “Who...?”
“Sergeant Steelhooves,” the stallion clipped. “Don’t worry, I have medical supplies.” He sank to the ground next to me, and began rummaging in a set of steel saddlebags. “Stay with me a little longer and everything will be fine.”
I tried to raise a hoof to wave him away, but failed. “Don’t bother,” I gasped. “Save them for somepony who’ll need them.”
“I can’t think of anypony who’d need them more,” he clipped, and jammed a bottle between my lips. I drank greedily, the ache of necrotic magic fading as the mystic brew spread through my system. I longed to take a sample for analysis but I guessed it wasn’t the time, besides the mixture tasted foul. “What are you doing in Canterlot?” He paused, spotted my ruined wing for seemingly the first time. “And when did you become an alicorn?”
I kindled my horn, setting a low grade healing spell into motion, enough to keep me from expiring for a few minutes longer. “Long story,” I sighed. “What happened here? To Canterlot?”
“The apocalypse, that’s what,” Steelhooves growled. “We came under attack by balefire megaspells half an hour ago, after we lost contact with the rest of Equestria. The princesses put up a shield to protect the city center but...” He took a deep, rasping breath, glancing over his shoulder at the roiling mist within the shield dome. “I don’t think it worked.”
I nodded in agreement, not really listening to his words. This was an attack? Canterlot’s death was the result of somepony bringing weapons, weapons I didn’t even understand, to bear against my home? I didn’t want to believe it. The idea that anypony-- anything could willfully cause murder on such a scale simply didn’t register. Even Nightmare Moon planned to leave Equestria standing once she had won.
“Who... who’s attacking?” I asked at last.
“Who’d you think, Seaponies?” Steelhooves exclaimed, then on seeing my confused look. “The fucking Zebras, that’s who! Who else do you think hates ponies so much?”
“...but Zecora,” I gasped, clutching my pounding head.
“Was as much of a traitor as the rest of her filthy race.” He stamped a might hoof, and leaned down. “Twilight, I know you’re hurt and I won’t even pretend to know why you’re an alicon, but you have to get to safety. Canterlot is dead, but Stable 2 is close enough for you to make it before the end. Even if it’s closed, Applejack was on her way there and will let you in. Do understand?”
I shook my head. Honesty was always the best policy.
“Tartarus!” he swore, and pulled a large syringe out of his pack. He paused only to remove the protective cap and jammed it into my shoulder.
For a moment I thought he’d killed me, as liquid fire poured through my veins. It felt like I’d swallowed a triple shot of caffeine, cocaine and capsicum, and the world burned with a single crystal clarity. For a moment I felt that I could do anything, rebuild the city, mend the world or birth a sun, then it all came crashing down as the agony from my ruined flank returned with a vengeance, doubling me over with pain.
“Get to Ponyville!” Steelhooves roared, taking me by the shoulders and shaking me. “Find Applejack! And tell her I love her!”
He was kidding himself if he thought a single shot of whatever the stimulant was enough to teleport me all the way to Ponyville. The only reason I was even alive was because alicorns were near impossible to kill. Still, the concoction had given me the strength for one minor spell.
I met the armoured stallion’s shielded eyes for a moment. “I will,” I assured him. And cut my connection to his world.
I could still hear the screams of Canterlot, even as I sat next to the dais, watching Rainbow Dash’s body twitch and jerk. Somepony had draped a blanket over my shoulders, and I had a mug of coffee in my hooves, but I had no clear idea who had given me them, nor when.
Of course, the screams weren’t exactly in my head. The guardspony, the one who’s horn had been shattered, was still howling in agony when I’d arrived home. Shattering a horn was often described as the single most traumatic thing you can do to any pony, and it had long been theorised that there was a large psychological impact that went along with the physical sundering. It seemed, at least, we had proved that today. We had discovered little else of value.
The factory floor was quiet, subdued even. The excitement and barely constrained energy of our departure had evaporated. We had achieved a wonder, and done nothing but seen horror beyond our imagining.
“Recall in five, four, three, two, one!”
There was a deafening crack of arcane discharge and Rainbow Dash suddenly began talking “-- any minute...” She looked around. “Huh... Now.”
She spotted me and leapt into the air. “Oh thank Celestia,” she exclaimed, hurying over. I managed to avoid wincing at hearing Dash use that name. “I thought we lost you Twilight. Did you, you know--” She traced her hoof across her neck. “--kick the bucket?”
“No,” I sighed. “A pony called Steelhooves found me and gave me some kind of anti-necromantic potion. Did you reach Ponyville?”
“Yeah, though there wasn’t that much left. Something had smashed up a load of buildings, and killed all of Applejack’s trees. I only found one pony, Silver Spoon.”
I blinked, I hadn’t realised the Silvers were still living in Ponyville. “Was she safe?”
Rainbow Dash shook her head. “Not even close. She and her husband had caught the business end of one of those firebombs. She told me a lot before she went though. There was a war with the Zebras, and somepony nearly killed the Princesses, and Fluttershy of all ponies came up with some world ending spells or something. Twilight, what happened in SIX MONTHS for the whole world to burn like that?”
“I don’t know,” I said, staring at my hooves. “I can’t imagine how things could get that bad.” Nothing we’d ever faced promised destruction on such a scale. I took a deep steadying breath and continued. “Steelhooves told me there was some kind of shelter in Ponyville, that Applejack should be there. That’s our next destination.”
“Whoa!” Dash leapt backwards, eye wide with shock. “We’re going back? To that murdered Equestria?”
I sighed. “It’s worse than that. I’m going to have to go back to Ponyville.”
