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Well, after approximately 10 years of consistent badgering, Noctus has finally done it, he's managed to convince me to partake in this little project of his. I mean, I'd be lying if I said I didn't see the point in it, but I'm just so very BUSY nowadays to actually have the time to sit down and record this whole shebang. But I suppose I did agree to it, and I've signed all the paperwork, so I guess here goes nothing. I now present to you the magnificent memoirs of Sterling the brilliant! Ahem... Anyway, here goes nothing.
...Okay, according to Noctus I have to give my name and explain who I am before I tell any more of the story. If I'm honest I don't see the point; if anyone's listening to this they should know who I am already, but Noctus insists so yeah, whatever you say boss~! Jerk...
Well first of all, it would probably wise to speak as things stood back then, before the whole... well, anyway. My name is Sterling, and I'm an, uh, a Unicorn pony male. I have a golden hued mane and a lustrously shiny greyish silver coat, one which I was pretty proud of at the time, given how dirty and generally squalid the Wasteland is. Keeping that thing clean was no small feat let me tell you that! Washing in irradiated water is never fun, and the things I had to do to get working shampoo... Ahem... I have a pretty decent grasp of magic, and I know a good few useful spells. I can cast little balls of light, automatically clean clothes, sort items, and worked out this pretty clever way to make ponies' body hair grow super quickly, on top of a few other wacky cantrips, which is interesting I suppose. Oh yeah, I can also cast these pretty weak magical beams from my horn, which has come in useful one or two times. Apparently the ability is quite rare, but I've never really seen the glamorous side of it. All that being said, I'd be lying if I said I didn't much prefer using my FIX-45 Recharger Rifle, a crafty little doohickey that I picked up from a back alley deal a little over two years before these events started. I thought that it was pretty much the ideal weapon for someone of my profession; it was durable, didn't need me to waste caps on ammo, and packed a fairly respectable punch. I much preferred using energy weapons as opposed to the more conventional weaponry found across the wasteland; projectile guns just seemed so uncivilized and crude. Though I suppose that given the world we live in, I don't really have much scope to accuse ponies of being uncivilized. Anyway, I'm just rambling now, so lets get back to the story.
It was about 1pm I think, and I was pondering around this broken down munitions factory on the boughs of the southern Everfree. I think it was one of the Ironshod offshoot locations, a place where field tests were carried out most likely, I don't remember the exact details. I was here on, uh, business, back before The Immortals. I was meeting this old chem peddler, fella had a package of Party-Time Mint-als for me to buy, which I hoped to sell on in Baltimare or something. Back in the day, the folks of that fair city had a demand for Mint-als like you'd never seen, so I was attempting to piggyback on that bandwagon for a while. I wasn't totally sure if there was a shortage of chem labs in the area or if the cityfolk were just hopeless junkies, but I knew that a single one of those little pink poppers could go for as much as 300 caps apiece there, and the deal I had was for 100 each. That was a good 200 caps profit per pill, and that sort of money could keep me going for a good couple of weeks, or buy me safe passage up to the Tenpony Tower area, so you can understand my apprehension surrounding this deal; I couldn't afford to be overly aggressive in my bartering or my trading partner could pull a fast one on me and up the price. Let me tell you, venturing into an old dilapidated arms factory on the borders of the Everfree for a shady deal doesn't do wonders for your nerves, so I was jittery before I even stepped foot in the building. But that's enough about my chem-peddling history, let me set the scene.
I stood outside the factory building, just outside the main entrance, wearing an old set of leather barding with one hoof on the cap-jar attached to my belt, and my horn readied with a telekinesis spell around the grip of my rifle in case of trouble. Nothing too outrageous for your bog-standard wasteland wanderer. I gazed up at the burnt out husk of the munitions factory, feeling tinges of cheerlessness running through my mind. It was evident that the factory once wore a bright coat of crimson paint over most of its structure, but any pigment left on the walls had been scorched black or faded to a dirty bleached pink by the weathering of time. Half of one section of the roof of the building had caved in, and the rubble looked like it had broken down through the upper floor. One of the chimneys that had once been protruding from the roof of the building had cracked off and collapsed onto the browned ground below, leaving a smattering of aged clay bricks slumped across the surface. The entire building was in a great state of disrepair; the thing looking like it could collapse at any moment, nothing like the shrine it is today. It was moments like these that always managed to remind me of the sheer severity and destructive power of the great war that devastated the planet near 200 years ago. I mean, I was born into this world, I didn't grow up in a fancy Stable or anything, but it still got to me, y'know? Seeing those ghosts of the old world was quite unnerving, but being inside one of them just made me feel the gravity of the situation even more. But I digress...
After conducting a brief perimeter check of the area, looking out for mines, potential escape routes and the like, I took my place in front of the main entrance and made my final equipment checks. I adjusted the straps on my old leather barding, checked my rifle was still in working order, fiddled about with my saddlebags, and only once I was confident that I was ready, or as confident as I could be, I stepped up to the rusted steel doors, leaned my forehooves against the cold surface, and pushed them open. As the doors swung open, the first thing that hit me was the stench; the whole place reeked of old gunpowder and rust, and once my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness and my brain overcame the overwhelming smell, it was easy to spot why. Inside the factory were several decayed conveyor belts, with the odd bit of dilapidated machinery dangling listlessly from the ceiling. Much of anything worth anything had been looted for scrap metal years earlier, but there was a good few bits of old construction equipment left; mostly shell presses and the odd gunpowder nozzle. Hell, some of it still looked operational. But I wasn't here for scrap metal to sell on to some desperate local mechanic or ghoul repairpony, I was here for 'the goods'. While I was still more or less focused on my imminent goal, I couldn't help but glance towards the walls and the myriad of propaganda poisoned posters hanging flimsily from the bare brick. I chuckled softly to myself as I read some of the old slogans.
“Work Filly Work!” I recited, as I examined the poster depicting an Earth Pony mare operating a bullet casing press with a disproportionately large grin on her face.
“Serve here, so they can serve out there!” I read next. This poster possessed the image of the same Earth Pony from the previous poster working her press in one corner on the image, while the rest of the poster was taken up with a phalanx of power-armoured soldiers and the Equestrian flag flying over their heads. I chuckled as I moved on to the next poster, finding a sense of morbid humour at the blind optimism of the pre-war propaganda. My eyes moved on to the next poster, my smile faltering as I observed the poster that had copies printed on buildings all across the wasteland.
“Pinkie Pie is watching you, ALWAYS!” I shudder now just thinking about it, there's always something about those old Ministry of Morale posters that could just never quite leave your mind, whether for good or for bad. Pinkie's eyes had that look in them that seemed to burrow into your brain like a maggot and nestle there, constantly bringing concern and discomfort, no matter how much the ink had faded over the years. I suppose that ultimately, that was the point of them. In any case, after my brief foray into the exquisite gallery of renaissance pre-war artwork, I remembered that I was here on business and began to focus up again. I suppose I really had a problem focusing on things back then. I cast my eyes out to the surroundings and tried to develop a memory map of the ground floor. From what I could tell, this section of the factory consisted of a large common area where the majority of the arms fabrication would take place, with two doors along the north wall of the building and with a staircase leading to an upper floor with offices that overlooked the common area, with gangways between office rooms. We had both agreed to meet in this place over messages sent via courier (coded of course), and I was beginning to regret my choice in location. There was also an open door on the upper floor that appeared to lead into some sort of hallway. The message had specified that he would be waiting in one of the office rooms on the upper floor, so naturally the first place I moved to was the staircase. I climbed the old metal steps with only a slight grunt of effort; the steps had been designed for the slightly bigger Earth Ponies, and as such, the steps were just far enough apart from one another to make scaling the steps a task far more arduous than it needed to be. When I at last arrived at the top of the staircase, a full ten vertical metres from the ground floor, I immediately set off to look for the dealer among the myriad office blocks.
As I slowly paced down the length of one particular broken hallway, my ears pricked at a faint sound independent of the sounds of my own walking. I immediately froze on the spot and attempted to slow my breathing, attempting to identify the foreign vibrations. As I focused my ears, I began to hear the faint sound of dripping water patting onto stone. A slight twinge of panic shot through my mind, and I immediately dashed briskly over to a nearby window and peered outside, past the broken glass. I stuck a hoof out of the window to test whether or not there was any moisture in the air that could be causing rain, but found nothing that could indicate any abnormalities in the weather. Rain was never a good omen in the wasteland, as the amount of ambient radiation floating about up in the sky made anything that fell from it extremely dangerous and usually highly irradiated, and I was busy enough without imminent radiation poisoning to deal with. While that did leave the question as to what the dripping actually was, I subdued my curiosity and continued to search.
While it was no doubt this place probably contained quite a decent amount of pre-war loot stashed away somewhere, perhaps in the multiple office blocks that lined the walls as I walked, the sheer proximity to the Everfree was making me extremely uncomfortable; I could see great tufts of green from the windows to my left, and I kept thinking I was seeing shadows moving all around me... Maybe it was the light or something, I dunno, but the end result was the same; I was even more on edge than I expected. Hell, I was practically vibrating as I moved. So when my contact thought it would be funny to greet me by tossing a defused grenade towards me from one of the office rooms, you can imagine my reaction as I heard the faint ‘tink tink tink’ as the small metallic object bounced down the hallway towards me. That being squeal like a little filly. I was shocked onto the floor in my panic, my flank striking the decayed concrete MUCH too hard for my liking, and my annoyance only increased when the grenade didn't explode into a fiery inferno. While I was still sprawled across the floor, an old, disheveled grey Earth Pony stallion, dressed in a ragged denim jacket covered in old pin buttons and stinking as if he had been bathing in his own shit for the past year trotted out from behind a door that was barely kept on its hinges, laughing like a maniac. I shook my head in annoyance and climbed back onto my hooves, glaring at the codger angrily.
“What the hay is your problem?!” I cried, much to the humour of the oldie in front of me.
“I'm very sorry my good sir, I thought I'd play a little practical joke before we got started,” he answered, chuckling into his hoof. I rolled my eyes in exasperation and replied.
“Right yeah, sure, whatever. I expect a discount for this though.”
“Whatever you say big-shot,” the smelly old colt chuckled, before turning on his hooves and trotting back into the room from which he had been hiding. With an exasperated groan, I followed the stallion into his room. Well, I would have done if the son of a bitch hadn't slammed the door in my face. I blinked twice at the shabby door frame in front of me, my brain trying desperately to comprehend what was going on. I shook the questions out of my head and reached a hoof out to knock on the door. The cracked voice of the old stallion rang out.
“Who is it?” he spoke. I blinked twice, had this stallion really forgotten me so quickly, or was he just playing games with me? Or was he just insane?
“Its me…” I replied simply.
“Oh not you! I knew you were coming!” the voice called, taking an almost songlike demeanor.
“Yeah, because we had a deal…” I called back, slumping my torso against the doorframe, attempting to take some of the weight of my saddlebags off of my legs.
“What deal? I don’t make deals! I just live, I exist here. Its very fun! The wall and I have such fascinating conversations!” I clapped my hoof against my face in exasperation, this buck was clearly screwing with me or just insane. Deciding that enough was enough, I contemplated a drastic change in my communicative tactics…
“Can you let me in please?” I asked. Who knows, this strategy may just be crazy enough to work…
“Oh, uh, um, hmmm… It depends, err, what’s your name?” he replied. I rolled my eyes yet again.
“Sterling.” Okay yes, here was some progress.
“And what is your favourite colour?” The voice inquired. I felt my irritation levels slowly rising.
“Umm, green?” Come on, we're so close now...
“I’m afraid green is not an acceptable answer!” the stallion chortled,
“Try again!”
“Ugh, yellow?” I answered again. This motherbucker was seriously getting on my nerves…
“That will do,” he replied, and I heard the sound of the door unlocking in front of me. Breathing a sigh of relief, I lit up my horn with magical energies and focused my mind on the knob of the door, the metal becoming illuminated with the light gold of my magical aura. A brief flex of my mental muscles and the doorknob twisted, and I heard the familiar click as the bolt behind the door slid aside, granting me access to the room. A quick push of the door and I was in.
As I stepped through the doorway, my eyes were first drawn to the decor in the room. The place had clearly been well furnished when it was first designed, with a fairly well-made desk in one corner of the room. The room was also occupied with a few old filing cabinets and what remained of a plant pot, though whatever leafy life form it once housed was more than long gone. All in all, it had an air of comfort and style, like it was the room of a manager, or some other high up within the factory’s hierarchy. Curiously enough, there appeared to be an interesting chem lab set-up in a corner of the room, complete with beakers partially filled with strangely coloured fluids and a hot plate warming an odd green concoction. What really punctuated my mind as I fully observed the entirety of the room was the copious amounts of foul-smelling excrement smeared around the floor, walls, and… sweet Celestia there was even some on the ceiling. Frankly I should have been disgusted, and don’t get me wrong, I was, but the sheer quantity of the brown stuff that was splotched around the room was borderline impressive. Disgusting filth of this level took some sort of specialised skill, and for a brief moment I wondered if shitting was this ponies’ cutie mark. Briefly. I gagged back my bodies natural instinct to vomit and attempted to begin negotiations with my partner.
“So, I uhh… I came for some of the ‘good stuff’,” I said, my eyes beginning to water from the smell.
“You’re going to have to be much more specific, we get a lot of requests nowadays. I’m fairly popular when it comes to the marketing of various drugs,” he replied, a sly, shit-eating grin infecting its way across his face.
“The Mint-als. The ones that I was told…”
“Ah, the Mint-als!” he interrupted, much to my chagrin,
“What type of Mint-als do you wish to procure? I have regular Mint-als, orange Mint-als, grape Mint-als, berry Mint-als, and Party-Time Mint-als," he listed, mouth flapping as he rambled on. I could even see flecks of spittle fly from his mouth as he yammered, and I instinctively cringed in disgust.
"Though I lied and I only actually have the first and the last Mint-als in that list. I’ve been trying to synthesize Mint-als of other flavours but that’s trickier than it sounds, and they always wind up making me sweat more than a ‘working-mare' in court. But the Party-Times; that’s the strong stuff!”
“Then I’ll take all your Party-Time Mint-als, if it pleases you,” I confirmed, nodding slightly.
“All of them? Wow… You must have very deep pockets! Well I have five, so that would cost you 500 bottlecaps, if that would be sil vous plait monsieur, mon petit cherie!” I winced at his use of odd accents and words, I really hoped to get this conversation over and done with as soon as I could. Suddenly, a spark of inspiration ignited in my mind. And I don't care what bullshit Talos says as part of his recordings, I swear this is exactly what happened, no lies.
“Say, are you into tricks?” I questioned.
“Tricks? Well I do like a good game, what’s the game?!” he stammered excitedly.
“I can make some ‘things’ happen. If you can tell me how I’m doing it, I walk out with what I’ve got. If you can’t, you give me some more of the, uh, stuff,” I replied, a sly look creeping across my face.
“But you have a horn, you’re clearly a unicorn. Of course you can perform magic. I’m not some fool, what do you take me for?!"
“Yes, but, you must tell me the exact specifics. Name the exact spell I’m using. Its a, uh, a logic and knowledge game if you like,” I spoke, turning on my full good looking hunk charms to attempt to sway the old pony into agreeing to my deal. The stallion scrunched up his nose and spat out,
“I have absolutely no bucking clue how magic works, but screw it, lets go, deal!” I let out a brief, genuine chuckle, amused at the pony’s spirit. I attempted to block out the smell from my mind as much as possible, and began to let my magic flow into my horn. I focused my aim onto the desk, and began to levitate it, my familiar golden aura surrounding the wood.
“Pah, that’s telekineses!” the stallion cheered, jumping to his hooves in excitement. I nodded, releasing the magic from the desk, wincing slightly as the wood struck the ground with a loud thud. In his movement, I managed to get a glimpse at his cutie mark. It appeared to depict a syringe injecting a glowing green fluid into a red love heart. Thinking back on it, it was actually somewhat sweet. Apart from the whole ‘living in a room full of shit’ thing.
“Those are some pretty dirty clothes you’re wearing…” I commented slyly. The stallion simply looked at me with a quizzical expression.
“Not anymore,” I grinned, as magic once again surged through my horn and into his clothes, tongues of golden light weaving through the fabric in his jacket and dancing across his flesh. In an instant, his clothes were, likely for the first time in years, clean. As soon as the magic dissipated, the stallion let out a loud yelp of fright, and immediately dashed over to the nearby window. With a leap possessing agility I would never have expected from a pony of his age, he surged into the glass of the remarkably still intact window pane, and crashed through it, plummeting downwards into the world outside. I raised an eyebrow in moderate confusion.
“Eh, I’ve seen weirder…”
To this day I have no idea what happened to that stallion. I think he survived, maybe Talos knew something, but honestly I didn't care enough to check. One way or another, a few moments later I picked up my new cache of chems, slung them into my saddlebags, and organised myself ready to go. Before I set off to leave the room, I cast my eyes over to the chemistry set in the corner and briefly deliberated pocketing the concoction. After a few moments of thought, I decided that there was no way in Tartarus I was going to take an unidentifiable and likely volatile chem with me, and I began to slowly pace my way out of the room, taking exquisite care not to step in any of the brown sludge on the floor.
I successfully managed to exit the room, hooves shit-free, and took several steps away from the open door so that I could finally take a breath of truly fresh air. Well, fresh compared to the ghastly scents where I, not twenty seconds ago, was standing. While I was gulping down mouthful after mouthful of clean air, I almost didn’t notice the sound of a loud clacking of hoof against stone resonate through the hallway. In an instant, my blood froze and the colour drained from my flesh. My horn illuminated with golden light and its aura enveloped the hilt of my rifle, slowly pulling it from its holster, attempting to remain as silent as possible. The previous shenanigans with the peddler had managed to knock me off my guard, and I had almost forgotten just how dangerous the location I was in really was. All at once the natural lighting in the hall seemed to dim, though I was certain that this was my mind playing tricks on me again. The atmosphere took on the consistency of thick pea soup and my breathing quickened, while I felt my muscles begin to flood with adrenaline, ready to prepare for a fight or to hightail it the sweet buck out of there. Not wanting to take any chances, I readied my rifle at shoulder height, my eyes following the crevice of the sights to the end of my hallway, where it met another hall running perpendicular to its length. The second anything came around the corner, I would be ready to fire if absolutely necessary. I waited for another few moments, before I heard the sound again.
Clack… clack… clack…
A bead of sweat ran down the brow of my face.
Clack… clack… clack…
I loosened up the magic pathways inside my brain, limbering up my spell reactions.
Clack… clack… clack…
The tension was killing me, and the sound was getting louder…
Clack… clack… clack…
Just when I thought I couldn’t take it any longer, the figure revealed itself from behind the corner. What I saw gripped the breath halfway down my throat like a vice.
It was an alicorn, coloured deep and vibrant green, much lusher than that of any unicorn I had met, or any alicorn I had observed from afar. Her face had an eerie aura of calm to it, as if she was totally at peace with her surroundings, but I caught a glint of purpose in her eyes, a glint that I feared intensely. To call this pony beautiful was an understatement, to say they looked welcoming would be an outright lie. I was by no means in the dark regarding alicorns, and knew just how much they valued unicorn “volunteers”, so you can understand just how terrified I was. I opened my mouth to shout out a warning to the alicorn, when all of a sudden, quicker than I could react, her horn illuminated with a black aura and she vanished in a cloud of ebony mist. Instantly I was thrown into panic and confusion, frantically spinning my head and body around to search for the whereabouts of the alicorn. Perhaps more worryingly than actually spotting her, my initial search turned up empty. Taking deep breaths to calm myself down, I focused my attention on the hallway that the alicorn had appeared from and tried to think logically.
“Okay, okay, calm down Sterling. Lets think. The alicorn came from down that corridor, so it must know the layout of that area of the building quite well. As great as alicorns are, just like alicorns, they can’t risk teleporting blind. So wherever it is, chances are it’s down those hallways somewhere,” I spoke, to no one in particular. I blinked twice, my face deadpanning as I weighed up my options.
“Nope,” I stated, turning on my hooves and marching back the way I came, traversing the metallic staircases back down to the factory floor.
"Nope nope nope nope nope..." Yeah, real brave I know. I stepped into the factory floor, and began to head my way to the building’s exit, but as I approached the centre of the main manufacturing area, I found my passage blocked by a lone figure, the dim lighting of my surroundings preventing me from getting a full sighting of the pony stood before me. My inner voice let out a sigh of exasperation.
“I just can’t catch a break today…” I thought to myself, as I quickly gathered all information I could from the silhouette that I could see. The pony was clearly male, and judging by the protrusions at his side, was a pegasus. Quite rare. He didn’t appear to be heavily armoured, but neither was he wearing a simple shirt. From what I could gather, he was dressed in similarly-styled hoofstiched leather barding to me. Well, that and he wore a battle saddle, with some nasty looking rifle mounted upon it. This was roughly all I could deduce before the character spoke out in a harsh, aggressive tone,
“Lets make this as painless as we can; give me your gun, drop your equipment, give all useful provisions you have to me, and no one will get hurt, you understand?”
And that was the first time I met Talos.
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