Introduction

When the megaspells fell, thousands of ponies retreated to underground stables, anyone unfortunate enough to be left outside retreated to the skies or died in the balefire and radiation. Years later, ponies left the stables in hope of a bright future, but they were greeted with the desolate hellhole that was once Equestria. The ponies spread out, hoping to rebuild the once beautiful land, but they didn’t even come close to succeeding.

What the instead made was the wasteland. A harsh unforgiving place where it seems everything and everyone is out to kill you. Sure there are pockets of what could be called society, but you’re more likely to stumble across raiders or ghouls before you get anywhere vaguely pleasant.

The wasteland is like one big board game, make a wrong move and that can be the end of you. One bullet can mean the difference between life and death. And karma always comes back to bite you in the ass, or shoot you in the brain. And it usually has something to do with somepony you pissed off somewhere down the line.

That is where ponies that were like me come in. When someone really wants a pony dead and they don’t have the skills to kill them, they go to professionals like I was. That was my life, I killed ponies for a living.

In all fairness, most of the ponies I killed were gits anyway and deserved to be shot. And it was a very well paying career. Though I had never particularly enjoyed my job, it was always for my friend. In one very brief moment of intelligence, I figured that if I earned enough cash, my friend Midnight would be safer. I then learnt that I had a particular skill in putting bullets through ponies brains, so that’s how I started.

And for 3 years, I traveled the wasteland, depositing lead into skulls. Nothing too special happened, and I was pretty content with my life. Then one day, I screwed up. I tried to do something good and in return I got my eye shot out. It was then that I quit my bloodthirsty job and turned to digging around old buildings, looking for some shit that I could sell.

Then, my life truly changed. I ended up on an adventure I didn’t know was happening until I had a bunch of fuckers hunting my ass. So, I’m gonna tell you all about it, but first I best tell you how I ended up in the wastes to begin with.

I was born in Stable ‘17’, down near some place called Dodge City. It was a pretty decent place to grow up in. The stable was always peaceful and friendly, and it was safe. I was raised by my mum and dad, along with my little sister Lillyflight. Mum was a security mare and dad was a doctor, pretty average parents. When they were busy I hung out with my best friend Midnight, causing trouble around the place.

And one day we did something real stupid, we found hobbies. Midnight found she had a real knack for making weapons out of scratch, and I had a talent at using said weapons. Now most ponies would say that there was nothing wrong with a harmless hobby, but that was different in the stable. Because the last thing you wanted was to get a cutie mark in an unproductive hobby.

When a filly hit school, they would first learnt the basic stuff. Maths and the like. Once that was sorted, they’d learn ‘work skills’. Which meant they’d drag kids down to maintenance to screw up some disused pipes, then up to the kitchens to give the overmare food poisoning (no lie, I actually did that) and then pretty much the same routine with all the other jobs available in the stable. And then the routine would go on and on until they go their cutie marks, usually when they were young adults. After that a pony would go into their field of work while learning all the extra’s in their spare time, such as history and music. Unless a pony was like me.

I was an ‘irrelevant’, somepony looked down on by the stable. An irrelevant was a pony whose talent had no purpose. Artists, singers, dancers, athletes, all irrelevant in the overmares eyes. Most of our entertainment came from dancing maintenance mares, or singing chefs. Anyone irrelevant was kicked out the stable and quickly forgotten about.

My cutie mark was in shooting, shown as a black arrow with flames on the flights. Unfortunately for me, our stable had never used firearms, having kept them locked up for years. That made my talent ‘irrelevant’ so I had to go. I wasn’t alone though. Midnight had got her talent in making and mending weapons, shown by a revolver with a spanner over it. We were the first in years, and looked down on by the whole stable. But leaving was the worst part.

And that is how we ended up in this shithole, scrounging through pre-war junk for scraps to sell. Then, like I said, I ended up on the most life-changing adventure. I almost changed the fate of the wasteland, and then I continued to change the land in hope of redeeming myself.

My name is Fireflight, and I am the pegasus who was hired to kill Littlepip. This is the story of my adventure across the wasteland. And why I changed my mind.

Author's Note

So, finally I have gotten round to fixing the first part of my story. Hopefully its a lot better than before, and if there is anything I can improve on please say so in the comments