Day of Cabbages and Turnips
Day of Cabbages and Turnips
Written for the Fallout: Equestria group's collab of January 2016
A warning message popped up on a terminal in the control centre of the Enclave cloud farm. The supervisor of the farm looked at his monitor in confusion.
"What?" he said. "That can't be right." He looked over to his colleague. "Uhh, Tinker? We're getting unusual activity in the Tower. Power fluctuations. Some sort of... energy buildup?"
The mare at the other desk raised an eyebrow and flew over to his terminal. "Lemme see, Burst," she said. Her colleague showed her the message he got, but she waved him away. "Oh, not that. The actual data, sheesh." She tapped the keyboard and brought up the Tower's logs.
Her eyes widened. "Th- that's impossible." She tapped a few more keys to confirm her fears. "Oh, starlight above, that's insane! Who would... wait, that's not our software..."
Suddenly she jumped back from the console as if it had burned her hooves. "The Hub? It's coming from the Hub?! Crap!"
She ran outside and towards the actual tower, with her confused colleague in tow.
"Tinker?!" Cloud Burst yelled behind her. "Can you please tell me what's going on? What's coming from the Hub?"
"I've only seen these readings once, when we were doing a full check of what we could do with the Tower. We never let it build up like this, though. This is actually going to strike!"
"Strike what, dammit?"
"Everything! It's a Sonic Rainboom!"
Cloud Burst stopped and landed where he was as Tinker flew on towards the white tower. The stallion hesitantly looked at the cloud cover below his hooves, and then at the farm around them. All those things they'd taken for granted. All those crops...
"That's insane," he whispered to himself.
Tinker slammed open the panel at the side of the tower and plugged a cable from her pipbuck into the slot inside. She quickly navigated through the menus. "Agh, this is impossible." She turned back to her colleague. "I've been locked out of ev—"
Cloud Burst wasn't there. He was still standing where he’d stopped, in the middle of the field, staring blankly at the leaves of a turnip sticking out of the clouds.
"We have to... harvest," he said numbly as he dug out the turnip and hugged it like a life preserver. "Harvest what we can, before..." He looked at the storehouse in the distance. It was made of clouds. Of course it was made of clouds. Everything was made of clouds. Even the harvesting carts, which were made of metal, were padded with clouds to keep them afloat; if the clouds were blown away, there was absolutely nothing that would stay in the air.
There was absolutely nothing they could do to save the crops. They would all...
"Forget about the crops!" Tinker shouted as she frantically tried to hack into the Tower's controls. "They're the least of our worries! This damn command was sent everywhere! There won't be anything left! The fields, the storehouses, the cities, everything!"
She looked at yet another error message on her pipbuck indicating the Tower's refusal to cooperate. "We... we've built our whole damn world on a megaspell ready to blow up in our face." She glanced at Cloud Burst and then back at the increasing energy levels mapped on her pipbuck. "Ah, dammit!"
She pulled the cables out of the tower and rushed over to her colleague, who was still desperately holding on to his turnip. "Up!" she yelled, pulling at his wing. "We gotta get higher or we'll be blown winds-know-where by this thing!"
Pulled out of his daze, Cloud Burst quickly nodded and flew up behind Tinker. Below them, the tower emitted a high-pitched whine, and promptly exploded into rainbows.
The two pegasi were swept away. They were no longer in the actual target area of the sonic rainboom when it went off, but they were still awfully close to the tower, and got hit fairly hard. By the time they managed to stabilize themselves in the air they had dropped quite a bit below the now-gone cloud level.
Cloud Burst looked at the wastelands below. Thousands of vegetables tumbled down, their leaves fluttering in the wind as they plummeted towards their doom, like damaged parachutes on a failed airdrop. A noticeably denser avalanche of produce was falling from the place where the storage warehouse had been. He watched in despair as the fruits—or well, vegetables—of all their hard work on the farm crashed down.
"My cabbages!" he yelled, still clutching the turnip in his forehooves.
Tinker patted her colleague on the back. "There, there," she said, tracking the organic projectiles to the ground. "At least we won't have to clean it all up." She frowned as she looked closer at the surface. "Burst... look at that," she said, pointing at something below.
"Ponies," Cloud Burst said, looking at the tiny colourful figures which had probably been gazing in awe at the rainbooms, but which were now quickly seeking cover from the incoming vegetable storm. He shook his head. "How in Tartarus do they survive down there?"
Tinker looked at the empty air around them. "I'm afraid we'll have to find out about that soon enough," she said soberly.
"What do you—" Cloud Burst tore his eyes away from the ground below and looked around and above them. "Oh." There wasn't a single cloud left in the sky. "Oh damn. You weren't kidding. Everything's just... gone."
"Let's hope it's not as bad as it looks down there, then," Tinker said.
* * *
Three ponies looked out of the open Stable door and watched as carrots, turnips, cabbages and other vegetables smashed into the ground outside.
"What the hell," the ghoul, Lemon Frisk, said. "As if the Celestia-damned attacks weren't enough. Now these featherbrains are pelting us with vegetables?"
"Maybe they ran out of bullets?" Misty Cloud, the mare standing next to him, offered. "Or, um, batteries or whatever?"
"Uh, dudes?" the younger stallion behind them asked hesitantly. "Is nopony gonna comment on the fact the skies opened?"
"It's gotta be a trick, Rambo," Lemon muttered back to him. "They're just doing all this to mess with us. Mark my words, they'll be covering it all up in no time."
Misty Cloud rolled her eyes. "Lemon, look. There's nothing left up there, at all. Not a cloud in the sky!"
"And yet, we can't take a step out there without getting our heads smashed in by rogue flying beets," Lemon threw back. "Leave it to those damn chicken wings to sour up even the clearing of the skies."
"Oh, chin up, old pone," the younger stallion, Rambo Apple, said. "Maybe some of it didn't smash too hard. We can always use new crops, especially after what happened to Hayden."
"Oh, sure, see the bright side," the ghoul muttered. "Want to know what I'm seeing?"
Misty Cloud rolled her eyes. "All right then, mister grumpy ghoul. What are you seeing?"
"An area covered with gravel, right outside our Stable, in which hundreds of vegetables are getting smashed to pulp." He turned to the other two. "Gravel, ponies. Not a nice flat hoseable concrete surface, but gravel. Tiny pebbles, on which ponies walk all the time as they go in and out of this place, stomping that mush into the ground. And then"—he pointed up—"there's the sunshine. You know what happens when you take mush like that, and the rain we've been having the past few weeks, and combine it with moderate amounts of warmth? It starts to rot. A ton of vegetable mush, on a surface that's impossible to clean off, rotting right outside our Stable door, with passing ponies smearing that crud all over the Stable, all the bloody time. That's what I'm seeing!"
Misty's face scrunched up as she imagined the full scope of that. "Oh. Ew."
"Indeed," Lemon growled. "This'll be a giant mess to clean up. And guess who will once again have to organize it all?"
* * *
Tinker looked at her pipbuck as she and Cloud Burst descended towards the wastelands below. Pipbucks weren't exactly common issue in the clouds, but she was a technician and needed it for her job. "Huh," she said. "No noticeable radiation around here. That's promising."
"All right," Cloud Burst said. "Can it detect any other kinds of poison, though?"
"Nope," Tinker said. "But those ponies below seem to have survived fine."
As they got closer to the ground, however, Tinker was forced to reassess that statement. "Okay. So that one doesn't look all that fine," she admitted, looking at the decayed-looking pony standing in front of the others in the cogwheel-shaped hole. "Still, he seems alive somehow."
"That's a Stable!" Cloud Burst said excitedly. "That's wartime construction! We'll be safe in there!"
"Um. If they let us in, that is," Tinker said. She didn't really like the looks the ponies were giving them.
As they got closer, more and more ponies started appearing in the open cogwheel door. They seemed torn between going into the sunlight and staying out of the vegetable mush, but seemed held back by the weirdly scarred one at the front, who was going for the latter choice.
Tinker recognized the pony's stance. She'd seen it plenty of times in the Enclave ranks, and this strangely-decrepit looking pony didn't need any markings, medals or uniforms to pull it off. He had Authority, capital 'A'. He simply radiated it.
As they got closer, the full feeling of wrongness about the pony sank in. He didn't really look old, but rather, weirdly decayed, his hide full of bald patches like a burn victim. Only, he didn't look burnt either. Just... decayed.
"What the heck happened to h—" Cloud Burst began, but he was quickly cut off by a gesture from Tinker. The mare threw him a quick glare and moved towards the Stable door, hovering in the air above the mess that was the remains of their warehouse full of produce. She glanced at Cloud Burst, who had just realized exactly what she was avoiding by not touching down, and who looked extra-glum about it.
"Are you the local leader?" Tinker asked the pony in front.
"Unfortunately, yes," Lemon replied, which earned him an eye roll from the mare standing next to him. "What's your business here?"
"Tinker Belle, cloud seeding division," Tinker replied. "Our cloud farm collapsed, and, uh, I'm assuming there isn't much left up there to go to in general. So I guess we, uh—" she looked at Cloud Burst, "—seek asylum?"
"Oh, that's grand," Lemon muttered. "First they steal the sun for two centuries, and then they think they can just knock on our door as if they're neighbours asking to borrow a cup of flour?" He glared at Tinker. "Piss off, sky rats."
Misty Cloud walked to the front and put a hoof on Lemon's chest. "Lemon Frisk, don't be rude," she said, giving him a somewhat exasperated look. "You heard them; they’re farmers, not soldiers!"
"Right," Lemon grumbled. "And I assume those are farmers' uniforms they're wearing?"
"Um, yes?" Tinker replied, somewhat confused.
"Wait, is she serious?" Lemon asked.
Misty peered at the uniformed mare and spotted the patch with a crossed rake and shovel superimposed over a turnip. "I actually think she is, Lemon. She did say 'cloud seeding division'."
Lemon gave Tinker a baffled look. "You're... military... farmers?"
"Well, of course. The Enclave manages the farms," Tinker said, unsure how else farming would work. She glanced up. "Well, 'managed', I guess. The whole place has been blown to vapour. Do you ponies, uh, know anything more about that? We heard rumours about being at war with some ground faction, but we never expected they could take, well, the cloud control systems."
"Reports are still comin' in on the radio," Rambo Apple said, "but it seems the Wasteland Heroine took advantage of the war between the Enclave and Red Eye to launch a wack little black ops commando mission at that thing. Single Pony Project, they're calling it. Controls all the weather."
"Single Pegasus Project!" Cloud Burst threw back. "You can't put just any pony in there!"
Rambo Apple smirked. "Well, judging from the somewhat nonexistent state of your cloud farm, it doesn't look like LittlePip cared much about that particular prerequisite."
"Burst, shut up," Tinker hissed at her colleague.
"But—" Cloud Burst said to Tinker, somewhat baffled by her outburst, "I outrank you, you know!"
"Burst," Tinker replied, pointing a hoof at the cloudless sky, "I think we kind of moved past all that." She looked at the ponies in the Stable door. "Right now, we're nothing more than refugees seeking asylum." She glanced aside to Cloud Burst. "And I dunno about you, but given the fact we apparently just lost a war, I'm feeling pretty happy right now that our ranks are basically 'farming technician' and 'farming officer'."
Cloud Burst lowered his head and sighed. "Fair enough."
"Anyway," Misty said. "I am Misty Cloud, and this is my husband, Lemon Frisk, uh, manager, of Stable sixty-nine."
"Manager?" Lemon Frisk asked.
"Well, pick something else, then!" Misty threw back. "You're the leader! Why can't you just choose a title and stick with it?"
"Dun wanna," Lemon Frisk grumbled.
Misty smirked and turned back to the pegasi. "So, as I said, this is Supreme Lord Lemon Frisk the Undying of Canterlot, Eternal Ghoul-Emperor of Stable si—"
"Hey!" Lemon cut in. He sighed. "All right, I'll handle it. Just... stop doing that."
"Whatever you wish, my dear," Misty replied smoothly as she moved back to her place slightly behind him.
The ponies inside the Stable door weren't the only crowd that was gradually getting larger. Tinker noticed that the pegasi that had worked on the farm were hovering behind them at what they apparently perceived as a safe distance. They were unsure what to make of it all, and seemed content to let their superior officer handle it... even though said superior officer was currently hugging a lone turnip and looking quite distraught over the untimely demise of all those innocent vegetables, while the farm's technician was handling the actual diplomacy.
Still, Tinker knew the situation had to be resolved quickly, before any of the farm workers started freaking out. Heck, before she started freaking out.
"Right, um, so... I request asylum. We're non-combatants, so I don't think surrendering is really a thing, in our case. But, uh... please don't eat us or anything?"
"Are you making fun of me?" Lemon Frisk growled, glaring at Tinker.
Misty held him back. "Lemon, they probably know less about the wastes than I did when I met you," Misty said in a calming tone. "Look at her! She doesn't even have a clue what a ghoul is."
Lemon sighed. "Fair enough," he said. "Right. So." He glanced at the group of pegasi hovering a bit farther. "Pegasi." He spat out the word as if it left a bad taste in his mouth.
"Ponies, dear," Misty corrected. "Homeless refugees, in fact. Please leave your two hundred year old grudges out of this."
Lemon Frisk closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "Right, right. Ponies, then." He looked at the hovering group in the distance. "That's about forty," he said. "We got space to harbour up to about a hundred in the Stable. Hayden's not gonna be happy about this, especially since their fields got destroyed in the Enclave attacks, but that also means we're controlling most of the food production, and they'll basically just have to deal with it."
"They're extra work force," Misty pointed out. "They can help rebuild it. That could placate Hayden a little."
"True," Lemon said. "I'm assuming a whole bunch more feathered folks are going to come down pretty soon, though. Meaning we'll need increased food production. So we rebuild the infrastructure at Hayden, and crank up the production of the Stable to the maximum we can manage. Which means, for both projects, we need more fertilizer."
Misty and Lemon shared a quick glance. They smiled in unison as their gaze went to the mess on the ground and then up to the two pegasi in front of them.
Cloud Burst shot Tinker Belle a dry look. "At least we won't have to clean it all up, huh?" he said sardonically. He narrowed his eyes and threw his turnip at her head.
Tinker caught the vegetable and snickered. She realized all too well that that could’ve gone a lot worse.
Author's Note
You know, from the moment I read the whole Sunshine and Rainbows part in the original story, I had the idea that somewhere, there must've been ponies below experiencing a rather odd rain of vegetables. So I asked Kkat about it. She confirmed that, yes, that must indeed have happened 
