Fallout Equestria: Sundown

Chapter 13: Braggadocious Perspective

At some point, I am most definitely going to make this time travel spell entirely more bodacious. It takes

me a whole month just to travel a couple centuries time, and one would think that it wouldn’t be an

issue since you can just travel to any point in time, thus making the travel time completely pointless. The

only problem with that, is you’re stuck contemplating life while flying through a tunnel of eldritch

horrors and your Grandmare Butterscotch.

“Are you shure you don’t want my candies, shweety?” Grandmare Butterscotch asked with a fluctuating

voice as she gently drifted around me for the six thousandth time, offering me her endless supply of

Butterscotch Candies that nopony in their right mind would want.

“I am most fine, Grandmare Butterscotch.” I, Braggadocious, had answered.

She had since lost the appearance of an elderly mare about a millennium ago, but that didn’t stop her

from pretending that she wasn’t killed the second I discovered this spell though experimentation. Yes I

feel responsible, but she’s also been able to run a fairly extensive candy empire here in the lands

between time and space. I’m fairly certain she’s even entertained a few cosmic horrors as guests for tea.

“Are you shure you don’t want my candies, shweety?” Grandmare asked again, forgetting that we had

had this conversation countless times before. Unless this was her form of paying me back as revenge.

“Just fine, Grandma.” I huffed. The end of my journey was coming up, and It couldn’t happen fast

enough. I had just returned from informing Marelin about my encounter with Sundown in the first

Balefire War before Celestia dropped in on the conversation just as I was mentioning the ‘Entombed’

Night Guard that was afflicted with the magical corruption of Nightmare Moon. The Sun Princess had

originally planned to have Sundown preserved and protected against any harm or would be murderers

while she was frozen, but judging from the Bat pony’s expression set in stone, she wasn’t appreciative of

it.

I know that if I had been frozen in stone for over a millennium that I wouldn’t be harboring any good

feelings, especially since Celestia had forgotten that whole part about rendering the pony you’re casting

the spell on unconscious before you cast it. I was actually more surprised that Sundown hadn’t gone

completely insane while she was trapped as a statue all that time, but she didn’t seem to be all there in

the first place when I met her.

“Are you shure you don’t want my candies, shweety?” she asked again, giving me a wink this time that

almost made me explode with frustration. My exit was almost here, thank the goddesses, so I controlled

myself.

“Thank you for your time, Grandmare. See you later!” I called out to her, as my exit from the wormhole

yanked me through the portal.

BLAM!

My portal had opened to the sound of a single, loud gunshot as I tumbled through the air, contorting so I

didn’t end up impaled on something in the wasteland before I fell to the ground with concrete crunching

under-hoof. I looked up in time to see Sundown falling over with a fairly squishy flop, her blood gushing

from where her head used to be and her throat was gurgling blood.

“Whoa. Most unpredicted.” Well, it was true. I was hoping to return before somepony had killed her, but

I guess I took longer than I had thought.

“Who the fuck are you?!” A unicorn mare holding a large and dangerous looking revolver shouted at me,

voice cracking from apparent stress.

“Fear not, for I am Braggadocious. Student of Mar-“

BLAM! I cringed, and quickly checked myself.

She had shot into the air this time, thankfully.

“Who. The fuck. Are. Yooouuu!” She screamed from barred teeth, looking ready to tackle or shoot me if

I said something stupid again. I had forgotten that I was in the wastelands, not Canterlot.

“Friend! I am a friend, and I mean no harm to you!” I hastily replied, hooves upheld in surrender as I sat

down on the concrete. She was breathing heavily and straining to hold back what looked like a whole lot

of anger. I wouldn’t be wrong in saying she had just turned Sundown’s head into a new bowl, so I didn’t

like the thought of my head becoming another demonstration of her bone carving skills with a revolver.

“Do you know what the fuck just happened here? Do you know what this monster just did to everypony

I knew?! She killed them! Every single fucking one of them are dead now because of her, and she can’t

even die!” She was ranting now. Her magical hold on the revolver was aiming it erratically and I didn’t

trust that she wouldn’t shoot somepony on accident, including herself.

I looked over at the corpse of Sundown, her brains scattered on the filthy ground and her head had

become a goopy paste.

“Don’t you even dare say ‘she looks dead to me’ or I will end you!” she screamed, pointing at me with

the revolver and now a magic pistol that she had picked from in her magic.

“Do you know what the worst part of it is? She wasn’t even in control! Not the Sundown I know,

something fucking possessed her and went on a rampage! The only thing I could think of to help her,

was shooting her in the face! I don’t know if she can come back from that, but at the very least she

won’t be able to kill anypony else.” Her anger was beginning to fade, and was being replaced with

exhaustion and grief. I decided not to press her, as she was probably going to break on her own.

“I… I can’t anymore. I can’t take all of this bullshit in the wastes, not on my own. I’m not stupid enough

to ask a pony that literally drops out of the sky, especially when they look like a… wizard.” A look of

confusion spread across her face, before she asked my name again.

“I am Braggadocious…” I paused, waiting to see if she would shoot me for the full name, but she spoke

before I could continue.

“You were there, at the Stable?” She asked cautiously, still pointing a lot of death in my direction.

“Most certainly.”

“Why? Sundown said that you had blown up the stable, and healed everypony. But the only problem

with that is that nopony can remember the same stable, let alone seeing a wizard.” She was dropping

her guard. Her weapons were pointed towards the ground in front of me, so I took the opportunity to

switch the safeties on while she was distracted.

“I can’t tell you why. She is correct that I healed all of you that I could, although some of your allies were

already too badly hurt or injured for my skills to fix.” I explained with a forced calm, heart beating from

the adrenaline of having weapons pointed at me. I knew that they couldn’t kill me outright, as a gift

from Marelin saw to it that I was well protected. Not invincible, but protected. I call it ‘The Bro-ach of

Marelin’ to annoy her. They would still hurt to get shot with though.

“I’m guessing it would be too much to ask you to fix all of this?” She gestured with a magic rifle held

with her telekinesis at the carnage of the devastated Steel Ranger base. Corpses and shredded

equipment strewn everywhere like a hurricane of blood and death had leveled the place.

“I can see who I can help. Do you know who the most recent to die was, aside from Sundown?” I

lowered my forehooves and stood up, cautiously walking towards the emotionally distraught mare.

“My friends… Cheese Wheel and Card Swipe. They died next to me.” She said quietly, guns clattering to

the concrete without a care for their condition. I offered my help, and she led me through the carnage

into a small room with an Audio Dampener. The one she had pointed out to be Card Swipe was a

crunched mess of bloody ribs sticking from a caved in chest, and Cheese Wheel was missing his limbs

with a look of agony and terror frozen on his face.

“I will do what I can for them.” I promised, holding them in the air with the bright glow of my magic.

With sickening crunches and blood spurting from the effort of placing bone and limbs where they should

be, I gave my best attempt at Necromancy. Normally to any Unicorn in Equestria, the knowledge of the

Zebra’s Black Book would be kept a secret, penalty of death. I, however, was a student of Marelin and

close friend to Celestia for centuries. It pays to know the right ponies.

My usual orange and red colored aura of magic was replaced with a null black, draining the color from

the room into a greyscale shift that streaked into my horn. The bodies of the Steel Ranger’s friends were

lifted by this same void and floated into the air.

“Are you sure that you wish your friends returned?” I asked with my eyes closed, concentrating on the

next portion of the spell.

“Do it already!” she snapped back. Very well then, nopony must’ve told her to be careful what she

wished for. The bodies were bathed in a black and grey fire, a growing whirlpool of dark magic coming

from beneath them as I chanted the words necessary for the ritual to begin in earnest.

“Mittentis reditum de morte ad vitam, robur animae ad reparare, ad renovandam vitam. Integro corpore

et spiritu vivificetur et ligare.”

“Qui patitur amor, qui habitant fames esse constitit atque benignus. Et mors ultra non dicere te , et in

perpetuum exilium a falce metit.”

“Maledicens animam scilicet et amicus est tibi in ministerium eris. Contemnis malitia et ad inimicorum

odia , ne pro defectu tui tuendae poenam sempiternam.”

At this point, the room was a complete hurricane of necromantic energy, the final words of power to be

spoken to bind the souls to their master proper. All sound, all light and all movement had stopped to

witness this unnatural event. The dark light of the spell’s power had torn several cracks in the

foundation and walls of the building in which it was cast, the eyes of the Initiates friends becoming pure

white orbs, glowing and searching for their souls to return.

“Anima vestra revertetur ad reliquias ossa tenentur domino stat dum mortis data est gratia. Servabis

Donec soluti corpore tueri permaneas in eius servitio. Surgam, et factum est. Non permisit quies!”

The spell was completed with a vicious shout, as the souls of the initiates were ripped from their

enjoyment of the afterlife and dragged screaming back to their bodies, held together from the force of

the spell and sealed forever in their bones. In a final release of energy, the screams of the damned

exploded outwards from the building. The souls of those Steel Rangers recently dead and dying were

scattered to the winds in a final flash of agony before the sound, light, and natural color of the world

swam back to take the place it once held.

“AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHGGGG!!!” the Initiates screamed, living in pain from their wounds being noticed

as they awoke from death. The Initiate that had requested her friends be returned to her had forgotten

me entirely at this point, and I had to make sure that Sundown hadn’t used this time to regenerate

herself and escape. She brushed past me, trying to console her friends and get them to calm down as I

briskly trotted out of the building in search of the tainted night guard.

The muffled sounds of the panicked and pained Initiates faded away as I determinedly marched past the

smoking wreckage of burnt out power armor and fused plating of a few Paladins as I saw Sundown’s

corpse already twitching and willing itself back to life in a spasmodic heap of twisted magic. Screeches

and high pitched yelps of agony escaped the now reforming mouth of the resurrected night guard, as I

opened another portal back to pre-war Equestria and shoved her still recuperating form into it. Giving

the surrounding devastation a last glance, I hopped into the maelstrom after her as the portal closed.

“Equitum portæ ad terram , pro duobus placer.”

Portal to Horse Land, Room for two please.

Just because it looks fancy, doesn’t mean it is.