Fallout Equestria: Sourpuss' Dossier

Chapter 2: The final moments

"The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?"

Fire, burning, pain beyond pain.

Those were the last things I felt as a regular pony, but I had little indication of it before... When I woke up everything was normal, and it felt like a normal day. Sure, my neck felt a bit more itchy than normal, but I was able to ignore it as I got dressed and ignored Sauce on my bed. I simply went about my normal routine, and walked out of my building normally.

On the way to work I took the subway, a feat of earth-pony engineering unmatched in any other city. Manehatten had mostly ignored it, allowing it's skies to be filled with pegasi pulling magically powered carts... but in my town, where the majority of the population were either non-ponies or earth ponies, more of us were comfortable underground than far above it.

I ended up walking out of my subway right next to my building, always glad for the stop right there, and climbed up to my floor. The nightclub wasn't exactly hopping, not during the day, but it was still louder than I would have liked, so I was glad when I was able to enter my office. Unlike pinkie I didn't like the sound of music, and I had instantly had my office soundproofed from all interruptions when I had taken the job.

"Commander Sourpuss, entering the office!" Came the crisp voice of the military personnel manning the door of the main offices. She was a good Mare, lean and good looking, but she was a bit too formal for my liking. I frowned at her but nodded, I couldn't even remember her name. She had a peach coat, and a soft chocolate mane, that was all I could ever remember. I noted her cutiemark, partially as an excuse to stare at her flank for a few seconds, it was a teddy bear with a switchblade... I wasn't sure I wanted to know how she got that one.

Finally I reached my personal office, and I was able to block out even more. For the next few hours I worked on my paperwork, happy to leave the 'high flying' work until it was late. It wasn't that I was ungrateful, but my work involved alot of pain and alot of pain-killers. And frankly, I hated the stress that supercharged LSP put on my body. So instead I worked happy on busy work. Happy until I got interrupted that is.

A loud, and cracking buzzing sound came from my door as the red light flashed. This indicated that someone wanted to see me, which meant something was wrong. I pressed the button that let someone in, and the one who walked in was someone I relay didn't want to see. Pescolt, an actor turned politician that had been bugging me for weeks at that point. "Sourpuss, I need to talk to you about Buried lede."

Well, that made me roll my eyes, this reporter had gotten under Pescolt's skin and that meant he'd had gotten under mine. "What about him, he finally get pictures of that vigilante?" I didn't admit that the vigilantly that had been doing stuff around the city had been hired by morale to be a symbol for the people in the city. "Or is he doing something else to fudge up our spinning gears and happily running machine?" I had to sigh, this reporter had been trying to get information out of the ministries since the start of the war. Sure, he was loyal to the crown, but he was a pain in my plot.

He paused for a second giving me a chance to study his visage. He looked like he usually did, in his dumb suit and with his graying mane messy as usual. He held a clipboard at his side, covering his Slice-of-Pizza cutiemark. "Honestly, there's nothing we can do. That reporter will do everything he can to publish the truth. And that's not always good for us."

"Then why in Taurus are you talking to me? I've told you a thousand times that trying to get the reporter to spin things to our side is the Ministry of Image's job." I slammed my hoof onto the desk, staring right into his eyes, my piercing and powerful eyes boring into his.

Pescolt tugged at his tie, looking uncomfortable as fuck. "Sir, I think I need to talk to you about my... Family." He sighed and slowly became far more confident then he was as a position, as if this was his true calling. "Look friend, I think you aught to accept the Calzone's offer. Take a hit out on the fucker."

"No." I cut in, sighing. I wasn't objecting over moral grounds, I was perfectly willing to get some help from the Family if I needed it, but this wasn't the time. "No, we can deal with this ourselves. Thanks. Now get out of my sight." This whole conversation had given me a headache to compete with the pain in my neck for who could be worse... It was already shaping up to be an unpleasant day.

***

I spent hours stalling taking that leap, because I knew that despite their headache killing effects those Mint-Als would not help my burning neck. My neck, mind you, that got worse with every moment. Still, I eventually had to do as I was hired to do, and take drugs for my country. So, later in the day then I ought to have, I pressed the few keys to save my work on my stable-tech computer and walked over to the single other peice of equipment in my office. The large, and perhaps overkill, gun cabinet I kept my drugs in.

Inside were alot of drugs, including ones that weren't being used by anyone else. But the one that I needed for my job, the one I was willing to take daily for my nation, was sitting right in the middle. A pile of hundreds upon hundreds of PTMs, Party Time Mintals. I took one tin, popped a few into my mouth, before locking the door and moving back to my desk.

At first my neck started to get worse and worse, as if something was searing it, and then I was hit by a weave of nausea. "Oh Luna..." I said, as my eyes clouded over and I was reduced to reacting like an overdoase. "T-there... There is going to be a bomb. A mega-spell! It's in an hour!" But no one could hear me scream as I lay there, and passed out from the pain.

When I woke up, twenty minutes later and finaly feeling the overwhelming power of PTMs in the rest of my system I was raring to go. I threw on my coat and ran out into the Morale. "Evacuate, there's a bomb. It's going to take out the city." I said, buttoning up. "And someone get me on the line with the mare, I know she's in her office right now."

"We can't get a line in." A random tech pony asked, who I mostly ignored. "What the hell are we going to do sir? This is fucking big!"

"You are going to keep calling until Pinkie gets her plot to answer the fucking call. Everyone else is going to evacuate Bucklyn as best as they can." I stared around the room. "What the hell are you waiting for, this is a fucking mega-spell and we've got less than a goddamn hour!"

Minutes passed, and I spent my entire time where I was, staring at my subsidiaries. "Everyone, get as many ponies as you can into the Bucklyn Stables. Protocol W4-12. And Get your families there. Pegasi, evacuate Griphons above the clouds and try to find a city that's not about to blow up."

They went. All of them went. And within the hour of my premonition, there was the blast. In my worrying and commanding I had stayed in the relatively unprotected offices, and I was the last one left except for the one pony, who was still trying to call pinkie pie. Fuck.

The blast was white-hot, even across the river. For all I know it was detonated as close to me as to most of Manehattan, because we were just across the river from where it had done the most damage. I can not tell you the pain of it, but I can tell you one thing. LSP goes away when those you are sensing die...

Footnote:

Quest Perk Added:

Ghoulification (Rank 1): You are in the beginning of ghoulification, and you'll soon become a full ghoul unless some other effect changes that soon. You have some of the benefits... but you are weak as your body adjusts itself to it's new biology.