Fallout Equestria: Sourpuss' Dossier

Chapter 3: New Dawn
Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.

When I woke up I was in a pile of rubble but, miraculously, I was somehow alive. The whole building had collapsed below me, or at leas the top floor had. Mixing rubble with ministry files and equipment. Forgive me but, well, with that knock on the head I wasn't quite thinking straight. So I simply walked away from what would later be the most important thing to me: the large amounts of trading supplies that filled the building.

No, I just stood up and slipped on my jacket like I usualy did at the end of the day. I placed my hat on my head, and I walked, acting out the moments before the blast... acting out like I was still there in true Equestria, and like it was time to go home. I walked down the stairs, ignoring the singular corpse left in the building, and walked down to the subway.

In that tunnel I waited for a long time, still in my daze, before realizing that the marvel of technology was unlikely to still be functioning at this point. The tunnels were still standing, though I knew that they would be crushed in Manehattan... I hoped they wouldn't let the water into the one thing I had left of the old times. My favorite innovation from the earth pony race.

Slowly I walked to my home, miles and miles away from where I was and into deeper parts of Bucklyn. Slowly I noticed that I was covered in cuts, ones that oozed gore... but somehow they didn't seem to be getting any worse or even hurt that bad. Only later would I learn that the necrosis had already begun to take it's hold on my body as I shambled and moved.

Making my way home was easy, I knew these passages by heart. Not only because I rode them every day, but because I had overseen their work and made sure they existed. Sure, that was the MWT's duty, but I had made sure that the subways would be made what they needed to be: Symbols of pride.

After a few hours I finally made it to my front door. I was woozy, and tired, and frankly I was filled with radiation. But I opened my door and passed out right on the couch, just how it normally was... like I would wake up tomorrow with it all being a dream.

***

I did not wake up the next day, or the day after that, or any time in the next week. Finally I did wake up, much much later than I aught to have. To a pain in my side. A pain in my back. A pain... well in a bunch of places. And I'm not talking about soreness or sickness, I'm talking about straight up viscous 'mauled by a tiger' pain. And that analogy was more apt than I would like to admit.

When I opened my eyes I found my cat... eating my flesh. Currently she was eating parts of my right shoulder, causing a deep hole there where she was trying to pick at my muscles. Trust me, I loved my cat, but that was not the sort of image you want to awake to. Thankfully my leg was still able to move, which I found out when I tried to knock her off me and hit her to the side of the room.

Getting up I looked around, I intended to apologize to my cat. Sure, it hurt like a blighter, but if your a cat lover like me your willing to excuse anything your perfect little angel does. Looking at my side I saw a massive goddamn gash where, while I somehow lived, she had ripped the skin and started to gnaw on my bones. Thankfully, it seemed, she hadn't gotten to anything important and I was still able to walk fine.

Eventually I found her, shaking in a corner. She didn't look good, and patches of her fur were falling out. "Sause, baby, I'm sorry. Please come here, your sick." I used my best soft and comforting voice, and I was able to calm her down. She'd mostly been freaked out because I had started to move, and thankfully didn't resent the mild abuse she had reserved when I'd found her nomming on me.

Picking her up I walked around a corner and first things first started to get some medicine out of my house med-kit. Deciding that we both needed it, I took a health potion and drank half, before forcing sauce to take a sip herself. She was emaciated but alive, and damn I was glad for that. But hell, I had survived so much in the last... I didn't know how long. I was willing to be thankful for anything.

***

Over the course of the next few days I ventured out of my house, and began to take stock of my surroundings. At first I didn't let Sause come with me, but eventually she just got too restless and I just had to. She'd been born in the streets and I had never had any intention of keeping her off them. And I was honestly thankful for her being with me. I almost never saw anypony else, and at that time my streets were filled with ferels.

The first time I met a feral was a... hard experiance. I met him... it in an appliance store on my first outing. It had turned grey, it's coat seeming to have fallen out in patches much worse than my own. As time has gone on I have found that I was lucky, I was able to keep an, admittedly thin, mane and tail.

When I saw the feral I ran over to it, yelling out in excitement for seeing someone else who had survived the blast. "Celestia! What has happened to you?! Are you alright? I have healing supli-" I was cut off by a guttural growl. Slowly it got up and I saw the wildness, the primal nature of it's mind, a madness I had only fended off with the help of my companion.

I was able to easily dispatch him with my hoofs, but I vowed to get myself a gun soon. However, it was as I looted that I found something I sorely needed. It was a radio, a simple stabletech emergency number that was phased out of production years ago, but it still had a home in my town. When almost nobody could afford, and for some even use, a pipbuck it lead us to make due with what we had.

The next day or two, when I wasn't trying to explore, I fiddled with the radio until I could find even one channel that worked. If I had just had a pipbuck, this would have been alot easier, but I made sure to mark down the radio frequency on the side as I listened to the first voice of a fellow sane pony I had heard in what seemed like forever.

" - the Manehattan MAS hub, on top of the obvious. Although the magical defenses of this building protected us from the brunt of the blast, what we didn't know was that a number of small holes in those defenses were letting radiation leak into the tower. One of those holes was located here, in the emergency broadcast room. Unfortunately, by the time we realized this and fixed the problem, Magpie, as well as a few others, had already taken a fatal dose. I hope you all join me in a moment of silence for the brave mare who stayed up here, trying to bring you all the truth of this disaster.”

This was a revelation I took to heart, that there were other ponies out there... and that the rest of them were somehow not feeling the same immunity to radiation as I had experienced. I ignored most of the rest of the broadcast, focusing on where the MAS hub was and how to get to it from where I was. I hadn't ever actually visited that ministry, so it wasn't precisely easy to remember an exact route.

Footnote!

Quest Perk Added

Ghoulification (Rank 2): Dispite how much better you look than many ghouls, you've taken your tole. The combination of physical trauma, and repeated experiance of radiation, has caused you to go into second-stage ghoulification. Radiation will now fully heal you, and you are no longer weakened by this taking it's effects.