Fallout Equestria: Old World Dreams

Chapters

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Intermission 1: Blue Moon
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Intermission 2: I'll Be Seeing You
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Dream Interlude #1: Blue Swede
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Prologue
Introduction

Chapter 1

Darkness. Silence.

Now a faint, steady thrum in the air.

Head swimming in empty, wordless thoughts, desiring only to return to nothingness.

But a spark refused to yield to the darkness, and began to ignite into a flame. Neurons and higher brain functions began to stir from rest, and the ignorant oblivion of deep sleep began to recede from her mental grasp. Slowly, reluctantly, her body began to respond, legs sliding about beneath the comforters in aimless stretches as their aches and tension became too much to bear. Her head, still desperate to escape the coming of the light, began to burrow into her pillows.

In an instant a blinding white light attacked her eyes through her eyelids, a sharp stinging prick that reached back into her brain and quickened its awakening. Her revitalizing thoughts began to take coherent form, carrying words into her subconscious. Bed. Slight rattle in the air vent. A misfiring stream of energy in the light panel above. Mane frayed and rustled through a night of her body tossing about in her sleep.

Now she was awake. Sort of.

Her mouth cursed the timing mechanism of her bedroom with unkind words as she oozed herself out from beneath the warm embrace of her blankets, fell to the carpeted floor with a soulless thud. Though awake, her body still refused to submit to the commands and desires of her energizing brain. Only with great effort was her nervous system able to get her rear legs to prop themselves up and began pushing the rest of her uncooperative body along the floor. A meek voice wondered silently how silly she must have looked with her rump being the only part of her actually standing up.

The door whirred open with a hiss of hydraulic pressure, and her muddled senses barely acknowledged the slotted recess in the floor as she scooted through the doorway. They only knew that her brain desired to move in this particular direction, and that something good waited for her if she got there. So her legs pushed onward, shifting to the left to make a crude right turn, and then shifting back behind her to continue the journey. A steamy thought strayed from her enclosed memories, recalling several rather enjoyable minutes of her life the last time she assumed this position when she was awake enough to do it willingly.

Within moments, however, even this raunchy effort by her brain to rejuvenate her body was stifled by her arrival at her destination. Her nose touched upon the cool, thick cushioning of a large bean bag chair, and then her body was tumbling itself over onto its side in order to land in the middle of the bag. The bean bag chair’s magic touch began to turn her body into weighted lead once more; pulling her brain back into the dulled, quiet mass of organic matter it had been five minutes earlier. Her limbs felt the release of relaxing chemicals seeping into the rest of her body, and her mind finally succumbed to the incessant, physical desire of her body to ignore the world for just a while longer.

Just five more minutes…

Her ears flicked wildly the moment they heard the door pull itself open behind her.

Holy stars Mom was awake!! This was so cool and so strange, Mom never woke up when her room lit up at the pre-programmed time every morning! Never! She thought she’d have to go and wake her up with the pans again, but now she could just put the things up and surprise Mommy with her favorite blueberry pancakes and apple juice and fresh buttered toa—

WHUMP!

…nevermind, she corrected herself, feeling her excitement die almost as suddenly as the sound of a pony’s body hitting its favorite napping spot. With a disappointed sigh she refocused her telekinesis spell, the effort itself little more than a half second’s afterthought, and soon two well-worn sauce pans were in her magical grasp. Sometimes it was funny, but this morning it was just…sad. She wanted to see Mom’s face light up with glee when she saw her favorite breakfast waiting for her at the table. She did not want to see that confused, terrified, wide-eyed stare that popped up when she had to be scared into waking up, even if it made her laugh.

And she calls me lazy?! She huffed mentally as she silently shifted around and began creeping up towards her mother with the two beaten sauce pans.

As was the case every time she had to do this, she found it hard to resist the urge to just put the pans up and let Mom sleep. She looked so happy when she curled up in her bean bag chair like that, even had her face buried into it this time. Her indigo mane was such a mess, but her teal blue coat was barely ruffled. And she looked soooo comfortable…

Any other day, the urge to just give up and let her be late for work might have won out, but the warm, sweet scent of the blueberry pancakes gave her enough incentive to go ahead and do the cruel thing. And so she sat down on her hindquarters and with one slight alteration to her levitation spell, swiftly smashed the sauce pans into each other about an inch away from Mom’s head.

It was hard not to be amused at the reaction, so she didn’t fight it. Her squealing laughter echoed off the steel walls alongside the harsh clang of the sauce pans as her mother’s body went from slumbering to shooting straight up and off of her bean bag, crying and shouting in garbled words for about four feet before coming back down—

WHUMP!

—and the look on Mom’s face was, as always, simply priceless. The frightened eyes, the heavy, terrified breathing, the rapidly swishing tail made it too easy to laugh at her misfortune in her presence. It helped that Mom liked hearing her laugh and enjoy herself, but usually not at her expense.

And she was always quick to point that out. “El-Tee!! How many times now?!”

Even Mom’s angry roar couldn’t dull the volume of her high-pitched chuckles. “Two hundred and sixteen!” she announced with a massive grin, promptly trotting back to the cabinets to put away her “Wake Up Mom” tools. “Ya flew higher than Miss Teakettle’s cat that one time when she stepped on his tail!”

“Then you are grounded for the two hundred and sixtee—“ Mom began to threaten ominously, her bean bag muffling the sound of her four legs pushing her body up into a standing position. They stopped moving entirely once her nose began sniffing at the air and picked up the scent of the one thing that would make her stop in her tracks. “…are those…actual blueberries? In a pancake?”

“With fresh toast and apple juice!” she answered proudly. By then she’d deftly slipped the dinged, dented cooking pans into the cabinet and slid the door shut, and began hopping over to her side of the gunmetal gray table. “Was gonna get some buttered hot rolls to go with it, but we didn’t have the ingredients for it, so…”

As usual, however, Mom was not paying particularly close attention to her, but rather to what was in front of her. She had managed the impressive feat of slithering from her bean bag chair to the pile of cushions on her side of the table, grabbing hold of a fork with a levitation spell and poking at the warm pancake and the slice of melting butter sitting atop its doughy surface to ensure that it was real.

“….I guess the lack of hot rolls can be your punishment this time,” Mom relented at last, setting the fork back onto the table, next to her plate. “Stars, it’s been six months since I got to nibble on a blueberry anything.”

Lie, she knew almost immediately. Her mother would probably tell her she couldn’t have that apple snack she liked to have every afternoon after school. But sitting here on her plush cushions, watching Mom’s face light up as the scent of the baked blueberries wafted up into her brain through her nostrils, watching all the monotony and stress of the daily life of a grown-up in a Stable fade away with the simple scent of a decent breakfast, she got this odd feeling of contentment and decided that missing an apple a day for a week was probably worth it. Now all she had to do was figure out how to stay a filly so she wouldn’t need pick-me-ups all the time.

“Well, dig in then!” she prodded gently from across four feet of table, matching words with action as she delicately lifted a butter knife and a fork to her own breakfast. “That pancake won’t eat itself!”

One scrumptious breakfast later, she was seeing her filly off to the one-room school on the eighth level of the Stable, mildly distracted with the incredible ease at which the child could escape punishment by making one feel like complete dirt for doing it. She could still taste the sharp, hot blueberries in her mouth. The kid could cook! Better than she could, sadly. How could such a smart little filly be so content to stay in a classroom where she was probably three grade levels ahead of all the other children and bored to death for nearly eight hours at a time?

The answer’s obviousness smacked her in the snout when she got to watching her Light Tail bounce away down the hall with nary a care in the world. Why, because she sees how miserable I am coming back to quarters from work every day and realizes growing up isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

“Be good this time!” she called out after her only daughter, her eyes briefly overwhelmed by the streak of electric blue in the little filly’s indigo tail as it swished upward in a wild arc. “Another stunt like last week and I’ll never hear the end of it!”

“Bye, Mom!” the child shouted back over her shoulder, likely purposefully ignoring her warning. “Try not to go mad at work!”

“Insufferable child,” she muttered under her breath as she set the lock code for her living quarters. Still, the kid wasn’t all bad. Blueberry pancakes and muffins. Couldn’t beat that.

And she worries for my sanity when everypony else just takes it as the way things go.

But then, that was Stable life. Living in a massive underground fallout shelter with no contact with the outside world had taken its toll over the decades. Air recyclers that once ran quietly without a hitch now sputtered and rumbled loudly as the maintenance techs salvaged every usable piece of scrape and metal possible to keep them running. Their steady supply of water purification talismans had dwindled to a small fraction of their former numbers; there was talk of more extreme rationing measures being discussed or contemplated within the next two years to stretch out what was left. The number of repair bots had dwindled as replacement parts were used up—only two were left from the Stable’s original twenty-five roughly two centuries earlier. The ones that broke down beyond repair were taken apart and used to keep other vital systems going.

Keeping oneself amused was also rather difficult. She’d read all the books in the tiny library several times over, even the boring ones. And one could only take so much chess, poker, and blackjack before losing interest in it for a time. She wouldn’t even get started on the in-Stable broadcasts of the same thirty-odd songs it started with when its massive door sealed shut.

This left procreation. But the first time she’d indulged in it during her last year of school, she ended up bringing her filly into the steel gray world of the Stable, and she learned the hard way why one shouldn’t be so carefree and wild about it. Still, it turned out to be the best blessing she could ask for in this depressing life. At times she felt more like an older sister than a mother, and she couldn’t decide whether that was wrong or not.

But as long as Light Tail kept making her laugh and smile just by existing and doing the things she did, she didn’t really care in the end. So what if half the Stable thought she was a terrible, undisciplined mother with the mating morals of a whore? The little filly behaved herself quite well most times—the only trouble she got into was when her “cutie mark crusading” got out of hand and wrecked stuff. Like last week when she thought her destiny might’ve been as the Stable clown and tried to prank Wheat Hooves’ colt with a firecracker in the boys’ lavatory (with predictably messy results). Or two months before that, when her attempts to re-arrange the library in record time wound up misplacing two-thirds of the unicorn history section into the fiction section and mixing up the earth and pegasus history sections so badly that the library index actually had to be dragged out to begin the arduous process of putting everything in place. Parchment was still looking for that book on herbal and natural remedies and two of the three books they had from the Daring Do series. Light Tail’s favorite books, no less.

And she had to admit, despite the problems that sprung from Light Tail’s antics, she was always looking forward to hearing the next crazy thing she’d no doubt be doing at some point in a week. And her job as the Stable armorer and quartermaster was about as unexciting a position as one could get in the security department. Mind-numbingly boring forms and “paperwork” whenever guards checked their gear in and out using terminals with barely functional commlinks to the central mainframe, sporadic drills with “snap caps” in their small arms arsenal because they couldn’t afford to waste ammunition for mere target practice, time-consuming detail stripping of weapons for function inspection and replacement of worn or cracked parts, or periodic inspection of their ammunition stores for aging or corroded rounds to take out of duty rotation.

Oh stars, how she wished for something that would actually offer an interesting change of pace from one day to the next. As it was, life in a Stable was all about monotony and lack of change. Because changes usually meant something had gone horribly wrong, thus endangering the Stable’s ability to sustain its population.

So if she lived the rest of her life without some major change affecting the flow of things, she could at least die in the knowledge that she had actually lived. Maybe not an exciting or important life, but a life all the same.

So secure and orderly was her routine that she’d even managed to make it to the armory without ever really paying attention to where she was going—before she knew it was happening, she was stepping through the door with an absent-minded telekinetic tapping of her entry code into the terminal on the wall. The front room of the “armory” itself wasn’t much bigger than the living room/kitchen of her own living quarters—the counter three feet away from the door was enclosed with high-grade security grating, with a slot in the bottom at the counter where armored barding, batons, and ammmunition (only by the Overmare’s order) could be slipped between guard and quartermaster. Imbedded beneath the counter was a drop box where sidearms would be deposited once the guard had signed for his gear if a pistol was handed out, and where they were returned when he checked them back in. Ammunition and sidearm were never transferred across the counter together. She never thought to ask why—these were simply the procedures she’d been taught by the previous quartermaster, and that’s what she went with.

She trotted around the counter to the side-gate entrance, stopping just long enough for her telekinesis to slip her iron key into the lock and twist it sideways before pushing the fenced door open with a light push of her head. Once inside the enclosed alcove the door clicked shut behind her, and she dropped the key back into her Stable suit pocket and took a few moments to give the Stable’s arsenal a quick visual inspection.

Four racks of 10mm semi-automatic pistols near the front of the counter, ten per rack for a total of forty sidearms, one for every guard in the Stable. None of them had any serious issues beyond the unavoidable effects of time and holster wear on their exterior finishes, though pistols #15 had a rather large crack in its age-hardened wooden grip when Stick Shift dropped it down a flight of stairs last month chasing down “Crazy” Moonshine again. Rose Glade thought #4 had a bad recoil spring the other day when she ran a function check on all thirty-two 10mms, but a detailed field stripping found the culprit to be little more than accumulated debris that required about four minutes to clean off.

Four racks of 9mm pistols right next to the 10-mils, ten per rack for a total of forty. Enough to hand out to a few civilians if they needed to, but if it ever came down to that they were probably better off flooding the Stable with noxious fumes and suffocating themselves. They were rarely used and still in excellent shape, though #31 had shown a drifting point-of-impact the last time it was test-fired. The problem had been narrowed down to a loose rear sight—the mounting screw had gotten loose and refused to be re-seated in a tight manner, forcing her to requisition a new one from the maintenance department…eight months ago. She was still waiting for it.

Two racks of pump-action 12-guage shotguns a couple of feet away from the pistols, five per rack, with extended magazine tubes installed for an 8-round capacity. Their synthetic forends and stocks held up to the passage of nearly two centuries’ worth of time much better than wooden materials might have, and had no discernible or distressing cracks and stress marks as they’d barely been fired in the last thirty years. The forends weren’t silk-smooth, but the action bars had yet to bind in manipulation drills, and the magazine tube followers and springs never failed to work as intended when using dummy rounds to practice shell changes and unloading/loading drills. Two were missing their front bead sights, but they weren’t meant for long-ranges anyway. She was planning on soldering new ones in place regardless.

Two racks of R-series automatic rifles near the back of the enclosed armory, 5.56x45mm, six rifles per rack. Introduced mid-way through the war that eventually rendered Equestria asunder with megaspells , these were considerably more difficult to keep running and maintained, and it showed when the entire battery had been taken out for test-firing last year. Rifles #5 and #11 had rather terrible accuracy problems that were eventually traced to large knicks in their muzzle crowns, #7’s gas piston had to be completely taken apart for a detailed cleaning and replacement of a piston rod before it would run reliably, and #3’s bolt never properly ejected spent casings. She suspected either an aged recoil spring or a bad claw extractor—all the magazines tested out just fine in the other eleven rifles—but getting maintenance to manufacture new parts for firearms was pretty low on their list of priorities compared to, say, indoor plumbing or power flow. So #3, 5, and 11 were out of duty rotation, and would probably be broken down for spare parts for the remaining nine if she could get a pass from both the security chief and the Overmare. She wasn’t confident that they could get #5 and #11 re-crowned, and #3 was probably in the best shape out of all twelve rifles (notwithstanding the suspect parts). And it would give her something different to do for a couple of weeks, even if it was just more boring paperwork cataloging and filing lists of new replacement parts.

Two racks of .308 rifles on the other side of the armory and directly opposite the rack of R-series rifles, five per rack. Once fielded in the war with the zebras, their .30-caliber diameter bullets left rather large and destructive wound channels in their targets, but could hardly be controlled in full-auto fire. They were eventually rotated out of the front lines in favor of lighter-recoiling 5.56mm rifles like the R-series, but the .308 rifles hung around in town militias and the round even found a new life in a sniping role. These battle rifles were one of the most reliable long arms one could get their hooves (or horn magic) on—even two centuries after their manufacture, these ten rifles had few issues beyond the expected weathering and wear on their paint and exterior finishes, and their wooden furniture had been replaced with hard synthetic materials long enough. The carrying handle bits were mounted in slots machined into the upper receiver, but almost never used—the rifles themselves were either mounted in battle saddles or fitted with slings for unicorn users. #6 had a wider spread than the other nine rifles as its bore was considerably more worn, suggesting it had actually seen service in the early years of the war before being retired to militia garrison duty. But the rest had easily kept their hundred-yard groups within two inches when they were test-fired six months ago. Probably the best weapons in the Stable arsenal.

These thoughts crossed her mind in the twenty seconds she spent inspecting the collection of firearms, and when she was content that no other issues were apparent she moved on to the suite of armored barding in a separate room, accessed through a door in the back of the armory. As the armor was checked in and out only when a need for it arose, the wear and tear was considerable light—a few tears in the outer cloth, a missing button or rivet here and there, but for the most part intact and fully functional. There were just enough sets to outfit every guard in the Stable, with twelve left over. The same couldn’t be said for the ballistic helmets—only twenty, but never used and well maintained.

Batons, they had enough of to pass out three to every resident in the Stable and still have spares, so keeping the security armed with something was never an issue. Pretty difficult to repair a one-piece impact weapon, though. When one broke, the usual response was to either apply one-fourth of a roll of duct tape to piece it back together, or send it to maintenance where it could be recycled and re-purposed for other uses. She usually did the latter. Boring paperwork, but ultimately more useful to the Stable as a whole.

It never crossed her mind that it took her less than thirty seconds to assess the entire armory’s contents of weapons and armor. Ammunition stores were next on her list, but that could wait. The shift change for the security mares (and four stallions) was coming up in a few minutes, and she needed to get the terminal booted up and hopefully in a cooperative mood by the time the graveyard shift ponies came by. Yet another morning filled with the endless monotony of a drone’s paperwork. And tomorrow would be the same. And the day after that. And the one after that. No new wonders. No changes.

How I wish I could be a filly again….

Uggggggh. So BORED.

And it was only….

A quick glance at the analog clock above the chalkboard made her wish it had been put somewhere else. Eight-thirty?! Oh stars, today sucks already!

Outwardly, she looked about as bored as she felt, but made sure that her attention shifted from the hundred-year old re-printed book on her desk to whatever Miss Amethyst was doing on the chalkboard (amazing that they still had usable chalk!). She could have skipped school for at least two years, come back, and still not learn anything new that she didn’t know already. But she didn’t want to grow up that fast. Not when she saw how miserable Mom was every day after work. Being a grown-up sucked.

No, what she really wanted to do was go back to the library and check out all three of the Daring Do books it had. If those books were even halfway based on reality, Equestria That Was must’ve been a really neat place before the War. Nothing like this stupid Stable. Never mind that she’d read the books so much she had them memorized word for word. It wasn’t the same as actually holding the book in her levitation spell and soaking in the words from the aged pages, letting her imagination color in the world piece by piece until she had every detail laid out in her mind’s eye. When one lived their entire life in a metal construct in the ground, just imagining what the world outside looked like was the only viable escape from the maddening sterility of it all.

And Daring Do herself was awesome! Always going to exotic places and discovering new things, and learning all sorts of neat stuff about ancient pony and griffon civilizations! She even knew things about the zebras that nopony else knew (which wasn’t hard). And she looked so pretty too. She dressed funny, but she still looked pretty. She went so far as to have her mane and tail styled after Daring’s, even if she couldn’t dye it gray and white. Daring Do was that awesome. She did look like the Ministry Mare of Awesome herself, after all. Why wouldn’t she be awesome?

She just wished they had more than those three books. She knew there was a whole series of them, but for some reason the library only had the first three. Not cool. Did any copies of the others even survive the War? Did any of the Stable’s first dwellers even write down how many books were in the whole series?! Did anypony even know wh—

A sharp, ear-splitting ram of a hoof into her desk snapped her out of her daydreaming so suddenly that she leapt straight up off her hindquarters and landed on the floor nearby, much to the amusement of all the other kids in the classroom.

If only Miss Amethyst could be just as amused….

“Light Tail, are you zoning out on my class again?” the amethyst-shaded earth pony mare inquired sweetly, a light undertone of suspicion and impending doom still managing to get through.

Light Tail did her best to ignore her aching rump and re-settled herself onto her rear hooves, trying (and failing) to look back at her teacher without fear and without being blinded by those overhead lights in the ceiling that never seemed to go out. “U-uhhh….k-kinda…sorta, maybe?”

Miss Amethyst’s head began to hang limply upon hearing her wishy-washy excuse, a sigh of exasperation heaving out of her lungs. “I’ve told you a hundred times to pay attention in class, young lady. This is very important, even if it doesn’t seem like it.”

Actually, you’ve told me two hundred and forty-three times, Light Tail almost blurted, but thankfully her teeth clamped down on her tongue before it could betray her and get her in even more trouble. She shrank back into herself in a show of submission to her teacher’s words, hoping it would get her out of this mess a little faster. “…I-I know, it’s all that’s left of Equestria That Was. We’re all that’s left. We gotta learn to do it right again someday.”

“We all do,” Miss Amethyst agreed, her tone becoming slightly more sympathetic at the mention of Equestria. “And that starts here, in class, paying attention. So can you tell me what I was just discussing with the rest of the class?”

Oh crud, of course you’d make this difficult! the light teal-blue filly cringed mentally, her hunkering down now an actual genuine reaction as the other fillies and colts began laughing again. She stole a quick glance at the chalkboard when she noticed that Miss Amethyst was looking away from her, probably at Sun Star or Lumberjack on the other end of the room—

—perked up when she saw the crude, but unmistakable image of the original unicorn pony tribe’s flag alongside the pegasus and earth pony flags, forming a triangle of sorts around the image of the old Equestria flag, and took a shot at her teacher’s question—

“You were talking about how Equestria That Was came to be,” Light Tail answered meekly, watching Miss Amethyst’s head turn back to stare down at her as she continued. “About how unicorns, pegasi, and earth ponies used to hate each other, and how it destroyed their original home.”

Miss Amethyst’s eyes betrayed a brief flash of surprise before her neutral, smiles-and-sunshine stare came back to her, and Light Tail knew she’d nailed it correctly. Everypony had stopped laughing at her. “And how did that happen?”

“….when a blizzard started and wouldn’t stop, they all blamed each other. Nopony trusted each other, the earth ponies had to give food to the pegasi and unicorns in return for them controlling the weather and bringing about the sun and moon. In the end they had to leave ‘cause the blizzard never stopped. ”

The mare’s eyes had a little more trouble hiding their surprise, but at least no one else in class noticed it. “Very good, Light Tail,” her voice beamed with pleasant approval. “It seems you were paying attention. Just…try to stay awake, and go to bed earlier from now on.”

Yeeeeees! Scott free!! “Workin’ on it, Miss Amethyst,” she yawned instead, quickly climbing back into her desk chair with an awkward leap (but still favoring her sore butt, that solid metal floor hurt whenever she hit it!).

And just like that, class slugged along without a hitch. She didn’t dare go off daydreaming about Daring Do again, which made the morning drag on for far longer than she’d ever thought was possible. She kept her eyes off the clock for a while, just to see how bad it was, and when it felt like an eternity had passed by she glanced up again and felt a little pin popping the bubble of hope inside her chest.

Eight-fifty one.

Her head slumped over onto the desk, begging for relief from this endless torture by the gods. I hate Mondays…

Lunch time. Forty-five minutes of blissful release from the brain-draining imprisonment of grade school. Forty-five minutes of wondering how the Stable was able to keep growing new crops every year with artificial light. Forty-five minutes of chowing down on her wheat bread and two carrots.

Forty-five minutes of plotting her next prank with her two best friends.

“Light Tail did that last week and it was funny, but gross!” Emerald snarled quietly, moments after last week’s spectacular firecracker prank was suggested yet again. The red-apple coated earth pony filly was not one for the gross stuff, and for once Light Tail had to agree with her. That firecracker was probably the worst idea she’d ever had. “Plus all the firecrackers got locked up after that, there’s no way we could get ahold o’ one again so soon.”

As Light Tail chomped another piece of her carrot off, the purple-coated pegasus filly beside her spoke up once again. “I still have one left,” she said softly, keeping her voice to a soft whisper so as not to allow anyone else to overhear her and ruin whatever plan she’d had as a back-up. “We could—“

As amusing as exploding objects could be, Light Tail didn’t want to push their luck using them two weeks in a row, and quickly moved to put an end to the idea of a firecracker anything. “No, no firecrackers. Wheat Hooves really didn’t like it and if we use another one we might end up in a lot more trouble. I nearly got thrown into the Overmare’s office for that stunt, y’know.”

The mere mention of the word “Overmare” was enough to make Grape Jam stick her firecracker ideas back into the depths of her brain. “Oh, crud, I didn’t know that! I didn’t mean—“

“It’s fine,” Light Tail assured the panicking filly quickly (even though it wasn’t). “We just gotta be a lot more careful this time around. Like, stop planning these things here in the diner, even. How ‘bout we just wait ‘till after school and meet in the library?”

“Parchment’s still miffed at ya for tryin’ to re-arrange the whole library for her!” Emerald reminded her sharply over another crunchy bite of her carrot. “She still hasn’t found those Daring Do books you love so much!”

That stung more than getting her hoof burned on an open stove. She hadn’t read The Griffons’ Goblet in almost three months and she couldn’t stand the thought of it lying unnoticed in some dark shelf corner, ignored and overlooked by everyone in the Stable. Those three Daring books were probably the most popular, judging by how often they got checked out.

“Well, maybe we could help look for ‘em!” Grape Jam suggested next, nudging her empty plate forward to the center of the table while shooting an irritated glare of her eyes in Light Tail’s general direction. “So long as somepony promises not to try getting a librarian cutie mark again.”

Jeez, I’m getting more grief over that than I am over that firecracker in the boys’ bathroom! “Okay, okay! Relax, I don’t think she’d let me help her again anyway!” she shot back defensively. “I don’t wanna find out if she really would clip my tail off!”

“She’d probably just take half of it and mount it over the door as a warnin’!” Emerald giggled, her eyes shut tight as she no doubt began to imagine what such a tail mig--….no, scratch that, she was imagining it, that grin on her face was one of pure satisfaction. “Ah can almost see the tiny little thing now, bobbin’ up and down with every step you take and looking really, really stubby and short—“

Grape Jam couldn’t hold back her snickering any longer, and even though it annoyed Light Tail to no end to hear her friends having a good laugh at her expense, she remembered when she was laughing at Mom’s misfortune earlier in the morning. Complaining about it happening to her seemed a little hypocritical—

She snorted a mild laugh through her nose herself when she found Emerald’s mental image jabbing itself in front of her eyes without invitation…and discovered their next prank. “…yeah…that’d be pretty funny-lookin’. And I just happen to know a pony in need of a new look!”

“Besides Sun Star?” Grape Jam muttered amidst her quiet snickering. “Do we even keep a list of pranked ponies, Emmy?”

But Emerald shook her head in a sharp sweep, her amusement dying in an instant. “No, not here,” she rebuffed with a raised hoof. “El-Tee’s right, we shouldn’t be talkin’ ‘bout this stuff where everypony could hear us.”

Yeeeessss! Light Tail cheered loudly inside her devious mind, finishing off her carrot with one final gulp. “Library, then. And if you guys find the Griffon’s Goblet or the Sapphire Statue I’ll be your personal slave for like, a week.”

“Oh, will you?!” Grape Jam’s voice cooed with an exaggerated sweetness, killing the unicorn filly’s joy at the impending antics of the afternoon. “I could use an extra set of hooves to clean up my room later!”

Oh crud, me and my big mouth, she thought darkly, but answered the pegasus’s faked happiness with a sugary smile of her own. Can’t be worse than what Mom’s day must be like though….

Noon.

All necessary paperwork filled out, filed onto the terminal, and submitted to the central mainframe. No e-mails from the security chief down the hall on potential clerical errors this time around that needed editing/correcting. No e-mails or orders from the Overmare authorizing the issue of a sidearm. No security issues reported by the 3rd shift ponies, as usual. No current issues reported by the 1st shift ponies. No impending fights with maintenance over limited resources and energy. No authorization to solder on those new front bead sights on shotguns #2 and #9. Her inspection of the ammunition stores showed no new changes in the preservation talismans keeping the rounds safe from the ravages of age and environmental corrosion. She didn’t even have a broken baton to tape together from her last half-roll of duct tape for the month.

She was literally left with nothing to do but stare at the walls for the next three and a half hours, until the next shift change. And even then she would have everything sorted out in fifteen minutes. And so she simply sprawled out across the cold floor, her sense of direction and sanity dulled and lessened by the sheer power of complete and utter boredom. She couldn’t even think in clear, concise sentences, her mental musings coming across in broken fragments and extreme displays of emotion.

Am so. Freaking. BOOOORED!!!! Must stay awake!! Stay awake…

And just like that, her mind began to drift away into a state of semi-consciousness. To stimulate it, she attempted to raise her right foreleg and swipe at the back cover of a repair manual, opened up and set down next to the terminal at the counter. She struck the dangling hardback cover with the tip of her hoof, jostling it slightly and setting it into a half-second swing before it came back to a stand-still. But that movement alone shifted the book across the counter, bringing it a tad closer to the edge….and allowing that back cover to drift down a tad. Just enough to allow her to give it a good smack with her hoof, rather than just the edge of it. So that’s what she did.

The impact pushed the book off the counter and sent it tumbling towards the floor, only to be caught in a field of indigo magic as her horn mindlessly released a minor levitation spell. With practiced ease she floated the book back up onto the counter and set it back where it was, already bored with smacking it about the room. And she honestly shouldn’t have been hitting it to start with; there were only three copies of it.

And so she was back to simply lying on the cold floor, with absolutely no other job critical tasks to complete or tend to. Scheduled cleaning of the firearms was next week, not this week. What had she done in a previous life to deserve being afflicted with such astounding levels of boredom and inactivity? If not for her Light Tail, she might’ve offed herself by now, unwilling to live an entire life of doing nothing but this six days a week.

But there, at least, was the saving grace of her sanity. At the end of her work shift, she could saunter on back to her living quarters and be amused and uplifted by the company of her daughter for the rest of the day. Was it wrong to want to spend all her free time with her kid? Was it unhealthy?

Did it even matter?

With the detached demeanor of the condemned, she finally bothered herself to rise from the floor, using her listless limbs to steady her lead body as she thumped back towards the terminal. At this point her mind had begun to blank out, becoming little more than empty space as what was left of her consciousness sought out a random task to carry out. A gentle flow of cool magic through her horn began to press at the keyboard, bringing up the morning’s shift change report for the fifth time for no real reason other than to give her eyes something to read for a few minutes. But the cold, monochrome green letters and numbers barely registered to her, and within moments a second flow of magic returned the report into digital oblivion.

A line of text in the lower right corner blinked, morphing into a slightly different number for her viewing pleasure:

12:01 P.M.

Her skull collapsed onto the counter with a soft thud. Time itself seemed almost frozen, her sense of the world around her feeling as though it were stretching out to make itself appear much larger than it actually was. All it did was depress her.

Hate. MONDAYS. SO. MUCH.

Her plans to get back at Lip Jam for calling her mother such a horrible name the other day got put on hold.

School had barely let out for the day when Grape Jam’s mother swooped in and took her away to the infirmary level two floors up. Emerald’s dad was likewise really quick to collect the little green-eyed filly before she could escape from the hallway. And a disappointed and disheartened Light Tail had no choice but to walk back to her quarters on the eighth floor. There was no way Parchment would let her into the library by herself, not after how badly she’d screwed up all the shelves and stuff.

Her saddlebag was quickly slung off of her body and tossed onto her favorite spot on the couch as she strolled through the door, her stomach grumbling for sustenance in any available form. Yet even as she latched onto the refrigerator door with her jaws and pulled it open, she felt almost no joy at the impending snack of sliced apple.
It was hard to be excited about coming home when no one was waiting for you.

Mom wouldn’t be home for a couple of hours, but there wasn’t anything she could do about that. And really, Mom had it worse. School was boring, but at least she got to do something. Mom didn’t even have that most of the day. She always came home so…lifeless. So brain-dead. Like her body was dragging itself along without the help of input and direction from her head. They wouldn’t even let her bring books to work, just stuck her behind a cage for eight hours and hoped for the best. So when Mom came home, she was getting pounced and tickled and gently gnawed on. And then maybe she might feel like teaching her a couple more spells out of that bookcase stuffed with entire tomes of them.

Until then, she was on her own, no matter how much she hated it.

She nudged a pair of milk bottles aside on the top shelf, revealing a plastic container in the back of the fridge which held six red apples. She picked out the healthiest one of the bunch and floated it up to the counter in a levitation field, along with a sharp-edged knife and a small plate, and had it sliced up into eight pieces in about as many seconds. With no homework for the day, no friends to hang out with, no mother to pester and play with, and no Daring Do books to read, she settled for the fifth best thing she could find to kill the time until Mom came home.

Gently cradling the plate of apple slices between her teeth, she trotted back into the living room while simultaneously focusing a levitation field towards the bookcase against the wall to her right. When the field began to waft over the books she refocused her hold on it, picking a book off of the shelf at random and pulling it along behind her as made her way back to the couch. She stopped just long enough to set the plate down on the coffee table before leaping up onto a well-worn depression in the couch, and brought the book up closer to see what prize she’d claimed:

A Song of the Night: The Mare of the Everfree
By White Quill

A childish squeak escaped her throat as she flicked the book open to the very first page. Somehow she hadn’t read this one yet, and now was as good a time as any. And sometimes this epic fantasy stuff could be pretty darn cool. Daring Do was still the best, though.

The book immersed her in its intricately crafted world, absorbing the entirety of her attention for the next two hours. The tale was one of a unicorn pony, drawn to the ruins of the old royal castle in the Everfree Forest in search of an ancient artifact once guarded by the alicorn sisters from all who sought it. Long forgotten in the chaos of Celestia’s battle against Nightmare Moon, it had come to the attention of a guild of sorcerers and brigands who worshipped Discord and wished to free him from his petrified state. It was said that this ancient artifact held the power to undo the effects of the Elements of Harmony, and a guild of unicorns known as the White Lily Society had sent one of its own to retrieve it on behalf of Princess Celestia.

Like any good story, it wouldn’t have been a very exciting one if everything had gone as planned. From the moment the heroine Starlight had waltzed into the Everfree around chapter five, her adventure took one wrong turn after another—first her enchanted cape and dress were mauled to pieces by a pack of timberwolves, forcing her to begin her mission without the aid of their magic-enhancing effects. Then she’d stumbled into a patch of poison joke and found that it turned her voice high and tinny, ruining many of her verbal-based spells until she’d stumbled upon the shack of an earth pony stallion who was able to brew a curative potion. She was so taken in by his kindness and gentle demeanor that she decided to stay in his shack for the evening.

The story picked up from there in the morning hours, where the heroine found the majority of her supplies gone and the stallion nowhere to be seen. Her fury shook the ground for three miles as she began to hunt for the thief with the use of a scrying spell (easily attuned to the stallion thanks to her…intimate familiarity with him, as the author put it), eventually tracking him to a riverbed where he was discovered to be meeting with agents of the cult of Discord. Though the magic-heavy battle that ensued was lengthy, her possessions became hers once again. Light Tail’s mind even briefly sketched together from scratch an image of the silver-coated mare standing in the river, soaked to the bone, as she turned the water around her into a watery visage of Princess Celestia herself and charged it straight into the trio of cultists. Afterwards the stallion learned the hard way why it wasn’t a good idea to get on a unicorn mare’s bad side, and the telekinetic vengeance of the mare gave her the shivers all over. Ouch! That even feels painful…but….why hit him there? I don’t get it.

Still, it had served the purpose of fulfilling Starlight’s desire for payback, so she left it alone without further thought. Someday, though, she was going to make Mom explain why it hurt colts so much to be smacked there.

Chapter nine ended with the unicorn leaving the stallion to writhe and twitch in agony by the river, and that was as far as she would get in the story today. Her ears perked up at the sound of the door’s massive pistons engaging to retract it inside the doorway, and she quickly set the attached bookmark inside the tome’s pages before setting it down next to her empty plate—

—hopped up to her feet and crouched down as Mom’s body began to stroll through the doorway, exhausted and drained from the mind-numbing boredom of sitting in a cramped room for eight hours—

—the second the door dropped back down, Light Tail leapt off of the couch, using her hind legs to give her pouncing attack the extra distance she needed to reach her mother—

“BOO!” she screamed out as loudly as she could—

—she broke into a fit of maniacal laughter as her mother’s body jolted in place, the mare shooting her a look of complete shock and surprise just before the little filly collided into the side of her body. While Light Tail didn’t really have the strength to knock her over by herself, her scare tactic gave her all the leverage she needed. Mom wasn’t standing on four legs anymore, and when that was combined with her flying tackle, the much larger pony was soon tumbling down onto the carpeted floor with a meaty thud, ripe for further torture with a tickle attack to the neck—

—Mom’s screams turned into frantic shrieks of laughter as the filly’s little hooves found those two ticklish spots along the side of her neck and the one underneath her right foreleg, and Light Tail knew immediately that any evils and foul moods had inhabited her mother’s mind were no longer there.

“Ahhhh!! That makes me so squeamish and girly—“

“Good! Makes ya easy for a little filly like me to handle!”

“Ahahahaha stoppit that tickles really bad—“

“Not ‘till you surrender!” And just because she could, she decided to reach over and attack another ticklish spot on her stomach—

Her mother’s legs began to kick against the ground, losing almost all control over herself and left at the mercy of a filly about a third her size—

“Eaaaahhh okay okay stoppit you win hahahahahahhAHAHA—“

The moment Mom surrendered to her tickling assault, Light Tail halted her torturous efforts and clambered off of her, grinning madly at the results of her hastily planned attack. “The great and powerful Light Tail wins aga—“

Almost as soon as her hooves touched the floor, however, her entire body began to grow warm with the touch of an all-too-familiar levitation spell, and she was being lifted up into the air before she could even attempt a counterspell—

“—aaaaiggghhhh wait wait this isn’t how it goes—“

Mom’s body scuffled against the carpet as she rolled over into a sitting position, her face now sporting the same evil grin that had moments ago adorned the filly’s visage—

Uh-oh. “W-wait Mom! Can’t we talk ‘bout this like civil ponies?!”

“No,” Mom answered flatly, but that evil, evil smile never left. If anything, it became even more insidious. “In fact, I think I’m going to reward your treachery with some of mine.”

Oh crud not th—

The attack came even as she realized what was about to befall her. All at once, every ticklish spot in her tiny body was attacked by what felt like a dozen separate telekinetic spells, all masterfully controlled and manipulated as though the feat was mere child’s play. As cool as it was, it didn’t make it any more bearable. Her body was paralyzed by sharp, contracting waves that slammed into her nerves and seeped into her deepest bones. The funny, fuzzy feelings washing over her even hit her in places she didn’t know she could be ticklish in. It was all she could do to keep from turning the carpet yellow, and even that was getting harder every second.

Not that her screaming laughter allowed her any space to complain about it. Yet.

“How do you like me now, ya sneaky little devil?!” Mom’s voice laughed darkly, filled with sick amusement.

“Ahahahaha oh stars I can barely breathe—“

“Really? Must’ve missed a spot.”

Now she was really doomed. A thirteenth telekinetic spell began to apply its subtle pressure on one last spot, right between her shoulders, and now all she could do was laugh herself hoarse and feel her legs bucking and kicking in just about every direction physically possible. It didn’t take very long for her to start feeling a loosening of pressure, and the slight panic it induced gave her enough self-control to at least start begging for release through her continuous laughing.

“Hehahahaha okay okay you win I give up just—hehehe—just let me go already hahaHA!”

“I fell for this trick once before, squirt!”

She wasn’t sure if it was the word ‘squirt’ that did it, or the relentless assault on her tickle spots, but she thought she felt a very slight wetness begin to creep out, and her panic doubled. “Hahahaha no Mom I’m serious I’m gonna pee myself if you don’t stop—“

Mom’s hold on her fourteen separate spells died almost immediately, allowing the little filly to plummet to the floor free from further tickling. The fuzzy, funny waves bleeding into her bladder rescinded, but she didn’t want to wait to see if she’d retain control of her biological urges for much longer.

She pushed herself back up to her feet and began trotting (quickly) towards the door into the hallway, still chuckling away from Mom’s tickling. “The great an—heheh—the great and powerful Light Tail will get you next time—SNNRKK—hahahaHAHA!”

Light Tail hopped and laughed all the way out into the hallway and turned right towards the lavatory/shower room in the center of the floor, and all at once the brain-draining despair of a monotonous Stable life drifted away into nothing. She was home, where she belonged. Where somepony she loved more than her own life had been waiting for her. Where she wished she could stay. As it was, she only got a few hours with her daughter every day. She spent the rest of it working or sleeping. It didn’t seem fair to her.

Like most things about life in this Stable.

With one last snickering laugh she finally got back onto her hooves and walked over to the couch where Light Tail’s sneak attack had originated. An empty plate tainted with the faint smell of Stable-grown apples was the only real mess left behind, and likely left there because the filly had been too engrossed by the book right beside it to bother putting it away when she was done with it. What was her little bookworm reading no—

Oh, this is a good one! The mother beamed with delight upon seeing the title printed on the top half of the cover. Maybe not quite up to the more adventurous tone of a Daring Do book, but still good, and it definitely had its fair share of action and intrigue. There were even a number of spells in it she wanted to try out just to see if they really could be done. She couldn’t think of a reason why they couldn’t be done, at any rate. She simply lacked a natural environment to toy with as the book’s heroine did. But one could dream.

Unfortunately for Light Tail, she also remembered enough of the last two chapters to decide to apply a localized censoring spell on its content (primarily involving rather….raunchy moments between the heroine and her lover). It took her a couple of minutes to find the paragraphs in question and set the spell upon them, but once it was done the magically-imbued runes sealed themselves into the paper in place of the questionable paragraphs, which quickly faded out of existence. The filly wouldn’t like it when she got to this point in the story, but there were some things she didn’t want her daughter reading or learning about just yet. And once the squirt was old enough, it was a simple affair to remove the spells and restore the paragraphs.

She never got the chance to tell her about it, however. Light Tail had just waltzed back in from the restroom when the Stable PA speakers fizzled to life, its static-laced message carrying with it a foreboding sense of doom and unease.

“All adult Stable residents, report to the auditorium by eighteen-hundred hours,” the Overmare’s voice dutifully requested. “Attendance is mandatory, as this is very important.”

The auditorium was the most lavish (and comfortable) space in Stable 115. While built of iron and steel like the rest of the Stable, it was given incredibly well designed carpeting that was still comfortable to the hooves even after nearly two centuries. In addition, the three hundred mahogany-framed, two-cushion sofas arrayed in front of the elevated stage were also designed so that the pony occupying it could simply lie down rather than be forced to sit on their hindquarters. For “town hall” meetings such as the one about to get underway, these sofas allowed the five hundred and eight-six adult ponies of the Stable to be comfortable for the proceedings so long as nopony minded being crammed onto a sofa with another pony.

Without Light Tail to keep her company, she was forced to make do with the presence of a pegasus mare named Cloud Wind, who bore the distinction of being the only friend she had left from her childhood. And despite the roar of a hundred-plus conversations happening at once around them, the sky colored pegasus showed a remarkable interest in trying to get her hooked up with somepony. Again.

“So I hear Quill Point is on the rebound,” Cloud teased when it was clear that nudging the unicorn with her hoof wasn’t going to get her attention. “Buttermilk apparently wasn’t his type, but she was impressed enough with his bedside skills to talk to me about it He could be just what you need to get you out of your quarters once in a while.”

“Cut it out, Windy,” she growled darkly, refusing to even acknowledge the pegasus’s touch. “This isn’t the time or place.”

Cloud refused to pull away from her, though the teasing, playful tone in her voice was noticeably lessened. “Oh come on, I’m serious, for once. You haven’t gone near a stallion since the last one you went to bed with knocked you up. That’s the reason you’re going insane, not your job.”

“I don’t need a stallion in my life.”

Cloud’s flank pressed up against hers until their cutie marks were mashing against each other. “Cute,” she whispered through a sadistic grin. “So you’re saying you’re into mares now? ‘Cause if you are, then I’d just like to say that I’ve always liked the way you swish your tail back and forth when you walk…”

A rush of blood and heat swelled up in her cheeks as she scooted herself away from the pegasus and into the side rest of the sofa. “By Celestia, you’re insatiable. And they call me a whore.”

Cloud’s gunmetal gray mane was brushed aside with a hearty laugh. “I’m just having fun with you! It’s just kinda sad to see you cooped up in your quarters all the time. Your kid can do fine without you for a few hours now and then. When was the last time you had some “you” time? Or the last time you even had a date?”

“The day I got pregnant with Light Tail,” she muttered back with a flat voice. “On my couch, no less.”

Cloud’s face scrunched up in mild disgust as she withdrew herself to the other end of the sofa. “Ewww, a little too much information there. Wait ‘till the squirt finds out.”

“I washed it afterwards!” she hissed quickly. “And you’re the one who asked.”

“I only asked about the last time you had some “you” time or the last date you had, not where you got laid! A mare shouldn’t kiss and tell.”

“Then don’t ask. If anything we ought to be asking how much longer we’re going to be here.”

They weren’t forced to wait very long for their answer. Just moments later the familiar red-apple mane of the Overmare emerged from behind the massive show curtain behind the speaking podium, trotting forward in her 115 jumpsuit with a look of weariness in her eyes. Either she had terrible news, or she’d spent another night doing just about anything but sleeping.

At the Overmare’s appearance, every voice in the auditorium promptly shushed themselves, filling the room with an eerie silence in which the Overmare could speak clearly and concisely.

“Thank you for being so prompt in your arrival,” the Overmare’s voice greeted the Stable. “As we all know, with our communications capabilities ruined on the day this Stable was sealed, we have no way of knowing the status of Equestria That Was without sending somepony out there to find out. Roughly thirty years after that horrific day, we began our tradition of doing just that. Each generation, we send some of our own to leave the safety of our Stable and try to discover what’s happened out there. To this day, sadly, none have ever returned home.”

The tone of grief in her voice caused most ponies in the room (herself included) to bow their heads in a silent prayer to the royal princesses. None dared bring up the fact that the last soul to embark on the Last Journey was the Overmare’s own mother, who had left the Stable in her daughter’s capable hooves before leaving five years ago.

“While this tradition keeps our numbers from being depleted beyond sustainable levels, it also means we end up waiting a minimum of twenty years between each Selection for news from the world beyond,” the Overmare continued after a few moments of mournful silence, her tone becoming steady once more. “And as we approach the two hundred year anniversary of this stable’s sealing, it’s become apparent to me that we can’t afford to wait this long anymore. We need to speed things up. And with that goal in mind, I’ve made the decision to initiate the next Selection this week.”

For the first time in her life, she heard the sound of complete and utter silence fall over her hearing, all rational thought brought to a brain-numbing halt. Even the oxygen in the room seemed to sit still in the air. Everypony dreaded Selection, dreaded being the one to have their name drawn from a flimsy cardboard box, condemned to the mysterious outside world where none of their predecessors had ever managed to come back from. The previous Overmare had sidestepped the process by actually volunteering, but the end result was still the same. She stepped out through the Stable door…and never came back.

Just like the nine Wanderers before her. Nopony wanted that fate. To leave their families behind to vanish in whatever cruel world waited beyond, to be gobbled up in its terrible maw. The Last Journey was a suicide mission, and they all knew it.

As the Overmare likely expected, the hopeless silence didn’t silence. Almost as quickly as it had died, the noise of hundreds of voices returned, their fears and horrors realized despite their hopes that they would live out a good portion of their lives without seeing the wheel of Fate spin again. The message from the Stable’s population was clear.

No.

“Are you crazy?!” a young tan-colored stallion at the front yelled up at the Overmare. She couldn’t see his cutie mark from where she was, but it sounded like Deck. “This stable’s lost ten ponies across a hundred and seventy years to this “tradition” and for what?! What have we ever gained from it?!”

“Deck’s right!” a second stallion joined in, confirming her suspicions about the first one’s identity, but she could tell where this new dissenter was speaking from. “We’re all safe and sound down here, there’s no need to put that at risk! Whatever’s out there isn’t worth any of our lives!”

The Overmare’s hoof slammed down onto the podium in front of her, the sharp echo thundering into everypony’s chest as though she’d smacked them herself, and the shouting died again. “We’re safe now, yes,” she said in a loud, authoritive voice. “But what about tomorrow? Or next week? Our families and ancestors have lived in this underground shelter for nearly two hundred years, and it’s remarkable that we’ve been able to keep it running fairly smoothly for so long. How much longer can that last? Ten years? Twenty? Fifty? I know for sure we can’t do it for another two centuries.”

“What if we’re all that’s left of ponykind?!” a mare in the back screamed out over the crowd. “What if all the Wanderers walked out into a world that can’t even support life anymore?! We’d be better off dying out in here than choking to death up there!”

“If that were the case our oxygen recyclers wouldn’t have had anything to suck in from the outside for two centuries, and the First Families would have suffocated in the first three hours,” the Overmare barked back sharply. “The environment outside has survived, somehow, even if Equestria That Was died in the last day of the war. If nothing else we should at least be seeing if it’s possible to re-settle the land around us. There will be a day when this stable won’t be able to support life anymore. We owe it to our children to give them the best chance we can.”

Bringing up the possibility that everypony’s little filly or colt could face a bleak future seemed to dampen much of the combative attitudes that had been threatening to boil over the poor Overmare. But it was also obvious that very few souls present had ever even thought of the possibility that the stable wouldn’t last forever. It was as though they preferred the illusion of safety to the reality of keeping an underground shelter running with only the parts and supplies it had started with two hundred years ago.

When no further voices of discontent aired themselves to the Overmare, she took it upon herself to close the matter before anypony else could get the nerve to speak out. “I don’t expect any of you to like it, but if we want future generations to survive we have to do this. I’ll make my final decision on who to send out by Thursday. That’s all for now. Security department, stay behind if you would, I’d like to discuss some other matters with you while you’re here. That includes you, Sling Shot.”

Great, the teal-blue unicorn bemoaned to herself as the crowd began to file out of the auditorium while the security ponies remained seated. More bad news. As if Selection wasn’t bad enough on its own.

“Ever notice that no one’s called you by your actual name for the last eight years?” Cloud Wind whispered in a seditious manner. “I thought your special talent was spell mastery, not guns.”

“And who says a mare can’t be good at more than one thing?” she whispered back, though she couldn’t shake off an ominous feeling dread that seemed to linger at the Overmare’s eyes.

Once everypony that wasn’t security had departed and sealed the doors behind them, the Overmare dropped any pretenses she might have been holding up about the nature of her next topic. “Starting immediately, every one of you is to be armed with at least a sidearm at all times,” she said quickly. “Earth ponies and Cloud Wind may opt for a long arm if they prefer. Maintenance is worried that another radroach infestation in the vents may be coming our way.”

“Did they find a nest?” Chief Farsight asked almost immediately, alarmed that such a security risk had not been brought to him already.

The Overmare nodded once in his direction. “Level two, just above the atrium. They’ve already put fire to it but several of the eggs had already hatched by the time they found it, and the vents in the atrium lead down to both floors on level two as well as level three. From three they could get into half the Stable. School will be shuttered until we have confirmation that the threat of infestation is past us, and I’m instituting a night-time curfew for all ponies and departments except security since radroaches seem to be more active during minimal lighting hours. Third-shift security will be authorized to detain any pony caught outside quarters, but I’d much prefer it if you just walked them back to where they’re supposed to be. Be nice about it, if you would. In the meantime, if maintenance team members should happen to ask for sidearms during their search of the vents, oblige them with an escort instead. I don’t want panicky ponies roaming our vent systems with guns they aren’t trained with.”

“Might be a good idea to get them trained,” Cloud Wind suggested politely. “There’s only ten to twelve of us per shift at any one time. We can’t be everywhere at once, and if the radroaches start making personal appearances in the hallways we’ll have our hooves full. We can’t afford to be even one pony short. Teaching them how to shoot will free us from having to foalsit them.”

“Or we could all just pull twelve-hour shifts until the infestation is handled,” Farsight added with a business-like tone, much to everypony’s disappointment. “That would double our numbers on patrol and give us a much better chance of containing an outbreak before somepony gets hurt, or worse. And I’d rather save the nine millimeters for the militia force if things get out of hoof anyway.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do,” the Overmare snapped briskly before anypony could object, and just like that, Sling Shot’s chance of spending any time with her daughter was scuttled into an airlock for the foreseeable future. As important as it was to keep the stable safe, she couldn’t help but feel hurt at having her time with Light Tail cut short like this. “Ten millimeter pistols for unicorns, and as I said, Cloud Wind and the earth ponies may use long arms mounted on a battle saddle if they find it easier to work with. No long arms on unicorn security unless we find enough nests to warrant the extra firepower. And if that happens, the entire Stable goes on lockdown and every resident will be handed a baton. It’s not great, but it’s better than being left to fend for themselves with just their bare hooves and rudimentary levitation magic. We’re not all at Sling Shot’s level, after all.”

“Oh ho, praise for the resident ‘immoral whore’,” Cloud Wind jested lightly in her ear. “Now I know we’re in trouble.”

“Third shift, consider yourselves on duty immediately until six o’clock tomorrow morning,” the Overmare continued, oblivious to Cloud Wind’s side commentary and the small murmur of discontent amongst the security department in front of her. “Half of second shift is also on duty until that time. First shift and the other half of second will be on duty from six in the morning to six p.m. Second shift, you have about two minutes to decide which half of the day to work. If necessary Chief Farsight will make the shift assignments himself. Stay in contact with maintenance and keep a close eye on the ventilation systems. I’ll make the announcement to the Stable at large in a few minutes. Stay safe, and keep us safe.”

“Hey, cheer up,” Cloud’s voice consoled her gently as they trotted back towards her quarters. “At least we’ve finally got some excitement going on here. Who knows, you might even enjoy work for a while.”

But Sling Shot was having none of it. What could possibly be exciting about giant mutated cockroaches with a taste for pony flesh? They were easy kills with a BB gun, so anything more than that was overkill, but if there were enough of them they could do a lot of damage very quickly. She still had nightmares from the last infestation five years back. That poor colt…

“I wanted to enjoy some time with my kid,” she growled back over her shoulders. “Now I may not even get to see her for more than a couple hours a day.”

“It’s not permanent,” the pegasus reminded her tiredly, growing slightly frustrated with the unicorn’s unhappy disposition. “And by Wednesday I’ll be on the six-p.m.-to-six-a.m. shift, so I can keep her company while you’re on duty. I was lucky that Rose Glade was willing to trade shifts with me for today.”

I guess that’s something, she admitted silently as she turned into the left hallway at the t-section for the final stretch to her living quarters. At least the kid won’t be left alone all day. And that thought alone began to make her feel guilty for being so harsh a few seconds earlier.

“…thanks for that,” was all she could think to say, her foul mood becoming lost in her guilt. “I’m moody, but it’s no excuse for taking it out on you.”

“It’s just that time of the month for you, I’m sure,” Cloud uttered casually, dismissing the matter almost effortlessly and with zero fanfare. “Come on already, you still got a couple hours you can use to pester the squirt before bedtime.”

That, ironically, was what she was afraid of. The Overmare’s announcement on the PA would leave the curious thing full of questions for her mother, and she wouldn’t like hearing about her new working hours. But she was smart enough to hopefully understand that it was necessary.

Hopefully.

The two mares had barely reached the door when it slid open, revealing the light teal-blue filly on the other side with what looked like blotches of flour and margarine on her face and the front half of her body. “Awwww yeah!!” she exclaimed happily at the sight of Cloud Wind, shooting her left hoof forward and up. “Whut up, Aunt C?”

“Nothin’ but the rain, El-Tee!” Cloud Wind squealed back, shooting her own left hoof out and tapping it into the filly’s. At the moment of impact the two childish ponies promptly jerked them back towards themselves, their mouths mimicking the noise of a small explosion before bursting into a short fit of laughter.

“Got some grub goin’, won’t be long!” Light Tail announced with gleeful cheer once their customary greeting had been concluded, and promptly turned around and hopped her way back towards the kitchen space. “You two lovebirds just chill out on the sofa. I won’t watch, I promise!”

A flustered Sling Shot growled at the world around her as Cloud Wind laughed heartily at the filly’s brave (but foolish) teasing. “El-Tee, have you been talking to Hayseed again?!”

“Oh calm down, Sling!” Cloud chuckled in the filly’s defense, subtly brushing their flanks together as she passed by the unicorn. “The little joker’s just trying to lighten your mood.”

Her face still warm with fresh blood, Sling Shot sighed in exasperation and followed the sky blue pegasus inside. She liked to tease her this way now and then, but this time she’d followed it with actual physical contact. And not the kind that could be dismissed as simply trying to pass through a narrow space, she’d meant to cross their cutie marks together like that. It was enough to make her wonder if she was just taking her teasing up a notch or if there was something more behind it.

“So whatcha cookin’ up this time?” Cloud asked the budding child chef as her wings unfurled from her sides and began to stretch themselves out. Being a pegasus in an underground fallout shelter didn’t leave a lot of room for flight practice outside the three-hundred yard room at the bottom of the stable.

“Got lucky today, Wheat Harvest came by with our weekly ration of grain and flour before goin’ to that meetin’ you all had!” Light Tail replied with that same cheerful glee in her words. “So I’m whippin’ up those fresh hot rolls Mom and I couldn’t have this morning to go along with the chopped lettuce salad, annnnd for kicks I sliced up a carrot and put a cube of that block of mozzarella to the cheese grater. Think we still got some grape juice left too, if it’s in the back of the fridge like I hope it is!”

Sling Shot’s mouth began to water and drool at the thought of the meal her filly had thought to start cooking while she was going, and even Cloud couldn’t hold back an appreciative whistle. “Dude, even telling me about it satisfies my hunger pangs! How do you not have a cutie mark in cooking, kid?”

“It ain’t for lack of tryin’!” Light Tail giggled sweetly, preparing to take a ladle into her mouth to pepper the salads with shredded mozzeralla the moment she finished talking. “And I had a funny feelin’ you’d be coming so I’m makin’ enough for three! Like I said, just chill out and pretend I’m not here, if you can!”

Hearing how happy and upbeat her child was pushed her into postponing the ‘bad news’ part of the day, for the moment. There was no need to ruin a good meal by raining on the kid’s parade jus—

“Oh, wait, don’t pretend, I gotta ask you somethin’ about that meetin’!” Light Tail changed her mind in the next instant, spitting the ladle out of her mouth and into a waiting levitation field, and began peppering the salads with cheese by the magic of her horn instead of by hoof. “The Overmare said there’s a night curfew on ‘till further notice, and that security would be doubled up and armed. Does that mean you two are gonna be workin’ extra hours for a while?”

Sling Shot’s face fell into a deflated posture, unable to keep up the weak charade of contentment she’d just started to put up. Sometimes the crazy child was just too smart for her own good. “I’m afraid so,” she answered, slouching her neck in a sign of disappointment. “I’m sorry…”

Light Tail’s cheerful outlook faded away in an instant, and she sighed to no one in particular as she set the ladle back onto the counter, having finished preparing the three salad bowls. “It’s not your fault,” she tried to console, but her dejected voice made it clear she was still mildly upset at the prospect of not having her mother’s company as often as she was used to. “Just wish this hadn’t happened now that I got to readin’ that awesome book. I was gonna ask you to teach me some spells…”

Hearing the filly’s mild request made her heart skip briefly. She’d never really complained about the lessons on the levitation spell, but she’d never really shown any further interest in magic studies. Even if it was just another one of her “cutie mark crusades”, it would be worth the effort and energy to see if the family talent for magic had successfully passed on or not. “We’ll work it out once things get back to normal,” she promised.

Light Tail’s body perked up slightly at the promise, and though she didn’t return to her overly joyous mood, she wasn’t moping about anymore either. “No rush,” she said. “It’s not like ya got picked for the Last Journey or anythin’, right?”

Sling Shot’s heart screeched to a terrifying halt, having almost completely forgotten about the subject up until that point. It was true that the Overmare hadn’t chosen anyone just yet, but she’d also neglected to say anything about it on the PA system, most likely to keep from panicking the children at such a late hour. And she wasn’t about to ruin dinner with such a subject. So long as Light Tail didn’t suspect anything, she wouldn’t do or say anything to bring such suspicions to the surface.

And if Cloud Wind’s dipped wings were any indication, the pegasus had been thinking the same thing. She even betrayed a brief glare of dismay as she turned back to look at her friend in the eyes, as if trying to silently ask how they were going to even tell the kid that Selection was coming over two decades earlier than it was supposed to.

All Sling Shot could come up with was a weak, half-hearted smile, one she hoped would be mistaken for being disappointed at her new working hours rather than the possibility that this week would be the last one she’d ever spend with her daughter. “Yeah….that’d be pretty awful.”

Chapter 2

This wasn’t funny anymore.

It started Tuesday morning. Mom never bothered to reset the timing on her bedroom lights and nearly overslept; she made it to work on time only by the barest of margins. It was kinda funny to watch, actually—her eternally morning-shy mother, up and zipping about the kitchen/living room in a high-pitched squealing panic as she tried to make herself something edible to munch on before rushing out the door in her Stable suit and holstered pistol at speeds she’d never shown herself capable of in the morning. Since school was out until the Overmare said otherwise, Light Tail spent the rest of the dawning morning hours cleaning up the mess left behind and trying to figure how to set the timing mechanisms on Mom’s room lights so that they’d wake her up two hours sooner than usual. Then she set her own room lights up for the same time to make sure Mom didn’t try to ignore the lights and sleep through them like she usually did.

Wednesday morning came, and Mom was so difficult to rouse out of bed that breakfast had grown cold by the time she’d crawled out from under the blankets. Mom didn’t like cold breakfast. She didn’t either, but she’d tried so hard to get her out of bed in the first place that she escaped punishment that time. Aunt C didn’t care either way. She was weird like that.

Thursday morning, it appeared at first glance, was going to be a repeat of Wednesday if she didn’t try something different this time. And after three days of being the one to kick her own mother out of bed when it should’ve been the other way around, she was starting to get irritated with the entire process.

“Rise and shine, Mom!” Light Tail announced in a high, loud voice, purposefully ignoring the suffering the bright lights inflicted on the slumbering mare. “A new day of excitement and adventure awaits!”

Mom’s only answer was to shove her head under her pillows and fling her blankets over herself in a vain effort to hide from the light and the tiny filly that had so rudely awakened her.

With a growl, she began to pull at the top comforter with her teeth in an effort to stir her mother from her slumber. “Come on, I’m the one who’s supposed to be doing this! Get up!”

One of Mom’s forelegs snaked over the edge of her blankets and bent inward at the knee joint, trapping them within and allowing her to pull the blankets back over her body. “Don’t wanna,” her mouth slurred quietly. “Go away.”

Arrrggh!!! How’d you get a job in security?!

Since asking wasn’t working (nor were her pathetic attempts to outmuscle a pony over three times her size), she decided this morning was a good time to try something a little nastier. “Then I guess you don’t want that delicious strawberry-flavored oatmeal and a helping of grapes,” she said with exaggerated flair, slowly turning around and walking back out of the room. “Oh well, guess that means more for me, then—“

Mom’s bedsprings creaked as she finally forced herself to at least attempt to leave the supreme comfort of her mattress and fluffy comforters. “….you wouldn’t.”

The taste of victory was bittersweet. It was kinda sad that the best way to get Mom’s attention was with a plate of food. “Wouldn’t want it goin’ to waste like yesterday’s biscuits and hash brown casserole. And I loooooove strawberry!”

The bedsprings creaked again, and Mom’s hooves thudded onto the carpeted floor with the enthusiasm of the doomed. “You are an evil, evil little filly.”

“I’ll take that as a ‘mission accomplished’!” she squealed with delight, and promptly trotted back out into the living room. “Hurry up, slowpoke!”

She wasn’t sure, but she swore Mom was mumbling something unkind under her tired breath as her body lumbered along behind her. Well, whatever! At least she was up and awake. A little. And she kept hoping against long odds that if she did this often enough, Mom would get the idea and start doing a better job of getting herself out of bed every morning. Not likely, but one could dream.

As was the case the last two mornings, breakfast was a rather quiet affair, mother and child content to munch away in silence and simply enjoy the warm, sweet strawberry oatmeal and the sharp buttered toast. In time, the meal was finished and the used dinnerware set aside in the washer, and the first real surprise of the day came not long after. As Light Tail pulled The Mare of the Everfree back out of the bookshelf for another morning reading session, Mom strolled out of her room in her stable suit, complete with a holstered sidearm on her left side…

And a small, black canvas bag floating beside her in a field of magic. Not her usual morning routine.

“Gonna do something a little different this morning,” Mom explained to her curious glance as she set the book down on the table. “I think it’s time I showed you how to shoot.”

Most children were not as smart as her little night light. Foalsitting on the side here and there earlier in her life had taught her that the hard way.

I’m hungry, a filly would say. Be patient, she’d answer. I wanna eat something now, would be the very next thing she’d hear. No, not now, later, she’d insist as per the parent’s instruction. I wanna eat now! Daddy would let me eat something right now! the filly would yell. Insolent little pest. Daddy’s not here right now, and he told me not to spoil your dinner, she’d explain. The argument would go back and forth, eventually ending in a mess when the father came home to find his little girl in tears from arguing with the stable’s “immoral whore”. And then another, shorter argument would follow concerning her lack of parenting skills in dealing with a child.

Don’t run through the hallways like that, she’d admonish a rambunctious colt. You’re not my mom, you can’t tell me what to do, the irritating child would bite back. I’m telling you for her, ‘cause she’d say the same thing. Don’t run in the halls! And the colt would ignore her, and speed on until he tripped on his four left hooves and cracked a leg bone, or bowled over a stable resident exiting their quarters. And then the mother would be rushing up to the infirmary ward, sick with worry at her child’s self-inflicted injury, and yell at the stable’s “immoral whore” about how kids were more than just the end result of sleeping with the first eager stallion that came along, and that she needed to be responsible for once in her life.

Do your homework, kids, she’d tell a pair of twins, brother and sister. We’ll do it later, the sister would half-promise with a dismissive demeanor. “Later” turns into “oops, sorry teach, forgot to do my homework last night”, she’d say. We’re busy right now, we’ll do it later, the brother would repeat for his twin. The checkers board will still be there when you’re done, if you do your homework now you can play the rest of the day, she’d try, hoping to appeal to their desire to be free of impending responsibility. They’d shrug and ignore her, mutter something about how mom and dad told them to try and be nice to her even though she wasn’t exactly an upstanding mare herself. She’d get mad at them, and let them waste away their evening. And then the parents would come to her a couple of days later and berate her for not making sure the little bug bites had done their homework because they’d just failed a surprise mid-week test that included their missed homework as part of the grade. They’d wonder aloud if the stable’s “immoral whore” had ever had an education in anything higher than sex ed because she didn’t seem to know how to keep her own child from causing trouble in her “cutie mark crusading”.

She finally put her hoof down. Fine, find another foalsitter, I’m done looking after your little demons, she’d told the parents of those lazy twins. It’s not like you ever wanted the “stable slut” anywhere near them to start with! A slap of her tail against their noses cemented her anger with them, and that was the one time her being in security came in handy. Nopony ever laid a hoof on a security pony and walked off without help. Their angry talk was just that—talk. She never looked after another pony’s kid ever again. Her own child needed her attention.

And she was much more intelligent than the others. Where other children wanted to just play all the time, Light Tail wanted to play and learn on her own time. Where other fillies wanted to play with dolls, Light Tail preferred to play with other fillies and colts. Where colts would see a filly with “cooties” and want nothing to do with her, she would see a colt that was being teased or bullied and stand up to the tormentor simply because she felt it was the right thing to do regardless of how it ended. Where other children were unsure of whether or not you actually could subtract three from two and end up with a viable number, Light Tail was already mastering the concept of geometry and advanced algebra. Where most children were reading books appropriate to their age and level of intelligence, Light Tail had already read most of the books in the library and learned something from every one of them. Where other parents had to cook meals for their kids, her own child could probably make better food than anypony else in the stable and frequently cooked their breakfast and dinner for no other reason than because she could. It was, at times, more like dealing with a yearling that was nearing marehood than anything else. The kid simply required less energy to deal with, fewer “Because I said so!” approaches to ensuring her wishes and commands were obeyed. There were times when a child’s mind would emerge for brief moments, but they were far less frequent than what she’d dealt with foalsitting other children. She was forever grateful for that.

So when Chief Farsight had debriefed the entire security department about a potential outbreak near the spark generator yesterday afternoon, she’d decided that she’d put off testing that intelligence long enough, and that it was time her filly started learning more concrete and usable skills in the event that she was ever left on her own. Her first order of business: learn to shoot.

And Light Tail didn’t like it one bit.

“I don’t wanna learn how to shoot somepony,” she pouted somberly, lagging behind her mother at a slow, leisurely pace that was killing her plans for making it to the shooting range with time to spare. “Equestria That Was died ‘cause that’s all anypony would do to zebras. Nopony wanted to talk about why they were fighting in the first place.”

Why couldn’t it be something as simple as ‘I’m scared of it’? “You shouldn’t want to hurt another pony at all,” she agreed solemnly. She didn’t like the kid’s stalling, but she couldn’t fault her reasoning for it. “But that’s not what this is about. Remember the radroach infestation the Overmare’s afraid of?”

“The one that’s got you and Aunt C working twelve hours a day? Yeah, what about it?”

“We think it’s gotten worse, and those things are usually about the size of Teakettle’s cat,” she answered. Terrible as it was, scaring her would probably make her less resistant to the idea of pulling the trigger on a gun. “But I’ve seen some bigger than that. We went to twelve-hour shifts to double our numbers on patrol, but I’ll feel a lot better if I know you can look after yourself until I get there. I don’t want to teach you how to hurt somepony, but I do want you to be safe. And this is Stable 115. You’ll never shoot anything more than a paper target or a radroach in your entire life. Nopony’s hurt each other here in two centuries.”

“Can’t I just levitate it out of the way?” Light Tail surmised in the next moment, just as the lettering on the shooting range door grew into a legible form. “Or push it with a telekinesis spell?”

“You could if you were just dealing with one radroach. We’re talking about dozens, all of them with a hankering for the flesh and meat of little ponies like you and me. Think you can control that many at once?”

The thought that she might end up cornered and trapped, facing death at the pincers of giant bugs was all Light Tail needed to stop resisting her mother’s efforts to teach her more practical methods of pest control. “….I…wouldn’t wanna try,” she admitted with a terrified gulp. “Guess I’d rather shoot it. I’m okay with shootin’ a bug, at least.”

The critical issue settled for the moment, Sling Shot continued on through the hall, eventually reaching the entrance to the shooting range where the magic of her horn compelled the door to retract into the doorway and allow her passage. Being the quartermaster of the armory, she was almost immediately recognizable to the poor pony stuck with manning the desk in the reception room during the graveyard shift.

“Oh stars, am I hallucinating again?” the pastel purple earth pony mumbled tiredly. Her seemingly aimless gaze had trouble focusing on anything in particular except the unicorn in front of her, and even that seemed to be a challenge. “….that you, Sling?”

“Lavender, you look terrible,” she spoke, growing more concerned with the range officer’s physical condition now that she had the time to take a good look at her. “….please don’t tell me you’ve been covering Butterscotch’s shift again. Because I told you not to do that anymore.”

“….he never came,” Lavender answered, but only after she’d taken a moment to think it over. “Nopony else came. Nopony came, so I had to stay. Farsight said he’d send somepony…was that last night? Or yesterday, or…oh crap, my brain hurts, no more thinking….I think, I need to…”

Lavender wasn’t done talking, but she seemed to lose track of her own thoughts, and as her body began to give in to its exhaustion and tip over, Sling Shot loosened a light levitation spell from her horn that enveloped the poor earth pony and lifted her over the counter, towards a more comfortable position on a lounge sofa in the corner of the room.

“Wow, she’s soooo wasted,” Light Tail blurted, taking a few steps forward to poke the response-challenged Lavender with a hoof. “Kinda like you in the mornin’, Mom!”

“Very funny,” she bit back, but pushed aside the rest of her barbed response and settled for activating the intercom to Farsight’s office. Even though he wasn’t due on duty for another hour, the night shift chief should still be there. “Hey, Daffodil, you still there?”

A momentary pause accented the response. “…Sling Shot? What are you doing in the shooting range, you’re not on duty ‘till six a.m..”

“I just came here to teach my kid some basic firearms handling, but Lavender is really out of it,” she answered quickly, taking a quick glance at the dazed earth pony and cringing as she began to swipe at the air around her, as if reaching for something she thought was right there in front of her. “She said Butterscotch never came in for his shift yesterday afternoon, so she’s probably been here for over a day and a half. I’m not even sure she knows where she is.”

“Never really does,” Daffodil’s voice snarled, but nonetheless she sounded very concerned by the situation. “But yeah, Farsight mentioned that when I punched in for my shift, said he’d sent Slipknot out to check on his quarters in case he was ill. He called me back a few minutes after the Chief left, said his quarters were empty. We’ve been looking for him since, not sure what’s going on. His Pip-Buck’s not transmitting his location, though. Our best guess is that he either turned it off or broke it.”

“What about Lavender?!” she shot back, miffed that Farsight would have overlooked the fact that the earth pony had essentially no relief from her duty station for over a day. That level of monotony for such a long time would drive anypony mad. “Did anypony ever think to come relieve her so she could get some sleep?!”

“H-he probably thought she could handle it,” Daffodil’s voice muttered weakly. “…um…since you’re already there I’m gonna go ahead and mark you as punched in for your shift, so I guess you’re her relief until the Chief can get somepony else down there to cover Butterscotch’s next shift. They’ll see her to the infirmary.”

Fu….why do these things happen to ME? “…ugh, can’t you send anypony else?” she protested loudly, her blood beginning to bubble with anger. “I don’t really trust Rose Glade or Sunflower to handle the paperwork for the armor transfers, not with the entire department crossing paths all at once—“

Daffodil’s tone was rather dismissive of the affair—or perhaps just of her. “Sunflower will be fine, the Chief said to forget the paperwork last night after maintenance found a second nest near the spark generator, not far from the first one they found. He doesn’t want our response time lagged because you’re too busy filling out a two-page form every time armored barding gets traded around. Look at it this way, if you went to the range to teach your squirt how to shoot, you’ve got plenty of time now. Those shooting lanes need testing anyway.”

She came within a second of loosening a barrage of hateful curses and disparaging questions concerning Daffodil’s parentage onto the unfeeling intercom that separated the quartermaster from the deputy chief. Only Light Tail’s nearby presence stalled her tongue inside her mouth, leaving her breathing in sharp rasps as the unspoken implications piled up. She was just the quartermaster. The “immoral whore”. Nopony wanted her in the halls safeguarding their lives, or watching after their fillies and colts, or doing much of anything beyond keeping their weapons and armor working for themselves. The last time the Stable had a radroach infestation, fifteen ponies got hurt before the bugs could be put down. One poor little colt eviscerated in a dark corner of the commons level, backed up into a dead end hallway with no escape.

And she’d been stuffed in the armory, told to stay put and guard the weapons and armor while everypony else—the Chief included—went out and did their jobs without her. And now that they were getting radroach nests near their power source, she wasn’t even getting the chance to do her job. Was she that unnecessary to the security and safety of the Stable? Were they just throwing her there to put her out of their way?

Did they even want her in security at all?

“….fine,” she hissed back, though her angry tone suggested otherwise. She slapped the intercom off before Daffodil could shout back, and promptly turned her attention to Lavender’s state of mind—

—Light Tail’s face stared back up at her, her wide eyes glimmering with the sense that she probably understood more of that conversation than she would have liked.

Why was she the only one who cared?

“….do they always treat you like that, Mom?”

Not this. Not now. “Let’s not talk about it right now,” was the only answer she felt like giving, trotting past her and up towards Lavender’s dazed, listless form. She nudged her hind legs up onto the lounge sofa in an effort to make the earth pony a little more comfortable, then pushed her body up against the backrest to ensure she wouldn’t slide off and hit the floor without at least rolling around a little first. “Just rest here, Lav. No wandering around, somepony will be down in a bit to take you to the infirmary. Okay?”

“Nuuu wanderin’,” the aloof mare mumbled back softly, curling her forelegs in towards her body as she settled her head down onto the cushions beneath her, her dark blue mane splaying out into the backrest. “Okies then just gonna lay here a bit, buh-bye…”

In a few moments the seductive allure of sleep tugged her mind into its grasp, and soon Lavender was slumbering soundlessly, her breathing slowed to a crawl. Sling lingered there for a minute just to make sure the poor thing didn’t have anything else wrong with her, and then finally turned back around and walked towards the door leading into the shooting range. A simple nudge with her left foreleg had Light Tail falling in behind her.

The shooting range’s door opened before her, revealing a row of eight shooting lanes, each separated by a divider and given its own bench rest for a user’s equipment. Behind the booths were two large steel-gray colored metal tables, measuring around ten feet in length and four feet wide, which came up level with her chest. She set her black canvas back onto the closest table and tugged the zipper open with a slight telekinetic pull.

“Before we even start I want to make a few ground rules perfectly clear,” she stated aloud, slipping into the best “stern mother” voice she could muster in her lingering frustration. “One, always make sure and check whether the gun’s loaded or not every time you get ahold of it. Two, treat it as if it’s always loaded no matter what. Three, never ever point it at anything you aren’t willing to shoot, and always point in the safest direction possible. Four, be sure of your target and what’s behind it. Five, don’t put any pressure on the trigger until you’re ready to shoot. Six, shoot only if you’re absolutely certain that nopony else will be hurt in case you miss. Clear so far?”

Light Tail’s wide eyes betrayed the tremor of fear filtering through her mind at her mother’s demeanor. “…j-jeez, that’s a lotta rules…but yeah, I got it.”

She narrowed her eyes as she stared back at the slightly trembling filly. “Are you sure?”

Light Tail wasn’t used to her mother snapping at her like that, but it seemed to bring her into a sharper focus for the task ahead, and she straightened her body up into a firmer stature. “Y-yeah, I’m sure!”

Guess that’ll have to do. Not wanting to start a fight before the lesson could even begin, she turned back to her bag and reached inside until her magic enveloped itself around the heaviest object it could find, and then slowly drew it out.

Compared to the arsenal she was used to working with in the armory, the pistol in her magic grasp was rather homely in appearance—a lightweight stainless-steel revolver, small-framed, five-shot cylinder, with a four-inch fully-shrouded barrel and a solid walnut wooden grip. There was no provision for mounting a mouth bit grip into the lower frame, as the revolver was designed for the talon of a griffon, not a pony’s mouth. Yet she found this style of revolver easier for her unicorn magic to grasp and manipulate, and came to prefer it over the pistols squirreled away in the armory. The rear sight was fully adjustable for windage and elevation, while the front sight ramp featured a brilliant green arcane crystal, cut into a perfect cylinder and sealed inside the black metal sight. Day or night, that sucker’s glow was bright and crisp, impossible to miss and easy to focus on. She loved it.

With a mere thought, the cylinder release button was pressed down, popping the cylinder loose from the frame and allowing the crane lock to swing it down for her inspection. Pleased with the five empty, polished chambers, she turned and promptly trotted off towards shooting lane #3, keeping the barrel pointed upward the entire time. She set the pistol down on its right side onto the booth’s knee-high bench rest (which was about chest high for Light Tail), barrel oriented downrange, and gently eased the filly forward with a tap to her flank.

“There’s two ways of lifting and using a gun,” she said. “Levitation, and telekinetic. For right now, just use a telekinetic spell.”

“Levitation would be a lot easier,” Light Tail complained immediately, as she expected her to.

“It would, but this isn’t a book or that pair of sauce pans you like to wake me up with. When a gun fires, it generates recoil. If you use a levitation spell to lift it, you’re tempted to use less telekinetic force to hold and use it, and if you’re not careful it’ll buck right into your face. By using just telekinesis you’ll generally be using enough force to properly control it during firing. It can be harder at first, but safer.”

Don’t want to give the Stable anything else to taunt their “immoral whore” with, either, she didn’t add.

She heard what sounded like an irritated whimper as her night light’s horn began to shimmer with a bright, opaque indigo glow, followed by an identical glow that morphed over the revolver. With focused effort and patience, the revolver slowly began to peel off of the bench rest and into a steady ascent—

—which became a rapid, panicked flight when she found the initial ascent too slow for her liking and tried to lift it up faster. The pistol came within a hair’s length away from Sling Shot’s nose before its flight path was halted, causing the mare to jerk away from it.

“Whoa, easy there—“

“S-sorry!” Light Tail cried quickly, going so far as to set the pistol back down on the bench rest, barrel aimed downrange. “I don’t think I’m cut out for this—“

“Mistakes are fine so long as you learn from them,” she assured her quickly before she could squirm her way out of this. She was not leaving until she learned how to do this right. “Try it again.”

Given little other choice in the matter, Light Tail simply huffed in resignation and did as she was told. Her telekinesis spell once again took hold of the revolver, but this time she took quite a bit more care in the amount of force exerted in lifting it from the bench. Its ascent was steady but measured, eventually coming to a hovering stop in front of her face where she began to fight it into a fairly steady and upright position, keeping it pointed downrange the entire time.

“How does it feel?” she asked when the revolver’s constant shaking calmed down into a gentle wavering.

“Feels…weird,” the filly answered quizzically, her tongue unconsciously poking out of her mouth as she continued to toy with her control over the weapon. “Like there’s somethin’ tuggin’ on my horn. It’s what threw me off the first time.”

“That’s a feedback loop from your spell,” the answer came almost immediately. “Density of weight can affect the flow and sensory input you get from the spell field. Move an object up, and you sorta ‘feel’ it pulling up on your horn. Down, left or right, forward or backward, every movement you will it to make will be felt through your horn. The heavier the object, the more you’ll feel it. Lightweight stuff like that pistol won’t bother you too much, but bigger or heavier objects can really tax the spell’s limits—and by extension, yours. Your ability to compensate for the weight and size will determine how much you can pull around.”

As if to confirm or disprove what she was being told, Light Tail began to shift the telekinetic forces at work within the field, and the revolver floated about in tune with her experiments. “Whoooa, you’re right…now this is stuff I wish I could learn in school. Already got three years’ worth of a head start on all the other kids, at least.”

“The biggest objects you can think of to lift can only be lifted by telekinesis,” she added after she began to think of the potential damage the little filly could do trying to find out what she could or couldn’t lift in yet another one of her “cutie mark crusades”. “A levitation spell works best on lightweight objects. About the heaviest thing you can cast it on is another pony. And all the levitation spell does is make something float. If the object is too heavy the sheer weight will overpower the spell and dissipate it before it even has a chance to work. Telekinesis, on the other hand, is dependent on your force of will. A determined enough pony can lift almost anything with that spell, but only a few have ever mastered it that well.”

“Like Twilight Sparkle,” the filly stated firmly. The revolver in front of her began to steady itself into a still form, no longer bobbing or tilting off to the side as she struggled with her control over it.

Quick learner. “Or the Princesses,” she added needlessly. Now that Light Tail was showing decent control over the weapon, it was time to move on to the next lesson. She glanced back at the bag on the table, reaching a telekinetic spell into its confines until she felt the field enveloping itself around a fairly weighty object (and an extremely feather light trickle right next to it), and then pulled the offending objects towards her—a cardboard box of ammunition and a few “dummy rounds” for dry-firing practice. “Okay, then, part two. Load these five dummy rounds in the cylinder and practice pulling the trigger a few times, then we’ll move on to live fire.”

She floated the five practice rounds out towards the filly, and quickly found them wrested from her telekinetic grasp and carefully slipped them into the empty chambers. And here her child encountered her first real problem—how to articulate the telekinetic field in a way that would pull on the trigger and nothing else. Her first attempt simply pulled the entire gun back towards her. Her second attempt barely budged the trigger, and her third attempt caused the weapon’s barrel to dip down towards the floor.

“…hunh,” Light Tail muttered aloud. If she was getting frustrated with her repeated failures, she was hiding it very well. “You make it sound easier than it actually is.”

Her own first-hand experience in learning this very trick allowed her to identify the issue almost immediately. “Your hold on the rest of the weapon slacks when you try to pull the trigger, doesn’t it?”

Light Tail’s fourth attempt to pull the trigger was met with the same result as her third attempt, though this time the barrel only dipped down to about a thirty degree angle rather than ninety. “Never had to change just one small part of a spell field before. How do unicorns get the hang of this?”

“With practice,” she answered. At the rate the kid was improving, it wouldn’t be long before they could actually start live fire practice. “It’s actually a lot easier than you think. There aren’t very many objects in this world that require you to fine-tune a telekinesis field this way, so once yo—“

She didn’t even get to finish her encouragement—at that exact moment, the revolver quickly righted itself upward until it was pointed at the back end of the range, and the trigger went through its complete double-action stroke before releasing the hammer. Light Tail seemed surprised at how quickly the hammer itself could snap back forward, and her flinch was transmitted to the weapon, which jerked forward and up.

“There, you see?” she finished casually, although she secretly wanted to start leaping about like a five-year old finally getting the birthday present she wanted all along. “Nothing to it. Just takes practice. You can cock the hammer first before you shoot, which makes the trigger a lot easier to pull. Practice both ways while I set up the target, and then we’ll actually start shooting.”

Increase in radroach nests. Butterscotch gone for over a day, if Slipknot wasn’t just covering for the fool. New reports from maintenance about altered air flow and oxygen quality on all three agriculture levels in addition to the spark generator level. And just a few minutes ago, complaints from residents on level eight about rattling environmental vents that kept the place cool and comfortable.

Things were going to Tartarus real fast. She didn’t care what Farsight said, the skin underneath her coat was itching and crawling with bad vibes all over. Now was not the time to be keeping the stupid shooting range open. Sling was of better use in the hallways, regardless of what everypony thought.

One emotionally-charged bad decision in the throes of passion did not make her a bad pony. Or an immoral, irresponsible “whore” of a mother. It just meant she made a bad call and paid for it with a foal before she was emotionally ready for the responsibility. And really, the kid was turning out all right despite all the odds against her. Any filly that called her “Aunt” with true affection despite there being no actual blood connection between them was okay with her.

So when that idiot Daffodil told her to fetch Lavender from the shooting range and take the squirt away from her mother to escort her back to quarters, she was very eager to carry out the task. Not out of malice, but because she didn’t want anything bad to happen to her or her mother. And as the designated safety officer for the security department, she could make decisions that nopony, not even the Overmare, could override if she could prove it was made to reduce or eliminate a potentially hazardous or dangerous situation. And she was pretty confident that leaving a single pony in the shooting range with no backup and no viable escape route other than the door in the face of an imminent radroach outbreak qualified as a dangerous situation.

She found Lavender exactly where she was told she would—on the lounge sofa, dozing away with nary a care in the world and a tiny smile on her face that suggested her dream was going fairly well. Since the exhausted and overworked earth pony was obviously going nowhere, she went straight towards the range door and pressed down on the large button labeled “BELL”, which would activate a warning bell inside the shooting range itself to warn occupants to hold their fire until the incoming guest could get their hearing protection ready. She waited for about four seconds before hitting a second button below it labeled “DOOR”, opening the way into the range and revealing a visibly stunned Sling Shot and her preciously smart daughter.

Predictably, Light Tail’s face perked up at the sight of the pegasus, and she promptly trotted away from her mother’s protective reach to greet her favorite “aunt”. “Hey, whut up, Aunt C?!”

Someday you’re going to learn how that pegasus greeting really goes. But until then, she would just go along with it. No need to ruin the kid’s good intentions. “Nothin’ but the rain, El-Tee!” she greeted in return, though this time the hoof-bump was omitted, as she really wanted to get the squirt back to quarters where she was safer. “Hey, I hate to break this to ya, but I’m shutting this range down.”

“Only the range master or security chief can make that call,” Sling Shot quipped from memory, surprisingly resistant to her friend’s efforts to get her out of this place. Such a stickler for rules at the worst times! “And you’re neither.”

“No,” she shot back sternly. “What I am is your friend and more importantly, the safety officer for the security department as well as the Stable in general. And as we’re about to have a real fracas on our hooves before the day is over, I find that keeping a pony squirreled away in the back of a shooting range that won’t see any use and with only one escape route is about the worst idea that one can get. Therefore, under Stable-Tec security regulations, chapter four, subsection E, concerning imminent breach of the security of the Stable, you are hereby ordered to shut this range down and report to the Chief for immediate duty reassignment. This is not negotiable by anypony, even the Overmare. Got it?”

For the first time in the five years that she’d known the kid, Light Tail actively stepped away from her, her eyes locked open in shock at the strong, commanding tone she’d laid down. “…whoa, Mom, you ticked her off…that’s never happened before…”

Cloud Wind’s ears drooped low almost instantly, her fiery attitude wilting away in the face of a terrified filly she hadn’t meant to terrify at all. “N-no, wait—“

Sling Shot saved her flank with a hearty laugh that bounced off of the steel walls and into her ears. “She’s not mad, squirt,” she assured her child gently. “She’s just being serious for once. Fine then, Miss Safety Officer, but only once I’m finished here. It wouldn’t do to leave without showing my one and only daughter how to protect herself when her mother isn’t around, would it?”

The sly, almost mischievous glint in the unicorn’s eyes did not combine well with that innocent smile she flashed whenever she was trying to use a pony’s own logic and reasoning against them. It was if as she was making her intentions plainly obvious to her adversary. Funny thing was, nopony ever called her on it.

Either because she was usually right, or because there really wasn’t time to argue over it.

“Five minutes,” Cloud huffed indignantly. “And I’ll be counting them with you. I’m serious, the sooner the kid’s back in quarters the safer she’ll be.”

Sling Shot was, if anything, efficient when it came to managing her schedule when pressed to keep to a timetable. She immediately turned her attention back to the shooting lane and the paper target that was set up at about seven yards away. “You’ve got fifteen shots,” she told the filly, withdrawing the stated amount of ammunition from their box and laying them out on the bench next to the stainless steel revolver. “Keep a good hold on the weapon when you’re firing. Line the bright front dot up inside the square notch in the rear sight over the spot you want to hit, and then squeeze the trigger. Don’t jerk it or pull it or you’ll mess up the shot. And don’t flick the cylinder shut or I’ll ground you for a month. That ruins the cylinder-barrel alignment over time.”

The sternness of her warning made it clear to both filly and guest that the unicorn mare was not making empty threats. With a nervous gulp the streak-tailed kid took the revolver into her telekinetic grasp and carefully loaded five rounds into the open cylinder, and then gently (and slowly) pressed it back into place inside the frame, and took aim at her target—a simple scoring bullseye, meant to be used at twenty-five yards instead of seven, but for a filly shooting for the first time, even the seven-yard distance would be challenging to hit accurately.

The ambient noise of the vents and glowing light panels died out, in tune with Sling’s magic shimmering over her horn, just before the kid took the first shot of her life—

--the hearing protection spell turned the ear-splitting sound of the gunshot into a tolerable, muffled crack, but did nothing to lessen the filly’s surprised shriek at the suddenness of the report. The gun in her magic grasp jerked up momentarily before being forced back on target, but it was already too late. All three ponies in the range could hear the bullet smacking off the ceiling, then ricocheting off the floor on its new downward trajectory. It finished its short flight with a final clink into a light panel near the back of the hundred-yard range, which amazingly remained largely undamaged from the impact.

Sling Shot was understandably displeased. “That is why you keep a good grip on the weapon when you’re firing,” she snapped calmly. “That bullet can easily bounce back and hit us. Try again.”

Her mother’s unusually strict attitude was startling for the kid, who wasn’t used to being talked to like that. It did much to keep her quiet and under control, but she wasn’t smiling or smirking. If anything, she looked a little upset, as if she didn’t understand why her mother was being so strict with her all of a sudden. Something to talk to Sling about later.

Shot two was much more controlled in the sense that she didn’t flinch and send the bullet into the ceiling, but it still missing the scoring rings completely and instead punched a clean hole in the top left corner where a two-century old logo had been adorned. Said logo was, naturally, no longer present. But her souring mood actually helped her to focus better. Desperate to avoid being scolded for messing up again, Light Tail took careful aim and squeezed off a third round, and finally succeeded in at least hitting the outer scoring ring at the top. Her fourth shot was further down in the eight ring, and the final round came close to nicking the center bullseye.

Impressive for a ten-year old filly.

“For the next five shots, cock the hammer before squeezing the trigger,” Sling instructed next, not even bothering to comment on how close her kid came to scoring a bullseye in just her first five shots. A little encouragement wouldn’t have killed her, would it?

But El-Tee didn’t complain (out loud, anyway). She simply opened the cylinder and ejected the spent cartridges, though it took her a moment to figure out that that was what the ejector rod was for. As she slipped her next five shots into the chambers, Sling quietly drifted the five empty shell casings out from underneath her filly’s hooves and tucked them away inside a pocket on the right side of her stable suit. Fired casings could be reloaded later, or melted down to be used as scrap metal for maintenance if they were too damaged to be used again.

The revolver reloaded, El-Tee took to firing once more. This time around, she did much better—three of her five shots landed in the center bullseye, while the other two pockmarked the eight and ten ring. The kid could really shoot.

“Nice shooting!” she shouted to ensure she could be heard clearly through the hearing protection spell.

“Good shooting,” Sling corrected the pegasus quickly. “There’s no such thing as ‘nice’ shooting.”

“Same sentiment!”

“Do you two need to go sit in the corner?” Light Tail berated both mares derisively as she unlatched the cylinder again and dumped the empty casings onto the shooting. The surprisingly motherly comment—coming from a kid, no less—tickled her brain into a short burst of laughter, which washed away the burgeoning anger that was beginning to cloud her better judgment. Even Sling couldn’t keep from chuckling. Seemed like the kid got fed up with their arguing just in time.

Or maybe she’d meant to calm down them to start with.

Rather than revisit her kid’s words and bring up the potential fight again, she simply went back to her task as though nothing had happened. “Trigger was a lot lighter that time, wasn’t it?”

“’Cause the trigger didn’t have to cock the hammer first, right?”

“Exactly. But it’s a lot slower to fire a revolver that way. The first revolvers, in fact, could only be fired that way. That didn’t work out so well the first time they went up against the zebra in the war, so somepony found a way to make the trigger both cock and release the hammer. Faster, but takes more pressure which means more force is exerted on the pistol that can affect your aim. Not as accurate. At ranges like this, though, you won’t have much time to aim carefully. Shoot five more rounds, however you like, and we’ll call it a day.”

Light Tail preceded to do just that—having already gotten the hang of single-action firing, she simply went back to practicing the double-action stroke with careful, deliberate trigger pulls. Which was actually not the best way to practice that method of shooting, because if one didn’t have the time to cock the first it was usually because something very dangerous was coming their way and their nerves would be jacked up with terror and adrenaline. Most combat shooting was done under stress, which translated into much larger shot groups than one would normally shoot. The best practice was stressful practice.

But not this time. This time, just getting used to the trigger pull was important, and even that would take several sessions. But the kid still managed to impress—this time around, all but one round stayed close to the center of the target, with one clipping right between the bullseye and the ten ring, and the other three landing inside or near the outer edge of the ten ring, forming a loose cluster of four holes. The one stray round—her third—smacked through the top of the eight ring.

Only then did Sling have anything positive to say—when Light Tail asked, anyway. “So how was that?” she quipped with a smirk, the revolver’s cylinder already falling away from the frame to dump the empty shells out.

“Considering this is your first time shooting, very good,” her mother replied, finally allowing some pride into her demeanor. “Most of the security department took weeks to get shot groups like that and we haven’t had the ammunition to practice on a regular basis for over two years now. If we had enough ammo in the Stable to allow it you could probably end up out-shooting them in a month.”

The revolver froze in place, hovering at about a fifty-degree angle with the barrel in an upward direction, as the filly processed the idea of just how regularly trained the armed security ponies were at a time when their skills should have been up-to-date. “…that’s…not comforting,” she wailed softly. “Not comforting at all.”

‘Comforting’ was not the word she would have used, but the message was the same. For such a serious situation to have to be shooting in, the fact that almost everyone in security had not actually fired a weapon on a monthly basis for two years was not ideal. Skills of any sort diminished or outright died without regular practice, and shooting was the one skill that needed to be a regular habit to do it safely. She had not personally pulled a trigger on anything outside of the last function check on the stable arsenal months ago! And she still had the gall to silently complain about not being able to roam the hallways with a loaded gun she wasn’t sure she could hit with? What a wi—

What a stupid mare I am for having an opportunity to test myself five minutes ago and wasting it!! she screamed at herself in the private confines of her brain. Just…just great! Stupid stupid STUPID.

Too late now. The Safety Officer hath spoken, and such. Sometimes Windy could care a little too much. Still, more than she ever got from anypony else in the Stable, save perhaps her daughter. It was almost sad, actually.

She parted ways with Cloud Wind when the elevator reached the eighth level—the first of the residential levels—and silently escorted Light Tail all the way back to their quarters, her ears and eyes attuned more to the vents than to whatever was in front of her. Fortunately, very few ponies were out and roaming about at this hour, so the journey was brief and relatively painless. Once inside their ‘home’, she was quick to lay down the law of the impending lockdown. It hadn’t happened yet, but judging by how anxious Cloud Wind was to get the kid somewhere safe, it wasn’t far off.

“The Stable may go into lockdown in the near future,” she said the instant the door whished shut behind them. “Whether it does or not, though, I want you to stay here. No wandering off to the library or your friends, understand?”

Most children would have complained and whined. ‘But why, Mommy? I wanna play with my friends!’, or ‘That’s not fair!’, or something with similar self-interest. Most children were not her Light Tail. “….it’s really that bad?”

“It could be,” she answered, trotting past the light teal-blue filly towards her bedroom. “So I’m leaving the pistol out of its safe where you can get to it if you have to use it. Don’t touch it otherwise, I will find out if you do.”

“O-okay,” Light Tail squeaked in a shaky voice, and Sling’s heart tore at itself. She’d never acted like this towards her before today. Even during the last radroach outbreak she’d been calmer and more collected. Today, she’d been more insensitive than anything else, lording over her night light like an overbearing boss. She wanted to chalk it up to stress—the stress of the largest radroach infestation in twenty years, the stress and monotony of being little more than a desk clerk in a two-century old underground fallout shelter, the stress of being the one pony in the Stable that was shunned and pushed away by the population at large, the stress and loneliness of having only her daughter and a pegasus mare to socialize with…

…the stress, and terror, of not knowing if she was going to be picked to leave the Stable and her daughter forever, to venture out into a world that would likely be her grave.

But truthfully, it was mostly her frustration at being so powerless to do anything about it that was getting to her. And that was no reason to take it out on the best thing to come along in her sad, lonely life. She would have to make it up to her later, somehow.

Today, she had to be overbearing and protective so that she could get a chance to apologize later. She couldn’t even bear to think of the possibility of life without such a bright and loving soul.

She deposited the canvas bag onto the coffee table where Light Tail would likely be able to get to it in a heartbeat from the couch, and hurried along into her room. Ignoring the crumpled, unkempt state of her bed and scattered wardrobe across the floor, she dove straight into her storage closet and dragged out a pair of leather-harnessed, thick canvas saddlebags, complete with pony-sized bedrolls and an assortment of holsters for storing pistols of various makes and models. Ever since the last radroach infestation, she’d taken to keeping these saddlebags packed and ready for a trip into the outside world in the worst-case scenario of the Stable becoming incapable of supporting life for one reason or another. Designed by a long-dead outdoors outfitter company from Equestria That Was, the amount of gear their spell-matrix treated bags could contain was nothing short of impressive, and was designed to work in tandem with a Stable-Tec PipBuck 3000-A to keep it organized. Her survivalist approach to the contents of each saddlebag set made good use of the generous storage—two months’ worth of MREs (Meal-Ready-to-Eat, though there were less flattering names for it), three canteens for water, enough water purification tabs to last four months if properly rationed, a first-aid kit with enough supplies to allow a properly trained medic to perform emergency field surgery if necessary, five healing potions, three soap bars, a flashlight with spare spark battery cells, a lensatic compass and a map of the region surrounding the Stable, a small tool kit with a screwdriver, an adjustable wrench, and an eight-piece set of hex keys, and a repair kit for her PipBuck.

And the weight limit for the saddlebag’s spell matrices still had enough capacity for another hundred and twenty pounds of gear. Now was a good time to add to it.

She lifted her saddlebag set up onto her bed and walked over to the wall safe on the other side of the room. It took her half a minute to input the combination on the dial lock, and a gentle tug on the handle unlatched the door and allowed it to be pulled away, revealing the contents inside.

The big brother to the lightweight revolver she’d brought to the range earlier, and an assortment of ammunition and speedloaders. The big revolver was nothing like the one she’d let her little girl shoot. This one was much larger, chambered for .44 Mag, and was likely from the same griffon company that had built the lightweight revolver as it shared many design similarities—thick, solid sidewall frame, longer overall cylinder with thicker chamber walls, and additional steel along the top strap and the barrel-to-frame junction. The checkered wooden grip itself had a strange-looking curve bump along the top that arched down towards the trigger guard, and the full underlug barrel shroud was designed to hold small weighted cylinders to alter the weight balance as the shooter desired. Along the top of the first five inches of the seven-point-five inch barrel sat a set of strange—and aggressive-looking—cross-bar slots, presumably for attaching a griffon-designed scope of some sort, as nopony in Equestria That Was had ever designed a mounting system such as this. The front sight ramp had a red crystal insert instead of a green one—still easy to pick up in the dark, but she was worried if it would be harder to see in the daylight if she was ever forced topside. She hoped she’d never find out. Still, an impressive weapon, far stronger than the Ironshod .44 Mag that likely inspired this design. Its dulled, satin stainless steel construction even lent it its own unique nickname—Grayhawk.

She carefully pulled the weapon from the safe along with its weighted discs, and then retrieved eleven speedloaders—five of them built for the lightweight revolver in the next room—and two separate boxes of ammunition. One, labeled “.357 Mag”, contained twenty-eight rounds, while the other one labeled “.44 Mag” contained forty-two. She took a little over four minutes to load all the speedloaders, and then set the .357 loaders and the last three spare rounds into the filly-sized saddlebag set on the floor, and the .44 loaders into hers on the bed. Lastly, she nestled Grayhawk into a large holster set into the harness along the edge of the right-side saddlebag after loading the last six rounds from the box into the cylinder and latching it shut. This routine was one she practiced roughly six times a year to ensure all the gear was ready to go at a moment’s notice, or during emergencies such as the one currently looming over the stable.

What wasn’t part of the routine was the short, silent prayer she offered to the memory of the Princesses in the hopes that she could put the stuff back up at the end of the day. The act itself made her worry that she’d just jinxed that plan all the way to Tartarus.

Too late now. As usual.

Her preparations complete, she took a few moments to calm her staggered breathing before trotting back out into the living room. Seeing Light Tail perched on the couch with the Mare of the Everfree open in front of her gave her the first real sense of relief she’d felt all morning….and the dreadful feeling that it might be the last, as well.

“….the vents are screwed in pretty tight, so you’ll know if anything crashes its way through,” she said to the worry-faced filly as she headed straight for the canvas bag on the coffee table. One last thing to do…

When she reached the table, she bent her neck down and touched the bag with her horn, then channeled a stream of magic into the bag that coalesced around the revolver still tucked inside. “This is how I’ll know if you’ve been playing with the gun while I’m gone,” she explained. “If you pull it out, the spell on the gun will leave a mark on your face through the feedback loop that only I can remove.”

“You don’t trust me to leave it alone?” the filly grumbled bitterly and not entirely without reason. She’d never honestly lied to her about anything before, but…

“This isn’t a plate of cookies, this thing could kill somepony if it’s mishandled,” she replied defensively. “You’ve never lied to me once in your life, but I have to be certain it won’t be used unless you need it. Just stick to that rule and you have nothing to worry about. If Cloud Wind isn’t held past her shift and decides to crash here again, just tell her not to touch it.”

“Might be worth lettin’ her just to see the look on her face when she finds out she can’t scrub the mark off with soap and water,” Light Tail said with an evil little laugh, likely having gotten the idea just now to try and make herself feel better.

Sling snickered a little herself. She could use a good laugh right about now, and seeing the sky blue pegasus panicking trying to get that magically-imbued mark off the left side of her face before the start of her shift would be just the ticket. “…I might actually let you do that,” she chuckled. “The spell lasts a couple of days no matter how many times it’s triggered.”

That bit of information was enough to tear the scheming filly away from the book and onto all fours with an excited leap. “Teach it to me when you get back?!” she begged almost immediately.

She’d learned long ago that that usually mean somewhat sinister purposes behind the request. “And get run down by my boss the next time you prank one of your classmates with it? I think not, you evil little demon,” she teased with a laugh. A tiny laugh, and yet even that little bit was working wonders on her tight-knot stomach, loosening up the tension and filtering the fear out of her nerves. Oh stars, why couldn’t she stay?!

“Demon?!” the filly shot back with faux shock…but then followed it with true, actual anger. “Say that to Sun Star, he deserves it! He called ya a slut and a—“

At the word ‘slut’ her brief moment of joy was crushed, disheartened at hearing such a filthy word come out of her kid’s mouth, and she spun back towards the filly with a mind to put some soap to that snout. “Where did you learn that kind of language?!”

“Sun Star!!” she yelled back, somehow growing even angrier as she recalled how she’d come to learn the words she was about to be punished over. “He pushed me into the wall on my way to the filly’s washroom last week, said I was a mistake!! Called you a slut and the dirty whore of the stable, and it’s not right!! I don’t know why it’s not right, I don’t even know what it means, but it’s just not right!!”

The tail for which she was named flicked wildly as she let loose a week’s worth of pent-up rage and hurt, blinding her mother with its electric-blue streak as it swished through the air, but even that failed to stir her from her stunned stupor. Nothing in her tiny world, not even the violent arrival of radroaches ripping their way through the vents into the room, could have hurt her more than what her night light had just told her. That the stable’s residents were less than receptive towards her was bad enough….but Light Tail had done nothing to deserve it. And now everypony’s opinion of her was filtering down to their children, some of who seemed to see fit to share it with them. And if this was the first she was hearing of them bullying her kid like this, how many other times had it happened before?

These were questions to be answered later. Her kid was hurting, and she had no idea how to deal with it. She couldn’t exactly slap a bandage and a mild healing spell on it to make it all better. The only thing she could think to do was scoop the poor thing up in one of her forelegs and nuzzle her. “….I’m sorry you had to hear those things, honey. But hurting him back just starts that vicious cycle that turned Equestria into a memory. We’re supposed to do better.”

“They could start by not treatin’ you like this!” she huffed through her clenched jaw, still refusing to let go of her fury now that she’d found it. Sling did not like hearing this kind of rage in her little girl’s voice. “If we’re supposed to do better, we’ve failed already!”

A wistful sigh left her lungs, rustled her child’s mane with tinges of sadness. “Nopony’s perfect. The fact that they say those things to my face at all is proof enough. But the Princesses taught our ancestors of love and tolerance, and every day is a chance to set ponykind back on the path of harmony. It’s not easy, but it’s possible. Equestria enjoyed over a thousand years of peace in a virtual utopia because of Celestia’s guidance and the willingness of her little ponies to make it work. We can’t let her teachings be for nothing.”

“I’m not the one who needs to be told that,” Light Tail sniffed. “And I don’t wanna hurt Sun Star, much as I think he deserves it. Just embarrass him more than he’s ever been embarrassed before!”

“After that firecracker prank you pulled last week I doubt that’s possible, you little joker,” she teased, ruffling the squirt’s mane with a hoof and thankful she finally had something to work with to try and brighten both their moods. “I’ll track down Sun Star’s dad during my shift, trade some words with him. Get you and Sun Star to stop fighting like this, ‘cause you two will tear the Stable apart otherwise.”

The filly tried to shake off her mother’s re-arrangement of her mane, with little success, and simply stopped fighting it after a couple of seconds. “Suppose the big jerkface don’t wanna listen, then what?”

“Then you learn a new spell to embarrass the brat with when I get off duty,” she replied with a slightly sinister tone. “One more imaginative than whatever you were just planning with that marking spell you were asking about.”

That got a rise out of the filly, who snorted at the idea (and just thirty seconds ago she was suggesting it). “What happened to ‘love and tolerate’? Princess Celestia practically ran a peace train.”

“Celestia wasn’t above fighting if the situation was dire enough,” she answered. “Even a peace train comes to a stop sometime.”

Light Tail was finally back into a somewhat cheery mood, laughing quietly at the euphuism for reasons only the squirt knew. “Stars help the poor souls when it does.”

Now it was her turn to laugh—what would happen if a train full of peace-loving hippies suddenly hit the brakes and stepped off of it? “We’ll talk more when I come back. I don’t think I’m going to try to explain what those words mean until you’re older, but…we’ll talk.”

Her night light, her eternal bundle of joy and love, picked up on the subtle unspoken message, and gently freed herself from her mother’s grasp, but not before leaving a parting nuzzle across the cheek. “…thanks, Mom. Be careful, okay?”

She couldn’t bear to leave right then…and yet she had to. Still, she stole another moment and left her with a light kiss to the forehead, and then finally turned back around to return to her original journey. “I will. See you soon.”

Her good mood held up until she’d left her living quarters and trotted down the hallway, turned right at the four-way cross section just past the washrooms, and then she finally allowed her own rage to return to her blood. And this time, she didn’t want to let go of it. Ponies had been slinging barbs at her for far too long, and now their attitudes were starting to rub off on their own demonspawn and tormenting her only child. If she’d done something about it much earlier that entire episode El-Tee had suffered could have been avoided. But ignoring them had proven to be so much easier that she just stuck with it. And now her kid was paying for it. That incident was as much her fault as it was Sun Star’s. Or Comet Star’s, for that matter. She wanted to scream, to cry, to find something fragile and utterly shatter it as violently as she could manage.

And Princess Celestia’s ancient words of wisdom were all that stopped her. Love and tolerate, my little ponies…

…well, that, and the fact that Cloud Wind was stepping out of the elevator at the end of the hallway. Wouldn’t do to freak out and trash stuff in her sight, the pegasus might think she’d finally gone off the deep end—

--her attitude faltered once more when a spherical shape slowly floated its way out of the dimmed lighting of the elevator’s interior and into the more brightly illuminated hallway, revealing a trio of mechanical arms—one with a buzz saw tool attached to the end, a second arm fitted with what looked like an arcane energy weapon, and the third arm featured a clamp that was fixated on a bent sheet steel panel, dragging it across the floor as the robot hovered out of the elevator and fell in line behind the pegasus.

Oh gods no, not now! She had to find another way up, this damn robot recognized her on si—

“Good morning to you, Sling Shot!” the robot’s synthesized voice modulator spat out, its accent replicating that of the Trottingham region from before the war—as did all the Mister Handy bots, for some reason. “It’s been three weeks, four days, six hours, forty-seven minutes and thirty-two seconds since our last encounter, oh how have you been dear?!”

She stopped cold in the hallway, turned towards the wall, and promptly dropped her head against it, crying softly. “Why now, Celestia, why? Why do you hate me so?”

“Oh come now, dear, that’s no way to greet a friend!” the robot admonished her gently, firing off its thrusters to reach her at a faster pace. “Where’s that unflappable spirit of yours?! That smart aleck wit you bear to the hateful residents that tarnish your name?! Because I don’t seeeee heeeer.”

“Give me a clue, Windy,” she begged of the pegasus who loved to torment her with blind dates. “When did this damn robot start calling me a friend?”

“I believe it was when you found that spare spark battery we needed to keep him up and running when his old one blew itself out,” Cloud Wind snickered with delight, amused at how the robot had doted on her ever since that day. “A good thing, actually, this is the only unit that’s authorized to repair the spark generator without pony supervision. He’s armed, even. He could probably handle this radroach problem on his own if Farsight would let him.”

“Oh fiddlesticks, I’ve no time for that!” the robot spat back, almost sounding offended by the prospect of combat. “I’ve duties to attend to! Speaking of which, could one of you little ponies kindly direct me to Hacket Wrench? I’ve found the replacement wall panel he requested in storage, but it’s in a slightly off shape and in need of some straightening. And he seems to have blocked my tracking software, I can’t trace his PipBuck tag. How rude.”

Suddenly the robot’s presence wasn’t quite as unwelcome. She’d been pining for something to smack the living daylights out of, and that bent piece of metal was just weak enough to do the trick without breaking her legs. She pulled away from the wall and pushed her head past the robot’s buzz saw arm to take a closer look at the wall panel. “Is that all?”

The buzz saw arm promptly lifted away from her neck, and the robot spun itself around to properly present the panel for her inspection. “I should think so! All of its mounting holes are properly threaded and the preservation talisman was still intact when I ripped it off of the storage crate! Should be an excellent replacement for the damaged power relay cover just over yonder! Remember? The one that spontaneously exploded last Saturday when somepony shut down the power relay for level seven and just shunted all the energy down here instead of PROPERLY re-routing it across the Stable so as not to overload a single floor?!”

“I remember the lights flickering on and off for nine hours before Socket actually answered repair calls,” she grumbled at the recent memory…and the lack of sleep she’d gotten that day. “Ruined Paint Splotch’s latest work too. Just lift the thing up a bit for a minute.”

She didn’t know how it was possible, but the robot seemed a mite confused over her order. “…umm…well, since it’s you, all right, but what do you plan to do exactly?” the machine questioned as it carefully lifted the panel up until it was barely off the floor. “You’re not really qualified for maintenance repair.”

Cloud Wind wasn’t quite sure what to make of the request either. “…yeah, he’s actually got a point Sling, maybe you should just let Hacket deal with it.”

She wasn’t listening to either one of them. The moment the robot had pulled the panel upright, she turned around and swiftly bucked it along the bottom as hard as her two rear legs could manage, putting all the rage and boiling hatred she’d been holding back into her kick. The impact reverberated through her bones and into her flank, and the packed nature of the hallway ensured that the hard clang would leave an echo in her ears for a quarter-hour. But when she turned around to inspect her work, she was pleased that not only had she left a pair of hoof prints imbedded in the exterior, she’d put enough power in her blow to bend the panel back into a fairly straight-looking piece of metal again. She didn’t doubt it wasn’t completely level, but it was straight enough for its impending new home. It was strangely cathartic, even if only for a moment, to know that her directed violence had actually had a positive impact for once.

The robot was ecstatic. “Oh, excellent work!!” it cried cheerfully, even “hopping” in place by putting a little extra power into its thrusters at regular intervals. What a strange machine. “I shouldn’t even have to bother maintenance to get it properly modified for the relay piping now, your hoof prints should be just deep enough to fit over the conduction coils!! Oh thank you my dear!! A thousand times, thank you!! Domo arigato and such!! Ah, you are always such a boon to my continued existence in this hellish hole in the ground!! I shall await our next meeting with baited photonic mana particles! I’ll be counting the seconds!!”

I don’t doubt it, she didn’t say. Instead, she simply let the slightly psychotic robot move on with its day, watching it float past and on down the hall—

--and without warning, the robot broke out into song as though its programmed happiness was not satisfied with the fact that its commanded task could be accomplished more efficiently.

“A griffon tar is a soooaring soul, as free as a mountain bird, his energetic fist should be ready to resist—“

His impromptu song continued on as it slipped around a corner in the hallway, disappearing from sight but not, unfortunately, out of hearing. She didn’t think there was a pony alive down here that couldn’t hear that thing’s racket now.

“…congratulations, Sling Shot,” Cloud Wind’s stunned voice finally found the strength to say. “You’ve given Stable 115 the gift of a singing robot. Now I actually want to hate you.”

“—orial wooooord! His nose should pant, and his beak should curl, his cheeks should flame, and his wings unfurl—“

Chapter 3

Something was so terribly, horribly wrong. Chief Farsight wasn’t yelling at her. Well, not loudly, anyway.

“Only you would have the guts to try and slap me with the rules,” he said tersely, turning his face down to the intercom imbedded in his desk. “But today’s a bad time to be playing this game with me.”

He tapped the intercom on, which linked directly to the Overmare’s office, and was about to utter his wishes to the pony on the other end when the door whished open and filled the room with a brief waft of the slightly cooler air in the hallway before it snapped shut again. All eyes turned to face the crude interruption—

—and Cloud Wind’s face fell in on itself at the sight of the poor mare’s eyes. No, not now, you idiot—

The bright yellow earth pony’s voice was trembling, as if on the verge of breaking into a shrill wail. “C-chief, where’s my brother?”

Farsight’s brown-coated face did its best to maintain a calm façade even though he probably felt like trying to strangle a certain pegasus right then and there. “Calm down, Stick. I’d told you we’d find him.”

“Y-yes, you told me you’d find him in a couple of hours,” the earth pony cracked back through glistening eyes. “That was yesterday afternoon! You’ve never lost track of anypony before, what happened?!”

The awkward, tense silence that followed forced Sling Shot to answer the question when Farsight couldn't—or wouldn’t—bring himself to do it. “….if what Daffodil told me is right, then he never got back to quarters after his shift,” she sighed. “His PipBuck’s not transmitting his locator tag either. Either it’s damaged or he got somepony in maintenance to turn it off, but why he’d do that is beyond me. Since he does the night shift at the moment, that would mean he’s been gone since yesterday morning when Lavender relieved him.”

Farsight’s eyes narrowed into an icy glare when she’d mentioned the likely true length of his disappearance, and the teary mare’s shocked gasp further cemented the mistake her friend had just committed. “…you don’t think the bugs got him….do you….”

Farsight saw an opportunity to settle the issue of what to do with Sling Shot (and punish her for speaking out of turn at the same time). “I’m sure he’s fine. And since you seem to be up to speed on Butterscotch’s disappearance, Sling, you can spend your shift looking for him. When you find him, let me know right away and what his status is, and report back here for re-assignment…”

His eyes shifted over to bring their intimidating fire upon the pegasus before continuing. “One of my choosing, not yours.”

Cloud Wind did not like being challenged by a stallion in that tone. Or being challenged in general, for that matter. Unfortunately, he hadn’t said anything she could actually use to start an argument she could win. She hated it when he did that (which was often). “Shoving somepony in a room with only one way in or out is a death trap and you know it! The last time you did this we had to beat the damn things off the armory door ourselves ‘cause you locked out Sling’s access to the weapon racks right before you left her in there! Residents can at least seal themselves in other rooms in their quarters! The bugs could’ve easily found their way inside through the vents and left her kid an orphan, we are not risking this again! Put her somewhere else—“

“No,” he refuted her “order” immediately and with zero empathy. “The security of our weapons and munitions stores is more important in this situation. Under Stable-Tec regulations, chapter four, subsection E-point-one, the armory is specifically stated to be under my direct control in a potential security breach. Only the Overmare can give me orders regarding that. Surely you recall that part of the subsection you just quoted to me a minute ago.”

I’ll “quote” you something else in about three seconds!! she wanted to scream back and pound into the thick-headed stallion’s skull with the blunt, hard metal of his own desk. The fight that almost ensued was, to her disappointment, headed off by the one pony that had every right to expect better from them.

“Will you foals quit your pissing match and help me find my brother?!?” the earth mare screeched into their brains, no longer trying to hide her tears or her pain. “He’s just a stupid kid, I promised Daddy I’d take care of him before he died, don’t make me beg! Do better!”

Her indignant anger bled off into oblivion, a wash of red hot shame flowing into her bones. She’d often forgotten that Butterscotch was still technically a security pony-in-training; six months shy of becoming a full-blown stallion in legal status, if not by behavior. He’d put in the extra work to graduate from his class a year early and take his departed father’s place on the security force, put in the time to really learn the Stable’s layout in daily walks around the fourteen-level shelter, put in the effort to try and know the other ponies in the security force. He even put in the time to learn about the shooting range’s mechanical controls and the joys of their maintenance routines.

And here she was, trying to huff and puff and blown down the big, bad security chief because she felt her friend was still being slighted by a stable that saw her as little more than their resident “slut”, when Butterscotch’s big sister had a much more reasonable and compelling need to vent and ask them to what they’d promised to when they took on the security oath.

The uncomfortable silence that fell on her ears was thankfully brief, as Sling Shot seemed eager to see herself out the door before things could get any worse. The unicorn spun in place and walked away from the desk, not even bothering to acknowledge anything that their boss had said to them. “Walk with me,” she said, then added with a sharp edge, “You too, Windy.”

Cloud felt her ears go limp as she meekly fell in step behind Sling’s indigo tail, but said nothing. She’d earned the disrespect to be commanded about like a rebellious child. Stick didn’t even flinch. She just seemed grateful that the search could carry on as she’d thought it ought to. She didn’t even care that it was Sling Shot doing the searching.

How quickly ponies would forget the way they treated her when they actually needed her for something….

“The last time you saw Butterscotch, what did you two talk about?” the unicorn asked loudly once they’d escaped the confines of Farsight’s office. Interesting question to ask right off the bat…

“...I…I….ummm,” Stick stammered. Now that she’d gotten the search to continue, she was back to fretting and freaking out over a kid brother that might possibly have become a large snack for giant, mutated insects, and she wasn’t doing as good a job hiding it as she was earlier. “I…when Daddy died…Butters was just starting to ask about…um….mares. Why girls lack some…certain male qualities. At first I was still too broken up to tell him…and it was easier to just avoid it, so that’s what I did, and he stopped asking after a while. It wasn’t until last year when Amethyst cornered me and told me to explain it to him because he’d skipped everything but the core subjects in order to graduate early and start training for security—”

An unmistakable groan of despair filled the air from Sling’s lungs as she stopped herself mid-step and whipped around to stare down the earth pony. “Get to the point already!”

Butterstick wasn’t expecting such a harsh reprimand from the “immoral whore”, and she visibly shrank back from the unicorn’s fiery gaze. “A-aaah! D-don’t make this more embarrassing than it already is! I’m his sister, how was I supposed to tell him something like that?! It took me a whole freakin’ year to work up the nerve! He should’ve learned it in school—“

Sling’s eyes grew harder and angrier, trying to bore a new hole in the earth pony’s skull with her impatience, and Butterstick finally stopping stalling. “Wa…w-wait, don’t hurt me! I…I told him the other night and he just…he just took off! He just took off and he never came home and I’m trying not to think of him being eaten alive by mutant cockroaches with eggs the size of a dinner plate and oh gods Daddy I’m so sorry I tried—“

Butterstick’s body crumpled onto the floor in a curled heap, and it took all of Cloud’s willpower not to smack herself in the face, now that she knew why Butterscotch had just up and vanished on everypony. For such a bright guy, he was being incredibly stupid right now. She’d never have believed it if she hadn’t seen it with her own two eyes.

“Wow,” she muttered over the crying earth pony’s wails. “A singing robot and making a grown mare cry like a little filly. And all in less than an hour? You really bring out the best in us, Sling. Truly, where would we be without your constant guidance?”

“I hate you all,” the unicorn grumbled to nopony in particular as she stared down at the bubbling mass of yellow fur at her hooves. “Basket cases, every last one of you.”

“So where would you go if you were three months away from being declared a full-fledged stallion and just now found out how babies are made?”

Sling took a few moments to respond, still somewhat preoccupied with getting Butterstick’s attention by tapping the crying pony’s body with a forehoof with no success. After her fourth attempt she finally gave up and left the pathetic thing where she was, and started strolling away along with the pegasus. “In the deepest, darkest corner of the Stable that I knew of. And Butterscotch knows a lot of those. He could be anywhere!”

“He can only be in one place at a time,” she countered calmly. “We did a sweep of the residential and agricultural levels six hours ago, so we can rule those out. Levels two through seven don’t have very many places a pony can go if he doesn’t have any business being there, except for the commons areas and we’ve got those locked down until the alert passes. We haven’t done a thorough search of levels fourteen and fifteen yet but that’s only because maintenance gets pretty irate if us dumb security types come barging through during inspections. They tend to just block the halls and doors with their bodies so we can’t walk through.”

Sling’s excessively eager response was swift and tinged with lingering frustration from the week’s stresses and emotional abuses. “I don’t have the time or the patience for their bullshit today,” she howled angrily, her hastened pace overtaking the pegasus’s in a display of slightly unbottled rage. “If they can’t make a hole when I come through, I will.”

They always laughed.

For some strange, inexplicable reason, whenever she allowed herself to get angry enough to show it, they always laughed. Like she’d uttered the punch line to a joke that everypony but her was a part of.

And today was a bad day for jokes.

“Hey guys!” Socket’s cream-colored body chuckled as he turned his hazel eyes away from her and motioned his head in her general direction, eliciting a similar roar of chuckles from the ten-strong crowd of earth ponies and mares behind him. “Check this out! She—hehehaha—she sounds serious! ‘Get out of the bucking way’ my tail—“

“Oh crap,” was all Windy would have time to whisper under her breath. In the next instant Sling Shot’s horn erupted into a brilliant indigo shimmer, and Socket’s body was flung straight up into the ceiling with enough force to bruise his skull on it, cutting his surprised shout short with a muted grunt of pain before he was dropped back to the floor by gravity.

Stars alive, that felt good.

“Let me make my position a little more clear to you,” she seethed in hot, heated breaths, her mind’s eye focusing her arcane energy flow into a second telekinesis spell in the event that she needed to do exactly what she’d threatened to. “Somepony’s been missing for over a day and I’ve already had all the BS I can stand today. I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. MOVE.”

Ten bodies immediately parted to the sides, their laughter dying in their throats at the sight of Socket writhing on the floor, his forelegs grasping at the pain in his skull. What were once stares of distaste and disdain now bore signs of confusion, fear, and even anger, as if they couldn’t understand why a security mare would resort to physical force to do their job when words weren’t enough. And maybe she had gone a tad overboard with Socket.

But they weren’t laughing at her anymore. At that point, that was all that mattered to her. That and the immense feeling of vindicated relief that flowed through her blood and invigorated her muscles. Whether it was rightfully deserved or not was another story. One Farsight would probably be hearing about later.

Since that time wasn’t here yet, she pushed it out of her mind and strode forward through the maintenance crew, Cloud Wind never more than four steps behind. She had no doubt that they were already planning to tell Farsight before she could even get back to his office, but that was a problem for later. Butterscotch was missing, Butterstick was probably still sprawled on the floor on the fifth level bawling her eyes dry, and she still had eleven and a half hours left to go in her shift. To Tartarus with what anypony else thought of her.

Even if that pony was a friend. “U-uhh, maybe you should call it quits this time, take a sick day or something,” Windy suggested softly as they strode through the corridor, bending around the wall as it bent to the right and funneled off into an intersection ahead. “You went over the line with Socket—“

“I told him he could move, or be moved,” she snapped back quickly, wanting to settle the issue and get the search over with so she could get back upstairs for whatever chewing session Farsight wanted to have. “He chose option B, so that’s what he got. You take the left side, I’ll search th—“

“Sling, I’m serious, you’re not thinking straight!” Windy protested still, ignoring her instructions entirely and instead focusing on whatever she’d decided for the unicorn. “Go practice your magic, take an hour in the gym and work it off, I don’t care, just stop—“

Just get to work, please, Windy! “Not now, ‘Scotch is sitting around somewhere and we need to find him. Now, take the left side—“

Her instructions were ignored a second time, the pegasus more concerned with whatever she’d decided was important rather than the task of finding somepony that could very likely be dead or dying right then and there. “Yes, now! What the hell’s wrong with you?! You’ve never lost your cool like that before, you could have seriously hurt him!! I know everypony treats you like scum to be scrapped off their hooves and it’s not fair or right, but you can’t just go slapping them around like that! You said it yourself, it’s just words to you! Why are you acting like this?!”

She tried. She tried so very hard to keep her mind on task, to just get on with the search and push it away, but the longer Windy yelled and berated her, the harder it became to not think of what Light Tail had screamed at her earlier. At how Comet Star’s colt had treated her, the things he supposedly said to her, about her own mother. And then….

And then she felt the dam holding back ten years of emotional abuse shatter.

“Alright, fine then, ‘MOM’, since you’re so gods-damned interested!” she screamed back, spinning around on her hooves to face the pegasus down. “I’ve been called a slut and a whore to my face for ten bucking years!! All because I had a kid when I was fifteen and still a year away from the G.O.A.T. exam and the three years of job skill classes afterward!! And why?! It’s not like I was the only one getting laid in her free time out of school, I was just the only one stupid enough to get caught at it!!”

Cloud Wind’s eyes shrank back into themselves, perhaps finally realizing that she might have been better off just leaving the matter alone, and she began to put some distance between them in the hopes that she might be able to avoid getting what she asked for. “Wh-whoa, wait a tic, stop—“

“NO!” she shouted into her face, her body stalking forward. “You wanted to know, and now you will!! It’s bad enough that I get treated like a used rag!! I’m yelled at, cussed out, or insulted to my face and I have taken every bit of it and said nothing!! I have not touched a stallion in a decade, and I’m called a dirty whore today regardless, but I take it—“

Cloud Wind’s shock did not last long—she soon squared her body and firmly planted herself onto the floor, her face staring back at the ranting unicorn with the stoic determination she was occasionally capable of showing. “And you shouldn’t have to, but this is not the time for a snit-fit—“

“My daughter should not have to take it!!” she went on, ignoring the tingling in her horn as she began to lose her hold on her anger. “I have let these stupid ponies drag my name and my reputation into the sewage lines for years, and it’s rubbing off on their children and hurting mine!! She should not have to walk these halls and hear other children call her mother the same things their parents do!! She should not have to catch everypony’s distaste and hate for me for one stupid evening I spent on my couch with a coltfriend!!! She has done nothing!!! She deserves better than what everypony’s giving us!!!”

Cloud Wind’s eyes began to lose their fire as she struggled to process what had just been bellowed into her ears. “….what are you talking about?”

A primal, almost animalistic growl vibrated through her throat and into the echo-friendly corridor as the unicorn’s mind fought off the urge to splatter her only friend across the floor. “You know what? Why don’t you go ask her, since you’re more interested in our business than in finding some poor lost kid?!”

If Cloud Wind had anything to say to that, she didn’t get to say it. The minute Sling’s voice stopped speaking, the world was plunged into blackness alongside the plunging, dying sound of hundreds of power conduits suddenly losing all of their energy at once. After that, any pretense of continuing their fight was long forgotten (if not the ill feelings that still lingered).

“…that’s twice this week,” Windy’s voice grumbled darkly, her head ducking down to pull the firing reins of her battle saddle up and locking it in place with a swift tap from her left forehoof. “The damn bugs are probably building a nest right over the exhaust pipes below us.”

The back-up generator began humming to life, and its associated back-up lights slowly began to energize and illuminate the hallways with just enough light for everypony to see where they were going. It would take them a half hour before they really lit up fully, but for now it was still better than shooting blindly in the dark.

And for once, she was actually looking forward to the coming violence. A good chance to work out her rage on something that deserved it. Her issued 10mm pistol cleared its holster in a flash, her magic already grasping onto the slide and pulling it back for a chamber check—

—the dull brass casing of the 10mm jacketed hollowpoint round nestled inside the firing chamber glinted slightly even amidst the dim lighting offered by the back-up lights, and she let the slide snap back forward with a slight tingle of satisfaction. “We’ll check it out while we search L15, then. If those things break the generator we’ll all be taking the Last Journey.”

She was right on top of the beginning of chapter twenty-seven when the world went to sleep. Her vision was plunged into darkness, the environmental unit stopped humming cool air into the living room, and the air vents were noticeably quieter than they usually were. Thank the stars the oxygen ran on its own separate back-up system designed to kick in if power went out.

That didn’t, however, make up for the fact that she was stuck in the dark, right when the story was getting to this really great part where Starlight had finally found the Princess’s old royal castle after an agonizing three weeks in the Everfree Forest—and had an impending fight with yet another group of cultist ponies. And Mom had never gotten around to teaching her any other spells aside from levitation and telekinesis. A light spell would have been really nifty right now.

With a frustrated sigh, she looped the cloth bookmark back over the binder, sliding it inside the first page of chapter twenty-seven before clasping the book shut and setting it down on the coffee table. The back-up lights were starting to come on, but they weren’t going to give nearly enough light for her to pick up her reading again for a while. And she needed to go to the bathroom anyway.

When there was enough light in the room for her to avoid bumping into stuff, she hopped off the couch and walked over to the door, concentrating her magic on the door controls, aaaaaand—

Nope, not opening, she spat to the stars when the door remained in place after four button presses. Perfect. Now I’m stuck in here.

She refused to accept that. No stupid door was going to keep her penned up like an animal in her own home. She was going to find a way to get it open. It might have been smarter to let the door stay put in case those bugs started swarming through the halls, but if they got in here then she’d stuck. She’d rather have a way out than be sealed in with pony-eating roaches.

She crossed over into the kitchen as quickly as her four hooves would move her, retrieving a flashlight from a cabinet over the stove before dashing back to the door. Her magic flicked across the on switch as she approached, bathing it in white light and affording her a much clearer view of the doorway and the useless controls.

Control panel mounted next to doorway, door moved by big gears and pistons and Celestia knows what else, her brain surmised in quick bursts of thought as her eyes scrutinized the door and everything around it. Door supposed to take explosions and still work, power cables routed to door under the floor…Stable built to outlast pony-wrought Endtimes so Stable-Tec musta counted on power going out now and then….bet it’s got manual controls somewhere—

Her flashlight started poking about the wall surrounding the doorway, looking for any latches or wall panels that she would have otherwise ignored entirely in a typical day—

Presto! she squealed mentally when the light beam fell over a section of wall marked with a pale yellow triangle, with a black exclamation mark in the middle and accented with a red outline. Beneath the mark lay the words “EMERGENCY USE ONLY.” She was pretty sure a power outage and impending biological urges counted as emergencies.

She quickly unscrewed the rubber-coated lens cap of the flashlight until it popped off, allowing the bulb to throw its light out into a general area rather than being focused into a singular direction. She set the cap down on the floor, focusing lens down, and set the still-shining flashlight inside the cap where it could stand stable and give enough light to let her see what she was doing. She then planted her hooves onto the floor in a firm, steady position, and began to tear at the panel with her telekinesis spell.

And dear Luna it was tough! Her first try failed completely, and she smacked herself in the face for forgetting to take the screws out first, but even after that, the panel simply refused to be budged easily. Her next four attempts lasted all of three seconds before it snapped out of her spell field and back into its crevice in the wall. On her sixth attempt she thought she had it as she managed to get one corner out of the hole, but something on the right side kept catching onto something inside her spell’s grasp and keeping the panel from moving any further.

C’mon already, get out! she demanded of the slab of metal, giving it an extra hard tug out of frustration, which was apparently enough to coax it free of its restraints. The cover popped off with a loud crunch, startling her into sending it flying across the room, eventually clanging harmlessly into the kitchen floor.

“…oops,” she mumbled over a nervous laugh, turning back to the hole she’d revealed and enveloping the stick lever within with a telekinesis spell. It proved to be nearly as frustrating as the wall cover, with the added downside of roughly two centuries of age, minimal attention from maintenance staff, and the arduous task of having to engage an untold amount of weight and pressure by sheer force without the assistance of power and hydraulics. It took her roughly four minutes to lift the door up enough for her to consider crawling across underneath, and by then she felt like she’d been running a marathon up and down the stairs. She simply wanted to collapse to the floor and be allowed to die right there.

And yet that annoying detail of a full, pressured bladder begging to release its contents in an acceptable and dignified manner kept her strained, exhausted mind focused on at least finding her way to the washroom before it chose to disregard dignity. And though the space between door and floor was not quite ideal, she was able to squeeze through and enter the slightly brighter confines of the hallway. Now it was just a matter of—

Of telling Grape and Emmy to give me some privacy, she amended her unconscious checklist. Even with most of the hall lights giving off only dim glows, she could easily make out the distinctive outlines of Grape Jam and Emerald’s manes and tails as they gingerly trotted towards her. Grape Jam’s head cocked to one side, likely studying the unicorn filly in front of her as though she wasn’t sure who she was staring at, but Emmy was quicker to recognize her and broke into a light gallop.

“Whoa!” the earth filly squealed in delight as she reached the unicorn and finally got a good look at the door she’d spent the better part of ten minutes prying open. “Figures ya’d find a way to get a door open when ya want out! What’s th’ rush, you coulda made it easier on yerself if ya’d just waited for the power to come back!”

“Can’t wait,” she huffed through a heavy breath as she stumbled around her friends towards the washroom. Still winded out. “Gotta go. Gimme a minute.”

For once, her friends seemed content to give her the space she asked for and simply continued forward. “No biggie,” Grape assured her as she drew close to the door of her home. “We’ll just wait in your living room—“

Light Tail’s heart stopped inside her chest, cold tendrils growing out into her lungs as she imagined the worst possible outcome of the two of them finding Mom’s gun on the coffee table and inadvertently setting it off, and then she suddenly thought better of them trailing her all the way to the washroom entrance. “W-wait, I didn’t say nothin’ about stayin’ put, just…what’re you guys doin’ here? Didn’t anypony tell you we might end up in lockdown ‘fore long?”

“Yeah, we heard,” Emmy’s voice sputtered, dripping with scorn at being told to stay put in one place instead of hanging out with her friends. But her hoofsteps stopped growing distant and began to grow louder and closer, and Light Tail’s heart gradually warmed with relief as Grape’s hooves fell in step behind the earth pony filly. One potential disaster averted. “But we ain’t locked down yet, and ah’m tired of bein’ cooped up alone. Ah’d rather be bored with my friends. And Grape wanted to talk to ya anyways! Ain’t that right?!”

She could almost imagine Grape’s face flooding with embarrassment underneath her coat. “Emm-meeee!” the pegasus whined in a sharp hiss. “I told you not to say anything!”

“Oh, come off it, wouldja?! Ah’m just makin’ sure you don’t forget!”

Their hushed, angry argument carried on in the background, pushed out of her conscious hearing by her own wandering thoughts as she realized that she’d never known Grape to be shy about saying anything to either of them before. She couldn’t imagine that changing now, unless it concerned her on something really important or personal.

And the bathroom was the last place she wanted to be asked any kind of questions like that.

“Well, whatever you wanna ask me, can it wait a minute?” she pleaded again as they reached the washroom door at last, but she didn’t regret enticing them to follow along behind her. She’d rather be embarrassed than heartbroken over seeing them hurt, or worse. “This ain’t exactly the kinda place for important stuff.”

She turned her head towards them, just to see if they’d finally get the unspoken message, and their wide-eyed stares as they realized (belatedly) where the unicorn had led them caused them to shuffle away from the door in a mad dash of embarrassment. “Uhhh yeah!” Emmy agreed with a chipper voice, desperate to look anywhere but at her. She seemed especially interested in the floor right then. “Yeah! Important stuff’s for…important places! Like a couch! Go on, we’re not even here! Right, Jam?!”

“R-right!” Grape sounded off in unison. “Not here! Not here at all! Just…chillin’ out!”

Light Tail allowed herself a few moments of laughter at their expense as she strolled through the doorway, thankful that somepony had neglected to close it before the power went out. Sometimes those two could be as dense as the walls around them. She loved them so regardless. What were friends for, right?

“Friends are not for use as battering rams,” Cloud Wind growled testily, refusing to come within twenty feet of the unicorn as she tried yet again to get the plate covering for the manual override lever off. And failed.

“We need this damn door open and your skull is the only one thick enough to take the abuse,” she snapped back, her fight with the protective covering giving her voice an added dose of hateful venom. “You won’t feel a thing, I promise.”

“No!” the pegasus bellowed, her voice amplified by the tight confines of the stairwell’s corridor. “Keep your fancy horn magic offa me! I like my skull the way it is!”

For the tenth time, she repeated the silent mind incantation for the telekinesis spell, willing the spell field into existence over the covering, and began to pull at it once more. “I’m not shooting this cover off! Or prying it off with the gun, for that matter, the barrel is worth more than these PipBucks on our front legs! It gets bent and the gun’s useless!”

“Better the barrel than my brain!” Windy shouted back, from what sounded like twenty-five feet away now. “Back! Back I say!”

At last she began to feel a smidgeon of success—the covering’s two left corners actually came away from the wall for about two seconds before the safety latch, long ago rusted into place, became too much for her hold on the spell, and the covering snapped back into place with an almost taunting flair. Her frustration began to boil over into physical actions as she slammed her right front hoof against the covering in despair.

“By Celestia, this is ridiculous!” she screamed to the uncaring Stable walls around her. “Has anypony in maintenance actually maintained any of these manual controls?!”

“Just rip it off, ya wuss!”

“I’m trying, dammit!!” she howled, grabbing at the covering with her front hooves in a fit of rage and beginning to physically pull on the thing in a bid to relief this overflow of anger. “This bucking thing—unnnggh!—is pissing me off!! I can….unnng—I can barely concentrate!!”

Cloud Wind had finally had enough of sitting and waiting for things to happen…that, or she simply didn’t believe that the latches for the covering had rusted over and frozen into place decades ago. She promptly stomped forward and bumped the unicorn aside with nary a care in the world, and began trying the exact same thing that Sling had just been doing. “Oh, by the unholy—step aside and let a real mare handle this, will ya? Wouldn’t want you chipping a hoof.”

Now Windy was beginning to frustrate her almost as much as that stupid plate of metal. She fought her way back into position, but wound up having to share the space with the sky-blue pony as she grabbed at one half of the covering’s edges with both front hooves and her magic, while the pegasus pulled on the upper and right sides. “A real mare?! You’ve been hanging around Steel Side too long, girl! Or do you even notice the lack of certain male body parts between your haunches, you thick-headed mule?!”

“Mule?!?!” Cloud Wind screeched, finally and truly enraged at her friend as she began to double the strength she was putting into her pulling efforts. “That’s it, when I tear this damn thing off I’m shoving it up between your legs!!”

“I’d like to see you try it, you flightless heavyweight!!!”

—SCREE—

“You just wait, hermit-girl!! When I’m done with you you’ll feel pain in places that never see light!!”

“Yeah, well, at least they’ve felt pleasure before in my lifetime—“

—SCREEEEEEEE—

Windy’s body began to drag across the floor as her pulling inevitably drew her closer to the panel. “Oh, now I’m honor-bound to hit you in low places!“

“You wouldn’t even know where to aim back there, feathers-for-brains!!”

—SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—

“How could I miss what I’ve been trying to tap for three years!?!?”

Her mounting rage flashed away, overridden by a shock that not even a power overload could have produced into her. “WHAT—“

—SCREEEEEEECCHHH!!!!!!—

The cover plating popped off, and in her stunned stupor she’d been totally unprepared for it—her spell field didn’t even register that its target was no longer within its radius, and exerted its full force on the manual lever she’d been trying to reach for the last five minutes. The physical exertions of both mares sent them tumbling backward head over tail across the twelve feet of level flooring and into the first several steps of the stairs behind them as the door slammed open and sent its ear-screeching echoes into the halls around it. The metal plate flew free from their grasp and clanged its way up the stairs as their bodies collapsed onto each other—the pegasus fell on her back, wings spread wide, as the unicorn was plopped down on top of her by inertia and carelessness. Their faces were less than an inch apart, but could not have been more different. Where Sling Shot’s face bore a look of extreme horror and uncertainty, Cloud Wind’s face bared teeth and hate…

…for all of three seconds, before the anger in her eyes gave way to tear-filled glee and school-girl antics as she began to laugh hysterically to the point of having trouble breathing, her saddle-mounted rifle clicking across the floor in tune with her shaking body.

“Oh my stars this is the best prank I’ve ever pulled over your naïve little eyes!!!” she howled with joy, when she finally could speak for a few seconds. “Holy cow you really thought I had the hots for you all week hahAHAHAHAHAAAA—“

But Sling Shot could barely process this confession—her mind was still locked on ‘trying to tap for three years!?!?’, and with their haunches so close together she felt more than small. She felt….

….non-existent. “….y-you…wha…”

The pegasus continued to roar with laughter and shift beneath her, oblivious to the world in general and Sling Shot in particular. “Oh gods—hahahaha—oh gods wait ‘till I tell El-Tee hehehahHAHAHA!!! She’ll just DIE—“

She would later come to believe that some ambivalent, bored deity in the stars above had been watching them all through the morning, waiting for just the right moment to begin alleviating his boredom with a heavy dose of irony, because right at that moment both mares heard amidst Cloud Wind’s non-stop bellowing laughing a terrified, hair-curling scream from somewhere beyond the open doorway that made the hairs of their manes stand up on end. Quite a feat, since Sling kept hers in a braided ponytail.

Cloud Wind’s laughter died as promptly as the bone-chilling scream, and she shifted over onto her belly and scooted out from underneath the unicorn. “…oh gods, I think that was Hacket Wrench…”

Her mind still trying to get past her friend’s raunchy comment that had deflated her bubble of fury, Sling could only steady herself upright and bring her 10mm pistol and flashlight back into her telekinetic grasp as she followed the pegasus through the door and into the fifteenth and final level of the Stable. Windy turned down the right corridor almost immediately, bounding down through the passage as it curved off leftward a hundred feet later, before the gravity of the situation had seeped deeply into her psyche and gave her the incentive to focus on her assigned task once again. “....I’m not seeing any red marks on my EFS—“

“You won’t down here,” Cloud Wind explained quickly, her pace slowing to a quick but careful trot as her rifle locked into place and began following her head movements. It was limited to a thirty-degree field of aim, but at least she could actually aim it instead of having to settle for awkwardly positioning her body to get the bullet to hit in one particular spot. “This is where all the spark generator’s exhaust is funneled and recycled, as well as the water used to keep the arcane rods cool. The pipes have to be shielded with containment talismans pretty heavily to contain the radiation, which wreaks havoc on the PipBuck’s EFS matrix to the point of uselessness. There’s a reason we call the generator levels “The Dungeon”.”

A spark of intelligence finally came to life within her addled neurons. “…that would also block locator tags…and Butterscotch’s has been offline since…Tuesday night? Wednesday morning?”

Sling’s observation caused the pegasus to screech to a halt as the obviousness of it all finally became clear. “…and Spiner said he couldn’t find Hacket’s too…oh stars, how did we overlook this?! That idiot’s been down here the whole damn time!”

The unicorn’s mouth began to part, to utter a warning about keeping silent, and a sharp, rapid set of clicks began to scratch at her ears from the darkened depths of the corridors ahead…and then another set joined in after it, their off-beat crescendo promising grim and violent futures. She didn’t even remember thinking to cock the hammer on her pistol, or slinging the tall, orange crystal-insert iron sights up into her vision.

She would never, ever forget those sounds for as long as she lived.

And neither would Windy. Her belt-fed rifle began to strain against its mount as it sought to accommodate her frantic head movements. “Guess we know what Hacket was screaming about now….”

“Don’t forget about ‘Scotch,” Sling said quietly, her heart beginning to fight with her ribcage as it tried to beat its way out. “We’ll swing by the exhaust pipes, see if they’re jammed up with bug resin or whatever they use to build nests out of, but we’re not leaving until we know for sure if he’s here or not.”

For all the pranking and jesting Windy liked to get up to, she could set herself to dead-serious tasks with robotic precision and dedication when she had to. She trotted past the unicorn, firing rein less than an inch from her open mouth, and began to creep forward at a careful pace. “Taking point,” she whispered back. “Watch our six.”

Sling swung her body around to the other direction, her eyes and flashlight focused more on the vents along the floor and in the ceiling, and after a quick check of her weapon she flicked the pegasus’s rump with her tail to indicate that she was ready to move. Windy’s hooves began softly clomping against the metal beneath them, and Sling Shot was never more than a step behind as she followed along in an awkward walk backwards. All the while, that foreboding sound of chitinous legs skittering about in the darkness continued its song of doom, adding more sets to its step and from more distant places. She was starting to think they were emerging from every conceivable hole in the halls, and she was having a very difficult time getting her heart to do anything other than try to tear itself apart. Her legs began to grow hollow and cold, her fear becoming almost a physical ingredient in her blood as it zipped about within her blood vessels—

—her muscles slacked into pudding, collapsing her to the floor, her hooves pressuring against her ears as dozens of insect legs scratched and scorched against the door beyond the meshed-in security desk—

Stop, brain, she begged of her resurging memory as the darkness began to grow along the hall. Don’t need this right now stoppit—

—their ravenous, guttural chirping billowed through the overhead vent, filling the room with their cries of hunger as she began to cry at the prospect of being slaughtered with nothing more to fight back with than her own hooves and limited combat magics—

Sling felt her rear legs begin to tremble, unconsciously backing herself up against Windy’s backside as her lungs began to struggle for oxygen—

—the walls began to squeeze inward on her, promising her no escape from the razor-sharp mandibles stretching apart at the thought of her flesh beneath her teal-blue coat—

The walls at the corners of her vision began to bend and curve inward, at once stretching and constricting themselves around her into what she swore was a tunnel—

—her lungs stopped working entirely as the thought of her night light’s future without her began to take hold in her broken thoughts—

Her shaky hold on reality was snapped back into sure footing before her memories could overwhelm her entirely with the timely—and emotionally confusing—intervention of Cloud Wind and a strong, enveloping hug that trapped the unicorn within her front legs and pressed their bodies together—

“Bookie, listen to my voice!” Windy’s voice rumbled into her right ear.

Her brain stopped mis-firing its commands at the sound of her old pet name, and her lungs began to work in concert with each other rather than fight with her for what they needed. Her legs, while still buckling, no longer felt as though they would snap in two with a mere brush. And her heart, while still anxious, no longer sought a bloody and fatal escape through her ribs.

“Just breath,” Windy continued to plead, refusing to release her friend from her grasp. “Take a minute, just breath—“

Her lungs obeyed the worded urging, sucking in recycled oxygen from the air and filling her with its cool relief. Once rapidly, then twice in a quick gasp, and then a third time…

….and a fourth, calm, relaxing breath later, she was back in control of herself, if not her wildly running emotions and fear.

“You’ll be fine,” Windy’s voice soothed in as assuring a voice as she could manage. “You’re not in a one-door room, locked up like a misbehaving pet with no way out. You’ve got a gun this time, and I’m not going anywhere. We walked into this mess together, and that’s how we’re leaving. Just focus on my ass, if that helps.”

Windy’s lame attempt at humor broke at least some of the tension in her limbs, but she still couldn’t shake off the sheer terror afflicting her. “Thought we went over this already,” she chuckled back nervously. Her hold on her pistol was firm again, and by the stars if she saw even a hint of those damn things she was squeezing the trigger, subtlety be damned. She felt she needed to see one of them split in half from a 155-grain hollowpoint traveling fourteen hundred feet per second. Maybe then she’d feel safer.

“There you go,” she muttered softly, finally unwrapping her forelegs from the unicorn and returning to her point-mare position. “Back to your old celibate self, that’s better. Just stay calm and focused.”

How can such a carefree pony be so fearless when it counts…

“Easy to say for one whose name pops up in a dictionary when the word ‘courage’ needs an example,” she derided gently, her tail feeling Cloud Wind’s body stalking away from her. She followed along in a backwards walk again, this time keeping her mind from zeroing in on the constant patter of insectoid feet in the dark by thinking of just about everything else. Light Tail, The Mare of the Everfree book she read once a year, the ballistic table for the 10mm’s various loads—

“Everypony gets terrified shitless when the chips are down,” the pegasus muttered back, finally allowing what sounded like apprehension to creep into her voice. “Courage is being scared to death, and saddling up anyway.”

Windy stopped talking after that and simply slinked along through the halls, leaving Sling Shot to ponder the unusually thoughtful words her friend had just uttered…and how much better they made her feel when she began to count each step she took in spite of the fact that she was surrounded by carnivorous bugs and had seen first-hand what they were capable of doing to ponies like herself. Every hoof forward (or backward, in her case) was in direct defiance to what her fear and bladder-emptying urges were telling her to do, and the longer she did it, the more clearly she could concentrate on her task.

Even if she was scared to death to do it.

With her initial terror squared away, they strode through the hall, stopping at each room for a quick peek inside before moving on. Neither of them saw any sign of anypony being attacked, but they held no illusions that such luck would last. In time they came to the end of the corridor, which split off into two more in the left and right directions—

—Windy’s body turned down the right corridor, and Sling curved her body around to her left as she followed along, continuously lashing her tail outward to keep the pegasus within touching distance and to keep her oriented. They’d practiced this routine ever since the last radroach outbreak, and it was paying off already in terms of emotional relief as well as actual security—

—her light flashed across a vent in the corridor across from her, just in time to spot the antennae of a radroach emerging from its crevice, followed quickly by the rest of its chitinous and creepily oversized thorax and body—

—a warm, tingly stream began to flow within her horn as she silently discharged her hearing protection spell, and when that same feeling stretched out to her ears and Windy’s she settled her pistol’s sights on the disgusting bug’s body and squeezed down on the trigger—

—the muffled boom of the gunshot was overshadowed by the brilliant muzzle flash erupting from the barrel, and she immediately regretted not fetching a suppressor from her armory before coming down here as she noted several minute details of warning signs and lettering along the wall that she could no longer see in the dim lightning. Even hearing the bullet crack through its exoskeleton and tear meaty chunks out of the disgusting bug little to re-assure her over the loss of her low-light adjusted vision. Had she been aiming for its head and missed, she wouldn’t have been able to see it well enough to try a second shot. Fortunately, its terrified shrieks of pain were brief, and she didn’t hear it moving or chirping afterward. One down, hundreds more to go.

“Was going to ask about that fancy spell of yours,” Windy’s voice chimed in, swelled with relief. “That thing would have made us both deaf without it.”

“Should have grabbed a suppressor, my night vision just got shot to hell,” she berated herself darkly, taking a moment to study how well the orange-crystal inserts glowed against the dark background in front of her, though with a flashlight in her grasp as well they were likely overkill. “Thank the stars for flashlights and night sight inserts.”

“You’ll need them in a minute, that shot will probably bring the swarm right down on us,” the pegasus countered. “I got two hundred five-five-six rounds in my ammo belt, what have you got?”

“Sixty rounds across five mags, including the one in the gun,” she answered bitterly after a quick mental count of her ammunition. “Enough to sweep this level if we watch our shots, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Shoulda brought Grayhawk with you, that handcannon could kill three with one shot if you aimed it right.”

The thought of her family heirloom nestled in its holster on her traveling saddle, instead of at her side down here where she’d wished it was, brought her a pang of regret, but the logical part of her brain that still worked quickly assured her otherwise. “No, too much recoil and muzzle blast for what we’re shooting at. We oughta be working with what we have instead of wishing for something else.”

“…good idea,” the gray-haired pony agreed as her body slung around a corner to Sling’s right, and then halted in place. “Speaking of which—“

—Cloud Wind’s rifle began barking in carefully aimed, semi-automatic shots, cutting off her own speech as its twenty-two caliber bullets soared across the hall and tore into the hard outer shells of her targets. Despite their small size, the rounds did an impressive amount of damage, often tumbling over inside the insect and shredding it apart from the inside out. From her rearguard position, Sling’s flashlight spotted a second radroach emerging from the vent, pushing its slain swarm mate out of its path as it turned towards the unicorn—

—a second shot from her pistol pinged off of the floor directly in front of it, but portions of the jacketed hollowpoint still managed to find and sever one of its antennae—

—a slight nudge of the sights brought the three glowing orange dots directly beneath its head before the gun roared again, and the bullet obliterated it and continued on directly through the body, her flashlight revealing an explosion of fluids from the rear end of its abdomen—

—a third radroach skittered out into the hall of death, apparently eager to join its brethren in the insect afterlife, and she obliged it with a single shot to its thorax as it somehow managed an awkward stand on four of its rear legs. Her flashlight revealed a ragged, gooey hole in its front as it collapsed to the floor—

—Windy’s rifle went click! after its tenth round, proving the ancient adage that such a sound would be the loudest one would hear in a gunfight.

“Frig, jammed!” the pegasus shrieked in a panic, and immediately backed herself into the corner, brushing Sling’s rump with the side of her body on the way. “Cover me!”

With no other insects immediately eager to leap out into certain death, Sling twisted her body around ninety degrees to her right—

—her flashlight revealed a sight that made her glad for the mere three bugs she’d had to dispatch, as she saw close to a dozen of the things a hundred feet down the hall, crawling over the seven corpses that Cloud Wind had created in roughly four seconds of firing.

Calm down, saddle up—

—her first shot rang true, completely separating the head from the thorax and creating another obstacle for the remaining eleven insects to clamber over. Her next round was less true, but found the backside of a radroach that had made it over the pile and split its hard-shell abdomen down the middle as it died in place. Her third shot missed its intended target but managed to smash into the underside of another one as it attempted to fly up and over its comrades, sending it into a spinning backflip and a soundless demise—

— Cloud Wind’s hooves smacked the side of her rifle out of frustration as the bolt slipped off and back into what sounded like a jammed chamber. “Godsdammit, I swear all these guns were built by unicorns, all these stupid small moving parts—“

--her fourth and fifth shots whacked into one bug each as they cleared over their dead and managed to make it three feet beyond the pile, splattering one’s head and leaving the other with its left side so badly mangled that it would likely die where it lay paralyzed in a minute or two anyway. Any other sentient beings might have taken the death of half their number as a sign that their plan wasn’t going too well and head for greener pastures, but radroaches were not terribly concerned with their own self-preservation. The remaining six—no, seven, she amended—simply continued with their goal of reaching the two ponies they’d found, intent on feasting on their lightly-coated flesh even if it killed them.

She indulged their fatalistic desires with the last four rounds in her weapon, taking out two with one shot each, blowing the head and part of the frontal thorax off of a third and completely missing her last target. The round ricocheted off of the floor, but thankfully sailed on down the hall and ultimately smashed itself apart against a storage crate that had been left out.

Still left with four threats rapidly approaching with renewed vigor (or anticipation at an impending meal), she shifted a small portion of the spell field holding the pistol and hit the magazine release with a solid tap—

—flicked the gun off on its side to help sling it out of the way, as this particular pistol had a rough magazine well and didn’t always like to release magazines properly—

—floated a fresh magazine of twelve rounds up and into the grip as it tilted back upright, and then shifted the top rear of the spell field over the slide and racked backwards on it, causing it to snap back into battery and strip a round into the chamber. One of the four radroaches chose that moment to unlock its wings from its backside and attempt to leap across the remaining forty feet of floor and sink its mandibles into whatever part of her it reached first—

—she snapped off a quickly-aimed shot, not even waiting for her grip to settle before squeezing the shot off, but was rewarded with a particularly gruesome effect as the bullet sailed right into the center of its head and blew it into dozens of nasty little bits. The bullet continued on, bouncing off the ceiling and then into the floor, even as the sights swung over to the next target—

—her shot was off-center, taking out a chunk of its rear abdomen rather than the back of the thorax, and the creature responded with an aggressive screech as it quickened its pace in a dash to attack her before it died—

—Windy’s rifle finally clacked shut into full battery, and the pegasus rushed forward to join her beleaguered friend in finishing off the stragglers, putting one round into each of the remaining three bugs in roughly two seconds with expert timing and aim, splattering their innards into starry patterns across the floor and ending the shooting gallery…for the moment.

With Windy back in action, Sling swung her attention back to the hallway on her left, and was only briefly relieved at the lack of additional living radroaches her flashlight found. If just the two of them had just run into almost twenty of the things already, how many where there in the rest of the Stable?

“Hell, even the last outbreak wasn’t this bad starting out,” Windy heaved in heavy breaths, lightly exhausted from her panic attack in having to clear her rifle malfunction with her bare hooves. “Surprised level 14 isn’t flooded with the damned things, that’s the warmest place in the entire stable. I really miss my EFS right now.”

“Let’s just find Butterscotch and get him upstairs to the infirmary,” she snapped back, not willing to trust that those three bugs were the only ones hiding in that particular little vent. “We can wipe these things out afterward—“

Their luck finally took a turn for the better for once today. As Windy began to canter down the corridor of bug carcasses they’d created, the earth pony they’d been searching for finally popped into the cone of light shining out of her saddle-mounted flashlight from a room in the far distance. Sling’s ears picked up his heavy, pained breathing and briefly took her eyes off of her fire zone to see what was ailing him.

His right rear leg was hastily bandaged, the result of having to work with hooves and teeth and without the benefit of a unicorn’s magic, and the bandage itself was heavily stained with crimson which streaked down all the way to his unshorn fetlock and even managed to cover a portion of his butterscotch sundae cutie mark. His hobbled walk, despite the fresh injury, was quick with fear and panic, desperate to escape the hell that his hiding place had become.

“I…I had this epiphany all of a sudden,” Butterscotch’s shaky voice huffed as he eyed the pile of mutilated insects in his path. “That maybe I might…I might be a trifle safer if I try not to piss you girls off anymore and apologize for you having to come grab me….”

A piece of his hide missing, bleeding, terrified, and afraid of his sister, and he still manages to crack jokes, she thought to herself, unable to keep from snickering at his words. “Worry more about what your sister will do to you in a few minutes. All this, because she finally got the guts to tell you how ponies make babies?”

That thought gave him pause, as his legs froze in place with one leg gingerly hovering over the first of the slain bugs…and then carefully cleared the remaining space and touched down onto the floor. “….nah, still safer than you two. Just…give me a gun before you leave me with her? So I can end my suffering on my own?”

Windy had little time for his jesting. Now that they knew he was alive and in relatively okay condition, there was still one other pony to account for. “Where’s Hacket Wrench? We thought we heard him a minute ago, did you see him down here?”

His face shifted into a veiled sadness at the mention of Hacket’s name, and his stumbling gait slowed considerably. “…y-yeah. He was walking me upstairs when the power went out. Those damn bugs started pouring out of the floor vents, took a bite out of my leg. He shoved me into a supply room, locked the door….even with all those things leaping on him like fleas, he managed to save my life by trading his, they…they were tearing him up bad. Took a minute to dress the leg, was working on the lock when you started shooting. There were a lot more of these things before he locked me in, they musta taken him off somewhere…”

“….shit,” the pegasus hissed through her clenched jaw, her eyes pressed shut to block out what Sling assumed to be tears of anger. “…let’s get out of here before they come back. Nothing we can do for him now…”

Another widow, none of them added, lest the air of dread grow thicker and harder to bear. Another kid without a father…

Sling almost didn’t hear herself speak, but her cracking voice made the pain clear regardless as her memories began to conjure up those distant images of a poor colt she’d found in four bloody pieces. “…by Celestia, not again, why….”

The call of nature answered at last, she washed up as quickly as she could manage in the dark, and then made for the open door. She stopped just short of actually going through, though, when her ears picked up the familiar voices of her friends in the hall chattering away with each other. One wasn’t really supposed to eavesdrop on their friends, but she had a gut feeling that she’d get something useful out of it if she stayed put for a few seconds, so she simply lingered beside the door, careful to keep inside the shadows so that her own wouldn’t show up in what little light there was.

“—an’t do it, Em,” Grape Jam’s voice pleaded bashfully. “It’s a stupid question anyway.”

“It’s only stupid if ya keep it to yerself,” Emerald’s voice insisted in return. “It ain’t like we already know the answer anyway.”

“What if her mom never told her?” the lavender-coated pegasus continued to protest, and now Light Tail had a pretty good idea what they were talking about.

She’d asked that question before herself, once. She was still waiting for an answer three months later.

A pretty good sign that she wouldn’t get one.

With an exaggerated sigh to hide the stab of guilt that was inching into her heart, she casually strolled onward into the doorway where her friends could actually see her. “Hey, whatcha talkin’ about?”

“Eeehhh…nothin’, really,” Jam offered as a convenient lie after a couple of seconds’ thought.

But this time Emerald wasn’t letting their confrontation-shy friend off the hook. “…ahh, fine, then, I’ll ask, ya big baby,” she grumbled to herself. “You uh….you ever ask your mom about your dad?”

“Emmy—“

“Nope,” she lied swiftly, before Jam’s admonishment could even get started. “Get the feeling Mom doesn’t wanna talk about it, so I don’t ask. You shouldn’t either.”

Her sharp tongue caused Emmy to shrink away from her along the wall, her eyes betraying the hurtful sting she’d inadvertently delivered. “H-hey, ah didn’t mean it like that—“

“It’s Sun Star,” Jam interjected quickly in an effort to smooth things over. “And Lip Jam, too. We heard them sayin’….things, about your mom. Things we never heard them say before—“

“That’s she a slut and a dirty whore?” Light Tail heard a voice from her throat roar in a fit of quiet rage that made her wonder if it was her voice or somepony else’s. “That I’m a ‘mistake’? Those kinds of things?”

Now it was Grape Jam’s turn to be afraid of the unicorn filly. “…y-you know?”

“Sun Star couldn’t help but share it with me last week when he “bumped” into me,” that angry voice continued, unabated by her friend’s growing apprehension towards her. “When I was tryin’ to get to the bathroom, the little creep. Either of you know what those words mean?”

Neither of her friends could bring themselves to answer her right off, and for a moment she allowed herself the illusion that she might finally get an answer to a question that was burning her for over eight days.

And then the illusion was broken by the reality that she was actually quite a bit smarter than most every other filly and colt in her class, and that it was silly to think that her friends would know something that she didn’t. “…we was kinda hopin’ you would,” Emmy said with trepidation. “Yer a lot smarter than we are, we’d thought ya know…”

“’Cause if we’re gonna get back at ‘em for it, it might be good to know what it means first, right?!” Jam added next, trying to change her facial expression into something placating and failing. “…r-right?”

Her slight disappointment at having her question evade the answers she sought was short-lived—hearing how much that angry, low voice was scaring them was enough to make her will it away now that she realized that it was coming from her, and not some invisible dark spirit lingering in her shadow. She shoved the last of her rage back into the depths of her brain, her eyes no longer willing to look into theirs out of shame. “….sorry, guys,” she sighed heavily. “I just…it ain’t right. It makes me real mad just thinkin’ about it, and I don’t even know what it means. But I feel like I ought to. Nopony ever treats my mom right, ‘cept Aunt C. I’m startin’ to wonder if SS and LJ are just copyin’ whatever the adults are sayin’.”

She couldn’t see their faces, only the floor, so she couldn’t read their eyes and their expressions and tell if anything she said was making them feel even slightly better about how she’d just treated them. But when Emmy started talking again, the slight apologetic tone in her voice made her feel a little better. “…ya might be right ‘bout that. Ah remember when yer Mom still foalsat for some ponies, ‘fore she stopped last year. This one night she was foalsittin’ Softfeather for Missus Pillow, didn’t work out too well since Softie didn’t want to do a durn thing yer Mom told her to. Pillow came back, saw her livin’ room wrecked, and started callin’ yer Mom the same things we heard Sun Star and Lip Jam say. Said she’d had no clue ‘bout kids other than havin’ ‘em, and that can’t be right ‘cause you don’t get grounded near as much as the rest o’ us.”

“That’s only cuz I listen,” Light Tail muttered back, still not willing to face her friends in the eye. “Amazin’ how many problems that keeps you out of when you do it. You oughta try it sometime.”

It had been as a simple statement of fact and honest advice, but Emmy seemed to take it as an intentional—but light-hearted—insult, and her apprehensive voice vanished with the return of her boisterious, fearless self. “Hey, ah coulda fixed that enviro mental box!” she shouted back defiantly. “How wuz ah supposed ta know crossin’ two stupid wires could make it explode?!”

“You could’ve tried listenin’ to your dad when he said ‘stop’, silly,” Grape Jam laughed, the memory helping to soothe much of the fear and hurt that Light Tail had unintentionally inflicted. “He fixes the things for a living.”

“He coulda said somethin’ ‘bout it instead of just yellin’ at me!”

Now Light Tail was starting to laugh with Jam at the memory of how Emmy had shown up at school the very next morning with her singed mane cut almost down to the coat and her two forelegs wrapped in gauze bandages. “Yer both too darn stubborn to listen to anypony, I don’t know why he even tried!”

“That ain’t true!” Emmy challenged back, but she was far from insulted. If anything, she seemed to be getting a kick out of being the butt of their teasing this time around. Maybe to try to make up for making her mad earlier, which wasn’t even her fault in the first place. Kinda made her feel even guiltier, actually. “Ah listened to ya when ya said we ought not to plan our pranks and stuff in the diner no more, right?”

“That was three days ago, of course you’d say that after all the trouble we got into over those firecrackers!” Jam shot back with a gleeful chuckle as Light Tail began to walk back to her living quarters. “I learned more about boys’ anatomy than I ever wanted to! Just GROSS!”

“Hey, at least we know he ain’t gotta squat to pee anymore!” the red-coated earth filly squealed evilly. “Ah wuz startin’ to think he was a girl, the way he went on and on ‘bout us that one time last month! “You girls do nothin’ but giggle all the time and you get cooties on everything and you get your own bathrooms and everypony keeps tellin’ us to be nice to you fillies!” Or did ya forget that little talk of his already?!”

“I remember the creepy doofus following me all the way to the bathroom while he was saying it, uuuggggh!!” Jam shrieked with an audible shudder of her tiny wings. “I swear there’s something wrong with him, it’s like he’s obsessed with seeing what the filly’s washroom looks like!”

“Ya might be right, he followed you two clowns there and that takes all kinds of crazy ta start with!” Emmy laughed heartily, her hoofsteps close behind her. “He just avoids me like th’ plague, maybe he’s got your cooties!”

Her face burned with embarrassment for reasons she couldn’t even fathom, and she wanted to get off this creepy subject before it could get really weird. “Hey, if we’re gonna talk about Sun Star, why don’t we try and figure out what we’re gonna do to him this time?” she suggested as the trio finally reached the door to her living quarters, and she quickly squeezed herself back inside underneath the partially-raised door. “Oh, and watch yer wings, Jam, this door’s a tight fit. It was hard enough makin’ it move at all.”

“Bah, she’ll be fine,” Emmy dismissed her concerns, her voice shifting downward and under the door as she dropped to the floor and scooted herself through. “She’s like a cat, real limber and athletic and stuff. Ah bet she’s more earth pony than pegasus.”

“It’s called ‘working out’, Emmy,” Grape Jam snarled back, unknowingly aiding her friend’s argument by scooting down underneath the door, and emerging into a standing position on the other side in a single stride within the glow of Light Tail’s upturned flashlight, whereas her friends had to scoot over completely before standing up in a separate movement. “You—unngf—you earth ponies might be naturals at this stuff, but the rest of us gotta work at it.”

“….ummm…yeah, sure,” Light Tail’s dumbfounded voice spoke a moment later. “…whatever you say…cat.”

The pegasus blinked in confusion as she began to scrutinize herself in search of whatever it was that her friends were staring at. “…what, is there somethin’ wrong?”

“Yeah,” Emmy answered calmly, but then started to snicker in short fits as she continued. “Where’s that can of crazy ya drank this mornin’?! Ah want some!”

“What?!” Grape Jam asked again, still confused at their reaction to her graceful entry through the door, and Light Tail decided on a whim to start searching Mom’s bookcase for a couple of books for her friends to read while they waited for the power to come back on. Their reading level wasn’t quite on par with hers, but she was pretty certain there was still something on those shelves they could dig into and stay out of trouble.

And away from Mom’s gun on the coffee table…

…and I bet I could find out what those ugly words mean in that thick dictionary! she realized in the next moment when her eyes fell upon the faded leather tome stuffed away at the top of the bookcase, near a section of the top shelf marked “References”. Crud, why didn’t I think of that sooner!?

She reached up with her telekinesis spell and plucked the heavy book out as a short test of whether Mom was truly right about how weight could affect a spell, and was rewarded with what felt like a hoof or a griffon’s claw tugging softly at her horn as she flitted it about above her. But it wasn’t that bad, and it wasn’t that much heavier than Mom’s gun. Maybe I oughta start using telekinesis more often…

Her delighted skip towards the couch didn’t go unnoticed. As Emmy’s mouth bit down on the lens cap holding the flashlight upright, Grape Jam’s hoofsteps began to follow along behind the unicorn. “….uhhh, El-Tee, that’s a dictionary, not Daring Do. It might actually make this blackout more boring, if that’s even possible.”

“A dictionary defines words, dodo,” she huffed as she leapt up onto the couch and dropped the dictionary down in front of her. “Words like the ones everypony keeps calling my mom, and I’m gonna find out what they mean so I can have a reason to be mad at them.”

Jam followed her up onto the couch without hesitation, ignoring Emmy’s epic struggle to keep the flashlight from slipping out of its lens cap as it teetered between her teeth. “….that really bugs you, doesn’t it? Can’t you let it go for a bit?”

“You’re the one that said we oughta know what they mean if we wanna get properly mad,” she reminded her tersely, flipping the dictionary open—

—and silently cursed herself as she found the words on the paper difficult to make out. It was still too dark to read much of anything without that flashlight! Stupid stupid stupid! “Hey Emmy, bring that flashlight over wouldja?”

“Ohm rhyin’!” Emerald’s occupied mouth tried to complain, but the badly garbled words only made them laugh instead. “Annn—“

Emerald’s voice was drowned out by a sharp, guttural screeching from the hallway outside, and Light Tail’s ears flinched as it tore at her brain. She slapped the dictionary shut and rose up from the couch, intending to hit the floor running and give that ‘bot a piece of her mind and a swift kick to his chassis. “Spiner, quit draggin’ your arms on the floor, Hacket Wrench hates buffin’ those scratches out—“

—her shouting voice promptly died in her throat as her eyes fell across the slab of dim light protruding in front of the door, and on the hideously massive (and hideous looking) bug that effortlessly skirted through the door she’d left open in an ironic attempt to escape the disgusting things if they’d gotten in—

—Emmy was the second pony to see it come through…and the first pony that the bug fixated its attention on. Its pincer-ringed maw screeched again as it began to close in on the red earth pony, almost as if the sight of her had enlivened its tiny brain.

Emmy’s proper and dignified response was to shriek at the top of her lungs like the little filly that she was, dropping the flashlight in her terror and allowing the light beam to roll about the room as she began to backpedal away from it as quickly as her four little legs could take her—

—but the bug was quicker. Even as Emmy had almost reached the kitchen behind her, the bug had managed to close the distance, chirping and screeching the whole way, and Light Tail’s lungs began to shut down as she leapt across the gap onto the coffee table, furiously tearing at the bag Mom had left in her care—

“Emmy!!!” Jam screamed, bounding off of the couch and rushing towards her imperiled friend—

—the bug’s chirping reached a crescendo as its wings snapped up in anticipation of its kill—

—Light Tail’s breaths came in short, terrified gasps as she unceremoniously dumped the bag’s contents onto the table and tossed it aside, her magic grappling with the gun an—

—Mom’s marking spell surged through the spell field and through her horn, leaving a lingering chill on the left side of her face as she swung the gun’s cylinder open and started jerking spilled bullets into its holes—

“Holy crap it’s hideous!!!” Emmy finally managed to scream once she’d gotten over her wordless shrieking, and she could hear the filly smashing her way over the dinner table to get at something from the cabinet. “An’ it’s bigger than Teakettle’s cat—“

“Emmy, RUN—“

Light Tail’s control over her magic was beginning to falter as the bug screeched again, and its feet continued to scratch its way across the carpet in its mindless trek to ki—

—Emmy’s red coat, stained in a darker shade of crimson as the bug’s pincers tore at her throat and cut her shrieks short into a bubbling, dying gasp—

“No,” she cried softly amidst her frustrated attempts to get her own spell under her control. The darn spell wouldn’t grab the stupid bullets like she wanted and she could only get one in the cylinder and she needed more or her friends were going to di—

“No no no no c’mon C’MON—“

—her spell faltered further, no longer able to concentrate on multiple objects, and the bullet fell back onto the table with an almost taunting flair. A horrified howl escaped her throat as her mouth shot forward and bit down on the back of the bullet—

“Too slow sucke—oh Luna it can JUMP—“

“Shut up Em just RUN—“

“Screw that, GJ, ah’m gonna KILL IT—“

Her eyes began to grow slightly blurry, her mouth struggling to find an empty hole in the cylinder as her friends tried to get away from the bug—

—something from the kitchen banged off of the stove and smacked against a cabinet on its way down—

—the bullet in her mouth dropped into the cylinder at last, and she nudged it shut with her snout and lifted her head up towards the kitchen, the gun’s green sights sliding up into place almost without thought—

—the vent over the coffee table tore loose from the ceiling, crashing down onto the table and startling her into losing control of her spell completely—

—a second bug dropped into her tiny world through the new opening, coming down on her back, its legs slipping and sliding down her flanks as its pincers began to pinch down on her neck—

—her body took control of itself after that, jumping and bucking about like a wild animal, her throat turning itself hoarse as it shrieked and screamed in wordless, bloodcurdling terror, her mind losing all focus on higher thinking functions and desiring only to put as much distance between her and large, hideous bugs as she could, as quickly as she could manage—

—the bug’s sickening carapace vanished after her fourth buck, though she could still feel its squirming, tendril-like legs along her sides as she attempted to jump down to the floor—

—and ended up tripping herself before she could even get airborne, tumbling over the edge instead and hitting her head against a table leg on her way down. An incredible and deep-reaching ache began to pound at her skull, turned into a sharp, hot pressure that forced her eyes shut as she stumbled away from the table in clumsy rolls and half-steps before giving up entirely and sinking onto her back.

When she dared open her eyes again, the bug had managed to find its way on top of the coffee table, and its head cocked off to one side for a moment as it studied her writhing, heaving form—

—it leapt forward, its chirping searing through her ears and into her pounding brain, and her eyes snapped shut and plunged her back into a willing darkness as her screams became the only sound in her world.

Chapter 4

They’d barely made it past level ten before Sling simply froze, her insides beginning to tingle with a cold itch she could not explain or even remember feeling before in her lifetime. For some inexplicable reason, she simply felt that something in her world was not right.

Gun’s fine, she began to rattle off in her mind as she tried to force her legs to start moving again. Don’t feel like a canned meal anymore, don’t hear the bugs in the vents or the halls, Butterscotch is breathing and walking on his own…why do my insides feel like ice…

Cloud Wind’s hoofsteps came to a halt as she sorted through her thoughts, and her head craned around to the side once she’d noticed that only one pony was following along behind her. “….Sling?”

“….something’s wrong,” the unicorn breathed slowly in reply, her legs beginning to respond to her mental demands for movement. “Like…gut-level wrong, like there’s something I ought to know right off, but I don’t…”

Windy and Butterscotch each gave her a face of utter confusion and uncertainty as they tried to make sense of what she’d just uttered. “….I’m sorry, I don’t speak your crazy moon language, could you try that again in plain Equestrian?” Butterscotch asked with a flippant pitch.

For his sarcasm, Windy rewarded him with a slap to the back of his head that sent him crashing onto the floor, clutching at his new headache in vain. “Ignore him, that’s the concussion talking,” she grumbled derisively. “What ar—“

“Aaaaaoooowwww,” his grunt of pain interrupted her briefly. “What concussion—“

A second THWACK! sounded off as she trotted past his body, likely from one of her rear legs that had just jerked out behind her, and aside from a painful yelp they heard nothing more from him as they talked. “The one I just gave you, smartass.”

Sling couldn’t figure out whether to be angry with her for roughing him up like that, or to be laughing her tail off at the whole thing. She didn’t even know why she found it so funny right then when they were supposed to be trying to get him to the infirmary in one piece, but she did.

And yet she still felt like something was just not right.

With Butterscotch’s sarcasm muted for the moment, Windy was free to press the unicorn for a clearer message. “What are you talking about?” she queried with a quizzical glare. “I know it’s weird not hearing the air vents and environmental systems humming all the time bu—“

“That’s not it,” Sling butted in before she could finish. “I just…something’s wrong and it’s scaring me to death. I don’t know what it is, but…something’s wrong, I just know it. I don’t know what, but…oh gods, maybe I need a new job…”

The pegasus’s gray eyes studied her for a few moments, lost in her own mental musings. “…your quarters aren’t too far out of the way,” she said at last, turning back around and stepping over Butterscotch’s twitching—but breathing—body. “We’ll budge the door open, brighten the kid’s day up a little. That always sets you straight.”

She’d never imagined the sound of an angelic savior could be so…disgusting. Even with her shrill, deathly screams of terror, it was impossible to miss. The bug’s gleeful, terrifying chirps came to an incredibly brutal end courtesy of a thick frying pan, and though the harsh clang of metal helped alleviate her rapidly beating heart, what made it truly stop was just how hard the thing had been smacked.

Her eyes shot wide open to the sight of Emerald’s mouth clenching the frying pan in her jaws in a death bite, slamming the pan into the bug’s head with all the strength her tiny earth pony body was capable of. And it was enough to shear the bug’s head off of its body with a wet, sharp crunch that caused a surge of bile to shoot up into her throat. Only her fear kept her from upchucking all over her friend.

Emmy wasn’t satisfied with the bug’s instant death—or didn’t notice that she’d taken its head clean off. She followed it as its course shifted off to the right, onto the floor near the unicorn, and brought the pan down on its back with another hateful swing and a wordless grunt. That same stomach-churning crunch rang out again, and again, and again, until Emmy had squeezed its innards out onto the floor beneath it.

And then she hurled.

“Oh Luna, Emmy STOP!” Grape Jam’s voice shrieked with horror, her forelegs pulling the stunned unicorn away from the bug’s beating and her small pile of vomit. “It’s dead already quit it you’re making a sick mess!“

The red-coated earth filly finally stopped her savage act, momentarily baffled as to why her friends would ask her to stop trying to save their skins. “Bwuaf!?” her muffled snout uttered, shooting her head back behind her, and then back at where Light Tail had been lying moments earlier—

—her eyes shot wide open, and she quickly scrambled backwards away from the bug carcass and the mess that the unicorn had unwittingly created. “O’ crad!! ‘Orey—“

She stopped speaking when she heard how mangled her words were when she was trying to talk with a mouthful of iron, and spat the pan onto the floor. “Sorry El-Tee!!” she squealed. “Ah didn’t mean it ah just was tryin’ ta kill th’ stupid thang—“

“Just…get the door shut!!” Jam’s voice screamed back, her forehooves keeping Light Tail’s head from turning back towards Emmy’s creation of violence. “El-Tee, I know your head hurts but you gotta get that vent shut before more of ‘em come in—“

Now that her brain remembered that it had been smacked around, that pulsing, pounding ache returned to her with a vengeance, reaching deep through her skull into what felt like a slug-sized portion of her frontal lobe. But the thought of more of those bugs dropping into the living room with little to resist them except gravity gave her the adrenaline to fight through it and focus her magic into her horn once more—

But the presence of magic in her horn seemed to double the pain, making that pulsing section of her brain feel like it was being over-inflated like a balloon. Oh Luna this hurts!

Her eyes opened to give her magic a focal point—the displaced vent cover that had nearly beaned her when the bug had crashed through—and with considerable effort she was able to wrap her levitation spell around it and allowed it to float up from the table of its own accord. With the weight of the covering taken out of the equation, her telekinesis spell took much less effort and therefore didn’t hurt nearly as much, allowing her to slap it up onto the exposed air vent with little more than a flick of her will. The screws had never fallen loose from the grating, and forcing them back into their screw slots proved a little trickier, but doable. For added measure and a peace of mind, she overdid it until the things started fighting her efforts to tighten them in further, and only then did she quit the magic tricks entirely and allowed her head to fall back onto the carpet.

With all of her concentration focused on re-fitting the vent cover—and her headache—she’d never even noticed that Emmy had just now gotten to fighting with the manual door controls until she heard the door slam shut with an echoing, chest-thumping shudder. Or that the earth filly had that kind of strength to start with—

“There, ah shut it!” Emmy gasped heavily amidst her heavy, frantic breathing. “And ah even…tossed the dead bugs out….’fore ah did!”

Upon hearing the words ‘dead bugs’, Light Tail’s mind replayed the heated, rage-fueled violence that Emmy had unleashed upon the thing with her second-best frying pan, and if she hadn’t already lost her breakfast, she’d have tossed it up right there. Her gagging was brief, but clean. This time.

“….I hate bugs,” she moaned weakly into the floor, her front legs wrapping around her skull in some vain effort to try and rub the pain away. “I’m never cooking with that pan again…”

“Ahh, don’t worry none, just need ta wash it real good first,” Emmy’s voice bounced into her ears, inadvertently causing the pounding in her head to get even worse. “Ah’ll…umm…ah’ll clean the place up, kinda my fault it’s messed up….hey Jam, see if that first aid cabinet’s got anythin’ for her head, her mom’ll freak out if she sees her like this.”

Shutting her eyes seemed to make the pain a little more bearable (and kept her sense of balance from getting whacked out), so she allowed them to stay shut and immerse her in darkness. She got up to her hooves and shakily stumbled her way around until her nose tapped into the coffee table, and then started to feel her way around it to the couch, where she carefully pulled herself up onto its cool, invigorating cushions. “…just don’t touch the gun,” she warned weakly as her forelegs reached out to draw a small pillow towards her.

“Yeah, I saw what it did to your face when you grabbed it with your magic!!” Jam’s voice rang out, rising to a shriek at the end as she invariably discovered the object in question. “What’s it doing out of your mom’s safe in the first place?!”

Jam’s shrill voice made the pain spike upwards briefly, and she clawed at her forehead to suppress it. “Don’t shout,” she pleaded through her suffering. “….she took me shootin’ this morning, left it on the table….’n case those bugs got in. Forgot to load it first…”

“Does she usually put a curse on ‘em first?!” Emmy’s voice yelled out, completely ignoring the little unicorn’s request, and she groaned into her pillow as the pulsing aches reached into her eyeballs. “How’d sh—“

“Eeeeemmmy…” Jam’s voice growled darkly—

“Oh! Sorry…..ah mean…what’s wrong with ya? That stuff on your face don’t make the blood look any better.”

She heard Grape Jam’s hooves began to scrape against the first aid cabinet mounted against the far wall on the right, and prayed that the pegasus would find a good-sized healing potion inside very soon. “…what blood, I feel fine…’cept for this freakin’ headache, ooowww…”

It wasn’t very long after before she began to feel a slick, sticky wetness on the cushion beneath her head, and before she could say anything Emmy had somehow darted across the room to her and began to press a dampened, cold rag onto her head where the pain was at its worst—

“Ya must’ve cut yer head on that table when ya fell off,” the earth filly whispered, her strong voice faltering slightly. “Just stay still, Jam an’ I’ll find somethin’ real quick…”

Now that she was aware of a head wound, her headache’s pulses began to synchronize in an attempt to make her feel every drop squeeze out, but Emmy’s stubborn hoof refused to allow it and kept enough pressure on it to keep it from escaping. Still, she couldn’t shake off this gnawing touch of light-headedness that was starting to make the room feel….bigger? Denser? No, wait, that didn’t sound right…

No, scratch that, it’s not right period, she amended when the feeling got stronger, and the room around her began to seemingly enlarge itself and muddling up what few senses she had left. “….think we oughta just skip the first aid, go right to the doc…”

She thought she heard Emmy’s lips smacking wordlessly at her, or maybe it was all the blood on the rag as she turned it around in her hooves to get an unsoiled portion of it on the wound—

“...y-yeah, screw the box on th’ wall,” Emmy agreed, for once simply going along with the unicorn’s idea instead of arguing over it. “Jam, keep some pressure on ‘er head, ah’ll get the door open again.”

There was a slight shift in pressure as hooves switched places and Emmy made a mad dash for the door, but oddly enough she could barely hear it this time. Everything around her just seemed to be moving away from her, strange as it sounded to say. Even her brain felt lighter, didn’t hurt as much now. Everything was so much….

…so much…softer? Ah, jeez, really don’t feel good now…

“E-Em, something’s n-not right,” she thought she heard Jam croak fearfully as one of her hooves pulled away from her head and started pressing into her side. “S-she shouldn’t be like this, not from just a scratch to the head—“

She supposed she should have been scared to hear her friend say that, but the only thing she could feel right then was…disconnected. Separated from everything around her, like it was being pulled away from it. The kitchen felt like it was miles away. The coffee table where Mom had left the gun might as well have been at the bottom of the Stable. Even Jam seemed out of reach despite the fact that she was touching her and poking her.

…was this what dying felt like? Should she feel so…okay with it?

She didn’t get to ponder these thoughts for very long. A metallic part of the world screeched in agony, jolting some sense of liveliness into her nerves and filling the air around her with a gentle intrusion of cooler air—

“Whoa watch it—“ Emmy’s voice cried out in surprise, only to have her shouts (and body) trampled by what sounded like another pony—

“El-Tee!?” Mom yelled into the world, unknowingly spiking her headache into another sharp series of pulses with her frantic shrieks. “Honey, are you—“

She seemed to have found the answer to her question with just a quick look around, because her voice went from frantic to some form of controlled hysteria and panic. “…o-oh gods, El-Tee?! What happened?!?”

She knew Jam was going to try and answer right away, but the poor thing barely got a word out before Mom’s body did the same thing to her as it did to Emmy—bumped into her and bowled her over in a crazy dash to find herself a spot beside the couch.

“…hit my head,” Light Tail mumbled through the growing fog in her mind and body. “Don’t think it’s going well….”

Mom’s forehooves went and did the same that Jam had been doing, one keeping pressure on the rag while the other carefully poked about her lungs and neck. Funny enough, Mom’s hooves were more ticklish than her magic, and she couldn’t help but giggle softly as she pressed into her sides for whatever reasons she had—

Mom’s head joined her hooves, pressing one ear close to her chest and letting it lie there for several moments, as if listening intently for something inside that might tell her whatever it was she was looking for.

And she found it. “…oh thank Luna, normal heart rate,” her soft voice cried softly in relief. “Honey, do you feel lightheaded? Sick? Tired, anything like that?”

Well, now that she mentioned it… “….wouldn’t mind a nap, if this headache would just go away,” she moaned into the pillow. “And it feels like I’m shrinking, or somethin’….”

Mom’s presence faded from her side, and for a minute she thought she’d been left alone, but a sharp, clean click of metal nearby amidst the faint song of an extended telekinesis spell quelled the brief surge of panic. More than likely, Mom was just picking up the gun from the floor—

—the ghostly, tingling touch of a telekinetic spell washed over the soaked rag, pressing lightly onto her head as Mom’s body began to dig underneath her and roll her onto the larger pony’s back. It became something of a struggle to find out exactly where she was at, but her forelegs found Mom’s neck quickly enough and wrapped themselves around it so she wouldn’t fall off. Oddly enough, the effort seemed to revitalize her sleeping nerves slightly, though her mind was still fogged and struggling to keep the world around her straight. If anypony else was around or saying anything around her, she didn’t hear it.

“We’re going to get you to the infirmary,” Mom’s voice cried quietly to her left ear as her head began to droop down past the mare’s neck. “I want you to count backwards from a hundred, slow and steady. Can you do that?”

She couldn’t for the life of her figure out why Mom would ask her to do something that silly, but if counting numbers could help take her mind off of this headache, she’d give it a try. Heck, she’d give anything a try at least once. “…hundred….ninety-nine….”

Mom’s body began a gentle trot, doing her best not to rock about too much lest the filly loose her grip or her sense of balance. “Thatta girl, keep going, we’ll be there before you know it…”

If you say so…. “Ninety-eight….”

Mom’s attention split off from her for a moment to start barking orders at her friends, but she was a little busy focusing on her counting to care. “You girls come with us. You can tell me what happened later, but we need to get upstairs. C’mon—“

“Ninety-seven….ninety-six….”

….what came before…oh right… “Ninety-five….”

….weird. She never got sleepy counting before….

“…ninety-four…”

….could she do this the whole way?

“…nine…ninety-three…..”

Her hold on her Mom’s neck began to slacken. Her muscles went from taut to rubbery as she tried to keep up her count….

“….ninety-two….”

The fog in her mind began to draw her consciousness away, calling her into its dark recess.

“……nineyone….nine….ni…”

And she followed it all the way into oblivion.

Her brain was always reluctant to follow her body when it stirred from deep sleep. And this time she’d really been out of it, because as her mind began to pull itself out of its cave in her skull, she couldn’t even recall what time she’d gone to bed, or even any snippets from whatever she might’ve dreamed about. It was as though the world had skipped a couple of days and forgot to plant its events into her brain so she’d remember.

Perfect excuse to just stay put and go back to sleep. ‘But Mom, I don’t even know what day it is’, she’d say once said mother barged in and demanded her to arise from the seductive pull of her blankets….

…no, wait, that sounded gross just now. Who in the world called their bed seductive? She was in no shape to be awake, not with a thought like that coming out of her head. Time to go back to sleep, she needed another four hours or so. Maybe even a whole day. Yeah, that would be fine with her.

….except that her body didn’t agree. Nerves and tendons began to scream in agony, crying for the release of tension and aches from a night of absolute stillness, and to make them stop (and hopefully coax herself back to sleep), she began to stretch her four legs out and about, ruffling the blankets draped over her….

…wait a sec, my bed only has one blanket…

Her brain responded to this additional stimulus, forcing itself further awake in order to clarify that she was, indeed, covered by more than one blanket. And when that was done, she began to take greater notice of everything else touching her body at that moment.

The mattress was not hers. There was too big a depression in it, for starters. This was the bed of a larger pony, one addicted to comfort and warmth if the chilly air around her head was any indication. And there was something wrapped around her head, keeping a larger…something, pinned to her forehead above her left eye. A quick brush of a forehoof revealed it to be gauze padding and wrap, with a bandage applied underneath for added security against whate—

—her body tumbled off the side of the table, her head smacking into a metal table leg on the way down and drilling her brain with an invisible sledgehammer—

She snapped herself out of her memory flash before it could finish, her senses becoming far more alert with the realization that she hadn’t gone to bed in the same shape she’d been in when she left it. In fact, beyond that little mishap, she couldn’t even remember what happened the last two days, save that she’d hit her head on the table, for some reason.

But what she was doing on the table in the first place?

She’d made up her mind to force herself out of this strange bed when the door opened wide, bringing with it an explosion of blinding white light that pierced straight into the front of her brain through her eyeballs, and she reflexively closed eyelids she didn’t remember opening—

“Ahhh, shut off the light it hurts—“ she begged of whoever had just barged in—

The lights dimmed considerably upon her request almost immediately, and then a set of hooves galloped across the carpet to be at her side—

“H-honey, you’re awake!?” Mom’s cried excitedly, her voice practically gushing with relief (and a few tears), and in the next moment the filly found herself trapped in a tight, life-crushing hug from the one that given her life to start with. “Oh thank the stars you’re awake—“

“I….might not be….if you don’t let go,” she gasped between the three breaths she was able to steal from the world and no more. She swore she heard her Mom’s throat squeak with embarrassment as she relaxed her death grip into something softer, but still clingy.

“Sorry!” she choked after taking a deep breath herself. “Sorry! Just…just had me freaked out these last two days, I just….when did you wake up?”

…two days? “….just now,” she answered hesitantly, only opening her eyes when they were assured by her brain that it wouldn’t hurt this time—

Mom’s teal-blue coat was a mess, she noticed right off. Her mane too. She usually kept it tied up into a braided ponytail (a cool pun if there ever was one) and brushed down, though this time the individual knots were considerably more frayed than she was used to seeing. Like she hadn’t taken a brush to it for a couple of days. “….what’s going on? Where am I?”

Perhaps sensing the unaired fear growing in her tiny chest, Mom sought to answer not just that question, but the next two she was already cooking up. “….you’re in my bed. You took a pretty hard hit to the head...do you remember anything?”

“….just the part where I hit my head,” she said, growing uneasy with herself as she began to take fuller stock of her situation. Hit on the head—and badly enough to not remember anything else about it other than that it hurt. Stuffed in her mother’s bed, which made sense since Mom liked to keep her room at autumn weather temperatures when she slept so that it made her three comforters really cozy and warm. And then there was… “….what are you talking about? These last two days? What happened to me?”

Mom finally let go of her and allowed her to settle back under the sea of blankets. “….you really can’t remember?”

“Would I have asked if I did?”

Mom’s face didn’t seem to like her snappy comeback, but whatever had happened to her must have been bad enough to make her let it go so easily and not punish her or anything. “…sorry,” she mumbled, suddenly too ashamed to look at her directly and settling for the floor. “….we had an outbreak. Radroaches damaged some major power relays and camped out in the generator levels. You managed to get the door open so you could get to the bathroom and your friends followed you back. Emerald was trying to get the door shut when one of the bugs waltzed in underneath….”

“….that’s what knocked me off the table?”

“No,” Mom said quietly. “I…I’d left one of my guns on the coffee table, in case you needed it. I put a marking spell on it to keep you from playing with it needlessly. Your friends said another bug managed to break through the air vent covering and fall right on top of you while you were trying to load it and get a shot off, and when you bucked it off you lost your balance and fell off the table. Hit your head on one of the legs. Emerald wound up killing both of them with a frying pan….think the sight of it made you sick to your stomach or something, or it could have been the concussion. This was all yesterday morning, and you’ve been asleep since then. It’s Friday afternoon. Five thirty-two, I think.”

Light Tail couldn’t bring herself to think clearly for a couple of seconds, trying to process how or why she would have gotten the inclination to pick up a gun and try to use it since she couldn’t even remember Mom showing her how to do it….or maybe she had and that was one of those things she couldn’t remember now.

“….I’ve been asleep almost two days?”

“…day and a half, but close. When we brought you to the infirmary you’d already slipped out, and Nurse Tender Mane went right to work on you. Wasn’t as bad as the blood suggested, but the concussion had us all worried. No permanent brain damage, but since you were out that’s all she could tell us. She put you under an anesthetic spell to keep you asleep and let her healing spells work. She’s been in and out of here every four hours since. You got off real lucky.”

She didn’t know exactly what a concussion was—only that it was a head injury and that one’s brain could get scrambled because of it. Memory loss and headaches were just a couple of the nasty side effects one could get from it. She supposed that if those were her biggest issues, then yeah, she got lucky. The way Mom was saying it, though, there were ponies that weren’t quite as fortunate. She wasn’t sure she wanted any details.

Fortunately, Mom wasn’t interested in giving any, and quickly changed the subject. “You feel okay enough to eat something?”

The mere mention of food brought her empty stomach to life. It growled with the fervor of an angry cat, and she swore it actually caused ripples to spill out over her flesh in the process. “….long as Aunt C ain’t doin’ the cookin’.”

Mom’s light chuckle seemed so much louder when she was right next to her. “Nothing extravagant like what you might whip up,” she laughed. “Just some daffodil sandwiches and the last of our grapes for the week. I wouldn’t let you cook anything anyway, you’re supposed to be resting.”

“Think I’ve done enough of that,” she whined as she began to crawl towards the edge of the mattress. “And I can’t stand to do nothin’ all day—“

She had more complaints about not getting past chapter 27 on The Mare of the Everfree yet, or trying to find out why Grape Jam was acting so funny around her yesterday or—

Er…I guess that would be Wednesday, actua—

Her journey through Mom’s bed ended quite abruptly when the forward half of her body unexpectedly ran out of mattress and stuck itself out into the chilly air, and before she knew it she was sprawled out on the floor at Mom’s hooves with the dignity of a four-left-footed cat—

“….smooth, El-Tee,” she grumbled to herself as she forced her legs to stand up for the first time in what felt like days. They didn’t want to completely cooperate and felt more like rubber sticks than organic limbs of bone and muscle, but at least she could actually stand. And walk without the world trying to spin itself in every direction when she moved, though she still looked like she’d been hitting hard cider for a half hour.

And through it all, Mom just snickered and kept pace behind her, never letting her get more than a few feet away. She had to side-step back inside her chosen path once or twice to get through the bedroom doorway, but she did eventually make it out of Mom’s room and into the warm interior of the kitchen and living room space—

Tender Mane’s snow white coat was there to greet them in the living room, her medic’s bag settling down onto the coffee table with the delicate touch that only a medical unicorn pony could impart in their telekinesis spell. Cloud Wind was milling about the kitchen, setting out plates and hoof-friendly drinking glasses but was oddly quiet for some reason.

“Well, look who’s struggling to walk in a straight line,” Tender Mane laughed at the sight of the filly stumbling about in her journey to the kitchen table. “Yeah, that settles it, concussion.”

“You were guessing?!” Light Tail choked incredulously, stopping in place when her right rear leg couldn’t seem to find the floor like her other three legs could.

Tender Mane’s snout dipped into her bag and began pulling various medical instruments from its tightly-packed interior, much to the little filly’s dismay. “I prefer to call it guesstimating. All the things your friends pointed out seemed to fit the symptoms—headache, nausea, disorientation, vomiting. Your lack of direction is just one more sign that I’m right—“

“Memory loss, too,” Mom offered freely and perhaps a tad too quickly. “She doesn’t seem to remember anything about the last day or two other than when she hit the table.”

Tender Mane paused in place momentarily before resuming her search through her bag for whatever she thought she might need in the next few minutes. “….okay, then, six signs that I’m right. Don’t worry, dear, memory loss isn’t uncommon with a blow to the head. What’s the absolute last thing you can remember, aside from the hit that put you down for thirty-plus hours?”

Light Tail had to rack her memory pretty hard to answer that question as she was inevitably re-directed towards the white-coated unicorn nurse, and by the time her unsteady body finally managed to bump into the couch next to her the only memory she could latch onto with any degree of certainty from…Wednesday afternoon? Evening? So hard to remember….

“….I think the last thing I can remember is bumping into Grape Jam in the shower section of the washroom, but I can’t remember when that was,” she answered tentatively, her forelegs trying to find enough purchase on the couch to pull the rest of her up onto it. And failing miserably, all she could manage was to look like a floundering fish. “…now that I think about it it’s kinda weird, the washroom on her end of the level is closer. If it was broke I don’t remember that either…”

Tender Mane’s magic enveloped her body and lifted her up onto the couch before she could embarrass herself any further, and the cold touch of her steth….ste….that cold-metal thingy that she used to listen to heartbeats and lungs and stuff, gods why did medical equipment have to have such obtuse names?! “Do you recall anything about it? What you might have talked about?”

“I don’t remember that thing being so cold before!” she squeaked in protest when the instrument prodded her side, even going so far as to scoot away from it before it could defile her body warmth any further.

Tender Mane’s solution was to simply huff a breath of warm air onto it before sticking it back onto her side, and it no longer felt like a cold pin prick in her coat. “Better?”

“Much.”

“Good, now you can answer my question.”

Crud, almost worked. “…no, I don’t know anything other than that we met there,” she sighed in defeat. “Ask her about it.”

“I might if she becomes another patient,” Tender Mane muttered quietly. “Which reminds me, your friends are fine, physically. Psychologically, it’s a wait-and-see kinda thing. Not ideal, but at least they’re breathing. Their sneaking away from their parents actually saved your life, so of course they’re squirreled away in their rooms like scolded pets. Gotta talk to those numbskulls about that…”

There was blissful silence afterward, Tender Mane content to simply do whatever it was that medical ponies did to make sure those under their care weren’t going to drop off and die on the spot. It took her about two minutes and two additional instruments, a tiny flashlight that was poked in her ears and a thermostat that thankfully went into the ear, and a slight satisfied grunt signaled the end of her routine.

“Sweet, I love it when these visits end painlessly,” she chuckled deviously as she swiftly re-packed her bag. “By the time you’ve washed up and had dinner, that silent healing spell I just cast should be taking hold. Another night of deep rest and you should be able to use your magic again without risk.”

Light Tail’s body jerked slightly, her mind racing through the last three minutes of her life and couldn’t figure out how a spell had been cast right next to her without her knowing it. “…s-silent? You mean you were casting a spell on me the whole time and your horn didn’t glow or nothin’?”

“Oh, it was glowing, you just weren’t looking hard enough,” Tender Mane’s voice assured her in that same devious laugh. “It doesn’t make noise or require any degree of concentration on my part. And with your attention focused on ignoring me you never noticed what little sign there was of the spell. Therefore, ‘silent’.”

Wonderful, Light Tail groaned to herself at Tender Mane’s exaggerated grin. Of all the medical ponies in the Stable, I had to be visited by the comedian. “Funny.”

The snow-white mare flashed a forehoof across the air in front of her as she floated a roll of gauze and a clean bandage pad out of her bag. “Pffft, naww. You should see the show I put on every Wednesday evening at the diner, now that’s funny.”

Light Tail simply groaned in despair and allowed her face to plop down into the couch beneath her. “I should have stayed knocked out…”

The squirt was getting her wish a quarter-hour later.

Dinner was a quick five-minute affair, thanks partly to the kid’s ravenous appetite after a day and a half of unconscious slumber, which helped mask the mild sleep-aid additives they’d snuck into her meal. She knew her daughter well enough to know how to help the stuff kick in even faster afterward—a hot shower. For some reason, heat seemed to lull Light Tail into a dazed, lazy stupor and made it easy for her to just conk right out if she closed her eyes long enough.

And even as the first streams of hot water began to pour down upon the trio, Sling realized that this time she probably didn’t even need to do that. El-Tee was struggling just to stand in the first place, and her drowsiness made it almost impossible to do much of anything except topple over onto the tiled floor and lay there.

“….you guys drugged my food, didn’t you?” she moaned sleepily, even managing a massive yawn as her mane and tail were quickly becoming soaked down to the last hair.

“Caught red-handed, darn,” Cloud Wind deadpanned, her voice holding none of the fear or frustration at having a devious plan ousted before it could even begin. “Whatever shall we do.”

El-Tee’s answer was a second yawn, somehow even bigger than the first, and her eyelids began to slide shut over her electric blue irises. “’xplain yerselves, fer a start…”

“Healing spells work best when you’re asleep,” Sling replied unapologetically almost immediately, dipping her head low to allow her shower head to soak the rest of her mane fully. “And like Tender said, you need the rest.”

“Not that,” her night light groaned through her sleep-addled speech, rolling up onto her unsteady legs. “…thought youse guys had twelve-hour shifts, what happened…”

Sling’s eyes snapped open, tracing a stream of water as it rolled down the side of her head and into the soulless gray marble beneath her, becoming part of the shimmering pool of water forming a thin layer beneath her hooves. She’d almost allowed herself the illusion that the kid wouldn’t remember the change in her working hours, but her memory gap only seemed to stretch back to some part of Wednesday afternoon. So of course the intelligent little bugger would wonder why they were off-duty instead of slaving away in their extended hours.

“Don’t worry about it,” Cloud Wind tried to reassure her, stepping forward slightly to shower the back half of her body with water in preparation for a lathing of coat shampoo. “We’re just glad you weren’t hurt that bad.”

Windy, do not give the kid any kind of a hint—

Light Tail’s nagging sensation that things weren’t quite right kept her from succumbing to the effects of the sleep aid drugs and gave her enough clarity to see through the pegasus’s desire to steer away from the subject. “What? Happened?” she repeated again more insistently.

Her parental instinct to admonish her child for such a forceful tone towards her elders flared to life, but at the last second stopped short of actually saying anything. Instead, she found herself only capable of staring down at the floor, watching the water flow around her head and into the floor....

….watched, and began to wonder at how similar it looked to the flow of fresh blood….

“WHAT? HAPPENED?”

Sling’s head shook away the ghastly images floating in front of her, forcing her gaze away from the gray floor and the streaks of blood that had dabbed up around her forehoof….

….her daughter’s blood….

The sight before her wasn’t much better. Chief Farsight’s furious scowl was a rare sight, and one that never brought good tidings. His body was practically seething behind his desk, and with what she’d just seen earlier in the morning, she didn’t have the capacity to even think of a reply. All she could do was stand there, her forehooves coated in crimson, and stare back at him in disbelief at just how wrong her morning had been.

And they hadn’t even had lunch yet.

Cloud Wind was no less shaken, but her more disciplined quality of training allowed her enough clear thought to try and answer an unreasonable pony’s question with a logical response. “You’ll have to be more specific, Chief, a lot happened this morning.”

“Down there,” Farsight bellowed, his left foreleg swiping downward over his desk. “In maintenance! Two-thirds of the first shift crew heard a gunfight down there! Where all of our generator’s waste exhaust and coolant water is funneled through, you idiots! What were you thinking?!”

Her memories flashed across her eyes again, this time with the flare of a 10mm muzzle blast as she saw her pistol sights floating from one target to the next with every squeeze of the trigger—

“We were thinking of taking out a swarm of radroaches that had just ripped Hacket Wrench apart!” Windy bellowed right back. “And they would have done the same to Butterscotch if we’d turned tail and ran off!!”

“By opening fire in the one section of the Stable where our EFS and S.A.T.S. systems don’t even work?! What if one of your rounds hit the ingoing supply pipes, or the outgoing waste pipes?! What about the power relay conduit at the other end of the hall?! Have you forgotten that we haven’t had the ammunition to afford to practice for the last two years?!“

“No, we haven’t,” the sky-blue pegasus answered back with a combative tone. “Which is why we rehearse drills and routines with snap caps during off-duty hours, and which we have suggested time and again for the rest of the department! Some practice with trigger manipulation is better than not touching the thing at all!”

Farsight’s body quivered with rage at her words, as if he’d only expected the words “Sorry sir!” or “You’re completely correct sir!”. “By Celestia, you two are beyond controllable. You could have displaced the entire Stable onto the surface! We have enough problems with the bugs popping up all the way up to level five!”

Sling purposefully tuned out the shouting with a subtle application of her hearing protection spell, turning the words into muffled throbs as mare and stallion battled it out with words and lung capacity. She just didn’t care anymore.

The only thing she cared about was getting back to the infirmary. Butterscotch’s leg wound was deep, but not grievous or mortal, and his timely first aid ensured that the healing potions and spells would leave minimal scarring and that he wouldn’t be walking with a limp. But Light Tail…

Just thinking of her name stopped her heart cold. The blood, from her little girl’s head, on her forehooves and face and she’d not even had time to wash it off. Her listless, limp legs, the way her brain seemed to have trouble keeping up with simple speech….

…o-oh stars is she even gonna be the same Light Tail if she wakes up—

“—nd you, Sling Shot!!” Farsight’s voice blared through her protected hearing somehow…at least, it was a “somehow” before she’d been snapped out of her wandering daze. The light, muffled tingle of her hearing was gone, bringing full sound back into her world. She was so distraught that she couldn’t even focus on her most ingrained spell….

“What the hell were you thinking on level fourteen?!” Farsight roared at her when she thought to turn her head towards him. “Socket was brought in with a mild concussion less than ten minutes after you passed through! Toolbox and Torque had to carry him up to medical and I have ten eyewitnesses that all say you flung him into the ceiling without warning!”

Her answer was so automatic and instant that the damage was done before she regained her senses enough to realize it. “I told him he could move, or be moved. I moved him.”

“So that’s what you call unprovoked assault?!” he yelled back, his body shifting around behind the desk to take her in more fully—a sign that she’d just garnered his complete attention. “Is that how we trained you to perform your back-up job?!”

“Chief, not a damn pony in that department ever listens to us—“ Cloud Wind began to fight back.

But the chief would not hear it. “I’m sorry, I was under the impression that I was speaking to Sling Shot! Is that you?!”

The pegasus, for once in her life, had no counter to the screaming male in front of her. Her second and a half of silence was all he needed to turn his attention back to the unicorn.

“Is that how we trained you to perform your called-upon duties as a reserve security officer of this Stable?! Are you expected to allow your personal issues to affect your job performance?! Are you instructed to assault Stable residents without due cause or provocation for not understanding your directions?!”

Even in the disheveled emotional state she was in, worried almost to the point of vomiting about whether or not her only child was going to be okay or destined for a worse fate, she could already see the signs of something much larger behind his “drill instructor” behavior. This was not a mere after-action review, or a spoken reprimand to be added to a written demerit. This was a career-altering—perhaps even ending—attitude, the kind of threatening, verbally bullying approach a boss might take towards a worker that had willingly broken and flaunted the rules and regulations they were expected to adhere to. He wasn’t testing her, he didn’t even care about any potential answer she might have had. He just wanted to throw his fit in front of her, in front of her best friend, so that the rest of the department would know not to ever dare risk a similar outcome to their jobs if they wanted to stay clear of his wrath.

She was a sacrifice. He would do whatever he’d already decided he wanted to do when she and Cloud Wind had walked in here, no matter what she said or did. And that was not a fight she felt worthy of her time.

With deliberate and swift thought, she practically willed her 10mm pistol out of its holster, the steel scratching across the leather as she snapped down on the magazine release and flicked the falling magazine out towards the desk. As it landed and skipped across the surface to smack into the Chief’s chest, her spell field gripped onto the slide and yanked it back so hard that the chambered round flew out over his head and clattered against the wall. And with one final mental command, the unloaded and locked-open pistol was slapped down onto the desk, next to the magazine, with the barrel pointed out to the right side….

—Light Tail’s slumbering body was splayed before her on the nurse’s table, blood spilling down onto the worn padded mattress as she struggled to answer the nurse’s questions—

…and her security I.D. badge following right behind it just as the unchambered round clanked onto the desk and rolled to a stop against the chief’s desk light.

Now she had his attention. Angry, and slightly confused attention, but she had it.

“I’m done,” she spoke, her voice and emotions becoming surprisingly crisp and calming, even emotionally invigorating despite the unknown terrors awaiting her in the infirmary. “An entire stable that calls me a slut and a whore to my face is not worth laying down my life for. The whole lot of you can burn in Tartarus.”

She’d barely even turned around on four amazingly steady legs when Farsight’s familiar growl of authority curled up over her back and into her ears. “Don’t turn your back on me, Sling Shot, we’re not done yet. You don’t get to go back to slutting around, not on my watch. You will not abandon your own in a time of crisis like this so casually—“

She thought she heard Cloud Wind utter something very profane and vulgar beside her, but she’d stopped listening to anything anypony had to say to her after the chief of security had so callously disrespected her in the very manner she’d just described as her reason for quitting on him. Her anger obliterated her self-control as her rear legs bucked out behind her, taking an upward motion as they connected with the desk and sent it into a tumbling jump upward—

—a gray whirl swished across her vision, her body seemingly teleporting itself back towards the chief as her magic callously slammed the flying desk out of her sight—

—Chief Farsight did not even have time to completely process what had just occurred in front of him when she tackled him up against the wall behind him, her front legs pinning him up and into the wall—

“I look out for me and mine,” a dark, insidious voice from her throat throttled out into his shrinking pupils, the drying blood of her night light becoming smeared into his coat. “That don’t include anypony I don’t conjure it to.”

As quickly as she’d assaulted the chief of security, she ended it, unpinning him from the wall and letting his shaken body slide onto the floor as she walked away. She wasn’t aware of her own magic reaching out and putting back into place everything she’d just tossed aside in her fit of madness, only that two levels down was a daughter that she’d once thought invincible, laid out on a nurse’s table with a bleeding head wound that had shaken her small world into scattered pieces.

Her eyes blinked the fresh memories away and returned the wet floor of the showers to her vision, and she allowed herself a small, hopefully unnoticed breath before she took a couple of steps forward, shaking the water out of her face as the warmth began to spread across her back and flanks. “I don’t work in security anymore,” she answered quietly.

If anything in the world could make her night light shrug off pharmaceutical effects like insects to be flicked aside, it would be anything that involved her mother’s life. “What?” the little one wondered aloud, forcing herself upright in a battle against her drugged body that splashed everything around her with a quarter gallon of water. “You…you didn’t get fired, did y-you?”

“No, nothing like that,” she answered, truthfully and as calm and collected as she could manage. “I…I can’t explain what happened. Not until you’re older. But I’m happier this way. I never liked my job to start with.”

As her levitation spell took hold upon a bottle of coat shampoo, Cloud Wind’s voice broke into what had been a mother-daughter conversation with some less-than-desired reality. “I don’t know many ponies in the Stable that likes what they do to keep it running,” the pegasus muttered over the running shower heads. “But we all do our part. It’s how we’ve survived.”

“And I’ve decided my time is spent better elsewhere,” the unicorn mare returned evenly, floating the shampoo bottle up to her chest and squirting a portion of it onto herself. “Parchment has been asking for an assistant librarian for years after Quill Scent passed away and left her to learn the rest on her own.”

The mere mention of the squirt’s favorite after-school nesting grounds was enough to make her not ask about her previous job anymore, even though she was likely still worried about how it had become “previous” to begin with. “…the library? Really?”

Stick with it, make it conversation topic number one ‘till bedtime. “Not yet, but I’m the first pony to become available for the job,” she said softly as her telekinetic touch began to lather the shampoo gel across her coat. “And the library’s been a one-pony department since Parchment took over, so she can just go right to the Overmare about it. In fact, she was supposed to have done it yesterday afternoon. I’ll need to pay her a visit in a few minutes to see how that went.”

“Well, you go on and do that when you’re done here,” Cloud Wind’s voice suggested hastily, before Light Tail could start going on and on about whether or not she’d find those Daring Do books within the next week. “I got the kid covered.”

The unicorn’s only response was a muted grunt of approval as she continued to spread the foaming shampoo across her sides and back, absently dabbing Light Tail with a second streak of gel across the length of her spine and neck. The sooner she got everything out of the way and back to quarters, the sooner she could get some much needed sleep.

And hopefully not see the constant recurring images of a broken, blood-covered daughter in her dreams…

She hated these stupid drugs FOREVER. Ponies weren’t supposed to be taking pills or icky-tasting liquids to sleep. She was supposed to wait until her body said “STOP MOVING”, and then she could fall onto whatever looked comfortable and snooze away right there.

When said body wanted to drop to the floor without reason with every step, it got a lot harder to think or do things, because all she wanted to do was close her eyes and let the emptiness of sleep claim her. Didn’t matter if it was a cold, wet floor or a carpet, she just wanted to sleep.

At least, until Mom said, “I don’t work in security anymore”. Just like that, no drama, no remorse, no nothing. It was like she’d just been talking about what their next breakfast would be, or the next play or concert act going on in the auditorium. It might’ve taken her a few seconds to actually answer when she got entranced by the water dripping down past her face, but she’d have expected an announcement like that to come with a little more fanfare. Or a warm-up sentence, something like “Honey, I have something important to tell you”. And the last time she checked, losing your assigned job was pretty darn important!

And Aunt C was a better bet for a clear answer than Mom. As soon as she stopped poking her in the flank to keep her moving across the living room floor, anyway.

“Hey, keep moving,” Aunt C prodded firmly. “You’re going to need another bath at this rate and I’m too tired to put up with it again.”

“Not my fault my legs don’t wanna work,” she grumbled darkly, pulling her slightly dampened body across the carpeted floor with her forelegs while trying to her rear legs to do something for once. But every muscle in her body was just so freaking tired, she was impressed she was moving at all. “So what really happened? How’d Mom lose her job?”

“She told you already, she wasn’t fired,” Aunt C’s voice answered dismissively, becoming slightly irate with the filly as she began using two hooves to prod her along instead of the one. “This is grown-up stuff, you don’t need to worry about it.”

A flare of anger rushed throughout her body and finally enlivened her legs enough to plant their hooves onto the floor, though she still didn’t have the strength to stand. “It’s my mom, I’ll worry as much as I want!” she hissed back. “What? Happened?!”

Aunt C must’ve been really tired, because she didn’t try to answer or be friendly and stuff. She just went and acted like most adult ponies would have. “You raise your voice at me like that again and I’ll—“

“You’ll what?!” she snapped, cutting her ‘aunt’ off before she could finish her grown-up threat and probably ensuring she’d get an earful from Mom later, but whatever! This was important! “Everythin’ around me’s gone crazy, last thing I remember is seeing Grape Jam on my way out of the washroom, hitting my head on a table leg and when I wake up I find out I’ve been out almost two days and Mom looks like she ain’t slept for none of it! Then she tells me she don’t work security anymore and she ain’t the least bit worried or angry over it?! Or did you even notice that?! It’s like her mind’s snapped or somethin’! What’s going on?! Why is my mom acting so weird, it’s starting to scare me!”

Aunt C’s eyes stopped glaring down at her, her scowl quickly fading into a look of pity as her shoulders began to slump. “….I…I didn’t…”

And then, before she could make her futile attempt to escape it, Aunt C had her swept up in a one-legged hug, ruining her strenuous efforts to get up on her hooves. “….sorry, El-Tee,” the pegasus whispered sadly. “I…I didn’t think how things must’ve looked like to you. Being out almost two days and not remembering the day before that…your mom’s been stressed out all week. Like, more than usual…”

With her limbs and body numbed into near submission by sleep-inducing chemicals, she could barely muster the strength to put up any kind of meaningful struggle, but if Aunt C’s grip of pity got her an answer or four, then she’d put up with it. “Define ‘usual’.”

“I meant…I don’t know,” she sighed in defeat, her wings opening out and dropping down to the floor as her mood continued to sour. “Butterscotch went missing, we had to put down curfews for non-working hours, we kept expecting radroaches to start skittering out of the vents everywhere we went…and I think she heard something yesterday morning that just pushed her over, she blew up at me when we were searching the Dungeon…”

That, she could believe. Sometimes it seemed as if Mom was always just one misplaced word away from exploding and taking out everything around her, and yet she always seemed to have this last measure of control she needed to keep it from happening. But the threat of a radroach outbreak would push that stress past those limits at some point. And if what Sun Star said to her last week was any hint of how everypony actually treated her Mom….

“What kind of something?” she asked gently of the leg trapping her onto Aunt C’s chest.

“….I didn’t understand it,” the pegasus dodged uneasily, and Light Tail began to doubt that she’d get any clear answers from her as well. “….but right before we found Butterscotch, when we first started hearing the bugs crawling around us, she froze up on me. Scared to death.”

“I thought you security types were fearless.”

“It’s not like that!” Aunt C shouted defensively, but quickly changed her tone to a more apologetic one as she explained, “Look, the last outbreak we had, five years ago…your mom wasn’t out with the rest of us. The chief had her locked up in the armory, to “guard” it, while the rest of us took care of it, and he even locked out her access key to the weapons. The bugs were all over that armory door, scratching and clawing and screeching at it. When we polished them off and got her out she was a mess, darted right out the door and kept going until she hit a dead end….and found what was left of Kick Start’s kid….”

The schoolroom tale of “Bloody Hoofprint” suddenly didn’t sound so farfetched. “…y-you mean…Hoofprint? The story every kid in school tells all the time? That really happened?”

“….the story is kinder than the truth, but…yeah. It happened. And your mom was the first to find him. She wouldn’t come out of her quarters for a month, you’re probably too young to remember it. And then yesterday morning when we came by to see if you were okay, and she found you covered in blood and with two dead bugs shoved out in the hallway….I think it all just came down on her. The stress, the fear, the….everything. I seriously think she needs help, and not just from a friend. I haven’t told her yet, but…I think your mom’s going to need some counseling. Compulsory, if we have to, she hasn’t been herself since yesterday morning.”

“….yer holdin’ up just fine,” was all the little one could think to squeak out loud, apprehension growing in her chest as implications began to run wild within her muddled imagination. What if they decided her mom wasn’t fit to work and kept her penned up and drugged? What if they decided she wasn’t fit to be Mom and took her away?!

“I have ways of coping,” Aunt C countered calmly. “But your mom isn’t coping well. She hardly has any friends besides me, she’s gotten obsessive with you—“

“After what you just told me, she’s got a right to be,” she shot back sharply, her fears giving her words the bite they needed to be heard. “C’mon, admit it, if I looked as bad as you say you were freakin’ out too. Mom’s just takin’ it worse ‘cause of what she saw happen to Hoofprint.”

“Exactly why I think she needs to get some help—“

You can help her, you dodo! “So what’s stoppin’ you? You said even one word to her about it, or were you just gonna go behind her back and get her thrown into the counselor’s chair by force—“

She felt Aunt C’s lungs briefly hold her breath inside them, very briefly, before they continued their rhythmic cycle of in-out, inhale-exhale, but that tiny pause gave it away. “…you haven’t.”

The pegasus’s grip on her faltered, and even the coordination challenged filly had no trouble pulling herself free from the older mare’s reach to give her that patented (pending) “You know you should” stare.

Aunt C’s will to resist collapsed within just three seconds, her eyes no longer willing to look down at the glaring child before her. “….o-okay, okay, I’ll try,” she conceded. “I don’t even know what to say, but…I’ll try, at least.”

Works every time, Light Tail’s triumphant mind squealed silently, and she began to stumble off towards bed as best as she could manage. Now if I could just get my stupid legs and body to MOVE…

Parchment was in tears when she caught up with her outside the library. The exact words and sentences weren’t quite that clear, but the general message was hard to miss amidst all the cries of “Thank Luna and Celestia” and “FINALLY!!”. Come Monday morning, Sling Shot was going to be the new assistant librarian and learn (with little difficulty as she was already familiar) the indexing and number system for the library’s collection. Not vast compared to say, the ancient libraries of the big cities in the time of Equestria That Was, but considering that the Stable’s library took up three quarters of level seven it wasn’t anything to sneer at either. She didn’t remember the exact number of books—just that Light Tail managed to read most of the ones she found interesting by the time she’d turned ten five months ago. And that Parchment was still trying to get them all back in their proper place after said child had managed to dismantle the place trying to get her cutie mark. Someday she was going to get the whole story from one of them about how such a thing could happen.

For now, the only thing on her mind was making sure her child was well and truly okay, and not breathing funny or bleeding from the head again, and able to sleep comfortably, and then she could try and get a nap in for herself. Not a long one, just enough to get some energy back in her so she could keep an eye on her a bit longer. Until she was up and moving on her own without looking drunk, she was never going to rest easy.

Maybe we shouldn’t have drugged her food, the train of doubt began as she trotted through the corridors on muscle memory alone. What if it throws off Tender Mane’s spell and her head doesn’t heal all the way? What if it makes her memory problems worse or starts eating away at that blessed mind of hers?! Wh—

No. No no no. Not like this, couldn’t be thinking like this. Had to look like everything was going to be fine, couldn’t let the squirt know she was deathly worried at every turn or she’d just catch on and bug her about it for eternity plus one. By the gods, sometimes that kid’s intelligence was a curse! Sh—no, no, bad thought, there was nothing wrong with her daughter’s brilliant mind. It just meant she had to be real careful what she said or did, and hope that she was smart enough to understand any explanations she gave or why she wouldn’t give certain ones just yet. Although…

…..although it would be nice if she never remembered that conversation yesterday morning. Her heart ached just wishing for it, her ever-vengeful brain always eager to make her recall snippets of it as though it were happening again. Never again did she want her daughter to hear anypony call her mother such things with impunity. Or hear it herself, for that matter. One way or another, this constant shunning and slander was going to stop. It was just the one night, ONE! And they talked like she did it all the time! What was wrong with everypony?!

Burn in Tartarus, indeed…

In short order, her dark thoughts melded into gentler musings and the desire of enveloping warmth from her three thick blankets as she found herself swishing through the door to her living quarters, passing by a swiftly-moving Cloud Wind without so much as a word spoken between them. Another mindless flare of her magic set the lock on the door, her attention focused solely on a quick—but thorough—checkup on the air vents above her as she trotted towards her daughter’s room. The initial outbreak of the radroaches yesterday had subsided quickly, and by the time she’d quit her job and stomped out over a hundred of the suckers lay dead across the hallways. But until a proper sweep of the vents and maintenance tunnels could be conducted, an all-clear was not forthcoming, and she didn’t want the things getting in again.

With her attention occupied on security, she didn’t notice the absence of a filly’s body in the bed until she’d bumped into by accident and tried to apologize, only to find nothing in front of her to apologize to. Panic and terror gripped her thoughts, freezing them into the singular notion that she needed to find her precious treasure right now, and barreled out of the bedroom at blinding speed. A quick check of the couch showed nothing but bare, freshly-washed cushions and pillows, nor did she see anything nestled into her bean bag chair that she’d moved next to the coffee table.

Only one other place to put a filly to sleep.

She tepidly sauntered to her bedroom door, surprised to find it open and inviting the warmer air of the living room into its walls, and sure enough Light Tail’s head was plopped down upon the dark-blue cushioned pillows once she’d flicked the lights on. With three blankets covering her body she couldn’t tell if the poor thing had already fallen, but the child was quick to answer that lingering question as the door swished shut behind the approaching mare.

“Ooooooh, yer blankets….so warm,” her high-pitched voice whispered tiredly, her eyelids not even capable of opening. It was quite possible she could have fallen into deep sleep had the mare not walked in when she had. “….bed too….so nice….”

“Y-yep, that’s definitely my bed you’re in,” she sighed heavily, drawing closer to the edge of the mattress, a levitation spell already beginning its mental incantations within her mind. “....why don’t we get you to your room? I’ve been selfish enough with where I put you.”

Her night light’s answer was slow, her fight with her drowsiness quickly becoming a lost cause, but she was not out of it yet. “…fine right here. Thought you’d sleep better if I weren’t so far away…”

Truthfully, she would, but keeping her little girl close to her just because she was deathly afraid of the shadows themselves dawning upon her was borderline possessive. No matter how much she might’ve wanted it. “I’ll sleep fine as long as I know you’ll be okay. That’s all I need.”

Light Tail’s answer brought her nearly to tears, for all the right reasons. “…just wanna know you will be, too. Lemme stay this once, Mommy….”

Sling could not find her voice for a moment. And when she tried, her vocal cords simply refused to vibrate and flex in any manner of recognizable speech. She had to suck in three large, cold-air breaths before they would work properly. “O-kay, then, honey. I’ll be back in a minute.”

Light Tail’s head burrowed further into the pillow, shifting around to either a warmer or a more comfortable position. “Not goin’ anywhere.”

She managed to make it to her daughter’s room before a single salty tear found a way down the side of her face, which she wiped off with her left foreleg as she quickly scanned the squirt’s unoccupied bed for—

Gotcha! She cheered silently upon spotting the snow-white, filly-sized plush toy of a white fox, a family heirloom since the first days after the Sealing. Perhaps the only remaining visage of the arctic wild animal in the world, it was continually handed down through her family over the last two hundred years to each newborn child, and was now one of Light Tail’s three personal and highly prized possessions. One which was always within reach of her whenever she slept.

She carefully seized it from the bed with a gentle telekinetic touch, and floated it out in front of her all the way back to her own room. A second spell lifted the layers of comforters up enough for her to slip in beneath them, and she’d hardly settled down into the mattress before the little one curled up against her chest and pulled the plush toy down into her forelegs.

“….oooh yeah, now I can sleep for half a day,” Light Tail murmured, and by the sound of it she was already drifting away into a better world than the one she lived in. “Nighty-nite, mommy…”

This close together, Sling could feel the faint pounding of her night light’s heart as it fell into a slow, gentle crescendo, her lungs synchronizing themselves to the same beat as sleep claim her senses. Even the soft crinkle of gauze and bandage became a ritual, her light breathing shifting her head slightly with every breath taken.

It was hard to hold back a joyful tear or three, so she didn’t bother. She just flicked the light switch off as silently as possible, allowing her right foreleg to find a home around daughter and plush toy and draw it ever closer to her. And for the two and a half minutes it took for her own body to succumb to its exhaustion, she could have believed that the world beyond the door was not one of steel and wire, but of the Equestria That Was that she dreamed of on a regular basis.

It was those old world dreams that finally lulled her into a painless, blissful slumber, and into the hope that for the first time in ten years, her life was finally starting to brighten up.

Intermission 1: Blue Moon

Blue Moon

Darkness.

Heat, strobing her senses and leaving a wake of cold tendrils as it grew and waned to its own rhythm.

A chatter of crisp snaps and a low, steady roar.

A jolting of her senses, rough tilts and yaws that signaled movement despite the darkness before her.

The movement subsided, and her senses began to shut down once more.

A brain-freezing cold took hold on her, snapping her brain into a state of shocked numbness as her eyes immediately tried to locate the source of her discomfort.

She instantly regretted even trying. Every shape before her wore a blurred outline, masking finer details but leaving enough clues for her imagination to fill in the blanks. Chunks of charred concrete littered the ground in front of her, and that steady roar was revealed to be a growing, hungry fire that was gradually consuming the set of shop stands arrayed across a sidewalk. A harsh, teeth-rattling ringing in her ears overwhelmed most of her hearing, leaving her able to hear only snippets of the dying world and muted, almost dream-like voices.

Her body began to slide away from the fire, pulled across the broken asphalt by an unknown savior or opportunistic looter (or worse), but in her dazed state she could offer no resistance or warnings. Cold lines began to trickle down her face and neck, and her mane stuck to her coat instead of flowing about around her head. Gradually, the street began to recede from her vision, pushed away by an approaching darkness, and the few sounds she could hear grew muffled and stuffy, as if blocked by solid matter—

A second helping of that skull-killing cold sloshed over her head, some of it spilling into her dazed mouth, and what was left of her natural instincts swallowed it almost immediately, recognizing it as ice cold water. The liquid spread its rejuvenating temperature through her throat and stomach, quenching her dry tongue’s thirst for nourishment and allowing her brain to begin processing more complex details and events around her.

A small, plastic tube briefly intruded against her snout before finding its intended destination through her mouth, and as she began to suckle its cool, refreshing contents into her body, a throbbing ache began to press itself against the back of her head—

“Don’t move,” a pony’s voice whispered quietly, just before a rumble of thunder thudded across the world. Even in her present state, however, she could recognize it to be far too loud to have come from a thundercloud. “Just keep drinking and don’t move your head.”

The strawberry-flavored liquid’s rejuvenating effects made the advice a rather moot point. In fact, with each sip the pain in her head seemed to lessen and fade, so she continued to drink at her present rate. Quickly, her senses began to improve. The darkness began to brighten, revealing faint outlines of glass counters with unknown goods sealed within. The ground beneath her began to resemble a dark brown carpet, its rough texture pressing against the right side of her body. Her brain gradually recognized the cold, slick sensation on her face to be cold water, her mane slickened and hugging her neck. Even the ringing in her ears was waning out into a faint tingle.

The pressure in her head eventually faded into a barely noticeable buzz by the time the liquid began to travel in broken segments, her suction efforts beginning to bring in air as much as the tasty treat.

“Feeling better yet?” the mysterious pony asked as the scattered bits of liquid quickly fell onto her tongue, abruptly cut off from their source as it was taken away.

“…much,” she moaned in reply, shifting the tube around until it was clamped down inside her mouth at the side. “….got another one?”

Her request was swiftly answered—the tube in her mouth was physically re-positioned until it had returned to its previous spot, and upon sucking upon it a fresh stream of the liquid was invited into her belly. She said nothing more as she sucked the fresh container dry over the course of a short, blissful eternity. By the time she’d finished it off, almost all the pain in her head had vanished—only a miniscule scratch remained, tickling the soaked skin beneath her mane on occasion. Her eyesight had vastly improved, allowing her to finally recognize the interior of Clover Luck’s general goods store and the glass case of outdoor camping gear against the wall, right beneath the main window pane that showed potential customers a glance at the wares within. That faint, tingling ringing in her hearing vanished entirely, allowing her to at last take in the sounds of the world beyond.

It was, then, to her great embarrassment that she only now recognized the weight and pressure clinging to her side when it shifted about to get a better grip on her body. “Mommy?” her daughter’s voice cried quietly. “Are you okay now?”

She instantly spat the tube out of her mouth and began to roll herself over into an upright position, tucking her legs in beneath her as her muscles began to seep relief into her tired senses. “…I’ll make it,” she gasped as her little girl’s forelegs found a new home around her neck and briefly interrupted her oxygen supply. “….how did we—“

“I found you in the street,” the pony’s voice answered before she could finish her question, and she carefully turned her head until she saw the mare’s body sitting several feet away to her left. A second clap of thunder shook the store, rattling glass and overhanging chandeliers of lights, and she began to recall the last few minutes of her life before now. She and her daughter, walking to the park, her saddlebags stuffed with their afternoon picnic lunch and blanket—

—a massive mushroom cloud of flame and ash, a spherical crackling of energy whipping through the smoke and tainting it red with its deathly glow—

“….it wasn’t a nightmare?” she managed to ask when the initial shock had taken its leave.

“Oh, it’s a nightmare all right,” the purple mare disagreed sharply, her watery eyes ringed with red. “Specialist Midnight Showers, Second Medical Regiment, Third Battalion, D Company.”

Medic pony, she noted with light relief, finally catching sight of the purple mare’s red cross leg band wrapped around her left foreleg, just below the cuff of her uniform’s sleeve. “….sorry, stupid question…”

“With the hit you took, no, it’s not,” Specialist Midnight replied, her voice strangely calm and devoid of the panic she was beginning to recognize again in the streets outside. “Your kid’s got some spunk in her. Bit me until I chased her around the corner when I wouldn’t listen to her. Good on you, squirt.”

She felt Star Shine’s hug grow tighter at those words, and her left foreleg managed to return the gesture with an awkwardly angled squeeze. “….what’s going on? I thought the battalion was out on training maneuvers this week.”

“We got orders from the brass at Fort Wiley to pull back into town,” Midnight answered with crisp tones. “Right before….right before things got bad. We arrived right before we heard the explosions, got split off by company to sweep the streets for casualties and damage. I was a block east, setting up a casualty collection point with my squad when your kid found us and led me here.”

Thunder rolled across the streets once more, but thankfully wasn’t quite as close as the last one had been. Only a thin layer of dust managed to flitter down onto the floor, eliciting a sneeze out of Star Shine’s tiny nose.

Any other day, she’d have laughed at it. Today, though….she didn’t know what to do about today. She wasn’t even entirely optimistic that she’d see tomorrow.

Midnight Showers, at least, was a better thinker under pressure than she was. Without waiting to be prodded or lingering to try and answer more questions with time they didn’t have, the military mare simply rose up to her hooves to resume her duties. “You guys wait here while I report back to my squad sergeant on Chester Street. I should be back in a few minutes.”

“And if yer not?” Star Shine blurted in a burst of fear, turning in her mother’s grasp to keep Midnight in her sight. “What do we do then?”

Midnight Showers’ trot to the broken doorframe paused for a moment, as if unsure if she should say something or simply keep going—

—and went with a few words of advice, her amber eyes finally showing a hint of terror and absolute fear in the mind behind them. “….whatever you have to do to get out of here.”

And without another word she broke into a brisk gallop, dashing out the doorway and into the ruined world beyond.

It was Midnight’s stark terror that finally spurred her into motion, her legs aching in protest as they assumed the weight of her body. “C’mon,” she commanded of her offspring in a firm tone—at least, she hoped she sounded firm and commanding. “We have to go, now.”

She should have known better than to her expect her intelligent star to know how to deal with this kind of stress right away, even after apparently rushing through shelled streets to find a medic pony. Star Shine’s forelegs wrapped around her mother’s left hind leg in an attempt to anchor the mare to the floor. “W-wait, Mommy!” she pleaded, her body scraping across the floor as her mother’s pace continued forward. “She wanted us to wait for her! What if she comes back and we’re not here?!”

The scenario played out in her mind in less than two seconds, alongside other less pleasant outcomes of staying in a place that had already been bombarded once before. “We can’t wait,” she said, coming to a stop at the door and poking her head out past its splintered, pointy edges. “We have to go. This street was already attacked once, it could happen again. We need to get home.”

“H-home?” Star Shine’s voice wavered briefly in disbelief. “W-what could we possibly need there!? We gotta wait for miss Midnight liked she asked us to!”

A muffled whump! in the far distance preceded another round of deep thunder, somewhere off to her right, and she began to wonder at the sudden change in volume in the explosions. What little she remembered of the thirty seconds before she’d been knocked out hadn’t been much, but she thought she could recall the megaspells being quite a bit more….enthusiastic, for lack of a better term. Their power was immense, considerable, and immediately familiar. But these last few explosions lacked that level of oomph!, and perhaps most importantly, she and everypony around her were still alive. A megaspell would have simply vaporized them and flattened everything in its blast radius.

“We have to go!” she insisted again, putting a more forceful emphasis into her command as she cocked her head right, down the other side of the street, as her ears picked up the clomping of several sets of pony hooves running their tails off in the streets. Their rumbling, panicked stampede quickly rose into a deafening orchestra of fear as they popped out into view from the intersection several dozen yards away, their faces wild with panic and confusion. She thought she spotted a couple of armed unicorn ponies in police uniforms trying to herd the small group of nine into a directed gallop, but they were failing miserably. Nopony seemed capable of even comprehending the two mares in their current state of mind—the instinctive “fight or flight” response. And their minds had chosen “flight” to the exclusion of everything else.

Star Shine was not encouraged. Not one bit. “….mommy, can we please just wait…”

Yet another explosion lashed out, somewhere close by—she could hear the concrete being ripped from the ground and the windows shattering from the shockwave of the blast. The event only spurred the panicked herd even harder along, and even began outpacing the two cops who had tasked themselves with trying to knock some sense into their charges. If they’d thought they had a challenge before, they were likely cursing at themselves for just how much harder their work had become.

She couldn’t comprehend the yelling and screaming with complete clarity. She could only make out parts of it amidst the explosions and their galloping hooves upon the concrete, but several variations of curses involving the Princess Sisters’ backsides were definitely among the words she could pick up in-between the expected cries for help, mercy, or simple wailing at the end of things to come.

She stayed inside the doorway, intending to let the wild herd of ponies rumble by so as not to get trampled by them in their mad quest for safety from wherever they wanted to be away from. One of the mare cops finally trotted to a stop, exhausted beyond immediate relief and fighting to get some air into her lungs—

—pink and red beams of light lanced into the street around her, taking the cop completely by surprise, and not even a moment later a rapid series of thunderous booms followed behind them—

—the stallion at the head of the herd crumpled into the asphalt, his body tumbling over itself as red splotches began exploding across his sides—

—she dove back into the shop, shoving Star Shine onto the floor and against the wall beneath the shattered window pane before throwing herself on top of her, throwing her back into the wall and pulling the filly into her body with her forelegs. The little one clamped her forehooves down over her ears to drown out the sound of the gunfire as it erupted into a deafening shower—

—amidst the screams and wails of pain, the bullet ricochets and the M.E.W. fire, the clunk of a hand grenade falling onto the street somehow managed to announce itself in the chaos a split second before it went off into her dampened hearing—

--a head-sized chunk of concrete tore through the wall right in front of her face and sailed on by, smattering her with bits of wood and plaster and nearly scaring her into emptying her bladder onto the floor behind her, but she thankfully maintained enough self-control to avoid such an embarrassing—and messy—give-a-way of her position.

She began to inch forward across the floor as the dying screams faded and waned in the murderous hail of bullets, to see who or what could possibly be interested in waging a street battle in such a final, apocalyptic exchange of megaspells around them….and whether or not they saw Clover Luck’s shop as an inviting looting opportunity—

She managed to get an eye out in front of the hole and stopped, keeping Star Shine pinned to the floor beneath her, though she worried that her rapid heart rate would quickly beat the little filly up if it didn’t slow down. Breathing became a mentally taxing exercise as she sought to slow her lungs down into a quieter rhythm and not gasp out every third breath she took—

—and then sought to simply get them to work again as they were shocked into stillness at the horrific sight the hole revealed. Four ponies were strewn about in a cluster, their blood slowly seeping out into pools beside them. One had lost a foreleg and wasn’t even breathing, a terrible, ragged chunk of his face having been torn off in the explosion. Another lay gasping and wheezing, his side riddled with torn pieces of his flesh and coat spilling crimson rivers down across his belly. What little she could make out of a pastel green mare made her thankful she couldn’t see the rest—all she could make out was the front half of her body, blood dribbling from the corner of her mouth as her lifeless eyes gazed slightly upward towards Clover Luck’s store sign.

The fourth pony, the blue-coated police mare that had been targeted by arcane weapons fire, was struggling across the street in a will-fueled crawl towards her pistol, her left foreleg now little more than a blood-ringed, cauterized stump just above the knee joint. A second cauterized burn in her left hind leg made moving it painful, forcing her to pull herself forward with one good foreleg and one that was barely there. For whatever reason, she was having trouble focusing her telekinesis spell on her pistol and was trying to get closer to it so it could take better hold.

The poor thing was dying, right in front of her, and all she could do was watch her struggle to strike back at her killers—

—one-and-a-half feet later her spell finally had the pistol in its hold, and the mare turned over onto her back, the large gun hovering above her head as it rapidly tracked its target in the skies above her—

—she managed to get off one shot before her attacker swooped down on top of her—a griffon almost twice her size, bearing a large, dull stainless revolver in one talon while the other casually slapped the mare’s pistol out of the air before lashing down into her chest, digging its claws into her flesh.

Her pained howl echoed into the store, forcing a gasp out of Star Shine’s mouth that the mother quickly smothered with a hoof lest they become this griffon’s next victim. The cop continued to scream and cry as she was tossed back onto the ground, behind an overturned and smashed shop stall that had been thrown off the sidewalk, and the griffon strode forward, his right talon cocking the hammer on the large gun and lowering it down at the helpless pony below—

Even at the end of her life, the cop still had fight in her as she fought back her tears for whatever life and loved ones she was about to lose. “I-I hope you burn for this, motherfu—“

—her curse was cut off with the massive, window-rattling boom from the griffon’s gun, the muzzle flash illuminating the front of his body for a brief instant. A splatter of blood exploded from behind the overturned shop stand, leaving little doubt about the mare’s fate.

As the griffon bent down behind the stall, disappearing from sight, two more griffons touched down onto the street around him clad in black armor covered in magazines, grenades, and other assorted gear. One carried a blocky-looking SMG, complete with a ribbed barrel and wood furniture, which he quickly leveled on the dying stallion and fired twice into his head, turning it into a bloody pulp and creating a ragged, meaty exit wound just behind his jaw. The other carried a weapon somewhat similar in appearance, but heavily modified with M.E.W. technology. Amidst the new ringing in her ears, she could make out soft thuds as more griffons took to the ground, out of sight, and three more singular gunshots announced their executions in brief, chest-shaking roars.

Now frozen in place by fear rather than desire, she couldn’t bring herself away from the hole and the small view of the massacre in the road as the griffon with the revolver rose back up from behind the stall, the mare’s barding in his left talon as he pocketed its gear for his own use. “Start pickin’ these mucks clean, one of ‘em might have one of those Stable-Tec letters about where they were supposed to go.”

Her heart turned to stone inside her chest, lodging against her ribcage and lungs. If these griffons were hunting for ponies with Stable passes….

….oh Luna, this is bad—

A set of paws and talons began making their way across the ruined streets, growing louder and firmer as the seconds passed, and a new, different kind of fear jolted her insides all the way into her intestines. “Hey, look at this place,” a griffon female’s voice exclaimed with joy. “I bet there’s tons of good stuff in there. MREs, ration bars, water purification tablets, I think we just hit the jackpot here!”

“Forget that shit, we got a mission to complete!” the griffon with the revolver roared with the grace of his lion half, tossing the barding behind him once he’d stuffed three pistol clips into his armored vest.

“Yeah, and what do you think happens to us after we’re done!?” the female roared back, stopping her progress and turning towards the revolver griffon. “You think those damned zebras got a fallout shelter all ready for us!? We’re mercs! We’re tools, we’re being used in some last-ditch petty effort to stick it to these lame-o ponies while they all burn the world to ashes! The war’s OVER! It’s time to take care of ourselves!!”

The revolver griffon’s reply was to turn his gun on his compatriot and squeeze the trigger, the tongue of flame obscuring his face and the gunshot mercifully drowning out the impact of the bullet into his latest victim. The female griffon’s body slumped onto the ground a few feet away from the storefront, her angry voice now a gurgling, pained mewing of confusion—

The revolver’s aim shifted lower, and flared again with a second shot that ended the female’s suffering and drove home the rapid new reality of the world even as it died around them.

Beneath her body, Star Shine’s quiet sobs began to seep into her chest cavity, her tears soaking into her mother’s forelegs.

“We have a mission,” the murderous griffon declared furiously, stuffing his revolver into a holster strapped to the left side of his body. “We complete the mission or our word as griffons is worth nothing. Anybody with objections to that had better get the hell out of my sight before I can get a bead on ‘em. Otherwise, search these worthless heaps of meat for any clues about the Stables!”

Talons and paws began to pilfer through the corpses in the streets, pulling at pockets and tearing off shirts and dresses in search of their prizes as their leader began to stomp his way out from behind the stall to collect the policemare’s pistol. The SMG-armed griffon kept his eyes on the road out to the right and his weapon ready, as did the M.E.W.-armed griffon—

—her eyes locked onto a pair of dangling, pineapple-shaped objects hanging from the front of their vests, each topped with a metal cap and a ring pin that rattled against each other, and her ice-cold fear was suddenly a distant memory as she began to focus almost exclusively on the grenades—

—a fourth griffon walked into view, his bolt-action rifle slung over his back between his wings as he started poking at the corpse of the lifeless-eyed mare. His grenades dangled from a belt that hugged the back of his body, near his hind legs—

—she added his explosives to her attention, reaching out with a multi-pronged telekinesis spell and latching each spell field as gently as she could over the arming pins—

Don’t look down—

—the first pair fell into her mental grip, barely a tingle in her horn, but the SMG Griffon’s focus on providing security blinded him to her efforts—

—Luna’s grace don’t look down—

—the M.E.W. Griffon’s focus was likewise occupied. Four down. Four left—

—Celestia help me don’t look DOWN—

—Bolt-Action Griffon’s brow furrowed, slightly puzzled at what felt like movement on his belt, but a saving grace of wind blew through the street at that exact moment, and he shrugged it off as mother nature’s touch and went back to his grim task—

—One more left, by Celestia please let this work—

—the barely visible glow of her spell fell over the leader’s grenades, tugging the arming pins in a snap test of their hold—

—his head cocked downward, having felt a slight tug on his vest, just in time to see the pins yanked free of the fuse cap—

—three other pairs of arming pins sailed into the air, the popping clicks of the spoon handles flying off finally drawing the four griffon’s attention to the grenades she’d taken possession of—

—she yanked four of them free from their owners and tossed off towards the left, hopefully towards the other griffons, and left three nestled against SMG Griffon, Bolt-Action Griffon, and M.E.W. Griffon. The last one she let clatter onto the street, right next to the leader.

“Oh SHIT!” Bolt-Action screamed in horror, rearing up on his hind legs as his arms scratched at the grenade still tucked into this belt—

—she threw a second telekinesis spell around her daughter, bolted up from the floor and zipped across the floor towards the counter—

“Stars-damned BITCH!!” the leader cursed at her back, his rage drowning out the terrorized yells of his compatriots—

—she leapt up and over the counter in a single bound, taking Star Shine into her forelegs and once more shielding her little body with her own as they came down hard onto the floor—

—six explosions filled the world, sending concrete, shrapnel, and what sounded like griffon limbs out across the street like confetti. Two more followed behind almost immediately, somewhere in front of the store, bathing the interior with rock and blood in their destructive wake.

Had she not been staring at the griffons for forty terrifying seconds, she would’ve mistaken the screams of the mangled survivors for those of the ponies they had callously slaughtered a minute earlier.

When the last grenade had performed its horrific purpose, she released her daughter from her grasp and bolted off from behind the counter, straight towards the back door leading into the alley behind the shop. “RUN!!” she screamed as loudly as she could manage. “Don’t stop, and don’t fall BEHIND!”

Adrenaline in her veins allowed her to crash through the door with the strength of three stallions and brush off her collision with the brick wall of a bakery shop behind the store with nary a loss in her step as she burst through the twisting alleys, desperate to escape the hell behind her.

Star Shine was never more than four steps behind her.

Chapter 5

Hearth’s Warming Eve was a time forever reserved for exclusive consumption of hot chocolate. The cold winter chill, the ever-constant presence of falling snow, and the alluring approach of twilight as the last light of Celestia’s sun faded from the world, all of it combined made for an exemplary sight in the countryside horizon. She would plop herself onto the couch, a steaming mug in her magical grasp and the fleeting kiss of the winter chill slipping through the pane window, and sip at the sweet beverage as she watched the pink sky grow darker and darker as the sun moved about its merry way in the celestial skies above Equestria, losing herself in memories of years past.

A perfect example was last year. The holiday had been spent in Canterlot to attend a royal-sponsored play of the founding of Equestria, with the Princess’s own protégé and her entourage of friends playing the major roles to boot. It had been an excellent performance, one worthy of the harmony and unity of Equestria’s ponies and a testament to Celestia’s impeccable wisdom and guidance. She even got to talk to her for a few minutes! She’d been surprised to find the co-reagent of Equestria a far more laid back pony than her royal title would have suggested. She’d even found a moment to ply a short, amusing prank upon a mildly bickering couple nearby by subtly shifting a sprig of mistletoe onto an overhanging decorative curtain above them, and then loudly suggesting the two “kiss and make up” according to the ancient earth pony tradition of finding oneself and their lover beneath the plant amidst a winter snowfall.

Naturally, it worked to a brilliant T. None could bring themselves to challenge the advice of the Sun, and the two admitted afterwards it had been silly to bring up such a minor conflict at a royal play, of all times. The princess was amused, and perhaps even elated, to see that her teasing had brought about a more joyful ending to the argument than what might have otherwise transpired. And she’d even drawn a passing waitress to her with no less than eight freshly brewed mugs of hot chocolate. It had been among her most treasured moments of the year.

This year, no such extravagant or high class events were sought or wanted. This year, all she wanted was to stay home, enjoy the company of family and friends, and continue her yearly tradition of drinking habits.

A tradition often challenged, unfortunately, by the housecat’s antics.

"Quit it, Sparky," Sling growled at the fourteen-pound, orange-furred feline pouncing at her swishing tail. As cats were wont to do, however, the animal simply ignored her and continued to bat and claw at her tail whenever the mood struck him, which was fairly often.

Could be worse, I guess, she sighed in defeat, this being the third time she’d repeated the command to the same indifferent effect. Could have a hole in the roof, or a—

The mere act of imagining less desirable outcomes seemed to make them become reality rather than wild imaginings. A high-pitched squeal pierced its way through her eardrums from the kitchen, followed very quickly by the sound of a hoof smacking into flesh and bone—

"By Celestia’s mane, wait!" El-Tee’s voice commanded, but the girlish, laughing squeal of her words did not give her words much weight.

"What for?" Windy’s voice countered sweetly. "They’re already done, quit fussing over them and let’s chow down."

An evil thought quickly took hold in her mind, one she was willing to indulge in. "Sparky, go bug El-Tee!" Sling Shot shouted at the cat’s twitching ears, and the massive, bushy-tailed feline did listen to this particular command, darting away from the couch and into the kitchen to begin tormenting his second favorite pony to his heart’s desire. El-Tee’s admonishing cries soon turned into surprised and slightly terrified shouts as the cat’s claws began to find purchase in her mane and coat.

"Ow quit it ow ow ow stoppit—"

Sling Shot filled the living room, and likely the entire house, with an evil, demented cackle befitting an evil and demented sorceress and resumed sipping at her mug of hot cocoa, turning her eyes back to the dwindling pink horizon of the world outside the window and bemoaning its short existence. In a few minutes the pink shade would darken into a lavender underbelly in the dark blue sky, and soon after that the sky itself would become a dark cobalt blue canvas upon which the stars would begin to appear. Contrary to most ponies’ beliefs, Luna did not move and create the stars above, though she had little doubt that the younger alicorn princess often envisioned such abilities in her dreams.

A rapid series of hoofsteps scoffed across the carpeted floor in the living room in the middle of her misty-minded longings, drawing her attention away from the window at last—

—Light Tail’s body was zipping out of the kitchen in a fast-paced backwards run, constantly rising up on her rear legs to bat away the cat’s lunging pounces with her forelegs in a wild display of panic that drew her into a prolonged bout of laughter. Her own daughter, terrified of a cat (admittedly, a fairly big one) and play fighting with it as if her life depended on it? Too much. She had to set her mug down on the coffee table, her hold on her magic was faltering with every passing moment.

Sparky was not about to let his prey (playmate?) escape so quickly. With the speed that only a feline could make look easy, he dashed around her to cut her off from her intended point of escape, and for good measure leapt up and slashed at her hindquarters to make sure she knew it. With a yelp the filly spun around to face her tormentor, her forelegs constantly rising up briefly to ward off potential strikes as the cat lashed out at her in quick swipes. It was much like watching wild deer bicker and fight over a pile of crushed acorns.

Eventually El-Tee began to circle around to her left in short, quick hops, blocking two additional strikes to her chest with her right foreleg, and that was when Sparky decided to start fighting dirty. His next attack was not at her body, but the forelock of her mane, part of which was hung out off to the side of her left eye. The additional fourteen pounds of weight pulling down on her mane brought Light Tail to a halt almost instantly, and within two seconds she’d fallen to the floor, yelping and yelling in pain as the hair was nearly pulled from her crest—

—Sparky’s body quickly bounded around her head to the back of her neck, where he quickly grabbed hold of her with all four legs and began kicking the living daylights out of her with his hind legs, lightly gnawing and swiping at the back of her head at the same time. Light Tail’s resistance faltered quickly.

"Ow ow OW okay okay you win you win stoppit—"

His goal of the moment completed to his satisfaction, Sparky promptly halted his attacks and pattered away on four amused and haughty feet, purring loudly in satisfaction as he made his way towards his favored cushion in the corner of the living room. Light Tail dared to do little more than glare at the retreating cat as she rolled upright onto her belly, tucking three legs in beneath her while her right foreleg went to work dusting off her mane and neck (and probably checking for unintentional cuts or scrapes).

Sling could hardly breathe, she was laughing so hard. She wasn’t even aware of her left foreleg tapping the couch pillow in her aimless, uncontrollable joy. Oh, how she loved to see her night light overpowered by a simple housecat! Particularly given how much pain and effort she endured to birth her into the world! Tears slid across her cheeks as she howled and cackled in her daughter’s general direction, and soon she couldn’t even breathe correctly.

Even Cloud Wind had a chuckle at her expense as she sauntered into the living room with a plate of freshly baked walnut brownies and chocolate chip cookies. This many sweets weren’t the usual after-dinner dessert affair, but Hearth’s Warming Eve was a special night of the year. And the brownies in particular were so very scrumptious looking….

"Wow, he even scratched your butt this time," she snickered, taking more careful steps as she came near El-Tee in the event she decided to lash out at him in vengeance. "My kind of cat."

"Traitor," El-Tee growled back, shifting her body about so that her hindquarters were no longer touching the floor. "Why didn’t you help me out back there?!"

"Hey, I had other things on my mind," she said with a laugh, gingerly stepping past her with care and continuing on to the coffee table, and gently slid the plate off the top of her skull when she reached it three seconds later.

"I swear, you’re only here for the brownies every year," she sneered back, slowly scooting herself across the floor to join the two mares near the table.

"That is not true!" Windy rebuffed with a feigned veil of hurt. "Why, just the other day I was talking with your mom about how awesome it would be if the cat actually knocked you out this year—"

"And did you two even clean up in here?!" the child continued to ramble, as if purposefully ignoring the pegasus as her forelegs began to swipe at the scattered pieces of paper wrapping and empty cardboard boxes strewn about the living room. "And you whine to me about my room?!"

With her daughter’s attention more focused on chewing out her mother and friend rather than keeping an eye on her plate of baked goods, both Sling and Windy took the opportunity to lift a brownie off the top of the pile. The mere presence of Sling’s magic encompassing the snack drew Light Tail’s attention back to the table, but by then it was already too late to stop it—Sling merely floated it back into her eagerly-waiting maw and bit half the brownie off in a single gulp.

"Hey!" the filly protested loudly as the mares quickly scarfed down their first treat. "Just once, could you guys wait a minute, is that so hard!?"

"Oh dear Celestia, it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever been asked to do," Windy answered promptly, even going so far as to snap her jaws down on a cookie at the edge of the plate and slurping it up in a single movement. "Seriously, I struggled for all of like, twenty seconds just carrying the plate. You’re lucky it made it here at all."

"And you bake an absolutely sublime layer of fudge on these things," Sling added, just before she broke off another quarter-piece from her brownie and swallowed it. "I swear it’s almost like some thick chocolate milk you slathered on. The walnuts are rather crunchy this year too. I still think you should’ve gotten a cooking cutie mark by now."

Seeing the folly of further arguing on a day that was supposed to celebrate the unity and harmony of Equestria’s ponies, Light Tail finally gave up and allowed her head to slump onto the coffee table as she mindlessly levitated a brownie towards her. "I think you only get those for a talent you’re naturally good at. It took me a year just to stop burning stuff in the oven."

The last piece of Sling’s brownie popped into her mouth as she mulled over the squirt’s words of wisdom. It wasn’t exactly a secret, per se, but fillies and colts were not among the most patient of life forms in Equestria. Desperate to find a part of themselves unique from everypony else, they would often destroy entire swaths of ponies’ sanity and patience trying to find it. It took time for the message to sink in and calm them down, and by then many had already discovered their latent special talents.

"You’ll find your niche someday," she promised her offspring when she’d consumed the last of her brownie into her stomach. "But there’s nothing wrong with getting good at other pursuits in life. Some ponies have even gotten their cutie marks that way, by finding their special talent while they were trying out something completely different."

Light Tail’s answer was delayed considerably by the baked brownie she was chewing on, and whatever she’d intended to say in response was never uttered. By the time she’d swallowed her bite, Sparky had gotten bored with lying about on his cushion and began prowling about the living room. He first leapt up onto the back of the couch where he could then step onto the windowsill and block Sling’s view of the fading twilight’s glow upon the flat countryside, but he never intended to stay there. Instead he began to climb up the window drapes, which somehow managed to shrug off the weight of a fourteen-pound cat sinking its claws into the fabric. His ultimate goal was quickly determined to be a length of overhanging tinsel that stretched from above the window to the other end of the living room—

He reached the top of the drapes and leapt onto the length of tinsel, and despite the size and weight of the animal he never lost his footing, nor did the nails give way or the tinsel itself snap beneath him. For all intents and purposes, the housecat was now essentially tightrope walking across the living room.

Try as she might to find the scene before her physically impossible, all she could scrounge up in response was laughter as she watched the feline slowly inch his way across the room above them, his wide eyes taking in the ponies below them as though he were sizing them up for a potential attack. When he was directly above them he stopped, his attention drawn to a pile of shredded wrapping piled up inside a box near the couch—

"Watch out sports fans, this kitty’s all riled up!" Windy’s voice laughed heartily—

—the cat indulged in his curiosity and leapt off the length of tinsel, directly into the box beneath him, and the resounding WHUMP! of his landing sent the shredded contents flittering out in just about every direction. Their motions in the air also caught his attention, as within a split second of landing in the box he jumped right back out, pouncing upon the closest piece of paper he could find.

The comical sight was too much. Her lungs began to bellow with laughter so intense that tears were streaming from her eyes, and she slid them shut to stem the salty flow down her cheeks—

—the room temperature shifted southward in an instant, shocking her senses into full clarity and causing her eyes to snap open to a pitch-black room. The warmth of a running fireplace was replaced by the hugging touch of multiple sheets of thick comforters layered atop her, her forelegs hugging a small, warm package to her chest….

…and she was still laughing at the dream.

A dream. Just a dream….

The small package in her grasp shifted about for a moment, and a flood of dim light from her bed stand’s lamp flashed onto the bed—

Light Tail’s eyes shut her laughing down with one clear look of fear and worry. The squirt seemed almost…afraid….

"….Mom, are you okay?"

Sling Shot had to forcibly shift her focus onto the present rather than the dead dream world she’d just left, though she couldn’t help but marvel at how much more appropriate it would have been to have this little scene play out in Equestria proper and not the cold, sterile Stable they called home. Her short, tiny legs hugged the white fox plush to her even in her sleepy state of concern for her only known parent, and she had to pin the plush’s head down beneath her own just to be able to see past it.

A brief shower of sadness came over her, and she quickly tightened her sleepy hug on her offspring in the hope that the contact would lull both of them back to sleep. "….just a dream, honey."

El-Tee, however, refused to do anything but what she wanted. She began to push back against the hug, trying to free herself from her mother’s emotional reach. "No, seriously, Mom, what’s wrong? It’s almost eight-thirty in the morning, I’ve been awake for the last five minutes and you wake up laughing. That’s not normal."

Sling’s face hardened with worry as her eyes began to search about the dimly-lit bed for the clock mounted on the far wall, and sure enough the ticking hands of the device bore forth the time of the day at around 8:27, with the second hand quickly clicking towards the bold-faced 12 at the top. The rest of her body chose that moment to begin assailing her brain with intense feelings of laden weight and tension in her muscles, even down to her rump and underbelly. Her attempts to work the stressful aches out of her hind legs failed miserably as she was barely able to even move them, so tired and unresponsive that they simply laid still.

"I was serious," she sighed back into her pillows, closing her eyes. "Just a dream."

"And were you laughing in this dream too?"

"Actually, yes," she responded with pointed pride. "Yes, I was. And if you’ll let me go back to sleep I might get to go back…"

"Dreams don’t work that way, Mom.

"….you’re such a killjoy."

El-Tee’s body finally wriggled free from her mother’s forelegs, though the bed merely shifted a half inch away from her as the filly rolled herself onto her belly. "So what kind of dream was it? Must’ve been awesome if ya woke up laughin’. I wanna know what it was!"

Two days ago I was freaking out about brain damage, and today she’s back to her inquisitive and boisterous self, she mulled silently to herself in relief. Most mornings, she would’ve fought and protested every effort by her daughter to rouse her from bed.

Today was not one of those days.

"I was dreaming about Equestria That Was," she replied with a wistful sigh, rolling off of her side and pulling her head away from her cozy pillows. "Hearth’s Warming Eve."

"No way!" El-Tee balked with disbelief. "Nopony even knows what the old world looked like, except for all those ancient photos the First Ones brought to the Stable with them."

A brief shake of her head flung her mane back behind her ears, though she could feel the hairs standing out and curling about in some of the strangest ways. Gonna have to fix that. "Yes, but so many books in our library are so descriptive, so….so mesmerizing at times, at the way the authors describe the world they’re writing about. You can get lost in it, see it take shape in your mind, and you see that world instead of the pages that it exists on. You read those three Daring Do books so much I thought you might’ve known that by now."

"I do, actually, but Daring Do is different! She’s awesome, she’s brave, she’s smart and pretty, and she always finds a way to get things done even when it looks hopeless! How could anypony not imagine that in their head?!"

The hero worship is almost cute. "And if you’d bothered to read any of the old world adventurers’ memoirs we have in the library, you’d find one thing they all have in common between them. Something even Daring is drawn to."

"The adventure?!" the pipsqueak answered immediately, her body beginning to get caught up in her swirling emotions as she began to act out her very words. "The thrill of danger at every turn?! The priceless rush of discovering some ancient and lost artifact from the times before them?! The adrenaline rush as their wits and quick-thinking see them through things nopony thought they could handle—"

Sling couldn’t help but chuckle when Light Tail’s forelegs reached up in front of her as she spoke, as if to grab hold of an object in front of her, and then jumped forward, swinging the back half of her body outward to mimic the act of swinging from a rope or thick jungle vine, and plopped down on the other end of the bed with the flair and grace of a three legged pony. "All common traits of the classic adventurer stereotype, but no," the mother replied, quieting her laughter as she shifted her body about to face the filly and displacing the comforters over her body. "Sit still and close your eyes, I’ll demonstrate."

"….how can you demonstrate somethin’ if I can’t see it?" the little one asked, one eye curling up in confusion.

"Just close your eyes," she insisted gently. "Clear your head, blank slate. Shouldn’t be that hard considering all the notes Amethyst sends me about your daydreaming in class."

Light Tail’s throat grumbled darkly at the cheap shot to her attention span, but did as she was told without any further protests or stalling.

"Now then," she began, following suit and closing her own eyes to better focus her attention to the task at hand. "You’re in a wheat field—"

The filly’s snickering broke up her thoughts before she could get going. "Hehehe, Haystack’s really behind on his wheat crop this season—"

"Focus!" she barked back sharply, and the snickering halted. "You’re in a wheat field, stretching out across the land as far as you can see. It’s winter, and the chill in the air caresses your coat and bites into your skin. Princess Celestia’s sun is arcing down across the sky towards the horizon. A breeze of wind brushes against you, and it tickles, but Celestia’s sun warms you right back…."

And oh gods I’m good at this, she didn’t say out loud, as she found the pitch black of her closed eyes slowing morphing into life—row after endless row of wheat stalks began to take shape in front of her, swaying about slightly against that breeze she’d just mentioned, and a bright, blue sky littered with patches of white clouds spread out above her—

"The sky is like water, bright, blue and clear, and puffs of white clouds stick out like marshmallows. The air is so quiet around you that you can hear all the wheat stalks rattling in the wind—"

—her hearing was the next sense to be affected, as she began to hear those endless golden rows flitter and crinkle in the wind she’d made up—

"The harvest is close, you can smell it from the stalks shoving their way into your nose—"

—and though she’d never once in her life smelled what organically grown wheat smelled like, her sense of smell began to simulate something to that effect, but couldn’t for the life of her describe it. She didn’t even know what it was supposed to smell like to start with.

A tear began to creep through her closed left eyelid, but she ignored it and pushed onward. "You stand there and just soak it all in. The skies, the sun, the wind, the wheat, even the clouds. You just stand there and watch it all."

A soft, exhaled gasp briefly broke up the auditory half of her illusion, but despite the disruption, she smiled.

"Now you’re at home, on your couch and staring out the window. It’s the hour of twilight, and the sky is dark. At the horizon, Celestia’s sun has turned red as it sinks down below the horizon for the coming of the night. The sky around the orb is orange, but beyond that it grows pink, and further out than that it’s a dark blue, like Princess Luna’s coat. The night sky seems to be chasing the sun away to make room for the moon."

And as quickly as she was speaking it, the illusion before her shifted in appearance, returning her to that darkening sky and the fireplace-warmed living room she’d been dreaming about minutes earlier, that cup of hot coffee swirling up into her nose—

"You have a porcelain mug in the grasp of your magic," she added, ignoring the second tear to flow from her closed eyes. "It’s close, so close you could just lap your tongue out and lick it up, and the sweet, sugary smell of hot chocolate flows into your nose. A fresh flame in your fireplace envelopes the room, basking you in its heat—"

Another outside noise interrupted her hearing, this time one of a contented and bewildered moan—

"Celestia’s sun finally vanishes. The tip seems to burrow into the horizon, and that orange hue starts to fade, as if the warmth of the sun itself is leaving the sky. It grows to a cool pink, and the pink beyond dies down into a cold cobalt shade. Directly above you, the stars begin to emerge, dim specks peppering the dark with an entirely different kind of life. Before long, the horizon on the countryside fades away to the night, and the sky begins to lighten up with a thousand tiny sparks—"

In her vision, the sky followed her words, transforming into a blanket of star-studded cobalt blue, as if Luna herself was tucking in all of Equestria for a night of well-deserved rest—

This time, the tears were welcomed. "The wheat field outside your house begins to glow with a pale white, and your eyes are drawn up. Luna’s moon is settling into the sky to your right, and a halo of light flows around it, like a magnifying lens, shining down on the land and basking it in a dim glow that matches the moon—"

She was barely aware of her horn flaring to life, the flow of magic filtering through like a trickle of warm water as it felt the need to directly simulate the necessary light for the illusion to have its most dramatic and realistic effect. But the end result was breathtaking. Luna’s moon, in her vision, began to radiate with that pale, white light, the kind of light a pony could look at without hurting themselves, and soon enough the imaginary wheat field outside her imaginary window glowed with that same light—

"If you were outside, you could almost feel the moonlight’s cool, refreshing touch upon your coat. The moon seems intent to show beauty and majesty, of both itself and all the lands of Equestria and beyond. To shine a new light on ponies’ lives, a side of themselves they wouldn’t see in the sun. In the sunlight you can see every detail in all its physical beauty, but in the moonlight you can see past it, see the sweat and tears of your hard work that are dried up by the sun. In the moonlight, you can see yourself."

No outside sounds this time. No nothing, in fact. Both of them were lost in their own separate visions.

"You stare out at your field, and the far away fields of your neighbors, and you can feel a sense of balance and harmony between all the fields of the prairie. You feel a unity of peace you can’t describe, and so you just sit on your couch, with that sweet cup of hot chocolate, and stare at the night sky until you’ve sipped the last of the cocoa, its warmth having faded into a watery coolness long ago.

"You let the cup settle down on a table, and cover yourself with a worn, thick blanket. The fleece enhances the heat from the fireplace, and you snuggle into the couch. Luna’s moon shines its light into the living room, lulling you into a well-deserved rest for a day’s hard work. The light is Luna’s promise that no harm will come to her little ponies as they sleep. Her moon is her vigil, its light her shield. You sleep soundly, secure in the thought that you will see the night again…."

The vision began to darken once more. The roaring fireplace, the couch, the empty cup on the coffee table all gave way to the oblivion of darkness….

"….and then you wake up."

With the illusion having run its course, Sling Shot opened her eyes once again, and had the fortune to be staring directly at her little girl as she too was roused from the grips of her imagination…

…and the bewildered stare of wonder in her eyes warmed her insides better than any cup of hot chocolate ever could. The thing was too lost for words right away, but managed enough thought to utter something after a few seconds of staring at her mom with her jaw hanging low.

"….wow….that was just…I never felt anythin’ like that before."

That warmth in her body spread out to her smile as she finally found the strength she needed to get out of bed. "And that, dear, is the thrill that every adventurer strives for."

“You can’t do this.”

The Overmare’s voice sighed, already exhausted from this short argument. “I can, and I have. And as I recall, she quit her assigned job on account of knowing you were never going to allow her out of the gun cage after how she handled Socket.”

Farsight’s face furrowed with silent rage—how he kept it from showing in his voice was beyond her, because she was certain he was absolutely seething at how things were playing out around him. “We do not reward insubordination and callous disregard for a pony’s state of being! She should be disciplined and punished according to our very laws and regulations! You’re the Overmare, for Celestia’s sake—

Mistake, Cloud Wind noted, quietly stepping away from the desk now that he’d made the error. She wanted some distance from what was about to follow.

“That’s right, I’m the Overmare, not you,” the mare’s voice on the other end of the intercom reminded him sharply, dropping all further attempts at politeness and courtesy. “I have decided that in light of her resignation, the manner in which she delivered it to you is conduct unfitting of a security pony and would be grounds for removal from the department regardless. I have also watched nearly everypony she ever knew and trusted turn on her when she was stupid enough to get knocked up at fifteen instead of helping and supporting her. I have kept tabs on how her talents and abilities were utilized within your department and found her time to be grossly wasted on tasks that several of your other subordinates could learn to carry out in-between their patrols. I have found records detailing no less than five submissions on the mainframe from her terminal in the armory requesting to be allowed to assume patrol and security duties of her own when her primary work was completed, and I have found no less than five refusals to such requests from your terminal in your office admonishing her to ‘learn some responsibility first’. Am I missing anything else?”

Farsight’s body trembled slightly behind his desk, his colossal efforts to contain his rage beginning to fail. But still he held his ground, and (perhaps wisely) kept any words he might’ve wanted to shout back in check.

“Between her estrangement from the Stable population and your squirreling her away behind a locked cage for most of her career, quite frankly I’m surprised she didn’t snap sooner. My decision stands. She is re-assigned to the library as Parchment’s assistant and subordinate, and I’ll chalk up her unusual behavior to the stress of over ten years of having everypony accuse her of spreading her legs for a living. Her security clearance was revoked yesterday afternoon, if that makes you feel any better. Compulsory counseling for her anger management issues may be forthcoming if these outbursts prove to be just the first of many, but for now I’m simply hoping that a change in occupation will give her the stress relief she needs. Now stop wasting my time and get back to work, we still have an infestation to clear out and I’m seriously considering a mandatory lockdown by fifteen hundred hours if you can’t give me a solid confirmation that we’re out of danger.”

The intercom crackled off with a sizzling hiss, and it took all of Farsight’s willpower to not transmit the entirety of his rage and embarrassment towards the lone pegasus in front of him. “You’d better have some damn good news for me.”

I am so kicking Sling’s ass the next time I see her. If she hadn’t up and quit on him like she had, these last two days would have gone so much smoother on the pegasus. Without being able to take out his frustration on the unicorn in question, however, he’d settled his rage on the next closest (and in his eyes, responsible) pony to pay for her transgressions.

Her only friend.

“Maintenance is still in shock over Hacket Wrench’s death,” she reported flatly, keeping as much of a neutral tone as possible. Today was not the time to be her usual “bite-back” self. “Particularly after Torque found what was left of him in the vents on level fifteen. I don’t think she’s up to the task of heading her department even if it’s just temporary, maybe Spanner or Sledge sho—“

“Torque’s gonna have to suck it up,” Farsight shot back, turning his attention to a small pile of papers scattered across his desk. “I want to know if they’re any closer to clearing the infestation.”

“They’re working on it—“

Bad thing to say to an impatient and ill-tempered stallion. “They’ve been ‘working on it’ since Monday, they need to work faster!” he roared across the room in fury. “They’re not being paid by the hour!”

“They only have six ponies small enough to fit into the vents and air ducts, and they won’t go in without a security escort,” she countered calmly. Oh ever so calmly. Must not shout, must not yell. “And only four ponies in security are small enough to go in with them. This isn’t a simple process either, it’s slow work and we’ve never had an infestation this bad in the Stable’s history.”

As she expected, her attempts to rationally and logically point out the problems they were encountering in their clean-up fell on mostly deaf ears. “Get back down there and tell the ten that can fit in the vents to start working by themselves. If they split off and put two each to the last five levels we need to search we can finish this up before noon.”

He can’t be serious! “Chief, that puts all of ten of them at incredible risk—“

Farsight had finally had enough of bottling his frustration at the way things had been going down around him, and began to channel it into his voice as he cut her off. “This entire Stable is at risk and I’m done with everypony’s BS! If I didn’t need you you’d have joined your whore of a lover out the door, and you still might if you don’t get to work and get a handle on these damn bugs right now!!”

It took every ounce of her remaining self-control to not leap at him from the other side of the room and do what Sling Shot should have done the other day, even though she knew she would end up regretting it later. But standing in front of the jackass as he slandered her sexual orientation and that of her friend’s in the middle of a security crisis, it was so very, very difficult to want to do anything but drill out the middle of his desk with his own skull.

So she simply turned and quickly saw herself out of his hateful gaze, into the hallway, where she was free to finally let a little bit of anger loose when she saw Lavender and Sunflower waiting for her right beside the door.

“….how’d it go?” Lavender asked meekly, recoiling slightly as the pegasus’s gaze fell upon her.

“How do you think?” Cloud Wind hissed back, stomping past the pastel purple mare as she fell into a quick jog for the elevator at the back end of the level. “He wants our ten tunnel rats to split up and work alone just to keep from being the first security chief in seventy years to have to oversee a Stable-wide lockdown. That idiot’s too pissed at Sling to see the danger he’s putting them in!”

“Some friend, hunh?” Sunflower’s mouth blurted without thinking, and Cloud Wind felt her legs go stiff as she turned her head back to face the pale gold-coated pony in a new, darker light.

“What the hell did you just say to me!?” she snapped at the blubber-mouthed mare, who only now realized the stupidity of what she’d just said.

“…w-wait, forget I said anything, I’m sorry—“

No. No more of this bullshit! “Like hell I’m going to forget!” she hissed quietly, trying her best despite her bubbling anger to keep from drawing a bigger scene through heightened shouting. “You just proved why she quit in the first place, you all treat her like shit to be scrapped off of your hooves!!”

“Well, can you blame anypony?! Whoring around and foaling before she turned sixteen, and then up and quitting on us in the middle of the largest radroach outbreak we’ve seen in a century when we need everypony at their posts the most?! How is that closet nympho still your friend after that?!”

Her anger was subsided—briefly—by Sunflower’s sharp, biting criticism, and even Lavender seemed taken aback by her barbs. “…Sunny, that’s cold, even for you…”

“That “closet nympho” is a better friend to me than you’ve ever been,” Cloud Wind fired back once her fury had returned to her. “And she wasn’t the only one getting some on the side. We all know it.”

“This isn’t about us!” Sunflower bit back sharply, her ears flattening backward in anger. “It’s about our responsibility to the Stable and our duty as security ponies to protect our own and she has never had the stones for this line of work! Why do you think she was stuck with gun cage duty all the time?! She choked and locked herself in her quarters for a month the last time we had an outbreak, or don’t you remember that?!”

“I remember Farsight taking her keys to the armory and locking her in before the rest of us went bug hunting! I remember running my rifle down to two rounds from the forty-nine I had left when we went back to check on her!”

“And do you remember what she did when we broke her out?! She bolted out like a terrified little filly—“

“And ran straight into what was left of Kickstart’s son in the northwest corner of L5!!” she finished for her, to try and drive into this thick, broadsided mare’s skull exactly what that little discovery had done to her friend. “You know, the corner you were supposed to sweep and clear for stray ponies before you joined us in the agri levels?! The corner Sling could have covered for us if she’d been allowed out of the damn armory to begin with?! You remember all the blood we had to scrub off the walls?! You remember how Kickstart cried herself hoarse and near-to-death when we had to break it to her?! You remember why she got she fired from security and is on constant suicide watch even today?!”

Sunflower’s ears stopped flaring back, and began to droop downward in despair. “….he wasn’t even supposed to be there…”

“That’s why we check our patrol coverage areas!” the pegasus continued to tear into her verbal sparring opponent. “To make sure ponies are not in places they aren’t supposed to be in! If you’re going to slam somepony about responsibility you ought to learn some of it yourself! Sling’s only thought after being locked up and stripped of weapons by her boss, nearly swarmed by flesh-eating mutant insects, and falling into an eviscerated colt was to make sure her own daughter hadn’t suffered the same way! She has raised that kid by herself for the squirt’s entire life without complaint! And the worst part of it all is that she tears herself up over Hoofprint and she wasn’t even the one who screwed up! You did!”

By the time she’d run out of breath with her quiet screaming, Sunflower had succumbed to her own shame and guilt, falling onto the floor and breaking out into quiet, gasping sobs. “H….he wasn’t supposed to be there….”

Cloud Wind had not finished with her, but before she could go any further Lavender’s body had made its way between her and the emotionally-broken unicorn, settling a harsh (yet slightly pitied) glare on the raging pegasus. “That’s enough,” the pastel purple mare commanded of her superior. “Or did you forget that we still have a job to do?!”

For the second time this week, Cloud Wind felt a rush of warm blood flow into her cheeks at how quickly she had tossed aside her own duties at the drop of an insult towards her closest friend, and her large reservoir of anger faded back into obscurity.

Is there anypony in security that’s actually fit for the job anymore?

Part of her told her an apology was in order—right or not, she’d gone too far, and it wasn’t supposed to have gotten so out of hand in the first place. And yet she was too ashamed of herself to even contemplate it on a serious level right then.

So the job would become her escape. As usual.

“….get back to L11, see how the sweep is going,” she heard herself say calmly and coolly, as though the last two minutes of her life had not even occurred. “And whatever the chief tells you do not split anypony up to make things go faster. Losing Hacket was bad enough, I don’t wanna see anypony else go before their time. Got it?”

“We’ll get down there as soon as I can get your mess here cleaned up,” Lavender responded coldly, turning her back to the pegasus as she lay down in front of Sunflower. “Maybe you should get going before you say anything else you’ll regret later.”

Cloud Wind was too fed up with herself to bother snapping back at her. She just did exactly as suggested, and left via the quickest manner possible—back towards the elevator at the far back end of the floor, and she barely remembered tapping the button for the fourth floor. She was too distracted by her thoughts and self-pity to care. Five days of twelve-hour shifts with little rest, constant readiness drills and spot checks of air ventilation ducts, hundreds of ponyhours of work meticulously securing each duct, vent, and maintenance tunnel, and what did they have to show for all their efforts to secure the Stable? Hacket dead, Sling on the verge of a mental breakdown, a security chief that was already there, a hundred dead bugs, untold numbers more still in the dark waiting to swarm again and no guarantee they could even find all the nests in time to stop the next outbreak.

This week has been pure shit…

The elevator pinged to a stop the instant the thought came to mind, and Cloud Wind’s musings came to a halt as she galloped out onto the fourth floor. Having memorized the path so many years ago, it had come as something of a natural response anytime things with the chief started getting heavier than she could deal with.

Go straight to his boss. And everyone’s boss, in a sense. The Overmare’s office sat in a corner, at the back end of the floor, which allowed for a more defensible position in the event of an outside invasion or an internal insurrection. And at the moment, it also imparted an overwhelmingly comforting sense of isolation from the rest of the Stable proper, from all the stress and exhaustions of the day. In that office, the familiar hazy cloud of uncertainty and worry was washed away.

She could almost feel like herself again.

As she was wont to do when she was pressed for time, she simply tapped the door open with a push of her snout against the controls and strolled right on through without waiting to be invited in. Fortunately, the Overmare was not a particularly busy pony every day of the week, and had apparently been lounging about on her office couch on her back when Cloud Wind had chosen to pay her a visit.

And when Cloud Wind paid a visit, there was usually only one topic that was ever discussed.

“….oh, in the name of Celestia what’s your problem this time?” the Overmare muttered bitterly at having her R&R time interrupted. “I just talked to him, I know he’s angry—“

“He’s not thinking rationally,” Cloud Wind answered immediately, wanting to get this unpleasant business over with. She’d never quite brought up a complaint this serious before…and if it backfired she probably would end up fired and re-assigned to janitor detail for the rest of her natural days. “He just ordered me to split up the ten ponies on our sweep team clearing the Stable of radroach nests. Two per floor for the last five levels we’ve still got to search, and he specifically told me that if they worked by themselves they could finish the search before noon.”

This got the Overmare’s attention. She quickly rolled herself over in the couch until she was back upright with her legs back beneath her body, her disappointment replaced with worry and concern. “….that’s insane, that would leave them dangerously alone in extremely cramped conditions if they run into trouble in those vents. He made those safety protocols after the last outbreak, for Luna’s sake. He can’t be that upset at Sling Shot.”

“I doubt that she’s the sole stress factor, even if he won’t stop screaming about her and her “whoring” ways. He lost Hacket on his watch, we’re in the worst radroach outbreak we’ve seen in the Stable’s history, and now you’ve told him you may be implementing the first mandatory security lockdown in seven decades and he’ll have to oversee it if it comes to it. His efforts to try and keep from bullying ponies into their quarters may just end up getting some of them killed.”

“….that again,” the Overmare mumbled softly, mostly to herself.

“I know it’s not pleasant, but it’s better than speeding up our sweep and risking us missing a nest—“

“I meant Bookie,” the earth pony mare corrected quickly, raising her head up from the cushion it had been resting on moments earlier. “Gods alive, it was just one night with her coltfriend from school, and we all know she wasn’t the only one in class doing it! How did everypony end up thinking she’s some kind of…prostitute?! I don’t think she’s touched anypony ever since she got pregnant! And it’s not like the kid’s doing that much damage, if anything she could be the youngest filly to ever take the G.O.A.T. exam if Amethyst’s reports are even halfway true. What happened here? Who started it?!”

“I couldn’t tell you that,” Windy replied, slightly confused as to the sudden change of topic. And on the use of Sling’s old nickname, to boot. She didn’t think anypony else even remembered her real name anymore. “That’s something she won’t tell even to me. And her parents have been virtually silent anytime their own daughter’s name comes up. It’s like she’s dead to them.”

The Overmare’s face kept its collected calm, unwavering and unflinching even in the midst of such an emotive subject. “….I’m beginning to have my doubts about initiating Selection. If this Stable of ponies is the best we can do after two centuries, then maybe we need to decide if we deserve to re-join the surface at all.”

Before today, Cloud Wind would have been horrified sick to hear the Overmare say anything of the sort. Before today, she would have physically recoiled from her, desperate to escape the range of her poisonous voice and spread the word to the Stable at large that their futures were not quite as secure as they’d thought.

Before today, she’d never been called a whoring lesbian to her face, either.

So all she could think to ask, was….

“Why, then?” she dared to ponder aloud. “Why did you start a generational tradition twenty-odd years early? What do you know that the rest of us don’t?”

“I explained that Monday evening when I made the announcement,” the Overmare rebuffed quickly. “We have the supplies to last now, but thirty years in the future that could be a different story. The sooner we find out what happened to the world above, the sooner we can we start planning about our Stable’s future. But I’m wondering now if we’d just re-introduce the same poison that killed Equestria That Was if we left.”

“What, the arcane-powered technology that gave us the megaspells and the spark generators?”

“That would’ve come in time no matter what. I’m talking about us. We used to live in harmony with each other. Now we can’t even go a week without breaking down into heated arguments with each other. Living with others is not easy, but we never killed. We never sold ourselves for a price, we never intentionally hurt others out of rage and hate, or for our own sick and twisted pleasures. We were never this…this ugly, inside. What happened to us?”

….wow, that was actually a good question, Cloud Wind had to admit after she’d taken a few seconds to try and find a quick response, and found herself wanting. A good, deep question. What happened indeed…

“If we knew the answer, our ancestors wouldn’t have spent the last two centuries living in a fallout shelter, would they?”

Now the Overmare’s face finally began to crack apart, her eyes softening and furrowing into a wistful, sad stare. “….no, I suppose not….go on back to work, forget whatever the chief told you, just make sure we don’t lose anoth—“

The room was plunged into a darkness of endless oblivion before she could finish, the steady hum of the environmental unit dying down into silence alongside it. In its place, a dull red haze of light began to brighten up the room, but it did little to ease either of their fears.

If anything, they only felt worse.

“….oh shit, the emergency lighting this time, not the back-ups….”

They’d barely finished breakfast when darkness claimed the room for itself. The alluring touch of the light was extinguished, plunging both freshly-washed ponies into momentary blindness.

“…..oh, wonderful,” Light Tail’s voice quipped dryly. “Because once this week was just not enough to scare the hair off a pony’s tail.”

“Twice, actually,” Sling amended politely, tendrils of magic already coming alive within her horn and coalescing into the tip in a concentration of energy. “The second time was the morning you got hurt. The bugs came out not long after.”

“….oh….”

When the last of the needed mana had been compacted into the tip of her horn, she turned her mental focus into bringing the spell to life, packing it into a perfect sphere and allowing it to activate at about two-thirds of its normal power. The washroom interior soon lit up with the bright white glow of her illumination spell, spilling its reach outward until it touched upon the couch in the living room.

“Might as well settle in and find a book or something,” she sighed disappointedly. “We could be in here awhile.”

She needn’t have bothered with the suggestion—Light Tail had already hopped off of her chair and quickly trotted over to the bookcase in the living, stopping only long enough to rear up on her hind legs and pull her desired tome from the shelf with her teeth before continuing on to her favored nesting spot on the couch. “At least we got light. Hard to read in the dark—“

The filly’s words stopped mid-sentence as she flipped the book open to where the bookmark had been set, her eyes beginning to stare into the pages in relief rather than anticipation. “…..aaah, right where I left off Wednesday afternoon, I think. Guess I didn’t get through twenty-seven after all.”

That’s a rather odd reaction to a bookmark reminder. “And you’re relieved…why?”

“’Cause I was afraid I’d actually read through it and didn’t remember, just like everything else about Wednesday night and Thursday morning,” she sighed as her eyes began to flitter back and forth, dancing across the words in the pages. “Kinda comforting to find something right where I last remember leaving it. Is this memory loss gonna be permanent?”

“….probably,” Sling decided to reply after a brief pause, her eyes scouring the ceiling vents for signs of loose screws or slightly jostled gratings. Something that she neglected to do Thursday morning, thinking they were fine as they were. She wouldn’t make that mistake twice. “It’s possible you might start to recall some pieces here and there, but most of it is probably gone for good.”

“….great,” the little one huffed back, torn between her own lingering despair over her memory gap and her desire to escape it by diving into the book’s pages. “’Cause now I’m kinda hopin’ I might remember why Jam was in the washroom on our side instead of hers Wednesday night. I get this ugly feeling in my gut that it’s something important, but I can’t remember! I hate bugs!”

“Join the club, squirt,” Sling muttered back absently, that cold, creepy itch beginning to seep through her spine again. While the vent gratings were well and truly secured, she couldn’t help but notice that the back-up system for the lights still hadn’t kicked in, even after thirty seconds. They remained dark and lifeless, with no hint as to why they were refusing to even sparkle dimly as they normally did on back-up power.

Her half-hearted comment didn’t go unnoticed…and neither did her observation of the lights. Within a few moments, Light Tail had taken her attention away from The Mare of the Everfree to see what it was that had her mother’s attention, and it didn’t take her very long to reach the same conclusion. “….shouldn’t the back-up systems have kicked in by now?”

By Luna’s moon, why does she have to be so smart all the time?! “Power’s been a pain all week,” she tried to lie, knowing it was likely for naught but hoping it might work anyway. “The back-up system’s been turned on twice this week, it might just be taking longer to kick in this time.”

“….mom, the back-ups are charged by the generator,” the filly replied with a touch of nervousness. “Even I know that.”

Left with no other plausible excuses for why the back-up lighting had failed to work as designed, Sling could only watch on in growing horror as another sign of foreboding doom began to appear. The innocuous oval-shaped light bulbs imbedded along the top of the ceiling began to glow red, quickly bathing the room in a terrifying crimson and bleeding into the natural white light of her hovering illumination spell. Her legs began to feel like icicles, her brain no longer capable of assuring itself that everything would be all right in the end.

“….oh shi—“ she almost squeaked, catching her tongue at the last moment before the curse could be completed. “….the tertiary lights…”

The red lights began to pulse, growing brightest at the top of their rhythm before fading backwards into a dim glow and then repeating the cycle in a four-second cycle.

Very, very bad news. And her night light was observant enough of her mother’s reaction to realize just how bad it was.

“….m-mom, what are we supposed to do?” Light Tail stammered, shutting her book and sliding off the couch. “W-we never talked about this…”

What are we supposed to do? Sling repeated the question to herself, finding some small comfort and certainty of self in having to focus on the request. First off….

“…come with me,” she said with a calm she didn’t feel, quickly trotting back towards her room and now thanking herself for leaving the door open. Light Tail’s tiny hoofsteps were much easier to pick out behind her now that the environmental systems weren’t running, softly compressing the carpet beneath her with each hurried movement. She pulled her illumination spell along with them, tugging it with a mindlessly chanted telekinesis spell and throwing it out ahead of her until it illuminated the entirety of her room.

She spotted her set of saddlebags piled against the far right corner just after passing through the doorway and, uttering a silent rebuke at herself for praying she’d never need them in the first place, began to pull them towards her with a pull of her magic.

“Come on up here and stand still for a minute,” she said, taking extra careful note not to accidently swing the barrel of the holstered revolvers anywhere near herself or El-Tee. “This may be a little heavy.”

El-Tee’s body, which had been moving along at a consistent pace, stopped dead-still two feet in front of her when her eyes fell upon the massive frame of Grayhawk resting in its holster and began to back away from the saddlebags. “W-whoa whoa Mom wait a tic, what are you doing?!”

“Just stay still,” she pleaded in vain, separating her saddlebags from her child’s and slowly floating the smaller set out towards the filly.

“Not until you tell me what you’re doing!” El-Tee screeched back, quickening her retreat from the saddlebags and their holstered sidearms. “It looks like you’re planning on leaving the Stable!!”

Frag me, how does she do this?! “I just want us to be prepared if we have to!” she shouted back, fighting back her own fear to avoid scaring her child any more than she already had. “I didn’t say anything about that being my first choice!”

“But you’ve thought enough about it to have this stuff ready ahead of time!” Light Tail continued to protest. Having run out of room to retreat, she began to resort to physically pushing the saddlebags away from her with her forelegs each time they drew close to her. “I know you hate it down here sometimes but this is ridiculous—“

The unspoken accusation cut through her wavering calm and began to sting her in ways she’d never thought her daughter could inflict upon her. “I never planned on leaving!!” she screamed in a burst of anger. “I don’t hate it here, I hate all the stupid ponies around me that cut me off from them for something that happened eleven years ago!!”

Her brief snit fit made it hard for her to feel sorry for being so hateful towards her little girl, and she would count herself forever lucky that Light Tail didn’t seem to take much offense over it. “Does it have anything to do with what Sun Star said to me last week? When he followed me all the way to the filly’s room and roughed me up and called me a mistake? Said somethin’ about you being a slut and a dirty whore? ‘Cause I’m gettin’ this ugly feelin’ this is a conversation we’ve had before and I don’t remember it.”

Sling’s hate crashed in an instant, overwhelmed with flashbacks of the last conversation they’d had on the subject Thursday morning and her fervent belief that it would be something they wouldn’t go through ever again. She was growing torn between bawling her eyes out and trying to find some way out of this mess that didn’t involve transmitting over a decade’s worth of bottled emotions onto a filly that hadn’t done a damn thing to deserve any of it.

“….I….I’m sorry,” she gasped through a choked sob. “I’m sorry you had to hear that…..but this isn’t—“

“It is,” the stern-faced filly snapped back, taking an unusually combative approach. “It is the time, and it is my business. Sun Star didn’t come up with those things, he’s just repeatin’ whatever he’s heard grown-up ponies call you to your face or behind your back. And I bet it’s gotten so bad that you packed these things for us so that we could leave if the chance ever came up, even if you don’t know it yet.”

Why, Luna? she cried to herself, staring down at her daughter through slightly blurry eyes. Why is my daughter, the end result of my screwing around that’s gotten me so shunned, one of the only two ponies that care what happens to me?

“I don’t know what those words mean, and I don’t wanna know if they hurt that much,” El-Tee went on when her mother could only stare back in teary silence. “I do know that when this is over you’re gonna talk to somepony. Me, Aunt C, that scary shrink at the medical ward, whatever, but yer keepin’ all that hate inside and it ain’t healthy. I…I don’t want anypony taking you away ‘cause they think you’re not doin’ well….ya just blew yer top at me, that ain’t like you at all…”

Now she’d begun to realize what she’d done, and she couldn’t bear to relive it or remember it in any great detail. Her little girl…wasn’t quite as little as she’d seemed moments earlier. Was she growing up that fast? Or simply smart enough to see what her mother had been denying even to herself?

She could, at least, bear to look at her, at the saner voice of the two in the room at that moment, and declare to herself that for all the bad that had come out of that night of careless sex, it at least had given her her night light. She was a blessing—one she’d go back and have again if given a chance to go through that night again, just to have somepony in her life that cared this much.

She couldn’t decide if that was pathetic, sick, or heartwarming.

“….won’t be you,” she whispered in the silent, red-hued room. “Don’t think you’re ready for that talk yet…but I’ll talk to somepony, at least.”

El-Tee’s serious face finally began to disappear from her cheeks, and she pressed her small frame against her mother in a quick hug. “…I’ll take that. Now c’mon, what are we supposed to do now?”

Still broken up over how she’d blown up at her daughter half a minute ago, she no longer tried to whitewash or gloss over what she’d been preparing for. “In about a minute we’re going to hear a pre-recorded message over the PA system,” she answered softly, bringing the small set of saddlebags back towards them. “It’s tied into the tertiary emergency systems. We have fifteen minutes to get to one of four designated safe zones in the Stable—the agri rooms, the auditorium, the medical ward, or the library. After that, the environmental control systems will start to suck all the oxygen out of the Stable outside the safe zones. Anything outside a safe zone will be suffocated.”

She felt Light Tail’s body go stiff with fear at the information she’d just been given, and she began to eye the saddlebags with apprehension. “….s-so….if we don’t make it….does that mean you know a way out anyway?”

“….through the Overmare’s office,” she answered, bidding her offspring to let go of her with a gentle prod of her foreleg. “There’s an escape shaft underneath her desk that leads up to the surface level. It’s the only way we can reach it in time if we don’t make it into one of the safe zones on level seven. That’s why I kept these saddlebags ready when we first got news of the outbreak, in case something like this happened. If we have to take our chances on the surface I want us prepared.”

Light Tail eyed the filly-sized saddlebags and strappings with wide, wild eyes, her mane and tail shaking slightly as her body began to react to the possibility that her life could be a very short one if things didn’t go exactly as her mother had planned. “….fine. Just hurry up. I cost us enough time as it is.”

In truth, she had, but Sling wasn’t going to be so cruel as to say something like that now, not after how she’d just behaved towards her. She floated the saddlebags up and over the filly’s back, settling it down gently and then pulling the strappings down her sides and underneath her belly until she’d secured them in place. A quick nudge test with her forelegs budged the saddlebags only slightly, and after a second adjustment of the strappings the set refused to move at all.

With that task done, she set to work securing her own saddlebags to her person, grunting slightly as she found the additional weight dragging down along her back and sides to be greater than she remembered it being the last time she’d tried the things on. Either she was getting out of shape (very likely), or she was mistaken about how heavy the things were to start with. Her stable suit at least made for a good cushion between herself and the security straps encircling her body, and the weight of Grayhawk along her left side was unexpectedly comforting despite its overkill factor.

And she still had to force herself to take several steady breaths to calm her nerves enough to even speak.

“O-okay, let’s go,” she squeaked, willing her body to move out of her bedroom one leg at a time. “Library, just one level up—“

The PA speakers embedded into every room and hallway in the Stable crackled to garbled life with the subtlety of a drunken bear in a china shop, causing her to leap in place for about two feet before coming back down on her hooves—

“ATTENTION STABLE ONE-ONE-FIVE RESIDENTS,” a computer-generated female voice blared out, its ghostly voice echoing throughout the metal corridors as it slowly sounded off its pre-recorded warning of doom. “EMERGENCY PROTOCOL “LS” HAS BEEN INITIATED. ALL RESIDENTS HAVE FIFTEEN MINUTES TO REACH A DESIGNATED SAFE ZONE. PLEASE PROCEED TO A DESIGNATED SAFE ZONE IN AN ORDERLY FASHION. MESSAGE REPEATS—“

“Gah!” El-Tee screeched in surprise, her forelegs clamping over her ears to deafen the noise level. “So loud—“

She’d barely had time to complain before her stressed-out mom threw out her hearing protection spell, and that high-pitched robotic voice stopped scratching the inside of her ears out. Now everything was only slightly less bad. At least they could walk to the library without wishing for earplugs.

Not wanting to waste any more time than she already had, she quickly trotted out of Mom’s room and towards the door to the hallway, taking a moment to swing by the coffee table and pluck The Mare of the Everfree off the surface and stuff it inside the saddle….ba….

….oh, wow! That’s neat! she wanted to squeal in delight at the sight of the inside of the bag on her left side. She’d thought the bags had some sort of powerful magic enchantment to them, the way her horn was tingling through her head, but looking right in it was something else! She swore she could see a ton of stuff crammed in there! Dull-looking olive drab packages the size of granola bars labeled “MRE”, a map and compass, two or three small tool kits, a first aid kit, some water canteens and funny looking tablets, a flashlight, some healing potions, bars of soap…a pony could live off the land for a couple of months with this stuff! And the bedroll resting atop her loin was probably about her size, or bigger. The only thing this saddlebag set was missing was a saddle to go across her back so that the bedroll wouldn’t roll forward, but it was strapped down pretty tight and there was a good-sized stretch of hard leather to cover her back and sides anyway, so no biggie. She wished she’d actually had her stable suit on, though. She never liked it, but the cloth would have made all the straps more bearable.

And for all the stuff in the bag she could see, it didn’t feel as heavy as it probably should. She was willing to bet there was more of this stuff inside the right bag. She was so going to get Mom to explain how come she had all this stuff. It had to be enchanted to feel as light as it did. How much more could a pony stuff in these things—

Oops, getting sidetracked, she realized, and stuffed the book inside the bag and snapped it shut with a hoof before her thoughts got any further. Safe zone now, bug Mom later.

As quickly as she’d thought of her, Mom came strolling past her, her magic stuffing a book of her own to read inside her left bag and snapping the one on her right shut with a solid click of the button clasp. “When I open the door, stay as close to me as you can, and try to keep up,” Mom commanded…or tried to, anyway. She was still shook up from that harsh talk she’d had to give (to her MOM of all ponies), and she felt bad about having to talk to her like that, but she needed some sense slapped into her. She was gonna snap, and then they’d take her away and she’d never see her again….

No! No, Mom’s not gonna snap. You got Aunt C to promise to talk to her, and you got Mom to promise to talk to somepony, it’s gonna work out! Mom’s gonna get some help and she’ll feel better, and she’ll love her new job in the library and I’ll love her new job at the library holy Luna I wish I hadn’t messed the place up now—

Mom’s horn began to glow with the shade of her coat, quickly tearing off a section of the wall next to the doorway before enveloping a hand crank sitting in the recessed, hidden compartment, and began to tug at it with all the effort she could muster in her telekinesis. With each pull of the crank, the door would shift upwards about three inches or so, and then stop. Within a minute there was enough room for both of them to pass through comfortably—

—and Mom broke off into a sharp, quick trot, forcing the filly to gallop along behind just to stay within three feet of her like she wanted. Well, okay, maybe not three feet but Mom said ‘stay close’ and three feet was pretty close, so three feet it was. And if Mom hadn’t thought to keep pulling her light spell along with them she’d have lost her if she’d strayed any further than that. She’d never seen the halls like this before! She was so used to the white light that she could hardly see the walls in the pale red emergency lighting that now lined the ceiling. It glowed and paled in long, predictable pulses, the shadows receding in its reach and growing back in force when the red light retreated and dimmed into barely-noticeable dots inside the large, oval-shaped bulbs along the wall. She could count down to the quarter-second exactly how long each pulse lasted, and how long it would take to cycle back and forth between bright and nearly dead.

It was the only sane, calm thing she would ever see in the Stable that day.

The pair had barely made it past the western-side washroom when Mom’s body jerked to a halt, her head swiveling around and seemingly studying the walls around them, her ears twitching at the distant touch of scratchy clicking sounds bouncing down the halls….and then swiftly pulling a big revolver from its holster near her left saddlebag.

“M-mom, wait—“ she started to say, to try and calm her mother down before she could start shooting at things that weren’t really there—

“Stay close,” Mom snapped sharply, a slight rattle in her voice as she began moving forward again in slow, cautious steps, her head continuing to jerk from side to side. “They’re loose in here again.”

“….loose? What’s loose?”

“Radroaches,” Mom answered, taking her attention off the walls just long enough to fiddle with a dial on her PipBuck. “That sound….like hooves scratching at a chalkboard….”

El-Tee’s heart began to have trouble working properly—beat, beat, a pause, beat beat beat, pause. Her brain had to fight to string enough words together into a coherent question. “…w-where?”

“Not sure,” Mom heaved with a heavy sigh, slinging her body around ninety degrees to face down an adjacent hallway as they strode into an intersection. “I don’t wanna find out either, let’s just get to the library.”

Moving forward with shaky, hollow legs was beginning to make her feel like a foal learning to walk, but somehow she still managed to get one hoof out in front of another in a continuing drive forward, despite the chill touch of terror in her lungs. “No argument here—“

A sharp, chest-pounding bang rang out into the hallways, amplified by the metal walls, and if not for Mom’s spell she was almost certain her ears would have been ringing from it. An animalistic, shrill screech managed to follow along behind the sound of the loud bang for a moment before several more of the bangs cut it off in a rapid rat-tat-tat. She heard three more such bursts of bangs before she figured out what she was hearing.

Gunfire. And only then did she start to hear screams.

“Oh gods they’re here!” a mare’s shriek cried out from around a corner, or maybe even from a hall two hundred feet away. Voices could carry quite a ways through a Stable corridor. “We’re cut off—“

“No we’re not, we just need to keep moving forward!” a stallion’s voice boomed back, desperate to maintain calm in the presence of uncalm things. “The stairs are only fifty yards down the hall, we can make it—“

Another burst of gunfire, this time from somewhere off to her right and much closer, and when she looked down the hall she could see bright, blinding flashes of yellow lighting up the wall of an adjacent parallel hallway, and a broken silhouette of an earth pony inside each flash—

A third burst, from somewhere behind them, but in a much more uncontrolled fashion. It lasted at least two and a half seconds, and she wasn’t quite sure but she thought she could hear a stallion crying out in broken gasps of terror amidst the gunfire.

Another short burst echoed into the walls as Mom’s voice began to resemble that terrified mare’s. “H-honey….don’t….don’t freeze. Keep moving, quick as you can.”

El-Tee jerked her gaze back to her mother, to the mare she’d held up as a pedestal she could lean on if things got really bad….and saw a pony that offered a mirror image of her own fear. Her body seemed to tremble in short fits, her eyes kept darting back and forth inside their sockets in search of anything that wanted her as a meal, her tail swished and jerked in an erratic pattern, and her rapid breathing made her coat and muscles seem to ripple across her body.

Mom wasn’t taking this any better than she was.

Gunfire. Then muzzle flashes so large and bright that they lit up entire halls. Ponies beginning to stream out of their quarters and right into the crossfire of terrified security officers with full automatic weapons. That horrible, endless shrieking of radroaches and their disgusting array of legs digging into the floor as they swarmed out from whatever dark crevice they’d been nesting in. She knew what she looked like to her little girl against all that—scared senseless, hyperventilating, terrified of the dark and expecting the shadows to grow and latch into her coat. And it was all true.

It was also true that the fear of seeing Light Tail even slightly bitten by the nasty things was the only thing keeping her from shutting down completely like she nearly had the other morning. All she had to do to keep some sense of order to herself was to imagine the sight of her filly in the same shape she’d found Hoofprint, and the heartbreak that tugged at the inside of her chest would spur her into making sure she never, ever had to feel anything like that again.

She didn’t want to end up like Kickstart.

.44 Mag being far too loud and powerful for the bugs they were facing, she slid Grayhawk back into her holster and went for the .357 on Light Tail’s saddlebags instead, along with the speedloaders stuffed into a pouch right beside the small revolver. “Do you understand?” she called out to her child, instantly admonishing herself at how panicked she sounded in the process. Idiot don’t shriek like that—

A quick push of the cylinder release button unlocked it from the frame, and she counted off five .357 rounds in all five chambers before Light Tail could get her mouth to answer. “….do you?”

Buck me, she’s about to freeze—

“Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway,” she blurted, latching onto the only response she could think of in such short notice. “….’least that what Windy told me. I don’t care if you’re ready to pee all over the floor, but we have to get moving. I don’t wanna lose you…”

That seemed to get the little one moving again. She even went so far as to nuzzle her mother’s side as she drew close, as if hoping the contact would bring her enough courage and comfort to do what she was asked. “....just don’t get away from me.”

Better, she sighed in relief, finding a strange sense of security in her daughter’s touch that calmed her breathing a little. “…try to keep up, stairs are close. We’ll just shoot straight up to L7, we’ll be in the library in about three minutes if we don’t stop. Okay?”

“The sooner, the better.”

She expected her legs to procrastinate or lock up on her, keeping her pinned to the floor and fighting to get herself moving, but amazingly enough they actually began to move and speed up into a light jog without too much effort. She could have gone much faster, but she didn’t want to outrun El-Tee and moving slower would let her see danger and still have enough control to avoid it. And if she couldn’t, the .357 was more than enough for a radroach.

The stairs she sought were at the north end of the level, necessitating a trip down at least one of the leftward corridors in order to reach it, but with her EFS so flooded with red marks and locator tags it was impossible to sort them out and guess at which one had the fewest threats. She settled for the very next turn down the hallway, slipping around the corner and flinging her light spell out ahead of her to chase away the darkness.

Thankfully, no bugs. And at the end of the hall was a straight path to the stairway—

“ATTENTION, STABLE ONE-ONE-FIVE RESIDENTS,” the manufactured mare’s voice chimed soullessly. “YOU NOW HAVE TWELVE MINUTES TO REACH A DESIGNATED SAFE ZONE—“

A four-shot burst of rifle fire finished the PA’s countdown to doom, and a pair of high-pitched chirps curled the hair of her mane up on end—

—and the hair of her tail followed with it when she reached the end of the hall and ran smack into a throng of radroaches fearlessly advancing against a lone unicorn stallion and his 5.56mm rifle, his magic desperately trying to clear the ejection port of a stovepipe jam—

—Sling’s magic reached out to his web gear belt, unlatching the 10mm pistol from its holster and flicking the safety off before she began to squeeze off carefully aimed shots as quickly as she could manage. After four shots and two dead radroaches, he’d finally fixed his rifle and resumed his shooting, sweeping the weapon from side to side in hopes of catching at least one bug with each spray of bullets—

“Idiot, use the sights!!” she screeched at him over the gunshots as she let loose with two more shots, taking out one bug with a headshot and another with a shot that buried itself inside the bug’s body. “Misses are nothing but loud noises!!”

But he didn’t listen—or more likely, firing at least two magazines’ worth of high-velocity slugs in such a confined and amplifying environment had temporarily deafened him. He continued to spray his shots about with little concern for proper aiming, missing far more often than not. It took a firm hold of her own telekinesis spell to bring the rifle’s sights out in front of his eyes before he even knew there was another pony behind him, and his body jerked in place at the sudden intrusion to his personal space.

“Line the sights!!” she screamed into his right ear, quickly trotting up next to him and demonstrating with careful use of the 10mm pistol’s sights to take out two more bugs eighteen yards away. “Squeeze, aim, squeeze, repeat!! You’re hitting nothing but air with that crap you’re pulling!!”

She felt his spell field attempt to overpower hers, and she dialed her spell back to its previous range and allowed him to resume his firing. To her relief, he began to take more careful deliberation with his shots, allowing only two or three rounds per aimed burst before tracking onto another target. Though the swarm of bugs drew closer with each step, their numbers were quickly dwindling, and the pair were able to finish them off just as the last two had gotten within lunging distance.

The 10mm now at slide lock, she punched the mag release and let the empty magazine clatter to the floor as she yanked a fresh one off the stallion and slapped it into the grip—

“H-holy sh….hoo man I need a minute,” the stallion began to blubber helplessly, his shaking body beginning to sink to the floor as he laid his rifle down in front of him. “Need a minute gotta breath—“

“Reload while you’re breathing,” she snapped back, flicking the safety back on and stuffing his pistol back in its holster as she eyed the three empty rifle magazines littered amongst the slain bug carcasses. “And don’t fire in full-automatic, you’re wasting ammo and putting ponies at risk with every shot you don’t hit with.”

“Y-y-yeah, sure thing,” he stammered with heavy breaths, now tasking himself with fighting the magazine out of the mag well and exchange it with a fresh one. “N-not a problem, breathe, dude, breathe, reload, breathe…”

Light Tail had been content to simply follow along behind her mother, but the sight of a grown stallion shaking like a leaf before her proved too tempting a prank target to pass up, even at a time like this. The little one inched to within three a few centimeters of his ears and eyed him with a critical, careful gaze for a few moments before launching her assault. “….you want to bake me a plate of homemade cookies for dinner.”

“S-sure thing, whatever you say….”

Light Tail’s dead-pan face broke into a fit of barely-contained laughter as she trotted away from the suggestion-prone security pony, and even Sling found herself choking back a snort at the sight. “Wow, you could tell him anything you wanted and he’ do it,” the filly laughed quietly. “Can we keep him?”

Her choked snort became a nose-bursting chuckle, eliciting a jolt out of the stallion as she turned back down the hall and made a run for the stairway door. “No. You don’t want Flashlight, you don’t know where he’s been.”

“We could clean him up,” El-Tee suggested with a squeal, gleefully hopping over a pile of dead radroaches as she went. “Get him straightened up and back on his hooves, maybe tie a bow in his tail!”

More gunfire erupted from the halls of level eight as they reached the stairwell and began the short flight up to level six, and the brief joy and elation over the jesting died as quickly as the sound faded. She wanted to feel ashamed for even making light of Flashlight’s turmoil to begin with. “….let’s just get to the library. We’ll worry about Flashlight later.”

She could barely hear the bolt of his rifle clacking shut in the hall as she ascended the first flight of stairs and bounded over to the next set with nary a lost step.

The way Mom just talked made her feel like she’d just done something she shouldn’t have, and she had a pretty good idea what it was. She hadn’t meant to put Flashlight down, but she wanted Mom thinking about something other than just having faced off with death and chaos without going mad, and making her laugh at something seemed like a good idea. Now she wished she hadn’t said anything.

Without another word she followed her mother up through the stairs, glancing back down behind them every fifth step to make sure the bugs weren’t following them, or that a throng of terrified ponies weren’t going to trample them in a mad dash for safety. It would have sucked to have come all the way up just to get squished from behind at the library door.

She amended her definition of “sucked” the second they reached the seventh floor and dashed out into the hallway. She’d thought things were bad when they came out of quarters, but it turned out she knew nothing of bad.

Things were even worse up here. The gunfire was constant now—short bursts like what she heard back on level eight, as well as single shots, and those bug chirps were like a choir, always shrieking and crying either at each other or as they died where ponies were shooting them.

And the ponies themselves….so many were shouting at each other, scared to death as they piled up into the corridors and tried to squeeze themselves through. Others were just screaming wordlessly, likely lost or cornered….or worse. The constant flashes of yellow and gunfire weren’t helping her night vision, nor were the strobing pulses of red light. In fact, it was starting to scare her. It was like the Stable itself was panicking.

She didn’t even hear Mom talking to her until one of her forelegs began to shake her loose from her stunned stupor. “—ey, I’m right here! Do you hear me, I’m right here!!”

“I…I’m here,” Light Tail heard herself gasp back, desperately trying to blink away the sights before her despite the knowledge that she wasn’t having a nightmare. “….in denial, but I’m here…”

“We’ll make it,” Mom assured her in the best, soothing voice she could muster, which was not really that soothing or collected, but at least she was trying. “Just—“

A pony’s screaming somewhere to their right began to grow louder, and closer, and Light Tail’s head naturally followed the screams. But that wasn’t what stopped her heart and lungs cold.

It was the four radroaches clinging to his body, chomping away at his neck and sides as he tripped on his own hooves and collapsed to the floor. And even as Mom raced past her and began flinging the nasty things off with telekinesis spells, a cold, ugly part of her gut told her that it was probably too late. And she couldn’t look away.

It happened so fast. Mom was tearing the bugs off and blasting them in mid-air with her pistol, but the pony was choking and gurgling, unable to talk through his neck wound, and the blood just started to pour out and bubble inside the ragged, bloody hole….

Mom was shouting at him as she wiped the last bug out of existence with a single blast from her gun, shouting and trying to plug that hole in his neck with a hoof, then with a torn piece of his stable suit, trying to stop the blood flow, trying something, while she just stood there frozen to the floor and staring at the blood—

Now Mom was jumping over him, hooked one leg over his neck wound and pulling at his stable suit with her teeth to tear more pieces of cloth for some kind of bandage. Her gun floated out past them, fired one more time, a huge tongue of flame spouting out of the barrel on the second shot—

She was saying something, to somepony. Maybe the stallion, maybe her, may—

Maybe I should just do something instead of standing here!

Without being bidden or commanded, the filly dashed forward, biting down on her tongue to choke back a gag as her forehooves came down on the stallion’s wound. A thin spurt of blood curled out from its depths and splattered her face, but also showed her where best to put on the pressure to cut down the blood flow—

—his body began to lift up off the floor, enveloped in Mom’s levitation spell, and it became a struggle to keep the pressure applied to his bleeding neck as she hopped backwards on her hind legs, pulling his floating body along with her. Her tail began to swish back and forth to help maintain her balance, but it would have been a lot easier if Mom would just help her out a little—

“Turn left!” Mom shouted, just as a metallic object clicked into place—

—she jerked her body around to her left without even looking behind her, thankfully running into little more than more open hallway—

—her hindquarters bumped right into a pony’s legs in the next moment, and despite everything that was happening all around her, she felt an immense rush of relief flow into her limbs at the sound of Aunt C’s voice. “Hey El-oooooh hell what happened to him?!”

That relief gave her back her voice, for the moment. “Hurt bad!” she shouted back as the pegasus began to shove her way through the filly’s front legs to see the injury for herself. “Real bad, bugs got all over him—“

Mom’s gun went off again, but with so many bugs chirping and shrieking and stuff, it was hard to tell if she’d killed one or not. She fired again as she came into view in the hallway, walking backwards and keeping the gun aimed out ahead of her—

“Sling, get Ballast to the medical ward!” Aunt C hollered out, brushing against the stallion’s body as she zipped out past her and took her mother’s place in the hall. “I got these ugly mothers—“

Whatever else Aunt C had to say was lost in a blaze of gunfire that erupted from a rifle mounted to the side of her saddle. She couldn’t tell how she was even shooting it, but she had this funny looking rein and bit stuck in her mouth that seemed to hook up to the mounting point that held her rifle—

—Mom’s spell field began to grow stronger, the telltale touch of her telekinesis spell pressing down on her hooves, and she drew her forelegs back onto the ground and let the spell take over the work of keeping pressure on the wound. Mom had no trouble keeping the stallion in tow as she took off down the hall as fast as she could safely manage, and the filly did her best to keep up. That little body chemical called adrenaline was a great boost, she didn’t know she could run this fast.

They had to weave their way through a smorgasbord of ponies crammed against each other a couple of times, and even leapt over another pair that had tripped over themselves in their mindless panic, but in short order they found themselves standing behind the crowd of ponies trying to force their way into the medical ward (as opposed to calmly filing inside in a dignified manner like the PA was asking them to), and Mom got the stallion past them by simply shoving them all apart from each other with a quick extension of her telekinesis spell before zipping inside—

“I got injured!” she screamed out on her way in, floating the stallion out in front of her, who by now was beginning to look less….alive. Still breathing, but barely, and the reception hall was stuffed full of hurt souls. None quite as bad as Mom’s haul, though. “Deep neck wound, pulse is dropping—“

Nurse Tender Mane happened to be the one trying to sort through all the injured when Mom burst in, and the white-coated unicorn mare wasted no time shifting her attention to the new patient being delivered to her. She rushed towards Mom and took a quick peek at the stallion, pressing one of her forehooves against his neck for a couple of seconds, and then reached out to a waiting stretcher shoved up against the reception desk and pulled it towards her. “Get him on the gurney and keep pressure on the wound. We’ll take him right to the ER.”

Mom’s resolve started to fade, probably at the thought of being pulled away from her, and she started to say as much. “Wa….wait, what about my da—“

“Go, Mom,” Light Tail squeaked back loudly before she could try to find somepony else to do what she was doing. “I-it’s fine, now, right? We made it here, we’ll be fine. Go on, I’m not goin’ anywhere.”

….well, actually, she was, but what Mom needed to hear was that yes, little Light Tail was going to be fine now and that it was okay to keep helping the poor soul she’d brought in to help in the first place. And even if Mom looked like she didn’t want to be more than five feet away from her right then, she wasn’t going to say no and take her attention off the hurt stallion right in front of her. Mom started to move along with the rolling stretcher when Nurse Tender Mane took the silence as her cue to take Ballast off to the ER, and soon both mares disappeared through the open hallway entrance and into the medical ward’s interior.

And then Light Tail booked it into the mare’s bathroom as quickly as her four short legs could carry her. She was safe now, even if the security ponies outside were still shooting and other residents were still trying to get inside a safe zone. She was safe, the bugs weren’t getting into the medical ward, there were at least two security ponies in reception if they did scuttle their way through the entry, Mom was safe….

….and everything that had happened in the last two minutes was finally starting to catch up with her.

She barely made it through the door and into a stall before she lost it, but thankfully hit the toilet bowl instead of the floor. It was a fight to get her lungs to breathe all of a sudden, and she couldn’t bear to look at her forehooves anymore. They were absolutely soaked with that stallion’s blood. From his neck, and he was choking on it and hardly breathing and…and….

…..and oh stars had she just witnessed a pony’s last moments of life?! Was he dying right in front of her while she plugged his torn-up neck in some sick vain effort to keep him alive and suffering a few seconds longer?! Oh stars what if there were other ponies out there that were dead, what if—

—her forelegs came down on top of her snout, choking back an upsurge of bile, at least until her bladder had finished relieving itself of its own accord, and one of her hind legs kicked at the flush lever as she turned around and hurled into the swirling rush of tainted water. Her entire body was starting to shake now, probably because she had a moment to process what had just happened, and—

—a second gag reflex tossed up the last of her breakfast, and a second flush of the toilet washed it away alongside a hoof full of used dry towelettes . How the plumbing systems were still working with the power out, she didn’t know, so she was just thankful that they were working. Her shivering form began to stumble out of the stall, bumping the door open with her head, and walked the six steps to the row of sinks mounted into the wall. With some considerable effort she was able to get a hoof up and over a basin sink mounted low to the wall, for little fillies like herself to make use of, and shoved her forehooves underneath the faucet as it began to spill warm water. Despite how sick it made her to see all that blood on her, she forced herself to look at it and make sure she got it all off of her, as quick as she could.

It became yet another fight for her struggling body, barely able to muster any kind of finite control over itself. Either her limbs wanted to smash their way about, or barely flinch at her mental commands. Either she wanted to shake like a leaf, or freeze where she stood. Either she wanted to breathe in loud, sharp gasps and hyperventilate, or struggle to even suck in a tenth of the oxygen that she normally did. And all she could think of was that bloody, pulsing wound she’d tried to keep from spraying blood all over he—

—she didn’t know why it took so long for her to remember that she got some of his blood on her face, but now that she remembered that little squirt she was in a near panic, sticking her head under the faucet and swiping her left foreleg over her face to scrub it off. Her eyes kept trailing it as it slimed its way through the running water and swirled about in a circular pattern in the sink, stretching out in a thin, red line as it ran into the drain, hoping she’d see it end in the next instant and panicking when it didn’t. The ten seconds it took for the water to start running clean and clear instead of crimson felt like a lifetime.

With a gasp she drew her head back, shook off the excess water and not caring how much of it splattered up against the mirror as she stared back into the foreign face it showed her. She knew deep down that it was her, but she could hardly recognize herself. She never looked so…

….so ragged looking, she wondered fearfully as her body shakes began to grow stronger. Stars, my mane, my body….it’s all a mess, oh Luna I hope he makes it I hope he makes it—

The chant, the silent plea to a departed alicorn, became something of a stab at her sanity. What if he didn’t make it? What if she’d just watched him live his last moments in pain, unable to even say good-bye or thank-you to the ponies that had tried to help him? What was his kid gonna do, or the mom? How many more were suffering like that? Had anypony actually died already and she just didn’t know it yet?

She’d never wished so hard for school to come back. Wished for everything to just go back to normal like it was supposed to, so she could sit at her desk and be bored to death by Miss Amethyst teaching stuff she already knew. Wait for school to let out so she could rush to the library and try to find those Daring Do books she’d misplaced by accident, play with her friends and hang out, and bug Mom when she got home and just sit on the couch and read something with her. And wish that things could stay that way, forever.

She wished so hard she didn’t even hear Aunt C barge into the washroom, calling her name, until the pegasus had to resort to shaking her out of her panic attack—

“—y El-Tee, you okay?!” Aunt C’s voice cried softly through her ears, her forelegs encircling the filly until she’d become trapped in the mare’s grasp.

Her voice became an anchor in the sea of intense emotions, and she practically willed her body up against the pegasus in some instinctive effort to find a source of physical comfort alongside the emotional one. “Aunt...Aunt C, I…oh Luna the blood is he gonna—“

“Don’t think about it!” she snapped back, her forelegs now encompassing the filly into a tight hug against her chest. “Don’t think about it, just listen to my voice, you’re gonna be fine now—“

“I can’t…I don’t….oh stars what did—“

“Light Tail, listen to me!” Aunt C’s voice blared, stunning her with the use of her actual name instead of just the letters. “You’re gonna be fine, you’re safe in here. Don’t think about it, just listen to my voice. Think about your mom, or that book you’ve been reading all week, anything but what you just saw. Don’t think about it, just calm down and breath slowly, and think of something else.”

She gasped in another three breaths before the touch of the pegasus’s hug and coat began to calm her shaking nerves, and her tail stopped twitching and zipping about in random directions and patterns. Her lungs began to work towards a normal, soft breathing rhythm, and like Aunt C suggested, she started to think about—

—Starlight’s horn blazed with her magic, shaping the water of the river into a sparkling visage of the Princess of Equestria, and willed it into motion with a breathtaking charge towards the surprised cultists of Discord that had sought to end her journey at the creek—

Light Tail’s gasp was now one of awe and wonder rather than desperation, and her mind’s eye sought to further the daydream a tad longer as her heartbeat began to wind down—

—her spell shattered into a brilliant shower of crystal blue sparks, the cultist’s shield shimmering from the impact even as she began to draw out a flow of red mana into her next attack spell—

“There, you see?” Aunt C soothed into her ears, her whisper clearly audible now that her lungs were no longer trying to suck in half the stable’s oxygen every time she inhaled. “You’re gonna be fine, breathe slow, keep thinking of that awesome thing you’re thinking—“

—Starlight’s eyes drew up towards her namesake, mesmerized by the otherworldly glow of the celestial night sky as it illuminated the ruins of the alicorn sisters’ castle—

“All better now,” the pegasus whispered with relief, and Light Tail felt a drab of wetness trickle down the mare’s face as she spoke. “Breathe, girl, just breathe easy. You’re fine now…”

Snippets of The Mare of the Everfree continued to play out in her head as she began to recollect herself. “….ahhh….Aunt C, I….I think….I know what I won’t be when I grow up.”

Somehow, even though she didn’t clearly explain what she meant, Aunt C seemed to get it right away. “’S okay, not everypony’s cut out to be security,” she assured her gently. “But don’t sell yourself short, you did great back there. Not many ponies rush to help without thinking about it, and even if you had to tell yourself to do something instead of standing there frozen, you still did something. Don’t let anypony tell you different.”

Her calm, slightly more collected mind began to freak out slightly at the mention of what had caused her to lose her nerve in the first place, and the sickening pulse of the stallion’s torn flesh began to creep back into her forehooves. “….is he gonna—“

“He would have if you two had done nothing,” she answered the question, tightening her hug and even nuzzling her head a little. “He at least has a chance now, and that’s more than he would’ve had otherwise. You did everything you could for him. Everything, you hear?”

That wasn’t quite true. She could have done something sooner, faster, better. “I-I shouldn’t have been standing there like a foal—“

“You didn’t,” Aunt C’s voice continued to coo into her ear. “You did everything you could. You’ve never seen anything like this before, and I’m sorry that you had to, but you can’t second-guess yourself like this. You did something, the right thing, when somepony needed you even if you had to fight with your own fear before you did it. Very, very few ponies can do that.”

“I about peed myself just now!” she howled back, growing both angry and ashamed with herself. All the days she’d spent so confident and sure of herself, and the one moment she should have been that confident she’d just stood there and gawked as her mother tried to fight off a swarm of bugs and keep him from bleeding out at the same time! “I couldn’t stop it, and I just puked up my breakfast and my body won’t stop shaking I’m so freaking terrified—“

“And that’s okay,” the pegasus kept on going in that soft, caressing voice that almost made her a second mother. “It’s like what I told your mom the other day, courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway. Your body is just trying to deal with it all now that it’s over. And…and sometimes that means a pony will lose control over things and mess themselves, or throw up. And your shakes are nothing to be worried about, it’s just your adrenaline being bled off now that your body doesn’t need it. That’s nothing to be ashamed of, okay? You did everything you could for Ballast. You’re a good, brave pony. You’re fine, just breathe and don’t think about it. Just breathe.”

She wanted to believe it, badly….and as her shakes began to fade and break up into short pulses instead of a constant running thing, Aunt C’s body warmth began to spread through her coat and envelope her as tightly as her physical hug. Oddly enough, the warmth was even more comforting than the physical contact. Like she could just close her eyes, and be protected in both body and mind if she just sat there and basked in it, and did like Aunt C asked.

So that’s what she did. She just closed her eyes, and let it all be.

And breathed.

Chapter 6

One…

Inhale. Slowly.

Two…

Exhale, steady.

One…

Inhale, again. Calmer this time.

Two…

Exhale, like a sleeping foal.

The tremors finally stopped.

Sling finally allowed her eyes to open, and the dim lighting for once proved to be a blessing as it failed to sting her eyeballs like an angry hornet. Had she not been shooting .357 rounds in the Stable corridor a minute ago, her vision would have been able to make out the lettering on the heat exhaustion advisory poster ten feet off to her left. But at least she could see well enough to not knock her head against a wall, and quickly saw herself away from the ER room where Tender Mane and Dr. Straight Jacket were furiously at work trying to save Ballast’s life—

—the screeches of a thousand bugs wailed at her ears, the lightweight revolver emptying the fifth and final round in the cylinder as her left hoof tried to find purchase atop his ragged neck—

Her legs stopped six feet short of the door to the reception lobby, her lungs once again repeating its previous calming ritual of inhale, exhale in four second metered intervals. After the third exhale the events stopped flashing before her, and her limbs no longer felt like giving out beneath her.

And she hadn’t even gotten to her daughter. How was that poor thing faring after what she’d just seen? What she’d done, and felt, as her little hooves pushed against his pulsing, flowing wounds, as her ears were assailed with all those horrible screams and gunfire? How long was she going to have to keep both bedroom doors open so she could hear whether or not her nightmares were getting too intense? Six months? A year?

Forever?

Once, Celestia, she prayed silently, her legs once more moving forward and into the lobby. Just once, I’d like a week where something doesn’t go wrong.

Her eyes began searching the lobby in quick fashion, ignoring the twenty-odd ponies in various states of dishevel and injury when she was certain they weren’t going to die in the next few minutes. She spotted at least one of her neighbors from her quarter of L8 huddled near the wall, nursing a bandaged foreleg with an ice pack, and by sheer luck the corner of her vision caught sight of Cloud Wind’s grayscale tail—

—spotted her night light walking right alongside the pegasus, quickly making way towards an empty lounge sofa on the other side of the room, and felt her heart flutter as she studied her face. Damp with moisture, a partially-slicked mane and forelegs, but otherwise unchanged from the last couple of minutes. Downcast, sullen….but alive.

It was Windy’s face that told her the tale. Even in such dim, red-hued lighting, it was hard to miss the glint of tears in her eyes, and her snout looked like it was never more than just two seconds away from crying, and she knew then that her suspicions about her El-Tee were right.

She was anything but fine.

It was a simple affair to separate the two. El-Tee seemed happy enough just to get the lounge sofa to herself and let the two mares walk away without a word, and Sling dragged her friend off to a corner with about six feet of empty space around them where she could despair quietly in somewhat more private circumstances.

“….how hard did she take it?” she asked softly. It wasn’t even a question of “if”, and at such a time as this it seemed a little silly to say “Is she okay?”.

“….not as hard as I would have at her age,” the pegasus mumbled, her voice broken and quiet. “Still….just a kid, she kept wondering if Ballast was going to die, hyperventilating most of the time. Amazing how well a hug and a soothing voice works on you two. Just wished I’d dried her off first, my stable suit’s half soaked now.”

Sling was almost ashamed to acknowledge that her little girl seemed to be handling her first radroach outbreak better than her mother had. “….wished I was that strong, the first time….you think she’ll need—“

“Counseling? Definitely,” Windy answered the question quickly. “You can try talking to her if you want, but I think she’s better off with Doc Heart Tone or Doorbell.”

The indigo-maned unicorn almost allowed herself to leave the conversation there, but Windy’s voice hung up at the mention of Heart Tone very briefly, enough to catch her attention to it and notice that the pegasus seemingly had to force herself to sound calm and sensible.

And she knew why almost immediately. “So what about you?”

There was the briefest of whimpers from Cloud Wind’s throat as she choked up, eventually tearing her gaze away from the filly on the lounge sofa. “…..I never want to see her like that again…just a kid, it’s not fair….”

Despite the fact that she was altogether grateful that somepony had been there for her squirt, she never expected Windy to let herself get this beat up over it. Cared too much, some might say. “….you were there when she needed somepony. And I feel better knowing somepony will take care of her if anything ever happened to me. She calls you “aunt” for a genuine reason, not because she thinks it sounds cool.”

Windy’s wings shook in place, one of them eventually unfolding from her side to stretch itself out in a desperate effort to wring her despair out of her psyche. “I know. That’s what makes it so hard to see her like this. Oh Luna does it hurt…”

In the blink of an eye she found herself hugging the pegasus with one foreleg, faintly recalling the mare’s ironic statement of how well they seemed to work for the unicorn and the squirt. “You see you and yours hurting, and you care so much it hurts you too. That’s not stress or psyche issues, it’s family. And who’d want family that’d let you carry it all alone?”

For once in their long, storied friendship, the pegasus couldn’t come up with anything to say to her, and simply laid there and allowed the emotionally unbalanced unicorn to be the one to give a comforting shoulder to shudder and sniffle into.

It wasn’t to last, fortunately. In short order Windy managed to pull herself back together, and while she wasn’t quite the collected and sensible pony she knew her to be, she was at least done moping around and despairing in vain. Her thundercloud grey eyes showed only trace amounts of tears behind them as she forced herself out of her friend’s reach and back to work. “O-okay now, get back to the squirt before she starts wondering about the birds and bees, wouldja? Don’t want that talk muddled with confusion about how mares might do it and I gotta talk to the Overmare anyway.”

Of course you’d brush it off with a joke like that, Sling snorted to herself. “One of these days you’re going to find yourself that special somepony and finally have a reason to stop pestering me.”

“And miss that delightful shriek of horror that amuses me so? I can only hope you’ll put up with my “pestering you” to the end of your days.”

She answered the pegasus with a telekinetic slap across the back of her head, though she knew it would ultimately do nothing but encourage further teasing. “Maybe if you didn’t pester me so much everypony wouldn’t be whispering about us “closet lovers” when they think we aren’t listening.”

Windy’s left foreleg began to rub tenderly at her abused skull as she pondered the wisdom imparted to her, and her subdued whisper caught the unicorn off-guard. “…..you may be onto something, there….”

“….somepony said something like that to your face this morning, didn’t they?”

The pegasus shrugged her withers, deciding that now was a good opportunity to move on with her duties before she got dragged into a talk she wasn’t ready to have. “…we’ll talk later, when this is all over.”

“Yeah,” Sling whispered back quietly, though she was certain she wasn’t quite loud enough to be heard by the departing pegasus. “….later….”

A quick glance around her alleviated minor fears about unwanted eavesdropping ponies lingering about, as everypony was too caught up in their own affairs to bother paying attention to hers. With a sigh of relief she wandered her way back to her lounging child, who was now tapping the front of the lounge sofa with a forehoof and an apprehensive taint on her face—

“Is he…is he gonna make it?” Light Tail blurted, stumbling over her words as though she were still struggling with the concept that she might have just witnessed a pony’s last painful moments of life.

“He’s with Doc Straight Jacket now,” she answered with a solemn touch. “We’ve given him the best chance we could.”

Light Tail’s eyes were glued to the wall across from her, unwilling to tear themselves away from whatever mental images she was forcing herself through at that moment. “…I should’ve done something. Something other than—“

Sling was beginning to get this ugly, gut feeling that her daughter had already gone through this with Cloud Wind, and despite whatever “Aunt C” had told her she was clearly still struggling with it. If this was a conversation the squirt had had before, well, it looked like she was going to have to go through it again, this time with her mother. “Honey, you did more than I asked of you. I was yelling at you to find me somepony to help me with him, and you jumped right in to do it yourself.”

The filly flinched in place slightly as a distant stattaco of rifle fire echoed through the walls, but she was too despondent with herself to bother caring about it. “I should have gotten help—“

“You helped,” she cut in, not willing—or able—to hear her night light degrade herself like this. Even now, looking back at the horrible notion of her little girl plugging Ballast’s shredded neck with her own hooves to stem the bleeding, she felt a rush of pride, of unrepentant love, for the little filly she’d labored to give birth to for the five most incredibly painful and exhausting hours of her life. “There were two dozen of the blasted things in front of me. If you had taken off to find help like I’d told you, there wouldn’t have been anypony left to save by the time you came back. I know you were scared to death, but you still did something. You did what another pony would’ve done, and gave me the time I needed to get that gun reloaded and a levitation spell on Ballast. You dragged him out of harm’s way until Windy could give us a hoof. You are the reason he has any chance at all in that operating room. I know Windy’s been through this with you already, so don’t tell me you don’t believe it.”

“That’s just it,” El-Tee mumbled darkly, still staring at that wall and tapping at the sofa. “I don’t. I keep thinking I should’ve gotten somepony smarter, or taken that first aid kit outta my bag and used it—“

“Do you know what to do with any of that stuff in there?” she asked next. If El-Tee was going to be all analytical of herself, she might as well make sure her daughter didn’t miss anything in the process. “How to apply the antiseptics or how to use the hemostatic clamp when you need to control the bleeding while you tie off severed arteries? How or when to use the collagen agent to induce blood clotting, or the suture kit to stitch a wound? How to set a broken bone and secure it with a splint?”

Light Tail’s eyes finally tore themselves away from the wall to look her mother in the eye, wide with confusion and surprise at just how much work was actually involved in simple first aid. “….w…well….no. Not really, now that you’ve gone and told me how much work it is….”

“Do you think anypony you could have found outside of medical could have done any of that?” she asked next, her mind already anticipating El-Tee’s rebuttal—

“Aunt C?” the filly quipped immediately…and just as Sling predicted, though she grew more concerned when a series of pistol shots rang out somewhere in the halls outside medical without getting even a startled jump or a flick of the ear out of the kid. “I mean, if you know all that stuff, then most of you security ponies probably do too.”

“They do,” she answered. “But in a situation like this, their job is to secure the stable and keep ponies safe. And if you think about it just a little harder, you’ll realize how incredibly unsafe it would have been to have even tried to do anything but what you did. Staying there was suicide, he needed help, and the best place to get him help was right here. So when Windy and I tell you that you did everything you could, we really mean it, because it’s exactly what we would’ve done if we could have. Windy took my place in shooting those bugs so I could take over for you, but until then you were absolutely needed where you were and what you were doing. I was too terrified to concentrate on shooting and putting pressure on his neck at the same time. You understand now? You did what you should have, when you should’ve, and nothing else you could’ve done would have made any more of a difference no matter what you tell yourself.”

El-Tee’s eyes gradually lost their bewildered glint, and her face grew sullen once more as she went back to staring at that damned wall, as if she were almost ashamed of herself. And it was infuriating. “….that doesn’t make me feel any better about it. I can’t stop seeing all that blood and…and how my stomach folds in on itself whenever I see how his neck looked when I saw it—“

—Sling’s heart tugged in place, her left eye tearing up and her tail flicking at the sound of a shotgun blast, maybe forty feet from the front door—

“—or how it felt under my hooves when I tried to slow down the bleeding. And I can’t stop wondering how it musta felt ta him. To feel that kind of pain, not able to tell anypony what hurts, or talk to ‘em….or….or say any kind of a good-bye…just…choke on his own blood and air...”

Another tear dropped, and a third began forming in her right eye but held itself back. Her entire ordeal was beginning to sound exceptionally familiar to her. Oh dear Luna, my poor baby…. “….I know it hurts,” she croaked, her voice slightly hoarse as she forced away a brief flash of Hoofprint’s eviscerated remains and the unholy splatter of blood that had turned the walls to a slick crimson. “It hurts you in the stomach, like your heart’s going to get sucked into it, and you keep going back to that moment. You’ll look at it, at what you’ve done, and keep asking yourself…why? Why me, why him? Why did it have to happen, why couldn’t it have turned out better…”

El-Tee’s eyes shifted away from the wall again, glimmering with tears and….and something else. Something in her eyes that tried to speak to her without words, and that did not even register or acknowledge the three short bursts of automatic rifle fire down the corridor at that instant. “…why’d you have to be the one to find him. To see what you saw….and not be able to do anything to change it….”

A sputter of a gasp gurgled through her tightening throat, frozen in shock at the subtle—but unmistakable—allusion to Hoofprint aired to her ears. How….how did this child even know that she’d been the one to find him?! How….

“….I think, more than anything, we wish we could’ve been there sooner so that nothing would’ve happened at all,” Light Tail continued with those glittering orbs of tears and pity. “You were locked in the security armory. You couldn’t even get yourself out. And that’s what hurts. That you were cooped up like that and safe, while he was cornered. You think you could’ve done something, that you could’ve saved him and instead you were stuck behind a locked door while he…while he died alone, and scared. I think I could’ve done something if we’d gotten up the stairs a few seconds earlier instead of messing with Torchlight’s head...”

Yes. No mistake now. Intricately, exceptionally familiar to her. “….I….I think we oughta talk about this later,” was all the mare could muster in response. “When all this is over and things go back to normal. We both need it.”

Light Tail’s body heaved heavily, a sigh of exhaustion bellowing from her small lungs. “….tell me that story again, from after we woke up. About those wheat fields and the moonlight….take me out of here…."

Gladly, the mother agreed silently, thankful to have something other than bloody corpses or a gravely-wounded pony to focus her mind’s eye on. She titled her gaze up to the wall behind her night light, clearing every wandering thought process out of her head as quickly as she could manage—

A second shotgun blast outside disrupted her attempts to initiate her daydreaming, and a slight growl of frustration slipped through her throat as her eyes snapped back open out of reflex—

—a splinter of light curled out into the air out of the corner of her eye, and her gaze darted off to the side to track it to its source—

—tendrils of blue energy peeled out through the cracks between two wall panels a few feet away, extending their reach with every passing moment and beginning to crackle ominously as they drew near. Several other ponies that had been right in front of this wall had somehow vanished entirely without her noticing or hearing them (and she noted with disdain that none of them had thought to warn her or her daughter either). Many of the injured and wailing in the lobby had by now begun to take notice of the energy build-up beginning to take place at other sections of the room, and took steps to expedite themselves away from the danger and piling into the center in one large concentrated mass.

Sling only had enough time to grab Light Tail and yank her off the lounge sofa, and had barely thrown herself over the filly before the room exploded in a roar of thunder. There was the briefest flinch of an impact to her back….

….and then nothing.

She couldn’t recall if she’d been dreaming, or sleeping. She only remembered talking to her daughter, trying to soothe her injured psyche, and….

….and that was it. Her mind was too addled with pain and….

….and the sharp crackle of fire.

Her eyes snapped open, her senses revitalized by the sharp fear and terror of a fiery death, and wished that she’d been having a nightmare.

Most of the floor of the lobby was slick with water, pockmarked with small puddles in a seemingly random pattern throughout the room. Her head, forelegs, and much of the forward half of her body were all soaked, though the heat of the nearby fire consuming the lounge sofa on the other side of the room had already begun to dry her. She felt something heavy—but cushioned and comfortable—pressing down upon her body, pinning her to the cold floor of what looked like the reception lobby of the medical wing. Several sections of the walls were shorn and ragged, with outward-pointing shears of scorched and warped metal suggesting an explosion had occurred somewhere within the power conduits behind them. The ceiling above the fire was slowly being obscured by a growing cloud of black smoke, but so far she could still breathe without getting any of it in her lungs. The red lights that once pulsed and waned in a predictable cycle now remained bright and constant—a final fail-safe built into the tertiary lighting system in the event that main power failed completely, to ensure ponies could see well enough to get out.

And not one single soul was in sight. Nor could she hear anypony out beyond the broken, half-open doorway. She couldn’t even see any sign that they’d been there at all. The only thing she could find that didn’t belong was a pair of shattered flasks a few feet in front of her, with several shards held together only by the adhesive label identifying the flasks as….

….healing potions?

She slapped her tongue about inside her mouth, probing along the roof and the insides of her cheeks, and quickly tasted a lingering sensation of strawberry, one of the most common flavors of healing potions she knew of. Now she was beginning to understand why she couldn’t remember how she wound up on the floor—whatever had injured her had likely knocked her out on impact, and somepony had been kind enough to force a couple of potions down her unconscious throat. It was a miracle she hadn’t choked on it. An injection stim potion would have made better sense, but it was entirely possible the pony in question had no idea where to find them.

That still left her pinned to the floor by a couch. Damn thing might have even been the reason she needed the potions in the first place. Had she come to on her own, without the aid of restorative potions, she wouldn’t have dared to risk aggravating a potential head injury with even the simplest of spells. But with only the weight of the couch giving her any degree of pain and given her current situation, she felt quite a bit more comfortable with the idea. And she didn’t really have much of a choice.

Damn Stable ponies had turned their back on her. As usual.

A surge of magic began to flow through her horn, bringing a pleasant tingling to her head, and with a few simple mental alterations to the pattern flow a telekinesis spell took shape and enveloped the couch. With the couch in her grasp, she willed it to be flung across the room, out of her way, and felt its weight tug hard on her hold as it flew away from her and crashed onto the floor to her left. Momentarily disoriented by the effort, she released the spell and allowed the mana flow to settle down back into her horn, shaking her head as a bout of nausea began to sneak its way into her. Heavier than it looks….can’t let that wind me out, gotta focus, gotta find my baby oh gods El-Tee where did you get to—

A frantic set of hooves broke up her tearful thoughts, clomping against the floor in the depths of the medical wing, and their rapidity and lack of weight gave her a shock of hope—

And for the second time this week, her prayers were answered in the way she wanted them answered—by the sight of her little girl, healthy and moving on her own, as the poor thing came dashing into the lobby, slipping on the water as she went and clutching a small leather pouch in her mouth. The instant she spotted her mother upright and staring back at her, she skidded to a stop, splashing thin wakes of water across her legs and belly as she gently set the pouch and its fragile cargo of fresh healing potions onto the floor.

“Holy L….Mom, you’re okay?! You—“

Sling couldn’t remember re-activating her horn’s magic, or conjuring her telekinesis spell once more. All she would remember was that she was so ecstatic to see her little girl that she literally willed her to be drawn into the tightest, most secure embrace she could give, and it was so. El-Tee didn’t even notice the spell herself until she was being flung towards her mother in a seemingly uncontrollable flight into her waiting forelegs.

“—oooooawwwoooah wait wait too fast—“

The spell field around her tiny body dissipated, leaving her helpless to avert her fate, but Sling didn’t care. She just wanted some physical assurance that she wasn’t hallucinating, that this was Light Tail and that yes, she was going to be okay—

“Oh gods oh gods honey so happy you’re not hurt!” she sobbed into her daughter’s mane, her forelegs wrapping around her tightly and hugging her close to her chest. “You’re not hurt, right I—“

She shouldn’t have said anything. The mere mention of the possibility of injury brought a warm, slick wetness to the attention of her chin, and she pulled her head away just in time to see the gauze padding and bandage wrapped around her little baby’s head stained red with fresh blood, and a trail of red creeping down the side of her face.

Her shriek of terror, while soft, was unmistakable, and that cold, hard panic began to creep back inside her. “O-o-oh Luna not again—“

Light Tail’s legs began to push against her in an effort to twist herself out of yet another death hug. “M-mom, quit it, I’m okay—“

But Sling barely heard her. All she could think about was Thursday morning, when she’d found her lying in a daze and covered in crimson, barely capable of speaking, and all the fears and night terrors she’d suffered at the thought of her daughter never coming back to her. “Where are those stupid potions?!” she shrieked in a huff, frantically grabbing at the pouch left behind on the floor and pulling it to her with a mindless fling of magic. “Just stay s-still, t-these’ll fix you right up—“

“Mom, stop, calm down I’m fine—“

“You’re not fine! You’re bleeding, just hold still—“

This. Was. Getting. RIDICOULOUS.

Every hour she was getting sucked up into a super hug of love and tolerance and death and it was ridiculous! She wasn’t that cute!

….well, okay, maybe she was, but it was still crazy! And now Mom was having a panic attack after just seeing the cut on her head she’d wound up re-opening when she banged it on the cabinet door where she’d found those extra healing potions. This had to stop!

And what better way to snap a stupid adult pony to their senses than to slap it into them? So that’s what she did. She reached up with her left foreleg and smacked her mom across the snout with a light-hearted but firm swipe, and all of a sudden Mom’s blabbering and crying came to a sudden and abrupt halt….

…..as did the pouch she’d stuffed full of potions. Mom’s spell died out the instant the shock of the hoofslap hit her, and now that pouch was falling to the floor and it was going to break every single flask if she didn’t catch it! Ponies needed that stuff!

The jingle of glass was close, and on a whim she squirmed her way out of Mom’s forelegs, twisting herself back around as she fell—

—was shocked at just how close that flying leather pouch really was—it was barely three feet away from them when she’d broken free, and closing fast. She barely had time to process it, but she had to catch it before it could get by her—

—on a whim she jabbed her head out, snapped at it with her teeth—

—caught it by its closure string just as her hooves touched down on the floor and her horn inadvertently flaring to life with a telekinesis spell to try and cushion the pouch’s flight so that it wouldn’t tear free and keep going. It worked, barely, and though the string tugged at her front teeth it remained in place, and she gently shifted the pouch down until it was dangling from her mouth of its own weight before releasing her spell.

The look on Mom’s face when she turned back around was priceless, and she couldn’t help but giggle and laugh at it despite the surreal and terrifying things that had been going on for the last four minutes. Mom was just sitting there on her haunches, her eyes wide open like she’d just been shocked, her forelegs now holding onto the empty space that had once contained a little filly, and her jaw just…hung there, wide enough to catch bugs if she stayed that way for much longer. But at least she wasn’t hyperventilating anymore.

“Hey, Equestria to Mom!” she squealed with a snicker, waving a hoof in front of her mother’s eyes, though she had to rear up on her hind legs a bit to do it. “I’m down here now!”

Mom’s eyes finally blinked. Once, at first, and then again, and then began resuming their natural involuntary blinking rhythm as her forelegs settled down onto the floor, her neck craning down to stare back at her with a slightly bewildered stare.

Oh crud, she’s gonna ground me if I don’t do somethin’ quick—

“I’m fine,” she said, putting extra emphasis on ‘fine’ in case Mom needed a little extra clarif….extra assurances! Stupid brain, you know the word you were gonna say, work! “I just banged my head a little running around back there! I got these for you.”

The front of Mom’s mane began to slide down across her head, soaked and flattened down into three large separate bangs, one of which began to fall over her left eye. “….wha….”

….oh Luna, maybe I shouldn’t have smacked her—

“I-I’m sorry!” she stammered quickly in apology, quickly setting the pouch down and plucking one of the potions out with another telekinesis spell. “I just…you got hurt. Somethin’ exploded right behind us, knocked the couch right into you and put you out. I didn’t get hurt ‘cause you practically shoved me under you. I tried to get somepony to help me get you out but they all ran off when the red lights went solid. Tender Mane and Straight Jacket barely got any help movin’ Ballast, I didn’t wanna get in their way but…but nopony else even listened! I couldn’t find Aunt C anywhere so I just started shovin’ these things down your throat! And when the second one didn’t wake ya up I went and found more, but I guess it was enough and—“

Trap. Mistake, whatever you wanted to call it, she’d made it, because she was back in that death hug before she knew it, and it was getting OLD. She wished everypony would quit hugging her so much! So emotional! So—

“No, no, don’t apologize,” Mom’s voice cried quietly into her mane. “You did good back there, okay? Very good. Just…just where did everypony go to?”

This time, getting out of Mom’s grasp wasn’t that much of a fight, she let her go willingly. She set the potion back into the pouch and flung her mane back out of her face when it began to flop around in front of her. Still wet and all. “I dunno,” she croaked back. Now that Mom was okay, and she was okay, the harsh reality around her began to come back to haunt her, and she was suddenly aware of how dangerously close to…no, no don’t think about that think good stuff—

“Everypony just left. Down the hall, back towards the library, but when I went down there it was locked. I think they might’ve tried to get to the agri levels. Thing is—“

The PA system—which somehow, someway, despite the lack of power, was still working—fizzled to life, and it did an excellent job of explaining things for her. Complete with a really loud klaxon alarm and everything.

“ATTENTION,” the robotic, disembodied female voice bellowed out. “EMERGENCY. SPARK GENERATOR FAILURE. ALL RESIDENTS MUST EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY. YOU NOW HAVE TEN MINUTES TO EVACUATE THE STABLE. REPEAT: EMERGENCY. SPARK GENERATOR FAILURE. ALL RESIDENTS MUST EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY—“

Mom’s eyes shrank into pin-prick sized pupils with a sharp gasp of terror. She even started to tremble a little. Her tail tried to flick itself around, but only managed a pitiful jerk here and there, and shook a little itself.

Which was fine, because that wasn’t what the stupid thing was saying five minutes ago. Five minutes ago it was telling everypony to evacuate level seven. “…..that’s….new….”

Mom’s body began to lay down, her head collapsing into her forelegs, and only when she started crying and sniffling did it finally strike the little one just how serious things were now.

She’d never seen Mom cry like this before. And it was scaring her.

“….m-mom, what’s wrong?” she dared to ask, though she couldn’t muster much of a confident or cheery tone. She sounded as scared as she felt, and that couldn’t have been doing Mom any favors at all. “….mommy? Talk to me, please? What’s going on?”

Mom’s body heaved, her lungs sucking in a hard breath of air, and she did this twice before she could bring herself to come out of her little impromptu hidey hole. Her eyes were….what did they call it? Bloodshot? All those red veins that crept up around the edges?

….o….oh, Celestia, NO—

“I’m….I’m sorry, honey,” Mom gasped tearfully, barely able to bring herself to say what she was saying. “….but….we have to leave.”

No no NO we can’t leave we CAN’T—

“….w-whaddya mean, leave?!” she tried to stall. They couldn’t leave! Not without Aunt C, or Tender Mane, or Paint Splotch or Spiner or….or everypony. “We can’t just up and leave everypony!! It says everypony evacuate—“

“Honey, listen to me!!” Mom’s voice boomed over her, somehow finding strength and sternness to speak to her like the mother she was supposed to be, and it stung enough to make the filly shut up and listen. “In ten minutes the blast door to the surface won’t have enough power to work. If we don’t get out of the stable by then, we never will!”

Light Tail felt her heart go cold and still at the unspoken prospects of how that was going to turn out. “What?! That’ll trap everypony inside with these stupid bugs!!”

“I know!” Mom screamed back, struggling to fight back her tears and failing miserably. “And we can’t stop it! With the power gone we can’t stop it!! We’ll….we can’t stay here anymore. We have to go. Now!”

She felt her legs begin to tremble, worse than Mom’s, and suddenly the world was getting a little blurry and wet as her eyes welled up with fresh tears. “….but….we can’t just leave everypony here….not Aunt C, not Jam or Emmy, or Spiner or….we can’t leave them here….”

For the third time in two minutes she was wrapped in another one of Mom’s hugs. But this time she didn’t care. She wanted Mom to hug her and tell her that everything would be fine, that everypony would find a way out in time even though she knew otherwise, she wanted Mom’s closeness and body heat to chase away the growing cold in her gut, she wanted to know that unmistakable feeling of unconditional love and security she’d taken for granted her whole little life.

She got some of her wishes, at least. “I’m sorry,” Mom’s voice tried to soothe her. “I’m sorry I can’t make any of this better, or that we can’t find Windy in time. But I want us to make it through this. I don’t know what’s waiting on the surface, or if it’s any better than things are down here. But if we don’t leave, we….we may very well die down here. I want you to live.”

There. She said it. Said the last thing she wanted to hear. That if they didn’t leave they’d….they’d die. They’d die, and Aunt C would too, and Jam and Emmy and Miss Amethyst and everypony else she knew and cared about….all gone. Just like that.

And no matter how much she felt like bawling her eyes out into her mother’s wet chest, howling and crying at how terribly unfair life was all of a sudden….

….she couldn’t.

Because she suddenly refused to believe that Aunt C would just roll over like that, or let anypony on her watch go so easily without a fight. Mom might’ve believed otherwise, and she had a good reason to, she was her mother. The only thing she ever wanted in her life was to see her happy and safe. If that meant leaving the stable….then it was probably the safer thing to do, in the off chance that she was wrong and things didn’t turn out for the better. But if anypony could save the stable and keep them alive….

It was Aunt C. She was that awesome. Daring Do-level awesome.

“ATTENTION. EMERGENCY. YOU NOW HAVE NINE MINUTES TO EVACUATE THE STABLE. ALL RESIDENTS MUST EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY—“

….nine minutes to leave. Nine minutes to fight their way through a horde of disgusting bugs, crack open the stable door that opened only once every thirty years, and get out.

They could do that.

She fought back a sniffle, withdrew a foreleg she’d not even known she was hugging back with, and nuzzled her mother’s neck in a gentle caress before drawing back. “….ya don’t have to be sorry,” she mewled through a tight throat. “It’s not your fault.”

Mom’s face was as close to breaking down as hers, but she was strong enough to fight it off and steel herself for the biggest decision she’d made in her life. “….we’ll need to run the whole way,” she whispered, her voice hoarse with sorrow. “Stay close, don’t fall behind. Any bugs you see, push them aside and plow through. We don’t have time to fight our way out. Understand?”

“….let’s just get this over with,” she squeaked back, wiping a tear from her eye as she took the pouch of healing potions and floated it back over onto the receptionist’s desk. With all that was going on around her right then, she didn’t even notice the weight of the things.

With one last, confidence-killing sigh of despair, Mom stood up on all fours and began to gallop out of the lobby, her horn flaring to life with a ball of light and flinging it out ahead of her as she banked around the door and darted into the hall on her right.

She kept pace with her as best she could manage, and to her surprise she found it rather therapeutic to have such a simple act as running take her mind off of the enormity of what she was doing. When she was running at break-neck speed, trying to keep up with her mom and putting every ounce of mental effort into it, she wasn’t thinking so much of the fact that she was leaving behind the only home she’d known her whole life, her friends, her favorite after-school nesting grounds. Before long, the task took up the majority of her attention, and her sorrow and tears were rapidly fading to a sharp pang of sadness that she could manage well enough without hugs and kisses and soft voices.

And that stupid, loud klaxon wouldn’t stop blaring into the halls, which helped take her attention off of their faces.

Mom wasn’t the fastest pony in the stable, but she could still book it along at a pretty hard pace with enough motivation. Within thirty seconds they’d already begun dashing up the stairway at the back end of L7, skipping the door to L6 and L5 altogether in a straight shot for L4. It was taking all of her energy just to keep from falling behind more than a few feet at a time, but as they emerged from the stairway and into the administration level she found her mother beginning to pull away from her as she broke into a hard run. This hallway was a straight shot all the way to the other end of the level, and the Overmare’s office was tucked away into a little corner on the right side. Before she knew it, she couldn’t make out the bands that made up Mom’s braided ponytail anymore, and she was getting further away with every step.

“Mom, wait!” she shouted at the shrinking mare’s backside. “I can’t—“

—a vent grating popped off and clattered onto the floor between them, and an insanely large and hideous cockroach the size of Miss Teakettle’s cat skittered out from the vent, chirping wildly at the sight of a fresh pony galloping towards it.

Light Tail’s natural and totally lady-like response was an incredibly high-pitched shriek, her eyes locked onto its massive mandibles as they clicked together in anticipation of its meal, and without conscious thought her horn fired off a telekinesis spell, wrapping around the vent grating and slamming it into the bug as hard as she could. The adrenaline boost helped a great deal, squashing it against the wall with a disgusting wet crunch…

….and suddenly Mom wasn’t that far away anymore. In fact, she could reach out and touch her flank if she wanted.

Too bad that bug wasn’t alone. Not even two seconds later she heard more chirping and screeching behind her as she passed by the vent, and the adrenaline began to boost her running speed at a much stronger rate. Now it was Mom who couldn’t keep up—

“Oh shi—RUN!!” Mom howled in terror, her hoofsteps beginning to match those of the filly in pace and speed. “I think you made them mad!!”

“They can eat poison and DIE!!!” she shrieked back, not even thinking about where she was going anymore. Just wanted to get AWAY—

“Turn right at the end of the hall!!” Mom shouted after her, just as she leapt over what looked like a discarded gun belt and a thin, tall object next to it.

Right! Right! I can do right!

The bug chirps grew more numerous and closer, from other places on L5, which only furthered her desire to beeline it to the Overmare’s office before they could find her and feast on her delicious hind legs an—

Oh gross, I’m not delicious! she admonished herself in horror as she slowed herself down at the end of the hall so as not to run right into the wall. Why would I even think of myself like that oh Luna that was just sick—

She’d barely pulled away from the wall and started running again when she heard—or felt, rather—Mom’s cool hearing protection spell wash over her ears, dampening every imaginable sound around her—

—three rapid gunshots rang out behind her, accompanied by a pair of grotesquely satisfying screeches that sounded like a radroach’s dying screams—

“—YOU NOW HAVE SEVEN MINUTES TO EVACUATE THE STABLE—“

Her mounting frustration at the stupid alarms and the stupid voice finally got the better of her. “I know, I know, you won’t shut up about it!! You’re not helping!!”

“Quit fighting with the stupid computer and watch yourself!!” Mom’s voice yelled back at her, quickly growing closer as the Overmare’s open office grew larger and more inviting. No bugs in there, at least!

“I am watching!”

“No, honey slow down—“

“I’m fine Mo—“

Her hooves bumped into each other as she slipped through the doorway, sending her tumbling through rump over hoof and straight towards the Overmare’s desk face first—

—Mom’s magic encased her body and caught her just before impact. She felt the entire back half of her sling up and overhead for a couple of seconds as her momentum shifted it forward, and allowed her body to slump back down onto the floor with no resistance or attempt to soften the landing as Mom began slamming the door to the office shut.

“…..w-w-whoa,” she murmured in a broken voice, her brain momentarily scrambled by the near-miss with the desk. It was sorting itself out pretty quick—in short order she remembered where she was, what she was doing, how she got here, and how much it would’ve freakin’ HURT to slam into a two-hundred year old wooden oval desk like that—

—the door clanged shut, and Mom’s magic left her body, allowing her to stand up under her own power once more. “That’s what I meant!” Mom hissed sharply as she trotted past her, her horn flaring to life and tapping away at a console behind the desk. “You gotta be careful running like that, you nearly tripped yourself right into the desk!”

She felt the flesh beneath her coat begin to burn in shame, and her ears instinctively dipped down as she hunched away from the desk. She didn’t mean to blow Mom off like that, she was just…. “….s-sorry….I didn’t know…”

—felt her body leap backwards as the desk shuddered free of the floor in a sudden jolt, then began rising up on several gear-driven pistons, revealing a hidden staircase beneath it.

“—OW HAVE SIX MINUTES TO EVACUATE THE STABLE—“

Her heart climbed out of her stomach and back into her chest where it belonged, and she allowed herself a brief snit fit at her mother to calm her startled nerves. “Jeez, would a little warning have killed ya?!”

Mom’s subdued laughter as she stepped back from behind the rising desk wasn’t quite as comforting as she’d wished it could have been—not when she was busy looking over the gun she’d picked up in the hall as if she were preparing for imminent combat. “Call it payback for getting the jump on me Monday evening.”

Light Tail mumbled something, but between the hearing protection spell, the motorized desk lifting up, and the hidden floor panel sliding out of the way to reveal the stairwell underneath, she couldn’t make much sense of it. Much of her remaining attention was centered solely on the 10mm pistol she’d picked up off the floor in their rush to the office (she absently remembered it as #28 in the inventory list), inspecting its slide and hammer, its safety and magazine release, its finish and the brightness of its orange, diamond-tube encased arcane crystal inserts embedded in the iron sights, the condition and exterior feel of the four magazines that had been stuffed inside the gun belt’s two mag pouches.

Because if she stopped thinking about it, she wasn’t sure she could go any further. Her heart was shattered, her resolve to vacate the only home she’d ever known faltering with every step upward. She’d personally never been any further up than L4 her entire life. With every movement forward (and up), she’d be going further away from her home than she’d ever been. It was more immensely terrifying than she could have imagined, and she didn’t want to contemplate it or she’d lose her nerve and stop moving.

Even the thought of losing Windy couldn’t compare to that. How terrible a pony was she to consider the life of her only friend less of a tragedy than the idea that she was about to leave her life behind her, even as she cried inside at how the pegasus’s would end up? That she valued her comfort zone and her daughter so much that she didn’t care what happened to anything else around her, so long as at least one of those things could survive? Would Windy understand? Would she be mad at her as her lungs ran out of oxygen? Would she cry as she lay suffocating, thinking her “niece” and friend were suffering the same fate and had no way to comfort them in their last seconds of life? Would she cry for somepony to hold her just so she wouldn’t die alone?

Was she ever going to live this down if she made it out of here? Did she want to?

She slapped a fresh magazine into the pistol’s grip and ripped the slide back into battery before her thoughts could stray any further down such dark paths. She put them out of her mind, wiping away the tears they’d inflicted, put every future thought and action into doing anything but standing here and thinking about what she was leaving behind. She still had her daughter to look after, and El-Tee would not survive up on the surface without her. Anything she did now, would have to be for her.

She damn well didn’t feel like doing anything for herself.

She pulled the ball of light from her illumination spell towards her, whispering a silent enchantment upon the recessed accessory rail on the pistol’s dustcover and then embedded the light ball into it. She watched it seemingly melt into the metal and coalesce the majority of the mana at the front of the frame, just below the barrel, projecting a tight, white beam of light outward like a flashlight, allowing her to search the darkness without having to drain battery power from her flashlight. When the beam showed no dangers lurking about in the dark, tight corridor beneath the Overmare’s office, she picked up the partially-expended magazine off of the floor and stuffed it into a mag pouch mounted ahead of her right saddlebag. Where she was going, she wasn’t sure she’d find any more of these, and she would need every piece of equipment.

“T-this hall goes to a set of stairs a hundred feet up,” she heaved in a single breath. “They go all the way up to the surface level.”

“And the door to the stable?” El-Tee asked as the mare began the short trek down the stairs. Only a dozen steps down.

“What about it?” Four steps down already, and the filly was right on her tail. Literally, the thing’s face was actually touching it.

“How are you gonna get it open when we get there?” she pressed gently, her snout batting the mother’s tail aside, only to have it return to her face.

“….when the spark generator’s about to go out, the control systems send a signal to the door to wipe out the access code and unlock itself,” Sling answered after a moment’s contemplation. No harm in telling her any security secrets now. “The PA is telling us how long we have before we run out of power to work the controls and get the door open. The door was specifically designed to withstand a direct, point-blank detonation of a megaspell, and our particular stable door has enchantments in place to keep a unicorn’s magic from interacting with it. No power, no way out.”

Bottom of the stairs. The embedded light spell in the pistol began to fizzle, and she injected a burst of mana into it to keep it going another few minutes. Still no threats in the hall, and she could even make out the door at the end that would lead them to the surface level.

She hoped the door had been serviced recently.

“….is…is there gonna be anypony up there?”

“Only one way to find out,” she answered, not willing to extrapolate aloud on why they hadn’t seen anypony else since they’d left medical. Either they’d already piled up in the “Gate Room”, as she liked to call the stable door chamber, or everypony up past L7 had evacuated down to the agri levels when the power started to fail and had yet to make their way up. Or were trapped.

Either way, she couldn’t help them.

Thankfully, Light Tail chose not to pester her with question after question, allowing them to traverse the hall in relative peace. It took her half a minute to fight the door open, unfortunately, and she might have cursed the maintenance crew for their lack of oversight had she not been aware of how hard they’d been pressed just to keep anything running for the last two months. Paperwork SNAFUs, or requisition forms getting lost somewhere in the system between the work terminal and the mainframe. Or just plain not having enough ponies to see to all the repairs and upkeep all the time.

She did, however, curse the designers who thought five flights of uninterrupted stairs didn’t need a set of lights to illuminate the path upward. And for an escape route built for the Overmare in the event of a violent rebellion, something like a working light bulb might’ve been an awfully good idea to invest in. Her only solace was that the idiots who designed the place had long since passed from this mortal realm, and that she had an illumination spell she could use to light their way up. A second ball of light formed at the tip of her horn, tethered to it and shining its light in every direction except directly into her eyes, giving mother and daughter all the light they needed to make the ascent a quick one. Within three minutes they reached the top of the stairs, the exit door ominously lacking any lettering or indication that they were about to depart onto the surface level. A twist on the circular hatch handle rankled her ears with its bone-shuddering screech, but otherwise gave her no trouble or resistance as she swung the door open—

—her EFS blipped three red hash marks at the bottom of her field of vision, offset to the left but barely moving, indicating either unaware or distant threats, and she wanted to keep them that way. The sounds of the evacuation klaxon were back in full force, but there was no guarantee that it would be enough to mask any sounds they made.

“Move quietly,” she whispered back behind her, her body lowering down as she began to creep through the door. Her horn drew the light spell in the pistol back into itself, killing the light beam to ensure that it didn’t prematurely announce her position. There was enough tertiary lighting that she didn’t need it anyway. “Talk quietly if you have to talk, otherwise stay silent. Stable door’s close.“

A tug on her tail—with teeth, no less—was as good an “okay” answer as she could ask for, and she began to slink through the living-room sized transfer block, her eyes settling on two separate doors, one to her left and one immediately ahead. The mental map in her head wasn’t quite as clear about the layout of the surface level as it was about the hidden path that got her up here, but with the red marks on her left she could at least rule out that general direction for the moment, and she went straight for the door ahead of her. This one didn’t screech or complain nearly as much, its hatch-operated locking bars creaking softly as she tugged it open and pushed the door aside with her head. A simple peek through, however, set her hopes back.

The room beyond was a dead-end. Littered with empty, rusted storage bins and a few rotted wooden crates, there was nothing else to indicate that this room had seen a pony’s visit in decades. With a silent curse she tucked her head back through and went for the other door, ignoring the red hash marks as they slid over to the center bottom—

“—GENCY. YOU NOW HAVE FOUR MINUTES TO EVACUATE THE STABLE—“

Her race-track heart began to beat harder, though it was already working itself half to death with all the fear and adrenaline coursing through her. Four minutes was not that much time if one wasn’t paying attention to it. She let her telekinesis pull down on the hatch, twisting it open and cringing at much louder the locking bars were—

—the three hash marks began to shift about, one sliding away from the other two at a slightly faster rate. What it meant, she couldn’t say. She hoped it was just milling about and not actually trying to search out the noise she’d just made.

This door, thankfully, led to a short hall, forty feet in length, with no obstructions or damage that might slow their progress. She let herself trot forward a little, momentarily surprised when she heard only her own soft hoofsteps and jerked her gaze back behind her—

—Light Tail was right where she expected her, no less than two feet away from the tip of her tail, and her little hooves barely made a sound as they tip-toed forward on slightly shaking legs. Good girl, easy does it—

—eyes forward again, and that faster hash mark began to grow further away from its two friends….and with much more noticeable shifts in its position. Very close. Possibly even in the next room.

Please let this be the door to the Gate Room, please please please pretty please—

End of the hall. A subtle, soft pull of the hatch—she didn’t want to alarm that moving threat any more than she already had. Happily, the door was as soft as the first one she’d tried, barely squeaking, and she stuffed her snout into the opening crack and pushed the door off to the side—

—her ears felt a lessening of air pressure as her body slinked through into the much larger and cavernous room beyond. Bathed in bright red from a row of overhead crimson light bulbs, there was little mistaking the room’s identity.

Gate Room.

Coming in from a hidden side path rather than the main stairway, the view wasn’t quite as…majestic as it might have been. She emerged into the room on a raised platform, a short set of stairs in the middle leading to the grated floor four feet below. Ahead, she could see a small security station at the other end of the platform, its glass window long broken and the ravages of time eroding at the metal walls within.

To her right, embedded into the solid steel wall, was the “Gateway” to the surface. A massive, mechanical arm hanging from the ceiling stood ready to press itself into the open port at the top of the gear-shaped stable door and pull the door inward and off to the slide along a set of recessed rails spanning the length of the wall. Inset in the center of the stable door, in faded but legible black lettering were pony-sized numbers:

“115”

“—AVE THREE MINUTES TO EVACUATE THE STABLE. ALL RESIDENTS MUST EVACUATE—“

Light Tail’s body bumped into her hind legs, distracted by her first sight of a world beyond level six, and somehow, despite the trauma and horror of losing everything she’d ever known, she still had the capacity to be awed and floored by things she’d never seen before. “…..oooooh, wooow….it’s huge….”

The overwhelming sense of wonder in her voice made Sling wonder whether she even wanted to tell her little girl the gravity of what they were about to do. “It’s our only way out,” she said in return, creeping forward once more and scanning the room with her attention focused specifically on where those red hash marks could come from once she entered the command to open the stable door. “And when it opens, any bugs on this level will know it and come looking for a meal. Be ready to run through the second you have room.”

“How long will that take?” El-Tee pondered, going so far as to inch past her mother to a place where she could get a better look at the door. “It’s….huge. And only opens once every generation. Not like it gets used a lot.”

How eternally grateful I am that you continue to use that brilliant mind of yours to completely derail my nice fantasies with a dose of pesky reality! “….good question. Like I said before, only one way to find out. See that console off to your left?”

Light Tail’s red-hued body shifted slightly as her head twisted around to the podium-mounted console right next to the stairs. Though its monochrome green monitor was dusty and well-worn, she could still hear its internal components buzzing with energy and the computer systems humming in anticipation of commands to carry out.

“The one I can’t reach ‘cause I’m too short?” the filly mumbled derisively.

“Oops,” she squeaked sheepishly. “My bad. Watch the doors.”

Light Tail reluctantly pulled her gaze away from the sight in front of her and did as she was told, moving out of her mother’s way as the mare quickly stepped up to the console and huffed at the controls, blowing ungodly clouds of dust off that swirled away into oblivion. Dirty as hell up here, she noted with slight concern. Like nopony ever comes up here unless they’re Selected. No reason to…

“….wow,” Light Tail’s voice whispered again, but this time there was no hint of wonder or amusement to her words. Rather, a tone of sadness. “….I guess, we’re the only ones that made it up….”

Her lit, flared horn paused just short of pressing the telekinesis spell field into the pull-out keyboard, her mind suddenly rushing back to—

—Windy’s face, beaming back at her in mid-laughter as she walked ahead of her—

“—OU NOW HAVE TWO MINUTES TO EVACUATE THE STABLE—“

—a tear dripped through her right eye, rolled down her cheek as she resumed poking at the keyboard, no longer willing to look at the keys as she punched in the commands that would suck up the last vestiges of power in the stable. Hesitated just before the “ENTER” key, a slight resistance to her escape plan still compelling her to…

….oh gods, I’m really….

Her spell field slapped the key before the thought could finish, and allowed the consequences to quell her hesitation. With a loud, brain-rattling groan, the massive arm began to crunch forward, its torturous movements echoing through the metals with such agony that she almost felt sorry for it. It was like listening to an aged, decrepit pony trying to walk without the assistance of others or a walker and hearing their brittle, old bones crinkle and crack under the effort.

She lost all sympathy for old metal constructs when her EFS began adding more red hash marks than she could count, quickly. She began to wonder if the things were nesting up here instead of at the generator, and they would not be happy with the silly little pony that had just woken them up.

“Oh snap,” she huffed loudly, whipping around to scan through the doorway leading towards the main elevator in the room behind her. “El-Tee, get behind me!”

She needn’t have said anything—the disjointed chorus of shrieking radroaches was enough to send the filly dashing behind her mother. Between the mechanical piston above them slamming into the door and the evacuation klaxon it was impossible to tell how close the bugs were now. Didn’t matter in the end, she didn’t have enough ammo to kill them all if this door didn’t open fast.

Mother and daughter inched down the platform stairs to the floor, Sling swinging the pistol about at every conceivable point of entry for the bugs—an air vent, the room with the main elevator, the security office that was now up and to her right if it had a vent anywhere in there. She didn’t even bother watching the hash marks, they were flooding her vision. She eventually shut the EFS off entirely just to keep from getting sick.

Just as the door controls began pulling the stable out with an agonizing screech of unlubed metal grinding against each other, the first of the bugs emerged into view in the main elevator room.

And it brought TWENTY friends to the party.

“Sh—“

Her magic squeezed the trigger, cutting off her swearing with an intense—but sound-muffled—boom and a flash of orange flame, then squeezed again, and again each time the sights came back down into alignment from the recoil—

—the muzzle flash obscured much of the gruesome effects of her shots, though the dying shrieks and shrill cries were enough to signify her success—

“—YOU NOW HAVE ONE MINUTE TO EVACUATE THE STABLE—“

—two more shots, another shriek that somehow brought a sick grin to the side of her mouth. Cathartic to hear them scream like that, after all the damage they’d done. The massive door began to roll along the rails, whether aided by the mechanical arm above them or another mechanism she didn’t know about—

“Mom, it’s opening!!!” Light Tail screamed as high as her voice could manage, her words growing more distant with each passing moment. “Hurry up!!!”

She ceased shooting, turned and bolted like a rabbit—

—shrieked in surprise as the door, barely pulled off of the entrance, was already beginning to tumble back over the exposed hole—

—her tail was the last thing to come through the entrance. Barely a moment later, the gear-shaped door slid back into place, shaking ages of dust and—

—and rock….

Sling skidded to a stop in the excavated tunnel, barely acknowledging the noise the door made as it shuddered into place and rumbled the walls of rock around them. Actual, solid, rock. With stalagmites hanging from the ceiling and jutting up from the ground. Her nose, tickled by the falling dust, instigated an instinctive sneeze to blow it away, allowing her to take her first, unobstructed breath of fresh air in her life. And it was like nothing else she’d ever inhaled. She’d never realized how…stuffy, how stale the air in the stable was, because she’d never known anything else. Now she did.

And when the last vestiges of ancient metal finished their echo through the caverns, she was introduced to an entire new sensation, one even an unpowered stable had not provided.

Natural silence. Save for the crumble of bits of rock as they clanked down the wall and the sound of her own steady breathing, she couldn’t hear a damn thing.

It took her less than ten seconds to forget all of these new sensations, once she began to realize she was now standing outside the stable door. With the giant “115” numbers facing outward now….

….and everything she’d ever known now locked behind it. No longer able to take the way out.

Her throat clamped down on her wind pipe at the thought of Cloud Wind, choking her of its own volition as she began to wonder what was happening to her right now. Maybe surrounded, maybe stuck in the agri level with the rest of the stable, suddenly aware of the dying power and the oxygen recycling systems with it….

A gentle, tentative poke in her side brought her gaze downward, and she remembered again why she’d just abandoned her home. Light Tail’s electric blue irises gleamed with wetness and understanding as she nuzzled her mother’s foreleg, as if hoping the contact might physically ease the heartache she was being hit with right then.

“Aunt C’ll be fine,” the little one said, full of quiet confidence that the mother didn’t feel. “She’s too awesome to let a little thing like lack of power keep her down.”

Sling’s eyes, though beginning to fill with tears, refused to allow them to bubble forth, instead bringing back to her a distant memory—

—Windy’s hoof poked at her hindquarters, at the mark of a shooting star streaking across the front cover of a closed spell book, and she couldn’t help but start to squeal like the nine-year old filly she was at the sight of her totally awesome cutie mark—

—the memory faded, and somehow Sling’s eyes had fallen upon the cutie mark emblazoned on her left hind leg, and now the tears began to trickle free. “….h-honey, it’s not—“

“It’s okay, Mom,” the filly insisted, nuzzling her leg again. “Aunt C won’t croak like that, she’s too awesome. She’ll be okay. But if we’re gonna help anypony now, we gotta find us a new place to live. I don’t know how much longer the stable can stay in there after all that, but it can’t be long.”

Her breath hung up inside her lungs, unable to break the hard truth. And hearing how much…calmer, and steadier Light Tail seemed to feel when she said that…it was almost as if she believed it, and that the thought was what gave her the strength and courage to even contemplate walking out of this tunnel of rock. How could she bring herself to do something so cruel as to shatter that hope with the cold reality going on behind that door? That without the spark generator to keep the stable going, there was no air either?

—a bout of laughter bounced off the walls as Windy’s latest prank came together in a single, spectacular blast of ice cold water sprang forth from the shower head, her spell field around the hot water faucet winking out from the sheer shock to her nerves—

Her tears were blinked away out of necessity rather than heartlessness. If believing that Cloud Wind would save the stable from asphyxiation in a matter of seconds gave her night light the fuel to keep burning, then she would let her believe it until her mane and tail lost their colorful luster. She didn’t have it in her to break her heart. Even if it would have been the wiser thing to do.

And they would need to find somewhere else to live now.

“…t-then I guess we’d better get moving,” she somehow managed to say. Even in this dead, natural silence, her voice was a mere whisper, her light-hearted nuzzle across the filly’s crest being her best signal that she was ready to start moving once more.

Light Tail took the hint and started walking down the tunnel, her indigo tail flashing about and turning that dazzling streak of electric blue in the middle into a light show that had inspired her name. And Sling Shot still lingered, her weary, wet eyes looking back at the steel door and its faded “115”, looking at it now as a tomb, rather than a guard against the unknown, wishing now that she were still on the other side, letting that door be her shield against everything beyond her world and keeping what she knew as close to her as she could manage.

She never thought she would have been so devastated to leave it all behind.

“I’m sorry, Windy,” she cried to the tomb. “I wish I could’ve done better by you….good-bye…”

Sling Shot tore herself away from the door, and her world….

….and into her new one.

Chapter 7

To be completely, totally honest, neither of them were expecting a land of sunshine and rainbows. Thus, it was with relief and mild trepidation that their initial expectations of what the surface was like was not so far from what they’d reasoned.

A massive, overhanging carpet of gray clouds obscured the skies as far as her eyes could see, distant patches flashing white and blue as random lightning strikes came alive within the clouds. The accompanying thunder rolled gently across the barren landscape, pockmarked in seemingly random patches with shriveled bushes and small clumps of prairie grass. Much of the ground in front of them, however, looked dusty and dry, and a cool wind whipped about the land in a seemingly random pattern. Clouds of dust occasionally rose from the ground and spread out in a misty fashion, and her damp mane began to grow cold from the touch of the rushing air.

More disturbing, however, were the rows of ancient sky wagons scattered about, many of them twisted and broken into barely recognizable heaps of metal. Nearly two centuries of exposure to the elements had ruined them—most were rotted out by rust, a combination of sickly looking brown and dark red, and the few baggage cases and storage boxes that looked intact had been looted long ago. Several contained remnants of the bones of their former passengers, and she was surprised that were any to begin with. Even so, there was little left inside the two closest sky wagons for anypony to be able to tell if they had once been mares, stallions, or little fillies and colts. She honestly didn’t want to know.

Aside from the bare earth and dead shrubbery, she saw only one husk of a tree masked by the field of debris and ancient machines, its trunk whittled down to the height of the Princess Sisters. But what remained was at the very least, still standing.

A perfect target.

Thankful to have a task to take her attention away from her lingering grief, she slowly nudged Light Tail out of her stunned daze with a quick tap of her snout. “C’mon, I need to teach you something before we get moving.”

Without waiting to see if the little one would respond she walked on past her, her route taking her near a rusted sky wagon that unfortunately did have a fairly intact skeleton still inside its passenger berth, and she did her best not to let her eyes linger on it as she hurried past.

“….t-teach me what?” Light Tail asked, her hoofsteps beginning to tap along behind her in a quick trot to match the larger pony’s casual walking speed. “And….and where did all of these sky wagons come from? The First Ones never mentioned any of this in their journals….”

This earned the filly a quizzical look from her mother, who was momentarily surprised by the fact that her daughter had shown any interest in the Founding Journals at all. “How much of them did you read?”

“Only the ones Miss Amethyst had us read in class,” El-Tee answered quietly. By the sound of her voice Sling presumed her to have moved past the rusted sky wagon, and the lack of terrified shrieks at the sight of a pony’s skeleton was welcome. Probably too short to see over the railing and inside the passenger deck. “None of ‘em ever mentioned these things bein’ out here, only that they crossed a field to get to the Stable.”

She briefly pondered how best to answer the question in a way that would get the point across without being overly detailed or descriptive of the fates of the souls the wagons had once borne. “…..what little I’ve read on the megaspells suggests they’re capable of emitting a secondary backlash wave of residual mana energy that can disable anything more advanced than a steam engine within a defined radius of the blast. Sky wagons, arcane energy weapons, spark generators and portable batteries, even the armor of the War Ministry’s Steel Rangers. My best guess is that these wagons were trying to escape the megaspell exchange when one detonated nearby or above them. Shut down the engines in mid-air, and their pegasi drivers don’t have the strength to pull them along behind them without the support of the engines.”

She didn’t finish her exposition; she didn’t have the heart to. And Light Tail was smart enough to figure out the rest from there on her own regardless. “….oh…”

They spent the next minute and a half in solemn silence, the filly now realizing they were essentially walking through a gravity-built graveyard and having little interest in conversation of any kind. When they’d come to within fifteen yards of the decaying husk of the tree trunk, however, Sling was forced to break that quiet and sanctity with the cold, indifferent necessity of reality. “I showed you this once before the other day, so you’ll probably get some vague feelings of déjà vu. You’re gonna learn how to shoot that gun on your traveling saddle.”

She stopped walking and looked back towards Light Tail, who had stopped herself cold mid-step to the point where even her right foreleg had halted its downward motion towards the ground. She took a slow, hard look at the lightweight .357 revolver tucked into a holster along her left side, and then sat down on her haunches with a heavy sigh. “….yer right, it does sound familiar. An’ I don’t like it. I don’t wanna shoot anypony.”

“You said the same thing the first time, too,” Sling answered back calmly, more than slightly afraid that the future might have other ideas about that particular statement. “You shouldn’t want to shoot other ponies, but that’s not the point. I want you to be able to look after yourself if we get separated, or….or worse. And not knowing how the gun works can actually be more dangerous. At least if you know how to handle it you can do it more safely. You saw how crazy it got in the Stable with all those bugs running around, right?”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it,” El-Tee blurted suddenly, her unusually sharp tone catching the mother off-guard. “I just said I don’t like it.”

“I’m not asking you to like it,” Sling bit back, letting her “Parent mode” slip into her tone. “But you will learn this. It’s important, especially now. Those bugs came from the surface and there’s no telling what else is out here.”

The little one’s response was simply another deep, resigned sigh, as if she were forcing herself to go through with the task ahead out of necessity. “….I know…”

Her daughter’s subdued, sullen mood took some of the bite out of her voice, and for the next ten minutes the lesson went largely as well as it had the first time, and even expanded a little as she showed her how the 10mm pistol worked as well—loading, unloading, the safety and magazine release, how hard she needed to work the slide to get it to snap forward after locking back on an empty magazine (it turned out the squirt’s magic pretty much maxed out at that particular trick). One particular caveat of interest did not escape her notice—it seemed as though merely repeating the lesson had done something to trigger El-Tee’s first memory of it, even if she could no longer recall it directly, and her first round of 125gr .38 Special fired from the lightweight revolver smacked right into the middle of the tree trunk. It was hard to tell at fifteen yards, but she noticed it largely because she was merely watching while El-Tee did the shooting.

“Wow,” her lips breathed of their own accord, her eyes locked onto the deadened chips of bark that had split away from the impact point. “Dead center, first try. Good shot.”

The lightweight revolver floated down below Light Tail’s face as she spied her own handiwork for herself. “I couldn’t tell from here with the gun in the way,” she said quietly, though much of her earlier disdain for the task was disappearing now that she was getting to the actual shooting. “…but this all feels kinda familiar to me anyway. Like I’m just re-learning somethin’ I already knew.”

“It definitely took you a couple of minutes to figure out to pull just the trigger and not the entire the gun the first time we did this,” Sling agreed, her mind already revisiting that Thursday morning and recalling another aspect she’d overlooked the first time. “Since you’ve already got the single-action pull down, just practice firing on double-action for the next nine shots. That takes more effort to shoot accurately and you won’t have time to keep pulling the hammer back if you ever need to draw that thing.”

With no protest (at least none that she could hear), the filly proceeded to do just that, peppering their spell-protected hearing with carefully-deliberated shots over the next twenty-five seconds. It quickly became apparent, however, that Light Tail was not going to get the hang of the ten pounds of pull pressure it required to pull the trigger and fire the weapon in a single session, as her shots were grouped all over the tree trunk. To be fair, though, fifteen yards was asking quite a bit of a weapon that was designed more as a trail kit gun than an implement of battle. And .38 Special wasn’t exactly a powerhouse round either.

Which the squirt was quick to notice when she’d fired her tenth and final round, taking out the tip of a jagged splinter of trunk at the top. “….so what’d you load it with? It’s not nearly as loud as it was in the Stable thirty minutes ago.”

“Those hallways were tight, cramped, and filled with metal,” she pointed out, finally giving in to her inherent curiousness and drawing Grayhawk from its holster on her left side. She already knew she could still shoot the 10mm just fine, but she hadn’t fired this hoofcannon in three years. “That amplifies the sound immensely. Out here there’s nothing to stop the sound and reflect it back at us.”

“I know that,” Light Tail bit back bitterly, turning the revolver upward to dump the empty casings free from the five-round cylinder. “I can still tell a difference in how this thing sounds. What were you shootin’ in the stable? Special bug-killin’ bullets?”

Sling snickered slightly at the remark, but it still stung hard to think back to such recent events and so she simply pushed the fresh memories out of mind for the moment and focused more on the present. “In a way, I guess. You wanna try one?”

As Sling pressed down on Grayhawk’s cylinder release to check the rounds inside, she could almost hear the gears in her night light’s head grinding to a sudden halt as she tried to contain her sudden rush of childlike glee. “Would I?!”

Sling kept her sinister grin mostly to one side of her mouth as she reached into the squirt’s saddle bag and slipped one round of .357 Mag out of its box, floating it out to her daughter in a teasing invitation. If nothing else, the prank would help take her mind off of what had just happened five minutes ago. “Here, I’ll give you one. Don’t have many to spare.”

Light Tail had the lightweight revolver back out in a flash, carefully guiding her mother’s offered ammunition into an empty chamber. With a careful press and indexing of the cylinder she ensured that the .357 round would be rotated into firing position when she cocked the hammer. Not something she’d taught the kid at all.

With her daughter’s attention focused on the upcoming shot, Sling was free to allow her grin to spread unsuppressed, stepping backwards as she sought to get the best view possible of the upcoming calamity. Still, her motherly protective instinct compelled her to keep her prank from being unnecessarily cruel. “Keep a good grip on it, it’ll kick some.”

“Yeah, I saw how you handled it,” El-Tee waved her off with a forehoof. “I’ll be fine, Mom.”

Suit yourself.

A quick glance at Grayhawk’s cylinder confirmed that all six chambers were loaded before she nudged it back shut, and her attention shifted back onto Light Tail as she focused on making the perfect shot—

—El-Tee squeezed down on the trigger, probably a little sooner than she’d expected to, and the resulting sheniagans gave her a good laugh. Even over the sound of the gunshot she could clearly hear her little girl’s shriek in surprise as the gun bucked its way free of her spell field and smacked her in the face, and the backlash of recoil knocked her off-balance enough that she wound up stumbling down on her butt a couple of seconds later when she couldn’t get her balance back. Her shot, surprisingly, managed to blow off the top of a jagged chunk of bark sticking out of the dead tree, but El-Tee never noticed.

She was too incensed over her mother’s sudden burst of laughter. “….you knew that would happen!!” she howled angrily once she’d gotten over her shock (and embarrassment).

She suppressed a snicker into a short snort long enough to answer clearly. “Hey, I warned you. And you said you’d be fine, remember?”

Light Tail’s answer was to simply growl and glare at her mother as she quickly picked the revolver off the ground and opened the cylinder, unceremoniously pulling the fired casing from its chamber, and then flicked it over her back and onto the ground beside her. “Fine, then, let’s see how you handle that monster you’re holding.”

Sling Shot’s grin only got wider as she brought Grayhawk’s sights upward and lined up the red-crystal front sight on top of one of Light Tail’s hits on the tree, and a slight shift in the spell field enveloping the revolver squeezed back on the trigger—

—Grayhawk roared to life for the first time in three years, and the sound and muzzle flash overwhelmed her with its abrupt eruption. Had she not remembered to keep a death grip on the weapon it could have very well bucked back right into her snout just as Light Tail’s gun had. Even with the hearing protection spell, the sound itself thumped its way into her chest and briefly made her heart feel as though it were being grabbed by a griffon’s talon. She swore she even felt the front of her mane being batted around by the back-end of the muzzle blast.

But this heavy price of recoil and noise was rewarded with the explosive deconstruction of the target—where Light Tail’s shot had merely split open a few pieces of dead wood, Sling Shot’s .44 Magnum absolutely obliterated the impact point and sent two-inch pieces of the trunk flying outward in several directions. The ancient tree, rotted out from the ravages of time, proved a much more fragile construct than she’d anticipated, for she could see much the same result exploding out from the back end of the tree trunk as well.

It took a few seconds for the two ponies to shake the noise of the gun out of their heads, and Sling resolved to work on amplifying the strength of the spell later when she began to hear a very faint ringing at the edge of her range of hearing. No more shooting for her, but at least she’d found out if she could still handle the weapon.

And it brightened Light Tail’s mood into one of stunned acceptance, which she preferred over a brooding demeanor. “….holy LUNA,” she shrieked, her rump sitting back down onto the ground as she soaked in every last detail of her mother’s shot. “….what is that thing?”

“Family heirloom,” she answered, unlatching the cylinder just long enough to replace the fired round with a fresh one before slipping the massive revolver back inside its holster. “Our ancestors brought it in with them before the Sealing. Passed down through the generations ever since. Same thing with the one you have, too.”

Light Tail’s gaze fell upon the lightweight revolver resting against her side in its holster, her eyes holding a mixture of fear and wonder. “…you….you mean these guns are over two hundred years old?! How are they still working after all that time?!”

“A properly maintained firearm will last for centuries,” she quoted from memory, recalling the opening line of the firearms chapter straight from the quartermaster training manual with which she’d become innately familiar in her eight years of security service. “That was my job in the stable, until Thursday, anyway.”

“Sounds pretty important,” El-Tee noted needlessly—

Trap, she recognized in the next instant. Something to get her to answer and draw her out of a comfort zone, into a place where she’d be forced to either answer the next question or make it obvious that she wasn’t comfortable answering it by shifting the subject.

Sometimes the kid was just too smart for her liking.

With no real polite way out of the mess, she went ahead and sprung the trap. “It was,” she offered as a reply, lifting her PipBuck up for a better view of its screen as she focused her telekinesis spell onto the mode switch and began flipping through the device’s various functions. With the short weapons lesson over and done with, it was time to get moving, and the first thing she needed to know was which way to go. At the very least, they could at least try to find the final resting place of some long-dead town or village, or whatever remained of the road system.

“So why’d you quit?” came the question she’d predicted would come, and feared answering it. Not just right then, but potentially forever. She’d talked and talked about staying true to Celestia’s words of wisdom, of refraining from violence for the sake of satisfying one’s rampant rage or anger, and the last thing she wanted was to admit she’d done exactly what she’d scolded her daughter for doing more than once when she gave Farsight her short “I quit” message.

Fortunately, when she switched the display to the local area mapping spell matrix function, she found an excellent way to squirm out of the situation even if the new one was potentially worse. “Oh, fu—poke me with a ten-foot pole!” she spat at the monochrome green miniature screen, catching herself before she could drop a rather uncouth curse upon her ten-year-old’s filly ears. “Of course this thing would have to draw itself a new map to replace the one it’s programmed with!”

“….what made you think a map from two hundred years ago would be any good now?” Light Tail inquired politely, likely deciding to forgo the hunt for her mother’s recent troubles in light of the fact that she’d just now admitted they were basically lost.

The simple logic of her reasoning almost caused Sling to slap herself in the face the moment she processed it. “Look behind us,” she replied with a touch of grief, her hoof slipping back down onto the ground as she reached into her bags for her binoculars. No use in messing with the local mapping function if it was just going to start drawing a new one. “Wherever those sky wagons came from, nopony’s been out this way to at least bury the dead ever since the war ended. The road systems and cities on the map might be in ruins but something of them could still be there. I was just hoping to find something that might show us the way to the closest road and we could go from there.”

With the binoculars in her magical grasp she lifted it up to her eyes and began scrutinizing every magnified detail the ten-power optics offered to her. The field of broken, rusting sky wagons and their skeletonized former riders only went out for a further forty yards, and the tree trunk they’d been shooting at sat atop a small hill, giving her a decent vantage point for surveying the immediate area. So far, however, she saw nothing else ahead of them except more patches of dry, dying tallgrass and cracked earth. What about to the right….

“…well, the stable was built near a town, right?” El-Tee suggested next.

“And that helps us, how?” she shot back as she swung the binoculars to her right…and saw much the same thing in that direction as well. Just more empty, barren land. “We still don’t know which way to go to get there.”

“It’d be in walkin’ or runnin’ distance,” the filly continued insistently, but her tone grew quiet and contemplative as she went on. “…y’know, since the First Ones woulda had to get here quick once the world started blowin’ up without warnin’….”

When she put it that way the idea sounded less stupid and wasteful. She held no illusions about what they would find, save that it wouldn’t be anywhere near as comfortable as their stable quarters and probably lacking a running plumbing system. She was already beginning to dread the next couple of days ahead.

With resignation she stopped scanning the lifeless landscape and slipped the binoculars back into their case inside her saddlebags. “….so your idea is to wander aimlessly in a circle until we find whatever’s left of this town?”

“Yup,” Light Tail quipped proudly. “It’s not like we got anythin’ better to do anyway.”

Sling stalled for a few more moments as she took the 10mm pistol out and made a quick round count. The gun belt had two full magazines in it, plus one empty one and the partial mag of five rounds she’d swapped out back in the stable. She’d picked up one empty magazine off the floor as well for a total of five spares…pop the mag out of the gun and scan the witness holes—

Terrific, she snarled bitterly as she counted nine rounds through the witness holes. With one I the chamber as well that left her….thirty-nine rounds of 10mm? Hardly encouraging considering how quickly they could be fired off from a semi-automatic weapon. She pulled the partial magazine out and stripped three rounds from it, and then stuffed them in the magazine she’d taken out of the gun to top it off before putting both mags back where they’d been earlier. She didn’t want to be caught with an empty weapon in the first two seconds of a fight if she needed it. She’d just have to remember not to grab the partial magazine for a reload until she had nothing else left.

She was pretty much carrying everything she owned now. “….guess we’ll start out going straight ahead for a few miles, then.”

“I don’t suppose that PipBuck’s got any music on it, does it?” Light Tail inquired innocently as the pair began their aimless trek.

“Not one iota of it,” the mare answered, distracted by her hounding thoughts of the stable they were leaving behind.

She only realized her mistake when the little filly began clearing her throat in preparation for a vocal task, and by then it was too late to talk her out of it. “Well, then—“

“No, wait—“

“One hundred bottles of beer on the wall, one hundred bottles of beeeeer—“

Sling’s hearing protection spell flared to life, muffling the little filly’s high-pitched singing….but unfortunately, there was really no way to tune her out completely or convince her to shut up. She knew—she’d tried it countless times, and failed. She was doomed. “Oh dear Luna, this is gonna be a long morning…”

“—ss it around, ninety-nine bottles of beer on the waaaall—“

She got down to sixty-two before they came across their first hopeful sign that some remnant of civilization still existed.

It was a pretty lonely looking thing, perched atop the crest of a slightly-upward incline of ground. Despite two hundred years of time and weather, the wooden house was somehow still standing, though parts of it had long ago fallen apart. One corner of the front had collapsed some time ago, and judging by the haphazard planks of wood nailed over the hole, the soul that lived here was not a pro at house building. The planks were probably just meant to keep nasty critters like radroaches from getting in for lack of better options and skill. Nothing wrong with that.

She had enough sense to stop singing and let Mom slowly creep forward, keeping a sharp eye on how she regarded the rickety house before them. Every few seconds, Light Tail would take a short look around them to make sure nothing was trying to sneak up on them while they weren’t looking, but all she saw was an endless, dusty wasteland. Barely any plant life to sustain the ground and keep the wind from eroding it, which meant that whatever survived up here had little to use for hiding spots when stalking prey. It was kinda sad, really. She already missed the familiarity of the stable, its cool air, her…

….her friends….

Oh stars, I hope they’re okay…

“H-hello?” Mom’s voice called out suddenly, breaking her out of her brief pang of homesickness and causing her to look back up the tiny hill towards the house ahead. “Is anypony there?”

She quickly trotted up to her mother’s side, and Mom sidestepped out in front of her to keep her from going any further up. She wanted to be annoyed, but she knew Mom was probably just trying to keep her from getting hurt if something happened. She probably shouldn’t have been running forward like that to start with. Mom was stressed out enough as it was.

The dead silence that answered them did not make either of them feel any more comfortable about it. Mom called out again in a louder voice, but still got no answer from any living pony. Only the hollow, haunting howl of the wind greeted them.

Mom seemed frozen in thought, torn between one thing or another, trying to make some sort of decision. Yell again? Forget the house and move on with their day? Stick around an—

A quick dust-up of wind rushed across them, scraping the front of the house and rattling it some…and pulling the door open slightly as it passed, allowing an incredibly stout stink to escape from the interior. The mere whiff that she got was enough to make her reel back and wish she’d been standing a lot further away.

“Whoa,” she half-heaved, trying to pinch her nose shut with a small telekinesis spell. “Umm, I don’t think anypony’s home, let’s just go—“

If the smell bothered Mom any, she did a really good job of hiding her distaste, but the second she pulled the black gun out and flicked the safety off she stopped wondering about bad smells entirely.

“Stay outside,” Mom barked at her as she began to saunter towards the door, her tail flicking and twitching about. “Let me know if you see anything. Anything at all.”

Light Tail felt her little heart start to tighten up, beating faster and harder as she began to wonder what had Mom so spooked all of a sudden. She didn’t want to be out here all alone if it was that bad. “M-mom? What is it—”

“Just stay outside,” Mom repeated fiercely as she snapped her head back towards her, now less than a foot away from the door. “I mean it.”

Light Tail’s ears drooped, unconsciously flinching at the sudden change in her mother’s voice, and slowly stepped back a couple of feet. “O-okay…”

She thought she saw Mom’s left eye wince a little, probably just now realizing how much her tone of voice had hurt her, but she didn’t say anything else and looked back towards the house, slipping through the open crack in the door with the gun out in front of her. A moment later the last of her tail followed her through, and Light Tail’s ears couldn’t make out any hoofsteps after that.

Only then did the filly allow herself a few tears.

Jeez, she didn’t have to yell at me like that, she sniffled, wiping at her eyes with a forehoof as she tore her gaze away from the house. Just wanted to know what she was doing, I can’t help her if I’m stuck outside all clueless.

…still, probably better that she wasn’t following her, if that was the kind of mood she was in. Maybe she shouldn’t have been singing as long as she had? Or maybe Mom wasn’t sure what was in the house and didn’t want her getting in the way until she knew it was safe? Whatever the reason, the filly couldn’t help but feel stung. Twice now Mom had bit her head off for asking a simple question, and now that they couldn’t get back into the stable she didn’t really have anypony to talk to, or help her with everything that was stressing her out. And Mom made it pretty clear she didn’t want to talk to her about any of it. Not old enough, or something like that.

So how was she gonna change her mother’s mind? The blatant-but-logical-question trick hadn’t worked so far, and she wasn’t sure she could get away with a more subtle—and time-consuming—approach with Mom like she could everypony else (even Aunt C). Still worth a try, just for the sake of trying. She couldn’t just stay back and watch her mom fall apart trying to deal with all that stuff on her own. It was already hurting her.

Stupid ponies, she hissed in her mind, laying her head down on her crossed forelegs as she stared out at the vast, dry wasteland before her. I bet if everypony that ever said mean things to her saw how she was blowing up at me from all the stupid stress they’d cut it out…

….or maybe they wouldn’t care. One had to be pretty ambvi….darn it, what was the word she was trying to think of?! She was supposed to be smarter than this! She was….

….was now entirely transfixed by the growing black dot on the horizon. It was so far off that she could only describe it as a dot, but it was definitely moving because it was getting bigger and bigger. Maybe it was another pony, possibly even one that lived in this house that Mom had just broken into!

….okay, she hadn’t really broken into it, she just kinda invited herself in when she smelled that awful stink. Still, this pony wouldn’t take kindly to strangers in his home—

—oh Luna, does he have a gun too?!, she thought suddenly, startled into action by the potential danger and standing up on all fours after rummaging through her saddlebags for some binoculars like Mom had. She floated them out and up to her eyes, barely noticing the mana flowing through her horn and empowering her telekinesis spell, too focused on figuring out what to say to the pony when he got to his house and saw a little filly parked on the bottom of the gentle hill. She didn’t want anypony getting hurt over a misunderstanding, not with the mood Mom was in. Still, she couldn’t help but get excited to finally meet somepony else, her first contact with a pony on the surface! That black dot couldn’t be anything else but another pony!

The black dot was not a pony.

She blinked her eyes, hoping she’d seen wrong or that the lenses on the binocs needed to be cleaned off or something. The subject of her viewing, however, refused to morph into the shape of a pony.

With a gasp she flipped the binocs over until she was staring down at the objective lenses, hoping she’d see some big scratches or damage that would explain why she wasn’t seeing a pony. But the lenses were fine. Eyepiece lenses were fine, too.

She had to tell her lungs to breathe when they started to complain about the lack of air she was getting, and she brought the binoculars up to her eyes again to make sure that this dot was a pony.

The black dot was still not a pony. No pony could be this big, except maybe Luna or Celestia, and they were alicorns. And this dot was not an alicorn, either. In fact, she didn’t know what the dot was. She didn’t know of any creature from the textbooks in class that looked anything like what she was seeing.

It was very large, and walked on four legs like a pony, but it was not a pony. And as it grew larger (and thus closer), she began to wonder if it was even alive. She was finally able to start making out some concrete details. The kind that made her insides quiver and churn, because to be honest it was terrifying her. It didn’t have a lot of fur, or hair, or whatever, and it looked like it’d been in some fights because it was missing chunks and long, ragged strips of its hide. And the creature’s hide itself was like some….grotesque and hideous jab at an animal’s body structure, it looked massively powerful. Way more than even those bears in that nature book in the library—

….o-oh dear Luna is that what it is….

….no, was. Now that she thought about it, it did look something like a bear. A really big, ugly bear with mange that probably made it really mad—

—it cocked its head in her direction, and stopped moving entirely.

She froze still, not out of any intentional effort to not attract its attention, but because she was so terrified that she couldn’t even bring herself to breathe. Whatever this…this bear used to be, it wasn’t anymore and it was looking right at her—

—its body began to turn towards her, no longer walking along its path. But running.

At her. And something that sounded like a heavy, snarling, hungry grunt managed to make its way to her ears even at the distance that this thing was at, and she was finally spurred into doing something other than wetting herself. She stuffed the binoculars back into her saddlebags, turned around, and high-tailed it back up the hill, back to Mom, as quickly as she could.

Not even the sheer stench of rot and….and other stuff, could upset her anywhere as much as the look on her little girl’s face when she’d snapped at her like that. It wouldn’t have been that much of a stretch to say that she’d practically slapped her across the face. The end result was pretty much the same.

Nice going, you stupid bitch, she admonished herself harshly, feeling a slight wetness in her left eye as she inched through the grime-layered living room. As if losing everything she’s ever known and loved isn’t bad enough, now you have to start yelling at her when you leave her alone for more than a couple of minutes and she wonders why? Why did I bite her head off like that, WHY? I’m just scared to death that she’s going to find the dead body I smell in here and I can’t explain that?!

….well, that settled that, then. The instant she was certain the house was safe, she’d go right back outside and apologize. And try not to cry in the process. She was a hair trigger away from bawling herself into dehydration as it was. No more fresh food and water, no more warm bed, no more library, or…or watching El-Tee and her little cadre of friends wreck things around them trying to find their cutie marks, or…

She pushed the mood-killing thoughts of the stable out of her mind when her throat began to grow so tight that she could barely breathe. Hard enough saying good-bye to a door. And by the looks of the surface, she might very well be wishing they’d stayed in the stable and died with all the others. But right now, she was too focused on making sure her only child would stay in one piece from one day to the next.

She hoped, and prayed, that she only smelled the remains of some predator’s latest catch.

The living room was not what she would have called homely. A single couch sat against the wall to the left, sitting on one broken leg and covered in dust. Aside from missing a good deal of its upholstery there also looked to be rust-colored stains across the one single cushion that was in decent enough shape to sit on, and she didn’t want to know where they’d come from. An equally dusty coffee table sat in front of the couch, with what looked like a burnt, black shell of a book that could have crumbled to dust with a simple touch of her breath. A pile of plaster, broken wood, and rubble sat in the far left corner, beneath the hole she’d seen outside that had been patched up with crudely made wood planks. A stairway along the wall in front of her with a broken railing led up to the second floor, and attached to the side of this stairway was a picture frame, but its glass had been shattered long ago and the picture inside ruined beyond all recognition, leaving only faint patches of various shades of gray and black.

Most tellingly, on the floor lay what looked like two empty 9mm casings a few feet away from the door, but she could see no evidence of a bullet hole either in the ceiling or on the wall surrounding the doorway behind her. Embedded in the wall ahead was an open doorway, leading into a kitchen of sorts—from where she stood she could make out part of a rust-covered stove, missing the handle on its oven door and two hotplates on the cooking surface. To her right was a hallway to the other half of the first floor.

Her nose was so overwhelmed by the stench that she couldn’t tell which direction it was coming from, so she chose to climb up the stairs and check it first. So far her EFS had not found any hostiles within the range of its spell matrix, but she wasn’t going to trust it entirely. Not now that she was the only thing left in Light Tail’s life.

The stairs creaked precariously beneath the weight of her hooves, and at least one step cracked under her right hind leg as she pushed upward, causing her to freeze mid-step and cast her gaze downward, waiting for a red hash mark to fizzle into view and start dancing about her vision. But when nothing happened for several seconds she allowed herself a quiet sigh of relief and resumed her journey, eventually reaching the top of the stairs and stepping into the hallway beyond.

The second floor was in no better shape than the first, but now that she was up here she could definitely tell a significant drop in the strength of the stench, so whatever had died in the house wasn’t up here. Paint was peeling off of the walls or gone entirely, and large sections of plaster were torn or rotted off, revealing the wooden frame beneath. More dust covered the rusted doorknobs on the three doors in the hall. The door to her immediate left led into a small bedroom, empty save for the bare frame of a bed and a mattress with nothing more left than its bedsprings and a few tatters of its fabric clinging to one corner. The next room down the hall was better decorated, with a wooden frame bed and an intact—but heavily stained—mattress, which she guessed to be mold or…

…no, you know what? It’s mold. Whatever else it could be, you’re gonna believe it’s mold.

With that queasy and unpleasant possibility pushed out of her mind (and no slumbering threats in sight), she continued on to the end of the hall, pushing the door to the third and final bedroom aside and sticking her head through for a quick look.

Master bedroom, she surmised almost immediately once the size of the room was quickly shown to have dwarfed that of the other two. In fact, it seemed to take up half the second floor’s space, just above the other half of the first floor that she’d yet to inspect. The bed itself was large enough for three ponies to sleep comfortably, with a dresser and bed stand to its left and right. A wardrobe the size of two ponies sat against the right wall with its doors closed, and what looked like a lockable long cabinet was right to the left of the wardrobe. To her left, just beside the doorway, was a chest of drawers, but instead of resting against the wall, it looked as though somepony had pulled it away in search of the embedded wall safe behind it. The safe itself, while missing some of its exterior finish, was in much better shape than she would have expected, and its hinges appeared to be intact. A quick push against its door handle with her left forehoof confirmed that the locking mechanism was still engaged, and the combination dial was a tad loose but still moved in distinct clicks when turned. Whoever had been here had not been able to get into it.

With the second floor cleared of threats, she retraced her path back to the stairs and the living room, where the stench returned with a vengeance, filling her nostrils with its foul and loin-wrenching touch. She sorely wished for a smell suppression spell she could cast to mitigate the ill odor. Her only hope, however, was to find the source and pray she could close a door to at least mask the stink a little.

She pushed the smell aside as best she could and quickly trotted down the short hall, taking note of a room on each side of the hallway for a later search once she’d found the decaying corpse. At the end of the hall was a second door on the left that led into what looked like a bathroom, and a second door on the right that led to a small bedroom.

It was in the bedroom that she would see her worst nightmares come back to her.

Dangling from a hook tied at one end of a rope, was a sight unfit for any pony’s eyes. The stallion’s corpse was horribly mutilated in ways she could not bear to make herself remember in any great detail. He was missing a hind leg, most of his tail, his….his male parts, oh dear Luna…even his insides were….

….his eyes too….

No more. She couldn’t stand to look at him any longer.

The poor mare on the bed….she couldn’t say the girl had gotten off easy, even with the dangling body offering strong evidence otherwise. Splotches of blood splattered the space between her legs, and down the inside of her hind legs, and there was enough blood beneath her neck to give a clear indication of how she’d been….

….murdered?

Violated, and murdered….in this rotting, ramshackle excuse of a home…and what had been done to the stallion….

….Light Tail could not see or hear of this. Ever.

Sling backed out of the room after holstering her pistol, clamped on the doorknob with her magic and pulled the door shut—

—it stopped half an inch away from the doorway, blocked by an object on the floor she’d neglected to spot on her way in. When she shifted the spell field downward to pick it up, the heft of the object’s weight tingling the bottom forward half of her horn triggered an instant sense of familiarity, and she quickly brought it up to eye level.

9mm pistol, specifically the Mare & Alicorn Manufacturing model that had proven so popular in local law enforcement service during the war. Probably the one that had been fired in the living room, to no avail. The left grip panel was cracked and held together with what looked like two hundred year-old duct tape that had turned fuzzy along the edges, and the firing hammer wasn’t much better off with a noticeable crack line running up one side. Its exterior finish was in terrible shape—most of the matte black bluing had been worn or scrapped off, leaving the ordnance-grade steel beneath exposed to the elements. Pits of rust dotted the slide and frame, and most of the front sight had been broken off, leaving only a jagged splint as an aiming point.

Had the circumstances been any different she would have taken a couple of minutes for a full inspection. Right then and there, though, all she wanted to do was shut that door and get as far away from this place as she could. She pulled the door shut with her left forehoof and stuffed the pistol into an empty holster right beneath Grayhawk, for a grand total of three pistols and one remaining empty holster for a fourth if she ever found one. The saving grace of the 9mm was that it was light enough that she barely noticed it. She did take a couple of seconds for a quick peek into the first two rooms she passed up, and caught sight of two spare magazines on a workbench, one loaded with FMJ rounds and the other with jacketed hollowpoints. She’d barely dropped them into a storage pouch on the left side of her stable suit when Light Tail’s body flew into the living room, hyperventilating as she slammed the door shut behind her.

Having just walked away from one of the most horrific things she’d ever seen in her life, her only concern was making sure her filly never found the sight in that bedroom, and she trotted into the living room and began to open the door again. “We’re leaving—“

Light Tail wasn’t having any of it. “Outside!!” she yelled frantically, as if struggling with herself to even speak properly as she backed away from the door. “It’s….oh crap it saw me it’s outside—“

Sling’s muddled confusion lasted only as long as it took her to mutter a bewildered, “What?”, before the object of her little girl’s fear made itself known with a deep, booming roar that rumbled through the door and the walls—

—El-Tee’s shriek was brief, but loud and shrilly, and Sling stopped pulling on the door and pressed herself up against it, peering through the peephole to see what kind of beast waited outside.

Waiting, however, was not in this creature’s vocabulary. In the two seconds that Sling was able to stomach looking at it, it had climbed up much of the hill and was only twenty yards from the front door, and it was an absolutely horrifying beast. It looked kinda like a bear….if one had taken that bear, shaved off most of its fur, and doubled its muscle mass before throwing it into a fight pit. Its claws were easily as long as her ears, and as far as she could tell, its eyes had no visible pupils and were a solid, cloudy-looking white.

And it was charging straight for the door as though it weren’t even there.

It was something akin to a miracle that she didn’t shriek or cry like El-Tee had, but in her defense she was simply too frightened to bother. The most she could consciously recall doing was using her magic to pick her filly up off the floor and pull her along behind her as she raced back up the stairs, completing forgetting how careful she’d been in traversing them the first time. She’d barely made it to the top of the staircase and into the second floor hallway when she heard the wooden door crashing and splitting apart from a violent impact. The hungry roar of the not-bear thing, however, sounded much more important, because it seemed to have caught their scent.

Run run run RUN—

—she made it inside the master bedroom, unceremoniously flung her daughter onto the bed and spun around to close the door—

—felt her heart trying to leap up her throat as the not-bear thing appeared to have skipped the stairs entirely by leaping up and through the guard rail at the top of the staircase to land directly inside the hallway—

“Oh fu—“ was all she heard of her own curse before she slammed the door shut, overpowering her foul language enough that even she couldn’t make out what she was saying. For added security she wrestled the chest of drawers away from the wall safe and shoved it right up against the door, the effort barely draining or taxing her in her heightened stress levels. Adrenaline was a powerful thing….

And so was this not-bear thing. She’d thrown herself against the drawers, trying to mash the heavy furniture up even closer to the door, when the beast rammed itself into the door. The impact caused the door itself to crack along the top, and she wasn’t expecting the blow to be this strong to start with. It toppled her over and caused her to hit the floor, and a sharp, tiny cracking sound accented her fall. At the moment of impact she was afraid she’d just broken a rib, but when her chest and lungs failed to set themselves on fire in searing pain her worries were transferred to the two holstered guns on her left side. Grayhawk’s grip seemed undamaged, but….

….but the nine was damaged to start with, she snarled in anger when she pulled the 9mm pistol back out of its new home, the damaged grip panel now split in two entirely. The tape holding it together was far too old to have any strength left, and the threading on the grip screw was so blunt and worn that it actually slipped right on out when she pulled part of the grip panel off the gun, causing the other piece to fall to the floor. Judging by how quickly and easily it had just broken on her, she was surprised its former owners had even managed to fire off a couple of rounds without getting the same result.

A second crash into the door split the crack open further, but the door remained in one piece and the chest of drawers didn’t budge. Much. The not-bear thing beyond the door stopped attacking the door and began to paw at it, grunting and huffing as it tested the impromptu barricade. After a few moments it gave a final, disgruntled snarl of disapproval at its luck, and muffled, heavy thuds began to sound out as it slowly walked away.

She didn’t trust this sudden turn of luck one bit. And neither did Light Tail.

“N-n-no w-way,” the terrified child stammered through frightened gasps. “N-no way s-something that b-big is just w-walkin’ off….”

Hell no, she agreed silently as she stowed the pistol away once more. “See if there’s anything sturdy enough we can use as a rope,” she cracked with considerable effort as she turned the broken grip panel over out of habit. “We can….”

She stopped talking as her eyes caught sight of a crude hoof-scrawling of what looked like two digit numbers along the back of the grip panel, with a dash between each number and a….

….a letter? An upper case “L” right next to the “36”—

—Oh Luna, is this what I think it is?!, she realized in a brief moment of brilliant insight, picking up the other half of the grip panel off the floor—

—the remaining portion of the third number was etched inside the back, and when combined with the other half of the grip panel formed a complete sequence of numbers and letters: “47L-15R-26L”.

Was this what the murderers of those poor souls downstairs had been looking for?

The thought to raid the safe herself came so freely and quickly that she almost didn’t believe she was the one twisting the combination dial until the lock clicked open upon hitting the last number, and even then her resistance to her first theft was surprisingly….numb. Like a part of her had already begun to accept that with the former owners dead, the safe’s contents belonged to whoever could get them first.

And she supposed that in the end, she would rather her own things be taken by somepony who needed them, rather than the monsters that had done…whatever they had done to those two.

Her mood swung southward, however, upon discovering the meager contents of the unlocked safe. Aside from a partial box of nineteen 9mm rounds all that awaited was a broken revolver with a dented and bent barrel, a large, thick pouch that jingled when she moved it, a ruined book, and a rusted hammer.

But she didn’t get to scowl at it for very long. Even as she was stuffing the ammo and the pouch into her saddlebags the not-bear thing returned with a thunderous desire for the two living ponies in the room. Its footsteps were quick and heavy, and it rammed itself into the door with sufficient strength to turn that crack in the door into a complete split, and one of its massive, long-clawed forearms wasted no time in shoving itself through for a quick swipe at the drawer chest pinning the door shut.

The re-emergence of a deadly threat brought her focus back where it should have been—on getting out of that house before it killed them. With little time to find a better alternative and Light Tail frozen stiff on the bed, she simply began pulling the stained, dirty bed sheets out from under her as she raced for the window near the bed stand—

—sixteen feet to the ground, she guesstimated the moment she poked her head out and stared straight down at the earth outside. Gods I hope these sheets don’t shred apart from the weight!

She quickly sorted through the sheets, picking the strongest and thickest looking blanket and tying one end around the closest bed post, and then began tying the remaining sheets together end-on-end to make an impromptu rope—

“Light Tail, get over here!” she snapped when she looked up and saw her night light still sitting on the bed, her body frozen stiff and her eyes locked on the splintering door, and the hideous, wasteland-spawned beast destroying it. “Now!!”

Being commanded about like that always seemed to get the little one to move, no matter what state of mind she was in. El-Tee remained on the bed for only a moment longer before she began to scramble away from it, and Sling hoisted herself through the window, hooking one foreleg inside the window sill to hang herself from it and sticking the other one out towards her daughter—

—but when El-Tee took hold of it and began to find herself being pulled up and over the window sill, she finally had a reason to take her eyes off the door and saw where they were going, and shrieked in terror as she began to pull away from her mother.

And the last thing she needed to happen right then, started to happen.

She saw Hoofprint again.

“O-o-oh Luna no, I don’t wanna fall!!!” El-Tee cried fearfully, her face streaked with tears. “I can’t do this!!”

—white-lit halls of steel began to morph into slick, crimson slabs as she rounded the corner, slipped on the floor and smacked into a thick, wet pool—

“Yes you can!! Just grab my leg and climb on, you’ll be fine—“

The door cracked apart with another violent slam, and the chest drawer began to jolt as the beast heightened its efforts to get inside—

—a tiny, severed limb five feet from her face oozed the last of its blood through its severed veins—

“N-noo! Please, can’t we think of something else—“

A futile attempt by her horn to release even a simple levitation spell fizzled as her insides began to quiver, her own fear overpowering her mental control over her magic. “This is something else!! Just grab onto me—“

—she didn’t hear herself screaming at the sight of four radroaches hunched over the poor colt, tearing into his body in a vomit-inducing feeding gorge as they splattered themselves and the walls with his blood and bits of bloody flesh—

“Gr-grab me with a spell or somethin’—“

“I can’t, I’m too scared to concentrate!!!” she howled back in a mixture of rage and pure terror. “Just….just grab hold of me!! Please!! You’ll be fine, I know you can do it, just please grab onto me—“

—the chest drawer bounced away from the door, giving the not-bear thing the last bit of room it needed to shove its forelegs through the broken door and begin to dislodge the drawers entirely—

—tried, desperately, to get to her hooves as the bugs feasted on their catch, and merely wound up getting herself soaked in crimson as she flailed about like a newborn foal—

—stuck with either a newfound fear of heights or an excruciating death at the massive paws of a not-bear thing, the filly finally came to a decision and leapt at her mother, grabbing onto her neck with her little forelegs and nearly choking her as she sought safety on her back—

—the bedroom door broke off of its upper hinge the moment the beast had pushed the drawers aside enough for brute force to finish the job, and Sling let go of the window sill and grabbed onto the length of bed sheets she’d tied together into a rope after falling roughly two feet—

—the beast’s roar became one of anger as it watched its prey vanish from the window….but instead of chasing after them, it instead turned around and dashed out of the room, as she could hear its heavy footsteps thundering through the walls even though she was now outside—

Oh SHIT it’s coming back outside—

—she abandoned her plan for a gentle descent and simply let go of the bed sheets, and then grabbed at them again after exactly one second to slow her descent. Even with El-Tee screaming in terror, however, she could still hear the two-century old cloth tearing apart at the sudden tug of a pony’s weight upon it, and mother and daughter jerked in place for only a split second before the bed sheets came apart and sent them crashing into the ground.

But that brief stop was enough—by then they were only three feet away from the ground, and while the pain from the impact was sharp, no lasting harm was done. Unfortunately, it also meant she didn’t have enough time to recollect herself and dash to the front door before the not-bear thing could reach it.

….but if it was a meal it wanted more than anything else….

She bucked the filly off of her with a gentle roll of her body and dashed up the side of the house, to a window that led into the first floor bedroom with the eviscerated stallion and the poor violated mare, her desperation giving her enough control of her telekinesis magic to break through the window and pull the bedroom door open. She then turned the spell on her daughter, pulling her back to her previous home along her spine and allowing the filly to grab onto her neck as she broke into a hard gallop away from the house, being careful to avoid tripping herself in her panic but otherwise paying little attention to anything else other than what was in front of her. Even El-Tee’s death grip around her throat barely registered to her nerves.

She just ran, faster and harder than she’d ever run in her life before.

And she hadn’t even been out here for more than an hour, to boot.

She didn’t dare look behind them until Mom’s body finally began to slow down into a terrible, disoriented stumble as exhaustion caught up to her, and felt a mixture of terror and relief flood her chest.

The house was nowhere in sight. She didn’t think she could find it even with those binoculars now—she couldn’t even find any hint of that small hill in the horizon. But the….the thing that was so eager to gobble them up wasn’t in sight either, so she supposed it was a fair trade. Better to be lost than to be a meal for some mutated monster bear.

“I…I think it stopped chasing us—“

Mom’s body collapsed onto the ground without warning, an exhausted groan of pain coming out of her snout on impact, and Light Tail tumbled off onto her flank alongside her mother in a similar undignified manner. The little filly quickly fought herself back to her hooves and began poking at her mom, desperate for some sign that the mare wasn’t in dire straits.

“M-mom?! Are you okay?!”

Her heavy, labored breathing made her reply torturously slow. “…..water….please….”

El-Tee stopped prodding her mom with her hooves and starting digging into the mare’s saddlebags for one of her canteens, pulling it out with her magic and twisting the cap off as she hoisted it to her mother’s waiting maw. “H-here—“

Mom’s magic took over, but in her exhausted state its hold was shaky at best, so El-Tee merely dialed back her spell’s hold to one of gentle support as Mom began to suck the chilly water from the canteen. She only took three gulps before she stopped, though, and then began to peel part of her spell field off to encompass the dangling cap and re-seated it onto the spout. With all the running she’d done just now she’d have thought Mom would’ve wanted to drain the entire thing….but who knew if they’d find fresh water anytime soon? Probably best not to get greedy with the stuff.

With her parched, sore throat slightly abated, Mom was content to lay there for a few minutes under Light Tail’s worried glare until she was breathing normally again, and then began the arduous task of standing on four wobbly legs. Only when she managed to stand for more than a few seconds without stumbling did El-Tee finally start allowing herself to relax a little.

At least, she relaxed until she noticed that her Mom’s eyes had become focused on the space in front of her, transfixed into a state of open shock and….

….despair….

El-Tee dreadfully turned to her left and followed her mother’s gaze, her magic refocusing itself around the lightweight revolver’s grip…

….and let it vanish into nothingness as she too stood frozen in place, her right foreleg falling slack onto the ground.

Neither pony had ever taken notice in their zealous desire to get away from the monster in the house, and now they could see how they’d gone so long without ever recognizing it. Dust matching the ground beneath them coated the maze of ruined, crumbling buildings in the near distance and unintentionally camouflaged them from the casual glance that one might give from a distance, as they’d done. Some had already collapsed into a pile of rubble from age and untold damage from distant times—others still stood but made one wonder how, as entire sections of wall were gone, exposing flights of stairs to higher floors and collecting into a pile of debris at street level. One building now and then would look mostly intact, save for a hole where a window used to be.

But not one sign of life could be seen anywhere in sight. Even the sign that marked the outer marker of its borders had succumbed to the touch of time, broken free of its mounting posts and partially buried in the earth at an angle. Amidst the dust that twisted and smoked away from the wooden board in the wind, Light Tail could only make out a handful of words. Some letters had vanished entirely or covered by a thick coating of dirt and grime, while others were barely readable:

“ L OME T H V LLE”

Mom was the first of them to break free of the trance with a soft cry of despair. “….oh, Luna…”

El-Tee didn’t bother to ask why she was so upset, because she already had a pretty good idea. If this was all that ponykind could accomplish in rebuilding efforts after two centuries….what did the rest of Equestria That Was look like now? Could it even be called Equestria anymore?

….are we ever gonna find a new home for the Stable in a world like this?

Mom’s voice croaked again, barely louder than the wind that began to howl around them. “….we should keep moving. There might be somewhere we can wait out the storm. Stay dry, at least.”

El-Tee’s legs stayed put, suddenly unwilling to creep even an inch further towards the silent town that had probably become the resting place for hundreds of poor souls in the last day of the war. It felt wrong…sacrilegious, to be stepping into such a place. “Wh…in there?” she squeaked, trying not to think too much of all the skeletons they’d walked past in their first minutes outside the stable. “….m-mom, ponies…ponies probably died in there…it feels like walking into a graveyard….can’t we go someplace else?”

“It was your idea to find this town in the first place,” Mom reminded her, her voice slightly terse. “….and I don’t know that we’ll find anywhere else to stay before that storm gets here. Just stay close and don’t look at anything you don’t have to, okay?”

A not-so-subtle poke at her hindquarters from Mom’s magic made any further protest an exercise in futility as the mare began moving forward—once she was startled into a quick trot she found it impossible to want to stay still. If she did, Mom would get too far away. And she didn’t want to be very far away if she could help it.

One small comfort—the gun. Even as she began to follow along in her mother’s wake, she felt the heft of the lightweight revolver inside her spell field as she drew it out and kept it close….and feeling its weight, its potential power just waiting to be utilized, made her feel far more comfortable than the gun had any right to make her feel. She was well aware of the irony at play here—an hour ago she was literally sick with the idea of using it on any living creature (except bugs), necessary as such an act might have been now.

Now it was the most comforting thing she had, next to Mom.

Except maybe Snowy, but…that was back home in the Stable, still on Mom’s bed where she’d left it.

Oh wow, what a grown-up little pony you are, she sneered at herself as they crossed over a decrepit-looking bridge that had been built over what was probably a creek bed before the war. Giant bugs, huge mutated bears trying to peel you apart like a banana, and huge crumbling ruins of a town and you’re crying over a stupid stuffed plush…Sun Star would have a field day with you if he saw you like this you idiot, toughen up a little.

A distant bang of thunder rolled over the decaying town, breaking her out of her hateful self-monologue and back to the unreal situation before her. Her hooves began to clop loudly as they touched down upon the broken, wind-eroded asphalt of the streets, and she shifted her leg muscles mid-step so that said clop would be much softer from here on out. She didn’t want to attract anything in the ruins that might be hungry. Like that mutant bear. Or…or whatever else lived and hunted around here.

She took her mind off the panic-inducing thoughts of huge predators by looking at all the buildings around her, and was surprised to see that quite a few of the standing structures still had their signs attached to them. Most of the lettering was faded, with some letters gone entirely just like that big welcoming sign at the town border, but it was still kinda neat to play the guessing game and try to figure out what the buildings had once been.

For instance, the one at the very edge of the town, the first building to her left that they passed, had a sign that said, “G LD SLE V S’ PRO PE TING O I E.” With about ten seconds of thought she came up with “GOLD SLEEVES’ PROSPECTING OFFICE”—it also kinda helped that the sign had a picture of a very faint-looking pile of gems with a miner’s pick underneath the words. Given that the Stable had been built underneath a nearby mountain, it would have made for a good front cover for a Stable-Tec office trying to operate discreetly—

I-Deeeeaaaa! she thought instantly when the spy-novel level wondering struck a chord within her brain. “Hey, Mom, can we look in there real quick?” she whispered quickly, tapping her mother’s left cutie mark with her right forehoof.

Her mom’s head turned and followed along the direction she was pointing in with her left foreleg, but her face showed no hint of interest in the building. “Not now, honey. Maybe later—“

“Pleeeeeaase!?” she begged (just a little). “I got this funny feelin’ about it!”

“What are you talking about?” Mom asked, her voice already starting to grow a little annoyed with her. Not good!

“Just…please? One minute, that’s all!” she begged again, for real this time.

Mom looked like she was about to say “No!” in her Stern Mom voice and physically drag her along, but at the last minute her face lost its hard edge. “….one minute,” she relented, turning towards the building and trotting towards it. “And what possessed you to beg for this in the first place?”

She had to suppress a giddy squeal as she bounced forward ahead of Mom and reached at the door handle with her magic. “I dunno, I just looked at it and—“

Her mouth stopped working as the handle firmly resisted her efforts to pull it down, refusing to move for more than a few millimeters before stopping cold no matter how hard she tugged on it. “…..aaaand it’s locked….wow, that sure killed that idea….”

“Not a surprise,” Mom grumbled, continuing to walk towards the door as her horn’s magic flared and withdrew a small pouch from her saddlebags. “Locking mechanism probably froze after two centuries of rusting. That or nopony ever bothered picking the lock for all this time.”

El-Tee wasn’t quite sure about that—after all, if all that was left of Equestria That Was after two hundred years was whatever had managed to survive the megaspell exchange, how many freakin’ locks could possibly be left untouched? Wouldn’t ponies have scoured every last inch of ground for supplies and stuff in the immediate aftermath? “Two hundred years is a long time for a lock to stay….locked. It don’t make any sense.”

A pair of precision tools floated out of the pouch and came up to the lock embedded inside the door handle, swiftly slipping inside in the next moment as Mom began to fiddle with them. “It would on this door. I can’t make sense of the letters but the picture on the sign suggests this was a—“

“Prospecting office!” she finished for her mother proudly. “Gold Sleeve’s Prospecting Office, I think!”

Mom’s head came up and away from the lock, and amazingly the little tools she was using to pick the lock continued to work as though she’d never taken her mind off of the task. “Is that what you think that sign says?”

“As a matter of fact, yes!” El-Tee answered. “The first two words are just a guess, but the third one’s pretty easy, most of the letters for it are still intact. And the only word I can think of with the letters oh, eye, and ee in the first, third and sixth letters in a six-letter word, is “office”.”

Mom’s face seemed to grow a little brighter—a small grin tried to force its way onto her face, and her eyes looked like they wanted to cry a little. The lock to the door clicked open a moment later, and Mom floated her tools back into her pouch as one of her forelegs pulled the door handle down and nudged it open. “Guess it’s time to find if you’re right.”

This time around a little part of a giddy squeal managed to leak out through her throat despite her best intentions at keeping it to herself as she dashed through the open door and into the interior—

—and promptly sneezed as a waft of dust floated down from the door and touched her snout. That settled that question, at least. Nopony had been in here a long while. Perhaps even since the day the megaspells were dropped! Being the first souls to set foot in here in centuries was awesome!

With a soft giggle, she brushed off her encounter with the dust and set about examining the room. A simple metal desk with a very old, very worn out terminal sat in the middle of the room, with a door at the back leading into another room. A table rested along the right wall and there was a large, black safe beneath, but she was too short to be able to see if there was anything on the table itself. A pair of filing cabinets in the far left corner looked like they’d seen better days, but they definitely looked a lot better than that field of sky wagons right outside the stable. Other than that, however, there was little else to the room to give any hint as to what it’s purpose was.

That settled it. Office. Offices never looked very useful. Or exciting.

Mom’s attention, naturally, seemed to gravitate towards the safe under the table, and she trotted right towards it without saying a word as the filly clambered around the desk and hopped up onto the chair where she could get a better look at the terminal—

“Oh, wow!” she squealed when she saw the screen come alive at the press of one of the buttons on the keyboard, and the terminal itself began to whir to life as it booted up. “I didn’t know these things could work this long!”

“That is impressive,” Mom agreed, the sound of her hoof pulling at the safe handle resulting in a soft thump!, and then a second one, before she gave up on trying to open it. “I didn’t see any kind of a back-up battery or a power source attached to it when we came in, it shouldn’t be working at all.”

“Well, it is! And it’s even booting up into a….uhhhh….”

The screen’s dull green background flashed to life at last, and in the upper right corner a pair of words in bright green letters became the only thing that stood between her inquisitive mind and the secrets buried inside this machine:

USERNAME:
PASSWORD:

“….oh crud,” she snarled at the dimly-glowing screen. “Ummm….it’s passworded….”

“Standard computer security one-oh-one,” Mom said, trotting up to the desk to search its retractable drawers, where several tattered remnants of papers lay. Most were too dusty and faded to read, though. “….I got an idea, scoot aside for a minute.”

The cushioned leather of the seat had aged remarkably well, still comfortable to the hindquarters and belly, and so she opted to stay in the rolling chair but pushed it along the desk to the side with her forehooves so Mom could get behind the terminal and start working on it. And to think she wasn’t event that interested in this place to start with. Funny!

“What’re you doin’?” she asked as Mom’s horn began to glow, enveloping the keyboard in the hold of her telekinesis spell.

“Trying to remember the command line for the debug matrix,” Mom answered, staring down at the keyboard.

“…..the what?”

“Something I learned sitting behind a desk with a terminal for eight years with nothing but the operating manual to pass the time,” the mare said, still staring at the keyboard and not moving. “All of Stable-Tec’s terminals use the same basic operating system and interface, and there’s a backdoor program built into it that lets technicians in if they happen to need to get access to it but don’t have the password. I got to playing around with it whenever I was really bored and stumbled across it, and found out I could crack passwords with it. Just trying to remember how it…wait, it’s coming back to me….”

True to her word, Mom’s magic began to peck away at the keyboard, and within moments she had those pesky “USERNAME” and “PASSWORD” lines whisked away in favor of a….

…..a whole freakin’ screen-full of absolute garbage! Tons of characters mashed together into an insane soup of the Equestrian alphabet and numerical system, along with lots of symbols like “#”, “%”, “@” and such!

“…..and this is an improvement, how?” she wondered aloud as she scooted the chair back towards the terminal for a better look. “It’s a total mess now!”

“Look closer,” Mom replied, and the lack of concern or panic in her voice led the little one to give the screen a second glance….

….and spotted the word “LACKY” in the second line of useless text. Scrolling her eyes down the left side of the screen, she spotted a second word in the fifth line, “FIGHT”, and a third word in the seventh line, “MIGHT”. At the top of the screen above the scrambled lines of characters was a short, but telling line:

FOUR ATTEMPTS LEFT:

She had it figured out in an instant. “You’re hacking the password out of the system!”

“Eee-yup,” Mom snickered, tapping the “DOWN” arrow key until the word “LACKY” was highlighted and then hit the “ENTER” key, causing a message to pop up along the right side of the screen, right beside the screen-wide lines of scrambled code:

LACKY
ENTRY DENIED.
0/5 CORRECT.

“….well, that definitely narrows things down,” Mom muttered darkly. “Let’s try….”

FIGHT
ENTRY DENIED.
3/5 CORRECT.

Mom’s mouth sputtered in disdain. “Better, but still not great…”

“How does this work out, exactly?” Light Tail asked, though she was already coming to a conclusion about the subject just watching Mom fight with it. “You pick a word and see how many letters are the right ones?”

“You got it,” the mare confirmed her suspicions, moving the flashing cursor down the page to highlight the words “MIGHT”. “It can be a bit frustrating, though. The debug program won’t tell you which letters are right, only how many of them are. You have to guess at it, and it only gives you four chances. If you get it wrong four times the program will kick you out and lock up the system entirely. Only Stable-Tec technicians know the process for re-setting it, it wasn’t covered in that dusty operating manual.”

“Why would they make a program that could break a terminal that easy?”

Mom’s hind legs started to flex and stretch themselves out as she flicked the cursor further down the screen. “I’m honestly not sure, but there’s a way to reset the program to keep it from locking you out. Just try three times and if you don’t get it by then, just cancel out back to the login screen and boot the debug program up again, and it resets. You can keep doing this until you get the password right.”

“Neat-o!” El-Tee laughed, momentarily dazed at how Mom knew of such crazy and useful stuff a mischievous pony could use to stir up trouble with. “So how many times did you break into the stable’s network with that?!”

“What are you implying, young lady?” Mom’s voice questioned sharply, her tone suddenly one of dark, foreboding warning. That kind of “don’t you dare say what I think you’re going to say” warning.

Which meant nothing to her, naturally! “I’m not implying anything,” she said confidently. “I mean….nopony was ever that nice to you, except Aunt C or Tender Mane….just figured you’d have used it to get back at some of ‘em once in a great while, is all….”

Mom’s head snapped towards her so suddenly that the filly nearly leapt out of the chair, and those hard, angry eyes bore down into her soul with such intensity that she began to fear that this was probably the one time she should have taken that unspoken warning to heart and shut up…..

…..and then Mom’s face melted into a sort of sad, wistful state as she laughed quietly, turning back to the screen in front of her. “…..okay, so there was a time a couple of years back when Sunflower was getting on my nerves. She kept stepping on my tail whenever my shift met for a monthly safety seminar in the classroom on L5. Sometimes she’d pass on a complaint to Farsight about my record-keeping in the armory when she covered my duties while I was on break or lunch, and I’d get chewed on for a quarter-hour about how I lacked responsibility and needed to get my act together or some such….”

Whoa, El-Tee thought sadly, watching her mother’s face as she tried a third password without success and began typing at the keyboard to reset the de-bug program. Of all the things I coulda done to get to her talk to me and this is what ends up working? A story ‘bout how she got back at somepony for hurting her? ….w-why were they so mean to her….

“…..so one morning when I punched in for my shift, I finally got the nerve to mess with her day a little. I had to drop by the mainframe room on L6 to do a hard reset for the armory terminal, and hacked into her user profile, and just had all her private messages sent to everypony in the Stable. Oh Luna the things in some of those messages were….um, let’s just say they weren’t fit for the eyes of little colts and fillies. Nopony ever did figure out that I’d done it and she spent most of her time after that trying to do damage control. Even Windy couldn’t stop laughing at her at times….”

“….that’s it?” she prodded with a gentle nudge of her snout after scooting herself to the edge of the chair and within foreleg’s reach of her mother. “You just embarrassed her to near death and never let her know it was you?”

The terminal’s screen flooded with that page full of garbled text again, and Mom went back to work flashing the cursor through the mess to try and find the right word to crack the system open with. “I knew. And I wasn’t trying to get recognized for it because I would have been fired and locked in the jail on L4 for three months if I had been found out. I just wanted her to stop bothering me, and the best way to do that was to make her more worried about herself. I don’t think she ever said another two words about me after that.”

Here Mom stopped, because by then she’d found the correct password—“OUGHT”—and the login screen brought itself back up, the username and password automatically entering themselves into their appropriate lines:

]USERNAME: gsleeve
PASSWORD: *****

“Finally,” Mom heaved with relief as the screen filled with what looked like data entries for some sort of message file folder. Most of the subject lines were all messed up and garbled, and whenever Mom tried to access them the system spat out a “CORRUPTED DATA” error, but a few entries were still intact, and there even seemed to be option for the terminal to unlock the safe under the table nearby. She moved the cursor down to the second one up from the bottom and tapped the ENTER key, and the screen began filling with text, which her eyes scanned through almost as quickly as the letters were being spilled onto the screen:

“Entry #5: “Gold Sleeve’s Prospecting Office” has been established without a hitch. It sounds crazy, but it just might work to keep the construction project a secret, for a while at least. Tomorrow morning I’m meeting with the forepony, Jack Hammer, from the excavation crew we’ve hired on from Baltimare. As far as they know it’s another wild goose chase for coal and arcane gems, but this is too big a project for it to run effectively by keeping them all in the dark. The MoM is still doing background checks on the crew, but Jack Hammer and some of her supervisors are already vetted, and I’ll need their help and cooperation to keep things under wraps until the job is done. And judging by the size of the Stable requested by the local communities, it’s going to be a long time before I see home again in Vanhoover.

I miss it already.”

Excitement filled her heart with every word she read. She was actually right! Totally, completely right about the whole thing being a big cover for the Stable construction way back in the days of Equestria That Was! How long ago was that?! Two hundred and ten years?! Two hundred and fifteen?!

“….oh, wow,” Mom’s voice whispered in awe as she soaked in the words on the screen. “This is…wow….nothing in the Stable ever mentioned how it was built or organized….”

Light Tail’s grin threatened to split her face in half as she hopped up onto the desk and started nudging the chair over into her mother’s side to encourage the mare to take a seat in it. It was big enough for the both of them, saddlebags and all, if Mom got in it first—

The back end of Mom’s body hopped up as she drew the chair in behind her, plopping back down onto the cushioned leather and leaving just enough room on the side for Light Tail to squeeze in beside her, and soon mother and child were pouring over the next few legible entries in the terminal:

“Entry #27: Eight months in, and this “prospecting” cover turns out to be a legit operation after all. We found a cache of arcane gems in the mountain two weeks ago, and whaddya know, finding the origin point requires us to dig deep down under the ground. We’ve already placed the industrial drilling units on order, and they should arrive next month for inspection and set-up. We should be ready to start digging just after Hearth’s Warming Eve. Perfect time for an operational shutdown, let everypony get home to their families for the holidays so they can come back charged up and ready to split rock with their bare hooves. Got my own plans for the time off as well.

As discussed with HQ, the proceeds from the gems will augment the locally-collected funds for the Stable project to help offset unexpected cost overruns. The excavation crew will get a good bonus as well, help keep them loyal to the project for as long as we need them here. Jack Hammer also runs a construction firm as well, and considering her exemplary work here, I feel confident in recommending she get the first bid for the construction project once we’ve drilled out the tunnels we’ll build into. She runs a tight crew here, firm but fair, and so far they’ve only had three accidents in the two years they’ve been running.

“Entry #64: Excellent progress made today. Now have the tunnels for the ground level, as well as the first three levels for the Stable. Seven caches of gems found, three imbued with massive amounts of arcane energy.

“Entry #81: Levels four through six excavated. Five caches of gems. Had an accident on level five yesterday, still investigating but it looks like a chunk of loose rock wasn’t cleared from the tunnel ceiling before the prospecting team went in and it broke a junior member’s back leg when it fell. Jack Hammer’s not happy, it turned out to be a first cousin of hers.

“Entry #125: Excavation is done. We’ll still need to drill out tunnels for the oxygen ventilation systems when we begin Stable construction, but the vast majority of digging work is complete and all the gems that could be found were extracted. Bittersweet moment when Jack Hammer announced it, most of the work crew have been here for over four years and they’ve grown attached to the area. Some even started families here, and those are the ones with the most to lose. Even Jackie seemed a little disappointed. There’s not much work out here for rock diggers, unless you like the life of a farm hand. JH’s construction firm is having a much harder time for the project bid than I anticipated. She knows some of her crew got settled down with a lucky mare or stallion, that they need some employment to keep their new families rooted here where they’re comfortable. I want to help, but my….personal involvement with JH makes that impossible without appearing to show favoritism. We’ll talk tonight.”

“Personal involvement?” El-Tee broke the silence once she’d read through the last of #125. “Ya mean like, coltfriend and fillyfriend?”

“Probably,” Mom said as she flicked the cursor onto the next data entry…sadly, one of only three left that were still intact.

“Entry #126: Fight with JH at her house last night, didn’t go well. I should never have gotten into that mare’s work pants, she was livid that I wouldn’t back her up for the contract bidding process HQ had last week in Canterlot. I told her I couldn’t show any favoritism for her on account of our relationship, and she said, quote, “You bloody well oughta show some favoritism if you want me to stay here!”. Mares.

I left a short while later. No use arguing with her, we’ve gone over it before and doing it again won’t do any good. If I show any favor for her, no matter how much I want to, I could lose my position and my job here. I’ve been overseeing this Stable project since the beginning, I have to see it through to the end, make sure it stays hidden from the zebras. That’s too important to put at risk….even for the sake of staying with loved ones. She has to know that. Why is she so adamant about this?”

Get into her work pants? Light Tail mused to herself, wondering why this stallion would even want to dress in a mare’s work clothes as Mom pulled one of her water canteens back out for a drink. Grown-ups can be really weird.

“Entry #127: Oh Luna and Celestia I should have known. The way she was acting lately, how much less like herself she’s been…she’s with child. Our foal. Oh dear Alicorns I should have seen it coming a month ago. She told me this morning before she went to work, and she was still mad at me to boot.

Too late. The bidding stage is over. JH will know within the week whether she gets the contract or not. And if she doesn’t, she said, she’s heading back to Baltimare, with or without me.

Oh dear Luna what I have done….please let everything work out.”

El-Tee wasn’t quite sure what to make of this one. With child? “Our foal”? How did grown-ups get to having kids, come to think of it? “….mom, where do foals come from?”

Mom’s immediate response was to choke on her water canteen and spit out the water that hadn’t gotten into her lungs in a sharp cough. It took her a few moments to get the rest of it out before she could answer….

….and predictably, she avoided the question entirely. “I’ll tell you when you’re older,” she gurgled, coughing up a slight wet mist as she quickly opened up the last entry in the system.

“Entry #130: It worked. I can’t believe it, it worked!

I had some suspicions about the Los Pegasus firm that won the contract and did some quick digging through some friends I still have in Vanhoover. Turns out their last three contracts are under investigation by the government for lax workmanship, and several of their executives are suspected by MoM to be funneling minor material aid to the zebras. As soon as I found that last bit I sent the information to my liaison at HQ, asking how such information could have gotten past the company’s own investigators who are supposed to be watching for exactly this kind of thing! The district supervisor for the prairie projects is absolutely seething. Now half the stables in the prairie are on hold until the other excavation and construction firms have all their employees re-vetted. That will slow progress considerably. No word yet on whether the Los Pegasus firm was ever told the truth about the project they bid for.

But none of that matters. What matters is that Jackie got the contract afterward for the stable she just built the tunnels for, and with additional bonuses to make up for the lackluster vetting on Stable-Tec’s behalf. She’s still not happy with me, but we can work that out because there’s no way I’m letting my mare and our foal go, now that they can stay here. Whatever it takes will be worth the effort tenfold. It’ll all work out.

Everything will work out. All of it.”

The safe turned out to be a letdown, materially—only a couple of old, drained spark cells for a pistol-sized MEW, a cracked clipboard, and a small stack of papers that had not weathered two centuries’ imprisonment in a safe very well. A surprisingly well-preserved journal inside, however, piqued her interest and she quickly found its survival to be a result of a spell enchantment once she’d applied a quick scrying spell of her own to it. The faint tingle she got from the feedback loop was not as strong as she would have liked, but it was a moot point as the enchantment had done its job.

What puzzled her was how it had gotten there to start with. Most preservation enchantments didn’t last more than a few years (the specialized talismans in the Stable being the exception), particularly if they’d been applied solely through a unicorn’s horn or an enchanted scroll, and she knew the difference between a preservation talisman and the simpler spell variant. The only immediate logical explanation she could think of was that the journal belonged to a surface pony that had used the prospecting office as shelter for a time, and had been careful to avoid leaving any sign that they’d been there by re-locking everything before leaving.

She deigned to allow the illusion to remain by leaving the journal and the safe’s contents intact, and locked it back up through the terminal before logging it off and ushering her filly out the door. After locking it behind her, however, she began to think they might have been better off staying inside.

In the span of a few minutes the approaching storm had grown close enough to belt the abandoned town with strong, consistent gusts of wind that carried a moist feel to it through her nose. Lighting now visited the town proper in white, split-second sheets of light, and the thunder that followed was at times almost as deafening as a gunshot. Her hearing protection spell flared back to life after the first such thunderclap, when Light Tail’s forehooves came down upon her ears in pain, and afterward the thunder was not a bother.

If only her little girl could follow suit.

“Maybe we’d be better off back there,” the filly suggested loudly roughly two minutes after they’d left the office and turned down an intersection seventy yards into the town. “Y’know, that place of shelter you’ve been looking for?”

“Somepony else is using it,” she answered back, nudging the filly along behind her with a subtle push of telekinesis to her hindquarters. After what she’d found in that house, she wasn’t going to trust anything out here. “I don’t think they’d take kindly to a couple of strangers breaking in when they come back.”

“And how do you know that for sure?” was the next logical protest to the mare’s decision. By Luna’s moon this child’s brain could be aggravating at times.

“I don’t, but that journal in the safe is too well-preserved,” she replied, trying her very best to keep a level, pleasant tone with the filly. “It’s a few years old at best, not two centuries. Whoever left it went to the trouble to lock everything back up before leaving.”

“It’s still a better place to be than out here,” El-Tee continued to press as they grew closer to a second intersection further ahead, maybe forty yards. “That place has a lockable door, it’s sturdy, and isn’t surrounded on all sides by other houses and stuff. It’s perfect—“

“It’s a fallback if we can’t find somewhere else in time,” Sling cut in, stopping the filly’s words mid-sentence with a sharper, more insistent tone now. “The last thing I want is to be dealing with an angry pony with every right to be upset with us for breaking into his shelter for our own use.”

Especially if they turn out to be the ones responsible for that….that slaughter….

“You’re assuming he’ll mind—“

“And you’re assuming that anypony up here will behave like the Stable ponies we grew up with!” she snapped back, and instantly regretting the harsh rebuke when she looked back and saw her filly’s ears flattening down out of fear.

“H-hey, okay, okay, stop yelling at me I get it I-I’m sorry—“

All of her sharpness, her fear and rage, vanished at the sight of her own daughter physically flinching away from her in such a fearful state. Again.

How many times now? How many times had she let her own personal stress and grief get the better of her like this?

How many times had her little girl suffered for it?

A push of telekinesis gently stopped the filly’s backtracking and nudged her back forward, and El-Tee’s immediate reaction when she came to a stop was to plop her hindquarters onto the ground and wait to be punished.

It never came. “…I’m so sorry, honey….I’ve been a real jerk to you lately, haven’t I….”

El-Tee’s eyes still bore fresh tears, but they were at least willing to stare back her now. How well a sincere “I’m sorry” could work was nothing short of astonishing. “….more than once.”

“I shouldn’t be.”

“….no. But until last week you weren’t being chased by mutant insects or bears….or quitting your job to start a new one in a library where you could hide yourself from everypony a lot easier. And you weren’t worrying about just getting by from one day to the next, like we might have to up here—“

“That’s no excuse for taking it all out on you. And it’s not just dangerous wildlife or harsh country living I’m worried about.”

El-Tee’s perceptive nature was quick to cut to the root of her intended words, as usual. “You found something in that house. Something you don’t want me to see or know about, because it scares you.”

She wasn’t going to ask how Light Tail came to figure that out. She didn’t want to have to explain it either. “I did. And I’m worried that ponykind hasn’t changed one bit since the war. Or gotten worse. I know you’re smart enough to have figured some of that out with just what little we’ve seen of the surface in the last couple of hours.”

“It can’t be that bad as how everypony treated you back home,” the filly suggested softly. And not without reason, that had been the kid’s sore thorn in her mother’s side for most of the morning. “This isn’t the stable anymore.”

“That’s just it,” she corrected for her. Much as she didn’t want to go into what she’d found in that bedroom, she did want Light Tail to know how potentially dangerous this new world of theirs was. “We just don’t know what kind of world we’re in, and I’m not going to trust that things will somehow work themselves out just because we’re in a new place. I need you to trust me when I do things that don’t make sense to you, because as logical as it is to go back to that office I don’t want to because I don’t feel safe there. I want—“

Sling Shot’s little lecture came to an abrupt end when El-Tee’s left foreleg poked her in the chest and pointed behind her, her little eyes becoming fixated on a distant object. She almost asked that cliché question of ‘What?’ as she turned round to see what had captured her night light’s attention so quickly—

—a tan earth colored earth pony stallion was coming to a stop twenty feet away from her, far closer for her tastes than she was comfortable with, and her instinct was to put a few extra steps between them as she pushed the filly along with her with her back legs. His mane was a wild, chaotic mess, fixed into several mohawk-shaped braids that exposed much of his skull, and what looked like a miss-mash of torn leather barding adorned his torso and withers. Several ring piercings in his ears and left foreleg flittered in the wind, and his coat was unkempt and dirty-looking, with tiny scatterings of scars along his forelegs and face.

And across his back was a metal pole, with what looked like a chunk of concrete at the end of it, as if he’d simply pulled a street sign straight out of the sidewalk for use as a blunt weapon—there were certainly plenty of pale, reddish stains on it.

A couple of feet behind him was an equally outlandish-looking earth pony mare, her light pastel blue coat clashing with her purple mohawk mane and multi-braided tail….and the rusted, but sharp-looking machete she clenched between her teeth in a death grip.

But most disturbing of all….their cutie marks. The stallion’s was horrific—a heavy-looking sledgehammer head, with a pool of blood underneath it and what looked like the broken pieces of a creature’s skull scattered around it. The mare’s mark was a crisscrossed pair of machetes, coated crimson with dripping blood—

“—three more behind us,” Light Tail’s voice whispered as quietly as she could manage, adding to her growing despair and her list of things to change on her hearing spell. She had not even heard any hoofsteps around her, but then, her attention hadn’t been that well focused on her surroundings a few seconds ago.

They damn well had her full attention now.

“Whoooo-wheeee, lookie here!!” a stallion behind her whooped loudly, a slight maniac shrill in his voice. “Have you ever seen such clean-lookin’ souls in yer whole miserable lives, I mean look at these two!! I bet they crawled right out of a stable this morning!”

Oh, shit—

“They did, ya brainless sack of oats!!” the stallion in front of her roared back, his eyes searching her over much as a predator might survey a potential meal. “Can’t you see the damn suit she’s got on?!”

“Oh, I’m not lookin’ at her suit!!” the whooping stallion hollered back, and Sling unconsciously dropped her tail down between her legs before they could get any more ideas. “Such a fine little specimen of the fairer sex—“

Her heart began to beat harder against her ribs. Oh shit this is bad—

“Hey, if they came out of a stable maybe they can get us in!” a mare behind her shouted out, her voice shifting as she moved around to box them in from her left. “Must be all kinds of shit in there, we’d be like kings and queens for life!”

“Yeeeeaaah, now there’s an idea I can get behind!” the sledgehammer stallion cooed, still not taking his eyes off of her as he began to scrutinize specific things in detail…like her holstered guns. “Judgin’ by yer getup ya came from the one-one-five in that mountain near here, so we already know where it is. Just tell us how we get through the damn door.”

She hoped her legs weren’t shaking as badly as she thought they were. “You can’t,” she answered calmly, trying to instill a fresh telekinetic spell in her horn as subtly as she could. “We left only because the power failed and we were being swarmed with radroaches. We were the only ones that got out alive.”

There was an unfortunate brief silence that did little to comfort her about the next two minutes of her life ahead. “….shit, thought it was weird that bug swarm vanished all of a sudden. Guess we know where they are now.”

“’Least we can scour around that mountain now,” the flanking mare sneered darkly. “Those bugs will be feasting for weeks.”

Her heart grew heavier, and beat harder. Now her lungs were starting to work erratically. Her options were starting to grow slim in her panic. Fight. Flee. Beg. Give up. The latter two were suicide, her mind’s voice told her.

The four options became two when the sledgehammer stallion’s eyes diverted downward, off to her side, where El-Tee had huddled herself to stay as close to her mother as she could manage. “You checkin’ out my flank, kid?”

No no no no—

“I think she is!” the flanking mare cooed in agreement. “Daaaymn they must start ‘em out young in those stables!”

You sick, depraved lunatics no NO NO—

Sledgehammer stallion began to stalk towards them, and she began inching backward, scooting El-Tee along with her back legs as she turned her back towards the crumbling building beside her to keep any of these savages from getting a free shot at her from behind. “S-stay back—“

“Tell ya what, you just go along quietly and things’ll go smoother for alla us,” Sledgehammer said, a menacing, sickly grin beginning to grow on his face. “I mean, there’s a big storm comin’, and we’re gonna be cooped up out of the muck for a while. We’ll need some entertainment.”

El-Tee’s body stopped moving despite Sling’s most insistent efforts to push her into doing so…and she started to cry. “M-mommy…I’m scared—“

Her heart stopped. Her lungs stopped fighting with her to breathe normally. Her trembling legs stopped shaking and became stout, firm pillars of strength. The two muddled options left to her became one very clear, very sensible path dictated by an enraged inner voice, one she had no trouble agreeing with.

Kill. Them. All.

Her 10mm pistol scratched against its holster as it flashed out and leveled squarely upon the flanking mare’s chest, who turned out to be a pale green unicorn wielding the only firearm among the group of five savages, but she seemed oblivious to its presence. “…bitch, you ain’t the first to pull an empty gun on me and even if it were loaded you don’t have the ba—“

It was just like live fire practice. Aim, careful breath, smooth squeeze and follow-through—

—BOOM!—

—the low-light conditions of the raincloud sky made the muzzle flash stand out, its bright orange tongue of flame roughly half the size of the gun itself and obscuring the results of the shot, but her pained cry of surprise told her all she wanted to know. She didn’t even wait to get a second sight picture, but fought the gun back down as close to its previous position as she could, as quickly as she could, and squeezed off a second shot so close to the first that one could have mistaken it for an automatic weapon.

She stumbled back, choking on her ruptured lungs as her pistol clattered to the ground, and Sling swung the sights to the right, on the sledgehammer stallion, his eyes widening in shock at how quickly their prey had turned on them—

—Sling fired another two quick shots from a single sight picture, managing to put one round on her target’s torso but missing with the second, just as the sky finally began to rain down on the land below.

Somepony, somewhere, starting screaming. She knew it wasn’t her, but beyond that it was a mystery she didn’t have time to dwell on, because now she had three fresh savages and one wounded one all charging at her, promising exceptionally obscene and unpleasant acts upon her corpse once they were done, and she didn’t intend to let them molest anything, ever again.

Sledgehammer stallion was the most motivated and therefore the first to reach her, his jaws snapping onto the metal pole and tearing the makeshift weapon free of its carrying strap as he brought it up in a rearing charge for a downward swing—

—she intentionally dropped her sights down below his exposed belly and squeezed off a fifth shot that brought him back down to the ground, his cries of rage turning in shrilling shrieks of agonizing pain and tears—

—the machete mare closed in before Sling could get a good bead on her, so the teal blue mare did the only thing she could think of in the half-second she had and darted forward, leaping over the screaming stallion and turning around for a better shot—

—two stallions with cropped, short manes and a bad case of mange on their dark red coats were splitting off from each other, one going straight for her night light and the other coming about to cover the machete mare as she skidded to a halt now that her target had moved. The charging stallion wore no barding or armor of any sort, but his mouth bore a very sharp looking and partially serrated knife—

—El-Tee’s revolver came up in front of the filly and fired off a shot at the stallion approaching her almost instinctively, and Sling joined in with a shot of her own that tore through his left side and made him forget about her little girl—

—the knife stallion closed the distance faster than she’d expected and bowled her over onto the broken street on her back, the knife in his jaws coming down towards her neck—

—she jammed the pistol’s barrel up against his lower jaw and squeezed the trigger once, his skull muffling much of the 10mm blast that obliterated the brain inside. His lifeless body collapsed onto its side next to her, mercifully giving her a good view of Machete Mare and the two seconds she had left to get out of her way—

—at the last second Sling rolled over to her left, the machete-wielding manic missing her head by about two inches but startling her hold on her pistol, and it clattered onto the pavement before she could fix her misfiring spell—

—Grayhawk’s weight left her side as she rolled over onto her hooves, the massive revolver’s red front sight swinging up onto the Machete Mare’s chest just before she pressed back on the trigger—

—the shot tore straight through the savage mare, caving in a ragged, bloody hole through her chest and expelling an unholy amount of blood out through what she prayed was one of her back legs, and Machete Mare dropped to the ground in a bloody heap without so much as a gasp—

“S-S-SHIT!” the last remaining stallion shrieked. Having been shot at by a ten-year-old filly and watching the mother ventilate one of his friends with a through-and-through shot, he’d become convinced that his only salvation was to charge straight for her with the straight razor he had tied to his left foreleg.

KILL. THEM. ALL! The red sight rose again, water droplets splattering all across the top of the barrel and the frame, obscuring the trail of smoke sifting out of the barrel—

Grayhawk roared again, the sights settling just slightly ahead of the stallion’s path when she fired, and when the revolver bucked up she bore witness to a sight almost as gruesome as Hoofprint—his head came apart like a melon, and his body tumbled over in a forward roll of flailing limbs before coming to rest near the sledgehammer stallion.

The screaming stallion had by then becoming a weeping, gasping shell of a gelded colt as shock began to set in, his blood becoming diluted into the growing pool of water collecting on the streets. “Y-y-you..you c-castrated me ….”

Grayhawk slid back into its holster, and her 10mm pistol came back into her grasp as she trotted towards the dying savage. “I told you to stay back,” she snarled back angrily, taking careful aim at a very specific spot between his eyes. “You should’ve listened.”

His glassy eyes began to shrink as they stared down the business end of the 10mm barrel leveled in their direction—

And El-Tee’s tiny body crashed into her legs. “Mom, stop!”

Her spell field stopped mid-stroke on the trigger, her aim unwavering. “Don’t look honey—“

“No, please!!” Light Tail’s voice cried, even going so far as to start pulling on her forelegs to try and move the larger, stronger pony. “Stop! They’re not gonna hurt us anymore!”

KILL! THEM! ALL!! the angry voice in her head repeated. “I’m just making sure of that—“

“This isn’t you!” the little one begged harder, her tugging becoming more frantic. “You’re better than this, I know it!”

Her pressure on the trigger tried to press back, to send a bullet into this savage’s brainpan, to keep him from being able to do unspeakable things to her and her little girl. “I said—“

“Are you listening?!” Light Tail screamed through her hearing protection spell. “Or are you so mad at everything that you’re gonna go ahead and take it out on anything you think you can get away with?!”

“What do you think this sick filth has been doing his whole life?!?! He’s getting off easy—“

“You’re not like them!!” El-Tee howled, her voice beginning to crack with tears. “You’re my mom and I don’t want you to do this, this isn’t you!! You’re not a murderer, so STOP IT!!!”

She had a sudden flash, back to that house they’d been in not even thirty minutes earlier, and to that poor stallion whose entrails had been allowed to hang from his split stomach, and to the poor mare who suffered unspeakable abuse before she was—

…..murdered….

Murdered.

And here she was, standing in the decaying ruins of a dead town, amidst a pile of corpses she’d just made, with a ten-millimeter, one-fifty-five grain slug sitting in the chamber ready to spray this helpless savage’s brains out all over the slickening streets right in front of her most treasured possession in the world, because all she could think about right then was how much hate and anger she had grown to harbor over the years.

Murderer….

The slide-mounted safety clicked on, snapping the hammer down into its uncocked position just behind the firing pin, her stoic hold on the pistol beginning to waver as she stepped away from the whimpering stallion. It took her three tries to stow it back in its holster—the cold rain didn’t help matters any.

Murderer. Sick as the rest of them.

Her ears never registered any of the thunder that sounded out with every bolt of lightning. She put all her effort into getting as far away from the slaughter she’d indulged in, delaying just long enough to appropriate the single pistol from the remains of its former owner and as much ammunition as she could fumble into her stable suit pockets in five seconds—a paltry seven rounds of ball-round 9mm. She deigned to allow Light Tail to take the lead when it became apparent she was losing the concentration needed to find a safe, dry haven, and the child chose the only singular safe place she knew of—the prospecting office they’d broken into when they’d first arrived.

It took her three minutes to fumble through the lock and pick it open, breaking four of her twenty bobby pins in the process, and another three minutes to fight her wet, rain-slicked stable suit and traveling saddle off of her body. It only took her a minute to find a dry towel from the saddlebags and begin to dry herself off with it.

A sick, sad angry shell of a mare that can’t stop blowing up at her own child even when she’s trying to save your conscience.

She began to shake and tremble. From the adrenaline bleed off, from the cold touch of the water, from her own growing horror that her daughter was more right than she’d ever realized. And that it was only by her night light’s intervention that she avoided poisoning her soul forever. To say nothing of the other four ponies she’d shot dead when she felt herself backed up into a corner by lustful savages with no care for anything but their own selfish desires. The only saving grace there was that they had all been trying to kill her.

It started as a gasping, choking sob as her coat and mane became frizzled from the remaining moisture that the towel couldn’t soak up, and before long she had broken down into a quivering blob of fur and hair as she cried in horror over what she’d nearly become. Not even Light Tail’s nuzzling hug could make things better.

And in the sickest of ironies, as the filly’s forelegs found purchase around her mother’s neck, the perceptive thing’s endless optimism still sought to comfort her with two-hundred year old words.

“It’s okay mom, it’s okay,” El-Tee murmured softly. “Everything will work out. All of it.”

Chapter 8

She’d never seen anypony get killed before. Hard enough to accept that she’d witnessed it firsthand in less than twelve seconds. Sure, they were bad ponies, and they scared her. They leered at her and Mom in ways she couldn’t understand, and yet which also terrified her to her core. They stalked her like hunters closing in for a kill, and the one thing she thought might offer some degree of resistance was shaking so badly that the bad ponies had probably not regarded her as a threat.

She didn’t even recognize her own voice when she cried out for her mother. The voice that sounded out could have belonged to a five-year old for all she knew.

And then Mom changed. As if hearing her cry like that set something off in her. She just…stopped. No more shakes, no more flicking tail or a scaredy-cat voice. Just…one second terrified, and in the next she was blowing them away with her guns as if she’d done it a thousand times.

In fact, once she started, it seemed as though she didn’t even want to stop. Too angry to try. She had to beg Mom to stop, more than once, before the message soaked in that she was crossing a very ugly line. She could live with slaying a bug. Disgusting little critters.

But….ponies? She didn’t know what to think about that. It bore repeating that they were bad ponies that wanted to hurt her, and had probably hurt and killed others if their terrible, twisted cutie marks were any indication of their true natures. She couldn’t really blame Mom for what she did—she was just protecting them from the bad ponies.

But she still killed them. And she could not wrap her brain around how Mom had found it so easy to do….or how far she was willing to take it once she started. She honestly believed that if she hadn’t run up and did what she’d done, that Mom would have blasted that poor stallion’s head apart until the gun had run out of bullets.

At least Mom’s common sense had kicked in when it had. There was no need to shoot a bad pony that wasn’t a threat anymore, dead or not. That was murder. She knew Mom understood the difference between killing in self-defense and doing it out of rage or some sick, deranged desire to see something dead. She’d just gotten so angry, so hateful, that she forgot about it until it was almost too late.

One way or another, she was going to get Mom to say something to her before they left this little office. She wouldn’t take another step forward into the world until Mom had gotten all that crap from the Stable off her chest and out of her mind.

When she’d stopped sobbing and crying into her forelegs, anyway. They’d been here like this for a while now. Mom just…laid there and cried, and at first El-Tee couldn’t bring herself to leave her like that. So she just lay down beside her and waited, and even fell asleep leaning into her for a bit. And when she woke up to a motionless and silent mother some time later, she decided she’d waited long enough.

But it was best to start with something simple and disarming. Ease her way in, and just let Mom decide when she wanted to start spilling things to her. “….gettin’ kinda hungry,” she said, feeling her stomach rumble slightly within her. Not surprising considering she’d hurled her breakfast back in the Stable….

Mom’s body stirred slightly, and shifted in place as her legs began to fold in beneath her. A shimmer of light enveloped her horn as she began to drag her moist saddlebags across the floor to her and began to rummage through its spacious confines for something edible, eventually pulling two air-tight olive drab packages out alongside a canteen and two drinking cups. El-Tee’s eyes quickly scanned the front of the closest package when the black lettering began to come into the light of Mom’s horn:

“MEAL, READY TO EAT
MENU ITEM #7
CHEESE TORTELLINI, WHITE RICE, SALTINE CRACKERS, WHEAT BREAD
STABLE #115 ISSUE”

El-Tee’s stomach did an about-face of attitude as old horror stories of military MREs from the War began to recount themselves to her from long afternoons in the Stable’s dust-free library. “….oooor maybe this is a good time to start dieting….”

Mom must have been thinking of the same thing she was, because she actually kinda laughed through her nose even though she was in anything but a cheerful or happy mood. “….these aren’t military rations,” she said quietly, placing the package down in front of her along with a metal drinking cup. “Trust me, you can actually eat these.”

El-Tee’s magic began to poke at the tightly-wrapped package, half-expecting it to bubble and gurgle from the touch. “….are you sure about that?”

Mom’s magic tore open one end of her package and pulled the plastic tray out, setting the tray down in front of her as an underlying enchantment began to react with the contents—in effect, the food was being cooked and prepared by a pre-applied magic enchantment set to activate when the package wrapping was removed. Or so she’d read in the library once. “Pretty sure. The one I ate last week wasn’t bad….”

As Mom’s MRE cooked itself before her, she began to shake out the remaining contents inside the package wrapping, and El-Tee quickly lost track of the amount of stuff that clattered out. Several different packets of condiments, a spork, something that looked like a candy bar—

“Whoa!” she squealed in awe when the last packet hit the floor in a tinny smack!. “What is all that stuff?!?”

Mom seemed grateful to have something to talk about other than the killing spree she’d indulged in earlier that morning, and she began to separate the packets in turn as she pointed them out with a shift of her magic. “….this one’s a fruit-flavor packet for a cup of water….cherry, I hope,” she began, tucking said packet up against her drinking cup. “Supposed to be loaded with electrolytes and stuff you can’t get from water alone. This one’s a sharp cheddar cheese spread, this one up here’s a pack of saltine crackers, we got salt and pepper over there…ummm….I think this one’s a granola bar of caramel, whole grain oats, and peanuts….decent snack, I guess—”

That was all she needed to hear! She promptly tore off one end of her MRE and dropped her tray down in front of her, and allowed the remainder of the package’s contents to fall to the floor around it as the magic enchantment began to prepare the meal. Sure enough, she got a lot of the same stuff, only…

“….berry blue rush?” she wondered aloud as she floated her fruit-flavoring packet up into slightly better lighting where she could read its lettering. “What’s that?”

“Try it and see,” Mom said, her eyes now locked onto her food tray as portions of it began to glow bright blue. The scent of fresh, warm cooked veggies and pasta began to waft into their noses, and El-Tee’s opinion of the MREs began to soften. It wasn’t home cooking, but it actually smelled kinda decent. Like care was taken to balance out the nutrients and taste as much as possible. From what she’d read in the library, military rations were all about the content with no care given to how it tasted….

“...so are the military rations really as bad as those old journals said?”

“Worse,” Mom snorted with contempt, physically shuddering at the thought. “Had to eat a couple as practice for how the Stable-made MREs worked. We always called them the Pack of Three Lies in security—‘It’s not a Meal, it’s not Ready, and you can’t Eat it’.”

Light Tail’s chest promptly exploded with laughter at the joke, though her forelegs were quick to muffle them into a low rumble lest they attract more bad ponies. “Oh Luna, that’s terrible!” she snorted in brief chuckles. “Terrible yet hilarious!”

“You think that’s bad?” Mom snickered slightly, and she even began to sound a tad more uplifted now. “The military had tons of names for them. Meals Rejected by the Enemy—“

El-Tee had to fight her guffaws down her throat, choking on them at least once. She could believe that one!

“—Materials Resembling Edibles—“

She didn’t fight this time. Not at first, anyway. “HehahahahasnRRK….”

“—Morsels, Regurgitated, Eviscerated—“

Okay, that one was gross! Funny, but gross! She even gagged a bit! “Hehehahah—grrk, okay okay that’s enough of that!”

Mom stopped almost immediately—and appropriately enough, their respective meal trays stopped glowing at that moment and faded away, signifying the end of the spell’s work. Lunch time.

And to her surprise, it actually was quite edible. Nopony would ever mistake it for what she was capable of making with the right, fresh ingredients, but if somebody had come along and told her that these Stable-made MREs were all that she could look forward to eating for the rest of her days, she wouldn’t really complain all that much. The white rice was rather plain, but the cheese tortellini actually tasted like…well, cheese tortellini, and not some gross misinterpretation of distilled water and goop. The fruit flavoring packet, on the other hand, was something of a mystery to her. She simply couldn’t place what it was supposed to taste like. Certainly not blueberry, and yet it had a slight sweetness to it that eluded her taste buds. It was really weird tasting.

Fulfilling, too, once the main and side dishes were taken out. Perhaps just enough room for the granola bar and crackers—

—Mom’s empty tray and a collection of opened packets flung themselves into a smashed, rust-spotted trash can next to the desk, breaking the filly’s attention away from the remainder of her meal. “Finish up quick,” she said softly, shifting her telekinesis spell around to encompass their saddlebags. “Another gun lesson.”

With a disappointed sigh, El-Tee went back to her snacks, gobbling them down in about the length of time it took Mom to collect all their guns and bring them over to where they were lying. Her refuse joined Mom’s in the trash can, and the empty drinking cup was floated away and off to the side to make room for the lightweight revolver being set down in front of her. The rainwater had long since wicked away, leaving light, barely perceptible streaks across the matte-silver steel.

A moment later a small black box settled down beside the gun, its latch popping lose to reveal a small set of wire brushes and a thin brass stick with a threaded hole in one end, and several different sizes of screwdrivers and drift punches. “….what’s this?”

“Cleaning kit,” Mom answered, her magic opening a much larger box in front of her, which contained a lot more brushes and several different sized brass sticks along with what looked like a screw-top can of oil or solvent and a small cloth bag of squared linen patches. “Take care of your weapons, and they’ll take care of you when you need them. This is going to be complicated at first, so we’ll take it slow.”

Wonderful, the filly moaned to herself, already beginning to dread the next couple of hours. I get to find out exactly what Mom did all day at work… “….how complicated?”

“You’re going to have that pistol broken down into several pieces in a few minutes,” Mom said, taking her massive revolver out in front of her and emptying the cylinder of all of its bullets down onto the floor in front of her. “You need to be careful with how you handle them, or you could end up damaging them to the point of breaking the gun. Just take it slow, and everything will be fine.”

The next hour and a half went a lot better than she’d expected. It took El-Tee several tries to get the gun broken down into its main sub-assemblies—trigger guard, frame, cylinder, and grip—but otherwise proved to be a quick learner. She didn’t care for the sharp-smelling cleaning solvents, or the mundane nature of the task, but unlike the short target practice they’d had earlier that morning she didn’t complain or try to talk her way out of it.

And the monotony of it helped take her mind off of….

No, she decided the instant before she could start to remember the grisly details, and doubled her focus on the pair of nine-millimeter pistols in front of her. With Grayhawk and the 10mm cleaned and wiped down, all that was left were these two “trophies” of the surface. Two heavily abused and degraded pistols, each with an equal number of broken and damaged parts, and a handful of decent ones. One pistol had no front sight and a partially rusted slide with a shaky external extractor, but the barrel was spotless in the interior and its exterior finish was only slightly burnished. Its grips were broken, and its hammer was cracked, but the trigger assembly was in decent shape. The other pistol had a lousy, worn out bore and the muzzle crown had been worn down almost to the tip of the rifling, but its slide had intact front and rear sights, with glowing green arcane crystal inserts to boot. The extractor didn’t rattle in place, the firing hammer looked solid, the grips were in one piece, and the frame seemed to have straighter slide rails than the first one. And best of all, the locking lugs on the barrel from the first pistol slipped in the locking recesses in the second pistol’s slide far more smoothly, as if the two disparate parts had been meant for each other but wound up getting installed on different pistols instead. Both recoil springs and their respective cam bars seemed serviceable, so she kept one set as a spare. The springs were well known as a “wear” item.

It took her all of three minutes to sort through all of these disassociated parts and gather the ones she wanted to keep, and then swiftly began reassembling them into a single, complete pistol. Within five minutes, she had one functional, cleaned, lubricated, and durable weapon and a smattering of bad parts that found a new home in the trash can. A quick function check of the slide and trigger confirmed the weapon’s working status, with the added bonus that this particular gun did not seem to have a magazine disconnect safety, unlike the 9mms she’d worked on in the Stable. Made it a lot smoother and lighter to pull.

In fact….

“Here, try the trigger on this one,” she said, floating the pistol down to her lazing daughter, who had been content to just watch her work after she’d finished cleaning and re-assembling the lightweight revolver.

“….won’t that break it?” El-Tee resisted momentarily, though her magic wrested the pistol out of her mother’s spell and hefted it up in front of her for a clear look down the sights. “You had two guns broken up into a couple dozen pieces and just slapped one back together from that mess—“

“It’ll be fine,” she assured her gently. “I doubt there’s anypony out there making fresh gun parts, so the next best thing I can do is cannibalize other guns for parts in better shape than the ones I want to replace. It shouldn’t hurt to try the trigger a few times, just keep it pointed at the wall.”

Sling waited with slightly baited breath as the filly’s hold on the pistol solidified, bringing up the sights on a distant section of the wall in front of them, and then watched the gun begin to waver slightly—

“….what the…Mom, I think you broke it,” the filly muttered, straining slightly under the increased pressure she was exerting on the trigger, and only then did she realize her mistake. “The trigger won’t move—“

“Cock the hammer first,” Sling said quickly. “Sorry, I forgot to mention, that gun’s single-action only.”

“….guns are really confusing,” El-Tee spat in disdain after a moment’s silence, her magic pulling back on the hammer. “It’d have been a lot easier to just make ‘em shoot one way, all the time. How many different kinds are there, anyway?”

“More than you’d believe,” the mare replied, just as the trigger pressed backward and let the hammer fly back onto the firing pin with a healthy click!. “Good thing about that pistol, once you start shooting, the slide will cock the hammer every time when it kicks out the spent casing and strips a fresh round off the top of the magazine. So that trigger will work the same way, all the time. Just like you want.”

Light Tail played with the trigger a few more times to confirm or deny what her mother had just told her, and then started to float the pistol back to her. “…not sure I want that yet. It’s so easy to squeeze I’m scared I might shoot it by mistake.”

That, she could understand. It was a pretty light trigger without the magazine safety. She could still remember the first time she’d unintentionally fired a second shot out of one of the 10mm pistols in the Stable, the first time she’d started shooting eight years back. Broke one of the overhead lights and maybe two percent of her hearing when Farsight tried to yell her tail right off her butt. “….it’ll take practice,” she agreed, snaking the 9mm back over to her saddlebags. “Eats ammo pretty fast too, you have to learn not to get trigger happy with it—“

—her body barely noted the raindrops pelting her coat, she was half a trigger-stroke away from putting a 10mm slug into the freshly-castrated stallion’s brain KILL THEM ALL—

She snapped back into the world with a forceful shake of her head, but her sudden departure from reality did not go unnoticed….nor did the choking stutter of her heart as it tried to comprehend what she’d sorely wanted to do when all her inhibitions were tossed aside.

Kill them all.

“….mom, you okay?” El-Tee’s voice broke into her thoughts with a soft, tender whisper.

The mare’s response was sudden and automatic. She simply stood up and trotted over to the one window that looked out towards the vast, empty wasteland beyond the town’s ruins, and laid her head down upon a pair of shaking forelegs thrown up onto the substantial windowsill. She didn’t want to go back to that street. To the deep-rooted, sickening rage that had taken hold of her without her even realizing it.

The filly, as usual, was not deterred. She simply grabbed the desk chair and shoved it around until it crashed to a stop next to her mother, and once she’d hopped up into it her little forehooves began to pester her with soft pokes at her withers. “Mom, please….don’t do this now.”

“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Sling choked, refusing to see the tiny smears forming at the bottom of her vision as she stared out at her first rainstorm. A brilliant bolt of lightning lashed out at the broken world in the horizon, filling the land with its white light for an instant before it vanished—

“You need to,” El-Tee insisted gently, her own voice becoming wracked by her own haunting thoughts. “….by the moon, I need to, first Ballast and n-now this…just…just say something. Anything….”

She couldn’t refuse to acknowledge it now. By the stars how could she have been so careless as to forget that her daughter had witnessed that and didn’t know how to process it? She was already torn up over what she’d seen with Ballast and now….and…

….and now her mother’s become a killer and she had to see it with her own two eyes....see all that hate just…come out...

“….I wish I knew where to start….”

“I’ll make it easy, then. What were you thinking out there? When that stallion wasn’t a threat and you still wanted to…to shoot him, right there, and end up no better than him…why?”

A crack of thunder rolled over the land, melding with the constant patter of water upon the world around her. The roof above her, the window in front of her, the muddy ground beyond this little office….

“I don’t know that I was,” she whispered to the storm. “I just….felt things. Felt angry at him and his band of savages for what they were about to do to us, what they’d probably done to dozens of others before us. Felt angry at the stupid stable ponies that kept treating me like a stain on the wall they couldn’t scrub off…it’s like the whole world just cut me off and I couldn’t get back in no matter what I did. And I still don’t get why. And then….I hear you crying out for me like the little foal I still remember and I just—”

—KILL! THEM! All!! And a charging stallion’s head splattered into several disfigured pieces with the squeeze of ten pounds of pressure on a trigger—

A salty streak began to roll down her left cheek, the wind outside howling its way through the ruins. “….I just wanted them to die, so they couldn’t hurt you. And I feel more rage than I’d ever thought I had. I never thought about it, I just did what I did. And if you hadn’t jumped in and gotten in the way I wouldn’t have stopped until I’d cleaned his skull out with the last seven rounds in that mag.”

“Because you weren’t just angry at him,” El-Tee murmured, the touch of her head beginning to rub across her right shoulder. “You were angry at everypony that ever hurt you, and me, when I told you what Sun Star said to me last week, even if you weren’t thinking about it. You keep it so bottled up that it gets out when you don’t mean to let it and this time you almost murdered somepony for it.”

—a gasping, whimpering whisper from the dying stallion as the sights began to waver, her little girl’s wet eyes screaming at her to stop—

A second streak of stinging water bubbled in her right eye, dribbling down her face and blurring her vision of the dark, wet mud outside. “….maybe I already have….”

“….what you did…you probably had to. But you have the sense to know the difference between saving yourself and murder and you lost sight of it ‘cause you were too mad to think about it when it was over. You’ve been blowin’ up at me all mornin’ and you’ve never done that before, ever. You gotta let it go, before you lose it again.”

She tried, and succeeded, in keeping her mind’s eye from showing her one of her five kills—she only vaguely recalled that it was a mare shot by Grayhawk. She couldn’t bear to look at the world outside anymore, and just buried her face in her forelegs. “….I am so sorry you had to see that,” she cried into the windowsill. “S-so sorry….”

Her night light’s rubbing grew stronger, leaning into her and eventually staying put against her slightly sobbing shoulder. “…..it’s okay, mom. I…I know you were only trying to keep us safe. Just…let that rage go. Don’t let it stay inside you anymore, you’re better than that.”

Gods alive it was hard to stay sore at this kid for more than a few seconds. Made her feel even more ashamed of how often she’d yelled at her over things that weren’t even worth fighting over. Now she could stand to stare out the window, but only because she suddenly started to recall every angry word she’d thrown at her filly today and the only escape was the rainstorm outside. The window was just low enough that she could settle down on her haunches and just sit there staring at the rain. So that’s what she did.

And she found that if she just wiped her brain clean and focused on the world through that window, she could forget just about everything else in her life. The slurs, the constant shunning and ignorance, the isolation of being stuck in a metal cage for most of her career in security, it all vanished in the pouring of the rain. All she saw was the waves of water washing down the two hundred-year old glass, and out further than that, the darkening clouds spilling thick sheets of rain upon the earth in a seemingly endless torrent. And in the sky itself, constant flashes of lightning, sometimes small and insignificant, and sometimes splitting the air in two with bolts like an ivory tower. Even the loudest cracks of thunder that resounded like gunshots failed to startle her from the window.

Light Tail’s presence never left her side, even as she soaked in the bewilderment of her first hard look at true, unbridled weather, of rain and lightning. Things both of them used to dream about at night, the kind of thing they once only thought existed in ancient books, written by equally ancient and long-dead authors.

And now it was outside. Neither of them had ever taken a moment to really take in the fact that they were out on the surface where a pony belonged. To really see with their own eyes the world they’d stepped into, however unwillingly the decision had come.

El-Tee’s nuzzling took on a softer, bewildered touch, and her voice brought back to mind that lingering, tinder moment when they’d woken up in the morning, and came out of that short, sweet daydream of wheat fields and moonlit skies. “….ooooh, sweet Celestia that is beautiful….”

Sling had a minor disagreement with that statement right then, but all she could bring herself to do to air it was to hug the little filly close to her with a foreleg, and just stare out at the storm beyond. Nothing else seemed to matter right then. Just them, the storm, and the wonder of seeing their first sight of water falling from the sky instead of a two-hundred year old sprinkler system or a shower stall.

She lost track of how long they’d spent just watching nature at work, and only when El-Tee’s body began to slump and struggle to stay upright did she even notice that what little sunlight there’d been in the day had long ago vanished, leaving only eternal darkness whenever the lightning wasn’t lighting up the world beneath the storm clouds. Her tired, tiny yawn was infectious, spreading her dazed, sleepy state of mind to her mother, and she was grateful to put the day behind her. The sooner they got to sleep, the better.

The heat-dry spell she’d cast on their sleeping bags hours ago had long since done their work, but still retained some degree of warmth and fluffiness to them when she rolled them out onto the floor behind the desk. It was a simple task to put El-Tee inside her bag and close it up on her, and she might have fallen asleep right there had there been a pillow for her to lay her head on instead of the inner layers of the sleeping bag. But it was still a better alternative than the hard floor. After slipping inside her own bag and zipping it shut, there remained only one last thing to do before sleep claimed her—

“….hrmm, gonna be hard to sleep,” Light Tail complained sleepily, her body shifting around inside her sleeping bag as she tried to bring it closer to the mare beside her. “Miss Snowy already….”

Sling’s magic silently reached out to her saddlebags, and gently pulled the arctic fox plush out of its confines, floating it up against Light Tail’s face to make sure the filly could not mistake it for her mother’s mane.

And her contented, grateful squeal brightened the mare’s mood better than anything else in the world could have after the day she’d had. “Snowy!” the child cried happily, carefully whisking the fox plush from her mother’s spell field and into the sleeping bag with her. “…oooooh, I shoulda known you wouldn’t forget to pack this thing….”

“And watch my little girl have nightmares all the time without it?” Sling replied, her eyes slowly sliding shut in preparation for the coming oblivion of sleep. And it was true—for whatever reason, whenever El-Tee didn’t have the plush in her grasp when she went to bed, there was usually a nasty nightmare that came after. But as long as she had that fox with her when she slept, she never dreamed of anything but good things. And she sorely needed a good dream after what she’d seen today.

And still, the filly saw a need to scoot herself as close to her mother as physics would allow, practically pressing their sleeping bags together before she stopped trying to close the distance and settled into her bag with her most treasured possession in the world safely tucked within her forelegs. “Best mom in the world, right here,” El-Tee whispered tiredly, the call of slumber already stealing her away. “….love you, mommy….”

No matter how many times she heard it, or how often she heard it per day, hearing those words would always bring tears to the mare’s eyes, and the lingering presence of her daughter’s weight pressing into her brought her enough comfort to be able to close her eyes and drift away as well. “Love you too, honey….sleep tight….”

“….and don’ let the bed bugs bite….”

The first unpleasant surprise of the day came before they’d even had breakfast.

She thought it had been the first ray of the dawn’s light that had awakened her, and found it hard to resist her little girl’s excitable mood at the prospect of seeing actual sunlight for the first time in their lives. But giddiness was swiftly replaced with dismay and confusion when they actually stepped out and saw the truth. The endless, forever-stretching canvas of dark gray clouds remained, and though the difference between night and day was exceptional it was still overcast and dim. Not a sliver of sunlight could be seen poking through the abysmal sheet of gray.

It cast a gloomy mood on an otherwise normal spat of morning activities, and as she closed the office door and reset the lock behind her she began to wonder if hideously mutated wildlife was only one of the many aspects of the world that had gone horribly wrong. She’d read enough of the weather ponies’ history in the library to know that a storm this size required the efforts and coordination of hundreds of pegasi, from the weather factory workers to the weather control teams themselves. She’d expected to see them even now, zipping about the sky and clearing away the gloomy clouds to allow the light and warmth of the sun to reach the ground below.

And as her hooves began to clomp onto the darkened, wet asphalt of ruined streets, not a single life form could be seen in the air. Even for two ponies squirreled away in a massive underground fallout shelter all their lives, it was an unnerving sight.

“…..this isn’t right,” Light Tail murmured fearfully, treading along behind her as they trotted away from the only known safe haven they’d found thus far. “Nopony’s up there clearing the skies. It’s like they want it to stay.”

“….for all we know, the pegasi may not even control the weather anymore,” Sling surmised in reply, her eyes fervently scanning every possible opening from which a threat could ooze out. Alleys, windows, doors, husks of ancient sky wagons and piles of rubble spilled into the street from the crumbled buildings that had once stood tall, anything that could hide something as large as a radroach was eyed with suspicion. She would not be caught off guard again. “It may have taken on a mind of its own.”

“That’s crazy,” the filly rebuffed with disbelief, her optimism refusing to allow for the possibility of a worst-case scenario. “That’s…that’s unnatural. It’s just wrong. There’s no way the pegasi would let anything like that happen.”

That’s exactly what I’m starting to be afraid of. But there was no need to air such an ugly, horrific thought. That there were no pegasi left to control the weather. After all, the megaspells that ended the world had to travel through the sky to reach their targets, and the pegasi lived in cloud cities. In the sky. “….let’s just find a way to the other side of town, get back on the road.”

“Why not look around first?” El-Tee pondered aloud. “I know you’re not thrilled at the idea after yesterday morning, but—“

“That’s exactly why I want to leave. I’d go around the sun-forsaken place if I thought we could get away without being spotted by any more of those….those things—“

“Hear me out for at least ten seconds, would you?” her daughter snipped back gently, and Sling began to feel that awful, blood-boiling tingle in her limbs. The one that told her that her will and desires were more important to her than whatever her little girl wanted, because she just wanted her to be safe and whole.

The one that had caused her to snap and bite at her all morning yesterday.

“….go on, then.”

“They….they looked like scavengers,” Light Tail explained, and the mare could almost taste the fear in her voice as she spoke. “And who knows how long this town’s been sitting like this? There can’t possibly be very much left to find in it.”

“Which is why they were so interested in us when they saw us. Which is why I want us to leave, now.”

“No, think about it a second. If that’s the case, why hadn’t they up and left long before yesterday? Why would they stick around in a place that has almost no supplies or necessities? It’s suicide.”

“They wer…” She began to answer, only to find that within about two seconds’ worth of logical thinking she couldn’t come up with a good answer to that question.

In fact, the more she thought about it….

“….they weren’t scavenging at all,” she uttered, her hooves coming to a full stop as the obviousness of it all began to hit her in the face. Their quiet hoofsteps, the way they’d just slinked out into the street from seemingly out of nowhere, it all suddenly made sense. “They were waiting.”

She could only imagine the satisfaction her filly was feeling at that moment. “Which means other ponies come here, and they’d only come here if there was somethin’ worth visitin’. Like a little camp or settlement somewhere in town where other ponies are holed up. We just gotta find it.”

“By Celestia’s sun you are too smart for your own good,” an elated Sling gasped, surprised at how quickly and effortlessly such a small thing had come to the conclusion while the more experienced adult had to be hoof-led to it. “I’m supposed to be taking care of you.”

“….family helps family,” El-Tee said, finally darting past her mother in a quick trot towards the intersection ahead. “‘Least that’s what Aunt C always says.”

Her short-lived euphoria was sucked out at the mention of Windy, but Light Tail’s blinding swish of her indigo-colored tail with its electric blue streak in the middle helped snap her out of her brief daze, and she began to chase after her little girl in an effort to put herself between the pair of young eyes and the impending sight of the five bodies of ponies they’d left in the street just around the corner.

But when the pair turned right into the street of slaughter, all that awaited them were small crimson stains that hadn’t been washed away by the torrent of rainfall. No grotesquely mutilated bodies, no shell casings from her 10mm, no discarded weapons. It was all gone.

Even the scattered bits of the head she’d blown to pieces.

She would always remember with a wistful sadness how suddenly both of them had drawn their respective pistols, barely a day out of their stable, at the sight of empty space where bodies had been expected. “….why don’t we skip the argument this time and just squeak through like little mice?” El-Tee quipped softly, the lightweight revolver wavering slightly in her magical grasp.

“Stay close and keep an eye out behind us,” Sling murmured in agreement, moving past her to take the lead, and for the next quarter hour mother and daughter slipped across what little sidewalk was left as they snaked through the decrepit roads and dismembered structures. Their bodies crouched low in hopes of being less recognizable as a pony at a distance, and their pace was quiet but agonizingly slow. What little they could make of the surviving, decayed signs that were still attached to their parent building suggested they were traveling through the business district of the town. In a pre-war settlement of this size most of them would have been locally owned and operated, though a few Equestria-wide corporations no doubt managed to have a shop or office squeezed into the small rural community. But if they were here, she never saw any sign of their existence. Either their identifying symbols and signs had vanished, or the buildings themselves were amongst the house-sized piles of debris they passed by on occasion.

In time, after managing to sneak through roughly nine city blocks’ worth of terrain, they finally stumbled into a pock marked street that offered some remote hope of sensible supplies in the vicinity. Only a fraction of signboard was still intact, at the right end, bearing the word “TORE”, but it didn’t take much imagination to read it as “STORE”, which at one point it probably had been. Across the street lay the tattered remains of either a wooden pull cart or a street-side vendor’s stall, though all that was identifiable was a broken wheel and its three attached, inward-poking spokes amongst a slab of rust-colored metal and the aluminum framework of an overhead awning. Interestingly, however, there was a fairly large water-logged hole on the other side of the metal slab. Time and weather erosion had likely enlarged it over the decades, but she could imagine it being a bullet hole when it started based solely on its unusually circular pattern. A natural crack or tear would have looked a lot more ragged and elongated. In theory, anyway….

But the debris and the state of the road around it wasn’t really important, in the end. The store was. She didn’t expect to find anything truly useful after untold decades of other souls raiding it for supplies, but it didn’t hurt to look. After all, that hidden Stable-Tec office still had things in it.

El-Tee had the same idea, as both of them had begun to quietly trot towards its front door with utmost caution for a couple of seconds before the filly resumed watching out for threats behind them. The storefront window had been shattered long ago, and the door was hanging onto its frame by the barest of margins along the bottom hinge. After a few seconds of meticulous eyeballing she finally began to creep through into the interior, and into its rows of bare shelving and the trash-littered floor.

Light Tail’s coat brushed against her left hind leg as the filly squeezed inside herself, and the first challenge of the day presented itself to her in short order as the tiny thing packed her pistol away and began to dart up and down the four aisles of the store.

Keeping the excitable child from hurting herself in her happy rush to find or discover something she’d never seen before.

“Honey, watch where you’re going!” she admonished the little pony sharply, swinging around to look out through the shattered storefront for any sign that they might have been followed. “There aren’t any nurses or doctors I can take you to if you get hurt—“

But the kid wasn’t listening—at least not to her. “Canteens, all gone, water cleaning stuff gone too,” Light Tail muttered aloud, as if reading out all the shelf labels she came across in her mad search for whatever had taken hold in her mind. “Lesee here, no foodstuffs either, no first aid stuff, no …no compasses? Awww, make it hard on us why don’t ya Luna come on where is it—“

“What are you looking for?” she finally deigned to ask, the 10mm’s orange-inset crystal sights wavering slightly at the bottom of her vision as she swung her gaze off to the right to peer down the street they’d come in from.

“A map!” the precocious squirt grumbled in frustration as the object of her search refused to turn up after she’d frantically searched a second aisle with no success, her short legs batting empty tin cans out of her path. “Ya complained about the map on yer PipBuck bein’ overwritten, I was hopin’ we’d find one in here. All we have is that topa…topo…..arrgh, what’s the word—“

“Topographical map,” Sling replied immediately, dark thoughts beginning to creep into her voice at the breakfast-time discovery of the largely useless map in her saddlebags. They needed a map with cities and roads, not a snapshot of the landscape from three centuries ago when it was abundantly clear that the world had changed so drastically as to make such a map near worthless except as a historical document. “A really old one, it was made back when the prairie wasn’t settled or inhabited.”

“That’s the word! That one’s kinda useless, the prairie was pretty flat all through. Even just a map of town would be a good start, but there’s nothin’ here!”

Sounds about right, considering my luck. “At least stop running around like that, you’re making a lot of noise kicking those cans around.”

That was enough to get the squirt calmed down to a point where she wasn’t zipping around on a sugar rush and making enough of a ruckus to attract every four-legged predator within earshot (savage ponies included). Her search of the third aisle yielded similar results, and halfway down the fourth she began to mutter dark musings about the nature of the universe, or something. She clearly wasn’t happy to have her quick search turn up nothing but trash and broken trinkets.

“I don’t know why I thought there’d be somethin’ like that still lyin’ around,” the electric-blue eyed filly spat in disgust at her wasted efforts, kicking at the counter on her left when she stopped for a breath. “Guess that prospecting office got me hopeful.”

“It wasn’t a bad idea,” Sling admitted, her eyes still focused on the street beyond the store. “Just not one that worked out this time.”

But El-Tee was not willing to give up without one last ditch effort to find what she’d sought. Seeing that the store shelves were offering nothing useful anymore, she turned around and darted back up alongside the counter, the sound of her hoofsteps disappearing behind its rotted, molding planks—

“Whoa, wait a tic, I found somethin’!”

Sling’s ears perked up as her filly began to drag something around the floor. “What is it?”

“A book!” the little one squealed, the mystery object scuffling across the wooden floor and flopping about as she tossed it up onto the counter, presumably with her magic. “Cover’s all faded out but some of the pages are intact!”

The hefty thud of the object as it smacked into the wood finally roused enough curiosity for the mare to take her eyes off the road, and there was indeed a lithe, thin book atop the counter, tufts of dust already spreading out into the air around it. In the three seconds it took her to reach the book she could discern that the cover was, indeed, illegible, and that its pages were considerably discolored along the edges. But a simple flip of the cover showed that the main content was still somewhat intact, as evidenced by the sheet paper cover page underneath:

“Fields & Dreams: A Tourist’s Guidebook of the Prairie”

“…..you little imp, you’re going to get a cutie mark in exploration at this rate,” Sling blurted after three wordless seconds of staring at their turn of good fortune, and she quickly began flipping past the copyright pages and into the table of contents. More than likely it was just a book on the natural landscape and various landmarks scattered about the region, but it was entirely possible to find at the very least a snapshot map of local roads and highways of specific areas, which was exactly what they needed.

They also needed some time to go through it. Even with no sign of danger over the last twenty minutes, she wasn’t willing to linger any longer in one place than was necessary.

“We’ll take it with us,” she decided in a snap, pulling the book from the counter and dropping it into her left saddlebag. “Once we find somewhere safe to stay for a while we’ll look at it. Anything else you were hoping to find in here?”

“….a million bits and a pillow….and now that I think about it ya grabbed a couple of pouches of jingling stuff yesterday, what’s in ‘em?”

“Later,” Sling insisted more strongly this time, emphasizing her position with a quick chamber check on the 10mm pistol. “If this settlement of yours even exists, we need to find it. Same deal as before, slow and steady. Watch the street behind us.”

As much as she really, really wanted to get inside that book, she didn’t want Mom yelling at her again, so she simply resigned herself to the long, fearful walk ahead. She barely registered the weight of the revolver in her magical grasp. Every few seconds she’d take a good look behind them, but so far all she’d seen this morning was ruin after ruin, wet asphalt, and a complete lack of life of any form. No insects (thank Luna!), no animals, no nothing. But after yesterday morning, she didn’t see that as a completely bad thing.

She’d rather see nothing than find more bad ponies. Bad ponies that Mom would kill if she saw them and thought they needed killing. She didn’t want to see that again.

The remainder of the morning’s journey, thankfully, turned out to be a rather short affair. Only a few minutes after leaving the old store, the general structure and purpose of the buildings began to change. Whereas before they were walking through what she assumed to be the “downtown business” portion of the town, she was beginning to recognize some semblance of a “neighborhood” around her. Brick-and-mortar, squared buildings had gradually given way to less imposing and threatening-looking houses of strong, solid wood, and she was surprised to see a lot of them still standing. A few were smashed and broken down into little more than a few pieces of standing framework, but for the most part the houses were intact and livable, if not homely looking. The confusing grid-like pattern of streets became simple lanes of road with curved bends here and there and the occasional intersection to connect to other neighborhood blocks. There were still a few official looking buildings though—they quickly came across one that sat in its own half-acre lot, with a five-star symbol on its front above the main door. She took it to be some sort of law enforcement building, though with every conceivable sign of identification gone there was no way to be sure.

Not even five minutes after they entered the neighborhood they both began to feel uneasy, as if unseen eyes and predators were watching their every move. It became something of a struggle to find the source of these prying eyes, however, as no matter where they turned or how hard they looked they couldn’t find a single source of movement or life in any place where somepony might be hiding and watching from. She figured they were watching through a window curtain.

And then, as they took a right turn at the fourth intersection they came across, they finally figured out where those ill feelings were coming from.

The street appeared to lead into a section of the neighborhood that had been divvied up into a little commercial sector of its own. Those squared, concrete and metal buildings lined the street on both sides, and that same grid pattern of streets was probably in the midst of them as well. Ponies—ponies that didn’t want to maim them—were milling about in a crisscrossing pattern of hoof traffic to various destinations of their choosing. Some wore odd-looking war-era clothing that had seen decades of use, with tears and gashes peppered all across the fabric. Others shunned clothing in favor of a pony’s natural state of being, though their coats were spotted with splotches of dirt and grime. Many seemed to sport an ugly scar of some sort here and there….and it quickly became a rare sight to see a pony without a weapon of some sort strapped to their sides in a holster or crudely-constructed bag. Most of them were blunt or bladed objects of one sort or another—a piece of lumber or old water piping, or a kitchen knife, or this really weird looking stick that was fat at the base but grew thinner further down to the tip. Some had small guns like hers, but a quick look revealed them to be in terrible shape otherwise, with rust and patches of their outer finish scarring them up.

The real threats—perhaps the source of those “prying eyes” they felt earlier—were perched on the roofto—

Her hooves stopped moving, her face bumping into Mom’s hind leg as she stared up at her first griffon. She’d never seen one before, except in books and pictures of the few griffons that had been among the First Ones when the megaspells started flying. They’d only lived a couple of generations before dying out—something about there not being enough “compatible” mates or some such. But her first living griffon was much like the ones in the pictures. As one article had put it, “half lion, half eagle, and all awesome”. And even with the same lack of hygiene as the ponies on the street, this griffon still looked majestic and powerful.

And so did his gun. The second he spotted them, they had his full attention for the remainder of their walk through the streets, and he never let go of his gun.

“Don’t stare,” Mom’s voice warned quietly as she flipped her gun’s safety on and stuck it in one of her many holsters. “Don’t talk to anypony, and stay right beside me.”

The revolver floated back into its holster on her left side as Mom started trotting forward again at a very deliberate pace, and the filly quickly found it preferable to stay within two inches of her once some of the ponies and rooftop griffons began to notice them. And once they did, they didn’t stop staring.

Too clean looking, the bad pony said yesterday morning….

Oh stars, everybody that sees us knows we don’t belong here!

“M-mom, maybe you were right,” she whispered fearfully. “We stand out too much.”

“It may also get us some answers,” Mom said back, keeping her eyes forward….and above, and to the side, or wherever somebody with a gun happened to be. “Just stay close and do nothing unless I tell you to.”

El-Tee had to swallow the air that lodged in her throat in order to breathe again. Staying within touching distance of Mom and shutting up wasn’t going to be that hard this time. As awesome as it was to see some sign of non-hostile life at last, they were still intimidating enough that she didn’t want to do anything stupid. A tall order for a ten-year-old filly, but she could manage.

She hoped.

She tried hard not to stare for more than a second or two as she continually scanned the environment around her, taking extra careful note of anypony with a gun (which turned out to be a grand total of six). Those with knives or other sharp looking objects were next on the Don’t Provoke list. Surprisingly, as they entered the block proper and into the midst of the mingling ponies, she started to see other fillies and colts close to her age. Some younger, some a bit older, but they were there. Those that were alone seemed to recoil from Mom’s gaze whenever she saw them—those that were near another adult pony would sometimes hide behind them, or said pony would nudge them back into walking on about their business while giving Mom a less-than-pleasant stare.

And then two ponies made a mistake.

Apparently too curious to be sated with merely observing her and her mother walk by them, the two stallions began to dart out from the sidewalk to meet them in the street.

Her breath turned icy with terrified anticipation of the next few seconds. O-oh Luna no no no you stupid ponies don’t do that—

“Heeey, yer new ‘round these parts,” one of the stallions said with as casual a tone as two ponies could muster when they weren’t being….well, casual-like. He just so happened to be one of the six ponies she spotted wearing a gun, too….

“Astute observation,” Mom quipped back, snapping a quick look at the other stallion but continuing to trot along. “Now walk away.”

Ooh gods—

“Hey, we just wanna talk a minute—“ the other stallion started to say, but Mom was having none of it, not after what happened the last time strangers tried to box them in like this.

“I’m not interested in talking,” Mom snapped sharply, coming to a dead stop as the latch on one of her holsters snapped loose from the touch of her magic. “Walk. Away.”

“Whoooa, hold on there missy,” the stallion with the gun said, his voice growing alarmed at how quick Mom was to threaten violence, but in her defense, she did tell them to go away twice already and they weren’t listening. “This cold withers thing mighta worked back where yer from, but this ain’t home—“

El-Tee’s lungs let out a gasp of air she hadn’t realized she was holding, terrified that her mother was about to snap again and start blowing them away—

“Walk away, or be carried away,” Mom’s voice sneered. At least, she thought it was Mom, but it was so….so dark…

“Is that what you told those bodies we picked up downtown yesterday afternoon?” the second stallion shot back, catching mother and daughter breathless with the revelation. “Or was that all just some incredible misunderstanding of fatal proportions?”

….o-oh Lu…don’t take her away—

“S-s-she didn—“

“I told them to stay back,” Mom answered first, cutting off the terrified filly before she could try to stop it. “They didn’t listen. Just like you’re doing right now.”

The gun stallion and Mom locked hard, unreadable gazes into each other for what seemed like an eternity, and Light Tail felt like time itself had just stopped. Like it was telling her that this moment with Mom might be her last.

“Walk with me,” the gun stallion stated flatly, and the tone of his voice suggested that it was not a request. “Got somethin’ to show you.”

“How many times do I have to tell yo—“

“Walk with me,” the stallion repeated, his voice raising slightly as the griffons on the rooftops shifted their attention (and guns) onto the argument he was having with Mom. “Because in case it’s escaped your notice, what little law there is in the wasteland only exists in little towns like this. I don’t normally afford strangers this much warning. Heed it. Walk with me.”

The “walk” took them through a hundred-strong crowd of ponies and into an ancient debilitated building that at one time had been the town’s tax revenue office, according to the partially faded lettering on the front desk’s plaque. Now the building’s hallways, offices, and records storage rooms served an entirely different and unintended purpose for those that came after.

A makeshift medical clinic. A few ponies sat in the lobby near the front desk, a couple of them pressing dirty rags against unseen wounds that oozed crimson onto the floor. The rest seemed to suffer from a disease of one sort or another. A wet cough, a stuffy nose as they made idle conversation, the occasional sneeze or a shiver of the body seemed to be the more common symptoms, but she couldn’t say what they were suffering from, or whether it was contagious. An orange-hued earth pony mare behind the front desk was busy sorting through an old milk bottle crate that seemed to contain jars of pills and antibiotics….of which there were very few. Perhaps just enough to treat or medicate those in the building, and that was assuming that the “doctors” or “nurses” here even knew enough of medicine to know who needed what.

Her guides strode through without bothering to check themselves in with the mare at the desk, nudging a door open to the left of the desk and trotting on towards…whatever it was that they sought. She followed them down the paint-stripped hall, passed at least two rooms in which lay several appropriated stretchers for use as beds. While a couple of them were empty, most had an unfortunate soul or four occupying it as they recuperated from their ailments and injuries. At least one pony was missing a foreleg, and very recently, judging by the red-stained gauze bandaging that capped off the stump of his right foreleg. His breathing was labored, heavy, almost as if he’d had no anesthetic or painkillers whatsoever, while a dark pink unicorn mare busied herself with a task on the other side of the room.

She didn’t bother to see what that task was when she noticed the bone saw and medical cross cutie mark on her hindquarters.

Two rooms later her guides finally deigned to enter a door on the left side of the hallway, the word “MORGUE” crudely etched into the wall next to the doorway with a pointed tool of some sort, and only then did Sling catch on to what lay beyond the door.

“El-Tee, wait out here,” she barked quietly as she paused outside the door for a moment to further instill her wishes of where she wanted the filly to park herself. “….you’ve seen enough already. No need to see it again.”

“So why do you have to, then?” Light Tail questioned in return, though her hoofs stopped moving almost immediately.

“….I did this. Nothing I see of what came after will be worse than knowing that I was responsible for it. You don’t have that burden, and I’m not letting you take it. Wait here.”

Sling passed through the doorway without another word, and felt a slight relief in her lungs when she didn’t hear tiny hoofs following along in her wake. It was the only break she would get in this place.

Splayed out on five separate gurneys and covered with aged, frayed bed sheets were the bodies of five ponies, lined up in a single row against the left side of the room. Aside from an overhanging oil lantern for light and a small end table with a few medical instruments, there was little else of interest except for a few empty rolling stretchers crammed into a corner in the back of the room.

She would never understand how she was able to calmly approach the five dead bodies without completely freaking out at the distinct lack of stench in the room. She barely noticed the faintly glowing runes imbedded in the sheets, which she recognized as a pattern for a smell suppression spell.

A decent alternative given the lack of refrigeration capability.

Without waiting for her to ask (or asking about it themselves), the gun-armed stallion simply clenched one of the bed sheets and peeled it away from the corpse beneath it—

“—ouped up out of the muck for a while. We’ll need some entertainment—“

—the 10mm-castrated stallion’s lifeless shell sat still against the underlying sheet of the gurney, eyes mercifully closed and sparing her the accusing glare of the departed. If she’d never run into him before today she wouldn’t have known him to be a savage, heartless monster with a penchant for ravaging mares and little fillies for kicks.

“Large caliber bullet took out his nads,” the gun-armed stallion relayed needlessly. She’d done it, after all. “Likely a hollowpoint judging by the mess it made of his internals afterward—“

“Ten millimeter, one fifty-five grain jacketed,” she corrected for him almost robotically. “Full-power load, not that reduced-recoil crap that cops preferred in the war.”

The stallion’s eyes glared back at her in the castrated corpse’s steed. “So it was you, then? What’d they do?”

“What haven’t they done?” she questioned back, beginning to less and less secure as the conversation began to take on a slightly accusatory direction. “Be honest with me, if their mockery of a cutie mark is any indication they weren’t exactly shining examples of ponykind to start with.”

“Humor me a spell anyway.”

Asshole, she almost spat in disgust.

Still, at least he cared enough to ask. More than she could say for herself at that moment.

“….they must have been hiding out in the alleys. They came out when I was arguing with my daughter. She saw them before I did, and it was the only warning I got. They kept asking me about a…”

She had to word this carefully. She didn’t want every soul in the settlement to know she knew nothing of the world around her. “….they kept going on about this stable under a mountain—“

“The one-one-five,” the stallion injected casually, just before he tapped her PipBuck on her left foreleg. “Your stable, if that number on this thing isn’t a typo.”

Fuuuu….gods DAMN IT I’m an idiot! she snarled accusingly, throwing a hateful glare at the betraying mark on the PipBuck. Didn’t matter that she’d left her Stable suit and its useful pockets stuffed inside her saddlebags to try and hide her origins when the stable’s logo was plastered on the hermetically-sealed PipBuck on her leg that could only be removed with the use of tools.

“I’m gonna venture that when they saw you in a Stable suit you’re not wearing anymore, they figured you’d just come out and wanted to use you to get in. What’d you tell them that made them change their minds?”

There was no further point in trying to skirt the issue, now that he’d already figured it out through subtle observation of the two clues she’d neglected to cover up. “The truth,” she sighed in defeat. “….the stable is gone. Radroaches swarmed in, killed the power. My daughter and I were the only ones close enough to the blast door to get out. Everypony else was trapped in the lower levels with no way out in time.”

Both stallions seemed to freeze in place at those words, though she paid little mind and went on with the tale. “After that, they….they seemed to get other ideas. Ideas I would not let them carry out on my only child. And since begging them to go away didn’t work, I blew them away.”

The unarmed stallion found his voice, but only after taking a quick look at the five corpses lined up against the wall. “…just like that? Bang bang, all on your own?”

“I believe it,” the armed stallion said next, pulling the sheet back over the body and sparing her any further glances at the life she’d taken. “Only the stupid or skilled carry a .44 Mag with the intent of actually usin’ it in a fight. Might be a little of both if that kid in the hall really is hers.”

It took a hard bite to her tongue to keep her from thrashing him into the wall in a single telekinetic sling of magic. “Are we done here?” she seethed through clenched teeth.

“Not quite,” the gun stallion replied, giving the sheet one final tug to make sure it wouldn’t flop off of the body before turning towards the door. “Come on down to my office. There’s some things you need to know while we get the bounty squared away.”

The imminent promise of information on her immediate surroundings was hung up by the word, “bounty”, and what it foretold. “….w-wait, a bounty?”

“Dead or alive,” the stallion confirmed nonchalantly, as though the concept were part of him and life in general. “We’ve been lookin’ for these scumbags for three months, and the whole town had a party when we came back with your mess.”

The stallion with the gun finally gave them his name. Blue Star. His name matched his blue coat and silver badge cutie mark, and that probably made him the closest thing to an old world cop that they’d ever find. He even had his own office!

…..okay, office space, stuffed in the corner of an inn with its own little store and bar, judging by all the stuff behind the front desk and by how many tables had been set up in the lobby in which they sat, but beggars couldn’t be choosers in a world like this. And Blue Star even had—

“Six hundred caps,” he mumbled through the two bags in his mouth, and dropped them on the worn wooden table right in front of Mom. “A hundred per head, plus a hundred extra for getting the entire group at once.”

Mom’s face seemed to almost drain itself of its color and luster as the paint-faded, bent bottle caps spilled out of one of the bags when it rolled over to its side. Her mouth tried to utter some kind of sound or word, but all that came out was a wordless gasp of shock.

So naturally, Light Tail jumped right in instead of waiting for Mom’s senses to come back to her. “….a buncha bottle caps? What are you, a collector?”

Blue Star chuckled at her response as he lowered himself onto his hindquarters on the other side of the table. “Somethin’ like that,” he laughed. “Bits might’ve run the world before the war, but today’s currency is bottle caps. Don’t ask me how it got started, nobody knows.”

Light Tail’s laughter was trapped within her throat before it could escape, and all that left her mouth was a muddled snort. “….you trade around soda bottle caps for money?”

Blue Star’s eyes stared back at her in disbelief, as if the concept of other forms of currency were foreign to him. “….everybody does. Kid, this ain’t the world you mighta learned about in your Stable. It’s the wasteland. You use what you can find.”

She wanted to keep laughing at this strange custom of using bottle caps like cash, except that the word “wasteland” soured her mood. “….wasteland? You mean it’s like this everywhere? Even Equestria That Was?”

“Everywhere that we know of,” Blue Star answered calmly, and El-Tee didn’t fail to notice that he didn’t sound too broke up about it. It was like he’d grown up knowing and believing that, and he would have had time to look around to see for himself. “The towns, the farm steads and their fields, the cities, even the twin capitals of the prairie, it’s all in ruin. Has been since the end of the war.”

Twin capitals? What di—oh, wait, he meant….

“The sister cities are still here?”

“What’s left of them,” Blue said, cocking his head towards a mare approaching the table from behind with what looked like a glass bottle of dark-colored liquid. “Trotpeka got hit by a megaspell, one of the few the zebras had. Didn’t hit dead center, though. Section of town near the south is still pretty intact, but the closer you get to the crater, the worse it gets. Radiation’s not near as bad as it was decades ago, but it’s still lethal at ground zero. Withercha got it worse, though.”

Getting hit by a spell meant to end everything in its blast radius was pretty bad by itself. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know how much worse it could get, but not knowing would probably be worse in the long run. “…..what’s worse than gettin’ fried by the worst weapon we ever made?”

The mare left Blue’s bottle of…whatever it was that was in that bottle, down in front of him where he could get to it, and even stuck a straw in it before leaving with a hoof full of bottle caps in her saddle apron’s chest pocket. “Gettin’ fried by one the zebras built on their own,” he said over the top of the bottle. “Balefire bomb.”

Balefire, balefire, balefire, the filly repeated in her head, trying to rack her memories for any tidbits or nuggets of knowledge she might have read or seen in the stable library in the last couple of years, but to avail. The First Ones weren’t exactly up-to-date on the latest zebra happenings when the war ended in brilliant flashes of mass destruction.

At least, she thought they weren’t. The mention of a zebra weapon seemed to be the spark that snapped Mom out of her stupefied gaze, because she finally stopped staring at the bags of bottle caps and looked up. “….I thought those were just old war time myths….”

“They were real,” Blue muttered darkly after taking a sip through his straw. “Nopony knows how they were built or how they managed to sneak one into the city, but they did, and it did a number on Withercha. Polluted the land for dozens of miles all around, nothing grows there anymore. Winds and storms must have carried the fallout out all over the Prairie, there’s places where the land just…died. No plants, no grass or trees. Little river that used to run through here dried up sometime in the first century after the war. The lake just past the valley to the west, all the fish turned carnivorous, I’ve seen them gobble up ponies alive down to the bone in three minutes. Some even grew arms so they can prowl around the lakeshore for prey. Lotta wildlife in the Prairie died out, and what survived….changed. We got one problem animal roamin’ around in the wastes outside of town even now—“

“Does it look like a big, hungry bear in a foul mood from bad mange?” El-Tee interrupted, flashes of the creature that nearly caught them yesterday morning beginning to force themselves back to the front of her mind. Terrifying, hideous images….

For some reason Blue seemed to find her short, apt description funny, because he wound up snorting some of his drink out of his nose. “Hehehaha, never heard a yao gaui described like that before,” he laughed. “Yeah, I guess it would look like that to somepony that’d never seen one. How you’d two get away from it?”

“Luck,” was Mom’s blunt, brief answer. “….how bad did the prairie get it?”

“Pretty bad. Won’t bore you with a history lesson, what you see here’s pretty accurate for what you’ll find everywhere else, and this is one of the more intact towns in the region. A few stables here and there emptied their populations over the decades….’cept yours, naturally. Something you oughta know, there’s legends of the one-one-five floating around out there on account of only one o’ you comin’ out every twenty to thirty years.”

“What about the last one?” Mom asked next, perhaps a little too quickly, but she couldn’t blame her for wanting to know what happened to the last Overmare. “Five years ago?”

“That one?” Blue asked seemingly of himself more than Mom, his eyes going slightly glassy as he began to scour his brain for memories. “Passed through here the day she left the stable. Stayed a coupla weeks to get her bearings, then went off towards Trotpeka. Never came back. A coupla traders I know there said she’d talked of looking for a way through the valley to Withercha, but never heard back from her after she left. She never left anything behind, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

An idea in Light Tail’s mind came to life, quickly forming into a question born of both curiosity and opportunity. “What’s this about a valley past Trotpeka? Ya mentioned it twice already.”

“It’s what left of the major river that used to run straight through the middle of the prairie,” Blue Star replied with another sip of his soda. Or booze, she didn’t really know. “Before the war, the pegasus cloud city would use it to suck up the water they needed for their weather factory. It’s said that during the megaspell exchange they sucked it all up before it could get contaminated, left almost nothing behind. Now and then the storms will flood the basin for a coupla days but it stays pretty dry otherwise.”

El-Tee could feel a rush of bliss flowing into her blood at the news of the pegasi’s survival. “Serenity survived the war?!”

But Blue didn’t share her enthusiasm or good cheer, and cast a hateful glance at her for her outburst. “Sadly,” he spat in disgust. “Nobody knows why, but within the first half hour of the megaspell exchange the pegasi started covering the entire sky with a cloud cover nopony’d ever seen before. As far as ponykind could reach and then some. Some kind of extremist government takeover up there’s kept them all skyside ever since. They don’t come down ‘less they’re lookin’ for some wayward pegasus found his way down to the ground, and they don’t mess with the weather. They just let it go.”

El-Tee’s brain actually ground to a halt trying to process that. How could weather just….behave “wild”? How could the clouds and the wind do rainstorms and snow and stuff all on their own? It wasn’t right. Wasn’t natural! Pegasi made the weather! They always had! “….that’s not funny.“

“’Cause it ain’t a joke,” Blue retorted sharply, causing the filly to snap back out of shock. “They blocked out the sunlight and left us to rot. Weather’s lost its way, like the rest of the world. Far as we’re concerned, Equestria died in the blasts.”

Light Tail began to grow fearful of the long road ahead. Ruined cities, leftover radiation from the war, more mutated wildlife, cut off from Canterlot and whatever survived the war, no sunlight, no….

…..no pegasi? That’s not cool at all. They were part of Equestria That Was. We all were….how could they just abandon everypony like that….

In a fit of frustration and a spark of idle curiosity she pulled that topographical map out of Mom’s saddlebags (without asking), and quickly unfurled it onto the table in front of her. Neither Mom or Blue seemed to take much notice of what she was doing or why, and let her go about her business undisturbed. She returned the favor and stayed out of their conversation as much as she could, but kept an ear tuned to them regardless.

“…how do you survive in the ruins like this?” Mom’s voice inquired softly, only mildly disturbing the filly’s thoughts. “How do you get food, water, ammo—“

“Mostly trade for it, if we ever find anything in the town worth using.”

“What could you possibly have left to trade in, in a world like this?”

This question got Light Tail’s full attention, not least of which was the fact that there didn’t seem to be very much left that was worth anything to start with. “Whatever’s still in one piece,” Blue said back, his straw suckling growing louder and sharper, signifying the imminent demise of his drink. “Old world tech, intact books, guns, bullets, meds, junk parts that the smarter of us can make into something useful. Food’s the tricky thing, up ‘till now most of us have been gettin’ by on the food stores left behind by the government after the war, but those are startin’ to dry up.”

“You mean to tell me that entire generations have lived their lives subsisting on two-hundred year old spell-frozen provisions that go stale after a shelf life of ten years?”

“Gross,” El-Tee blurted the instant the thought of eating a two-century old fruitcake came into her mind. Even with a spell preservative there was no way any piece of food could still resemble an edible object for that long! Ponies would’ve had a great deal of….digestive issues their whole lives or starved out into extinction! “Leave a soda out long enough and it turns into some disgusting goo that ain’t fit to be drunk by anything. I don’t wanna think ‘bout how the food might turn out!”

“It’s all we got left,” Blue murmured solemnly. With the last of his bottle slurped up into his stomach he nudged it aside with his snout towards the edge of the table, probably for that waitress mare to pick up the next time she came around. “And it’s not as bad as you’d think, whatever the government did to the stuff to keep it preserved seems to have worked really well, still edible even today. But like I said, the supply’s startin’ to dry up. Probably why the slave trade picked up in the last coupla years.”

El-Tee had just started to trace the distance between the big blue line and one of the smaller ones that lead out to the right and dipped down around one of the lighter tan lines, and the mere mention of the barbaric practice killed all the interest she had in trying to figure out exactly how far away they were from this valley. The idea that a soul—pony, griffon or otherwise—would be pressed into a life of forced servitude to another like property or livestock….that a soul was worth some finite amount of bits and no more….

Even Mom had trouble believing it, if her shocked tone was any clear sign. “….s….slave trade?”

“What little food that can be grown is farmed by slaves,” Blue explained calmly and casually, as if merely discussing the scheduled weather for the week. “Cheaper than paying ponies to work the fields and less trouble for the owners. Slavers have always been a problem, but it’s gotten worse the last two or three years. They’re all over the place, even paying raiders to haul in anybody they don’t kill outright. My advice, don’t take the side roads. Just stick to the main highways, and don’t travel at night unless you have to. If you get caught…you may never get out.”

…pay!? Ponies get paid to catch other ponies for this—

“Y-you just let them do this?” Mom said with a hoarse voice, and El-Tee could almost taste the bottled rage coming off of her words.

“Ain’t a matter of lettin’,” Blue stated firmly, rising up from the floor at last. “Plenty of folk have tried to change it. An’ they’re all dead to the last stallion and mare. Their kids too, just to make a point. The slavers made it clear—push on ‘em any, and they’ll kill every last onna us first chance they get.”

No.

No no no NO. This was not what ponies did! They were better than this! They—

….were better, the little filly realized in a sickening moment of irony when she analyzed her own thoughts. They were better, back in the day….but if they had really been that good, they wouldn’t have blown the whole world up and then some. This was just the poison that had killed their good natures, taken to the most extreme ends one could fathom. This was what ponykind had ultimately turned into.

A bunch of savages beating each other to death for the last scraps of the old world their ancestors had destroyed.

“…..I don’t know what’s worse,” Mom hissed angrily. “That those kinds of savages exist or that you let them.”

“I’m partial to livin’,” was Blue’s excuse as he began to walk away from them. And good riddance, she’d had all the horrible, bad news she could stand to listen to today already and it wasn’t even ten A.M. yet. “If I’m a coward for it, so be it. Stick to the highways. And don’t let ‘em take ya, whatever it takes.”

Bottle. Caps.

Those poor souls had been mutilated, violated, tortured, and killed. Over a safe with a pitiful bag of BOTTLE CAPS that somehow replaced the Equestrian bit as a form of cash! She’d been paid in CAPS for killing five savages yesterday morning!

And ponykind had now taken the concept of property to mean other ponies if they were caught and beaten into submission?! “Property” bought and sold with BOTTLE CAPS?!

Leave. Now. As far away from the prairie as our legs can take us.

“Wait here,” she barked the moment she saw Blue Star slink out the front door. The inn’s concierge desk being used as a bar also seemed to double as a “store” of sorts, she’d seen all sorts of junk stuffed onto barely-standing shelving behind the kiwi berry-colored stallion sitting behind the counter, and she swore she thought she saw what looked like ammo on a couple of them. “I’ll be back in a minute. Stay in sight, don’t wander off.”

“Y-you stay in sight,” her electric-blue eyed night light shot back, now studying the topographic map she’d stolen out of her bag with the intensity of the doomed.

Good. No wandering child to worry about.

She trotted off towards the “store” at a quick pace, just as a griffon with a bolt-action rifle strapped across her back had concluded her business with the kiwi-shaded stallion. A brief glance at her left hind leg as she walked away showed a pair of slash scars scratched across the outer thigh, but a small, thin cardboard box in her beak gave her a glimmer of hope when she hear the distinctive, quiet rattle of rifle cartridges bouncing about inside.

That hope quickly turned to guarded caution when she herself approached the desk. The kiwi stallion’s faint purple mane was tied back behind his head in a single tail, and his blueberry eyes were already hard at work taking in every detail in front of him that he could see—

“Wow,” he blurted the moment his eyes fell upon the PipBuck on her left foreleg. “Don’t see very many of those, and most of ‘em are broke. Where’d you get it?”

“Somewhere else,” she shot back before he could start asking all kinds of questions about the Stable. “I’m looking for ammo. Do you have any left?”

He stopped looking at her PipBuck and switched his gaze upward, peering into her eyes with what looked like a disinterested or disdainful demeanor. “Do I have ammo? Yeah, I got some. Am I sellin’ to some dainty mare that can’t be bothered to show a fella some manners? Nah, I don’t think so—“

“This ‘dainty mare’ has four hundred caps to spare,” she interrupted with a curt clip to her voice, despite the rising, boiling rage that told her she was better served by tearing his face off with two minutes’ worth of a telekinesis spell. “If you don’t want it, I can find somepony else willing to take the business.”

Disgustingly, the mention of the potential payoff was all she needed to drop to get this stallion into a more agreeable mode for bartering. He stopped glaring daggers and spite at her and allowed a more serious glint to come into his eyes. “….well, I ‘spose we can’t all be saints, missy. Whaddya lookin’ for?”

“Nine and ten millimeter, .38 Special, and .357 and .44 Mag,” she snapped off crisply. “Magazines too, if you have any.”

“Yeah, you and me both,” Kiwi Stallion laughed in return. “Ain’t seen one fit to break down for parts in months, and .44 Mag’s hard to find these days. Not too many of those guns around anymore. Got a bit of the rest though. Nine mike-mike and thirty-eights run you a cap per round, .three-fifty-seven goes for two. Ten-mil will cost you three.”

She sensed something amiss already—he’d only mentioned the calibers, not the type of bullet, and she was looking for more than just standard jacketed ball rounds. But if he didn’t seem to know the difference…. “Got at least a hundred each of the nines and thirty-eights?”

“If that’s what the lady wants,” Kiwi smirked, ducking down behind the desk for a couple of moments before coming back up with a pair of 9mm ammo boxes clenched in his jaws. She deftly pulled the ammo carrier free from its cardboard packaging and plucked a few rounds out, impressed with the fairly clean-looking (if burnished and scratch-marked) brass and the presence of an actual copper coating on the bullet. Even the primers were impeccable in shape and condition. Four of the seven rounds in her grasp were FMJs, but the other three were hollowpoints, suggesting a mix of both round types existed in these two boxes. No way of knowing how many of each were inside without taking the time to count them, and she would rather do that after the purchase in case he did understand the difference. “Good. Copper coating seems intact.”

“Won’t find that on most post-war manufacture bullets, ‘less you know how to do it yerself,” Kiwi agreed, after bringing out two additional boxes of .38 Special for her inspection. “A lotta the wartime stuff’s been used up, but there’s still some left here and there if you look hard enough.”

A quick look of the .38s showed similar details—copper coating, clean brass with no smudges or grease build-up that might stick to the inside of a chamber after firing, and no primers looking like they were popping loose from the shell base. A quick count of two hundred caps of her blood money changed hooves, giving her night light a chance for some more practice in the very near future. Sadly, he only had twenty .357s and one box of 10mm, fifty rounds total, but they were all in as good a shape as the 9mm and .38s. Another hundred and ninety caps left her bag, making it considerably lighter than it’d been five minutes ago.

If she hadn’t gotten this nagging feeling that she would be needing the rest of the “bounty” in the near future, she’d have dropped it all right here, as sick it was making her feel to be carrying it around. Just knowing there were ponies willing to put a price on another pony’s head, even for evil deeds committed, was eating away at her inside. That she’d been paid for killing them only made it worse. Never mind that she’d never even known there’d been a “wanted dead” decree on them.

She didn’t get to dwell on her moral compendium for very long, thankfully. She’d barely concluded her business with the kiwi earth pony and trotted away to her daughter when the excitable thing began peppering her with whatever thoughts had built up in her head. “Hey, I think I know where we are!”

Had the last twenty-four hours not proven the kid’s seemingly natural luck at finding stuff out of the blue when the mood struck her, she might have just brushed it off and told her to pack up and get moving. And with what little information Blue Star had given them about their immediate surroundings, it wouldn’t have been that difficult to get at least a rough estimate of where they stood by staring at that old map long enough. “Can you tell me in ten seconds or less?”

El-Tee’s forehooves went right to work, tapping a big blue line that cut down the middle of the map and had several smaller lines spiraling out from it, much like a leafless tree. “This is the biggest river on the map, so that’s gotta be this valley Blue kept talkin’ about!” the filly began, her tail swishing about rapidly as she blabbered on. The electric blue streak quickly began to leave an imprinted image in her vision when its brilliant shade grew into a singular blinding blur, so Sling drew her eyes away from her daughter and towards the map she seemed so enamored with at that moment. “And if it’s west of Trotpeka then one of these smaller rivers have to be the one we walked over across that bridge when we first came into town yesterday! Trotpeka’s somewhere west o’ us, and after we get through that valley we could just shoot up northwest if we wanted to find a way up to Canterlot or Ponyville in the old Equestria Core! Skip Withercha altogether if it’s that bad!”

“….that was closer to fifteen seconds, but not bad,” the mare snickered, her eyes already spotting at least three smaller rivers on the map that could be a close match for the one that used to run right around the town. “That’s still a minimum of sixty miles to walk just to reach the riverbed, though. And if this wasteland is as bad as Blue says it could be a very long walk.”

“We’ll just stick to the roads like he said,” Light Tail countered, losing some of her excitement now that her mother had gone and dropped reality right on top of her grandiose ideas of surface world exploration. “An’ we’ll keep an eye out the whole time. So what were you lookin’ for at the bar, anyway?”

BANG!—

—an ancient, empty milk bottle shattered into dozens of jagged pieces atop a four-foot wall, the only remaining evidence of a two-story building that was still standing—

BANGBANG!—

—another milk bottle lost its nozzle top and tipped over behind the wall, while her third and last shot flew high and smashed against the pile of brick and framework debris that had collapsed on itself decades ago—

—the slide refused to snap back into place, and she immediately began pushing around the trigger guard for that button that Mom told her to h—

—a sharp pop signified her success, causing the now-empty magazine to fall out of the gun, which she caught within her spell field and floated back towards her side before swapping it with a loaded one and slapped it into the grip—

—and instead of hitting the lever at the side like she’d done the first time, she shifted the spell field at the top of the gun slightly, causing it to wrap around the back half of the slide and pull on it before letting go—

—the slide racked back into place, and though it took her a second to get the sights back on that last milk bottle, once she did the trigger squeeze was almost instantaneous, and she was rewarded with a shower of chalky-white bits as the bullet smacked into it.

“Wow,” Mom’s voice cooed softly with pride, and hearing the praise made the whole affair of learning to shoot better….better. Not great, ‘cause she knew that at some point she was going to be shooting something that lived and would never be comfortable with it. Except bugs. She could live with shooting a bug even if she’d rather just toss it aside and run away like the little filly she was. “You’re a natural with that thing.”

“Don’t want a cutie mark of a gun,” Light Tail sputtered with slight disappointment at herself. “That’d be a terrible thing to have. Like…like what those bad ponies had, I don’t want that—“

“Hey, don’t talk like that,” Mom soothed with a nudging caress of her cheek. “You’re nothing like those savages. They enjoyed hurting others. I have to force you to learn this just so you aren’t left defenseless and helpless if we’re ever separated. You don’t get cutie marks for things you don’t like doing. Nopony has.”

She wasn’t quite sure about that—Aunt C’s cloud and tornado cutie mark seemed to be almost an accident, considering there was only one room in the entire Stable that had the space for a pegasus to fly around in it. But then again, she was always down in that room when she wasn’t working or hanging out with her or Mom, or whatever else adult ponies did for fun. So maybe there was something to it.

And she wouldn’t admit it out loud, but just shooting at targets like milk bottles and paper targets was kinda fun in its own way, to see how well she could control a bucking object hurling a little piece of metal at insane speeds out in the opposite direction and make it hit something. And at least with this “nine millimeter”, she could do that with far less effort and concentration than that little lightweight revolver she’d shot yesterday morning. She liked that it could only fire one way, so there was no heavy pressure needed, and the thing even had a safety she could turn on when she wasn’t using it. And it was a lot faster to load a gun with a magazine than it was to put the bullets in individually one at a time.

“Think that’s enough for now,” Mom said as Light Tail carefully shifted the spell field around the hammer to catch it the instant she squeezed the trigger back—

—her heart stopped briefly the moment the hammer began to fly forward, even though she caught it exactly as she intended to and carefully lowered it down until it was back in its little nesting spot in the back of the slide. She wished she could have done that with the safety on, or that the safety would lower the hammer too when she turned it on.

She also wished she could be back in the Stable, like things used to be, but the funny thing about wishes was they didn’t always come true when you wanted them to.

It took Mom maybe a minute to re-load all the magazines she’d emptied and put them back in these little pouches on her travelling saddle, and even put a couple more in the one loaded in the gun to “top it off” before floating back over to her—

“Keep it,” Mom said, her telekinesis poking at one of the empty holsters on the filly’s saddle. “We’ll clean the barrel later, when we’ve found somewhere to camp for the night.”

She took the hint and stuffed the gun in the holster, and the mood for conversation died as quickly as those milk bottles as Mom began to move down the road at a quick trot, eager to get out of this ruined town and away from any other bad ponies that might be hiding somewhere in the rubble.

Instead they seemed destined to run right into them.

They’d only gone a few blocks away from their improvised shooting range outside the settlement of civilized ponies when Mom’s ears began to flick as she strained her neck out, as if trying to extend her hearing a little bit further. Which was silly, because ears didn’t work quite like that.

“….Mom, if yer neck itches that bad just scratch it,” El-Tee snickered quietly, going so far as to trot up next to her and start rearing up to try and reach said neck with a forehoof. “It’s not li—“

Mom’s right forehoof swiped across the air and planted itself on her snout, shutting her up rather abruptly (and rudely!) as she came to a full stop. Without the soft clomp of their hooves taking up a part of her hearing, El-Tee could finally start to hear what it was that got Mom’s attention. Another set of hooves somewhere up ahead seemed to be running at a hard gallop, ringing down through the streets and alerting anything within earshot, friendly or not.

When Mom started moving again, it was with very deliberate and soft steps, with her body hunched down low like they’d done earlier in the morning, and El-Tee shut up without further comment and followed suit the best she could. It was kinda slow, but after yesterday she didn’t want to be telling every living thing exactly where she was if she could help it.

They did this for roughly two minutes, sticking to the sidewalks and alleys, and it was easy to keep track of the galloping pony because he/she/it would stop every few seconds before taking off again. Probably looking around to see if anything was following, so it was a good thing she and Mom weren’t in sight or his paranoia would be justified. And that would be a bad thing. He—or she—would probably mistake them for bad ponies and shoot them, and make Mom have to shoot back….

After those two minutes the galloping slowed down considerably, and seemed to grow louder and closer with every passing moment—

—a stallion with a sage blue coat and a reddish-brown mane and tail darted out into the street from an alley some distance ahead of them, wearing some sort of crudely made barding of leather on his torso and a strange-looking gun strapped across his back. If not for the ancient husk of a sky wagon that had crashed into the road upside down between them he could have turned his head and seen them out in the open in an instant. Mom took that as their cue to stop walking and scrunched herself up against the husk as much as she could, and El-Tee did the same thing, her eyes now focused on the road behind them while Mom risked a peek through the passenger section of the sky wagon to see where the stallion was going.

The four seconds between their stopping and his speaking felt like an eternity. She felt as though she had the time to soak in every detail of the ruins in her view—the numerous cracks and craters in the road, the barely-standing, wind-eroded buildings and the crumbled remains of the ones that had fallen to time, the twisted, bent street signs at sidewalk curbs and along the streets. And if she let herself zone out enough, she swore she could feel the despair and hopelessness that the sight before her represented.

Or hear the ghastly echoes of those who had seen how the town got this way.

The stallion’s voice was briefly welcomed—it snapped her out of her daze and reminded her that she wasn’t in a safe place anymore. “Hey!! We gotta get outta here—“ he shouted out to seemingly no one.

“No one” turned out to be a very mean-spirited and unpleasant “someone” when the stallion’s careless yelling was answered almost immediately. “Shut up, you idiot!” a deep, rumbling voice roared (roared!) back. “You wanna attract every brainless raider with two bullets to their name?!”

“No, we gotta leave, now!” the stallion yelled right back, ignoring the mean-sounding voice almost completely. “I just found why bit pieces and his crew didn’t show up yesterday afternoon! They got wasted, all o’ em!!”

There was silence for a couple of seconds, and then the meaty, weighted thump of a body landing in the street, and El-Tee’s curiosity got the better of her for a moment as she sneaked a look around Mom’s head to see what was going on—

Through the doorless passenger section and the rusted frame of the sky wagon’s chassis, she could see a stretch of asphalt and a half-collapsed two-story building beyond, with the sage blue stallion on the right and a very large, very imposing griffon standing maybe two feet away from him—

—and in the grasp of his talons he held a purple-coated mare with a few scars streaking across her sides, and a little blue-shaded pony….

—a colt, she noted with slight embarrassment upon confirmation of his gender. Not a difficult task considering he was being held by the scruff of his neck, like a misbehaving kitten. The mare kept her tail tucked in and her ears lay flat down on her head.

And neither of them were willing to look at either the griffon or the pony in question. Probably because they had these awful looking metal collars around their necks that made it hard to move their heads where they wanted.

“Wasted how?” the griffon’s voice rumbled through the streets, sending shivers down the little filly’s spine.

“Shot up all to hell,” the stallion answered back, somehow managing to remain stiff and unafraid in the scary griffon’s presence and anger-laced voice. “Knicks’ head was blown clean off, bit pieces bled out, machete got a second through-and-through asshole front to rump—“

Mom’s throat seemed to tighten up on her with every horrible death mentioned, though El-Tee had no idea what the stallion meant by as—

Oh! the filly realized when the word “rump” played back through her head at the thought, and her haunches quivered in disgust. ….oh gods, that’s gross, I just learned what a cussword meant and it’s a gross one! Adults are weird!

“I get the picture,” the griffon’s voice boomed, unwavering and still clinging to the two ponies in his….talons. Or forelimbs. So odd how he used them, almost like a monkey’s arm. Then again, griffons were supposed to have been some of the best soldiers in the war. Using their forelimbs like that let them use guns so much easier than earth or pegasi ponies. Only unicorns had an easier time of it. “Any idea who?”

“Not a clear one, but I thought I saw those damned runners in town this morning,” the stallion answered, moving forward just enough that his hindquarters came into view through the sky wagon’s doorways, and she could see what looked like a…..

…..a whip, tipped in red….on his left hind leg…..

Her stomach began to grow cold and sick at the sight of it, and what it meant. Oh stars, Blue wasn’t lying….

“Get the crew on their hooves,” the griffon stated, finally dropping the ponies onto the ground as his wings unfurled from his sides and began to lift him off the asphalt with massive, powerful strides and flaps. “I’m gonna scout their likely search route and rig it, should slow them down enough to give us a clean break. Whoever isn’t ready to move by the time I come back gets left behind for the runners to find!”

The griffon’s right forelimb clutched at a satchel bag slung over his body as he took off, and the leather-barded stallion’s attention shifted to the poor mare and colt left behind in his charge. “Get up and back inside, and stay put!”

Light Tail’s heart started skipping beats. He spoke to them like they were pets, and bad ones at that, and when the mare was a little slower to rise up than he liked he smacked her in the stomach really, really hard, and after that the mare was fighting back tears as she hobbled her way back inside the partially-exposed building. The little colt hounded her every step like a shadow…

….just like she did with Mom….in fact, he probably looked about her age….

When the trio vanished through the doorway, Mom broke away from the sky wagon and immediately began sneaking away from the street and the poor souls as quickly and quietly as she could. “We gotta get out of here, before they find us—“

Now the filly’s heart was beginning to stop altogether. After yesterday, after everything she’d said about her being better than a murdering monster, Mom was still willing to just….

…..no….

“No,” Light Tail’s voice said flatly, and not in the squeaky mouse voice she thought was going to come out. “We’re not doing this.”

Mom’s head snapped back swiftly, staring down at her with that parent-patented “NO” look that often struck fear and submission into little fillies and colts. “You don’t have a say in the subject,” Mom whispered quietly, but the harsh sting of imposing authority was unmistakable. “We’re leaving. I’ll tie you to my back if I have to, but we’re leaving.”

“And leave those two back there like that?” El-Tee whispered back, ignoring as much of her fear as she could and trying to sound, if not cooperative, than at least reasonable. “We just saw how they treat her, what about that colt? What are they doing to him?”

Mom’s magic began to reach out at Light Tail and pull her from the ground, and it took every ounce of her own magic to keep her rooted to the concrete. “We’re not doing this here—“

“We can’t leave them like that!” she snarled back, her hooves scratching across the road as she began to lose her fight with Mom’s telekinesis spell. “We gotta help ‘em!”

“How!?” Mom shot back harshly. “There’s no telling how many are in there and I can’t outrun a flying griffon! I will not put you in any more danger than I already have—“

Push harder, the filly decided when she heard a slight break in her mother’s tone. Push a little harder—

“If that was us in their place, would you want somepony to leave you behind?!”

Bingo. Point was sinking in—Mom’s pulling faltered, and her short journey across the pavement came to a stop. And for some reason, Mom started to find it really hard to look at her as harshly and sternly than before. She knew the “little filly” was right.

Keep pushing.

“Would you want them to help you get away from the worst kind of pony you can imagine? Would you want them to at least get me out of there, if not you?”

A soft whine was Mom’s only initial reaction. Her eyes began to bounce slightly, shifting in one direction and another as she tried to think of something to say—

—the poor mare became her third and final argument. A feminine cry of pain curled out over the sky wagon and into their ears, followed very quickly by a frantic plea for mercy that the bad ponies didn’t have—

“Noooo, please—“

Another stallion’s voice, deeper and lower in tone, “Shut it and take it like the sl—“

The leather-clad stallion’s voice cut in—but not to save her from whatever it was that his friend wanted to do. “Take it upstairs and make it quick! And don’t hurt her, we don’t get paid for damaged goods!”

The poor mare’s cries continued on, wailing for her captor to stop, to not do whatever he was about to do, for some higher deity or one of the Princess Sisters to save her, and every shriek of terror made it harder for El-Tee to stomach hearing the next one.

She was saved—momentarily—by the familiar, deafening presence of Mom’s hearing protection spell as it dampened her hearing to the point where the poor thing’s screams weren’t so audible anymore. But when Mom physically began stuffing her inside the passenger compartment of the overturned sky wagon she began to realize that she may have just done something incredibly fatal for somepony.

Even if they were bad.

“Stay here,” Mom warned fiercely, her magic already drawing out her 10mm pistol and checking it to see if it was loaded. “Stay quiet, and don’t come out. If I’m not back in five minutes, run back to the settlement as fast as you can and find Blue Star, tell him what happened here.”

O-oh crap, NO! “M-mom, wai—“

“Tell him! And if you have to run, you shoot at anything that gets in your way until you get to Blue Star!”

Mom’s face, barely visible for a second, showed an unusual mixture of fear and rage that scared El-Tee more than the sight of her gun, and when she darted away and out of sight, the filly’s heart began to beat hard against her ribcage.

Gods alive, for the second time in two days, something she said set Mom off, and more bad ponies were going to get killed.

The wasteland was already eating her soul alive.

The screams brought her back to that bedroom. The eviscerated stallion, the violated and ravaged mare, the stench….the horrors and pain inflicted upon them before they were granted the cruelty of death’s peace…

She wanted to hate herself for wanting to leave the poor mare to her fate, for wanting to avoid being in that position and watching her daughter suffer the unspeakable abuses about to be heaped upon the screaming female in that ruined building. El-Tee was, as usual lately, more right and morally-centered than the mother that was supposed to be teaching her right from wrong.

Because if it had been them stuck in the grip of that cursed griffon, she’d want somepony to help her.

The hate, she had to leave in her mind, and not let it be part of what she was about to do. She’d done that once already, felt sick to her very soul afterward, and still felt less of a pony for it after she’d cried herself dry. Whatever excuses El-Tee could make for her, she’d killed those five savages with hate as much as fear. She would live with the self-imposed image of murder until the day she died. She didn’t want that feeling getting any worse.

She was surprised the building was still standing—part of it looked like had fallen apart only days ago, creating a conveniently placed pile of rubble upon which she could climb up to a hole leading into the second floor, though that meant exposing herself to the view of anypony down in the first floor rummaging through its contents. But it was the quickest way up, and speed mattered almost as much as stealth. And going through the front door was simply not an option. She wanted this done with as little bloodshed and gunfire as possible—any signs of a fight would bring that griffon right back and that was not a fight she wanted to have. Aside from some obvious inclination towards explosives if his talk of setting traps was anything to go by, he had at least one sidearm and a magazine-fed long gun strapped across his back. All she had was a 10mm pistol and a .44 Mag that bucked like the dickens. He’d tear her apart.

But maybe if she could get ahold of that shotgun that leather-clad stallion had….

No. Getting it would require a gunfight I don’t want.

So. Sneak and kill impending rapist it was.

She crossed the street in a little under five seconds. With the ruckus the fools were making in there, a quick little trot of her hooves went largely unnoticed by the slavers. The poor mare’s constant screaming helped cover up her approach too. Unfortunately, the closer she got, the less her hearing protection spell drowned out—she was already starting to recognize words and phrases again—

“—ing to my mom?” a high, child-like voice asked nervously. Probably the little colt—

“Yer mother’s fine, kid,” another stallion’s voice answered, somewhat thinner and higher than the shotgun-armed stallion that had walked the mare and colt inside. “It’s what mares are around for. You’ll see someday. Just gotta break ‘em in a little.”

“….sure,” the colt’s voice replied, sounding more resigned than accepting….though it didn’t sound like this had been the first time he’d been told that. And therefore, not the first time something like this had happened.

That hateful, soul-sickening urge to barge in and paint the walls red with their blood began to take hold in her legs, and she had to fight herself to get up the slope of debris towards that hole in the second floor wall.

On the other hand, it did make it easier to justify killing the savage she was sneaking up on….

By fortune or the luck of the Princess Sisters, none of the slavers downstairs bothered to look out the broken window frame near the debris pile, more concerned with collecting their few possessions and travelling gear in preparation for a road trip. Once she slipped in through the hole and got a good look at the second floor’s layout, her impromptu plan started to look a little better.

The building was simplistic in design and scope—a short hallway measuring only ten yards, at the other end of which was a staircase to the first floor. Only three rooms comprised the majority of space up here—two were on the left with broken doors, while the one she wanted to be in was on the right, and the sadistic slaver had not even bothered to close the door behind him after dragging his victim in with him.

Perfect.

She snuck up on the open door, using every ounce of willpower she had to avoid barging right in as she began to hear the sounds of various objects being carelessly dropped onto the wooden floor. What sounded like a pony’s body was first, and then the popping of buttons and straps as a set of armored barding slid across a pony’s coat and slapped onto the floor. A faint, opaque glow of neon blue signified the use of a unicorn’s magic, but was of little concern to her. With this stallion’s attention focused on more carnal urges, he wouldn’t be much of a threat if she could stay quiet long enough to get within striking distance. All she needed was a clean shot at his head—

—or his knife, she smiled inwardly when she poked her head through the door for a quick scan. Thankfully, the stallion had oriented his prey towards the wall, and with both of their backs turned to the door neither of them even noticed the teal blue unicorn eying his barding for the survival knife attached to the left side of the armor…..nor did they take notice of the slight sheen of her horn as she took hold of the scabbard and started to tug at the knife hilt—

“Dooon’t,” the sobbing, prostrate mare begged, her captor’s forehooves beginning to find purchase along her withers as he prepared himself. “Please, don’t make him hear this—“

“Just keep yer mouth shut, this won’t take long at all—“

Sling used his voice as a cover as she unhitched the blade from the scabbard, twisting it around for a downward stroke as her body slipped through the doorway—

“Nooooooo—“

—at the last second, just as her tail passed through the doorway, the unicorn stallion’s horn shifted its magic field and latched onto the door to pull it shut—

—she leapt upon her target just before the door slammed shut, the banging sound drowning out his brief, pained gasp of shock as the partially serrated seven-inch blade sunk into the back of his neck and plowed clean through the vertebrae and trachea—

—the instant loss of nervous and motor control past the neck caused the stallion to collapse on top of his victim, and the splash of blood that splattered across the mare’s withers as the blade tip cut through the front of his neck caught her by surprise, eliciting a shrill-pitched shriek that Sling quickly silenced with a forehoof to the snout—

—the slavers below took her scream to be a sign that her abuser had begun his foul deed, filling the first floor with laughter and more than a couple of whooping cheers. The thud of his body slipping off of her and hitting the floor was likewise mistaken for other actions.

With the kill done and her presence still masked from the rest of the slavers below, Sling’s magic took hold of the gurgling, dying stallion’s body and pulled it away from them, shoving it quietly into a corner where neither of them would have to see it anymore.

And through it all, the mare remained in her prostrate, rump-raised position, almost as terrified of her rescuer as she was her abuser. Her grape-colored coat shook in repeated waves of trembles and shivers, and her tail continually rattled in place as she stared back at Sling with wide, terror-filled eyes and a partially-blooded neck.

“We don’t have very long to talk,” Sling began to whisper after bringing herself as close to this poor thing as she dared to without risking a full-blown panic attack. “When I let go, I need you to speak quietly, and bang the floor or the wall about once every two to three seconds so they don’t think something’s up. Got it?”

The grape-colored mare’s head nodded—shakily—twice, after perhaps a second’s hesitation, her wild eyes trying to comprehend what was happening around her. Sling’s hoof pulled back, and the mare’s gasp was short, but soft, and she began to tap the floor and the wall in front of her with her hooves and forelegs at a regular pace to keep up the pretense of being ravaged.

“How many are there?”

“F-f-five,” the mare gasped after fighting with her lungs for the breath to speak. “….i-including the one you…..”

Four left…

“What kind of weapons do they have? Guns, grenades, knives, things like that?”

“A co-coupla guns….I-I think one had a grenade but I’m not sure…one just ba-bashes things to death with his bare hooves….”

“Any kind of armor or spell casters?”

“….j-just one unicorn left…they all got barding of some kind….and the one you knifed….he left his gun downstairs….”

“What’s the kid’s name?”

The mare didn’t speak right away, probably not sure if she ought to be telling a stranger—even one that had just saved her from a most unpleasant act—the name of her child….

“….y-you first,” she stammered at last.

Fair question. “Sling Shot,” she answered.

The mare’s eyes briefly glanced down at her hindquarters, probably to see if her cutie mark matched the name in any way, but if she suspected anything different she didn’t show it. “….Kite,” the grape mare squeaked—

—and sure enough, Sling could spot a blue-colored kite and string on the mare’s right hind leg—

“….m-my son…Bee-Jay. As in the letters….”

“BJ? Odd name.”

“….I didn’t name him. I just call him that ‘cause….”

The mare seemed to stop herself at the last second, and Sling decided this was a good time to get things back on track. “Tell me another time. Keep up the banging a bit longer, then take the barding and get out. There’s a pile of debris at the other end of the hall you can slide down to the streets.”

“N-not without my boy—“

“I’ll get him out, but I can’t risk you getting in the way down there, I don’t know how this is going to go down. Keep up the act until I move in, then take the armor and get out. Got it?”

The mare accented her slight frustration at being told to leave her child in the hooves of a stranger with a particularly hard slap to the wall, but her body remained where it was. “….it doesn’t look like I have much choice…..”

Sling took that as her cue to get moving with the most difficult part while the slavers were still unaware of what was actually going on. She turned and slinked back to the door, popped it open quietly and slipped back into the hall, and then pulled the door back into the doorway, stopping just short of actually closing it before teetering on towards the stairs—

“—ing on, he ain’t usually this quiet,” the leather-barded, shotgun-armed stallion murmured with some touch of concern. “Oughta be filling the walls with screams.”

“So what?” another male voice rebuffed over the sound of a weapon’s action being manipulated. “Let him get his freak on however he wants and be glad Saurus ain’t said nothin’ about messin’ with his whore the last three weeks.”

The decidedly unpony-like name—and the implication that the mare had been kept purely for personal gratification—only further cemented Sling’s desire to stay as far away from that griffon as possible. The urge to slaughter everything in the central room down stairs was beginning to grow stronger than her will to overcome it. And if she let herself go, there was no telling if that colt would survive the crossfire.

Or herself.

Surprise them, maybe. Off one with a headshot, might get lucky and startle the other three into backing off….or….

“I’m goin’ up,” the shotgunner declared, his hooves clomping with speed and purpose as he quickly neared the bottom of the stairs she was only now descending. “Slips, watch the stairs—“

An uncouth and foul curse left her lips as she pulled the 10mm free from its holster and flipped the safety off, her plans to resolve this with minimal gunfire dashed in an instant—

“Didn’t take you for a voyeur—“ one of his fellow slavers called out after him, just as his head poked into her pistol’s sights as he bounded up the stairs—

—the moment his eyes swept up and spotted the gun leveled at him he stopped moving and stumbled back down the stairs, crashing into the floor of the central room—

“Hahahahaa!! Clumsy ass foal—“

Seeing a slim opportunity to get the drop on the rest before the shotgunner could find his voice and warn them of her coming, she leapt down the remainder of the stairs in quick, short hops to land at the base of the staircase just as the shotgunner began to find his hooves—

—pumped two rounds into his head just as he started to shout at them, one round completely penetrating his skull and splattering the floor with bits of brain matter and blood as his body sank into an odd sitting position with his legs folded in beneath him—

—of the three slavers left, only one—an earth pony with a mange-ridden coat of pearlescent blue and an unkempt orange mane—had a weapon mounted onto his armored barding, but his attention had been focused on his saddlebag on the floor instead of the stairs. In the time that it took for the gunshots to register to his senses she had already settled the sights of her pistol on his skull, and she squeezed back the trigger just as he snapped his head towards her—

—the bullet smacked into his head, just above his eyes, and his body tumbled over and slumped to the floor on its side—

—two bodies collided into her, building up momentum as they carried her into the wall and slammed her into a decaying bookshelf that splintered apart on impact. A sharp, stabbing pain shot through her right foreleg and scrapped her across the top of her withers, just below her neck—

—she reached up with her left foreleg and smacked one stallion in the throat as he pinned her to the floor, her gun having been tossed aside in the collision and clattering across the floor as they struggled. His clean, but scarred pearl-colored body began to stumble as he struggled to breath cleanly, but his mango-colored partner was not nearly as deterred by her feeble strikes against his barded chest, a chunk of wood embedded in the limb making it difficult to even move it without it screaming in fiery pain. He reared up over her, preparing to smash his forehooves into her face with the full weight of his body behind his attack—

—a furious, feminine scream of unadulterated rage drowned out the sound of the knife that cleaved into the side of his neck, and the gurgling, choking gasps as his throat began to spurt streams of crimson, his body tumbling backwards as he lost his balance and toppled over.

Those screams did not, however, block out the sight of Kite furiously bringing that knife back down on the bleeding stallion at just about any spot that wasn’t being covered by his barding—his forelegs, his face and neck, anywhere that could be struck with great effect, she sank that serrated survival knife into with what looked like years of pent-up rage and fury at all the unimaginable abuses she must have suffered under their hooves. Before long her grape coat began to grow dark purple with all the blood she was being splattered with, and the metal collar around her neck looked more red than aged stainless steel.

And Sling could not bring herself to look away, no matter how horrifying it became to witness this savage act of revenge.

Because if she looked hard enough, she swore she could have seen herself in Kite’s battered eyes as she stabbed and sliced at the one tormentor left alive for her to take it all out on. Seen all the hate she harbored inside exploding at the first available opportunity and just letting loose until it was all expended.

Kite was done in all of about twenty seconds, and the stallion had stopped breathing and struggling within the first ten. Sling had never gotten a clear, good look at his face in the chaos of her failed surprise attack, and what Kite had left when she was done couldn’t have been recognized as a pony at all. One foreleg was almost completely severed at the leg joint, and the other one had so many cuts and stab wounds that all she could see was a red, dripping covering.

Kite stared at the carnage she’d wrought for only a couple of seconds before she spat on the bleeding remains and kicked the body with a foreleg as her magic sank the knife into his jaw one last time, just to be absolutely certain she hadn’t missed anything important. “I’d piss on you if I had any to spare, asshole.”

“Jeez, mom, didn’t have to all psycho on ‘im,” the colt muttered dismissively, and to Sling’s horror he did not seem all that bothered by what he’d just witnessed. “How are we gonna get these collars off now?”

“Not now, son,” Kite heaved in heavy breaths as she pulled the blade free from the stallion’s corpse and re-sheathed into its scabbard that she’d tied around her torso with a leather strap. “Can you still walk?”

As much as she wanted to question the colt’s ambivalence to all the brutal deaths that had just taken place in front of him, the more pressing and immediate concern was to get this piece of wood out of her leg and get back to her little girl before that griffon came back to check on the gunshots. “Need a minute—“

—her magic wrapped itself around the wood chunk, and after a careful testing tug, yanked it out of her leg as fast and as hard as she could. Thankfully, only a half-inch’s worth had stabbed into her and missed the bone, but it cut deeply enough that even after the initial, excruciating pain that set her limb on fire, there was still a deep, sharp pain that manifested itself whenever she attempted to move it. She quickly drew out a pair of healing potions from her saddlebags and drowned one down her throat, and the pain subsided almost immediately. She didn’t dare look at the liquid spell’s work as it mended all the muscles, blood vessels, and tendons in her leg back together into their original state.

She was sickened enough as it was.

“Saurus’ll be back any minute, we have to go,” Kite insisted strongly as Sling began to poke about the room with her magic. Her 10mm pistol was the first item retrieved and holstered, and as the first healing potion’s effects began to fade the pain in her leg crept back into her nerves, and so she drank the second flask on the spot and tossed it aside before resuming her search of the bodies—the shotgun, the one grenade she could find on the four bodies, another 9mm pistol, ammunition—

And she decided that she’d plundered long enough when she began to feel this indescribable itch at the back of her neck. “Guess that’ll do. Go on, I can make it from here now—“

“We can’t,” Kite interrupted before she could start giving them directions towards the settlement she’d left about an hour earlier. “….and…and you’re not a bad shot. Think our chances are better if we stick with you.”

“Plus these collars still got bombs in ‘em,” the little colt blurted in nonchalantly, and Sling’s heart froze at the revelation. “So….y’know, it’d be all kinds of awesome if you could get ‘em the hell off sometime.”

Sling’s eyes zeroed in on the collars around their necks, her stomach growing queasy at the thought of seeing them detonate without warning, and particularly anywhere near her or El-Tee. “….are they….safe?”

“Saurus deactivated the signals ages ago, so no one could use us as a sacrificial bomb from a distance with a transmitter,” Kite answered, just as the second healing potion’s effects began to wane thin. Sling risked a quick glance down at her foreleg and was relieved to see the wound completely healed, with only a minimal amount of scarring left behind as evidence that she’d been hurt at all. “But the explosives are still there. Can we maybe talk about this once we’re somewhere safer? Saurus is bound to have heard the gunfire.”

El-Tee…..

Yes, this was definitely not the place to be talking about removing exploding collars. She promptly galloped past the mare and the colt and back into the streets, eying the overturned sky wagon for any sign of her daughter’s presence. “El-Tee!! C’mon out, it’s time to go!!”

Light Tail’s teal blue body fell out of the confines of the sky wagon and immediately scrambled to her hooves in a mad dash to return to her mother. “Don’t gotta tell me twice—“

—a harsh swoosh of air above was the only warning anypony heard before the dark-feathered griffon’s body landed on the sky wagon at almost full speed. The harsh crunch of metal and centuries-old concrete surprised the little filly into a tumbling roll forward with a shriek of surprise—

—his right talon gripped a pistol, leveling it at Sling and cocking the hammer back—

“I’m going to assume that you wasted most of my crew seeing as how my property is walking out with you covered in blood,” the griffon bellowed with a growl. “That’s a very expensive mistake you just made.”

Shit shit shit! Her legs began to buckle slightly, her mind racing about for some way out of this mess, some trick or last ditch idea that might at least see her daughter’s freedom for another day, but nothing useful came to mind. Trying to draw a weapon would just get her shot mid-draw, and no soul alive could outrun a bullet, he was perched on the only meaningful cover in sight….

“So here’s what I’m willing to offer, in light of the costs you’ve extracted for your little rescue,” the griffon continued, his unusual-looking pistol still aimed at what she assumed was her head. Fairly long barrel, stainless steel, with a matte-black open slide design exposing most of it. “You drop all your gear in the next ten seconds—“

—and his pistol swung downward until it was leveled at her precious little girl—

“—or I splatter her little brains out right in front of you,” he finished, his eyes never wavering off of her as he spoke. “Countdown starts now.”

It was just like before. All her fear vanished. All her thoughts stopped. There was only this vicious griffon, holding a gun and threatening her daughter with it if she didn’t surrender herself to the same fate she’d just risked her life to pull Kite out of.

KILL HIM.

Her precious night light, stars bless her, had learned something from last time, and from the two mornings of gun lessons she’d given her so far. With the griffon’s attention focused on her, he failed to even notice the filly’s horn coming to life until she’d smacked the magazine release button and bolted away like a rabbit. His gasped, cliché “Wha?” lasted only as long as it took to fire the one chambered round uselessly at the spot she’d been lying in a second earlier, but it was all the opportunity Sling needed.

The pump-action shotgun she’d taken off the dead slaver flung out and forward, the stock coming to rest against her chest as she reared up on her hind legs and hooked her right foreleg around the curved pistol grip section, bracing it solidly and lining up the bead sight for a quick shot—

—the griffon’s wings flared and flapped to take him into the skies, but it was too late to completely escape the blast of buckshot that exploded out the barrel. His right wing was caught in the cloud of pellets, folding in on itself in exceptionally awkward angles and turning his ascent into a rapid fall onto the ground behind the sky wagon, a puff of feathers flittering through the air behind him. The recoil from the shot bucked her fairly hard and almost pushed her onto her butt considering her unbalanced and unnatural shooting position, but she ignored her teetering body and simply shucked the fore end hard, kicking out the spent shell and chambering a fresh one for a second shot—

—a distinct and unmistakable snap! smacked into the street somewhere behind her, a tell-tale sign of a bullet hitting its mark, and the griffon took off on all fours, surprising the unicorn with the sudden burst of speed even as she sought to swing the bead sight on his rapidly shrinking form—

—he disappeared around the street corner just as she fired, the buckshot sailing into air instead of his hind legs, and as this second shot succeeded in knocking her off balance and onto her back, the sound of a third gunshot rang out from a considerable distance away. But when she failed to hear a bullet impact within the next three seconds as she fought herself back upright, she began to understand what had just happened.

Someone, somewhere, had taken a shot at the griffon at the same time that she had, and from a great distance because it took a little over two seconds for the sound of the gunshot to reach her. Had El-Tee not done what she had, it was entirely possible that this unknown shooter could have taken the griffon down where he’d stood.

And the little one knew it almost immediately. Her shaky voice tried to put out an air of humor, but the shock and adrenaline rush that had hit was already beginning to loosen its grip on her, and if anything she sounded more fearful than jestful.

“…..o-oh, crap, I bring out the worst in everypony, don’t I?”

Chapter 9

They were all dead. Just like before.

To be fair, Mom didn’t kill all of them herself. The purple mare had some sort of freak-out and cut the last two up like a celery stick, which explained all the blood on her. She could only stand to look for about two seconds and then turned tail back outside, and let Mom and the mare do all the stealing-from-the-dead they cared to.

Which naturally left her alone with the colt, and he was somewhat more willing to engage in pointless, idle talk than she was considering that she’d just narrowly avoided being shot in the freakin’ head—

“Hey,” he sputtered in a bored voice, his left forehoof coming up to try and scratch at his neck and failing thanks to that big metal collar around his neck. “What’s yer name?”

Grateful to have something to think about other than the events of the last five minutes, she stared back at his face nervously for a brief moment before staring back down at the street again. “Uhhh….L-Light Tail….what’s yours?”

“Bee-jay,” he answered immediately. “…well, actually, that’s not my name, but my mom gets mad if I say it, so I just say BJ. Says it’s uncouth for girls’ ears, or somethin’. Grown-ups are weird.”

“Well, then, why not pick another one? Somethin’ that won’t make her mad? Like Butter Jelly!”

BJ stopped scratching at his neck and stared back at her with that same, blank bored look he’d had since he first came out of the crumbling building. “….oh great, I found a dumb one….”

El-Tee had to bite herself in the inner lip before she could smart off right back at him. “No, seriously, if yer name’s that bad why not just ditch it? It’s not like anypony’s got it written down on a record or somethin’ that says, ‘Dis be yer name ‘till the end of yer days’. Who’d know?”

“Me,” he shot back almost instantly again. “….and my mom. And whoever gave me my name. And my last three masters. But hey, BJ’s good enough—“

Oh jeez, how long was he kept as a slave? “Okay, stoppit right there. First thing, you ain’t got a master. You’re yer own pony, you don’t belong to anybody.”

His eyes lost that blank glaze and began to scrutinize her face for several moments. “….you a stable pony or somethin’? You talk like one.”

Crud, even talkin’ gives it away! “You’ve met one before to say somethin’ like that.”

BJ’s eyes finally began to brighten up a little, perhaps delighted that she wasn’t quite as stupid as she looked (sometimes). “Hunh. Maybe you’re not so dumb after all. Yeah, Mom and I met a couple of ‘em a year back. Pretty clean lookin’, like you. And they didn’t know how things are up here, ‘cause everythin’ we told ‘em just made their eyes bulge ‘till they looked like they were gonna pop out if ya so much as breathed on ‘em. Like yers did when ya told me I didn’t have a master.”

Did they….I didn’t even notice…. “’Cause it’s true. You’re only as weak as you let yourself be. If you let bad folk push you around all the time, you’ll always be less than a pony to them.”

As quickly as they brightened, his eyes fell back into that dismissive, disdainful stare he seemed to view the world with, and the clear disappointment in his voice was hard to miss….or stomach. “Tough talk’s easy when ya got the gun. Why don’t ya talk to me about it after you find out if ya got the guts to shoot ‘em or not?”

For a brief moment Light Tail felt herself seemingly shrink in size in the face of such a sharp accusatory tone. She felt….lessened. Like she was no longer a pony, but something less than normal. And it wasn’t just because of what BJ had just said, but how he said it. Did he mistake her words for overconfidence just because of the two guns she had on her?

She didn’t get to snap back at him, or try to fix the mistake she’d just made. Mom and the grape (blood?) colored mare emerged from the building ruins only a couple of moments later, laden down with the pilfered loot of the departed slavers (and in the mare’s case, considerably less blood than she’d been covered in two minutes earlier). Mom’s overly eager gait made it clear she wanted as far away from here as they could get. “Let’s go,” she said with a clipped tone. “Sooner we get away from here the better.”

Gladly. El-Tee bounded into a light gallop and quickly caught up with her mother—

—only to hear the approaching hoofsteps of that same colt and his mom following right behind them—

“….M-mom, what are th—“

“They’re coming with us,” Mom answered quickly, before the question could finish forming in her mouth. “Try to keep up, I want as much distance between us and that griffon as we can get.”

A palpable sense of dread began to creep into her lungs as she briefly glanced back behind her, but thankfully BJ was less interested in glaring at her than he was at hopping around every few seconds to check behind them before catching up with them again. His mom likewise kept her attention focused on the side streets and alleys as they trekked through the town ruins, leaving herself and her own Mom with the task of watching out for anything in front of and, now, above them.

She was more than happy to contend herself with the skies. Just looking at BJ’s mom was sickening, even after she’d cleaned herself up a little. How the mare could even stomach walking around covered in blood was equally as disturbing. Were ponies up here so desensitized to death and violence that they accepted it as part of the natural order of things?

I wanna go home, she whined to herself quietly, keeping her gaze glued to the depressing, Equestria-wide cover of dark gray clouds so nopony would see her tearing up a little. I wanna go home, I wanna go home….

The trek to the edge of town was, for once, eventless and without peril. Though there’d been a time or two when she’d thought the griffon had been sneaking up on them, it turned out to be a piece of trash being pushed down the street by the wind.

And with Kite quietly guiding them along, they made it through in less time than it would’ve taken Sling to do it on her own, and even managed to get them onto the street that connected with the main thoroughfare leading out into the vast, empty, and soulless wasteland of the prairie. Patches of parched, dying tallgrass and shriveled, dead brush swayed about in the breeze, poking out of cracks in the asphalt of the highway and dotting the dry land in seemingly random spots as far as she could see. Dust clouds occasionally rose from the ground, stirred by the wind, but flittered back to the earth in a scattered spray shortly afterward.

And as she’d feared, Blue Star’s tale of the pegasi cloud cover seemed to be holding up, for that damnable dark gray canvas continued to stretch across the sky in every conceivable direction. It was exceptionally difficult to tell if the whole thing was one large, continuous cloud or an insane combination of millions mashed together into a whole entity.

Kite did not let her linger for long. “Still shocked by the clouds, stable pony?”

Got to find a way to file that big “115” mark off my PipBuck. “….I’m more shocked that the pegasi have kept it up for so long,” she sighed with a slightly wavering voice. “….is this really it? What we’ve become after nearly two centuries?”

“It’s all that’s left,” Kite replied simply, unmoved by the teal-blue unicorn’s plight. “Twenty miles down this highway is another town, we can figure out what we’ll do from there. If a storm picks up again there should be a couple of solitary homes between here and there we can wait it out in, if bandits or raider gangs haven’t taken them over yet.”

Sling latched onto the set of directions, finding solace in the planning of a course of action and survival. Gave her something to think about other than the terrible reality she didn’t want to acknowledge just yet. “Anyone there that can disarm those collars?”

“Should be, if you can afford the work—“

Light Tail’s ever-inquisitive ears did not fail to pick up on the conversation, and injected herself into it without warning or invitation. “…wait, what are you talking about? Disarm those collars? What’s wrong with them?”

“They’re bombs,” BJ’s voice answered flatly, getting a jolted gasp out of the little filly with his bluntness (which was probably why he did it). “It’s how the slavers keep us in line.”

The ghastly image of an explosively-decapitated pony flashed itself before her eyes, and apparently her night light’s as well, because she sounded more horrified than before. “…oh s-stars, what kind of sick soul does that….”

“A slaver,” Kite replied unsympathetically, finally breaking away from the group by continuing on forward onto the highway. “Good thing about this area, it’s pretty wide open, not much to hide behind. Should be able to see them coming from pretty far off.”

“Two mares and their kids are still an easy target when they only have a shotgun and four working pistols,” Sling shot back tersely, galloping ahead until she was back in front of the group. The first thing she wanted a potential threat to meet was an armed pony, not a freshly-freed slave. “I can already tell you know your way around a knife, but what about guns?”

“Not my thing, but I can manage. BJ’s better at that.”

Sling’s blood began to run just a tad colder as her magic began to envelop the 9mm pistol she’d lifted from the pile of dead slavers and pulled it out for a quick look—

“Crap, this one’s shot,” she snarled when her eyes swept across the slide and noticed a patch of empty space and a small piece of the slide missing from where the rear sight normally sat. In its place, somepony had crudely carved a slight “trench” sight cut all the way to the front sight. It was an amateurish job by a soul with access to few, if any, tools, and she cringed when she saw a crack in the slide near the external extractor—no doubt made from the effort to carve the trench sight into the slide. “I’ll take it down later for parts, but we’re not using this one.”

“Fine by me,” BJ replied, seemingly more interested in the air around him than in the actual conversation. “Things ever get to a point where I need a gun, there’ll be plenty on the ground to pick from.”

A rather morbid way of looking at it, but he’s right, she thought sadly, taking little note of El-Tee’s soft gasp other than that she seemed upset by his attitude. Only nine shells on the shotgun, don’t know that I’ll ever find any .44 Mag, and 10mm isn’t much good against hardened barding…

“This town we’re going to….does it have a merchant? One that trades in weapons?”

“Didn’t the last time BJ and I were dragged through, but that was two months ago,” Kite answered quickly, her hoofsteps faltering slightly as she chanced a quick look behind them. “Ought to be thinking of finding food and water—“

“We have plenty,” she assured her with a quick tap of her water canteens dangling off the side of her traveling saddle. “Wouldn’t mind knowing where a good water source is once it comes time to refill, though.”

“Clean water’s hard to get,” the grape unicorn murmured with a guarded tone. “Only a few places in the entire prairie with a functioning water talisman, and two are close to burning out. They charge a good sum of caps for non-residents, and it’s rationed. The stupid try to get by on booze ‘till they realize that the alcohol actually dehydrates them. Funny thing, all those old soda vending machines that popped up during the war still get re-stocked, somehow. And the stuff’s fresh.”

“Soda?” Light Tail quipped with doubt. “What good is that? That stuff’s loaded with sugars and ingredients I can’t even read off the bottle. And how in Celestia’s name is the stuff still being made?!”

“Nobody’s ever figured it out,” Kite explained further. Satisfied that the road behind them was threat-free for the moment, she fell back into step with the group in three strides. “There’s an old bottling plant south of Withercha, some of the bots outside are still working, maybe that’s where it’s coming from—“

Sling’s horn unconsciously began to release the spell work for her hearing protection, a low (but unmistakable) groan of dread rumbling through her throat—

“There’s working robots out there?!” El-Tee’s voice screeched with joy, having caught up with the grape-colored mare so quickly that her now-muffled hoofsteps had come across as one single bound of excitement. “Are they friendly?! Do they talk?! What kind of robots—“

“W-what the frig, how’d you get here so fast—“

But El-Tee’s “Endless Excitement Switch” had been triggered on—now that Kite had caught her attention with interesting knowledge of the surface world she wanted to know (and that would take her mind off of whatever was bugging her), there was no escape from her or her endless barrage of questions. “—does anypony fix ‘em up?! Are there any Handy models?! We have a couple in the stable, one of ‘em we call Spiner likes to sing and I taught him “A Griffon Tar” a couple months back and now he sings it at least a once a day—“

Kite’s body whisked itself beside her in the next instance, seeking escape from the awakened bundle of energy that now hounded her. “Sling Shot, turn her off—“

“She doesn’t have an off switch,” Sling groaned back. Though the hearing protection spell dampened a good bit of the shrill in her night light’s voice and softened the volume, the constant stream of questions and the obliviousness to the world as she sought to sate her curiosity could not be deflected or defeated—but at least now she knew who to blame for Spiner’s spontaneous singing. “Good luck.”

“What?! You’re not even gonna help me out here—“

“Hey! Hey!” the little filly began to badger, hopping up and poking at Kite’s side with her hooves to try and get the mare’s attention again. “Are there any models with a pony-shaped chassis there?! Do any of ‘em have brains for a processor—“

“S-stop, please, I don’t know—“

Her pleas may as well have been uttered into a gushing tornado, for all the good it did. “—do you think they might have something to do with the soda machines getting re-stocked?! Maybe that means there’s a bunch more inside makin’ the stuff, how far from Withercha is it—“

“I-I’ve changed my mind, take me back to Saurus—“

With all the noise and hyperactive antics her daughter was getting up to, she never thought to look for BJ until the little colt’s voice moaned in displeasure from her right, and she stole a glance downward to find him hopping along on three legs as he tried to drown out the shouting filly with a forehoof to his ears. “Ugh, it’s like being surrounded by radroaches.”

“Not quite,” Sling disagreed, but only slightly. “You can shoot the roaches.”

“—where would they be getting the bottles and the water and the sugar and all the other stuff—“

Kite turned her pleas to the afterlife in the hopes of finding a sympathetic ear in the Beyond. “Luuunnaaaa, Celestiaaaa, help....pleeease…”

Once Kite figured out that her only escape was to placate the filly’s questions with answers, the thing calmed down in time as curiosity was satisfied and the questions dwindled from a few dozen to three. Her constant bouncing had settled back into a controlled walk and her shouting and gleeful shrieking turned into a calmer and more pleasant conversational voice, allowing Sling to release her hearing protection spell roughly an hour after Kite had inadvertently hit the “Death by Endless Questions” button. Fifteen minutes afterward she had run out of things to ask and fell back a few feet to go bother BJ, but his refusal to entertain her attempts at conversation finally got her to shut up. For most of the next hour, they’d been blessed with relative peace and quiet.

And then Kite jinxed it—and their chances of traveling unnoticed by strangers—by speaking up once again.

“Oh gods, she’s still shouting at me in my head,” the poor mare whimpered slightly, rubbing at her left ear with a foreleg. “Does she read Dar—“

That was as much as she would get to say before Sling’s left forehoof shot out and plugged the mare’s mouth shut. “If you want to live to nightfall, do not say that name. You will die with her voice in your head in the afterlife if you finish that sentence.”

Kite’s irises shrunk to the size of a pinhead and began to visibly shake slightly at the thought of being hounded to death by an overly curious and excitable filly, and when Sling’s hoof returned to the ground to continue the journey, the dreaded name was not uttered.

“….how have you survived her?”

“She’s pretty well behaved most of the time, actually,” she said, focusing her gaze on the endless, pockmarked and cracked highway in the far distance. Aside from one lonely looking, debilitated house sitting off on its own a hundred yards away from the road thirty minutes ago, she’d seen nothing but endless hilly wasteland and small patches of tallgrass for the entire walk so far. “But if she gets real curious about something, and you let on that you know something about it, you’ll never get rid of her until she gets the answers she wants. She once followed me all the way to bed when she got to wanting to know how unicorn magic works. I put her in her room and locked the door so she couldn’t badger me in my sleep, and the little devil still found a way out and into my room, and kept hopping on my bed like the six-year old she was until I broke down.”

Kite began to laugh quietly, though a sad, wistful sigh made it tough to tell if she was amused or dismayed….until she spoke. “….wow. That…that sounds so….alien….”

Oh buck me, how could I be so stupid? Stables must sound like the Canterlot Castle to these poor surface ponies… “I-I’m sorry, I didn’t me—“

“No, no, it’s fine,” the older mare assured her softly, though her tone remained downcast and slightly stung. "….it’s…when you live in the wasteland your whole life, it’s hard to imagine life could be any different. Things like soft beds, friendly faces, no mutated wildlife trying to eat you alive, or enough necessities to go around….most folk live their whole lives never knowing anything like that, and somehow along the way it just got accepted as….normal. The stables are dream worlds to us. And most of ‘em are gone. Yours is one of the last….”

A hard lump began to form in her throat that couldn’t be swallowed away. “….it’s gone now, too. Radroach outbreak….power went out….my little girl and I were the only ones that got out in time.”

“I figured as much,” Kite whispered back. “Nobody ever leaves paradise willingly. Does she understand?”

“She’s a lot smarter than she looks,” Sling forced herself to say through her tightening throat, fresh memories of Cloud Wind trying to force themselves forward. “And incredibly optimistic. She knows the chances are slim, but she’s convinced the stable survived, and that we’re trying to find a new home for them too, not just us.”

Kite’s voice took on a slightly harder edge. “And you’re going to let her believe that?”

“If believing that everyone she knows is still alive is what gets her through this hell of a world, then that’s what I’ll let her believe….”

She would have said more after that, but her eyes began to focus on a small set of black specks coming up over the top of a small hill several hundred yards ahead, straight down the highway and heading right at them. She came to a full stop in two steps, floating her binoculars out of her saddlebag and the shotgun out of the long gun scabbard on her left side—

—CL-CLANK!—

—the shotgun’s rough slide-action caused two tiny bodies behind her to come to a stop, just as the focus on the binocs began to sharpen and turned the enlarged blobs into the recognizable shape of a group of ponies—

“M-mom—“

“Hush,” Sling commanded of her offspring, going so far as to encourage her to move behind her completely with a consistent swish of her tail across the filly’s body towards the empty space right behind her.

“….what do you see?” Kite asked nervously, slowly inching backward as the blobs grew larger.

The pony-shapes gradually turned into actual ponies—an equal mixture of mares and stallions, eight in total, clad in khaki-shaded, thick-looking armored barding with a mottled three-shade pattern, like a chocolate chip cookie.

Desert camo, her security training told her in the next instant. Makes sense given the terrain, but that doesn’t look painted on—

One stallion turned to his left, ostensibly to scan for potential threats to his group’s flank, and mounted to his right side was a belt-fed rifle of undetermined caliber. A second stallion behind him sported a similar weapon on his side, and a unicorn mare at the rear sported a shortened, griffon-style carbine within her magical grasp—

“Oh shit,” she spat quietly, forgetting the extreme proximity of her daughter behind her. “Automatic rifles, desert camo barding—“

“O-o-oh fu…..oh gods not them—“

The sheer terror in Kite’s trembling voice told her all she wanted to. She stuffed the binocs back into her saddlebag and frantically began searching around them for the nearest hill they could book it to. “Kids, get ready to run, slavers—“

“Union,” Kite interrupted, her legs buckling as she sought safety behind the former stable mare. “They’re not slavers. They’re merchant union. And they’ve already seen us, oh gods—“

For the first time that morning, BJ’s detached demeanor was nowhere to be found. Instead she heard what sounded like benign assurance…a tone a slightly tired parent might take towards a child still scared of their imagination’s work in the dark. “Mom, quit it, your new friend can just blow them away with that big gun of hers—“

Union….merchant union….the way Kite uttered those words….

“What’s this merchant union? Talk quick.”

“They’re the power that runs this part of the prairie,” Kite answered freely, her voice close to tears. “They r-run the major trade routes, they patrol them, the towns in their territory….they t-trade in everything. Including slaves.”

Sling did not any more information than that to figure out what had Kite so terrified. Two slaves, in the company of the mare that had slaughtered their former “owners”….

And there was absolutely nowhere to run to. The nearest hill with any meaningful cover was over a hundred yards behind them, and she could already see the group of ponies picking up their pace to meet them. No way they could bolt for it, and she was not willing to risk the chance that they would be mistaken for bandits or savages and shot at—

“Kite, BJ, stay behind me, don’t look at them,” her mouth spouted off quickly over her quickening heart rate, slinging the shotgun back into its scabbard and popping open the holster latches for Grayhawk and her 10mm. “Nopony say a word to them, I’ll do the talking.”

“M-mom—“

“I mean it!” she snapped back sharply before her filly could get any cute ideas about trying to help out, her magic relieving Kite of her knife and its scabbard without protest. “Stay back, stay put, and say nothing—“

Oooooh shit what the hell am I doing!?

Four hundred yards now and closing. These union ponies could really move when they wanted to!

Light Tail’s hoofs finally moved her further back, though whenever she tried to scoot to the side to see around her mother, Sling would overtly side-step in front of her to discourage the attempt, and after three tries the filly gave up and did as she was told.

It took the union ponies half a minute to cover the remaining distance, but when they finally got close enough for her to discern coat coloring they slowed down and began to spread themselves out across the highway and onto the puddle-filled, muddy ground on both sides of the road. A pale foliage green-coated stallion with a darker green mane and tail, flanked by a chartreuse mare with a matching mane tied into a single braid and a short, cropped tail continued their steady gallop towards her, and as they drew close enough for her to see their eye colors she finally recognized a set of three sharp pale yellow-colored chevrons on the front of his camouflaged barding—

“Stay where you are!” the chevron-marked stallion barked sharply, slowing into a trot as he began to scrutinize her and her entourage.

“I’ve already been attacked twice in the last twenty-four hours,” she shot back with an equally strong tone. “And if you and your squad don’t stop surrounding me I’m going to take three of you with me into the afterlife.”

For a brief moment she was afraid he’d call her bluff and cut her down with his saddle-mounted rifle, but then he clicked his forehooves across the pavement twice, and the rest of his party halted mid-step and began inching backwards but remained spread out across a forty yard spread. “…no need to get violent over a standard ownership check—“

She would never know how she managed to not flinch or jolt in place as her heart smacked into her ribcage in fear. She never expected there to be any sort of functioning bureaucracy after what she’d seen yesterday, certainly not one competent enough to formalize some set of standards and regulations for the barbaric practice of slavery. But it did explain the blood-soaked scrolls of parchment she’d found beneath one of the dead slavers when she and Kite had done a quick once-over search of them before they’d left.

Papers she’d left behind because she’d considered them useless.

“My papers are gone,” she said as she forced herself to stare him down in the eyes and hoped she could fake enough confidence to get him to back off. “One of those two times I got shot at. Had to chase the thieves down and wipe them out to get my workers back, but the papers got ruined in the mess.”

“Likely story—“

“Y’know what, go on,“ she cut him off angrily, swiping her left forehoof back in the direction of the town she’d left. “Go on towards town, take a right at the second intersection, walk three blocks, turn left and walk for two, turn right and go another five. You’ll come up on a street with a two-story building with part of the outer wall collapsed and forming a slope of debris to the second floor. Fish through the bodies all you like, you’re bound to find those bloodied papers, and good luck reading them!”

“Ma’am, if you can’t prove ownership on demand we’ll have to detain the slaves until we can verify it with the main trade office,” the chevron stallion remarked calmly, though she caught a hint of discomfort in his voice, as if he was starting to grow uneasy (or uncertain) about the way things were going, and his eyes began to try and tear themselves away from her. “My sympathies for your troubles, but—“

“My troubles!?” she shrieked back to his face, bearing into his eyes with as much rage and hate as she could muster. She did not want his gaze going anywhere near her Pip-Buck—if he spotted that stupid “115” on its outer casing, her hasty bluff would be shot. “I came all the way out here on some stupid rumor that somepony near the mountain finally found a way into that damned stable last week!! I thought I could strike it big on a new trade route, but all I found was the same locked door that’s always been there! I come back into town and don’t even get one block in before some local bandits take a shot at me and my little girl! I just got ambushed again this morning trying to get out of that cesspit and I almost lost the most valuable things I had left from this entire idiotic venture! My entire week has been nothing but one stupid mistake after another and I just want to go home, before I go out of business!!”

The stallion’s face began to lose its composure, forcing the chartreuse mare beside him to cover for him—and the subtle tone of disapproval and disrespect gave Sling the impression that this was not the first time this mare had to cover for her superior. “….suggest moving on our way, sir,” the mare hissed quietly into his ear, her rifle lowering further as her attention was shifted from her weapon to getting as far away from the screaming “merchant” as possible. “Papers get lost sometimes. We have more important places to be.”

His left eye twitched at the tone of the mare’s voice, and though he was able to set his face straight again, he never did have the gall to look back at her, or at Sling, as he clapped his right forehoof into the ground with two solid strikes. In the blink of an eye, the six ponies spread out at the sides unlatched the firing reins from their mouths and began moving forward again without a word.

“….get your ownership credentials straightened out,” he said in parting as he began to trot past her. “The next patrol you run into won’t be so forgiving.”

“Forgiving my ass,” the chartreuse mare muttered under her breath, but fortunately for her, the stallion never heard it. She didn’t even bother to acknowledge that Sling existed and simply followed in his wake, quickly darting ahead once she’d caught up to him and taking the lead for the eight-pony squad as it gradually reformed into a two-line staggered formation on the road. Within a minute they’d become little more than the black blobs they’d started out as.

And only then did Kite finally allow herself to fall apart. She simply collapsed onto the asphalt and began heaving in large, gasping breaths and soft wails, while BJ promptly bolted away from them, off the road and into the wasteland until he was about twenty yards away—

“H-hey, BJ, where ya goin’—“

“Leave him be, El-Tee,” Sling said loudly, already having a pretty good idea why he was moving away from them so quickly. “Just…let him go for a minute.”

The filly insisted on making sure that BJ wasn’t going to get gobbled by the mud or a hidden swarm of bugs, but quickly changed her mind once she saw why he’d gone off to the side and quickly backpedaled back to the other side of the road. “I just wanna make sure he’s gonna be okaaaaaaaeeeee WHOA whoa whoa nevermindnevermindhe’sfine—“

“Oh shit, oh shitohshit—“ Kite squealed softly, barely audible over her frantic breathing, and her body began to shake from a combination of fear and adrenaline bleed-off. Even her tail quivered in place. “Shit shit SHIT—“

“Hey, cut that out,” Sling whispered quietly after the sixth curse. “Just br—“

“—ake a minute, just breathe—“

Windy’s voice faded from her mind, seemingly blending in with her own as she fought past the memory flash and continued to try and soothe this cowering mare into a walking mood. “….take a minute, just breathe—“

“Oh sh—….oh my gods, I could see the selling block again,” the quivering mare sobbed, her forehooves clasping down upon her face to wipe away her tears. “I….I’ve never seen anyone talk their way out of an ownership inspection like that…“

“It wasn’t by skill or luck,” Sling said in return, keeping her eyes on the shrinking dots of the patrol ponies in case they changed their mind and doubled back. “That stallion isn’t fit for command of anything, too used to his position alone getting him through his tasks, and he let that mare practically give him orders once I started going off on him and pushed him out of his comfort zone. If she’d been in charge we’d all be dead or in chains right now. She could still convince him to come back if she starts thinking too hard about the bad lie I just gave them.”

Kite’s body stiffened at the prospect that potential threats to her newfound freedom still lingered, and though she was still shaking and trembling she refused to allow it to stop her any longer. She rose back up onto her hooves and began testing her legs with tiny steps forward to ensure she could at least walk without tripping herself. “…right….keep moving….’nother mile up, we can stop there for a bit—“

“We’re not stopping until we hit the next town,” Sling cut her off as she began to search the rain-touched wasteland around them for any other threats that might have taken notice of four ponies stopped in the middle of the road. “Those collars are going to get us all killed or worse if we don’t get them off fast.”

For the next two and a half hours the group moved along the degraded highway with the silence of the dead. Sling didn’t care to slow down, not even for lunch—she’d already put them all in a mess with an on-the-fly constructed fib to a Union patrol, and the collars did attract attention. The sooner they were off, the easier future journeys would be.

Near the end of the twenty mile journey, she could begin to make out the sight of a looming city in the distance, quite larger than the tiny ruined settlement they’d just left earlier in the morning. A few war-damaged, jagged peaks of tall towered-office buildings leered over the sprawling cityscape around them, with several support beams exposed to the elements of nature and many of their windows shattered or cracked. Once such building was adorned with a dying neon sign depicting the stereotypical pitcher of maple syrup, its light occasionally flickering out but fighting its back to existence seemingly by willpower rather than by any known power source.

“Hey!” Sling Shot bellowed over her shoulder. “What’s this town we’re about to walk into?!”

Kite’s head had to shake itself awake before she could respond. “Syrup Mound,” she answered after a lingering look at the syrup pitcher, and Sling began longing for a fresh, warm blueberry pancake. “Supposed to have been mostly an industrial town. One of the few in the prairie, before the Last Day….”

“…the what day?”

“The day the war ended,” Kite explained a little further, just as Sling finally tore her eyes away from the forty-floor structure that tormented her with the trappings of a breakfast she’d probably never taste again. “When all the megaspells went flying and turned the world into….this. It’s been called the Last Day for as long as anypony can remember.”

Sling Shot’s eyes softened slightly, barely focused on the mile of highway that separated them from the outskirts of the city. “….that name actually makes a sick kind of sense. In the stable, we called the era before the war’s end ‘Equestria That Was’.”

“….think I prefer that, actually. If everybody out here focused more on what was lost than on how we lost it, things wouldn’t be so bad as they are now...”

“So do you know where to go to find the one that can get those collars off?”

She was starting to figure out how things worked up here.

Firstly, there was no government…well, at least, they didn’t know of anything that resembled a functioning government. Maybe Kite or BJ knew, but they weren’t saying much. Still, without any sort of working government, or harmony, or nice stuff, or anything resembling peace and love and tolerance and all that jazz, ponies and griffons were really miserable and really hungry. They were stuck with the ruins and relics of the beforetimes, and all the ills and pick-me-ups that made one forget said ills.

Like booze.

So for the second time today, the place to go to find what they were looking for was a bar. And this was an actual bar, not some burned-out hotel re-purposed into one. It had tables for its patrons, a bar, and a bartender pony (a pinkish unicorn mare with a really tiny drinking cup for a cutie mark that Mom said was a shot glass when she asked about it) that stayed behind the bar, and she thought she could smell a kitchen at work somewhere through a drape-obscured doorway next to the bar. A few other mares of varying shades of pink and purple were going this way and that, the earth ponies balancing delicate plates of shot glasses and bottles of booze on their heads and the unicorns simply floating it about with their magic.

Mom shuffled them all into a corner booth table at the far end of the room, where she could see every soul that came in through the front door….and she made sure that every one of them could see the three guns she carried with her. It didn’t seem to be having much effect, though, since she could see that half the room was armed themselves. If anything, she felt like Mom had just deselected them from their list of things to harass.

The rumbling chorus of talking ponies drowned into a barely comprehensible muffle as Mom’s hearing protection spell enveloped her ears, and her spirits dampened slightly. She’d been hoping the noise around her would keep her from thinking about home….

“You’re new ‘round here,” a dark pink waitress mare cooed sweetly (or she was really good at faking it) not even five seconds later, causing Mom to stop fishing around her saddlebags to look at this mare in the eye. “Sight-seeing?”

“Business,” Mom replied flatly, keeping her voice calm as her eyes darted around the room for a quick second or two. “You sell anything other than booze?”

“Now what kinda soul walks into a bar and don’t want a drink?” the waitress pushed back gently.

“Me,” Mom replied, still calm but slowly losing her patience with the mare’s sales pitch. “Alcohol dulls the senses. It makes you slower, dumber, and more likely to shoot yourself in the leg. Dehydrates you, too. Water’s not easy to come across, y’know.”

The waitress huffed a lock of her mane out of her face, a slight hint of displeasure forming at the corner of her mouth in the face of what was probably the first pony that day who didn’t want booze, but she didn’t push it. Probably because of Mom’s guns. “….got a couple cases of sarsaparilla in the back. Ket keeps ‘em chilled with a fancy cold spell, so it don’t come cheap. Five caps a bottle—“

Mom didn’t even hesitate. She just pulled twenty bottle caps out of their sack and dropped them into the waitress’s pouch tied around her neck. “I’ll take four.”

The mare’s eyes widened slightly at just how quickly Mom was willing to throw money down on something like that without even haggling a little, but she didn’t say anything and just trotted on towards the kitchen.

Once the waitress was out of earshot, Mom turned her attention back to more pressing issues. “Who are we looking for? What does he look like?”

“G-griffon,” Kite whispered back, her neck and head leaning in as if she were afraid the words would reach the wrong ears if she spoke too loud. “Runs a junk shop, but stops in for lunch every day. Shouldn’t be long, it’s past noon already. Wears a toolkit around his torso and a pair of goggles. Calls himself Fixer.”

Oh wow, somebody smart enough to know how to fix stuff out here, even with everything that’s been wasted! I bet talent like that’s real valuable—

Her short glee died in a flash. If a soul with the skill and know-how to fix stuff was hard to come by…..his services wouldn’t come cheap either….

And how many caps had Mom blown today already out of the six hundred she’d picked up?

“…..what does he charge for his services?” she heard herself asking before Mom could get the guts to say it out loud.

Kite’s eyes couldn’t bear to look at either of them anymore, and settled for the warped, splintered table between them. “…..for collars? ….four hundred apiece.”

Mom’s body seized up on itself beside her, and her expression was no longer hidden behind a composed veil. “….four hun….I don’t even have half that for one of you!” she hissed back softly, her eyes furrowing in distress. “You didn’t think to mention this before we came here?!”

Kite seemed taken aback by Mom’s sudden, drastic change in behavior and mood, and actually shrank back into the booth seat. “I-I…I didn’t think of it….it’s not like caps are all he takes, there’s….other ways….to pay him…..”

She meant it to try and calm Mom down, but it only seemed to make her more frustrated, because she came within a second of smacking her hoof onto the table before she caught herself. “No. I’m not doing that. Ever. You understand?”

Now it was Kite’s eyes that changed. The growing sadness in her voice was unmistakable. “….try to say that when your kid needs you to do things you’d never imagined yourself doing.”

Light Tail chanced a look back towards the kitchen, just in time to see that waitress mare emerge from the draped doorway with a saucer plate in her mouth and four soda bottles cradled atop it in an impressive display of balancing skill. Or luck.

“Could you kids stop fighting long enough to enjoy a cold drink?” BJ blurted with surprising assertiveness, given how he seemed to look at everything with about as much interest as a school filly in a boring subject (which she knew plenty about!). “....lunch would be nice sometime today too, but one thing at a time.”

El-Tee couldn’t help but snicker at the fact that a smart-mouthed colt got two supposedly adult mares to stop bickering at each other, though that changed to a surprised, gurgling choke when the waitress dropped off their drinks and left with new requests for something edible from the kitchen. Her first taste of the sugary, sweetened sarsaparilla was….

“….holy Luna, this stuff’s awesome!” she squealed as the last of her sip sizzled into her taste buds with the sharpest, most delicious sensations she’d ever tasted. “What is it?”

“Root beer,” BJ muttered, clasping his bottle between his forelegs after gulping down roughly a quarter of his its contents. “Doesn’t taste flat either, they must brew their own. Awesome.”

A shock of surprise managed to knock out the taste of this “root beer” from her mouth. “….p-ponies can make this stuff?”

“With the right ingredients and equipment, yeah—“

Mom’s groan of fear hardly registered with her, given that her veins began to fill with a wondrous, heart-racing thrill that she couldn’t explain. She suddenly wanted to pounce on the colt and wring his tiny brain for all the information he had on the subject! If this stuff could be made, she wanted to know how—

“Don’t bother asking me how it’s made or what it takes, I don’t have a frickin’ clue,” the colt added hastily in his deadpan, sullen tone, and the filly felt her bubble of excitement bursting at the touch of his rudeness. “All I know is that’s possible. Stuff’s loaded with sugar anyway, don’t need to be drinking it all the time.”

Her drive of discovery deflated by the uncooperative colt, she sat back down into the booth seat she didn’t realize she’d leapt from, and contented herself with making this chilly, five-cap bottle of heaven last. “Spoilsport….”

“Baby,” he snorted back over the top of his bottle, just before he took another sip.

Oh, you did not just call me that! “Scum-bucket.”

“Cut it out,” Mom snarled sharply at the both of them, before BJ could fire back with an insult of his own, and El-Tee felt her ears droop slightly in shame.

BJ, unfortunately, didn’t seem to get the message right away. “Hey, I’m just acting my—“

“BJ!” Kite snapped back, causing the little colt to jump in place as his mom turned her “wrath meter” up a notch. “Stop!”

She wanted to laugh at how quick BJ was to turn into a cowering foal before the sight of an angry parent, but there was enough fear behind his glazing eyes that it was actually uncomfortable watching him get the third degree like this. “…o-okay….”

And Mom noticed it too. But she kept her mouth shut about it, probably more concerned with getting those collars off of their new traveling companions. “….after lunch we should probably find some traders, see what we can get for the gear we picked up this morning.”

Despite the hearing protection spell and the muffled backdrop of twenty different conversations happening around them, Light Tail still managed to make out the creak of the front door as it swung open, and out of curiosity she stole a glance past her Mom to see what new life forms had waltzed in looking for a pick-me-up—

A griffon clad in leathery barding and a short-brimmed hat, plastered with the same khaki-tan-beige mottled patterning as those scary “union” ponies, sauntered through the door with nary a care in the world, the dusty leather coat covering most of the rest of the body. Two long guns were strapped across the back, one all-black and one with a wooden stock, and around the right hind leg was a holster with a pistol stuffed inside, its flat, tan-colored frame mixing in with the slightly gold shade of the fur. A second griffon in identical clothing was right behind, and his rifle even had the same color pattern as the leather barding. This one kept a pistol in a holster strapped across the barding, and kept a strange-looking gun cradled in its right forelimb. She was starting to wish she knew guns a little better so she could at least know what kind of threats she was surrounded by….and wish she could tell griffon genders when they were all armored up like that. So far she couldn’t tell whether they male or female—

…wait, think the one up front’s a girl, she amended after a closer look at the uncovered back legs and body. For some reason the front griffon’s body—what little there was that wasn’t covered in armor—seemed a bit more lean and slender, while the one in back was somewhat thicker and more solidly built. And the front griffon’s green eyes were more….feminine looking? She couldn’t figure out how she could tell that, or what made her see them that way, but—

The front griffon’s eyes took a quick sweep around the room, and both of them stopped cold the moment they spotted her staring right back at them….

…and then shifted away from their bar-bound course and began coming for them instead.

It took little more than two seconds for Light Tail’s curiosity to re-assert itself and bring trouble with it. The filly had taken a quick look around and found something worth staring at long enough to be noticed….two somethings, in fact. Very well-armed somethings.

And by the time Sling noticed they were there at all, they were already less than five feet away, their silent approach defying the cumbersome look of their armor and gear—

—the lead griffon plucked a shell casing from the pocket of its leather duster and set it down right in front of her as the pair reached the booth, and although Sling’s eyes were briefly distracted by it, it did not keep her from latching onto Grayhawk’s grip in a flash of her magic. But she had little doubt that things would end badly if she’d actually attempted a quick-draw right there—

“Ruined a perfectly good shot,” the griffon’s voice chirped politely, her crisp tone coming across as oddly calming and polite. “.308 match rounds are hard to find.”

For a brief moment Sling could only wonder in confusion about what the hell this griffon was talking about, until the word “.308” was aired, and then she had a brief flashback to that street, to the sound of the bullet that hit the asphalt three seconds ahead of the actual sound of the shot itself….

…and one look at the bolt-action rifle strapped across her back made her eyes bulge slightly inside her sockets. “….you took a six-hundred yard shot without a scope?”

The griffon’s beak sharpened into a gleeful smile (somehow), and her eyes began to scrutinize her in a new light as she let off a low, sharp whistle of approval. “Close. Six-twenty-seven. How’d you know?”

The answer was so automatic she didn’t even feel herself saying it, though she heard it loud and clear. “It took around two seconds for the sound of the shot to catch up to the bullet. If I remember it right the report of a gunshot travels about three hundred yards a second, which would make it close to six hundred in two seconds.”

“Hot damn, most souls can’t tell one gun from another,” the griffon squealed in delight, taking the expended casing back into her coat pocket. “Leon, we gotta recruit this one, she’s sharp.”

The other griffon merely moaned in despair as he pulled up two chairs from a nearby unoccupied table. “Oh gods, two gun nuts now?”

“Oh, get stuffed!” the female griffon laughed at her partner’s dismay. “What’s yer name, pony?”

The quick, fortunate turn of events before her made her answer slower to come than was probably socially acceptable, but the griffon didn’t even seem to notice. “…S-Sling Shot…”

The female griffon’s eyes studied her as the unicorn struggled to answer, and took considerable interest in the PipBuck around her left foreleg. “…so, S-Sling Shot, how long you been topside out of the one-one-five?”

That remark was enough to shock her senses back into full alert, and she hastily stuffed her left foreleg under the table before anybody else could point it out. “Fu…scream it out, why don’t you?!” she hissed angrily, glaring daggers at this oblivious avian…thing….

But the griffon just laughed quietly. “Anybody with two working brain cells ‘round these parts is gonna figure it out if they notice that thing. And I overheard your talk with Blue Star this morning. He left a lotta open gaps.”

Another flashback played out in her mind, this time to the store counter in the hotel-turned-bar, in the ruined settlement, and the scarred, female griffon walking away on all fours with a box of ammunition tucked inside her beak—

Her heart stopped cold in fear. “….you’re tracking me.”

“Well, I am now,” Ada snipped back playfully, as if the entire conversation was merely a game to her. And probably was. “But before that, I was trackin’ the griffon you winged—“

Her face contorted into a compressed visage as the curious wordplay games in her head began to come together. “Snrrrrk!! Hehahaha…get it? ‘Winged’? ‘Cause you totally shot him in the wing…”

Sling didn’t find the concept of shooting another living creature (even a slaver) very funny, but for whatever reason El-Tee did, because the filly began bawling with laughter as her head sank to the table. “Hahahahaha!!! ‘Winged’ him, that’s a good one—“

“Ain’t it?!” Ada laughed back. “Anyways, yeah, he’s a slick piece of work. Even without bein’ able to fly, he managed to give us the slip. Stupid booby-traps and all. Seven months of tracking and hunting, down the drain ‘cause of….y’know, this would be a good time to tell me what went down. From my vantage point all I could tell was that he got the drop on you, literally—“

El-Tee’s laughter picked up again, just as it had begun to die down, and she wanted to be sore at her for finding humor in the fact that that griffon had “dropped” down solely intent on murdering the little filly.

And she couldn’t.

“….he did,” Sling answered, her eyes darting back towards the kitchen to see if the waitress mare was bringing their lunch out yet, but nothing emerged from the drapes. “Threatened to shoot my little girl if we didn’t give up. But he kept his eyes on me the whole time, didn’t seem to think my daughter was any kind of threat or problem. And she hit the mag release on his gun the instant he stopped talking. Took him off guard, and gave me a chance to get a couple rounds off. You saw how that went.”

“Awww, sweet move, kid!” Ada chuckled heartily, even going so far as to extend a forelimb and a closed talon towards her daughter—

—El-Tee reacted almost instinctively, as though they were back in the stable diner and in Windy’s company once more. Her left forehoof tapped the closed talon with a soft thud, and both filly and griffon mimicked (poorly) the sound of an explosion as their respective limbs withdrew from the impromptu hoofbump.

Just like the filly used to do with Windy—

“Dumb griffon!” El-Tee laughed with another sip of her sarsaparilla. “I hope he never hurts anypony again!”

“Yes,” Kite offered quietly, her first softly spoken words in this new conversation with the two griffons. And yet, Sling’s senses caught a hint of….

….oh, shit, don’t you dare—

“In fact,” Kite continued, her soft voice giving way to a more rage-filled, hateful tone, “Why don’t you tell me why you let that monster and his sick friends hold me like they had?! You were watching the whole time and you did nothing!? Why?!”

What little cheer and goodwill that had been built up with Ada’s almost child-like attitude seemed to vanish into the abyss. Even the griffon’s eyes seemed to pale in the face of her accuser, and for good reason. Anyone that took long-ranged shots at targets with the expectation of hitting them could have easily sprung Kite and BJ from the malicious grasp of their tormentors. And yet she’d done nothing but watch.

And had probably watched the horrible things they’d done to her when the whims struck them…

Light Tail sought to try and defuse the potential hostilities, even though she had no real clue about the unspoken implications that all the adults understood. “H-hey, I’m sure she—“

“If you’re gonna track a target, you have to learn to set yourself aside,” Ada mumbled sullenly, her downcast eyes no longer willing to look up at any of them. “No matter how much it might piss you off to see ‘em doing things you wouldn’t want done to you, how badly a soul needs you to save them from those things….you can’t let yourself get involved. You gotta stay put, and stay smart. I was watching him for the last month to find out how wide his operating range was, how many other freelance slaver parties he might know or barter with, who he sold his catch to and what kind of numbers he sold in. We’d been looking for him in these parts for over six months ‘fore we found him, and I didn’t want to just blindly blow his head off without knowing how big an impact he had on the slave trade here. I could save ten souls immediately, or a hundred in the long run. I chose the hundred.”

Sling felt her vitality drain from her body. She couldn’t imagine forcing herself to sit and watch the things those savages must have done to Kite, sit and watch and know she could do something about it. Nor could she imagine herself doing it for the sake of others, because until El-Tee had yelled the senses into her she’d been willing to up and leave the poor thing and her colt in their hooves. And here this griffon was, all but admitting the coldness of such a choice, and how wrong it was even if it was meant to save more souls later….

She hated the wasteland. Not even two days in it, she hated it and all the wrongs it brought upon those who lived in it. She wished she’d stayed in the stable and suffocated in it, not knowing the truth of the world above. She would’ve died in ignorant bliss—

“….wait, ten?” Sling heard herself ask numbly as she replayed Ada’s words in her head over again. “….but….”

“Saurus had eight others, when he took me and BJ from our last master a month ago,” Kite explained, still willing her eyes to fire arcane beams into the griffons at the side of the table. “Sold ‘em off over the last four weeks, but kept me and BJ for himself. He tends to hire raiders to scour around for victims, but from what I heard a couple of days ago they went overboard at one homestead outside town. The things they did—“

“Will not be done again,” Leon finished for her, his left talon tapping along the receiver of his SMG. Sling couldn’t recognize the model right off, but she was certain it was tucked away somewhere in her firearms recognition book. “We saw to that.”

“Then maybe you could see to making up for watching them ra….for watching them do what they did to me,” the purple unicorn’s voice quivered in a husky tone. “We’re looking for Fixer, to see if he still offers his “side” services—“

“Fixer’s out of town,” Ada said with some degree of apology. “Left Thursday morning, went up north. Probably won’t be back for at least a week, assuming we don’t get any more rain.”

Kite’s eyes withdrew their hateful stares, and her withers began to slouch back into her body in defeat. “….great….”

Ada seemed torn on the inside, as if fighting herself in her head for some reasonable way to salvage herself out of the mess she’d inadvertently walked into. Only after the waitress mare had returned with the four unicorns’ lunch (plus two additional plates of steaming meat for the griffons—they were apparently regular enough visitors to warrant an automatic order without asking for it) did she seem to have something to say.

“Tell ya what,” she offered in a subdued tone. “Leon and I picked up a job to scope out a little farm town a few miles north of here. Some raiders been holed up there, making hits on independent traders in a twenty mile radius, and there’s rumor that the clinic there still has some unlooted supplies. You help us out, and I’ll get those collars off.”

The surprisingly edible lunch before her—lightly buttered maize and a smattering of fried, breaded sticks she assumed to have been made from a potato—managed to make Sling Shot slightly more inclined to listen to this stranger’s proposal than she might have been otherwise. “Do you even know what’s in those things?”

“Half a pound of plastique, shaped around all through the casing to encompass the neck and wired to a detonator that’s connected to a pulse receiver,” Ada rattled off, as if listing off the components of a meal. “Receiver’s set to receive a signal from a transmitter that blows the collar up if the wearer doesn’t get out of range in time, but Saurus pulls those out of all of his collars. The one time somebody thought to try and take him out by using his own slaves as a living bomb was enough to make him paranoid over it.”

Sling didn’t want to ask how she knew that much about Saurus (particularly when Kite had mentioned the same thing earlier), or the specifics of why he went to the trouble of removing a portion of an explosive-laden slave collar out of self-preservation. She was pretty certain the answer was one she wouldn’t like. “….so what’s the catch?”

“The catch,” Ada said amidst a swallow of her fried….whatever it was that had been dropped in front of her, “is that I want to keep the plastique in the collars for my own use. And the raiders in the farm town are better armed than that small group you ran into yesterday, but between the three of us they shouldn’t be a problem. You can take a share of any med supplies we find in the clinic afterward, but we get first dibs on weapons and ammo. We’ll split a piece of the bounty off to ya after we pick up the payment, but don’t expect a good share. Our gear’s pretty expensive to keep running.”

Mercenaries, she spat derisively in her head as the griffon counted off the conditions of their participation in their “contract”. Still, at least she knew she was dealing with a level-headed one….and perhaps one willing to haggle if the counter-offers were just right.

“How expensive?” she deigned to ask, not just out of curiosity, but in the hopes of finding some leverage. Perhaps her eight years as an armory quartermaster would come in handy after all.

“The armor? Insanely,” Leon gurgled through a beakful of meat. “We’ve taken to sharpshooting our way through jobs on account of the four souls within fifty miles that can keep them in shape charging two legs for the efforts, and we don’t like getting shot in the first place. The guns are cheaper, but only because we know a dude in town with access to the parts they use.”

“They in need of any work right now?” she asked next. She didn’t care at this point if they saw her angle coming—if anything, it might even make it easier to talk them into parting with a few extra caps. “Wouldn’t do to be walking into combat with guns that don’t shoot straight.”

“Sidearms are running great,” Ada beamed with a slight grin. “My .308 too. My other rifle’s a bit sluggish, though, and the compensator on his SMG needs work. Probably from all that hot +P ammo he likes to feed it.”

A tiny, insidious smile began to form on her lips. Bingo.

“Well, then,” Sling said after scarfing down a couple of crunchy—and slightly salted—potato sticks. “Lemme take a look at ‘em. If I can get them squared away, you can afford to part with a bit more of that bounty instead of paying somepony else to do it later. Minus the cost of any parts you have to buy, naturally.”

Ada stopped chomping on her lunch just long enough to gaze up at her with a curious eye. “And what, pray tell, did you do for a living, stable pony?”

“Quartermaster, security department,” the teal blue unicorn replied, licking away bits of salt from her mouth. Whatever these fried potato sticks were called, they were quite scrumptious. “And the stable was quite well armed. Nine and ten-mils, a full battery of R-series five-five-six rifles, some semi-automatic .308s, even a few shotguns. Whatever ails your firearm, I’m fairly certain I can find the problem.”

The griffons began to see her in an entirely new light—whether it was a good light or not, she couldn’t say, but she began to get the feeling that she had just uttered words that would doom her to work others could not bother themselves to save their lives. “See, Leon? Told you, gotta recruit her.”

With lunch behind them and the pair of griffons set to head out for the farm town tomorrow morning, it made sense to bunker down in a relatively safe location for a night’s rest. An old six-story hotel two blocks away from the bar was still intact enough that a few ponies had taken it over and re-started its old business in their own name, and they had a few vacant rooms left on the third floor to rent out for interested travelers at a rather modest rate of ten caps per room, per night. Kite and BJ were given their own room, while she squirreled herself and El-Tee away in an adjacent one. Ada and Leon took one across the hall.

Ada wasted no time in gathering hers’ and Leon’s gear together for the former quartermaster to tinker with, and surprised Sling by doing so completely unarmored. She seemed fit into her armored barding as though it was made specifically for her, but was glad to be rid of its weight and allow her imposing frame to stretch out and be cooled by the open air.

“Okay, here’s the problematic children!” she heaved in a massive sigh of relief as she dropped a pair of long guns and a small black bag onto one of the two stained beds in the room. The mattresses had long ago hardened and the bed springs stiffened into little more than static, frozen coils of metal, but it was still better than the worn, faded carpeting beneath her hooves. “There’s some spare parts and the repair manuals for the guns in the bag in case you need ‘em. And before you ask, no, the rifle does not need a cleaning or fresh lube, I tried that already. Think the spring on the buffer tube might be acting up, but I haven’t had time to take it down and test it.”

Sling was still trying to get over how huge Ada seemed to be, even without the barding covering most of her body. She was quite a bit larger than any stallion she’d ever seen, and the slightly tannish-gold fur of her lion half sported a handful of scars—one slashed across her back, another adorned her belly, and two more that looked like crude surgical scars across the front of her torso, just beneath her plumage. The two slash scars on her left hind leg that she’d seen earlier looked to be more superficial than anything, as Sling could not see any noticeable stagger or limp to her gait.

“….see a lot of fighting, do you?” the mare couldn’t help but remark as she traced her eyes down the griffon’s torso once more. The back scar looked particularly nasty, the way it curved across the spine and trickled down into the left side….

“That’s life in the wasteland,” Ada huffed as she pulled her desert camo boonie hat down off her head and allowed it to slide off behind her neck by its strap. “These are just some old war scars from years back. If yer lucky you can get a couple. Then we can trade war stories and stuff over a bottle of root beer, or whatever. That oughta be fun!”

Her response was postponed by the noisy—but healthy sounding—flush of a toilet in the adjoining restroom, and a refreshed and washed-up Light Tail emerged through the door looking greatly relieved. “Oh, wow, that thing actually works!” she sighed deeply, sauntering up to the other bed and hopping up onto it. “It looks….old. Hope the shower runs too.”

“Don’t get used to it, kid,” the griffon warned lightly. “This is probably the only place this side of Trotpeka that has a working water system. Savor it.”

Light Tail’s face darkened considerably, her hopes for future pleasant places to sleep dashed as quickly as they’d been dreamt up. “…oh, thanks for that. I thought you were the life of a party, bird brain.”

“And don’t you forget it, short stop!” Ada jested in return with a thunderous laugh. “I’ll be back in a coupla hours, check on our stuff. Leon and I should have a rough plan worked out by then.”

Sling was already pretty sure that planning was far from the actual activities that Ada and Leon would be doing, but she wasn’t going to argue or debate the subject in front of her little girl. And she had work to do if she was going to get these guns sorted out by the time the griffons returned. “Then I’d better get started,” she said in parting as she enveloped the guns and the black bag into a field of magic and began pulling them towards a table nested against the wall on the far side of the room.

Ada took the hint and padded on out into the hall, shutting the door behind her with her tail. Within a few seconds the griffon’s footfalls faded from her hearing, but for added measure she went ahead and re-applied her hearing spell over their ears.

El-Tee didn’t even bother to remark on the spell. “I like her,” she giggled loudly as she shifted about on the bed until she was facing towards her mother, with her legs tucked in beneath her. “Reminds me of Aunt C. A lot.”

“Don’t get too comfortable with her,” Sling Shot warned her, setting the two long guns down on the table before shifting her telekinesis field to her saddlebags piled up against the wall. A quick glance at her PipBuck’s organizational matrix helped her zero in on the object in question—

—a brief flash of purple light emanated from the opened saddlebag as she withdrew a large, worn hardback book and floated it up to the table. The slightly discolored title, “FIREARMS RECOGNITION GUIDE, VERSION FOURTEEN”, adorned the middle of the cover, and she quickly flipped it open to the table of contents. She already knew the rifle bore a resemblance to an M-series 5.56mm rifle, but the sub-machine gun eluded her memory—

“…well, yeah, sure, she’s kinda scary lookin’, but she seemed pretty nice! And she even offered to get those collars off Kite and BJ—“

“By going with her to wipe out a band of bad ponies a few miles away,” she finished for the filly, her eyes scanning across the contents page until she found the subsection for “SMGs” on page iv. Page 141, separated by caliber… “Or did you not catch that part?”

Light Tail’s good mood found itself waning in the face of what said help for their traveling companions entailed. “….I know. I was right there, remember? I’m just sayin’ ya don’t need to keep everybody at room’s length. If those two wanted our stuff they’re goin’ to an awful lot of trouble for it, woulda been easier to just bushwhack us on the road this morning when we didn’t even know they existed. They were followin’ us the whole way.”

Sling had to replay the words in her head twice before she could acknowledge that they’d come from her night light and not the suspicious part of her head that had warned her of something similar. And also because Sling had been thinking of them attempting such a ploy tomorrow, rather than earlier this morning when it would have been a much more perfect opportunity to do so.

But then there was the matter of all those scars….and the potential stories they had behind them…

“We don’t know what they’re ultimately doing here,” she said, quickly flipping through the pages until her eyes caught the number “128” in the lower left corner, and then took a more leisurely pace through to ensure she didn’t miss the intended SMG subsection. “And the scars she’s accumulated this early in her life have me worried. I think I might actually be older than she is, and she’s seen a lot of fighting. Probably killed a lot of ponies along the way. I don’t know what kind of griffons these two could be, and I don’t want you getting hurt. Besides, once we’ve completed our deal tomorrow we probably won’t see them again. Best not to get too attached.”

Unfortunately for Sling, her filly’s fresh memories of Cloud Wind—and on how much this Ada reminded her of the pegasus—seemed to make her more intent on making sure their two newest “friendly” encounters became more than that. “What if we could get them to stick around? They seemed awful eager to let you tinker with their guns, and they’ve got to know somepony else that’s been doing it for them for years.”

“Only because I promised to take far less in compensation than what they’ve been paying out in the past to that other pony,” she answered back, flipping past page 151 and so far not seeing the SMG in question. A quick look at the barrel listed it as a .45 Auto, though….

“That’s still worth somethin’! And she said Blue Star left out a lot of gaps, whatever that means! D’ya think he maybe might not have told us stuff we oughta know about what’s what around here? Even Kite hasn’t said much other than this…this union of ponies that trade in slaves…and stuff…”

She had to admit that that had been bothering her ever since that coward of a stallion had left to return to his “law enforcement”, or what passed for it in the wasteland. Blue Star had never once alluded to the existence of the Merchant Union, and even Kite wasn’t willing to say much on the matter. If they were going to be passing through their territory (or living near it), she wanted to know as much about this world as she could.

And Ada certainly seemed traveled enough to give a little information….

“….let me just worry about making it through tomorrow, first,” she relented slightly, just as the pages turned onto the weapon in front of her, and she quickly set the book down for a quick study of the passage. .45 Auto submachine gun, twenty and thirty-round stick magazines, fifty round optional drum mag, ten-point-five inch barrel without the compensator….hunh, the one on the table looks like an older model, cooling fins on the barrel, wing-protected rear sights, and a top-mounted charge handle on the receiver…okay, then, repair manual’s next—

“What about me?” Light Tail dared to ask next, filling her mother with a pall of dread at the next few seconds of this conversation. “You’re not gonna leave me here all alone, are you?”

“I’m not taking you anywhere near a gunfight if I can see it coming!” she returned sharply, pulling at the black bag for anything that felt like a book and quickly finding two falling into her spell field. “You’re staying here with Kite and BJ, period!”

“Oh no I’m not!” El-Tee shot back, the bed beneath her creaking slightly as she stood up in defiance of her mother’s wishes. “I’m coming with you, and that’s final!”

A sudden, sharp rage filled Sling’s blood as she dropped the repair manuals on top of the table and fixed her “Angry Parent” glare onto the increasingly rebellious filly. “I ever hear the words ‘that’s final’ come out of your mouth again, they truly will be. You’re. Staying. Here!”

“Here is wherever you are—“

An obnoxiously loud, unmistakable rumble of forced air chugging through a throat forced the arguing mother and child to turn their budding frustrations towards the source—

—an innocent-eyed Ada tapped her throat with a left talon, while her right talon held a slender, black object within its claws. “Well, you two definitely fight like mom and child ought to. But anyways! I forgot, you might need this multi-tool for the rifle. Damn M-series is almost a crew-served weapon sometimes, helps to have something like this around.”

The griffon casually flung the object towards the two bickering unicorns, which fell into Sling’s spell field and slowed into a graceful curve until it was cradled next to the black rifle. “….been there long?” she sneered over her withers.

“Long enough to add my own two bits,” the scarred griffon answered calmly, her wings unfurling momentarily to shake themselves a little. “Better if all you ponies come along for the trip.”

As hostages, I bet?! Sling didn’t say out loud. Though she was going to if she didn’t like the answer that came next. “Any particular reason, merc?”

“You can’t leave slaves alone,” Ada responded, unwavering in the face of Sling’s unspoken threat of violence with the fairly tame slur she’d thrown out. “If a Union patrol finds them here, and their supposed “owner” isn’t around, they’ll be carted back off to the main slave pens and sold off again. And leaving the kid behind with them won’t count, they’d likely take her too. You went to a lot of trouble to get those two out of Saurus’s claws. It’d suck if they got slurped up by the very thing you promised to get them away from.”

“It’s not safe—“ Sling began to retort, despite the fact that much of what Ada said actually made good sense. She just couldn’t consent to bringing her only child within range of an assured firefight that was going to see ponies killed.

“Have you figured it out yet, stable pony?” the griffon rumbled back, her throat firing off a quick, animalistic growl befitting her lion half. “There’s no such thing as a safe place out here, only safer. They are safer in our company than they would be if we left them here to the risk of being picked up by a patrol looking for some merit points with their superiors by finding runaways. If you want those two in the next room to have a chance at never getting put in chains again, you need to keep them in earshot at all times.”

“She’s right, Mom,” El-Tee added next, going in for a swift kill before her mother could get a chance to come up with a better reason for why leaving her here in the hotel room was the best option. “I don’t wanna leave you alone, but more than that….I…I’m scared to be alone. We don’t know how these union ponies keep track of who’s a slave and who’s not. We haven’t even been up here until yesterday! If there’s a system to the whole thing, we’re not in it. We need to stick together…wherever.”

Sling did not want them sticking together in every potential gun fight for fear that when it was over, she would look back expecting a healthy, unharmed child, and see instead a dead or dying daughter bleeding out her last seconds life in the cold, unforgiving hell that had formed from the ashes of Equestria That Was. Her heart seized itself into tight, painful fits just imagining it, and she couldn’t bear the thought of how she might react if such a thing ever came true. She didn’t want to find out. She wanted Light Tail safe, here, in this relatively normal hotel room from over two centuries ago.

She wanted something to come back to, to assure herself that the killing of bad ponies had been for a good reason.

And then the potential scenario….the one that Ada alluded to, began to play itself before her. Began to show her ghastly images of a ransacked room, of spent 9mm shell casings, blood, and bullet holes in the wall, and empty space where her daughter should have been waiting, or where Kite and BJ should have been. Images of El-Tee in shackles, being paraded and corralled like a domesticated sheep in front of hundreds of depraved souls seeking a filly to mold into whatever they desired….

She had to choke back the upsurge of bile that threatened to expel itself onto the floor at the thought, and shut the imaginings away before they could get really bad. Either option was a terrible thing….but at least if El-Tee was nearby, she could kill anything that even remotely threatened her. She couldn’t do that if they were seven miles apart.

She spat an angry glare onto the pair of souls that had ganged up on her, resigned to the slightly more desirable risk of seeing her night light get caught up in the midst of a gunfight and zipping bullets. “….fine,” she huffed in defeat, squaring herself towards Light Tail as she spoke. “But you! When we get there, you’re go—“

“Going to do whatever you tell me, whether I like it or not,” El-Tee finished her sentence—the exact sentence, because that was precisely what she was going to say. “And I’m not coming out of whatever hidey hole you stuff me into unless you call me out or I have no choice but to leave.”

“….you, BJ, and Kite, all three of you,” Sling added, hoping the slight blur at the edge of her vision was just the cool air biting at her eyes.

Even though she knew it wasn’t.

“Good, then!” Ada announced loudly, in some vain and pathetic attempt to break the tension that had sprouted up. “Now that we’ve got that settled I’ll just—“

She stopped talking in coherent, sensible words as soon as her eagle eyes fell upon Sling’s traveling saddle, and the griffon began to babble in broken phrases and pieces of words as her left talon tried to point out what had gotten her so tongue tied.

“—juaaah….juaa…..guhhh….guuh…..”

Both ponies found Ada’s infantile babbling profoundly confusing, and did much more to relieve them of their lingering frustrations than any genuine attempt at peacemaking could have done. El-Tee even hopped off the bed and trotted up to the griffon, though she had to leap up very high in order for her forelegs to even wave themselves in front of her eyes.

“Hey!” the little one shouted, her tail beginning to swish wildly as she leapt and landed with short, quiet grunts. “Hey! What—unnh—what happened? Why’d your brain get all screwy?”

“Guuuaaah—“

“Equestria to Ada!? Hellooo?!”

“G….gun!!” the griffon finally managed to sputter, her eyes growing larger as she finally began to get herself back…mostly. “Big, shiny gun!”

Sling unconsciously shifted herself towards her traveling saddle, Grayhawk’s pristine, premium-grade wooden grip poking out of its holster, accompanied by the dulled, matte-silver metallic sheen of the frame beneath the holster flap. “….what, my .44 Mag? What about it?”

Somehow, just mentioning the caliber seemed to freak Ada out even further (or drastically increase her happiness, it was exceptionally difficult to tell). Her beak began to open and close, in some strange attempt to utter words, and failed to utter anything of consequence for three seconds until she found her voice again.

“Oh….my…..gods,” she mewed softly. “D…..do you have any freakin’ clue what you have there?!”

“A .44 Mag with the strongest frame and barrel construction I’ve ever read about,” Sling answered cautiously, slowing backing away from the now-trembling griffon as she answered the question.

And Light Tail followed suit right with her. “….umm….Mom, shut up—“

“T-that’s not just any .44,” Ada continued to speak in awed, almost adoring tones. “That is one of the rarest, most precious handguns to ever come out of the Phoenix Rising arms factory…the single most precious griffon-designed .44 Mag ever built. There are only supposed to be a hundred of them. The grip alone is like touching the heavens to my kind….”

“Oh Luna, Mom, hide the thing—“

“No!!” Ada shrieked loudly, causing the ponies to jump in place, startled by the sheer shock in her voice. “I just….I’ve only seen one in my life. One. And it’d already had hundreds of thousands of rounds through it, and I had the misfortune to see the barrel snap off the frame in its last firefight of its life. It got the slaver, but the owner lost an incredible arms treasure. And you’ve got one, and it looks like it’s brand new out of a war-era factory, and how the hell did you get it?!”

….oh sweet Celestia I wish you’d ignored us and flew on by! “….I didn’t,” Sling answered cautiously. “….umm, I mean….it’s a family heirloom….my ancestors brought it into the stable with them, the day it was sealed….and we’ve had it ever since….”

Now Ada’s squeals began to cause the griffon to shiver in delight. “….oh sweet moonlight it’s….lemme hold it.”

The rather simple, benign request took the mare off-guard, simply because if not for the fact that she was staring at her, she would have sworn that Ada was no more than a little…griffon…hatchling….or however it was that griffons came into the world. “….t-that’s it?”

“P-pretty much, please,” Ada affirmed, even going so far as to assume a slight submissive posture, complete with what could have been described as puppy-like, pleading eyes. “….y’know, if ya don’t mind….”

I do mind, but it’s safer than letting you stand there and blabber like an idiot! With great resignation (and fear), Sling carefully reached out to the holstered revolver and pulled it free from its holster, popping the cylinder open to remove the six rounds inside, and then gingerly floated it towards the griffon until it was within grasping distance—

—Ada took hold of the weapon with far more grace and care than Sling had expected, given how she’d been reduced to a stuttering child by the mere sight of the grip. And as she took it into a firm, two-talon grip hold, she had to admit that the revolver seemed like it fit the griffon far better than it would have fit anypony else. Her claws seemed to fit over the recessed grooves at the front of the grip like she was putting on a glove, and the strange, raised curve that adorned the top of the left grip panel was especially well suited to allow the off-claw to rest upon it in fairly good comfort—

—that off-claw suddenly zipped up and placed itself upon the hammer as her left talon came up and gently pushed the cylinder back into the frame, and before she knew it she was playing with the hammer and trigger pull—

“Ooooh sweet Sisters that is smooth—“

She was so enamored with the pistol that she even rose up onto her hind legs, flaring her wings wide to preserve balance as she continued to keep up a firm, accurate firing grip with both talons, managing to take eight dry-fire practice shots before she had to return to all fours….well, no actually, three limbs. She cushioned the fall with her left forelimb, and kept a safe, solid grip on Grayhawk as she began to emit a pleasant, purring sound from her throat.

Grayhawk flipped around in her grasp until it was turned around and being held by the frame and cylinder, with the barrel pointed down and the grip held out towards Sling. “We are officially best friends forever!” Ada squealed in sheer delight. “….or until next Wednesday. I wanna shoot it someday.”

Sling’s dumbstruck mind could only think to retake possession of the revolver with a gentle pull, surprised at how willing the griffon was to let go of it considering her girlish freak-out over just the sight of it….

…and said the worst thing she could have said. “….s-sure….someday….”

With a final, exasperated shriek of joy, the griffon happily excused herself from the room and bounded back down the hallway, leaving two utterly confused and slightly terrified ponies in her wake.

“….M-Mom…is it too late to reconsider staying behind?”

Chapter 10

The ninety-minute walk to the farm town, and the two-hour wait inside an abandoned post office as Ada and Leon scouted out their targets gave the former quartermaster more than enough time to ponder the stupidity of her participation in a bounty hunt. Her armament was, quite frankly, ill-suited for the task.

One 10mm pistol, N-series. 79 rounds left, all of them 155gr jacketed-hollowpoints. Six 12-round magazines gave her a combat load of 72 rounds—all but seven rounds of her total supply.

One (admittedly rare and well-built) .44 Mag revolver, 39 rounds left out of the forty-two she’d started with two days ago. These too were all hollowpoints, of the 240gr variety. She had to pull three rounds from a speedloader to top off the cylinder, and if what that kiwi-shaded stallion the other day said was true, she couldn’t count on finding .44 Mag anytime soon. She’d have to be careful what she used it on.

One newly acquired 12-gauge shotgun, pump-action, five-round magazine tube, griffon-made judging by the stock and forearm which had no provisions or alterations to allow pony users to manipulate it with their hooves or a battle saddle. A quick inspection last night showed it to be in surprisingly decent shape compared to most of the pistols she’d found so far, with some minor surface pitting on the receiver and finish wear along the barrel. With a handsaw borrowed from Ada she was able to saw off the buttstock at the wrist, leaving the slim, pistol-grip section intact to give her magic something other than the receiver to grasp at (and making it much easier and more comfortable to stow inside the long gun scabbard on her traveling saddle). She only had nine shells for it, though—00 buckshot, nine-pellet load. The 21-inch barrel had a choke tube installed inside the muzzle, but it was a simple improved cylinder choke and sat flush inside the muzzle. A superbly simple front bead sight was the only sighting aid—she’d have preferred a set of rifle-type sights for potential slug use, but she could make do with the bead. She’d had plenty of practice with it years ago, before the Stable’s ammunitions stock ran low enough to make regular target practice impossible.

None of these armaments were of any use against armored barding. Modern armored barding worked much like a net to do its job—it was made of a material that, when woven together into multiple layers, was stronger than steel, and would essentially “catch” the bullet and stop it before it could completely penetrate the barding. The more layers there were, the better they would be at stopping bullets. The downside was that it would be thicker and heavier, and harder to move around in. And blades could still pierce the barding with a straight-in stab without too much trouble. Many souls had tried to improve the concept in the war, even designing new materials in the hope of finding that singular “do-it-all” miracle product that would give both the best protection and the best mobility possible. And while armored barding could stop a bullet from penetrating it, it still left nasty welts and bruises from the impact, and sometimes the blunt force trauma by itself was enough to break bones. It was still better than the more serious and potentially lethal gunshot wound, but nopony liked getting hurt.

Until two days ago she’d thought she was armed well enough, and with proper shot placement that was still the case. But her two gunfights so far had been against ponies she’d been able to get the drop on—the first group didn’t think she had the guts to actually shoot them and gave her all the time she needed to line up her shots on her first kill, while the second group had been caught by surprise long enough to let her kill two of their number by headshots before the last two tackled her to the floor. Her third firefight was not going to go down that way, and she didn’t think she could concentrate well enough to get decent shots at the head under fire. She could do body shots….

….but only if they were unarmored. And aside from those savage raiders, most everypony she’d shot at had armor of some kind that looked thick enough to turn aside a 9mm or .38 Special. A 10mm or .44 Mag might have enough velocity and momentum to truck through, or it might not. And the soft lead pellets of a load of buckshot were most definitely not going to cut it.

Today was going to be no different. Ada had hardly walked two steps into the creaky post office before she dropped the bad news. “Ten souls,” she snapped off softly, her talons dusting off her coat as she spoke. “Three griffons, three unicorns, four earth ponies. Most of ‘em got armor of one sort or another. They must’ve just come back from a raid, had all kinds of loot and bags with ‘em. They went into an old grocery store at the edge of town, and one griffon’s back outside on lookout duty on the roof.”

Sling kept her uncouth curse quiet enough that the only sound that escaped was something akin to “cluck”. “…options? From what I saw that grocery store front covers three streets, and trying to sneak around to the blind spot means going out into the open wasteland. Y’know, where the lookout could spot you if he gets the idea to take a short flight around the block.”

“I can pop him from the water office further into town, three blocks away from the store,” Ada answered as the last puff of dust from her coat sprayed into the air around her. “Leon might be able to bag two more with suppressing fire when the others come out to see what’s going on, but after that it’ll be down to who can hit who first. Plenty of cover in the streets—smashed building walls, old sky wagons and carriages, stuff like that. There’s even a hole in the street running by the grocer deep enough to hide a pony in it. It’ll make for a messy firefight, and you’re not exactly bristling with AP munitions.”

“I figured that part out already,” the unicorn snarled in reply over a howling gust of wind that began to flow past the post office door. “Hitting them where they’re holed up doesn’t sound like the smart way to do this. They’re organized enough to hit caravans, so they probably already have the area around their base scouted out for flanking routes and potential ambush sites.”

“Or booby-traps,” the griffon added, as if wanting to ensure that no potential Bad Thing would go unnoticed or unmentioned. “Found what was left of a dog in the alleys near the store when I was scouting around for a sniping position. Looked like the classic ‘tripwire-grenade’ trap, most of the blast damage was at ground level. Could be more, Leon’s poking around for ‘em right now. We’ll have to be careful when we move in.”

A spark flared to life inside her brain as she sought ways to better the odds they’d face when the time came to fight it out with the bandits. “Maybe we shouldn’t be,” she whispered evilly. “They’d come running to check things out if one went off. We can draw one or two out away from the group—“

“And cut their numbers a little without triggering a shootout right off,” Ada finished with a sick grin. “Won’t work more than once, but it’ll definitely even things out more in our favor. All right then, let’s go find us a bomb.“

Well, at least it’s a plan, she heaved in silent nervousness. “In a minute. Wanna make sure the others don’t freak and bolt out when they hear something they didn’t expect.”

The heavily armed griffon merely grunted and planted herself near the doorway on all fours. “Make it quick.”

Sling had to bite the side of her tongue to keep her retort in her head where it belonged, and quickly trotted towards the back of the post office, behind the counter and into the bedroom-sized mail sorting space—

Light Tail’s head perked up from their resting spot on her forelegs, her eyes betraying her eagerness and hope that she would hear something other than “Mommy’s going to go kill ponies now”.

She wished she could say what her daughter wanted to hear….

“It’s time,” she whispered sadly, and El-Tee’s face wilted until it looked like she’d died on the inside.

“….m-mom…d-do you have to—“

“If we want those collars off Kite and BJ, yes, I do. It’ll be over in about fifteen minutes. You may hear explosions too, not just gunfire. Whatever happens, none of you come out when it’s over. Wait until I tell you it’s safe. If you don’t hear from me or Ada in thirty minut—“

“Don’t,” the little one snapped back sharply, surprising her mother with the sudden fire in her voice. “Don’t talk like that. Just makes the waitin’ worse….”

I’m trying to say it for me, you silly child! “I just don’t want you caught without a plan if the—“

“We’ll be fine,” Kite’s voice injected from the side of the room, her body tucked underneath a table, where a pile of decayed crates hid the majority of her body. “Things won’t get that bad. Just…just get this over with so we can get these stupid collars off.”

She hadn’t expected the freshly freed slave to be the sole voice of confidence amongst the ponies in the room, and it sucked her words out of her mouth and back into the oblivion of her mind. Without another word she clamped her jaws onto the door and pulled it shut, her daughter’s soft, glistening eyes following her face until the door clicked shut, and she hastily rejoined Ada at the doorway before she could give in to the childish urge to smash it open and grab the filly in a terrified hug.

The griffon had, by then, drawn her pistol from its holster on her hind leg, her head carefully peeking out beyond the doorway for a quick scan of the streets. “Other side,” she said, her left talon pointing towards an alley between two buildings across from them—what looked like a flower shop and the caved-in remains of a bakery. “Tread softly, sound carries farther than you think.”

She didn’t need a reminder—she’d not have tracked down that slaver making a beeline for where she’d found Kite and BJ if the idiot had been a little slower getting back to his gang. Still, she didn’t want to be out in the open for longer than she needed to be. With a deep breath and a shake of her tail, she slipped out past the griffon and into the road, not daring to look to either side of her as she traversed to the other side as quietly (and quickly) as she could do so.

She didn’t even hear Ada coming up behind her until the griffon’s talon tapped her withers in a gentle, claw-first poke—

“I’ll take point from here,” the mercenary whispered, slinking past her on three limbs while the fourth clutched her pistol. “Leon’s waiting behind the water office.”

Sling had her 10mm pistol in her magical grasp before the griffon had finished, and for the next few minutes followed along behind her in a backwards walk as they trudged through the alleys. A flick of her tail every ten seconds would brush against one of the griffon’s hind legs and keep her on track, and a couple of times wound up backing up into her backside when the merc had stopped to thoroughly inspect what she thought might have had a bomb or tripwire attached to it.

When Ada stopped for a third time, one of her hind legs shot back and stopped the unicorn in her tracks before she could repeat the mistake. “Find anything, Leo?”

Leon’s voice was quiet, but still managed a slight bestial tone. “Coupla of booby traps in the ruins across the street, just like we thought. Hand grenade with a tripwire, won’t be hard to disarm ‘em.“

A piece of brick broke off from its parent and tumbled onto the cracked pavement of the alley, and Sling’s eyes traced its fall to the ground, its impact mixing with the whistling breeze. “Leave one intact, stable pony here has a better idea.”

“Does she?”

“Yeah, set one off, it may draw a couple of ‘em out to see what’s going on,” Ada answered coldly. “Take her with ya while I set up the shot, she can trip the grenade without exposing herself. Take out whoever comes sniffing around, quietly, then give me the signal to take the shot. Use the other grenade to start off the ambush when the rest come running. We gotta put the griffons down first, or this contract’ll go south on us.”

A brief tingle of terror shot through her muscles at the thought of having to get close to a live explosive trap with the intention of actually setting it off, but she kept her misgivings to herself…mostly. “L-lovely,” she stuttered, but quickly set her focus on her mouth to keep from sounding like a bumbling idiot. “I would be crazy enough to set off a bomb on purpose.”

Ada had a short, snorting laugh at her expense as she drew away from Sling’s tail and saw herself into the building beside them, through its back door. “I thought you were just crazy. Just remember to breathe before you start shooting, and aim for the head or their front legs. Use that shotgun, the distance you’ll be shooting at should get a good, tight spread out of it.”

“Only got nine shells for it,” she shot back in protest, but to little avail.

“Then don’t miss.”

Another curse left her snout, silently, as she slinked off down the alley in Leon’s wake. It took most of her concentration to keep her slight trembling from getting worse as they snuck through the alleys, and at one point inadvertently dinged her PipBuck against a drainage pipe still hanging onto a building by a few rusted screws. She cringed at the impact, but the sound didn’t carry terribly far, and Leon didn’t even stop to scold her for the break in noise discipline. She stole a moment to check the casing for damage—

—and cursed herself for her shortsightedness as she suddenly remembered that she hadn’t even bothered to turn the EFS function back on since she’d left the Stable.

You bucking idiot, you have combat advantages built right into your leg and you don’t even think to use them! Her magic hurriedly began to twist and grab at the switches and dials surrounding the monochrome green display. Within seconds a familiar, faint green directional overlay began to form at the bottom of her vision, showing a large N off to the left and an E on the right end atop large, bold hash marks, with various sized smaller hash marks in-between the letters. And while Leon and Ada didn’t have PipBucks, the E.F.S. matrix still registered their life signs and displayed their general locations with small green triangles along the directional overlay—Leon’s was right at the center, while Ada’s was smaller in size and situated a few hash marks over to the left to indicate that she was somewhere behind them.

And for added measure, she went ahead and booted up the S.A.T.S. matrix as well. A pair of letters—“AP”, as in Arcane Power, she assumed—popped up in the lower right corner of her vision, and a green bar slowly began to fill up in a leftward path as the spell gathered the energy needed to function. She spent the remainder of the trek going back over the basics of its use and principles—she hadn’t touched the feature ever since her shooting had started to drill two-inch groups with handguns at twenty-five yards three years back. She’d always considered S.A.T.S. something of a crutch—it was usually easier and faster for her to just use the iron sights and target manually rather than fiddle with a built-in spell matrix to take over the shooting. But in a world where ammo supply was inconsistent at best, the spell matrix was suddenly starting to make better sense.

And it would make landing headshots on armored savages a lot easier….

By the time the S.A.T.S. bar stopped filling up, they had reached their intended destination—a congested collection of small, one and two-floor buildings in various stages of disrepair, stretching far enough across that they were shielded from the view of the griffon perched atop the roof of the grocery store across the street. Her E.F.S. had by then filled with ten red hash marks overlaid onto the left half of the compass….

…and two smaller green triangles were mixed in with them.

“Hold up,” she whispered over the griffon’s shoulders as he stopped just in front of a trash can and slowly laid himself out on the ground. “Two unknowns in there somewhere.”

“How the hell would you know th—“ Leon snarled back in response, cutting himself off mid-sentence as the answer dawned on him. “….oh, right. That fancy PipBuck. Didn’t know you’d turned it on.”

“I try not to depend on it,” she replied, turning around for a few seconds to check behind them. Even if the E.F.S. wasn’t showing anything, she wasn’t going to trust it completely. “Just wish it would tell me the difference between a pony, a griffon, or an animal.”

“Most likely animal,” he said with a slight grunt, pulling a small multi-tool knife from his duster and flicking out what appeared to be a wire-cutter tool. “That dog we mentioned we found blown to bits? It was a female, one probably nursing a litter of puppies. Wouldn’t surprise me if the griffons in that raiding party took them for meat. The body’s a couple days old, wouldn’t be more than one or two pups left by now. Might explain those unknown tags you’re seeing.”

If Light Tail had been here to hear this, she would have been heartbroken. One reason she clung to that white fox plush so much was that she’d always wanted a dog or a puppy, but until two days ago all she’d known of them was what she’d learned from the library. She was probably still under the impression that most animal life up here had died out….

….wait, what? Dog?

“…hey, wait, you mean like….A dog? A normal one, like in Equestria That Was? No mutations, no hideous-looking…sacs of something growing out of its skin? Just like….a normal looking dog that barks?”

“Yup,” Leon affirmed, without bothering to complain or wonder aloud why she’d ask such a question. “One of the few animals that didn’t get changed by all the radiation and…and whatever it was that the zebra’s balefire bombs released when they blew. Cats too, but since most of their prey’s mutated into carnivores themselves they don’t do too well hunting anymore. Some of the sheep in the ranches out west kinda…regressed, I think. Heard rumors that before the war, the sheep flocks up north could talk like us. Thought that might’ve been true down here too, but either it was all bullshit or they just seemed to lose that intelligence in the decades after the blasts. They don’t talk, ain’t near as smart as us either. They sorta just graze most of the morning on what little grass they can find, and spend the rest of the day chewing cud. All they’re good for now is meat and wool.”

Her heart skipped several beats as old memories of the Stable came flooding back to her, now tinged with horror as untold implications of radiation exposure began to attach themselves to the memories. “….imagine that. Talking sheep.”

A soft click! popped into the air, accompanied by a quiet sigh of relief from the griffon’s throat as he stowed the multi-tool and began to reach around the trash can. “Ahhh, there we go. The other one’s at the other end of the alley. You can see straight around the corner to the front door of that grocery store from there.”

She could already see three potential hiding spaces between their current position and the other trip-wire booby trap—an industrial dumpster, a pile of old, rotted wooden crates collected against the wall on their right, and an open back door into the building on their left near the end of the alley. “Got a spare knife? Never thought to pack one when I left home.”

The griffon’s answer was to pull what looked like a field survival knife from the back of his armored barding underneath his duster coat and held its grip out towards her. Her magic wrapped around it and pulled it in for a better look, and a part of her hindquarters cringed at the sight of the sharp, jagged teeth along the back of the blade. The cutting edge of the blade itself looked fairly new, though, something she didn’t expect to see on the surface.

“I’ll hide inside the shop up ahead,” he said, his eyes locked onto the open doorway. “You duck behind the dumpster right by the door. Quick and silent, we’ll need to take them both out at the same time or they’ll give us away sooner than we want.”

“Then sit still for a second,” Sling returned evenly, concentrating her magic into a second spell and feeling the familiar touch of her hearing protection ward envelop her hearing. “You can’t hear them coming if your ears are ringing from an explosion six feet away from you.”

Reading a stupid book while her mom went off to shoot and kill seemed….well, stupid.

For one thing, those bad ponies could catch them by surprise if she was so focused on reading that she didn’t pay attention to anything else around her. Secondly, she was pretty sure BJ would just give her a hard time over reading a book to take her mind off the blood her mom was about to spill.

And thirdly, to sit there, reading an epic fantasy book in relative comfort while her mom was shooting at other ponies and risking being shot herself….it seemed wrong. Insulting. Like she would be saying that she was so unconcerned for her mom’s well-being that she could just kick back and relax. So she left the book in her saddlebags against the wall, and contented herself with just watching and listening for any sign of flesh-eating bugs, or bad ponies and griffons that wanted to hurt her.

And she really couldn’t concentrate on distracting herself when she was worried sick that her mom wouldn’t come back. Her erratic, heavy breathing as she quietly paced about the storage room helped her a little bit, but it seemed to get on Kite and BJ’s nerves, because in just three laps around the center of the room the colt decided to come out from under the table he was hiding under and get into her walking path.

“Cut that out,” BJ demanded quietly.

I don’t remember Mom leaving you in charge, El-Tee thought with a slight bitterness. “I’m being quiet enough—“

“There’s things out that hear better than we do,” he continued, cutting her off before she could dismiss his presence entirely. “Death claws, bloat sprites—“

Her worries over her mother only intensified at the mention of the grotesque names for creatures she hadn’t even seen or heard of….but with names like “death claw” and “bloat sprite”, it wasn’t hard to figure out that they weren’t looking for cuddles and companionship. “….w-what’s a death claw?”

“It’s this really big, ugly lizard that walks on two legs, has these two huge limbs that griffons call arms, or something, and they got really sharp claws the size of yer head and—“

“BJ, stop scaring the poor thing,” Kite admonished her colt when it became clear that he took more pleasure out of the question than was probably appropriate. “….look, it’s nothing to be worried about, nopony’s even seen a death claw ‘round these parts for months—“

“That don’t mean there won’t be,” El-Tee shot back with a slight shudder just trying to imagine what a death claw might look like. “And I’d rather know what’s out there from you guys than finding out when we run into the things. We won’t last a month out here if we keep walkin’ around blind, we barely got away from that….that yao-thingy the first hour we were out of the stable.”

“Yao-gaui,” the scarred mare corrected gently with a resigned sigh, her body finally turning over until she was upright with her forelegs tucked together in front of her. “….how’d you get away from one of those? They don’t stop chasing a meal once they find it.”

She tried—without much effort—not to remember that blur of a memory. All she could recall right off was that it looked like a big, hungry bear suffering from a very bad case of mange, that it had chased her and Mom up into an upstairs bedroom, and that Mom had tied something around the bed and made her go with her out the window and—

“….I don’t know,” she answered, her eyes losing their focus on BJ as she tried to will the images out of her mind. “Ask my mom, I really don’t wanna think about it.”

“I will,” Kite promised softly. “….but as far as death claws go, they haven’t been seen all that often. Only saw a couple last year, and we were far enough away that they ignored us. Bloatsprites are what became of the parasprites after the war, when the radiation from all the megaspells and whatever the zebras used got to changing everything they touched. They’re really disgusting to look at, got these spines along their backs that they can shoot at you, and they’re really hard to hit unless you got a PipBuck or a shotgun. But as long as you don’t get close to them, they’ll leave you alone. You ask me, you need to be worried about all the radhogs.”

A shiver slide through the filly’s spine and into her four legs, her brain already tracing together scattered bits of information to arrive at a seemingly outlandish conclusion. Well….it would have been outlandish last week, when all she worried about was falling asleep at her school desk. Today? Totally possible. “Lemme guess….mutated from pigs…”

“Pretty much. They’re much nastier and meaner than old world pigs, though. They’ll charge you on sight, and they have a pretty mean bite, it’ll go through your leg like an old pipe stem. Kill ‘em on sight, they’ll do you the same way if you let ‘em.”

“So what about this union of ponies?” she asked next. If they were going to be talking about the dangers of this “wasteland”, she wanted to know more about which group of ponies to be friends with and which ones to hide from. “The slavers? How does it all work?”

Kite’s steady, neutral face began to grow visibly uncomfortable with the direction this little talk was going, her eyes beginning to glaze slightly as she sought to find a way out of explaining it all. “….l-let’s not talk about that….”

Oh Luna, you’re as bad as Mom. “I don’t wanna hear ‘bout how you were treated, I already know it ain’t pleasant. I just wanna know how they make the whole thing work. How they keep track of who’s a slave and who ain’t. How ponies keep from bein’ made slaves, or how they get out of it. You knew who to look for when we came into town lookin’ for somebody that could get those exploding collars off, so I know somethin’s goin’ on behind the slavers’ back that they don’t like.”

“Don’t fight it, Mom,” BJ quipped up next, surprising the filly with his unusual support of her efforts. “She has a brain, and she actually uses it. Just answer her questions ‘fore she starts going off like she did yesterday and brings every raider in town down on us.”

She had something fairly nice to say to him until he said that, and she felt her ears flattening in disdain. “Gee, thanks….”

“Hey, it’s what I’m here for—“

And that was when it happened, just like Mom said it would. It sounded oddly….subdued, like the sound of thunder from that awesome rainstorm she got to see the other night, but she guessed that was because there were walls and distance between her and the explosion. But it didn’t rumble and crackle like the thunder did—rather, it started off with a sharp boom, and then gradually echoed into a faint whisper. It didn’t shake windows or thump into her chest with the sound, but she was certain it would’ve if she were closer to it.

And those bad ponies that Ada and Leon were after were probably a lot closer to it. They’d come running out to see what it was. And they’d get slaughtered.

….did….did Mom do that just to get them out where they could shoot them?

The last bits of asphalt and brick had just clacked back onto the ground from their physics-induced flight when she heard what sounded like two males shouting and cursing as they emerged from the ruined grocery store across the street.

“Shit, again?! Better not be another damned dog—“

“I’d rather it be a dog than some dumbass wanderer walking through the wastes. Dog meat’s tastier.”

The chance appearance of one of the three griffons they needed to take out was overshadowed by the dawning horror that this raider had likely eaten a pony before to be able to compare the two tastes, and a small, gaping hole inside her chest seemed to open up and take her oxygen with every breath she took. O-oh Luna…

The hoof/footsteps quickly gained a condensed quality to their echoes as they grew closer, likely from the walls of the buildings around them, and in short order they became crystal clear thuds as they rounded the corner and skidded to a stop right in front of the doorway….

….and just around the dumpster she was squished up against….

“….whoa, wait a tic, what’s going on here?” one of the male voices demanded of the empty space around him. “There’s nothing here.”

“Oh for fu—I told you not to pull the pin that far out—“

A quick pair of metallic clicks from inside the building—Leon’s talons tapping against the blade of his knife—sprung the mare into action far more quickly than she would have thought possible. She zipped out from behind the dumpster, her magic flaring to life and bringing her borrowed knife upward for an impending stab into her unaware target—

—an earth pony stallion, covered in armored barding all the way up to his neck, was staring in wide-eyed terror at the griffon bursting out through the open doorway he’d neglected to even look into, barely a second before Leon’s large, saw-toothed silvery blade sank into his skull between his eyes with a loin-flinching crunch of bone and….

She pushed the gut-wrenching sound aside and swung her knife upward, towards the poor stallion’s black-feathered griffon partner, and caught the pony-eating savage right in the throat as he tried to bring a rust-coated revolver up for a clean shot. The blade must have severed the spinal cord from the neck down, as her victim collapsed soundlessly onto the moist concrete beneath them in an instant—

The stallion tipped over onto his side, onto his saddle-mounted long arm, and in the process must have triggered the firing mechanism linkage between the saddle and the firing bit, because a single gunshot roared into the tight confines of the alley. If not for the hearing protection spell, the sound might very well have ruptured an eardrum. Even so, the sharpness of the report left a slight dinging echo in her ears, but thankfully the bullet buried itself into the wall inside of ricocheting off and careening out of control all around them.

Within a couple of seconds of the shot, a second, more distant shot erupted from the streets roughly three hundred yards back, and Sling leapt over the bodies of the savages and around the corner—

—a faded red metal sign sat plastered over a pair of windowless double-pane doors, large enough to accommodate entire groups of ponies entering or leaving, and the words, “Slate Rock’s Grocer” were almost as pale as the sign itself. A second black-feathered griffon had collapsed on top of the sign, and what looked like a droplet of blood began to seep out from his head as he hung listlessly over the edge, his rifle clattering onto the sidewalk at ground level without going off.

She had perhaps five seconds to find cover before the rest of them burst out the front door looking for whoever had dared to come after them.

She broke into a hard run down the alley, feeling a brief rush of exhilaration as she burst out into the open air once more and eying what looked to be a smashed pull wagon made entirely of metal, with age-hardened rubber tires crunched in at odd slanted angles beneath it that suggested that something heavy had landed on top of it at some point in the last two hundred years. She’d hardly found safety behind it when she heard the grocer doors slap open from the rush of souls rushing out—

“—nd ‘em and gut ‘em alive!” a female voice shrieked angrily, a primal, animal-like growl inflecting every word with malice and savagery. “I’ve had enough of this shit—“

A bright, flashing green triangle popped up in the corner of her vision to her left, quickly tracing its way upward as she jerked her head up towards whatever it was pointing at—

—a single grenade, shaped like a pineapple and stippled with small squares across the surface, arced over the wagon and into the crowd of red hash marks in front of her. It clacked across the pavement for only a moment before it exploded, tearing chunks of asphalt out and sending them in seemingly random directions as the savages howled in pain from the shrapnel assaulting their bodies. A second distant gunshot rang out, but with all of the screaming going on she couldn’t tell if it had any effect.

Six sets of legs began bounding for cover anywhere they could find it—behind ancient mail boxes or sky wagons, piles of spilled rubble, anything that could stop a bullet was good enough. She popped out from behind her own cover, her shotgun floating out in front of her and settling the bead sight on the closest target she could find—

—a purple spike-maned, cherry-red coated earth pony mare was hobbling straight towards her with several ragged, bleeding wounds in her hind legs hindering her efforts. She didn’t seem to realize that Sling had already chosen this particular wagon for her own use until it was too late, and the bead had barely swung into place over the spike-haired mare’s face before she squeezed the trigger. The boom drowned out the sound of her body hitting the ground as her magic shucked the forearm in a furious tug to chamber the next shell—

—a quick burst of automatic fire from her left caused her to duck back behind the wagon, the bullets banging into the weathered metal. She shot her eyes back towards the alley she’d come from, to try and warn Leon to stay back before he got cut down—

—the griffon was stalking forward on his hind legs, upright, with his wings slightly unfurled to help balance his awkward-looking approach as he shouldered his .45 submachine gun and its heavy 50-round drum magazine and began to let loose with controlled bursts of three to five rounds apiece—

“Oh shit, runners!!” one of the savages roared to his surviving comrades. “Get back inside—“

A sharper, louder gunshot further down the street cut off his warning abruptly—and permanently—and when Sling stole a glance down the street she spotted Ada roughly a hundred yards away, doing much the same thing as Leon. Walking upright on her hind legs and using her wings to balance herself, with her M-series rifle shouldered and blaring off single, precise shots at her targets as she swung from one target to another—

—not wanting to have to face these raiders inside an old grocery store where stocking aisles would create two dozen ambush possibilities, Sling swallowed hard and stood back up, raising her shotgun out in front of her and scanning for targets—

—she saw three ponies hurriedly trying to dash back through the grocer’s front door from their previous positions off to her left, but one was cut down with a series of shots to his pale yellow-coated legs and head. Two bodies lying just in front of the small crater created by the grenade had fallen atop each other in a tangled mass of limbs and wings—one gray-feathered griffon, and one pale lime pony, both with head wounds that likely reached deep into their brains, and the griffon’s armor seemed to have been pierced by multiple pieces of shrapnel as well—

—She unconsciously brought up the S.A.T.S. targeting matrix on the remaining two living savages as they made their run to safety inside the store, the sound of steady bursts of automatic fire from Leon’s weapon making it a tad harder to concentrate on the rapidly bouncing overlays of green percentage numbers and the lines they were tracing towards various body parts. Limbs had an average of 56% hit probability, body shots were much higher but not worth taking when they were wearing body armor—

—She settled for the legs and mentally commanded the spell matrix to cue up two shots, one on each pony, targeting the front legs, and then executed the sequenced shots—

—she felt her spell field around the shotgun suddenly surging with power as the S.A.T.S. briefly augmented her telekinesis, the shotgun snapping over the rear savage’s front legs and letting off a shot faster than she could have done it on her own before slamming the forearm back and forth and chambering another shell. She barely saw the impact on his legs—at roughly fifteen yards away the buckshot would have started to spread apart by the time it reached him—but enough of the pellets found important things to tear up that he was considerably slowed, and was made much easier for Ada and Leon to tear apart with their own focused fire. Ada’s rifle had little trouble ripping through his armored barding, while Leon settled for a short burst of four rounds that traced up the side of his neck and head. It was difficult to tell whose rounds had ultimately killed him.

Her shotgun had already zipped over to the lead pony by the time the next shell had been slammed into the chamber, a unicorn mare decked in full-body barding, sporting dual 9mm pistols in her telekinetic hold and a stockless submachine gun dangling from a strap around her neck. The bolt barely had time to click back into battery before the gun roared again, but this time the charge of buckshot managed to miss with most of its nine pellets. Only two found purchase inside her right unprotected foreleg, but didn’t hit anything vital enough to slow her down. A single round from Ada’s rifle popped her along the back of her armored barding, but also had little effect on her as she finally made it inside the grocer, escaping a furious string of rounds from Leon’s .45 Auto subgun as it peppered the wall around the doors and zipped through the empty panes of the doors themselves.

And only then did she begin to realize just how quickly this entire sequence had gone down. She counted two shots from her shotgun in under two seconds….

Leon’s body slammed into the wagon right beside her, startling her so badly that she jumped and spun in place until she’d landed on her belly—

“Wow, I cannot believe that,” he muttered in disbelief. “She actually missed. Hey, Ada, did you drink any Sparkle-Cola in the last ten minutes?!”

“Up yours!!” the female griffon roared back angrily as she quickly took flight and zipped towards them in a low-gliding drop. “She must’ve had an armored plate over her spine, that was a solid hit!”

“We can still take her out if we’re careful—“

The savage mare must not have gone too terribly far from the door, because her frantic, terrified shouting reached out to them the moment the two griffons began debating her final fate. “N-n-no, w-wait!! I g-give up, I don’t want n-nothin’ ta do with this!! Don’t shoot me—“

“Tell that to the forty souls you wiped out over the last month, bitch!” Ada screamed back, her voice dripping with anger as she touched down onto the street, standing upright, with her rifle aimed at the doorway—

—the savage crept out slowly and steadily, tossing her three guns aside as she emerged straight into Ada’s sights, her bright blue eyes glistening with tears. “I-I was with the first caravan they raided!!” the mare screamed back, her voice beginning to crack as she tried to plead for non-existent mercy. “I w-was the only one they took alive!! I’ve been their plaything for weeks—“

“Sweet dreams,” was all that Ada cared to say, her cold tone telling them all they needed to know about what was about to happen.

And the savage mare knew it. “O-o-o-h nooo—“

“—nt you to do this, this isn’t you!! You’re not a murderer, so STOP IT—“

Sling’s magic dropped the shotgun into the wagon’s interior, her daughter’s teary-eyed pleading echoing back to her as she shifted her spell over onto Ada’s rifle and grabbed hold of the trigger just as the griffon’s claw squeezed back, keeping it from moving even a millimeter.

The griffon didn’t even look to see which of the two unicorn ponies had just blocked her shot. “You’d better let go of that trigger, stable pony.”

“Wait!” Sling shot back, focusing her attention on the savage trembling in the grocery doorway. “You! Start talking, which caravan?!”

“S-Sunny Side’s caravan!!” the savage cried, her legs giving out beneath her. The name meant nothing to Sling, but she hoped it meant something to Leon or Ada. “F-from Stifla! I’m f-from Syrup Mound!! She s-stopped into town, lost two guards to a slaver raid a month ago, was lookin’ for new hires!! I s-signed on, we got hit ten miles north of here when we set out two days later!! Th….they killed everybody…”

Sling’s heart began to grow heavy with each passing beat, taking in the quivering, terrified mare in a slightly different light. None of the savage ponies she’d met had acted like this. She didn’t think they were even capable of faking this kind of fear.

She did think they were capable of letting their victims live long enough to….to “play” with them….

Ada’s firm resistance to her spell field began to soften, no longer pressing against it in a vain attempt to squeeze the trigger, but Sling was not willing to release her hold on it just yet.

“….I tried hiding in the bodies,” the mare continued to cry, her eyes becoming lost between her stark terror and the memories she was forcing herself to relive for the sake of coming out of this mess alive. “…but they found me….they kept me alive. Made me do things….with them….to them…..all of them. They used me, beat me….forced themselves on me….I-I cracked, I told them I’d j-join them. It seemed like the only way to make it stop…”

She felt the rifle begin to slip through the spell field, dipping low and slackening until it was no longer aimed at the tortured soul before them.

“…t-they let me come with them this morning. They got w-word about a caravan coming to the Mound, somehow….they hit it exactly where they hit Sunny’s….they wanted t-to take another mare…j-j-just like they took me…”

Her telekinesis spell died entirely, her bones growing numb as the poor thing’s sob story began to take a dark, vile turn. Ada didn’t even seem to notice.

“….I killed her….shot her in the head, so they couldn’t take her, and do to her what they’d done to me….and they laughed. They took everything, and we came back. And I finally remembered her when we came back, I knew her….she was…we used to scavenge the city ruins, until the Union restricted access to that part of the city….and I think she recognized me, too….”

The tortured soul ran out of things to sob and scream, and started to cry and shake where she lay in wordless gasps and howls….

….and Sling couldn’t bear to let her go on like that anymore.

She didn’t even feel herself moving, she was so numb to her own motions. She could see herself pulling the poor thing up off the ground and leading her away from the grocery store, thought she felt herself cringing as the mare flinched under the touch of her magic. She could hear herself trying to soothe her panicked psyche as she found a secluded, debilitated attorney’s office across the street and barged into the receptionist’s lobby, trying to tell her that she wasn’t being taken away to be executed in a dark corner or taken advantage of. She could almost feel her magic straining to pull the mare’s armored barding off when her nose picked up an all-too-familiar stench that reminded her of Light Tail’s days as a newborn foal. She could almost taste the water she was splashing the mare with to clean her up like said foal, tossing aside the torn, used rag when she was done and never intending to use it again.

But all she could truly feel as the trembling, crying cream-coated mare within her hug began to howl into her chest, was how utterly inadequate and foolish she was to think that she had serious problems. So what if her stable called her a slut and shunned her from their midst? That wasn’t suffering. That was nothing. There were souls up here, suffering far worse and on a far larger scale, with little or no hope that it would ever stop, and that nopony would come to save them from the horrors others were willing to inflict on them. She was ashamed to think there was a time she thought she had it bad in life. Even more ashamed that she had to have a living survivor cry it out to her before it finally sank in.

So she sat there, the way El-Tee had been sitting in similar places for her, and let this victim of the wasteland cry and scream herself to sleep in the grasp of a pony that meant to be better than that.

She’d never even noticed that her E.F.S. had changed this mare’s red hash mark into a friendly marker until she carefully lifted the sleeping pony up and carried her back outside in search of a better napping spot.

“Her name’s Cinnamon Roll,” Ada’s voice spoke softly, sparing only a short glance at the sleeping pony in the jury-rigged, stained-blanket padded wagon they’d patched together over the last hour. “Her father runs a caravan company in Syrup Mound, came to us a week ago. Said his daughter had disappeared when a gang of bandits had taken up a home in this little town a little over a month back, and he was pretty sure she’d been killed by now. He told us he’d pay us a thousand caps to take ‘em out if we brought back proof of her fate. There’s this stretch of the old highway a few miles north of here where a bunch of sky wagons fell outta the sky during the megaspell blitz, just like that field outside the one-one-five. Perfect place for an ambush. Four caravans been lost there in the last month. Sunny Side’s was the first.”

Sling had to cover her snout with a foreleg to suppress the shocked gasp that nearly squeaked out, instead of the question she wanted to ask….

“….how can ponies do these things?” she said with a hoarse voice. “What black magic changes a soul to something so vile and evil that it turns them into wild animals straight out of the Everfree Forest of old?”

“The same black magic that told your ancestors that building weapons of mass destruction specifically to use on cities full of non-combatants was the morally right thing to do.”

…shit, I shouldn’t have said anything. “….these….these savages, if I didn’t know any better I’d say they were straight out of a horror story—“

“They’re not stories,” Ada cut her off sharply, her gaze fixed on the horizon outside the town towards Syrup Mound.

Sling Shot could only swallow her pride and wait for the truth she’d already pieced together.

“They’re not like anybody else you’ll run into. Slavers just abuse you ‘till they get you sold off, bandits just rob and kill you, but raiders…it’s like they stared out at the edge of the wastes, saw oblivion in the beyond and went mad. If they catch you, they’ll rape you to death or until you slit your own throat, cut you into pieces for the meat on your bones, sew your coat and flesh into their clothing, and decorate their lairs with your entrails. And if you’re very, very lucky, they’ll do it in that order. Cinnamon was beyond lucky to go as long as she did without them peeling her meat off in front of her eyes.”

Now it was Sling’s turn to shiver and tremble where she stood. That was one hell of a definition of “lucky”.

The twenty seconds of horrific silence were broken up with Leon’s presence as he waltzed into their field of view and began to load the wagon with the spoils of battle he’d spent the last hour sorting through.

“Anyways, we’ll be heading back to Syrup Mound in a bit,” Ada huffed nervously, tugging her boonie hat down until it nearly covered her eyes. “Kite isn’t finding much in the clinic, so whatever she does find is yours. Most of the ammo was for rifles and pistols. We’re keeping a share of the 9-mil for us, but we got no use for the 10mms, .38s and. 357s so that’s all yours. 12-gauge shells too, they had a decent stock of buckshot and about twenty slugs. Three hundred and eighty rounds all put together. Guns are up for grabs, within reason. You want any of the rifles?”

“Never was any good with one,” Sling mumbled back absently. “Wouldn’t mind a couple of those pistols to break down for spare parts.”

“Hrm. Oughta find you one of those 5.56mm revolvers, at least. You’ll want something to punch through armored barding with.”

The talk of weapons and ammo was starting to take up slightly more mental energy to focus on…and Sling quickly found that if she focused on it, she wasn’t thinking about Cinnamon’s horrors. “….know where I could find one?”

“Not as common as they used to be, spare parts are starting to dry up. So they’re expensive as hell, six to seven hundred caps and up for one that’s got a working motorized cylinder, never mind whether it shoots straight or not. You might find one in a stable not far from here, though. It’s about fifteen miles northwest of here, surrounded by ant nests, which is why nobody’s thought to go back to it. If you can find a way inside without those things pulling you apart limb from limb, you may find one there. That’s where most of them came from when that stable opened up eighty years ago.”

The way Ada spoke of these ants, she didn’t think they were going to be of the kind that ponies once squished under their hooves without even a thought. “….ants….”

“Yeah, ants,” the griffon sighed. “They can be mean bastards, some of ‘em are almost as big as a brahmin. The worker drones don’t bother you unless you shoot at them, but the soldiers spend their day looking for threats or food to tear up and bring back to the nest. The reason they haven’t overrun the prairie is ‘cause they don’t seem to lay millions of eggs anymore, and the Union’s patrols do a decent job at keeping their numbers thinned out. At most you’ll find a few dozen per nest. But there’s several out around that stable, and there’s nothing else out there that anybody wants to bother with, so they don’t go out there.”

“….what’s a brahmin?” she asked next, afraid the answer would be one that would twist her childhood school memories into a sick joke.

She was rewarded, at the least, with the truth. BJ had been content to simply come up quietly behind them and pulling along a heavy, grunting beast with him, but had apparently been listening to their conversation long enough to feel a need to inject himself and his blunt sense of humor into the mix.

“This is a brahmin,” he said through the rope between his teeth, her gaze freezing at the sight of the horrific, two-headed….cow he had in tow. Its rust-brown colored hide didn’t have any hair on it to speak of, and its udder was grossly bloated from what she was used to seeing on a female cow. “Smelly things, but they pull carts and wagons good. Makes for good hide for barding, and meat for griffons too. And believe it or not, their milk is the least radiation-tainted drink you can find outside a town with a working water talisman.”

Sling merely nodded in horror and watched the colt lead the mutant cow to the front of the wagon, where he began to strap it into the pulling harness it would call home for the next two hours.

“When Kite gets back, I’ll pick those collars off,” Ada said next, her talons digging at a pouch attached to her camouflaged barding which Sling assumed to contain the tools necessary for the delicate work ahead of her. “Think your kid’s still in the grocery, might want to see what’s grabbed her attention for the last hour.”

I’ve got a pretty good idea, she didn’t say as she wordlessly trotted away from the wagon, whisking herself inside the store in a matter of seconds.

The place had likely been picked clean as the megaspells dropped—its shelves were bare, with only the occasional scattering of trash and broken milk bottles to suggest that anything of value had ever been there to start with. Rows of checkout aisles mocked her with their silent testimony to better, more bountiful times, and their cashier’s registers had been smashed open long ago, but whether Equestrian bits still had any value now was dubious at best. Perhaps as a collector’s item and not as actual currency. The lights above her had all burned out or burst long before her grandmother had even been born.

And yet, somewhere in the far corner in the back of the store, was something that had managed to keep her daughter squirreled away inside for most of the last hour.

What had her little Daring Do found now?

She pushed past the haunting echoes of times past she swore she was hearing as she trotted through the aisles, jumping over a counter in the left corner of the store that had likely at one time displayed fresh produce from the farmlands surrounding the town—

—Light Tail’s voice began to creep from the slight crack in the door to a room behind the counter, which according to the plate next to the door was a supervisor’s office—

“—t’s okay, no mean griffon’s gonna eat you now—“

She nudged the door open with a tap of her snout, slipping through with a slightly disheartened sigh that didn’t even register with the filly. Had she already found what was left of the others?

“….no, they’re not,” she agreed solemnly as she drew closer to El-Tee’s spot in the corner of the room, next to a desk with a barely-working terminal, and the shivering bundles of whimpering, whining fur trapped in her little forelegs. A pair of husky puppies, their gray and white coats giving little room for error as to what breed they were, and their wolf-like appearance belying the fear they felt at all the strangers coming and going around them. Where was mom, they were probably wondering right now….

Light Tail’s slightly damp face had run out of tears to shed for the moment, and settled for letting the puppies nuzzle her as they tried to get their mother to come to them with their cries. “….it’s got to be real bad up here, for folk to want puppies for a snack….”

“Very bad,” she said, settling down beside her night light and resting her shotgun up against the desk nearby. “I wish we’d stayed in the stable—“

“Don’t say that,” El-Tee snapped back with a sniffle, a hoof reaching out to corral one of the puppies back to her when it managed to wiggle free from her. “You said it yourself, we coulda died in there if we’d stayed. And bad as it is up here, there’s still some good if you look for it. Ada, Kite, Blue Star, Leon….even BJ….and then there’s these little guys….Ada said somethin’ bout a dog bein’ blown up earlier, when she came back to get you….I guess that’d be their mom….”

“Probably.” No use sugarcoating what the squirt already knew, even if she wished for her mother to say otherwise.

The other puppy began to squeal and howl, since it’s earlier cries had gone unheeded, and Light Tail couldn’t help but nuzzle it to try and calm it down. “….and then that mare you found…you guys didn’t shoot her. She didn’t look anything like a bad pony….”

“….she could have turned out that way, if we hadn’t shown up when we did. She’s had a very, very hard time these last few weeks. As hard as Kite and BJ…or worse. It’s so hard to tell. And I don’t know that I want to make the distinction. It’s all so wrong, what they’ve been through. It makes me feel…I’m ashamed. That I thought I had it so bad all these years, when things going on above us were so much worse than half the ponies I lived with calling me an immoral slut behind my back. I had it easy. They’d trade places me with in an instant to have the problems I did. And they were nothing compared to what everypony’s suffering up here.”

“…they still hurt you,” El-Tee quipped, amidst the scratching of a puppy’s ear with a forehoof. Or a tiny telekinesis spell, she wasn’t really looking. “Maybe not physically, or to the point where you wished you were dead…but they still hurt you, on the inside. That ain’t any less wrong than what’s goin’ on up here. Just…the wrongs up here, are the ones that make you go mad.”

A tear began to streak down Sling’s face. In a matter of two days and three gunfights, her little girl had already begun to grow up, changed by all the death and horrors she’d seen and heard.

It wasn’t fair. None of it was.

“This wasteland….it’ll eat you alive, if you let it. It’s already eating you when you kill bad ponies and griffons, when we find things like…like this. We gotta find a home, a safe one. Someplace where all this…is just a nightmare you wake up from, and the stable can keep on living. We can’t tell everypony back home to settle up here.”

“….honey, our ancestors burned the whole world,” she croaked, three more tears rolling from her eyes as she draped a foreleg around her in a tight hug. “There may not be such a place anymore.”

“There has to be,” the filly insisted strongly, sniffling back her own tears as she sought to keep the puppies in her grasp calm and safely in her reach. “Somewhere up north, maybe. Cloudsdale, Vanhoover, even the Crystal Empire…somewhere out there has to be safe. This can’t be all there is. The windigoes that pushed the tribes to Equestria woulda destroyed everything in an endless winter by now if it was.”

“That’s just an old legend, honey.”

“Ever think there might be somethin’ to it? That Celestia had a thousand years of peace and harmony through luck alone? We used to be better than this. And somewhere out there, ponies still are. Somewhere that nopony’s talkin’ about, or we’d have heard about it already. We gotta find it.”

She came close. So very close to just….breaking. Telling her that the Stable was gone, that everypony she’d known and loved had choked to death while they skedaddled out the tunnel of rock and into hell. That they would have to find a way to make it up here, or get past this stupid valley to the west where this stupid Merchant Union didn’t seem to have a reach yet. That this was their world now, and that they would have to find a way to live with it.

And at the last second, she switched the subject entirely.

“Got any names for ‘em yet?” she whispered through her daughter’s mane. Oh dear Luna, please forgive me for this one day…

“….not many,” Light Tail heaved heavily, finally allowing the puppies free reign to escape her grasp if they felt like it. And to both ponies’ surprise, they didn’t stray very far, maybe no more than a few feet. But they continued to cry and whine for their departed mother as they fought between going back to the filly’s warm body or risking a few extra feet of distance in the hopes that they’d find what they were looking for. “I was pretty sure you were gonna tell me we couldn’t keep ‘em, ‘cause they’d be a drain on our food and water. It’s gonna be hard enough to stretch it with Kite and BJ with us….”

Sling didn’t care. She might have if Ada had aimed a little higher and blown the back of Cinnamon’s head in before she could get to begging for her life, or if she’d thought to shoot her in the head herself with her shotgun in S.A.T.S. mode, or….or any number of things. But after that, after what Cinnamon had blubbered out in sobs, and messing herself up in fear of the death they’d tried to inflict on her….she didn’t care. Let the little puppies have a share of their rations every day. Wasn’t their fault that their mom had wandered into a booby trap set by sick-souled, evil beings. The least they could do to make their existence up here better was to give them some kinder company. Even if they only managed to live for a few more weeks, or months, it would be better than the fate they were facing this morning.

“…..we’ll find a way. They’re a few weeks old, at the least. Probably capable of eating solid foods now. We may have to kill other animals to get them meat, our rations were meant for ponies. Water’s going to be the bigger problem.”

“….head on back to Syrup Mound, then?” Light Tail suggested, as one of the puppies gingerly returned to her and rubbed her outstretched foreleg with its cheek. “Plenty of water there, if we can afford to stay in that hotel room for a bit. Could be a market for food, too.”

Yes, she agreed almost immediately. Let’s get the hell out of here.

“We’ll be moving that way soon. Soon as Ada gets those collars off Kite and BJ. Did…did BJ want one of these guys?”

“Big jerk told me to leave ‘em,” the filly spat in disgust, pulling away from her mother’s grasp as she finally stood up and began to stretch her legs out for a long walk. “Just for that, he’s gonna have to help clean up after ‘em when they use the bathroom on the floor or somethin’.”

Already thinking that far ahead about what having a pet entails? I knew you were smart. “Speaking of which, might want to find out what they are. Girl, or boy. Can’t name ‘em ‘till you know that, y’know.”

“…..yeah, um…I kinda figured that out already when they ran to the corner over there and…relieved themselves. So I got a couple names in mind. Un-ponylike names.”

“Nothing wrong with that. What are we calling them?”

Light Tail seemed almost proud to announce the newest members of their traveling entourage as Sling finally rose up from the floor herself and collected her shotgun from its nesting place against the desk. “Well, this one right in front of me’s a boy, so his name is Max. And his sister up there? Her name’s Mona now. And if they’re the husky breed that I remember readin’ about in the stable, they’re gonna eat us outta house and home by the time they’re all grown up.”

The names didn’t exactly roll off her tongue with any natural flair, but it wouldn’t take long to get used to them. Didn’t take her long to get used to her second nickname, after all.

It wasn’t hard to keep Max and Mona in tow—they seemed to think that Light Tail was the next safest thing they could be close to, since their mother wasn’t answering their howls and cries. In fact, they wound up nearly being stepped on more than once because they kept darting in between her legs to hide beneath her. They still whined and whimpered, but at least they’d stopped howling and crying for the moment.

She took her time going back into the streets as she did a quick search of the store for anything she and Ada might have missed earlier. In a few minutes’ time she was satisfied that everything of worth had been found and finally led them back to the front door, though she noticed that Light Tail couldn’t help but let her eyes linger on the cashier’s registers as they passed by them. She could understand why—they’d always had enough food in the stable, but it was all grown in the agri levels and had to be rationed out carefully to keep everypony fed and healthy without running out. The idea that there were once stores that did nothing but sell food to any soul with the bits….there would’ve been more than enough for all of Equestria. Enough of it that folk could go out and buy something extraneous as a snack or treat without worrying that they’d go hungry.

She couldn’t imagine such a thing happening in her lifetime.

She pushed the grocery doors aside with a soft bump, and the filly quickly trotted through the open doorway for fear the doors would swing back in and smack her in the face. But it turned out that the hinges were so old and rusted that the doors stayed open and refused to swing back in place, allowing the filly and two puppies to scamper by and catch up to her.

They found Ada sitting next to an old wagon they’d dragged out of a small storage shed another block down the road and fixed up, with Kite furiously scrubbing at her collar-free neck with a glassy-eyed stare of relief as she finally got to scratch at itches that had been bothering her with impunity. A strange-looking mark on the other side of her neck, however, refused to be rubbed off no matter how hard she tried, and after a few seconds she gave up on it entirely. BJ was crouched down in front of the griffon on all fours as she carefully picked away at the locking mechanism with two tiny, thin metal tools.

By the time they reached the wagon, she heard a distinctive, metal clink! as the collar popped open, and BJ seemed almost surprised by the sudden release of pressure upon his neck.

“There we go,” Ada sighed with relief. “Be free, little dude.”

The colt carefully slid the displaced collar off and gingerly laid it down in front of the griffon before hoofing it at full speed back towards his mother—and stopped cold as he spotted the two puppies hiding under her daughter’s chest and belly. “….oh crap, you’re keeping them...”

“Yeah, and?” El-Tee cackled as Ada packed her tools away and casually plucked the exploding collars off the cracked-up asphalt as if they were mere rags.

“And I told you to leave ‘em. They’re noisy, clingy, and get underhoof everywhere you go.”

“Sounds like a certain little colt I know,” Kite snapped off, causing him to flinch in place and stop complaining…and that was when Light Tail noticed that he had the same kind of mark on his neck that his mom had. “…wasn’t much in the clinic. Just a couple of healing potions, a radaway, and some first aid supplies, and I had to turn the place inside out to find them.”

“Wasn’t much in the way of medical supplies in the store or on the raiders, either,” Leon grunted from behind as he lifted up something heavy off the ground, filled with what sounded like either loose bits or bullets jingling about inside. “Guess it was a little silly to expect there’d be anything left to steal after two centuries, no telling how many hundreds of thousands of souls have passed through here getting the same idea.”

“Speaking of ideas,” Mom blurted out, coming to a stop six feet away from the wagon, and Light Tail stopped in tandem along with her. The pups kept going only for the second and a half it took them to realize that their moving shelter wasn’t sheltering them anymore, and then they darted back to within two inches of her. “Before we dropped these savages, one of them called you ‘runners’. I’ve heard that once before, when I followed one of Saurus’s minions all the way to him. Said he had no idea who’d killed that gang I ran into, but thought he’d seen a couple of runners in the vicinity. Sounded scared about it, too. Exactly what are you guys?”

“Well, it’s about time you asked, you silly filly!” Ada laughed, her body shuffling in place as she shifted the weight of her two rifles about into a more comfortable position along her back. “We’re with a group west of the valley, the Prairie Runners. We’re the leanest, meanest sons of bitches in the plains.”

They had to wait until they got back to Syrup Mound before they could get any clear explanations out of the griffons—Ada had taken it upon herself to fly ahead of them and keep an eye out for more bad ponies and griffons, and Leon wasn’t interested in talking “on the job”. And even then, it took a while for things to get sorted out.

That poor, tortured mare that they found had a dad, who was so insanely happy to see her come back to him alive that he cried and told Mom that her hotel stay in town was on his tab for as long as they stayed, and didn’t even say anything about the shotgun pellets they had to pull out of his daughter’s leg. So they didn’t have to worry about finding someplace where they could sleep safely, even if the bed sheets and blankets were really old and stained and patched up several times over. And the mattresses weren’t much better—she was surprised they were even still there after all these decades. She’d have thought they’d been worn out into ragged pieces.

Then there was all the stuff that Mom, Ada, and Leon had found off the dead bad ponies and in the grocery store. Guns, bullets, foodstuffs, old work junk, a few books, a couple of crates of booze, and little ponyskull-and-crossbones marked boxes with stuff inside that Ada called chems. There was some argument about what was going to happen to it all, but eventually it got worked out, and they spent the entire afternoon selling most of the stuff to any merchant that was willing to buy it. By the time the meager daylight started to fade from the cloud-obscured sky, they’d wound up with a grand total of around twelve hundred caps, in addition to the thousand-plus caps apiece that the tortured mare’s dad had paid out to Mom, Ada, and Leon for bringing her to back to him. Split three ways, the spoils of their looting from the dead garnered them four hundred caps each.

Their first splurge was another tasty dinner at the bar, at the same table they’d ate at yesterday minus the awesome sarsaparilla bottles, and it was accompanied by a decent explanation of just what was what around here.

And it all started with the first question out of Mom’s mouth. “What are Prairie Runners?”

“Prairie Runners are basically mercenaries,” Ada gulped through a beakful of…of whatever meat it was she’d ordered or not ordered, because the waitress pony just brought something out on a plate without Ada ever asking for it. “We’re scouts, trackers, fighters, survivalists, and whatever else we need to be to make a living. But we got standards. We don’t do slavery or chems. We don’t raid and steal, and we don’t kill anybody if we think it’s for a bad reason like say…a jealous ex-spouse or some merchant baron wanting to wipe out a competitor’s business, or a bandit gang chief wanting extra muscle for a hit on a town or a caravan. Other than that, we’re up for whatever. Usually we get paid to protect towns, scout out the ruined cities and towns for any old world tech still lying around, or guard trade caravans heading out east from our side of the valley, but now and then we get slaver gangs coming over and hitting a few towns for fresh “product”….”

Ada spat that last word out with disgust (or maybe it was the piece of bone she’d inadvertently bit off, ‘cause it landed on the floor beside her). “That’s when we freelance and do whatever we think we ought to so that they don’t do it twice. And that’s how Leon and I got here. Saurus’s gang hit three towns in two weeks a few miles south of Withercha, beat it all the way past the valley and through Trotpeka before we even figured out where he’d gone off to. We got sent to find him, and put him down.”

“And it’s taken you over half a year to find him?” Kite mumbled amidst a healthy crunch of what looked like fresh, chilled lettuce. A delicacy in the wasteland, she figured. And a mystery. Where was this kind of fresh, normal food coming from? “Slavers don’t exactly work in subtle ways.”

“This one does,” the griffon replied, her talons turning her hunk of meat over to begin feasting on the uneaten half. “He’s from our side of the prairie, knows enough of how we operate that he’s careful to not poke his head up any longer than he has to. He makes a run at a town or caravan, gets his captures sold off, and bunkers down within three days. Sometimes he doesn’t even do that, just pays raiders and highway gangs to do the work for him. So long as a decent cut of the sales come back to him he don’t care how they do it.”

Sparks of thought began to clash together inside the filly’s head (and her hindquarters when Max brushed up against her for a more comfortable napping spot and wound up zapping her with a static spark). It was starting to sound as though this valley in the prairie formed some sort of informal barrier, or a border….

“Why do you call it ‘your side’ of the prairie?” she asked, after a quick sip of her glass of unsweet tea that Mom had brewed up with a pot of clean water from the kitchen and a couple of tea bags from their rations. Kite’s eyes were still misty with tears of pleasure from just tasting her own glass of the stuff, and she’d barely drunk a fourth of it so far. “We’re all tryin’ to make it out here, why not work together?”

“That question calls for a history lesson,” Leon answered swiftly, smacking his beak clean of dark sauce or grease from his latest bite of his cooked meat slab. “The Merchant Union started up a little over thirty years ago, mostly just a bunch of caravan owners looking to pool their resources to protect their trade routes better and make more caps. Somewhere along the way they got to settling down in a town northeast of here called Stifla, made it a permanent alliance and conglomerate—“

“What’s a congla….congl….whatever that word is?” Stupid brain, quit stumbling over big words, you’re supposed to know better—

“It basically means that all the smaller groups turned into one big one.”

“….ah.”

Leon’s beak tore another chunk of meat off and began to chew it apart, leaving Ada to continue the story. “A couple of years after they set up a permanent HQ, they finally found a way into the old Equestrian military base that sits out in the middle of nowhere, northeast of here about fifty miles out or so. Fort Wiley’s got the biggest collection of guns, ammo, and military-grade armor in the prairie, and the Merchant Union’s got complete control of it. Even figured out how to get the defense turrets running again. From there, their power really got to expanding. They started hiring and sending out armed patrols of guards to find and wipe out highway gangs, raiders, and anybody that so much as crossed their eyes at their assets. And a couple of the stables around Stifla had opened up a few years before the Union got started, and they knew enough about farming to get some crops going. But even two centuries after the war there isn’t a lot of ground that’s suitable for growing much of anything. And since the Union didn’t want to deplete its numbers to work the few crop fields they had, they turned to slaves. A single company of troops armed to the teeth with automatic weapons can keep all the Union’s farms in constant production, under the direction of stable-trained and educated supervisors. That leaves the rest of their forces free to expand the Union’s trade reach, and they use part of their food surplus as a commodity.”

Light Tail’s stomach began to grow sour from the food in her stomach and what was left of it on her plate, suddenly beginning to realize that maybe this good-tasting food was there because a bunch of mean-spirited ponies enslaved other ponies to grow it for them. Mom’s face likewise began to see her dinner in a somewhat darker light.

“….expand by force, or lopsided trade agreements?” Mom asked somberly.

“A mix of both. But about ten years back, they started outright claiming towns for themselves. They got the biggest guns, and more of them than anyone else, and they seemed to figure out that they didn’t necessarily have to go into fragile trade agreements to make money when they could just conquer a town and take a portion of caps as a “tax” from residents and merchants alike. They went as far out as Trotpeka, took it over and started sending companies across the valley to scout out potential acquisitions. Then they ran into us.”

….uh-oh….

“We’d been sending scouts out across the valley for years before they came over, saw what they were doing there, and we didn’t want them doing the same thing to us or any of the towns on our side. That started the first war in the prairie since the Last Day.”

Now Light Tail’s appetite waned into near-oblivion, stunned by the freely-spoken word of “war”.

Had no one learned anything from the last one?

The short silence gave Ada enough time to munch on her dinner a bit longer before continuing. “A good deal of the early fighting was around the valley. We’d set up ambushes at the only passable routes, and any Union patrol or caravan that tried to cross, we wasted to the last pony. A few months into the war, some of those caravans started turning into counter-ambushes and got a few of us killed, so we switched up and took the fight across the valley, into their territory, and that’s where the really nasty stuff happened. Union troops are organized well enough, but they operate in large groups and they’re too compartmentalized to move or operate too freely without orders from somebody higher up in the command chain. We’re more like guerrilla fighters, we move in small groups, we hit hard and fast, and we don’t stick around in any one place for long. Some of the towns they’d claimed started fighting back against Union control, and we’d train them the best we could. We’d funnel in weapons, med supplies, ammo, whatever they needed to fight effectively. We didn’t have the numbers to fight them head on, but for a while it looked like we could keep them tied up in a constant chase across their side of the prairie trying to hunt us down. We even got word of Union-wide orders to kill any Prairie Runner on sight, anytime, anywhere.”

For a while….bad news, coming our way, Light Tail murmured silently, her right forehoof softly stroking a sleeping Mona at her other side.

“Then we got stupid. All our successes gave us the idea to hit the biggest and largest group of Union troops at a camp near Basin Ridge, just ten miles south of Stifla. Had to work our way around Fort Wiley to get there without being spotted, but we thought if we could at least displace the line of troops they were using to guard the capitol town of their territory, it’d make them more eager to negotiate an end to their expansion on terms of our choosing, not theirs. We gathered up as many guerrilla cells as we could, and made our play….and we lost.”

“It was a trap, wasn’t it?” Mom inferred aloud, to which Ada agreed with a slightly bitter nod.

“Big one. Most of our cells were wiped out after we completed our initial objectives. The seventeen of us that survived had to fight our way back out into the basin where we’d staged our blocking force. We managed to fight ‘em off to a standstill, even with the reinforcements they got from Fort Wiley, but with most of our guerrilla cells gone, we couldn’t keep up the hit-and-run tactics in ten places at once like we used to. They stopped trying to cross the valley afterward, but that one battle solidified their hold on this side of the prairie since they’d wiped out most of the resistance to their rule. We walked right into it...”

This seemed to be a sore spot for Ada, because she stopped talking about it and went back to her food for a bit, and Leon got to pick up the tale again as by then he’d managed to devour the majority of his meat.

Maybe she’d even been at this battle….

“We did manage to get a negotiation with them,” he said. “Just not the one we wanted. Met on the one bridge connecting Trotpeka to the western side of the valley. They wanted at least some trade access to the western half of the prairie, and they were willing to call off the war if we’d let them send caravans now and then across the bridge. With most of our fighting force in the east gone, we didn’t see any other way of keeping their grunts on their side of the valley. So we said yes. That was about seven years ago. Ended the Unification War, with partial results for both sides. Think the Union came out far more ahead in the end, though. Now they’ve got a presence in every town in the Prairie.”

“Trotpeka’s grown into a trade port since,” Ada added after a particularly hard swallow of chewed meat. “It’s the one Union-authorized access point across the valley, and our side of the prairie has things they can’t get as easily here. Gun parts, munitions manufacture, a decent stock of unmutated livestock and meat for the griffons here, and a couple of intact medical facilities that can still make healing potions and first aid supplies. Even got an optics factory that makes riflescopes by hoof and claw. Slow to make, but well worth the two thousand caps for a ten-power scope with no scratches on the lens. Still trying to get me one for my .308…”

“….so if you two fought against the Merchant Union, how is it that they’re even allowing you to be here?” Mom asked next, before gingerly dipping back down to her plate for a nibble at her fried potato sticks. Must’ve been really hungry to not care that it was probably made from potatoes grown by slave labor….

“They rescinded their kill-on-sight order, not that they ever could follow through on it in the first place. They still don’t like us, and if they think we’re hitting their registered slaver companies they’ll come after us anyway. We’re only getting away with hunting Saurus ‘cause he’s not registered with the main slave trade office in Stifla, otherwise we’d be in big trouble. And since he’s not registered, he can’t ask them for protection either, he’s gotta take care of that on his own. Slaves are a different matter, they’re considered protected product no matter who brings ‘em in. Kite and BJ might not be wearing collars, but the marks on their necks signals who the last slaver company to own and sell them was. Without registration papers you won’t be able to move around too freely without risking trouble with the Union patrols. I saw you talk your way past the first one, but I know the stallion in charge of that particular squad and he’s the rare inept type. You won’t get that lucky again, I guarantee it.”

I knew there was some kinda system to the whole thing! the filly snarled in her head as she took back to her meal, intent on at least finishing it off instead of enjoying it. Food was food, and it was better to eat it and stay strong than let it go to waste and get weaker later. Crud, maybe we were better off with the collars….even with the bombs in ‘em….

“Some scarves or bandannas should cover up the marks, at least at a glance,” Mom suggested quietly. They might’ve been the only ones in their corner of the bar, but they weren’t taking any chances of somepony hearing them on the other end. “….but no, that might not work either, Union patrol would just check underneath to be sure. Dammit, those collars might’ve actually been useful—“

“No, please,” Kite begged almost immediately with a startled gasp. “I-I’d rather take my chances, please don’t make me wear that thing again…”

“If it were just you at risk I wouldn’t, but I got myself and my daughter to worry about too—“

“Mom, don’t,” El-Tee butted in before she could finish. “She said no. Don’t force it on her. You might as well be asking her to be a slave again if you’re gonna do that.”

“….kid, you keep this up, I’m gonna start thinkin’ you’re the brains of the group,” Ada said with a devious smile. “You’re right, Union patrol will check yer necks no matter what. But they’ve been cutting back on their rounds lately, sticking to the main highways, and they aren’t at the main town entrances like they usually are. Think it might have something to do with the massive radroach sightings around Stifla, they may have pulled most of their troops to clean ‘em out and keep their crop fields safe. Once that’s done with though, you can bet on seeing a patrol on every road you set hoof on. It may be weeks, but they’ll be back in force. If those two don’t get out of their territory by then, they probably never will.”

“How?” Mom huffed angrily, a forehoof slamming the table out of frustration. “You said it yourself, the only way across is through Trotpeka—“

“I said the only Union authorized way was through there. There’s other routes through the valley, most of them within thirty miles of the city. They’re dangerous ones, and not just ‘cause of those psychotic raiders. The megaspells and zebra weapons didn’t change just the wildlife. They changed ponies too. Those unlucky enough to survive the radiation exposure of the blasts turned into…into something else. They look dead and rotting, only they’re not. And some of them…they went cannibal. Full-out mindless cannibals, and they’ve taken up parts of the valley around the city. We call ‘em ghouls. The sane ones are nice enough, but a little sore at us “fleshies”. They can’t survive without regular exposure to radiation, it seems to heal them. The cannibal ghouls….it’s not pretty. You’d have to be crazy to want to go through there…or know a safe route.”

El-Tee caught the mischievous glint in the griffon’s eye as she said that. “A safe route that you guys would know about.”

Ada’s amused chuckle brought back slivers of hope to the filly. “…yeah, you’re definitely the brains. I’ll give you two routes, in case you end up having to turn back from using one of them. But don’t use it more than once. They’re our only way back into the east side of the prairie unnoticed if we end up in another war and we don’t want the Union finding them. And I think you guys will like it better on the other side anyway, very few slavers, no big group of heavily armed ponies telling you what to do or what you can have, and raiders have a hard time popping up for more than a week without getting shot to pieces. Food and water’s not grown by slave labor, it’s worked by ponies willing to do it. It ain’t as much as what the Union can grow, but it’s honestly grown. Over there, you can make your own way through life. Over here, part of what you make goes to the Union whether you like it or not.”

“This that recruitment thing you kept asking me to take up yesterday?” Mom shot back with a sneer of suspicion.

Ada’s smile only grew wider as she laughed. “My sales pitch that obvious, stable pony?”

“We should check it out.”

Of course she wants to chat it up five minutes before bedtime, Sling groaned to herself as she spat the last of her mouthwash into the sink of the restroom attached to their hotel room. Another short stream of lukewarm, clean water from the working faucet washed her mouth clean of the remaining residue. “We’re not walking through a valley filled with radiation-mutated cannibals. I don’t care how promising those safe routes Ada gave us are.”

Max and Mona began to whimper at how much the ceramic tiled floor of the restroom amplified her voice, disturbing their brief entry into slumberland, and they began to struggle to get on their feet and stumble their way closer to her—

“No, no, sit,” she commanded of the sleepy pups sternly, cementing her desires with a firm push back onto El-Tee’s barely-worn stable suit, which still had enough of her scent to it that it seemed to keep them calm whenever she was out of their sight. “Stay. I mean it.”

Max—she could tell it was the male by his slightly larger size compared to his sister—refused her command and simply nuzzled her foreleg as she pushed it against him, but Mona seemed resigned to her fate of a night in the dark without the presence of another soul aside from her littermate.

“I said stay!” she tried again, louder and with slightly more force in both voice and hoof, and this time Max took the hint and stumbled back onto the stable suit. But he wasn’t happy about it and continued to whine quietly as she backed out of the restroom.

“Good boy. Stay.”

His eyes pleaded with her to reconsider as she shut the door, but thankfully he didn’t resort to barking and howling to change her mind. He probably thought Light Tail would do it for him.

He would come to find out just how foolish a notion that would be.

“I still think it’s worth at least a look,” the filly continued to press, now that the puppies were more or less corralled. “We’ll never get across the valley through Trotpeka if those stupid union ponies are watching for runaway slaves. And even if the other side is no better than this one, it’s still the only way to get to the Equestria Core. The old highway through to the north ran from Withercha, remember? That was how the prairie kept in touch with Equestria That Was.”

She remembered her Equestria history class from her school days very well. She also remembered that not one soul had so much as mentioned that highway or any of those cities in the Equestria Core in the three days they’d been out of the stable. “El-Tee, not one soul has even said anything about them. Whether they survived, or tried to send help, or if they even keep in contact with them. Equestria That Was could have been turned into a radioactive lake in the megaspell exchange for all we know.”

“We won’t find out for sure until we try. We talked about this already! There’s gotta be somewhere safe away from all this!”

“I’m willing to take my chances on the other side of the valley, but not by going through it! There’s gotta be an old bridge or something nobody’s ever found—“

“If there was a bridge we coulda used Ada would’ve mentioned it. Either those union ponies got them, they blew them up, or they got blown up in the war. We can’t jus—“

Outsiders were beginning to display an incredibly nasty habit of interrupting her arguments with her daughter at just the right (or wrong?) moments. A simple creak of the centuries-old door connecting their room to Kite and BJ’s was sharp enough to catch their attention, and a slightly sleepy-eyed, grape-coated mare sauntered through with a slightly irate glare for each of them.

“By Luna’s moon, can you two stop fighting for just five minutes?” Kite seethed quietly. “Some of us want to sleep today.”

Another silent, uncouth swear formed on Sling’s lips, though no sound ever gave it enough life to be heard. “….sorry,” she squeaked sheepishly. “Just….trying to figure out where to go from here.”

“Can it wait ‘till morning?” Kite begged, her voice suggesting that this would be the heavily preferred option. “The prairie’s not going anywhere.”

“I’ll wait if you’ll tell us if anypony’s ever heard from Canterlot or any of the cities up north,” Light Tail countered sweetly with an innocent-eyed gleam in her eyes. “That’s where we wanna go eventually.”

Kite’s eyes darkened and fell in on themselves. “….don’t bother. There’s no way to get there.”

“And how would you know that?”

“Because I used to live on the west side of the prairie when I was your age, little one,” the scarred former slave croaked sadly. “That old mountain path into the Equestria Core? It’s a nightmare, a no mare’s land. Just a big open wound of flesh-stripping sandstorms and broken land where there used to be life. Not one living soul has ever come out of it in the two hundred years since the war ended. If there’s anything left on the other side of the pass, we’re cut off from it."

Chapter 11

A blissful existence in dreamland came to an abrupt, rude end with the uninvited touch of a cold object sticking itself to her face. Its effect was such that her senses were rapidly coming back to life, to the point where she couldn’t even remember being asleep at all.

She’d come to learn the culprit of this crime very well.

“Hey!” she squealed in sleepy protest, a foreleg coming up to push the puppy’s nose away from her. “Quit it!”

But the puppy wasn’t fazed—if anything, trying to refuse its presence just made it more determined, and now included a healthy licking across her face. In addition to being really gross and wet, it did a good job of killing any remaining vestige of sleep from her body.

“Oh, gross, stoppit!” she commanded again, this time using both forelegs to make her point a little more clear. “I mean it, stop!”

The other puppy joined its sibling in the showering of affection towards their new adopted caretaker, and now two wet, cold noses and sloppy tongues were rapidly ruining her mane and coat as she quickly retreated from the bed and began to flee towards the restroom. “Help! Mom! Kite! BJ! They’re being clingy again!”

But nopony came to her rescue, and little Max and Mona had gotten exceptionally talented at staying within two feet of her whenever she was awake. By the time she’d made it to the restroom and began to reach out with her magic to slam it shut behind her, the pups had already managed to catch up to her and resumed their near-daily “good morning” greeting.

Fine, then! she grinned evilly as Max’s head pushed its way around her left foreleg to lick at her cheek below her left eye. You wanna play rough? We’ll play rough!

“All right, fine, slobber me, but guess what?” she cackled, turning her magic towards the barely functional bathtub behind her. “When you’re done, it’s bath time!”

To make her point loud and clear, she then deliberately shifted a spell field over the faucet knob and twisted it on, and the change in their mood was instant and priceless. They no longer wanted anything to do with her, and even began to turn away and try to run back out the door, but she quickly shut it in front of their faces to trap them inside the restroom with her.

“Oh no, not this time! I gotta take a bath ‘cause of you two, so you’re gonna get one too! Now get over here!”

Their excited yips quickly turned into a series of pitiful whimpers and yelps as they found themselves encased in her telekinesis and dragged into the running shower with her. She had to practically sit on Mona to keep her still most of the time, but once Max got soaked all the way down to the skin he usually stopped struggling with her and gave up, lying down in the tub and begrudgingly allowing her to soap his coat with a dab of conditioner. She’d have washed them separately (along with herself), but with water being such a precious commodity out here, it was faster and less wasteful to just go ahead and get it all done at once.

She spent the next ten minutes washing both herself and the two husky pups as thoroughly as she could manage, and then shook herself free of the remaining loose water before hopping out of the tub and pulling the pups in behind her. They followed her lead and covered the walls (and herself) with water shaken from their own bodies, but it wasn’t anything that couldn’t be cleaned up in a couple of minutes. In fact, this time was probably the least destructive bath time she’d given the pups so far. The first time, it turned out that their “gray” fur was actually more black than gray, mostly because with all the dirt and grime they were covered in it was hard to tell—but this awesome discovery was marred by the fact that it took two days to completely clean the towels she’d dried them off with afterward.

As she strolled back into the hotel room and floated the pups over onto her bed, her eyes swept over her saddlebags nestled against the foot of the bedframe….and found that Mom’s bags were missing from her bed, and her heart took a short plunge into her chest.

Gone, again. Without even saying a word this time….

No telling where she went off to. Sometimes she’d be gone half the day, and other times she’d be back before lunch. But when she was gone most of the day, she usually came back with less ammo and more caps.

She didn’t have the guts to ask why. She figured it out the first time Mom had done it—bounty hunting seemed to require the hunter to shoot and kill the bounty for a reward. Mostly caps. And Mom had done this twice a week since….

….a quick glance at a series of hash marks engraved in the wood above her bed reminded her of the passage of time, and for a second time felt herself grow depressed with her morning.

Five sets had been crossed out with a single line, making the sixth set stand out with its four unbroken marks. She barely felt herself scratching it out with a small folding knife, partially unwilling to believe the number.

Thirty days. A month, more or less.

That was how long it’d been since they left the stable. They’d spent most of it here, in this run-down hotel from centuries back, because Mom wasn’t willing to venture any further without knowing the area they were going through. And while she knew Mom was right to want to learn about the region before trekking through it, she couldn’t help but wonder if she was also using it as an excuse to stall and put off the resumption of their journey.

It wasn’t like Mom to be scared of something to the point where she’d put off doing it.

With little else to do until she returned, however, Light Tail resigned herself to another day of lounging about the hotel room, re-reading Mom’s firearms recognition book or The Mare of the Everfree (she’d finished it three weeks ago), or counting up all the bullets in her saddlebags, or taking her guns apart and putting them back together for practice. She’d gotten to the point where she could get both of her guns down to their major components and back together in under a minute.

But before she could start another boring day in the hotel room, she had to dry herself and the pups off before they turned the whole bed into a wet blanket. So she pulled a dry towel from her saddlebags, hopped up, and started rubbing the towel over their damp bodies to soak up the moisture. Neither of the pups seemed to mind this part of bath time—in fact, Max seemed to like it. Probably felt like getting scratched behind the ears to him.

She became so absorbed in the task that she didn’t even notice she had company until BJ started bumping the bed frame with a forehoof to catch her attention. “Lot more work than you’d thought they’d be, hunh?” he said as his hoof banged against the wooden leg in front of him.

“Actually, I thought it’d be worse,” she shot back with a grin. “Thought they’d be using the entire floor for a bathroom, but it turns out they figured out what commodes are for. Surprised me and Mom the first time we heard them use it.”

“……gross,” the colt shuddered in disgust, jumping up onto the bed so he wouldn’t run the risk of being ignored. “Impressive considering they’re maybe three or four months old, but still gross.”

“Less gross than having to clean up after them,” she reminded him, half her towel now damp to the touch whenever it brushed against her forelegs. She tossed it onto a nearby bedpost and pulled another dry towel from her bags to resume the task—she’d gotten herself mostly dry now, and Max was only wet from the shoulders on up, but Mona’s coat was still slick with water and beginning to soak the sheets beneath her.

BJ wasn’t one to keep up small talk, she’d learned—when he was done with a subject, he’d just stop talking and walk away, or find something else he wanted to talk about. “Your mom tell you if we’re gonna be leaving today?”

I wish we would get moving again. “She was gone when these two jokers woke me up,” she murmured disappointedly, rubbing the towel against Max’s shoulders, much to the husky pup’s delight. “Her bags were gone too, and so’s most of the junk she and Kite have been hoarding for the last two weeks. Maybe they’re finally getting around to selling it.”

BJ snorted in contempt and settled down into the bed with his legs folded in beneath him. “’Bout damn time, got tired of tripping on all that crap. We might be leaving today after all. Your stuff still packed up?”

“Always,” she answered, feeling a slight relief at the idea that they might finally get back to finding a new home for the stable. “We’d be gone already if we hadn’t kept all that junk Mom kept bringing back every day.”

“Nah, she had the right idea. Trotpeka would be two or three day’s walk from here if that highway west wasn’t blocked off right now. We’ll have to go up and around it, through a coupla smaller towns to the northwest, and then come back down towards the city. Adds a couple weeks to the journey. Might need the extra caps.”

“What’d the Union block the road off for again? I wasn’t really paying attention when Mom came back last night.”

“Some mass outbreak of ants,” he answered with a soft sigh. “There’s supposed to be several nests of ‘em around an old stable twenty something miles north of here. Your mom said they lost a couple of patrols around there last week, and another on the highway yesterday morning. And that road happens to be a major trade route for the Union’s more prosperous caravan companies. So of course they’d shut it down for a clean-up. Our route goes around the wasteland the nests are located in, so when we do get moving, don’t wander too far off the road when nature calls and keep a gun handy.”

Great, El-Tee spat inside her mind with dread. ‘Cause having to relieve yourself in the open wasteland just has to have the risk of getting you killed doing it. I’m gonna miss this place. “You call it an ‘old’ stable….meaning nopony lives in it now?”

“Nah, everypony in it came out decades ago,” he said, shifting in place a little but otherwise remaining completely still. “Their descendants are spread out all over, probably even across the valley.”

“Why’d they leave?” she asked next, though in the back of her mind she was already coming to the conclusion on her own—that they had no choice.

“It wasn’t willingly,” he confirmed for her, and the speed at which the towel lathed and rubbed against the pup’s damp fur slowed a little bit. “But nopony knows for sure now. Maybe the power died, like your stable. Maybe they couldn’t grow their own food anymore. Maybe those ants found a way in and they couldn’t hold ‘em off.”

El-Tee couldn’t help but think back to the morning that had forced herself and Mom to the surface, to all the gunfire that she’d heard in just the fifteen minutes from the power outage to the explosion in the infirmary that had sent everypony running for another safe haven (and leaving her and Mom behind), and she swore she thought she could even hear it again for a moment. Short bursts, or singular ear-splitting booms, or….

…or the fact that mere radroaches had managed to do enough damage to trigger the evacuation alarm and simultaneously disable the majority of the power grid for the stable. And they weren’t much bigger than a really big full-grown cat. If these ants out in the wastes were truly as big as a cow….

“….our stable had plenty of guns,” she heard herself whisper hoarsely, her magic hold on the towel slackening to the point of dropping it on top of Max’s head. “And they couldn’t keep a bunch of mutant cockroaches from breaking the spark generator. If those ants had gotten to that stable, I don’t think anypony would’ve made it out at all. But they still scare me, those Union ponies got armor and bigger guns than anybody else, and Ada and Leon left the day after we came back with these pups….”

“I wouldn’t fret none,” BJ consoled her—truly consoled, as his voice had somehow lost its blandness and disinterest and taken on a slightly concerned tone. “Your mom might not be right in the head at times, but there’s no way in hell she’d ever take you anywhere near a death trap like that.”

The time spent in Syrup Mound had been an enlightening experience.

Her short adventure with Ada and Leon had given her a course of action for sustaining herself and her daughter through some form of steady work. Bounty hunting was a surprisingly lucrative occupation—someone, somewhere, wanted someone else dead or captured virtually every week, and sometimes they were willing to pay rather well for the effort. With her best skills being magic and firearms, Sling found herself particularly well suited for the lower-risk bounties posted at Chet’s diner and soon found steady enough work to keep herself a regular seat in the corner table and stockpile caps for the inevitable time when she would need to find more ammo and med supplies. She did her best to pick bounties that were clearly directed at savages and raiders, but more than once she caught sight of a job offer that had the feelings of being less than honest upfront with what the job entailed. She never had the guts to track down the posters of those bounties to get more concrete details.

In a month’s time, she’d wound up with nine more dead bodies to her name…and the strange, sickening sense that she was being turned into something less than a pony when she found she could look at the accumulated caps and not feel herself close to barfing all over it like she had the first time she’d been paid for killing somepony. It helped that she’d only killed savages so far, but she was not counting on that luck holding for much longer.

When she wasn’t thinking of her changing conscience or her degrading sense of shock at the act of taking life, she was dealing with more external problems. Kite turned out to have a thing for mares, and for her in particular (which made a sick kind of sense considering she’d been the one to kill the slavers holding and abusing her). She didn’t find out until about a week after settling into the hotel, when Kite had made a subtle pass at her after the kids had gone to bed. Caught off-guard and with no real way to gently disappoint her, her only reply was that she didn’t “swing that way” and wasn’t looking to start anytime soon. Kite took it surprisingly well, particularly after Sling explained to her that she was probably just feeling that way because of how they’d met. The two were laughing about the whole thing within three days…but Sling could not ignore the fact that once in a great while, she would feel scrutinized by Kite’s gaze whether her back was turned to her or not. She wanted to say something, but when she considered that most of Kite’s intimate encounters might not have been by choice, she couldn’t bring herself to object. In the end, she decided that so long as Kite’s longing stares were all she had to put up with, she could live with it.

Allowing her to indulge in her silent desires and longings seemed to help a great deal in getting her to open up some. She’d been unwilling to divulge much in the way of information at first, but as time passed and their familiarity with each other grew, the former slave grew a little more comfortable with dealing with her. And today, it finally began to pay off.

The two of them had taken the pile of loot she’d collected over the last two weeks—mostly dinged, freshly repaired barding and .32-caliber revolvers and a few barely serviceable tools—and sold it to three separate traveling merchants that had set up a temporary market about nine blocks away from the hotel, near the edge of the settled portion of the city. They had just started the walk back to the hotel when Kite popped a question that didn’t deal with immediate survival or their next meal.

“Sling Shot isn’t your real name, is it?”

She curled her head around to her left to stare back at the scarred ex-slave behind her in mild shock. “….you’ve wondered that for weeks, haven’t you?”

“….the way you tell your name kinda gives it away,” Kite murmured in reply, suddenly finding an intense interest in the air off to her side. “Like it doesn’t roll off your tongue like a reflex . I’m the same way with BJ. And let’s be honest, your name doesn’t match your cutie mark at all.”

“Not everypony’s name has to, you know.”

“But enough names do that the ones that don’t stand out more. I’m…I’m just asking, is all.”

She allowed herself to slow down a little so that the other mare would be closer and easier to hear. “…you’re right, it’s not. It’s a nickname I got in the stable when I got good enough at pistol shooting to be able to draw it from a holster and print two-inch groups at twenty-five yards in under four seconds. It’s stuck with me for eight years now. I got to the point where I answered to it as well as I did my real name, and I don’t know that anypony even remembered calling me by any other name after a while.”

“I figured it had something to do with guns,” Kite said. “So what is your real name?”

“What’s BJ’s?” she countered calmly.

She instantly regretted even trying to get that answer. Kite’s body began to visibly shiver, and the confidence in her voice wavered. “I-I don’t wanna talk about that. F-forget I said anything.”

Don’t push it. Easy enough. There were things in her life she didn’t want to talk about either. “…tell me about the slavers, then. How they’re organized, things like that.”

Kite actually wasn’t any more comfortable with this subject than she was with the last one. “….I’ll tell you, after you tell me how Light Tail can be so damn smart and still have no clue where babies come from. I thought stables had schools.”

Sling’s insides began to tense up as decade-old memories began teasing her with snippets of emotional torment suffered along an eleven-month pregnancy….at fifteen….

…and the changes made to the school’s teaching curriculum afterward…

“….I…didn’t…plan on being a mother. It just….happened. My fifteenth birthday, I got the idea to celebrate it by sleeping with a colt…got pregnant right off, but I didn’t find out until about four months later. After that, the stable decided sex ed shouldn’t be taught in the school, but by the parents. Most do a decent job, but others…well, they put it off so long that a few mares and colts fresh out of school and on their first job assignment couldn’t explain why they had different parts or what they were for. I still don’t know myself when I ought to explain it to her….and she’s not old enough to bear young right now anyway.”

“….oh,” Kite’s subdued, quiet voice mumbled. “….you aren’t the first teen mom in the world…even if most of ‘em I hear about didn’t get a choice in the matter….”

Sling felt her breakfast churn slightly inside her stomach. That was not what she wanted to hear half an hour before they were set to venture back out into such a black, evil world….

In hindsight, she’d begun to wish she hadn’t asked about the slavers, but when Kite began to explain it all to her she found it easier to keep from throwing up if she thought about how she was going to deal with them if they ran into one of their “hunting” parties. “The slavers are organized into five guilds, all registered with the Union for trade and asset protection. Each one focuses on providing….”product” for a particular purpose. One guild focuses on farm hands, they’re the Union’s sole source for their crop field workers. Another guild focuses on providing house servants and assistants to traveling merchants…that’s the one that initially caught me, but they didn’t keep me for long. A third provides….whores, for lack of a polite term. They’re one of the worse guilds, they don’t care who buys their slaves, or how old the slaves themselves are. They even have their own brothel that serves double-duty as a…”try before you buy” store of sorts….”

….oh shit, to know that much about them, you’d have had to have been….

Fortunately, Kite kept on going before she could complete that thought and hurl her breakfast onto the neglected, eroding asphalt beneath their hooves. “….one guild focuses on providing physical labor. Wagon pulling, construction, shit like that. The last one is something unique, they actually train their slaves in some technical or medical skills, for the town or two lucky enough to have a semi-functional factory or med clinic. Treat their slaves pretty well, compared to the rest, even let them work their way to freedom. You’d think that would make them an easy target, but they got access to knowledge and instructors you can’t find anywhere else, and everypony knows that what little technology we can still get to work would crumble to dust without them. Plus they got the biggest collection of M.E.W.s this side of the prairie. You don’t mess with them, they’ll dust you and use the ashes as kitty litter.”

“….and they’re all….they get a free pass from the Union to go and catch anyone they want?”

“No, nothing like that….not yet, anyway. There’s no business in having everyone enslaved, they wouldn’t have anyone left to sell to. Plus the Union’s got the guns and the numbers to wipe them out if they ever do get out of hoof. There’s a couple rules to who they can catch and who they can’t. Merchants and caravans pay monthly taxes to the Union based off their profits, so they’re off-limits. Anyone in their employ’s out of bounds too, but as you might’ve guessed some of them use slaves as employees themselves. If you’re a contracted merc or town guard, you’re off-limits, but you can’t stop the slavers from capturing anypony or you forfeit that protection. Union ponies themselves are untouchable, period. But everyone else is fair game outside a town. Thing is, those rules only apply to the slaver guilds—anypony else that fancies to make some quick caps, they can try and kidnap anypony else they think they can take, and the Union and the guilds won’t raise a fuss. It pretty much boils down to whether or not you got the guns to keep yourself free. And if you don’t, and you’re not lucky enough to be working for the Union or a merchant…you’d better stay in town, or travel with a caravan, or you won’t get to where you’re going.”

No. She wasn’t going to wait for a caravan to pile together and start a trade run through the wastes…and they’d stayed too long in Syrup Mound as it was. Saurus was still out there, and any kind of a head start they’d had on him when she’d crippled his wing had long since vanished, even with Ada and Leon hunting him down. They had to leave, today, before he could pick up their trail and hunt them down…assuming he hadn’t already done so and was just waiting for them to leave town.

“Third option is to kill anyone who tries to take you, whether they’re guilded or freelancers,” Sling replied with a fleeting touch across Grayhawk’s grip. “So long as we’re not actively hurting a guild’s operations they shouldn’t be too mad at that, right?”

“Not many folk try it anymore,” Kite answered solemnly. “Most of the ones that did wound up dead, and a couple of times a group did form up to try and make a difference. The guilds just got all their guns together and slaughtered them all, even down to their newborn foals, and the asset protection clause of their registering with the Union means they can do whatever they want to protect their “business”. Prairie Runners are the only ones they’re afraid of, which is why they keep to this side of the prairie. Any slavers heading across the valley are independents—Union and the guilds won’t turn away the “product” if it gets here, but they won’t protect them either. If the Runners ever did start hitting the guilds, it’d give the Union cause to start another war…one they might win.”

Get out of the prairie, she repeated to herself for the hundredth time in a month. Get over the valley, find that mountain pass and find a way through, and get out.

“How do you feel about a plunge into an old, abandoned stable?” she asked next. She’d learned enough about the slavers’ operations for the moment, and there was still the matter of finding better weapons capable of penetrating armored barding. Syrup Mound didn’t have an arms merchant, and the few traveling traders that did have weapons didn’t have anything she would classify as ‘armor-piercing’.

And El-Tee might even enjoy the idea of “treasure hunting” in ancient, pony-built ruins….

“….what are you looking for in there?” Kite asked, a hint of fear in her voice.

“Ada said there might be one or two guns still left in one, twenty to thirty miles away from here,” she answered quietly, her eyes focusing on the dizzying mix of pale colors in the far distance that would soon begin to separate into a throng of ponies milling about the streets. “It’s a hell of a long shot, but I want to check it out and be sure. We need something that can punch through armor or we won’t last long in a firefight with slavers or Saurus. It’s surrounded by—“

“Ant nests, I know,” Kite bit back. “I know the area. Saurus used it to move between Syrup Mound and another town forty something miles out called Maize when he didn’t want to be followed. He knew where most of the nests were, even though new ones seem to crop up all the time as they fight each other for territory. He never went into the stable itself, thought it was a deathtrap with all the ants around it. But he made sure to find it in case he ever changed his mind. One gun can’t be worth all that trouble.”

“One gun, no, but there could be med supplies in there too, I’ve already used up most of the healing potions I left the Stable with.”

“….fine, then. Think I remember enough about the area to find a way around the worst of it…”

Sling’s brief elation at her stroke of luck was dampened by a month’s worth of learning experience in the wasteland….and of the general tendency of luck in her life to be fleeting and random. “….what do you want in return?” she asked, trembling slightly as she began to mentally list off all the possible prices Kite could want to extract from her—

“I want you to take me home,” Kite said crisply without hesitation. “I came from out west. I want to go back. Ada was exaggerating a few things, but she’s right, it’s better over there than it is here. I’ll humor your detours through the wastes, I’ll tell you how to get where you want to go, but I want you to take me home because you’re the best chance I have at getting there alive and free.”

She was struck with an intense sense of irony. Standing in the dusty, cracked landscape of the wasteland, staring out into the endless, abyssal reaches of barren earth and isolated tallgrass, filled her with such an overwhelming notion of defeat and dismay that she couldn’t help but turn her frustration onto the closest living thing she could see.

The one that had told her she had nothing to worry about.

“….what was it you told me back at the hotel, BJ?”

“Shut up, Elly.”

“Both of you be quiet or I’ll be the least of your problems,” Mom snarled sharply, but quietly, her eyes furiously scanning the vast, empty wastes before them in search of large, cow-sized bugs that could bite all of them in half in a single motion.

That was enough of a threat to keep even BJ and the puppies in line—the pups huddled close to her legs and refused to move until she did, and even then they would only move at her speed, and never ventured away from her side. BJ stayed close as well, probably feeling safer within her small sphere of protection than he did outside of it, even if he would never admit it. Light Tail, for her part, was still trying to come to terms with the fact that for once Mom was willingly leading her into a known den of danger, death, and dismemberment for the chance that they would find something worth all the risk at the end. And she missed her chance to bug her about it a half hour ago, because she didn’t want her talking and chattering to be the reason they all got snipped to pieces.

She also had trouble believing she was even out here, worrying about things like food, water, decent places to sleep, having enough ammo to…to kill things, before they killed her. She wanted to believe that she’d wake up back home, in the stable, and be bugged by Emmy and Jam at lunch hour, or in the library, or bug Mom by pouncing on her like a cat from out of nowhere when she trudged through the door to their quarters. She wanted everything she’d ever taken for granted to come back in her life.

Instead she had the company of a scarred ex-slave, a screwed-up-in-the-head colt, two husky pups whose mother had met a very messy end to her hard life, and a mother who seemed to be losing a piece of herself with every life she took…all while she privately whined for petty things like working plumbing systems and a clean bed.

Shut up, Elly, indeed.

So she just squared her withers and, with a final check of her weapons to make sure they were fully loaded, followed Mom and Kite as the scarred, grape-coated mare began to lead them through the seemingly endless swath of dry, dusty earth that looked like it was taking its sweet time dying. Since Mom had the Pip-Buck she could pick up threats that none of them could see, but only as long as they were in its range. Light Tail wasn’t sure if it would show anything that was behind them, so she kept herself occupied by diligently looking around them in a full circle about once every ten to twenty seconds.

Everypony was, in fact. Made it difficult to keep a steady pace going, but at least they weren’t going to be sneaked up on. She even made it her business to look up to make sure no bad griffons were circling overhead….or that no mutant birds existed. She hadn’t seen any, and nopony had ever mentioned any, but she wasn’t going to discount the possibility entirely. She’d never thought a cow could have two heads, and in a month’s time she’d seen over two dozen.

But it wasn’t long before she began to put the majority of her focus on the ground, where more immediate dangers laid in wait. She heard Mom and Kite begin to slow down for a time, and she heard them cursing at what they thought was a low volume, but it wasn’t until she passed by a large splotch of dried blood off to her right that things began to get interesting.

Which, in the wasteland, was usually also dangerous.

“—ething hit a patrol out here, we know that much just by the blood here,” she heard Mom curse out loud as they inched their way through the blood-caked ground beneath them. “But you’d think there’d be a lot of shell casings, they would’ve been able to see trouble coming a mile away—“

“Yeah, Union patrols aren’t usually this sloppy with their situational awareness,” Kite agreed worriedly, moving almost lockstep alongside Mom. “But I don’t see any holes in the ground either, what are we missing—“

“Hey,” BJ’s voice whispered into her left ear as a foreign, tingling sensation began fiddling about her travelling saddle for one of the canteens she’d taken to keeping tucked away within grabbing distance of her magic. “Need a drink.”

“Knock yourself out,” she whispered back softly, swinging her eyes about in a quick sweep and cringing at the sight of what looked like the skeleton of a two-headed cow splayed out with several of its rib seemingly pulled outward.

“Thanks,” he muttered just before the canteen slipped out of the pouch, and she could hear its icy cool contents sloshing about inside as he drank down a quick swig. “…wow, this thing’s awesome, keeps the water nice and cold. It’s got a chill enchantment on it, don’t it?”

“Probably. Never bothered to pull the canvas cover off of it to see.”

“Meh, long as it works, I won’t ask how,” he gasped after a second gulp from the canteen, and then slipped it back into the pouch he’d taken it from. “….probably not a good time for talking anyway, our moms seem pretty freaked….”

When isn’t my mom freaked out lately? she wanted to say aloud. But still, he was right to be worried. Mom had her shotgun out in front of her, aimed low towards the ground so she could see in front of her, and Kite’s magic was wrapped tightly around her survival knife, slipping the blade under a carelessly dropped rifle and laying herself out on the ground to look beneath it as she slowly began to turn the blade upward to tip the rifle up a little. Like she was checking for something beneath the gun…

“…Beige, what’s your mom doin’?” she couldn’t help but ask when her curiosity began to overpower her sense of fear, if only briefly.

“Checkin’ for landmines,” he answered coldly, causing the filly’s stomach to churn in terror as she watched Kite’s actions with a new, horrifying insight. “Mom says the Prairie Runners were really well known for rigging just about everything you could imagine with booby traps during the war, knowin’ the Union would check everything on a battlefield for any kind of salvage. Heard some stories about how they rigged one whole ghost town so bad that it wiped out over sixty Union ponies with just about every improvised munition they could throw in there. Mines, three or four different kinds of grenade traps, shotgun door traps, even heard a couple tales about single-shot rifles slapped together from water pipes and couplings, pipe plugs, screws, a few bolts, and a nail for a firing pin. Bad thing is, the idea spread around to everypony else. Gotta be careful with what you find in the open.”

“…oh Luna, that’s awful,” Light Tail gagged lightly. Suddenly Ada didn’t seem quite as cool as she did a few minutes ago. “Just…it’s awful.”

“It works. Be thankful the Runners had morals, raiders and bandits sometimes use living ponies, hopin’ somebody with a bleeding heart will come running. Those types tend to have more med supplies. If you see somebody standing or lying in the open begging for help, but they won’t move, don’t get close, they could be bait for a trap.”

….oh gods, that’s even worse, nevermind, Ada’s a saint compared to the sick soul that would do something that horrible—

Seemingly satisfied that the rifle was not a trap waiting to claim her life, Kite’s knife floated its way back into its sheath tied around her torso. “Rifle’s clear, take a look at it, Sling.”

A second indigo-colored glow enveloped the rifle, bringing it up to Mom’s view as the magazine fell out of the weapon. “Hate the weight on these service rifles,” she grumbled as she checked the rifle over, its wooden forearm heavily taped together to keep it from falling off the rifle. “Full mag, no barrel obstruction….front sight’s a little bent, but intact…want it?”

“Not my thing, but I’d rather shoot a bug than stab it,” Kite answered, and the weapon and its ammunition slowly floated its way back to Kite until the grape-coated unicorn had it within her own telekinesis spell. Within a moment’s notice she’d placed the magazine back in and flicked the safety switch on, slipping it around and over her back by its carrying sling until the barrel was pointed out to the right. The whole weapon itself, now that she could get a much better look at it, looked a lot like Ada’s black rifle, only longer and heavier looking, and with some wooden parts to it, like the stock and forearm. “Okay, the Stable should be about three miles further….northwest, I think, but there were a couple of big nests between here and there the last time Saurus dragged us through here, we may have to keep going north another mile before we can swing around ‘em—”

Light Tail had her 9mm pistol out and in her tight grasp a split second before she heard the earth around them begin softly rumbling from three different places. For whatever reason she couldn’t place, she’d just known that once Kite started talking about safe paths to this abandoned Stable their luck would run out, and that they would get to find out exactly what had been responsible for all the blood around them.

Probably because those “somethings” that BJ was afraid of were nesting all around them, just waiting for prey to come along before springing out from beneath the ground—

“W-what the hell is that?!” Mom cried out, swinging her shotgun over at one of the three sources of noise beneath the earth.

“Fu—run!” Kite screamed sharply, following her own advice and bolting out straight ahead of them. “Get some distance, they’re slow enough you can outrun them!”

Great idea! Light Tail agreed with a slight, shrieking gasp, stuffing her pistol away and plucking Max and Mona off the ground with her magic before joining everypony in a heated run away from whatever it was that was trying to unbury itself an—

—she finally got to see what it was when a plum of dirt spiraled up out of the ground, pelting everything within ten yards in a brilliant shower of dirt clods and rocks. She didn’t know how long she screamed. Or how she managed to do it and run at the same time.

She’d seen blown-up images of ants in school, back home, and this thing was like, thirty times bigger. It was almost as big as some of those two-headed cows that all the traveling merchants used to haul their wagons around. And those hideous looking mandibles were certainly big enough to kill one outright! Little ponies like her would’ve been gobbled up whole! It made the radroaches that stormed her home look like….

….like…well, ants.

Another giant ant erupted from beneath the dying earth as she screamed her way past it, just as her screaming began to morph into a twisted, terrified laughter.

A laughter that made sense to no one but her.

“Elly, what’s so damned funny?!” she heard BJ screaming into her ears, furious with either her or the giant, murderous bugs digging themselves out from under the ground. Probably both.

And she still insisted on laughing. “Hehehaaa! It’s just…I was just thinkin’ ‘bout the radroaches that swarmed into my stable! And…snrrrk!...and these bugs make them look like old world ants! Hahahahaha—”

“That’s what’s got you laughing your tail off?! By Luna’s moon, why’re all you stupid stable ponies so insane?!”

—a flash of orange lit up the far end of the hallway, accompanied by an echoing burst of gunfire—

Light Tail blinked the memory away, her laughing dying in the instant it took for the real world to come back to her senses. W-what am I thinking, this isn’t funny at all, we could die here—

The sounds of the world rapidly faded into a muffled mess—the screeching ants, the rumbling, cracking ground they were ripping apart to unbury themselves, her own increasingly labored breathing as she fought the air for the oxygen she needed to keep going, all of it began to sound much, much further away than it was before, and in some cases vanishing entirely.

Mom usually started shooting things not long after applying that spell.

With her hearing dampened, she was forced to start paying much closer attention to what she could see. BJ was right where he’d been for the last two hours, right beside her on her left. Mom was only a few feet ahead of them, and Kite was maybe twenty feet further ahead from her. They both had guns out in front of them, Mom’s shotgun was tracking something off to her right like it was trying to line up a shot—

—even with the hearing protection spell, the shotgun’s report was loud enough to rattle her chest, and the burst of fire flaring out from the barrel seemed almost comical in appearance considering how loud the gunshot was. She jerked her gaze right for just a second, just to see what Mom was shooting at—

—she saw an ant half-buried in the ground just a few feet away, as if it were pulling itself out, and Mom happened to shoot it at the moment when its head was oriented up towards the sky. A chunk of its exoskeleton simply burst off of the head, and a second, larger burst exploded from the top, accompanied by a spray of disgusting, greenish liquids she couldn’t identify. Did bugs even have blood?

Regardless, it died instantly, and its body slid back down the hole it had tried to crawl out of. She didn’t even hear it scream. Probably the hearing spell. Or it never felt the shot.

But it was just one giant ant among dozens. Maybe even hundreds. She spared another two seconds to look around, the puppies’ weight pulling at her spell field and making her horn tingle, and she thought she was seeing things at first. She counted two—no, three, four, seven, ten ants behind them, having fully emerged from their hiding spots and scurrying after them. They’d probably walked over the things earlier and never knew it.

To their left….six? Some of them very far off, and more were popping up with every moment.

To their right she counted another eleven, not counting the one Mom blew away.

And yet there was nothing in front of them….

…nothing at all.

Maybe that’s our way ou—, she began to hope, cutting her hopes short as a dark, almost impossible thought came to her. Mom and Kite were wondering what had happened to a Union patrol out there, why they weren’t seeing as many bullet casings as they thought they should….and then she understood. The empty space in front of them wasn’t a path to safety.

It was a trap.

“…w-wait, STOP!!” she screamed as loud as she could, following her own advice and slowing herself into an ungainly and awkward stop as she began to trace the sights of her 9mm over the nearest ant to their left. “They’re herding us!! They want us to go that way!!”

She saw BJ’s body begin to stumble into a slower gait in the brief moment that she could still see him, before she’d turned to face the dozen-plus ants closing in on them with little more than a pistol and thirteen bullets in its magazine—

She got off three shots at a bug, hitting it once in one of its many legs and slowing it down a bit, before she heard Mom’s voice again, much closer than she’d expected her to be, which gave her great relief. “Whoa, Kite, stop, she may be right—”

“Bugs aren’t supposed to be that smart!!” Kite screamed back, her voice growing softer for a moment, then grew louder again as she seemingly turned around to rejoin them. “I’ve never seen or heard of them doing anything like this before!!”

“Well, they’re doing it today!” Mom shouted before her shotgun went off again, and was rewarded with the death screech of another ant behind them. “Ther—oh shit, now there’s thirty of them that way—”

“Another twenty just joined the chase from the way we came!” BJ called out, though El-Tee didn’t bother to look to confirm it for herself. She just kept shooting at the bugs in front of her right now, finally killing the one she wounded after another four shots. How did Mom make this look so easy, she could barely concentrate on holding the gun and keeping the puppies safely in tow! She wanted to focus on just one task, but she was afraid the pups wouldn’t be able to keep up with them on foot when they started running again—

—the pups were ripped free from her spell field, their absence empowering her hold on her gun, and not even a moment later she felt a pair of small hooves stuffing them into an oversized equipment pouch on her saddle—

—the sights on her pistol began to solidify, no longer wavering like a bouncing foal learning to walk, and she had no trouble tracking them onto the next ant and sending two rounds into its body. Though mortally wounded and no longer moving closer to her, it didn’t die right off and continued to scream in pain. Same thing with the third ant, a bit further left, only this time it took three hits to make it stop moving. Eleven…twelve shots fired? She’d lost count, best to reload—

—she slapped the magazine release and caught the magazine as it popped out of the gun, stuffed it in an empty pouch on her traveling saddle and yanked a fresh one out and back inside the gun—

—just as she’d feared, she heard the earth near the seemingly empty path to freedom crack and break as a swarm of ants forced themselves to the surface—

—BJ’s magic took hold of the lightweight revolver still strapped into its holster on her left side, ripped it out and started shooting at the approaching swarm coming at them—

“Idea!!” Mom screamed, bolting out in front of her and scaring the living daylights out of her as her head came within mere inches of sliding into her pistol sights, and she instantly dipped the gun’s barrel down towards the earth—

“Mom, what are you doing?!”

“Plowing a hole through the thinnest ranks!!” she screamed over her withers, her shotgun sliding into its scabbard along her left side, before her 10mm pistol slung out in front of her seemingly of its own will—

Mom started blasting the things left and right, sparing only one or two shots per ant as the eight-strong gang rapidly dwindled to little more than two barely moving stragglers. Bits and pieces of ant heads flew about in a scattered shower of gore with every shot, and amazingly enough, a couple of ants managed to keep moving forward after the first shot tore a chunk out of their brains (if they even had any). The slide on the pistol locked back just as the last threatening ant was sent to the great anthill in the sky, and despite the colossal expense in ammo, they finally had a way out of this nightmare of an ambush.

“Keep running!!” Kite screamed, flying past them all at a speed that seemed almost supernatural “Stay on my tail, we can make it to the stable if we don’t stop!!”

The lightweight revolver found its place back inside its holster just before BJ took off after his mom, and Light Tail’s magic flicked the 9mm pistol’s safety back on as she joined in the great chase of Kite’s tail. With all the adrenaline and fear running through her, she found herself more than capable of keeping up with the two of them despite the weight of her traveling saddle. In fact, she barely felt the thing at all.

But Mom stayed behind them. Never more than a few feet away, but never really closing the distance. She seemed intent on killing any ant she passed by with her pistol if she was certain she could hit it on the run—about once or twice every twenty seconds or so, to be exact, and most screamed death throes before stopping cold forever. Did she think it would make a difference later?

Or was this all just target practice?

Within a few minutes’ time she began to make out what appeared to be a cluster of small buildings far ahead of them, and strangely enough up to that point no ants had ever broken out of the earth in any great numbers. One or two had tried a minute earlier, but Kite’s rifle put them down almost as quickly as they had appeared. It was just another one of the many oddball things about the entire bug ambush that gnawed at her mind…and it was awfully convenient that their route to the abandoned stable was relatively clear, considering how many dozens of the things were popping up all around them every step of the way so far.

She was starting to convince herself that it was deliberate, and not a stroke of luck. That this stable might have the answer for a great many questions as to how their day had turned out like this…and how to get out of it. And that, frankly, intrigued and excited her almost as much as it terrified her. It was almost like a rough draft for an unpublished Daring Do book! Danger? Plenty of it, especially the lethal kind, which terrified her! Mystery? Enough of it to occupy most of her time in that dank, dark stable trying to figure it all out—like, for instance, what had made the bugs smart enough to lay an ambush designed solely to drive them to the real trap, and why there weren’t more bugs in their way when they figured it out and made a straight dash for the stable. Adventure? Having spent her entire life inside a working stable herself, the allure of traveling to unknown parts of the world to discover what lay beyond the next road was as close to unrestrained freedom as she could possibly imagine. Every step was something new to her, and every ruined town and building was a chance to try and find out what had happened to the world after the war, and how things got to the way they were now.

Maybe coming out here wouldn’t be such a waste after all.

It seemed like such an illogical place for a stable to be hiding—a small hamlet of buildings huddled together in the middle of a vast field, far from the highways and side roads, with no easy or quick access possible except by hoof and wing. And the lack of crashed sky wagons compared to the gravity-induced graveyard that had first greeted her when she emerged from Stable 115 was rather worrying—her stable was quite a bit further from Trotpeka than this one. Logically, if the field in front of her home had been littered with the infernal contraptions, than areas of the prairie closer to the Sister Cities should have been crammed with them as well.

But these were rather silly concerns to be having when she was being chased by pony-eating ants the size of a cow, and which had managed to surprise her by launching an ambush designed chiefly to drive them into a pre-prepared kill zone. She couldn’t say from experience that insects never did this, but from all the school studies she still remembered, nothing she’d read suggested that they were ever that clever. The more she thought about it, in fact, the more this particular scenario stood out. She would go so far as to call a classic military tactic.

Which was something that would have to be taught…and which made her wonder if the relatively clear path to this abandoned stable was another trap, or the answer to all the questions that this morning had brought up so far.

She hoped, and prayed, that this stable’s entrance wasn’t locked or frozen shut from decades of rusting—her lungs were beginning to ache and burn from all the hard running, and her legs were beginning to slow down despite her massive physical and mental efforts to keep going. The others were beginning to feel the effects of their strenuous exertions as well, as their hard gallops had begun to degrade into a steady canter. If the stable had been any further way, the predatory bugs surrounding them would have had little trouble catching up t—

Kite dashed straight through the center of the tiny eleven-structure village, ignoring it entirely in favor of a lone barn roughly forty yards away from the clustered single-floor houses and shops—

“Inside the barn!” she called out, sparing only a brief moment to look around her for unseen or unnoticed threats before speeding on ahead. “We’re almost there—“

—a haunch-quivering shriek from behind caused Sling to turn her attention back behind them and fire the last round in her second magazine at a pony-sized ant drone that had managed to scurry ahead of the main horde. But her exhaustion was starting to have an effect on her aim, as the 10mm slug merely ricocheted off the ground in front of it and barely grazed one of its legs. It didn’t even seem to acknowledge that it had been shot at.

Not willing to waste another shot now that she wasn’t shooting at her best, she turned around again and started to charge after Kite and the kids—

—the earth exploded behind her in a frightening display of power, and a cold, stiff something scratched at her hind legs as an adrenaline surge gave her the speed to escape a near-immediate dismemberment at the mandibles of an ant….and what felt like a flash of heat at her hindquarters—

—a plum of flame erupted behind her, nicking at her tail as her startled, tumbling body tripped itself up and caused her to fall over, allowing her a full view of the fire-breathing ant that had nearly bit her legs off—

“Holy FU—”

—her shriek of terror was punctuated by the rapid appearance of her shotgun and a quick tug of the trigger, and the bug’s red-hued skull jerked and bobbled as the charge of nine .33-caliber pellets perforated its exoskeleton, the flames from its mouth dying in a pitiful, vanishing flash just as they’d begun to lick at her hind legs. Its body dropped to the floor in a disgusting, quivering mass of legs and antennae only a few feet away from her.

She didn’t bother to look at the horde slowly pushing its way through the village, but just scrambled back up on her hooves in a running, startled jump that saw all her exhaustion and pains vanish, at least until she had a megaspell-proof blast door between herself and this insane world—

She found herself inside the barn, barely a second behind her daughter, and nearly ran straight into a massive sinkhole making up the majority of the ground inside the structure. The sinkhole itself formed into a wide-mouth tunnel, its wooden supports somehow still intact and decorated with rusted, broken lanterns.

A hole big enough for the ants to get through.

Kite’s tail was already disappearing into the tunnel’s darkened depths, and it was something of a miracle that Sling was able to relinquish control of her telekinetic hold on her shotgun long enough to form a simple illumination spell at the tip of her horn. Its bright white light enveloped everything around her in its revealing glow, chasing away the darkness as she charged into the tunnel with BJ and Light Tail right beside her.

They caught up with Kite only a few seconds later—it turned out she didn’t have a light spell of her own at her disposal, and had slowed herself almost to a dead stop until the light from Sling’s horn threw itself out ahead of the group. But even with everypony in the group back together and within inches of each other again, Sling found it hard to find comfort in their company.

Not when the tunnels were bringing back memories of hallways lit in red, filled with the chittering screeches of mutated bugs and automatic gunfire…

O-oh buck me, not now! She cried in her throat when she thought she saw the walls around her warp slightly. She tried to convince herself it was just the way the light from her horn was hitting the walls, and when that didn’t work she tried to explain it as shadows moving and tilting as she trotted through the tunnel.

And when that didn’t make her feel better, she tried to tell herself that the ants wouldn’t follow them into such a narrow and constricting space.

And when she heard a faint whisper of splitting wood and the high-pitched clicks of excited, hungry ants, she tried to tell herself that the door would open and close long before the ants could reach it.

A notion that died a tragic death in its infancy less than three seconds after she’d thought of it, as the tunnel widened once more into a spacious cavern with enough room for a hundred ponies to fit inside. A large, gear-shaped door imbedded inside a solid sixty-foot wide slab of steel bore faded white numbers—“128”—and signified the location of the Stable that Ada had mentioned a month earlier.

And the operating console by the door was in terrible shape—its monochrome display screen was cracked, and as she skidded to a shaky halt in front of the console she saw that a portion of its built-in keyboard consisted of blank-faced buttons whose identifying paint markers had long ago eroded. It appeared as though only half of the Equestrian alphabet and four numbers remained readable, though she didn’t doubt even those would fade away in the coming years.

Most distressing of all, a quick peck at the keyboard did absolutely nothing to bring it to life.

“O-o-oh crap!” she squeaked in terror as she planted herself upon the ground, tearing at a panel beneath the console to begin a quick check of its wiring. Please be a loose wire, loose wire loose wire—

“Oh crap, what?!” Kite’s voice cried back over the sound of her rifle’s bolt being partially racked, perhaps for a quick check of the chamber. “Open the door already!”

I’m trying!! “I need a minute, the controls are shot—”

“What?! Oh shi—”

The covering panel bent easily beneath her magic, even taking the screws out with it as she broke it off and tossed it aside. The tunnel proved to be an excellent conductor of sound—she could hear the damned ants marching through it even from where she was, and she had to clamp down on her insides to keep from soaking herself and her tail in urine when she heard what sounded like a burst of flame from the depths of the tunnel—

Green wire’s the power cable where it is where it is where is it—

The culprit wire for the power connection—still green in color, somehow, despite two centuries of time—hung loosely from the massed coil of cables and other colored wires, its plug partially disconnected from its socket. She hurriedly snapped it back in place, scooted back out from beneath the console to check the monitor—

A dull green wall of text filled her with relief and allowed her rapidly beating heart some extra room to move in as she began to scour the screen’s contents—

STABLE-TEC INFORMATION SYSTEMS INTERFACE, V.7C4.
SYSTEM RE-STARTING, PLEASE WAIT…

Sling’s mouth dropped open in wordless shock, her body growing numb with despair as her floundering magic began slapping at the keyboard in an effort to make the process stop. “S-shit shit shit no no no no—”

“Mom, quit cussin’ and open the door!” El-Tee’s high-pitched voice pleaded fearfully as Kite’s rifle began to fill the cavern with bright orange flashes. The hungry shrieks of mutant insects began to turn into angry, pained screams.

“—no no start working dammit, work—”

STABLE 128 DOOR INTERFACE.
DOOR LOCK RELEASED.
CAUTION: MAIN POWER OFFLINE. BACK-UP POWER SYSTEMS ACTIVE.
ESTIMATED RESERVES REMAINING: 18%
PROCEED? (Y/N)

Her eyes quickly scanned the debilitated keyboard until she found what she hoped was the “Y” key and tapped it with a quick burst of magic…and was rewarded with the dust-shaking groan of ancient metal as massive gears within the embedded Stable wall began churning for perhaps the first time in sixty-plus years.

“There!” Sling cried out with a mixture of laughter, joy, and tears, feeding a string of buckshot shells into her shotgun until she’d stuffed it full. “It’s opening! It’s openi—”

—she made the mistake of turning around, hoping to see a tunnel filled with dead bugs, and instead found herself staring at what looked like a gang-pile of mutant ants trying to climb over two dead comrades to enter the cave and reach their prey—

“—iieeeeeEEEEEEE—”

Her shotgun rose up in front of her, seemingly unbidden, and began emptying the magazine tube into the ant pile as fast as her magic could work the forearm and settle the bead sight on a moving body part—

—the first blast sheared a quarter of a bug’s head off. While not killing it outright, it stopped moving and writhed in place, stuck amidst its comrades—

—two rifle shots peppered another ant near the top of the pile, but only succeeded in angering it even further as evidenced by its increasingly frantic efforts to break free of the group and eviscerate the stupid little pony that shot it.

Light Tail’s 9mm joined in the fusillade of gunfire assaulting the impromptu bug wall, though Sling quickly found it hard to tell whose shots were doing what other than her own. Her second shot tore through the thorax of an ant that had managed to push its way through the middle of the clogged group, dislodging the dead bodies that had been blocking their progress and allowing better access into the cave proper.

The star-pattern muzzle flashes from Kite’s rifle lit up the cavern another three times, just as Sling racked a third shell into her shotgun’s chamber, and then stopped altogether as the grape-coated unicorn spat a look of hatred upon the silent weapon. “Dammit, I’m out—”

Shotgun blast number three ripped through the guts of a fire-breathing ant as it raised its upper body and began to emit its horrible flames from its mouth. The flames died out as it crumpled onto the cold, rocky floor, screaming in agony and attempting to crawl…somewhere. Forward, off to the side, wherever it wanted to go, it wasn’t getting there quickly. Its legs scraped the floor in vain to move its body, and yet it kept trying…

Light Tail’s gun was the next one to go empty as shell number four bounced into the chamber—a total of three newly deceased ants littered the ground in front of the little filly. “I’m out too—”

The earth shuddered behind them as the Stable door screeched into place atop a track of rails in front of the wall, and the megaspell-proof door began to roll off to the side and exposing the entrance—

“It’s open!!” BJ yelled out, his legs already taking him through the entrance—

—Kite slung her empty rifle across her back and took off after him as Sling fired again, this time taking out a smaller drone ant that had gone around the growing pile of dead bodies to come at them from their right—

—she saw Light Tail turn and dash past her, out of the corner of her vision, and she took this as her cue to move back to the console and quickly mash in the command to re-seal the Stable door, and then run into the Stable herself—

—a shriek from behind, far louder than any of the others, was the only warning she got before she felt a pair of hard, sharp-feeling limbs snap onto her left hind leg and bring her running to a crashing halt just past the entrance. She managed to twist herself over onto her back, cutting her leg in the process, reached out with her magic for the shotgun that had flung forward into the stable when she’d been grabbed—

Her captor was a crimson red, monstrous-sized ant, larger than even a brahmin, using its large mandibles to grab onto her leg and pull her towards its hideous mouth and a second, tiny pair of eagerly clicking smaller mandibles—

For perhaps the first time in nearly eleven years, she screamed like a little foal as she frantically ripped her shotgun off the grated floor and slung it into the mutant insect’s mouth, barrel first, shucking the empty shell out of the chamber to make room for the fifth round—

—the mutant bug’s head muffled much of the shotgun blast (as well as its brief, surprised shriek of momentary pain), and its large mandibles instantly released her slashed, bleeding leg and allowed her to pull herself back through the closing door. It continued to stumble about, as if no longer receiving clear instructions from its brain, and only as the massive stable door rolled back over the entrance did it collapse and begin to twitch uncontrollably on the cavern floor.

One less problem to deal with when they came back out, at least.

With the stable door sliding back into place within the entrance and sealing it against the outside world, the four terrified, exhausted ponies were finally given a respite from the wasteland’s trials to focus on more immediate concerns. For Sling, the most immediate concern was to find a dark corner in this stable’s “Gate Room” and let her bladder empty itself onto the floor rather than her hind legs and tail as her body began to come down from its adrenaline-induced state of survival. She barely had the capacity to be ashamed for such loss of self-control, though she did catch Light Tail’s gaze trying to follow her before Kite bluntly nudged the kids further back into the Gate Room to allow her some semblance of privacy for the next thirty seconds.

She tried hard, with some success, to think of anything but bugs and stables, and just put all her mental focus onto other thoughts, and onto not sounding like she couldn’t breathe (even if it was true). Shotgun was still within reach, empty, locked open—odd, she didn’t remember working the forearm after that last shot—10mm pistol still had…..three loaded magazines? Four? So hard to think straight all of a sudden, it was so clear before th—

No. Think of something else, think of Light Tail, Mare of the Everfree—

—a field of wheat stalks amidst a chilly, cloudless winter afternoon, Celestia’s sun shining high above the world—

She wasn’t sure if her sigh of relief was from the daydream or the sudden lack of pressure on her bladder. Didn’t matter either way. Her body was done humiliating her.

After taking a few moments to clean herself up, she began to tread back out into the dim, dark red lighting offered by the back-up lights, already taking note of how much different this stable’s entry floor was from her own. Aside from a side office off to her right where stable security would normally station a pair of ponies as a form of administrative punishment, the entire room was flat throughout, with no raised platforms or stairs of any kind. And the way this Stable’s door opened and closed was not like 115’s door either.

She didn’t know why she expected it to be the same. She would’ve felt more uncomfortable about this place if it was. Even so, with her body beginning to lose its shakes and her breathing coming down to a soft, silent rhythm, she felt it prudent to at least check her shotgun over. Seven shells fired in the course of…what was it, five minutes total? Not bad, really, though the expenditure of twenty-five 10mm rounds was a little distressing, she hadn’t found much of the war-era stuff in the last few weeks. Out of reflex she racked the shotgun’s forearm forward to close the action, squeezed the trigger to reset the slide lock, then began to load the magazine tube up with more buckshot rounds, but stopped after slipping the fourth shell in and leaving it one shy of its maximum capacity—this way, if her target was out of shotgun range at the start of a fight, she could just load a slug round on top of the four buckshot rounds, chamber it, and give the target a nasty surprise as to how safe they really were. So long as she didn’t top off the magazine tube entirely, she could keep doing this until they were dead or close enough for the buckshot.

She’d barely gotten the fourth shell into the tube when she spotted Kite slinking out of the side office, heading straight towards her and keeping as neutral a look on her face as she could manage.

“….everything okay now?”

Sling’s face burned hotly with a mixture of shame and anger. “Nobody thought to mention that these things breathe FIRE!?”

Kite’s body froze into place, her face flinching under the sudden burst of anger flung in her direction. “….I-I didn’t know,” Kite whispered fearfully, her eyes slowly tracing downward. “I’ve never seen or heard of that either, I swear! I don’t know every damn thing there is to know out there!”

She almost made the mistake of uttering ‘BULL’ when her nerves began to remind her of the very sharp mandibles that had grabbed hold of her right hind leg, sending fiery jolts of pain straight into the bone and muscle as she walked. “….fuu….dammit that’s starting to hurt…”

Kite was quick to jump onto the opportunity to change the subject. A little too quick. “Y-yeah, it’s bleeding pretty good, cut up all around the gaskin. But you’re not limping. Better lay down anyway, even if it’s not serious we’ll need a minute to clean it up and bandage it.”

Every step she took seemed to make the pain sharper and move deeper into her leg, and so she promptly stopped and plopped down onto her left side after popping her travelling saddle off and setting it on the floor—

“—oh crap, didn’t see that,” Kite snapped at herself harshly, quickly zipping her head down towards the injured leg. “Stay still—”

Sling’s thoughts of the other mare’s intentions briefly took a dark, sinister turn before Kite’s teeth clamped down on what felt like a small knife embedded on the inside of her leg, prompting her to raise it momentarily so the ex-slave could get better leverage on the offending object—

Kite jerked the piece of toothy mandible out without hesitation or a warning, causing Sling to scream in pain for a couple of seconds before catching her tongue. Couldn’t let El-Tee see her lik—

“Mom?!” Light Tail’s voice cried out tearfully, her hooves quickly pattering across the floor as she emerged from the side office at the sound of her despairing mother. She could hear Max and Mona’s feet scrambling after their caretaker—

“Whoa, slow down and take it easy!” Kite snapped back before the filly could start freaking out and hyperventilating. At least, that’s probably what Kite intended to prevent. “I just need some med supplies and we can fix this up.”

El-Tee slid to a stop right next to her mother, her magic reaching into her spacious, spell-enchanted saddle bags for a first aid kit and plopping the metallic case down beside the two mares. “Got some water too—”

“Save the water,” Sling butted in, reaching into her own bags to take out one of her stable suits as she began to find a sense of calm washing over her now that she had something else to focus on. “The iodine and antibiotic ointment in the kit will do for cleaning the wounds….”

Kite’s eyes darted back to the first aid kit by her forehooves, widening slightly in surprise as her horn lit up and pried the casing open to examine the contents. “….oh dear gods, this is sinful. You have a better set-up here than what most “doctors” can scrounge up from the ruins of an old hospital.”

Sling almost laughed at the notion until she remembered the first makeshift med clinic she’d seen in the wastes, and specifically the image of a mare with a handsaw and medical cross cutie mark having just finished amputating a poor soul’s leg…

“…gimme your knife,” she sputtered as a stable suit was dragged from the depths of her travelling saddle and pulled towards her. “Sooner we get this done, the sooner we can start poking around for something we can use to fight our way back out.”

Kite felt an unbidden urge to sarcastically remind the stupid stable pony whose idea it was to come here in the first place, but the sight of the poor thing bleeding all over the floor and still coming down from a fear-induced panic attack made it very difficult to actually want to do something like that. So she set to work cleaning up the series of slashes that adorned the mare’s gaskin—dry cloth cut from the leg sleeves of a stable suit to wipe off the blood, a few droplets of iodine across the oozing cuts themselves for disinfectant purposes (which caused Sling to curse through her teeth and flinch from the stinging pain), a dab of antibiotic ointment to help prevent further infections, and a few gauze pads to both sides of the leg, tied down with about six feet of elastic bandaging to cover the wounds, though this meant Sling would be walking with a slight limp due to the restricted movement of her wrapped leg. If they could find some spare healing potions in the clinic in the next hour, she could come through the injuries with next to no scarring—otherwise, she’d have to resort to a suture kit to help close the cuts, and Sling would be sporting reminders of her close encounter with a fire-breathing ant for the rest of her life. While they had a few potions hand at the moment, Sling was not willing to use them for non-crippling injuries until they could get ahold of a steady supply of them. At the moment, they only had…seven? Eight? Out of the ten total that she and her kid had put together when they came out of their stable a month ago?

It was a shame, really. She’d just grown used to the sight of a pony with no visible scarring to them. She hated to see this mare finally get a mark of the wastes on her body.

On the other hoof, it did give her an opportunity to get a little physically closer than she could have otherwise. She was pretty sure Sling noticed those wandering eyes as she worked to treat and bandage the wounds. But the stable pony didn’t say anything—whether that meant she cared or not, she couldn’t say.

She resolved to make her staring a little less obvious in the future.

With all wounds and weapons taken care of, their foray into the abandoned stable’s darkened depths could begin, and it quickly became something of a fight in of itself as to what part of the ancient structure they would defile first. Sling, naturally, wanted to find that damned gun she’d dragged them all out here to find. Light Tail wanted to find the library and search it from end to end. She, herself, wanted to find the infirmary and see if any medical supplies had been left behind by the original inhabitants.

BJ just wanted to find someplace to take a leak without “a bunch of dainty girls” around. He peeled off from the group when they hit the main atrium on the third floor and disappeared around a corner, and nopony bothered to follow. With all the signs and arrows on the walls pointing the way to wherever a soul could want to be, it quickly became apparent that getting lost in this stable wouldn’t be one of their issues. The hallways themselves were quite spacious, as well. More than enough room for a crowd to roll through, which seemed to throw the two stable ponies off, for some reason.

But thus far, Sling’s PipBuck hadn’t picked up any sign of hostile life. Probably wouldn’t, if that door had been powered down all these decades. If not for all the ant nests in the fields above, this stable would probably be as good a place as any to settle down and make a living.

“Infirmary, level six,” Sling read from the giant, mold covered signboard hanging off the corridor wall by a single screw near the top. “Library….level seven, just like back home….security station’s on level nine, along with the armory….odd, ours was on level five...”

“Looks like the cafeteria’s on five, though,” Light Tail added, a tiny hoof fighting its way around her mother to poke at the lower portion of the signboard where the various locations were listed. “Say we all meet up there in an hour, see what we’ve found?”

“Twenty minutes,” Sling offered instead, backing away from the signboard. “Don’t know how many doors or stairways could be intact. Just see if there’s a clear path to whatever we need to visit, then come to the café. We’ll work out what to do then.”

Not a bad plan. She’d never been in a stable herself—all the rumors of the wastes said the things were supposed to last for centuries, but nopony had ever thought to mention that that estimate was made with the assumption that ponies would be around to maintain the place. She had no idea how long a stable could last without some TLC here and there. “Go on down, then,” she said, stealing a look down the hall to her left to see if BJ was coming back right then, but he wasn’t. “I’ll wait here for BJ before I hit the medical ward. If I don’t find any potions and you’re not willing to use one, I’m stitching up those cuts when we meet up again.”

Sling’s eyes grimaced in fear as the mother-daughter pair wordlessly turned away from the signboard and cantered on down the hallway, disappearing around a corner with the two husky puppies hot on their tails. She couldn’t blame her—a suture procedure with no localized painkiller was…painful.

“Ugh, girls everywhere, never gonna survive this,” BJ’s voice crept into her ears from the hallway, and Kite’s brain flashed brief, blurry images before her that she washed away with a furious shake of her head before the horrors could come back to her.

She wished she could’ve forgotten the day of his birth…

“Oh, toughen up, Beige,” she snipped back. At least that little pet name of El-Tee’s didn’t stir up harsh memories. Seemed to ruffle his nerves a little, too. Which was good, because he’d need to start paying better attention to their surroundings now that their stable pony helpers had gone off on their own. “Could be worse. We could be cramped together in a one room house with nothing but an old pot for a toilet.”

She actually heard his body shiver in disgust as he came to a stop next to her. “….oh gods, why do you say things I can never unhear?”

“Because I can,” she laughed with an evil smile as she began a steady trot down the hall. All the arrows on the corridor pointed ever onward straight ahead, hopefully to a flight of stairs down to the sixth floor. “We’re going to pay a visit to the infirmary, see what’s worth taking. Shouldn’t be long, I don’t expect there to be much left. We’ll meet back up with Sling and Elly in a…café, on the fifth floor in about twenty, see what happens from there.”

“I bet the baby’s all fired up over a library or something silly like that,” the little colt grumbled in her wake as he followed along behind her. “Swear to Luna she never went without a book for more than an hour back in Mound. Something called Everfree Mare or some such. Sling has this real thick book in her bags that she won’t let anypony near, though, guards it real close. Looks important, might be worth somethin’ if we can get to it.”

Oh, her little wastelander entrep…entre….godsdammit, how did that word go? Oh, forget it, they shouldn’t even be having a conversation like this! Not this time! This time would be different. “Not an option. You’ve seen her shoot. We wouldn’t get ten steps away before we got ventilated.”

“Nah, just wait ‘till we get back outside, she’ll wet herself facing all those ants again—”

“I said not an option,” she snapped back sharply, and she could hear his hooves come to a full stop out of reflex. “For Luna’s sake we’re not raiders!”

“N-no, we’re slaves on the run with a pair of clueless stable ponies that got no idea what they’re in for out here,” he replied with a slight shakiness of his voice. “I told that baby to leave those pups behind and her bleeding heart adopted them anyway, they’re sucking up food and water we could be eating.”

“And here I thought you were learning to get along with somepony else your own age for once,” she growled darkly, turning to glare down at her offspring. Gods as her witness, she tried to raise him right, but he had too much of his bastard father in him at times, sh—

“—en that mouth, whore, I don’t care what state yer in, I bought you for only one reason—”

“Yeah, sure, she’s cool sometimes, but she’s so stupid!” BJ shouted back through her memories, mercifully cutting it short before it could turn into a bowel-emptying flashback. “She don’t get that this ain’t her stable, she’s gonna get herself or us killed with that naïve attitude of hers! Sooner we can cut them off, the better!”

“She’s learned enough to point out a trap that I didn’t think was even possible,” Kite said with a slight edge. “She’s a decent shot on her own, took a few bugs out back there. Keeps quiet when she needs to, stays alert, watched the sky far more often than the rest of us bothered to. So what if she can’t fathom the idea she might have to kill somebody? We got more than enough of that attitude between us to make up for it. Kinda nice to have a travelling companion that ain’t lookin’ to gut every living thing they see for their caps and ammo. Could learn somethin’ from her.”

“Like what?” the rebellious colt dared to challenge. Which wasn’t often, she was used to him backing off when she got angry with his callous disregard for anything but himself.

“Like what it’s like to be treated decent for a change,” she snarled angrily, turning around with a stomp and marching off down the hall again. “I don’t care what Saurus’s bastard friends told you. They hurt folk weaker than them for a livin’ and look where it got them! You want a chance at livin’ long enough to die in bed? Keep some folk close to you, folk you trust not to stab you in the back for the scraps you’ve got on you when you aren’t lookin’.”

“Master Bark Skin treated us well enough—”

“We were property to him and all the others!” she howled over her withers, her tail beginning to shake at distant abuses revisiting themselves upon her eyes. “Bark Skin just knew to take better care of his tools so they last longer! I did more than just serve as his nurse in his clinic, y’know! You ever live long enough, I may even tell you what else I did when you weren’t around to hear it!”

“I know enough, Mom,” BJ droned back in that flat, distant tone of his. The one that infuriated her with its disdain for life in general. “We had that “talk” months ago, I ain’t forgot. I…I know what Saurus kept you around for….”

…by the moon, why is this life so hard…. “That’s not what “us mares” are around for,” she said coldly. “It takes two souls to make another and turn it into a family…something I wish you could have had. Those bastards just wanted cheap thrills. You treat a girl nice, you hear me? You don’t treat them as some plaything to toss aside when you’re done, they’re ponies like any other soul.”

“….what got into you all of a sudden?” BJ’s voice squeaked softly, the first sign of emotion other than panic that she’d heard out of him today. “You never talked like this before. It was always ‘stay quiet so they won’t hurt you’, or ‘don’t pay them ponies no mind, we won’t stay forever’. It was always ‘us against them’. What changed when I wasn’t lookin’?”

She hoped the water in her left eye was just the decades of dust she was sniffing as she breathed. “….all you’ve ever known is a slave’s life. You were born into it, told what to do, why to do it, where you could go and what would happen if you didn’t obey. You couldn’t think for yourself if you tried. I still remember what it’s like to be free, to have friends and family you could count on. They may all be dead now, but I didn’t forget them. And if we can get the hell away from the Union, you might get a chance to taste that kind of life. See for yourself what a pony is meant to be. We aren’t property or pack mules, we deserve to forge our own path through life.”

“Ponykind tried that once, blew everything up,” the colt poked back simply. But in those seven words, he managed to punch a hole in her on-the-spot speech of freedom and living. One big enough to fit a megaspell into. “Left all this ruin behind as our legacy. Is any of that worth it?”

She didn’t have an answer. Never would, really. Much as she wanted to say otherwise, when ponies were at the top of the world…what did they do to it? Ruined it, first with their newfangled technology, and then their new weapons. In fact, they ruined it for all life on the world. There was no way of knowing who fired the first megaspell—she doubted that even during the Last Day that anypony knew for sure. She did know that ponies were the ones to come up with the idea. The tech.

The purpose for it.

And what did somepony want to do with something when it was built? Use it. It was silly to think to build something with the intention that it never be used. She couldn’t think of a dumber idea in all the world.

She didn’t have an answer, at least, until they slumped down to the fifth floor, coming out of the crumbling stairwell to stare at a pair of placards on the wall. One read “INFIRMARY”, pointing to the left, while the other read “OVERMARE”, somewhere to the right.

“….go check out the overmare room,” she commanded in a dulled tone. “Come find me when you’re done. Watch for traps, heard stories that those overmare rooms had laser turrets built into their desks or some shit.”

Mercifully, BJ went on his way without another word, and with almost immediate gusto. Probably happy to have something to do that would take him away from her and the increasingly uncomfortable conversation they were having.

Just like all the other times she tried to talk some sense into him.

She made it to the infirmary, barely realizing she was walking, before her frustration and anger grew too great and tight to be contained within her scarred frame, and she lashed out at the closest fragile object she could lay into inside the front lobby—an old table, littered with bits of paper and clipboards. She hammered her rage into the table with her forehooves until it bent and collapsed to the floor before her, spilling its inhabitants across the grime-coated floor like spilled dice.

How, Luna?! she cried silently. How the hell can I do him better than what I got when he doesn’t even want it?! How can I get it through to him?! HOW?!

Like every other prayer she ever bothered to make, she found no answers coming to her. No great epiphany, no sickening realization that she’d been doing it all wrong. Just a face full of tears, aching legs, and a sick sense of hatred for the bond that Sling seemed to have with her own filly. How could such an angry mare be so doting and attached to her offspring like that?! It was obvious to anypony that paid attention that neither of those two would last a week without the other. Elly adored her mother too much to be able to imagine life without her—Sling was so angry, so emotionally distraught for some form of attachment that didn’t include being ridiculed for being a teen mother that her daughter was something akin to a teddy bear to her, whether she realized it or not. And somehow, despite these odd little neurosis, they were family.

Something that Kite hadn’t had since she was fourteen.

With the table obliterated and her rage slightly abated, she began a quick check of the infirmary’s maze of rooms and halls. Many were patient rooms with long-eroded beds and rusted medical equipment, though she did spot a couple of relatively clean scalpels and tweezers she pocketed for later. She found one intact stethoscope on a rolling cart in the main hall, but it looked like it had been home to colonies of various molds and bacteria over the decades and likely ruined. A few rooms turned out to be offices—two still had name plaques in one piece outside their respective doors, a Dr. Lame Hoof (a poor name for a medical pony) and a Nurse Darkheart (also a troubling name that didn’t inspire confidence). Lame Hoof’s office was mostly empty, with only a few trinkets and cracked clipboards inside the desk drawers and a bookshelf that had collapsed on itself. Darkheart’s office, on the other hand, seemed to have been abandoned in a less thorough manner—a terminal on the desk still functioned, connected to the stable’s power supply and still running despite the presence of red back-up lighting suggesting otherwise. The desk had a few syringe kits, with five vials and needles apiece, perfect for making an injection healing stim or a shot of some other, less helpful chems like Med-X or Buff. Or Rage. The chemicals tortured souls were willing to abuse to escape the hell of the wastes was astonishing, when one considered the long-term damage.

Not that she could blame them.

She stuffed the syringe kits into her saddlebag (which had been violently pilfered off of a raider by Sling last week) and quickly found her way through the terminal’s main menu and into the long departed nurse’s filed records and reports, though only a few were intact and readable:

“Log #572: Another session with Wind Shear this morning. Wings are holding up well after his accident a month ago, but not mending as quickly as he’d like. Suggested I use a dose of Hydra to speed the healing process, which I denied. Not much of it, we can’t make more of it, and we may need it if our first venture into the surface world since the bombs goes as badly as I fear it might. With time and proper rest, Shear’s wings will make a full recovery and he’ll be able to fly again. Why is that damn stallion so impatient?

Anyways, as a precaution I’ve asked Lame Hoof to have the Hydra moved to a more secure location than our meager storage room. Suggested the armory on level nine, don’t know if he’ll actually do it, but the request was logged on both the central mainframe and the Overmare’s office. Stuff is damn nasty, we have old records from the war about how recipients grew extra legs or cancerous, bulbous growths in regenerated limbs. There’s a reason it’s listed as “Last Resort”!

Remainder of scheduled appointments went without a hitch. Think Solar Flare is pregnant, but I need her to come in for a check-up to be sure. She’s not a drinker, but the café keeps a stock of whiskey and beer for off-duty residents to chug back. Don’t want her having even a taste of the stuff if she’s with foal, the damage can’t be undone. Only seen it happen once, to Dancer’s foal, but that’s one time too many in my opinion. It’s also the reason why all expecting mares are required to be listed at the café to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Tomorrow’s a pretty light day, maybe I can talk her into squeezing an appointment into her schedule. I’ll talk to her after I punch out anyway, just to make sure she won’t go near the booze.”

Kite added the armory to her list of spaces to search for medical supplies—risky or not, Hydra had it uses, not least of which was as a trading item. Some merc companies used it to keep their numbers from dwindling after a hard fight. Mercenaries that couldn’t walk or shoot couldn’t earn their pay.

“Entry #579: We’ve finally done it! The Overmare allowed a group to venture into the surface for the first time in a hundred and twenty years. They left this morning, eight pegasi and a couple of unicorns. Was told to issue two weeks’ worth of medical supplies and equipment to them, which is listed in the morning log. Still worried about what we’ll find—nopony’s heard anything from Equestria since the war. Could be there’s nothing left of it, or the zebra won and claimed everything that was left in the ashes. Might even be griffon territory now. No telling what they’ll find.

I almost wish we hadn’t opened the door. So much easier to just live down here, forgotten by the world, no troubles but what we stir up on our own. But our stable is important to the survival of those that may have come after. It was slated to house weather pegasi, with a few earth ponies and unicorns for support functions like mine. The miniature weather factory in the lower levels won’t be enough to handle all of the prairie’s weather needs, but it’s done well for retaining weather management skills in the generations after the megaspells fell. Even if we feel we’ll be better off down here, the world above will need these pegasi, if they don’t already.

We owe that much to all those that couldn’t make it to the stables in time…”

She flicked out of the log, moved the cursor down to the next one when her eyes had scanned enough of the remaining passage to figure out it was little more than a rant to relieve unvoiced fears and thoughts. But sometimes, a pony needed somewhere to just let that stuff out, or they’d crack. A lesson Sling had obviously yet to learn.

“Entry #584: It’s been ten days since the expedition left, and everypony’s on edge. Seeing a few more patients than usual lately. Nothing major yet, but if ponies don’t stop fretting and concentrate on their tasks we’re eventually going to see a serious injury, possibly even a fatality. Going to the Overmare later this afternoon to talk about morale efforts.

Oh, yes, I was right about Solar Flare. She came to my quarters last night after my shift, crying and begging me not to tell anypony just yet, only for word to get out this morning so there’s no harm in putting it on official record. Seems she was seeing Mellow Field on the side as well as Bell Seed. She was intimate with both on a regular basis, to the point that she has no idea who the father might be. Both stallions got into it in the café at lunch break, security had to practically form a wall between them to separate them. They’re both cooling off in the brig at the moment, but Solar’s really suffering. Her neighbors on L10 are particularly bothersome, went so far as to smear her door with, ahh…words. Something about being a…”slurping slut”, which is all I care to type down here. Heard another resident on her floor outright asking her if she gave group discounts for threesomes, in rather grotesque detail. Oh, and yours truly now has a warning citation for violence amongst the population and two weeks reduced rations. I still say the jerk deserved it. Letting Solar stay on my couch for the moment until new quarter arrangements can be made. Swear I have no ulterior motive, she’s not even my type. Just…nopony should be treated that way.

And to think I suggested the other day that we have some massive party and orgy to relieve everypony’s stress and boost stable morale—nothing like a healthy, rambunctious night of mindless mating to take your mind off things, right? Yeah, real bright idea, DUMBASS. I’m lucky my skillset prevents me from being punished more heavily than I already have been, or I’d be spending the rest of my life scrubbing washrooms after what happened today.

That expedition team had better get back soon. I can’t wait to have some work to take my mind off all of this.”

Wow, Kite though sadly, flicking on down to the next entry. Guess some things never change…not that Sling would feel any better about knowing somepony else suffered like she did…

Though she had to admit, a night like that with no fear of consequences, biological or otherwise, did sound quite nice….

“Entry #586: My prayers were answered, and now I wish all I had to worry about was which stallion knocked up which mare on his off day.

The expedition team came back, everypony accounted for, and in surprisingly better shape than most of us anticipated. Minor injuries to four, which were treated without issue. All ten have been given indefinite leave from their stable duties while they recover. Not physically.

Emotionally. Their ammunition and med supplies…they didn’t have much left, which might be why they were in as good a shape as they were. The world really went to hell in the last hundred years. Bandits and crazed “raiders” everywhere, stealing, murdering, and raping anything they catch. Small settlements have just enough guns and bodies to stave them off. A massive cloud cover blankets the entire prairie, maybe even all of Equestria itself. Maybe the world. They don’t know. The Twin Cities are in ruins, Withercha especially, seems something called a “bale fire bomb” went off, poisoned most of the earth around it for miles and miles. Not much farmable land. The day the war ended is called the “Last Day” up there. Creepily fitting, actually.

Animal life is nearly gone. What’s left, horribly mutated, bears big enough to claw a pony’s head off in a single swipe, mutant lizards and ants the size of cows. Big, bloated, hideous looking parasprites that shoot spines, carnivorous hogs and pigs….even the fish around the one lake they found are murderous. Lucky Streak swore he saw one walk on two legs, looked more…well, he didn’t know how to describe it. Best he could do was say it walked upright like a monkey, but straighter, and didn’t drag its “knuckles”, which would mean it had…arms?! Celestia perish the thought. Said it tore a little filly in half when the “caravan” they were travelling with got too close to the lake. Recommending him a year’s worth of sessions with the counselor.

The pegasus city of Serenity? They abandoned us. Sometime during the “Last Day”, it’s said, Serenity’s pegasi went and sucked up all the water from the river that they could. The riverbed’s dry now, and the valley around it is lifeless, makes a sort of crude barrier in the middle of the prairie.

One bright spot to all this madness, though. They said they sent Dusty, Leaf Mender, and Sky Star up past the cloud cover. Those three apparently made contact with something called the Enclave. From what they can tell, the pegasi cut themselves off from the world during the “Last Day” of the war, and this Enclave may be all that’s left of Equestria Before. Their meeting wasn’t very friendly, in fact they made it sound like this Enclave is rather distrusting of surface dwellers. But they did show interest in them as pegasi, and at the fact that there might be descendants of the prairie’s weather pegasi still separated from the rest of them.

I nearly peed myself thinking of how this Enclave might seek to “liberate” them from the tight, cold confines of our Stable.

….gonna schedule a counseling session for myself after my shift. Think I need it too.

Dear Celestia, help us through this.

And send a nice stallion or mare my way while you’re at it.”

Ah, the frustrations of a lonely soul looking for intimate company. She could relate, a little. Once in her life, she’d like to have some private time with a willing partner. Preferably a mare. Like Sling.

Who was not into mares, or into experimenting.

Dammit.

This was, unfortunately, the last legible log—the remaining hundred-plus entries that the terminal listed were all corrupted and of little use. Perhaps a year’s worth of data, which meant this stable had been abandoned…what, a year and a half after it opened? How did it get so bad that they had to leave?

She did know one thing for sure—Light Tail wouldn’t want to leave until she’d figured out the mystery. She could, at least, offer an explanation to the inquisitive little bugger as to why the hallways were so spacious.

With her snooping through the terminal done, she trotted back out into the hallway and did a quick sweep of the remaining rooms. Only one held anything of use—the storage room mentioned in Darkheart’s log entries. Though it had clearly been cleaned out during the stable’s evacuation, a few items of worth still remained, namely a rather extensive first aid kit with a healthy supply of bandages and gauze pads. Unfortunately the kit itself had not been sealed well, so the bandages would have to be heavily sterilized first. Alcohol or an antiseptic compound would do the trick. She also found what looked like a forgotten case of healing potions, four in total, though one was not quite as colorful as the others. She discarded that one and kept the other three, making her way out of the room and retracing her route back to the infirmary lobby, where she found BJ waiting for her. She doubted she’d find much more in here, but a more thorough search later wouldn’t hurt.

Her return trip to the café was quiet and uneventful. BJ wasn’t saying much of anything about the Overmare’s office just yet, but neither of them could bring themselves to bring up the subject. Or any subject, for that matter. Probably just as well, she’d always been terrible at making small talk. They made it with about five minutes to spare, and thankfully Sling and Light Tail were already there, poking around behind the service counter and lifting what appeared to be crates of empty bottles onto the countertop.
“Find anything?” Sling asked with a huff after setting a fourth crate onto the counter, a foreleg hanging off over the edge as she leaned into it.

“Matter of fact, yes,” Kite heard herself answering, setting the first aid kit and healing potion case onto a nearby table booth and popping them open. “Coupla healing potions and a first aid kit. Need something to sterilize the kit with, though. Use the potions, or get ready for some stitches. With no painkillers.”

She thought she heard the night-colored mare mouth a rather foul curse under her breath, but she didn’t bother to protest or put it off and sullenly made her way across the café’s floor. “…gimme.”

“Say please,” she said in what she hoped was a soothing, alluring voice as she dangled the box of healing potions out in front of her in a teasing fashion. “Manners, you know.”

“You know an awful lot about medical stuff,” Light Tail’s voice called out from somewhere behind the counter, in between her grunts and heavy breaths as she began to push a fairly heavy object across the floor. “I didn’t think bad ponies would let slaves learn anything like that.”

“….it’s a bit complicated,” Kite replied, still keeping hold of the potion case. “Not all slave owners beat and abuse their charges. Not all the time, anyway.”

“She makes a good point, though,” Sling muttered from three feet away, her horn beginning to glow. “Where did you learn it?”

Crap, better answer before they think I’m hiding something worse…

“…my third master,” she answered, surrendering the potions without any further teasing. “He was a stable-taught doctor, out of a clinic in Stifla. He taught me enough to help with his workload. Among…other things. Found that the work occupied my brain pretty good, so I kept at it after he sold us to our fourth master to pay a debt.”

Sling’s magic took hold of the case and flipped it open, drawing a flask towards her and draining it dry in a single, three-second gulp. “…what kind of debt?”

“He never said,” she replied, laying the freshly acquired medical kit onto a table nearby to lay out its contents and separate them by category. “Might’ve been mercenaries, a caravan making a supply delivery, maybe some chem dealers in another part of town he dealt with for short-term med needs. Don’t really matter in the end, he sold us, and that was the end of our time there. Fourth master figured out quick we weren’t quite like dogs, traded us off to our fifth master for a month’s supply of Dash. That guy lasted maybe two months before he made the mistake of trying to rob a travelling merchant from Trotpeka rich enough to hire a Runner for a bodyguard. Wasn’t much left of him to bury when it was over. And since ownership of slaves don’t transfer over just ‘cause you killed their previous owner, he had to bring us to the main slave office in Stifla. We’ve kinda bounced around since. Saurus got his claws on us a month ago....already seems like a lifetime….”

By the time she’d finished, she’d had most of the kit emptied and sorted—bandages and gauze pads in one pile. Minor instruments like hemostats, scissors, a scalpel with replaceable blades, and tweezers in a second pile. Air-tight tubes of burn ointments, iodine tincture, and antibiotic gel in the third pile. A long-expired cold pack, she tossed aside. Bandages and instruments needed to be sterilized before they could be used. The rest of it was in decent enough shape to make use of…

“…library’s a mess,” Sling said quietly as she began to pull the bandaging off of her leg to check how the cuts were mending over. Off in the back of the café, Light Tail’s battle with the heavy box began to bear some semblance of success as it oozed into view around the edge of the service counter. “Armory’s in better shape, but it’s locked. Think the desk terminal can get us in, if I can crack the password out of the system. Good news is, this café’s loaded with cases of glass bottles, all empty. I’m guessing they served booze over the counter here.

“I’d hate to hear your bad news,” BJ finally spoke up from the comfort of the far corner of the room, where he could keep everypony in front of him and in sight. “That junk’s useless.”

“It’s useless now, but if this stable was as well stocked as mine, it could still have supplies stocked up somewhere,” the stable pony answered with a mad, slightly maniacal grin, flicking her leg in some sort of quick test for lingering pain. “I got an old Equestrian armed forces improvised munitions manual in my bags. Kerosene, oil, turpentine, baking soda, white phosphorus or sulfur, there’s tons of ways to mix up a Maretov cocktail. If we can find enough components, I can make us enough of those babies to burn out half the nests up topside. Just need to raid the residential levels for clothes to use as wicks.”

Oh, shit, she’s dangerous, Kite nearly squealed aloud in glee. By the gods I wish I could pounce her, why are the dangerous, exciting ones always straight?!

“I can search out the chemicals,” she chirped excitedly. “BJ and Elly can gather the clothes while you hack up the armory—”

“Hold up a sec,” Light Tail butted in loudly as she huffed to a stop, apparently satisfied with simply pushing the heavy crate up against the wall and laying down for a brief moment of rest. “Before we go pokin’ around for stuff, we maybe might wanna figure out what made everypony leave in the first place. What if the spark generator’s damaged? Could be leakin’ radiation all through the bottom levels.”

Both mares stood frozen where they stood, shocked less at the loudly aired threat and more at the fact that the little filly had thought of it before they had.

And the fact that a year’s worth of log entries in Darkheart’s office had degraded into error codes made it impossible to discount the possibility. “….I’m….not entirely sure, but I think this stable housed weather pegasi,” Kite murmured with hesitation, already preparing her ears and brain for the inevitable “Death-By-Endless-Questions” response she was about to trigger in the little girl. “…I…I found a working terminal in the infirmary, said something about the stable being a home for them. Also said they opened their door about…eighty years back, ran into the Enclave…”

“…the what?”

“…the pegasi,” she answered, flinching slightly as Elly began to rise from the floor and stretch her legs out. Probably preparing to hound her to death with question after question. “Their government…they call themselves the Pegasi Enclave. They seem to view visiting the surface as a crime against their own, because they only come down to hunt and kill those that try it. Once in a great while they might send a group to observe us “surface” folk for a bit, but they never bring any kind of help. They just….stand by and watch, and waste anypony that gets too close to them. They got tech from the war, tech nopony else can get. Power armor, MEWs, even cloud ships…Celestia knows how they keep ‘em fueled and maintained, none of the old history books I’ve read ever mentioned Serenity having the facilities to build them.”

Pounce her, the filly did….but not in the way she expected.

And it scared her more than the outcome she’d initially feared.

“….then what in Luna’s name made the ponies here abandon the only safe sanctuary they had?”

There was something bad wrong about this stable. She could feel it all through her little body the moment they calmed down enough to take notice. The big halls with enough space for pegasi to fly through if they wanted, the decades of neglect of what should have been a very long-lived stable, the fact that the back-up lighting still worked somehow, the decades of neglect in most of the places they saw...

She wouldn’t say it out loud just yet, not until they found actual proof of it, but she just felt that somepony actually lived here still. It was perfect—it still had stuff in it, and all those terrifying ants outside would make a lot of folk reluctant to come poking around (excluding present company, of course). Still had some manner of power, though she couldn’t see it lasting years. Only one way in, and Mom had to fiddle with the console to make it work—which, curiously, only had one loose wire rather than a bunch of them torn out or eroded from the ravages of time, and which had merely been unplugged.

Something that someone would do to ward off less determined visitors from going any further.

And then there was the stable itself. If what Kite said about the pegasi was true, and they really were that mean now…why would the weather pegasi in this stable abandon it? Why not just seal the door, make it impossible for anypony to come hurt them?

For that matter, why was this stable meant to house weather pegasi, while hers barely had any at all? She would’ve thought something as obvious as weather management in the new world would’ve been accounted for when Stable-Tec built the things, and that her stable lacked pegasi simply because they never made it there in time. It seemed like a really bad idea to spread out and concentrate important elements of a society into single places like that—if one stable failed, like this one did, it lost everything it had been meant to save with no back-ups elsewhere to take over. It seemed smarter to Light Tail to build stables as a complete package—weather pegasi, earth pony farmers and various types of crops, unicorns for support and magic studies preservation, miniature weather factories (which her stable didn’t have, but she was willing to bet this one did). Give every stable a chance at being able to do what they were supposed to do—save ponies, and build a better world than the one that ended in widespread arcane destruction.

Why would Stable-Tec build two different stables with completely different goals? It didn’t make any sense.

All of these thoughts crossed her mind in the two seconds that it took for her question to sink into everypony’s brain and get them to thinking about just what had really happened down here. There was more to it than what Kite had found, and the Overmare’s office seemed like the best place to go to find out. Any decision about whether or not to leave, the Overmare would have been the one to make it. She just hoped the terminal there still worked, like the one that Kite had found.

“….BJ, is the Overmare’s office open?” the scarred, grape-colored slave mare asked after a few more seconds of uncomfortable, uneasy silence. For Luna’s sake, she could hear Max and Mona breathing right behind her, it was so deathly quiet….

“…don’t know,” the colt quipped with a nervous tick. “It ain’t blocked off or nothin’, but when you mentioned killer gun turrets I didn’t wanna go in….”

El-Tee’s brain stumbled over that one. Gun turrets!? In the Overmare’s office?! “…M-mom, is that true—”

“Yes,” Mom answered immediately. “The Overmare’s office terminals can access every function in the stable. Life support, water, power, environmental controls….all of it, right at the Overmare’s hooves. The desk is fitted with automated turrets as a defense mechanism. In our stable they were .308 caliber chain guns, had to work on them once a couple years back. Only the Overmare has the codes to activate them, which is why we didn’t see them when we used her office to get to the top floor of our stable. But this stable…no telling what kind of turrets they are. And we don’t have the firepower to knock them out if they’ve been activated.”

Her insides began to churn in fright, and she hoped she didn’t end up having to find a corner in the very near future. “A-armory might, if we can get in it…”

“That’s my first stop,” Mom said, a sense of purpose filling both voice and body as she began to walk quickly towards the exit. “My Pipbuck wasn’t picking up any radiation on level nine, so we can go down at least that far. But until we know for sure if the lower levels are safe or not we shouldn’t be poking around any further. If the Overmare’s terminals are intact we may find out for sure there….otherwise, we’ll have to find out where the stable mainframe’s at. Residential quarters start on level 9, maintenance storage rooms should be on every level, if you want to get a head start on those Maretovs.”

…oh crap what if the library was irradiated—

“We’ll get to that in a few minutes,” Kite said as Mom passed through the doorway. “Need to sterilize the bandages and tools, if there’s booze back behind that counter.”

“Couple cases of whiskey,” Mom answered, her tail peeling around the doorway as she trotted on into the hall. “Knock yourself out. You coming or staying, honey?”

Light Tail had a sudden and intense desire to follow Mom as closely as she could, fearful that the library she’d tried to move through had been tainted by radiation she couldn’t see, smell, or taste. She chased her tail through the door and wound up nearly smacking into Mom’s hind legs before she’d even gone out of sight of the door.

“Coming!” she squeaked through a shaking voice. “Kinda wanna know where radiation is so I don’t walk in it!”

“Don’t worry, I didn’t pick up anything near the library,” Mom said softly, though she was pretty sure she caught a bit of a laugh in her throat too. “Passed by it on my way to the armory, I heard you thrashing around in there. Was it a mess before or after you got there?”

Her primary fears abated (for now), Light Tail could feel her chest heaving in relief even as Max and Mona’s small, fuzzy bodies caught up with her and locked pace with them. “…both. Thought I found an atlas of Equestria That Was, but it was ruined. Most of the history books too. Didn’t get a good look through the fiction section, was hopin’ I’d find a Daring Do book in there or something….”

“Still might, if we have time,” Mom offered gently. “….assuming, of course, we’re the only ones here. I know you’ve thought of it too.”

Now that there was no way of avoiding the subject (not when Mom had brought it up, anyway), she resigned herself to feeling notions of abject terror for the rest of their time in this place. “….yeah, kinda convenient that the door console only had one loose wire. One that turned the thing on when you fixed it.”

“Too convenient. It’s what I would’ve done if I wanted to seal myself inside a stable. Didn’t occur to me ‘till I picked the cage door open in the armory. Main power’s out too, but there’s enough in the reserves for about another year’s worth of operation. After that, that’s it. This place is done.”

They passed through an intersection without making any turns, instead heading directly for the end of the hall where she could make out the overhead, barely working backlit panel marking the stairwell leading down to the next level. “…still wonder what made everypony here leave. If this…enclave is that bad, you’d think they’d wanna stay inside.”

“I’m wondering why our stable didn’t have a contingent of weather pegasi,” Mom wondered aloud, just as Light Tail’s eyes wandered down to her mother’s right hind leg where she’d been bit. Thin lines of her coat were missing where she’d been cut, but other than that she couldn’t tell she’d been hurt at all. Healing potions were really awesome that way. “You’d think something like that would’ve been planned for. The stables were supposed to save ponies, so that they could rebuild when it was safe to come out. We’d need pegasi for the weather…but all the First Ones had were those that had been working in the local area the day the world ended. It’s why we’ve only had a couple dozen at a time through the stable’s whole existence. Why would Stable-Tec stick so many of them in one specific place?”

“….yeah, why not make each stable capable of doing their rebuilding on their own? Specializing like this…you lose one stable, might as well not bother with others, they can’t do it on their own. Weather, crops, magic studies and support…all in one package, for every stable. It’s how it should’ve been done. Why wasn’t it?”

“….if we can get into the Overmare’s office, we might just find out.”

Will we even like what we find? El-Tee didn’t say out loud. Though she honestly didn’t need to. If she was thinking, she was pretty sure Mom was too.

Their trip to the ninth floor continued on in dreadful silence. With the thought that somepony else might be inside the stable with them, it was probably for the best that they not talk much anyway. Light Tail contented herself with watching their backs and keeping the pups as quiet as she could manage, and for the most part they behaved. Now and then they’d start squealing and yipping when their noses caught a sniff of something they wanted to investigate, but a stern shushing and a light tap to their noses discouraged them from running off on their own. She felt kinda bad about it, but she had to keep them in line for their own good, until they learned to watch out for themselves on their own.

Made her wonder if this was what Mom went through every day with her. She made a note to try to behave better herself.

Within a matter of minutes, they reached the ninth level of the stable, and Mom’s pace quickened considerably in her dash to the armory. El-Tee followed behind her the best she could, and both of them stumbled through the entry to the armory at roughly the same time. It was a lot like the armory in their own stable—a small reception area, with the main counter separated by a cage with a lockable door. Behind this “cage” was the door leading to the actual armory’s store room where most of the stuff was kept.
Mom leapt right onto the terminal inside the cage, having picked her way through the cage door in her list visit, and went to work on the keyboard hacking the password out of the system. Light Tail kept her eye on the front door while she worked…and her magic less than a second away from releasing a telekinesis spell on her 9mm pistol.

Odd how that became such an ingrained habit in just a month.

It took Mom considerably longer to get this terminal working than the one in that “prospecting office” they’d slept in a month ago, but she did eventually get through after a few frustrated curses at her luck and at passwords in particular. “’Bout time,” she grumbled darkly, giving the counter one last thump with a forehoof as the terminal began whirring to life. “Frickin’ nine-letter passwords, pain in th—”

“Can you open the door?” El-Tee cut in before her Mom could go off about ponies that wanted to keep other ponies out of their stuff. This really wasn’t the time for it.

“….yeah,” Mom answered a few seconds later, her eyes flicking across the screen. “Safes too…terminal entries are too degraded to read though. A shame, might’ve been an inventory list in there….”

With a pair of taps to the keyboard, a hollow clunk! Sounded out from the storage room door, as well as a few softer clicks from beyond the door, and the pair quickly pried their way through to the interior to th—

“….oh crud….”

The armory, to put it kindly…was a mess. She could see entire walls stuffed full of empty weapon racks and display cases, dozens of crates and thin, metal boxes toppled over with carelessly discarded lids and empty insides. Tatters of paper, rusty screws and bolts littered the floor—only a few safes along the right side of the room seemed intact and sealed against the elements.

…well, so much for finding anypony a gun down here…

Her mood now considerably darkened with disappointment and ill will, Mom could only grumble in disjointed, aimless spats as she began to nose about through the safes on the other end of the room. She probably didn’t even care for finding the Overmare’s office now. All she’d ever come here for was to find a gun or two, and the place was picked clean of them.

She went almost unnoticed to Mom’s ears as they poked through each of the six safes in turn, starting with the first one on her left and moving on as she cleared out each one of any worthwhile items—mostly cleaning solvents and lubricants, as well as several bags of cleaning patches and wire brush tips. Predictably, it was the last safe that would contain the most valuable prize of them all.

Resting atop a padded shelf at the top of the sixth safe were two pistols, one silvery-looking and with what looked like a few unpowered light diodes along the body. The other one was tucked inside a dark brown leather holster and strapped closed, along with six five-round speed loaders that were curiously empty. Mom took hold of the holster and slipped it out of the safe, unsnapped the retaining strap and withdrew the pistol for a closer inspection—

“Awww, shit,” she cursed at the air upon seeing the gun—and more specifically, the noticeable, deep-reaching crack that marred the left side of the five-chamber cylinder body as she hit the release switch. The cylinder whirred and clicked, as if it had a little motor inside of it, flipping out to the left side with rapid speed and automatically popping out to push out the three rounds still loaded inside with this star-shaped disc in the center of the cylinder. The base of each round read “5.56 MATCH”, and were in decent shape, just a couple of light dents and blemish marks on the bullets themselves. Despite the thin coat of oil, the gun’s clean, matte-black finish had some shine to it. She didn’t know if that was a good thing or not.

None of that made the crack in the cylinder any easier to take. She had no idea if the gun was even safe to shoot or not, and if not for that one bit of damage, it would have been perfect. Mom silently uttered another foul curse—one she couldn’t make out this time—as she closed the cylinder and slipped the pistol back into its holster, gathering the speed loaders to store them in a small pouch attached to her left saddlebag. Best they could hope for was to find another pistol with an undamaged cylinder and swap it out.

The silvery pistol had no holster of its own, and the moment Mom pulled it out it became clear that it wasn’t in any better shape than the revolver. A noticeable dent along the top forward half and some unhealthy chinking sounds as the weapon rattled in her grip caused Mom’s scowl to darken even further, somehow. “By Celestia, one lucky break in here, please?”

“Can you fix it?”

“Don’t know,” Mom answered, a touch of frustration coloring her voice. “It’s a mew.”

“….a what?”

“Magical energy weapon,” she extrapolated, this time in a calmer tone as she continued to tilt and turn the pistol in her inspection. “Some folk call ‘em laser or plasma guns depending on what kind of energy they fire, but they’re all basically the same. Takes special spark battery cells, very high end arcane-tech weaponry. It’s not something I have a lot of experience with, all of our stable’s mews were long broken by the time I became quartermaster. All I know is what I bothered to read out of the technical manuals.”

That sounded a lot more like an “I don’t know” answer, but something this advanced had to be worth the effort to fix, if it promised them the firepower she thought it might. One run-in with those ants had already taught her that bullets alone might not be enough. “Do you at least know what’s wrong with it?”

Mom didn’t seem to like being pestered by a barrage of questions right then, but she didn’t drop the weapon on the ground either, so she guessed that there was at least a chance the thing could be fixed. “….this isn’t like an AE-series pistol. Looks more like a conventional gun, makes the components harder to diagnose and get at for replacement. But I think the focus housing chamber is damaged, which is the part that concentrates the energy from the battery into a beam or bolt and fires it. If I can find a gun with a working part and the right tools, I might be able to fix it, but I need the tech manual so I’ll know how the whole thing works. Might break it otherwise.”

“Bet the library would have one. Didn’t get a look through the whole thing.”

“We said the same thing about this armory, and look what’s left,” Mom bit back bitterly with resignation. “….still, if the library had any copies, they’d be in either the references or the special interest section, if the library here is arranged anything like ours. Once we’re done here you can go search for it while I make a pass at the Overmare’s office. When you’re finished, head back to the café, help Kite or BJ with anything they bring back.”

“So what am I lookin’ for?” El-Tee prodded gently as she strained to find some sign of identification on the gun. Something to tell her what model it was, or who made it, or something like that.

“Lightbringer 2000,” Mom answered almost immediately, and the silvery pistol floated its way over towards her. “F1.2 series variant. Says so right on the receiver, take it with you so you can look it up if you forget.”

Light Tail released a burst of magic from her horn, re-forming it in a telekinesis field around the pistol and slipped it into an empty holster on her right side. One left. She was starting to have almost as many guns as Mom did. “See anything else in there?”

Sadly, there were only a few spark battery cells in the safe itself, and no spare parts or repair tools to speak of. There was, however, a fairly large black nylon knife sheath on the bottom of the safe interior, along with what looked like a removable data disk, small enough to fit into a terminal’s data port, or Mom’s Pipbuck.

“….that’s a funny thing to stick in a safe with a coupla guns and a big knife.”

Mom wordlessly plucked the rectangular-shaped disk out of the safe and slapped it into her Pipbuck, then turned her magic’s focus towards the controls and quickly began downloading its contents onto the onboard memory. In moments the monochrome screen began to fill with rapidly filling lines of text, and El-Tee squeezed her head around Mom’s leg to read it for herself:

“Quartermaster Marked Star, Stable 128 Security.

Age: 35

Gender: Mare, pegasus

Hometown: Vanhoover

Previous occupation: Sergeant, Trotpeka Police Department, Range Officer for District 5

Relatives: Lucky Break (husband, pegasus, 32), Blueberry (daughter, pegasus, 12), Shale Stone (son, pegasus, 13), Home Stretch (mother, pegasus, presumed deceased), Glide Wind (father, pegasus, presumed deceased)

Log #1, four days since the megaspell exchange:

Our lone griffon survivor lost his last battle earlier this morning. The wounds he received during his drive to the safety of the stable proved too much, and as he had repeatedly stated that we not use our more advanced medical technology that could have saved his life, his injuries ultimately proved fatal given the treatment options left available to us. It is Doctor Harp Stroke’s belief that “Blade Runner” had simply lost his will to live, having lost his mate and daughter in the blasts and his son during their trip to the stable—a loss I frankly cannot fathom coming back from myself, so his request is understandable. His company of mercenaries had originally been contracted by the government to deliver armaments to Fort Wiley, intended for the 5th Aerial Ranger Battalion which is….was…comprised solely of griffon volunteers for the military. Having lost contact with Fort Wiley and with the megaspells flying in numbers too horrifying to count, most of the mercs apparently opted to re-route their delivery to the closest safe haven they could find. It was blind luck that they ran into the main 128 group from Syrup Mound just south of here.

Several companies of zebra commandos, unfortunately, were inserted into the prairie just prior to the megaspell exchange, alongside several of their hired griffon mercenaries. One such commando team managed to locate the main route for the stable and was waiting in ambush six miles out of town, hiding in the wheat field. Roughly forty percent of the stable population would have been wiped out before even reaching their destination had Blade Runner’s team and their weapon caravan not been with them. As it was, all but Blade were killed in the twelve-mile running firefight, including his son, before the group reached the stable entrance, with Blade himself suffering multiple gunshot wounds to his body, wings, and left hind leg. Twenty-nine others in the civilian group were also killed. Security had been alerted ahead of time by a team of weather pegasi that had flown ahead of the group to get help, and were able to drive off the few zebras that still remained. All information about the zebra commandos and their objectives were obtained off the three bodies that security was able to extract from the field before the sealing of the stable. We can only guess as to how many were ultimately operating at the time of the exchange—it is exceptionally doubtful that any of us, or our descendants, will be able to safely leave the stable for decades to come. If there’s more behind this last attack in the prairie, it died with Equestria. We do know that none of the intel recovered from the bodies indicated that the megaspell event was planned or even anticipated. It’s entirely possible this operation was planned to be executed on its own, without the unleashing of the megaspells, and that the two events simply happened to occur on the same day by sheer misfortune. It’s also possible the commandos were left entirely in the dark as to the coming destruction and merely sent as a last insult to our kind, that one last stab in the back that comes just when you think things couldn’t get worse. Nopony will ever know for sure.

Our lone griffon was named so due largely to the eyewitness accounts of the Syrup Mound group (as well as a lack of persons who knew his actual name as he refused to give it), who stated almost to the last mare and child that he ran more than a few zebras through with his knife when his pistol was damaged by a stray round. Still sharp as a razor, it nicked my foreleg just below the joint with a simple brush. The vast majority of the weapons now secured in this armory are from the weapons shipment his team died to protect, including several crates of AEP-7s, AER-9s, nine older model six-barreled laser miniguns, and several of the newer model Lightbringers and Model 86 pistols. Unfortunately, most of these weapons were not designed to be used by pony hooves or in conjunction with battle saddles—while they could certainly be jury-rigged into a saddle mount, it would be a spotty method at best, and we only have a handful of unicorns in security. Recommending that all unicorns regardless of their respective department be trained in the use of our new weapons’ stockpile to augment our pegasi-heavy population here in the event of a breach of the stable door. Which is likely decades away, if it is even at all possible.

As per the Overmare’s request, Blade Runner’s pistol and knife are to be stored in a secure safe, alongside this data file, and not to be re-issued to any security personnel out of respect for his actions and the fact that he has no next of kin to which they could be passed onto. Standing orders of myself and all future quartermasters are to maintain these items to the best of our abilities without compromising our other armaments. This includes, unfortunately, the replacement of the cylinder of Blade’s pistol.

I sorely wish Blade Runner had allowed us to save his life. Even if his leg and wing injury had proved crippling, he would have made a fine addition to our security department, and as a source of first-hoof knowledge for the unicorns now tasked with preserving all of our personal histories and those of our homelands. I had always been curious about the griffon skies and their homelands, even had a griffon lover once in high school and university. Blade Runner’s knowledge of his people’s history is now lost to us, perhaps the only chance we had at preserving some part of it forever—a greater loss than even his own life.

All future quartermasters should denote the condition of the firearm and knife at the beginning and end of their service so that proper preventative maintenance can be taken. A separate file, contained on this data chip, will examine the weapons in detail for those unfamiliar with them. As to myself, I estimate the pistol to be in serviceable condition aside from the damaged cylinder, and the knife is in astonishingly superb condition and dangerously sharp. Given the material the knife is made of, I expect it to remain so for at least another century given proper care, if not longer. It’s a work of art.

And so was the departed owner. Whatever afterlife he believed in, I hope he reached it. The life ahead of us, of our descendants, is not one I would wish upon anypony. Those that died in the blasts may very well have been the lucky ones.
-M. Star, 128 Security”

Mom’s foreleg dropped to the ground in numbed dismay, both of their eyes now falling upon the holstered revolver in an entirely new light. Of all the things they’d expected to encounter in this abandoned stable, a note detailing a damaged weapon’s former owner and the last days of their life was not one of them. She couldn’t even summon the energy to be angry at the crack in the cylinder anymore. It felt wrong to hate it. Like she would be spitting on the ashes of its long-dead wielder. Wasn’t his fault it got shot, after all. Not when he was too busy getting shot to death the day the world ended.

Mom still took the weapon, stuffing it inside her right saddlebag, and attached the knife sheath and its accompanying blade onto an empty mounting point on the left of the travelling saddle just in front of the saddlebag. Not being nearly as learned up on a blade as she was a gun, she could only discern that the grip had a slight curvature to it from the hilt all the way to the end, and that the end of the grip section formed into a pointed cap that looked strong enough to break glass or bones if the user wanted to. The tan grip panels themselves were a mystery—while they had the grain pattern of wood, they most certainly were not made of wood, but rather some sort of synthetic material with fairly aggressive stippling and a set of two grooves for a griffon’s claws near the hilt. Griffons seemed to like putting grooves for their claws in all the weapons they used. Made sense, actually.

But at least now Mom had a knife. This last month had taught her the necessity of such an overlooked tool; Mom had been constantly borrowing Kite’s for some task or another. Now she just needed to find herself one.

Assuming they made it out alive.

“Remember, search the library for anything on the laser pistol, then go back to the café,” Mom commanded gently, her body rising up from the floor in a quick stretch of her legs before trotting off for the exit. “And watch your back.”

And just like that, Mom was gone, slipping through the doorway and back into the corridors of level nine, leaving her alone to carry out her task.

On her own.

….okay, not alone. She had two husky puppies with an annoying habit of getting under hoof when they got spooked. So they could probably double as an early alarm that something nearby was not right, if she thought to pay attention to them.

So! Off to the library.

Alone.

She barely made it out of the armory before her nerves began to give out. That familiar, cold chill in her chest that grabbed at her heart and made it beat harder. She’d felt it quite often lately.

Couldn’t be the walls. The rust-brown, decaying metal hallways, bathed in red emergency lighting that reminded her of her home stable. No, not the walls at all.

She suddenly began to feel like Max and Mona—cut off from a parent’s protective gaze and their superior strength, suddenly looking at everything around her in a new, more hostile light. Things she might have brushed off as nothing now seemed more important—distant shadows and sounds, unusual smells, signs of recent habitation by ponies she might not be learned enough on to know by sight. It suddenly became very important that she get back to the library, find what she needed to, and get back to Kite and BJ. No messing around, no loitering, no side-tracking…

….well, maaaaybe a quick peek through the fiction section, she thought when her mind began to think back to snippets of Mare of the Everfree or any of the first three Daring Do books. A short paragraph in an otherwise-blank page, just past the publisher/copyright page, listed Everfree as merely the first in a four-book series. The other three were laid out by title—Legacy of the Moon, Return of Chaos, and Crystal Winter, all presumably almost as popular as Daring Do for author White Quill to have penned them. She got the impression from the ending of Everfree that it had been intended to end right there.

And then there were those two and a half pages that had slightly glowing runes adorning their surfaces, replacing all the text upon those pages. She knew Mom’s magic when she felt it, even if she didn’t know what the runes actually meant. It was hard to describe that feeling, though—she could only say that when she felt it, it felt like a little piece of her was mixed in with it. She felt as though Mom was right next to her, even if only faintly. Most non-unicorns didn’t get it. Which was fine, because they would never be capable of feeling it in the first place. But the runes still puzzled her. Mom had never done that to any book on that old shelf before. Why this one? Why just those pages? There was certainly enough violence in the rest of the book to qualify for supervision of…she hated to think it, but most colts and fillies in the stable weren’t quite what she would call….responsible. Any other parent might not have let them read that book for another couple of years.

But Mom wasn’t like that. Not yet. It wasn’t like the book was graphic in detail or anything, but it was clear that ponies were dying or drawing blood when the action got heavy. It was one thing to read about death in a work of fiction—it was all planned, the characters weren’t real anyway, and the most one could feel at the passing of a character was some sense of loss or sadness. No real, honest-to-Luna grief or crying, unless one let themselves get really emotionally invested in the book to the point of believing it to be real.

It was quite another thing to watch her own mother kill ponies for real, far more violently than anything she could have read in that book. She didn’t think she’d ever get that first gunfight out of her head. The way she just…changed….slaughtering them that way, and losing herself in her own rage to the point of nearly murdering some soul…the things she’d done to the others….

She had to stop in the stairwell, just before the doorway into L7, and lie down on all fours for a minute to chase away the shakes that began to seep into her legs. Closed her eyes, and wished away the bloody images with daydreams of wheat, sunny winter days, and warm, fuzzy blankets and hot chocolate in a living room and its fireplace. Daydreams of boring days in class, of stable-wide hijinks with her friends, of surprising Mom the second she dragged her sleepy, tired self through the door with an out-of-nowhere pounce and hug. Anything that would push out the images of her mom blowing heads apart with that monstrous revolver, or nearly murdering a hurt, dying pony out of sheer rage.

Her relief from this sudden torrent of horror, surprisingly, wasn’t from herself, but from two small, warm, fuzzy packages that whimpered in sympathetic tones as they nuzzled and pawed at her face. Somehow sensing (or more likely seeing) her distress, the pups found it impossible to move on without trying to nudge their caretaker back into a better mood. And it worked.

She consoled herself by returning the animalistic affections, scratching the pups behind their ears and allowing them to head-butt her across the cheek until she found herself back in the cold, dark stairwell, their warmth blanketing her face and forehooves. These pups were suddenly worth all the hassle of keeping them in line, solely for the comfort and company they provided right there.

With a resigned sigh, she finally pushed herself back to her hooves, and the pups began to step away from her as their playtime came to an unwanted end. But they didn’t whimper or bark at her heels when she whisked herself through the door and into L7, and simply continued to hound her legs as they carried her ever upward.

She quickly came upon the library door, maybe a minute’s walk after leaving the stairwell, and to her relief nothing about the interior had changed since she left it. The receptionist’s desk was still covered in molded, ruined books and a broken lamp, several bookcases had fallen over and spilled hundreds more books across the floor, and so far as she could tell, all of the lounge chairs and sofas on this end of the library were covered in a thick layer of dust and carelessly discarded index cards from the library catalogue. The one intact, legible poster on the wall behind the receptionist’s desk was a leftover from Equestria That Was, apparently from the Ministry of Arcane Science. A lavender unicorn pony bearing a purple-colored mane with pink highlights—Twilight Sparkle—adorned the lower right corner of the poster. Arrayed around her were piles of books, with a particularly large hovering in Twilight’s magical grasp. The faded words at the top read, “KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.”

The first time she saw the poster, she had uttered something to the effect of knowledge not being enough to keep the past from repeating itself. This time, she just stared at it in wistful silence, wishing that the library could have simply pointed the way to a time travel spell that would let her and Mom go to the days of Equestria That Was, an Equestria that wouldn’t go down the dark, violent path that had left the world in ruin. Then she wouldn’t have to worry about things like food, water, and not being eaten or torn apart by mutant wildlife.

If only.

This library, fortunately, seemed to be arranged much like the one back home, even though it only took up half the floor. The non-fiction section was on the far side of the library to her right, while the fiction stuff took up the left half, where she now stood. Since this library seemed to have arranged its books by both author and subject/genre, she started with the “fantasy” section, about a hundred yards into the library to her right, and started nosing through the shelves. As she delved further into the collection of tomes, the damage seemed to grow less severe, though she could see signs of age and erosion on just about every shelf in sight. Many bookcases rose up almost to the ceiling and required the use of special ladders to traverse to the upper shelves.

But by luck, the “W” section started at the top of one bookcase, and continued on to the bottom shelf of the next case down the row, and she quickly fell upon the “Wh-“ named authors. White Cape, White Case, and so on. At an eye level shelf she finally began spotting names closer to the ones she wanted—White Nose, White Opal, White Qu—

White Quill! Her mind’s eye shrieked with joy, quickly pulling the brown leatherback book out of the shelf for a closer look. The binder didn’t list the title, just the author—

Her silent shriek turned into a high-pitched loud one as her eyes scanned over the title, Legacy of the Moon. She had to fight with her lungs to keep slightly calm as she carefully opened the book to begin a quick inspection of the pages themselves, blowing a thick dust off the surface that caused Mona to sneeze when the cloud enveloped her nose. Binding looked okay, hard to tell what condition the pages were in with all the dim, red lighting…

She fished a flashlight out of her bags and flicked it on, holding it in her mouth so her magic could flip through the pages, and she liked what she saw! Edges didn’t seem to be all that discolored or anything, the hard leatherback covers kept the book itself straight and rigid so nothing was bent or warped, the pages themselves seemed to have escaped the majority of aging damage that had ruined a lot of the other books she’d seen when she first came in. She couldn’t sit there and glance at every page to see if all the text was intact or if some of it had begun to run off, but through the first hundred or so everything seemed at least readable. She counted that as “good enough for now” and gently stuffed the book into her right saddlebag, its enchanted interior flashing with a bright purple glow as it sought to fit the recovered tome amongst all the other stuff it was tasked with containing. Someday Mom was going to explain how these bags could hold so much stuff and still be so darn weightless. Still, awesome find! She’d never bothered to look in her stable’s library for these, so she had no idea if Mom had read this one or not. Either way, both of them would be happy with this find!

Unfortunately, this seemed to be the only copy of White Quill’s books that were there, as the next one down the line read “White Rose” on the binder, and she couldn’t see any more mention of White Quill anywhere else on the shelf.

Next stop….the adventure section. Back towards the library entrance. In hindsight, she should have started there, made things a little quicker. Oh well.

It wasn’t hard to track down the “A” labeled author section—there weren’t a lot of pony authors whose name started with the letter A, and even fewer who had such strange names as A.K. Yearling. The entirety of “A” named authors comprised a single bookcase, with the bottom three shelves quickly narrowing down to the “Ya”, then “Ye” an—

“Yearling!” she shouted aloud upon spotting the familiar, green-shaded hardback binder of the first book in the series, Daring Do and the Sapphire Statue. This book she pulled out as though it were made of glass, and it might as well have been if the loose binding was any indication. The cover art wasn’t quite as crisp as the copy back home—in fact, she would go so far as to call it grayscale, there was so little luster to it. But the pages inside the cover seemed remarkably intact, with sharper looking print than in Legacy of the Moon. And that was really all she needed. She’d just have to be careful with the page turning and such, lest she wear the binding out to the point of entire pages coming loose.

The second book in the series, The Griffon’s Goblet, was also present on the shelf, and in a similar condition. Faded cover art, but stiffer binding, and the interior print was a little duller but still more than readable. Sadly, no other Daring Do books could be found. But two was more than she’d expected to find in the first place, and she was willing to call it a good salvage at three readable books.

With her new acquisitions stowed in her bags, she set about searching through the non-fiction half of the library, feeling far more energized and uplifted than she had fifteen minutes ago. She could hardly wait for them to find a better spot to set camp for the night so she could break out Sapphire Statue for the first time in….four months? She was willing to bet that Mom wouldn’t mind a little quiet time with the second White Quill book as well. Maybe even Kite or BJ would want a read-through.

….well, maybe not BJ, he didn’t seem all that interested in….well, anything. He seemed to just float through the day without any care as to what went on around him, unless it was threatening or dangerous. She’d have to correct that. Somehow.

The references section was rather anemically stocked—while there were at least five bookcases for the section, most of the shelves were empty, and of the few dozen books left she could quickly see that none of them looked like they had anything to do with guns. But the absence of information here was rather odd. Most other bookcases here were empty simply because they were broken—here, it seemed as though they’d been carried away and never returned.

Could this enclave of pegasi have taken them? Or had this part of the library never been stocked well to start with? She might have been able to tell if the indexing system had been intact, but that had been her first stop the last time she came here, and it was wrecked. Like somepony had deliberated destroyed or removed most of the index to make it difficult to find any specific book. Jerks.

The special interest section, just a few bookcases down, seemed to be in better shape, at least, though it was quite a bit smaller in size and only encompasses two bookcases. Each was given the honor of its own ladder, making it a simple affair to start eliminating shelves as potential hiding places for the book she sought—

One of the pups began to growl behind her. Endearingly cute, actually, to hear such a tiny young thing try to scare off something it didn’t like….

…until she realized that if the pups didn’t like it, she probably wouldn’t either.

She swung around, shifting the flashlight into a telekinesis spell and shining it in whatever direction the pups’ eyes seemed to be staring—

—a ragged-out, dirt-patched pony, dressed in what could charitably be described as rags sewn together into a crude vest, barely flinched at the introduction of light into his green eyes as he stared down at her. His coat was some sort of light blue, kinda like Socket back home, and his mane was unkempt but clearly a shade of dark lavender. Not a great combination, really.

Color combos were the least of her worries. She’d been literally jumping for joy at the discovery of cherished books not even three minutes ago—now she was face-to-face with a stranger who looked hungry, had at least one bladed weapon at hoof (literally, it was tied around his left foreleg), and who had only been spotted because the pups’ sense of smell was a lot better than her attention span.

And he was right between her and the straightest path back to Mom that she had.

“…how’d you get in here, kid?” the stallion asked her in a gruff, hoarse voice.

Despite the terror creeping up and down her spine, El-Tee still found it impossible to not be a little snarky with him. “…through the door. Ain’t locked.”

“You know what I mean, kid, now answer the question,” he warned in a slightly sharper tone.

Her hold on the flashlight wavered slightly as her chest began to tighten. “….t-the door console…we fixed it.”

“We?”

S-shoot, do I tell him? Would numbers mean anything to him? Would he back off or get the idea to use me to get to them….

“…me, my mom….coupla others,” she relented under his unfriendly gaze. Beneath her, the pups continued to growl and snarl, but stayed well within her reach.

“And where are they at?”

Her tail quivered, this time in fright. Not working like I thought…

….but she’d already told him too much. Holding back info now might just make him angry….

“…my mom’s close. Probably coming up right now. And she’s not near as nice as me.”

This seemed to make the strange, threatening stallion even less likely to leave her alone. “Heard that plenty o’ times. Drop your guns and food, slowly. You won’t be the first filly I’ve run through for their stuff.”

Her legs began to shudder as she did the exact opposite, but in her increasing panic she found it difficult to hold both her 9mm and the flashlight, so she settled for the pistol.

She didn’t even see herself draw it, it came out so fast….

And it did nothing. Even as she had the sights settling somewhere around his chest, she found it exceptionally difficult to ponder the idea of actually squeezing the trigger. To actually shoot somepony.

He could see the conflict in her, the indecision and unwillingness to harm another just because she was scared of them. “What do you think you’re doing?” his gruff voice seemed to laugh at her as he started to stalk forward, and her legs found it hard to back away from him in a steady manner. Sometimes a leg would slip or stay put. “Seen that look in your eyes before. The wastes eat little ponies like you for breakfast. That gun might as well not even be there. You don’t have it in you to pull that trigger.”

He’d barely finished speaking when she heard the world go deathly quiet, her heartbeat becoming muted to her again, and her gasping breaths became like whispers.

….m-mom? Her body waited for death to claim this stallion’s life—

—CLICK!—

She’d found little in the Overmare’s office of worth besides a few terminal entries she’d simply downloaded to her PipBuck for reading later, and a battered copy of Equestrian Army Today which by chance happened to feature the Lightbringer 2000 in a corner photo on the cover. A quick glance at the 10-page article went into just enough detail on the weapon’s inner workings that it would suffice as a starting point for learning how to troubleshoot it, so she stuffed it in her bags and darted off towards the library on L7.

Because she’d suddenly developed this chill in her guts, an icy itch that something in her world was not right. And the last time she felt it, she’d found Light Tail bleeding on her couch from a head wound and barely capable of speaking.

When she bumbled her way to the library, the red hash mark on her EFS sent that itch to the rest of her insides with how close it was getting to the green triangle marks that were her daughter and the puppies she’d taken in.

And when she’d snuck up on that danger mark, and found it to be a dirty, disheveled stallion stalking his way into Light Tail’s personal space, she felt all that fear and terror wash away in the cold, furious emotion that she’d come to believe was a mother’s rage at the sight of a threatened child.

She had her 10mm pistol out in front of her without so much as a sound, and allowed the flick of the safety to announce her presence to this stallion of ill intent.

“Stop,” her angry voice called out from the darkness behind the stallion, setting the sights over the back of his head. “Stay exactly where you’re at. Move even an inch closer to her, and I’ll kill you.”

The stallion’s forward movement stopped, though whether he acknowledged the presence of her gun or not, she didn’t know. She didn’t really care, either. Light Tail started making her way around him, and kept herself facing him the entire time with her 9mm pistol in front of her. The growling pups beneath her daughter stayed with her every step of the way.

“You the mother?” he dared to ask.

His rear legs snapped shut against his haunches as she peeled off a second spell, took hold of his boy parts and began to squeeze them in a vice-like grip—

“Talk to me again and I’ll rip these off,” she hissed, giving this second spell field a slight twist to implicate how she was planning to accomplish that particular task.

He took the hint and stopped talking, or moving. Or doing anything that made her want to shoot him any more than she already did. It didn’t take El-Tee long to get past him and back within her leg reach, and she even brushed up against her, probably just to make sure that she was really there and that she wasn’t just imagining this.

“We’re leaving,” she said next, her 10mm pistol somehow hovering almost perfectly still as she began to inch backward. Despite the pain that had to be assaulting him from his nethers, she didn’t hear so much as a tortured cry…and it was starting to scare her. “You come near us again, and you’re dead.”

She gave his stallionhood a slighter tighter squeeze to hopefully encourage him to stay put, urging her daughter back towards the library door with a brush of her right foreleg, and the filly didn’t even ask any questions. She just turned and began running back towards the other end of the library, hopping over spilled piles of ruined books as she went.

She followed right behind her only after she’d backed far enough away that maintaining a hold on his family jewels strained the reach of her magic further than she could keep up with.

She didn’t even get within sight of the front desk at the entrance before she heard his hoofs galloping along behind her. She skidded to a stop, whipped around to plant two rounds in his head like she’d promised she would—

—found herself facing not one grime-coated stallion, but three of them, as the other two had been far quieter and somehow managed to evade her EFS’s threat detection matrix until she spotted them—

No, not threats, she realized when a quick glance of her eyes downward still showed only one red hash mark approaching her, while the other two stallions were tagged with green marks. Still didn’t answer the question of how they’d managed to avoid being picked up by the EFS—

“Cleaver, you take another step and we’ll let her waste you!” one of the friendly-tagged stallions yelled out, his voice more even toned and cleaner than the charging fool before her. But it had the effect of causing this poorly-armed threat to stop running, though it took him a second or two to stop completely.

The knife-armed stallion—Cleaver, she was going to guess by how quickly he answered back—bristled slightly under the barrel of her pistol, but he never took his eyes off of her. “Idiots, told you we shoulda jumped ‘em at that café—”

Buck me they’ve been watching us that long?!

“We got enough food and we don’t need the Union or a Runner poking around looking for somebody’s lost lover or some shit,” the left-most friendly stallion berated Cleaver from the shadows. “And if you haven’t noticed, this mare’s got enough firepower to take us out if it pleases her and you damn near made her do it for tryin’ to jump that kid like that! So stay put and let us fix the mess you just got us into!”

“….whatever you’re doing here, I don’t care,” she tried to say in a calmer, softer voice. “I came to see if there were any supplies left behind by the original residents. Now that I’m done, I want to leave.”

“Take anything out of the infirmary?” the other friendly stallion asked next, finally stepping forward from the poorly-lit backdrop to reveal the battle saddle harness and the heavily used automatic rifle mounted to it…and what looked like rope or duct tape wrapped around the barrel and forearm.

“…me, no. Travelling companion helped herself to a few healing potions and a med kit…”

The rifle-armed stallion gazed at her momentarily before turning his attention to his partner across the aisle. “….guess a couple potions and a pile of junk is a fair price for them leaving without killing us, don’t you think?”

“Hold up,” the other disagreed, his face furrowed in suspicion as he glared back at her. “The old armory. You got in somehow. What’d you take out?”

“Nothing useful,” she said, briefly gauging the distance between each of the three males and how quickly she would have to shift her aim to down all three. “Just a coupla broken guns and a knife. Place is empty. Nothing on the terminal said why. Check it out yourself later, I didn’t bother locking it back up.”

“And those chemicals your friend and that little colt have been moving around for the last half hour?”

“Improvised incendiary devices,” she replied immediately.

The armed stallion jerked his attention back to her, suddenly becoming slightly more interested in her than she thought was healthy. “….leave us a few on your way out, and we’ll call it even on the potions and whatever you did get out of the armory.”

Bastard, she spat in her head. I didn’t come here to save you!

“I’m making those for the bugs up top,” she countered—

“We can help with that.”

The bad pony’s friends were much better behaved, and much more willing to help in some way (it probably helped that they were afraid Mom would shoot them dead if they did anything else wrong). A couple of hours later after running in them, two of them came up to the café bearing vials of slightly foul-smelling, green-shaded liquids, just as Mom had finished sorting out her “maretovs” and booze-soaked cloth strips. Twenty in all.

“This is how we get past the bugs whenever we head out for salvage,” the rifle-armed stallion mumbled through his teeth as he set the small box of vials atop the service counter. “They’re terrified of yaoi gai, for good reason. The first time we saw one come through, every bug in sight got the hell away from it before they even saw it, and we figured they could smell it somehow. We found a way to extract that scent. Pour it on a scarf or something, and the bugs won’t want anything to do with you.”

She was still coming to grips with how close she came to that gut-wrenching choice of shooting somepony, even if she felt it might’ve been the only way to keep him from hurting her. She just stayed in the corner, curled up to keep the lingering cool air at bay, and Max and Mona cuddled up right next to her and had been dozing off for the last hour. Felt rather nice to have their warmth nearby, actually. She didn’t much care for this place anymore, or for anypony that might’ve been in it aside from herself, Mom, Kite, and BJ. She just wanted to leave.

So she let Mom do all the talking this time. Listening to the adults bicker and talk kept her from thinking too hard about much of anything. Just what she needed.

“You’re not particularly well-armed,” Mom said from behind the counter as she re-counted her bottles for a third time. “How did you manage to get your hooves on this stuff?”

“It got some of us killed the first time, but we brought one down,” he answered calmly. “Second time we needed to find one, we baited it with a slaver we caught out on his own, away from his group….”

Brief, haunting images of her first hour in the wastes caused her to tighten herself into a slighter smaller ball and bury her face into Max’s side. He squirmed slightly at the touch of her nose, but didn’t wake up and continued to dream whatever it was that puppies dreamed of. She couldn’t think of much worse fates than being caught and used as live bait…even if it was a bad pony like a slaver. She wasn’t sure she could forgive anypony for doing that.

“After that, a few months ago, we finally ran into somepony who’d managed to tame one enough to the point where it wouldn’t tear her to pieces. Wasn’t hard to talk her into joining up with us, most folk don’t even venture out this far, let alone come to the stable. You’re the first group to try in the two years we’ve been here.”

The steady, muted thump of bottles settling against a hard countertop stopped momentarily. “You want to be here?”

“Why not? It’s surrounded by ant nests in a place where nopony wants to be in the first place, so we rarely get visitors. And slavers don’t stray this far off the road, not around here. Weather don’t bother us, there’s only one way in, and until today pulling that green wire out of the console outside seemed to be working pretty well. Guess we’ll have to figure somethin’ else out.”

With her face buried in Max’s fuzzy fur coat, she couldn’t see anything else in the room, but she was content enough to just listen. “Yes, you will,” Mom’s voice said, and she sounded a little sad as she spoke. “You don’t have much power left. Can’t see it lasting years. A few months, maybe.”

“….yeah,” he sighed in resignation. “Most of us would rather not admit it. But we know it’s coming. Kinda why I asked you to whip these up. Might need them when it’s time to relocate. How long will these keep?”

“Don’t know, never made one ‘till today,” Mom admitted freely, briefly startling the filly (and probably the stallion too!). “Just followed the directions in an old Equestrian Army field manual. Might take a couple to see if I did it right, light a few of the bugs up. But if this scent masking trick of yours works, I don’t think we’ll need any.”

“So all that work we did was for nothing?” Kite’s voice mumbled, stung by the seemingly wasted effort she’d put in.

“Wouldn’t say that,” the stallion said. “You did take a few healing potions out of the infirmary, used one already. If these things work, we’ll call it even. Otherwise you’re out some caps.”

The foul-smelling, musky odor from those vials began to grow stronger as she heard Mom take a vial from its box and presumably began to pour it onto something, eliciting a choked gasp out of her when she inhaled that finally did succeed in jolting the pups awake. “Holy cow that stinks!” she gagged, coughing on her own oxygen.

“Has to, if it’s gonna work,” he said with a sympathetic glance, once she got to opening her eyes again. “It’s hard enough coaxing that yaoi gai to let us extract his pheromones in the first place. We want what we can get to work. That means making it stronger than usual. One whiff of these scarves, and you can walk right on top of their nests without them raising a fuss. They might even carve a path for you if it gets you away from them faster.”

Light Tail’s nose wrinkled in on itself at the thought of having that smell almost directly in her face. But after how things had gone earlier in the morning, the discomfort of a stinky odor seemed like a small price to pay for being able to walk back out in one piece.

Plus seeing Mom shaken out of her wits like that was….hard. If there were more giant insects like this in other places, she wasn’t sure that Mom would want to keep going…or that she’d be able to keep herself together and fight through them. She hoped this “trade” included a few vials of this stuff for use later.

“One more thing before we go,” Mom said, pulling a set of scarves out of the box of foul-smelling vials and laying them out across the counter. “When those bugs came up out of the ground, they were trying to herd us towards another group waiting for us to get right on top of them. Where did they learn to do that?”

“No idea, but you’re not the first ones they’ve tried that on,” the stallion answered, shuddering slightly as he talked. Could have been the chill in the air just then….or he didn’t like talking about it. “Saw ‘em wipe out a Union patrol a week ago doing just that. They made a stand for a few seconds, saw what looked like a clear path and made a run for it. Got swallowed up whole, not a damn one of ‘em made it out of that trap. Looks like you found the one rifle they left behind….”

Light Tail felt a sharp chill through her spine, slightly horrified that they had narrowly avoided the same fate only because she saw something that didn’t look right and had the guts to point it out to two adults who thought they knew better. L-Lucky….

With nothing left in the stable to hold them there, they quickly gathered around the counter as Mom doused a set of scarves in the greenish liquid and passed one out to each of them in turn. Kite and BJ didn’t seem the least bit bothered by the smell, and she and Mom tried not to let it get to them. Max and Mona, however, took an instant disliking to the scent and refused to huddle beneath her like they usually did. They kept at least several feet away from the group as they journeyed back upstairs to the ground floor, a pair of “maretovs” floating alongside them in Mom’s magic.

It wasn’t until they reached the ground floor and the stable entrance that she finally saw a sign of hope in Mom’s eyes.

Predictably, because of the impending use of a weapon. One apparently meant to burn things alive. So long as they only used it on bugs, she could survive its horrific existence. Might even give Mom some kind of stress relief to see them burst into flames after how badly they had scared her earlier.

“Still a couple of bugs beyond the door,” Mom warned as she brought one of the bottles up in front of her, along with what looked like a small flip-top lighter. “Stand back.”

Four sets of hooves did as they were requested and scooted about fifteen feet away from her, just as she brought the open flame of the lighter onto the soaked strip of cloth, setting it alight. Gave her enough space that only Mom would suffer if something went wrong with her flaming bottle.

Not that she liked the idea.

When she was satisfied that everypony would be safe if she screwed up, Mom quickly shifted a part of her spell to cover the console and tapped a few buttons on the keypad, causing the gear-shaped door to begin screeching its way outward and onto a rail, where it then rolled off to the side and out of their sight—

A pair of mutant ants were indeed hanging out in the little cave outside the door, though most of the other ants they’d killed earlier were long gone, likely dragged away by their surviving nest mates. Did they eat their own? Use the corpses for some other purpose? Did they just want to make it easier to move around in such a tight spot?

Whatever the reason, it still left two living ants and one hours-long dead one in that little cave, and the moment the door began to roll away from the entrance their antennae began to twitch as their heads turned towards them—

“Here, catch!” Mom screamed out, the flaming cloth beginning to burn down into the bottle itself as it was hurled directly at the ant to her left—

—she heard the glass bottle shatter against its head, right before a great FWOOOSH! Erupted from the ant’s head, suddenly engulfed in a great bonfire as flames completely enveloped its head. Smaller patches of flames burst into existence in some kind of splatter pattern, like water, but none of them did near as much as that initial burst.

The immolated ant began screaming. Really screaming. The sounds it made were simply a much higher, sharper pitch of its usual bug screeches, but it was definitely screaming in pain and fear. It flailed about the cave, blinded and unable to sense or feel its way back to the tunnel, for a few moments before it stopped moving and fell, its legs beginning to lash and kick as it rolled itself about in agony.

….and Mom just laughed at it, barely even registering the release of her hearing protection spell that encased her ears in that familiar muffled sensation.

The other ant wisely fled the cave before it, too, could be turned into a flaming effigy. She was pretty sure the stinky scarves had nothing to do with its desire to flee. Mom continued to cackle in deviate joy as she trotted past the burning ant, even spitting on it as she passed by. “How do you like it now, ya flame-spitting mutant? Gods I wish I could burn the rest of you out.”

She watched her mother disappear into the tunnel, the glow of her magic from her horn lighting her way forward, while the ant continued to burn and scream in lower, softer tones as the flames took their toll. Kite and BJ simply strolled on by, stepping around the thing as they might step around a pothole in the road.

And she just stood there, gawking at the dying bug, suddenly beginning to grow sick to her stomach at the whole thing. Bug or not…that was a horrible way to go….

Worse still to laugh at it.

It was the dirty, rifle-armed stallion still lingering at the door with her that spurred her to move forward through this fit of insanity. “….is she okay?” he said, his voice coming through as a whisper.

Her voice was a sad, broken song. One she feared would become quite common in the weeks ahead. “….I don’t know anymore….”

“…then don’t give up. Or you’ll lose her, and she might not come back.”

…o-oh Luna, I wanna go home….

…but since she couldn’t, she had to go on. Somehow. And find some way to make Mom talk to her. That thing with Hoofprint…she should have seen it coming the second Mom suggested coming out this way weeks ago. She was nowhere near ready to deal with these things, not then, and definitely not now. Or any kind of giant, pony-eating insect. She’d been harboring a deep-rooted fear of them for too long.

She nudged the pups into following along with her with a click of her tongue…and stopped just long enough to pull her 9mm out and put the bug out of its misery with a single shot to the head, ending its screams and death throes in an instant. Despite the presence of Mom’s spell, the shot seemed a lot louder than it should’ve been, though it was nothing compared to the supreme irony of what she’d just done.

She’d just killed something to end its suffering. And it was a bug she could barely stand in the first place, when she’d been too conflicted to contemplate even hurting another pony that clearly had no problem with hurting her.

She made it halfway through the tunnel before her disgust caught up with her, sending her into a gagging fit that took her ten seconds to fight off. Thankfully, nothing escaped her stomach this time…except her hopes that Mom was getting better at handling her stress. And her own.

But whining did nothing. So she just pushed on, and resolved to try hard not to think about it too hard. Yet.

When she finally stumbled her way out of the tunnel, back into the barn that hid the stable, she couldn’t see anypony in sight, so she hurried to the barn door and squeezed through after making sure the pups were still right behind her—

As she’d expected, Mom had quickly found another bug to use her last fire bottle on—she found it crumpled in a heap of crunched-up limbs, on its back, silent. Of the few bugs that milled about around the fake village, only one seemed to be having any conflict about whether to stay and fight or flee for safer territory—all the rest were doing their best to get as far away from the ponies as they could. She would’ve expected one bug to flee in the face of flaming death, but not eight. She figured the stinky scarves were doing the trick after all.

Fine by her. One death-defying shootout was more than enough for her in a lifetime, though she knew more would follow. All she could do was watch for it, and hope that next time it wouldn’t be because they went looking for it.

Mom wasn’t too far away, happily trotting through the town and back into the wastes in short little hops, and Kite and BJ followed along in her wake. El-Tee had to run for a bit to catch up with them and get back beside Mom, but after that their walk was blissfully uneventful. They watched as ant after ant suddenly found themselves needed elsewhere when they came by, some going so far as to begin digging themselves another hole to hide in. It would’ve been funny any other day. Today, it was just a relief that they didn’t have to shoot their way out.

The return to the age-weathered asphalt of the ruined highway was a welcome change from the dusty wasteland—so long as her hooves were hitting concrete, she was on the right track, so she could keep an eye out for threats and not really worry about where she was going. Gave her plenty of time to think, to try and figure out how she was going to get Mom to start talking about…about this deep-rooted terror she harbored in the presence of mutant bugs. Not an unreasonable fear, but one she was starting to let take deeper hold than was healthy. It was a really familiar path, one she’d thought she’d steered Mom off of. It was okay to be scared of them—it wasn’t okay to let that fear justify turning savage at the sight of them. How long before she turned that justification around, made it so she could justify doing the same things to bad ponies? Slavers?

Or folk just trying to get by, same as them? She never said anything about it, but she’d been listening to Ada in that town, after she and Mom and Leon had wiped out those “raiders”, from the safety and concealment of the grocer door. Listened to her describe the horrible things these kinds of ponies would do, and though she didn’t understand some of them, Ada painted a clear enough picture for her to figure out that they were the worst kind of pony to run into. She said something about them seeing oblivion in the wastes and going mad from it. Turning cannibal, sadistic, all simply for the sake of it.

And she was getting worried that Mom had begun to go down that path. It was a small thing she’d done, in such a bleak, dark world as this. But bad ponies didn’t get that way in a day, it started with small things.

Like burning a bug to death and laughing at it. She thought so, anyway. And she wasn’t going to let Mom go that route. She was a good pony, she just got really scared and wanted to make herself feel better about it. She was just doing it the wrong way! She knew it. She just had to make her see it. So long as she let herself believe that this violent outlet was the best way to relieve her stress and fears, she’d keep doing it every time she felt that scared. There had to be better ways to accomplish that.

But for the life of her tiny self, she couldn’t figure it out. Not in the three hours and fifteen-plus miles they’d walked before they caught sight of what looked like an old “rest stop” station for sky wagons, just off the road. Back home, she’d read about these places being something like an “all-in-one” store for travelers on sky wagons—get more fuel for the wagon, or get it fixed up if there was something wrong with it, get a bite to eat or use the restroom facilities and such. Pretty popular places to stop, if all the parked, ruined sky wagons on the other side of the road were any indication. The rest stop station wasn’t much bigger than a house, but it was something with four intact walls and a roof, and she didn’t like the idea of sleeping outside in the open.

“Think we found our stop for the day,” Mom called out as the rest station drew closer and closer, and she could start to make out the letters on the signboard at the top of the building: “SALT LICK’S ONE-STOP SHOP! FOOD, FUEL, FULL-TIME MECHANIC!”

“Yeah, looks pretty sturdy, actually,” Kite agreed with what sounded like….pleasure? Hope? “Might actually find something in there.”

She couldn’t help but notice that Kite had been sorta glancing at her out of the corner of her eye as she said that. Some subtle hint that the scarred, grape-colored mare had an idea of what she was trying to do, and trying to tell her she would be better off waiting a little bit. She was probably right, too.

“…think I’ll slink off in that little boneyard across the road,” Mom said, her head turned towards the scattered debris and overturned pegasi contraptions that adorned a good seventy yards of ground. “Nature calls, and all that.”

Kite saw this as an opportunity to forestall a coming fight/argument between mother and daughter, and wasted no time in springing into action. “Elly, BJ, c’mon, we can scope out the rest station pretty quick between the three of us.”

Light Tail didn’t take the bait. “N-nah, I…I gotta go too,” she lied. She didn’t really have to. Yet. She just wanted a shot at talking to Mom alone. Could have picked a better time, yeah, but…how often would they be getting any kind of privacy now, if at all? Just the thought of a colt being in the same place as her while she slept and ate and did her business was unsettling. At least in Syrup Mound they had working restrooms. No such luck out here….

“You sure it can’t wait?” Kite persisted anyway. Had to give her credit for trying, at least.

“It’ll be a lot darker later,” she countered, taking a passing notice of the sky and how it seemed a bit…darker in color. Even with that cloud cover stretching across for hundreds of miles (if not more), there was a stark difference between night and day, and she’d learned to tell when the sun was starting to set by how much light was still left. And judging by the sky, it was mid-afternoon…probably close to four, she didn’t have a PipBuck with a clock so she couldn’t say for sure. “Would rather do it while I can see what I’m doing.”

Kite’s face, despite losing only a hint of a smile at her lips, had changed, now seemingly apprehensive about what kind of problems would be strolling through the door in the near future. But she had no polite or subtle way of convincing her to change her mind now, not unless she wanted to potentially start a fight right here.

“….right,” the mare said through a forced cough from her throat. “Better be proud of how lucky you are, BJ, you don’t have the problems we have.”

BJ’s groan of disgust was clear and unmistakable. “Oh gross, I do not want to hear about your problems with going to the bathroom, just dig a hole and get it done!”

She was pretty sure three sets of cheeks blushed red with blood and embarrassment at the suggestion….until she got to thinking about it a little longer, and….

“….hey, that’s not actually a bad idea,” Mom said, seemingly impressed with the snarky little colt’s thinking, for once. “Bury the waste like a cat. Keeps predators and folk from tracking us that way, at least. Didn’t think of that. I was wondering if I would ever need this stupid folding shovel in my packs.”

BJ’s face found one of the few occasions to show his emotions—his features began to cringe and crunch up as he tried to block out the mental images no doubt assailing his brain at that moment. “….I’mgonnagoaheadseeyalater!” he blurted out in a second-long burst of speech before bolting off towards the rest station, small clouds of dust puffing up from the ground around his hooves.

She tried to stifle a short laugh at his expense, but relented and let it hound him in his wake when his mom began to choke on her own snorting.

“Pffft-snnrk, so scared of us girls half the time it’s a wonder he gets through the day,” Kite mumbled through her nose as she trotted along in his trail of dust. “He’ll never survive us.”

She didn’t really have to go that bad. She was just making up an excuse that would ensure no one would bother her when she went out of sight, where she could begin to properly freak out over the morning’s events.

The first thing she did once she and Light Tail had found sufficient distance from each other within the miniature scrapyard was to smack her head into the side of a sky wagon that still had some shade of pink color to its chassis.

“Bucking idiot!!” her voice snarled at her in anger, a hoof coming up to join in the battering of the ancient husk of metal. “You stupid, bucking idiot what were you thinking?!”

Thinking? Oh, no, not thinking, her mind argued back. Just venting—

—the shattering of glass, the showering of volatile chemicals set ablaze in an instantaneous combustion that utterly consumed the mutant ant’s head in an instant—

…right. Venting. Violently, and right in front of your only child who’s such a bone-deep pacifist she can barely stomach shooting a bug to start with…and yo—

…and…

….and little Light Tail had put the thing down with a bullet, rather than leave it screaming and burning, like her mother had….

Just a bug, she’d told herself. Terrified the piss out of her, literally. It was okay to vent and take back some of her pride and dignity, show the damned things not to mess with her. Burn the bastards alive, make things better for the wastes and make herself feel better about peeing all over the floor like a terrified, wild animal, right in front of her little girl. Visit vengeance upon them tenfold for all the pain Kickstart felt at the sight of her five-year old son eviscerated and spread across the walls like paint. The horrors she lived with having been the one to find him in the first place.

Dumbest idea she’d ever had. Not even messing around with El-Tee’s father for a fortnight and getting pregnant could compare to what she’d just visited upon her precious child. She would regret this day for the rest of her life. That one little gunshot, to end a creature’s suffering by killing it….

Her lunch came back up abruptly, but she didn’t fight it. Just let herself gag out her disgust at herself, washed her mouth out afterwards with some water and staggered away from her corner of the scrapyard in tears. Bad enough to be killing ponies right in front of her eyes, but this…

“…w-what am I turning into….”

She hadn’t expected an answer to be waiting as she stumbled into a rough clearing in the scrapyard, formed from an irregular ring of sky wagons encircling the bare-bone remains of what looked like an outside camp site replete with a small fire pit and a rotted, rusted out barrel. She got an answer anyway…from her little night light, who was waiting by the barrel and staring right at her as she came around the edge of the camp site perimeter, with her puppies nowhere in sight. Likely left with Kite and BJ.

“….you’re a good pony, getting lost in her own emotions,” Light Tail’s electric blue eyes pleaded in sympathy and pain. “Angry, scared…you let it get to you…and you can do better. Even if you have to kill something, you don’t have to do it out of anger or fear…don’t have to…to do things, and laugh about it….we’ve been through this before, you know that.”

Her legs buckled and fell in on themselves, her world blurring into a watery swirl of colors.

By Celestia, her only child was a better pony than she could ever be.

She cried for a while. She was pretty sure El-Tee did too, pressing her face up into her chest and refusing to part ways. She tried to tell her how sorry she was for hurting her, for being the reason she had to go and clean up after her and twisting the best parts of her into something horrible, but all that she could do was gurgle something out of her throat that sounded something like “So sorry I hurt you”. Or something to that effect. It didn’t matter, in the end.

It was a little late for ‘sorry’. She would have to try to be better than what she was if she wanted her most precious treasure to grow up and still be the same pony she was two months ago. The wastes might very well devour her soul and body alive, but she would suffer a thousand hells to make sure the legacy she left behind in her child was better than the world she lived in.

It didn’t take her long to run out of tears. The willingness to leave, and just move on with the day, came from the bundle of fur and love she’d birthed into her life, and made her wish their home had survived. “…w-we should get inside,” El-Tee squeaked. “Gonna get dark soon….”

…y-yeah….inside…dark enough inside me already… “….gonna need dinner…hurled my lunch…”

“…I heard. And…um….y’know, maybe even if we don’t really need to right now…we might wanna um….take care of business? While we got light, anyway…”

Even in such a sour mood, she had just enough sense of herself to shake her head at herself at how they had both made the same excuse to get some space to talk. “….we need to come up with a better lie next time…”

Light Tail promptly snorted into her chest, leaving a little more than just tears soaking into her coat, and the filly quickly pulled herself out of her mother’s legs as she stood up. “H-hey, it was your idea,” she snickered.

“It was your idea to go along with my idea.”

Her child’s body began to turn towards her right, towards the other end of the scrapyard, and it began to dawn on her that she might actually have meant what she said. “Yeah, well, now I think I might actually need to….um….uhhh, I’ll be back…”

She watched her daughter slink away through a gap between two nose-crunched wagons that had likely fallen from the sky in the blasts of ages gone by, laughing as she went.

With a heavy, tired, sigh, she forced herself up to her hooves, to slip back to that quiet corner of the scrapyard and dig a hole—

—she heard metal creak and groan in the distance beyond the camp site’s impromptu perimeter, seemingly explainable by the presence of wind that would bat a chunk of twisted steel about like a stalk of grass.

Except that the light breeze was not nearly strong enough to do it.

All thoughts of relieving herself into a hastily dug hole vanished, fear gripping at her heart as her shotgun slid out of its scabbard and racked a shell into the chamber on instinct—

—a heavy thud sounded out from the other side of the sky wagon in front of her—labeled “Princess’s Pride” in faded standardized Equestrian—followed by what sounded like the chassis frame being physically peeled off—

—a massive, dark gray feathered griffon, his right wing held in place by a make-shift splint and bandage, bounded over the wagon’s roof in what looked like a running leap, his right talon already swinging downward to swipe at her. And in that brief moment when time seemed to slow to a standstill, when it felt like she could make out every detail of his body in exquisite detail, she spared a glance at his eyes…and saw a world of hate and fury being directed strictly at her—

O-oh fu—

She had time, just barely, to start to backpedal away from him, to try and bring the shotgun up for a clean shot at his torso, but it was already too late for that. His talon’s claws slashed at her head, just above her left eye, and raked down across her face, the prickling sensation on her skull giving her eyelid just enough warning to smash shut before the hit—

She felt the left half of her face suddenly explode in blinding, fiery pain. Even her eye seemed to scream in agony along with her voice as she found herself howling and screaming, losing her hold on her shotgun and stumbling onto her back in her blinded efforts to put some distance between them.

“Not quite like clipping a wing, but it’s a start,” the griffon’s voice roared angrily through her screaming, his body thumping into the ground hard enough to send a slight tremor through the earth beneath them.

It was his voice that brought back some of her focus, that gave her something other than blinding, intense pain to fight through as she began to recognize this griffon. This animal.

Saurus.

Her other eye, undamaged, forced itself open, and she glared upward through a slightly off-centered view of the world—

She remembered Saurus being quite a bit more…robust, in his appearance…but with only one eye to see through, the world as a whole looked quite a bit flatter than usual. She still recognized his face, his eyes, that large pistol with the open-top slide and its exposed stainless steel barrel that, at this distance, now looked to be a 9mm-sized bore—

“You’re lucky you didn’t blow my wing off,” he snarled, stalking towards her on all fours, a black rifle slung across his back jiggling slightly to his movements. “Or I’d be pulling that eye out with my beak. I’d make you my bitch if I thought I could keep you penned in, but you’ve just pissed me off enough to make me not care about getting some on the side. Maybe that little shit of a filly instead—”

She had a brief mental image—one that infuriated her far more than those savages she’d blown apart in the rain. One that showed this animal, this thing, pinning her precious treasure onto the ground as she struggled against his violence—

KILL HIM!!

An explosion of pure, savage rage emboldened and energized her frightened frame, turning her magic into a barely-thought of process that seemed to know what she wanted before she did it. The eroded metal barrel became a projectile, flung towards the sadistic griffon with such speed that he was startled into a halt and hastily knocked it aside before it could smash into him.

In the time that it took him to do that, her shotgun had zipped back into her magical grasp, the bead sight focused on the obscured griffon and waiting for a clea—

—her ears perked upward at the sound of bare hooves clopping against the ground, rushing towards her from behind the wrecked Princess’s Pride and heading for an opening at the far corner—

—she swung the bead sight off towards this new threat as she bolted for better cover, waiting until the last moment to be sure she was shooting at a threat—

A grungy-maned earth pony mare bearing a 9mm pistol in a mouth-bit grip harness sped around the edge of the camp site perimeter, five yards away, her roughly-hewn, tattered vest showing no sign of any body armor beneath it—

She squeezed the trigger back on the shotgun, the muffled blast surprising her almost as much as the rough, ragged patch of ripped metal that marked the buckshot’s actual impact point. Cursing her half-blinded sight, she worked the shotgun’s forearm and attempted a second shot, holding off when the savage mare ducked back behind the Princess’s Pride—

Two more shots rang out from behind, beyond the camp site, and smacked into the Princess’s Pride in a “walked” pattern behind Saurus as he ran for cover himself—

Sling finally made it to the edge of the perimeter herself, leapt through the pony-sized gap where the overturned sky wagon’s passenger doors used to be in a past life, and planted herself against the frame on the other side—

“Light Tail, run!!!!” she screamed in terror, her magic briefly shifting to her travelling saddle, jerking at the zippers that attached the saddle bags to the harness—

The bags fell off onto the ground, and though their enchantments nullified much of the weight within them, that wasn’t the point. It was simply much easier to move about quickly without those things on her side. She’d learned that the hard way.

“Run where?!” El-Tee screamed back in clear panic from the maze of warped metal and bones. “There’s five of ‘em—oh sh—”

A burst of gunshots bellowed out before her daughter could finish her first swear word of panic, and Sling felt her heart twisting and tearing in ways she’d never thought possible. Frantic, she risked a peek up over the chassis, hoping to catch sight of either Saurus or this new mare “hireling” of his—

Saurus’s body rose up over his cover twenty yards away, his arms leveling a black rifle that reminded her sharply of Ada’s and squeezing off a pair of quick shots at her as gunfire off to her left began to ring out in a steady pattern of shots from seemingly two sides—

—two metallic pings zipped through her cover, culminating in a pair of tear holes on her side of her cover that showed just how protected she really was against his rifle—

—she answered back with three shotgun blasts—at the distance she was shooting from, the buckshot pellets were able to spread out and cover a larger area the size of a pony’s chest, but he was quick enough to duck back into cover before the second blast—

The mare finally drew enough courage to charge at her again, coming out from behind the Princess Pride and squeezing off a shot in passing as she tried to get around Sling’s cover to finish her off up close—

She let off her fifth and last shell in the gun, missing her target by a hair, as at close range buckshot was compacted much like a solid slug round and had almost no spread to it. Faced with a charging, armed mare less than ten feet away and an empty shotgun in her own magical grasp, she briefly contemplated bashing the mare’s face in with the taped-off hook end of the sawn-off stock—

—she dropped the weapon instead, flinching as the mare fired off a second shot that twanged into the wagon’s front end—

—the pistol failed to cycle completely—she saw the weapon jerk within the mouth-bit grip as the empty brass casing got caught in the ejection port mid-cycle, a simple stovepipe malfunction that she could clear in less than a second. But this earth pony mare didn’t have the magic to accomplish that clearance with that speed.

The mare’s eyes widened in stark terror as Sling burst forward, her forelegs reaching up and pulling the savage back towards her before roughly shoving her into the side of the wagon. She followed up with a pair of solid blows to the side of her head as she tried to struggle out of her grasp, then threw her onto the ground and unconsciously ripped her newly appropriated knife from its sheath—

—you can do better—

Her daughter’s words saved this savage at the last second, and the knife’s drop-point, seven and a half-inch blade was flipped over in favor of the hilt’s backside, clobbering her attacker into unconsciousness in a single blow—

“Mom behind you—”

This mercy was not extended to this new threat—she barely had time to register her daughter’s warning when she heard the hooves behind her, running up to her without firing a shot—

—she whipped around, blade end facing outward, and drove the entire blade into the throat of a pale orange unicorn stallion before he could bring his crudely-forged sword down upon her spine. The pale yellow glow of his magic vanished and dropped his weapon—

—Saurus’s rifle began barking at her from across the campsite, ripping into her cover and nicking the back of her hind legs—

—she caught the unicorn stallion’s falling body in her forelegs, bringing it around to face the griffon as she drew her 10mm pistol and pushed it past the bloody neck, using his lightly armored body as her new cover as she began to unleash a steady stream of slugs—

—even through her reduced field of vision, she could make out bits of flesh, fabric and blood popping up out of the dead stallion’s backside as they exchanged fire, and she pulled the body with her as she hopped away from her shot-up cover, trying to escape from the camp site’s perimeter barricade—

—he stopped shooting, ducked back behind his cover, and she dropped the dead stallion and bolted away, barely remembering to take her knife with her—

—she spotted Light Tail huddled behind an upside down wagon, one empty magazine on the ground next to her and another one being flicked out of her 9mm pistol as she frantically tried to get a third one into the gun. Across from her was a maze of wreckage, some of it little more than ruined engines pulled out of their home sky wagons and dismantled for parts lifetimes ago, and at least two more threats trying to kill her and her night light.

One of them—a scruffy-looking griffon with pale gold feathering and a tan body, was raising a 10mm SMG over the top of his position, unleashing short bursts of four to nine rounds in Light Tail’s general direction. While he had sufficient cover from El-Tee’s position, he was partially exposed on his left flank as Sling galloped into this part of the firefight, and she took advantage of it with a string of fire from her pistol—

—the slide locked open after the fourth shot, but three rounds punched into the griffon’s left side. His arm slackened and slid off the side of the engine he was using for covering, dropping the SMG as he slumped in place and grasped at his mortal wounds.

Light Tail had barely reloaded her pistol when she was picked up off of the ground by her mother’s magic, pulling her along with her as she made a mad dash for the edge of the scrapyard. The fewer directions they could come at her from, the better—

A burst of automatic fire smacked into the dirt behind her, spurring her into running faster, darting left and right and deftly edging her way through the maze of dead sky wagons, before finally coming to the edge of the mess. A lone commercial passenger craft, built to accommodate many souls within it for lengthy travels, had half sunk into the ground many decades ago and was preciously exposed for much of its remaining visible topside. But the back end, where the engines were housed, remained more than tall enough to hide a pair of terrified ponies in the midst of a honest-to-Luna gunfight, and she firmly threw herself up against the chassis frame before finally letting go of her daughter.

The shaking, trembling filly had trouble finding her legs, and settled for crawling up to be next to her mother as she fished out a fourth—and final—magazine from her travelling saddle. “M-mama—”

Her exceptional rage had begun to subside, leaving her exhausted-yet-energized for the next burst of gunshots, and the sound of her daughter’s crying, choking voice spurred her motherly instincts into trying to soothe the terrified thing into a calmer state of mind. “Ssshh, ssssh, it’s okay, I’m here,” she tried to say calmly, nuzzling her child across her face. “I’m right here. Where’s the other one?”

“I-I…I don’t know!” she sobbed, her body continuing to shake as she tried to get up to her hooves. “I don’t know, there were three of them, and I heard you scream and I pulled the gun on ‘em…and they seemed surprised or somethin’ they didn’t do nothin’, not ‘till I turned around and shot at that big griffon to make him move…and then they got some sense back in ‘em and started pullin’ guns on me, I barely got time to warn you before they started shooting an—”

Her hind legs suddenly began to part slightly, her tail hiking involuntarily—

“—aaand oh crap I think I really gotta go no—”

Oh fu—

She barely had time to lift the filly off and away from her, further back, before the poor thing lost it, and she turned her attention back towards the center of the scrapyard to see if Saurus or the other unknown threat were making their way through to her. And to give her frightened, crying child a moment’s peace to let her fear run its course.

In the minute that it took for Light Tail to suffer in humiliation, she was able to get a rough count of remaining munitions organized in her head. Three magazines left on her 10mm, a full cylinder in Grayhawk and five full reloads….her shotgun was still where she’d left it so that was useless to her….

….Light Tail had two mags left, twenty-six shots….

“—idn’t say anything about a kid bein’ with her!!” she heard a male voice growl out from somewhere within the scrapyard—

“I said there was a target I wanted dead!” Saurus roared back. “And I told you not to kill anybody else with her if you could help it, and you damn near screwed that up!!”

“Damn kid pulled a gun on us, knew how to use it! Drilled a hole in my leg, I didn’t sign up for this sh—”

A lingering whiff of hot urine began to creep into the air, just as a single gunshot rang out and put an end to the short argument in violent finality.

“…wha….was that what I think it was?” El-Tee heaved in deep, hard breaths, her saddlebags popping open.

Sling couldn’t bring herself to answer right away, still shocked at how callously Saurus seemed to regard the lives of others. “….oh, shit….”

“….hunh…yeah, it was,” the child stammered. A few seconds later she could hear her hooves begin to stumble forward, almost like a foal still learning to walk—

—a blood, placenta covered newborn, her mane and tail slickened and flat, struggling to even find a way to pull itself towards her as it mewed and cried in distress—

Her mouth went dry, cracking apart to speak the next horrifying words from her throat. “….honey, I need your help….”

“…no, Mom, d-don’t make me kill somepony please—” the child cried, still stumbling forward.

—its cries and its jerking, rolling movements to try and get its legs working stirred her exhausted body, suddenly drawn to this helpless, shrieking package of flesh that had been ripped from its comfortable, warm bubble and pushed out into a cold, unfamiliar world devoid of the steady heartbeat that had been its entire world—

“Honey, please…we won’t make it unless we work together…”

Light Tail had to fight herself, her senses and morality, in order to answer her. “….ma…mamaa, please—”

Fresh tears began to flow from her eyes, stinging the flaming cuts across the left side of her face. “I don’t want you to kill him. I’ll do that myself.”

“Then what do you need me for?!” Light Tail finally found the strength to scream back.

“I need you to…I need you to shoot at him so he stays put. I don’t care if you hit anything or not. I just want you to make him stay put, so I can get around him and at his side—”

Her words died in the air as Saurus emerged from the crude perimeter of the camp site in a manner that had her nearly wetting herself for a second time that day.

He came out walking upright, on his hind legs, with his rifle up and shouldered, ready to fire. His walk was ungainly, aided by only one wing…but he was walking, and with a superior view of his line of fire. There was no sneaking around him.

She’d seen this once before, too.

“….oh, fuck me….”

“…m-mom….what’s that mean….”

Fu—…oh shit shit shit—

Now caught between two equally uncomfortable positions (one of her own doing), she sought to put an end to at least one of them as quickly as possible. “…honey, shoot, now. Before he gets any closer. Shoot!”

She said the last word a little too sharply—Saurus’s hearing picked up on it almost immediately, and his rifle dipped around towards her—

—she bolted out from cover, heading left, raising her 10mm up and blazing away in his general direction in the hopes that he would focus on her—

—his rifle tracked her movement down to the tiniest muscle twitch, bellowing round after round at a moving target. Metallic pings and clods of dirt sprang up ahead of her as she ran—

—Light Tail’s pistol began barking out shots, coming precariously close to Saurus’s position, taking him off-guard and causing him to stop and take cover behind a sky wagon turned over on its side—

—her 10mm locked back on an empty magazine, which jettisoned out of the mag well with the push of a button to make room for the next one—

—caught in a cross fire between two shooters, Saurus took the incoming rounds in stride, only rising to pop off one or two quick shots at either of them before ducking back into cover. Light Tail didn’t want to move anywhere regardless, but Sling had been hoping to get a better shot at his side and was cut short of her goal. Her only cover was a broken-down engine, most of its innards ripped out, and there was simply too much empty ground between her and the firing position she wanted for her to risk making a run for it.

It was only about fifty feet, but against that rifle, it might as well have been the other side of the world.

The three exchanged sporadic fusillades over the next twenty seconds, and Sling was able to keep track of only her shots and Light Tails, and barely at that—she thought she’d counted eleven shots from Light Tail, but a break in her shooting caused her to wonder if she’d missed hearing two others. Her own round count was also off a bit—she’d initially counted nine, rose up to fire another three, and was shocked into a frantic dive when the “tenth” shot turned out to be number twelve and locked the slide back. With next to no time to line up a good shot, none of them were able to land a hit.

She shook the empty magazine out—for some reason it was sticking to the inside of the magazine well—and slapped her last one into the weapon, when she heard Saurus’s rifle click after just two shots at her cover.

She sprinted out of cover, squeezing off three rounds at his body as she dashed towards what looked like the storage trailer of a moving company, with a white silhouette of a pony with a packed-up box on its back against a black circle backdrop—

—her jaw swung loose from her face in shock at Saurus’s response to an empty gun—rather than duck back to reload and faced with the prospect of taking fire from an exposed flank, he chose to vault over his cover, rolling over in a sort of forward flip, and when he landed on the other side he had his pistol in both talons and was already shooting back at Light Tail, who had thought it best to open up on him with her last magazine while he was vulnerable.

He quickly found a way to put as much cover between him and Sling Shot as possible, and she panicked and began taking any shot that presented itself, to little avail. Within a few seconds the 10mm’s slide slung back and locked open, and in a shrieking fit she dropped the weapon and ran back towards the campsite perimeter, not willing to unleash Grayhawk’s firepower with her daughter so close to the line of fire—

—get the shotgun get the shotgun get him away from my baby—

She barreled past the gap that Light Tail had used to enter and leave the camp site, doing her best not to gag at the sight of a unicorn stallion's body and his spurting head wound sprawled across the ground, intending to dash on across towards her original cover and the shotgun she had left behind—

—Saurus’s body lumbered out into view in front of her just as she reached the other side of the camp site, his left talon lashing out and sinking its claws into her chest—

—her pained scream curled up into her ears as her magic reached out for the only viable weapon she had left at this distance, her knife whishing up in a crude slash—

—he lifted her up and slammed his head into hers, the cuts on her face flaring up once more and disrupting her hold on the blade—

—she felt a warm, metal pipe lightly brush up against her left side briefly before she heard three gunshots blaring into her ears, and three sharp, deep stings that tore into what she assumed to be one of her lungs and her stomach, because she suddenly found it hard to breathe…

….or to do much of anything. She felt pain inside her, pain in places she didn’t know she could feel pain in, and she felt the world…slipping….

….growing smaller…..

He dropped her, hard, but she barely registered the landing, struggling to even cry out in pain. She’d never been shot before….

…he stood over her, empty pistol, trying to swap out the magazine and finish her off….only…

….he looked hurt….bleeding from his left shoulder….

He glanced at her for a minute, then at something off in the distance….and then he vanished in an eye blink.

….or her eye had shut for more than a second, because she could see Light Tail shrieking at the sight of her, dropping her five-shot revolver and trying to get her attention….

She tried to talk, to say something. To say something that would make this heartbreak easier, to say “I love you” one more time….her vision blurred, wet and warm, and Light Tail’s face blurred into a swirling of colors….

…Luna….not like this…..please….

The color swirl vanished, and Sling Shot began to cry as she began to see the first time she’d seen her little girl—

—her forelegs, unbidden, reached out, gently scooted the screaming, crying newborn up against her chest, and its cries halted as it heard the familiar beat of her heart—

….not…like this….

She barely managed the breath to sob when her night light’s voice shrieked into the world, at a volume she’d never heard anyone cry at before, and her legs began to slacken as she lost the energy to move herself any further.

"KIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITE!! HELP MEEEEEE!!"

Chapter 12

“ATTENTION. EMERGENCY. SPARK GENERATOR FAILURE. ALL RESIDENTS MUST EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY. YOU NOW HAVE TEN MINUTES TO EVACUATE THE STABLE—”

Her eyes snapped open, instantly aware of every minute detail revealed to them—broken potion flasks, their labeling torn and wrapped amidst the shards, a bright, orange flame actively consuming the crumpled remains of a lounge couch, rippling puddles of water reflecting the dancing fire in an endless loop. Her mane, wet and flopped across the cold floor….

…Grayhawk, laid out before her in a pool of water, its matte silvery finish adorned with a pale orange hue as the light of the fire pulsed into the room….

Her precious treasure nowhere to be seen.

She shook as much water and pain free from her as she could manage in three seconds, forced herself upright on four weakened, aching legs. Taking Grayhawk into her magical grasp, she stepped forward through the door in search of what mattered most.

Family.

The darkened hallways offered a horrific visage—bodies of ponies sprawled about, bloodied and motionless, some bearing the ripped armored barding of heavily-armed security personnel. Shell casings of all kinds littered the floor—pistol, rifle, some shotgun rounds—and the walls were peppered with circular impressions from pistol and buckshot impacts, and sheared, ripped holes from the power of higher velocity rifle ammunition. But she could find only a sign or two of their attackers, in the form of wounds on their victims and the occasional splash of discolored, dried liquid splattered on wall panels and flooring.

She couldn’t imagine her night light staying in such a place as this.

She trotted past the carnage, glancing at it only long enough to make sure she didn’t step on any of the bodies. Brief, sudden strobes of light from misfiring light panels blanketed small pieces of the world at seemingly random whims. Bright orange warning lights, on the other hand, remained functional, their beams swinging across the walls in a constant, steady pulse. When combined with the malfunctioning lighting, it was enough to make her nauseous.

Or, rather, it should have. But she could only marvel at the confusing combination of colors and wonder at why the warning lights were orange. It felt as though the color was…off. Not right.

…but no. It wasn’t important. El-Tee, Windy….they were all that mattered. So she pressed on.

She found her way to a stairwell at the other end of the hall—curiously, she seemed to reach it a lot sooner than she would’ve guessed, but she wasn’t going to complain about a lucky break to her search speed. She found plenty of other things to curse at when she reached her destination at the bottom of the stairs—L15, marked in large white lettering on the wall.

The spark generator level.

“—IDENTS MUST EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY. YOU NOW HAVE SIX MINUTES TO EVACUATE THE STABLE—”

The massive time gap never registered—only a sense of panic prevailed as she began to gallop through the corpse-littered halls, searching frantically for her child and friend before the stable died and took them down with it. She forced herself to look at bodies that remotely resembled a pegasus or a filly, and felt no relief when each check turned up only a stranger’s face. The wounds on the dead were recent, by as much as a couple of minutes if the fresh, oozing blood was anything to go by. Whatever was killing everypony, it was very close by, and had yet to run out of ponies to play with.

Grayhawk’s bright red front sight burned hotly despite the lack of decent lighting, as if yearning to find something to shoot and destroy. She turned a corner, nearly tripping over a lifeless grape-coated mare—

—heard a burst of automatic gunfire from a room a couple dozen yards away, strangely muted despite the tight, metallic confines of the stable halls, and rushed towards it. Flashes of light spilled out into the hall from the room with each burst, an—

—and terrible, bug-like screeches caused her resolve to waver as she neared the door.

A last ring of shots pinged off of the ceiling, a pony’s screams of pain replacing them, and she stumbled through the doorway, Grayhawk in her magic field—

—an earth pony stallion, lime green, fell to the floor, a trio of filly-sized ants clambering over him and tearing into his neck and face, and before she could think to peel the bugs off of him, his screams came to an abrupt end with the tearing of his trachea from his neck.

She scrambled back out of the room, sealing it shut once back in the hall. Too late to help him. Had to save the ammunition for somepony that could be helped.

Back into the main hall, and back to her original path—towards the generator room. Windy would probably be there, trying to cover the maintenance ponies working desperately to keep the generator going long enough for survivors to get out. Light Tail would probably be there, trying to talk them into leaving with her.

After an eternity and a seemingly endless hall of death and blood, she found that nopony had left the generator room alive. The door itself was seemingly torn off with sheer brute strength, tossed aside like paper and crushing at least three souls inside. A dozen bodies lay eviscerated about the area, some splayed out over a railing on an overhead walkway, others snipped in half where they had fought.

She spotted Cloud Wind’s sky-blue body near an open vent, its grating cover nowhere in sight. The ammo belt for her battle saddle-mounted rifle was down to what looked like eleven rounds, and a shower of empty casings and metal links were piled up all around her. One of her wings had been bitten off, leaving a bloody stump behind, and part of her neck had been ripped open…

….and she was still breathing. Barely.

She cried, silently, as she crept up to the dying mare, to comfort the poor thing in her final moments…

…the pegasus’s voice croaked softly, unintelligible, and she leaned closer to her blood-caked face….

“…wh….why….”

Her crying tapered off, guilt flooding into her in its wake…

“…why…didn’t you come back….why…”

She tried to open her mouth, to say something….

…and instead bolted off for the nearest door when she heard a familiar cry through the vent, and a chorus of excited, hungry bugs closing in on a meal—

—charged back into another hall, where the cry was much louder and more terrified, and she willed herself to be at the source in the next instant and stop it—

—she was greeted by the sight of a colt when she turned the corner into a dead end, his twitching body being torn open by a pack of radroaches, his right foreleg mere inches from her as his blood smeared down the walls—

She couldn’t tell if the screams were hers or his over the sound of Grayhawk blasting the bugs into pieces, but when the fourth and final insect was blown apart, it was too late. His cold, lifeless eyes were all that remained to accuse her of failure.

“—ATELY. YOU NOW HAVE THREE MINUTES TO EVACUATE THE STABLE—”

She staggered away from the grisly scene, barely capable of breathing, as she sought out the only thing left in her life in the maze of chaos. “…h-honey, where are you…”

“Right here.”

Her night light’s answer startled her into a short, screaming fit as she spun around, and the sight of her child glaring back at her as though she were a stranger broke what was left of her heart.

“You left them,” El-Tee boomed at her in an accusing, resentful tone. “You left them all to die.”

Try as she might, she couldn’t come up with anything to say. Not to the truth.

“You left them to die, alone. You left Aunt C to die! You murdered her!”

The tears came fresh, and hot. This was not her night light. This was not home. This was not what her daughter had told her earlier. “I…I di…I c-couldn’t save them—”

“You didn’t even try!” “Light Tail” screamed back, still glaring at her. “You just left! All you could think about was yourself! We’re supposed to do better! All you’ve done is murder people!! Aunt C, Hoofprint—”

“I didn’t kill him!!” she squealed back, crying a virtual lake of tears now. “I wish they’d found me instead, I wish I could go back and change it! I didn’t kill him!!”

“Bullshit!” El-Tee screamed back, shocking her into submission with the ferocity of her voice. “You were just glad it wasn’t you! Or me! Everywhere you go, it’s all about you!! You wouldn’t even go back for Aunt C! You just left her alone to die with everypony else! Even now, all you see is people to murder if they get close!! You kill them without asking if there’s a better way! You laugh about it! You enjoy it! Murderer!!!”

Her senses began to crash, blinded with guilt, tears, and horror at what this monstrosity of her little girl had to say to her face. Her legs buckled and folded in on themselves, allowing her body to sink to the floor. She couldn’t find the strength to defend herself anymore.

“You should have gone back. Should have tried to save somepony other than yourself. You murdered them all without firing a shot. You’re the worst of them.”

“—OW HAVE ONE MINUTE TO EVACUATE THE STABLE—”

“…yeah, there you go. Sit there and cry, let it all end right here. It’s what you should’ve done to start with, murderer,” her facsimile daughter taunted before fading into the shadows.

Radroaches began to close in on her from all around her. She let Grayhawk clatter onto the floor rather than resist. What was the point now? Everything was gone.

“—GENCY. SPARK GENERATOR FAILURE. ALL RESIDENTS MUST EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY—”

Hardened carapaces began to tingle across her back, and her mind began to think back to Windy, to Hoofprint, lying dead in their own blood…

…and all she could think of, as the pincers began to slice into her flesh, was how ashamed she was for surviving while they perished in her place….

Her body jolted as hideous teeth began to pull at her flesh, her senses suddenly showing nothing but blackness and silence. Her legs found themselves trapped in a tight, warm cloth-like cocoon, and the cold floor was replaced by a feeling of cotton-like fabric caressing her—

….her bandaged, aching body….

She felt more bandages wrapped around her head, pressing what felt like a pad over her left eye as it sent spikes of hot, searing pain into her face. The klaxons, the screaming bugs, all the sounds of the hell she’d just been in were gone. She could hear only deathly silence, broken up by the occasional wheeze of a wind breeze, and the sounds of a pony’s sleep-addled breathing….

“—ALL RESIDENTS MUST EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY—”

A warm, small package stirred against her body, as if slightly disturbed by her own echoing, fading nightmares, and settled down again without another sound, its head brushing against her bandaged chest….

…its small, child-sized head….

Hoofsteps carefully crept forward from the darkness, and before she could think to reach for a weapon of some kind, a soft, bright aura lanced out at the floor, encompassing a small area around its bearer—

A metallic flashlight was settled down onto the floor, a tiny light bulb shining at its tip, and she finally recognized as the small survival flashlight from her saddlebags that could double as a small candle-type lamp when the lens assembly was unscrewed….

“...Sling? Can you hear me?” Kite’s voice whispered as another object was set down beside the flashlight.

Sling Shot’s mind, still partially trapped in the nightmare that had torn at her mercilessly, could only mumble a soft moan in response as she tried to get her senses in order once more. It felt like she was in her sleeping bag….

“…don’t move too much,” Kite said next, slowly unzipping something in front of her. “You were shot about seven hours ago. Three slugs to the body…you may not remember it…”

Oddly enough, the moment Kite mentioned it, it managed to come back to her in a painful flash—a hot barrel, the intense sharp stings and tearing of her flesh, like red hot soccer balls being flung into her….Light Tail’s voice, crying out for help….

“….oh gods, El-Tee….is sh—”

“She’s fine, now,” Kite replied before she could finish sobbing her question. “Had to give her a sedative to get her to sleep, and even then she refused to be put more than a couple of inches from you. She managed to stuff herself into your sleeping bag with you, plush fox and all. She’s been out like a light since. Even the frying pan I dropped an hour ago didn’t wake her. Or you, for that matter.”

Her left foreleg unconsciously drew back in towards her, inevitably coming into contact with Snowy’s faux fur coat, and a further squeeze confirmed the presence of her daughter cuddled against her. With her most precious treasure seemingly safe and sound with her, her body finally allowed itself to release its tension and terror from the horrors of her dreams. “….ha…how long?”

“Seven hours,” Kite answered again, setting what looked like a box of bandages down next to the flashlight, and then a bottle of tincture of iodine and another box containing gauze pads. “I’ll make it quick, I had to pull the bullets out while you were still awake. I’m hoping the trauma was enough to make you never remember it, you barely survived it. I had to pour five healing potions down your throat, but after the third one they started having less and less effect on you. They did manage to fix up the internal damage to your organs, but…but I had to stitch up the wounds on your body when the potions stopped working. You needed a blood transfusion too. Elly was a closer match, naturally, but you needed more than her body could provide and survive it. Turns out my blood is a decent match as well, so I used mine. The stab wounds in your chest healed up without any issues. Only lucky break in the whole mess….”

Another slight squeeze around El-Tee confirmed that she was still there, sleeping soundlessly and unaware of the conversation going on in front of her. “….did she see?”

“No. I made BJ take her outside. Think they got into a fight out there when she tried to come back, I found him pinning her to the road when I was done, covering her head with his body like he was trying to block out your screaming from her ears. What was left of the last healing potion I used on you was enough to smooth over the bruises and bloody noses. That’s when I sedated her. Figured she’d had enough stress for the day.”

…oh, Luna, my poor little girl, why…

“I got just enough of a look at your eye to tell that it’s intact,” Kite went on, floating a pair of scissors down next to the gathered medical supplies. “I gave you the healing potions before I took a peek, so they may have fixed it up. Whether you’ve had any vision loss in it, though…that’s another matter. I know a doctor in the next town with the knowledge to give a proper diagnosis.”

She wasn’t sure how to feel about that. It was enough of a shock that she barely survived a live surgery she couldn’t remember going through. But in the elation of the knowledge that she was still alive, she found it a little difficult to complain about losing some vision in one eye. If all that came out of this ordeal was that she needed a monocle to see clearly for the rest of her life, she would try not to complain about it too much. Whatever scarring that was left behind on her body and face….she hoped it wouldn’t be too much more traumatic on El-Tee than today had been.

Kite’s magic began to tug at the zipper of her sleeping bag, pulling it apart and lifting the top half of it away from her body, and a chill air began to assault her mangled body. “Time to change those bandages. This might take a few minutes, you really got the shit kicked out of you.”

Sling wanted to laugh, except that it tended to hurt when she breathed, and the short snort that did manage to get through her nose caused that pain to triple in intensity. “Snnk…oh crap, don’t do that, it hurts—”

With the sleeping bag out of the way, Kite began to carefully slip El-Tee’s slumbering body away from her, and to both mares’ surprise, the filly was not the least bit disturbed by the movement. “…yeah, laughter isn’t always the best medicine, is it?”

This time a short chuckle managed to escape, intensifying the pain in ways that made her feel both aggravated and….relieved? Was that th—

“—ould see the show I put on every Wednesday evening at the diner, now that’s funny—”

Tender Mane’s voice faded from her mind, inflicting a stunned tone to her voice. “….not really….”

Thankfully, Kite chose not to press the issue, and set to snipping off the bandages and pulling the blood-stained remnants off as gently as possible. Still, she felt fiery stings assaulting her nerves with every inch of gauze padding removed, as the stitches were still fresh and just feeling them being disturbed sent quivers of fear into her haunches.

After a minute or two of poking at the stitches to make sure they weren’t coming loose, Kite’s magic enveloped the iodine bottle and began unscrewing its cap. “So what was it that woke you up like that?”

Sling tried, hard, not to remember any discreet details of the nightmare, and allowed her good eye to close and blind her to the other mare’s work. “…nothing good. Don’t wanna talk about it.”

“I’m serious,” Kite rebuked gently. “Do you feel feverish? Sweaty? Sick? Any sign at all of an infection? I disinfected the tools and wound sites the best that I could in twenty seconds, but I’m not confident about it.”

“…no, nothing like that,” she sighed into the air. “Just a bad dream…”

Another bout of silence followed…at least, until Kite started pelting her stitches with iodine droplets, and then they started to burn strongly enough that she yipped a little. “Ow ow ow shit that stings—”

“Shhh!” Kite’s voice shushed sharply, a hoof planting itself onto her mouth to halt her complaints. “Elly may be out cold, but BJ isn’t.”

The hoof remained pressed to her mouth as Kite worked the iodine up and down her body wounds, and she did her best to keep her cries of pain in her mouth or, barring that, muffled quietly into the hoof on her lips. After roughly twenty seconds, the droplets stopped hitting her wounds, and a patch of cloth began wiping away the excess as it dribbled down her side and across her belly.

“….soooo, what’s your real name?” Kite asked next when her hoof finally withdrew itself from Sling’s face.

It took several scrubs at her side before the question actually sank in (despite the fact that she’d heard it once before recently), and at first Sling wanted to dodge the question entirely and just tell her to finish her work…

…but when she thought back to that moment, hours ago, when she’d been lying on the ground, unable to even gurgle a good-bye to her little girl as she struggled to breath, and the efforts it must have taken Kite to pull three bullets out of her body and lungs without the aid of painkillers or even a decent operating surface, with nopony to help hold her down….

….after all that, that was the first thing on Kite’s mind after everything else was squared away? Her name?

“…..Bookcase,” Sling answered, slowly opening her eye and craning her neck upward a little, to give herself something other than her sleeping bag and the bottom of the flashlight to stare at. “…..my real name’s Bookcase.”

She saw Kite’s eyes wander off to the side, fixated on her hindquarters for a moment. “…fits your cutie mark better than Sling Shot. Don’t suppose there’s a story to it?”

Kite’s magic put away the tincture of iodine and began pulling out several thick, sterile gauze pads, laying them out across her body to cover the stitches. “….asked my mother about it once, when I was thirteen. She said she named me that because I was born in front of a bookcase. Went from cooking lunch to live birth in less than ten minutes, she barely had time to get out of the kitchen before the contractions hit her. She just set down in the living room and had me right there.”

Kite had to put the bandages and gauze pads down for a couple of seconds, as she somehow found that amusing enough to laugh about it. “Snnrk….cute. Think I’ll stick with Sling Shot. Won’t laugh as much.”

Sling could only mumble derisively and set her head back down, her one-eyed gaze now fixated on a slumbering Light Tail a few feet away. How odd that the pups weren’t anywhere nearby….

“Okay, serious question now,” Kite said after one last snort at her expense. “…was it really Saurus that did this?”

“—ybe that little shit of a filly instead—”

“….Saurus, and four others,” she hissed, more at the memory than the mention of his name. “Killed two, beat one unconscious….he killed the fourth himself when they started arguing about the “job” he hired them for. Not sure why he didn’t finish me off, he had me….”

Kite set the last gauze pad down onto her side, and then enveloped her in a levitation spell to hold her up in the air while she began to wrap another roll of bandaging around her body. “All I could get Elly to tell me is that she thought she hit him, but she was too busy freaking out over you to care where. Did see somepony sneaking out of the scrapyard after I dragged the kids and all the guns and equipment back in. If you’re good enough to walk in the morning, we need to get out of here. Surprised he hasn’t come back already. And whoever you let live…I hope it doesn’t come back to bite us.”

“Speaking of things that bite, where did the pups take off to?”

“Those little buggers? They’re keeping vigil, believe it or not,” Kite said with a grunt as she fought to keep the injured mare afloat long enough to complete her task. “They’ve taken to sniffing around outside once in a while, but they mostly hang out on a table next to a window. Already tipped me off to a couple of radhogs that came trailing after the blood trail you left, probably found the promise of fresh meat better than the dead mercs in the scrapyard. Offed one with that neat knife you found in the one-twenty-eight, think it’ll provide enough meat for the pups for a couple of weeks. Thing’s really sharp and tough, must be made of some kind of enchanted tool steel. Even feels cold to the touch, like a cold spell was cast on it during its forging.”

She’s a knife freak, Sling decided as her body was tilted slightly in mid-air. How else could she even guess at what kind of material it’s made of? “Medicine and blades? You have a rather strange skillset for an ex-slave.”

“No more stranger than yours,” Kite huffed back, still focused on bandaging her up. “’Sides, a blade doesn’t jam or run out of ammo. Just need a good set of sharpening stones and honing oil to keep it sharp. At bad breath distance it’s your best choice. Slaves naturally aren’t allowed to have weapons of any kind, but it’s easy enough to learn how to work a knife when they’re not looking. A few times BJ and I got to learn up on how to shoot a gun. Nothing like what you can do, though.”

A month’s worth of time in the wastes had taught her how foolish she was to overlook the utility of a decent knife—she’d used one to save Kite from violation, after all, not even a day after leaving the Stable. From there on, she’d seemed to need that knife at least once a day for some task or another, and she had to keep asking Kite for it since she seemed pretty intent on keeping it close. She probably knew how to handle those things a lot better, come to think of it….

“….tell you what,” Sling said, craning her neck around as she was turned upside down for a few moments, the roll of bandaging beginning to add a third layer to her body. “We get enough ammo, and I’ll teach you guys how to shoot better, if you teach me and El-Tee how to use a knife better.”

“Not hard to learn a knife, actually,” the scarred, grape-colored mare murmured absently, the tip of her tongue poking out of her mouth as the concentration needed to maintain her levitation spell began to take a greater amount of her attention. “You’ve been doing it right from the start anyway. Best way to use one is an ambush, kill your target before they know you’re there. Our magic can work weapons by just thinking about it so it’s almost second nature at times. There’s a reason there’s more of our kind than earth ponies these days. If anything, you ought to be teaching us magic.”

Sling’s chest began to grow tight with apprehension. “And what makes you think I have anything to teach? Most unicorns never learn more magic than what goes beyond their talents. Some think it’s impossible for a unicorn to learn more than a set amount of it.”

“Your cutie mark is a book with a shooting star streaking over it. If you’re not practiced in some degree of advanced magic then you have a terrible representation of your innate talent.”

….okay, she’s got me there, but I seriously doubt it was my cutie mark that gave you the idea I had something to teach….

“Which one of you found my book?” she asked carefully, trying not to sound angry or judgmental. Not towards the mare that had just saved her life hours ago….

Kite’s eyes flinched slightly, but her hold on the former stable resident never faltered as the end of the bandage roll was pressed against the right side of her body, and several metal clasps began to float away from the floor and latch onto the bandage to secure it. “….BJ thought he saw an important looking book in your possession, a week or two back. Said you guarded it pretty closely.”

“…it is important,” she sighed, shutting her eyes as her body was flipped right-side up once more before slowly lowering back into her sleeping bag. “It’s a family heirloom, a spell book. Every generation of my family has added a spell or three to it for close to five hundred years. Magic is something of an innate talent in my bloodline. It’s what I’m best at, even if my pistol shooting says otherwise.”

“So why not use it?” Kite asked next. Now that she no longer had to keep a slightly heavy mare in the air, she allowed herself a few moments to catch her breath, lying down on the floor next to the flashlight. “Save yourself some ammo and grief now and then? If you have a whole book of spells to draw from, why aren’t you using it?”

“….it…never occurred to me to use it,” she said, drawing her sleeping shut over her as the cool air began to cause her to shiver slightly. “Not in a world where ponies are beating each other to death like wild savages over the ruins left behind by a world-ending war. The few combat magics in that book take quite a lot of concentration and practice to use. And they can really drain the magic out of you if you don’t do it right, to the point where your horn won’t work afterward, sometimes for days. It’s faster and less taxing to just shoot anypony that threatens me. Most of the spells I learned are more for utility than a fight. Light, fire starter, a scrying spell I can use to track ponies or objects, I can even place runes with different effects. Used a set to censor a couple of pages out of that book El-Tee keeps diving into—”

“I saw those,” Kite remarked lightly, her horn lighting up as it enveloped Light Tail’s slumbering body in a light purple magic field and began to pull her back towards her mother. “I was rather disappointed, I remember finding a decent copy of that book in an old library a few years back. A really….hot love scene, and I’m not even into stallions. Think that was the best part, for me. Wondered who had put those stupid runes in their place…”

“That’s not something I want Light Tail reading about just yet,” Sling shot back, feeling a rush of blood flowing into her cheeks. “She’s not ready for it. She can barely handle shooting a bug, I don’t want to think of how she’s going to take coming close to killing another soul.”

Light Tail’s body quickly found itself nestled back into the sleeping bag, pressed against her bandaged body to give Kite enough room to zip the sleeping bag back shut. “….you might want to re-consider that. I had that talk with BJ months ago and I’m not sure it took. He knows the how of where babies come from….but the ‘why’? He’s spent so long hearing others ra…violate me, whenever it pleased them, that part of him thinks that’s just how it is. If you hadn’t come across us when you had, I…I think they might have tried to make him one of them. Elly doesn’t have that kind of experience yet. It’d be best if she got the ‘birds and bees’ speech now, before it can get colored or twisted by things she’s seen or heard.”

It was Sling’s opinion that BJ was halfway there already, and she’d begun to wonder how many of the savages she’d killed had started out that way—as simply an unlucky colt or filly with the misfortune to grow up in such a hostile and evil environment that it was all they knew. It was entirely likely they were as much a victim of the wastes as their “prey”….

…but such thoughts were best left to times when she was in a better mood to deal with them. Even now, the constant, sharp pain in her side and a lingering stinging on the left side of her face made it difficult to ponder anything for very long. Hours earlier she’d been bleeding out, dying…now she was alive, relatively safe, and in no danger of dying anytime soon. The sleeping bag was a poor substitute for her bed and three blankets, but it was warm enough to start causing her eye to unconsciously drift away from the ex-slave that had saved her life. Tired, in pain…

…yes, it was time to go back to sleep.

Kite seemed to sense the shift in her mood—she could hear her re-packing the medical bag even as she shifted her body a tad so that Light Tail’s head had a little more room to toss and turn in her sleep. “I’ll wake you up roughly an hour before dawn. Give you some time to get all the guns cleaned and reloaded. We’ll take stock of ammo and meds then.”

Her hooves retreated into the darkness, and only then did Sling allow herself a few quiet moments of pain as she unconsciously squeezed her filly close to her, as if trying to convince a silent part of her mind that everything around her was real and that she wasn’t going to drop off and perish in the next thirty seconds. That this wouldn’t be the last time she would see or feel her daughter’s presence.

The pain in her side robbed her of any confidence of those hopes panning out.

Morning brought an entirely new set of challenges to her day.

Light Tail, as she’d predicted, was so ecstatic to see her awake (and alive) that she seemingly turned into a filly-sized tick, latching onto her and never letting go no matter what she said or did. Only when nature’s urgings became too great to contain was she forced to dislodge herself from her mother’s side and venture outside to take care of things, and she hated to admit that she felt a great relief wash through her when the terrified thing had let go of her. She’d been afraid that El-Tee would be too terrified or scared to even think of leaving the rest station, but if she was confident (or conscious enough) to find somewhere distant to relieve herself, she would probably be okay enough to walk a few miles to the next town today.

And with El-Tee out of sight, she finally had the transparent privacy she needed to beat her mind senseless with disparaging thoughts of how badly she’d screwed things up. She had not once even considered the possibility of that scrapyard being a favored site for banditry and ambushes despite it being nearly perfect for such things. She’d never thought to turn her PipBuck’s EFS back on after they’d left Stable 128 and got back on the road, she’d never thought to even look around a minute for any sign that there had been recent visitors in the scrapyard. She’d just been too consumed by her own guilt and grief over El-Tee witnessing her burning things to death with glee and laughing over it, to the point where the child felt compelled to end their suffering by killing them. Of all the things that this cruel wasteland could have inflicted upon a soul, she didn’t think she could find one that would match that level of innocence stealing without resorting to carnal abuses. And this one was all her fault.

Breakfast was an afterthought, barely noticed in her own self-loathing as she hurriedly cleaned out every firearm that Kite had collected and dropped in front of her. Her 10mm pistol and shotgun had seen a fair bit of use yesterday and actually had near-solid black cleaning patches coming out of the barrels and slides for a minute. El-Tee’s 9mm was a little less fouled, and her lightweight revolver needed only a couple of swabs through the barrel and cylinder chambers. Within a few minutes’ time she had them reloaded, re-lubed, and ready for another fight.

The recovered collection of arms from the dead mercenaries was in far rougher shape. One 10mm SMG, with a few splotches of rust on the exterior receiver finish and three thirty-round magazines whose finish was worn down to the bare steel, but still somewhat functional and the barrel looked as though it still had a few thousand rounds left in its life, but she wasn’t willing to bet on it lasting much longer if somepony decided to do entire magazine dumps through it. One over-and-under double-barrel shotgun, 20-gauge, that looked like it had been continually repaired and used since at least the time of the megaspells—the barrels were coated in a rust-like color and seemingly held to the stock with duct tape. The receiver plate was scarred and pitted almost into obscurity, and the latch release switch looked like it was held in place by a wrong-size screw, as it stuck out enough to completely obscure her sight picture when she lifted it up and aimed it up at the ceiling. She was willing to bet that the pony that had done that had not been able to find the right sized screw and simply used the closest fitting part he/she had on hoof. And when she hit the latch release to open the barrels for an interior inspection, she saw that this particular shotgun did not eject its ammunition automatically, which would mean that shells, fired or not, had to be removed manually. But the barrels themselves, at least on the inside, were still in decent enough shape to take a few hundred shots….except that BJ had only found eleven shells on the merc that had owned it. There was a crudely made sword of sorts in the corner that had only been given a cursory glance—it looked like it had been fashioned out of a sky wagon’s engine fan, a name plate from an office door for use as a guard, and a few layers of duct tape over a shaved-down bottom portion of the fan blade, suggesting that a griffon had used it prior to it finding its way into the hooves of its departed unicorn owner. Even Kite’s war-era, military-issue combat/survival knife wasn’t in this bad a shape. The 9mm pistol of the mare she’d spared was nowhere to be seen, suggesting that her melee victim had quietly slinked off with the weapon after regaining consciousness sometime after the fight.

The pilfered ammunition was no better. The eleven 20-gauge shells looked so pale and lackluster that she had a hard time telling if they had ever been yellow in their lifetime. The 10mm ammunition—all seventy-seven rounds of it—had what looked like sickly dark green spots of mold or grease over the unjacketed lead slugs, and the brass casings looked burnished and scratched up, like they had been used at least two or three times. If this was the quality of post-war munitions, it was a wonder to her that the guns were lasting as long as they were….or perhaps it explained why the guns she was finding were in such battered conditions.

Then again, Ada and Leon’s weapons seemed fairly well cared for, and certainly in far better shape than what she’d seen elsewhere. Perhaps this side of the prairie simply lacked the resources or facilities that the other half had? Whatever the case, the 10mm rounds were not what she wanted to be using herself for fear of a case rupture ruining her own weapon. The 20-gauge rounds and their accompanying shotgun would make for a decent trade offer to a traveling merchant. The 10mm SMG? She wasn’t sure what to do with it—she’d never fired anything on full-automatic before, preferring semi-automatic, aimed shots rather than a spray of lead. And with decent ammunition seemingly as rare as a weapon in decent condition, she wasn’t sure she wanted to be using anything like an SMG at anything beyond bad-breath distance. Even BJ wasn’t fond of it.

So with the recent ammo additions filtered out of their current stock….how many rounds were left? A month ago she had over two hundred 10mms, eighty-plus buckshot shells and some slug rounds, enough 9mm and .38 Special to afford some practice shooting. Several bounty hunts had seen a small portion of those rounds used up, and then yesterday, with the alarmingly high expense in ammunition in two separate fights…

“Not quite as many as there were yesterday, are there?” Kite’s voice broke into her thoughts softly, after what seemed like a minute’s worth of just staring at the pile of ammo she’d pulled out of her saddlebags.

She welcomed the chance to focus on something other than nearly dying yesterday afternoon. “Used a bit of it the last few weeks, hunting bounties. But I must’ve shot off a hundred rounds through my ten-mil alone yesterday…lost track of the shotgun round count. Half our supply of 10mm’s gone. Maybe a hundred decent rounds left….sixty-two buckshot shells and fourteen slugs? Forty-one rounds of .357, but Light Tail still can’t handle the recoil on those just yet. Thirty-nine .44 Mag rounds left. I came out of the stable with forty-two….”

“What about the mercs’ supply?” Kite asked, her hoof sweeping briefly over the separate pile of recently acquired munitions a few feet off to their right…and Sling’s eye finally caught sight of a bloodied gauze pad tied down with bandaging, just above the leg joint. “Ammo’s ammo, right?”

…..oh…right….blood transfusion…. “Exactly how is ammunition made out here? I doubt anypony’s started up a new munitions factory in the last hundred years.”

The answer confirmed her fears about “modern-day” ammunition supply. “….I think it’s mostly salvage. Shell casings, if they’re in decent shape, there’s a group up in Stifla that’ll re-use ‘em. Reloading, they call it. Bullets, they cast out of whatever lead they can find. But nopony else on this side of the valley has their kind of access to copper or the equipment to coat the bullets with it, so….most of what’s made now isn’t as good as war-era, and what little of it that is costs a good number of caps. You probably know more about this stuff than I do.”

“Some,” she growled darkly, eying the new ammo additions in a less favorable light. “The casings can be re-used with the right equipment, but usually not more than three or four times. After that you throw ‘em out, even if they look intact. They could rupture from the repeated heat and pressure stress, or if somebody makes a mistake and puts too much powder in it you run the risk of the thing blowing up in the chamber. Ruins the gun, and maybe you with it. With the kind of shape all these guns are in, it’s a miracle that anything’s still working in them.”

“Seen that a few times, actually,” Kite whispered, her eyes rolling up as she scoured her brain for the memories locked within it. “Bark Skin….our third master, the stable-trained doctor that taught me nursing? He’d make a trip to a town now and then to ply his trade. Sometimes he’d travel with a caravan, but sometimes he’d hoof it over on his own, with me and BJ in tow. Couple of caravans we were riding with got ambushed, and a lone doctor and two slaves are pretty easy targets too. Some of the raiders, their guns were so old and worn they’d literally explode when they fired them. Saw one griffon aim a bolt-action rifle at a brahmin pulling a wagon, only for the bolt to snap off and slam into his brain through his eye when he fired. Killed him right there.”

That’s not how I’d want to go, Sling shuddered, the mental image being a bit too gruesome for her to stomach it for long. Hell, I’d rather not die at a…

“Then you won’t be too sad to see these rounds end up as trading commodities,” she said instead, when the throbbing, pulsing aches in her side seemingly grew in size from the dark thoughts in her head. “Not sure how one would go knocking the primers out of the casings, but the powder and lead are still good. Or, if someone’s willing to take the risk, they can just use ‘em as is. The double-barrel 20-gauge is what scares me the most. That gun is suffering.”

“I’ve seen guns in worse shape and still working,” Kite said in return. “Not for long, but they worked. Stand up a minute. Take a short walk around, see how much it hurts to move.”

Sling had no illusions about how that would turn out, but for the sake of it she indulged the ex-slave anyway and carefully forced her legs to stand up. That in itself, didn’t hurt much, but moving forward—even at a casual walking pace—proved more painful to her side than she’d have cared for. She took a short lap around the dining area of the rest station, then returned to her sleeping bag with a pained grunt and laid back down. Even bandaged up and pressed down, those stitches stung. They didn’t have any painkillers to spare…

“….ow,” she moaned through her teeth, trying to push the pulsating, aching waves of fire in her side out of her mind and failing. “….how many healing potions did you say you went through? Because they didn’t work.”

“They stopped working at the fifth one,” Kite reminded her sharply. “Which was almost all you had left in your bags.”

“Wonderful,” she bit back bitterly, her magic reaching out to her weapons and sliding them closer to her travelling saddle…and the three blood-stained bullet holes in the left side….

Holes that the saddlebag would cover up once she re-attached it to the saddle.

“I’ve only seen potions stop working like that once before,” Kite went on, just as Sling’s magic latched onto one of the saddlebags and pulled it up onto the saddle, hooking up its zipper lining with the zipper on the saddle. “If I had to guess, I’d say that your body is somewhat resistant to magic, which includes the healing magic in potions. When we first met, when you took on Saurus’s gang and came out with a piece of wood impaled in your leg, it took you two potions to heal the wound, when normally it would only take one. And while the five I poured down your throat healed all the internal damage and closed up the wounds on your chest, I had to stitch up the bullet holes and incisions I made. Your face got a little attention from the potions, but….it’s going to have a nasty set of scars on it in a few weeks, eyelid included. I’m just thankful the eye itself wasn’t ruptured or you’d be half-blind for the rest of your life. As it is, you might still have some vision loss in it, but I was never trained in eye care. I never got a look at your eye before the potions were used, so I can’t say if it was damaged or not.”

The zipper flashed across to the right, re-attaching the saddlebag to the saddle, and she slowly re-did the loop-and-buckle latches at the bottom to secure the bag in place so it wouldn’t move around. She usually left them undone, but she didn’t want them moving around and making her pain any worse. “….how many stitches?”

“Eighteen,” Kite answered flatly. “Six per wound, plus the incisions. Got lucky, none of the slugs broke up on entry, but they went deep. You, uh….you didn’t need to use the restroom anymore when I was done….”

Despite having no memory of yesterday beyond the point where she’d been shot and left to die, she couldn’t help but feel a rush of blood flow into her cheeks out of shame. Twice in a day…. “…oh…”

Kite, however, was far more dismissive of it than she’d expected. “…don’t worry about it. You were shot, dying, being worked on with no painkillers or drugs of any kind. I would have been surprised if that didn’t happen. Would’ve made it a lot easier on me if you’d just fainted from the pain, but you didn’t. Like some part of you was afraid that if you did, that you wouldn’t make it through. You only passed out after I cleaned you up and started stitching the wounds. And like I said last night, Elly didn’t see a thing. BJ wouldn’t let her. All she knows is that you were screaming in pain for the better part of twenty minutes, which will be traumatizing enough. Sedative gave her a good night’s rest, but we can’t do that every night. She’ll have to work through it, and that may mean several restless nights and night terrors. Both of you, actually….”

She wanted to say that Light Tail was stronger than that. Stronger than her, even. She wanted to believe that her filly would come through this none the worse for the experience….

…but when the front door softly creaked open, she chanced a look up and saw a filly that barely resembled her little girl at all. Her frizzled mane, her bloodshot, weary eyes, her seemingly lifeless trot back towards her mother…for the life of her, Sling Shot could not find even one sign of the care-free child she’d been raising for the last ten years.

And when El-Tee came to a stop at the pile of guns laid out on the floor, and wordlessly collected the 9mm and .357 revolver from the floor to stuff them into their holsters on her filly-sized travelling saddle, Sling began to believe that the wasteland might have already taken away the most precious treasure she had left in this world.

And the wasteland’s only response to such a tragedy was, “Tough luck.”

“….BJ, get your pack together,” Kite called out to the other side of the decaying rest station. “We’re leaving soon.”

“Been waiting for thirty minutes, Mom,” the eternally disinterested colt called back, his voice moving across the floor as he spoke, indicating that he was already making way for the exit. “Faster we get going, the better.”

“We move as fast as Sling can manage, and no faster,” Kite barked back sharply. “You’re going to have to pick up some slack this time—”

Sling’s magic wrapped itself around her bloodied PipBuck and hastily flipped the “EFS” switch on, filling her one-eyed vision with a compacted, green-tinted overlay displaying, among other things, directional compass and the EFS’s threat matrix, which had already marked El-Tee, Kite, and BJ as friendly tags. “Leave him be, I’m the one who screwed up. If I’d had this damn thing on yesterday I’d have seen them coming and none of this would’ve happened in the first place. I won’t be making that mistake again.”

Neither of the ex-slaves seemed to have anything worthwhile to say about that, and BJ quickly showed himself out the door and on lookout duty. Even Kite was at a loss for words, and who could blame her? She’d probably thought she’d been smart enough to make full use of her PipBuck at all times.

Kite’s traveling pack was likewise already packed and ready to go, and she quietly retrieved it from the floor before turning towards the exit. “Elly, where are the pups?”

“….outside,” Light Tail answered in a low, sullen voice, her attention focused on getting her travelling saddle on and her three spare 9mm magazines stuffed into a pair of pouches on the right side. “Don’t think they wanna stay here much longer.”

“….don’t take long,” the scarred mare said, her hooves making way towards the door. “Those bodies in the scrapyard done attracted one pack of radhogs, others could be sniffing them out right now.”

Sling had only seen a radhog once, two weeks back, when she’d been tracking down a caravan robber in the uninhabited ruins of Syrup Mound’s northwestern corner for a bounty job, and she’d found it to be an aggressive animal. Charged her on sight, and if not for the PipBuck’s S.A.T.S. matrix it might have torn her up really bad. As it was, it took two shotgun slugs to the body to bring it down, and she had no desire to face down more than one at a time if she could help it. With a pained huff she hurriedly re-attached the other saddlebag to her harness, and was in the process of rolling up her sleeping bag when Light Tail finally stood up, her travelling saddle strapped on and secured to her person—

“….Kite, wait,” the filly spoke up loudly, her voice quivering slightly as she turned around and began trotting towards the other mare.

The grape-coated female stopped in her tracks, turning to face down the filly closing in on her. “…what is it—“

Without warning, Light Tail broke in a gallop to cover the last four steps, leaping up and grabbing Kite around the neck in a tight hug and a quick nuzzle across the crest—

“…t-thank you,” El-Tee croaked, barely able to speak the words as she squeezed and tightened her grip on the visibly stunned mare. She lingered for only a couple of moments after that, and then slowly released her hold and dropped back down onto the floor, making her way back to her mother and leaving the violet-eyed mare to stumble out the front door in something of a dazed stagger, her apple red tail swaying slightly with her movements.

Sling allowed herself a short-lived tear from her eye as she turned back to her sleeping bag, hastily rolling it up and tying it off. The wastes had worn both of them down already, tried to break them. She was sure it had broken her. But it hadn’t taken her night light. Despite all the psychological trauma no doubt pressing upon her even now, she was, deep down, still Light Tail.

And if she had any say in the matter, Light Tail would stay that way until the day she died.

Her brain was nowhere near ready to work again. Yesterday was just too much.

Abandoned stable with a few scruffy-looking vagrants barely eking out a living in this wasteland. A field filled with giant cow-sized ants, some of which burped fire when the mood struck them, who all had a murderous taste for pony flesh. That mean griffon Saurus….and her mom, bleeding, shot….

…dying….

After that, her brain sorta just…broke. A good deal of things that happened after that were something of a blur to her. She could remember screaming for Kite, screaming for Mom to not die and leave her all alone, she could remember Kite screaming at her to go back outside and leave her alone with Mom on a dirty, old dining table in the rest station….

….she could remember BJ dragging her outside by the tail when she wouldn’t budge….and remember the short hoof-fight she lost trying to get past him…

…and all she could remember after that, was Mom’s screaming, and her own crying as she tried to block it all out. She thought BJ was also crushing her with his body, but Mom’s screams weren’t nearly as loud as she thought they should’ve been. She hadn’t cared so much then, but now that she had a few calm hours to think about it, it was beginning to look like he’d done it on purpose, like he was using himself as a pair of earmuffs. Or something.

She could remember Kite coming out a while later, when the screams had died out….and after that, nothing. Just a big blank. She’d been in such a deep sleep that she couldn’t even remember falling asleep at any time yesterday.

Probably for the best. What she woke up to was far better than any dream she might’ve had. Mom was somewhat awake, in pain, and bandaged up all over her body and face…but she was alive. Whatever Kite had to do, it had worked. Mom was alive. She wasn’t going to die.

She had to keep telling herself that all through the morning before she started to believe it.

The next town—Maize, Kite called it—showed up like Syrup Mound had, a blur of rough rectangular shapes in the far distance, roughly three hours after they’d left the rest station (and at a rather slow pace). And while Mom had to stop for a few minutes several times in that time frame, at the end of the long walk she didn’t seem to be any worse off than she was when they’d left. She wasn’t panting or having trouble breathing, wasn’t coughing up blood, and only cussed at her pain once every thirty minutes (which was usually when she would stop and lie down). At that point, she began to worry less about Mom and more about the new town they were walking into.

Like Syrup Mound, and that first settlement in the ruins she took to calling “Lome” after that faded welcome sign at the city limits, Maize was a crumbling, ruined shell of its former life as a center of pony civilization, and didn’t have any tall, towering buildings like Syrup Mound did. There were ponies and griffons on guard at the main road into the town, and on the rooftops, and they were far better armed than the guards she’d spotted at Lome. She was guessing that it had something to do with the massive cow pen that was the very first building they passed by—most of the two-headed cows were hitched up to wagons, or the warped, worn out husks of old rubber-wheeled, ground-bound “motorized” wagons that had engine housings in their rear, and she could see ponies and griffons loading them up with various boxed or barreled goods. Each group of wagons seemed to be separate from the rest—one was guarded primarily by griffons, while another was staffed almost entirely by earth ponies. A third had a mixture of unicorn and earth ponies working them, and a fourth had a mix of all three species.

But what drew her attention most was the herd of two-headed cows in the pen, and the ponies who were tending to the animals and the pen conditions….because every pony inside the pen had those metal exploding collars around their necks, and very few of them would stare at anything other than the animals or their work.

Slaves.

BJ’s voice crept into her left ear with a soft, subtle warning. “Elly, stop staring, don’t give the guards a reason to come out.”

With a slight shudder, she tore her eyes away from the pen and returned to continually looking around her in every direction. After yesterday, she wasn’t willing to risk any more trouble with anypony, ever again. Mom was still hurt, and needed help that Kite couldn’t give her.

They quickly passed by the caravans and continued onward into the town’s well-protected center, where the majority of its market was established. Here, most of the buildings were largely intact, with only a couple of them missing portions of a wall or roof, and many of them sported hoof-made and painted signs tacked over the original, war-era signboards to signify the new owners and their wares. One rose-red brick building, two stories high and with bare concrete window sills, was labeled “GREASE JOINT’S JUNK”, and through an open window she could indeed see all manner of twisted, gnarled junk metal piled up in stacks of crates, as well as a couple of shelves behind a counter with broken display cases stuffed end to end with more intact-looking objects—toasters, desk fans, a couple of roll pins for a kitchen, a coffee maker, stuff like that. Another store, in a run-down grayscale brick-and-mortar building that she suspected was once a flower shop, had a sign over its front door reading “FORELORN REPAIR”, but all its windows were boarded up with old plywood or sky wagon doors.

Neither Kite or Mom paid any attention to any of these stores and their wares, but continued to weave their way through the crowd of ponies in search of a very specific place—

“There,” Kite called it out roughly two minutes later, squeezing her way through a group of uncooperative stallions that seemed more interested in their conversation than in getting out of an injured mare’s path. “Five blocks down, left side. Overdose’s Clinic.”

“That’s a comforting name for a medical pony,” Mom huffed, her horn briefly coming to life and not-so-gently shoving the stallions aside. She thought she saw one turn around to give her grief over it, but the second Mom met his gaze and took hold of her massive revolver, they both backed off and found a quieter corner of the street to be at.

“He’s one of the only three doctors in the Union’s territory that can diagnose eye problems,” Kite explained, one of her forelegs pointing to a marble-faced stone building with quaint-looking pillars decorating its front doorway. “We’ll get him to take a quick look at your eye, see if there’s any damage to it, then we’ll hit up the inn a few blocks from here and find us a room to hold up in for the next coupla of weeks.”

“Two weeks?” Mom protested with a pained gasp, glancing back at her and BJ to make sure they were still there before continuing forward. “We can’t stay that long, th—”

“It took us over three hours to cover ten miles in your current condition,” Kite cut her off. “That’s not even counting the five times we stopped to let you rest for a few minutes. We should’ve already been here and been done with this. We need to stay put until you’ve recovered. Or would you rather face down Saurus again the way you are now?”

That shut Mom up, for once. Her only response was a wordless grumble as she trotted onward in Kite’s wake, being careful to avoid stepping on Max when the strangely protective pup took up space by her side and refused to go away.

For that matter, both pups were being weird. They didn’t do this yesterday, but…

….but nopony was hurt either…at least, not ‘till Saurus showed up…it’s like they know Mom’s hurt and needs help…

…were those fuzzballs really that smart?

Her initial answer was a hesitant yes—when they reach the clinic doors and pushed their way through, Max immediately began barking and yipping at the air above him, which predictably attracted the attention of the dark tan unicorn stallion hunched down behind an old desk in the far right corner of the room—

“Dammit, third time this mo—” he huffed angrily in a husky voice, coming up from behind the desk with what looked like a double-barreled shotgun in the grasp of his horn magic—

He changed his tone and manners almost immediately the moment he saw what was in front of him, and put the gun back down behind the desk. “……ooornneeeeng what medical services do you require?”

She couldn’t help but notice that this might’ve been something she’d have laughed at if she were in a far better mood. As it was, all she could muster was a tap against Max’s ear with a brief burst of telekinesis, and that seemed to be enough to get him to stop barking and come back to her.

“I hear the doctor here is pretty decent at eye care,” Mom answered carefully, never sitting on her haunches or taking her eye off of him.

The stallion’s voice didn’t sound nearly as old as his gray mane might have suggested, and he seemed very physically fit, more so than Mom. “You do appear to be having eye troubles of late, yes. And I am inde….wait, who is that behind you?”

“It’s just me, OD,” Kite replied somewhat sheepishly, though she seemed more embarrassed than afraid of him. “…new owner and all….”

OD’s face literally brightened up, no longer bored or studious, and he promptly leapt over his desk and quickly galloped to meet the scarred mare on a much more personal level. “Kitey!!!! You devilish girl, you show up in all manner of odd places!! But if this is your new owner, I doubt you’ll be in good hooves for long, she’s such a mess—”

“Yes, oddly enough, that’s why we’re here,” Kite said quickly, rearing up lightly as she backed away from the oddball stallion. “She ran into Saurus and lived. I did what I could, but I don’t know about her eye. Told her that you could help with that.”

OD’s brief shower of joy and playfulness died instantly, and he turned back to Mom with a far more discerning eye than he’d shown before. “….this scruffy thing? Little pudgy around the belly.”

“That would be the five layers of bandaging keeping pressure on the gauze pads over my eighteen stitches,” Mom snarled back, as if she took some offense to being called “pudgy”. And she was, kinda. At least, she was when they left the stable. She’d thinned out a bit since. “And Kite is exaggerating a little. I wouldn’t have lived if she hadn’t been there to pull the slugs out of me. If you can help with the eye, great, I’d like to get it over with. Otherwise we’ll be on our way.”

“No no no, I think not,” OD rambled quickly, and suddenly zipped away from her and into a cramped hallway on the left side of the room, pulling his shotgun along with him. “If you shot at Saurus and lived, he won’t leave you alone until you’re dead. Can’t have you trying to fight back half-blind. Come along, dear, we’ll get your post-surgery examination done with and see about that eye. I suspect it’s not severe or you wouldn’t be here.”

OD had barely disappeared around a corner in the hall when Mom glared back at Kite through her uninjured eye. “…is he even all there in the head?”

“….he’s odd, yes, but he’s good,” Kite admitted, her ears flattening slightly. “…a-and he’s one of the few decent stallions I’ve met in my life. Taught me a few things when Bark Skin owned me, things that saved your life yesterday.”

Mom glared at her still, but after a moment she turned away and hobbled her way around the desk, and they reluctantly followed close behind. The short, thin hallway spilled out into a larger central room, complete with old bench seats resting against nearly every bare wall, a set of stairs to a second floor, and what looked like a set of teller windows along a wall on the left. The room itself had two halls of its own, one leading off to the left, and another to the right, and a quick look around revealed the “clinic” to be formerly another building, one that seemed very dull and official-looking judging by all the name plates she saw beside every door. Things like “TREASURER”, “TAX ASSESOR”, “RECORD KEEPING”, and such.

A small, tiny spark of curiosity finally began to come to life within her cloud of despair. “….wait, this ain’t a clinic….”

OD’s hearing was a lot sharper than she’d expected. Even with a twenty-foot lead on them, he seemed to have heard her as clearly as though he were right next to her. “It is now, by necessity,” he laughed lightly. “But before the end of the war, I suspect that this building actually used to be the local courthouse building. The actual clinic on the north end of town was destroyed long ago, either in the war or by the decades of age and decay afterward. I imagine many of the townsfolk went south to Syrup Mound for serious medical care anyway, so this quaint little town wouldn’t have had a complete facility available. Courtroom itself is upstairs, but it’s mostly a storage space for us here. Speaking of which, you kids may remain here while Kitey and miss….er…wait, you never did tell me your name…”

“Sling Shot,” Mom answered dryly. “…how long will this take?”

“Depends,” OD replied as he continued down the hall. “I have an eye solution that may or may not enable me to perform a proper eye exam, depending on how your eye responds to it. The children will be fine, I keep a military-grade Mister Handy ‘bot on the premises. Pain in the hindquarters to keep repaired, but even Saurus won’t take it on. He found out why the hard way. It’s out running a quick errand for me, but it should be returning shortly. It won’t harm you unless you shoot at it.”

Wh…does Saurus hate everybody? El-Tee wondered silently, watching OD, Mom, and Kite grow further and further away from them, eventually slipping through a door somewhere in the middle of the hallway and closing it behind them. More to the point, if he’s that violent to everybody, how is it that nopony’s killed him by now?

Left alone with a colt more interested in the air than her, she silently moved towards a cushioned bench seat to their right, near the hallway leading back into the front lobby. A quick hop landed her in the middle of the bench, and he followed her up, dropping down beside her as settled herself down into a comfortable position. The pups were content to take up some space in front of the bench and behave themselves, for once.

After a short lifetime of silence (or probably just ten seconds), he surprised her for a second time by deigning to start a conversation with her.

“….umm….ss….s-sorry….’bout yesterday….bustin’ your nose and stuff….”

Nothing else in the world could have delivered as strong a shock to her system as what she felt right then (except maybe a repeat of yesterday afternoon), and she had to look at him for several seconds before she believed that those words had actually come from him. “….o-oh…sure….’s fine…I wasn’t really…me, right then…”

“…no, I’m pretty sure it was you. You hit like a girl.”

….okay, that sounds more like BJ… “….gee, thanks…”

“You should thank me,” he huffed back. “Now that you know, you can work on hitting like a boy.”

“…I think I liked you better when you were quiet.”

“I think I like you better when you’re quiet too.”

“Pffft, you would. You hardly say nothin’.”

“Still better than being enough of an airbag to fly a kite.”

A seemingly alien noise burst through her nose from her throat, which she recognized a moment later as a….

…a laugh?

…could she still find something to laugh at, after…after yesterday? Was it right to laugh at things so soon?

“…how you can stand to just sit there and watch everything go by and not care beats the heck outta me.”

“Beat you? Okay,” the colt laughed with a slight, sadistic mirth, and promptly locked a foreleg around her neck while he proceeded to rustle and mangle her mane with the other. “Should be easier than scrambling eggs for a griffon’s breakfast, not much up there—”

Ironically enough, his attempts to belittle her or irritate her just wound up making her laugh out loud in earnest—his hoof found a ticklish spot right at the back of her neck, and before long she was at his mercy, her hind legs kicking at the air as she tried to squirm her way out of his grasp. “H-he-he-hahaa hey stoppit—”

“What was that? I can’t understand a thing yer sayin’—”

His hoof began to rub a little harder at her neck, and now she forced herself onto her side to try and orient the back of her neck away from the offending limb. “Eeeeaaaaaaaahhhahahahaha nooo stop stoppit please I give—”

“Give? Give me what?” he feigned in mock ignorance, and a brief touch of magic began to scratch at her spine in search of a second ticklish spot—

“I give up!!” she shrieked in laughter when he found that spot just behind her shoulder blades and started torturing it to the point where she could barely fight back anymore. “I give I give stoppit hehahahaa seriously stoppit before I pee myself—”

In truth, she was nowhere near that tickled, but just the threat was enough to make him stop and let go of her neck, and she quickly rolled away from him for a couple of feet before coming to a rest on her back. And still she couldn’t stop laughing. Probably wouldn’t for at least a few more seconds…

…but she felt so much better now than she was when was just moping around on a couch, crying at all the bad things that had gone down yesterday…

…better….

….o-oh Luna, was that what he was doing….

“There,” BJ’s voice broke into her stunned thoughts, confirming that sneaking, tear-inducing revelation in her head. “Even with all that bad crap that went down, you can still laugh at the good when you find it.”

Her chuckles died in her chest as she rolled back over onto her belly, no longer regarding him as a clueless, emotionless husk of a colt that had no business wearing a pony’s coat. “….yo….you….you can think?”

She almost regretted blurting that out, but to her great relief he didn’t seem the least bit bothered by it. “I ain’t been encouraged to. If….if you knew half the crap I saw…you’d shut yourself out too. It’s…it’s just easier to get over it if I don’t think about it, and just shut everything and everypony out. Always gettin’ traded off to some new master or another…ya never know where yer gonna end up or how long you’ll stay there. Don’t help to get to leanin’ on folk if you know you won’t be there later. Gotta learn to look after yourself.”

A well of pity and regret began to stir inside her. Despite knowing he’d been a slave all his life, she’d not often thought about the kinds of things he might have had to suffer—only that such a life had made him too silently obedient for his own good. She’d never thought to consider that his distant, detached demeanor could have been meant to shield his feelings from an uncaring world.

“…..why this…why now, and not two weeks ago?”

“….t-that coulda been my mom yesterday,” he sighed into the air. “…I never seen anypony I knew break down like you did…I don’t really know why, myself. I just…felt I oughta do somethin’. Got too used to you being all hyper and talkative and dumb that I don’t know how to deal with you when you’re like me…even if I prefer the quiet…”

She didn’t feel pity now. She felt sad. Sad that maybe for the first time in his life, he had what some folk would consider a friend, and he had no idea what it meant or why he might have been feeling so….different.

“…ya never had friends, did ya?”

“Don’t know that I’d know it if I did.”

“….I think you just proved it, actually. Back home, when my friends were sad or depressed, I’d try to cheer ‘em up, make ‘em less mopey, make ‘em remember that just ‘cause they just had a rough time over somethin’, that they weren’t alone. It…it kinda helps when you know ponies that care about how you feel, that won’t abandon you or stay away just ‘cause you’re not in the mood to play and have fun. Friends stick with each other through bad and good. It’s…I guess it’s how we weather the bad without losing it completely…”

If anything she’d said had stirred or touched any latent feelings of warmth or friendliness in him, his face showed no sign of it—only that same distant, unmotivated stare that he offered the world as his mask. But she knew he was more of the type to say what he felt or meant, rather than show it. “….so is that what we are now….friends?”

“Probably….not the kind of friend I’m used to…but….”

He finally groaned in disappointment, burying his head in his forelegs as if seeking escape from an increasingly uncomfortable subject. “….aaah, crap. Shoulda kept my mouth shut, now you’re gonna bug me forever.”

…well, if that’s what he expects, I’d better not disappoint him!

“Bug you? Okay!” she shouted back, her face breaking into a mad grin at the promise of payback for his “ticklish” assault. “Do you know that you tend to hang close to me when we’re on the road even though my mom’s got the biggest guns—”

His head snapped up, eyes widened in what looked like a dawning realization that he’d just walked himself into a trap from which there was no escape. “Oh shit no—”

She went right along without missing a beat—he’d even given her something to roll with! “And you keep cussin’ like Mom and Kite, ya oughta quit that, it ain’t nice but now that I think about you could probably tell me what some of that stuff means—”

“Shut up, Elly—”

The pups below began to stir from their mild nap, Mona even poking her head up over the bench seat out of curiosity. “Like this one f-word my mom blurted yesterday, when I asked her what it meant she acted like she knew she wasn’t supposed to say it around me and told me to start shootin’ at Saurus—”

BJ began to rouse up from his lying position, his legs unfolding and pushing his body up off the ground. “I mean it, shut up—”

“—or that s-word, she says that like, all the time when she thinks I can’t hear it, and it must mean somethin’ bad or somethin’ ya don’t like—”

“Ya mean like blabbermouth little fillies that don’t know the meaning of ‘shut up’?” he growled loudly—

“Hey, wait, is it anything like ‘crap’? ‘Cause I think I know that one means and Mom never yells at me for sayin’ i—”

—he suddenly leapt towards her from his side of the bench and slung his forearm around her neck once more, trapping her head against him as he began to assail her neck and mane once more—

“—iiiieeeaaaaha ha ha ha ha haAAAA oh Luna not this agaaaaainnn HAHAHAHAA—”

With her head forcibly tilted off towards the far hallway where Mom and Kite had gone, she could no longer see Mona or Max staring at them as though they’d just lost their minds. In fact, she couldn’t see much of anything. Her eyes were already welling up with tears, and her hind legs were starting to kick at the wall—

Their impromptu playing was brought to a sudden, ignominious halt by the rude—but lively—interruption by a third voice, one she’d not heard in over a month but had already managed to remember. “Awwww, that’s so cute, you gonna kiss her or what, little dude?”

BJ’s body jolted so hard that he wound up falling off of the bench—and with his forelegs wrapped around her, he ended up pulling her down with him. The both of them landed on the cold, hard floor with a meaty THUMP!, and BJ was practically flying away from her before the sound of their impact had faded—

“Gah whatthehell don’t be gross—”

El-Tee just kept laughing as she rolled back upright, but she was having trouble getting herself to stand up without collapsing into the floor, she was laughing so hard. “Hehahahahaaaa oh Luna you got him good Ada—”

“Hey, his fault for letting his guard down,” Ada’s voice chuckled, her sharp-tipped talons grabbing hold of her and lifting her back up onto the bench. “And I hate to break it to ya, but if you guys stopped here looking for meds, Doc Overdose don’t sell much of his stock. Unless….you’re here ‘cause you need them…”

Between BJ’s tickling and Ada’s teasing of him over it, she couldn’t find it in her to be depressed or hurt by Mom getting shot, bad as that moment had been, but just remembering it was enough to kill her laughter. “…hehehe….ahh, I mean…yeah….Mom….she got hurt yesterday, real bad. Kite…she saved her, but she still can’t move too good, took us three hours to walk ten miles. Her face is wrapped up good too…Kite said the doc here could help, soo…”

Ada’s feathered face lost its cheerfulness, and her body seemingly slumped and deflated within her spotted-tan armored barding. “…this have anything to do with those bodies Leon and I found at that old service station down south? Because we found a few wrappings that looked like your stable rations in a trash can, inside the station. Better to bury your trash, that sticks out too much.”

…o-oh crap, I didn’t think about that… “…y-yeah….it was Saurus, and some goons of his….”

At the mention of Saurus, Ada’s eyes suddenly cleared up…but what Light Tail saw was not joy, or excitement.

She saw rage. A quiet, reserved rage, bottled up and ready to blow. Like Mom, almost.

“….where’s your mom at, squirt?” the large griffon asked next, her voice curt but noticeably controlled.

El-Tee looked back down the hall that Mom and Kite had gone down, to point her in the general direction—

—Kite’s body had already begun to slow to a gentle trot, apparently having heard her and BJ playing around and coming out to see what was going on, and her eyes were fixated solely on Ada as she trudged into the central room. “….what’s going on out here? You were making a lot of noise.”

“They’re just playin’ around, like kids ought to,” Ada answered for her, to her relief… and a slight mischievous smirk of her beak gave away the rest of her answer before she could give it. “…think your boy wants to kiss her, too.”

BJ’s shriek of rage was unmistakable, and El-Tee couldn’t help but laugh at his misfortune. “I do not!!” he howled with embarrassment, trying to hide behind the other side of the bench. “Jeez, I do one favor for ya and this is what I get?!”

“Yer welcome!” El-Tee laughed back.

“We’ll talk later, son,” Kite promised him darkly regardless, keeping her focus on the griffon. “And you’d better have a damn good explanation for why you and your partner can’t seem to find the slaver that has no trouble with finding us. He was waiting for us at a rest station ten miles south of here, you stup—”

“I’m sorry,” Ada sputtered back, her voice faltering for a slight moment. “…we did track him to a mercenary company here, but lost him when he went back out into the wastes four days ago, heading northeast. Went through a slaver’s guild pen and a Union checkpoint on the freeway junction leading out to Stifla, then hooked south around a fissure and went into the ruins of Grainville. Lost his trail at the fissure, didn’t find his campsite outside Grainville until yesterday. Took us a day to follow the new trail out here….and we spotted him in town, back at that merc company he hired his new hands from. Found some ration pack wrappers labeled “115”, thought you guys might’ve come this way to take care of injuries.”

Kite’s aggressive posturing—and El-Tee’s sense of safety and security—died an inglorious, silent death, and fear began to take root in the both of them. “…o-oh shit, no…no no no, Sling’s in no shape to fight anybody—”

“She won’t have to fight anyone,” Ada assured them, getting back up on all fours and taking a quick glance down the hall that Kite had emerged from. “Pretty sure Saurus already knows you guys are here, I spotted one of the mercs on the street a few blocks down, watching this clinic with a pair of binoculars. Took off before I could get a good look, so I don’t think he knows that I’m here, yet. I wanna to talk to Sling first though, make sure I’m not missing anything. Something about this feels off.”

Whatever anger or distrust Kite had for the griffons, she didn’t let it get in the way of their finding a way out of this increasingly terrifying mess. This was supposed to be a safe place…. “Sixth door on the left, down that hall. But what about the front door?”

El-Tee had figured on Leon being close, seeing as he and Ada never seemed to go too far apart from each other for very long, and she was somewhat comforted by the sound of his voice coming from the hallway leading towards the front lobby. “Front door’s covered. Make it fast, A.”

Ada took the warning to heart and promptly bolted away from them, into the hall and towards Mom and OD, leaving the three of them somewhat alone for the immediate future.

And with nothing else to take her budding frustration with the griffons out on, Kite began to focus on the next most important thing on her list. “….so what’s this about a kiss, son?”

BJ flailed his forelegs up over his face and ducked back behind the bench in a vain attempt to hide from his mother, unknowingly drawing a quiet giggle out of the filly he’d tormented moments earlier. “Oh, for Luna’s sake, kill me now….”

Kite’s tail had barely slipped out through the door when Overdose turned back to her, as though nothing at all had interrupted his work. “Any ill feelings or symptoms? Nausea, upset stomach, chills, feverish—”

“Nothing of the sort,” she bit back through a brief flare of pain in her side as his magic poked at her exposed stitches. “Just a lot of friggin’ pain OW watch it that really stings.”

“That’s good,” he muttered back, his nose nearly touching the blasted stitches and their iodine-soaked threading. “Kitey got you stitched up almost perfectly, I don’t see these coming loose provided you don’t run. Could take a few days, or ten to twelve, but eventually these will be snipped out as the wounds fuse shut. How’s the eye?”

When the doc mentioned the eye he’d doused with some sort of cold, sharp-smelling liquid, she’d begun to wish she’d just had stitches to complain about. The cuts running across the left side of her face began to burn as droplets of the solution leaked out of her left eye, which in her opinion did not make up for the rapidly clearing vision she was being granted by the stuff. Moments earlier, when the bandaging had been removed, her clear, if slightly offset vision, had been given a blurry “overlay”, mixing up into a confusing swirl of clear details and fuzzy masses of color. But with the eye solution freshly applied, it was rapidly clearing up to a point where her vision was almost picture perfect once more. “….it feels better than the rest of me….”

“Vision clearing up?”

“Quickly. What is this stuff?”

“A prototype spell-treated solution I found in a smashed clinic in Trotpeka, years ago,” Overdose mumbled as he began to scrutinize her eye with the use of a slightly cracked, head-sized magnifying glass device of some sort that she couldn’t identify…or ever remember seeing in Stable 115’s infirmary, for that matter. “There was an R&D lab under the ground floor, escaped much of the war’s end and its terrible destruction. Several crates of the stuff survived inside a climate-spell controlled vault. Long story short, this solution clears up any temporary blindness or blurriness that might arise from extended periods of eye closure when one is awake. Should let us get a quick eye test done. I take it by the PipBuck on your leg that you’re the latest wanderer from the one-one-five, do you happen to remember the results of your last eye exam?”

She’d long ago learned to be less than surprised when someone deduced her origins by the presence of her PipBuck and its bright white “115” on its outer casing, which to date she had not been able to remove or deface by means of magic, scraping tools, or unhealthy amounts of old (and likely useless) paint thinner. “20/15. Used to be nearly 20/10, but about three years ago my eyes got splashed with some manner of chemical in the infirmary during a scheduled physical. Don’t know what it was, just that it damaged my eyes a bit. Still better than average vision.”

“Oh wow,” Overdose marveled in slight awe. “Well, hopefully there isn’t too much loss, vision like that is exceedingly rare in this hell of a world. Most possess good 20/20 vision, but…well, suffice it to say I’ve only met one pony with superior eyesight before today. Sit upright, if you would, and look ahead at the chart on the wall over there while I get the lights.”

With a deep sigh of resignation, she did as he asked and re-positioned herself into a sitting position on her hindquarters as the lights dimmed and a large, metal instrument suspended by a mechanical arm swung towards her. She recognized it within a couple of seconds as a phoropter instrument for eye examinations, but knew little else about it other than the fact that the front of the thing was seemingly covered in numbered dials and lenses. Having been through an eye exam at least once a year for as long as she could remember, she already had a fair idea of what lay ahead for the next quarter hour or so.

They’d hardly been at it a minute, however, when the door opened once more and allowed an explosion of light to flood the room and obscure the eye chart roughly twenty feet away from her—

“So what was that racket out there?” Sling asked lightly, her eyes scanning down the chart all the way to the second-smallest line, “F D P L T C E O”, at which point those letters began to blur ever so slightly.

Just like last year.

The voice that answered her question was not Kite’s. “Just kids bein’ kids, for once.”

Sling’s horn tingled with magic, quickly shoving the phoropter out of the right half of her face long enough to make sure that she wasn’t hearing things, and th—

It’s her, she snarled, dark thoughts beginning to cloud her mind as Ada’s body obscured the doorway in that mottled-tan body armor and boonie hat, with at least two long guns strapped over her back.

“Ada,” Doc Overdose said politely, gently shoving the phoropter back over Sling’s face once more. “If you’re going to occupy the room, close the door behind you so I can continue my test.”

The griffon’s tail complied with the request and quickly snapped the door shut, filling the room with darkness once more, save for the projection of the eye chart on the wall.

“Good. Sling Shot, can you read out the bottom line?”

“Not clearly,” she snipped back curtly.

A click later, the bottom line cleared up. “How about now?”

“Yes.”

“Read it?”

“P, E, Z, O, L, C, F, T, D.”

Another click—and a noticeable switch of lenses through the machine—and the bottom line blurred slightly. “How about now?”

“Slightly fuzzier, but still readable.”

A third click, and with the swish of a faint, gray blur that was a lens, “P E Z” grew harder to discern. “And now?”

“Worse. Pez, olec, frag this dude, if you’re wondering if I can see it.”

A fourth click later, the line was obscured enough that she could no longer read it. “And now?”

“No dice, doc.”

“Good.”

As the lenses switched back to their original setting, Ada finally found a moment to inject herself into Sling’s world. “El-Tee and Kite say Saurus roughed you up pretty bad.”

Sling’s fore hooves pressed down into the stiff, cushioned examination bed beneath her out of a barely suppressed rage. “If Kite hadn’t been there, they’d be burying me right now.”

Doc Overdose seemed to care little for her having a conversation with another being…or he knew better than to get in the path of an angry, armed mare. He simply carried on as though Ada wasn’t even there, and she seemed content to return the favor. With another series of clicks, her right eye suddenly saw nothing but pitch black. “Start again from the top of the chart, and move down until you can’t read it anymore.”

Guess he’s satisfied with how both eyes work together already….

Another twenty seconds passed—with her making it all the way down to the third-smallest line—before Ada found another break through which to speak. “How’d it go down?”

“Up close. Three rounds in my left side, point blank. Ask Kite for details, all I know after I got shot is that she had to pull them out with no painkillers, no anesthesia, and whatever tools and med supplies we had on hoof.”

The lens switched once more, rendering the bottom line unreadable. “Sling, can you see the bottom line?” Overdose asked out loud.

“Not anymore.”

The lens switched again, and the “P E Z” line cleared up slightly. “How about now?”

“Not much better. Still hard to read.”

He switched the lens, this time to one that made the line readable, if still fuzzy. “Now?”

She responded by reading out the line, slowly, slightly squinting at the letters to clear them up a little when she wasn’t sure.

Afterward, he reset the machine to its original settings, and started over again. Down the chart, and another twenty seconds, this time making it all the way to the bottom—

—and then he abruptly began to focus on the larger lines near the top, but here he had to go through nearly an entire cylinder of lenses before they would even become remotely blurred. About five minutes, all told.

It was here that Ada would start to take up a little more of the conversation space.

“….point blank? In the body? Is that all he did?”

“Doc, stop a minute,” Sling called out, her magic enveloping the phoropter and gently swinging it away from her. “And turn the lights on for a second.”

Her eyes, recently adjusted to the low light of the eye chart projection, were stung as the room lights flooded her vision, but they quickly adjusted to the higher brightness. And more importantly, it gave Ada a good look at her slashed, bloody face as she snapped her left eye shut and stared back at her with the other.

The griffon’s face cringed slightly as she took in the injury in the full light. “….guess that explains the eye exam….”

“I’m pretty sure you’ve already been through that scrapyard,” she hissed back, a slight jolt of pain shooting through her face through the still-burning cuts. “They were waiting. And like a bucking idiot I left my damn PipBuck off and never knew they were there until he climbed over the wreckage and slashed my face up. Said something about it not being like clipping a wing, but that it was a start. Even threatened to r-….to hurt my little girl….”

Ada’s face was no longer willing to look at hers, and the griffon sullenly turned away and allowed her to resume the examination.

Briefly.

Within a minute—and the determination by Overdose that no amount of lens switching would make the top-two thirds of the chart unreadable—Ada did, at last, find something to swear about.

“….awww, shiiit!” she roared, a low, primalistic growl mixing itself in with her angry voice. “I don’t believe this—”

“You’d better believe it, you la—”

“No, no, this whole thing, it’s a sun-damned trap!” the griffon continued to curse, seemingly at herself, as she began to claw at her own ruffled feathers.

This degree of interruption with his work was more than Overdose was willing to tolerate, and he promptly injected himself into what had been a second side conversation inside his own examining room. “Ada, I can assure you I’ve had no contact with Saurus in two years, not after what he did to—”

“Not you! Me!” Ada clarified more angrily. “The trap’s for me!”

For a third time Sling pushed the medical instrument away from her, now thoroughly tired of this griffon and what seemed like a mountain of excuses for failing to track down a target that had no trouble finding her. “This should be good. Tell me why that raping asshole would go to the trouble to try to kill me in the hopes that you would care enough to come looking for him.”

“Because he’s here, in this town, right now, back with the gang of mercs he hired his last bunch from!” Ada snarled, more angry with herself than with whatever situation she seemed to think herself in. “Look, if he wanted you truly dead right there, he’d have put two in your brain to make sure of it. I know it.”

There you go, Sling spat back silently. You do know more about him than you let on at first…

“I’m sure you do. Since he used to run with your little gang of mercenaries.”

The expected reply—indignation, and tacit refusal of her theory—never came. Only a hateful, self-directed stare at anything other than her face. “…because’s he my brother.”

Sling felt a great deal of air being sucked out of her lungs, along with her anger towards this seemingly shrinking griffon. “…what?”

“...my family, my whole family…we’re all Runners. It’s where our ancestors came from. He was my spotter, always had been. When the war with the Union started, we were posted on the valley, sniping ghouls for ranging practice when the first Union troops tried crossing. They came right up to our hide, and his first taste of close combat…it changed him. I could see it even then, but I didn’t say anything. Like it opened up some primal hunting instinct in him. The war only made it worse. Every time he got into combat, he seemed to like it even more, it was like a chem to him. Two years in, and he got himself assigned on lurps. I didn’t see him again until after the cease-fire a year later…”

Lurps….lurps…..wait, does she mean long-rang-recon patrol? “…go on.”

“…he was almost an animal, at times, near the end,” Ada continued, her voice now an almost reverent whisper. “I think he expected the war to have gone a lot better for us, but he was out a month at a time, at the least. That left him out of touch with the rest of us. He didn’t know we’d lost at Fort Wiley ‘till after the war, when his patrol snuck back across the valley and back home. Think that finally pushed him into full-on crazy, what with all the wicked shit lurp ops could get into. Got violent. Picked up a rep for….savage lust, best way I can put it. This went on for two years, and then dad finally got fed up, had me go with him to round him up from his post at the southern end of the valley...”

“…he’d vanished?”

“…no, he was there. Using his post as a contact point with slavers from across the valley. Had a little system set up for it. Now and then when he went on patrol he’d come across some travelers on the roads. Ones he figured stood a good chance of not being missed, he captured and sold off to the slavers when they were due to come by…we happened to come in on one such meeting….whole lot of ‘em were….ummm…”trying” the poor mare out….”

She felt her mouth grow numb, and her brain, for whatever reason, began to tell her eyes to release tears, because she felt the sting of saltwater on her cuts a moment later.

“…dad started the firefight, figured it was best to take them out when they had their minds on other things. Woulda worked any other day, but that afternoon…I think seeing Saurus doing what he was threw him off real bad, couldn’t hit anything for shit, and I wasn’t much better. Only got half of ‘em before Saurus got around to our left flank…..and, he just killed dad, right beside me…his blood and brains all over me…an…and then I found out, for myself, just how true that savage rep of his was…”

Her poor, pony stomach began to churn, sickened with horror. …o-oh gods, stop—

“S-stop!” she blurted, unable to keep her voice from cracking with fear. Or grief. “Tha….that’s enough.….I…I get it…I get why you kept quiet….I…I-I’m sorry…”

When she forced herself to look up, she found a pair of avian eyes staring back at her with some degree of relief and…

….and something else. Gratitude, she’d thought.

Had she just become the first soul in that griffon’s life she’d spilled that to?

“…after that, Saurus took off with what was left of the slaver party, didn’t bother to try and finish me off, and I had more important things to see to that day. Didn’t see or hear of him again until last year, when he came back with about fifty mercs. Hit a couple towns near the valley border, made off with eighty souls and killed a number of us in the process. One of the survivors recognized him, got word back to us. I asked for the job to track him down, and I got it. Gotten close a couple of times, but…well, you’ve had better chances at killing him than I’ve gotten. And he knows Leon and I have been looking for him for a while now.”

Sling had to catch her breath—and quell her queasy stomach—before she could talk again. “…h-how does that have anything to do with me?”

Ada’s willingness to look her in the eye didn’t last long, and she returned her gaze to the floor as she began to explain her theory. “He’s savage, he’s violent….even crazy, but he didn’t survive a year’s worth of lurp ops by luck. He’s observant, crafty, quick on his feet. You messed up my shot on him a month ago, and since he was my spotter once he knows how far off I can be and still hit my target. He knows me well enough to know that I’d want to catch up to you to see how that happened. He knows that I’d want to stick with you a day or two afterward for the hell of it, so that would mean that I would naturally come looking for you if I saw some sign that you or that kid got hurt. He must have known that Kite had some skill in medicine that could save you, or maybe he thought that they would try to haul you out here to try and save you. Or bury you. Either way, you left enough signs of your presence at that station that I thought to come here to find you. Next time, bury your ration wrappers or burn them. Or better yet, keep ‘em. They make for great expedient plugs for sucking chest wounds if you run out of healing potions.”

She mouthed off a foul curse at herself, but at least this time this mistake actually turned out to be a hidden blessing. Next time, though…. “…I was bait? This whole time, I’ve been bait?”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong, he’d love to kill you and take that filly for his own sick uses just for crippling his wing. But he knows he can’t hide from me and Leon forever. And his best shot at taking us out is what he’s doing right now. I came here looking for you, hoping I was wrong about what I found, and I walked right into it. If he does this right, he can get all his problems taken care of at once and get back to his hedonistic life.”

“Then you have a problem, because I cannot have a firefight at the only decent medical clinic in this town,” Doc Overdose finally cut in, though his tone was more sympathetic than anything else. “And while my ‘bot can handle a single target, if he hires mercenaries—and I’m fairly positive that he will—they can overwhelm it in short order. Sling Shot is in no condition to fight. She needs rest, perhaps as much as two weeks of it.”

“You got a back entrance you keep blocked off, don’t you?” Ada quipped.

“With heavy furniture and cabinet drawers, yes. How does that help us?”

“I can move that crap,” Sling said, her magic flowing through her horn as her travelling saddle floated its way over to her. Whatever this eye exam could have revealed about her left eye, it would have to wait. “But if he has mercs sweeping through the alleys they’ll catch us before we can even make it out of town, and where the hell would we go even if we made it out?”

“There’s caravans at the south and west ends of town today,” Ada said, her forelimbs reaching behind her at last to unsling one of her long guns. “It’s tax week, and there’s a Union patrol making rounds, collecting tithes for their bosses. Caravans won’t go anywhere until the patrol’s done, and they won’t come running to check out a single shot….but if they hear a firefight, they may let the caravans go and come running to try and stop it. The chaos that’ll create will be your ticket out. Your best bet is to make your way to the western caravans, if you can make it before they leave you may be able to get passage to their next stop, wherever that is. Get there without being seen, and Saurus will have to start from scratch to find you again. Leon and I’ll keep him and his mercs pinned down best we can. I’m hoping he’ll start taking shots at the Union patrol if they show up…”

“…there’s a lot of “ifs” in your plan, merc. Two-way firefights are chaotic enough, bringing in a third side will shoot your plan to hell.”

“It’s the best shot you’ve got in five minutes or less. You need a couple of minutes to get your wounds re-dressed anyway.”

“….one more thing, then,” she relented, her magic pawing at her saddlebag for the 5.56mm revolver she’d found yesterday and pulling it out of the enchanted storage space. Might not get another chance to ask… “I did manage to find one of these in that stable yesterday, along with a laser pistol, Lightbringer series. Damn near mint condition, except for a crack in the cylinder and what I think is a broken focus housing chamber on the laser pistol. Do you know of anypony within thirty miles that might have replacement parts?”

As she’d expected, Ada’s talons were immediately drawn to the revolver, even taking it into her claws and giving it a once-over—barrel, motorized cylinder mechanism, sights, even the odd red lights along the underside of the bottom secondary barrel (at least, she thought it was a barrel). The larger green light on the back end of the frame seemed to change to a yellow color when the cylinder was opened up, and changed back the second it was closed again. Some sort of status indicator of the cylinder action, perhaps to warn the shooter if the cylinder didn’t lock into place?

“…damn, you get all the good luck with mint guns, first that .44 magnum and now this? I take it you never had any of these in your stable?”

Overdose’s magic began to envelop her body, dabbing her stitches and her facial cuts in some sort of antibiotic cream from her med kit in preparation for re-dressing her wounds. “None. Read about ‘em a couple of times, but nothing about how to keep it fixed up or repair it. Never thought I’d see one.”

Ada’s right talon began to test the cylinder release latch, and was seemingly disappointed with the way the crane was unlocking from the frame. “Yeah, it’s not like fixing up lower-tech guns. Power cell on this one’s a little low, the cylinder should be swinging out and back a lot faster than this. Takes any kind of spark battery cell, should fix that right up if you can get ahold of one. Cylinder’s gonna be tougher, you’ll need tools to pull the crane motor out so you can get the cylinder off. As for replacement parts…like I told you before, these things are getting harder to find in decent shape. Might have to cannibalize another pistol for parts, none of the traders I know of around here have had any on hoof or claw for close to a year now. Good thing about something this complex, most folk that own one know that they may have to fix it themselves and make sure to keep the tools they need on ‘em. Might be somebody in Trotpeka with the parts, but they won’t come cheap.”

Sling’s eyes began to stare at the 5.56mm pistol in pity and longing. Two centuries ago, that gun had probably been one of the best made—and most expensive—sidearms a soul could hope to acquire. To see this technological marvel reduced to a hoof-full of working units with no hope of ever seeing new parts surface for them….once they were all used up and broken, they’d be lost to the ages. She didn’t think anyone alive would be able to figure out how to make them again.

“…great. Finally get ahold of a weapon with some promise of armor penetration and it turns out to be a super-bitch to get working. Shoulda just kept on going down the road.”

“Awww, don’t say that,” the griffon cooed back soothingly, still playing around with her prize from the 128. “Aside from the cracked cylinder, this thing’s in impeccable condition. That’s the one part on this gun that I’ve never seen wear out from all these decades of shooting, they had to make the thing Tartarus-level tough to take the pressure of a five-five-six round long enough to be useful. Get that sorted out and you probably won’t have to worry about parts again for a long time. Snap up what you can find regardless. Power cells aren’t that common, but somepony sells a few somewhere in every town. Six or seven should be all you need to keep the motorized cylinder running for a few years. At peak power it’ll be like shooting a semi-automatic.”

She barely noticed the gauze pads and the bandaging being wrapped around her side until bandages began applying pressure to her body. “Had one before, did you?”

She finally stopped fiddling with the cylinder release and left it closed, and returned it to the saddlebag it had been stored in. “Loved it. It bought the farm a coupla years back, pretty nasty firefight with some highway gang on my side of the prairie. Fired off a cylinder, ducked back behind this big-ass coal hauler truck and reloaded, came up and got two shots off on some idiot charging stallion before the motor gave out and fried itself. Ruined enough of the internals to make it unsalvageable. Took a hit to my right side, punched through my armor. Not a fun day.”

“…what the hell would you call a fun day out here?”

Ada’s beak broke into an insidious, almost maniacal smile. “The kind of day I’m about to have in a few minutes.”

“That’s a hell of a plan, merc. A bad one, at that.”

Ada’s voice curled around the corner of the hallway, briefly stirring him from his increasingly uncomfortable crouched position as he kept his eyes—and his .45 Auto SMG—leveled on the front door. “Ain’t the best I’ve had, I’ll give ya that. But would you rather go out the front door?”

“Kite, just…just go with it,” the stable pony pleaded, her voice slightly exasperated from what had to have been a hellacious morning thus far. “I don’t know that we’re going to get a chance to come up with something better. Let’s just try and get out of here.”

The crazy-ass “doctor” seemed more than willing to help see them off on their way, if only because he didn’t want his clinic or his few med supplies to get shot up or wrecked. “Kitey, do remember to make use of the textbooks and the instruments I’ve packed into your bag once you’ve found someplace to lie low for a while. I wasn’t able to give Sling Shot a complete diagnosis, you’ll need to finish it. You have everything you need, just refer to the books. I don’t suspect a serious drop in her vision quality, but you’ll need to know regardless. Come along now, I’ll get the back way opened up for you. Once the door shuts behind you, you won’t be able to come back that way. Be sure you’re ready.”

“I’ll be heading out the same way, take another route to the street,” Ada’s voice added loudly, perhaps to make sure he heard it. And he did. “Leon, try and keep Saurus talking for a couple of minutes so I can set up a shot. Don’t think I’ll be able to get him if he uses you to block me out, but I can take out one of his mercs, give you some room to work.”

“Wilco, moving,” he roared back, finally glad to be allowed to move and get some blood moving in his hind legs again. With a flick of his off-claw he had the safety of his weapon back on, and adjusted it so that it rode across his chest on its carrying sling as he began to move forward on all fours, but capable of being taken up into firing position again with next to no effort. He already knew most of the plan—he and Ada had talked about it for a couple minutes on the walk over, and the only two things they couldn’t account for was the number of hired mercs and what Saurus planned to have them doing. Once that Union patrol came to shut down the fracas, though, everything would go to hell and they’d have to fight their way out on the fly. The Union did not take kindly to folk starting gunfights in their towns, less so on tax week. He was kind of hoping that Saurus would still be pissed off enough at them from the war to want to fight them if they came in shooting. Might give him and Ada a chance to slip out without being ID’ed as the ones who’d started the mess in the first place.

Curiously, however, OD’s damn bot had yet to show up despite the “doc’s” assurances that it was due to return shortly.

…okay, then. Three things they couldn’t account for.

He took a moment at the front door to re-adjust his weapon, and to check and make sure that his magazines were still inside their pouches on the web harness overlapping his armor. Three thirty-round mags on his left side, four twenty-rounders on his right, and a single fifty-round drum mag in its own separately shaped bag riding against his lower back…another set of six twenty-round magazines for his heavily-modified service rifle….and eight seven-round magazines for his 12.7mm pistol….his “Big Demon”, as it were. Ammo was hell to find, but the firepower was worth it. A shame his 14mm had broken last year, that thing sounded more like a shotgun than a pistol….

Shit, I’m turning into Ada, he swore at himself, shaking his head to rid himself of the unhealthy fascination with an old firearm. How that girl could nearly swoon over old firearms tech was a mystery to him—there were times when he thought she loved guns more than she did sex. She had been behaving herself lately, but….

….ever since they ran into those stable runaways she seemed almost smitten by the filly. She always did have a soft spot for kids, it was like she could speak to them at their level. Probably helped that she acted like a child half the time. Had that run-in opened up some buried maternal instinct his father had warned him about when he and Ada had set off on the hunt for Saurus? Would she want a kid at nearly…twenty-four, this coming October?

….ponder it later. If he survived this shootout. It was a big enough deal that Ada even had her old .357 automatic revolver, “Ghost”, on her. She almost never used that thing anymore, the parts were damn near non-existent. Still had a few years left in it, and could still hold under two inches out to at least thirty-odd yards, but the mechanism was a little more delicate than most revolvers he’d seen. Had to be careful with how it was gripped during firing or it’d jam.

That she was willing to use it had him worried enough that he wasn’t going to be particularly picky with his ammo waste. They had a cache stashed away a few miles from here if need be.

With one last nudge of his .45 SMG’s stock to push the barrel away from his left forelimb, he nosed the lobby door open with his beak and made a quick scan of the ruined streets outside. A block and a half to his left, the street ended in a T-shaped intersection with a four-story building overlooking the intersection. Great view of the street, and probably where Ada would be moving to within the next sixty seconds. To his right….

….to his right, shockingly enough, was Saurus himself, with part of his heavy leather armor torn away at the left shoulder to reveal a blood-stained bandage. He was still at least two hundred yards out, but even at this distance he could see that he was being flanked by at least three mercenaries from the Black Asphalt gang. Gangs were not that terribly creative with what they called themselves, if they bothered to give their group a name, but these guys were smarter than most. Had themselves an old highway police station for an operating base, somewhere to the east, and it had just enough guns in it to give them an edge in firepower over the average raider. Tended to hire themselves out to whoever wanted them—slavers, wastelanders looking for a missing loved one or friend, sometimes the big boss of a town would need a nuisance animal taken out and send out a hired gun rather than someone from his community.

After losing three mercs to that stable pony yesterday, he didn’t think Saurus would take his chances with that low a number of bodies again. There had to be at least six to eight of them, perhaps more. Maybe stalking their way through the side alleys and adjacent streets, to cut off alternate escape routes or to try and box him in. And between him and Saurus, there were enough wrecked motorized wagons and cargo trucks littering the street to make a firefight a very prolonged affair. Plenty of cover for the mercs to fire and advance from, and at several points he’d be exposed to attack from the flanks from side alleys.

…shit, maybe that brothel girl was right, this is starting to look like a very bad idea….

Oh well. Only one thing to do when all he had was a bad idea.

Run like hell with it.

He snapped off to his right, began to saunter down the road with nary a care in the world in the hopes that any passing pedestrians wouldn’t take notice right away and try to take off and tip off the Union patrol early. But within the first twenty yards of his walk, he began to realize that it was a waste of time—most any soul with half a brain simply took a look down the other side of the street, saw at least four armed mercenaries making their way through as if they owned the place, and suddenly found themselves needed elsewhere, and galloped as far away from the looming gunfight as their hooves could take them. By the time he counted off a hundred and fifty yards in his walk, most every window that could be closed was closed—every door, every business, every street-side merchant with even a foal’s carriage worth of junk for sale had vanished.

Except, of course, for the mercs and their current paymaster.

Saurus’s left forelimb rose up when there was roughly thirty yards distance between them, and to Leon’s disappointment his shoulder wound seemed to have been healed over by a potion or two, as Saurus showed no sign of pain or impairment of movement with his forelimb. His right forelimb gripped tightly at his slung 5mm carbine, ready to shoulder it and open fire at a moment’s notice. Behind him, his three paid pony mercs—all unicorns, naturally—came to a sudden halt, keeping themselves several feet apart from each other to keep a grenade from taking them out all at once. They all carried at least one sidearm strapped across their armored, black-colored barding, and the one directly behind Saurus held a double-barreled 12-guage in his magical grasp, while the other two held a 9mm SMG and an older R-series 5.56 rifle….

Leon could feel his right talon sliding over the pistol grip of his SMG as he made a quick, cursory glance at his right, and felt a slight relief at the sight of a broad-sided building roughly a hundred feet wide. At least he couldn’t get shot at directly from the right flank just yet.

“Not like you to be up and about this early,” he called out loudly over his nearest available cover—a motorized ground wagon with what was said to be a “cockpit” for earth pony drivers to sit in and steer the vehicle. Its wheels were long gone, leaving only rusted, dying rims and a crumbling chassis. “No mares to play with this morning?”

Even five years after his desertion, Saurus’s….”tastes”, were almost legendary, as was the frequency with which he indulged in those tastes. And he never did like being called out on it, which made his comeback somewhat worrying. “Not done with this one yet. Gimme a day or two, see what happens.”

He’s here for the stable pony, he surmised, for once feeling a little concerned for Ada’s latest batch of fast friends. And no kid deserved to be in the claws of a soul like Saurus. Maybe his ex-whore too…. “Didn’t take you for one that liked to play with his food.”

Another glance, this time to his left, and he saw at least one alley, slightly ahead of him, that might offer a potential avenue for attack for whoever was inclined to use it against him. “Cute. My little sister tell you that one?”

That got his attention. Not once in the two times they’d gotten close to him had he ever mentioned anything about his blood connection with Ada. “Surprised you remember her. If I recall, you offed your own father like it was nothing. Still not sure there’s anybody home up in that skull of yours.”

“Oh, there’s plenty going on up there,” Saurus sneered back, his eyes fixating on him as though he were trying to kill him with his gaze alone—and he didn’t doubt that he would someday find a way to make it happen. “That whore of mine? The one that damn stable pony and her shit filly took in—”

Wait a sec, he knows she’s from a stable despite not having seen her for more than a minute in his entire life—

“—she’s a nurse. Stable-trained, from her third master who liked to help himself to her other “services” now and then. And my sister always had a soft spot for kids. What better way to draw her out than to pop a few rounds into the brat’s mother and see if that whore could fix her up?”

How his face managed not to show any hint of surprise or shock was a mystery to him—he was freaking out on the inside. Mother of ducks this is a trap and we walked right into it—

“…pretty lofty thinking on your part. Not like you.”

“I know my own blood,” Saurus spat. “I was her godsdamned spotter in the war, before I went into LURPs. I know how she thinks, how good a shot she is, how inviting it’s going to be for her to put a bullet in my brain for sending Dad to hell. That four-story building behind you? It’s rigged. She’ll be mincemeat in about twenty seconds, then it’s your turn, and then that stable pony gets hers for crippling my wing and taking my piece of tail from me. Maybe that brat of hers can be broken in, but that bitch dies. HARD.”

A short series of foul curses strung themselves out in his head as he took a second look around him—no harm in doing so, Ada was right, he liked to gloat when he thought he had the upper hand. No other mercs were lining up in the alleys, but they likely weren’t far behind. He hadn’t heard anything like gunshots or brief screams of pain—

“Wait, hold up a sec, you said we could take first crack at her,” the light gray shaded stallion to his right protested, as though he now viewed his current “employer” in a less than savory standing. “All the stables around here emptied out decades ago, we wanna know if hers is still intact. Tons of shit in an intact stable to be had.”

“You changin’ the contract on us mid-way through?” the shotgun-armed stallion added, though from the way he was eying Saurus’s back he was growing less fond of the griffon by the second. “’Cause that ain’t how we do things over here, birdy.”

Let them bicker, divide themselves up, he decided in an instant. If he was going to have any chance of avenging Ada’s impending death, he wanted as few targets shooting at him at possible. Turn this gloatin—

“You’ll get your time with her,” Saurus growled. “But you’re wasting your time, if there’s anything left of her stable, it’s in ruins. You think those idiots from the Stifla stable had any choice thirty odd years back?”

….wait…she said he’d gloat like this, take his time if he thought he had it in the bag…she would have to have seen something like this com—

It all came together in an instant, a brilliant, bright flash of insight and glee that, quite frankly, turned him on. Ada had seen this coming, had told him to keep him talking. Not to set up a shot from a plainly obvious sniping position that Saurus would see a mile away….

…but to keep him distracted long enough for her to sneak in at the flank and attack from ground level. Saurus was so certain she’d want revenge for the death of their father that she would do it via the method most likely to see success. It’s what he would’ve wanted to do. And for a time, he’d have said the same for Ada, but Saurus didn’t realize that she was not the same little sister he’d known in the war. She’d actually grown up since his desertion. If anything, the way he left, what he did, had done more to harden her and prepare her for life in the wastes than anything their father—or the war—had ever done. She still wanted him dead, but she valued her friends enough that she was willing to put her own desires aside to help them.

She didn’t want to kill Saurus today. She just wanted the stable pony and her filly to have a chance at getting out. And she still stood a good chance of plugging her brother in the process anyway.

By the Sisters, girl, you are getting it good tonight.

“Maybe we wanna find out for ourselves,” the bright green stallion on the far left challenged, his 9mm SMG beginning to sway dangerously closer towards Saurus instead of Leon. “It’s not like you’ve been all that forthcoming about what happened to our friends yesterday, y’know?”

Leon’s body began to tense up, subtly, sensing the changing shift of attitude and tension between his opponents as Saurus’s hired “help” began to grow less helpful with every passing second. Ada, hurry up and start laying down some fire—

“I told you, that bitch stable pony dropped ‘em, don’t even ask me what happened to your whore, she took off—”

Saurus made the single mistake of taking his eyes off of his quarry to argue with his hired guns, and that had been the only opening Ada needed. Before Saurus could finish his lie, a pair of sharp rifle shots rang out from somewhere further up the street—

—the bright green stallion’s head jolted slightly, just before a spurt of red spilled out from just below his left eye as his body simply collapsed onto the floor—

—Leon spurred his forelimbs into motion, the stock of his .45 SMG snapping into his shoulder as he squared the sights on the gray stallion to his right and settled on his rather large torso—

—a burst of four rounds, accompanied by a sharp muzzle flash, sailed into his target as the stallion bolted towards cover. With his barding absorbing much of the impact and a shot of adrenaline likely hitting his body, he didn’t seem to notice the shots at all—

—Saurus leapt over the remains of a crashed sky wagon, most of its chassis worn away and stripped bare save for its engines, while the shotgun-armed, pale blue-shaded stallion sped away to his own separate piece of cover on his left and brought his weapon up for a quick snap shot—

—another pair of rifle shots put a stop to his attack—Ada could really shoot when it mattered—and bits of the pale blue stallion’s barding seemingly jettisoned into the air as he stumbled into a rough slide behind what looked like a recently-vacated produce stand. Even with his ears beginning to ring from the harsh report of +P .45 Auto rounds, he could still make out the painful screams of the wounded stallion, indicating that Ada’s shots had hit something very important and sensitive inside the torso.

“—amned bitch, I hate that stable pony!!” Saurus screamed furiously, popping up from cover, his 5mm carbine tracking towards the sound of Ada’s rifle shots and letting loose a steady stream of fire in that general direction—

Idiot, he grinned, swinging the barrel of his SMG over Saurus’s back—

—a burst of five rounds to the back of his armored barding imparted enough force into his body to throw off his rifle fire, and the sadistic griffon stumbled back behind his cover as a chorus of gunfire began to sing on the other side of the street. He risked a quick glance down the road, spotted what looked like three or four ponies firing various weapons at an unseen target. He couldn’t tell at this distance what they were shooting, but it sounded like at least one shotgun, a rifle, and maybe a pistol or an SMG….

Every one of them had armor, though. An SMG was a poor choice for this fight.

He was back behind cover a second later, slinging the .45 SMG back across his back in favor of his modified service rifle—desert camo paint job, and a forged rail-top receiver onto which he’d put a scope taken off an out-of-service marksman carbine. He prayed it was still zeroed.

A quick tap of the magazine to make sure it was seated, and then he popped back up, cinching the stock up into his shoulder as he quickly sought out a target across the street—

—the scope’s magnified optics finally allowed him to discern, with some clarity, the identity of the weapons being leveled against his partner. An old combat shotgun, with a forward-mounted magazine drum, of all things, a bolt-action varmit rifle in the magical grasp of its unicorn owner, and a pair of .45 Auto pistols being wielded by a single unicorn, altering fire between each pistol in such a manner that he realized Ada was being shot at by three mercs, not four. He’d mistaken this bastard for two ponies, the way he was shooting—

—the scope’s crosshairs had barely settled on the dual-pistol wielding unicorn when he squeezed the trigger, the recoil jolting the scope slightly off-target—

Duck, an inner voice warned sharply, and he followed suit just as a shotgun blast erupted from the direction of the produce stand. A couple of pellets pinged against the metal shell of his cover, but he swore he could have felt a brush of air bat at the top of his head as something whizzed over him at incredible speeds.

Right, he thought grimly, grasping at his holstered, black-nickel finished pistol as he slung the rifle across the front of his body momentarily. Wounded, not dead.

He wasn’t willing to pop up and risk getting his head blown off a second time, having just narrowly avoided such a fate by sheer luck. It sounded like only one barrel had been fired from that shotgun—

“Got you now, mother fu—”

Stars alive, make it easy on me why don’t you? He smiled deviously, leveling his pistol towards the back end of the car as he waited for the wounded, gasping stallion to foolishly come around the back end for a finishing shot. No clue why he was walking out of cover, and he didn’t care. He just wanted this threat to his left flank gone.

That stupid pony came around the “car” at the beginning of “fu” and that was as far as his sentence went. Leon’s claw gently squeezed the trigger on his sidearm the moment the pony’s head whisked its way into his sights, and the 12.7mm slug ventilated his left eye and sent a spurt of blood out the back of his head. His body toppled over onto its side instantly, the magic glow surrounding his weapon dying just as quickly, and the Runner quickly turned his attention to the remaining two threats directly ahead of him before they could be drawn to the twitching corpse he’d just created.

“…bro, you all right?!” he heard the gray stallion shout, just as Saurus’s rifle unleashed another stream of rounds at Ada, and Leon felt a sharp sting in his lungs. He hated knowing anything about who he killed. “…c-c’mon, say somethin’—”

Is it any wonder that I’m starting to get tired of this shit?

“What the hell are you doing, you idiot, shoot!!” Saurus’s voice roared angrily in-between bursts of rifle fire—

….okay, he’s shooting at Ada, gray stallion is more worried about the brother I just killed—

“…sonavabitch, you damned Runners kill everybody with your bullshit!!” the lone surviving stallion wailed—really wailed, had likely just spotted his brother’s twitching body in the street. “I told Screwdriver not to take this damn job, I to—”

A short string of shots—likely three to four rounds—cut his brief fit of crying to a deathly halt, and even through the ringing in his ears Leon could still make out the tactile thud of a body slumping onto pavement, like a puppet that had just had its strings cut.

And to Leon, it felt as though he’d pulled the trigger himself.

“Godsdammit, that’s the last time I hire on any of those damn Asphalt mercs,” Saurus growled, as what sounded like an empty magazine clattered onto the broken street, quickly replaced by a fresh one. “…not bad, sis. Not bad. Not any less pissed at you, but…not bad.”

The latest spat of gunfire had hardly died before El-Tee uttered the question she was afraid of.

“….w-we’re not gonna help ‘em?”

“….honey, their whole idea was to help us,” Sling whispered, continuing to slink and slither through the alleys with her eyes practically glued to her EFS display. Enough red hash marks were popping up on it that she was starting to lose track of which ones were moving and which were stationary. “If we go back we ruin everything. Keep going.”

Light Tail’s hooves didn’t resume their trotting pace for another couple of seconds, but she did eventually start moving again.

One problem gone, for the moment. Next one was getting away from the firefight before any of the mercs spotted them. She knew at least a couple of ‘em were working their way through these alleys up ahead, judging by the two red marks that stayed close to the center of her EFS’s directional compass. If they kept coming towards them, they’d run into each other in just a few seconds, and she wasn’t confident she could even off one of them quietly—

Buck me, I’m a curse onto myself, she sneered at herself as a griffon male and an earth pony stallion emerged from around the corner of a debilitated hotel roughly thirty yards ahead. Even with the gunfight roughly four blocks behind them, she suddenly felt herself trapped into an impossible situation, with nothing but buildings as her walls and their only route of retreat was backwards…which was now out of the question, as the griffon’s eyes had already spotted them after a quick scan behind him and leveled his battle rifle directly at them—

“There you are!” he sneered joyfully (somehow), his right trigger claw tapping off the safety embedded in his rifle’s trigger guard. “Stay put, not another step forward!”

A cold chill began to spread out from her gut, freezing her breath over. O-oh fu… “…w-wait—”

“Shut up!” the earth pony snapped back, cutting her off as he drew to within twenty yards, his saddle-mounted rifle seemingly aimed at Kite as the mare froze in her tracks beside her. “Make even a move towards those guns and we drop you all where you stand, the hell with what that damn Runner wants.”

Shit shit shit—

“...a-at least let the kids go—” Kite tried to reason fearfully, to no avail.

“Contract was for all four of you,” the stallion countered coldly, his rifle’s barrel settling on Kite’s body as a target. “Dead or alive. Said nothing about wounds. Give us any trouble, and we cap your legs.”

Sling was still trying to work through her panic, to think of some method by which to either run or fight their way past these two armed mercs despite being in no such condition to accomplish it, when Light Tail dared to try and reach out to some deep, decent part of them that she thought might exist.

“W-what makes you think he’s gonna honor anything he told you?” the filly dared to ask from beneath her mother’s chest.

“Zip it, brat—”

“He killed one of your friends yesterday!” the child shouted back, and Sling felt a tear leak through her right eye. She’d silently hoped the child would never remember that. “Just for talkin’ back to him ‘bout what he told ‘em! He hurts people for fun, he…he sells them like cheap furniture! What makes you think you can trust him!?”

The stallion seemed to have had enough of the child’s screaming, as he began to shift his point of aim down to the small filly trembling behind her forelegs. “Told you to shut up—”

Sling had already lowered the front of her body into the stallion’s sights, intending to absorb the bullet into herself out of an instinctive, terrified act of love and motherly protection, when the griffon stayed his partner’s actions with a sharp voice. “Wait a tic, Driller! What’re you talkin’ about kid?! Saurus said you guys killed our friends!”

…o-oh my gods, could this actually work….

“…we did!” the filly sniffed, refusing to be crushed to death beneath her mother and opted to try and poke her head through a foreleg. “…a couple of ‘em, anyway. But one of ‘em tried arguin’ with him over me, or Mom, or somethin’….and Saurus just killed him…”

Driller tried, one last time, to stick to what he’d been “contracted” for and tried to quiet the filly beneath her. “Dude, stop it, we were paid to take four souls alive, not question them—”

“Never heard of a client wantin’ to try again after the first time failed,” the griffon rumbled in reply, and Sling’s hopes began to swell, slightly. “And he never did say how they got killed, just that this stable pony did it. We ain’t heard back from Long Road ‘bout what he found out there either.”

“He doesn’t want us,” El-Tee continued to cry, not wasting a breath now that she seemed to have an opening to run with, without her mother’s bidding. “He wants them.”

Driller and the griffon took a short look off to Sling’s right, seemingly scrutinizing Kite and the colt hiding behind her. “…don’t look that special to me,” Driller mumbled after a few moments of silent thought.

“They’re ponies, the same as you and me,” El-Tee shot back. “A…and Saurus kept them like pets. Hurt them. Like they were cheap chairs or somethin’. That’s how he looks at anypony’s life. You’re not worth anymore to him than they are. How can you trust anypony like that?”

Sling thought he heard the griffon mutter a curse very much like one she’d accidently slipped out yesterday afternoon. “….Driller, check their necks, quick. That Union tax collection team’s gettin’ closer every second—”

The griffon needn’t have bothered with the request—Driller was already on top of Kite, forcing her onto the ground and peeling her neck around until her mane was parted away from the strange mark along the right side. “…sonava….she’s marked! Life Tap’s guild! The colt too!”

“Shiiiit!!” the griffon hissed sharply, his body swinging around until his back was pressed against the building beside him so he could view both ends of the alley with little trouble. “You, whore! How long you been marked?!”

Sling felt a slight rise of her temper begin to boil, but Kite’s will to resist seemed to wane by the second. “…t-two years….S-Saurus…d-didn’t buy me…he shot my last master….near Lome, almost three months ago…kept me as a plaything….”

A quick plan of attack began to form in Sling’s mind. If Driller stayed where he was just another three seconds….

Now Driller began to grow just as distressed as his partner. “Ooooohhhhh, fffffuuu….w-we can’t go with through this!” he shouted out to no one in particular as he backed up and began to check every possible route from which a newcomer could stumble onto them, just as a fresh round of gunfire began to echo throughout the streets and alleys. “Decker, we gotta cut loose, let the others know we’re helpin’ a slave thief, if it’s that massacre I’m thinkin’ it is!”

“No, we gotta cut loose, period!” the griffon—or Decker, now—howled back in a mixture of terror and anguish. “That asshat gutted those two Union scouts we nearly tripped over, I watched him do it!”

“…oh, fu…f-fine…you win, kid, you convinced us, j-just…just get lost, before you find out the hard way what the Union does to those that help runaways!”

With that final, terror-hinged warning, Driller and Decker took off with a sudden burst of speed, pushing past them and towards the firefight further back into town, not giving any of them so much as a second glance....and Sling felt the release of what felt like years of tension heaving out of her lungs.

Her daughter had accomplished with a few words what she’d intended to do at the cost of two lives….

Kite did not question their sudden turn of luck, and quickly scrambled to her hooves and began to gallop down the alley the moment she was free to do so. “C-c’mon, we won’t get that lucky again!” she cried over her withers.

Muttering a curse at the fleeing mare’s back, Sling gritted her teeth in pain as she began to trot after her, ignoring the pulling, stinging sensations that flared up in her side as her muscles stretched out the stitched-up cuts. She felt Light Tail’s body scrap past her hind legs as the little one hung back for a moment, perhaps to get some room to run herself, or—

“Beige, hurry up you slowpoke—”

“Kite, wait!” Sling heard herself yell out into the alley automatically, stopping in her tracks and turning back to see what was keeping the colt back—

BJ was struggling to even force himself up with his forelegs, his hind legs shaking like leaves, and she suddenly understood why he wasn’t in any mood to be moving forward. And so did El-Tee.

“….Beige, you’re not goin’ back,” the filly’s said softly, her body unflinching in its concern for a friend despite the chorus of rifle fire that stabbed into the air just then. “Saurus won’t get his claws on you or Kite again, okay? We’re stickin’ together—”

“H-he won’t stop,” BJ whispered fearfully, and Sling saw what looked like years of…of whatever it was that had to have witnessed begin to break through that empty, lifeless shell he put out as a face. “….seen his like before. He won’t stop ‘till we’re dead or caught….”

“Don’t talk like that!” El-Tee half-cried, her own forelegs beginning to fight with the uncooperative colt as she sought to pull him up to his hooves herself. “Not after what you told me back there! C’mon, get up—”

“You were right, El,” the colt mumbled on, as if he wasn’t even listening to her. “…he’s only after us….maybe if we stayed, he wouldn’t chase you anymore….he’d treat you like my mom….or worse….”

Sling’s gut began to violently churn, knowing full well that his colt, this child, knew exactly what horrors awaited a female in the claws of such a savage monster….

She never even noticed that Kite had come back to her side until the scarred, grape-coated mare began to cry beside. “….s-son, don’t talk like that, we can’t do that—”

It was then that Sling made her first, genuinely emotional-based decision with her ex-slave charges, suddenly unwilling to allow them to be submitted to the whims and sick desires of anypony, ever again. “No one’s staying,” she said, her voice surprisingly solid, if somewhat angry. “We’re all leaving. And the minute I’m recovered, I’m going to kill him.”

Her night light’s eyes shot back at her with a growing horror, her mouth slightly ajar in shock. “….n-no, not that way—”

“As long as Saurus is alive, there’s no way we’ll get across the valley without him coming after us,” she stated flatly, trotting towards the two children and pushing them upright with a hard shove of telekinesis. “Until he’s dead, we’re not safe. I learned enough about him from Ada to know that much.”

“…Mom, that’s murder,” El-Tee continued to plead tearfully, stumbling a bit as she fought to get her hooves under her own control. “It’s one thing to kill to save yourself, but to go after a soul to kill them first…you’re better than that…”

“Saurus is not some screwed-up savage who doesn’t know any better,” she seethed back, clicking her tongue three times in rapid succession to call the pups out of hiding when a cursory glance through the alley didn’t turn up any sign of the fuzzballs. “He knows what he’s doing, and he enjoys it. He cannot be reasoned or bargained with. He will not stop chasing us, he will not stop hounding us until we’re dead, or he is. He will hunt us down with only one leg and no wings if he has to, but he will never stop. Either I kill him the first chance I get, or he kills me and takes the three of you for whatever disgusting pleasures he wants for himself, and I will not let him do these things. Not ever. Do you understand? This isn’t murder, it’s survival. And right now, our survival depends on us getting out of here. So get moving!”

She hadn’t meant to demand their cooperation like that, at the end. She’d meant to just gently nudge them along in her wake, keep them calm. But the more she talked about Saurus, the angrier she got…because deep down, she was speaking more truthfully about him than she’d wanted to admit. For better or worse, Ada’s deranged, rape-happy brother had to die.

But she did, at least, succeed in getting the two children to finally—if sullenly—start moving at a faster pace as she followed after them. Faster than she herself could manage without fear of ripping her stitches apart. She had to settle for a fairly moderate trot, and also had to weave back and forth as Max seemed intent on staying within two feet of her hooves no matter what. It was getting slightly irritating, to be honest. She hadn’t asked for a personal guide. But every burst of gunfire from the streets behind them spurred her ever onward, to ignore the tiny, yipping package of fur and teeth hounding her every step and just press on down the alley.

It was, however, a trip that quickly produced the most promising stroke of coincidence she’d ever come across. Perhaps thirty seconds into the journey, Max suddenly began attacking the ground with his nose, furiously sniffing out something that had attracted his interest, and quickly began to follow his new interest down a side alley leading into the nearby street to their left.

Oh, godsdammit, not now—

“Max, get back here!” she commanded sharply, going so far as to follow the wayward pup into the alley and preparing a telekinetic spell in her horn. “You can mark your territory on something else later—”

A putrid, barf-inducing stench began to invade her nostrils, and she promptly stopped in her tracks for a moment to fight off the urge to hurl her breakfast. Oh my gods it smells like a latrine over there! She grumbled, nearly retching as the smell seemed to touch the back of her throat. D….did someone just die he—

Max’s muzzle began to bark as he turned towards her for a moment, and then back at what looked to be the crumbled, lifeless limbs of a griffon clad in the Union’s trademark desert camouflage barding, obscured from the sight of pedestrians in the street by a pair of rust-covered dumpsters—

….right, those mercs said Saurus had killed a couple of Union troopers earlier….but why is this damn mutt leading me to it?

“Max, heel!” she tried again, hoping she wouldn’t have to unleash the spell building in her horn, and that the puppy would comply and back off of his new find. She really didn’t want to stay near this dead body for very long, if that Union patrol came by they might mistake her for this poor soul’s killer….

But the husky pup continued to yip and bark, sporadically shifting his attention back and forth between her and the body, and she was forced to move closer and began to form a spell field around the misbehaving puppy—

—and promptly allowed the spell to die a quick, flashless death as her eyes fell upon the griffon’s body, and spotted the tell-tale grip of a 5.56mm pistol poking out of a holster attached to a gear belt…

Buck me, can I really be that lucky twice so quick?! Sling cried as she quickly drew close to the bod—

Bodies, she amended quickly—as she came closer she found that the griffon’s body was lying atop the smaller body of a light pink unicorn mare, also covered in desert camo barding….except for the rear of her body...and just as lifeless and dead as the griffon. A pair of jagged, bleeding gashes across their throats made it quite clear that they’d been caught by surprise…and in the middle of enjoying each other’s personal company….

….couldn’t save it for a hotel room, could you? she admonished the dead sadly, the stench fading from her nose as she quickly chanted off a mild smell suppression spell over the bodies. At the very least, it would keep her from barfing all over them. What she was about to do was insulting enough to their corpses.

But it wasn’t like they had any need for their weapons and supplies anymore, was it?

Two service rifles stood propped against the building wall on her right, curiously left loaded, as a quick of their twenty-round magazines confirmed them to be fully loaded. It was almost as if Saurus had been in a hurry to off these two and left everything behind. She would have expected a well-experienced merc to have taken the ammunition, if nothing else. And while she had no use for the rifles themselves, she took them anyway. If nothing else, the parts would allow her to complete some freelance gun repair work in the future if needed.

It turned out that the griffon had the only sidearm between the pair, and a sergeant’s insignia on the shoulder of his barding and the presence of a lower-ranked insignia on the mare’s indicated this little rendezvous was not entirely sanctioned by whatever rules or regulations they might have been governed by, which would explain why they had gone to the trouble of hiding it in a dirty alley. An NCO getting it on with a lower-ranked enlisted? She’d read more than enough tales of such things in Stable 115’s journals to know how that turned out—a quick end to the careers of those involved.

Still, she had what appeared to be a working 5.56mm pistol from which to draw spare parts from to fix the one she had, an intact operations/repair manual and a small bag with the words “PISTOL TOOLS” stitched into its side, and enough ammunition from the two bodies to keep the weapon fed for several firefights, at least. Some faded—but intact—MRE packets gave her haunches a shudder of disgust as she begrudgingly pocketed them into her saddlebags, and the remainder of the supplies and equipment were quickly sorted out as being of little use to her, and left alone. All told, she’d spent perhaps twenty seconds stripping these two dead lovers of useful things….

…and only then did Max stop hopping back and forth and zip back into the maze of alleys, prompting her to follow along after uttering a soft prayer of apology to the bodies she’d just robbed—

—she nearly plowed Light Tail over as she rounded the corner back into the alley, not having expected anypony to have stopped and waited on her—

“H-holy crap, Mom, don’t do that!” El-Tee squealed in fright as the filly scrambled away from her before she could be trampled. “You tell me not to wander off and then you go and do it anyway?”

Fuuu…dammit, why didn’t I say anything!? Bucking idiot!! “….sorry,” she mumbled sheepishly, unable to hide her newest rifle acquisitions as she’d chosen to wear them slung across her back. “…Max took off down a side alley, had to reel him in…only…”

Light Tail was nothing if not perceptive. She needed only a glance at the rifles on her mother’s back to figure out what had happened. “….only he wasn’t running off to mark something as territory. He smelled out a dead body or two and led you to it….how else would you get two rifles like that without a fight in thirty seconds?”

A rush of shame began to wash over her as she trotted past the filly, as a new, stronger chorus of gunshots began to pepper the streets in the distance…and this time, it seemed there was no end to, and there seemed to be far more guns this time around.

“….let’s just get out of here,” she groaned as a shot of fiery pain zipped into her nerves. “Sounds like the Union patrol finally made it to the fight. We don’t have long now.”

It went to shit a lot faster than she’d expected.

Saurus wasn’t taking great aim, he was just laying suppressive fire at anything that resembled a threat—her, the mercs that had now turned on him when a pair of them came flying out of the side alley yelling for their friends to turn their guns on their employer for lying to them, Leon who was probably twenty yards behind him….

….and Saurus was winning. Even with roughly eighty yards between herself and him, he was still managing to score hits with what sounded like a 5mm assault carbine on full auto. Three of the mercs at her position were already lying prostrate on the ground, bleeding or dead, and another just got his leg drilled when an AP round tore through his cover and his armor. And now that Saurus knew that the stable pony was not the one shooting at him, she couldn’t poke her head out for more than a couple of seconds without drawing a string of fire. Two bursts had torn the concrete barrier she’d ducked behind into rubble very quickly, forcing her to a less desirable position behind what looked like the remains of an old civilian transport—a “car”, built to be used by an earth pony, of all species. What was left of it sat rather low to the ground, and its rear-mounted engine housing was quickly becoming perforated with 5mm needle-nosed rounds. She wasn’t sure it could get any worse than this.

Four minutes after she’d fired the first shot, it did.

She’d found a rare moment of opportunity to send a few rounds downrange from her custom-built service rifle, and was even elated to see Saurus’s face wide with terror through her short-range scope as the slugs came within an inch of his face. If not for the fact that she was stuck with surplus 5.56mm rounds at that moment, she could have probably tagged him right then and there, ended the fight.

So of course that damn Union patrol she was trying to avoid would come barging in from the rear after the sixth shot rang out, their hooves, paws, and talons all but announcing themselves to the misbehaving “civilians” that had dared to start a gunfight on tax collection day.

“Lay your weapons on the ground and kneel down!!!” a magically-enhanced, angry male boomed out from what sounded like the other end of town, his voice pounding its way into her head with sheer force of volume. She swore it even rattled the hundred-plus empty casings scattered all around her and the mercs. For sure it rattled the buffer tube in her rifle, somehow—thank the stars that stable pony had been able to work out the kinks in it, thing ran smooth as butter now—

“—ck me, you damned bitch, you knew they’d be coming to stop this and you opened up on us anyway?!” one of the surviving mercs screamed out at her, somewhere to her left—

—it was that griffon that had told the rest of his friends to turn their guns on Saurus and leave her and Leon alone, no matter how many of their friends they’d already killed. Grievances could be sorted out later, he’d screamed.

Guess it technically is later, now….

“Plan was for me and my partner to pull out just ‘fore they got here, let you and Saurus slug it out with the pretty boys,” Ada yelled back, turning over onto her back long enough to see how close that patrol was—

—oh wow, that guy can really shout! She grinned madly when she saw that they were still several hundred yards away. Her exceptional, eagle-sharp vision made it easy to make them out, even from a great distance. In fact, she could see what looked like a pale yellow stallion at the front of the eleven-strong patrol, his horn glowing faintly from the magic he was using to either carry his weapon or project his voice across the street. Probably both.

No griffons, though. That meant they couldn’t exactly see her, or Leon, not yet anyway. They had at least a small chance of getting out of this mess without being blamed for it.

“…think we can still pull that off, in fact,” she added, flipping back over to her previous position, and then turning onto her right side, with her rifle aiming downrange at Saurus once more underneath the “car”. Just enough of a height clearance to make it work, though she was less than happy with having shell casings hitting her in the face with every shot when they ejected into the ground and started bouncing around. Messed up her follow-up shots.

“….mind including us in the plan? Let that asshole down there deal with the pretty boy patrol?”

“Sure!” she laughed, just as she spotted Saurus’s uninjured wing poking out from behind his cover through her scope, and quickly snapped off two rounds into the chassis of the hollowed-out coal hauler he was hiding behind. The wing disappeared behind the ruined vehicle almost instantly. “Peel off, I’ll keep Saurus shooting this way for a couple of seconds!”

She rolled back up onto her hind legs, settling the rifle onto the back end of the car as a rest, and waited for the rat bastard to stick his murdering head up—

--a grayish-white blur shot up into the air, and she traced its path up, tracking it with her rifle—

“Ohhh, shiiit,” she mouthed in shock at the sight of her brother soaring into the sky on one wing. He couldn’t go that high, maybe only sixty feet or so, and his flight path was shaky at best, but he was airborne, if only briefly. If anything, it was more of a flying leap than true flight. A technique the griffons in the Runners taught and practiced, but rarely used because of the strain on the one wing tasked with generating the lift needed to haul the body into the air.

And Saurus was using it to clear over eighty yards of distance to—

—to get behind me while I’m sitting with my beak catching flies!, she shrieked at herself when he began to descend over her, quickly vaulting herself over the car and onto the other side—

—a sharp burst of gunfire from above accented the destruction of the aged, neglected asphalt she’d occupied a half-second earlier, bits of concrete and dust peppering the car’s side as she landed on her left side with a healthy thud—

—much as she hated to shoot at folk she had no quarrel with, getting the Union to firing in her general direction was about the best hope she had now. With a huff of terrified air, she straightened up, popped up with her rifle raised at the incoming patrol—

—saw with slight relief that Saurus was mid-way through a mag change out of the corner of her eye before she squeezed the trigger, but only managed two shots before the bolt slung back and locked in place inside the stock of her rifle—

—she thought she saw the lead stallion flinch slightly a couple of seconds later, even from over six hundred yards off, and hoped that meant that her rounds had hit close—

—eleven flashes of flame and light lit up from the patrol, and she instinctively ducked back behind her cover just as bullets began to slam into virtually everything around her—the ground, the buildings, their overhanging signs, abandoned road-side display stalls, the cars—

“Bitch of a sister, you got me good today!!” Saurus screamed with rage, just before turning his rifle onto the advancing, firing patrol and began to let loose with short, controlled bursts. “Get this pansies scurrying for cover first, then I’ll deal with you—”

Even with the three surviving mercs hastily beating hooves and paws into the side alleys to escape the coming chaos, Ada found it impossible to resist the opportunity that lay before her. To avenge all the wrongs he’d visited upon her and countless others in his five-year path of wanton misery.

And to make all of this rage and anger inside her worth something.

Her relic of a revolver—an automatic revolver, at that—slid out of its holster across her lower back with such practiced ease that it was in her talons and squared down on her brother’s back before she’d even thought of it, and then the weapon was bucking in her grasp as she quickly squeezed off three .357 rounds into his armored barding, almost as quickly as she could fire her 9mm, just as the sounds of gunfire from the advancing patrol began to reach their position. The impact of the rounds threw off his balance—standing on two hind legs to fire was a lot harder than they made it look, and it didn’t help having to deal with the recoil of a fully automatic weapon and the kinetic impact of a .357 slug at the same time. By the third round, he’d stopped firing, his legs beginning to stumble and lose their footing, and he was forced to throw his forelimbs out to cushion his fall—

—he bolted away from her, off to the left, as she tracked his form and loosed off a fourth shot that missed his tail by half an inch and splattered across the pavement. A fifth shot knocked off a dangling license plate from the rear of that military transport, where she lost sight of her quarry. She briefly contemplated chasing after him, to keep him on the run, but the impact of an errant slug into the car in front of her—and seven more into the street—spurred her to break off the engagement while she still had the chance. With a scowl of hatred at yet another opportunity having slipped through her claws, she slapped the pistol back into its holster and took off on all fours, down the other side of the street where she’d initially emerged from—

“HALT!!!” that screaming stallion shouted from over four hundred yards off now. Just enough time to clear the alleys before they could catch sight of her, if she was lucky—

—she slipped off to the right into the main alley, back towards Overdose’s clinic, and started a hard charge, hoping to clear at least fifty yards in the next five seconds—

—a door from the back of what looked like an ancient restaurant from Equestria That Was—El-Tee’s words, not hers, but she liked the sound of it—swung open, and that merc griffon’s ebony-feathered head poked out—

“In here, quick!” he shouted out at her rapidly approaching awesomeness.

Never turn down help from a handsome griffon! she squealed, elated at her change of fortune. Without hesitation she made a direct run for the open door, and rolled right through the doorway two seconds later—

—found herself in a backroom kitchen, where at least one of the pony mercs was already disappearing into a hidden staircase revealed from underneath a removed portion of the tiled floor. She followed him right through, heard the griffon slam the back door of the restaurant shut as she descended down the stairs and tried to warn them about Leon still being out there—

—but when she hit the bottom of the stairs, into an underground, military-bunker styled interior lit by poorly-charged light bars embedded behind wire-caged housings, she found her partner’s familiar white-feathered, pale gold body sullenly popping the straps off of his armor to pull it off, and finally allowed herself to calm down a little.

Just a little. She was still mad at him about that prank he pulled with her MRE last week. She hated beans and franks….

“….sorry you missed most of the action this time,” she jested lightly as she drew closer to him. Behind her, the sound of the staircase’s hidden entrance sliding back into place rumbled through the walls. “But it serves you right for switching my MREs up like that.”

“…godsdammit, Ada, we almost didn’t make it out this time,” he growled back, pulling the upper half of his barding up over his neck and dropping it to the floor. “Why couldn’t you just tell me we were walking into a trap when we got here?”

If she’d had pony ears, she was certain they’d be flattening in shame and despair right now. It was a good thing she wasn’t a pony….though her wings betrayed her emotions just as well, as she could feel them drooping away from her sides. “….I…didn’t figure it out ‘till I got to talking with the stable pony….knew something was off, but I had to talk to her to be sure. Saurus doesn’t leave people he hates alive unless he needs them for something…needed you to believe I was gonna snipe him from the building behind you, which I’m pretty sure was rigged to blow me to bloody bits. He might’ve seen through it if you were just trying to act…which you’re terrible at, by the way.”

His eyes looked back up at her with looked like a brief tinge of disbelief, as if he couldn’t believe she’d been that far behind in figuring out Saurus’s next move. “….seriously? You switched up the plan at the last minute because you didn’t know you needed to until then?”

“…yeah,” she sighed in defeat, slumping onto the ground in a sphinx-cat position. “Look, I already know I tossed us into a fire pit back there, it was the best I could do on short notice. I haven’t exactly been a stellar performer in tracking our target this last year.”

“I figured that part out already, but we can talk about it another time. These mercs aren’t offering their shelter for free.”

She heard the remainder of his armor slap onto the metal floor. “….somebody wanna tell us what the cost is? ‘Cause if you’re looking for a ride or three from this girl, I’ll take my chances topside.”

“Haven't decided that yet,” the dark-feathered merc griffon bellowed as he descended the stairs behind her. “You did take out at least four of us back there, and you owe us big time for that.”

“Surprised you ain’t gutting us already,” she replied with a cautious tone, raising up slightly for a better reach at her holstered 9mm, just in case….

“Yeah, well, one of those damn kids shed some light on what kind of guy that Saurus is,” one of the pony mercs mumbled from the comfort of a rolled out sleeping mat in the middle of the room. It seemed they used this place quite often…and made her wonder what kind of trouble these guys got up to when the Union wasn’t around to supervise them after curfew. “Plus he didn’t mention he was after escaped slaves. We don’t want nothin’ to do with that shit, ‘specially not if he got them by killing their last owner. Union don’t look kindly on that.”

“We’re not quite as harsh, but it depends on the circumstances,” Leon assured him darkly, the sound of his “Big Demon” pistol being unloaded and tossed onto his discarded armor, along with his rifle and his SMG. “For the record, that stable pony and her filly did take those two slaves out of his hands, and they’re better off for it. If you’d seen half the shit Saurus did to the mare, you’d have let them go without asking.”

“Whore trembled like a leaf the second we came down on them,” the pony merc sighed sadly, rolling over onto his other side, as if physically trying to escape from some unbidden image before his eyes. “….I’m out, dudes. Had enough of this shit today….you damn Runners ever see that little girl again, tell her thanks for saving most of our asses…”

A small, benign smile crept onto her beak as she stood up to stretch out her limbs. Good on ya, El-Tee. Maybe there’s something left of you ponies after all…

“And as far as making up for killing four of our own back there,” the griffon went on, coming to a stop beside her, “we get that we didn’t have the whole picture, all right? We ain’t all on top of shit like you Runners, but you still offed friends of ours. If I knew that I wouldn’t have that damn filly’s eyes haunting me in my dreams for taking you out after she warned us about him, this would’ve been settled already. As it is, I’m tempted to take some payment out of you in personal ways. Change my mind.”

“You hurt even a feather on my girl and I’ll rip your balls off,” Leon’s voice roared angrily, finally showing off that lion half that he kept hidden for good reason. “Might make you eat them, too.”

“He’ll do it,” she teased with a smile. “We ain’t above working off debts, but I draw the line at being used as a whore. You got work you want done, we’ll do it, within reason. Work with us on this. You’ll live longer, trust me.”

The merc’s boisterous threats began to wither and fade in the face of such naked aggression from a competing male, and his plumage flattened considerably. “….all right, all right. Screwdriver might have somethin’ once this shitstorm you whipped up dies out….can’t blame a guy for tryin’, though, right? Biggest damn girl I ever met and I can’t touch you…”

“Oh, I never said we couldn’t have some fun if I got to liking you enough,” she cooed into his left ear. “But you gotta work for it. Show me you’re worth it….and show me yer clean, to boot. I plan on having kids someday and I’m not about to ruin myself with STDs. You got a name, merc, or do I just call you Dark Feathered One?”

Dark Feathered One’s face began to grow increasingly uncomfortable with the direction this conversation was going. From dictating the flow to now essentially being claw-handled about like a rag-doll, he seemed uncertain with what he ought to be doing next. “….first you threaten me with your boyfriend for suggesting it, and then you go and proposition me? What the hell’s wrong with you Runners?”

“You wanted her as payment,” Leon clarified, still glaring at him (or maybe her, too) with that death stare of his. “Against her will. But if she’s willing and she thinks you’re worth it, she’ll spend a night or two with you, no strings attached or anything. I learned that three years ago, and until we finish our tour in the field and settle down somewhere, I have no problem with it. You aren’t the first one she’s hit on like this, believe me. She’s hard to keep satisfied for long.”

Dark Feathered One’s eyes began to scrutinize her in ways she couldn’t discern at that moment. “….name’s Decker. And I’m already starting to regret ever bringing it up…”

Her smile broke wider as she finally stood up fully on all fours and titled her head down at Decker’s face. “I’ll bet you fifty caps you won’t be thinking that way by the time we part company.”

The town of Maize shrank in the distance as the wagon creaked and rumbled down the road, occasionally shuddering as the wheels crossed over a crack in the asphalt or bumped into a stretch of earth and dust that had built up in one of the many potholes that had formed up through the decades. The slight stink of rarely-bathed brahmin and their earth pony handlers made it difficult to be able to doze off and sleep off the ride.

And so she just lay there, with Sling lying on her unwounded side across from her, and the kids curled up between them, and watched the town grow into a smaller blur with every passing moment…until the silence grew too much for her to bear.

“….town we’re heading to, it’s called Stonewall. It’s a few hours out, to the northwest. Might add another week to our trip down to Trotpeka, but it’s out of the way of most merc groups and raiders. Should be quiet enough to let you heal up.”

“Fine,” Sling deadpanned into the soft canvas covering beneath them, her shotgun laid out beside her, its barrel pointed out towards the back of the wagon.

“...has a working water talisman, to boot,” she added next, hoping that might get at least a stir out of either Sling or Elly. “Clean water. Heard they even have a bath house.”

“Cool,” Elly deadpanned as well, unbelievably enough. She was just content to lie there, huddled up next to her boy, and lazily stroke her pups behind their ears with soft scratches from her magic.

“….it’s the one town outside Syrup Mound or Trotpeka with a good bar and a decent food market.”

“Awesome,” BJ droned soullessly, though that was par for the course for him. Today, though….

….today, I feel like being an evil bitch, she smiled evilly. “….think it has a library with a three-quarters complete set of Daring Do books.”

This finally got the senses-shocked filly out of her depressed state of mind. That trip out of Maize had shaken the whole of them up in just a few seconds…she’d never, once in her life, ever seen BJ break and nearly cry like that, and to see it happen because he felt….concerned? For a filly he complained about half the time? And the way Sling promised them that they would not be harmed by anypony….

…like she’d begun to see them as more than just travelling partners and guides….

….was this….friendship?

And did it have to come at the price of a hyper-active filly that woke up at the slightest provocation of things that interested her and turned her into a machine of death-by-questions?

“Really!??!” El-Tee shrieked, loudly enough that it pierced her ears and made her cringe as the filly sat up and prepared to pounce on her. “Three-quarters?! Do they have the first three-quarters, the middle, or the last three-quarters?! Are they in good shape?! Do they let anypony check ‘em out or do ya have to do chores or work to get in—”

BJ’s left hoof shot up and plugged her mouth shut before her fit of excitement could draw unwanted attention. “Keep that up, and they’ll make us walk the rest of the way,” he warned tiredly. “Behind the brahmin.”

Elly’s eyes widened in horror at the thought of having to dodge the leavings of the two-headed beasts, and promptly laid back down beside him. “….you are such a killjoy.”

“It’s what I’m best at.”

“Then why don’t you have a cutie mark in it yet, blank flank?”

“That’s the awesome thing, my blank flank is the cutie mark,” he shot back. “You can’t see it ‘cause it’s, like, literally nothing. I can be anything I want.”

“And you choose to be nothing. That’s not a special talent, that’s being….lazy.”

“You’re best at making me want to kill you just to shut you up, and I don’t see anything on your butt that matches that.”

“When I find out what I’m so awesome at that I get my butt tattoo at last, it’s gonna make you wish yours wasn’t so embarrassed of you that it looks like your butt.”

The children’s playful bickering finally succeeded in getting a rise out of Sling, who simply laughed softly into her forelegs as she curled up tighter to block out the light.

And she had to admit, this time around, they didn’t seem to be arguing with each other out of spite. More like….a game.

Like they were playing with it and having fun with it.

“Except that nobody could stand to look at your cutie mark for long ‘cause they’d just get blinded by that weird ass streak in your tail. They might prefer to ponder the mysteriousness of my cutie mark, like an old painting from Equestria That Was in those big cities with their fancy art places or something.”

“If you could find even ten people that could stand to look at your butt for that long, I’d pay them like, a hundred caps out of pity and tell ‘em, ’thanks for tryin’ to find BJ’s talent of boringness and getting bored by it’.”

“It’d be caps well-earned. Better than having to listen to a certain filly shriek and scream loud enough to wake the dead in boot hill in the next town just at the mention of Daring Do.”

“And what’s wrong with Daring Do? She’s awesome, she’s smart, she’s pretty, she can fly, she’s like, a super-expert on all things ancient and decrepit and magical. She’s everything you’re not, because she tries.”

“She’s fictional, just like all that hot air you blow out your mouth.”

“She’s everything I wanna be. A mare like that can change whole worlds and make a difference. And we need somepony like that now more than ever.”

Kite felt something tug at her heart just then, eliciting a tear from her right eye that the kids thankfully couldn’t see. You poor, naïve child….this world isn’t meant for souls like yours….

“….can you start by shutting up and making a difference in how quiet the ride is?” BJ snarked back.

“What, and ruin this perfectly good bonding moment we’re having? I swear, you’ve been nicer and cooler today than you’ve been ever since we met. I think you got my cooties, you big dummy.”

“Me, the dummy? Who’s bumbling around the place like a lost puppy every time we step into a new town?”

“I got puppies to keep from getting lost. Those fuzzballs got minds of their own.”

“That’s more than I can say for you.”

“You can say something about me?”

“She who questions me twice, is a fool.”

“So what do you say?”

“Aha!” BJ shouted, finally rising up to tap her in the side. “You admit you are a fool.”

She couldn’t tell who laughed first. It could have been both of them. But right at that moment, both mares burst into a snorting fit of laughter at the joke played on the filly (who might have seen it coming and chose to walk into it anyway).

A joke they never would have thought the colt was even capable of expressing.

And when El-Tee grinned and latched onto him in a fitful, gleeful hug, they realized that she had been aiming for that reaction all along. “So there is a pony under that boring, blank flank!”

What BJ did next brought his mother to joyful tears, for the first time in her life, and she swore to herself that whatever happened to them in the end, she would never let down the souls that had finally gotten her only child to open up a little.

“....there’s a friend under that boring, blank flank,” he answered, locking a foreleg around her neck and ruffling her mane with the other hoof. “Whatever that is, or what it means, I don’t know. Can’t be that bad if I get to torture you with tickle spots for being too annoying.”

Chapter 13 Author's Note

The massive 6+ month gap between this chapter and the last one is inexcusable, and for the few that have kept up with this tale up to this point, you have both my apologies and my thanks for sticking with it. I don't intend to let that happen again, and will strive to have a somewhat more regular update schedule in the future--and I'd better, if I want to finish this thing. :)

Chapter 13

“Three hundred.”

“Bullshit,” she snarled back instantly, her ears flattening as irritation began to set into her bloodstream. “Hammer and sear are tight, no cracks to speak of in the receiver either. The bore’s worn down some, but the barrel’s clean and the rifling’s intact. At least another five to six thousand rounds in it.”

“Except that most idiots with a full-automatic like to do entire mag dumps in a fight,” the gray-maned, charcoal-coated stallion returned with an even, unperturbed tone. “If you know enough about guns to guess at how long their barrels will last, then you also know what that kind of constant heat abuse does to them. I’ve seen machine gun barrels cooked and warped all to shit because their owners wouldn’t let off the trigger for longer than it took to load a fresh two hundred round belt.”

Sling felt her jaw come loose from her head, gaping in shock at the thought of how such a thing could even happen. Or that some folk would be so willing to waste all that ammo in a world that barely knew how the technology worked.

“So you see the dilemma,” he went on when she couldn’t offer anything meaningful to say at that moment. “Yeah, the gun might be worth two to three thousand caps as is, but to the bucking fool I’ll probably end up selling it to, it won’t be worth much more than a junk 9mm pistol, because that’s about how long it’ll last in their hooves, or claws, or whatever the hell else they grab things with. So I’m buying it for half of what I’d sell it for, unless you know enough about gunsmithing to modify it to a semi-automatic only gun.”

“What’s the point of such a big-ass gun in 10mm if it’s only gonna shoot once per trigger pull?” she shot back, already finding at least two things wrong with that statement. “If you were selling this thing at...what? Two thousand caps? For a five-pound gun with a thirty round mag and semi-automatic only? And over here you’ve got what looks like two old C-series 10mm pistols for six to seven hundred? Why would I want that modified SMG over those? Even the N-series would be a better choice, and those things are fragile as hell. Smaller, lighter, fires the same round, faster to get on target, and 10mm was a pistol round to start with so the barrel length’s already perfect. Might as well leave the SMG intact and get your caps’ worth out of it.”

“And I’m going to take advice from a half-blind unicorn, why?”

Temporarily! she roared at him mentally. “Why do you care what the buyer does to the thing once you’ve sold it? If they want to throw away two thousand caps for a gun they’re going to ruin in a couple hundred rounds of careless shooting and neglect, let them. But make them pay for what the gun’s worth to you, not what it’ll be worth to them. Hell, the high price might scare off those idiots to start with. You get somebody that actually knows how to keep their firearm running and not abuse it, then maybe you can work something out to both your benefit.”

The stallion’s eyes tore away from her bandaged face, back down to the 10mm SMG that had been sitting on his table for the last two minutes…and a three-shell magazine tube extension for her shotgun, with matching spring and follower lying next to it. “...even at a thousand caps in trade worth, you’re still short seven hundred for the extension.”

Her brain nearly mouthed off a foul curse, but staved it off at the last moment before she could utter it. It wasn’t quite what she’d been aiming for, but it was still better than the price she’d been looking at a minute earlier. Take it and be glad he’s not stiffing you for over seventeen hundred like he’d wanted…

It took her nearly three minutes to count off the required caps (and the increasingly lighter weight of the caps purse scared her with every passing moment), but in the end he took the “money” without further complaint and scooped up the SMG and its three functional magazines off the table, while she slipped the magazine tube extension and parts into her saddlebag. “…does the lady require anything else? Besides the rare and mysterious bullet called .44 Mag that I’ve not seen in high quantities for four years now?”

Her heart floated down a bit lower in her chest at that remark, but she took special note of his phrasing. “…but you’ve still seen at least a few, somewhere?”

“…yeah, that’s the word. A few. Seriously, not near as much of those around now as there used to be, most of the old Ironshod revolvers that survived the end of the world are all shot out and ruined. Anybody with a working model, they don’t fire it much. Only .44 magnum guns I see in working order these days are lever-action rifles or a Phoenix Rising model of some sort. Like yours. You sure you won’t sell it? That thing’s worth two-thirds of my inventory.”

Sling unconsciously shifted her body weight about until she felt Grayhawk’s weight tapping into her side as its holster bobbed in place slightly. “You even think to reach for it and I’ll cut your leg off at the joint.”

Surprisingly, the stallion merely laughed at her threat, apparently not realizing that she meant every word of it. “Okay, okay, fine, I’ll stop asking. As for .44s, sometime after the megaspells, they had a hell of a rep. Supposedly could kill any living being that walked, crawled, or slithered on the earth, or at least that’s how my grandfather remembered things. I still remember twenty years back when the demand got so bad that some wise guys set up shops pushing out reloaded .44 Mag rounds at a fraction of what a war-era round would cost. Apparently they never bothered to learn that the casings can only be re-used so much before they get stretched out and overstressed from all that pressure, and the rounds explode the next time they’re re-charged and fired off. Lots of guns and their owners got blown to bits before folk caught on, but by then the damage was done. Not much of ammo or gun to go around now. So if you find any war-era .44 mag rounds, expect to pay a lot more than two or three caps per bullet.”

There may be a reason he’s single, she thought bitterly, her eyes scanning over the rest of his small collection of ammunition behind him. He’s depressing the hell out of me and I just met him. “What about 5.56? Or civvy .223s?”

“Biggest stockpile’s in Union control,” he spat with disdain. “But the army left enough caches lying around that you can usually find a can or two if you go out looking for salvage. Except the armor-piercing rounds. Union snatches up every batch of those they find, and they got patrols and salvage teams that do nothing but search them out.”

She did indeed fail to spot any manner of AP munitions in his stock in any caliber in which such a round would actually be useful. Plenty of simple FMJ rounds and a scattered count of jacketed-hollow points, even some .357 flat-nosed soft point rounds….but absolutely no armor-piercing rounds. “You’d think they’d have enough for themselves, sitting on top of that military arms cache of theirs.”

“Doesn’t mean they want the rest of us to have any. Runners gave ‘em hell years ago, so they want every advantage they can get if they ever have to tangle with ‘em again. Nine-mil, .38s, even .357 Mag, got plenty of those. .44 Special too, but only a couple of boxes. As for 12-guage, I don’t have much of any particular type, but I got slugs, buckshot, three-inch magnum shells, a couple of bolo shot shells, bean bag rounds, flare rounds—”

She’d already begun to sort out the quantities of pistol ammunition she’d need to get the next round of target practice going when he got to listing off his shotgun shell stock, and had a sudden urge to bug him over the bolo shells. “Whoa, wait a minute, bolo shot? I thought that was just an experimental round.”

“Which might be why nobody finds that many,” the stallion replied, even going so far as to pull one of the shells out for her inspection. “Supposed to be able to cut a head off at close range if the wire is pulled taut, but the damn things rarely work right. Most of the time they just nick you pretty good, or the bolos just tumble over each other in flight, or the target gets smacked by the ball rather than the wire. Better off with flechette rounds, but I don’t have any. Another one of those ammo types that the Union likes to suck up on sight.”

She promptly set the bolo round back onto the table. Such an exotic and unpredictable round was not worth the risk in a firefight. “I need around seven to eight hundred caps’ worth of ammo, mostly 9mm and .38s. Thinking around two hundred of each of those to start, plus those .44 Specials, then we’ll work in some other calibers.”

“Well, my gods, the lady is on a spending spree today!” he laughed as he began to pull out boxes of variously-labeled ammunition onto his counter. “You keep this up and you’ll have enough ammo to fight Runners for half a day.”

Sling spent the next ten minutes working out her ammo order. Four hundred caps were already allocated to two hundred 9mms and two hundred .38s, and another hundred for fifty rounds of .357. Another eighty caps netted her the forty rounds of .44 Special, just so she’d have something else to shoot through Grayhawk. Afterwards she was torn between adding to either her stock of 10mm or 12-gauge, given that ten-mil went for three caps a round and the 12-gauge shells varied widely in cost depending on the type. She eventually settled for roughly two magazines’ worth of 10mm, at 60 caps, and splurged the rest of her ammo budget on 12-gauge. She eventually wound up with a small helping of roughly nine 3-inch magnum shells, four flare rounds, three slugs, and five 00 buckshot rounds. The nine caps left over at the end went back into her caps bag, leaving her with roughly six hundred and twelve for future dealings.

The walk back to the hotel at the northwest quarter of town went largely unnoticed to her, with much of her attention focused on memorizing the takedown procedure for her shotgun. She barely even registered that she’d made it back to her rented room until she was slinging her traveling saddle off and onto the floor beside the bed, and chills of terror slid through her bones at the thought of her missing potential threats eyeballing her and trailing her all the way back here. She’d have thought a near-death run-in with a hedonistic merc would’ve taught her to look out for herself a lot better…

“He have much of anything you wanted?” Kite’s voice crept up from behind, growing closer with every passing second.

“Plenty,” she replied with a grunt as the left side of her face briefly attacked her nervous system with a flash of searing pain. “After lunch we’ll hike back out to the north end of town, take some more target practice.”

Kite’s presence began to intrude into her personal space as the other mare crept to a stop beside her, her magic tugging at the bandages over her face and eye. “Is that still bothering you?”

“It’s my bucking eye, of course it’s bothering me!” she hissed back softly when Kite’s pulling began to get uncomfortably close to the scabbed-over cuts on her eyelid. “Shit, watch what you’re doing you’re making it worse.”

Instead of taking the hint and leaving things be, Kite’s response was to simply shove her up and over the foot of the bed until she’d landed on top of its ragged, patched-up blankets, and then quickly hopped up after her as she began to snip away at the bandaging. “Oh you poor, big baby, shut up and sit still so I can pull these off. It’s time to be rid of them.”

Sling’s blood began to grow hot with anger, her forelegs trying to push her up into a standing position so she could better resist the ex-slave’s efforts to take away the one thing that kept the dust and wind out of her healing wounds. “The hell you will! Get offa me—”

Kite’s body sat down on her back before she could get up, and she was surprisingly heavy considering the food quality of the wasteland—she found it very difficult to get her legs back under her now that she had this pony-sized tick on her back. And when Kite’s forehooves grabbed hold of her head to hold it still, she suddenly decided that she might have been better off simply staying put instead of risking re-opening her cuts in a struggle to get free.

“Sit,” Kite spat back sharply, as if she were giving one of the pups a command. “Stay.”

“…just get it over with.”

“Good girl,” the scarred mare purred, her voice practically dripping with satisfaction. Her magic began to unravel the maze of gauze and bandage wrapped around her head, and as the layers began to grow thinner Sling could feel a slight, pleasurable release of pressure and relief seep into her skull…

“…oooooh, that actually does feel better,” she sighed, allowing her body to relax itself and quit trying to find out a way from underneath her “tormentor”.

“I told you it would,” Kite mused with a quiet laugh. “But did you ever listen, nooooo, you just squirmed and squealed like a foal until I got tired of it and let you keep the damn thing on another coupla days.”

The wrappings began to tickle her coat as they were peeled off of her skull, and the gauze pad that had been pressed against her eye began to loosen up. “…kinda scared of what the mirror’s gonna show me….”

Kite’s amusement died almost immediately, and she began to take greater care with her work now that the pad was no longer held against the eye. “…I…didn’t think of that…or Elly….”

The last of the bandaging lifted away from her skull, and Kite’s magic started tugging gently at the pad over the eye to pry it off without disturbing the scabs too much. “…where are they now?”

“On their way,” Kite replied, though most of her attention was now focused on the gauze pad as it resisted her efforts to remove it. It seemed to have gotten stuck on a couple of scabs, she could feel the crusted wound sites screaming fiery rage with every movement. “They took the pups out for some air and play time out back, that was right after you left. The moment I heard you come back I told them to come up. Should be here any minute now—”

Kite had barely spoken of the increasingly rambunctious children when they began to hear their voices curling around the top of the staircase, eighty feet down the hall to the right—

“—ieve you taught them to fetch that quick!” El-Tee’s voice squealed happily. “Come to think of it, I didn’t think you could teach much of anything!”

“…Mom and I wound up with a brahmin herder for a few months once. What was it…two years back? Had to work the fields, and he used dogs to help keep watch. Learned a bit about teachin’ tricks there.”

Kite’s body finally got off of her back, coming around to sit in front of her and allowing Sling to bare at least one eye onto the scarred slave’s face. “…brahmin herder?” she asked.

Kite’s ministrations to her eye became subdued and half-hearted, and her eyes grew downcast and withdrawn. “….we’ve gotten bounced around masters a lot the last few years, after Bark Skin sold us off…that was actually one of the better ones….”

The sullen, low tone of her voice convinced her not to ask any more questions.

“—at else could ya teach ‘em?!” El-Tee’s voice cried next, now louder and far closer to the door. Probably just a couple seconds away…

“What’d ya have in mind? They already stay put when they’re told to, most of the time. They keep watch, they sniff out stuff we might need—”

The door creaked open without warning, a faint electric blue glow popping over the doorknob as the door swung inward and revealed the indigo-maned filly’s body, her head looking over her withers towards the colt trailing in behind her—

“…roll over? Stand up? Or maybe train ‘em so they can track any of us down if we get separated?”

“Think that was covered when your mom got all those guns and ammo off those dead Union troops two weeks back,” the light blue colt muttered as he slipped through the doorway, though his path was momentarily interrupted by a pair of black/white blurs zipping in between his legs—

Awww, shit, Sling growled silently as Max and Mona began to chase each other all over the hotel room, and while Light Tail seemed amused by their antics, she dreaded the next quarter hour ahead. They seemed to get bigger every week…

“Stop! Heel!!” she barked out sharply before the pups could get the idea to try leaping onto the bed in their energetic zeal to amuse themselves—

Both pups came to a halt within two seconds, their heads and pointy ears cocked in the direction of the large pony that had just yelled at them. But instead of ignoring her and going back to their play, they reluctantly sat down on all fours with a whimper and contented themselves with examining their surroundings.

“…yup, pretty much trained already,” BJ decided a moment later, his hind leg kicking the door shut behind him. “Intelligent little buggers, swear they’re smarter than you are.”

“Oh yeah?” Light Tail laughed. “What’s the square root of twenty-five? When did Princess Luna become head regent of Equestria—“

That, apparently, was all it took to scramble BJ’s brains like a cooked egg. “…the…, wait, what now? What’s a square root? Is it like…a square-looking plant root, or…”

“Ha!!” Light Tail laughed back triumphantly. “Smarter than you, then! Don’t think those fuzz balls even know what math is!”

“…heeeeeeey…”

Kite chose that moment to butt into the children’s playful bickering, seemingly miffed that neither of them had even taken notice of their mothers. “Nice to see you too, Beige,” she grumbled, turning her attention back to the stubborn gauze pad and the increasingly painful gasps coming out of Sling’s throat. “Be a dear and fetch the med kit for your poor mother.”

Instead of obeying her instantly, the smart-ass colt simply relayed the message to one of the pups. “Max, fetch the med kit.”

She heard a pair of husky feet begin to patter across the floor as the pup immediately darted across the floor, likely for the saddlebags stacked together in the corner, and when she looked up to gauge Kite’s reaction she saw an unamused mare flatly staring back at her stubborn-headed son.

“…what? You said fetch the med kit. Didn’t say how,” BJ sassed back at the silent glare of his mother. “Had the dog do it. I don’t do fetch.”

“Your lunch is a military MRE,” Kite snarled testily. “Talk to me like that again, and you’ll be eating them until we’re out.”

Sling heard what sounded like BJ’s voice trying in vain to come up with something that would either get out of trouble, or at least not get him into any more trouble, but after a couple of seconds he just gave up and dragged himself to a far corner of the room, where he plopped himself down and stayed put.

And quiet.

With BJ more or less punished for displeasing his mother, Light Tail was left with little else to do but bug her own mother for amusement. “…whatcha doin’?”

She felt a scab over the lower half of her eyelid began to peel off, sending a sharp pain through her eye, and she reflexively grabbed at the sheets beneath her with a forehoof. “Ooooh, y’know,” she half-squealed through the pain. “Just sittin’ here, being tortured by this heartless so-called nursemai—”

Kite stopped being gentle with her tugging, and in one swift motion simply ripped the gauze pad off of her eye, taking with it the scabs that had gotten stuck to it. Now instead of one small pain, she had an entire eyeful of it assaulting her face, and she shrieked with a mixture of shock and anger. “—aaaaaaaeeEEOOOOOWWW OW OW OW OW OW—”

“Do you want some ice for that, oh poor tortured girl?” Kite muttered back, her tone completely neutral and detached as she tossed the pad into what looked like a trash can held together with decades-old fuzzy duct tape. “Maybe a kiss to make it better?”

She almost snarled off a hateful curse, but bit her tongue at the last moment when she remembered her daughter’s presence only a few feet away. Instead she simply lay out onto the bed, rubbing at her eye with her left foreleg in some vain effort to scrub away the pain and hissing her pain out through her teeth.

“…better that way anyway, Mom,” Light Tail dared to say in Kite’s defense. “Ain’t that what you told me the last time I asked for help getting a band-aid off? You just tore the thing off without a care in the world as to how much it stung.”

I hate the wasteland! she howled to the depths of her mind. There is no punishment I can give that is worse than the horrors of living out here!

“When you’re done screaming and crying like a little foal, sit up so I can get some eye solution in that eye, clear your vision up,” Kite went on in, just as Max’s body leapt up onto the bed with a small, red-cross marked bag in his jaws. “By the time we eat and get out there, it should be good as new and you can actually hit the target today.”

She heard BJ’s mouth open and close in disgust, as though he could still taste that horrible military ration half an hour later, almost retching in horror at the taste of it.

“Oh…dear…Luna,” he mumbled in his misery. “I hope it comes out easier than it went in.”

Groooooosss!! “…gross, Beige. Just…no.”

BJ, however, ignored her, and continued to try and huff out the taste and, occasionally, spit it out as they followed their moms through the sparsely-populated streets and ruined, crumbling buildings and houses. “And to think the army fought on stomachs full of that shit…”

Light Tail had, by now, figured out what that particular cuss word meant, and she really disliked it. “Stop cussin’. Especially that word, that’s gross.”

“No, seriously, how could anypony fight for freedom and all that when they had that to look forward to back at camp?” he went on. “If I was a soldier in the war, I’d desert and tell the zebras to hurry up and win so the rest of us wouldn’t have to eat that stuff anymore.”

“…from what I’ve read, those rations weren’t meant to be eaten for long,” she answered back, momentarily setting aside her distaste for his constant swearing as she made a quick scan behind them to make sure there were no bad ponies or bugs sneaking up on them. “Supposedly they were purposely made to focus on calorie count ‘cause they were going to soldiers in combat zones, and they burned through a lot of energy fighting and wouldn’t be able to set up a kitchen or anything like that. The rations had to have a really high shelf life so they could just pluck them off a store room rack and ship ‘em to a front line when they needed to. That meant making it taste really, really bad, or it wouldn’t last near as long.”

“I can believe that,” BJ gagged back, still fighting with the aftertaste in his mouth. “…was it considered a war crime to feed them to zebra?”

“…maaaaaybe?”

“…no wonder they were mad at us for so long.”

The next four minutes were spent in solemn silence as they trotted through the dusty streets, broken up only by the occasional gag of BJ’s throat or Max and Mona barking at either each other, as they’d taken to play fighting while following them. Only when she saw Mom stop at the end of a dead end street facing a crumbling, half-smashed house with a short stretch of fence in its front yard did she sense an end to their brief journey.

“…good spot,” Mom said, mostly to herself as she surveyed the surroundings. “House makes for a decent backstop, fence is mostly intact. Don’t see anything on my EFS other than us, too. Rest a bit while I set up some targets. Lotta junk lying around…”

Finally glad to be rid of her traveling saddle for a bit, Light Tail unceremoniously pulled its straps open and slid it off to the ground, then began pulling her guns and a share of ammo out from their pouches and holsters. “Which one ya want this time, Beige?”

“Neither,” he answered, digging into her saddlebags as well. Probably hunting down that honey oat granola bar she’d snuck out of the stable ration at lunch for him. “You and mom need the practice more, I think.”

“If you’re decent enough at it, then you should keep at it when you get a chance.”

“Had plenty of practice the other day. Your turn. Somebody’s gotta keep the pups still anyway, might as well be me.”

…well, if that was what he wanted, she wouldn’t push it. She didn’t waste any more time trying to convince him otherwise, and simply collected the guns and ammo together in a single spell field before carrying it with her as she trotted onward towards the end of the street, where Kite was laying out a couple of rifles and several boxes of ammo herself. In a way, she was kinda glad that BJ wasn’t going to join them now.

It gave her a chance to try and subtly pry some information out of his mom. Gently, of course. She wasn’t gonna be rude about it.

“BJ don’t wanna shoot today,” she heard herself say as she stopped beside her, setting her stuff down in front of her and beginning the task of sorting it out. The lightweight revolver went off to the right side, along with its speedloaders, which she’d emptied out earlier in the morning in preparation for the afternoon’s target practice…

“He’s good enough at it when it suits him,” Kite murmured back, one of the rifles coming up from the ground, surrounded in Kite’s magic. “Me, I barely know what I’m doing with this thing. Need all the practice I can get.”

“And how’d he get decent at it if the Union don’t want slaves to learn how to work a gun?” she asked next, popping the magazine release on the 9mm pistol and catching the mag as it fell out, setting it down gently, and then quickly racked the slide to clear the chamber. A glint of movement sailed out from the gun’s slide, and her eyes followed the bullet until she could catch it in a spell field and bring it back to her.

“…some of our masters, now and then, would let BJ shoot a little when they were sure they could get away with it with nopony else watching or knowing about it. Something about boys and their guns...all I ever learned about ‘em was what I saw others doing. I can hit something if it’s in front of me, up close, but for that I’d rather have a knife. Much easier and quieter, and enough tasks and jobs had me using a knife for something or another that it wasn’t hard to get the practice in on those with no one the wiser for it.”

With both of her pistols unloaded, she set to emptying a couple of magazines of their bullets, setting the rounds aside inside a small belt pouch she kept tied around her torso. Lately she’d taken a liking to having a pocket or two to stuff things in, and didn’t want to be wearing that traveling saddle all the time to do it. And it turned out that a few of the pouches could be taken off and fixed to a belt to wear on their own, so that’s what she wound up doing a few days ago. “You learned how to shoot by watching others do it?”

“…well…maybe BJ showed me a thing or two, when nopony else was looking. Used one of these rifles to do it, was surprised by how he managed to load, unload, and actually fire the thing without help. I needed him to hold my hoof for a half hour until I got it.”

“You did well enough two weeks back, when those ants were trying to eat us,” she forced herself to say, and tried hard not to remember anything specific about that day. The ants (especially ones that burped fire), the terror, the half-starving ponies in the stable that Mom almost shot to pieces…

…the image of Mom peeing herself all over the floor when they’d finally gotten inside the stable, away from the bugs that that terrified her to such a humiliating degree…

“…I did, didn’t I,” Kite said dismissively as the T-shaped handle embedded inside the rifle’s carrying handle was pulled out until she heard a click! from inside the gun, at which point the handle slid freely in and out of the receiver as the magazine fell free from the weapon.

“You did.” Now she had everything set—empty magazines for the 9mm, speedloaders for the revolver to load up and practice using, at least fifty rounds per gun to shoot with…

…and Kite, slowly backed into a corner, figuratively speaking. She’d thought about it for weeks, continued to dwell on it now and then, but only now did she have the guts to try and see if she was right…

“…lucky me, eh?” Kite said, but a noticeable pause in her words, the hesitation in her voice…

She knows what’s coming...

“…yeah, lucky. Lotta that. Thinkin’ it’s more than luck, though—”

Mom nearly ruined it all by coming back a lot sooner than she’d expected, and apparently having heard enough to figure out what she was trying to do. “Honey, stop that,” Mom rebuked her sharply, her body seemingly appearing out of nowhere right before them. “She’s not a bad pony, she’s just…not comfortable talking about that part of her life. Don’t pry it out of her—”

Crap, gotta speed this along or I won’t get anything out of her… “I don’t wanna hear about all the bad things others did to her. But there’s some stuff that ain’t makin’ sense.”

“Like what?” Mom challenged back sharply, just as El-Tee had satisfied herself with her target practice preparations and dared to look u—

Her haunches quivered slightly, her face cringing at the sight of Mom’s face without her head wrapped up in bandages and gauze pads. Two large, ragged strips of bare flesh streaked down across her face from above the right eye and into her cheek, and a third, smaller scar now creased her forehead and curved around the edge of the eye itself. Probably one of Saurus’s claws that hadn’t gotten as deep or as good a hook on her face as the other two…

…and El-Tee couldn’t keep from thinking that she half-preferred seeing the bleeding wounds instead of these scars, when all that blood had covered her mom’s face and kept her from seeing how bad it really was…

She saw Mom’s face lighten up a little out of pity, probably seeing just how much it hurt to see her like that, and the slight pause of silence between them gave the filly enough time to re-organize her thoughts. “…it’s just…Kite knew where to find somebody to get those exploding collars off, all those weeks ago. His name, where he lived…that ain’t common knowledge or the Union would’ve taken him out a long time ago. She can shoot a little, and knew how to use that rifle a bit when you found it out in that field of ants two weeks ago. Didn’t need to ask you anything about it.”

Mom’s face began to grow conflicted as she started to look back and forth between her and Kite, and she already knew why. It could be really hard to judge somepony that had saved your life, or ask them questions that seemed to sound like you didn’t trust them…

“…ffffuuu…dammit, do we have to do this now?” Mom whined softly, her ears beginning to lay flat against her skull.

“Better here than back at that hotel where ponies might overhear it. Ain’t sayin’ we’re in trouble, just…Kite, c’mon, if there’s something we need to know about what ya did years back, tell us…”

Shifting the focus onto the scarred mare seemed to spread her mom’s dismay around, as now Kite’s ears were flattening out of despair, her body lumbering down into a prostrate position with her legs tucked in…

…and with a heavy, mournful sigh, she simply stopped resisting and spilled her guts out without any further prodding. “….hell with it. The Union didn’t always have solid control of this half of the prairie, and the slave trade wasn’t as…strong, as it is now. Back then, there weren’t any rules or such backing up the slaver guilds, they just took whoever they could grab on the highways. But the Union was getting some groundwork done on that, in their core territories…”

El-Tee heard what sounded like soft hoofsteps coming up from behind her, along with the curious strange noises of the pups as they sniffed out their surroundings. Something between a growl and a whine…

“I’d been over here a while, when the first Union caravans tried to cross the valley. BJ was only…a year old, I think. The war they touched off with the Runners threw this side of the prairie into near chaos. Only safe place was a town with a good set of guards and guns, and even then highway gangs and raiders would take their chances. The Union and the Runners would shoot them to pieces on sight out in the wastes, and caravans only traveled with heavy guards so they wouldn’t get hit. Slave trade was a mess. Runners even thought to try and starve the Union of slaves by building up an underground of sorts, places where slaves and runaways could be funneled along ‘till they crossed the valley.”

Sparks of information came together in her tiny head, drawing to a conclusion that her mother had already figured out before Kite could finish. “That’s how you knew about Fixer,” Mom murmured softly.

“…yeah. At the time I was with my second master Breaker, a general goods merchant in Syrup Mound. His basement was a “pit stop” of sorts for runaways, and Fixer worked for him fixing up any high tech junk he found in salvage or trade. He also knew enough about the collars to get them off. None of the guilds marked their slaves or kept any kind of records back then, so it was a lot easier to sneak off unnoticed once the collar was gone. A cloak, or some robes and pants, and a runaway could brave the rest of the road on their own after Syrup Mound if they wanted, or stick with the underground.”

Now that Kite was talking, Mom seemed to have no problem with poking her head for information, so she let her do all the questioning. “So how is it that anyone involved with this…underground railroad, is still alive after the war?”

“…most of them aren’t,” Kite answered sadly, dampening spirits and thoughts all around her with her words as BJ came to a stop beside her. “A month after the Unification War ended, the Union and the slaver guilds started hitting the pit stops, starting with Stifla, killing everyone they caught along with their families once they’d gotten all the information they could out of ‘em. When they wiped out the stop in a town called Laura, a bit northeast of Mound and Lome, we got word of it through a courier that had slipped through their perimeter. Laura’s stop led to Lome, and from Lome the route led to us in Syrup Mound, and then on to Trotpeka. From the sound of things, it looked like the Union and slavers were just following the main central route, piece by piece, because only a few souls outside the Runners actually knew the entire network, and Breaker was the last one left alive with that information. Rest of us only knew the stops before and after our own. We decided to break up what was left of the underground starting at Lome, and scattered out as far apart from each other as we could. BJ and I were sold to Bark Skin before Breaker packed up his shop and went south. Fixer stayed put, and Bark Skin never knew I was part of the underground. Union scoured Lome and Syrup Mound for weeks, but never found any further trace of the route, so they called off the search and focused on solidifying control over their half of the prairie. That’s about when they figured out they needed to keep track of all the slaves in the trade.”

…so that’s why the slavers get free reign to kill anybody they want, Light Tail half-cried silently. ‘Cause folk dared to stand up to ‘em and make things better…

“How were slaves moved from one place to the next? Caravan?”

“…yeah, actually. Most of the runaways that came to us did so disguised as guards for caravans, sometimes with Runners along for the ride on their way to their next target. Occasionally Breaker would organize a caravan of his own when he needed to make a run to Trotpeka, he’d take any slaves he had waiting in his basement and arm them up. I went along mostly as an extra gun, learned my way around a rifle and a few pistols, but never well enough to take on anything at a distance. Only reason I didn’t get across the valley myself was ‘cause Breaker was pretty well known in Syrup Mound, and folk knew I belonged to him. Best cover he could think of was to keep me so no one would suspect he was leading slaves out of Union territory. I mean, a slave owner secretly sneaking slaves off to freedom? Who’d believe that?”

“I would,” Mom answered immediately. “But I’m kind of distrusting like that.”

“…I noticed….” Was all that Kite was willing to say to her face.

“And I get why you didn’t say anything,” Mom went on, her voice oddly calming and…polite. Usually, when Kite said something she’d been holding back, Mom kinda got a bit angry…. “…beginning to wish you’d stayed quiet, but at least we know how things with the slavers got the way they are…and how Ada knew who you were talking about when we first asked around about Fixer. Do you know of anypony else in this underground that might have survived beyond Fixer and Breaker?”

“Just the five that ran the stop at Trotpeka…provided the wasteland hasn’t killed them in the last seven years. Always thought this one stallion in Lome was in on it, went by the name Blue Star. But the underground only went one way, never backward. Breaker was real particular about what I was allowed to know, so I never knew who ran the stop there.”

“…that’d make a bit of sense, actually,” Light Tail quipped after a moment’s thought. “When Mom and I first walked into Lome the day after we left the stable, we ran into him, and…he seemed kind of angry when he got to telling us ‘bout the slavers. The kind of anger that folk say comes with losin’ someone close to ya…”

Kite’s gaze finally dared to pull away from the pavement and take in the faces around her…..faces that, to her surprise, seemed to be pitying her rather than hating her for hiding things about herself.

So Mom took that as a cue to get off the topic before anybody got any more depressed. “So how well do you know that rifle?”

“….I can manage when I have to,” Kite answered softly, seemingly grateful to have the conversation back where it had started. “Don’t expect any miracles though.”

“What about pistols?”

Kite’s breath came in grunts and groans as she stood back up, shaking off what seemed like decades of dust and bits of asphalt off of her legs. “Only one I ever cared for was a .45 Auto a Runner leant to me for a caravan run, back in the war. Hated it at first with that safety in the grip, but once I got the hang of it I hit better with it than I did anything else, even a revolver. Runner said it didn’t seem to break down as much either.”

“It wouldn’t,” Mom said. “.45 doesn’t work at near the pressures a nine or a ten-mill does. Eighteen to twenty-thousand pee-es-eye, max. I’ll keep an eye out for ‘em. Wasn’t looking at .45 ammo these last few weeks so I have no idea how often it can be found. Load up those mags and speedloaders, we’ll just focus on sight alignment and trigger pull today. Last chance to change your mind, BJ.”

“…I’m fine,” the colt muttered, his voice distant and almost entirely removed from whatever it was that was bugging him on the inside as he turned tail and trotted away from them at an unusually brisk pace. For him, anyway.

Mom didn’t seem to catch on and simply began pulling her own guns out of their holsters, but all El-Tee needed was a quick look at Kite’s face to confirm what she suspected.

She’d never told him any of that before today. She looked almost....stung. Like his tone had hurt her.

Light Tail’s mind had been made up before she even knew she’d decided anything. She’d had her 9mm wrapped in a spell field, but quickly put it back down and took off after him. “…go ahead, I’ll be back in a minute. Wanna make sure he can keep the pups corralled on his own.”

“They don’t seem gun shy to me,” Mom’s voice countered in confusion.

“They were real strung up and hyper earlier, took the both of us to keep track of ‘em. I just wanna make sure they ain’t gonna take off on him.”

Mom thankfully chose not to bug her any further over it, and let her go, simply putting her attention back to her own concerns. “All right, Kite, I got sixty rounds of ball ammo I can spare. Load up three mags—”

She heard Kite say something back, but by then she’d stopped paying attention and stayed on BJ’s tail—literally, her eyes were focused on it as it disappeared around the edge of a house maybe sixty yards away from where the shooting was going to be. She picked up her pace and zipped into the alley roughly five seconds later—

BJ’s body had just plopped into the ground, his magic absently pulling the pups back to him from the far end of the alley, and while his body seemed listless and tired, the hard, stoic glint in his eyes gave away the turmoil he was likely feeling right then.

“…Beige, you know why your mom never told you any of that,” she said after giving it a moment’s thought. No point in dancing around the subject. No “hey, you okay”, or anything like that. It was pretty obvious to her that he was anything but okay.

“Beginning to wonder about that,” he spat darkly to the wall of the house in front of him. “She trusts you guys more than she does me…”

“You heard her, they killed everybody they caught who was involved in it, even killed thei…even their families,” she choked back. “That’ve meant you if they’d found out she was in it. She didn’t want that.”

“There’s days when I think she don’t want me,” he croaked, his anger turning his voice into a deep, hollow roar. “Half the time she looks at me, she gets this look in her, like I remind her of something she don’t wanna remember. And sometimes she just…bites my damn head off at the slightest thing and I don’t know why.”

Light Tail felt her resolve and determination fading by the second. She’d gotten the same vibe off of Kite at times, as though she wasn’t entirely sure what to do with BJ sometimes. But hearing him say it himself, knowing it himself….what was she supposed to say to that?

“…m-maybe she’s just…stressed,” she spoke meekly, her legs tensing up in preparation for a quick walk back to where she’d come from, just in case he did blow up at her. “Life out here…it’s hard. I won’t pretend to know anything about it, but…by the moon, just the few things I’ve seen have been giving me nightmares and this stupid wasteland almost killed my mom….I can’t begin to imagine having to grow up and live in this place. That’s got to wear on a pony’s soul.”

“Seems to have weathered it well enough to have me,” he bit back bitterly. With Max and Mona now firmly under his control (much to their disappointment), he could finally start to put a bit more focus on his conversation rather than his magic. “Won’t even say a damn word ‘bout who my dad is. Wonder if she even cares.”

Oh, come on, now what am I gonna say?! I don’t even know how moms and dads have foals!

“…y’know, I kinda wonder the same thing,” she murmured softly. “It’s…it’s not something we’ve ever talked about. I wanna, but…but when I get enough guts to ask, I get this ugly feeling in my stomach that tells me I’d better not. If my dad was somepony special to my mom, I’d think I’d have heard something about him by now. But then sometimes I think he was, and that she doesn’t talk about it ‘cause it hurts. And she’s never once told me anything about how the whole parents and foals thing works…”

BJ didn’t look away from the wall, but a hard, exhausted sigh left his lungs that betrayed his waning patience with that particular subject. And maybe she had been bugging him about it a bit much these last two weeks. “…gods, look, your mom ain’t told you for a reason, and I ain’t about to do it for her,” he said. “Yeah, I know how it all works, and no, I ain’t gonna tell you. Your mom ought to. Not my fault she’s scared to.”

“…wh…what makes you think she’s scared to explain it?”

“’Cause my mom was when she told me. I’ll tell you this much for free, though….don’t wander off alone and out of our sight. Stay close.”

El-Tee felt a tinge of frustration flare to life within her. “I ain’t stupid, Beige, these last two months have shown me everything I need to know to stay close to you guys—”

“You ain’t seen shit,” he snapped back harshly, finally turning to look at her with an angry glare. “Worst you’ve seen is your mom bleeding out from gettin’ shot, and yeah, that’s pretty bad. But to be honest with you, that’s probably one of the better ways to die out here. You don’t wanna even know a third of the things Saurus did to girls when he felt like it. Things he did to my mom…things he’d do to you…and he ain’t the only guy out there who’d do it. There’s a lot of bad people out there who wouldn’t think twice to hurt you, in ways you shouldn’t be hurt, just ‘cause they’d get a kick out of it. So when I tell you not to go looking around on your own, I mean it. Wouldn’t take but two minutes and they’d…..they’d make you wish you were dead. Don’t trust anypony you see, ever. Stay close.”

It felt like Mom talking down to her, laying down the law of the living quarters. It shocked her how fast he seemed to change on her—harder, meaner, angrier…but it seemed as though some of that anger was coming from something else. Maybe from some of the things he was talking about, that he’d seen…and also maybe because she’d been bugging him about these kinds of things for too long…

And it hurt, hearing him talk to her like that. Like she was some little baby stepping out of line and needed to be corralled, like Max and Mona.

Maybe she was.

The weight was off.

Sure, the extra three shells that the extension gave her were welcome, and she wasn’t about to pull it off. Three rounds could have made a big difference in that scrapyard two weeks ago, and she wasn’t about to be caught with an empty gun again if she could help it. But the weight of the extension, plus the added ammunition, made the shotgun more forward heavy than it’d been when it just had the standard magazine tube. Not that much heavier, but enough to make a difference. She could feel it in the feedback loop of her telekinesis as she hefted the weapon about to test the weight balance, how it swung from one target to another, how much more mana she needed to put into her spell to keep it steady. The barrel clamp that slid over the barrel and tube extension now seemed less superfluous than it’d looked when she’d bought it. Part of her was afraid the added weight would cause the extension to slightly bend out of place over time—with the clamp in place, it was firmly secured in perfect alignment with the barrel and wasn’t going anywhere, ever.

The trade-off, in her opinion, was worth it. She could work with the added weight, eventually get to where she could get it on target just as quick as before, and it wasn’t as though the gun was any longer now than it was before.

The 5.56mm revolver, on the other hand…she had no idea what to make of it. She’d never fired one, never worked on one ‘till she found the spare pistol on that dead sergeant, and it’d taken about three days of reading up on the repair manual before she’d been able to replace the damaged cylinder on the one she’d found in the stable. Five shot motorized cylinder, with a fresh spark battery to power it…she could easily see the cylinder being bored out for eight rounds, considering the size of the cartridges themselves, but the five-shot cylinder made sense considering the pressure levels a rifle round put out. More metal to contain the pressures, without overstressing the chamber walls. She couldn’t see this cylinder wearing out, provided it didn’t get hit hard enough to crack it.

She just hoped the five-inch barrel didn’t rob the bullet of its velocity. The round was meant for a much longer barrel and rifling length. Then again, the designers had to have thought of that when they built the things in the first place. And she had felt a tinge of magic enchantments in the gun whenever she handled it…

The clink and jingle of loose rounds brought her attention back to the world around her, and she briefly turned her gaze off of the 5.56mm pistol to see who was playing around with their ammo—

—she spotted El-Tee sullenly gathering a small collection of .38 Special rounds from a box she’d laid out beside her pistols, soullessly floating them into her five speedloaders in a manner that resembled an automated manufacturing line—the rounds were held in a straight line and simply fed into the loaders as they were rotated around to present empty holes to the first cartridge in line. Once filled, they were locked in place and the loader set down on the ground. It took her maybe twelve seconds to load all five loaders.

A month ago, it would’ve taken her a minute…

With Kite having gone off out of sight for a moment to answer the call of nature, she had just enough time to find out for sure if BJ had said something to kill her good spirits. She knew the filly hadn’t gone off just to make sure he could handle two rambunctious puppies….and Kite probably did too, but she hadn’t wanted to say anything about it out loud.

“…he didn’t take all that too well, did he?”

El-Tee didn’t even look up at her. She just set the loaders down on the ground and started streaming rounds into the two 9mm pistol magazines she’d emptied earlier. “…not really, no. Can’t really blame him.”

“Let Kite and BJ sort that out. Don’t get in the way.”

El-Tee stopped loading momentarily when she’d topped off the first magazine, a disappointed sigh escaping her lips. “I…I know that’s probably a better idea, but I still wanna help. BJ has a hard time trusting anybody. It took you gettin’ shot up and sliced and my freaking out over it to open him up, and he don’t get why his mom gets angry at him at times. There’s something else she ain’t told him that’s eatin’ at her, and it has to do with him…”

Sling felt a tight knot begin to form in her stomach. If El-Tee had already figured that much out, how much longer before she inadvertently stumbled onto the truth? “…I’ll see what I can do. I ain’t promising anything, that’s something that seriously freaks her out if it’s mentioned. The one time I asked, it seemed to trigger some really bad memories that got her shaking and trembling like she was reliving it. Don’t push it, just let her be. I’ll deal with it.”

Light Tail’s mouth sputtered in disappointment, but she kept her dispositions to herself and simply resumed loading the other magazine, just as a light green triangle began to morph into being at the edge of her vision. Sling followed the EFS mark towards the approaching life form—

—Kite’s body sauntered back into the street from the darkened shadows of an alley between two half-demolished houses, her eyes settling on the service rifle she’d left lying on the ground unloaded. “...not so sure I’m up for this now…”

“We’re doing it anyway,” Sling shot back gently, turning back towards the fence at the end of the street, roughly twenty yards away. “If anything, blowing the crap out of ancient milk bottles will be rather cathartic. Take up a weapon and load up.”

To her left, she heard the familiar slap of a magazine finding its way home inside its pistol, followed by the sharp clack! of a slide snapping forward a half second later. Kite was far less enthused about it, but managed to have the service rifle up and loaded in about six seconds.

Firstly, demonstrate…

“Sight alignment is easy when there’s no one shooting at you,” she began, taking hold of her 5.56mm pistol and pressing down on the cylinder release—and holding it in place as the motorized cylinder swung free from the frame, to keep the ejectors from pushing the five loaded rounds out automatically, a feature she’d figured out the hard way. “When you’re panicked and terrified it gets a lot harder, you’re lucky if all you get is a group size larger than from when you’re practicing. You want to focus on the front sight, and not necessarily on the front and rear together. You should still see enough of the rear sight to get it aligned with the front sight. It’s normal for the rear sight and your target to be on the blurry side, but keep your focus on the front sight.”

“Says the mare with the eagle-like eyesight,” Kite muttered bitterly. “I swear that solution OD gave us actually improved your vision…”

“Quiet you,” she shot back, though she was not nearly as irritated with the comment as she pretended to be. All she had left over from that gunfight was a set of scars on her face and left side—and a slightly different outlook on life. “Where you settle the sights on the target matters too, and this is where it gets tricky. Depending on the model of the gun, you either set the sights directly over the target, or just under it at what’s called a 6 o’clock hold. For the handguns that we have, centering the sights on the target seems to get the best results—”

She followed her instruction with a quick check of the front sight blade on the 5.56mm revolver, and was satisfied to see a slightly blurred image of the rear sight that crept up under the front sight blade in her vision. “Everybody’s eyes are different, too. Some folk can’t focus on the front sight with both eyes open, they blur together, or they get double vision trying to focus on the front sight. For those types of problems, just sight in with your dominant eye, close the other one—”

Even as she spoke, she followed suit, putting her focus on the front sight with both eyes open…and was inwardly elated to see no change in her vision, as usual. Front sight was clear, rear sight stayed slightly blurry but didn’t split into two distinct ghostly images, and she could still see a clear target—a weathered, sunbaked milk bottle stuck onto the remains of a mailbox pole—

“Never had that problem,” Kite mumbled, and out of the corner of her left eye Sling could see her aiming down the street at the various targets scattered about on the fence in front of them. “…good to know for when my eyes start getting older, though.”

“El-Tee’s eyes are actually better than mine, too,” Sling added. “Almost 20/10, like I had before that accident I had in the infirmary three years back. Probably how she spotted that yao guai so quick the first day we were out of the stable.”

“I still think it was really mad from its bad mange,” Light Tail said, also playing around with the sights on her 9mm pistol. “And I also think we’re getting sidetracked. We can talk and play later.”

The child admonishes the adult…now I know she’s growing up too fast…

With a slightly heavier heart Sling unleashed her ingrained hearing protection spell over their ears—she’d been teaching it to the others the last two weeks, but for this particular practice session she wanted their focus on their shooting, rather than the new magic spell they’d been trying to get the hang of. “…right, anyways, once you get the sights aligned and on your target, then comes the shot. Squeeze the trigger straight back, don’t jerk it—”

And with those words, she deftly swung the front sight over the center of the milk bottle, smoothly rolled the trigger back in a near-unconscious squeeze of her spell field—

—the report, even with the hearing protection, was sharper than she’d thought it would be, though the rather large, star-like muzzle flash that accompanied the gunshot was just about what she expected to get out of a such a short barrel for a 5.56mm round. Velocity, however, seemed to still be in “rifle” range, as the muzzle flash had barely appeared before she heard the milk bottle shatter into hundreds of pieces and fly in just about every direction imaginable. Recoil wasn’t that bad, probably a little less than a 9mm given that the pistol weighed about five pounds. As a quick test of its shooting speed, she went ahead and sighted in on a rather large fragment of the milk bottle that had begun to sail upward, tracking its path upward for a half second while she zeroed in on it—

—a second squeeze turned this flying piece of debris into dozens of even smaller shards, with the same trigger pull pressure as the first shot, just like she’d have expected on a semi-automatic. Two shots, just under a second…

…okay, yes, she already loved this gun. Cylinder rotated by the motor automatically after every shot, internal hammer cocked at the same time as the cylinder rotation, rounds ejected automatically upon opening the cylinder so she could get the fresh rounds in a little faster, accurate at the ranges she intended to be shooting it, and velocity was still high…yes, she could work around the five-shot cylinder in a pinch with some practice…

“Show-off,” Kite spat with slight disgust.

“I don’t think I could do that in an actual gunfight,” she shot back darkly, unlatching the cylinder and catching the rounds as they were cleared from their chambers—even the three unfired rounds. One drawback to the automatic ejection, she supposed. “Once your target starts moving and shooting back at you, the stress and adrenaline hits you like a train, which is why mastering the basics is so important. And they take time to get right. Every day you keep at it, you get better. So start popping bottles.”

It was probably just as well that they only got sixty rounds of ammo to practice with. Barely a second after Elly’s last shot, the skies had darkened considerably to the point that it was almost mistaken for nightfall, and the constant, randomly located flashes of white light and streaks of lightning crackling through the clouds compelled them to seek shelter back indoors before the rain hit.

Still, Sling was right about one thing—watching those bottles explode into hundreds of pieces every time she hit it was kinda fun. Even….what was that word she used? Cathartic? She imagined a couple of bottles to be the faces of former, more abusive masters, and though the elation was only brief when they shattered, it was definitely uplifting. Took her mind off things, and made her want to focus on shooting better so she could do it again. All told, she got about twenty hits. A one out of three hit ratio. Sling said that was pretty good, but coming from a mare that had shot a bottle, and then popped one of the flying shards barely a half second later just for fun, with a gun she’d never fired before, that sounded more like the kind of half-hearted praise that a disappointed teacher would give their student for at least trying to learn the lesson.

Sling, apparently, didn’t believe that.

“I’m serious, you didn’t do that bad,” she said over her withers, though most of her attention was focused on the pile of firearms on the coffee table at the edge of their hotel room. “One out of three is a lot better than one out of five or six.”

“On targets that didn’t move,” Kite bit back, lying listlessly on the bed in the center of the room. The kids were, thankfully, preoccupied with giving the pups a bath in the adjoining bathroom, giving them a little semblance of personal space. “You’re right, though, I’d never hit anything in a real fight.”

“....I didn’t, either,” Sling sighed in dismay. “Out of all that shooting in that scrapyard, I only actually killed one of Saurus’s mercs with gunfire. I killed the other one with that knife I found in the stable. The ants were easy, they had no sense of self-preservation. They literally walked up into our sights. But a pony or griffon? Whole different story. If you can get the drop on your target you’ve got them, but once they know you’re there and they can get to cover, it comes down to who can get the hits that count first. There are a lot of things about that fight I should’ve done differently, now that I look at it harder….but it’s given me an idea, too.”

Kite bolted upright almost instantly. She’d thought the stable pony had only said those things to get her and her boy to moving along with them as they snuck out of Maize. She didn’t think she’d actually be stupid enough to try it. “….you’re kidding.”

“Dead serious,” Sling half-snarled, her magic re-assembling the 9mm into a working firearm once more. Once she’d played with the slide and trigger enough to be satisfied that it was working, she set it aside and pulled up Elly’s small revolver from the pile. “Been thinking about it for days, cooped up in here like a pet. I can’t take him on in a stand-out fight, he’s far more experienced and trained. I’m not even sure this plan is going to work, but it’ll make the odds better.”

“You don’t have to do anything,” she blurted suddenly, trotting from the bed to the coffee table in about three seconds. “He doesn’t even know we’re here, we can sneak off again, find a way across the valley—”

“That’s the only way this is going to have a chance at working. If he finds out where we are he can set up another ambush or just come right after us. I have one shot at doing this. And he will find us if we get back on the road long enough. You know how he works better than I do, you know that much.”

“Whatever you’re planning is suicide, just drop it,” she hissed sharply into the stupid stable pony’s ears. “We’ve got a straight shot to the valley from here, a week’s travel at best and we’ll be there—”

“Through a canyon infested with mutant cannibals? Hell no, I’d rather take my chances going through Trotpeka. It’ll be easier with Saurus dead.”

“Drop. It. Please,” she insisted again, far more strongly, and maybe with more tears than she’d intended to show as she planted a forehoof on the revolver, pinning it to the table to ensure she had Sling’s full attention. “Those damned Runners can’t even find him and they’ve been looking for him for months. And even when they did find him, they did nothing but watch him rut me every other night hoping he’d lead them to more slavers. I don’t know what those bastards promised you when I wasn’t looking but it’s not worth it.”

Oddly enough, Sling did not respond with a huff or an angry voice, or even forcefully push her off of the gun as she’d expected. She just looked at her with this strange gaze of…pity? Empathy?

“…..she’ll kill me for telling you this,” Sling muttered at last, releasing her hold on the revolver and simply picking another gun from the pile to clean. “….but Ada’s hunting him for personal reasons. They’re siblings.”

Kite’s brain, sharp as it was, began to fuddle and misfire as it tried to process how two wildly different griffons could possibly be related in any way. “….y-you mean….like….blood-related?”

“He was a Runner himself,” Sling answered calmly. “Which is how he knows how they operate, and how he’s able to avoid those two so well. He…didn’t take the Runner’s stalemate agreement with the Union all that well. Or at least that’s what Ada says. Before long he was drowning his rage in every female he could pin to the ground. When their father finally had his fill of it, he took her with him to deal with him, one way or another. It didn’t turn out well for either of them….he had back-up, and they were too shocked with what they saw to fight better than they did. He killed his own father….and…”

Sling’s mouth paused a moment, as if stumbling over how to press on with her grisly tale…

“….and, after that, he vanished. For a while. He showed up a few years later, made a mess of things on their side of the prairie, and she asked to be the one to track him and kill him. But I imagine she’s finding it harder to actually do it once she finds him, despite what he did. Family is still family, I guess….even the crazy, rape-inclined members of one’s flock.”

Now it was Kite’s turn to stumble over her words. If Sling was making all of this up on the spot, it was a hell of a tale. But something in her gut told her otherwise—that Sling was holding something back. Saurus supposedly killed his own father in a gunfight and….and then what? Just left? Saurus wasn’t one to run off from a fight he won unless he was alone and wounded…

“…..you’re not telling me everything.”

“I’ve told you enough. Leave it at that, trust me.”

Oh, buck you, you start showing signs that you actually trust me and you still hold out on me?! I already know what that sick bastard is capable of, he did it to me often enough I can tak—

Her thoughts screeched to a halt, a sudden dawning beginning to rise to conscious thought as she recalled the weeks of carnal abuse she’d suffered at his talons…

…and…

…her tail began to shake at the implications.

“…o-oh my gods…he…h-his own sister…”

Sling’s breath came out in a heavy sigh, and set her 10mm pistol down onto the table with its slide locked open. “…I told you to leave it…”

But Kite’s body couldn’t stop shaking now. Not now. As much as she wanted to hate those Runners for failing to do anything to stop him…if it was true…and….and she just watched, instead of acting…

“….oh, Luna, how could she watch all that…”

“She watched because she wanted to find out exactly how many others he was selling those poor souls to, and how big an operation he ran, probably to track down the unguilded slavers and kill them. And it must have killed her inside to watch from a distance, knowing what you were suffering, and having to put that aside for the sake of trying to save as many other enslaved souls as she could get to, not just you and the few he kept in tow. I think, if she could have popped him right there and still accomplished that goal later on, she would’ve done it the moment she found him.”

“….a-and you still want to find this sick bastard?!” Kite hissed back.

“No,” Sling answered coolly. “I want him to find me. ”

Her eyes widened, nearly encompassing her entire face (at least, she thought so). “….w-what?”

“I want him to find me. And I want him to walk right into what I’ve got planned for him. BJ was telling me a few stories about the war the other day, including one where the Runners rigged an abandoned town with so many improvised munitions that they wiped out nearly sixty Union troops with just the traps alone. Grenades, shotguns, pipe rifles, spike pits…if we can find something similar, find enough junk parts to make some one-shot pipe guns….we can do the same thing. If not kill him, at least give me a good shot at an even fight so I can take him out. It’s the only chance we have save for finding Ada and Leon and teaming up with them, and I have no idea where or how to find those two.”

“….a-are you insane? Listen to yourself—”

“How far do you think we’ll get with him out there?” Sling shot back, throwing a hard, angry glare back at her. “To the next town? Trotpeka? Across the valley itself? He will find us, you know that. Right now, he doesn’t know where we are, and we have this once chance to take advantage of it. I do not want to try this later once he’s picked up our trail. I want him thinking he’s tracked me down without me knowing about it. If he thinks for even a minute that I’m anticipating him he’ll vanish and the next time we see him is when he’s filling me with holes and taking you and El-Tee as playthings. Don’t fight me on this, please, I want to know that he will never lay a claw on any of us again…”

O-o-oh gods, she’s playing that card…I…I can’t let her do this, I can’t—

Her heart stopped cold, her own ears and eyes beginning to play tricks on her as she tried to think of some way to dissuade this crazy mare from her path to oblivion. She couldn’t allow this.

Can’t let her do this, not again—

“—IIIIIITE!!! HELP MEEEEEE—”

A flick of her tail chased the terrified screams away, but the memory still lingered. Luna help me I don’t wanna hear her scream like that again, I don’t wanna see her breaking, c’mon you stupid bitch think of something—

—a buried, long-dormant urge spurred her forward, encompassing the mare’s neck in a tight hold as she lashed out with a deep kiss—

—a blink of her eyes, and she was back in the room, still sitting next to Sling and her begging eyes…and awfully close to her, close enough that she could reach out with her forelimbs, draw the stable pony closer for that kiss…

…and at the last second, lowered her forelegs onto the ground, pressing them down into the floorboards to suppress the urges and desires that the other mare did not share.

“…don’t, please,” she croaked, the words barely escaping her lips in a whisper. “He nearly killed you. You said it yourself, he’s far more experienced and trained. Who’s to say he won’t see your traps, you’ve never built these things before, all you have is that book to show you how and you got lucky with those fire bottles. And you want to try building junk guns out of scrap now? What we find in the wastes is in pretty sorry shape to start with and these are the properly built guns, these…these “pipe guns”? You want to make them out of nails, screws, and water pipes lying in the open for centuries? If he doesn’t kill you for this stupid stunt, your own traps will. Drop it. Flee. Don’t…don’t do this…”

Surprisingly, Sling didn’t have anything to say right off, though she seemed to take great notice of how her front legs were seemingly struggling to stay put. “...why are you fighting me so hard on this? I’d have thought killing him would be a dream come true for you.”

“I don’t care anymore,” she blubbered (blubbered, with actual tears). “I just want as far away from this place as I can get. I don’t want to hear Elly screaming and crying ‘cause you got yourself killed going after that bastard, I don’t want your blood all over me, I…”

…o-oh shit, I didn’t mean to say that out loud…

Having put herself in an exceptionally awkward corner, she had suddenly found it next to impossible to speak any further, no matter how hard she tried to. Even Sling seemed stunned by what she’d just cried out, perhaps sensing the unspoken, subtle meaning behind those words.

Unspoken meanings that she’d never meant to let get out.

With a choked gasp she turned away, retreating back to the bed and burying herself into its patched, fraying blankets in a vain attempt to hide from the world.

She felt like a complete and utterly insensitive ass. She’d not once thought of how that ordeal might’ve affected Kite, only that it had happened and that she would’ve died without her help. Light Tail’s scars were easily seen and tended to, but…

…but until last night, Kite had done a stellar job of hiding hers. If not for that buried infatuation she still harbored, she probably could have done it for months on end.

Or had she grown to see her and Light Tail as something more than just mere traveling companions? Dare she say it…friends?

Something she’d been sorely lacking in since El-Tee’s birth?

Breakfast offered no answers or solace from these thoughts. Nor did the preparing of their weapons and traveling equipment for the next leg of their journey west. Wrestling control of their kids and two rapidly growing husky pups disrupted her inner musings for about as long as it took to get El-Tee and BJ to stop playing with each other’s heads and get their stuff together. They were starting to get worse and worse since that caravan ride, now they seemed to playfully bicker and argue almost daily, seeing how long they could keep it going. The other day it seemed as if they’d never shut up…

It was only now, briefly, that Sling could bring her thoughts together and try to mend things with her…

…no, not a guide. They had learned too much about each other, gone through too much, to still just be two mares with a mutual goal of escape. She was still hesitant to call Kite a friend…but she was now clearly much more than just an organic guidebook to this wasteland. So “friend” would have to do.

And because she wanted to try and do this right, she changed her mind and allowed the moment of clarity to pass in silence. There were far more important things to put her mental energy into today than trying to figure out what to say to an extensively abused ex-slave without sounding like the insensitive ass she perceived herself to be…

“Which way we goin’, Mom?” El-Tee’s voice prodded gently into her thoughts, just as she’d finished strapping her traveling saddle on.

“…highway heading west will get us back on track,” Kite’s subdued tone mumbled from the corner of the hotel room, still fiddling with her own saddlebags. “…exit forty-nine will take us south, three hours out…”

El-Tee, ever the perceptive little bugger that she was, took note of Kite’s somber and unenthusiastic mood almost immediately. “…Kite, you okay?”

“Let’s just…go, okay?”

Ahhh, shit…

“…Beige, you were right,” El-Tee announced somewhat casually. “Our moms were fighting while the pups were drowning us in the bath tub last night.”

“Dammit,” the colt blurted angrily almost immediately. “Seriously, yesterday wasn’t enough? We gotta do it again now?”

This was not how she’d expected the stroll into the wastes to go. The children were ganging up on the adults, and they’d heard more of their discussion last night than either of them were comfortable with. “Let’s not—”

But Sling’s words went unheeded, as her daughter merely picked up where BJ left off. “I mean really, you two are worse than us, and we’re just playing half the time. You gotta admit it, Mom, your plan depends too much on things goin’ accordin’ to plan…or something.”

“And how much of my ‘plan’ did you catch eavesdropping on us?” she challenged back, in vain.

“Enough to know you need more than an afternoon to pull it off. Saurus has lived out here his entire life. He’s seen more and done more than you have, his guns are a lot bigger, and he knows how to use ‘em. He was shootin’ through my freakin’ cover two weeks ago, how do you fight somethin’ like that?!”

Sling’s ears and eyes briefly flashed back to that afternoon, to that hollowed-out sky wagon and the harsh clang of high-velocity rifle rounds shearing through the aged metal…

“Plus there’s the fact that he’s like, y’know, super crafty and shit,” BJ added, as nonchalantly as ever, though it was quite surreal to hear him saying anything in support of El-Tee at all. “In the few weeks that Mom and I were in his clutches we never, ever saw him just walk into a place without scoping it out real close first. He could spot two-thirds of the traps I told you about the other day, because he knows how to set them up himself. If you’re really serious about killing him, you’re gonna have to do it head-on. Try to outthink him and you’ll end up dead. Trust me on that one….you’re not the first to think to come after him like that, and it didn’t work out for those guys. Won’t work out for you either. You’d have to know him like family to get the drop on him, and I bet they’re all dead. Let’s just run.”

“Yes, run,” Light Tail agreed, with an almost playful flair, even going so far as to point a forehoof out in front of her. “To the west!”

“You’re pointing to the south.”

“You know what I meant! Anyways, look, if Saurus really wants to go to all the trouble to track you down no matter where you go, at least out west he can’t get as many hired guns. And those Runners probably want him dead badly enough that they’ll help us out. We’re on our own out here, but if we can get over the valley, we can get help. And get Kite and BJ away from these stupid Union jerks.”

Sling’s mouth had barely opened to protest when the plain obliviousness of her child’s words smacked her senses awake as if she’d been blind half her life. She was so worked up, so pissed off at the idea of Saurus doing anything foul to her only child, that she’d squirreled it away and used it as a silent fuel for every half-decent plan she could throw together within the next week to kill the bastard. Using herself as bait, setting up a town full of death traps, even outright hunting him down like a bounty…and here said child was, using far more common sense than any child had any right to have, telling her own mother she was better off just swallowing that pride and anger and getting help. It was dangerous to be on the road for long, yes…but in hindsight now, all of her own plans required some degree of travel and risk themselves. Saurus would eventually find them, either way…

…and Light Tail was right. She’d rather he find her in a place where she could get help and not worry about the Union getting in the way. Hell, going west into Runner territory might even make him back off rather than risk tangling with his former merc band…

“…she’s quiet,” BJ spat with a blunt edge. “Starting to look like she’s been slapped in the face. I think you got through to her. Again.”

“Nah, wait a tic, she’ll swoop me up in some big hug, then we’ll know it worked—”

“It worked,” Sling blurted softly, a small sigh escaping in the process. “…you had me at “get Kite and BJ away from these stupid Union jerks’.”

Light Tail’s face began to scrunch up in confusion, as if she’d expected a much more dramatic conclusion to the whole mess. “…re…really? …just like that?”

“Just like that,” she confirmed, with as little flair and drama as possible. El-Tee was right, to a point, she could get overly emotional at times. Even so, she couldn’t help but raise a forehoof, pointing towards the west (at least according to her EFS compass overlay)… “…to the west. That way.”

El-Tee’s face began to break into a mad, gleeful grin as her body perked up, and she began to hop and canter out of the hotel room and into the hallway. “Hey Beige, last one down forfeits the granola bar at lunch today!”

BJ’s growing fondness for the various-flavored oat/grain/nut bars that served as treats in their Stable-made rations caused the colt to forget to be angry at being called that pet name she’d come up with on a whim, and he hurriedly chased after the filly and her rambunctious husky pups in a mad fit to catch up. “Like hell I’m giving that up, get back here—”

The kids and pups quickly vanished beyond the door, their hooves and paws thumping through the wooden floor and creaking, paint-stripped walls, leaving Sling alone with what appeared to a visibly-shaken and shocked m—

…o-oh, shit, she managed not to say aloud the moment she took a closer look at Kite’s body language. She seemed to be on the verge of crying, or….or something, but the way she kept trying to squeeze her forehooves into the floor, like she was forcing herself to stay put and not do whatever it was she wanted to do right then…

Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit have I just gotten onto her permanent good side—

“…K-Kite…look, you were right,” she breathed uneasily, her body taking a short step backward. “…you made me promise to take you home in exchange for your help getting over the valley…I should’ve been trying to do that the moment I agreed to it.”

Surprisingly, Kite managed to keep a level voice when she answered. “…yes, you should have…but at least your detours got us
enough weapons to do it with…just…no more sidetracking. No more stupid plans to try and outsmart a griffon that knows better than you do how those plans work. Let’s just…get away from here. Make those stupid Runners clean up their own mess. They’re good enough at fixing everyone else’s troubles, they can handle their own.”

Sling saw an opportunity to get away from this increasingly uncomfortable situation on a good note, and decided to simply do just that instead of screwing it up. “…soo…still the same route, then? West for a bit, then south?”

“Y-yeah. Should be an old granary between here and that southern highway if we need emergency shelter, we’ll just…ignore the old farm town at the junction…”

…right…the town I was looking for to turn into a death trap…

“Yeah. Ignore it. We can hoof it all the way to the next town, if we have to. That’d be…what, thirty-two miles?”

“More or less. The…the actual distance, if you drew a straight line from here to there, would be more like twenty, but we’d have to cross the wastes, and I don’t know what all’s in that particular part of the world to our southwest. There’s an old dry lake bed just north of the highway we’re taking, might have an ant nest or three. Once we hit the junction we’ll be out of their foraging range….”

S-shit, bugs, she shivered, her hindquarters already quivering slightly at the thought of having to face mutant ants again. But at least this time, it would be in the open, and they wouldn’t be heading into a cramped tunnel at her insistence…

“…I’ll keep the PipBuck on,” she assured her with a slight nervous tinge. “…w-we should get going. Long day ahead of us.”

Kite’s pained words came out in a long, desperate gasp. “…no shit…y-you go on down, I need a minute…”

Her initial instinct was to do exactly the opposite, but something in Kite’s voice re-wired that response into a more cautious approach, and she found herself wordlessly trotting out the door before she could think to do otherwise. Kite wanted some space, for some reason…and it suddenly felt very wise to give her that space.

Even wiser to make sure the kids weren’t wandering off from being left on their own for more than ten seconds.

Thankfully, they promised to be at least a little controllable today—they’d parked themselves on the sidewalk, passing the time with more of their mind games, and barely even registered her presence at first.

“—ith my not-so-little eyes, something that starts with ‘R’,” Light Tail’s voice droned almost soullessly, to which BJ immediately responded in kind.

“Road.”

“Strike one, try again slugger.”

“Rubble.”

“Oh for two. One last swing, make it a good one.”

“Ruined house.”

“And you. Are. Out! It was ‘Reed Avenue’ on that little sign post by the corner, right over there.”

“Damn, I can’t even read that from here. What kind of spell did you use to see that?”

“It’s called superior eyesight,” Sling butted in, now that she was certain they wouldn’t so much as even acknowledge her presence until she made it known. “She gets that from me.”

She found herself surprised by the kids for the second time in less than five minutes. “Thought you’d be up there longer,” BJ muttered over his shoulders, not even bothering to look behind him, though she couldn’t overlook the subtle insinuation in his voice. “…my mom okay?”

“She’ll be down in a minute, then we’ll get going,” she answered swiftly, just as Max’s cold nose began sniffing at her left foreleg, and she gently shooed the pup away from her with a soft nudge. “She also mentioned the potential for ant nests along the first half of the day’s journey, so we won’t be stopping until we hit the highway junction southward. Go easy on the water.”

“Might get lucky and find a working soda machine somewhere along the road,” the colt suggested dryly. “Better than nothing.”

“Ech, no,” Light Tail spat with disgust, which surprised her since she seemed to like her first taste of the stuff weeks ago. “Stuff goes through me in like, an hour. Got better things to do than constantly trying to find someplace to go in peace.”

“New rule, no soda for the baby, got it.”

“And don’t let Max or Mona have a sip either, they’re hyper enough without all that sugar.”

“Think they’re getting that from you.”

“At least they’re getting something useful. Who’d wanna be a boring, dead-faced blank flank?”

“This boring, dead-faced blank flank will be all the rage with the ladies when he grows up.”

“Oh, they’ll be raging all right—”

“By the Sisters’ eternal souls, stop that,” Kite’s irritated voice growled suddenly from behind, her voice almost overpowering the sounds of her hooves as they passed onto the concrete sidewalk through the doorway. “I could hear you two halfway down the stairs.”

Kite’s warning did not seem to have the effect that she’d intended—the kids merely stopped bantering back and forth long enough to stare at each other for a few moments, as if silently conferring with each other how best to respond to that particular comment.

And Sling decided to let them. It wasn’t as though they’d get to have any fun all that often, now that they were more or less back to traveling along the slaver and raider-infested wastes…

“…if she can hear us with all those walls and junk between us and her, how does she not know we’re eavesdropping on her?” BJ asked aloud after a few moments.

“Attention span, maybe?” El-Tee pondered in return. “They really weren’t paying any attention to what was going on around ‘em, they just argued with each other about what to do about Saurus. They didn’t even seem to wanna know why Max and Mona were constantly whining and crying about their bath—”

Sling’s mind allowed itself a small, momentary thought of darkness, of how easily somepony could sneak by her to harm either of the children when her attention was focused on something else entirely, and decided that she’d allowed them to play with everyone’s heads long enough. “I promise you that will not happen twice,” she bellowed into their world, jolting them both back to the reality of having to deal with their mothers once more. “From now on neither of you will be left alone for very long, dogs or not.”

The kids’ response almost made her laugh, despite how serious she’d meant to be right then. Both foals began glancing back and forth between each other and their moms, their forelegs pointing at them, or at their moms, or both at once, as they tried to wordlessly work out what to do about that particular commandment—

…and then, after roughly three seconds, they just promptly gave up with a large, exaggerated sigh (at the same time, even), and sullenly turned to face the streets in front of them.

They’re not done, a cautious voice warned in the back of her head. They will hound you for another quarter-hour, at the least, and you cannot stop it.

“…just…put that endless energy into keeping an eye out on the highway,” Kite whined quietly as she trotted past them, apparently intent on taking the lead for the moment. “We got a long walk today…”

The voice in her head continued to whisper warnings of seemingly endless hours filled with the sound of playfully bickering children, yipping puppies, and the hostile growls of a mare at her wit’s end with these merciless antics of the young. The voice assured her that her own patience would be tested by mid-day as she fell into step behind Kite, ushering the kids along with a soft click of her tongue. The voice all but promised her an evening of literary antics as El-Tee and BJ continually tried to best the other in long-running back-and-forth conversations or, failing that, to see which of them could get their moms to snap first (it was increasingly looking likely that Kite’s patience would fail first).

It never warned her of the hardships that loomed ahead.

Chapter 14

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Chapter 15

It was never a good day when one of her subordinates had the gall to drop by her little squalid house in the residential quarter of town.

And the unlucky bastard knew it, too—he was already sweating enough to turn his mane slightly damp, and he had a very difficult time looking her in the eye.

“This had better be good, Corporal,” Colada heard her slightly gruff voice demand politely, yet in that special, reserved angry tone that contained only a smidgen of her true displeasure. “You’re breaking rule number four.”

His eyes widened into saucer plates, the irises even shrinking a little even though the amount of light hitting them had not changed. “….t-that was…today? Oh shit…”

“Sometime this afternoon would be great, unless you like the sound of Private Rivet.”

Corporal Rivet’s fear could not have gotten any worse than it already was, and yet she began to notice a slight tremble of his tail as he composed himself (and his message) before speaking. “Y-your presence is….required, at your office, ma’am.”

“Required, Corporal?” she snarled back. “On my kids’ birthday? The day that I endured nine and a half hours of pure hell giving birth to them in the first place? That aforementioned rule number four of Major Berry Colada’s garrison that states that all troopers get their loved ones’ birthdays off, no exceptions, no paperwork fights, and not one godsdamned interruption? I am required to report to my office on my kids’ fifth birthday, which we are enjoying very thoroughly I might add?”

Rivet’s face, amazingly, did not change or falter, but only because she had already stricken him with mortal terror. “….y-yes, ma’am.”

“By who, Corporal?”

“…one of the Board, ma’am. Sandy Shades.”

Outwardly, she allowed no visible change of her body language—inwardly, her fury at having her precious time with her family disturbed was being redirected from the Corporal to the Board member who had clearly chosen the absolute worst time possible to do a follow-up on that incident with Gus’s caravan almost five weeks ago. She wasn’t quite sure what the penalty was for murdering one of the Merchant Union’s nine regulatory Board members. It’d been roughly fifteen years since the last time anypony tried….

“Report back ahead of me, inform Shades I will be there shortly,” she snapped off briskly. “Hell, I might even catch you at the door on your way out. Dismissed.”

His right foreleg snapped across his torso at an upward angle, tapped his left shoulder, and then he was simply gone. She had to blink twice before she could accept that she was now staring at empty space where a terrified, trembling stallion had been only moments earlier, though the dust cloud streaking off in the distance to her right helped too.

If only she could have been as lucky herself….

She felt her left ear droop down as she trudged back into the house, turned left after crossing into the living room and popping back into her dining room—

—the father of her children was the first to see her…and the first to realize the day wasn’t going to go quite as planned. “...ahhh, crap,” the bluish-green coated stallion sighed sadly, even as the kids stopped chomping at their birthday meal—an exceptionally rare and baked cake, with actual frosting to boot. “Floppy ear is never good news…”

Her daughter licked off a smudge of frosting from her nose with a simple flick of her tongue, perhaps hoping the taste would make her feel slightly better at what was about to be said. Even at five years old, both kids had already come to learn what it meant to have a Union officer for a mother. “….ya gotta go, Mommy?”

Major Berry Colada, battle-scarred veteran of the Unification War and the heroine of the Battle of Riversong Ridge, never, ever failed to cry a little when her little girl’s voice sounded like she’d just kicked her puppy. “….I’m sorry honey,” she tried to say in apology, her own voice matching her daughter’s tone. “Just for a little bit.”

“But why can’t you stay? Aren’t you everypony’s boss here?”

“I am,” she said. “But I have bosses too, and one of them wants to see me. I’ll make it as quick as I can, and then I’m coming right back, okay?”

“Your mom’s not gonna let some jerk take her away for long, not on your birthday,” her other significant other butted in, her voice somewhat stronger and harsher than the others. “She’ll be back. With his butt on a plate, if she feels like it.”

“What did I tell you about inciting violence at the dinner table?” Colada shot back, turning her gaze to the bright blue earth pony mare that sat at the other end of the table, the forward half of her orange-tipped yellow mane split into several separate braids.

“To wait for an opening and exploit it,” the mare sassed in reply, her gaze turning to the two children as they deftly hopped off their chairs to latch onto their mother’s legs in a death hug. “Go on, take care of this fool quick and come back here. I found an intact deck of cards last week and it’s been a long time since we got to play blackjack and poker. Even got some fuel for the kerosene lamp, with the storm coming in it’ll be like a campout indoors.”

“Speaking of which, I should make sure the windows are batted down tight, see to the roof,” the stallion mumbled before taking another bite out of his share of the cake. “You kids let go of your mom, she can’t make her boss go away if you keep anchoring her down.”

“Think that was the point,” Colada surmised as she gently shook her forelegs to encourage the children to free themselves from her. “Go on, get off. I’ll be back soon, I promise. Okay?”

Her children’s near-simultaneous “Okay” was almost comical. There were times when the two seemed to be able to read each other’s minds and finish each other’s sentences, an antic which drove her mad to no end (and to their eternal amusement). With a quick parting nuzzle to her forelegs, her kids forced themselves to return to their seats at the table, allowing Colada to depart her house in relative peace and without the haunting cries of two heart-broken children following in her wake.

It was a rare thing to be able to disappoint them so graciously.

The ten minute walk to the garrison HQ gave her enough time to find her anger once more, and true to her word wound up crossing paths with Corporal Rivet on her way through the front door. She gave the sergeant at the receptionist desk only a passing nod as his right foreleg shot over his torso in a quick salute before returning to his desk work, and her hooves thundered up the stairs to the second floor with the fury that had made her so infamous in the corps.

Fury that, unfortunately, did not seem to work many favors for her when it came to dealing with the Union’s political leadership.

Sandy Shades, a young-looking, sand-shaded stallion with pale blonde mane and tail, was sitting upright in the sofa in front of her desk and at apt attention as she swung her office door open with a flash of magic. “….you look ready to murder me where I sit, Major.”

“Can you give me an extremely compelling reason why I shouldn’t?” she fired back with a sharp edge as she shut the door behind her.

“I read quite a tale recently,” Shades countered smoothly, as though her entirely serious threat had come across to him as “You asked to see me, sir?”. “Twenty-four troopers KIA, ransacked resupply caravans, raiders running amok along the highway to Trotpeka…even a little tidbit about Julaya and a bounty hunter you sent after her. Your monthly report was quite intriguing.”

…shiiiiit, Colada’s harsh mind cursed silently. They actually read it… “Must be, if you remember enough of it to summarize it.”

“Anything you’d care to share with me on the subject, then?”

….what the hell is this paper-pusher after? Nobody in the trade guilds has ever been interested in any of the reports I send back, ever.“I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific about what you’re looking for. I’ve never had the displeasure of having a Board member take a personal interest in what goes on in my garrison. You’re usually happy enough that we keep the highways clean of raider filth.”

“Well, there is this little incident with Gus’s caravan that has Life Tap rather unhappy with you,” the sandy—and very certainly shady—stallion said. “Apparently you killed two of his crew, severely wounded a third when they attempted to collect a pair of runaways you’d caught a couple of days before.”

“Attempted to collect without first clearing it through me,” she added sharply, lightly stomping her way around the sofa to take a seat at her desk. If she was going to be grilled over a monthly report, she would do so sitting from her official seat of authority and power (and where she’d stashed her .45 the other day), to remind this Board member that he was dealing with a major in the trooper corps and not some half-starving female yearling looking to get a kosher job by sucking up to him. “And proceeding to order me around as if I worked for them in the process. That is not how the agreement works. This is the second time this year I’ve had to remind these assholes of that, and there will not be a third. The next caravan that steps out of line, I will wipe out to the last mare and stallion.”

“Major, you’re going to have to re-think your approach on this subject,” Shades said with a subtle hint of disapproval. “The guilds are not the mare-beating savages they were two generations ago.”

“Don’t think Life Tap’s guild got that memo. If anything, they’re the one guild holding back all the trade opportunities with the west. Independent slavers keep risking their necks across the valley, and the Runners keep sending them back in pieces, if they send anything at all. And we all know they’re only going out there to cash in on Tap’s standing bounty for any captures they can bring back.”

“Nopony has ever proven that such a bounty exists, and Life Tap also operates the largest of the five guilds and has a presence in nearly every settlement in our territory,” he returned evenly. Colada was starting to think he was somewhat more involved with the slaver guilds than he was his own trading company. “His caravans alone number a quarter of the trooper corps, he can do some very serious damage if he decides the Union is just getting in his way. A position you make easier to take when you shoot up his caravans simply for speaking to you out of turn.”

“My attempts to keep the agreement in force are not why the guilds are getting antsy and turning this whole shit system upside down. They’ve been trying to screw us in the ass ever since we helped them crush the underground. I told you morons that helping with perimeter control in that fiasco was going to cost you. They’re ingrained into our economy even deeper now than they were before the war, and if I’m hearing things right at least one guild has tried to petition for a seat on the Board.”

“….Searchlight did make such a request at the beginning of the year,” Shades sighed, his body finally beginning to show a slight sign of exhaustion over the subject. “As a “non-voting” member. An…observer, if you will, but also as the slaver guilds’ official representative to the Board.”

Colada’s heart started skipping random beats, seizing at her chest and robbing her lungs of air. Searchlight’s guild was generally seen as the “nicest”, considering it tended towards medical and technical training of its captures and even allowed them the opportunity to work for their freedom. But her guild also had the largest centralized collection of MEWs in the prairie—some very serious firepower she could put to devastating use if she put enough thought as to where to make her move. Enough to destroy them as an effective stabilizing force, even.

And if she was petitioning for a more active role in Union politics….

“….you can’t give any of them that, not even Searchlight,” she said softly. “Hell, if she had the gall to ask in the first place, it’s a very troubling sign. She has the firepower to make things very difficult for us if she decides to make use of it against us.”

“….you’re not the first officer to make that observation. But there are larger concerns at work here. The guilds are getting larger, more powerful, and like it or not, they are providing a business and service. And the Merchant Union is, at the end of it, a business alliance and we are using a great deal of their services to keep our farms running and our three factories in some manner of operating condition. They are arguing for the same rights and privileges as the rest of our affiliated companies and businesses, and to not have the troopers shoot up their workers and impair their business.”

“Their “business” is in trading around ponies, zebras, and the occasional weakling griffon like chairs and office desks! The Runners still won’t talk to us as long as even one of the guilds operates with our sanction!”

“The Runners don’t rule their side of the prairie. They’re just mercenaries, like all the other mercs and bounty hunters we’ve ever dealt with. We’re looking into making inroads with the western towns even as you and I sit here arguing about current events.”

Colada felt her lungs burst out into a short fit of hysterical laughter, which she quickly brought under control and ended with a mild chuckle. “….you look like you’ve spent most of your life behind Stifla’s defensive perimeter, so let me explain something to you,” she started gently. “I have dealt with almost every major merc band in the prairie, from both the east and the west for the three weeks that we managed to push a company across the valley for a raid mission during the war. Not a damn one of them would last a week against even a pair of Runner scouts in a serious fight. They turned the whole east side of the prairie into a war zone and fought five entire companies of troopers to a stalemate at Basin Ridge. We suspect they only had sixty fighters to match our thousand and we only counted thirty-seven bodies on-site during clean-up. Even now there’s a dozen of them roaming about our towns and roads, slaying raiders and bandits by the dozens and making us look like amateurs. Most of them are better shots than our best designated sharpshooters, and they thrive and survive in places we won’t send a platoon into without a supply chain to back them up. They’ve done all of this with only scavenged weapons and munitions and no known access to any significant pre-War arms stockpiles. We’re barely managing to hold our side of the prairie together and we’re sitting on an old world military base and two Stables feeding us technology like newborn foals on their mother’s teats.”

“And now we get to the true purpose for my visit,” Sandy Shades said with a coy smile. “You needn’t worry about Life Tap, the vast majority of the Board tends to side with you on such matters. Your report also stated that the runaways arrived in the company of a…Stable pony? Sling Shot, of the one-one-five? Along with her poisoned child?”

That cold, twisted part of her gut grew larger, and more painful. She’d regretted putting that in her report the instant the ink fell on the paper, and now it was starting to make her outright sick. She was lucky she’d been able to delay its journey to Stifla as long as she’d had. “….that’s right.”

“And that she possessed information that led you to Julaya’s location, after which you contracted her for a hit in exchange for protection from Gus’s caravan?”

“….not in that specific language. She wanted the runaways to come with her, which was impossible without a significant amount of caps. I told her she could take her case up with the caravan master if she brought back proof of Julaya’s death, which I suspect she knew wasn’t going to work out in the first place, but she went anyway. Brought back the bitch’s katana and two wagons worth of combat spoils. She used the caps to buy the freedom of her runaways….something I’ve never seen or heard anybody ever doing, most of the freed slaves worked their way to it through Searchlight’s guild. I sent 2nd Platoon out to confirm the battle, and they reported back one collapsed building that had been standing the last time we checked the place out, as well as twelve dead bodies, all stripped bare of gear and weaponry. They also found evidence that she had help from two Runners, but none of the bodies were Julaya. Haven’t seen or heard anything on her in the last five weeks. The stable pony never specifically confirmed that she killed her, only that she’d taken care of the problem and that I wouldn’t see her again. I suspect she made a deal with the zebra to let her go in exchange for the location of the caps stockpile.”

“So she essentially conned you out of not only Julaya’s ill-gotten gains, but in actuality helped one of our most wanted bandits and murderers escape Union territory….and you didn’t kill her for it?”

Inwardly, Colada was starting to sweat a little herself—she was beginning to understand how her subordinates must have felt when they were forced to report unpleasant things to her, like failure, or unwanted visitors like Sands. She was starting to pray, very hard, that she would still be able to go home to her family after this conversation was over. “….in all honesty, she never actually agreed to kill her, or to do anything that I wanted. The only answer she gave was that she wanted her gear back if she was going to go out there. I took my chances, and I lost out.”

“Then the material risks, and consequences, of your gamble is yours and yours alone. I am not here to rub salt in the wound. I am here to ask where this Sling Shot is now. As I recall, the last one-one-fiver to pass through this area shot her way through the first checkpoint towards Trotpeka five years ago, and one of your troopers chose to sleep with her instead of arresting her.”

“Lucky Strike paid for that with his career and I’m still tracking down that addict’s foals five years later,” she hissed back angrily. “Bastard put enough of my fighting force out of action through sheer pregnancy rate that I’m convinced he’s got thirty-plus other kids out there.”

“Yes, well, the Board is putting an end to your inquiries on that matter. The ten you’ve identified outside your garrison thus far are as much as the Civil Support Corps is willing to tolerate. We cannot drain our coffers of caps to take care of the foals of a singular trooper who couldn’t keep his pride tucked in. Any other claimants that come forward will have to support themselves. As for the Stable pony that pulled one over you….where is she now? Your report indicated she was being quartered here for her protection after her deal with Gus’s caravan. I would very much like to question her about her stable’s current status. One of those two Stables you mentioned is not expected to last another decade and the Stifla Stable alone is no longer enough to sustain what little technology we can get to work. The Union is the first real stabilizing force the Prairie has had since the megaspell event and we cannot afford to see it weakened. We need to find another Stable.”

“Then you should have gotten here a little sooner. She left two days ago, with her kid and the freed slaves after they got their freedom marks. They’re at Trotpeka by now, or very close to it.”

Shades pleasant demeanor and calm stare changed almost immediately. “…wait, you just let her leave? Without so much as a question about her Stable?!”

“I had nothing to hold her on and she’s more than willing to shoot her way out of forced confinement, so yes, I let her leave peacefully,” she replied to his furious outburst. “By her account and her daughter’s their stable is gone anyway. Radroach outbreak, around the same time that our farms were hit by a swarm themselves. Supposedly there was a failure with their main power and they were the only two that managed to escape before the stable sealed itself up and shut down. If anypony was still alive down there after that, they didn’t live very long.”

“We’d like to find out the truth for ourselves,” Shades sneered. “Fortunately, I anticipated this outcome and had the foresight to draft a detention warrant before setting out. I’ll have it delivered to your operations officer shortly. As you no longer have Sling Shot at your garrison you are hereby directed to deliver the warrant to Colonel Granger at Trotpeka. She’ll likely be long gone by the time the warrant arrives, but his troops can be on alert for her should she return to the city.”

“Your delivery will have to wait until after the storm passes. In case you haven’t noticed, those black clouds gathering to our west tend to spit lightning at us and this particular storm could put out thirty-mph winds. Nobody in town’s leaving until it blows over. That includes you.”

“Surely your troopers can handle a little rain, Major—”

“My troopers are not going to risk their lives to deliver a sheet of paper for an objective you have already admitted is unlikely to be achieved immediately. You said it yourself, she’ll probably be long gone by the time the warrant gets there, so it can wait. Trotpeka’s not going anywhere.”

“….fine,” Shades grumbled reluctantly as his body began to slide off of the sofa. “One more thing, Major…if you expect to make Colonel yourself someday, you may want to consider giving the guilds a little more leeway in the future. Like it or not, they are becoming a more integral part of Union business. The times are changing, and you will be left behind if you can’t adapt.”

Colada had to bite her tongue to keep her retort to herself—it was often wiser to let a Board member depart with the “last word” on visits like this, to give them the illusion that they sufficiently impressed upon the officer in question the seriousness of their intentions. And she would rather let them believe they had intimidated her than give them cause to schedule further visits that might see her career derailed or worse.

If anything, all these visits did was compel her to paint targets on the backs of their skulls in preparation for the day when the Union finally rotted itself out from its association with the slavers.

In a fit of frustration she snatched her holstered .45 from her desk drawer and slung it across her barrel as she stomped out of her office, and made it to the bottom of the stairs in the lobby just as Sandy Shades’ tail was slipping through the front door and back out into the streets.

The sergeant at the desk did not even bother to ask what had gotten her so visibly upset—the fact that he could tell it at a glance was enough information. “Orders, ma’am?”

“Keep as discreet an eye on him as possible until he’s out of town,” she heard herself growling harshly, her eyes locked on the door and briefly pondering if a .45 slug would still be able to punch through his skull after going through an inch of aged oak. “Send word to Lt. Breeze to report to my office at 0900 tomorrow, and to have a rifle squad in his platoon ready to move by then. First Sergeant Wayward should have a warrant in his possession within the hour, make sure it reaches my desk before Lt. Breeze’s arrival.”

She heard a pencil drop onto the desk as the sergeant released it from his magic, gathering up his 5mm carbine and gear belt from the floor beside him. “Wilco. This have anything to do with the stable pony?”

“Sergeant, you know damn well by this point in your life that anything involving a stable pony is bad news for everyone involved.”

“Hit me.”

“Tempting,” he mumbled quietly, just loud enough for the baby to hear it over the soft tap of a seven of spades making contact with the hardwood floor.

Only in games of chance did he have a shot at making her make angry faces more than once. Her electric blue eyes shot wide at the sight of the seven, then immediately began glaring at it as though it had gravely insulted her. “…crud,” she snarled at the card, flipping her one face-down card to reveal a seven of hearts alongside the ten of clubs. “Was hoping for a four…”

“I was hoping to see that look on your face,” he grinned madly, drawing the cards on the floor back into the deck and shuffling it in just about every way he could imagine. “See? One of us always gets what we’re looking for.”

“….just deal,” she spat gloomily.

“You suck at blackjack,” he replied cheerily (it wasn’t hard when he had that disappointed face of hers to inspire him). “Best out of thirty?”

“Max, bite him.”

A soft, ominous growl from the corner of the room revealed his mistake for the life-altering event it would be if he continued to aggravate the baby filly before him. “Straight up poker it is!” he agreed to her unaired request, and promptly began dealing out their cards.

“On second thought, keep napping, boy.”

The growl turned into a contented grunt, and the mutt was silent once more.

“…all this noise and your mom is still asleep.”

Elly’s head finally turned away from the card games they’d been playing since breakfast, staring at her mom’s napping spot at the far end of the room. A pile of surprisingly comfortable wool blankets had been bundled up underneath her sleeping bag to serve as either a mattress or a moat, considering that she’d thrown a few blankets out around her in the process of creating her sleeping space. Two more blankets, folded up, served as pillows, and seemed to be functioning well enough in that capacity that the mare had not moved one inch since she’d bedded down for the morning.

“…let her,” Elly sighed, turning her eyes back to her hand of five cards and bringing them up for her perusal. “She kept watch for a long time, conked right out the second we started waking up. She could be like that until late afternoon.”

His own hand of five cards wasn’t all that promising—a pair of fours, one nine of hearts, a seven of aces, and a five of spades…. “Coulda been in Trotpeka by now—”

Two of Elly’s cards promptly floated away from her, set off to the side face down. “As tired as mom was? She’d never have made it like that, we’d still be walking.”

He discarded everything except the pair of fours, and new cards began to float off of the top of the deck—one to him, then one to the baby, until they both had a full hand again—

Fffuuu….nothing, he hissed at his poor luck. A six of spades, a two of hearts, and an ace of spades. “….at least we’d be moving. Spent most of my time with you guys sitting in hotel rooms, and when we do take to the road we end up in deep shit halfway through the trip to the next town. This time we’ve managed to not get shot at or ambushed and I’d like to get to Trotpeka before that happens.”

Something about what he said seemed to rub her the wrong way, because she suddenly slapped her hand down onto the floor, face up. “Two pair, threes and sixes.”

“…..lousy stinkin’ pair of fours,” he grumbled, dropping his hand to the floor and letting the cards scatter apart.

“…this is a lot more fun with more than two people,” Elly sighed, her growing boredom with the card games beginning to show on her slightly sleepy face. “Uggh, where’s a library when you need o—”

Elly’s lame bitching over a library stuffed with dusty books was gleefully cut short when the door to the office creaked open, and Mom hurriedly raced through the doorway, her eyes quickly scouring over the four corners of the room—

“…oh, gods, no,” Mom cried in slight despair, her quick trot turning into a slow one as she drew near Sling Shot and her fort of wool blankets. “Why does she have to look so damn cute when she’s sleeping…”

Elly laughed quietly at his mom’s coming misfortune, but he just groaned inside. Her infatuation with Sling was starting to get a little more….obvious, and open, when the two of them were around their moms than he was comfortable with. If they thought Elly’s constant badgering about the birds and the bees was annoying before, it’d only get worse when she started catching on to what was going on with Mom….

Elly was right about one thing, though. This would be funny.

“Sling, get up, they’re here,” Mom said at first as she came to a stop at the wool blanket fort, thinking her voice alone would rouse the stable mare from her slumber.

Sling Shot did not budge even an inch.

Mom’s face began to grow dismal as the reality of her task set in. “….oh, what th…please, get up.”

Again, Sling Shot simply continued sleeping, as if nopony else in the room even existed.

Now Mom started getting physical. She put her forehooves to Sling’s body and started to shake her vigorously, her voice growing angrier and harsher. “By the…get up you lazy foal!! Up!!”

The combination of foreign hooves jolting her body and a harsh, yelling voice was just enough to break dreamland’s hold over Sling. The stable mare began to moan as she attempted to burrow herself deeper into her sleeping bag and the wool blankets she’d draped over her head. “….don’t wanna…go away…”

“I’ve heard that before,” Elly snickered aloud. “Like, a thousand times.”

Mom wasn’t paying much mind to either of them with her attention so focused on Sling, so Elly got away with that little snarky comment. “G...g-go….by the Sisters you’re the one who wanted to wait here until they showed up, so you’re getting your lazy ass out of that…that childish moat of yours, and you’re going to meet them with a fragging smile!!”

Sling’s slurred, soft voice barely rose above her blankets. “….don feel like it…”

Mom’s patience with the whole thing had finally run out, and in a flash of magic had grabbed hold of Sling to literally drag her out of her sleeping bag. “Get. Up! Now!!”

Sling’s counterspell, signified only by a brief, but brilliantly intense flash of blue light, broke Mom’s hold over her, and actually knocked her off of her hooves a bit. “….go ‘way….”

Oh, wow, this is actually hilarious, BJ laughed inside. He’d never seen an adult act so…childish about trying to stay in bed. Granted, Sling had a good reason to want to stay, she’d been awake for like, twenty-seven hours or so over the last day and a half….but still! The way Elly told it sometimes, this wasn’t a new thing either. Apparently the filly had struggled with this very thing a great many mornings for as long as she could remember. He hadn’t believed her earlier, simply because for as long as he’d known her Sling had usually been one of the first of them to be awake every morning. But looking at the scene playing out before him, he was beginning to wonder if that had merely been because Sling had never slept on anything resembling a comfortable bed outside her stable until today. He soon found himself laughing out loud despite his efforts to stay quiet.

Elly, on the other hand, was practically roaring and tapping the floor with a forehoof.

With magical efforts clearly not working out, Mom went back to physical means to rouse the lazing stable pony out of her sleeping bag. She grabbed hold of the mare’s head and began to pull her out as quickly and as harshly as she could manage. “Get the EFF out of there this instant you pudgy mule of a pony—”

A second lash of Sling’s magic pushed Mom away from her, gently and quickly, and before Mom could begin to recover Sling had scooted herself back inside her sleeping bag, zipped it shut, and once more buried her head underneath one of the blankets she’d thrown over herself. “I like it heeerrreee ….”

Elly’s body began to roll and tumble as she lost control of her lungs in her furious laughter, a foreleg reaching over her face to brush away the tears that were no doubt coming out of her eyes right then.

Mom’s face had, by then, become livid with frustration and disbelief that a mare of Sling’s age could be so childishly stubborn about getting out of bed when she was told to. “….oh, my gods, I’m going to kill you,” she seethed through her teeth, stomping forward and wrapping Sling up in another spell, this one fueled by both mana and sheer rage. “Get your lazy ass out of your cocoon and wake up!!”

Mom’s spell had begun to pull at the sleeping bag, turning it around a hundred and eighty degrees as she began to drag the stable pony inside it by the hindquarters, but Mom’s spell had only managed to get her quarry a couple of feet across the ground before Sling’s forehooves shot out of the bag and began to pull herself and the sleeping bag back towards the pile of wool blankets she’d bedded down on, simultaneously breaking Mom’s spell with yet another effortless counterspell burst and even knocking her off balance briefly. “Nuuuuuuuu….”

By that point, BJ’s face was starting to get soaked with tears, he was laughing so hard. Even through his own laughter, however, he could hear Elly’s breath coming in short, loud gasps, mixed with a choking laugh or chuckle, as she struggled to breathe properly in spite of her great amusement.

Mom was the only one who wasn’t amused. In fact, she seemed almost….

….pissed.

Mom stomped back to the stubborn, overgrown foal that was supposed to be Sling Shot, lowered her head onto the mare’s ear, and began whispering into it softly—

—roughly four seconds later, Sling Shot was suddenly a brand-new pony. Whatever it was that was whispered into her slumbering state of mind, it terrified her to such an extent that her body began to explode in a flurry of motion and activity, jolting upright within her sleeping bag and simultaneously hitting Mom in the face with her head—

“Allrightallright I’mupImupImup—”

“Owww, FU—my frickin’ face—”

Sling wasn’t listening or looking—in fact, she was so desperate to get away from Kite that she failed to escape her sleeping bag spectacularly, only managing to get half of her body out of it before she either tripped herself up or got her rear legs tangled up in something and fell back onto the floor with a hard THUMP!, and after that resorted to using her forelegs to try and pull herself out—

“I’mupI’mmoving don’t do that thing you said you’d do I’m upupup—”

Mom continued to writhe and squirm on the floor beside the pile of blankets, cursing and swearing beneath her breath as she rode out the pain flooding her face—

Sling finally managed to stumble out of her sleeping bag after having pulled it off of her blanket pile with her, and in a flash of her magic had pulled the door open and began to stumble outside in a panicked, ungainly dash to escape whatever it was that Mom had threatened to do—

“ImupImupI’mgoing—”

Something about the word “going” triggered the baby into getting up herself, though with her breath coming in short gaps amid her hysterical laughter it was hard to see how she was doing it. She continued to laugh and howl mercilessly as she followed her mom out the door, though once through the doorway she took a hard right instead of following the mare in her panicked escape attempt, and when BJ spotted a small pouch slung across her body, he figured out her desire to leave and gave neither stable pony another thought.

Not when Mom could still amuse him with her suffering for another few moments.

Chuckling and snorting as he went, he found a way up to his hooves and slowly trotted up to her, watching as she rolled upright and nursed her sore face with a foreleg. “So what’d you tell her?” he laughed.

“I told her that if she didn’t get her lazy ass out of her little wool fort I’d start kissing her in front of Elly,” Mom hissed in pain, her left eye clinching shut as a particularly painful throb seemingly reached back into her head. “Ooooooosssshiiiit that was a mistake….”

“Make it again sometime, that was funny as hell!” he snickered back. “Elly was laughin’ so hard I think she had to take a piss!”

“BJ!” Mom yelled sharply with a touch of displeasure. “A little restraint with your foul mouth would be appreciated!!”

“Hey, I ain’t sayin’ anything I didn’t learn from you.”

That always seemed to shut her up about his language, she never seemed that restrained with her words around him. “….I guess not…”

With that potential threat to his food supply taken care of (he hated military MREs), he contented himself with packing up the remainder of their stuff, starting with the wool blankets in the corner where Sling had been trying to sleep. “At least we know why she bought so many of these things now.”

“I knew I should have talked her out of it,” Mom groaned, still rubbing at her face. “The way her eyes lit up when that merchant rolled into town last week with ‘em, I just knew it was going to bring trouble.”

He had the first of eight or nine blankets folded up in no time, and well on the way to adding two more to the pile. “So you aren’t thankful your girl crush got you a couple of ‘em? Hell, I love the two she gave me.”

“....that obvious now, is it?”

“Mom, you make it any more obvious and Elly will catch on,” he shot back. “And that girl is dumb as a bag of rocks when it comes to stuff like that. Don’t mess her brain up any.”

He’d meant that to try and get Mom to behave herself a little, but it backfired on him almost immediately—kinda like how half his jokes and comments wound up working to the baby’s advantage. “What’s this? My boy is taking a liking to a filly he keeps calling a baby?”

The teasing, playful tone of her voice unsettled him with its unspoken insinuations. “Hey, it ain’t like that!” he snapped defensively. “It--…well, it’s….kinda….kindaaaaaaah shhhhiiiit why’d you go make me think about it?!”

“Because until now I had no clue you regarded her as anything more than a brain to play word games off of,” Mom’s voice announced ominously as she rose to her hooves and began to close in on him. “….at least it’s a platonic interest, for the moment.”

“…whazzat mean?”

The third blanket joined the top of the growing pile before Mom answered. “It means non-romantic.”

Mom’s ever thoughtful illumination of the increasingly confusing cloud his thoughts were becoming was welcomed with a silent thanks, though he made the mistake of showing it openly. “…whew…”

“….so you were worried it was the other thing?”

Shit, he cringed openly, gathering a fourth blanket onto the pile and folding up a fifth one…and watching as Mom added a blanket to the pile herself. “…it’s not like I got the experience to know any different. Part of me didn’t even believe it could happen willingly. Most of what I seen of relationships, was usually our masters…or what others would…do, with you….”

“That’s not our life anymore,” Mom said softly, a touch of joyousness coloring her voice. “We don’t have to worry about being beaten or abused by sick assholes with no concept of compassion or love. We’re free because somepony, for once in my sad, shitty life, cared enough to do whatever she could think of to get us out of that…that mess of an existence. I don’t have nightmares of you getting sucked up into the darkest corners of this wasteland and twisted into another raider, I don’t worry about some lust-crazed sicko taking me in front of you and making you watch—”

He wished she hadn’t brought that up—just mentioning it brought back too many horrid images and screams he couldn’t describe, and didn’t want to. Even back then, young as he was, he’d known it was wrong, but over the years he’d heard it happen enough that it started to get…normal….

“….so what is our life, then? Some stable pony bought our freedom so she could be our new master in everything but name?”

Mom stopped messing with the three remaining blankets on the floor, suddenly stricken with what looked like a dawning realization of…of whatever it was she was thinking….

“….you and I both know Sling isn’t like that,” Mom said quietly. “Even if she doesn’t have any clue what it’s like to have friends. She didn’t seem to have but one or two in her entire life and they all died in her Stable. And I told her two months ago that I wanted her to take me home, back where I was growing up. She knows we’re not traveling with her forever.”

“Even if it feels like it,” he mumbled under his breath, but Mom’s keen ears picked it up regardless.

“…I…I haven’t really told her yet, but…I’m kinda afraid that when we part company, we won’t see them again…and I don’t want to let go of them anymore. Elly’s too sweet and kind to be in this wasteland and I just get this urge to squirrel her away in a corner and keep her away from all the horrors out here so she doesn’t change….”

He thought it odd that she mentioned the baby first, but then, he had an idea of what Mom thought of Sling anyway. “And Sling?”

Mom’s voice grew strained and hinged on the edge of frustration. “…dammit, it doesn’t make any sense because she’s too damn wound up to open up to anypony. All I know is that she’s into guns and magic, she’d fall apart in a week without Elly in her life, she looks at everypony like a target to kill if they get too close, she keeps biting off more trouble than she can handle….”

“And tends to kill people that piss her off,” he added snidely, though it was also a rather truthful observation.

And Mom did not challenge it in the slightest. “….and damn it all she’s done all of…this, for us,” she cried softly. “Got us away from Saurus…though Elly had to talk her into that one…kept us safe, tried to get us out of here…found a way to get us free when it looked like we were going back to the pens….godsdammit I want her and it makes no sense at all. I want her, in every sense. I’m scared to let her keep her promise.”

By that point all of the blankets had been collected, folded up, and piled up into a neat stack, and BJ’s attention turned to the small pile of gear stuffed in the corner of the room. Mostly Sling’s stuff—her travelling saddle with its enchanted, bottomless saddlebags, her guns, a black sword scabbard with a katana in it whose existence she wouldn’t explain, and Elly’s travelling saddle. He also found it more than odd that of all the guns Sling had on her, he had never once seen her use that massive revolver she kept tucked to her side, but ammo for it was supposed to be pretty rare. A shame Colada wouldn’t let them keep any of the rifles they’d looted over the last few weeks…

“….did you ever have a plan for what we’d do if we were ever made free?”

“…not a good one,” Mom sighed fearfully. “The only skill I have worth trading is medical care and that’s hard enough given how rare it is to find decent medical supplies and instruments. But I’d rather try my luck at that than make a living letting stallions have their way with me. It’s a miracle that I’ve stayed clean this long given how…often I was made to….”service”, past masters. To say nothing of the times when their friends and cronies would just….”

He purposefully cut in before Mom could go on—lately it was starting to get harder and harder to hear her mention it, and he couldn’t fathom why. “...do you think you could settle anywhere, like you want to?”

No, scratch that. It was getting harder to hear Mom talk about these stable ponies, because now it was all she could do to keep from crying as she contemplated their near future. “….dammit, it wasn’t supposed to go this way….just take us over the valley, back home, drop us off and go on their merry and now I don’t wanna leave ‘em….”

Now he was at a loss as to what he could say or do to snap her out of this funk she’d talked herself into. He was never good at this mushy feeling stuff…but then, all he’d known before was a slave’s existence. Even if all of his old masters and their friends and “cronies” tended to just use Mom however they wanted, they were decent enough to him….mostly. There was one or two that were…not no nice, but the funny thing about those types of masters was that they eventually ended up pissing off someone who had absolutely no problem with wasting them on the spot for their transgressions, and so his and Mom’s time under the ownership of those not-so-nice masters was rather short. Terrifying, but short.

And the longer he thought about it, the less he seemed to like the idea of leaving the relatively safe company of an angry, well-armed Stable mare and her baby filly. Sling wasn’t like any of the others—she didn’t hit him, or Mom, she had no taste for mares and she let him bug Elly for amusement, whereas past masters had forbidden any contact with their kids on pain of extreme suffering and torture. With Sling and Elly, he didn’t feel like a servant or the pony equivalent of a dog.

He felt like a person. And he’d never known how badly he’d been treated until these two Stable ponies came into his life and showed him what it was like to live among normal ponies. To be looked at like he mattered to them, even if Sling herself tried to keep her distance from him and let Mom be the one to deal with him. To be able to talk to another filly around his age and not get yelled at or beat up for even being in the same room with them under adult supervision. To have that filly constantly badger him and tickle his mind with word games that drove both their moms nuts. To feel like he mattered in some way to someone other than Mom.

Sling might’ve been more of a closed book than anything, but Elly…Elly cared. Not just for him and Mom, but for anypony, even raiders and thieves. She felt bad when Sling had to kill somepony and she wasn’t even the one pulling the trigger. He couldn’t fathom why or how she could feel any compassion for ponies who routinely robbed, violated, and murdered their way through daily survival, but she did….and godsdamn it all if she wasn’t just as effective with her words as Sling was with a gun. She’d talked them past ponies that Sling would’ve killed if given another moment to figure out how, she practically cried at all the dead bodies around them when they shot up that gang of robbers disguised as Union troopers even after shooting at them, she cried for her mom who had to go and kill them….

And somehow, without him ever seeing it coming….it somehow became exceptionally important to him that she not change one bit. That she did not get hurt, or used in the way that ponies used to use his mom. That she stayed the same, no matter what she saw or had to do, because if she changed any….

….she might end up like her mom.

“….m-maybe…maybe we should stick with ‘em, then,” he found himself muttering to his mom’s ears. “You keep sayin’ how great it is to be free. To have these damn blue marks on our necks tellin’ the slavers we’re off-limits, that we can do whatever now. Who said you had to stick to what you made Sling agree to, then? If you wanna change yer mind, who’s stoppin’ ya now? We’re….we’re free now, remember?”

A quiet, subdued sniffle from Mom’s nose betrayed her lingering terror of even such a simple choice as that. “….I know…and it’s starting to scare the shit out of me.”

The stark, unfiltered terror of having to explain to her little girl why two mares would kiss in that funny way was a much, much worse wake-up call than those stupid battered sauce pans that El-Tee always banged next to her head. She would never, ever curse those things quite as badly as she’d had in the past, ever again (though she’d still ground the filly for it regardless).

Kite’s method of rousing her from her slumber tended to give far more witnesses cause to laugh at her, after all.

She had only stumbled through the door for a couple of seconds, begging out loud that Kite didn’t have to go and kiss her in front of El-Tee, that she was up and she was moving and going out, when she spotted a Brahmin-drawn wagon pulled to a stop in the parking lot of the highway rest station they had holed up in for the night, heard a bellowing laughter out in that general direction, and saw that Ada had practically collapsed onto the broken asphalt, unable to contain her amusement at her misfortune, and realized that the damn griffons had probably heard what had been happening in that little maintenance shed even from where they’d stopped.

Even Leon couldn’t help but laugh derisively at her as she stalked closer towards the griffons. “Not a morning pony, I see,” he chuckled, a talon wrapped over the top of his beak in some lame attempt to control himself.

“Bite me,” she growled back angrily, a flush of shame flooding her cheeks. “The note Colada gave me before we left mentioned you had something to show me. What is it?”

“In a minute,” Leon snickered. “….still not over “childish moat”.”

The mere mention of her pile of freshly woven, real wool blankets courtesy of a caravan merchant with access to a rare flock of normal, untainted sheep in the west brought back a very strong desire to simply tell these griffons to kiss her ass and go back to sleep in her little wool nest. “….you heard everything in there, didn’t you?”

A devious mirth of laughter escaped the griffon’s throat before he could choke it back, though he offered no apologies for it. “Almost everything. I’d love to hear what she did to get you up and moving so quick when all that screaming and cussing failed.”

“You wouldn’t have gotten to hear anything if you two hadn’t wanted us to wait for you out here, so what is it that you want?” she hissed back with an exceptionally strong emphasis on impending violence coming their way.

Leon, at last, began to realize that she was not quite as amused with her situation as they were, and with a harsh, guttural choke of air to clear his lungs, began to dial back his chuckling. “Ummm…h-hey, Ada, cut it out, we just got put on a time schedule and after what she did to Saurus I’m not that anxious to get on her bad side.”

Ada, despite her best attempts, was having a much harder time killing her laughter—she wound up pulling herself up on her feet by latching onto the edge of the wagon and hefting herself up and over the edge just so she could look the pony in the eye without falling over. “Hehahah…sure thing, dude, just….just gimme a minute—”

Sling could feel a very slight surge of magic begin to hasten its flow through her horn, and the last of Leon’s mirth died in the face of a slightly shimmering spell field forming before her. “Now, Ada,” his stern tone rebuked. “By Luna’s teats I’d have thought you’d take this trip more seriously given what your own brother did to you. Straighten up.”

The spell field broke apart harmlessly, her hold on the mana jolted by the unmistakable implication in his words. In turn, Ada’s laughter quickly faded away, and in-between eye blinks she seemed to change entirely. A dip of her boonie hat covered most of her face, which had shifted into a sullen, downcast mask, and in the next moment she was sliding off edge of the wagon and walking away from the wagon entirely like a scolded child.

Not the reaction Leon had been going for—his face grimaced briefly when he saw the crestfallen griffon’s shoulders slumping slightly as she put some distance between herself and the wagon. “…aaah, shit, that was not what I was going for….”

“Then don’t ever mention that again,” Sling warned softly. “Thought you’d have known better.”

“….that makes two of us. Did your crazy plan work?”

“Yes,” she replied after a moment’s lingering gaze over the wagon and its covered contents…though by the shape of what lay beneath the canvas cover, she was beginning to see what it was that had Ada less playful than usual. “…might have made things worse for me, though. Kite’s got it bad for me now and she can barely contain it in the kids’ presence. She’s trying to keep her distance, but when it’s just us it can get….awkward. Don’t know how much longer I can put up with it….”

“…well, you took a lot of risk getting her and her kid out of a slave’s life. Not many souls out here that’ll stick out for runaways. For sure none of them would have the balls to go as far as you have. You’ve got a hell of a balancing act to work with now, so try not to screw it up.”

“…what about your end of the plan?”

“They made it across,” he confirmed nonchalantly. “Julie wasn’t happy about having to give up her sword. She doesn’t think Colada’s gonna buy the fact that you killed her.”

“And she’s right,” Sling sighed, taking a seat on her hindquarters for a brief rest. “Colada never outright said it to my face, but a week after I paid the slavers off she called me to her office and gave me Julie’s sword back. Said it was my trophy to use or return as I pleased, special emphasis on return. I don’t think she meant herself, either. Didn’t say anything else about it the rest of the time I spent there.”

“….if she let you go despite suspecting otherwise, I’d leave it that way,” he counseled strongly. “You’ll have enough problems as it is if the Union decides they want to find a way into the one-one-five. Best to get over the valley while you can.”

“I’m trying to, believe me,” she grumbled in frustration. “And we’ll get back on our way as soon as you tell me why you wanted us to stop here for a day.”

Leon’s reply was simply to reach into the wagon and pull back on the canvas cover, revealing the cargo ben—

….no, not cargo, as she’d vainly hoped despite her suspicions.

A body.

A broken, blood-stained body of a rather large, gray-feathered griffon she recognized quite well despite meeting only three times in her life….

“Just thought you’d want some proof that he wouldn’t be a problem anymore,” Leon’s voice said grimly. “He never was able to dig himself out from under that building you brought down on him. Probably died within a coupla days. We aren’t real sure because we dug him out six days after the fight, after we’d made sure Julie and her girl got over the valley. He’d been dead at least two days, maybe more. Only piece of his gear that came out in decent shape was his nine-mil pistol, which Ada’s keeping since it was a gift from their dad, long before he went crazy.”

She barely acknowledged his voice, though her ears were well-tuned to the words being spoken to her. Her eyes had latched onto this crushed body, still mostly covered, and in particular on the blood-stained face, and the left eye that appeared to have been burst inside the eye socket….

….and her brain had begun to latch onto the possibility that he had likely still been alive, slowly bleeding out less than a quarter-mile away, pinned and crushed by tons of concrete, steel, and plaster, while she slept soundly and semi-comfortably in the depths of the town hall with a smile on her face at the thought of having finally killed him….

She promptly turned and trotted away from the wagon before she could burn any more details into her memory. But she was fairly certain she would be haunted by the image of his blood-stained, dead face and its destroyed eyeball for the rest of her natural days.

Leon’s voice gave her the impression that he seemed to understand her reaction better than she did. “….he was dead whether he got helped out or not,” he sighed. “Injuries were way too severe for the few healing potions we had on-site. Couldn’t have moved him out without killing him, not the way we found him. And if you think he was only threatening to do nasty things to your kid to scare you, ask Ada what he did to a couple of fillies nine months back. I still get nightmares about it myself. We’d have popped him in the head the moment we got enough of the rubble off of him to get a clean shot.”

“—ybe that little shit of a filly instead—”

Saurus’s harsh, furious voice faded out of her mind with a hard blink, and she was back to staring at the cracked asphalt beneath her forehooves, and the tendrils of shriveled prairie grass that had attempted to make a home in-between the cracks. “….I’m trying to believe I wouldn’t have done the same thing….and I’m not sure I do….”

An ugly, tense silence began to permeate the air between them, and Leon quickly sought to move the conversation on before it could dominate their psyches. “...there was a reward bounty on him,” Leon said. “Best bounty we’ve ever put on a target, given what he did to earn it.”

Sling felt a slight bubbling of bile build up in her throat, which she choked back with a gulp. “You can keep it.”

“It’s a gun set,” Leon went on quickly. “Rifle, pistol, ammo, spare mags and parts…and the training to use the rifle to the best of its capabilities. That 5.56-mil revolver’s cute and useful up close, but you’re gonna need a much better long-range response than a 12-guage pump and slug rounds if you’re going to insist on picking fights with half the wasteland.”

That surge of bile began to die down as her mind latched onto the words “rifle” and “pistols”. Caps she could turn down…but a weapon, particularly one she needed…. “….what kind of rifle are we talking about….”

“A good one, 5.56mm, with semi-automatic and full-auto fire modes,” Leon clarified. “Pistol’s a .45, built from scratch. Rifle’s a Runner secret we’d like to leave a secret as long as we can, but we can explain more once we go to pick it up.”

“That’s not much of an explanation on the rifle, I know a half dozen models that fit that short description.”

“I’m being vague because I’m not even supposed to be mentioning it. Trust me, it’s a good one.”

“….I guess I’ll have to,” she sighed sadly. Having chased off lingering horrors and quelled her unsettling stomach, she was stricken with a sudden urge to put her mind and body to work before she could get enough time to think again. “How far are we traveling together?”

“We’re not, at the moment,” Leon clarified. “We still need to get back to Maize. Those mercs Saurus hired, your little girl convinced them to turn on him, and that helped turn the odds against him enough that he bailed out, but not before Ada and I killed a few of them. They’re pretty sore at us for it, so we’ve been doing some jobs for them here and there to make up for it. We need to get back and pay them off.”

She silently thanked the departed Sisters for her night light’s exceptional empathy. “Then how will we find you once we cross the valley? Kite doesn’t remember much of the west anymore, beyond a few settlements here and there.”

“There’s a town to the northwest of the bridge crossing, roughly fifteen miles’ distance,” he answered, mercifully tossing the canvas cover back over the body and shielding her from its dead glare. “Find an inn called Last Stand, run by an earth pony. Tell him we sent you and he won’t give you any shit. We’ll catch up with you there, escort you the rest of the way. You’ll be there a few days, so be ready to earn your keep if you’re running low on caps.”

If one could believe the old stories of the First Ones, Trotpeka was the jewel city of the Prairie.

Established in the twilight century of Princess Celestia’s rule, the humble riverside town had grown into one of only two mega-sized metropolitan areas in the plains by the time Princess Luna had ascended to the position of regent ruler of Equestria. The rapid industrialization and modernization that followed Luna’s ascension transformed the commercial center of the Prairie into its heart and core. Skyscrapers and office buildings in the commercial district almost matched the majesty of steel and glass that dominated Manehatten, Baltimare, and Fillydelphia. Self-contained and self-sustaining neighborhoods the size of most of the prairie’s farm towns dotted the residential districts with lush, green yards, small forested parks, and unobstructed views of Celestia’s sun and Luna’s moon. The neighborhoods came complete with schools, medical clinics, and small family owned businesses, making it possible for a family to live in Trotpeka without ever visiting the more congested commercial shopping districts, if they so desired. The industrial districts of the city were among the most advanced in the entire region, inclined more towards research and development of advanced tech than smelly, smog-pumping manufacturing factories and processes, though time and war desperation would eventually see a few such facilities erected for the production of munitions, weapons, and even tracked and wheeled war vehicles. At its peak, the city claimed a population of over 170,000, with close to 200,000 if one included the various farm towns and communities that surrounded the city on both sides of the Serenity river.

Some distance to the north was the sole pegasus cloud city in the prairie, Serenity. Responsible for supplying the weather teams and managing the prairie’s seasons, Serenity held an important enough place in the region’s happenings that the pegasi got to name the river beneath them after their city. Serenity’s reputation for peace and quiet was such that even at the height of the war with the zebra lands and their allies, it had managed to avoid becoming embroiled in the manufacture and maintenance of Equestria’s cloudships, though a small airfleet and skydock were installed as a defensive measure nonetheless. The distance was great enough from Trotpeka that one couldn’t see Serenity from the ground, but in the days of Equestria That Was the two were often no more than half a day’s travel away from each other via sky wagon.

And then the war ended.

The First Ones who fled to the stable never knew how badly the prairie had been devastated. They only knew that megaspells had begun flying across the skies, like comets of brilliant rainbow colors peeled away from each other, and that mushroom clouds that could be seen dozens of miles away began dotting the horizons around their towns not long after. That the wastelands were not flooded with life-killing radiation nearly two centuries later was a mystery to the wastelanders that came after, though here and there were said to be pockets of it that would poison a soul exposed to it. Sticking to the roads seemed to keep travelers safe from the risks of radiation poisoning. Some surmised that the majority of it had been blown away in the years after the blasts by the weather that had raged out of control.

The same could not be said of Trotpeka. Its commercial district, a maze of concrete and steel skyscrapers, had been gutted and eroded by the detonation of a megaspell in the city’s northern industrial district and the continual passage of weather across nearly two hundred years with nopony to maintain and upkeep the properties. Even at a distance from the city, one could tell that a part of it had been erased from the face of the earth, a massive crater where factories and tech centers had once toiled endlessly in support of the war effort—perhaps the reason why this part of the city was targeted for oblivion. The blast itself damaged the entirety of the city to varying degrees—the edge of the commercial district, closest to the industry sector, was little more than twisted I-beams and “naked” buildings stripped clean of glass and most of their outer walls. The further away from the blast itself, the less severe the damage. The blast point itself was still lethal, even today—supposedly the Union occasionally tested the radiation by scaring an animal into the ruins, usually a goat or a brahmin, and then retrieving it a day or two later with the use of heavily-shielded “dive teams” loaded down in radiation-resistant suits, laced with anti-radiation chems, and even the use of a shielded wheeled vehicle that had managed to survive the war and the long decades of time afterward. The animal was almost always found dead of radiation poisoning, or close enough to it that it was left where it was found so that it could finish dying on its own. Only radroaches and mutant reptilians the wasteland referred to as “geckos” seemed to thrive in the crater and the ruins immediately surrounding it.

The residential sectors had been subjected to an entirely different devastation—desperation. In the decades before the Union’s arrival, what was left of Trotpeka was home to a struggling community surrounded by gangs, raiders, and free-roaming mercenaries that had origins in the neighborhood’s immediate life after the blasts. Some merc bands traced their origins back to local police department precincts, while the more savage raiders and gangs seemed to have had ancestors that had once been prison inmates or frequent “visitors” in the city’s justice systems. The community was descended down from the combined residents of the various neighborhoods who survived the end of the world and banded together in the most intact suburbs among the throng of dozens that had once existed.

The Union changed all that, a year at a time. Fifteen years after establishing a trade route to the city ruins, they now had effective control of the prairie’s jewel city and the largest, most secure bridge across the dried-out river valley. The gangs were a shell of their former selves, reduced to a straggling few that refused to abandon the murderous lifestyle that had seen them slaughtered by the trooper corps. Most of the merc bands dispersed or became “contracted” to one of the Union’s many trade guilds and caravans. And the community of survivors flourished under the blanket of protection and security offered by armed troopers. Trotpeka today was the “entry point” to the west, and vice versa—wastelanders and traders from both sides of the valley crossed here to reach the other side, or to set up shop in the city to offer their wares to visitors passing through. Efforts to repair and re-start the one factory that wasn’t radiation-tainted had been ongoing for at least the last four years, and the talk among the Union was that it might reach operating status by the end of the year, adding a fourth factory to their production capabilities. There was even a series of working medical clinics up and running throughout the commercial and residential districts.

The city had been their goal for what seemed like years. Delays and circumstances had turned what was supposed to be a two-week journey into a three-month sludge—some were by choice, others by necessity, and still other delays were imposed upon them. But the city remained their ultimate destination. The gateway to the other side, to something…better. Better, at least, in the sense that slavers were not running around looking for fresh “product” to add to their pens; they held no illusion that life would be any easier aside from that little detail. But she couldn’t help but stare out behind her, at the rotted out office buildings and the constant, depressing blanket of gray cloud cover that cast a continual shadow upon the world, and feel….disappointed.

After everything they’d gone through to get here, she hadn’t expected it to turn into a barrier against further progress.

“…why is the bridge closed?” she asked of the gray skies above her.

One of the four troopers standing guard at the large central bridge over the river—the one that had broken the news that their journey had just hit another travel snag—answered her plea as though she’d said it to his face. “Some slaves got loose from their handlers overnight. Guilds get pissy if we don’t at least block major exits while they search ‘em out.”

“You just let them run through unchecked?”

“….between you and me, most of the Union brass don’t have Colada’s balls,” the trooper said quietly after a quick scan around him, probably to make sure there weren’t any officers or sergeants within earshot. “She’d have wiped them out already if they’d tried this in her garrison, but Colonel Granger’s more worried about his standing with the Board than with keeping the guilds in line. Hell, way I hear it from most of the squads past Galesville, the guilds actually have some of the checkpoints on their payroll to suck up a few souls passing by them now and then. We’ve definitely noticed an uptick in the number of slaves in their pens these last coupla months, on account of a lot of squads getting pulled off patrol to put down that radroach infestation that popped up near Stifla…what, two and a half months back? Three?”

My gods, has it really only been that long since the stable died behind me….

“Not an encouraging sign,” she muttered.

“But one most of the brass don’t want to bother looking into. Got enough to deal with just putting down raiders and cleaning the highways of all the mutant wildlife crawling around. Colada’s about the only one in this part of Union territory that’s keeping the guilds in line, even given her quirks.”

“Quirks?”

“Quirks like being married to a stallion and a mare, at the same time, and going so far as to live with both of them in the same house with the two kids she had with her husband. Or letting her entire garrison get it on with anybody they like, regardless of rank, so long as it doesn’t disrupt operations or unit cohesion, or end up with unplanned foals. Pays extra for troopers that put in the time and work to make expert on their rifle skills and stick with it. Even puts her company’s financial resources on tap for anybody in need of a few extra caps for food or medical care. Naturally, that means her company’s backing trade guilds need to work extra hard to make sure they’re pulling in the profit to support that kind of generosity.”

Sling’s brain went into a short circuit trying to comprehend the idea of having two simultaneous spouses of opposite genders, and after a few fruitless seconds abandoned it altogether. “….Colada is many things, but the five weeks I spent as her “guest” in her garrison did not give me the impression that generous was one of them.”

“She’s generous to those it matters being generous to,” the trooper said with a small—but noticeable—smile. “You say you were her “guest” for five weeks. It have anything do with those blue marks on your companions’ necks?”

Sling stole a quick glance at Kite, roughly thirty feet behind her, and at that yin-yang neon blue mark on the right side of her neck. The right half was a much brighter shade of blue than the left half, but its appearance was unmistakable for anything else but what it was professed to be—the almost non-existent freedom mark of a freed slave.

“….that rare, are they?”

“Maybe a hundred in the entire prairie, but those are the first two I know of that were outright bought out of it,” the trooper beamed back. “Heard some scuttlebutt through the slave caravans ‘bout a couple of slaves getting bought free a few weeks back, figured if it was gonna happen anywhere it’d be in Colada’s garrison. The guilds want so much for a buyout that nobody ever considers it, so I already have a rough estimate of what it cost you to pull that off. She wouldn’t have let any of you out of town until that was done and settled. If anything, the fact that she kept you in her garrison at all tells me that she considers you a pony worth sticking her neck out for.”

I can’t be worth that much trouble if she’s telling her bosses where I came from. “That’s still not going to get me past you.”

“Nice try, though. Stick around a few days, the bridge will open up again eventually. Enough inns and bars looking for business that you can probably get a decent group discount if you pay up ahead of time. Just don’t go near the north side or the red district on the southwest corner of the main trade quarter. Red district has most of the vice, and that’s where we have the most problems.”

She didn’t bother saying any sort of a good-bye—a simple wave of a forehoof was enough for this trooper to signify that she was done wasting her time and his with conversation, and her brief trek back to the others was met with growing looks of disappointment and despair.

“…the bridge is locked down, isn’t it?” Kite grumbled, her eyes furrowing in annoyed disbelief. “Would be just about our type of luck….”

“Locked down, and not opening up to anybody, even traders,” she spat back. “Some slaves got free last night, and the guilds are looking for them.”

Kite’s jaw mouthed off a silent, foul curse as a forehoof stomped at the ground in frustration. “…damn it, what does it take to get away from these people? It’s like the wasteland is actively conspiring to keep us on this side of the valley—”

Light Tail’s voice quipped in with unsettling, disturbing thoughts that reminded her of how glad she was that the child could be more perceptive than her mother. “….the bridge is closed? The one bridge we need to cross to leave…is closed? Not even a day before we get here? Am I the only one that finds that too funny to be a coincidence?”

It took only a couple of seconds for Sling to see the potential for trouble—it had happened before, after all. “That is awfully convenient….but Saurus is dead. Leon showed me the body himself, in that wagon they dragged along. And even if that slave master I paid off for Kite and Beige suspects that I knew they were runaways, it wouldn’t make any sense to try anything now. He landed a fortune in caps for his guild, and these two got their freedom marks. If they tried anything against any of us now it’d put them in deep trouble with the Union.”

“We’re right here, you know,” BJ interrupted, a slight bitterness slipping into his tone. “And I don’t see how the bridge being closed would lead us into another trap. We can just hang out at another inn, like we always do, wait ‘till it’s open again.”

“Sitting still in one place would mean that anybody looking for us wouldn’t have a hard time of it,” Sling replied, thoroughly rejecting the idea of another few days cooped up inside a hotel room. She was tired of rock-hard beds and patchy blankets, she was tired of sniffing ages of dust that never seemed to get swept up, but most of all….she was afraid that if they stayed in one place too long now, Kite would lose her self-control and try something funny again….

….and by all the fortunes of the wastes, Kite also seemed to be the best bet for finding another way through the valley.

After a thorough visual scan of the streets around them to ensure that there was no one else within earshot of their voices, she began peppering the grape-coated mare with questions that would ultimately set them on a path to the other side of the valley. “….Kite, when you came here with the underground, where did you stop?”

She kept her head craned around to the side, to gauge the mare’s reaction, and the way her ears drooped down made her feel slightly guilty about putting her on the spot like that. “….t-the red light district, southwest corner of the trade quarter….too risky to have the stop close to the valley, would’ve been too obvious.”

So that’s one stop we’re definitely not making today. “Did any of the souls that ran the stop there ever talk about how they got anyone over the valley?”

Now Kite’s head began to turn away from her, as if making sure there wasn’t anybody listening in on them herself…or maybe she simply preferred to cross the valley via the safest method, and Sling couldn’t blame her for that. “….n-not to me, directly….but now and then I’d hear one of them talk about it. There was a smaller bridge in the old residential neighborhoods back then that was still standing, but it was in pretty bad shape. Couldn’t get a caravan across, had to go through on hoof. About three months before the war with the Runners ended it finally got too dangerous to use, and the trooper corps took over their end of the bridge. The stop only made two more runs over the valley after that…something about a….a river port, on the edge of the commercial district, that was spread out over the valley and used some connecting bridges to ferry traffic from one side to the other. They weren’t too fond of that one either.”

“Why not?”

“…the ghouls,” she answered fearfully.

“Ada mentioned those once, when we first met her,” Light Tail’s voice broke in. “Said they used to be ponies, but they ain’t anymore and went cannibal, right?”

“….something like that,” Kite confirmed. “They…they look like the walking dead. I don’t know a whole lot about them, the few sane ones tend to keep to themselves in their own district here. It’s the ones that lost their minds that scare us. Ada wasn’t exaggerating about them, ain’t anything left of them up there. They just roam the valley around the city, killing and eating any living thing they catch, and it’s…it’s ugly. Never know when a horde will be coming through either, they’re pretty quiet ‘till they see something to eat. To this day they haven’t found a way up the riverbed, they aren’t smart enough to climb up the valley. Only lucky break the prairie got out of those bastards, otherwise they’d have eaten everypony in Trotpeka decades ago.”

“Any chance of finding any of the guys that ran the stop here so we can ask them about that last bridge?”

“It’s been seven years, they could be anywhere,” Kite cried softly, though whether the fear was from talking about the underground or the ghouls was anypony’s guess. “We broke up and scattered into the winds, remember? Safest thing we could do.”

Sling’s gut began to turn and twist inside, fearful of leading any of them—least of all El-Tee—into a part of town with absolutely no knowledge or information about what they were to look for. It seemed simple enough—a river port complex spanning the width of the river itself, but that would mean it would’ve been located in the irradiated industrial district, or very close to it. And if Kite and Ada weren't exaggerating about how dangerous these “ghouls” were, any trip through there could turn south exceptionally quick….

…but she wasn’t about to take any of them, especially the kids, to a part of town openly known to house most of the whores, drugs, and booze that the tortured souls of the wastes drowned themselves in to escape their pain…

…and then it dawned on her, ever so slowly, that a part of her still considered Kite and BJ to be runaways and not the free ponies she kept trying to treat them as…

If they were going to go much further as a group, it was long past time for the group as a whole to start deciding things.

“….so we have a coupla of choices,” she said softly. “Stay in town, wait out the lockdown, or find another way over the valley….”

BJ did not wait for any type of discussion to start—he simply leapt onto the path he found to be the easiest to take. “So let’s just find another inn to laze around in, like we always seem to,” he mumbled bitterly.

“Except that I’m afraid that the Union’s going to start looking for me, specifically, in order to find a way into my old stable,” she said back gently. “I know Colada took her time sending her report out, but a stable pony doesn’t exactly crawl out into the wasteland all that often.”

“But yer stable’s dead, ain’t it?”

“That’s what Mom and I keep sayin’,” El-Tee answered the question for her. “That don’t mean they won’t try, if they really want to. Even a dead stable can still be pretty valuable, if it’s intact. All sorts of stuff inside, guns, bullets, fresh untainted material like raw metal and things like that.”

“So what do they need either of you for then? They already know where the damn thing is, ain’t like it’s moved any in the last coupla hundred years.”

“They don’t have a way in,” Sling replied. “The stable door can take a megaspell blast at point-blank, and our particular door was laced with enchantments that keep a unicorn’s magic from even affecting it. Seeing as how only two or three souls in all of ponykind’s history had the power to move anything that heavy through telekinesis, that would leave any group wanting inside with only one option—the door console. Without the password or a working PipBuck, even that would be worthless to you.”

BJ’s brain did not take very long to figure things out from there. “….and you, for sure, have at least one of those…..”

“I get the impression that a full-functional PipBuck is a rare thing to even see, much less find,” she confirmed grimly. “So yes, a wandering stable pony with a working unit would be a very valuable….find, for anybody looking to crack a Stable open. Colada delayed her report as long as she could, but she couldn’t hide something that important coming through her garrison. If the Union leadership doesn’t know I exist yet, they will very shortly and I’d like to leave as soon as possible before they ramp up a search effort that makes hiding you two from them seem like a child’s game.”

“…they’d only be looking for us,” El-Tee squeaked next, her coming words filling her with a slight, creeping terror at the implications. “….you two could probably get across whenever you wanted, if it came to it—”

“It’s not coming to that,” Kite blurted in a sudden burst of tortured emotions. “We got this far together, we can make it further.”

That got Sling’s attention far better than getting gutshot did. She actually had to stop and make sure it was Kite’s voice she’d heard breaking like that….

…and so did the kids….

….and yes, that had indeed been Kite’s words. Her face cracked, briefly, but when she looked in her eyes, Sling thought she could see a hint of terror at the thought of leaving out on her own to save herself…

….or maybe she’s not entirely sure what to do with her life, now that it’s hers again…

El-Tee, perhaps uncomfortable with the awkward silence that was beginning to form between them, sought to steer them back onto their original topic—their next move. “….well, whatever we do, we need to do it soon. Stay put, or find a way over, and we got a lead on the second option we oughta check out, at least.”

“And the second we find it yer gonna insist on goin’ through with it,” BJ shot back, a slight accusing tone to his words. “We’re fine, we ain’t runaways no more. I don’t even get why you think anybody’d go to the trouble to get the main bridge shut down just to hold us up, Saurus ain’t alive anymore. I do not wanna go anywhere near the valley where ghouls might be waiting for a snack!”

“What about the slavers that almost took you and Kite away, when Mom came and gave them all those caps?” the little filly said next. “Their leader knew you two were runaways…that we knew it. He might have cared more about the caps in the end, but the guys you say the major shot up or killed? You think they’re gonna forget that, or let their reputation suffer for it? They killed a lot of people to keep their sick slavery going, and they don’t seem like the type to let things go so easy. I can see them pulling this stunt to make us sit still long enough to come after us.”

It didn’t take more than a couple of seconds’ thought to realize that El-Tee was probably far more accurate and correct than any of them wanted to admit. How this filly, this child, could come to conclusions that adults should have arrived at a lot sooner baffled her to this day, but there was a terrifying clarity to her logic.

Because if she were in their horseshoes, if she were that nasty minded, she was certain she’d be doing exactly what the filly was suggesting was possible.

“….buck me, Mom, why does that sound like she’s right?” BJ whispered with a deathly hoarse.

“…because they’ve done it before,” Kite cried in soft terror. “We need to leave Trotpeka. Today.”

She wanted to be wrong. So very, horribly wrong. That a pony couldn’t be that…that angry, that they were willing to engineer (or outright fabricate) a “slave escape” and shut down a town’s exits simply to trap the souls they were hoping to murder.

And then she’d remember that wagon full of ponies, glimpses of whom she’d caught through the tears in the fabric covering the wagon, as it passed by her, and seeing nothing but defeat and hopelessness in their eyes as it rolled out of the major’s town. And she would remember that anypony who thought subjecting another soul to a life like that was okay, was not exactly a nice or stable person to start with.

She’d watched Mom kill raiders—literally blew one’s head up with that big gun of hers, a sight she found more haunting than the fact that Mom had killed. She’d watched her kill bandits and guns for hire, and saw how she seemed so much more…okay with it the more she did it. Like she could live with slaying another pony. And maybe she could, given that she hadn’t shot anybody who wasn’t trying to kill or enslave them. She was pretty sure Mom would have no trouble with taking a slaver’s life, and she was hoping she would never have to see that, because she was pretty sure Mom wouldn’t be so gentle about it (at least, as gentle as one could get with shooting or stabbing somepony).

The scariest part of that thought, though…was that she wasn’t sure she would feel bad about a few slavers getting killed. And the first time she’d pondered that horrifying thought last week, she’d barfed up breakfast and nearly messed herself, making it the bathroom by the barest of margins. She was lucky she’d been alone at the time, or she’d have never heard the end of it from the others.

So she wanted to be wrong. She wanted her all-too-real scenario to turn out to be worrying over nothing, and that the four of them would just scoot on down this river port’s bridges and be on their merry way, laughing at how silly she was to be suggesting that the slavers were looking to murder them all despite giving them a fortune in caps to let Kite and BJ go free. She wanted to spend the rest of her life not seeing how truly angry Mom could get with somepony, and watching her tear them apart like those bugs she hated so much.

And most of all, she wanted to be home, in the stable, laughing and playing with Emmy and Jam again and worrying about nothing more than homework and how long they’d get to play in an afternoon. She missed their company. Their voices. Their gleeful, careless laughs. She did her best not to think about them too much, and BJ was amusing enough that it wasn’t that hard. But on days like today, when she was faced with the reality of where she was standing and walking right then….she would remember. And then it took every bit of will (and a couple of cold, wet noses poking her along) to keep herself moving without breaking into a crying fit.

Days like today, were always the hardest.

And so she took to the best relief she could find.

“…h-hey, Beige, what’s yer name?” she said quietly, starting with the first question of the day she always asked him for these last two months.

He never answered in the same way twice. “I am Pale Death, come to deliver you into Tartarus,” was today’s sarcastic reply.

“…no, seriously, what does BJ stand for?”

“…oh, that name,” he snipped back playfully. “….nah, not for girl’s ears. Even I don’t like it. Why would I tell you?”

“’Cause I asked? I mean, you know my name.”

“And it fits oh so very well with you,” he laughed, his eyes stealing a look at her namesake. “Seriously, if you swish that tail enough it turns into a light show and blinds the crap out of me. It’s kinda awesome, that bright streak even matches your eye color. As names go, you got a real fitting one.”

She didn’t know why, but hearing him say something like that about her made her blush a little. It was a rare enough thing for him to compliment anybody to start with. “Eeech…I dunno, I kinda wish Mom coulda been more original….”

“What, you don’t like Light Tail?”

Her thoughts of home, and Emmy and Jam, faded quickly, uplifted ironically by the company of a colt that seemed to spend most of his day dead to the world around him. An irony in itself, as most of the world pretty much was dead, if these crumbling city ruins were any clue. “I didn’t say that, I just…c’mon, Light Tail? Anybody that so much as looks at my tail gets the joke right off.”

“But it ain’t a joke. I mean it, it just fits. I mean, look at my mom. Kite? She looks nothing like one, she’s just lucky her cutie mark matches.”

“Wonder what it means. Haven’t seen her try to fly one.”

“Ask her sometime, she’ll probably tell ya. If she feels like it.”

Her brief, joyous mood began to dampen once more. You’ve asked that before and didn’t get an answer…

“At least tell me what yours means.”

“In how many different languages do I need to tell you “no” in? ‘Cause I only know one.”

“…three?”

“I’ll work on it. In the meantime, no! Nada, zippo, zilch, zero!”

She let her breath come out in a heavy sigh. “Look, if you don’t tell me yer name I’m gonna have to make one up.”

This actually got a short chuckle out of the boring-faced colt….and a surprising answer. “Fine, then.”

Her ear flicked as she cocked her head in his direction. “Wha…wait, what?”

“I said ‘fine, then’. Make one up. No name you come up can be worse than what I got stuck with, trust me.”

She stopped cold in her tracks, and felt Mona’s coat brush against her side as the mutt came to a stop beside her. “….where’s Beige, you deceivin’, low-down dirty….deceiver?!”

“He has gone to find himself,” the colt droned back, still trotting forward and leaving her behind in his wake. “If he should get back before he returns, please keep him here.”

She couldn’t help but snicker through her nose at that. “Mona, quick, stop him—”

And before she knew it, the now-Light-Tail sized husky pup eagerly darted forward and attempted to pin the colt to the ground, only to have the slippery bugger begin hopping forward to escape her. “Hey, what’s this, he came back,” he laughed, even going so far as to hop backwards as the pup leapt forward. “Why’s the dog chasing me—”

“Mona, heel—”

Mona looked a little conflicted, perhaps having expected a little playtime, but she settled down quickly nonetheless and came back to her side with a soft howl. They were doing that a lot more lately. More howling than barking. And the sheer variety of howls, the tones and volumes, the moods….it was starting to match the more adult, wolfish-like appearance they were growing into. These guys were going to be bigger than her in no time at all, and they’d still be growing for months afterward. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to be happy or terrified of that concept, so she just went back to bugging BJ.

“Okay, so now that we got Beige back we gotta find a name for him since he won’t give it,” she giggled, her brain already dreaming up several with which to torment him. “There’s the old favorite Butter Jelly—”

BJ stopped hopping around and slowed down his pace until he was back at her side again. “Better not.”

“Next candidate would be Burnt Juice—”

“I think I’ll leave the story on that one a mystery.”

She snorted through her nose, the mere mention of the name being just enough to jog the memory into focus. “It was some cranberry juice I tried to make once, and POOMF! Went up in some crazy flambé, think I used something flammable in the mix.”

His short laugh rumbled through her chest. “Oh crap, you try to cook?”

“I got good at it…eventually. Fact is, I did the cooking in the stable ‘cause Mom never really cared for it. She’s not bad at it, she just don’t like doin’ it and found it easier to just let me have the kitchen.”

“Oh wow, a grown mare having her meals prepared by a mere ten-year-old filly!”

That one seemed to reach Kite and Mom, and she could see Mom wilting lightly under Kite’s curious and sly glare. “Ten and a half! ….or is it ten and three quarters now…anyways, next name in the round robin, Buttfire Juke—”

“Okay, I take it back, you can do worse—”

She went on with her tirade, catching a sideways glance from Mom and Kite in the process (but for the moment neither of them yelled “Shut up!”). “How ‘bout Blazing Junipers—”

“…better than what I thought it was gonna be when I heard ‘Blazing’—”

“Burning Junkpile?”

“….Mom, can I tell her my name?”

“No!!” came Kite’s instant and exasperated refusal.

The next name to come out of her mouth almost ended the short game before she was ready for it. “Baffled Junebug!”

“Mooooooomm—”

“Nooo!!!” Kite screamed back, and that was when Mom’s gaze went from disinterested to…displeased, and she started to turn around.

“Light Tail—” Mom began to say in that low, threatening tone seemingly shared by all moms and dads, that little warning that was meant to say ‘You’re treading on real thin ice, buddy!’.

Panicking a little (and not wanting to find out what punishment she could get that would be worse than living in the wastes or having to eat military MRE’s for a day), El-Tee’s eyes quickly swept over BJ, hoping that a quick visual scan of him would trigger a name that would get her out of this mess she’d just dug for herself—

—noticed that his bluish-coat seemed to match up well with the duller, darker shade of blue of his short mane and lengthy tail—

“….Blue Jay?”

The name popped out before she knew it was in her head—alongside a brief, fleeting photo of a long-extinct (she assumed, anyway) blue jay and its distinctive blue feathers—but once uttered, found that it seemed….ironic, paradoxically. Blue jays were supposed to be pretty noisy and aggressive, more than willing to mob and chase hawks, owls, and the occasional pony that wandered into its territory. BJ, despite the blue coat and mane that reminded her of the bird at a glance, was neither of these things…and yet she found the name fitting.

This was all, naturally, beyond the colt’s understanding. “….what’s a blue jay?” his confused face asked when he ran the words through his brain and came up with nothing.

She laughed, giggled, and even hopped up and spun around in a circle, briefly pleased to have tripped him up on something today. “It was a noisy, aggressive bird that would chase hawks and owls! And ponies, if they felt like it. You’re like, super-quiet and passive and tend to sleep and rest in the corner of a room! Yeah, you’re Blue Jay now!”

His look of confusion remained, eyeing her over as though she’d lost her marbles, and then looked back at his mom. “….I’d like to reconsider the Junebug thing—“

“Blue Jay sounds….nice,” Kite’s voice sighed wistfully, her aggravated features having melted into a slight visage of…happiness? Gratitude? It was hard to say exactly what she seemed to be feeling, but at least she wasn’t mad anymore. “….hell of a lot better than the real name you got. Blue Jay it is.”

And then Kite’s head turned back around, looking ahead once more, and her posture and body language seemed to perk up a little, like she found the whole thing….uplifting. Even Mom seemed….pleased, if nothing else.

“…that is nice,” Mom murmured quietly at last, returning to her previous spot just ahead of Kite, with Max staying right behind her the entire time. “Make it last by being quieter, would you?”

…well, at least she wasn’t going to be gagging down a military ration for dinner! She’d call this one a win! She was happy now, Kite was happier, and BJ was now Blue Jay and looked like he’d just lost ten straight rounds of blackjack against her!

“….know this,” BJ promised in an evil, dark voice. “You are doomed. You must sleep sometime. And I know where you sleep. And when you do, vengeance will be mine.”

“You know where I’m gonna sleep tonight?!” she squealed in fake glee. “Oh where doth we settle this fine night, little colt? A cave of rock and moss, or a squalid diner covered in a thick layer of rust and dirt and—“

“Ohhh, godsdammit,” BJ’s voice moaned in despair, his head hanging low briefly. “It’s like an MRE stuck in my ears I can’t get it out—“

“Quiet,” Mom commanded sharply and loudly, forcing the group to a halt as she summarily planted herself firmly still and stared out ahead of her. “I think we found it.”

“It”, when Light Tail shut herself up and squeezed past Mom and Kite’s legs to see for herself, was a rather sorry looking thing. The river port looked no better off than most of the other buildings she’d seen in the wastes—the place was crumbling, ruined, with parts of it scattered across the streets and things like that. The tattered, twisted remains of a chain-link fence had been weathered and worn down to a few rust-covered poles and slabs of fencing sticking out like…like broken bones, ugh. She didn’t know why she thought of it that way.

The most important part—the bridges and walkways connecting each half of the port to the other—was the most depressing. There had indeed been several at one point, but most of them had fallen apart and plummeted to the bottom of the dried-up riverbed long ago. Only three were left intact, and one had enough chunks of it missing anyways that it would probably meet the same fate in a couple of years or less. A second bridge was missing most of its roofing, but what little she could see of it suggested that its flooring was more or less stable and safe. A singular walkway spanning the width of the riverbed stuck out through its lack of guard railing and protective roofing, and it looked like it twisted and titled to the left or right at a couple of points. Not much, but enough to be a problem for two growing puppies.

And through it all, Mom’s eyes kept themselves glued to the little green screen of her PipBuck, her magic working the dials and switches on the thing for reasons understood only by her….

“Closer to the blast crater than I’d like,” she said, her voice slightly shaken. “PipBuck’s not picking up rads where we’re standing, but I can see a few skyscrapers from here that looked like they got hit by the blast two centuries ago. Could be pockets of intense radiation scattered all through here.”

“Never heard of that being a problem with…those guys,” Kite’s voice consoled gently, initially confusing the filly with ‘those guys’ until she realized the mare was probably trying to avoid openly saying anything about the underground. It was a big enough risk to have even mentioned it earlier…. “…but they didn’t have any fancy stable-tec attached to their legs either. You should take point. If you come close to a radiation pocket you’ll get advance warning before it gets too bad. We won’t.”

Mom’s mouth uttered a curse beneath her breath, though to El-Tee’s eyes it looked like that f-word that nobody would explain to her. “…I hit one bad enough, we’re turning back. Don’t have much rad-away to spare. Walk where I walk, don’t stray off, and don’t rush ahead of me until I know it’s safe. That means the pups too.”

“Great,” BJ spat in disgust. “So the mutts relieve themselves in our path instead of beside it?”

“They’ll stay behind us,” El-Tee sputtered the moment BJ aired that unpleasant thought, her magic tugging on Max briefly as she clicked her tongue three times in rapid succession—BJ’s taught signal that the pups were to come to the one signaling them (provided they liked that person enough). And they took to it quickly. She’d hardly felt her tongue pull off the roof of her mouth on the third click when Max turned around and promptly walked back to her, joining his sister behind her.

“That also means no exploring on your own,” Mom finished sternly, and extra loudly to make sure she heard it. “Stay close, stay quiet. This is not a game, our lives depend on it.”

With a nervous gulp, she shut herself up and followed in Mom and Kite’s wake, with BJ in front of her and the pups trailing behind her with a simple “Follow” command. The eerie, tense silence of the dead, decaying city around them only further underscored the seriousness of the moment.

The bits of skeletons and pony bones that had yet to erode away in the streets and sidewalks probably helped too.

This was the first enemy she couldn’t kill with a bullet to the head, and it was scaring her half to death.

Radiation was often referred to as the Phantom Death, because that’s what it was. It had no taste, no smell. No way to feel it seeping into the flesh and bone, no way to even see it through advanced imaging and vision methods, mechanical or magical. Without a working rad detector, there was no way to know where it was or how much of it one had been exposed to until it was too late. And even with a detector, in the modern age that was the wasteland there was no way to defeat it, dilute it, or move it once it had settled into an area to live out its ridiculous half-life often measured in decades or centuries. If it was there, then it was there and one either bit the bullet (and a Rad-X) and walked through it, or found another way around it.

Her mind continually assaulted her with memories of the First Ones’ journals and memoirs as they crept closer to the river port’s perimeter, marked by the tattered remnants of an old fence. Some of the First Ones had been soldiers, combat medics, or engineers in the Equestrian military, and had enough first-hoof experience with radiation and its dangers to fill in the blanks those dry textbooks and encyclopedias left out. Even a hundred rad count exposure dose was enough to induce nausea and vomiting—higher counts turned one’s bodily functions into uncontrollable rivers of discharge. A rad count of four hundred was lethal half the time—600 and higher was guaranteed death, and it was never pretty. Apart from the combined uncontrolled nausea, vomiting, and the runs, one could expect their mane and tail to fall apart, their coat to lose swaths of hairs, their skin to blister and boil, and even flash burns to appear. In the case of the skin and flesh damage, one could expect great amounts of pain in the process.

In short, it was probably an act of mercy to outright kill an irradiated soul with a rad count in the 600 range. Most victims in the 400 range, in the age of the wasteland, would probably argue that they warranted a mercy kill themselves, and she wouldn’t argue with it. Even a minor exposure of 25 rads was enough to affect the body in noticeable ways.

That they weren’t already laced with enough radiation to kill them inside of two days was a miracle in of itself—the blast crater in Trotpeka’s industrial sector was only four miles from the river port, and this was supposedly the point at which the Union’s dive teams would launch their experiments and suit up for animal retrieval afterward. And with only limited amounts of Rad-Away and no doses of Rad-X to pop in advance, any encounter with radiation would effectively kill their sojourn into the river port. If El-Tee was right about those slavers (and she hoped she wasn’t), that would leave them sitting ducks waiting to be eaten.

She could only recall a couple of other moments in her life when she was this terrified inside—once, five years ago, locked away inside an armory she couldn’t get into while radroaches shrieked and banged on vent coverings and doors. And then again when she was running down a tunnel to a long-deserted stable, with fire-breathing ants close behind. How she wasn’t showing it in her legs, or involuntarily pissing all over herself, she would never know.

Regardless, she kept one eye glued to the upper right corner of her vision, where her E.F.S. would helpfully (or maliciously, depending on one’s view) display whether her immediate environment was laced with life-threatening radiation levels to the point where it would register on a per-minute/second scale. Anything that even registered and couldn’t be bypassed within twenty seconds would end their expedition. She hoped the river port’s buildings would have kept out all the hard stuff in the blast and the decades afterward.

Her tender, almost hesitant steps beyond the fence gave her hope to continue when she failed to hear that scratchy, clicking sound that was the PipBuck’s rad counter going off. Each step she took that didn’t register rads was a small victory….up to and including what looked like the door into the river port’s administration and office building, which they were now drawing close to.

And when her magic slowly twisted the doorknob to test the lock, the knob crunched and clanked open, likely tearing it up in the process, and allowed the door to creak open and invite the whole lot of them into its dim, dank depths, as if openly mocking them with the possibility of death by invisible particles of radioactive matter.

It took all of her willpower to lead them inside, ignoring the faint, taunting images of Kite or herself lying in a pool of…messes….dying…..ever so slowly and horribly….

…oh shit, maybe BJ’s right this time….

“….well, it’s okay so far,” Kite’s voice heaved softly in nervous despair. “Even got some lighting in here. Not much, but…if it has that much, then the Union probably uses it from time to time.”

As her eyes adjusted to the diminished light of the half-dozen overhead lights that still worked, somehow, she found it difficult to believe that anypony would find any use for a place in such rough shape. They were inside the front lobby—not much aside from a reception desk and an open doorway that had once been home to a pair of glass security doors, but which had shattered ages ago. All that was left of their existence was a dented door handle and a few shards of glass. Place looked like nobody had bothered to repaint it or repair it in two centuries, the ceiling was falling apart and leaving big gaping holes in the roof.

In fact, it was so quiet that she didn’t hear another word from any of them until they’d navigated their way through the office building and into the warehouse area proper through a connecting corridor a few minutes later. The warehouse racks, probably once stuffed full of goods and supplies, had been picked clean of anything useful over the decades and now revealed only skeletal-looking towers of dark-green painted steel and rusted-out, rotted lift machines scattered throughout the warehouse floor. Many other racks, however, had succumbed to fatigue and age and fallen apart, creating piles of dangerous debris that now lay between them and the other side of the warehouse. Not even a trace of any wooden pallets remained. The remaining empty racks that still stood stretched for several hundred feet all the way to their right, where she could make out the small shack at the end of the building that she guessed was the warehouse receiving office.

And still, not a hint of radiation lingering about, waiting for a pony to stumble upon it and silently claim their life. No red hash marks angrily dancing about the compass bar of her E.F.S., no alien sounds in the immediate environment that didn’t belong…not that she’d be able to tell what kind of sounds a dead, abandoned warehouse was supposed to have. She wasn’t hearing any skittering or bugs screeching, at least. That was usually a good sign.

Usually.

Still, she took the lead, gingerly hoofing up and over any obstacles that could be climbed over, or shoving it aside in a fit of telekinesis if she didn’t feel like messing with it. With every crash of metal she created, she’d sit still for a few seconds, sweeping her head in a slow scan of the warehouse to see if her noisy antics had aroused any mutant lifeforms from a deep slumber. One would have thought the first coupla of times would be enough, but then, El-Tee had to bang sauce pans against her head to get her to wake up most mornings….

…well, at least the wasteland had that much over her old stable life. It was a miracle she hadn’t developed a bad case of tinnitus from it. As it was, she’d notice now and then, once every few weeks, that she would get this ringing tone in her ears for about ten to fifteen minutes before it gradually faded out. She noticed it enough over the last couple of years that she perfected her hearing protection spell so that she could simply cast it with almost no conscious thought. She’d been working on a duration component that would allow it to last several hours so that she could cast it before bed and not risk having her ears damaged further by those damned sauce pans. She’d also considered just telling the filly to stop that nonsense….but now that she was wandering about the surface surrounded by slavers, thieves, murderers, rapists, and irradiated, mutant insect and animal life capable of tearing ponies apart limb from limb, she’d put that part of her magical research on hold for fear that she might miss the noises these new dangers would make sneaking up on her in her sleep…

So maybe Kite’s method is the preferable one, after all. Bleh.

Naturally, merely bringing the mare into the front of her thoughts seemed to cause the universe to compel her to speak. “….why don’t we break into that office for lunch?” Kite suggested lightly as they drew near the garage-sized office shack shoved into the farthest corner of the warehouse. “You slept through breakfast and the kids haven’t had a bite in a while…”

Her stomach rumbled and rolled silently, tickling her insides and teasing her brain with a faint suggestion of hunger, and with a simple sigh she changed her course, aiming away from the warehouse exit and towards the front office door. Once inside she began pushing several overturned file cabinets aside to give them some legroom to walk in. It turned out that the office was a two-room structure—a divider wall in the middle separated the office space from the second room, with a door and a wide window sill giving her a good view into it. She could see several round tables in this back room, each with a set of four or five chairs, as well as a dust-covered, brown-colored couch that had probably been a much brighter color in a past life. A quick walk-through with her PipBuck found no trace of radiation to speak of, and with a tap of her right forehoof the others filed into the room behind her, with the kids opting to take up space in the rec room for their lunch.

The pups seemed a little conflicted as to where they wanted to be, looking between the mares and the kids several times before Max decided he wanted to stay near the kids, and Mona opted to stay with the adults and sat down underneath an office desk to patiently await her next meal.

Kite’s body plopped down onto the floor, next to a file cabinet, visibly relieved to be off her hooves for even a few minutes. “Oh sweet Luna, these long walks are getting harder every day,” she sighed happily as her legs were stretched out from beneath her body, and then left splayed out in a limp state out to the sides as she remained in an upright position. “How much further are we going today?”

Sling’s magic absently dug into her saddlebags after snapping her travelling saddle off and setting it on the floor, her mind’s eye being bombarded with faint images of the enchanted bags’ contents as she sorted through them until she came upon her stable ration packs and sucked two of them out into the world. A brief glimmer of purple light radiated out from the open bags as the ration packs emerged from within, and one was tossed over into Kite’s waiting spell field. “Depends on what we find on the other side,” Sling answered. “Leon gave me directions to a town to the northwest but it’s about fifteen miles out from the city, and I’m pretty sure you don’t have another fifteen miles in you today.”

“I most definitely do not,” Kite groaned at the mention of the distance to their next stop, setting the ration down onto the overturned file cabinet and tearing one end of the wrapping off to activate the cooking enchantment. “Wasted too much energy getting your lazy ass awake.”

Sling set her ration down next to Kite’s as she laid down on the other side of the file cabinet. Forelegs out in front of her, her hind legs laid out behind her in an awkward-looking position that only the young could find comfortable. Fortunately for her, she’d yet to grow out of that stage of body flexibility. “I’ve never been much of a morning person…”

“No shit,” Kite growled lightly, quickly dumping the contents of the MRE pack onto the cabinet after carefully sliding the still-cooking meal tray out. “I thought Elly was exaggerating her stories, but I’m beginning to wonder if she was actually trying to sugarcoat her struggles with you.”

“I think my mild tinnitus is thanks to her damned sauce pans,” Sling grumbled, her next foray into her saddlebags producing a 2-quart, squared canteen she’d filled with black unsweet tea the morning they’d left Galesville. With the cold chill enchantment on the canteen cover, it would provide a nice, refreshing and safe drink for lunch…and Kite’s eyes always went glossy whenever the stuff was poured out. “Kinda glad she doesn’t have those stupid things to wake with me anymore, even if your method’s worse.”

The second she set the canteen down alongside a pair of tin drinking cups, Kite’s eyes went from tired and half-lidded to wide awake and fully alert. She’d watched her fill this canteen and knew full well what was in it. “….oh dear gods, tea for a road lunch?”

“You look like you need the caffeine,” she replied, popping the spout cap off and filling the cups to roughly half an inch shy of the brim. “Save the flavored drink packet for your water later.”

Caffeine—or any kind of stimulant—was the last thing on Kite’s mind, however. All she wanted was the taste of the tea itself, and the second she had herself a short sip of it from her cup, her mood seemed to brighten as the liquid flowed its way through her. “Buck me, this stuff is always a treat after a lifetime of just water and flat sodas. Stop spoiling me like this or you’ll never get me off your back.”

“Oh, I will once you get to where you’re going,” Sling laughed quietly, though one ear was keenly tuned to the rec room beyond. She could hear the kids bantering back and forth, but quietly, and a soft tear of MRE wrappings muffled enough of one sentence to make it inaudible—

—and reminded her that Mona was still hiding under the desk behind her, waiting for something to eat. She dug back into her saddlebags for a suitable meal, quickly coming up with some strips of dried jerky meat lightly preserved in salt, and tossed them at the pup—

—Mona’s jaws instantly snapped out and clamped onto a jerky strip before it could touch the ground, and the pup quickly began gnawing and consuming her “catch” with a contented whine. The others would be devoured in due time. Little bastards were getting ravenous in their hunger…

With that issue settled, Sling turned her attention back to her own MRE cooking itself before her, sparing a quick glance at the discarded wrappings still as she sucked them up in a spell field—

Ahhh, a decent one, penne pasta with some basil sauce, coupla hot rolls, so—OH godsdamn hashbrown casserole I love that stuff!

Her eyes flicked back up, almost pulling one of the wrappings up for Kite’s perusal….

….and saw Kite’s eyes growing downcast and sullen despite the cup of tea in her magical grasp.

…..oh, crap….

“….you’re beginning to doubt if you want to part ways,” she murmured softly, her attention rapidly shifting away from the coming meal and onto this increasingly conflicted ex-slave. “…aren’t you?”

Kite’s long, sad sigh all but confirmed the stable pony’s fears. “….I…never actually expected to get this far,” she said quietly, her eyes seemingly drawn to the dark amber liquid that filled her cup. “I certainly never expected anypony to risk everything they had to free me. None of the things that have happened these past three months have been…expected. And here I am, several hundred feet from the unofficial border of Union territory with a freedom mark on my neck, in the company of the mare that freed me, drinking this….this rare and delicious unsweet tea that was probably a common drink in Equestria That Was….I’m close to getting everything I want and I’m not sure I want it anymore….”

Sling barely contained the f-word curse that flowed freely through her mind. “….what did you want, before we met?”

“To live to tomorrow,” Kite answered immediately with a soft howl. “Now I’m measuring my life expectancy in weeks instead of days. Might even get to see if my hometown is still intact.”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“The Union barely exists beyond the valley,” Kite answered, her magic playing with her MRE pack’s contents and sorting them out—condiments, what looked like a cherry-flavored power mix for a water canteen, and….a small package of six cheese spread cracker sandwiches? A rather rare treat, actually, she’d only snagged one herself these last three months. “Some of their largest trade companies have a few caravans making rounds on the west side, but that’s about it. And the Runners aren’t nearly as large a group as their wandering scouts might suggest. They can’t be everywhere at once, and a lot of the smaller towns aren’t so lucky as to be able to afford to hire up a town guard. My home was one of those towns…hell, the lack of a guard is why I got caught in a slaver raid to begin with.”

Sling’s magic, having barely dumped her own MRE pack out onto her part of the file cabinet, flickered briefly in surprise. This was the first time she could recall Kite ever mentioning anything about her life before slavery. “…how did that happen?”

“Because like the dumb little fourteen old girl I was I went out at night after my parents told me not to,” Kite cried wistfully, her mess kit floating out next to her meal tray as she peeled the film cover off. “I….I was sneaking out to meet up with a colt who lived on the other end of town and….”

Part of her wanted to laugh at the idea of a teenaged Kite actually chasing boys instead of girls….but the fact that her hormones had landed her into such a hard and abusive life killed any humor in it. “….were you the only one they caught?”

“….no,” Kite murmured sadly, poking a fork into her hashbrown casserole for a bite. “They caught nine others when they charged the south end of town. I was the only kid in the group, they were mainly going after young adults. Eighteen to twenty, one stallion was the oldest at twenty-two. I imagine they only took me ‘cause they didn’t have the heart to kill a kid and didn’t want me getting away to warn the town night watch. They still slaughtered quite a few in their raid before the town could organize enough guns together to sting ‘em. We weren’t all that well armed, mostly pistols and some shotguns. One old coot of a griffon who lived on top of a hill near town had a rifle, he would be the one that’d take care of radscorpions that got close, but…other than that, we were hardly a threat to anybody organized. Once the slavers got over the valley they sold us off to the first guilded caravan they met, Silver Plate’s guild. One of the nicer ones, if you can call a slaver nice. Most of the group got sold off over the next year, but Silver Plate won’t sell kids. Wound up getting “sponsored” to a few masters until I was eighteen.”

“….sponsor?”

“It’s….not quite ownership, but not really free either,” Kite replied between bites. She really liked the casserole. “It’s how most of the guilds condition children they catch or buy. They put the kid with a slave owner, and the “sponsor” pretty much does their best to turn them into controllable slaves, if not obedient ones. Initially it was mostly chore work—clean house, clean what dishes they got, clean brahmin pens…icky job, by the way. When I got switched off to a shopkeeper it was “mind the store”, “count this shit I call my wares”, “stock the shelves”. Not a bad life, that one, actually. Third “sponsor”, she was something else. Loved guns and MEWs, was backed by Searchlight’s guild. She kinda hit on me now and then, but for most of my time with her she never really did anything with it. Probably just trying to encourage me to work harder without using a whip or a cattle prod….it….it kinda worked.”

“Kinda?”

“I was just a scared kid taken away from her home and family by violent people, I took any relief I could get. In some ways you kinda remind me of her, actually….well, aside from the subtle flirting, anyway—”

….oh gods, is that where part of her infatuation is coming from? Sling’s brain mused with a slight tinge of horror. “….Kite, I’m starting to think these slavers did more than just….use you. You’re speaking of these “sponsors” with some degree of fondness.”

“….you’re probably right,” the other mare sighed. With most of her casserole now gone, she turned her attention to the hot rolls, taking out roughly a fourth of one in a single mash of her jaws. “Compared to most of the “masters” I wound up with later, they were actually…decent, especially the gun and MEW nut, Boom Boom.”

Even with her brain trying to come to grips with the possibility that part of Kite’s constant passes were partially a result of teenaged conditioning, she found it impossible to avoid laughing at this third “sponsor’s” name. “Oh no, seriously?”

“Everypony called her Boomer ‘cause they were too scared to say her real name,” Kite’s subdued voice laughed back. “The one soul that dared to spit out “Boom Boom” to her face didn’t like what she did to his gun afterward, but he kinda deserved it the way he treated her. She wasn’t that much older than me by the time I wound up with her. I was seventeen, she was….nineteen? Maybe twenty at most? She never really said. She thought I was older than I really was at first ‘till I told her, and then the flirting kinda dialed back a little. Real genius with MEWs, could get them shooting and running with junk parts if she had to, but she really wanted to get them working like fresh factory units.”

Sling had barely registered her food for most of the conversation—only her first bite of hashbrown casserole finally got through to her taste buds, and she relished each taste afterward, inwardly feeling guilty for not even realizing she’d swallowed most of her penne pasta already. “And yet you say you didn’t learn anything on guns until later?”

“She wouldn’t let me near them,” Kite answered. “She’d just gotten accepted into Searchlight’s guild, she didn’t want to screw that up. Most of the time I just handled her influx of clients and customers. A couple thought I was….available, for other purposes, but she actually shot one of them for trying and scared the other one off before he could finish his request. I asked why later, and she said she’d had to do things like that before she was sixteen just to be able to eat, and that she wasn’t going to put me through anything like that.”

“Unless it was her.”

“….that, happened a week after my eighteenth birthday,” Kite said, her ears flattening with embarrassment, though a small smile still managed to flow into her lips. “She took a day off, kept her shop closed…the day before I was shipped off to Stifla for my first slave auction. It was the strangest thing I’d seen a slave sponsor do, we just….stayed at her house all day. No work, no chores, just…lazing around. I’d thought I was free for a moment, but she made sure I knew different, said that I probably wouldn’t get any days like that day again, and that I should just relax and enjoy it while I could. Everything was….nice, and slow, and lazy….until after dinner. I don’t remember how it started, but…well, our day off ended in the bedroom with some…rigorous exercise. The morning after, when I was picked up by the caravan taking me to the auction block, she kept staring at the wagon train the whole time that I could see her. And I swear that I could see her tearing up a little, just before the wagon started rolling. That….that was probably the only time in my entire life as a slave that I’d been treated like a pony…or see anybody involved with it show any sign of regret...”

“….so, am I a….a substitute, for past memories?” Sling’s mouth uttered before her brain realized it had come to that conclusion.

Kite’s face lost its wistful nostalgia, though the lack of any anger in her body language suggested that she wasn’t in the least bit insulted or infuriated by that accusation. “….I guess it would be naïve to think there’s no connection, even a subtle one, but that’s not really it, mostly. I can’t even explain it to myself, I just…you’ve risked a lot for me and BJ, even if you didn’t really want to at first. Something about you changed after Saurus nearly killed you. You….you actually kinda opened up a little when you told me your real name.”

“….you’d just pulled three bullets out of my guts, no painkillers or anything, and put up with my thrashing and screaming and shitting myself in the process,” Sling’s voice croaked sheepishly, the hot roll in her telekinetic grasp suddenly becoming far too small a thing to be hiding behind. “Pumped your blood into me to keep me going afterward. And the first thing you ask me, after making sure everything else was fine, is my name…and it didn’t seem right to hide something that simple and stupid.”

“I wouldn’t say stupid,” Kite snickered lightly. “Got off easier than Boomer did, as names go. As for your….less closed state of mind….I can’t blame you for not wanting to make any friends so soon after losing your home. And the wasteland is unforgiving. It’ll take your friends before you know it’s happened, and shit on you afterward to make sure you know it….”

“Which brings me back to my original question…what do you plan to do now?”

The last of Kite’s hot roll disappeared into her maw, delaying her ponderous answer until she’d swallowed it. “….I honestly don’t know,” she admitted with a heavy breath. “Best course of action would be to just find a town in need of a soul with medical knowledge and set up a business, considering it’s the only skill I have worth trading in. Part of me wants to stay with you, but that all depends on your plans….”

“….north,” Sling answered. “I want to go north, find out what happened to the Equestria Core, why nopony’s come down here in nearly two centuries. And if I remember right, you said the old mountain pass between here and there was a…no mare’s land?”

Kite’s face darkened quickly. “It’s death,” she warned sharply. “Nopony’s ever come out of it. Nopony even knows how many have gone in, because they never come back out. The two settlements closest to it say they can see dust storms on the horizon, big brown clouds that just blot out everything you can see. Some swear they can hear the wind howling even from several miles away. If anypony could have gotten through it they would have a long time ago. Don’t waste your time.”

“There has to be a way through. Ain’t hard to dress up for foul weather and I still got enough rations to last two months, I can find a way—”

“Don’t,” Kite begged once more, a foreleg shooting out to latch onto one of hers in a pleading touch. “Don’t go. I told you, nopony’s ever come out of there. It’s too dangerous for a grown, fit mare, let alone a kid, you can’t drag Elly in there with you.”

She began to answer back, to try to explain her plans for the future a little further, but a flurry of color at the bottom of her vision distracted her from the task—

—and set her on an entirely new one when her eyes spotted a red hash mark on her compass bar, floating about from the far left and slowly finding its way to the center—

—she promptly pulled away from her lunch and lurched up to the office door, pulling her 10mm and her knife from her travelling saddle crumpled up on the floor—

—she could barely hear Kite’s hooves quickly and quietly shuffling across the floor behind her, moving further into the office, ostensibly to warn the kids, but her eyes were practically laser-focused onto the warehouse as she poked her head around the doorway—

—a black-armored unicorn stallion was traversing the length of the warehouse wall, slowly making his way towards the office, but his eyes were focused on the rows of empty steel in the center of the warehouse and had yet to notice her peering out at him. She couldn’t make out his coat color in the faintly lighted interior, though the brown leather gun belt wrapped around his torso wasn’t hard to find. The red hash mark on her E.F.S. moved in conjunction alongside him, and though no other marks were popping up, she wasn’t convinced he was alone.

It looked like El-Tee was right after all.

She quickly zipped back into the office, watching the hash mark and crouching down as low as she could and hoping, vainly, that he wouldn’t want to waste his time searching the office. It wasn’t long before the sound of his hooves began reaching her ears—

—and the smell of her lunch reaching his nose, apparently, as he began to pick up his walking pace almost immediately. “Sonvabitch they got actual food—”

Sling’s brain screamed and cursed at her stomach for its longing for a meal, though for the moment it seemed his eagerness for a quick snack would work in her favor. He didn’t seem to be considering the possibility that they were still there. Hell, she might even be able to ambush him, silently take him out before he could get a shot off—

—he managed the impressive feat of closing the distance to the door while that thought went through her mind, his voice booming out around the doorway as he drew near—

“All right!” he shouted gleefully, right on the other side of the wall she was hiding behind. “Leftovers that don’t look like a pile of ma—”

His body had barely begun passing through the doorway when her body and magic sprang out, her forelegs grabbing hold of him as she tackled him and sent them both back out of the office, her knife tearing its way into his throat and turned his gleeful shout into a gurgling, blood-choking cry of pain and terror—

She didn’t wait for him to bleed out—she just pushed the knife in as far as she could force it as she pulled his body away from the doorway, to the left and hopefully out of El-Tee’s sight, swore she felt a brief resistance as the blade found bone, and then his brief struggling fit to escape her deadly grasp simply ceased and his body went limp from the neck on down. She let him slide off of his knife as he hit the floor, wiping its blade clean on his exposed foreleg and then quickly pulling the gun belt off of his body before she tossed his dying carcass into the corner, where the warehouse wall met the outside wall of the office shack.

She prayed that Light Tail had not seen any of that. She’d seen her mother kill too much as it was.

“It’s clear,” she called out solemnly as she trotted back through the office doorway, returning her knife and pistol to their respective scabbards before she pulled at the pistol in the gun belt—

—came out with a worn, but still serviceable .45 Auto, a light tingle billowing through her horn four times as she tapped her spell field across the inside of the pouch attached to the belt. Scores of scratches and small dings adorned the slide and frame finish, and there was a bit of play in the slide-to-frame fit, but in all honesty she was impressed at the tightness of the fit considering how old the gun was. Small crack in the trigger guard, just ahead of the trigger itself, grips were aged out and looked rather dull….looked like the left side grip panel screws had some rusting on them. One hit of the magazine release sent the seven-round mag flying from the weapon to land in a waiting spell field, though when she began to pull the slide back she found the recoil and mainspring resistance to be rather light. Probably close to the end of their service life, if they weren’t there already. She racked the slide just enough to check the chamber, found a round snugly in place and awaiting its violent destiny with its next target, and slapped it back into battery before replacing the magazine and stuffing the gun back into its holster.

She barely had time to look up into the rec room and toss the gun belt in Kite’s direction when her E.F.S. lit up with more red hash marks in the center. She couldn’t tell if they were in front of her or behind her, but there were more hostiles around her and she was pretty sure they weren’t coming to make sure they got across the bridge okay.

And Kite noticed her eyes flicking down at the bottom of her vision almost immediately. “….more?”

“At least four, possibly six,” she replied, barely registering the weight of her travelling saddle as she strapped back onto her body. “.45 has a full mag plus one in the chamber, I counted at least four more mags in the gun belt pouch. Check the load on the mags and then we need to go. Mona, with me—”

A short, low howl was the only sign of acknowledgement, but nonetheless the filly-sized pup was by her side in less than three seconds….and when she looked back at the desk the mutt had chosen for her temporary shelter, she saw no trace of any of the jerky strips she’d tossed over there.

“Your stomach is like a vacuum cleaner, mutt,” she groaned mostly to herself. She found the pups getting harder and harder to feed to a satisfactory level. She couldn’t really trust the dogs to say when they were full, they’d eat almost anything put in front of them short of military MREs whether they were hungry or not.

…problem for later. Slavers first, then these bottomless stomach pits we call dogs…

Still, she saw no reason not to finish off what was left of her lunch herself, before the pup could slurp it up. She floated her meal tray and cup up to her, quickly swallowing up the remnants of her penne pasta, hashbrowns, and her last hot roll before chasing it down with the tea in roughly three gulps—

“….really?” Kite’s voice admonished her quietly. “Knife a guy to death and then you’re back to eating lunch?”

“It’s either that or leave it behind and waste it,” she replied, tossing the empty tray aside and putting the canteen and drinking cup back in her saddlebags, and then pulling her shotgun out and topping off the magazine tube with three buckshot shells after racking one into the chamber. “…you want yours, or can the mutt have it?”

Kite’s only response was to silently grumble something along the lines of “lazy-ass mare” before diving her head down at her own meal tray, gobbling up what was left as quickly as she could manage and then slurping up the last of her cup of tea before returning the cup to her. “There, it’s gone, can we get the hell out of here now? Kids were done before we were, ravenous little buggers…”

“I heard that,” BJ bit back bitterly as the mares quickly joined their offspring in the rec room, who were patiently awaiting their mothers by the exit door.

“What was that, you wanted a mil-rat for dinner?” Kite hissed back as Sling pushed herself through the door, which led to what appeared to be a wide, open space of concrete loaded with cargo containers on the east side, though most of them had long ago been looted clean. She could see what looked like the actual docks further ahead, roughly half a mile….

….but to their left, a few hundred feet away, was the one safe-looking bridge over the dry riverbed valley they needed to get to—

—and before they could get ten steps in that direction, those red hash marks began moving, and quickly, as black-clad ponies began emerging from behind the cargo containers. Two, then three, then five—

—and the sixth and last pony, bearing pucker-like scars on his legs and with what looked like a cattle prod resting inside a hoof-made scabbard strapped to his withers, baring such a hateful glare at her that she swore he was trying to kill her with looks alone.

“Had you figured right,” the cattle prod stallion growled angrily, stomping forward with a slight limp as his fellow slavers fell in behind him. Most were unicorns sporting 10mm subguns, though there was one earth pony stallion with a rifle in his battle saddle. “Walked right on out here instead of waiting for the main bridge to open up. You were safer in town, whore.”

A surge of anger shot through her blood as she turned her body towards him, the shotgun pointed low towards the ground. “Colada’s the one that shot your legs up, not me,” she yelled back across the asphalt as his group closed in. Still too far for the shotgun, roughly forty yards, but they were trotting quickly. Maybe in another six seconds… “Take your problems up with her.”

“You brought those runaways with you,” he shouted back, his voice rising with every word. “You talked the major into letting you out so you could get to Julaya and get her help in buying them out—”

Sling’s gut grew slightly colder. He wasn’t far from the truth, but the way he was talking he seemed to think that had been her plan the whole time….

“You made a mockery out of me with that shit you pulled!!” he continued his furious tirade. Thirty yards away, and closing fast. Two more seconds. “You are the reason any of that even happened at all!! Give me one very good reason why I shouldn’t cut your guts out in front of your kid and throw the whole lot of you into that valley with the ghouls!!”

The coldness stopped, and vanished, replaced by a red-hot core that quickly engulfed her nerves and settled its furious justice upon this short-tempered stallion and his five unfortunate friends.

Nopony that had threatened her child had lived to carry it out, and she wasn’t about to let that streak be broken now.

“I won’t bother,” a darkness within her promised. “You won’t live that long.”

You dumbass sonvabitch, Kite screamed inside the moment that damnable stallion and his cattle prod leveled his angry words at them instead of Sling Shot. He’d gone to all this trouble setting them up for an ambush—an ambush that Elly had seen coming half an hour ago! —because his pride and precious ego had been crushed by one very short-tempered Union major, and he blamed Sling for it?!

She might have let his stupidity and short-sighted temper be had he not gone and threatened Elly’s life after promising a gruesome death to Sling. Of all the things that had been said to that mare’s face, the one thing that seemed to set her off so fast and hard was to threaten Light Tail with rape, torture, or death (or some hideous combination of the three). She could sense the mood change in her the moment the stallion’s threats left his mouth, see her body stiffen with barely suppressed rage at the monster that dared set his sick gaze upon her filly. She swore she could even taste it coming off of her in sharp, heated pulses.

She had never seen these violent mood swings until today (though Elly unfortunately had borne witness to it personally a number of times). Sling had only told her about them, and only after a long night of prodding the stable pony over the dried blood that had marked the light injuries she’d sustained killing Saurus…after a long night of crying and laughing in the most exquisite joy she had ever felt ever since she’d left Boomer’s sponsorship. She did not explain when or why these…these mood changes had started, but Kite suspected that it had a great deal to do with being derided as her stable’s outcast and downtrodden “slut”. And now as she looked upon this mare, saw what looked to be half a life’s worth of resentment, anger, and hatred boiling up to the surface with a threat to the most precious thing in her life, she began to wonder if Sling had already been damaged before she’d ever stepped out of her stable and into the hells of the wastes.

She knew of only one safe place to be to wait out the coming storm of violence, given the complete lack of cover out here. Back in the warehouse, just behind them, through the door they’d just walked out of.

So that’s what she did. She scooped up the kids and dogs, and galloped hard right back inside, out of Sling’s way, so that the stable mare could cut loose on these stupid bastards without worrying about whether anyone important to her would be harmed in the process—

No, scratch that, the slavers weren’t completely stupid. The moment she took the kids and animals with her and began scurrying back inside, somepony started firing, a rapid rat-tat-tat-tat-tat of an automatic weapon chasing her all the way through the doorway—

—her ears were quickly overwhelmed by a muffling of the world, as if a set of giant invisible earplugs had just been shoved in, but even then she could make out this strange sound of what sounded like the very audio spectrum itself being warped and bent—

“What the fu—” was about the only thing any of the slavers outside could say before that very sound erupted into a louder, warped WHOOMP!, and what sounded like….

….a wet…crunch….

And that was when the screaming and the shooting started. Mostly automatics, and more than a few rounds tore their way through the wall and encouraged Kite to put as many desks and file cabinets between her and the kids and the fight as she could manage. But amidst the automatics, Sling’s shotgun was very clearly audible in the singular, overwhelming booms that rang out periodically, alongside the lighter, sharper barks of a 10mm and the distinctive pops of her 5.56mm revolver. And amongst all the sounds….

…the sound of…well, sound, being bent, warped, and shifted in tune with whatever spell or weapon was causing it was unmistakable, and unrelenting. As were the screams.

And it seemed that they were all coming from the slavers. Particularly one scream, that turned into a painful wail as the fight raged on an—

—something slammed into the wall, hard, because it cracked the inside of the wall on impact, and suddenly there was one less screaming voice in the world—

—the door banged open again as she shoved Elly and BJ beneath her, to use herself as a shield, and when she poked her head and .45 up over her crude barricade, she spotted one of the unicorn slavers, light tan coat and yellow mane, partially bathed in blood, his SMG floating about in a frantic pattern as he sought to whack a shell casing out of its ejection port, an—

….and peeing himself all over the floor as he frantically tried to escape the battle outside, and found himself facing down the barrel of a .45 Auto leveled at his head—

“O-o-oh fu—”

Kite, for her part, didn’t hesitate. The moment the crude sights settled on his face and she had a solid focus on the front sight over his head she squeezed the trigger straight back once, and then again almost immediately afterward, just like Sling had taught her so many weeks ago, felt the familiar, harsh thump of the pistol bucking inside her spell field as the bullets tore through his head between his eyes, cutting his shriek off and ending every care he had left in the world. His still-urinating corpse rolled backward, as he’d been trying to backpedal away from her and had actually reared up on his hind legs when she’d fired, then collapsed to the ground and knocked a table over onto its side in the process, and through the open doorway, Kite spotted something bathed in….glowing purplish-blue light, that looked like a pony-shaped object streaking through the air for a brief moment in tune with the explosion of another warped soundwave….or whatever the hell was causing that noise….

…because whatever it was, had the slavers terrified, when only moments before they’d been screaming orders and warnings at each other….and now there seemed to be only two le—

Sling’s shotgun blared again, probably for the….sixth? Seven time? She’d lost count already, but in any case, it signified the end of a slaver’s scream, and their life. Their immediate environment was now down to one terrified, sorry excuse of a pony lifeform….

….and strangely, no further gunfire. As quickly as the fight had started, it had come to a deafening, depilating halt. Maybe….

….ten seconds? Eleven?

Even the kids were at a loss as to what had just happened. One second they were staring at a wall of armor-clad ponies ready to murder them, the next they were being dragged back inside and shoved beneath a terrified mare, and then it was just over? Just like that?

“…h-holy shit,” BJ’s shaky, stunned voice mumbled as he crawled his way out from beneath his mother’s barrel. “Wh…what just happened….”

“I don’t wanna know,” Elly wailed softly, stumbling out back onto her own four legs herself. “I just wanna get out of here….”

“…try not to look at anything too much,” Kite warned the filly as she stood up and began trotting back through the door for a third time, gingerly hopping over the trail and puddle of piss the poor soul she’d shot had left behind. “And watch your step.”

“Jeebus Christine that guy made a mess of himself—” BJ’s voice complained bitterly behind her as she slipped through the door—

—she made it about three or four strides before she came to a halt, her mind stunned at the sight she saw up ahead. Sling Shot stood, barely, on four badly shaking legs, her chest heaving in deep, heavy breaths as though she’d just run for ten minutes straight, her weapons clattering onto the ground as her magic flickered out of existence, along with what looked like a pistol belt she’d been trying to lift off one of her kills….

….splotches of blood, covering her right foreleg, and likely part of her body and face as well. Before her were the remains of three slavers—one was missing a left foreleg and had a bloody, unrecognizable face. The second, further away from her, looked like he’d been drilled in the head and neck multiple times, and smaller bloody dots covered his forelegs.

The third….

….the third, looked like that cattle prod stallion.

Looked like him, anyway. She was going by the size of the corpse rather than his face (seeing as how there wasn’t much left of it), and it looked like his body had literally been ripped apart by whatever he’d been hit with. It also looked like whatever he’d been hit with had pushed him across the asphalt directly into the side of a cargo container, shearing off one of his hind legs in the process and leaving a blood trail that marked his path of involuntary travel. The other hind leg looked like it had been blown off by an explosive device, though she didn’t even hear one going off in the fight and couldn’t explain how the injury could have occurred otherwise. His forelegs looked…well, they weren’t really there anymore, but there was a lot of blood spread across the cargo container, and his head was literally bathed in blood, even down to his widened, dead crimson-coated eyes …..

…behind her, she saw, was the body of a fourth slaver crumpled up against the outside warehouse wall, apparently flung into the building with such force that it shattered his spine and neck, and which was responsible for the new crack on the wall inside. Probably killed him instantly, the way the blood was seeping out of his nose, ears, and….

…hell with it, he was dead. No need to learn how. With the one she’d shot in the office herself, that was five….that left on—

“Mom, left!” BJ’s voice cried out sharply—

—she spun herself and her new .45 about in the colt’s desired direction, spotted a sixth, groaning, panicked slaver, a unicorn mare with a bloodied face and tendrils of purplish blue energy peeling off of her body as she struggled to bring herself upright enough to settle the sights of her SMG on either Sling or herself—

—the .45’s sights swung over the mare’s head before she felt her magic push the trigger back, once, and then again, and then a third time, in roughly a second and a half—

—when she saw the body topple over after the fourth shot, she stopped firing and lowered the pistol….

…no more wounded slaver mare. Just a dead one, now.

Just in time for Sling to start puking her lunch back out. After a fight. Again.

Kite felt her stomach flip about at the sound as she flicked the safety on and darted towards her, her medical eye already pouring over Sling’s body for wounds or signs of internal injury as her magic pulled her away from her mess—

“Can you ever keep your food down when you kill people?” Kite tried to jest, to put the exhausted mare’s mind at ease over what had just happened—

“N-not…not the fight,” Sling gasped, spitting out the taste of her own bile at a feverish pitch as her forelegs tried to reach around her for something. “Not the fight….to….too mu….too much magic, too quick…grrrk oh fu—”

Sling’s body lurched forward, ejecting another portion of previously-devoured meals, and Kite had to smile viciously to keep her own gag reflex in check…or so the old mare’s tale went, anyway. “…at least tell me your bowels still feel fine.”

Sling’s body shook violently as her second wave of intense nausea and exhaustion washed through her, and she stumbled about trying to get away from…that stuff, on the ground. “….for the moment…”

“BJ, try and find some healing potions off the slavers, quick,” she barked loudly. Of the two souls left capable of the task, BJ was the one least likely to be disturbed by the aftermath of Sling’s violence, and the colt gladly removed himself from the vomiting mare to carry out his assigned task. Elly, though….

“….Elly, help your mother with some water, she can’t seem to use her magic just yet—”

She needn’t have bothered with the instructions—she’d barely spoken when she saw a flash of electric blue light surround one of Sling’s water canteens, and she was splashing her mother’s mouth with short streaks of water to wash out her mouth and tongue. “M-momma?” the filly cried, tears welling up in her eyes. “Momma, wh…what’s wro—”

“T-too much magic,” Sling’s voice slurred back, partially gurgled by a mouthful of water which she spat out. “Too much….”

“….so that was magic we heard just now?” Kite’s mouth uttered with a baited breath. “….that…that sound, like the sound barrier being warped like sheet metal?”

“….com-combat spell,” Sling choked in reply. “Mana burst….ju…just…too much. Was surrounded….pissed off…no cover….had to go overboard…..mana flowback, I can’t use my magic…”

Shit! Kite hissed silently. An internal physical injury she could deal with….but matters of magic like this were beyond her…and most other souls in the wastes, for that matter. “….that you know what that is tells me it’s happened to you before.”

“….did it once,” the stable mare’s voice bubbled. “Long time ago….told myself not to do it again, haaaa haaaa haaaooo fat lotta good that promise was….”

“Does it hurt you? Internal bleeding, concussion, anything?”

“…one healing potion….would be nice—”

“One it is!” BJ cut in, his tiny body crashing to a halt into her body and shoving one into her open muzzle, which she took without complaint. Drained the thing in like, four seconds. She seemed to like the strawberry and cherry-flavored potions….

As the potion’s magic began to work its way through Sling’s system, Kite took another hard look around them, specifically at the bodies of Sling’s work…well, most of it, she’d killed two herself. She was hoping some of them would have something like a caps purse, or a weapon that Sling hadn’t busted up or shot, but given what she’d just done caps could have been scattered all over the place like the body parts she’d blown off with gunfire or magic…

….no, no need to loot bodies this time. Just leave.

And through the whole mess, the moment Kite had found and reached Sling, the pups had popped up right beside her, whining and whimpering at the state one of their favorite ponies had just gone into, and refused to move away from her even when Kite tried to push them away. It was both endearingly cute and agonizingly aggravating how attached they could get to any of them when they were hurt or sick.

All of that aggravation vanished, flushed out of her system like a shot of Fixer directly into her bloodstream when she heard a sharp pop! in the background, followed the sound as it turned into a fizzling burn—

—a bright red, hot ball of smoking flame streaked up into the sky from the streets, its glow bathing the immediate area around it and filling her with a sharp, horrific dread.

“….oh shit,” she howled in terror, slightly trembling at what the red flare foretold.

Elly’s eyes, also following the flare, somehow knew that it did not signify good intentions. “….what’s that mean?”

“….it’s a warning,” Kite cried, her heart beating faster with every second. “These guys…they weren’t working alone. Others must be nearby….they were probably waiting for a signal flare from this group when the shooting stopped. The red flare means they suspect trouble and want other groups to get over here and see what happened. They’ll be here any minute—”

“…..and with Sling basically an earth pony now we’re easy targets,” BJ finished unnecessarily. “…oh shit, we’re fu—”

“O-over the bridge,” Sling spat out, though she struggled to get to her hooves even after swallowing the healing potion she’d requested so badly. “G-get over, break it, or…or something….”

“One thing at a time,” Kite cut her off, her magic latching onto Sling’s guns on the ground and quickly floating them over and back into their holsters, along with the pistol belt she’d been trying to loot. Didn’t look like she’d even bothered to reload her 10mm after emptying it, slide was still locked back…. “First we get over, then we worry about not being followed. Can you walk?”

“…not well,” was the painful reply she didn’t want to hear, as she watched the stable pony force herself up on four unstable legs…and then again when her first attempt failed in a crumpling of limbs. “F-f-fu…th-this is worse than last time…..”

She found herself ducking down and rolling her body into Sling’s underside without hesitation, waiting until a pair of forelegs found a solid grasp around her before standing upright again. “Walk as I walk. Try to support some of your weight, you lazy mule.”

“Shut up,” Sling groaned in pain. “Or…or I’ll turn your mane green….and not in the magical way…”

“Cute—”

Another flare roared into the gray skies, turning their banter into a silent plea to some higher power that they would get through the next ten minutes alive. It was slower going than she’d have liked, but she couldn’t think of another way to get Sling across, not with the slavers coming down on them….

….and it got even slower when they reached the foot of the bridge after roughly two minutes, peered down over the edge of the old river peer, and suffered a brief spike of pain in their ears at the horrified shriek that left Elly’s mouth.

One glance over the edge made her forgive the filly’s panic attack.

Amidst the debris and wreckage of boats, sky wagons, and some strange four-wheeled contraptions that looked like they were operated by earth ponies, the slow, shuffling movement of the walking dead abominations that the wasteland came to call “ghouls” sent her heart racing with every slurry of movement she spotted. Five…no, seven…ten….fifteen….

….and as the numbers grew, so did their awareness of potential meals scurrying above them on a decaying bridge. They were….hideous, to look at. Their coats devoid of much of their color, with patches of hair exposing the dried, wrinkled skin beneath….their faces lacking any hint of sanity or personality, only the hungry, cold look of a heartless monster. Those that still had manes had little of them left, and all of them were sporting wounds and torn-open flesh that would have spelled death for a living, normal pony—several were missing eyes, others were missing part of a leg and stumbling on three hooves and a worn, bloody stump, some only had half a jaw, a couple were somehow still moving despite gaping holes in their torsos where their innards would have been….

She couldn’t blame Elly for stepping away from the bridge, suddenly unwilling to press forward despite it being the only direction they could go now.

“O-o-oh L-Luna….n-not that way—”

BJ was not having any of that, though for once he bit back any frustration he might have felt at her sudden change of heart and settled for simply pushing her back into formation with a push of his head. “Just walk forward,” he said with a slight grunt. “Don’t look down, keep your eyes forward. We can’t go back the way we came.”

A third flare whistled into the skies behind them, as if secretly encouraging them to step forward and take their chances dangling over the horde of the damned slowly filling the riverbed beneath them. She was counting over thirty now, and she could spot more of them slowly rising from their restless slumber up and down the riverbed as the deathly moans of their fellow ghouls began to reach them.

“Don’t look down, keep your eyes forward” worked for roughly a minute, at best.

It started with a scream of “Holy shit!!” from behind, no doubt let loose by a soul emerging from the warehouse and into the bloody aftermath of Sling’s rage. She looked back, not intending to shoot, but to see just how many slavers were pouring out of the door—

A break, please, she pleaded to the uncaring, bored gods above as close to a dozen black-armored slavers oozed out onto the pavement of the pier, some of them already taking notice of the two mares and the kids trying to stumble away from the grisly scene. One break today, that’s all I ask…

The uncaring, bored gods, apparently hearing her plea, decided to amuse themselves by answering it in the most literal way possible.

Two of the slavers were apparently armed with rifle-type MEWs, as lances of reddish-pink energy began lashing out at them from the weapons mounted on their battle saddles the moment they turned their bodies towards the bridge. Some of the shots sailed wide overhead….

….but some fell a bit short of their intended target, instead slicing through the aged, fatigued metal bridge as though it were made of paper—

—a sharp snap! and a screech of tortured metal accompanied one laser as it cut into one of the support beams beneath them—

“…shit, kids run—”

The pups immediately took off like little black and white bolts of lightning, with Elly hurriedly chasing after them—

—the bridge behind her cracked and broke apart amidst another flurry of shots, and as she felt her senses titling backward she had just enough time and forethought to toss Sling’s body off of her and onto the grated metal in front of her before a final, ear-splitting crunch of metal signified the collapse of the bridge’s center—

—BJ’s teeth latched onto the end of her tail, sending a sharp hot spike of pain through her spine that reached the back of her brain and caused her to scream briefly, her forelegs struggling to find purchase on her half of the now-broken bridge as the end began to dip dangerously low towards the ground—

—they slipped on an outstretched metal stem, and her heart hung freely inside her ribcage in a brief moment of terror, before Sling’s forelegs lashed out and hooked themselves around her leg joints to try and hoist her up, stopping her fall before it could start—

—but when Kite looked up at the stable pony’s face, she knew that her efforts would not be enough. She had regained enough control of her magic in the last two minutes to at least handle the heft and recoil of a weapon, as a 9mm pistol was hovering out in front of her and popping off slow, aimed shots, but even then she could see the indigo glow of her magic flickering in random spazzes, as if she were rapidly draining herself of even that much control trying to shoot back at the slavers. And Sling looked to be keeping herself anchored to the bridge by hooking her hind legs around a guard rail—she’d tear her leg up if she had to hold onto it for much longer.

And through it all, she could hear the unending, deathly cries of the ghouls below, rising up from the depths of the pre-war wreckage and eagerly awaiting the arrival of fresh meat—

—another shot from Sling’s pilfered 9mm rang out, and she swore she could hear one of the slavers crying out in shock, something to the effect of ‘holy shit she can still hit us from that far off with a pistol’—

“C-climb up,” Sling gasped, the strain of her efforts beginning to manifest in beads of sweat rolling down her face. “…hurry….climb u-up….”

BJ’s weight, hanging off of her tail, began to shift slightly and carefully, his forelegs scratching up past her hindquarters to try and find a good hold from which to begin his ascent—

—another shot from a laser rifle, impossibly loud as though to signify what it had done, suddenly killed the weight pulling on her tail, and even as she threw her gaze downward she knew in her heart what had just been done.

The shot had cut her tail in half, missing her son entirely but still sending him plummeting earthward towards the riverbed….and the horde of ghouls gathering amongst the wreckage several dozen feet away from his landing. And the look of shocked surprise and terror that flashed into his eyes…..

…the look of a soul that had suddenly realized their time in the world was much shorter than they’d thought….his eyes stayed locked on her for the entire drop down to th—

—he impacted with the topside of what looked like a shipping container roughly a second and a half after her tail had been shot in half, mercifully turning his fall into a serious of bumps and collisions with other assorted junk piles until he hit the riverbed, where he began to struggle to his hooves and limp away towards the closest cover he could find—an upside-down city bus roughly the length of two wagons, having likely wound up in the river in the chaos of the Last Day and coming to a rest where it now lay after the pegasi of Serenity had sucked the river dry of all of its water.

A quick flurry of 9mm bullets—three, maybe four, she couldn’t tell for sure—answered the slaver’s laser shot that had sent BJ into the valley of the walking dead, one of the spent casings tapping Kite in the back of the head on its way down and stinging her with a flash of heat—

—the bridge screeched again, apparently not done with its slow, agonizing death, and as Kite’s eyes jerked back up, a jammed 9mm pistol zipped down past her, no longer held in the spell field of an exhausted unicorn mare—

—the aura around Sling’s horn began to flicker violently, struggling to stay in a solid, opaque state for more than a half-second, as she was apparently trying to conjure up the strength to pull her up with telekinesis and failing miserably—

“….Kite…climb up,” Sling gasped, her breath beginning to grow short and heated in her efforts on top of the extreme violence she’d doled out roughly three and a half minutes ago. “…can’t pull you up…hurry…”

The bridge screeched again, slowly, as if taunting them both with the threat of a grisly deathly at the teeth and hooves of hungry ghouls….

…drops of salty water began pelting Kite’s face….and she didn’t think it was sweat…

She couldn’t fathom why, or how, but suddenly it seemed as though time itself was slowing to an infantile crawl. Laser shots broke up the gray skies above, with one or two coming close to hitting Sling’s body, yet the stable pony refused to simply let go and save herself. She was seemingly desperate to try and save both of them…

….and Kite knew in her heart that she couldn’t. And Elly could not be allowed to move on into the wastes alone.

“Please,” Sling gasped again, though her voice choked on tears and pain. “….climb up….not again, can’t l-let this happen again….j-just climb up, please…”

The hungry, eager howls of the ghouls below only made her last words to her even harder.

“….thank you, for trying,” Kite’s voice sobbed, her eyes beginning to swell with salted tears themselves. “….I’m sorry….”

There was a brief moment of recognition in Sling’s eyes, of what was coming, but before she could do anything to try and stop it….

…..Kite pulled her forelegs out, breaking herself free of the stable pony’s grasp, and followed her son all the way down into the riverbed.

She swore the poor stable mare’s horrified scream could have been heard all over the city—

—her body slammed into the same cargo container her son had hit, filling her left shoulder with a sharp ache as she bounced off, rolled over the edge and further down into what looked like the withered husk of a boat hull, and then after that she slid over the side and down onto a….

….onto something. She didn’t care to really eyeball it, and simply hit and finished her descent into the ground, though at a brief glance it looked like one of those “cars”. Everything she’d ever hoped for, had come so close to, was about to die with her….

….but if they lived through this….

….she could at least go out knowing that.

She barely caught the sight of her son’s tail disappearing into that overturned bus, and as she rose to her hooves, her battered, bruised body begging her to stop moving and simply let these ghouls win, she began to poke about her body for the .45 on her gun belt—

—found the pistol on the ground in front of her, and the gun belt itself gone, along with her saddlebags, likely having been torn off somewhere in her fall—

—with a sobbing cry, she scooped the pistol up off the ground and hobbled towards the bus, the cries of the dead becoming a roar as the first of them sighted their prey—

—a long, anticipatory groan drilled into her ears from her left, and a quick glance had her staring at a lone unicorn ghoul, far ahead of its pack, its gender no longer discernable, shuffling towards her quickly with its mouth hung open—

—her .45 plugged it with one slug to the brain, ending the poor thing’s eternal suffering and allowing her to finish her journey to the bus, where she quickly clambered inside and began scooting herself along the ceiling towards the front, where she spotted BJ stuffing himself behind a row of seats that had fallen free from the floorboard above. She didn’t bother to look out the shattered windows.

She knew what was coming.

She found her son shivering and trembling beneath the seat, crammed into the corner as far as he could squeeze himself—

“…Blue Jay, I’m here,” she cried, the cruel irony of Elly’s last gift to them causing a surge of tears to pour out as she laid herself out and hugged him with her right foreleg. “I’m here….”

He didn’t bother to pull himself from her foreleg, but just hugged it back and dried his eyes across it. “….d-did they make it over….”

She briefly considered the truth, that she only knew for sure that one of them did….

“….they made it,” she croaked instead. Which was probably true—without the weight of another mare and a colt on her, Sling could probably pull herself to safety even in her exhausted state, as long as she’d held on to try and save them both….

….tried, and failed…and would now have to hear the horrible sounds to come….

….until the weight of the .45 in her spell field floated up between them, hovering to a stop before BJ’s face, as the wails of the damned began to grow louder and closer, banging their way into the bus….

His hollow, haunted words tore her apart. “….will it hurt?”

Will it hurt, Kite cried to herself, as the muzzle of the pistol brushed against her son’s mane, pushed past it and made brief contact with his skull. Will it hurt when my own mother kills me so I don’t die being ripped apart by ponies that should have died a long time ago….

“….no,” she tried to say. Though what she was certain came out instead was a blurb, bubbling shriek as she pressed the grip safety in and pulled the trigger—

CLICK!

He flinched at the sound, but almost immediately knew what it meant.

….and it scared him into a speechless, stunned state.

Her, too.

She cocked the hammer in a furious fit, tried it again—

…same result. Click, not boom.

She latched onto the slide, ripped it back to chamber the next round as the dud flew out and bounced off of the overturned seat—

—and the slide refused to go back into battery. Locked open, despite three desperate tugs to get it to slam back in place….

…and a tilt of the pistol revealed an empty magazine when she peered down through the ejection port.

The empty pistol fell out of her magic, the heavy thud of its impact echoing deeply into her ears as she looked out at the back end of the bus—

—for once in her life, she suddenly felt the urge to let herself go and dump the contents of her bladder and intestines out of her body as several mutilated, hungry ghouls squeezed through the broken windows and began crawling towards her. In a sudden fit of desperation she latched onto the seat that BJ had hidden himself behind and—

—and seemingly crushed it inward, turning it into a crude shell around her offspring and hoping it would be enough to save him—

She could not process it.

Her mind had been sprung from its exhausted, tired haze, desperate to try and save at least one of them, if at all possible. Had been desperate to burn her magic out to pull the mare up with her, failing, and begging her to climb up so that they could search for a way down to the riverbed and tear it apart to get BJ out…

….and then was stunned into a horrified, heartbroken scream when Kite just….

….let go.

She let go.

She just….let go….

“….thank you, for trying.”

She couldn’t process it.

She didn’t want to. She wanted to save them.

She wanted to save somepony important to her besides herself and Light Tail for once in her godsdamned life. Once.

Hoofprint died when she could have saved him. Hacket Wrench was dead because she couldn’t open the sun-damned door to the generator level of her dead stable and got caught up fighting with Cloud Wind….Ballast probably could have been saved from his grievous injury if she hadn’t gotten distracted helping Flashlight save his stupid own stupid ass and then letting Light Tail play with his shell-shocked brain….

….Cloud Wind was gone…..because she didn’t go back for her…..

….and now Kite…..

….and now Kite had just….LET GO.

She let go and there was no way she could get down there fast enough to save anybody, not with the slavers still shooting at her from the other side of the broken bridge….

….she thought she’d finished screaming as she finally pulled herself back up onto somewhat stable, level bridging, crawling onward until she could stand upright and stumble away from the fusillade of fire seemingly chasing her away towards the west half of the prairie….

….the west half that Kite was supposed to be going home to….

A shot from below went almost unnoticed—she glanced down only long enough to confirm, sullenly, that Kite had only shot one of those…things, in her mad dash to find her son and spend her last moments with him…..

….and she prayed she had enough ammo left to spare them the grisly death they were about to suffer….

She tripped over herself as she stumbled off the bridge, onto the other side of the pier, felt her heart and soul breaking at the sight of Light Tail’s face locked onto the space where Kite and BJ had fallen to the ground….

“….we gotta go back,” the filly cried, tears flowing down her face. “….we gotta go back….”

Max and Mona, ever attuned to the emotions of their pony masters, seemed almost as conflicted as she was. She wanted to go back herself, she wanted to tear everything down apart with her bare hooves….

…and she barely had the strength to fire a 9mm, much less escape….

…and when she finally realized that she somehow, even amongst that chaos, still managed to find herself with Kite’s saddlebags, floating beside her in a dying field of magic, she realized that she had just robbed her friend of her only chance for a peaceful death….

With a sobbing cry she’d not known herself capable of making, she hurriedly and clumsily scooped her daughter up onto her back with a roll of her head, struggled to her hooves and began to hobble and stumble away from the slavers and their mad efforts to murder her—

—even in her shocked, deathly still state, Light Tail still had the heart and the will to try the impossible. “N-no, mommy go back, we gotta go back—”

She’d not gotten more than ten tired, clumsy steps forward when the horrors she’d hoped to spare her daughter from began to ring out from the riverbed….

….Kite’s terrified, crying screams as those….things, those evil things, began to tear her apart…..

And every step she took only seemed to make it harder to leave.

“….oh my god go back!!” El-Tee shrieked, her tears and cries deafening her mother to tears herself. “Momma go back!!!”

She went forward instead, barely making it around the corner of another warehouse and into the alley it shared with another building, breaking both of their hearts with her refusal to stumble in any other direction.

It was impossible to tell whose screams would haunt her more. Kite’s, or Light Tail’s…..

“GO BACK!!! MOMMA GO BACK GO BACK—”

—Kite’s screams, at that moment, seemed to grow even louder…and more horrific….she didn’t want to imagine why….

She was crying, loudly and endlessly, the whole way out, Kite’s deathly cries chasing her the entire time and Light Tail’s heartbroken, sorrowful begging making every step all that much harder.

“—GO BACK!!! GO BACK MOMMY PLEASE GO BACK THEY’RE KILLING HER GO BACK!!!”

Intermission 2: I'll Be Seeing You

I’ll Be Seeing You

Knowing this would be the last time she would ever set eyes upon her home made it impossible to not start falling apart in front of her little shining star.

The tears started when she crashed through the front door, crunching it clean off of its hinges and breaking her vase of white roses that she’d grown from a packet of seeds her mother had gifted to her before her passing last year. Feeling the fragile petals being crushed beneath her hooves brought back her last visual memory of her mother, her frail, 62-year old body wasting away under the merciless advance of stage 4 pancreatic cancer in the coldness of her hospice room….

….and the heartache that had bombed her at the funeral began to come back to her as she realized that her mother was one of the lucky ones.

Little Star Shine, still shaken and terrified by the carnage they’d barely escaped at Clover Luck’s shop, did not seem to truly grasp the horrific scope of the death to come to Equestria just yet, though she understood that a lot of ponies’ lives were going to suffer today. “….M-momma, why did we come home? We shoulda waited for Miss Midnight like she wanted….”

Special Midnight Showers’ last words shot through her mind like a spark of live electricity, and she finally found the strength to at least stop crying visually and focus her energy on saving the only thing of value she had left.

Family.

“….honey, go to your room,” her crying voice quipped softly. “…the saddlebags in your closet…the ones I told you not to touch….take them, and stuff it with everything you can until it won’t let you put anything else in, do you understand?”

Star Shine’s violet, glistening eyes could not bring themselves away from the crumpled roses on the floor. “….momma….Granma’s roses….h-her last roses….”

She dropped to the floor and hugged the filly close to her before either of them could completely lose it. “I-I’m sorry….but there’s no time to talk about it. Just go to your room and pack those saddlebags. They’re enchanted, they won’t let you put anything in once you’ve stuffed the enchantment to its limit. Just go, please. Hurry.”

With a light kiss and a nuzzle, she managed to send the little sobbing filly on her way upstairs, leaving her alone in her living room for a few moments to collect her scattered thoughts into a simple, sensible plan.

Pack saddlebags. Get “bug-out bag” her husband had insisted on keeping put together in her closet for that “shit-hit-the-fan day” that had finally come….

And that was as far as her thoughts could go at the moment.

With a choked gasp she started up the stairs herself, barely registering the sight of her ocean-blue carpeted floor or the sounds of Star Shine making a mess out of her room—

—her eyes fell upon the bedroom door at the end of the hall, curiously left partially open despite the fact that she had clearly shut it before she’d left earlier….

—she dashed into the door, pushing it open and scanning about in a quick sweep—

—a thick envelope sat on the edge of the queen-size bed in the center of the room, already torn open and its contents spilled out atop the comforters….

…and her heart began to skip several beats as she spied the Stable-Tec logo sprawled across the front of the envelope, and a freshly-folded note laid next to the envelope….

Her eyes dared to skirt over the envelope’s contents for a moment, and then had to bite down on her tongue to keep from screaming.

Spread out in a three-prong fashion, lay three large identification tickets and I.D. cards:

STABLE 115 EMERGENCY ADMISSION TICKET, EFFECTIVE 12 APRIL, 21ST YEAR OF LUNA, FOR THE FAMILY OF 427 TORRENS DRIVE, HOOFVILLE

RESIDENT #975
NAME: MOON MIRAGE
AGE: 29
SPECIES: UNICORN
SEX: FEMALE
FAMILY: HARDTACK (HUSBAND), STAR SHINE (DAUGHTER)
CUTIE MARK IS CRESCENT MOON W/SHOOTING STAR

RESIDENT #976
NAME: HARDTACK
AGE: 31
SPECIES: UNICORN
SEX: MALE
CUTIE MARK IS HAMMER AND SCREWDRIVER CROSSED TOGETHER
FAMILY: MOON MIRAGE (WIFE), STAR SHINE (DAUGHTER)

RESIDENT #977
NAME: STAR SHINE
AGE: 11
SPECIES: UNICORN
FAMILY: MOON MIRAGE (MOTHER), HARDTACK (FATHER)
NO CUTIE MARK NOTED IN ADMISSION FORM

THIS TICKET IS TO BE PRESENTED TO STABLE 115 SECURITY PERSONNEL ALONGSIDE ISSUED I.D. CARD IN THE EVENT OF “FALLOUT” PROTOCOL ACTIVATION. LOST I.D. CARDS MAY BE REPLACED THROUGH CORRESPONDENCE WITH YOUR LOCAL STABLE-TEC OFFICE. FOR EASE OF ADMISSION DURING “FALLOUT” PROTOCOL, ENTIRE FAMILY NEED NOT BE PRESENT WHEN PRESENTING TICKET. LOST TICKETS MAY BE REPLACED FOLLOWING CONFIRMATION OF REGISTRATION STATUS WITH LOCAL STABLE-TEC OFFICE.

With a silent cry she carefully scooped the tickets and I.D. cards up in a field of magic, happily sobbing as she carried them over to the dresser while she gathered the remainder of her gear. She and Tack had put in for a spot in the Stable with the vast majority of their combined life savings roughly a year ago, right after her mother’s funeral, and after many harrowing nights of long talks within these very bedroom walls (usually after more…physically exhausting activities). At the time she’d thought it a knee-jerk reaction to her mother’s death and a waste of their hard-earned bits, bits she’d wanted to set aside for Star Shine’s secondary education when she grew up. She’d not believed that the world would be so insipidly crazy as to destroy itself in a flash of megaspells and hatred, but Tack….

….Tack wasn’t so sure. And he’d had enough sleepless nights over it that she’d finally caved in and agreed to it to ease his fears and calm him down.

Now she was listening to the bombs and the megaspells blowing the world up all around her, and thanking the stars above that her husband had been such a stubborn mule about the whole thing, even as she took a quick read of the note sitting by the envelope:

“Moon

Got back early from the training exercise, and got these from the Stable-Tec office along the way, thought you’d want to see it when you and Shine got back from the park. Apparently we got approved some time ago, just took a while for these things to get down here, and Gold Sleeve wouldn't say how long when I asked him. I wish for once you weren’t your punctual self. If this all turns out to be a false alarm we can laugh and cry over the whole thing when I get back. Maybe even send the squirt out for a sleepover at Jenine’s so we can get really loud like we used to…

The battalion got orders to pull back into town early for some reason, but my company got ordered back out almost immediately, barely had time to drop these off. My platoon lieutenant won’t say why, but I’ve got this ugly feeling something very nasty is about to happen. I hope this is all just another case of the army’s Big Stupid, but if it isn’t….

I left your 9mm out next to your saddlebags, along with the trail gun. I know you weren’t big on keeping those around after you did your three in the service, but I wanted you to have something to protect yourself with if you had to. I hope you didn’t forget how to work the nine. The trail gun’s loaded with .357s, it’s a bit heavier than your usual “pocket” revolver but it’ll still have a pretty good kick to it, thing only weighs about thirty ounces. If you have to use it, keep a tight death grip on it when you shoot.

If this is what I pray it isn’t, it’s possible my company is headed to the stable to make sure it’s secure and ready to accept incoming refugees. If that’s the case, I shouldn’t need my ticket and I.D. card, but take them all with you anyway. If not, I’ll try and scoot on outta there and meet up with you at the stable. Yeah, I know, desertion and AWOL, but who the hell’s gonna come and round me up for it if the world comes to an end? Luna’s ghost? You and the squirt are far more important to me than anything else…even a government oath service.

Lastly…if…if this is it, if this is the last thing you get from me….

I wish that I could do more than just write you the same words you’ve heard me whisper into your ear every night. You girls are the best things that have ever come into my life, and your parents were pretty cool too….eventually. Swear your mom tried to lace my morning biscuits with poison once. I’m sorry we didn’t get on good terms until her diagnosis. She was only trying to protect her her hormone-crazed little girl from an equally hormone-crazed stallion barely six months out of high school. I’m serious, she loved you dearly, and she didn’t want you hurt. If the mare I got to know in the hospital was the one that raised you, I’d had loved to have met her sooner than I did.

So much I want to write down, to tell you, but there isn’t enough time in this life or the next for that. Just know that this life we built, the memories we’ve had, and the kid we made in that crazy night that turned your room into a tornado-struck disaster zone, are the greatest treasures I could ever find on the face of this planet. A guy would have to try pretty hard to do better than what I got.

Hang onto this so we can laugh it up later in bed….or try and make sense of the future we’ll have underground. Stay safe.

And don’t let a damned thing in the fucking world lay so much as their eyeballs on our little girl.

-Tack”

Despite the terror and grief assaulting her, she found it impossible not to blush and laugh a little at the letter, and carefully tucked it into her saddlebags alongside the tickets and ID cards after pulling them out of the closet. As last memories went, this one wouldn’t be so bad….

She just wished she could have made the journey without the damned guns. Even in the service she’d never cared for them. She got her familiarization training during AIT, mostly on the 9mm, and shot it once a year for basic proficiency qualification, but her job as a comms technician made it an afterthought at best…..though once in a while, when she got called out to the field to fix up a radio tower, she’d wound up needing that sidearm when a zebra raiding party tried to take out the tower and everypony in it…..

….and now she was going to need it again. Possibly for the last time, if she was lucky….

The five-shot .357, she left tucked into the traveling saddle in favor of the 9mm, which had two spare magazines alongside it. A quick check of the pistol confirmed it to be loaded, with one in the chamber, and that was all she cared to bother with. As long as she got Shine to the Stable, she didn’t care what happened to the gun afterward.

She’d barely strapped the saddle on and broke out her husband’s “go-bag” from under the bed when she heard glass shattering somewhere downstairs, sending her into a short, startled leap that turned into a quick trot into the hallway with the gun drawn into a telekinetic spell field—

—the crash had drawn Star Shine’s attention as well. The filly’s head cautiously poked through the doorway of her room, drawn to the top of the stairwell at the other end of the hall, and then curled back around to see if her mother had heard it too—

The little thing’s eyes widened at the sight of the gun floating in front of her, likely from the memory of the last time she’d gotten too close to it without permission and gotten herself grounded for a month. “….M-mama, why do you have the gun ou—“

“Get back in your room, finish packing, quickly,” Moon heard herself command of her child as old memories and training began to set into her mind and muscles. “Now.”

With a trembling gulp, the filly retreated back into the relative safety of her room, quietly pushing the door shut as Moon continued on down the hall, crawling down the stairs as quietly and efficiently as she could manage. She barely felt the gun in her spell field, or even noticed the bright green dot sights atop the slide as her ears began to pick up a frantic, terrified breathing as somepony began tearing through her kitchen as though he were demolishing it—

“—aw him here e-earlier,” a deep, familiar male voice muttered to himself in stark terror as she closed in on the archway leading to her kitchen. “W-wasn’t gone long, wh-where’d he put it where’d he put it—”

A slight alteration to her spell silently pushed down on the safety lever as she crept into her kitchen—

—a dark gray-coated earth pony stallion was focused on searching through the cabinets and the countertops in the back of the kitchen, apparently helping himself to whatever canned food goods he thought he could carry out with him whenever he found what he was looking forward judging by the pile of canned corn and peas on the island countertop in the center of the kitchen. His black mane was lightly frizzled and his tail shook uncontrollably—an understandable state given what was happening to the world right then, if that never-ending tornado warning alarm was any indication….

“….Slate, what are you doing?” she tried to say in the calmest, most non-confrontational voice possible, but all she wound up doing was causing her neighbor to leap in terror and nearly back himself into her fridge—

“Aaacck Moonie wh-wh….what are doing here—”

“I live here,” she shot back lightly, keeping the gun low so as not to frighten him too much more by the sight of it. “….if anything, I should be asking you why you’re breaking into my house and tearing my kitchen up.”

Slate’s blue eyes could not bring themselves to focus on her, avoiding all possible eye contact as he continually spied the room for whatever it was he was searching for. “….I-I saw Tack here earlier, h-he had a letter—“

“A letter for us, Slate, not you,” she reminded him. “…look, I’m not blind, I know what’s happening out there right now is terrifying, but y—”

“T-terrified!? Girl, I’m scared shitless, literally, I saw that letter, I know you got into that stable outside town—”

…oh shit, Moon cried inside, suddenly feeling some of Slate’s terror rubbing off onto her. If he knew where the letter had come from….what was in it…..

….had he come here to try and steal it?

To save himself and his own family?

“….Slate, what you’re planning, it won’t work,” Moon said softly. “….yes, my husband and I got tickets and ID cards to get into the stable, but they’re specifically labeled for us and our daughter. It’s got our cutie marks down by description, your family will never pass as us….”

Strangely, Slate’s body suddenly seemed to stop trembling, and his voice grew calmer and softer….and that only made her feel even more apprehensive. “….not us, no, but….but our filly, she’s blank, just like yours,” he said stoically. “And a unicorn. She can pass as Star Shine….”

There was a growing…coldness in his voice, a sort of hungry desperation in his eyes, as he spoke. “…she’ll pass as Star Shine…and our little girl will make it—”

Slate’s body began to inch forward, creeping around the kitchen island and a rack of cutlery—

“S-Slate, wait a minute, y-you can’t me—”

“I can’t?” the gray-coated stallion screamed politely (if there was such a thing). “….what, did my family’s lives suddenly just become expendable now that you got that ticket into that little vault in the ground? The same place my wife and I were rejected from when we put our application in over the winter? We don’t matter to you anymore?”

Moon felt her legs tipping backward, taking her away from the approaching stallion, which was exactly the last thing she knew she should have been doing, but no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t get herself to stay put. “Slate, y-you…do you know what you’re saying? Th—“

“I know exactly what I’m doing,” the stallion promised as his jaws took hold of a knife handle and pulled it free from the rack, revealing over six inches of razor-sharp celery cutting death to her. “Not that I’ve ever killed anypony before, but…anything for my little girl…anything….”

A foul, soundless curse parted from her lips as she felt a sudden shift in her fortunes, willed the pistol to come up and plant two in his chest—

—he lunged forward with surprising speed and violence of action, slamming into her and pushing her into the countertops behind her. His forehooves planted into her chest, pinning her to the counter as his jaws sought to sink the knife into her throat—

—her left hind leg kicked outward, and his body immediately doubled over as he howled in excruciating pain, his nethers crushed beneath her hoof—

—her forelegs shoved him away from her as she stumbled forward, frantically searching out the pistol and finding it lying on the floor behind her attacker—

—as she darted towards it to collect it in a field of magic Slate renewed his attack, tackling her to the floor, and she twisted herself over to plant her spine into the floor and keep him from paralyzing her in a single strike—

—his jaw-clenched knife came down towards her face, slicing through her right cheek and sending licks of fire into her nerves that reached the back of her eyeballs—

“She has to live!” he screamed frantically, somehow managing the incredible feet of speaking and trying to murder her with his mouth at the same time as he pulled the knife up and tried to bury it in her throat. “I won’t let her die like this—”

—her magic, fueled by a burst of adrenaline, effortlessly pulled the 9mm to her and planted the barrel into his chest as her forelegs struggled to keep his second attack from making its way into—

“—you’d do the same you know it—” was the last thing coherent thing he screamed at her—

—a rapid series of loud booms! filled the room, amplified by the ceramic tile beneath her and the close, tight walls of her kitchen and seemingly slapping her silly with light taps against her eardrums. But in his panicked state of mind, he didn’t seem to feel the bullets ripping into his chest or the hot, spent brass casings bouncing off the cabinet doors and back into his side, and just kept trying to stab her through her esophagus—

—she felt the pistol shift about, moving further down his body, and then another pair of booms erupted into the air and turned her battered hearing into a sharp, persistent ring that overpowered almost all other sounds—

—but he felt these shots. Deep in the gut, likely turning part of his intestinal tract into bloody ribbons. His jaws slackened and dropped the knife, the tip of the blade piercing her flesh just below her neck and missing vital arteries and body parts by mere millimeters at best.

She turned over, ignoring a red hot flare in her right side as she crushed a spent casing under her weight, throwing him off of her and scrambling to her hooves, feeling the knife fall off of her chest and her pistol coming up over his face, as one of his forelegs began to rise up to ward off the bullets—

“M-Moon, wait n-no do—”

Two quick blasts from the pistol cut his begging short, his head jolting slightly under the impact of the bullets as they punched through his brain. A rather bright muzzle flash lit up the kitchen, a—

—she was in a forest in the far east of the Equestrian Core, her world lighting up in a brilliant bright flash of yellow as her pistol popped off two rounds into the head of a zebra that had just tried to ambush her as she worked to repair the radio tower—

—in the next eye blink the memory vanished, her body stumbling about as her senses fought to retain some sense of balance with her ears constantly ringing and pumping slightly aching pulses into her brain. She made it out of the kitchen, wiping blood off of her face….

….thought she could hear a little filly’s voice screaming in her direction as she almost fell into the living room, saw Star Shine’s face practically in tears as the tiny filly hopped down the stairs….

….thought she heard a second voice screaming at her too….from behind?

Leave! Now!

She scooped Star Shine up in a burst of magic and planted the filly atop her back, carrying her out of their house, ignoring the tiny, frantic hooves tugging at her neck trying to get her attention…

….and her ringing, tortured ears still trying to figure out if she was hearing “Mommy” or “Daddy”.

Chapter 16

She couldn’t figure out how things had gone so wrong so quickly, but she knew where to start.

The asshole that had just woken her up.

“Get up, you lazy little shit,” an angry, rough-sounding stallion rumbled as he burst open the door to “his” room (as he continually referred to her temporary quarters for the duration of her “debt work”). “Just ‘cause the sun don’t shine don’t mean you get to sleep in every morning. You got thirty minutes of missed work to make up for already.”

An unmistakable curse of exceptionally foul proportions escaped her lips, though he chose to ignore it (or didn’t hear it). “...in a little bit,” she groaned angrily, forcing herself off of the stiff mattress on the floor that served as a very poor bed.

“Not ‘in a little bit’,” he shouted back quietly. “Now.”

“It’s either the outhouse or your floor,” she hissed back, furiously rubbing the sleep and bits of crust out of her eyes with her left foreleg. “And I’m not asking for permission, asshole.”

His throat became a cauldron of garbled, unspoken threats as the smoke gray stallion turned and stomped back out, but he stopped screaming at her, at least. She’d done it the last time he tried this, and while the black eye and broken rib had not been pleasant, he didn’t dare try to dictate when she could and couldn’t relieve herself anymore. She wasn’t his godsdamned pet.

Even if he kept trying to turn her into one….

With the immediate threat of violence upon her deflected, she slowly stumbled out of the room, seeing herself out of the inn through a flight of stairs at the end of the hall on her left. The town bathhouse was only two buildings down, and she wanted this done quickly before he could find an excuse to tack another hundred caps on top of her “debt”. Fortunately, this late after “sunrise”, most folk that could afford to splurge for the rare bath once in a blue moon had done so, and the place was devoid of souls save for the head mistress and two of her assistants.

And Mistress Glossy Shine had a soft spot for downtrodden fourteen-year olds in need of a pick-me up. “Rally!!” the pink-haired, pastel blue coated mare squealed with excessive happiness the moment she barreled through the front door. “You look absolutely terrible, how long has it been?”

“Too long, Miss Shine,” she groaned sleepily. “….little filly’s room working?”

If a pony’s face could blush, she was certain Glossy Shine’s cheeks would be a deep beet red right then. “O-oh, yes, of course dear, go on ahead while I prepare the water. I assume you’re on a time schedule today?”

“According to Mister Dickless I’m already a half-hour late, so yes, a quick wash will have to do.”

Glossy Shine’s face scrunched up slightly at her language, though she never once seemed to disagree with her choice of words for her current “employer”. “My dear, even five minutes here will have you smelling like roses and lilac. Your worries will simply wash away!”

The eternally happy mare seemingly bounced away towards the back rooms as Rally lumbered onward towards the restrooms, the door politely opened up for her by the lanky-legged assistant Remedy in an inviting tease. It wasn’t just any place in the prairie that had a working commode, after all. They had a right to flaunt the facilities.

With her business tended to, the lukewarm, soapy shower that followed unfortunately proved Miss Shine’s rather poetic words to be fairly accurate. Two weeks’ worth of accumulated grime and filth were washed off and scrubbed away in a matter of minutes by the combined efforts of the mistress and her dutiful assistants, and within eight minutes of her walking in she already felt like an entirely new pony. Her “payment” for the morning bath would be to work a half-day in the bath house, after “Mister Dickless” was done with her for today, since she had trouble holding onto any caps his bar patrons saw fit to tip her with. Jackass kept stripping them right out of her apron, said it was going towards her “debt”, but as much as he was extending it every time she did something he didn’t like (which was fairly often), and tacking on room and board while he was at it, she was starting to doubt that he even intended to let her go.

Given that she’d never even meant to stay in this little shit town, that was a problem that had to be taken care of, somehow, someway….and soon. Before they tracked her down, if they hadn’t already. How this jerk hadn’t wound up swinging from a dead tree with the way he treated everypony around him, she couldn’t fathom. She wanted to murder him with her bare hooves as it was right now. She had it all figured out, too.

She just needed a good enough reason first. Apparently, even in an age of endless strife, bloodshed, and near-complete lack of anything resembling law or government, strangling a widely acknowledged asshole in his sleep required something a little compelling than “I didn’t like him” when two-thirds of the town had the same motive. She prayed, endlessly and fruitlessly, that each day she woke up in his “service” would be the last, that he would finally screw up and talk down to the wrong soul, or piss off a Runner passing through. She’d heard he’d gotten on the bad side of a couple of ‘em, a while back, but nobody in town would say anything about it to her. Probably didn’t want to get caught up in that kind of a mess, and she couldn’t blame them. “Good-natured” as they were, as mercenaries went, the Runners weren’t known for putting up with anybody’s bullshit for very long.

The bullshit she was laden with, at least today, was still more of the same. She’d hardly bumped her way into the back kitchen of her “boss’s” inn when she found herself being roughly shoved into a pale yellow server’s apron—

“’Bout damn time,” his voice seethed impatiently, his rough, dark charcoal hooves scratching across her freshly-bathed coat and threatening to turn her pink-and-blue mane back into a disheveled mess. “You take a shit for two?”

“Wanna find out?” she threatened back with a glare at his hateful eyes. They should have been black, like his heart, but noooooo, they just had to be green….

“Out on the floor, already got a half dozen souls waiting,” he spat back, turning around and leaving her to tie the apron on in peace, for once. “Customers looking for some leisure time, send ‘em to Willow or Ginger. Unless you’ve decided to take on some of the work yourself.”

She had to clench her mouth shut to keep from spitting on his backside out of contempt. “I’ll stick with getting idiots drunk and fat with greasy leftovers.”

His only response was a sharp snort as he disappeared around the corner, into the bar proper, and probably on his way to his “office” for a hit of whiskey himself. She hoped, anyway.

Tugging on the warmer wrapped snugly around her right foreleg, she weaved her way through the kitchen and the three cooks that had yet to quit on him—a gray unicorn stallion, a yellow earth pony mare with a disturbingly familiar meat cleaver for a cutie mark, and a grizzled female griffon with a noticeable limp in her gait—and slipped onto the bar floor, pausing at the doorway to take in her impending work and any potential problems.

The bar, as it was, was probably one of the few in the west side of the prairie that actually was a bar back in the War. The bar counter itself was kinda smashed up on one end, but the rest of it was in decent enough shape to actually put drinks on and still had a few stools left for it. The bar floor itself had…fifteen tables on the floor and ten and a half booths alongside the walls, if anybody still counted the shattered booth in the front left corner as useful.

And at the moment, there were only six folk sitting at three different tables—one couple, a lone mare, and three griffons huddled around a single table near the far right corner. Ginger was already making his way to the griffons, which left her wi—

“One of these days the boss is gonna knock yer block off, kid,” she heard Willow’s raspy voice wilt into her ears from her left. “Which would be a real shame, ‘cause yer the only foalsitter my little runts ain’t run off yet.”

“Guy’s a jackass and a major creep-o,” Rally shuddered visibly. “Keeps jacking my debt up over some bullshit every week.”

“Quit pissin’ him off and he won’t have a reason to. Now go on and get to work before he sees us yakkin’ like this. Anybody lookin’ for company, just send ‘em to me or Ginger and don’t say nothin’ else to ‘em. It’s just like any other day, kid.”

Sure, she didn’t say, a soft sigh huffing through her lips as she lumbered onward towards the closest occupied table, the lone mare with her attention focused on her tattered map and what looked like a working compass. Any other day in the service of a wanna-be slave owner…

“Mornin’,” she called out gently when she reached the mare’s table, causing the pale turquoise unicorn to briefly look up at her. “Need a drink?”

“…just some Sparkle-Cola, if you have any,” the mare replied hesitantly. “Not the carroty-flavored stuff, hate the taste of it.”

Oh sweet, I thought I was the only one! “That makes two of us,” Rally cooed in approval, quickly jotting down the mare’s request on the back of what looked like a shipping invoice paper from an old war-era company. “Plain-flavor soda it is. Got two more customers to check on, then I’ll be right out with that drink.”

The mare said nothing and merely went back to her map, for whatever reason, and Rally was keen to leave the thing in peace. She’d already had a bad start to her day and she didn’t want to add to it. Fortunately, the couple at the table proved fairly amicable—just some biscuits, fried hashbrowns, and water, which was actually more expensive than a soda since the town’s water talisman was not doing too well at the moment.

With her immediate concerns seen to, she went back to the kitchen to give the cooks their first order of the day, snagged an unopened bottled of plain Sparkle-Cola and filled two fairly clean-looking glasses with water from the working tap, and floated the drinks out with her as she ventured back onto the bar floor—

—felt her jaw drop at the sudden appearance of an additional ten souls filtering their way through the front door, many of them clad in the distinctive dark blue of a trader’s garb and web gear.

“….buck me,” she spat at her sudden turn of luck. “Caravan came in.”

“No shit,” Willow grumbled in sullen agreement, grabbing her own work apron from the wall rack. “Whole town’s gonna filter through here any minute. It’s gonna be a long morning, squirt.”

Another foul curse bounced around inside her head as Rally sauntered onward, dropping off her drinks before splitting off to cover her corner of the bar floor. Willow tended to work the center on busy days, and Ginger looked after little bits and pieces here and there in addition to the right half. But when it was really slow, Willow was content to just stay back and let Rally and Ginger do most of the work. One of the perks of being the boss’s top whore, she supposed.

And for a while, she was kinda right. It was like most other days, with the exception of it getting really busy up until the early afternoon, when anybody looking to trade with the caravan had come through and gone back to whatever it was that they did to subsist in the wasteland. Bounty hunting, trading, salvaging, scrap hunting, or….or whatever. She wouldn’t really know, she spent most of her time in this bar or the bath house nearby.

Most days, unfortunately, weren’t always pleasant. A couple of screwed-up orders, or the wrong drink getting to the wrong soul, or getting her tail chewed off because the order didn’t get there in a timely fashion or some shit like that. She’d only been stuck in this dive three weeks, but that was all she needed to know that she didn’t want to wait tables for a living. It sucked. Too chaotic, and too many assholes she couldn’t do anything about. Having to work for one didn’t help matters either.

At the end of the caravan and trader rush, when things had finally quieted down to their normal mid-day mild buzz, she was finally allowed a breather from her work and practically shoved herself into the bar’s old employee rec room, crashing onto the rickety couch and rolling onto her back for a short rest.

Willow wasn’t far behind, apparently feeling the need for a break herself. “See, kid? Just like any other day. You get through it.”

“I had doubts at a couple of points,” she heaved into the air, absently rubbing at her right foreleg. Something seemed…off, about it, right then…. “Shoulda known somethin’ was wrong when I was takin’ a plate of cooked meat to an earth pony….”

“Oh-ho-ho gods that was hilarious,” Willow chuckled lightly. “Like, the color just vanished from his face like you’d just fed him a cousin or something.”

“Glad to have been of use to you,” she mumbled back, scooting herself up the couch until her withers were propped up on the arm rest. The more she thought about it, the more she was certain something was up with her leg…

Pushing her mild discomfort aside, she gingerly pulled the leg warmer off, baring the leg to the outside world, and for a moment she felt her hindquarters cringe and tighten at the sight of the cold, cybernetic limb grafted into what was left of her right foreleg. Even after nearly three years, she had trouble just accepting that it was there at times. To not feel anything below the leg joint, yet be able to move it about as though the mechanical limb was a natural part of her…..

“….something wrong with your leg?” Willow’s voice queried softly.

It took a few seconds for Rally to work through the motions—moving and bending the joint with mere thought, the commands jumping through organic nerve to artificial wiring, curling the pastern downward and then flexing it back into its natural position….and then commanding the metal hoof to unlock its four individual, griffon-like talons, and then manipulating her new digits with a flexibility akin to an ancient ape, even twisting it around a little. As artificial limbs went, she had to admit, it had its uses.

But all things considered, she’d rather have her natural leg back. At least it didn’t need oil and regular attention from a bag of very specialized—and very rare—tools.

“….no, just the usual,” she heard herself answer sadly, working through the limb a second time to ensure that it was indeed functioning correctly and now believing her initial worries to be merely her everlasting unease with the damn thing. It seemed to be in perfect working order, for the moment. “Just wishing time would rewind and give me my leg back. As it is, I’ll be having a new one put on on my next birthday….”

Her spine shivered at the thought, suddenly realizing how much closer that day was since the last time she bothered to remember the date.

With her leg worries more or less verified as just lingering discomfort and unease, she let the leg drop back to her side, her left foreleg curling up and over her belly to rest for a spell. It would have been nice to have been able to just lay here and let the world go by her….

….but the boss wasn’t having that. Not much of it, anyway. Maybe ten minutes after she and Willow had slipped in for a short rest, the gray bastard was nosing his way in with that perpetually angry glare that for all she knew was permanently glued to his face. “Having fun, slackers?”

“Just takin’ a breather, Puck,” Willow said back, though by now she had also taken to lying on her back on the other couch, and was probably talking to the ceiling more than the boss. “First break in the crowd we’ve had all day.”

“Well, get back there, got a customer looking for some company,” he growled back. “And Rally! Get your butt up and cover her tables ‘till she’s done!”

His body disappeared back through the door, letting it slam shut behind him as if adding emphasis to how serious he was, and Willow took a heavy breath and slowly rolled off of her couch. “Hope it’s not a griffon, still sore from the last one….”

Bleeeh, Rally’s mind retched in disgust, reluctantly pulling herself upright and hopping off her own resting spot. Hate double-duty. Hope Ginger ain’t busy too….

After putting the leg warmer back over her right leg, she followed the mare back out onto the bar floor, then nudged past her to take in the floor once more. Didn’t look like anything had changed in the last twelve minutes—no customers in Willow’s area of responsibility aside from a single stallion that was probably her next “client”, and Ginger was, as always, keeping himself busy and amused busing back and forth from one side of the floor to the other tending to the other nine souls at their tables.

A couple of moments of shushed conversation confirmed her suspicions about the lone stallion, as he quickly fell into step behind Willow as the maroon-coated earth mare spun about invitingly and trotted on up the stairs. How much of Willow’s eagerness was earnest or faked was hard to tell, and the mare wasn’t one to divulge too much about herself.

Probably for the best, really. The second she found a way out of this mess, she was taking it. Of course, finding that way would be the hard part. Until then, she still had an afternoon to slog throu—

—the front door creaked open, barely audible with the low buzz of chatter going on around her, and while nobody else seemed to pay the newcomer any mind, Rally’s eyes were drawn to this teal blue-coated unicorn mare almost immediately...and then further drawn downward to the unmistakable presence of a working PipBuck on her left foreleg—

Shit me she’s got a lot of guns, her wary eye warned, sighting what looked like two revolvers and a black automatic stuffed into a small horde of holsters on her travelling saddle, along with some type of long gun in a scabbard on her left side. Her saddlebags looked strange—while they were definitely storing things, she couldn’t see any of the items printing through the thick leather and canvas, and atop her back were a second set of bags and what looked like a well-maintained red and black scabbard and matching katana. The mare’s face was partially obscured by her indigo mane (the back of which was tied into this impossibly cool-looking braided ponytail), mostly covering one side, though the other eye was scanning the bar, an—

A flick of the mare’s head as she shifted her gaze to her left whipped the front of her mane out of her face, revealing a pair of ragged scars running down the left side of her face from above the eye down to her cheek, though the eye itself looked fin--….

….no, not fine, she corrected herself mid-thought. Her gaze, her body language, the way she carried herself….she might have been armed to the teeth, but she barely had the heart to even walk through the door. The deep, sunken coat and flesh beneath her eyes suggested a dangerous or non-existent sleep pattern, and there was an…emptiness to her eyes, a lack of sparkle or something….like she’d just lost something important to her.

Barely a moment after she’d swept the room with her empty eyes, her left hind leg tapped the floor, and a small filly dragged herself in behind the mare. Her coat was a lighter teal blue than the mare’s, and her indigo tail had this catching streak of electric blue in it that matched her eye color. Her travelling saddle looked like a smaller version of the mare’s, and had a couple of guns on her as well….little sister, maybe. Beside the little filly were a pair of husky pups a little larger than she was, and while she wasn’t nearly as good at reading dogs as she was ponies, the fact that they were walking with the filly without a leash or even verbal directions from either of their masters mean that they were either well trained or really smart and loyal….maybe even both….

And somehow, in the five seconds Rally took to look these guys over, she just somehow knew that a drink was the last thing on the mare’s mind.

She felt herself drawing closer to this gun-laden mare, slowly and carefully so as not to trigger some jerk-reaction quick draw or a burst of mana to the face. “…e-excuse me, do you need anything?” she heard her voice ask, stumbling to find her voice for a moment before calming her nerves.

The mare’s face titled towards her, her empty gaze apparently trying to decide if she was looking at the floor or a fourteen-year-old yearling. “…is this the Last Stand?”

Maybe someday Puck will actually put a sign up so folk stop asking me that. “It is. Are you looking for someone here?”

“…waiting,” the mare replied slowly. “Need a room.”

Fu—of course I end up walking up to the one soul that actually needs to talk to that jacka—

Ginger, bless his gentle nature, overheard enough to interject himself into the task before she could spit a curse out loud, his hooves taking him further back towards Puck’s office. “Ah, you’ll need to talk to the owner for that. I’ll fetch him, but I warn you now, he’s…not nice.”

The mare’s eyes watched Ginger’s body until the stallion had vanished into the depths of the back rooms before speaking, mainly to herself. “…whatever.”

“…he’s not kidding,” Rally spoke quietly. “Puck’s an asshole. Town hates him.”

For some reason, that suddenly garnered her the mare’s full attention…or as much of it as her defeated, exhausted mind could conjure up, anyway. “…little young to be working in a place like this, aren’t you?”

“Nopony stays young in the wastes on their own,” she replied grimly. “…been alone for years. Got me here, of all places. My advice, take the room and live with his jacked-up prices. His “deals” will get you nabbed into his debt.”

Now the mare’s eyes were starting to wake up a little…and Rally didn’t like what she saw in them. “Know from experience?”

“Something like that….”

Luna be blessed, there wasn’t that lingering, uncomfortable silence, because Puck was barging out onto the bar floor right then and eying his newest “catch” up and down…and the mare didn’t seem to like him eyeballing her. “I’m told you need a room,” the gray stallion stated tersely, going so far as to budge Rally aside to stand in front of the mare. Damn near stepped on her tail in the process, the jerkass—

“Assuming you have one to spare that’s not being used for…other work, sure,” the mare droned back dryly.

Puck’s eyes briefly swept over the little filly and the two mutts, his muzzle scowling slightly. “The mutts housebroken?”

“They prefer working toilets, actually,” the mare replied with a scrunch of her face. “But they’ll let themselves out if you show them where they can go, whether it’s a ditch or a commode.”

“Hunh,” Puck muttered with a slight air of surprise. “….well, in any case, it’s thirty caps a day.”

“A bit steep. Most charge ten to fifteen.”

“Most folk don’t have a bar and a working kitchen to go with the room either,” Puck returned, undeterred by the mare’s rather lame haggling attempt. “’Course, a reduced rate can be had, in return for some extra work on the side.”

Instead of questioning him further on the matter, like most did when they heard his rather exorbitant rates, the mare simply pulled out a small bag and quickly filled the stallion’s belt pouch with what Rally assumed to be thirty caps. “Need a room, not a job. I expect to be here a few days until my contacts show up.”

If Puck was annoyed by her flat refusal of his scheme, he didn’t let it show in his face or voice, though he was never happy with customers that stayed too long without netting him more than the flat room rate. “The word “contacts” suddenly has an imminently important bearing on how available that room stays. My bar is not a hang-out for mercs.”

“Your bar is where I was sent because it’s the closest one to Trotpeka, not because it was liked,” the mare answered testily.

“’Liked’? Exactly who was it that sent you to a place they don’t even like?”

The mare’s response was curt, but unflinching. “Coupla Runners, name of Ada and Leon. We met three days ago, they just told me where to wait for ‘em while they finished up some business in Union territory. The way they described my destination gave me the impression they don’t have fond memories of you. Might be best to just leave it at thirty caps a day and call it an afternoon.”

Puck’s face sank inward somewhat, suddenly visibly uncomfortable with what the mare had just told him, and when he spoke, his voice lacked the vigor and fire it had held earlier. “….Rally, room 5,” was all he said, and he turned away from the mare and retreated to the darkness of his office in the back of the bar.

A brief respite from the bar floor was always welcome, particularly after seeing the rare instance of Puck being reduced to a quivering colt of a pony. “….is there anything else in town you need to do before you head up?”

“Not yet,” the mare sighed. “….any co-workers of yours busy up there?”

To a passer-by, they would probably have understood that she meant “a whore at work”. But to the little filly behind her, barely able to look at anypony around her as she struggled not to burst into tears over whatever it was that was bugging the both of them, it would probably register as little more than an innocent inquiry about cleaning duties or something.

Rally deigned to let that illusion stand. “….yes, but it won’t disturb you. Sound suppression runes keep it nice and quiet upstairs, so nobody bothers each other.”

“….after you, then,” came the mare’s quiet surrender.

Grateful to have at least a few minutes where she didn’t have to do any real work, she loped on up the stairs, latching onto her rusted keyring in an absent thought of magic and fishing through the keys until she came upon one with the number “5” scratched into its bow. True to her word, though Willow’s “working room” was occupied—as evidenced by the closed door with a blue ceramic insert set into its nameplate to indicate it as such—no sounds could be heard coming out of it as they passed by it, and the mare did not pay the door any further attention than was warranted.

Room 5, just past the mid-point of the hallway, was not one of the largest rooms available, but it was enough for a mare, a filly, and two-filly sized puppies. The room’s two beds were spread apart from each other, one against each wall, and the windowsill was boarded up from the outside with what looked like a metal plate. The dresser, sitting in the far left corner on three intact legs, was missing a couple of drawers but was otherwise serviceable. The floor itself was swept clean—one of her many work duties, though she’d had no time for it just yet today. Didn’t look like the place needed it anyway.

She did a quick look-around as the mare and filly lumbered past her to ensure that no remnants of the previous occupants remained—used chem syringes were the worst, and she was pretty sure the last renters weren’t shooting themselves up with the crap, but it never hurt to be careful. Beds were the first place to loo—

The filly unceremoniously dropped her saddlebags onto the floor, right next to the right side bed, and when Rally’s ears hear a curious rattling of metal and plastic she looked down at the bags, and nearly squealed in exquisite delight at the sight of what looked like a Lightbringer 2000 series laser pistol—

“Something catch your eye?” the mare’s voice jabbed into her brief fit of joy, though even her dark suspicions couldn’t drive her away now. Not when that was sitting right there in that little filly’s pistol holster!

“….where did you find that?” Rally had to ask out loud, her left forehoof pointing at the laser pistol as her brain began to break down all the possible sources or reasons for the unhealthy metallic clattering she’d just heard. Busted crystalline board, damaged array, or maybe the focusing lens and crystals themselves were wrecked and filling the interior with bits of arcane gem with every rattle. “Ya hardly see those anymore.”

“Do you even know what it is, kid?” the mare challenged back, though her tired voice suggested it was more of a plea that perhaps the little fourteen-year-old wouldn’t know and be defeated by the question, and hopefully go away.

No way in hell was she going to walk off without at least getting a look at it. “Lightbringer 2000, F1.2 version by Ampere Industries out of Vanhoover from the Before,” she rattled off without even bothering to consciously recall the data from her brain. “Effective range of a hundred and fifty meters if you install an enhanced arcane emitter system. Tightens the beam and gives it some extra oomph, just the thing to cut through the thickest armor the slavers or the Union can throw on. Only laser pistols that can match that are the latest AE variants that came out in the heyday of the Great War. Those later AEs were more like weapon frames with an absolutely unbelievable block mod program of parts. Stocks, grips, emitters, the laser module barrels and capacitors themselves could be switched out and modified to extend the ranges, or modify the laser for strong single shots or a rapid fire automatic like those classy-looking RCW models—”

“All right all right, you know what it is, I get it,” the mare surrendered quickly before Rally could lose herself in a flood of data points and a giggling voice. “Jeez, where’d you learn that kind of stuff?”

With a half-hearted sigh, she sat on her hind legs and lifted her forelegs up off the ground as she pulled the leg warmer off of her right leg through her magic, revealing part of the cybernetic limb to the mare and filly. “….kinda had to, after I got this,” she explained softly. “Only way to keep it running smoothly is to make sure I know how to take care of it. Got into MEWs alongside it, just to develop a skill set I could make caps off of, but there aren’t a lot of folk with beam weapons around so that kinda went south on me real quick. But the things are just so freakin’ cool I can’t help it when I see one, I turn all girly and gooey! What’s wrong with it?”

“….maybe you can tell me,” the mare offered gently, an indigo field enveloping the weapon and removing it from the filly’s travelling saddle, and Rally had to bite herself on the lip to keep from squealing as it was floated up to her. “Guns and magic are my thing, but a MEW’s beyond me. Haven’t found a soul that could fix it in the two months I’ve had it.”

Without waiting to be bidden or otherwise encouraged, Rally’s right hoof unlocked into a talon and grabbed hold of the pistol’s grip as she began to visually inspect it. Battery cell chamber was empty, weapon itself had no power and was in incredible visual condition, only a few nicks and light scratches along the silvery surface. But with every tilt and upward movement, she could hear some very delicate parts in the forward section of the barrel rattling about, and she brought it up to her ear for a clearer shot at its inte—

“Crystal array’s shattered,” she commented when she heard the tell-tale sound of crystal chinking against the inside of the barrel. “I can hear bits of it bouncing around in there. Only bad thing about the Lightbringer, the original factory crystal array’s housed in a rather soft steel, can’t take the abuse that the military-grade AEs shrug off. Upgraded emitter arrays use military-grade anodized aluminum or titanium to fix the problem. Gun must have taken a hell of a fall.”

“….that sounds like a very specific and specially manufactured part,” the mare uttered in soft breaths. “One that probably can’t be made.”

“…not easily. But you’re in luck!” Rally beamed with a gleeful smile. And she couldn’t help but smile! She finally had what she’d bitching about getting these last three weeks—a way out of this place and away from Puck the Eternal Asshole. “In my efforts to become a wandering MEW repairpony, I happened to assemble a collection of spare parts. One of which is that enhanced emitter targeting system, which requires replacement of the crystal array to one rated for the additional output and heat generation. I can get this little puppy back to barking armor-piercing lasers that’ll turn slavers into glowing kitty litter inside their own armor by morning!”

A short, but loud snort from the bed that sounded something like a laugh briefly distracted Rally from her exquisite tirade, and looking over she saw the filly’s mouth curl into a very slight smile as she tried to doze off, where before the poor thing had just been universally dour and sad and really unhappy. “….funny,” the filly said, her high-pitched voice coming out rather hoarsely and softly, still laden with grief. “…in a morbid way….”

“….what you do want in exchange for the work?” the mare asked next. “I can’t offer caps, a good deal of what I have left is going to this high-priced room and I don’t know how long I’ll be here.”

Rally’s heart crashed a little. She’d thought the mare might had more caps on her than that, but…but then, she had warned her to just live with the price instead of risking getting pulled into one of Puck’s schemes, so she would probably want to try and stretch out her caps as much as possible. But there had to be a way to turn this into an out, there had to be….

“….as you might have already figured out, I warned you about Puck’s generous offer to reduce your rate in exchange for a job, because that’s how I wound up working for the jerkwad,” she began, turning her eyes back towards the Lightbringer to examine it further. Must have come out of a stable to be in such good shape. “He keeps a small brahmin herd in a field outside of town, mostly to sell them to caravans needing replacement beasts. I was supposed to help tend to the herd, only when I got there there was a pack of mongrel dogs tearing into the blasted beasts. Three got killed before I could drive them off, and the bastard dinged me two hundred caps per lost animal the morning after along with my gun. I didn’t even have a hundred on me, and now I’m stuck here trying to work off the debt, which he keeps raising every time I break something else in here while charging me room and board too….”

It was the filly, surprisingly, that spoke harshly of her “debtor’s detail” first, though Rally didn’t doubt that the mare’s thoughts were quite similar. “….that sounds an awful lot like slavery….”

“…I suppose it is, in some ways. Don’t change the fact that I’m stuck with no way out anytime soon—”

“You’ll get out,” the mare said, her voice growing dark with a suppressed anger. “If that’s your price for fixing that MEW, you’ll get out.”

There, she cried silently. That’s my out! My ticket out of this mess!

And yet, she couldn’t help but wonder…if the mare couldn’t pay off the debt for her….

“….how, exactly?” she asked, turning to face the mare fully. “I mean, you just told me you don’t have the caps, and I’ll take any help I can get, but—”

“Ada and Leon,” the mare answered before she could finish. “The Runners I’m waiting for….they might be able to help out, once they arrive. The only thing they even told me about this Puck wasn’t in any kind of a positive light, so it shouldn’t be too hard to talk them into it. Ada, at the least, seems to have a soft spot for kids, she’ll probably do it on principle alone. If Puck owes them any kind of money or favors, they can probably spring you out in exchange for forgetting that debt he racked up on you.”

“…and if they can’t?”

The mare’s body shrank with a heavy sigh, her eyes falling onto the floor. “….then we’ll try something else. Lemme sleep on it a bit.”

“….I’ll stop by for the gun later, after I’m done working for the day,” Rally said, sliding her leg warmer back in place before trotting towards the door. “It’ll probably be late, I stashed my spare parts elsewhere in town and I don’t want Puck finding them or I’ll lose them the same way I lost my gun.”

“….door will be open,” the mare said back. “Try to be quiet, mutts may be dozing by then.”

Said “mutts”, as the mare called them, seemed content to stay by the filly’s side as the kid tried to pass off into dreamland herself, though the little thing did kinda wave at her with a sleepy forehoof as she left in a really cute way. A definite improvement from the lifeless, almost robotic behavior she’d been showing a few minutes earlier.

Somebody died on them, she mused sadly as she trotted back downstairs to the bar floor. Hard to say if it was family or friend, but somebody very important to both of them died and they’re barely comprehending it.

Which meant, in Rally’s world, “stay away”. Grieving folk were not always keen to have company when they were hurting that bad, and she could oblige them. Getting her hooves on an actual, partially intact Lightbringer was an exceptionally rare opportunity. She couldn’t wait to get it in her room and pulled apart, see how it ticked. The two she’d seen up to this point had been all smashed up and little more than battered steel and plastic housing a pile of shredded, broken bits of circuit boards, wires, and crystal.

Her anxiousness, in fact, made the remainder of her afternoon such a mind-bogglingly slow chore that she swore she’d aged three days in three hours, and barely remembered any part of it. She only recalled that at the end of it all, when she was slithering into the rec room to shed her work apron and move on to Miss Glossy Shine’s bath house, Puck was waiting right behind the door to take it off of her and empty its pockets out of the seventy-three caps in tips she’d racked up over the course of the day before shooing her out of the bar entirely. He’d let her back in after nightfall, when he closed up shop. This way, he kept her from trying to scoot on out of town. No weapons, no supplies, no caps, meant she wasn’t going anywhere, couldn’t buy or barter her way into a ride to the next town, and couldn’t try to hire a merc or two to rough him up and get her out of his “debt”. All she had was the bag of MEW parts she’d kept stashed at Miss Shine’s place, and she was reluctant to even go near the things for fear that he’d find them and steal them as a “down payment”. She was taking enough of a risk fixing that mare’s gun as it was. But if it worked, if she really was friends with a couple of Runners whose mere names turned Puck into a scared little colt, she’d be free of all this bullshit by next week….

….well, all the bullshit she’d racked up here, anyway. But she’d figure that part out later.

Miss Glossy Shine, blessedly, was a far better pony to be working for. The work was….difficult, at times. Applying water, soap, and the rare lathering of shampoo was not hard, but some ponies were not comfortable being bathed by another, much less a teenager. The reward, aside from working off the price of her morning wash, was the opportunity for a more thorough bath for herself at no charge, which she gladly took. This was really the only thing she’d miss about this town, and she didn’t enjoy the prospect of living without regular access to bathing water or soap once she was out of here.

It was the work afterward that proved to be the hard part.

Miss Shine kept her stuff in her personal office, under lock and key inside a safe, by mutual agreement. Miss Shine had had just enough run-ins with Puck to know how persistent the bastard could be when pursuing what he thought was owed to him, and agreed to hide her collection of rare MEW parts and work tools on the condition that they not leave the safe until she’d worked off her debt to him.

And so when Miss Shine looked up from her burnished, splintered husk of a desk as Rally pushed herself through the office door, the very first thing to cross the mare’s mind wa—

“….Rally, how much more do you owe Puck now?” the tired-eyed mare asked gently.

“….still the same, Miss Shine,” she answered with a level voice…or she thought she did, anyway. “…I….I need to get a couple of parts from my stash.”

Miss Shine’s violet eyes blinked a couple of times, but remained passive and soft. “…are you intending to sell them to Puck?”

“No…I…I need them for a job. A mare and a filly rented out a room today….they have a MEW that needs work, which I have parts for.”

“….Rally, if you think Puck is aggressive with your debt management now, it will only get worse when he finds out you’re doing work without cutting him in on it,” Miss Shine warned her gravely. “No matter what that mare promised you, the trouble is not worth it.”

“She didn’t promise caps, she….she said a couple of Runners were coming to see her and that they might be able to help me out.”

Miss Shine’s eyes and face took on a pained, almost tortured look. “…y-you don’t honestly believe that, do you, dear? I know how you get when you see a MEW, especially a rare one. You were probably gushing at the sight of it!”

Rally felt a slight blush flow into her face. “….o-okay, so maybe I freaked a bit when I saw it, but—”

“Rally, that mare could be playing you into fixing the gun up for next to nothing!” Miss Shine shot back sternly, briefly stunning the light-pink coated teen with her sudden change of demeanor. Like….like she’d suddenly hit the switch labeled “Parent Mode” or something. “You’ll get yourself in deep water with Puck and next thing you know that harlot is skipping town laughing her tail off at your desperation! She’s using you!”

“Everypony in this damned town has been trying to use me since I got here,” Rally sneered back, feeling her ears flattening in anger. “That creep of a pimp at the edge of town, the blacksmith across the street, Puck keeps trying to push me into…into things I don’t wanna do and I’m getting scared I won’t get a choice in the matter if I stay much longer! I don’t wanna end up like Willow!”

“Willow does that willingly, and Puck is not so crazy as to push a…a child, into that work. Town would string him up and quarter him!”

“They got plenty of reason to do that now, what more would my situation do to push them into it? This is the best shot I’ve gotten at getting out from under that bastard’s hooves, I gotta take it—”

“Dear, the Runners aren’t the law, they’re just mercenaries!” Miss Shine shouted back forcefully, hushing the teenaged filly into temporary silence with her sharp tone. “…better than most, yes, but at the end of the day they still expect payment for their work and they don’t do it for free! If those idiots hadn’t riled the Union up with that pointless war we could have been swimming in business and trade now, it is a miracle that any caravans from the east come this way anymore! You’re making a mistake, a big one, and you’re going to get hurt! Just…just go back to your room and tell this mare your spare parts went missing or broken or something! Don’t do this!”

“….I didn’t come here to argue about stupid wars,” Rally forced herself to say calmly, despite the slight sting that Miss Shine’s words had inflicted on her already. “I just came here to get a couple of parts for a job I agreed to do. Can I get them or not?”

For a moment it looked like Miss Shine was going to say, “No, dear”, and turn her away from her bath house entirely and leaving her empty hoofed. But to her relief, she reluctantly gave in, and silently trudged over to the safe crammed into the corner of the room behind her desk, working the lock open and pulling out a compartmentalized, heavy duty saddle bag with her teeth.

What little joy Rally felt in her verbal victory crumbled to dust when she caught sight of what looked like a tear in Miss Shine’s left eye, which went a long way towards explaining the wilted, downcast ears. “….I do this, so that you will understand afterward why you shouldn’t be so quick to trust people,” she bemoaned softly…perhaps the first time Rally could recall her looking or sounding even remotely sad or hurt.

Try as she did, she couldn’t help but feel hurt herself as she dug out the needed equipment and parts from the saddlebag and closed it up. Miss Shine had probably been the only pony in town that had been nice and decent to her out of principle (Willow didn’t count, though she was fairly decent for a whore). She’d have thought Shine would have been happier to help her get out of this mess she’d gotten into with Puck.

Maybe she’d gotten a little too attached to her?

Whatever the case, she had what she needed, even if she wound up feeling like she’d lost in the end anyway. She left the bath house without another word, lest either of them wind up saying something they would quickly regret, and once outside in the black of night she found herself face to face with the next obstacle in her plan.

Getting back into her room without Puck taking her stuff from her. Sure, she could probably punch his lights out with her cyber-leg, but that would only make her situation worse when he came to. She wasn’t sure how willing that mare was to look out for her and she wasn’t about to drag that crushed little filly into the middle of it all. Poor thing was still in some sort of emotional shock, a violent fight was the last thing she needed to see. She briefly thought of sneaking it in somehow, but she’d never really been good at that sort of thing and only got worse at it when she got her new metal leg, so that was out. Bribery was limited to favors she had no intention of ever carrying out, which left….

….luck. Somehow or another, whether she got to re-enter Puck’s bar without getting robbed of her few possessions depended on whether or not he was anywhere in sight when she walked in. That fire escape door she took to get out earlier in the morning only opened from the inside…..

….in….side….

Oh screw me sideways I’m an idiot!! she insulted herself with a giddy squeal as she turned off into the alley between Puck’s bar and a junk store she’d never gone into. I’m a freakin’ unicorn, I can just open the door from the outside with a push of magic! Just drop the parts off in my room, then slip back out and come in through the front so he don’t suspect anything!! Idiot little girl, I am!!

She happily—and calmly—bounded her way up the fire escape stairs, pausing at the door and setting her tools and packaged parts down just long enough to will a telekinesis field into existence on the other side of the door, gently pushed it open, and then scurried inside with soft, light steps…or as soft as she could make her right foreleg move. The candlelights in the hallway barely illuminated the hallway, but it was just enough to allow her to make her way to her room and carefully set her stuff down on the floor by her mattress. With that done, she quickly retraced her route back out the fire escape door and down into the alley, and then began a leisurely-paced walk out into the street, turning right and allowing herself to pass in front of the bar’s front windows in vain hopes that maybe it would be Willow or Ginger letting her inside this time instead.

She was only mildly disappointed to see Puck’s gray body within the walls of the bar, visually inspecting his tables and chairs for damage or nicks, and both ponies snarled with hatred at the sight of the other. Puck’s body promptly thundered to the front door, hastily unlocking it an—

“Another five minutes and you’d be sleeping in the dirt,” he growled angrily at her. Still. She began to wonder how a pony could always be that angry, all the time, and not tire themselves out. Maybe he wasn’t really a pony, but some ancient and grumpy golem construct of a mad sorcerer.

“Given the quality of the room you’ve provided to me at my expense, I really can’t tell the difference,” she sassed back. “Do I get to sleep with walls around me today, at least?”

His mouth opened and closed in a silent curse to her face, but he nonetheless stepped aside long enough to let her in, and then slapped the door shut behind her.

“Given any thought to taking on that “extra” work?” he roared at her quietly as she made her way towards the stairs. “Pays better than waiting tables. Sooner you’re out of my mane, the better, honestly.”

“I’m not doing that,” she shot him down angrily. “I don’t care how many caps I could rack up, I’m not selling myself, ever.”

“I had enough customers asking about your availability today to have taken a quarter of your debt out,” he countered harshly. “And quite frankly, I’m getting tired of your shit. Consider it carefully, while I’m still willing to let you keep a part of the caps for the work.”

She’d heard that little threat before, the first time he’d started badgering her into taking the work last week. She’d heard it again the other day, and then this morning….

….but this time….this time, it sounded like he meant it….

Her tail quivered in fright as she hurried up the stairs, though she managed to keep the rest of her body mostly stable as she came upon the mare’s room and cautiously invited herself inside. She hoped those Runners showed up soon, the—

“….awwww,” she heard herself mew quietly in awe, her eyes falling upon the little filly’s bed. The squirt was wrapped in what looked like a couple of wool blankets, fast asleep on her right side and completely oblivious to the evil world around her as she hugged this filly-sized white fox plush doll close to her. She seemed to be using a third blanket as a pillow, but it was the sight of the husky pups huddled next to her that had her heart melting at the cuteness. One of them was curled up against the filly’s back, and the other one was resting against the filly’s hind legs with its head unconsciously trying to burrow itself into the filly’s body, hindered only by the plush fox in the little girl’s grasp. “So cute.”

“If you say so,” the mare’s voice said softly, barely audible in the silent room. Rally turned her head leftward to see if the mare had the MEW with he—

Oh, my, that’s a big gun, she cringed mentally when she caught sight of what looked like a rather large, matte-stainless revolver lying before the mare on her bed, its cylinder open and empty as a brass brush continually scrubbed in and out of the cylinder’s six chambers. “….got the parts,” she said when she found her voice again. “….where is it?”

The mare’s silent response was to simply wrap the broken Lightbringer in an indigo shimmer and float it out to her, and Rally took it into her own spell field with a careful slip of thought.

“….may take me an hour, tops,” she said, taking care in handling the gun so as not to disturb the loose bits of crystal and metal inside. “…if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather just give it back before I get some grub and Zs. Trade caravan came to town today, one of the merchants might have some battery cells for it.”

The mare’s indigo magic wrapped around her saddlebags, opening one of them up and causing a brief flash of neon purple light to burst out from the inside as an olive drab package was lifted out and floated over to her—

“….we’ll call that a down payment,” the mare said, turning her eyes back to her big gun. “Just tear off the marked end and let the tray out, it’ll cook on its own. It’s one of the fresher ones I have.”

Though her stomach lurched at the thought of a military ration for dinner, it was still a somewhat humbling offer. She couldn’t recall the last soul that felt they had enough food to spare to casually pass some off to a stranger like that…

“….t-thanks,” Rally managed to stutter as she turned back towards the door.

She’d meant it as a genuine ‘thank-you’, but the mare’s quiet, subdued laugh indicated it might have been taken as a jab against the ration (which would not be entirely untrue either). “…it’s not a mil-rat, it’s actually edible.”

“Heard that lie before,” she laughed back, her body brushing against the doorway as she scooted through and shut the door behind her.

From there, it was just a few seconds’ walk to her room, and then it was all she could do to keep quiet as she hopped over to her mattress, plopped down upon it and went right to work. Her body suddenly felt so much lighter and…and giddier, weirdly enough, but she had a right to feel weird things! This was the first time she’d gotten to work on a Lightbringer and she couldn’t wait! She laid the abused MEW down on the floor next to the mattress, setting her tools beside it as she flipped the ration package about in her magic, the tough plastic crinkling loudly in her grasp:

MEAL, READY TO EAT
MENU ITEM #3
GEMELLI PASTA W/VEGETABLES IN BASIL SAUCE, CHEDDAR FLAVOR RICE, SLICED PEACHES, WHEAT BREAD
STABLE #115 ISSUE

Her brain stopped working briefly when she read the last line.

Stable-issue.

As in, it came from an honest-to-Luna Stable. The one-one-five, even.

….as in, she’d just gotten a Stable-made ration….

….from a stable mare?

In hindsight, actually, the PipBuck should have given that away, but it wasn’t unheard of for a soul to grab hold of one somehow—usually by taking it out of an abandoned Stable, or off a dead stable pony. Rare, but not unheard of. But….the rations were something else. As far as she knew, none of the other found Stables in the prairie had ration stores that lasted more than a few years, and most of them had long since been emptied out. The three that weren’t…well, two were in Union control, and the 115 was sealed up tight, not even magic could interact with its door. The Union had tried before a couple years back, and supposedly a unicorn had died in the attempt. The 115 only sent a pony out once a generation—anywhere between twenty to thirty years apart, depending on how they felt about it….

….but if that mare was from the 115, she couldn’t have been a scout. The kid and pups would have made it really hard to scout about the wastes…

….ask her, when you take the gun back.

Gun.

….gun! You’re supposed to be working on the gun, idiot!

No longer willing to let herself be distracted by idle thoughts or questions, she poured the remainder of her energy into her work…though even that proved to be challenging upon her first bite of the basil sauce-basted pasta. Afterward, all thought of work and MEWs vanished as she savored every delicious, mouth-watering bite of the ration. She’d had a military ration a couple of times, and remembered little more than an urge to gag upon every bite. But this stable ration….by the gods, it was just too tasty! Even the fruit flavor drink packet she mixed into her water canteen was unlike anything else she’d ever tasted. The packet said it was a “cherry” flavor, and she had no idea what a cherry was, but it had turned her water into a sharp, sweet flavor that oddly made her thirst for it more with every gulp.

And it was a good thing she’d indulged in the meal first. The taste, the actual sensation of a satisfied and full stomach made her repair work almost an afterthought. Like it had put her into a sort of zen state of concentration and awareness. Every thought, every movement, every tingle of magic flowed together into a careful, delicate ballet of technical precision. The upper receiver housing came off as if it were made of air, the busted crystal array was unscrewed and pulled in a smooth, effortless motion, the loose bits of crystal, wiring, and arcane-based tech was picked out in meticulous fashion….and then came the fitting of the new crystal focusing array, and of the new receiver housing containing the enhanced arcane emission tightening system that was markedly different from the original silvery housing. The nose end of the “slide”, as it were, was noticeably enlarged, with a pair of amber-colored crystal diodes to assist with the beam focusing on each side, as well as a red slotted light on each side of the front, encircling the barrel end. Two pairs of additional cooling tubes in place behind the emitter nose on each side of the slide served to regulate the additional heat buildup, and a red ring-style light on each side was present, just behind the cooling tubes. Out of pure aesthetics, she left the green diode light beneath the barrel muzzle in place, and changed out the plastic dustcover sheath with the upgraded tan-colored synthetic material sheath. What it was for, she couldn’t fathom, as it was a griffon-designed variant of the Lightbringer and was not meant for a pony’s hooves or mouth-bit grip, but it did give the weapon a distinctive look…and perhaps that was its purpose.

She couldn’t help but squeal like a five year old girl when she’d set the last screw in place, holding the finished product up before her to take in in all its old world glory. It looked bad-ass, to put it bluntly! A lot meaner looking than the plain silvery look it had before…and a lot more durable. Now that she finally had a chance to see what the end product looked like, she was desperate to find more Lightbringers to do this to! She hadn’t been this excited or joyous in quite some time.

And in the midst of her celebration, she had forgotten the one constant in the wasteland—if it saw good tidings and great joy taking place, it would do everything in its unholy power to rip it away from a soul.

She had barely set her tools back into their pouch when the light from her lantern in the corner was blocked out by the presence of an intruder, and when she looked back towards the offender, she felt all pretense of joy and satisfaction drain out of her blood.

“The hell do you got there?” Puck’s voice demanded harshly, his body appearing almost coal-black in the lantern’s dim, dark yellow light.

…oh shit…oh shit oh shit….

“…..g-gun,” she replied softly, her hold on the Lightbringer beginning to weaken, and she carefully laid it down in front of her on the mattress before it could fall from her faltering magic.

Puck’s head cocked about the room briefly, pausing when he spotted the refuse from the ration. “Looks like more than a gun. Looks like you’re taking work on the side behind my back.”

F-bombs began bleating through her mind, though she offered them no voice. “….n-no caps….just a ration….th-that mare, with the kid….”

“A mare with a broken gun wanted you to fix it and your price was food? I ain’t buyin’ it.”

Her lips moved, almost to utter one of the silent curses pounding out in her head, but at the last second she managed to speak normally….or as normally as a scared little girl could sound. “….it was all she was willing to offer….so I took it—”

“Behind my back,” he snarled, cutting her off with a menacing step forward. “You went behind my back to rake in some caps when you still me owe me for three dead brahmin, this room and the food I’ve been feeding you with for the last three weeks…and with perfectly serviceable weapons parts you’ve been hiding from me the whole damn time?”

Rally’s body began to shake, paralyzed with fear of this increasingly dangerous demon of a pony stalking towards her.

“You owe me, little bitch,” his voice heaved angrily. “And if you’ve got the time to pull in work on the side, you’ve got the time to make full use of yourself in my bar. Come morning, Willow will talk you through the basics of your additional duties, specifically the pay and where it goes when you’re done.”

Oh my gods oh my gods this isn’t happening thisisn’thappening thisisn’thapp—

“N-no, please, not that,” she squeaked, her terror beginning to make it difficult to look him in the eye or speak calmly. “I-I’m not even fifteen pl-please no—”

“It won’t be for long,” he growled, stopping mere inches from her. “But you will learn, that when you owe a debt, you will pay it—”

Without warning, one of his forelegs lashed out, smacked her straight in the nose and filled her face with red-hot pain, blinding her to the world as she collapsed onto the rocky mattress.

“Or you will be made to pay it.”

A second blow whacked the side of her head, and right then the world seemed to stretch out for a million miles, her thoughts slowing to a glacial crawl. Darkness began creeping across her vision, though she stayed conscious just long enough to see the bastard clutching the laser pistol in his jaws as he pilfered the weapon for himself and left her to her pain. As the last shred of consciousness slipped away and plunged her into a dreamless sleep, her last fleeting thought was a muted question on whether the warm streak carving across her face was blood or salt-water tears.

The next conscious thought seemed to sparkle into her brain an eternity later. It was a singular thought, instinctive and urgent; awaken. Her body, however, was dead to her. No amount of thought or insistence on the part of her primal thought could entice her lead-weighted limbs to so much as stir from whatever warm cocoon had taken her prisoner. Her body was of the opinion that things were fine right where they were, and that the brain needed to pass off to sleep with the rest of her.

And yet the brain persisted. The primal, singular thought grew, gradually stirring more complex thoughts and processes to the forefront of her mind. She soon came to recognize the feel of a slightly rough fabric draped over her, and the almost fluffy-bodied surface cushioning her body from below. This surface seemed to conform to fit her shape, adding its own voice to the constant chorus demanding that she stop moving or thinking, and return to her dreamless world. And it was a very appealing idea.

She was pulled from the powerful grasp of sleep by an outside force….one she did not expect.

A cold, wet poke to the face.

The icy shock, planted near her eye, sent a chill through her brain, and she reflexively turned her head away from the offending object before it could poke her again. “….stoppit….”

A quiet, animalistic whine answered her plea, and a weight she’d not even noticed vanished from her immediate presence, replaced moments later by a much heavier one—

“Rally?”

The foreign, warm voice whispered her name softly, gentle logs pulling at her body to stir her from her warm, fuzzy trap…..

When she opened her eyes, the exceptionally blurred world beyond stunned her with its bleak, drab brown colors, in which a somewhat brighter teal blue shape stood out against it, looming over her like a small mountain. A moment later, a black and white blur popped up from beneath the teal blue shape, morphing into a stationary and wolfish-shaped blob—

—a blink of her eyes wiped away some of the blurriness, refining her world image and giving detail to the shapes. The black and white blob became the head of a four-month old huge husky pup poking over the edge of a bed, its mouth parted slightly as it stared at her. The teal blue shape became an indigo-maned mare with dark lines scraping down one side of her face—

“Rally?” the warm voice whispered again, now clearly coming from the mare’s moving mouth.

A fleeting moment of confusion began to set in. She didn’t recall falling asleep anywhere ne—

It came back to her in a pulsing flash, briefly re-visiting the pain inflicted on her head, and then she understood.

The mare had come back for her gun, and stupid little Rally didn’t have it.

Her mouth moved, stammering slightly as she spoke. “…m-miss, I’m sorry…y-your g—”

“We’ll get to that in a minute,” the stable mare shushed her gently. “…are you sick? Does anything hurt?”

Rally’s brain pushed and pulled with itself, trying to figure what the stable pony meant. Physically? Did she mean physical pain? Or….or did she think….

Something in her eyes, or on her face, must have betrayed her thoughts, because the stable mare was very quick to dissuade her from those thoughts. “H-hey, it’s okay, I….I’m no expert, but when I found you, you looked…untouched, in that regard, and the doc didn’t find anything wrong there. Just looks like you got beat up.”

Oddly enough, the moment the mare mentioned it, Rally could suddenly recall with crystal-ball clarity the hoof that had smacked her nose and likely broken it….and yet she felt no pain in her face at all….

“….m-my nose….was it broke?”

“Pretty badly,” the mare whispered. “Had to convince the town doc to turn my last three healing potions into injection stims, I didn’t want to risk you choking on it.”

Her dead-weight limbs began to stir at last, her left leg sliding up and unfolding within the trappings of what felt now like a wool blanket…

“….you found me?”

“…well, you said it’d take you an hour at most to get the gun repaired,” the mare’s voice answered. “I gave you ninety minutes, then went looking for you. Room was open, found you on a slab of rock passing as a mattress, or something. Your face was covered in blood….what happened?”

Rally didn’t answer right away, stumbling over the fact that the mare had actually come looking for her when she didn’t come back when she said she would. Most folk just figured she’d blown the appointment off and forgot about her….

“….P-Puck,” she stammered, shivering slightly underneath the blanket as she forced herself to relive that last minute of terror, though she was silently grateful that the beating was all he’d done to her. “….it was Puck. Had the gun all fixed, was about to get it back to you when he showed up. Maybe he heard me working on it through the floor, maybe he had….other ideas….but, when he found me with the gun…..he wasn’t happy. He…he took the gun, beat me senseless….I…I-I’m sorry, I d—”

One of the mare’s forelegs came up over the edge of the bed, gently pressing against her snout to stay her apologies—

“It’s fine, don’t worry about it,” the stable mare soothed gently….

….though Rally couldn’t help but detect a hint of forced pleasantry in her voice.

“….no, it’s not,” the teenaged filly moaned sadly. “You won’t get it back now. Not without paying my debt or picking a fight. And he keeps a couple of mercs on retainer as muscle.”

The mare seemed to almost gloss over that last fact, her eyes briefly lost amidst her thoughts as she mulled it over. “….two? Armed?”

“…one is. The other prefers his bare hooves.”

The stable mare’s response was an absent grunt as she pulled away from the bed, walking to the other side of the room, and Rally gingerly raised her head to follow her path—

The mare’s body stopped at the bed on the other side of the room, hefting her travelling saddle up after unzipping the saddle bags from the sides, and strapping it across her body with practiced ease and smoothness—

—followed, very quickly, by a small collection of weapons that had been sitting on the desk next to the bed. That big revolver, a smaller black one that looked like it fired rifle rounds, and then a shotgun with what looked like an extended shell tube and a cut-down stock….

Her final weapon, a blocky semi-automatic, she left out, briefly ejecting the magazine before pulling the slide to inspect its chamber. Seemingly satisfied with its condition, she slapped it back in and sauntered back to her.

“…my daughter went out a few minutes ago, should be back any time now,” the mare said, setting the pistol down near Rally’s body, along with what looked like four spare magazines, all loaded. “….you know how to use one of these?”

“….I’m okay with it,” she answered hesitantly, her head craning about to take in the blocky automatic. “….but I prefer a revolver, really. Found a really good one, months ago, but lost it when Puck dinged me for those dead brahmin. Don’t know if he sold it or kept it….”

“….left a ration out, if you feel like eating,” the mare said, her body moving towards the door. “We’ll talk some more after I come back. Shouldn’t be long.”

The promise of a second meal consisting of real food, as alluring as it was, was still not enough to dissuade her from trying to at least poke at this mare’s brain a bit further. She was already tying with Miss Glossy Shine for the title of Most Helpful Pony to Poor Rally, and yet she didn’t even know her name—

“….where are you going?”

The mare’s answer, though brief, sent a dull chill through her bones with its slightly furious edge. “I’m going to pick a fight.”

Much of the week had been an agonizing nightmare she could not wake up from. The screams still haunted her, somewhere in her head. Never overwhelming, but she swore she could still hear them. The pain, the sorrow….the unrelenting horror of being torn apart and eaten alive. Sleep had become a foreign subject to her.

And then there was Light Tail’s pain. For the first time in her little life, the poor thing had gone ballistic on her. Screamed at her, tried to punch her lights, crying and howling all the while. And when the child had exhausted herself in her mad grief, she just…shut down. For much of the first day she just laid in one place, unresponsive, and when she did show signs of life, it was to simply cry into her forelegs. Day two was more of the same, with the occasional added movement to another part of the shop with no discernable purpose or aim. It was only on the third day that she showed any sign of being willing to walk any great distance, but communication was still not very high on her list of priorities, no matter how much Sling tried to coax just two words out of her. To be virtually ignored like that in a time of great pain and grief broke her confidence as a parent, but she knew in her heart that even if El-Tee had felt like saying anything, she would not be able to offer the filly any relief or insight into the nature of death and emotional heartache. How could she, when her only response was to shut it out and focus on her only child? It had been her response when they left the Stable, left her only friend behind to die along with over eight hundred other souls. Shove it aside. The child was all that mattered.

To the child, everyone mattered. Even the murderers and cannibals. And now she was wrought with grief at the loss of two dear friends who were no longer in her life….a loss caused in part by bad ponies, and was probably well aware that her mother had inflicted this kind of pain on plenty of others given all the lives she had taken in the last three months, if raiders and killers could feel such things. How could the mother possibly offer any advice or consoling words about loss when she had no qualms with taking others from those who cared about them? How?

Sling would have argued that the killers, the thieves and crazed, sadistic raiders, did the things they did because they didn’t care about anybody but themselves and their own desires. But when she looked at the things she’d done, the number of souls she’d forced to take an early exit from the earthly plane, and her singular desire to ensure that Light Tail survived at any cost, even her own life….she began to wonder if there was any real difference between herself and all the lives she’d taken. She didn’t even think twice about it anymore. She just did it. Knife, gun, her bare hooves, or, more recently, a destructive surge of magic, whatever could kill her foe the quickest, she did it and she no longer hesitated.

She wasn’t sure she ever had, honestly.

So without any answers for her child, or relief and solace for herself, Sling was left to deal with her own maelstrom of powerful, primal emotions in some other way, and more than once had brought herself to the brink of vomiting her meager meals at the overwhelming thoughts and feelings flooding her every sense. Kite was only the second true friend she’d had in her life…and yet the loss stung so hard she couldn’t fathom it. Was it because she’d had to hear her final, terrifying moments of life as she was ripped apart by the victims of the Great War? Was it because Kite had come to value her and El-Tee so much that she had willingly….let go, to certain death, just to ensure they would make it away from the slavers? Was it because she had let go, so close to her end goal of the western prairie, her just and earnestly deserved salvation from all the abuses and hardships she’d been forced to endure?

Or had that half-crazed, out-of-the-blue kiss of pure joy been more than just a spontaneous decision made mere minutes after being bought of the slave trade by the efforts of a mare she’d known for barely two months? Had it been an inkling of desires and feelings that Kite herself didn’t know about, emotions that amounted to more than simple infatuation and adoration? Even though Sling herself had no conscious memory of that moment, at times she could still see snippets and little flashes of what she could only assume to be her perspective of that kiss, and strange phantom tendrils of movement across her tongue that she couldn’t place. And when she gathered the courage to look at these strange, seemingly planted memories within herself, she usually came to the conclusion that Kite herself was probably only vaguely aware of what she was doing….but she was aware of it, and that was more than Sling could say for herself in that moment.

It didn’t make the poor mare’s violent, gruesome end of her life any easier to absorb. And then there was BJ, mere inches away from her the whole time…she couldn’t even bring herself to contemplate what the poor colt had suffered in his last few moments. It was too much.

She struggled to even comprehend her pain, for over four days now, with the answers no clearer or closer now than they’d been before. She’d struggled for something, anything, anything at all that would somehow explain it to her, or at the very least give her something to focus on that didn’t drain her of all her hope and will to live.

And then the luckless teenaged filly slid into her view on her four rather lanky legs, her light pink coat adorned in a dirty apron covered in dozens of stitched-on patches and a worn blue leg warmer concealing much of her cybernetic foreleg, and suddenly Sling had what she wanted.

Something to focus on.

Something to focus on….that was also painfully familiar. An abused soul, forcibly indentured to another, desperate for a way out...and whose brief window of brevity at the sight of her broken laser pistol reminded her so much of her daughter that she felt a strange, compulsive stirring pushing her into action without thought or contemplation of what trouble it would entail for her.

It was like meeting Kite and BJ all over again. And this time, she would do it right. She would do what she should have done the first time, and help the poor thing when she needed it most. She could only hope that Kite, wherever her soul was now, would understand…and that it would bring her peace.

It quickly became apparent to her that the way to help was to find her a way out of her forced service, and if Leon’s brief advice for dealing with Puck was any indication, he and Ada would have been the best route for doing it without having to shoot anyone. It was child’s play to bring it up, and while she felt slightly guilty for getting the kid’s hopes up, it was worth it for the chance to get her laser pistol fixed and give her hope—real hope—that she would see an end to her debt slavery. If she was as talented and intelligent as she claimed, it would be worth it a thousand times over.

So when Rally failed to return the pistol to her in the time frame she’d quoted her….when Sling found the teen battered and bleeding on the floor of a bare-bones hotel room with little more than a rock-solid mattress, left to possibly suffer brain damage or lethal blood loss….

…the molten-hot, familiar poison of exceptional rage began to boil within her. It had been a miracle that she’d not torn the entire building apart like she’d wanted to, to find the child’s attacker. But she’d promised herself that her attacker would be found, and dealt with. Harshly. She wouldn’t say it aloud, but she was virtually ecstatic when the kid named her abusive “employer” as her assailant. Now she could get her out of his heartless clutches without having to wait for Ada and Leon.

The bastard had no idea what he’d just unleashed.

Her slow, deliberate march down the stairs to the bar floor did not have the look of a pony looking to murder and maim. At a glance, she looked to be simply making her way to the bar for a drink or a bite to eat. Much as she wanted to give her quivering anger some manner of release, she didn’t want to tip off his hired protection just yet. She didn’t even know what they looked like, and if they saw her before she could pick them out they could catch her off guard. She wanted to deal with them alongside her prey, get them all out of the way at once when she could surprise them.

Much of the mid-morning crowd had settled in for their daily routine by the time she’d reached the bar, her eyes locked on a cream-shaded earth pony stallion busying himself sorting through the various bottles of booze stacked on the display counter behind him. What was his na—

“Ah, hello there,” the stallion said with a crisp, pleasant tone, apparently recognizing her on sight despite only having seen her for a few minutes in the last twenty four hours, and that’s when his name finally clicked in her head. “….Rally okay?”

“….physically, yes,” she replied carefully. While Ginger seemed to be the nicest of Puck’s two prostitutes, she had no idea how much he valued his job in the bastard’s employ and didn’t want to risk a fight just yet. “….where’s your boss? I have words to share with him.”

Ginger’s face lost much of its mild pleasantness, falling into a slight gaze of despair. “….Puck is….unhappy, at the moment. Best to avoid him, he and my sister have been arguing half the morning.”

“He run out of whiskey or something?”

“No, no,” he said, his head turning to his right briefly before he went on. “….look, I heard some things between them earlier….apparently Rally was to be….joining us in our “extra” duties—”

Sling’s hold on her anger suddenly became much more precarious. The kid hadn’t mentioned that part….

“….I don’t think Rally would ever agree to anything like that.”

“…even if she was willing, Willow and I wouldn’t let her,” Ginger’s voice spoke quietly, as if afraid his words might reach the wrong ears. “….but we don’t get much of a say in anything around here.”

“He doesn’t get a say in the matter either, he just doesn’t know it yet. Where is he?”

Seeing that his polite (if weak-willed) attempts to convince her otherwise would not work, he sadly pointed a foreleg at a shadow-veiled doorway just past the bar counter. “….through that door. Take a left in the kitchen, his office is at the end of the hall. And…remember that I did warn you.”

She promptly trotted away from him, following his directions and sauntering into the kitchen, and then quickly ducking through the door to her left, entering a dim, candlelit hallway that turned right behind the kitchen. Ignoring the other doors and rooms, she made straight for the end of the hallway, and as she neared the final door on the left side of the hallway a pair of voices hashing out a very heated argument began to grow louder—

—she unconsciously switched her PipBuck on, her vision bracketed by the EFS and the appearance of three green triangles embedded inside the compass bar—

“—king asshole, you could have killed her!” a raspy mare’s voice screeched sharply. “How the hell did you expect her to work all messed up like that?!”

“I didn’t, I expected one of you to get her back on her hooves and in that room upstairs paying off her debt,” Puck’s hoarse, deep voice countered coldly. “Come to think of it, why are you even here? You need to go back upstairs and get that damn brat schooled and ready for her first customer.”

“I ain’t doin’ shit,” the raspy voice shot back instantly. “She’s fourteen, for Luna’s sake! You don’t do that to kids, not even in the east!”

“This ain’t the east, this is my bar,” Puck growled darkly. “She will pay her debt if I have to take it out of her myself—”

Her blood-boiling anger began to give her tunnel vision, and that was as far as she was willing to let this argument drag on. She pulled on the doorknob and invited herself into the room, a rather stuffy office with a non-functional ceiling fan, an old wooden desk, and two debilitated bookshelves. A maroon-coated mare with an unkempt blueberry mane and tail stood in front of the desk, her angry glare rapidly turning into confusion at this sudden intrusion. Puck’s charcoal-gray body sat behind the desk, his cold green eyes already promising unpleasant threats to her, and in the corner by one of the bookshelves was a tan-coated earth stallion with a candy-cane color mane and a deep cross-shaped scar on his face….and he wasn’t armed, either.

She’d have to settle for two opponents. Get the third later, if he became a problem.

Her eyes were quick to sweep the room for its occupants, and then found themselves drawn towards the sight of a laser pistol on Puck’s person, though its slide housing was much bulkier and adorned with additional red and amber colored lights near the barrel, and what looked like a couple of small tubes along the sides.

“You have something of mine,” she stated calmly, her ears focused on any advancing movement in her direction while her eyes were locked on Puck.

Puck’s hard eyes never wavered away from her. “Ain’t yours anymore. You don’t hit up my workers for free favors, or cut me out of caps for work done in my bar. If you weren’t friends with those Runners you’d already be out on your ass in the street. Get out of my office before I forget that.”

“Ada and Leon are not who you should be worried about today. You have something of mine. I want it back.”

“…hell with it, then. Twister, get rid of her. Her brat too when you find her—”

Sling’s horn flared to life, ripping Grayhawk out of its holster and immediately squeezing off two rounds of .44 Special into each of Twister’s front legs. Despite the cramped, tight confines of the room, however, the shots themselves came out strangely muffled, though Twister’s brief screams of pain seemed louder by comparison. She didn’t even recall consciously casting that hearing spell. A second flash of magic wrapped around his head, slammed it into the floor as she grabbed Puck’s head with her forelegs and smashed it into his desk, face first—

—her knife came out next, seemingly of its own free, and pierced clean through his right foreleg as he tried to draw it towards himself and the holstered laser pistol, pinning it to the desk surface and eliciting a deep, mane-curling scream from the dark hearted stallion—

—the office door slapped against the hallway outside as the maroon mare bolted out, her voice alternating between brief words of disbelief and quiet screams—

—Sling took a brief moment to swing the door back shut, flipping Grayhawk’s cylinder open and extracting the four spent rounds and two live ones in exchange for a full load of .44 Mag, then closed it back up.

With Twister seemingly out cold and more or less neutralized as a threat, she put her attention onto Puck, and her EFS’s compass bar, watching for rapidly-moving marks closing in on her. “This is mine,” she spat at his writhing face, her magic pulling the laser pistol off of him and back into one of her remaining empty holsters. “And I have words to share with you about what you did to that little girl last night.”

Another flash of telekinesis ripped the knife out of Puck’s leg….and straight into the other one, filling the walls with his screams once more. Trails of blood began to seep out from underneath his legs, staining the ancient desk’s surface into a darker shade of brown-black.

“You make me sick,” her voice roared darkly, ripping the knife out and bringing the blood-drenched tip to within an inch of the corner of his left eye as she held his body down against the desk. “Breaking her face, damn near smashing her skull in….you could have killed her. But to force her to…to sell her body, her dignity….to let others use her like a toy for a sack of bottle caps?! You surface folk are disgusting—”

“C-crazy, bitch,” Puck gasped through his pain. “You are dead in this town—”

The knife sank into his leg again, and this time she left it in, keeping the leg pinned down as she took to slamming his face into his desk a couple more times when the urge struck her. “I once crushed a hedonistic sadist of a griffon under five tons of brick and plaster for threatening to force himself on my child. I wiped out a slaver hit squad with magic and the guns on my body in eleven seconds for having the gall to try and kill me because they thought I sicced a Union major on them. I could shit a bigger problem out than you. You have one way out of this, and I’m going to give it to you. Are you listening?”

She kept her forelegs locked around his head, using her magic to slowly twist the knife place for a couple of seconds to emphasize just how serious she was (as if it wasn’t already obvious). With a quiet scream in his throat, Puck’s face contorted into a mixture of fear and pain, and his eyes were no longer willing to look into hers.

But he managed, at the least, a single, brief nod of acknowledgement.

“Rally is no longer your problem,” she started with a deep, furious howl. “She no longer owes you so much as a spit wad. You will not touch her, speak to her, or even look at her. She will not be your slave, your barmaid, nothing. She is her own pony again, and for her safety for the rest of her time here she will stay with me in the room you will now lend to me at no further cost, because I spent all of my caps getting her the medical attention she needed after you broke her nose and left her in a pool of her own blood. You will do this quietly and with no fuss. You will treat me and my daughter as if we were Rally because if I even think you’re trying to get at my little girl I will come back, and when I’m done what’s left of you will fit in a tool box after I take a piss in it! Is there any part of this you don’t understand?!”

She waited, angrily, for a response, and when he failed to even shudder a yes or no through his body language, she took hold of the knife and began to tug it towards herself, eliciting another short scream out of him—

“Nnnnggaaaah allright all right juststoppit I’ll do it—”

She promptly pulled the knife out, cringing slightly as the scream managed to pierce her hearing protection spell slightly, and watched as he sank down behind the desk while she worked to clean the blood off of her knife with a strip of cloth she found lying on the desk. “One last thing. She said you took a gun from her, when you first pulled her into your debt slavery. Do you still have it?”

With a fearful grunt of pain, he began flailing at a drawer in his desk, blinded by pain and blood, and she took the hint and pulled it open, throwing her magic around the first gun-shaped object she could feel through the spell field—

—and came out with what looked like one of the nicest looking .357 magnum revolvers she’d seen in the wastes, slung inside a hardened leather holster fitted specifically to this gun and attached to a gun belt. Looked like a heavy frame Ironshod model, six inch barrel, and though its blued finish had faded considerably over the last two centuries it was still remarkably intact with no apparent surface rust. The intricate, checkered side panel cocobolo grips showed only a few nicks and gouges on the surface, and the top strap of the frame was noticeably larger and thicker than a standard Ironshod. Nowhere near as thick as a Phoenix Rising model, but combined with the reinforced forcing cone, it was enough to take a constant diet of .357 rounds without accelerated wear. The full-barrel, rod-shaped underlug gave the gun enough forward heft to tame the recoil a bit, and the raised, bladed front sight had a red bead-shaped arcane crystal imbedded in it, and was easy to pick up through the adjustable rear sight’s white outline.

“….this is Rally’s?” her surprised voice asked of the hideous pony-shaped lifeform cowering behind the desk, to which the creature only nodded in quick accession to her query and tried to pull himself away from her presence.

Sling took the weapon and gun belt into her personal space, keeping it close to her chest as she turned and trotted on back into the hallway. It wasn’t until she passed into the kitchen, into the stunned, mouth-agape presence of the three cooks that she realized that her little “talk” with Puck was probably not as isolated or private as she’d intended it to be—

“L-let her go, get back to work,” the maroon mare’s voice commanded with a terrified stutter from the bar doorway. “….seriously, just let her go. Puck had it coming.”

The cooks slowly turned away from her, and returned to their meal preparations with a seemingly renewed and intense interest, allowing her to pass out of the kitchen in peace and rejoin the maroon-coated mare at the bar counter.

That left one last possible threat….

“He has two mercs on retainer. Where’s the other one?”

“He quit earlier in the morning, when he caught wind of what Puck and I were fighting over,” the mare said softly, likely in deference to the seven souls quietly minding their own business throughout the bar floor. “….said he was hired to guard a bar, not a child abuser. Twister was never really that smart….”

She felt years' worth of tension and anger fade away, returning her to her previous state of mind—lost, and hurt.

…had to fix that.

“....they’re still alive,” Sling said. “And Rally’s done working off Puck’s bullshit debt.”

The mare’s mouth spat a silent curse, but left her displeasure at that. “….help was nice while it lasted…..ju…just watch yourself now. Puck never forgets a wrong done to him and it sounded like you messed him up pretty good.”

“Convince him to make an exception,” she warned gently as she pushed past the mare, heading for the stairs to the second floor. “I won’t be that gentle again.”

She marched on upstairs in seven brisk steps, and trudged back into her borrowed room a few mindless moments later, finding Rally lying upright on the right side bed with what looked like pure ecstasy plastered on her face, while Light Tail’s body was sprawled across the back end of the bed with the pups, content to simply watch the room in silence.

“Oh, my, gods this hashbrown casserole is awesome!” the pink-coated filly squealed with delight as she swallowed what looked like the last of the ration tray’s contents. “Is that what real food tastes like?!”

“Close,” Sling replied, her voice growing slightly wistful as thoughts of warm, doughy pancakes laced with blueberries taunted her taste buds. A gentle burst of magic floated the gun belt and its contents down next to her on the bed, and the weight pulled down on the wool blanket beneath her enough to draw her attention to it. “You’re done with Puck. Got this back, even.”

Though part of the kid’s left eye was obscured by her mixed blue and purple mane, the right eye lit up like a light bulb, and a faint shimmer of light blue reverently extracted the revolver from its holster. “Oh buck me I thought I’d lost this,” the girl cried with a soft laugh, the cylinder swinging out to reveal four rounds of .357 inside. “Wow, he never did anything with it, I only had four shots left when he stole it from me. Must have been asking too much for it. Where are those blasted speedloaders—”

The revolver settled down into the bed near her, her magic pulling at a pouch attached to the gun belt and drawing four empty speedloaders into view. “Ah, there they are. Should get ahold of that dude in Fleeceville, might still have those extra loaders the last time I went through there.”

“It’s a nice gun,” Sling commented absently, her eyes scanning it over once more. “And in insanely good condition, given what most guns I come across look like. Re-blue it and polish it up, and it’ll look almost brand new. Where’d you find it?”

“In the back of an abandoned gun store in Withercha,” Rally answered freely, taking hold of her gun once more and beginning a thorough visual inspection of it from barrel to grip. “Safe was air-tight and sealed up, but the lock was broken, which explains why it was the only thing left in there worth looting after two centuries. Took me most of a day to get it open, and I came close to wrecking my metal leg in the process. My best guess is that it belonged to the store owner in the Before, and that he never made it back to retrieve it after the megaspell event. I don’t really know anything about it other than that it’s a .357.”

Sling’s brain filtered through her memories for all of a second and a half to find the information she’d memorized a lifetime ago. “Looks like a high-end Ironshod model to me. Could be what they called the Deluxe Officer’s Magnum meant for highway patrol units, supposedly they were pretty weighty. When I first picked it up I thought it was a .44 Mag. Mine doesn’t weigh too much more than that one and it’s got weights in the underlug. How do you shoot something that heavy at your age?”

Rally’s mouth broke into a mad grin as she pulled her leg warmer up to expose her cybernetic leg. “With this,” she cackled, the metal hoof unlocking and coming apart, then rapidly forming into what looked like a mechanical griffon’s talon, the four individual digits flexing and flicking about like an ape’s fingers. “One of the few benefits of a cyber leg is that the strength of the leg itself makes the recoil of a .357 child’s play, and I can get the hoof custom-tailored to work like this for grabbing and using things. Comes in pretty “handy”.”

El-Tee’s nose burst into a mild snort, her head shifting about over her forelegs. “…that was lame.”

“Well I thought it was funny.”

Sling’s eyes locked onto the mechanical talon, her thoughts growing morbid as she tried to comprehend how the kid could have gotten so badly injured, if she was taken to thinking her way through problems rather than charging in. “...and yet you thought yourself powerless to get out of Puck’s control?”

Rally’s brain worked faster—and smarter—than her own brain did at the kid’s age. “…don’t misunderstand, I’d have loved nothing more than to knock him senseless. Would’ve been easy, one right hook and POW! One jerkwad of a pony out cold on the floor and a little girl laughing herself silly. But then where would that leave me with his on-call bodyguards? One’s got a gun and mine was locked up somewhere, and I’d have to leave all my stuff behind if I wanted out of here without getting beat up…which meant running into the wastelands with no weapons, no food or water, no med supplies….that’s a death sentence.”

“…well, like I said, you’re done with him. You’re free to stay in here with us until my contacts show up, or you decide to strike out on your own. Try to stay clear of Puck, he was…unhappy, when I was done talking to him.”

Unfortunately for Sling, Rally wasn’t quite buying that little white lie. Something in the girl’s eyes, the way she looked at her….she wasn’t convinced it had all been solved with a little “talk”, given what the girl knew about the bastard. “….how unhappy?”

“One more mistake will be his last,” was all she was willing to say. “…know anybody in town in need of an extra set of hooves? I spent all my caps getting those healing potions converted.”

“….depends on what you can do, and what’s needed,” Rally answered carefully. “….if I’m really not working for Puck anymore, I kinda need to hit the bathhouse down the road myself. The head mistress there…she has all my stuff, helped me hide it from him, and she’ll probably let me work for a few days for some pay, at least to get me started on the road. She might be able to point you somewhere where you can pull in some work, I never really got to get out of this place much.”

The promise of getting clean for perhaps the first time in two weeks seemed to be enough to rouse her little night light from her quiet slumber. El-Tee began to force herself to stand up, calling the pups up to their paws with a couple of clicks of her tongue—the most life she’d shown in four days. “….guess we could use a wash…”

…yes, she told herself. Maybe in doing right by Rally the first time, she might find some peace.

Or at the very least, find the Light Tail that she’d lost four days ago.

Chapter 17

She didn’t think the mare’s “talk” with Puck had been all that amicable or peaceful, but it wasn’t until she saw the bastard hobbling down the street, his forelegs covered in blood-soaked bandages and what looked like dozens of spidery stitches that made her cringe in uncomfortable places, that she realized that the mystery stable mare’s subtle rage had a very violent breaking point. It was one reason why she hadn’t mentioned the little fact that Puck was making her out to be his next—and youngest—call girl, but somehow or another she’d found out anyway.

She wanted to take pleasure in his suffering, the small, almost unnoticeable shift in his eyes of a defeated ego having met up with a soul who was not the least bit afraid of him. She wanted to squeal at every painful step he took even if it made her tense up thinking about how all those stitches felt when he so much as twitched a leg. She wanted to memorize every unstable shake of his tail as he drew closer to his bar, his one sanctuary in an uncaring wasteland, every minor quiver of his hindquarters as he seemingly fought the urge to relieve himself in public.

The moment he stopped his forward progress to turn into the alley with a hurried, pained gasp, all she could feel for her former “boss” was a sad, unexplainable pity that his day had turned out so very different than what he had expected. And as a cry of sharp anguish rang out from the alley and through the walls of Miss Glossy Shine’s bathhouse, she swore she would say she almost felt bad for him.

Almost…but not quite. Not after what he’d planned to put her through. But she still couldn’t shake off that….that look of mortal terror, as he tried to return to what had once been his sole castle, and now seemed to do nothing but remind him of a certain teal blue unicorn with an extremely violent side to her when pushed the wrong way. She didn’t feel the least bit sorry for him….

….but she couldn’t bring herself to laugh at his misfortune, either.

She turned away from the window and wandered back into the depths of the bathhouse’s rear corridors before she could get to thinking too much longer about that kind of thing. She had other things to take care of, now that the place was closed for the night. Like getting her stuff back, permanently, and getting paid. Last night, Shine had told her trusting that mare was a mistake, and she’d expected to be able to say “Guess it wasn’t!” the next time they met.

She never got to.

Miss Shine’s first question when the teen filly poked her head through the office door should have clued her in on it, but she paid it no mind. “….was that Puck I just heard a minute ago?”

“….yeah,” Rally replied, squeezing through the doorway and shutting it behind her. “Think he’s pissing himself all over your outside wall.”

Miss Shine’s face scrunched up slightly in distaste. “….don’t tell me you enjoy seeing him reduced to such a state.”

“….it’s hard to feel bad for him, considering he was about to lock me into a room to “service” adults,” she spat back. “What was it you said about that mare? Couldn’t trust her?”

“And I haven’t changed my mind one damned bit,” Miss Shine hushed her with a hard glare and a snappy tone. “I know you want your things back, that you think you’re safe with her, but you’re not.”

Oh god, again?! “We’ve been through this already—”

“Then we’ll do it again because things have changed,” she cut her off. “You can’t trust her.”

“Because she’s “using” me? She got both of our guns back and she got me out of a tight spot when everypony else was telling me to suck it up and take it, and I can’t trust her? Explain that one to me, please.”

“I was at Doc Bones’ place today. I saw what that ‘Sling Shot’ did to him, if that’s even her real name—”

It took Rally a couple of seconds to figure out who she was referring to, and then mentally slapped herself for forgetting the mare’s name so easily. Then again, she’d barely paid any attention to her when she’d introduced herself and her kid to Miss Shine….

“I don’t care what name she goes by, I care what she does, and she’s already done a lot more in one day than most folk have in the three weeks I’ve been stuck here.”

“That crazy….bitch hacked his legs up!” Miss Shine spat with a barely restrained fervor. “Shot Twister’s knees out, Bones doesn’t think either of them will ever get full use of their legs again!! She’s dangerous!”

“Then it sounds like Puck finally went and pissed off the wrong person. He was bound to someday.”

“And has it occurred to you that this “wrong person” is the last soul you should be making friends with!? By the sun, open your damned eyes for a second and look at this whole situation! Normal people don’t slice other people up like celery sticks on a whim, they don’t shoot out the legs of folks ten seconds after seeing them for the first time, and they don’t just switch from calm to fucking murderous in less than an eye blink!! There’s something wrong with her and you need to stay away from her!!”

Rally’s words died in her throat as she tried to process what Miss Shine had just screamed at her. She had never been this….this forceful, about anything to her before, but this time….by the gods, she was even crying a little, if those tears really were genuine. And she never quite swore like that unless…

…well, to be honest, she’d never heard her curse before. It kinda scared her a little. Either Miss Shine was just a tad bit possessive….or she really was worried about her….

…but either way, Miss Shine was not the kind of pony she needed help from right now. If anything, staying with her would just get her killed, and she wouldn’t forgive herself if that happened.

“….normal people don’t break a little girl’s nose and try to force her into a whore’s life after screwing them over into a debt trap,” she sniped back bitterly. “Whatever issues that mare’s got right now, she was the only one who gave enough of a shit to get me away from that backstabbing snake when everypony else just let him do what he wanted to me. I am not asking you for approval, I am asking for my stuff back. You can keep the caps you were going to pay me for today’s work as my thanks for holding onto it for me.”

She saw Miss Shine’s lips begin to quiver slightly, and she wished right then that she’d caved in and let her win. But the mare stopped fighting with her and retrieved her bag from the locked safe, though she did so with such sloppy hooves that Rally began to believe that she was on the verge of breaking into tears…..

….and she didn’t want to be anywhere near here when that happened.

She swiped her bag off of the desk and showed herself out of the bathhouse in silence for the second time in twenty-four hours, half-wondering if she’d just ruined any chance she had of getting back into Miss Shine’s good graces if this thing with Sling Shot didn’t work out. And it stood no chance of working out at all if she didn’t come right out and tell her what was going on with her life. She didn’t want to hang around the mare for a couple of days and have the bastards drop down on them out of the blue, no warning or nothing. If she’d messed Puck up like that over a girl she’d just met, what would she do to people that went after her kid?

…..shit, maybe Miss Shine’s onto something….

…so, the best way to avoid getting caught in her wrath was to just be up-front with her from the start, before things could get out of hand. If the mare didn’t want to risk her life or her kid’s afterward….well, she was screwed. Royally. By Luna and Celestia, and maybe the moon and sun while they were at it. Only other option she could see was to cross the valley and risk getting swept up by the slavers, and then she’d be back where she’d been with Puck—trapped, capless, weaponless, and almost completely powerless to do anything about it…or the things that might be done to her.

Shit let this work let this work, became a repeating mantra of prayer and hope all the way back to Sling’s rent-free room (she didn’t ask how she managed to do that)—

“Something on your mind?” the mare’s voice crept into her panicked thoughts, just as her nose bumped into the adult pony’s barrel without even realizing it, and the sudden contact of both body and voice jolted her into a slight leap of terror that ended with a less-than-graceful landing on three hooves.

“L-lotta things on my mind!” she chittered back, hearing the door squeak shut behind her as she set her bag on the floor. “Lots of…things, and….stuff….”

“Something specific to your jumping bean act just now?” the mare smiled back, slightly, rolling out what looked to be an adult-sized sleeping bag across the middle of the room.

Well, she’s quick to sniff out trouble, Rally bemoaned silently, watching as the mare began setting out a pair of wool blankets by the sleeping bag, presumably to serve as pillows. …not that she’s wrong….

Despite it being her plan the whole time, now that the opportunity had essentially been hoof-delivered to her, she found it a lot harder to actually say anything about it. Where to start, or how much to tell her, especially since she seemed to be putting an effort into making sleeping space for a third soul instead of forcing her to share a bed with one of them.

Then again, it could have also been because the husky pups seemed to be taking up enough space on the filly’s bed that putting a teenaged filly over there would have left all four of them cramped and uncomfortable. “….lots of…specific somethings,” she whispered softly. “…mostly Miss Shine, just now…”

“Something go wrong?” Sling replied quietly, further surprising Rally when she began to slide herself into the sleeping bag, seemingly leaving the more comfortable bed free for her to take as she wished.

“….have you ever said something you wished you hadn’t?”

Sling’s head stopped lowering towards her wool blanket pillows. “….too often.”

“….it…it didn’t go like I thought,” she started as she slowly trotted around the sleeping bag to the empty bed in the corner of the room. “I was just gonna ask for my stuff back…”

“…what’d you do?” was the mare’s polite question. Non-accusing, but non-committal. Like she was simply fishing for information until she could decide if she cared or not.

“It’s not…it’s not that. It’s…she thinks you’re dangerous to me, or something. Scared of you. Lotta folk are, actually, after seeing what you did to Puck. Some even think there’s something really out of whack with you.”

“….they wouldn’t be wrong,” the mare sighed, settling into her sleeping bag and “pillows”, though for the moment her body was still facing towards the bed. “You’ve thought the same thing.”

“…some,” she admitted under Sling’s neutral glare as she pulled herself up onto the bed and slid underneath the patchy blanket. Not really the warmest thing, but a lot better than the rock-hard mattress she’d been sleeping in for the last three weeks, and she didn’t really care to sleep on floors, even in a sleeping bag. “I mean….I can just see it. The look in your eyes, the way you carry yourself…you and your kid, actually. You both just came out of something really nasty, lost somebody very important to you….who wouldn’t be messed up after that?”

Sling’s gaze forced itself away from her, though for a brief moment Rally could see a stunning flash of grief settling into her features, as if those words hit a much deeper nerve than she’d intended. Light Tail all but burst into tears talking about it earlier in the afternoon, but Sling Shot was nowhere near as willing to deal with it, and she didn’t want to see how she’d react if she found out she’d bugged her kid to get all the gory, harsh details behind her back. “….I was messed up before I ever came out here….”

Shit, back off, getting too close….

“...speaking of messed up things…there’s one you should know, if you’re gonna stick around me for long…”

Sling’s voice, despite its soft, sullen tone, surprised her with its unnerving accuracy. “…we’re all running from something,” she sighed, her words softening as she drew herself into a light sleep. “Whatever, or whoever it is you’re running from….will find very poor company if they find you.”

By the time Rally could find something to say, the mare had drifted away into a slumber, her breathing dying down to a slow, steady crawl and leaving the teen filly to try and silently ponder how she had already managed to figure it out on her own. She’d thought she’d been pretty tight-lipped about everything, honestly….

…but then again, how many fourteen-year olds were wandering across the wastes on their own, scraping by on whatever work they could get instead of settling down in the first decent place they could find? Life was harsh enough that a kid would have to be either an idiot or desperately outracing folk they’d pissed off to want to leave anything resembling safety behind. And given that Miss Glossy Shine was about as decent a pony as she could find to stay with….

….shit, she probably figured it out this morning, when I said I was just looking to get enough caps to get me back on the road…

…figured it out….

…and did nothing to encourage her to move on her way, or kick her out, and apparently still very willing to keep sticking her neck out, if what she’d just muttered in her sleepy state of mind was any clue….

She wasn’t sure how to take it. Nobody had ever gone out on a limb for her before, not like this, and now an exceptionally angry stable mare with a hair trigger hold on her rage was including her in her personal sphere of protection. For how long she did that, appeared to be solely up to little Rally.

It was enough to make her eyes slightly moisty as she hunkered down in bed and dozed off, though from her perspective it only seemed like moments when her eyes opened again. A moderate, persistent pressure in her bladder immediately revealed itself as the catalyst for her rude awakening, and her sleep-addled brain cursed at herself for forgetting to take care of business before bed. With careful, slow movements, she slid out from underneath the blanket and quietly snuck out of the room, going straight for the fire escape door at the end of the hall.

With her mind so singularly focused on one task, she didn’t realize she’d opted to use the wall on the back side of the inn until the pressure had passed and her eyes had finally figured out why she was seeing the brick-and-mortar broadside of the old law office that sat beside Puck’s inn, and by then she had already cleaned herself up with some of the contents of a small canvas pouch labeled “HYGEINE KIT MKI”, apparently lifted from the stable mare’s stuff subconsciously.

She swore at herself in disbelief as she trotted out of the back alley, and into the side alley and the bottom of the fire escape stairway, her eyes locked on the pilfered pouch and its luxurious contents. Gods alive, twenty-four hours in her company and I’m already stealing stuff from her, and I can’t even be awake enough to do my business properly in the outhouse to boot! Keep this up and you’ll be back on your own in no time, idiot!

….then again, she’d told Puck a couple of times that his shitty little inn in the wasteland was just good enough to piss on, and now she could say that she’d literally done that. It was a lot funnier the first time she thought of it.

Now when she thought about it, she kept thinking back to earlier in the evening, when Puck was so mortified at the sight of his own inn that he almost wet himself in the middle of the road….

…maybe that bothers you more than you want to admit…

With a shake of her head to clear her vision and thoughts, her forelegs began climbing up the fire escape stairs….

….and stopped mid-step when her eyes noticed the dim yellow glow of a lit lantern’s light coating the side window in the wall….

….after closing hours. Puck normally kept Willow and Ginger around after closing only long enough to clean the place up for the next day’s business, but that had been….two hours ago, maybe longer. She hadn’t really checked the time when she woke up. And given the state he was in, she doubted that he was up to making rounds around his bar to tidy up a little himself….

Her insane and perpetual curiosity—the part of her that had learned how to repair MEWs or build one from scratch with working spare parts—directed her legs to back off of the fire escape and trot around the side of the building to check the front door, which she curiously found unlocked and slightly ajar. Had she been more awake she might have judged it suspicious enough to avoid it and just retreat back to the safest place she knew of, but right then, she was simply too tired to feel little more than curiosity at how out of place things were, and why they were that way.

The answers, it turned out, were waiting for her in the back, past the kitchen. The main bar floor had been lit up by a sole lantern, and through the open kitchen behind the counter she saw another lantern aglow as well and followed the light to the back hallway, where she found that several of the overhanging lanterns had been lit in turn to illuminate the hall. The trail of light led her to the end of the hall, just outside of Puck’s office, the door slightly open and allowing her to hear every bit of what was going on inside—

“Took you long enough,” Puck’s voice complained bitterly, his words accented by a sharp gasp of pain. “I sent you word two weeks ago.”

The voice that answered was not the least bit perturbed by Puck’s mood. “I don’t work for you, I work for me,” the gruff male voice replied. “Where’s the package?”

“…upstairs,” Puck surrendered quickly. “Room five—”

It took a sharp bite of her inner lip to muffle her gasp into silence, though her heart was suddenly a lot louder in her ears.

They’d finally found her.

“She alone?”

Puck’s voice groaned slightly, probably from his legs. “….eff no. Some…some crazy mare took a fancy to her, took her in or some shit. Did this to me!”

“’Some crazy mare’ could apply to half my ex-girlfriends. Try a little harder. What does she look like, what kind of guns does she have, equipment, shit that like—”

“…she ain’t a lightweight for sure. Saw about three pistols and a shotgun on her, her brat’s got three guns herself, and they got a pair of mutts that might be trouble, they’ve stuck by the filly the whole time they’ve been here.”

“….pair of mutts…huskies?”

Her tail began shaking slightly, in accordance with the increasingly rapid beating of her heart. To even guess that correctly, he would have had to have heard something about them out there….

And even Puck wasn’t that stupid. “….you’ve heard of them?”

“Our contact in Life Tap’s guild got word to us this morning, said the Union was looking for a mare with a kid and two husky pups. Supposedly she wiped out a slaver hit squad in Trotpeka a few days back, and did it in a way they can’t figure out. She look kinda dreamy? Dark bluish coat, darker mane, wicked set of scars on the left half of her face? Kid’s got a sick streak of bright blue in her tail?”

A chorus of f-bombs and slanderous insults of the Princess Sisters’ true relationship began silently passing through her lips as she began to inch away from the door on her four slightly trembling legs. She’d heard all she needed to know.

“….that’s the bitch,” Puck seethed angrily. “….you takin’ her alive?”

“If they’re all asleep like you said, it’ll be a cinch.”

“….bring Rally and the mare down to me before you go, so I can say….“goodbye”, and you can keep the caps you were gonna pay me for the troublesome brat.”

“No go on the kid, boss wants her back unhurt, but you can ravage the mare until sunrise for all I care. What about the other one?”

“Keep her, sell her, kill her, whatever you wanna do—”

Oh fu—

She’d barely made it to the other end of the hall, around the corner, when her ears picked the last bit of bad news she could stand to hear—

“Hold onto her a bit, might have a buyer across the valley for her. Fifty-fifty cut in it for you if it comes through. If not you keep her, do whatever you want with her.”

“Deal,” Puck’s voice agreed coldly.

It was all she could do to sneak through the kitchen without breaking into a hard gallop, or to calmly trot up the stairs to the second floor instead of screaming in terror. Or to avoid bumping into the sleepy-eyed zebra mare that apparently had the same urge she’d been awakened by minutes ago, stumbling out of the room right next to number five.

The second she crashed her way back inside, though, she finally decided to panic. Just a little.

“S-Sling, get up get up!!” she tried to say quietly, though it came out as a slight shriek that managed to stir the slumbering mare regardless. It might have also helped that she was using her right leg to vigorously shake her awake, with the result being a full-grown mare being more or less pushed around by a fourteen-year old kid as though she were a mere wooden log. “Get up get up—”

“Ghhh shhhiiiiiiii quit it quit it quit it I’m up I’m up I’m up,” Sling cried out, her words coming out in an alternating crescendo of highs and lows as she was violently shaken out of whatever dream she’d just entered. “Oooohh fuuuuuuI’mgonna be sick….”

Across the room, little Light Tail’s body began to stir awake, disturbed by the sudden burst of noise and clearly not liking it. “….shuuuduuup,” the little filly begged, still half-asleep as she turned her back to the room at large.

“They’re coming!” Rally shrieked next, now that she’d gotten Sling more or less awake, and without getting punched or kicked or anything to boot. She hurriedly ran over to her stuff nestled in the corner of the room, her right hoof shifting into a griffon’s talon as it brushed over the grip of her gun. “They’re coming right now—”

Hearing the panic and dread in her voice seemed to help shake off any lingering frustration Sling might have had at being so rudely awakened, and the mare’s body began to free itself from the sleeping bag at a hurried pace. “Who’s coming?”

She’d barely grasped her gun and pulled it free from the holster when soft thumps began to creep through the hallway, filtering into the room through the crack in the door that she’d failed to shut completely—

“—shit that’s her, she knows we’re coming—”

A silent scream threatened to leap forth from her throat, her gun coming up into her view—

—Sling’s body slinked out of her sleeping bag like a gushing water current, her horn lighting up in an indigo flash, and a similar light enveloped her shotgun and her travelling saddle and dragged both towards her. In what seemed like an instant she had her saddle strapped onto her body, minus the saddlebags, and every sound in the world was washed out into a muffled tap, like somepony had just plugged her ears up—

—Light Tail’s motions and voice became much more animated and lively, her little body now scrambling to escape her bed and slam herself into the floor, dragging her pups down with her in a crash of surprisingly subdued yips. And it didn’t look like a complete knee-jerk reaction…but more like a partially learned reflex, as if she’d seen this kind of thing before and knew instinctively to get out of the way.

She had just enough time to follow the squirt’s lead and dive into the floor herself before the room lit up with a blinding flash, and the compact nature of the room made the shotgun blast sound much deeper and heavier than it might have outside. But even within the window-rattling noise, she could still hear the sound of wood cracking apart and the sharp, metallic clack of a slide-action being worked over an—

—a second blast, maybe just under a second after the first one, filled the room with more chest-thumping noise and splintering wood—

“—ck me, get her—“

The panicked, terrified stallion’s voice barely spoke when a rapid spattering of gunshots from the hall began popping off, sending bullets back at Sling through the wall and ripping into the mattress of the bed behind her. She chanced a look up into the room, her pistol held out in her cyber-talon as she tried to pick out which growing set of bullet holes to shoot back into when she heard Sling’s hooves beating into the door and smashing it open—

—just before the mare dashed through the doorway and into the hall, she saw that she had her 10mm out in front of her alongside her shotgun, and the darkened hallway began to lit up in quick, orange-yellow flashes in tune with the shotgun’s booms and her pistol’s sharp, loud barks—

—she counted three more shotgun blasts and about eleven or twelve 10mm shots in about three seconds, along with a couple more bursts of automatic fire from the hall, but the silence that filled the air afterward was almost as loud as the brief spat of gunfire itself—

—she whipped her eyes about the room, hoping to the Sisters that she wouldn’t spot the squirt or the dogs lying in a growing pool of blood, and felt a strange sense of body-lightening relief at the sight of the three roughly an inch apart from each, pressing themselves against the floor as they waited out the spat of violence, with no immediately obvious wounds amongst them—

—a harsh thumping of running hooves rippled through the bullet-riddle wall, rapidly fading down the hall and accompanied by a short string of silence that was followed by a heavy thud at least twice before the pony in question began disappearing down the stairs to the ground floor…and where a new chorus of gunfire began to pick up and quickly grew in intensity.

She didn’t think too terribly much of the situation beyond “get out!”—despite her hyperventilating breathing and the heart that wanted to spear itself against her ribcage, her biggest concern was helping the stable mare before she wound up dead on the floor and leaving a broken ten-year old filly an orphan. She thought she screamed something to the effect of “stay put” to Light Tail, rushing to the door and slinging herself through it—

—her breath was sucked out more by the presence of three brown-and-green armored bodies in the hall, than by the impact of her body against the hallway corridor. Just past the door, and directly beneath two hoof-sized tears in the wall where Sling had fired her first shots, was the fresh bleeding corpse of a light green-coated unicorn stallion, with the left half of his face covered in blood and unrecognizable and a short-barreled 10mm SMG lying on the floor next to him, its bolt locked mid-cycle on an empty casing jammed inside the ejection port. Crumpled up a few feet behind him was the body of an earth pony mare, her upper torso contorted and slumped against the wall instead of following the rest of her body to the ground, and the three bloody holes in her face and neck was a strangely gross contrast to her blue coat…not that the wood camo armor was any better. Five holes at the end of the hallway signified close to five misses from Sling’s 10mm, though she spotted a bit of blood splatter just to the left of the cluster of holes, and the mare’s saddle-mounted rifle was partially detached from its mount and dangling by its ammo belt.

The third body, she only saw the back half of as she gingerly leapt down the hall and around the previous two corpses, and initially identified it as a beet red mare with a yellow tail, only to find the mangled remains of a stallion’s head when she made it to the stairs and saw the rest of the body. An impact of what looked like a tight cluster of shotgun pellets was clearly visible on the left side of his armor, like a hoof-sized clump of the outer fabric had been physically torn out, and further down the stairs was what appeared to be a six-shot revolver with a rare mouth-bit grip on it. Blood dribbled down the stairs in slim lines, staining the wood into a darker shade of brown.

And through it all, as she neared the lower half of the staircase, was still a raging gun battle between a fourth soul and Sling Shot, who was conspicuously absent from the floor itself. The fourth—and possibly last—member of the party that had come for her was crouched behind a table turned over on its side for use as cover, though the ragged chunks of plywood jutting out at him from several bullet holes suggested his impromptu plan wasn’t all that well thought out. The black-feathered griffon, who was quite small for his species, was in the process of reloading his magazine-fed rifle when she spotted him, and didn’t seem to realize she was even there….

She reacted almost instinctively, raising her pistol up until the glowing red rod of crystal imbedded in the front sight ramp obscured his face, and rolled the trigger back with a miniscule thought from her brain into her cybernetic limb—

—the cyber leg was barely moved by the recoil push; the revolver itself merely floated up a tad in the firing process despite the heavy boom that batted her face and the massive muzzle flash and five-inch flames that shot out of the cylinder gap, and she had the front sight settled on him again almost instantly. But it proved to be an unnecessary gesture, as she thought she saw a bit of blood spurt out from his position before she heard him slumping over on his side—

—a final shotgun blast tore a chunk of the table’s surface off of the edge as the griffon’s body fell out into the open, possibly a split-second shot Sling had taken without realizing that her target had already been felled.

Or maybe she did, and just wanted to take a shot at him anyway. They had just filled the hotel room with bullets with her kid less than ten feet away from her. Given what she’d done to Puck just for what he tried to do to her, Rally did not think she would have any mercy at all for those that put Light Tail’s life in danger in any way.

So she walked, slowly, down the remainder of the stairs, sweeping the room with her eyes as she holstered her gun an—

—Sling’s body hefted up and over the bullet-riddle bar, her shotgun flinging an empty hull out and slapping a fresh shell into the chamber as if she intended to put another one into the griffon’s body, but after a couple of seconds she stopped walking and simply began loading it back up.

“….good shot,” the mare’s voice mumbled, and mid-way through her words became crystal-clear once again, along with just about every other sound around her. “....done it before?”

Have I killed a pony before….gods, yes, don’t make me remember.

“….like I said, you don’t stay young in the wastes very long on your own,” she sighed sadly, stopping at the bottom of the stairs to get her thoughts back in order as she began to come down off her adrenaline high. Her lungs were already slacking off, and her heart wasn’t quite as interested in self-mutilation anymore…and she prayed that would be the worst of it. “Most orphans lucky enough to live as long as I have got help or found an adult that wouldn’t take advantage of them. Then there’s the few like me, who don’t get that luck and got to watch out for ourselves…and that means having to kill people looking to hurt us for their own pleasure. Those that don’t find a good soul, or have the strength to make it on their own…don’t make it to puberty….”

The stream of red-colored hulls feeding themselves into her shotgun began to slow considerably, and Sling’s face lost its hard-edged fury. “….is Light Tail okay?”

“…everybody’s fine,” she replied softly, ignoring a slight tick in her left foreleg. It’d start shaking in a bit regardless of what she did. “…well, except these guys, obviously.”

“You woke me up saying, ‘they’re coming’,” Sling said next, shocking her with her uncanny perception. “Not ‘somebody’. Where in town did you stumble into them, and how did you find out that they knew where to find you?”

There must have been a “deer in flashlight” look to her eyes, because when she failed to work up an answer Sling merely laughed quietly as she finished loading her weapon and slung it back inside a long gun scabbard along her left side. “Surprised?”

Rally’s left hoof came up to her temple, rubbing at it absently as though it might help jump-start some critical thinking. “…I…I know you kinda figured out I wasn’t running by choice,” she muttered helplessly. “Bu…but I never told you how I found them here….how….”

A mild grin spread over Sling’s face as her magic floated out that little “MKII” pouch in front of her, open flap and everything, and Rally’s face began to burn a little. “…well, the fact that you took my little outhouse kit here tells me you had to…take care of business, earlier,” the mare snickered. “I gather that you found these guys at some point between here and there. I just want to know the particulars of that moment in time. I’m not gonna kill you for wanting to make use of this stuff, I got plenty of it for the time being.”

She was glad her face was too bewildered to betray her true thoughts, because she was suddenly acutely aware that another pony’s life—albeit one she didn’t like—would depend on whether or not she was cruel enough to tell her everything like she asked. Shit, I should just be glad my having to take a leak might have just saved our lives, but if I tell her everything there’s no telling what she’ll do to Puck. Much as I hate the asshole, I don’t want him murdered on something I said….

“….I…wasn’t really all that awake when I went out,” she started, running her mind through the lie as she spoke to make sure she could tell it right, and consistently. Going over Sling’s words had just given her an idea on how to get out of this jam, tell her about these guys and who they really were, and without getting Puck killed in the proce—

….wait, something’s wrong, she thought suddenly, turning her eyes towards the bar and the kitchen behind it. …shouldn’t he have come out by now?

“….hey, wait a sec,” Rally’s voice spoke of its own accord. “….Puck does live here….why isn’t he coming out here screaming about the gun fight that just tore up his bar?”

Sling’s eyes widened slightly as she jerked her gaze backward as well, though unlike Rally she had a much clearer reason to be fearful. She had that fancy PipBuck that could tell where nearby folk were, after all. “….oh, hell,” she cursed lightly, breaking into a quick gallop towards the back, and Rally found herself drawn to follow—

—Sling’s run came to an abrupt halt in the kitchen, where Rally crashed into her backside and nearly toppled the mare over—

—and in the process of righting herself back onto her four legs, came to spy the presence of a growing pool of blood behind the kitchen’s island in the center, and cautiously wormed her way around the mare’s legs to follow the blood to its source—

—Puck’s body was splayed across the tiled floor, his right side pocked with at two bullets, plus another to the side of his head. Mercifully, he was facing away from them and thus sparing them the empty, lifeless stare of his dead eyes, though she wasn’t sure his ass end was any better to look at. She promptly turned around and showed herself out of the kitchen, barely taking note of the fresh bullet holes peppering the kitchen wall and the backside of the bar.

Much as she hated him….it kinda hurt to see him just…die, like that….even if he had been the one to send those damn mercs upstairs in the first place….

And whatever personal issues she had, Sling seemed to still have a decent grasp on reading others’ emotions….or maybe just that of a kid’s, as she followed her all the way back out until she’d stepped out in front of the teen and stopped her in her tracks with an outstretched leg. “Whoa, wait stop, stop,” the mare commanded gently. “Stop a minute, take a breath—“

A canteen, engulfed in indigo light, floated its way into the space between them, its cap twisting open, and Rally simply swiped it with a burst of her own magic and took a gulp of its wat—

….no, not water, she realized upon sampling the foreign taste upon her tongue. Water doesn’t taste so….strong….so….something else, I’ve never tasted this before.

“…what is this stuff?”

“….tea, unsweet,” Sling replied, though she couldn’t help but notice a tinge of sadness when she said it. “It…it’s something other than water, for the road. Just for a slight change of pace…”

She didn’t totally buy it, but she didn’t care enough to ask any more questions about it right then. Not when there were more important things to be bitching over….

“….I didn’t know he was back there,” Sling muttered over the sloshing canteen. “…not in that exact place, I…my PipBuck doesn’t tell distance, just direction. That was just…bad luck.”

Her hold on the canteen faltered slightly, shaking it a tad as she fought off the urge to just drop it and start screaming. It wasn’t bad luck, he made a deal with them….

….hell with it. Tell her. It wasn’t like she could kill Puck for it now anyways, right?

“…like I said, he lives here,” she gulped through a swish of this “tea”, her left leg pressing down into the floorboard when she felt a light tremble begin to manifest in the limb. “…and when I was coming back, I saw the lantern on in his office, and the front door to the bar was open, when it’s usually locked at night…so I snuck back there, and these guys were in there….”

“And who are these guys, exactly?” Sling’s voice prodded gently. Whether she was forcing herself to be gentle, or genuinely doing so, she couldn’t tell. “If not for the forest camo pattern and the sloppy approach they made just now, I’d have mistaken them for Runners.”

A sharp snort escaped her nose as she pulled the relevant data from the vast collection of information in her head. “According to them, they’re the Runners’ biggest rivals,” she sneered lightly. “Not that the Runners even pay attention to that kind of shit. They call themselves the Pythons, mostly because they’re based out of an old zoo in the Withercha area that used to have a forest python exhibit, before the megaspells. Most of their armor and weaponry were taken out of a local military garrison they found mostly intact. The armor’s a woodland camo variety of what the Runners use, but other than that, they’re nothing alike. Runners are actually pretty decent mercs, won’t run chems, and they kill slavers, raiders, and highway gangs on sight without being paid to do it if they run across them. Pythons are…well, they’re basically well-equipped raiders. No job’s too foul, no murder too gruesome or cruel. They do run chems…and booze…and just about every vice a soul can lose themselves in. They even have a lab in the big city where they make some of it.”

“…so how the hell did you end up getting chased by people like this?”

“….I took a job, some months ago,” she answered, her voice growing somber and regretful. “Somepony came up to me, said he had a stash of MEWs he’d found but needed somepony to fix ‘em up. He told me he was gonna sell ‘em to either the Runners or the Union, coulda made a fortune for both of us, and a fortune of caps can do a lot for a fourteen-year kid on her own. Everything was fine up until about three months ago, when he found a different set of buyers….”

“The Pythons.”

“…it was a last-minute deal,” she confirmed sadly. “Runners didn’t have the caps, Union was too far away for the shipment to make the journey safely and they wouldn’t send troopers to make sure it got to them, not that deep into the west. By then he was getting tired of the whole mess, just wanted his caps, didn’t care who got the weapons. Pythons were gonna use the MEWs to make a hard push on the Runners, and I didn’t want all my work being put to use wiping out the most decent souls on this side of the valley…”

“So you made sure it wouldn’t…and they aren’t the type to forgive.”

She would count that night as the most haunting of her short life. All those beautiful, meticulously crafted MEW rifles and pistols…and she had to break them after all the blood and sweat she’d put into making them functional again. It was almost as criminal as what Puck had tried to do to her. “….anybody would be pissed if they spent twelve thousand caps for a stockpile of MEWs that got broken by a smart-ass little girl with a cyber leg before they could get their hooves and claws on it. They’ve been searching hard for me, and Puck must have recognized me or got word later, to keep screwing me over as often as he did just to keep me in one place long enough to send a message to the Pythons telling them where I was….”

Sling’s head turned back briefly, looking out through the bar’s front windows as a flash of her magic enveloped her 10mm pistol. “…then I doubt these four are the only ones that came out here. Could be another group or three in town, or camped outside it along the roads. And if these four were smart they left one or two of their own outside to watch the place and report back to the group if they failed.”

A nervous, terrified sigh escaped her lips as he set the canteen down, having had her fill of the “tea” for the moment. “….you wouldn’t be wrong….”

Sling was quiet for a moment before speaking again, and when she looked up to stare the mare in the eyes she found a…sympathetic face staring back at her, rather than a fearful one. “….you have a choice to make, among several,” Sling said. “Most of them aren’t all that appealing.”

“No shit,” she blurted derisively. “Most of them end up with me dead or in servitude to people who would do things to me that’d make Puck look charitable. Best choices that I can see is to either try and get over the valley, land work with the Union trooper corps or a trade guild, or try and hook up with the Runners, who aren’t known to take in runaways and strays at the drop of a hat…”

“We might want to work on getting out of town first,” Sling offered quietly and freely, which didn’t surprise Rally as much as it might have yesterday. “Then we can start weighing your options.”

I am so going to hate this…

“….your options, as they are, aren’t much better than mine,” she sighed heavily. “When I found them in Puck’s office, they were making deals with him….mostly over you and Light Tail…”

Sling’s gentle, quiet mood evaporated almost immediately, replaced by a loin-cringing, contained rage that nonetheless scared her a bit. “….what?”

Rally felt herself flinch slightly at her harsh tone, though it was directed more at the air around her than at the stupid fourteen-year old…though she had no bets on that lasting for much longer once she spilled the truth out. “….they…they said they had a contact in one of the slave guilds…Life Tap’s, I think. That you’d apparently wasted a slaver hit squad in some way that’s got them confused as to how you actually did it, and that the Union was looking for you because of it. They specifically mentioned you, Light Tail, and those two pups of yours, and…and the Pythons might try to sell your kid if they catch her, they told Puck to hold her for a bit while they search out a buyer….”

Sling’s head snapped up, staring into the back kitchen so fiercely she feared the mare might actually rush back in there and pump some more bullets into him. But after a few tense moments she merely hissed a string of silent f-bombs at the corpse bleeding out thirty yards away from there and smacked at the floor beneath. “….well, shit. That…complicates things.”

Massive understatement. Still…at least she wasn’t blowing up at her, so…there was that. But waiting for these two Runner friends of hers was quickly becoming a dangerous prospect. If there were more Pythons out there, they’d be on their way into town at first light in the morning. “…yeah, can’t really stay put like you want. Plays right into their hooves.”

“So does trying to move about in the dark on only ninety minutes of sleep. Go on back up, try and sleep a bit. I’ll take care of the bodies. I’ll wake you in four hours, so you can take watch while I get some rest. We’ll play it out by ear come first light.”

Five minutes.

She could not get over it. Five minutes.

Five minutes was all it took to lose them. To go from lunch, laughing and playing….

….to never hearing their voices again, or seeing them, or….or anything. As quickly as she could blink they were simply gone. And it was….

….horrible….the screams….oh gods, the screams, they were so terrible. So….

…scared….

Kite died, scared…and alone….and in such a violent manner that she couldn’t fathom it without barfing…..

…so she just stopped fathoming anything at all. For what seemed like an eternity, she would wake up, see that they were gone, and cry herself to sleep, hoping that the next time she woke up, the nightmare would be over, and they would be right there.

Of course it never worked.

And after that eternity, she found herself walking, somehow, following her mom along a hoof-paved dirt path until she found herself stepping into a run-down bar that happened to have a few rooms, and the prospect of crying her grief out on something besides a cold concrete floor was enough to wake her up long enough for her to toss her stuff on one of the old beds and hop up, and only then did she notice that her world had another pony in it.

An older filly, her pink coat and mixed blue and purple mane and tail oddly distracting her from her dark thoughts, with a kinda cool cyber-leg. That bit about turning that broken MEW into a “puppy that’ll bark armor-piercing lasers” was kinda funny, in a morbid way. Not quite something that Aunt C would say, but it was still sorta like her. And it did something else.

It took her mind off the pain that she couldn’t explain.

So…sorta like Mom, Rally had become something to focus on. If for no other reason than to simply try and forget how much it hurt inside when there was nothing physically wrong with her.

And it worked, somewhat. At least, it worked when Mom wasn’t there. When she was there, she would start to remember...things. Hateful things, that she must have done to Mom, because she was seeing it through her eyes. Her little hooves, lashing out in blind, furious strikes at the sole parent in her life, drawing blood, making bruises, and probably adding injury to the harsh insults being screamed out of her mouth—that she’d just left them, that she was no friend to them to leave them like that….

….that she’d intentionally dropped Kite just to save herself….

And when she started remembering those things, she’d shut down again, curl up, and sleep it off. Rally never bothered to ask her why she just shut up and went to sleep when Mom came back, and Mom never had the heart—or courage—to wake her up or bother her otherwise. For a brief time, that was as close to peace as she could get, and even Max and Mona were starting to get a little fed up with her, if their huddling around the floor was any serious clue.

And then Death came back to remind her that it still lurked in the shadows, always ready to claim the next soul on its endless, eternal list.

She’d barely dozed off when Rally burst back in, panicking and shrieking that “they” were coming, and the moment she saw Mom change into that…that other pony, that killed in the blink of an eye right after she cast that hearing spell, she found herself diving onto the floor out of learned reflex, and only in the midst of the muffled gunfire immediately afterward did she realize how badly she wanted to go back home.

Wanted…and couldn’t. In the sickest of ironies, she knew that if she tried to strike out on her own and go back across the wasteland, she would be quickly swallowed up by the horrors that dwelled in the wastes surrounding the ruined towns and cities….or by the savage ponies that scavenged for their existence within them, because she didn’t have Mom’s willingness to kill them. Even now, with…with Blue and Kite gone, because those evil slavers just wouldn’t leave them alone….she couldn’t bring herself to contemplate killing another pony or griffon. Not even to save the ones that mattered most to her.

She was a coward, in every sense of the word, and she couldn’t stand to look at herself anymore. She just wanted to go home, to Emmy and Jam and Aunt C and Spiner and everypony else in the stable. She was sick of watching people die. She was sick of Death in general, to be honest. The journey had promised to be dangerous and eye-opening, and in that regard all of her assumptions had borne out. Just not in the way she wanted.

And now she wanted to leave….and knew that it also impossible. There was no way in Tartarus (or the wasteland) that Mom would just give up, turn around, and limp back home into a land of slaving murderers after what had happened at that stupid bridge. Or in this stupid bar-slash-inn last night, when more bad ponies going after Rally showed up, and in the aftermath learned that she and Mom were also targets.

No. When bad ponies went after Mom, she didn’t let them do it for very long. They would all die, violently and horribly, and she and Mom and Rally would be safer for it.

After suffering a little for it, first. Naturally. The wasteland did not like good deeds going unnoticed.

The pitch-black darkness outside had barely begun to brighten into a tolerably visible overcast gray when their “reward” for backing Rally up showed up in the form of one of mister Puck’s employees, a maroon-colored mare that deftly swished her way through the door to their rented room as they were packing the last of their bags and guns for the road trip ahead.

“….you gotta go,” the blood-like coated mare warned in that raspy voice of hers. It wasn’t really blood…but maroon lately was reminding her too much of dried blood, and she felt sorry for the mare, but that was the truth. She couldn’t stand to look at her for more than a couple of seconds before she started seeing bodies in her eyes.

Bodies that Mom had shot….

“As you can clearly see, we’re well on our way to doing just that,” Mom said back, not even looking back at the other mare as she secured the last buckle of her travelling saddle into place. “…and for what little it’s worth to you, I’m sorry about the mess I left you with.”

“No, you really have to go,” the mare insisted, very strongly and very impatiently. "Pythons have long memories when it comes to vendettas and you definitely made their shit list for killing four of them last night. If they aren’t on their way yet they will be very shortly and I do not want you here when they arrive.”

Mom’s shotgun racked a shell into the chamber, the sound amplified to an uncomfortable sting in the compacted room. “….that confident about it?”

“Confident enough that I’m not risking my life any further than this. Just…just go. Please.”

“….you girls ready?” Mom asked, her eyes scouring her shotgun one last time.

She meant to say “No, not now, not ever”. What she squeaked out was, “...sorta.”

Rally couldn’t help but be a smart-aleck, even knowing they were probably gonna get into another gunfight. “….who’s ever ready to get shot at?”

Mom’s patience with smart-alecks usually wasn’t very high when it came to serious stuff like this, so the lack of that patented “Mom” attitude only startled her even more. “Stay close, watch the windows and alleys.”

A dull nausea began to creep up her throat as she followed Mom out of the room, her 9mm conspicuously heavy in her spell field. Her legs seemed to be taking her forward of their own will, when all she wanted to do was stay put and hide in the corner….or it could have been the pups pushing into her hindquarters with their skulls to urge her to move.

Or it could have been an instinctive desire to not be very far from Mom, because anytime she got more than a few feet from her, she felt exceptionally exposed and vulnerable, more so than if she were right next to her. Even if being right next to her meant possibly getting shot at. Mom was a shell of safety.

A vicious, life-stealing shell of safety….that couldn’t even keep Kite or BJ alive….

She must have done something to catch Rally’s attention, because a moment later the bigger filly was slowing down to walk beside her at her pace, and her presence was….oddly comforting. More than Mom’s, even….

And it took her mind off all this hurt.

“….we’ll be fine,” Rally’s voice whispered softly after chancing a look at Mom to see if their conversation would be noticed or not. For the moment, it looked like Mom was more worried about bad ponies and griffons lying in wait for them than on two fillies quietly chatting away behind her. “Might even be able to leave before they find us.”

“….not counting on it, with our luck.”

“…this have anything to do with what we talked about yesterday?”

Of course she’d bring that up now, of all times….

“….I don’t wanna talk about that right now.”

“….right, sorry,” Rally relented after a moment’s peace. “…and…sorry, for getting you and your mom dragged into my mess.”

That wasn’t quite how she remembered their paths crossing—she remembered it as Mom deciding on her own to take care of Rally’s problems with her meanie of a boss, albeit quite violently in the end. “….I think Mom’s just tryin’ to make up for….for things she wished she’d done earlier. Just wish we coulda waited a bit longer.”

“For your Runner friends?”

“….I wouldn’t call them friends,” she said, her head turning about to her right to scan over the windows and alleys when the thought struck her. “….not quite, anyway. Ada, she’s…she’s kinda cool. A lot like Aunt C. She and Leon keep showin’ up when Mom needs ‘em….most of the time….funny coincidences and stuff. Hopin’ they show up today, too….”

….now that she thought about it, she wished they could have showed up at that bridge, too….when they really needed them….

“….better not to count on it,” Rally sighed. “Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”

“….the worst being we run outta bullets and die, or get caught….”

“…okay, maybe not that bad,” the older filly backtracked quickly. “….your mom found some battery cells for that Lightbringer at the market yesterday, right?”

Her magic unconsciously tapped at the now-fully functional—and totally cool-looking—laser pistol holstered on her left side. “….you mean this “puppy that barks armor-piercing lasers”? Yeah, it’s charged. Got like, three spare cells for it, even. Not sure how she managed to afford ‘em when we was flat broke, but….she got ‘em.”

“….it comes to it, use it,” Rally suggested with a grim tone. “Best option we got for cutting through their armor.”

“….if that’s the case, it’s better off with Mom,” she countered, quickly taking the laser pistol’s holster off of her travelling saddle, along with the three spare power cells. “She’s much better at shooting than me….and somethin’ tells me shootin’ somepony in the leg with this is just gonna slice it off, and…and I don’t wanna do that to anypony.”

Despite the fact that Mom’s attention was focused on looking for threats and killing them, she was still quite capable of hearing everything the two of them were saying. “Keep it,” she said over her withers with a brief glance backward. “Let Rally use it. If we get separated I’d rather have the firepower spread out than have it all on me.”

“….or we could do that,” she whispered meekly in defeat, quietly re-attaching the holster to her saddle.

“….I got enough spare parts to mod a couple more Lightbringers, if we find ‘em,” Rally offered, a slight squeak slipping out of her throat as she spoke.

“Why not a rifle?”

“Because a laser rifle is operating on a much higher output,” came the unsurprisingly “no DUH” answer. “…well, most of them. There’s this last war-era variant that got out into the field that was based on an AER frame, and the thing is crazy modular. I mean, I can make it a short-range pistol or a rapid-firing rifle, or even an overcharged sniper rifle and anything in-between. It’s like, a MEW nut’s nocturnal dream and I want one!”

The slight, giddy adoration with which Rally spoke of this gun was hard not to laugh at a little. It was almost like watching Mom find a few gun that she really, really liked. “So get one,” she snickered back.

Rally’s ears wilted slightly in despair. “…well, that’s the thing,” she mewed sadly. “….the biggest collection of ‘em I ever found....I….broke, most of them….so these psycho mercenaries couldn’t use it on the Runners….”

“….most?” Mom’s voice creeped back into the conversation, her body slowing down as she turned about to face them. “…that’s not what you told me last night.”

Rally’s body froze up, her eyes widening into little beads. Even her front legs stopped mi-step. It would’ve been funny if things hadn’t turned so serious right then. “…..no, it’s not….”

…uh oh….

El-Tee unconsciously began to back away from Rally as Mom began channeling that “impatient parent” glare through her eyes and into Rally’s soul. “Because now that I think about it, it’s a little difficult to believe that you’re being actively hunted down, at a potentially heavy cost in caps, materials, time, and lives, as vengeance for a pile of broken weapons. I could see them making it a standing order to catch or kill you on sight if they came across you, but there’s too much work involved in hunting down even a single person across the prairie to make it worthwhile. Not unless there’s something else involved….”

She put it all together before either of them could spell it out. “….like where you might have stashed some of the weapons after you broke all the others,” she sputtered. “…I mean, you did just get all girly and stuff just talking about them….there’s no way ya coulda resisted stealing one or two for yourself….or any rare spare parts they had. Like the parts you fixed our gun with.”

Rally’s body began to shake slightly as she promptly plopped herself down into a sitting sphinx position, no longer willing to look either of them in the eye. “….damn my mouth and the smarts of precocious fillies—”

“Rally,” Mom’s voice growled angrily, “if you want me to keep helping you I need you to level with me, right now. What did you mean by “most”?”

Seeing herself cornered into an inescapable predicament, the teenaged filly offered very little resistance to Mom’s quiet wrath. “….b-by most….I mean that….I might have swiped…a few of them…before I broke the rest….”

“How many—”

“T-twelve!” Rally surrendered, now clearly seeing that Mom wasn’t going to back off of her “parent mode” until she was thoroughly satisfied. “I….I got twelve out of the warehouse….broke the rest, a hundred in all—”

Mom’s eyes bulged slightly in place, but she remained quiet as Rally continued spilling her guts (figuratively)—

“I….I took everything I could load in two bags and a brahmin,” she went on, lowering her head into her forelegs in fear, and El-Tee slowly began to wonder if Mom was pushing her too hard. “I had just enough time to stash them somewhere safe before they found out what I’d done to the stockpile. I…I found out they had a bounty on me the first time somebody tried to collect on it. That was…three months ago. I never went back to my stash, I just tried to get away…I tried to get away and nothing’s working and I keep getting screwed over—”

Rally’s voice began to break down into a soft cry, and El-Tee couldn’t stomach it any longer. It was starting to sound too much like….like….

…..herself….

Up until now, the pups were content to just watch the ponies bicker and fight, but now that one of them was starting to get hurt by it, they were quick to change their minds and start squeezing into Rally’s personal space, as if trying to nuzzle and rub her fears away. “….m-mom, stoppit, it’s hurting her—”

“It’s our lives!” Mom snapped back harshly, and El-Tee swore she could feel her ears being batted down by the sheer volume of her voice. “If there is even the slightest chance that we can get these mercs off our backs without having to kill them we need to take it, I can not take them all on in a stand-up fight—”

Light Tail could think of at least three ways to accomplish that right off, and two of them were not in Rally’s best interests. She seemed to realize it too, because the teen filly began to shake uncontrollably and even tried to scoot away from them, and now she was sure Mom had gone overboard. “N-no, wait, don’t please—“

It was getting disgustingly familiar. The terror, the tears, the shaky, scared voice….it was like Mom giving Kite the third degree over something she didn’t feel comfortable talking about. And in Rally’s case, she was probably thinking her very life was at stake in the mess….

….and in a sickening moment of clarity, she realized that it was.

She acted before she could even think of how to act—she lurched forward, latching onto Rally’s barrel with a clumsy hug, and then clinging to her tightly in some vain hope that she could keep her still and not run away. “No!! Mom stop, that’s not helping!!”

“Neither are the secrets!!” Mom’s voice bellowed deeply. “This is serious—”

“We know that” she shrieked back, snapping her head back at Mom and even feeling part of her lips curve up in a strange, dog-like snarl. “Kite hid all sorts of stuff from us and you never bit her head off over it!!”

A tiny hoof popped into her mouth the moment she heard those words peel free from her tongue, but it was too late to take them back. Seeing Mom’s face go from angry to almost….heartbroken….it took a lot of the fight out of her, among other things.

….but it took the fight out of Mom, too….

…and feeling Rally’s body shiver in fright within her hug brought her focus back to the most important problem at hoof, for the moment. There’d be time to mess with the other stuff later. “…look, if these snake guys are really as mean as you and Rally say, then nothing we could offer them would make them go away. They want Rally, and the guns she stole, and they won’t leave us alone until they get both. They’re not gonna take her stash and let it go at that. Or us, for that matter, now that you’ve gone and killed some of them.”

Mom’s eyes slid downward, almost in shame. “….I…I wasn’t suggesting her as a sacrifice….”

El-Tee was a little confused as to why she would even think such a thought crossed her tiny brain…at least until she thought back several days….when she practically beat Mom up and all but accused her of doing exactly that to Kite….

….useless bucking idiot, she spat at herself hatefully, tears rolling out of her eyes and down her face as she barely avoided cussing herself out in her head. Why not just scream “murderer” at her face while you’re at it?! Why not just ruin everything else…..

“….we can figure out the how later. But we gotta get outta here first….could try getting a ride with a caravan, like we did the last time we had to get out of a town in a hurry without being shot up…”

“....yeah,” Mom said quietly, turning away from them and starting back on the path to the market. “...not like I have any better ideas....”

The fortunes of the wastes tended to be fickle little bitches.

For instance, the matter of Saurus, and the ill-advised and ill-fated request for assistance in tracking a hated nemesis. While she had never actually sided with him on it, she did say that she would keep the request in mind and keep an eye out if she had the time, and she quickly found that she didn’t really care to bother with it and went back to her own business. It seemed that even that minor a lie was enough to draw his ire. She wished now that her saviors had left at least one of the mercs alive so that she could have learned when or how he had managed to subvert her entire hired crew out from underneath her. She’d gotten a little carried away with a couple of them herself, yes, but…well, what was a girl to do when she was cornered like that? Let them have their vile way with her? She was still retching from the fact that she had let Lucky Strike touch her, much less…other things, but it had saved her some caps in the end. Doubly so when the crazy stable pony and her party ran into his “checkpoint” and slew him and his entire crew.

Still, it was quite a tale of rapidly-switching fortunes, one way to the other and back again, and at the end of it all she was back home in the west, alive and somewhat well….and almost completely broke. That wasn’t how the plan was supposed to end. But it did make for a good story to tell others she trusted enough to tell it to. And despite the pitfalls and hardships that had fallen on her in the last few weeks, she found herself wondering whether the crazy stable pony’s plan had worked, and if her runaway slave friends were well.

The wasteland being what it as (and likely seeing a chance for amusement in humoring her), she was given a chance to obtain her answers rather abruptly and without warning. It came to her in the market row of Rough Port, a sad little speck of a town in the western prairie roughly a dozen miles or so from Trotpeka’s valley crossing. Despite her appearance she was able to semi-mingle into a small crowd without drawing too much attention, as long as she kept her mouth shut when a pretty thing drew near her. She had not thought that would require as much mental effort as it did, and she found it increasingly difficult to scour the small, two-block stretch of travelling merchants and traders in search of both Sling Shot and a suitable replacement for her lost blade with so many nice looking mares and stallions (and a couple of griffons, she wasn’t picky) to be found amongst the throng of scarred wastelanders. Yet as she entered her third day into her dive through the market row’s visiting merchants, she began to entertain the very serious thought that she might have made a mistake in how to approach the stable pony. She’d missed her entrance into Puck’s bar the other day by roughly an hour, having gone out to slake her thirst for fun with another willing soul, and after the violent events of last night she’d thought better of trying to meet up with her face to face and elected to try and catch her in the morning, after she’d had a chance to calm down and put the fight behind her.

But when the blackness of night gave way to the gloomy, dark gray overcast sky that passed as morning in the wasteland, she’d found that the stable pony and her entourage had already left, and even as she charged into the market row in search of them she’d thought she’d lost them for good. And then she spotted a potential sign of her quarry amongst the throng of early risers in the market, and her brief look at the unicorn pony in question derailed her brain’s thought processes with the information she gleaned from that two-second look.

Teal blue coat. Darker colored mane, like the Night Princess’s coat, a travelling saddle adorned with weapons….which, by a stroke of luck from gods above or below, included a black katana scabbard capped with a red tip and a red ring at its open end, through which protruded the tell-tale extended grip of a full-length katana, adorned in alternating black and red cording. The grip itself was modified with a specially sized and fitted hoof cuff through which a magic-less pony could fit a foreleg and use the weapon.

She knew this, because she’d made it that way. How or why this crazy stable pony mare had come to keep possession of her most prized weapon, she couldn’t fathom…but then, that’s what questions were for.

To be answered.

She began to chase after the pony in seemingly weightless leaps and bounds, her excitement overtaking her to the point where it seemed that she was leaping forward far faster than she would have if she’d decided to run, and caught up to her prey in about eleven and a half jumps—

“Hey!” she shouted at the seventh jump, roughly thirty feet behind the pony with her sword, causing her to snap her head back over her withers—

“The hell is th—”

Oh yes, it is her! She squealed to herself in delight. Lengthy, ragged scars running down one side of her face, eye color matched her mane and tail. Yes, this was crazy stable pony Sling Shot!

“Hey!” she shouted again at the zenith of her ninth jump, bringing her ever closer now that Sling Shot had come to a complete stop. “Crazy pony!”

Sling’s face was rapidly growing confused, her brow furrowing deeply into her forehead, and now she could see signs of what looked like two children following closely behind her as the crowd around the mare began to pull away. One was a teenaged filly, her head coming up to Sling’s neck, and with what looked like a patched-up blue leg warmer around her right foreleg. The other filly was smaller, maybe just small enough to duck under the mare for protection if she felt like it, and while her coat was a lighter shade of Sling’s, her mane and tail matched save for this streak of electric blue in the tail that dazzled her eyes briefly whenever it swished about. “Wh—”

Her eleventh leap was not quite as profitable as the last ten, only taking her three feet forward, but her next half-jump brought her within four feet of the stable pony’s presence, and she chose to stop here and immediately prostrate herself before her, splaying her legs out across the ground as she dipped her head down in mock prayer. “Crazy pony Sling Shot, I humbly beg for the return of my sword which rests upon your back,” she commenced to speak in a quiet, reverent tone. “….you know, if you do not mind….”

A brief moment of silence only made Sling’s reply even funnier amidst the children’s quiet giggling. “….what the ever living fu….”

She had to bite her tongue hard to keep from laughing. “….um, yes…my sword. Which I gave you, to aid in your ploy. Which I kind of want back. Soon. Please. If…if you do not mind…”

To complete the joke, she let herself lie there in silence while Sling supposedly tried to make sense of what had just happened to her right then, and in a few seconds she could hear the unicorn groaning in defeat over the sound of a leather strap rubbing across coat and flesh…and the cool, hard touch of the scabbard upon her outstretched forelegs made the payoff worth it. “….take it and get away from me, you lunatic.”

With a delighted giggle, she snapped up to her hooves in a single bound, sweeping up the katana into a tight, but quick hug against her chest before slinging it over her neck and across her barrel, until the pommel of the katana was hanging over her withers and the sword itself resting on its side, positioning the hoof cuff just so, so that her right foreleg could slip into it with a thought and begin cutting her enemies to pieces when the mood struck her. “Aaaaahh,” she sighed contently as the sword’s weight finally resolved that lingering feeling of unease and…nakedness, that had bothered her for weeks. “I feel whole again.”

“Glad to hear it,” Sling mumbled darkly, already attempting to slip away deeper into the market and pulling the two children and mutts with her with a flash of magic. “Good-bye, Julaya.”

“Wait wait wait!!” she called out loudly, leaping back into Sling’s personal space and landing immediately to the mare’s right—not that it really mattered, when she had her guns spread out on both sides to keep the weight balance even, but she seemed to keep her shotgun on her right side along with one of her revolvers, and Sling seemed to be a….right-hoofed person, even when using her magic, so at the very least she wouldn’t get a shotgun to the face if she irritated her too much. “Please wait, I have questions!”

“My answers may come in the form of a ten millimeter slug if you keep this up.”

“….then I will ask the questions most important to me so that I may die with knowledge I sought,” she chuckled back. “Your plan to save your friends…did it work?”

She did not expect the reaction that followed—Sling’s ears began to seemingly melt until they’d almost folded against her head, and her tail drooped low until it was practically dragging across the ground. Even the little Sling look-alike wilted where she stood. “….they’re dead,” she whispered with a choked sob. “….slaver hit squad ambushed us….shot up the bridge, and they…they fell off, into a riverbed infested with ghouls….”

Her rush of elation and joy at being reunited with her sword died almost as violently a death as the poor stable pony’s aforementioned friends, and all pretense of humor and levity left her.

This was no time to act like a child.

“….I….I’m sorry,” she whispered, a touch of shame creeping into her voice and face as she felt her own ears flattening out. “….how does the little tail of light fare in all this?”

Mini-Sling’s voice was barely audible, but the pain of despair in her voice spoke more than enough on its own. “….was doin’ okay, ‘till you said somethin’….”

She felt her eyes close for a brief moment, her mouth utter a silent prayer to departed spirits in the hopes that they might hear her plea and act on it. Children always seemed to suffer the most in this cruel wasteland. “….that was rather uncouth of me,” she said when the prayer upon her lips had ended.

Sling’s face turned to her with moist, but wary eyes. “…surprised you care, given your previous occupation.”

…okay, I can see the oddity in that. Going from robbing and killing caravans to “I’m sorry your friends died horribly in a pit of murderous, hungry ghouls” would seem somewhat….unbelievable, to a stable pony. But the truth was too simple to ignore…and fortunately for her, simple to give, unlike others who might not find it comfortable to speak of their own feelings. Like this stable pony, apparently. “I care because the grief of losing loved ones should not be carried alone. Especially not by a child.”

The stark honesty seemed to catch the stable mare off-guard—her faced hardened slightly, but her eyes began to grow uneasy and turned away from her, as if uncomfortable with her. “….I guess it would be hypocritical of me to say otherwise, given the last few days….”

“….you would be called “careful” in the eyes of most,” she offered back. “Children fall prey to strangers, often with terrible results. Do not forget that you now inhabit a land where the depraved and sick-minded have little to fear except those who know how to fight back.”

Sling’s face began to wipe away its grief and confusion, reforming into a stoic, unreadable form that reminded her partly of a griffon’s glare. “Don’t remind me.”

Perhaps it is best to find another subject, she surmised silently. Before she gets too depressed to suffer my company any longer.

“….are you looking for anything in particular in this collection of sometimes-thieves?” she finally asked, after several tense, uncomfortable seconds of silence of trying to find something to ask about other than that boring old question about the weather (the answer was usually a sarcastic-ass “Sunny”).

“….a way out. We need to leave town. Now. And without attracting the attention of mercenaries who want to find us. They’ve already tried their luck once last night and got the bar owner killed in the process.”

“…I know. I was hardly out the door when the shooting started. I….took my time returning, and when I did you had removed the bodies and retreated to your room once more. I held off on bothering you until later. Which would be….now, I guess….”

“Then let me return the ‘favor’,” Sling shot back. “She only mentioned it in passing, but Major Colada was of the opinion that you could vanish into the wastes for a good stretch of time whenever it pleased you. Otherwise she wouldn’t have found it so hard to find and kill you for all the grief you caused her over the years.”

Ah, I was wondering when you would ask. “’Tis a natural skill I seem to have nurtured since I was capable of walking. The roads can be just as dangerous as the wastes, crawling with slavers, troopers, and bandits of varying degrees of depravity, and I found it no less or more dangerous to simply walk across the open wasteland to my destination instead. When the Runners crossed over to take the fight to the Union in the war, I was one of many volunteers who accompanied their squads to learn the lay of the east and map alternate paths of travel. I eventually used several such routes to lead runaways over the valley, by paths no slaver or trooper would dare tread without company. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I could walk into or out of any settlement in the prairie without ever touching the decaying highway system that connects the towns.”

“Then you could conceivably tell me the quickest way westward? The major roads here seem to lead either north, south, or east, but not westward.”

“If you wish to live off the land, then yes, you can simply stroll into the west, but water is rather scarce around this particular spot of earth. But it would not be a chore to turn northward to the next town on the highway. Not as close to the old riverbed as here, but if you want to leave quickly, then that would be your best option.”

Sling’s head began swinging around in a slow sweep, her eyes suddenly regarding every shadowed alley with suspicion and mistrust. “….how quickly? How close?”

“…you can be there by tomorrow, if you must….”

The stable pony studied her environment with caution and wary as she began to pick up her pace. “...is it a friendly place?”

“’Friendliness’ is a tad…subjective,” she said cautiously. “….it would be no worse than here, if that is what bothers you. But I would ask something of you first.”

Sling’s voice took on a slight hint of disdain. “I’m not swimming in caps at the moment.”

“That is actually quite painful,” she laughed, instantly recalling a recent memory, when she still had that vast fortune of caps spilled across the floor of that old brewery and decided to see if she could play in it. That little childish venture lasted for about twenty seconds. “But no, caps are not what I desire. These last few weeks I’ve spent alone have been…well, lonely. I…I am not used to travelling alone, and I do not like it. Much of my life since the war has been spent robbing and killing slavers and the Union troopers who support them, and I obviously cannot return to that life now.”

The stable pony was not that dumb, though in hindsight she was probably a little too obvious with what she wanted. “….alone? What happened to your….friend?”

She had expected this question, and for the sake of getting along with the crazy stable pony later, she did not bother to try to dodge it. “We…did not part on good terms,” she replied, a tinge of sadness coloring her tone. “The caps I gave you….I…I had promised her a new eye, someday. I had forgotten about it until we crossed over, out of Ada and Leon’s feathers, and…she exploded. It was…necessary, to part ways. I do not blame her for her anger….even if it hurt…”

“….so you want to wander the roads with a stable pony you barely know, after all that?”

“Even the company of casual acquaintances is far preferable to me than silence. And I promise to only make your life difficult some of the time.”

The crazy pony was surprisingly silent for a few moments, and when she finally spoke it was with a strangely sad resignation. “….she did the same thing,” she said quietly. “….and I can’t decide if I miss it or not.”

Try as she might, she could not conjure up any words of consolation or sagely advice, and decided she was best off just allowing them to follow her out of the market in silence, but she could not help but dryly note the eerie accuracy of her theory on wasteland fortunes.

Fickle bitches, indeed.

Chapter 18

I am not used to travelling alone, and I do not like it.

Julaya’s words haunted her into the opening gasp of dawn, when the blackened overcast skies shifted into a lighter gray that robbed her of hope with its mere presence. By luck or foresight, Julaya’s path had taken them through what seemed like an endless stretch of parched, cracked earth until they’d come up upon a lonely farmstead and what remained of its husbandry and agriculture equipment just before dusk the previous night. The barn was the only structure intact after ages of neglect—the small house had been crushed by an ill-placed grain silo just behind it, and when she’d taken a quick look through what remained she’d found portions of a pony skull and bits of rib and leg bone underneath the rubble that suggested the house’s original residents had been done in by their careless building planning.

It was also entirely possible the bones had belonged to a wastelander, born decades after the megaspells that burned the world, and that this poor soul had simply chosen the wrong shelter at precisely the wrong time. No one would ever truly know for sure.

But at least this departed soul had remains that could be identified as such. Kite and BJ had nothing. All that was left were the memories that others in the wastes had of them, if anybody even remembered. And with Light Tail having gained something of a thousand-yard stare and Rally seemingly afraid to look her in the eye, she tried to dive back into those memories and quickly gave up on the pursuit once she found herself hurting more from Kite’s absence than she wanted to believe. Memories were a poor substitute for the actual sounds and sights of the recently departed. It was then that she realized that she felt more alone now than she did when she lived in the Stable.

And like Julaya…she did not like it.

She would suffer almost anything short of Light Tail’s death or dismemberment if it meant getting Kite and BJ back. She’d even put up with another kiss or three….

….or four….

….or….four? she repeated to herself when the crude thought had struck her, almost unwilling to believe it. She didn’t see mares that way….or even Kite, for that matter. At least, she didn’t think so. But even now, silently bereaving over the absence of her only friend in this wasteland, thinking back to that moment in Galesville when that friend had just….thrown herself at her….

….oh, gods, she really did have it bad for me and I just…just, pushed it aside and….

No. No no no, she did not crush Kite’s heart, that mare knew it wasn’t going to be the way she wanted, she only did that on account of having been pulled out of the slave trade permanently, along with her colt, after what seemed like half a lifetime of being abused by it. She had to admit, that was a fairly good reason to give a kiss like that.

But Kite had always wanted something more. Something she knew she would not get from her….

….by the moon, maybe I should have let her…

….not that it would have changed anything, in the end. Might have made things worse, actually, but….but for all the hardships that Kite endured in her life, she deserved to have gotten something more out of her few weeks of true freedom than just a blue mark on her neck and the company of friends before being ripped apart and eaten alive….

“Perish the thoughts that harm your aura,” Julaya’s voice intruded into her personal space, jarring her out of her depressing spiral of anguished thoughts before they could start to overwhelm her. “…or I can give you something else to think about, but it will not be as desirable to you as it would be to me.”

Any other day, she might have groaned at the slight flirt flung at her. Today, however….she simply didn’t care. “….doubt that would work either,” she sighed into the air through the upper loft window overlooking the wasteland beyond. While the open stable space below was much roomier and open, she hadn’t liked the idea of them sleeping on ground level in a wasteland infested with mutated, pony-feasting wildlife, and none of them were rested enough to take turns standing watch. The best she could do was plaster smell suppression runes all throughout the barn and pray no nocturnal predators would come along as they slept, and by luck, the runes, or a combination of both, they had made it through the night unscathed.

She felt something thump into the wall beside the windowsill, and when she pulled away from the dimming view of the wastes for a quick glance she found Julaya’s striped forelimbs setting what looked like a shortened variant of a black M-series rifle, but sadly had only iron sights on it instead of an optic.

“…try this, then,” Julaya murmured softly, perhaps in deference to the children slowly waking up on the other side of the loft. “I last visited here a year earlier, when….when my love and I came back briefly to tend to affairs in her family. I made certain to stash one or two guns for her in some of my hiding places to compliment the pistol she always kept close at hoof. For this hideaway, I tried to find one whose bullets could be easily found….at least, I think they can, I am not a gun mare—”

Finally! she wanted to scream, though she settled for simply taking the rifle into a telekinetic spell field and began inspecting it heavily. She recognized it as being very similar to Ada’s rifle, even with some of the bluing having been worn off. The rounded handguards had some cracks along the surface, but still locked together tight. Pistol grip was likewise in decent shape, front sight was straight and undamaged, the rear sight embedded in the carry handle on the receiver was intact, and the telestock was fully extended, which she quickly corrected by pushing it as far in as possible to make it easier to handle with her magic. The 30-round magazine—the weakest point of the design—was thankfully serviceable, with straight feed lips and undamaged follower, though the magazine spring did seem a bit weak and would probably worsen if kept loaded for a few months, possibly less.

“…ah, but it seems you are,” Julaya’s voice laughed as she worked the bolt back and pulled it out of the receiver for a more detailed inspection. “This is like looking at a child receiving a cherished birthday gift! Perhaps I will spoil you with the extra clips I have stashed in one of the stables below, yes?”

“…how many?” she found herself asking with rapt anticipation, which seemed to play right into the zebra’s hooves.

Even in the dim, cloud-blocked light of the early morning, she swore she could see Julaya’s eyes light up in a mischievous glint, her grayish-silver mane splayed out all across her neck and skull. With a sly grin, the zebra turned and practically hopped down onto the ground floor, not even bothering with the ladder and simply using the dividers of the stable stalls below as landing points…and all on her rear hooves, no less. She even did a little flip when she leapt onto the ground, and the aerobatic display got enough of Light Tail’s attention that the filly’s head rose up and craned over the edge of the loft to peer down into the barn below, perhaps curious to see how the zebra would return to the loft without the help of a ladder.

Julaya spent no more than seven seconds on the ground floor, her jaws clamping down on a lunchbox crammed into a corner of a barn stall, and when she reached the middle of the floor she leapt up onto a stall divider once more, and then again onto the edge of the loft, hauling herself over onto solid footing with a single, seemingly effortless pull of her forelegs and dropping the lunchbox at Sling’s hooves.

“I don’t recall a precise number,” Julaya said with a slight huff, surprising Sling with what seemed like a rare use of a contraction in her speech. “More than one, less than ten, judging by weight.”

A quick dump of the box’s contents revealed a mostly-full box of 5.56mm ammunition and a pair of twenty-round magazines, with most of the finish worn down to the bare aluminum and some minor rust on the baseplate of one of them. But the magazine springs themselves seemed stronger than the thirty-round mag, and the followers didn’t have any gashes or nicks along the edges that would impede feeding. The little cardboard box of ammo itself had 18 rounds—most of the packaging art and lettering had faded out, forcing her to pull the rounds out to inspect them individually—

Oh, eff yes she squealed silently in delight at the sight of the faint, black-tipped bullet.

AP rounds. Eighteen of them, to be precise.

All eighteen rounds were pulled from the box and loaded into one of the twenty-round magazines almost immediately afterward, the cartridges almost sinking into the mag body like a water stream as they were fed in straight down. “Where did you say you got this?” she found herself muttering in mild disbelief as she spared a few seconds to check the bore and barrel. By her own admission Julaya was not a gun person, yet this rifle was in explicably good shape internally—

“I didn’t, but since you asked, a trader near Withercha,” the zebra answered happily. “This was the only rifle he had in his inventory, and seemed quite happy to be rid of it as he found it difficult to sell, for some reason. I had Ada look it over for me before I stashed it away. If she is to be believed, the barrel will not wear out for quite some time, and she shot very well with it when she adjusted the sights.”

For some inexplicable reason the rifle became a tad heavier in her spell field, though at least now she knew who’d last had their claws on it. Unfortunately, that also meant the rifle had probably been sighted in for a griffon’s eyes and not a pony’s. But at the ranges she was getting into fights at, for the moment she could live with it so long as she kept her shots on the body instead of trying any fancy, like distant headshots.

Two and a half minutes on weapon’s innards convinced her that all of the rifle’s critical parts would function properly, at least in the short term, and she carefully began re-assembling the rifle in whole. With all the practice she’d gotten maintaining their former stock of service rifles back in Union territory, she had the carbine back together and fully functional in about ten seconds, loaded up with twenty rounds of standard 55-grain FMJ rounds in the other 20-rounder. The thirty-round magazine, she loaded up with only twenty-five rounds out of deference to the weaker spring, and would just have to be ready to start yanking stuck casings out of the weapon if it started acting up.

“…sooo, got a rifle,” she whispered, setting the rifle down on its side next to her sleeping bag. “….that is awkward for a pony to use and may not be zeroed right. And that I don’t know how to shoot well. At all.”

“It is much harder than Ada would make it appear to be,” the zebra agreed in a pleasant tone, settling down next to her and getting perhaps a tad too close for her personal comfort….but she was simply too emotionally tired to care, and it wasn’t like she would try anything with the kids close by and in sight.

At least, she’d thought as much, until said children had finally allowed themselves to finish their sleepy breakfast, huddled together in a corner with the pups choosing to use the ponies for backrests while they gobbled on their own helpings of salt-preserved meat strips. She’d barely taken back the pile of wool blankets from Julaya’s outstretched forelegs when the zebra spoke again. “….tell me of this friend and her colt,” the zebra whispered gently.

Uncouth language threatened to burst out of her lips, but at the last moment her tongue articulated her displeasure into more polite words. “….not now,” she begged tiredly, slinging the carbine across her chest. “Please.”

Julaya did not seem to take no for an answer…or not right off. “I was not lying when I said such pain should not be carried alone,” she insisted. “By the looks of the pony yearling when you draw near her, it would seem she was subjected to anger she did not deserve. I am not looking to blame, I am merely offering an ear.”

Guilt welled into her chest and hung on, like an unwanted lead weight pulling her to the earth. “Not. Now,” she said again, her voice growing a little sharper.

As refusals went, that was probably one of the nicer ones she’d given lately, and the zebra seemed to know when it was best to quit before her attempts to be friendly backfired. “….another time, then. Though I would suggest mending your ways with the yearling in the near future.”

She watched the striped mare depart from the loft in silence, tracing her aerobatic route to ground level…and when she spotted El-Tee’s body deploying the loft’s ladder and slid down it in the next moment to quietly pester the zebra with whatever had just popped into her little brain, she found it very difficult to actually contemplate the advice she’d just been given.

If she was good at anything else besides killing people, it was hurting them when they didn’t deserve it.

The morning trek to their next destination was a fairly short one—twelve miles in all, walked in roughly three hours with a couple of breaks and a near total embargo on conversation of any kind. The silence was broken only when the distant black blur line they’d been staring at for the last thirty minutes finally began to break apart into separate blocks of black that looked to resemble houses, or the remaining framework of said structures.

“…well, shit…”

The expletive that normally escaped her mouth surprised her when she finally realized it had come from someone else’s throat instead. “....wrong town?”

Julaya’s striped foreleg rose up to point accusingly at the distant town. “…no, no, we are where we should be. But I have few fond memories of the infernal place.”

Dark thoughts began creeping into her brain. “....please don’t tell me you owe somebody money or favors in there.”

“Nothing of the sort,” the zebra spat with disdain. “The souls who live here are simply…more unsavory than most. They do not care much for tribals.”

“…tribals?”

Julaya’s throat grunted softly in affirmation. “Most folk were not lucky enough to be at a Stable when the world burned. Many perished in the megaspells. Countless more fell victim to the chaos and the fallout that came after, but enough were left afterward that life survived. Civilization was erased, and so many groups of survivors simply…began again, as it were. Tribals are mainly ponyfolk and zebras. Some are superstitious folk who believe more in old mare’s tales than anything else and can be quite hostile to strangers wandering too close to their camp. Others are lucky enough to possess guns and knowledge and would actually integrate quite well with a more…civilized settlement, some might say? A few are versed enough in self-sustainment to have something to trade should you encounter them. And a few other tribes are scavengers, lacking the skills to survive on their own. The scavenger tribes are unfortunately the ones that most are familiar with, because they can act like raiders at times. One of them is more mercantile and willing to trade for what it cannot take by force, but the others will take live prisoners as slaves for their camps, and have a habit of attacking caravans. One common element of all the tribes is that they never stay in one place permanently. Their camps are always moving, lest they be found by raiders or roaming wildlife.”

The Union is starting to look a lot better than it did a week ago. “So what does this have to do with you?”

“Because I am tribal myself,” the striped zebra clarified. “…or I used to be, in my eyes. And my tribe had some….unpleasant customs, which is the reason I no longer count myself among them. But tolerance and understanding are not words the wasteland understands very well, and this place can be even worse. We may be better off simply moving on.”

“No, we need more water if we’re going to go much further. I’ve gotten lucky finding places with working talismans so far, but I bet the next thing you’re going to tell me is that my luck just ran out.”

Julaya’s hoof came up to her face and brushed at it in absent thought. “…I would, if you had not guessed it correctly already. Some towns are lucky and have a ground well. But most depend on water caravans, and there aren’t enough working talismans in the west to get water to all who need it. So the Union will send caravans of their own over the valley, and they do not charge more than the western carriers for it despite the far greater distance they travel. It is the only Union-sourced trade good that the Runners will make effort to protect.”

“…that sounds like a suspiciously easy way for the Union to get more influence over here—”

Light Tail’s voice finally came alive with some sign of that bright, perceptive mind of hers that had been sorely missing in life of late. “One thing at a time,” she cut in sharply, her head swiveling about in a cursory scan for unseen threats or trouble, though she quickly settled for the darkening skies in the distance that weren’t quite this close earlier in the morning. “That storm in the distance is a lot closer than it was this morning and it’s too late to turn back. We don’t hurry up and we’re gonna be arguing about this soaking wet. Unless you want to fill all our canteens with rainwater that might make you sick.”

Both adults could not help but stare at each other in slight shock that the child had seen the storm clouds coming long before they had, to the point where the little one had to point it out to them before they noticed. “….getting indoors sounds good.”

“Very good, yes,” Julaya agreed heartily, even zipping ahead of them to take the lead. “I will buy you a Sparkle-Cola just for being smarter than the dumb mares who are supposed to know better, little tail of light.”

“Light! Tail!” her daughter shouted back as she began trotting along in the zebra’s wake. “And I’ll pass on the soda, I don’t feel like peeing all day!”

A dark-gray and white blur flashed past her, morphing into Mona’s filly-sized body rushing to catch up to her favorite pony…

….but Rally was not so quick to join in the parade towards the town. If anything, Sling thought her somewhat apprehensive of it.

Or her, given that the teen could hardly stand to look at her after yesterday morning. Couldn’t really blame her for it, either.

“….something wrong?” her mouth forced itself to speak after a couple seconds of uncomfortable quiet. Besides me, anyway?

Rally’s eyes never found their way to hers, too focused on the town ten minutes ahead. “….been here before,” she replied flatly. “Rough place, actually, the zebra’s not kidding on that. Not….not safe for a little girl on her own.”

I don’t think such a place exists in the wastes, actually. “Anything in particular we should be wary of?”

“The usual,” she answered immediately. “Town this small, the bar’s the main gathering point for the residents. Think it used to be an auction house for the farms around here, before the megaspells, so it’s pretty spacious, even had a bunch of conference rooms on one side. Anything worth doing is done there. Trade, bounties, jobs…whatever. The auction floor was turned into a dancer’s stage years ago…and I don’t mean ballet. It’s walled off from the rest of the bar, and the animal stables in back got turned into the backstage area for the dancers and organizers. Whole operation’s guarded, only way in peacefully is through the door the bouncers are guarding with MEWs…and that’s where the more lucrative business and jobs tend to be. It’s…it’s where I got the job to fix that MEW stockpile, months ago.”

Sling felt her stomach flipping over itself in disgust, her heart sinking at the thought of a child finding her way into such a seedy and vile place out of sheer necessity. “….you…you weren’t….trying to go on-stage, were you?”

“….the wastes can wear your morals down to dust, if you live long enough,” Rally mumbled, her voice hollow and haunted as she finally found the energy and willpower to move forward. “I…almost did it. But something in the world, some….some higher power, or maybe fate….every time I get close to tossing my dignity aside just so I can eat and get some water, something comes along to snap me back. Here, I’d convinced the boss of the place to let me take to the dance stage, and I was halfway through the door to the back rooms when that trader pulls me aside and asks me if I know how to fix MEWs, ‘cause he saw my cyberleg and figured I knew how to keep it running on my own. A year before that, I was waltzing up to a brothel in Trotpeka’s red light district to ask about work when a sergeant on patrol snatches me up and drops me in front of his CO, and I get sent back over the valley with enough food and water to get me to the more decent towns in the west after fixing up a couple of laser rifles in his platoon’s arsenal. Miiiiiight have been the mild dehydration talking at that point in time...among other things.”

Oh god, no wonder she freaked out yesterday morning….shouldn’t have bit her head off to start with, but with all that in her life…. “….I…I’m s—”

“Don’t,” Rally’s voice fired off crisply, but then quickly settled down into a steady, calm volume. “…it’s not like I was all honest with you to start with….”

“…given what you’ve endured to make it as far as you have, on your own, in a world that would gleefully toss you to barbarians to use as they please…no, you had every reason to keep to yourself…”

“…and you had every reason to want to know what you were really getting into….I didn’t think it mattered, in the end…”

Up ahead, Light Tail’s body began to rear up and poke at Julaya’s side to grab the zebra’s attention, and while she did get it, Julaya did not slow down her pace in the slightest. She could see her daughter’s mouth moving, as if asking her something, but they were too far away for her to hear it clearly given that she was busy trying to patch up the trust she’d torn up with Rally. “…it probably doesn’t. It just….look, getting through Trotpeka…it was hard on us.”

“Anybody lookin’ at you two can tell that right off.”

“….I…am not great with people. I’m…I’m not trying to be a bitch, it just…turns out that way sometimes. We could probably both stand to be a little more patient with the other….”

Rally’s nose snorted at her in a half-sneeze. “….answer me something, and I’ll consider it.”

She got a sneaking feeling what the question was going to be…but at this point in her life it didn’t really matter to her anymore. “Depends on the question.”

“….when did you have Light Tail?”

Knew it. “….for my fifteenth birthday, I treated myself to a night with a colt I thought I loved. A month before my sixteenth, the foal I birthed became the only family I had left, because almost everyone else practically cut me out of their lives. So…yeah, not great with people. Be thankful El-Tee doesn’t take after me.”

“…no shit,” Rally’s voice mumbled in slight disbelief. “….damn, you’re not even old enough to be my mother….”

“…closer than you’d think. But foaling at twelve would be exceptionally dangerous, and much more likely to be fatal.”

“…I…think that’s enough talk of babies—”

Talk of any pleasant kind came to a harsh and inconsiderate end as Mother Nature injected her own “thoughts” into the matter with a sudden, blinding flash of lightning and a roll of thunder that seemed to echo across the world itself. Two pairs of eyes followed the sound upward, dismayed to see that the dark storm clouds Light Tail had pointed out were now sporting random flashes of white lightning amongst them. Sometimes it peeled out and slapped into the ground, and other times it simply remained within the clouds.

But the storm was coming. And she was starting to wish they’d stayed at that barn in the middle of nowhere instead of hoofing it all the way out here.

“….dammit, it really is too late to go back, isn’t it?” Rally’s voice asked fearfully. “…because that upper loft in the barn was actually kinda cozy and the roof was mostly in one piece where we slept…”

“Waaaay too late.”

The little tail of light was an annoyingly…inquisitive creature.

The filly had been mostly behaved for much of the last twenty-four hours, content to simply wallow and suffer in her grief alone. Even went as far as to huddle into a corner in the barn loft and stay there, and with those pups choosing to bed down next to her, it became almost impossible to find any sign of the filly’s coat in the sea of black and white fur.

She knew something was terribly wrong when she saw that. Dogs could be exceptionally perceptive of their masters’ feelings and moods, provided they were of the right disposition. And these two pups, probably four to five months old at the least, somehow sensed the filly’s internal distress…and chose to stay as close to her as possible when she set down somewhere. It was as if their physical presence was intended to chase away her sorrows, or at the very least give her enough peace of mind to find restful sleep and wake up in slightly better spirits for the day ahead.

And judging by the way the filly was quietly badgering her even now, as they drew near the shoddy, tiny settlement that the ponyfolk called Rust Burrow, the dogs’ efforts were not entirely wasted.

“…coat’s so pretty,” the little filly whispered quietly, even going so far as to reach up and touch her side briefly. “Are…are you white with black stripes….or black with white stripes?”

She dared a look behind her, to see if this manner of contact was sitting well with Sling. Parents could be rather protective of their young when they attempted to mingle with strangers, but for the moment it seemed the crazy stable pony was more preoccupied with the yearling than with her own offspring. One of the pups—Max, she thought—had chosen to hang back with the stable mare, while the other one stayed by its favored master’s side.

“…could be either, or both,” she whispered back. There was little harm in humoring the filly’s questions, though she felt something was off about the entire affair. She would have thought the child would have a great deal more energy and enthusiasm towards a non-pony sentient being she had never met before. Or maybe the little one had seen enough of the wastes to know when to rein in that enthusiasm. “I see me as being…me. A zebra. Not one thing with stripes, or the other. Just me.”

“….and this…tribe thing? Is that really necessary? ‘Cause…’cause it’d be a lot easier to survive if everybody stayed together instead of fightin’ each other…”

“It would, truly. But life is so much more complex and involved than simply surviving. Ideologies, beliefs….interests, and tolerances, it is simply impossible for every living thing to be able to get along all the time, and it would be quite boring if everyone acted the same way, little tail of light. Even so, there are some like me who prefer life among the ponyfolk.”

She heard what sounded like a little growl from the filly’s throat, probably at being called “little tail of light”, but she just couldn’t help it. That electric streak in her indigo tail was just so….so bright, when her tail swished, it was like a little bright light all on its own. And the fact that it matched her eye color only doubled the cuteness factor. “….ponyfolk? Are ponies so blind that they blame the zebra for all this and keep them out?”

Oooooor maybe I may have offended her unintentionally…. “…I do not mean ill by my words. But by and large, Equestria was the land of ponies. Griffons, zebra, minotaur….all came from other lands. I suppose in some way we still see ourselves as strangers in this land, even though our ancestors have lived in the ashes of Equestria ever since the last day of that horrendous conflict. For as long as any of us can remember, many zebra have simply preferred to stay together and roam the wastes. My tribe in particular was most content away from the ruined cities and tried to avoid ponyfolk when they could. There have definitely been times when I felt out of place in a crowded market square, even though most folk pay me no more mind than they do the ponies next to them.”

The child’s next question was not a surprise to her. “So why’d you leave?”

Brief memories of events and horrors best left forgotten filled her vision, but were quickly pushed aside. “…it was…necessary to leave. My reasons for leaving are my own. I am better off for it.”

“…don’t you have family that you miss?”

For the first time in recent memory, she finally allowed a touch of her frustration to slip into her words in an effort to get the child to back away from a subject she had long since put behind her. “They are not my family anymore. Please, let it be.”

Her rebuff had the intended effect of steering the filly away from the subject, though when she deigned to stay silent afterward Julaya began to regret saying it at all. Now she had no real means of getting the child to speak of her pain—it would be quite hypocritical of her to try, when she refused the child’s own efforts to do the same for her. Perhaps later, if the little thing’s grief came back to her an—

Her thoughts were abruptly and rudely interrupted by the presence of Mother Nature, who chose to abuse the souls beneath her by blasting their ears with thunder more akin to an explosion than to a natural act of the environment. The lightning was also becoming much more frequent. Sometimes it erupted from the clouds and lashed at the ground in anger, and sometimes it just stayed in the clouds and was content to light up patches of the sky. Even little Light Tail jumped in place at the deafening crack that rumbled across the earth.

“…well, Mother Nature is certainly eager to ruin our day,” she contemplated out loud, not really expecting any kind of an answer.

And the little tail of light made sure that an answer was not what she was given. “…does that happen a lot? The rain, I mean? It’s…it’s really pretty and awesome with all the lightning, but….it kinda makes travelling a pain.”

“The weather seems to do whatever it pleases,” she answered freely. “Sometimes it will rain without pause for days. Sometimes you will not see a drop of water for weeks. And sometimes the winds grow bored and begin making tornadoes to throw at the earth, like a foal with a bag of marbles. It is really very unpredictable.”

The little one did not seem to find that very comforting, given the slight nervous tic that crept into her voice. “…unpredictable usually means dangerous…”

She had her own thoughts on the subject, and on others subjects regarding the ponies’ seemingly innate desire to have complete control over the natural world they lived in, but this was a rather poor time to be engaging in philosophical debates with a ten-year-old. “We will be safe enough soon.”

“…will we?” the little one dared to quip, though in the next moment her concerns would prove to be fairly valid. “The only plan we had when we came out here was to get here and hope we can find clean water. No thoughts on what we’d do afterward. Go north? West? Stick it out a bit here? With those snake guys looking for us we can’t keep going from one place to another on a whim, but we can’t stay put too long either. We gotta think a bit. This storm’ll buy us a day, at most, and that’s if they don’t wanna walk in the rain any more than we do.”

By the ponies’ Sisters, this child is far too bright for her age. With no immediate ideas for what Sling and company might want to do, she quickly beckoned for the stable mare to join her with an impatient wave of her left foreleg. The child was right—this had to be figured out, and quickly.

“…is she bothering you too much?” was Sling Shot’s first question the moment the stable pony drew near her, which made Julaya wonder if the filly’s penchant for questions had once been a more…exhausting problem than she was currently experiencing.

“…on the contrary, she is scaring me,” the zebra replied. She tried to sound assuring, but she didn’t think it worked too well. “She does not recall a specific plan for what we would do once we arrived here, beyond acquiring water. And given that you are all wanted by the Pythons for various and unkind reasons, it would be prudent to have one before you go further, if you don’t already.”

When Sling’s immediate response was a still silence, she began to realize that the little filly beside her was probably more responsible for direction and guidance than she was comfortable with. “….the plan is a work in progress…that I’m still working on. It all depends on if—or where and when—we run into the Pythons here.”

She stopped in her tracks almost immediately, and the tail of light’s hooves skipped to a halt beside her very shortly afterward. “I thought you wanted my help in avoiding their attention.”

“On the roads,” Sling returned flatly. “Rally cost them a great deal of caps and firepower. The group that shot up Puck’s bar the other day were not the only ones they sent. I’m almost certain they’ve got others in the settlements to the north and south, as well as scouts watching the roads to warn them when she’s spotted coming their way. By coming into town through the wastes instead we’ve hopefully bypassed their lookouts and the Pythons here don’t know we’re coming, which means the group here would have no reinforcements. Beyond that, I’ve got nothing. We do it right, and we disappear from their radar for a while with enough water to make it to the next town. We screw up, and they’ll know from which town to pick up the search and sniff us out a lot faster.”

Inwardly, she cringed. She knew of at least one place in this seedy den of debauchery where she would expect to find the caravan master for a water convoy, and she was not looking forward to it. But she also recalled what she had told Ada weeks ago, after the stable pony had brought an old bathhouse down on top of one of the most vicious griffon slavers she’d ever known.

She hadn’t expected to be making good on that remark so soon, but…these Pythons needed to be found and eliminated. And the extra caps on the side wouldn’t hurt either, since they would essentially have if Sling’s search for a water merchant came through.

“…I have a clue where to find one or two water merchants,” Julaya murmured softly. “Perhaps procure us some caps in the process as well.”

“….procure, how?” Sling asked next, her voice growing slightly apprehensive.

“The how is my decision, not yours….though I would appreciate some…back-up, when I do. The children should not be near, either.”

The request was more for her comfort than the stable pony’s, and she seemed to pick up on the unspoken message as well. “…..Rally, is there…somewhere you can wait with El-Tee, while we do that?”

“…we’ll be out of the way,” the teenager mumbled, her voice slightly disheartened. “Close enough for you to help us if we need it, but far enough away to not be near your work. If we think the Pythons are closing on us, what do you want us to do?”

“Whatever you have to. If it comes to it, come to us, we’ll fight our way out from there.”

Little Light Tail was quick to catch on to what was happening without her input, though she didn’t quite understand some parts of it. “…what is it, exactly, that you’re gonna do, that you want me and Rally somewhere else, but want my mom’s help when she’ll already be busy doing somethin’ else?”

“Grown-up stuff,” Rally said quickly, before either mare could take too long to come up with a convincing lie (and she was starting to believe the filly would see through it regardless). “We’d just get in the way. They’ll be fine. Just stay close to me and keep to yourself.”

“….I’m not gonna get much of a choice about it, am I?”

“No, you’re not,” Sling assured her strongly. “Don’t ever get out of each other’s sight, both of you.”

She heard what sounded like a quiet, aggravated grumble out of the little filly, but she paid it little attention as they approached what looked to be a watch tower of sorts missing the one component critical to its intended purpose—an actual guard. Not one sign of life could be seen anywhere nearby.

“….helloooooo?” she called out, likely for naught, but she wanted to be sure that somebody wasn’t just sleeping on the floor of the tower before strolling by. If nothing else, they could at least pretend to be polite when they arrived at new places, which sometimes included checking in with whatever passed for security. “Stripy zebra and three unicorns wish to ennnnteeeeer….”

A gust of wind from the approaching storm sailed through, buffeting their bodies with its chill touch and lightly dusting off the wall and gate. But no one rose up from behind the tower’s barricade to answer her call.

“….great defense system,” Rally sniped at the unseen or absent guards. “Nobody’ll ever sneak past with such watchful eyes on duty.”

“…maybe they’re on break?” Light Tail’s voice pondered aloud, though she didn’t sound all that convinced of her own theory.

Before anybody else could offer any other useless theories about why the guard tower was failing in its only purpose, a shimmering indigo glow gently pushed into her hindquarters and urged her forward from the ground. “Maybe they don’t post people here 24/7. Let’s go,” Sling’s voice insisted firmly.

With a quick breath to gather her wandering wits, she followed the urgings of the stable mare’s magic and pressed forward into the settlement. Much of it had fallen into ruin and disrepair over the long decades, and the seemingly random mismatch of long, curvy streets intersecting with the more organized grid pattern of a commercial district was little more than a series of asphalt blocks separated by large swaths of earth and cracks. But these twelve blocks of shops, businesses, and large parking lots filled with old farm and construction machinery were all that the residents here had to call home, so they made do.

To no one’s surprise, the streets themselves were barren of life—any soul with sense in them would have simply stayed indoors and let the storm do as it pleased, and it seemed that everypony had seen fit to pass the time at the local watering hole. The shouts, the roaring laughter, the dull, but brain-pulsing thud of what was passed off as “music” in the dance floor section of the bar made it abundantly clear that while the rest of the town might have been dead, there was plenty of life (and vice) to be had here.

She had little fear of the little tail of light inadvertently finding her way into the back half of the “bar”, such that it was. They had hardly passed through the front door and into the lobby of the old auction house when the yearling took charge of the filly and her pups, breaking away from the mares and ushering the child and animals on ahead of her. “Most of the old conference rooms in this place got combined into one large one to make the actual bar, off to the left. That’s where we’ll be. If I happen to spot a water merchant I’ll send him your way. I’ll try to get as close to a corner in the back as I can, make us easier to find when you’re done.”

“You sure about that?” Sling warned her. “You’ll be boxed in if those mercs show up like we’re afraid they will.”

Rally’s right hoof unlatched into its uncomfortable-looking griffon talon, closing the claws into a fist which tapped the holstered revolver on the gun belt slung over her torso. “That’s the idea. Only one way to get to me, and I’ll see it coming. If they want me that badly, they’ll pay in blood for it. Might make the survivors easier for you to pick off afterward too.”

A light chill passed through her spine at how casually the yearling had boasted of killing those who sought to get too close. There was no bravado, no smugness, only a conviction borne of experience and a strong desire to live to tomorrow. She prayed that this orphan of the wastes had not been stumbled upon too late to save what remained of her.

Even Sling seemed a little unnerved, watching them depart in silence until they had left hearing range. “…not even fifteen and she already sounds so old…”

She wasn’t certain she wanted to dwell on the subject too long, given what she was about to do in the near future. “As orphans go, she would be. Most do not make it to her age on their own. Fillies in particular are exceptionally vulnerable….the wastes are full of the sick-minded who would toy with them until they broke them. The things she must have done to avoid such a fate are not things I want to imagine.”

Particularly when they are things I already have an understanding of….

Their path to the “dance floor”—the old auction block itself in the back half of the building—took them through a hall on the right side of the lobby entrance, which split off to the left about fifty yards later…and was devoid enough of other souls that Sling found just enough time (or nerve) to try and dissuade her from what was necessary—

“You don’t have to do this,” the mare’s voice pleaded softly. “We…we can find another way. Sniff around the place a bit, or just mingle in the crowd ‘till we catch their attention, wherever they are….anything other than this—”

“Did I mention that the last time I did this I raked in close to six hundred caps in one evening?”

Sling’s mouth audibly worked itself through the motions of trying to speak, emitting only silence for a couple of seconds before her voice remembered how it worked. “….what? Six hundred, from a crowd you said hated tribals to start with?”

“They only know that if I tell them. And I imagine it had more to do with my….exoticness, at least to the eyes of ponyfolk, than any physical assets of mine, though I am told I am quite fetching to the eyes of many. We may talk more later, when I am done.”

“…you’ll be doing it alone. I’m not going up there.”

“That is good, because I planned on dancing alone!” she laughed back, shuffling her katana off her back and setting upon Sling’s. “The trick is to give you enough breathing room to try and discern if there are enemies in the crowd while you search for a water merchant, as I suspect their attention will be on me. And when you find them, remember them, but do not cause trouble. It will do great things for my nerves onstage if I do not have to worry about errant bullets hitting me in the ass. I am rather fond of it.”

“It’d do great things for my nerves.”

“Such a violent stable pony!” she found herself giggling as they passed by the customer entrance to the “dance floor”, guarded by a pair of unfriendly-looking griffons armed with what she presumed to be MEW long arms, and continuing on past them towards the entrance to the animal stables at the end of the hall that had been re-purposed into the back rooms and dressing stalls for the “performers”. “There is more than one way to discard your stress.”

“So I hear,” Sling growled back.

Another rolling chuckle escaped her lips as she let her tail flick about in the stable pony’s face, unable to resist a chance to ruffle her mane a little. “Take a little peak at the stage later, if you can, and you may see as well.”

This was a mistake.

It wasn’t because it was a bar that didn’t like little fillies like her. The mean stallion who ran the last bar she was in didn’t like her being there, but Mom shut him up over it really quick and he never said one word to her the whole time they were there.
It wasn’t because she didn’t feel safe, either. She figured the last bar was as safe as any other in the wastes, and in the end she wasn’t proven entirely wrong when that same stallion got killed in what Mom called “crossfire”, when those snake ponies showed up looking for Rally, Mom, and herself. Mom once said that she didn’t think there was such a thing as a safe place in the world anymore, and it was starting to look like she was right.

It wasn’t even because of the crowd. Bar or not, the world seemed destined to be filled with rough, violence-leaning folk, whether they were ponies, griffons, zebras, or whatever else walked the earth. As things went, a bar in the wasteland was probably one of the safer places one could be despite the rough crowds, because everybody was looking to rest, get drunk, or whatever, and not cause trouble while they were there….most of the time.

It was a mistake because it felt like they were walking right into a trap, and she was still trying to figure out where it would come from. She pondered it over and over as she followed her new “foalsitter” to the other side of the building. Pondered it, mused on all the possibilities and outcomes that horrified her as she did her best to avoid being stepped on by the larger adult ponies that were intent on ignoring her. She pondered and picked at her brain for every little stray thought about this place that she could think of in the hopes that she might figure it out. Were those snake ponies waiting for them in this stupid bar? Were they waiting at the edge of town along the highway? Had they already spotted them and set up camp outside to ambush them the moment they walked out of this place?

…crap, I hope not, she concluded nervously, when she and Rally had finally taken their seat in a booth by the corner. The one-piece, continuous half-circle chair was kinda neat, though it meant anybody sitting in the middle was sort of stuck there unless somebody on the edge got off the chair to let them out. Max and Mona contented themselves to sitting right under the table, though, and she and Rally got to have the chair to themselves so that wasn’t a problem.

Gave her plenty of time to take a little look around. See if she could figure which ponies in the crowd might be Pythons, or just really well-armed travelers like Mom. See if she could eliminate at least one of her ambush scenarios.

“….so what happened to your leg?” she asked, knowing it was in vain, but it got some manner of conversation going, and anything was better than being left alone in silence. Bad enough that she woke up this morning and almost said something to BJ before she remembered that he wasn’t there anymore….

“Lost it,” Rally answered back, her right leg resting on the table, probably so she could reach her gun real quick if she had to. That patched-up leg warmer kept the cyberleg hidden, mostly, but anybody that looked at the hoof knew it was there. She probably just wore it so nobody would see how it was fitted to what was left of her real leg (and that did make her cringe whenever she saw it). “Never did find it.”

“Har har. Seriously, what happened?”

“Lost it,” Rally said again. “Don’t wanna talk about it. Painful enough the first time.”

Painful…and she wasn’t willing to talk about it right off. Meaning she lost it in a fight, or an explosion, and not cut off ‘cause it got too infected and sick to be saved. And she kept it hidden under that blue leg warmer all the time. Rally didn’t look like she would’ve spent any great amount of time in the wastes if she could help it, and probably stayed in the towns and settlements for as long as she could manage. That meant she would have been mostly around ponies, who traded in all sorts of stuff. Guns, bullets, knives and crude swords, bombs and explo—

…explosives, like…

“…landmine?”

Her leg twitched. Very slightly, but it twitched the moment she said it.

“…landmine,” she repeated, suddenly growing a more solemn understanding of the cyberleg on the table before her. The moment she thought of the word “explosions”, she’d thought to an old journal in her stable, from a war veteran, at how some folk had lost limbs to landmines on the front line and for some reason though it suddenly had merit…

Rally’s leg curled in towards her, though it remained on the table even as she took to trying to hide it with her other foreleg. “….dammit, how’d you guess that?”

“If you’d lost it ‘cause you got sick or somethin’, I’d think you’d be a little less angry with it and not want to hide it under that leg warmer. You can’t stand to look at it sometimes, like it reminds you of somethin’ you’d rather forget. I can’t imagine you getting into a lot of fights, it’d be a lot smarter and safer to not fight, and you’re a really smart pony. So that leaves….a bomb. One that only ruined part of one leg, and not the rest of you, if you were anywhere close to my age when it happened. And the only thing I could think of, was these old journals in my stable that talked about the war, and how some soldiers on the war front lost parts of their bodies to landmines….”

The hint of a sad smile began to creep into the teen’s jawline, her eyes falling on her covered cyberleg. “….smart my ass,” she spat at the table. Or her leg. Probably both. “…I knew better than to go with ‘em, but I did it anyway. Needed the caps, and the ride to Stifla.”

“…so what happened?”

“…I was…maybe a few months older than you, when it happened,” Rally said sadly, her other leg now poking at the cyberleg, like she was making sure it was still there, or maybe she thought she could still feel her old leg there. “It was a caravan, making a run from Syrup Mound to Stifla, transporting some assorted spare parts goods, munitions, and explosives for the Union’s trooper corps. They needed a couple extra sets of hooves to work inventory and keep everything together, and I thought I got lucky by convincing them to let me do it. Not hard work, all I had to do was make sure the total inventory count stayed the same the whole trip. A day after we set out, we hit a really nasty crack in the roads that almost sent a couple of wagons on their side, really made a mess of the cargo. I was told to go check one of them, count everything up and put it back best that I could. Mostly junk stuff, and some dried leather and things like good screws, bolts, nuts, things like that…”

She didn’t really need any more information from there. It wasn’t hard to figure out, given what she’d learned already. But she let Rally talk, mainly because while Rally was busying talking, she had a few seconds to take another look around the room, just to see if she could spot anybody that could be one of those Pythons. If they were smart they’d take their armor off so they could hide in plain sight….

“….a landmine had gotten mixed in with one of the crates that had turned over, probably before we left Syrup Mound, which….I set off, when I reached my leg up over the back to pull myself up. I remember feeling the trigger plunger click when my leg came down on top of the mine, and I had just enough time to let go and almost get away from it when it went off, and…and took about half my right leg with it.”

Light Tail felt a terrible tremble in her own right leg, and tensed it up so that it would quit, but it didn’t really work. The thought of having a part of herself blown up was…unsettling. And Rally had suffered it at…eleven?

“….probably lost your hearing, too….”

“…nah, got lucky on that one. I was napping a while before that, used some ear muffs and plugs so I could sleep easier. It was the road bumps that woke me up, and I was too sleepy to think of taking them off, or being more careful in checking out the wagon before I tried to climb in. Now and then, I get this little ringing in my ears, but it never lasts long, and only every other month or so. It was the leg that was…traumatic.”

Roughly half the bar’s tables had souls sitting at them—ponies, griffons, and even a few zebras, but none stood out particularly well since everybody was minding their own business and ignoring the two children in the corner…for now. No armor, either, like she’d thought. Probably have to start looking at their guns. “…so how’d you get the new one?”

“…the caravan master wasn’t supposed to hire me, by Union rules. No idea how he planned on getting past Stifla’s perimeter without declaring me and my status…might have been planning to dump me on the side of the road a couple miles out with nothing but my coat and mane, or he might have been looking to try and sell me off to a slave caravan on the way. A Union patrol was doing its rounds in the wastes nearby when they heard the explosion and came running, caught the caravan trying to leave me behind to bleed out—”

El-Tee’s heart stopped briefly. She hadn’t thought anybody would be so cruel as to leave an eleven-year old filly bleeding to death on the road, terrified and in great pain, especially when it was their stuff and bombs that had hurt her to start with. But in a sickening sign that she was growing too used to such evil things…she wasn’t terribly surprised by it either….

“…bet they got in real big trouble,” she sighed, taking another look around the room, starting from her left like last time.

“…I wasn’t privy to the details, but in general, if you screw up and the Union catches you at it, it’s not a good ending. Me….Union was good enough to give me a new leg, out of the stable in Stifla, which has the best medical facilities in their territory, since I got hurt working a caravan that wasn’t supposed to have hired me in the first place.”

That little tidbit did surprise her, and she couldn’t hide it, not when her head snapped back at the teen with a shocked glare before she could stop it. “….they…they actually did that, without askin’ for caps or nothin’?”

“Oh, no, somebody had to pay for it. Just wasn’t me. My guess, the trade guild that sponsored the caravan got made to put up the caps for it. Only thing is, the leg has to be built to my size, and since I’m still kind of a growing girl, I kinda have to get a new leg every year around my birthday. Which means another operation, every year, and I do have to pay for those. I got lucky the last three times I needed to do this, found something worth just enough caps to cover it, but this time….I’m not sure….”

...right, all those MEWs you busted up when you found out they were gonna get sold to ponies you didn’t want getting them…..but you still got a few left…

“…I might have a clue, but it’d be better to tell you when there aren’t so many folk around us. And you probably won’t like it.”

Rally beat her to it…probably because the thought had crossed her mind already. “If you’re thinking what I think it is….then yes, that might be my only solution,” she said, her eyes taking a quick sweep across the room herself. “….but as long as they’re looking for me I can’t go anywhere near it. I don’t want them finding it.”

It was kinda hard to pick out people that could be a merc trying not to look like mercs. The lack of armor didn’t help. And a lot of the folks here had scars of some sort somewhere on their bodies, so she couldn’t use those to single them out. But the one thing she’d noticed over the last three months, was that the only souls that seemed to have full automatic weapons more often than not were either mercs or Union trooper ponies. Most of the other souls of the wasteland made do with blades, pistols, shotguns, and bolt-action rifles, but the rifles weren’t all that common. Same for the “service” rifles the Union ponies—and maybe the Runners—seemed to favor, even though most of them seemed to only shoot once per trigger pull. But the true “machine guns”, as Mom called them? Hard to find, even harder to feed with bullets since they could burp the entire magazine in about two seconds.

And only mercs and troopers seemed to ever have those on a regular basis.

“…then I guess we’d better lose these guys fast,” she said quietly. The tables right next to them were empty, but a little further out, maybe….twenty yards? Thirty? She thought she saw a potential Python. Griffon, male (maybe), pale gold coat and off-white feathered head and neck, talking with an earth pony mare wi—

….with a purple coat, like….

….it’s not her, she had to remind herself. To push past the memory, the pain, and look at this mare closely. It wasn’t her.

…so.

Earth pony. Mare. Green mane tied into a single long tail, and a shorter tail than most ponies. Had a saddle harness on, and on her left side was what looked like a skeletal chassis where a rifle would go, but there wasn’t one there. But she could see the front end of a barrel poking out behind the mare’s body, pointed upward, and the griffon seemed to have some sort of long gun that looked kinda like the bigger rifles from home that she’d only seen twice before that radroach outbreak. So…two potential threats. She wasn’t sure, though. They didn’t look like they were paying any attention to her or Rally, but she hadn’t been paying any attention to them before now either and she’d only just now noticed them.

“That who you’re looking for?” Rally whispered back, and while she did seem a bit annoyed, she was worried enough to at least be seriously listening to her instead of brushing her off, like most adults or older kids might have. “You don’t even know what they look like.”

“I know their gear will be better than most other people’s stuff. Full automatics or decent rifles. If they’re in here they already know where we’re at.”

Rally was pretty quiet for about seven seconds, which gave her just enough time to pick out what could have been threat number three—a bright yellow unicorn stallion sitting at the bar, brownish mane and tail, neither of which looked like it had seen a brush or an attempt at styling in months. She might have figured him to be just another wastelander, but he kept a long gun propped up against the bar. It kinda looked like a service rifle, but it was shorter and all black, and had some kind of scope on it and something Mom called a “suppressor” attached to the barrel muzzle. She didn’t know much about them other than what she learned from a couple of paragraphs from Mom’s firearms recognition book, but they were supposed to make the gunshot sounds quieter so that people from farther off couldn’t pinpoint where the shots were coming from. She’d seen some folk with stuff added to their guns like that, but not many.

She thought she might have narrowed a possible fourth threat—a tan-colored unicorn mare with silvery mane and tail like Julaya with what looked like a pair of 10mm pistols with really big magazines—when Rally’s brain finally caught onto what she was talking about, if her terrified cussing was any clue to go by. “….oh, shit, you’re right, I think we just walked right into them….”

Her heart started to beat itself against her ribs again. The way she said it, that little bit of panic in her voice….

“…yeah?”

“….we’ve been here…what? Twenty minutes? And not one soul has come to ask if we want anything for lunch? We’re taking up space a paying customer could be using and they’re ignoring us.”

It didn’t take her very long to figure out the implications and dangers….and when she did, she wanted to scream. It was such an obvious sign of something wrong that she’d missed it, trying as hard as she was to try and figure out who might’ve been a threat or just another wastelander passing through. Nobody coming to take their orders meant….they were trapped, surrounded, and couldn’t expect any kind of help from the guards, because the way it was looking now, it was possible they’d been paid or convinced to turn a blind eye to whatever plans the snake ponies had in min—

….or they paid off a water merchant to lead us into an ambush, was the next, horrifying thought to cross her mind. They were on the run, and didn’t want to stay in one place too long. They’d need water if they wanted to go anywhere. This was supposedly the closest town to Rough Port, and….of course they’d be waiting here, looking to take advantage of that.

And the second they took off to tell Mom and Julaya, they’d figure out they’d been made and would probably just try and catch whoever they could and escape, or hurry up and leave and watch them from a distance, ambush them the moment they felt their chances were best. But they had to try—she and Rally wouldn’t last very long on their own.

“….how bad is this adults only place that Mom and Julaya went to?”

“Bad enough that you’re not following me inside,” Rally snapped off, briskly hopping out of the chair and using a burst of magic to kinda push her into joining her. “Just stay close to me ‘till we get there and I’ll get them out, quick as I can. Shoot anybody that tries to get close to you, including the guards. They might have been offered a deal to either help catch us or turn a blind eye to any fights involving us—”

She felt her magic unlatching her holsters before Rally could finish—out of the corner of her eye, she could see that griffon and his pony partner casually getting out of their chairs, and the griffon’s right talon went straight for the grip on his rifle. And that yellow stallion at the bar, and the other unicorn mare on the far end of the floor started getting out of their chairs almost in lockstep with them.

Coincidence? Or was she right about these four being threats?

“Just go,” she said sharply, adding a pair of tongue clicks to get Max and Mona up and following her. “And hurry.”

Twenty minutes later, she found herself coming back to the world from a senses-shattering crash that left her stunned into a stupor, though this time she was able to come back to herself far more quickly.

Mostly because some misguided stallion had the audacity to outright proposition the both of them at her corner table the moment Julaya had returned from the back rooms, perhaps five minutes after the conclusion of her “performance”, and had the unintended effect of thoroughly pissing her off to the point where she felt like cleaning his brains of every dirty thought within them.

The hard way.

“Say that again,” she hissed sharply, pushing Grayhawk’s barrel right underneath his jaw and pulling the hammer back. “Just so we’re absolutely clear what I’m killing you over.”

The gun had the intended effect, as the stallion immediately began backing away from them without another word, then turned about and galloped away into the crowd gathering around the center stage, where another “performer” was making her entrance.

Having seen more than enough of the spectacle when Julaya had been up there, she turned away and holstered her weapon after lowering the hammer back down. “No amount of caps can be worth what you just put yourself through.”

“On the contrary, I rather enjoy it,” the zebra smiled softly, though a slight nervousness in her voice betrayed her true emotions. “….just not here. For whatever reason, the patrons here are….more uncouth than most who frequent these types of places, if that is even possible. They are not used to being teased. I could do what the others do, but I’ve found I rake in more caps when I do everything but what they expect. I tease, I insinuate…but ultimately, what they seek is just beyond reach and sight. They may get glimpses, but never more. Many patrons seem to enjoy it, but here it seems…unwelcome. I would be happier not seeing this place again after today.”

Torn between being disgusted, guilty, or completely unsure what to make of what she’d seen up there, she settled back into a more comfortable feeling of guarded caution and indifference, sliding Julaya’s katana back to her across the table. “So where are the caps?”

“They will be along shortly,” Julaya assured her, slinging her weapon over her back in a single practiced movement. “The owner discourages his customers from showering the stage with caps, and having to deal with little purse bags on top of performing is a fairly awkward affair, so the tips are dispersed to the bouncers surrounding the stage. When the mare of the hour departs the stage, the tips are gathered together and taken to the back. The owner takes his cut, and the dancer gets the rest. How much a cut he takes depends entirely on his mood, so I pray he is feeling generous today. I should get enough to at least rent us out a room for a couple of days, if necessary. I was lucky to be able to get onstage immediately. The mare that was supposed to go up was…not well, and the next one was not quite ready when I inquired about trying my luck.”

A shudder of thunder rumbled through the building, muffled by the walls and roof, but was otherwise ignored by most of the room in favor of the “festivities” taking place before them. “….when you said you would dance provocatively before strangers for their amusement and caps and give them to me, I didn’t think you were actually serious about it.”

A sheepish squeal managed to squeak out of Julaya’s throat. “….I was, but did not think I would be making good on such a promise so soon. But this is the most I will do in selling myself, so do not ask of more…personal endeavors of me for earning caps.”

“I don’t think I’d let you.”

Julaya’s mouth worked a bit faster than her brain—or maybe she just enjoyed poking fun at those around her at their expense. “Ahhh, keeping me to yourself, are you?”

Her body shot upright inside her chair, her forehooves locking into the table’s surface almost out of instinct. “Bite me.”

“Not my style,” the zebra merely laughed back quietly. “I prefer a little nibble here and there.”

“….you’re going to be frustrating to travel with.”

Julaya’s amused chuckle did not make her feel the least bit better, if that was the intended effect. “I wouldn’t be if you would let yourself relax when it is appropriate. You cannot be so serious and dour all the time, yes?”

A brief, hollow echo of Kite’s last words, and the terrible screams that came after, whispered into her ears and threatened to tear down the walls she had just managed to build over her memories. “…what do I have left to be happy about? My stable’s dead, I’m adrift in the wastes, hunted by slavers and mercenaries who want me dead and my little girl in their sick grasp for their amusement, and the only friend I had in all this madness got eaten alive by it.”

Julaya’s glee vanished in an instant, a flood of pity and sadness flowing into her face and eyes. “…you still live. Your little tail of light lives. And despite what you may tell yourself, in all your grief and self-hatred, you are still capable of feeling and caring, if your protection of the yearling is genuine. You are not lost to the wastes…but if you shut out the ones you care about, it will not have to work very hard to claim you. You will throw yourself to its cruelty willingly to escape your pain. Come to terms with it, make peace with it…and do so soon.”

A plethora of foul-mouthed curses threatened to burst out, stayed at the last moment by a very powerful desire to do anything but go back to that bridge, and the groaning, half-dead horrors that had broken her in ways she did not want to understand. “….I told you before, no.”

“No, you said ‘not now’, and I have respected that. It is now ‘later’. But we will speak when you are ready for it, not before…and judging by your response, that time has not come yet. So I will settle for simply annoying you and making you fluster on occasion.”

Her blood heated up to intolerable levels, spurring her mouth to begin hurling insults and angry demands, but she managed, somehow, to hold back those hateful words. “….do you ever act your age, stripes?”

Julaya’s eyes shifted and narrowed, the only hint of displeasure she had shown thus far. “Why should I, pony?”

“Oh, I don’t know, could be that maybe the world is rife with thievery, savagery, murder, slavery, and mutant animal and insect life capable of tearing you apart alive in seconds,” she snapped back briskly. “With the only stable form of law and order being either the guns you can carry into town or a combined force of merchants pretending to be a government and flooding the highways with heavily armed goon squads to collect “taxes” to feed their coffers. A world in which you can rake in obscene amounts of bottle caps that pass as money in exchange for….for what you just did on that dance stage! How can you be even the least bit cheerful over any of it?!”

Surprisingly, Julaya’s response was a soft, amused smile. “I am cheerful and immature because it does me no good to bitch and moan about the ills of the world like a foal, as you seem wont to do.”

She almost felt slapped by her words, as gentle and un-aggressive as the zebra’s tone had been in uttering them. But when she tried to speak, to shout back….

…nothing came to mind. Because she was right.

“I could scream for hours,” the zebra went on, still wearing that godsdamned smile on her face. “Take my sword and slice the nearest dozen slavers into a hundred pieces each, stab a gang of raiders to death dozens of times apiece until my forelegs ache from the effort, toss another bunch of miscreants into a piece of working farm machinery after beating them senseless—which I have done, by the way. Blow another one to bits with a bomb. Beat many more to death with my bare hooves, which I have also done in more fights than I can remember simply because I am no good with guns. I could be the angriest, most murderous soul to walk the wastes if I wanted. By the Sisters’ souls there is enough evil in this town alone to warrant it.”

“But you’re not.”

“…not out loud, no. Because even if I did all of these horrific things….what would change after? Slavers would still roam the lands for the weak to enslave. Raiders would still rob, pillage, and destroy. Orphans would still die of disease, dehydration, and starvation, or from the abuse heaped upon them by an uncaring world. The wrongs of the world would not be righted immediately, or even quickly. I would still be surrounded by all of these horrible things you mention. My rage would buy me nothing but blood and bodies, and neither of these things would make any difference to the world in the long run, only to those who had been wronged by whoever I killed that day.”

Her forehooves, still pressed into the table, began to ache from the pressure, and she reluctantly relaxed her death grip and allowed her forelegs to draw back to her body. “….so you smile, to avoid going mad? Like the punchline to a sick joke only you understand?”

“No, I smile, laugh, play, frolic, and fool around because I am alive,” Julaya replied, her tone coming off as though she were answering a confused foal’s question instead of the angry adult in front of her. “I do not want to waste my time and energy being angry at the way things are, when I have little power to change them on my own. I want to take pride and joy about what little difference I can make, and I want to make the best of my time in this hellish world because it is a rare thing to live long enough to grow old. I want to enjoy what little I can enjoy. I want to live. And part of living, is finding friends, cherishing family, and making potential lovers or casual acquaintances happy that you are merely right there in front of them, easing the burdens of the world with your love, hugs, and occasionally yourself, for as long as you are able to. And more often than not, at the end of the day, I go to sleep knowing that I have had a much more profound effect on others than if I had merely went and slain the raider gang threatening their food supply and their lives.”

By the time the seemingly insane zebra had finished her gentle rebuke, Sling’s rage had receded to a dull buzz of shame. For a third time in three months, she was gently reminded of what little she knew of true suffering and anguish, what it took to weather it….and now, what it meant to actually live.

This former highway bandit, who had robbed and killed Union caravans and slavers, who had scratched out her survival on scraps and the junk of the wasteland, knew more about making the most of her life than the stable pony who’d grown up wanting for almost nothing even after all the supplies rationing going on.

For better or worse, Julaya quickly proved to be perhaps as perceptive as a certain filly. “….you were not a well-thought of soul in your stable, were you?”

“…I think I’ve made more friends up here than I ever had in that damn stable.”

“Because you were still a child when you had yours?”

Worst year of my life, until recently. “…didn’t exactly get a helping hoof from anybody. Friends, family….everybody basically took a shit on me and walked off like the smell was getting to them. One…one friend stuck it out with me, and when the time came to repay the kindness eleven years later all I could think about was getting myself and my baby out of that hole before we got sealed in. I never looked back, until it was too late to go anywhere but forward….”

Julaya’s forelegs came together in front of her, her head dipping slightly as though she had just come to a revelation. “…ooooooh, I think I see now, what ails you so terribly….you…you are correct, this is not a conversation to have at this moment…”

Maybe not ever.

Fortunately for the both of them, one of the MEW-armed bouncers chose that moment to slip into their personal space and drop a light cloth pouch onto the table between them. “Great show, stripes,” he muttered quietly. “Too bad it’s not one that pays well here. A hundred caps total. Boss took thirty off the top, rest is yours, seventy in all.”

Julaya’s head snapped back up sharply, her mischievous nature nowhere to be seen. “Surely not.”

“You’ve done this before Julie, you know the drill,” the gray-feathered griffon snorted back as he turned around to resume his duties. “Show little, get little. Next time, maybe give the crowd the show they want and not the one you’re best at.”

She didn’t even wait for him to get out of earshot, cursing quietly as she shoved the pouch across the table. “....gorram hell. A cheap whore can make more than this in an hour.”

Sling barely noticed her magic pulling the caps pouch into her saddlebags. All that…for barely more than enough to find a clean bed for two days? “I actually feel dirty taking these caps.”

Julaya’s angry glare continued to stare out at the crowd gathered around the dance stage, perhaps painting targets onto each of their backs as they jeered and hollered at the prancing mare above them. “You? I’m the one who went up there. At least say you found the water you sought.”

“…maybe. Managed to find a water merchant, but it was hell getting him to take his eyes off you long enough to do business. He’s on his way to his caravan now, near the edge of town to the west. We should get the kids and get over there, get the water and find somewhere to wait out the storm.”

Julaya began spitting what she assumed to be curses in a foreign tongue she couldn’t understand as she hurriedly scooted herself out of her chair and began making her way towards the exit. “Then let’s be on our way. My vibes are not telling me great things about this endeavor, best to do it quick.”

Sling hopped out of her chair and followed her out, desperate to both get away from this place and to get back to El-Tee and Rally. But the pair had barely shown themselves back into the corridors when a pair of rapidly moving green hash marks drew her attention to her right, and spotted Light Tail and Rally running up the hall towards them—

“Mom, we gotta go,” the little one huffed with a quick breath. “Like, really bad.”

Of course you do now that we need to be somewhere in a hurry, she didn’t say. “…make it quick, we need to meet up with a water seller in a few minutes.”

Light Tail’s eyes briefly furrowed in annoyance. “….that’s…um….fine , R-Rally, where—”

“Somewhere between here and wherever we’re going will do,” the teenager groaned, taking it upon herself to lead the way for them. “It’s not like the world is swimming with facilities and such, so just deal.”

What sounded like a soft little growl filtered out through El-Tee’s throat as they followed Rally’s lead. In a little over four minutes they’d left the auction house behind for a cluster of little one-story buildings on a street corner (none of which had more than two walls left) with some alleys one could duck into for some semblance of privacy. The building at the corner looked like it had once been a…barbershop? The faded barber’s pole attached to the outside of the structure somehow still remained, but its red stripes were so faded they looked more like a pale pink. Of its four walls, only a portion of its front and side still stood, and the side wall had crumbled in some parts, to the point where it barely stood taller than the sidewalk at the back. Anything of value inside had long ago been stripped out, even the chairs and floor tiling, leaving only bare foundation behind. The remainder of the street block itself was rather empty, as all the other structures along the cracked street had long ago given in to age and weathering—some were just piles of rubble, and others were little more than crooked-looking slabs of brick waiting for their turn to become a pile of rubble and ruin themselves. Three blocks down, however, was a two-story brick building that was still standing with most of its walls still in place. Probably not a bad spot to set up camp for the evening…

Max and Mona seemed to view this as the moment to see to their own needs, as both pups quickly darted ahead of them to pick some random section of a wall for their personal use. “Okay, we can drop the BS now,” Rally announced, coming to a stop and plopping her haunches down to rest for a minute.

Oh no no no, not right in front of us like animals!

"Uhhhh, noooo, you're going to go around the corner and retain some degree of decency," Sling sneered.

Rally’s head turned back to face her with an irritated glare. “That's not what we meant back there.”

Light Tail’s expression, likewise, didn’t falter or flinch at her words. If anything, it only made her more determined to stand her ground, her face bereft of any levity or pleasantness. “We only said that 'cause we didn’t wanna tip the guards off in case they were in on it.”

Oh shit, she’s thought of something I didn’t…

As usual.

“In on what, little tail of light?” Julaya pressed gently, her brow furrowed in confusion. “What troubles you?”

She kept as much of her ears tuned to the conversation as possible as her eyes began to scour what few buildings were intact along the street. Her little night light was suspicious of something, but what….

“That we were there like, twenty minutes and not one waitress came by to even ask if we wanted a drink. We’re walking into an ambush and I don’t want us going into it, not after….”

….not after Trotpeka, she couldn’t say. But she didn’t need to.

“…the water merchant,” she said softly, her mind latching onto the possibility that before now had not even been considered as she began to study her surroundings much more intently. “….you think the water merchants might have been asked to lead us into a trap when we came into town looking for water.”

“Bullshit,” Rally scoffed almost immediately with a scruff of her hoof against the pavement. “Water merchants don’t do shit like that. It’s against their own rules. No profit in it.”

“Rules didn’t stop somebody from hiring you when they weren’t supposed to,” Light Tail shot back. “There’d be profit in getting a share of the reward that’s on your head, for what you did. And they know we wouldn’t get all that far without water, who better to lead us into a trap?! We’re practically gift-wrapping ourselves for them!”

“Listen to what you’re saying! The water merchant, stabbing us in the back for a share of a bounty? The one Union trade good that the Runners will actually protect over here? Just attempting that would be a death wish!”

“I must admit that such a scenario makes very little sense,” Julaya murmured thoughtfully. “The yearling is right, most of the water caravans come from the Union. It would destroy trade entirely if even one of them was found to be complicit in such a scheme.”

“Not if they were able to keep it quiet. Like, ooooh, I don’t know, making sure the ambush is set up away from anybody that would see it? Like where we’re going right now?!”

Her heart skipped several beats at the notion that for what seemed like the second time in a week, the child was able to perceive a potential ambush before the adults around her did. But even as she contemplated the idea of a firefight at the meeting point with the caravan, her mind stretched the scenario a bit further….

….what if the ambush was laid out somewhere along the trai—

….oh hell...

…along the trail….

….meaning….they could have walked into it alrea—

“Lie in wait for a pony with a PipBuck? I thin—”

She saw it almost an instant before she felt it—a pale yellow flash, from inside the second floor of the two-level building three blocks down, just as a surge of magic flowed out of her horn and shoved out at the three ponies passing her by, throwing them to the relative safety of the nearest building on the street corner as she began to rush forward in their wake—

—a white-hot pain stabbed through her left hind leg, just above the gaskin, and then seared into the meat of the other hind leg, turning her run into a forward tumble onto the ground. The pain flared and spread through her legs, her forelegs fighting to get back underneath her and hobble the rest of the way to cover, just as the sound of the gunshot finally reached her ears. She wished she’d had some sort of timer or something on her EFS, just to help her time the delay between the actual bullet hitting her and the sound of the shot itself, but it couldn’t have been more than a second, so….three, four hundred yards away?

That didn’t matter quite as much as the horrified, crying shriek that pierced her ears to the point of her hearing spell popping out of her horn on reflex to quiet the volume of it.

But then, Light Tail had plenty of reason to panic.

“Mom?!?! Oh god momma—”

With both hind legs too wounded to support her weight, she was forced to scrap her way across the pavement with her forelegs. She could see Rally scrunched up against it, holding a frantic Light Tail in place with her cyberleg, but Julaya’s body quickly obscured her sight line as the zebra rushed out to her, and on instinct Sling pushed herself up on her forelegs—

—Julie’s body skidded to a stop, grabbed hold of her rising torso and forced her fully upright, and then turned back and bounded back towards the kids, carrying the wounded mare further along than she could have gotten on her own—

—a hard snap clacked into the asphalt behind them, a harrowing sign of how close she’d come to taking a second bullet, though the initial one had done quite a bit as it was. And as she collapsed onto the ground, pushing herself up against wall and into the terrified, trembling grasp of her only child, it occurred to her that had she been half a second slower, that first bullet could have wound up plowing through her chest and killing her instead….

Despite the panic and the train wreck of emotions hitting her, Light Tail still somehow managed to stifle her shrieks into hushed whines as she began pulling at her saddlebags for the first aid kit. A brief flash of purplish signified the removal of the kit, and a moment later it was dropped onto the ground in front of her as a pair of hooves turned her onto her back for someone behind her to get a clean look at it—

Oh fu…

….her right leg….a chunk of her right leg had been blown off, attached to the limb only by the grace of a persistent strip of flesh. The crimson-drenched wound froze her on the inside the moment she saw it.

“….oh dear,” Julaya’s voice wretched in disgust, gently moving the dangling chunk of pony meat back into place and pressing it in slightly, which only made the pain worse to the point of having to nearly choke herself to keep from crying out. “….you have at least one potion, I hope….”

Light Tail’s magic pulled the object in question out not even a moment later, holding the auto-injection stim up where both mares could see it and the red-colored concoction stored within the tube. “….j-just two of these,” she stammered. “…an-and healing potions don’t work on Mom as well as it would us….”

Julaya’s face showed no change in expression as she studied the stim. “Then this is precisely the type of healing potion she should get. The syringe allows one to direct the potion’s effects to where it is needed the most. Start with a third of the stim, inject it just below the wound, and hurry.”

“Where did that even come from?!” Rally shouted back, having relinquished her hold on the filly in favor of her revolver.

Easy enough answer, and Sling found that conversation kept her eyes off the sharp needle approaching her mangled leg, so she indulged the yearling’s question. “Saw the flash, right up the road…that two-story building, maybe three or four hundred yards up…”

“I thought PipBucks could spot threats to your life, stable pony,” Julaya crept in ominously.

“Not that far out, they can’t. Focus on the road, we’re pinned in and they could be sending guys at us right now—”

A sharp stabbing pain introduced itself to her right hind leg, right next to the wound, and all her focus and energy went into trying not to scream like a 5-year old child as the healing potion’s effects took hold. It wasn’t like just drinking the thing down—it was actively working to repair and re-attach the severed flesh to her leg, and doing so at a very aggressive rate that set every last nerve ending in the wound on fire. As excruciating as that was, though, it didn’t last for more than a few seconds, and when she dared to open her tear-stained eyes and peer at her leg, she was surprised to see it back in one piece again, as though she had never been shot there. Only the fresh blood coating her leg remained.

She hoped it would be just as effective with the through-and-through wound on her other leg….

“Good, very good,” Julaya murmured in approval, giving her right leg a passing touch with a forehoof. “Now, the other one, same way as before. You may need to use the remainder of the stim for this one, the injury is actually much worse than the other one—”

A crack in the air, like distant thunder, echoed across the barren streets, though she had trouble discerning where it came from. Could have been thunder, or it could have been a gunshot. She hadn’t heard the bullet impact, tho—

The pain returned, this time in her left leg, and unbelievably worse than what she’d just suffered moments earlier. This time her efforts not to scream failed briefly, and so she just bit down on one of her forelegs until it passed, and then dared to open her eyes again and see if the wound had mended over as well as the other one had—

—four red hash marks popped up inside her EFS’s compass bar a moment later, almost in sync with Max and Mona’s sharp growls and barks—

—her 10mm sailed out of its holster as she rolled back over onto her stomach, risked a second’s worth of time to peek over the top of the collapsed wall and squeeze off three rounds at the first moving body she could sight on—

—twenty yards ahead in the street, in-between muzzle flashes, she saw what looked like a brown-furred griffon in forest camo barding collapsing into the shattered asphalt and three identically-armored ponies bolting away from her line of fire—

—Julaya’s forelegs ripped her back down behind the wall, barely a moment before a chunk of it was blown off and would have torn through her neck had she still been upright. The distant gunshot that followed a little over a second later confirmed her earlier suspicions about the sniper. Three hundred plus yards, and the bastard could pinpoint the bullet to her brain if he wanted to—

“Do not try that again,” Julaya’s voice warned sharply. “I am not a very good substitute parent.”

….no, the best souls I could trust El-Tee’s life to died in the stable and the fucking valley….

“….watch the alley,” she huffed back, her impromptu meeting with the ground having knocked her breathless momentarily. “Three split off from their friend when I shot him. Could be more—”

One of the Pythons made the fatal mistake of calling out to his surviving friends rather than using silent body language to convey his message, and it would prove to be a very fortunate mistake on her end. “—amn it, get his laser rifle quick, that’s a unicorn we just ambushed—”

At the word “quick”, Sling zipped her head back up over the wall just long enough to try and spot the griffon’s body in the street, and practically flung a telekinesis spell over him to drag him over to her, barely avoiding another sniper’s bullet in the process—

“…did that idiot just scream ‘laser rifle’ out to all his friends and enemies?” Rally begged to know.

Sling answered by dropping the body of the griffon down into their view, quickly stripping the corpse of his equipment and weaponry before tossing him back into the streets—

—and the last sound she expected to hear in the madness began to fill her ears.

The sound of an ecstatic, gleeful child looking upon a cherished and highly desired gift.

Even if two-thirds of the Pythons’ numbers had been charging down the street, ready to tear her limb from limb (among other unpleasant acts) for screwing up their grand plans to take out the Runners, she’d have found it exceptionally difficult to not freak out and squeal like a filly of Light Tail’s age, so she just let herself fangirl all over the dangling prize that Sling Shot had appropriated from her latest kill.

An AER-9 Mk IV laser rifle from the Ministry of Arcane Science’s MEW Block Mod 2 Improvement Program in the last couple of years of the Great War. Amazingly enough, it had been developed to completion and produced in enough numbers that one could be found here and there, though it was never as common as the standard frontline AER-9. To give soldiers on the front greater flexibility in their combat load and streamline logistics and maintenance needs, the MoA had developed a modular baseline weapon around which an incredibly diverse line of modifications were built for wildly different mission profiles. The base weapon was a redesigned pistol, with a much more ergonomic grip akin to a ballistic semi-automatic weapon and a “short barrel” diverter unit, basically making it just a much shorter laser rifle. The grip could be removed and replaced with a rifle stock, of which existed the curve-happy (and uncomfortable) standard stock, and two specialized stocks designed to aid a marksman’s aim or help with the recoil generated by the diverter when it discharged a beam.

The diverter unit could be detached from the weapon frame and capacitor and replaced with a longer unit for drastically increased range, or a strange-looking, triangular-shaped unit that was actually three separate diverter units designed to provide full-automatic fire by rotating sequentially during the firing sequence, like a minigun’s barrel trunk. A couple of the gun and science magazines she kept in her bags even had articles on an oversized diverter unit that could actually build up an arcane emission charge and let it loose in a single destructive blast at ranges of almost a thousand meters with no more than a three-inch spread, and the accompanying photos of said unit reminded her of a scuba tank. And the diverter unit’s focusing lenses and anodized titanium crystal array had been modified with a bracket mount to accept a variety of muzzle attachments. Nothing real fancy, just a couple of recoil compensator lenses and beam focusing units, though she’d seen reference to a beam splitter module that supposedly turned the weapon into a MEW-based shotgun in one magazine article as well.

The capacitor itself could be changed or modified to increase shot power and density, set targets on fire, improve the power draw from spark battery cells, the works. Even the string of optics developed bewildered her—the standard telescopic sights were there, obviously, but more intriguing to her were the reflex sights and the high-tech night vision scopes and the target-tracking scopes that could lock onto and track multiple targets within the scope’s field of view. She had turned quite a number of miserable days into passable ones just pondering how the tech even worked, and the only thing she could recall lusting for more than one of these rifles was this kinda cute colt a few months older than her that she ran into a few weeks ago, but her better judgement had won out on that venture and she just moved on down the road rather than throw caution to the wind.

And now, even with a sniper trying to blow Sling’s head off (along with whatever bounty had been placed on it) and Pythons slithering about in the streets looking for a way to get to her without getting shot to pieces, she found herself staring upon a slightly weathered, but fully functional Mk IV laser rifle, with an extended diverter unit and what looked like a recoil-compensating stock….and somehow completely forgot the dangers lurking around her and allowed herself to properly freak out over the thing in as polite a way as she could manage without being looked at like she was crazy.

They’d probably think that when she was done anyway.

“Oh, my, gaaaawd isthatwhatIthinkitis izzitizzitizzit—“

Her right leg was reaching for the weapon as her mouth began to slur her words into an incomprehensible jumble, the talon unlatching and attempting to grasp onto the stock, and as her eyes studied it further she found herself even more impressed with how this particular stock had been fitted. Apparently its former owner had been enamored enough with the pistol grip’s ergonomics that he’d left intact and simply found a way to graft the buttstock unit from a recoil-compensating rifle stock onto the grip, while leaving enough room for a griffon’s talon to slip around and grasp the pistol grip securely. The way the work had been carried out, it actually looked more like a factory part than a jury-rigged workaround by some jackass with an old workbench and worn-out tools. She didn’t think it would be as effective as a genuine rifle stock would have been, but it was definitely better than the standard skeletal-like stock she despised. And she was never truly fond of the long, claw-like trigger of a standard laser rifle in the first place.

Surprisingly, she was able to wrest the weapon out of Sling’s spell field without any resistance whatsoever, allowing her full (if temporary) possession of it and truly begin examining it. Great weight balance even though it was almost too big for her, her talon was able to grip into the stock just right and bring it up to her chest, the padding on the buttstock didn’t claw at her face….eh, sights were a bit crude, a bright dot on the front post and a bare rear sight with no dots or lines, just a notch, but she could fix that with some time. Diverter look good, no dents or cracks in the housing, the lens bracket at the muzzle was tight and not going anywhere, focusing lens itself was clear w—

“….umm, Rally?” Light Tail’s voice squeaked quietly and fearfully, somehow managing to break through her thoughts and bring her back to reality, if only for a moment. “…you okay there?”

Her jaw moved silently for a couple of seconds before her throat would work properly and emit words instead of silence. “Y-yeah, yeah, fine. I’m good. This is fine. I’m fine holy EFF ME this thing is just divine—“

Even the sound of Sling’s pistol popping off two shots wasn’t enough to break her mesmerized state of mind, though the mare’s irritated tone did a good deal more to bring her focus back onto immediate survival. “Rally, quit it, we’re being shot at here!! Is that thing working?!”

Rally’s reply was one of action, as she simply snapped the rifle up into firing position, throwing the stock into her collarbone and sighting in on a distant target three blocks down the road they’d come in from—a faded billboard advertisement for some junk food brand way back when, with a light blue mare and her shit-eating grin, proudly directing all eyes towards an oversized red box of some cereal or something. The box even had these rays of white streaking out all around it, like some holy divine light or something. She had no idea what it was, because the top third of the billboard had eroded away and taken the advertisement’s words to the distant wasteland grave, but that mare’s fake smile and rows of pearly white teeth were oddly insulting. She settled the crude front post dot on her face and gently squeezed the trigger back after looping her left foreleg into the carrying sling to steady her aim. The sharp pop of the diverter’s discharge seemed overly dramatic when she considered the mild recoil that tapped her, but when the energy scatter from the shot impact flittered away and showed a glowing hole where the mare’s left eye used to be, she decided it fit the damage quite well. The orange-hot ring quickly faded away as the hole began to cool down, barely a second later.

“Oh yeah, it’s working!!” she squealed in delight, sliding the safety catch on and briefly hugging the weapon close to her chest. She didn’t think she’d get to see another one of these again anytime soon, and now Sling had found one that was actually better than the one she’d stolen and stashed away. “Hooooomagawd I love this thing!”

She thought she could see one of the zebra’s forehooves making a lazy circle beside her head, but she paid her little mind. All that matter now was that she had the second-most awesome MEW in the wasteland within her grasp…and with it, a chance to help them claw their way out of this mess.

“Idea forming!!” she half-giggled, titling the weapon forward to see what the capacitor’s readouts where showing on the battery cell.

Sling’s 10mm popped off another shot, though from the way she was silently cursing it didn’t seem like it did any good. “I’m not sure you’re in the right mind to be giving ideas right now.”

“I’m serious, the focusing lens hasn’t a chance to heat up, it’ll be like, pin-point accurate for another four or five shots before the impact point starts wandering, and there’s no bullet drop to worry about! I can tag that jackass sniper from here or at least keep him from shooting again—”

And I can do that like, right now!! she cut herself off—the moment she aired the thoughts aloud they sounded like the best idea they were going to get in the next ten seconds, and since there was only one two-story building down the road she knew right where to shoot. With a hop and a twist of her body she put herself right beside Sling, shoving the laser rifle out in front of her to cradle it on top of the crumbling wall and settling the sights over that second story window, right where Sling said it was—

It was a good thing she’d just went and done it. The way Sling was reacting, asking for permission first would have just gotten her nowhere. “N-no, Rally stop get back g—“

She squeezed back the trigger, letting the sharp, slightly buzzy pop of the rifle’s discharge be her answer, and true to her hopes, the bright red beam lanced out and found its way to that window, right where the sights had been centered, though the slight kick into her shoulder as the diverter and capacitor accelerated the energy to coherently visible levels was a bit more than she’d expected. She had to tilt the weapon back down and to the left to get the sights back on target, fairly close to their last position, and fired again about a second later.

Sling said something—or angrily cursed something or someone—as she abruptly leapt over the wall, her new black rifle floating out ahead of her, and Rally felt something cup her ears and muffle the world around her a split second before that rifle started touching off single, aimed shots at a rapid clip even as Rally took a third shot at the window—

—this one seemed to sail a bit over the top of her aiming point. She either threw it, or the focusing lens was starting to heat up enough to affect the accuracy. Either way, it proved to be a fortunate accident, as she saw the interior of the room beyond that window briefly light up in bright orange before fading out quickly, and she knew what had caused it.

Instant incineration from a laser hit. She had yet to figure out the why of it, given how inconsistent it was, but sometimes the AE-series of laser weaponry would just outright render a victim into ash. Not nearly as gruesome as some of the earlier plasma guns, but still somewhat unsettling. She hoped it was a painless death, at least…

A high-pitched shriek from the right managed to get through that muffling barrier around her ears, and she quickly turned about in that direction, allowing herself to fall onto her hindquarters and try to get the laser rifle onto whatever had just caused Light Tail to freak out—

One of the Pythons had managed to get past Sling, cutting through the alleys on the street corner and coming out of it right between herself and Light Tail…and he seemed to realize he had made an exceptionally unwise decision, because his eyes were zeroing in on herself, but had found Julaya’s coiled body waiting for him right in front of her, her right foreleg hooked into the cuff on her sword—

—the zebra’s movement was so fast and sudden that she had almost no memory of it actually happening. One second, she was standing there her on her hind legs, one foreleg hooked into that cuff and the other one held up in front of her chest, and then her body was twisting to the left, that right foreleg now somehow swinging out in that direction as well….with the hoof and pastern of her right foreleg gripping her katana through the hoof cuff affixed to the grip, and the edge of the blade coated red as the Python’s body continued to run right on past her, seemingly oblivio—

—her stomach churned in cramped, uncomfortable ways as her eyes swept over the light gray stallion’s head.

The bottom half of it that was still attached to the neck, anyway. She thought she heard something splattering back down the alley he’d come from, and she didn’t want to know what it was—

—Julaya’s body moved again in impossibly fast and complex ways—she had done a complete twist, coming back around to wrap her right foreleg around the partially-decapitated merc’s barrel and having somehow shifted her sword to her left hoof in the process, and a moment later she was hurling his still-running body back into the alley he’d came from with an angry roar that was almost as loud as Sling’s rifle down the street. The body vanished into the darkness, out of sight…and particularly Light Tail’s, who a couple seconds ago had been watching the merc burst out with murderous intent.

The zebra’s twisting turn continued for another second, her rear hooves scraping across the sidewalk as her right foreleg came back down to help slow her movement until she came to a stop, her body now slanted almost equally towards herself and Light Tail on the other side….

….and dammit all, she just stared at this zebra with equal parts fear, horror….and a star-eyed bewilderment at how freaking awesome she looked just standing there on three legs, her left foreleg gripping her sword out parallel with her body and the blade pointed out behind her and the front bangs of her silvery mane swaying and bouncing about in front of her face.

It was entirely possible that Light Tail would have no conscious or visible memory of having been witness to such a quick kill. It had all happened in like….two seconds? Two and a half? She wasn’t sure.

She hoped Light Tail would never be sure.

“…holy shit,” she heaved in a heavy breath, barely registering the gun fight happening twenty-plus yards away. “You’re like some…some really awesome comic book character or something….”

Just speaking to her seemed to break Julaya out of her murderous focus, as the zebra’s eyes lost their hard, narrowed glare and morphed into a calm, warm outlook that drew attention to her bright ice blue eyes. “Hrm? I—o-oh…oh, yes, that. I um….I am very quick when angered. Or threatened. Or…well, just about anytime, actually….”

“….what…was that?” Light Tail’s voice squeaked from behind the zebra’s body.

The striped mare’s head turned off to her left, her ears wilting slightly as if she were a bit ashamed of what she’d just done…but more likely, ashamed at having done it right in front of a ten-year old who was already traumatized from the recent death of dear friends. “….I….I am sorry you saw that, little tail of light. Do not wander into the alley, just stay where you are.”

Light Tail surprised both of them with how casually—or how well, she hoped—she seemed to be taking the swift death that had just been delivered before her eyes. “…I…I meant…y-you just moved so fast, I didn’t see what you did….”

“….then let’s leave it at that,” Julaya sighed in relief, removing her left foreleg from the sword cuff and reaching around for a strip of cloth she kept tied around the scabbard along her back. “Stay put, I think your mother is almost finished with her foes.”

A furious spat of gunfire erupted in the streets for about four seconds, with Sling’s 10mm being the last weapon to bark its fury into the air, and the deathly silence that came afterward worried her enough to make her take her eyes off the awesome zebra and take a peek down the road—

—Sling was stomping back up the road towards them, her magic latched around one of the Pythons’ bodies and dragging it across the asphalt, with a very angry look to her face that actually made Rally jump a bit the moment their eyes met.

Oh shit she’s pissed she’s gonna yell at me again—

Sling’s magic dropped the body about twelve feet shy of the group, and as the stable mare closed in on her, her mouth began trying to find something to scream out at her, but nothing came out besides a few wordless gasps and failed sentences. She quickly gave up on it after a couple of tries and just focused on the others. “…anybody hurt?” she seethed through her teeth.

“…no one that we care about,” the zebra answered calmly, the cloth in her left hoof and pastern wiping the blood clean off of her sword. “Though I could do without you dragging the corpse of your foes about like that.”

“This “foe” was the so-called “water merchant” I talked to earlier. There’s no water caravan anywhere near here.”

The world lit up with a bright white flash, followed quickly by a clap of thunder that sounded like it had come from just a block away from them. “….we can talk later, when we’ve sheltered down for the storm. I know a place nearby that will do. Five blocks to the north, a rather larger diner with a fully intact roof and lockable doors. Has a big sign of a mare atop it, it cannot be missed.”

Sling’s eyes whipped down to her left foreleg as she brought her PipBuck up, her magic pulling at the dials and toggle switches embedded into the casing around the screen. “Take the kids and head over there quick, I’ll get what I can off these mercs and catch up.”

Julaya dropped the blood-drench strip of cloth to the ground and re-sheathed her sword, abruptly turning about and hiking her way past Light Tail. “Come, then, girls. Quickly, the storm is eager to greet us.”

Chapter 19 Author's Note

A YEAR between updates? Yikes, time got away from me. Gonna let this rough draft go up for now, and clean up the formatting and whatnot later. I got a lot of catching up to do...

Chapter 19

The first time they went after a target, it was essentially a fifty-fifty chance of success, and the less they knew about the target and any potential allies and/or capabilities of said target, the more the pendulum swung towards the “fail” end of the luck bar. A lot of them figured this time would be different—sure, Rally was unusually intelligent for a fourteen-year-old smartass until she got near a MEW, but she was still just a little girl. Shouldn’t have been that hard.

Bittersweet and his crew got first take. He personally thought it was because Bitter had wanted to hump her ever since he laid his eyes on her and saw this as a chance to have his way with her. He made sure that it was understood that if Rally didn’t come back to him a virgin, Bittersweet would not go home a stallion, assuming he survived being gelded with a rusted hacksaw. Her humiliation was the boss’s alone to inflict on her.

A week later, he and four other teams had finished setting up camp by the roads around Rough Port in case the sassy little bitch got away when Bittersweet’s scout, a light gray unicorn stallion named Clover, galloped into his camp. Alone. That was when he knew that this wasn’t going to be like other hunts.

They’d gotten word of a rather interesting character from their contact in the slaver guild a couple of days prior. An actual, living stable mare, and one skilled or lucky enough to turn a hit squad into raw hamburger with pure destructive bursts of magic and very accurate gunfire. Their contact offered him a ten thousand-cap bounty for her PipBuck, and eighty percent of the profit from whoever wound up buying the mare’s little girl if they managed to catch her and get the brat to their guild handler. The method of the PipBuck retrieval was left open—it was his understanding that they didn’t care if they handed it over with the mare’s bloody stump of a leg still attached to it, as long as they got the damn thing. They didn’t say why they wanted it, and he knew better than to ask anyone from Life Tap’s guild questions on things they didn’t want to discuss. They did say that she was likely in Rough Port to recuperate from the fight in Trotpeka—the last they’d seen of her, she was barely able to stumble away, but by that point they’d had other concerns to deal with and didn’t chase after her.

Bittersweet, for once, agreed with him that a night ambush was the best way to go. PipBucks could pick up threats to their wearer’s life, so going after the stable mare when she was awake was not the best of ideas, not if she was as dangerous as their contact suggested. That alone should have tipped him off that this wouldn’t go well, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Clover reported otherwise. Gunfight in Puck’s bar, maybe a minute after they’d worked out some minor details with him, mainly compensation for his snitching on Rally’s location and managing to hold onto her long enough for them to get out here, as well as half of their cut from the sale of the filly if he was willing to hold onto her for them until things played out. Rally had somehow spotted them and was rousing someone from their slumber when Bitter’s crew went upstairs. Clover stayed downstairs in case Rally got by. Instead of a bunch of crashing and thumping, though, Clover heard a shotgun go off two or three times, and a few seconds of gunfire later he saw Terrance and Juniper trying to hightail it back downstairs, but Juniper caught a bullet to the head and didn’t quite make it to the bottom. Terrance did—he could have gotten the stable pony dead to rights, if his rifle hadn’t been jammed when the bitch leapt down after him.

Clover got out of there after that, and stayed outside just long enough to hear the short exchange of fire, then a very brief lull, and then a .357 Mag went off, and that was the last gunshot. Clover figured that Rally had shacked up with the mare and he wasn’t about to take on a pony-filly team that had just wasted his friends like a scythe slashing away at a wheat field, so he came back to the main group.

He normally killed people for cowardice, and for abandoning their team in a fight, but he had a better idea—make Clover lead the next team to try their luck. He sent the bastard northwest to the nearest town, Hayfield, and told him to take them from a distance this time if they showed up there. Clover’s new crew had an ex-Union trooper turned freelance bandit with a really good sniper rifle, and a griffon with one of the only two MEWs that the Pythons had. In all honesty, it was in better shape than the ones that Rally had fixed (and then trashed to shit), but a cache of a hundred and twenty energy weapons was the find of a lifetime. They could have pushed hard on the Runners, maybe even them pushed them all the way out into the Sandy Grave several hundred miles west. But nooooo, the little slut had to grow a conscience and break the whole lot of them, make off with roughly a dozen others.

When the other groups didn’t find any sign of them on the other roads the next day, he realized the stable mare might have just sidestepped them all and went out into the wastes proper, making her way to Hayfield without ever touching the roads with that PipBuck to tell her where to go, and had everybody regroup south of the town while he sent somebody to check on Clover. And now, as his scout poked her snout into his brahmin-hide stitched tent an hour after dawn with a sour look on her face, he already knew how attempt number two had worked out.

It hadn’t.

“Clover’s dead,” the pale lavender earth pony said bluntly—Sky Showers, he remembered a moment later. “His crew too, even that ex-trooper. All I found of him was a pile of glowing ash, she musta gotten hold of Henric’s laser rifle. How the hell are we gonna get around that? From what I saw of the combat site the trooper was turned into kitty litter from over four hundred yards away. Distance didn’t do shit for him.”

That did present something of a problem, but it was one they’d have to put up with. He had around twenty-two people to throw at this stable bitch this time and he was done being nice and subtle about this whole mess. She was too good—or too lucky—to take on in small numbers. “Figure out where they went after?”

“Got a fair clue. Saw this sign for a diner a bit north of the bodies, maybe five or six blocks away from the ambush. The way those thunderclouds were acting yesterday, they’d have been looking for shelter and that would’ve been perfect.”

“Then get everybody up and ready, we head out in twenty and finish this bullshit. All of us.”

The storm she’d been really afraid of—an angry, frustrated stable mare biting her head off for dealing with that pesky sniper without waiting for permission—never materialized. Neither did the rainstorm. The clouds just passed by, spitting lightning and bellowing thunder at everybody on terra firma, like they were taunting the world with their power to turn the roads and wasteland into impassable mud fields whenever they wanted. For some inexplicable reason, the rain simply decided it didn’t want to fall, and the randomness of the weather terrified her. If those damned winged rats up in the sky hadn’t up and left everybody down here to die, the weather would be behaving properly. It would rain when it was supposed to, and be clear and sunny when it was supposed to. It wouldn’t be doing this bi-polar mood swing shit all the time.

Light Tail, in all her precocious, child-like innocence, was absolutely mesmerized by the lightning (and not even an hour after watching her mom get a chunk of her leg nearly blown off, to boot). The little filly watched it through every window in the old restaurant for hours on end, squealing at every bolt that lashed out at the earth, and she had to admit that it was nice to be able to just sit and watch the light show from the cover of solid shelter. She’d never seen red lightning until yesterday, and the sheer number of cloud-to-cloud lightning strikes alone were almost breathtaking in both pattern and color variety. Red, blue, yellow, she swore she even saw a couple of purple flashes. Pretty cool stuff, really. The cloud-to-ground strikes were almost as impressive, and quite a bit bigger to boot. She hoped they got lucky and fried a few wandering predators in the wastes while they were at it. World could always use a few less deathclaws, geckos, and whatever else liked to eat little ponies and zebras.

Still, it came as a great relief to finally watch the filly crash and burn herself out. One minute she was zipping from window to window, trying to catch the last glimpses she could of the lightning storm, and the next minute she was slugging herself along like she was running on a dead spark battery. She barely had the energy to conduct her bedtime routine, and Rally wound up having to stuff her in her sleeping bag when the little one just plopped to the ground, ten feet short of her goal, and fell asleep where she landed. Cute, if a little annoying. At least her pups behaved themselves. They just hid under a table on the main dining floor, and watched their little master bounce about the place until they grew tired of it and went to sleep.

A couch in the break room was the best she could do for a bed, but with a couple of wool blankets she made it work, and it seemed to be enough because she couldn’t remember what she’d been dreaming about when she woke up. All that mattered when her eyes began to peel themselves open was a very powerful need to find somewhere to piss before she tossed dignity aside and went on the floor in front of everybody. She barely realized she was dragging her gun belt along with her until she’d bumped it into the doorway on her way out, and then she had trouble keeping up with it. She was still too tired to manage more than a simple levitation spell, though attempting to get the belt on with a telekinetic spell inadvertently brought more of her brain to life the more she tried it. By the time she’d stumbled out a side fire exit and into the depressing, cloud-covered outside world, she’d finally gotten it at least strapped tight to a point where her gun wasn’t pulling the thing off with its dead weight.

Only afterwards, outside, did she finally get her first clue that her morning would not be a quiet one. She hadn’t expected to find it, but a touch of magic on her gun belt ran into a pouch she didn’t remember putting on it, and a quick tug undid its attachment loops and pulled it up to her eyes. Sling’s little hygiene kit with the glorious contents of bathroom luxuries that were almost non-existent outside Union territory taunted her with its goods….and a small piece of faded paper, folded up and tucked inside a small shell loop on its front facing. Another tug pulled the paper out and unfurled it to reveal a surprisingly well-written (if brief) note inside:

“One block north of the diner. Need to talk. -SS”

Her mouth spouted off a silent, foul curse of the “F” variety, and after cleaning herself up she briefly contemplated just ducking out and hitting the road entirely, but realized she’d get maybe half an hour’s peace before something—or someone—made her regret taking off on her own. And Light Tail wouldn’t like it if she just vanished without so much as a good-bye.

…funny how that little filly she’d known maybe…three days, was already starting to hold her back on her decisions.

So she went north a block—not that anybody would be hidden away or anything. Julaya’s little diner hideaway was about the only structure still standing in this part of town, and going one block in any direction just meant passing by lots of small piles of rubble where other buildings used to stand, along with a few walls, and on occasion a wall from a multi-level building with parts of two floors still attached to it. To the north, there was just ruin and rubble, and no walls or pony-sized piles of debris—she imagined that the survivors of the Last Day, years or decades later, had pillaged through the ruins for any piece of useful scrap they could take with them, and what was left today was the useless refuse of nearly two centuries of scavenging and looting. Didn’t explain why the diner was so intact, though. Maybe it was just dumb luck, maybe it was just built better. Didn’t really matter.

What mattered was that she was getting within shouting distance of an unstable stable mare (no pun intended), who was more focused on practicing magical discharges than on what was coming up behind her, but then, she didn’t need to concentrate on that when she had a PipBuck on her leg.

“…guess you’re not a morning pony, either,” the mare said lightly, her horn ablaze in a bright indigo glow as she shaped and molded the small, bluish-purple orb of pure mana in front of her. Larger, smaller, even elongated it. Considering that a lot of unicorns could barely manage levitation or simple cantrips, what this mare was doing right now was pretty damn impressive.

Two hundred years ago, she would have probably been considered average….

“Never much of a morning worth getting up to,” she said back, coming to a stop about seven yards behind her. She didn’t want to be too close to her, in case that ball of mana went haywire or the mare decided to start shouting. “….look, if you’re gonna yell at me, get it over with so I can be on my way.”

“If I’d listened to myself yesterday that’s exactly what you’d have gotten,” Sling warned gently, the mana orb pulsing slightly as it began to float around in a lazy circle. “Still want to, honestly, sticking your damn head out like you did for that sniper to pick off.”

Well, surprise, let’s get this done with. “It worked, didn’t it? I didn’t hear you coming up with anything better.”

“You didn’t give me a chance to, either. Ten more seconds, I could have flooded the street with a light spell, blown it up in their faces and blinded them long enough to let us get to better cover.”

“Prove it,” she blurted before she could think to stop herself from saying it….

…and was briefly relieved when, instead of yelling at her to shut up, Sling simply increased the flow of mana in her horn and turned the orb in front of her into a brilliant, white-hot color, and then slung it off into the streets beyond and turned her head away from it—

—out of caution, Rally followed her lead, and had barely turned her gaze to the broken concrete and asphalt beneath her hooves when her eyes were stung by an intense explosion of light, like somebody shining a flashlight right into her face. But because the orb was some distance out and she wasn’t looking at it, that was the worst of it, and before she knew it the light had faded out of existence.

She made a small, mental note to never, ever dare this stable pony to do something two seconds after she claimed to be capable of it. ….well, shit….

“That griffon with the laser rifle also happened to have a couple of good smoke canisters on him,” Sling went on, turning her head back upright and forming another mana orb into life before her. “I could have popped them both and given us a smokescreen to cover our retreat. We could have used that laser rifle and picked off all the ground targets, cut through any cover they could have used, and then we’d have had all day to find a way around that sniper. Maybe even take him alive, see if we could learn anything about the rest of his little gang. And you went and threw yourself right into his sights before I could stop you.”

Maybe, could have…didn’t, what did it matter? They were alive. “It still worked. I got us out of that mess.”

“You got lucky,” Sling said, tossing a rifle cartridge back at her with a tiny flick of a separate telekinesis spell that sputtered out almost as soon as it had completed its purpose in life. “Found this on the floor next to his ash pile, with a live unfired round in the chamber. Your reckless little stunt might have worked only because the cartridge that should have killed you was a dud. But since he’s dead, there’s no way to be absolutely sure.”

Rally felt her heart skipping beats as her right hoof unlatched and caught the flung cartridge in the air, turning it the bullet over until she was staring at the bottom of the casing, and the strong, healthy dent in the primer’s center. If Sling was right, if this round had been in his rifle when she’d popped up from cover to shoot at him….

“You’ve been on your own, been your own boss, for as long as you can remember,” the mare said, when it became obvious to her that stupid Rally wasn’t going to say anything right off. “You’ve never had anyone you could depend on, you’ve had to survive on your own, and probably have plenty of memories of times when it looked like you wouldn’t make it to the next morning. You know far more about the horrors ponies commit on each other than any child should, I get that, but—”

“Do you?” she dared to challenge back, her eyes still locked on that lightly-struck primer. She wasn’t a gun person, but she knew enough about them to know when they weren’t working like they should have been, and that it wasn’t the kind of luck she wanted to be betting her life on. “Because you wanted to bite my damn head off afterward. You have, more than once. And as much as I appreciate the help, in the back of my mind I’m always aware that there’s usually only one reason why lonely adults would be interested in older kids like me.”

The mana ball in Sling’s face flickered and pulsed momentarily, as if she had lost her hold on it for an instant, and that was enough of a sign to Rally that she had struck a nerve. One she decided to push on a little harder, just to make a point. “….not just Puck, hunh.”

Aaaaaand push. “….a couple of others. A stallion in his late thirties….more than old enough to be my father. He found me huddling in the corner of a wall…five months after I got this metal leg, I think? I don’t really remember. I remember that most of the building was gone, just that wall and part of the second floor above me was all I had for shelter from the rain. I was cold, wet, starving, sick with a cold and at risk of pneumonia…yeah, I let him take me somewhere drier. For a few days it looked safe, until the cold passed and I wasn’t so weak from hunger, and then he made his move. Guess he’d figured I’d be grateful enough to…pay him back, so I did…by kicking him in the family jewels and getting the hell out of there before he could get on his hooves. Second time, a year later, was an earth pony mare and her zebra boyfriend, when I was scrounging around through Withercha. They...they got a lot closer than anybody else has. I only got away because some raiders stumbled across the camp and just started putting bullets into the tent. I got out. They didn’t. That was the last time I tried to find an adult nice enough to take me in. Miss Shine….she might have been different, but I couldn’t stay and put her life in danger if she was, because she deserved better than to get killed because of me.”

Sling’s magic ball broke apart and scattered into the winds, her horn losing its brilliant, wavy glow. “…oh fu….so stupid why didn’t I see it—”

Any other mare, in any other situation….she wouldn’t have trusted them too much, not after that night. But stable ponies, at least the four that she’d met, were a lot less….sick in the head, and at the very least she could trust them to not try to rape her, even if they were assholes. And this stable mare had just lost a friend to the ghouls in Trotpeka’s river bed, and had clearly been in no mood for anything beyond mere survival when she nudged into Puck’s bar to wait for those Runners friends of hers. No, taking advantage of a wasteland street urchin for her own sick amusement was not in Sling’s nature. She trusted her at least that much.

“Probably because you saw a little girl who needed help, the same way your friend needed help, and so you helped her if only to make yourself feel better about how she died.”

Sling didn’t dare turn around. She didn’t really blame her. But the way her body just went stone still right then…well, she wanted to strike a nerve, and she did. Now she wished she’d held back….

“….she died, because she let go,” the mare’s voice spoke hoarsely. “...she let go, and I couldn’t do anything but watch her fall….”

….oh, came the hard, crashing truth a moment later. Oh crap, I should have left it alone. Her friend died saving her and I just put my own fool head at risk of having its brains blown out.

She would thank the gods and the departed Sisters that Sling chose not to call her out on it too harshly. “….so, yes, when I see you sticking your head out where a sniper can put a bullet in it almost as fast as you could think about it, I want to scream and terrify you into never doing something that stupid again. You are not alone, you are traveling with a group, and what you decide to do can affect everyone around you. Do you think Light Tail would take you getting shot in the head well? Do you think she would have understood if I had died yesterday because I went and made myself a target out there, in the open, in the hopes that the sniper’s next bullet would be aimed at me instead of you?”

…..the key words, of course, being, “too harshly”. Still harsh, but she could have been much meaner about it. “….I….wasn’t, even thinking about any of that,” Rally heard herself mumbling softly. Until now she’d not even thought that the reason Sling went out there to kill everybody was to try and get them to shoot her and not the idiot giggling filly with a laser rifle she treated like a toy… “….or about anything besides making them stop shooting…..”

She waited for the stern, harshly worded warning not to do something so foolish or she’d be abandoned to her own whims, and Sling let off a heavy, tired sigh, like the mare was just as exhausted with this subject as she was the rest of her life. “I told you a coupla days ago, that you had a choice among several to make. That you had options. Maybe it’s time we laid them out.”

Shit, here it comes.

“You clearly know how to take care of yourself, or you wouldn’t have lived this long on your own. I told you that you could stay with me until you decide to go out on your own again. You can still do that. Don’t think El-Tee will like it, but you can go, if you want.”

“….the word “options” implies there’s more than one choice.”

Sling conjured up another orb of mana, which quickly began to take on an otherworldly appearance as it seemed to shift between exceptionally bright glowing colors of blue, white, and purple all at once. “Most of them are what you do if you decide to take off, which you’ve already thought of. Your best chance of living, if you leave, is to try and make it to Union territory. You’ve been over there, you know how the Union works, and you could probably get into a support position in their trooper corps with how well you can maintain MEW weaponry. You could try to work out your spat with the Pythons on your own, but I honestly don’t think they’ll do much more than rape you until you beg for death, and then sell you to slavers and put you through a lifetime of it. Or just rape you and kill you when they’re tired of you.”

It wasn’t hard to see what Option Number Four was. “….and if I don’t do any of that? If I decide door number four is the winning choice….”

Sling didn’t laugh, but at least she didn’t yell at her either, so that was something. “….option four. You stay with me, for keeps. But that option means you are no longer your own boss. You don’t get to take off on your own on a whim, because I won’t let you. Our stable rations won’t last forever, so get used to chomping on mil-rats now and then.”

“Shit, always a catch,” Rally blurted immediately, mostly at the military rations bit.

“Not the one I expected you to be swearing at, but that goes into the next point. Try to keep that foul language to a minimum, at least around Light Tail. I’ve said things I shouldn’t have in her presence, and she’ll actually nag you more about it then I will. I don’t honestly expect you to be perfect with it, not with the life you’ve had, but I do expect you to try.”

“…I actually do believe that. She was asking me about the ‘F’ word last night, and what it meant, and it took me a minute to figure it out ‘cause she wouldn’t say it or spell it out. When I told her it wasn’t a word for fillies like her, she got this scowl on her face that said ‘Oh, Mom said a really bad word and she knew it and won’t tell me’. Soooo…guess you’re busted.”

“…I’m more afraid what she’ll think when she finally learns what it means,” the mare moaned, her ears drooping slightly.

“…it seems like no matter what, I’m losing my freedom. The choice seems to be, lose it now, or lose it later.”

That brilliant, tri-color ball of magic began to exude what she could only describe as a shimmering mirage of itself as Sling began to move it about in small circles, like a cat playing with its prey. “…in a sense, you are. Yes, you will be controlled to a degree. You won’t be the one making decisions about where you go and when, you will not be putting yourself into a fight if I can keep you out of it, you will not be taking risks with yourself, and you will not have much choice about going anywhere by yourself for long stretches of time. I will be the one in charge of your life, and your safety, and I will do my best to provide for you and Light Tail in this wasted land but there may be times when I’ll need you to put your skills in repairing tech to use to net us some caps and food, because bounty hunting isn’t the safest way to go about it. This isn’t slavery, this is somebody willing to take on the role of your guardian because I have this ingrained and deep-rooted force called maternal instinct that compels me to keep children safe at any cost, even if they aren’t mine. I don’t mean to hurt you, and I will try my best to be patient, but you already know how that might go.”

“….a long-term foal-sitter, of sorts,” she grumbled, already growing uncertain if she was really, truly ready to just…give up the life she had and let somebody else boss her around, even if it wasn’t going to be for more than four years, tops. “…one with a talent for killing and violence, so I know she can hold her own in a fight….”

“…Rally, I know it’s hard to trust anybody, when it seems like all the world has done is shit on you for kicks all your life. You have better reasons than most to say no, given what a lot of adults have tried to do to you. You deserve a lot better than what you’ve gotten. I can do that, if you want it. But be sure that you do, because I will not let you go back to the life you’ve had afterward.”

She’d had this gut feeling that Sling would offer something like that. Stable ponies were pretty predictable about that “helping others” thing, if the wastes hadn’t hardened them and turned them into vicious souls. But it still put a rock in her gut, to hear it laid out, what it could conceivably mean. She was used to making her own decisions, her own way in life, and by now she had a pretty good handle on it now and then, but it was hard to say she was perfect considering she’d gotten herself into a pretty sticky situation with both the Pythons and then with Puck. In fact, if not for Sling, she’d probably be slung across a bed to be whored out to anybody willing to pay the caps for the “privilege”, or worse, in the Pythons’ clutches, where she would be beaten and violated until she broke down and gave up her weapons stash, and then beaten, violated, and murdered when they were tired of playing with her. But there was still that nagging, irresistible desire to stay the course she was on if only because it was all she’d known. She wasn’t sure if she’d be able to take having to do what somebody else told her to most of the time. She hadn’t liked it one bit with Puck…but, that was an entirely different thing, really. He was bossing her and kicking her around because he thought he owned her, in some sense that she owed him for dead brahmin he’d never told her he was going to charge her for if she failed to keep them alive.

Sling….at least so far, on appearance, was looking out for her out of a twisted guilt over the grisly death of her friend, and some strange, twisted motherly sense of wanting to look out for a kid who needed it. It wasn’t the healthiest way of coping with a loss, but it was a way, and Light Tail seemed to be coming around from the loss better than her mom with smart-mouthed Rally around. So maybe….in some symbiotic fashion, Sling’s offer of long-term protection and sustenance would end up helping all of them in the end.

Still, this wasn’t a choice she could just make right here and now. Not if Sling was serious about not letting go if she decided to stick with her, which was starting to sound like something more than what was being said. This stable pony wasn’t what she’d call an “open book” with her emotions. “….there a time limit on this deal?”

“Only if I die. Going from being your own pony, to having somebody doing most of the deciding for you….even if only for a few years, is not a small change to be making, and I expect a lot of learning and frustration from both of us to really figure out what that will be like for you. But before we do any of that, we still need to get these mercs to back off. Talking it out with them isn’t going to work too well, not after how many we’ve killed in the last two days, and they don’t seem interested in taking me alive so I’m not even going to try.”

She might have laughed if it hadn’t been so damn early in the morning. “From what I’ve seen, talking to your enemies isn’t even one of your preferred options. You seem to prefer turning them into gibby treats and holed cheese blocks.”

“Better them than me,” Sling responded with a heavy tone, and pushed her orb of arcane destruction up into the air where it burst harmlessly into thousands of glittering bits of white-blue-purple embers, and was actually a really pretty display. “Head on back to the diner, tell El-Tee and Julie I’ll be back in a bit. I’m going to check the bar, see if a water caravan came in before dusk yesterday. Should be back in about an hour.”

“And if you’re not?”

Sling’s travelling saddle—and its assortment of weapons—came floating up to the mare from its resting spot on the sidewalk nearby, its straps enveloping her body as it settled onto her back and the bolt of her black carbine racked a round into its chamber. “You’ll know long before then if something goes wrong.”

The mercs that had tried to kill Mom and take the rest of them alive were dead. She wasn’t happy that they were dead, but given what they’d just tried to take from her, roughly a week after losing Kite and BJ, she didn’t think she’d cry over it either. She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not, so she just accepted the fact that Mom was alive, the mercs weren’t, and she would rather have Mom alive than the mercs.

She’d gotten just enough of a look at the bodies (minus the one that Julaya killed, of course) to know that none of them were the ones she’d seen in the bar, but that wasn’t necessarily reassuring. It was now well into the morning hours the day after, and they had yet to show up again in any form, so she was pretty sure they weren’t with those snake ponies. If they had been, they would have come after them by now, or even back in the streets earlier today, attacking them from behind when that sniper started shooting at them. But that didn’t mean they weren’t threats either—they could have been bounty hunters, or mercs with another group.

The diner that Julaya had picked as last night’s shelter was in much better shape than most of the other places she’d stayed in overnight along the roads. She’d go a bit further and call it an actual restaurant. It had a small section that was like a diner, but then there was a lot more floor space beside it with lots of tables and booths, and there was even a big counter at the back that exposed the kitchen on the other side. There was a little lounge lobby right off to the left of the front entrance with chairs and a couple of sofas, for some reason, and the back rooms next to the kitchen were really spacious, with a decent bathroom and shower even, and a big break room that looked like it was meant to have a couple dozen ponies in it at once and had a couple of sofas and lounge chairs all over. The roof was mostly intact and had no leaks in it, most of the doors were still on their hinges and still had working locks, there wasn’t a lot of debris and junk lying around, and once Mom and Julaya had taken a few minutes to dust the place off, it honestly wasn’t that dirty.

Not that she took a lot of notice of that until this morning, because she’d spent countless hours last night watching the lightning storm pass by when she realized that the diner’s windows had a great view of the sky and all the other buildings and stuff around the diner weren’t standing in the way, because they were just piles of rubble. She never, ever got tired of watching the weather when it started freaking out and spitting lightning all over the place, and this time was really cool! She saw white lightning, blue, yellow, red, even some purple lightning! And sometimes it just stayed in the clouds and lit up the wasteland like a big lightbulb for a split second! She’d watch it from one window for a bit, then jump off the table and go find another window to see if it had a better show for her, and she was never disappointed. Rally didn’t seem nearly as enthused about it, but she did watch it with her for a bit, and it was nice to have somepony with her she could relate to a little bit. Sure, she was kind of a bit older, like…fourteen and a half, or something, but she was really smart. Smarter than her, even, if she could take MEW guns apart and fix them. And she didn’t treat little Light Tail like an annoying brat, but more like an equal of sorts, most of the time. And as long as she had Rally with her….not waking up and being able to bug BJ anymore was a little easier to take.

So of course, Rally would have chosen the exact time when she had to go out and find somewhere to pee to finally wake up and disappear, because when she came back the break room was empty, and she was left all alone with only two sleepy pups for company, and she didn’t want to wake them up just yet. But Julaya…she was always somewhere close by, and seemed always willing to stop what she was doing and humor her questions and whatever else popped into her tiny mind, like she was still a filly at heart herself.

And the zebra turned to be a much more interesting person to bug in the end. She wouldn’t answer any questions about the tribes in the wastes and she was kinda scared to ask about them again after how she pushed back against her (politely, even) last time. But she knew a lot about this side of the prairie, and she didn’t even mind explaining how she had gotten to be so athletic and swift with a sword and her four legs and everything.

In fact, she was willing to teach her a few things. Like where to hit a pony with her forehooves when she wanted to make them stop coming near her.

By letting herself be the target.

“…..you’re sure?”

“As sure as a soul can be, little tail of light,” the zebra laughed mildly, standing on all fours before her. “Zebra and pony are not so different as we appear. And I have been hurt by much worse than you and walked away afterward, so there is little chance tha—”

Well, if she was sure, then she was sure, and Julaya had just talked about striking her target at the first opportunity, and this seemed like a good time to show she’d been paying attention. So while Julie was talking and trying to reassure her that the “little tail of light” was no threat to her, she went ahead and jabbed the zebra right where she’d been shown, just below the throat, and the zebra’s legs immediately buckled and let her fall to the floor with a choked gasp.

That wide-eyed “OUCH” look on Julie’s face was just priceless, and she wound up laughing at her target as she gasped and fought the air for a share of its oxygen. “Hey, it worked just like you said it would! Where else can I hit somepony to make them fall like that?!”

One of Julie’s forelegs brushed against her throat, though that wasn’t where she got hit. “I hear good things about striking one’s ego….”

“I can’t hit that.”

“It depends on where you strike. For instance, a boy’s naughty bits. Very painful, to both body and pride.”

Her nose scrunched up slightly in disgust. That wasn’t somewhere she ever wanted to physically touch, ever, even if she knew it would work almost immediately if she had to do something like that. Then again, that was probably why Mom was so quick to threaten a stallion’s boy parts when she really wanted them to stop doing something really quick. “Eeech! That’s both gross and mean. You could really hurt somebody permanently if you hit that part of him hard enough.”

Julie’s eyes began to lose that pained, glassy look, though the sadness creeping into her jawline confused her initially until she spoke. “….then be sure such a thing is necessary before you do it.”

Hunh. She musta done somethin’ she wished she hadn’t….like a lot of people out here….

Or maybe that was why she didn’t want to talk about her old tribe….

“Sooo….what’s next?”

“…good question,” Julie groaned painfully, still rubbing at her neck. Maybe it made her feel better? “Allow me a few moments to ponder your next lesson.”

“But we just started.”

“Yes,” Julie’s voice mumbled. “....but the gods have punished me for underestimating you. I should like a few moments before tempting fate again.”

She managed not to laugh at that, even though she was kinda disappointed that Julie was giving up—even temporarily—so quickly. “Eh, should probably go check on the pups anyway. Won’t take long.”

“I should figure out how to avoid embarrassing myself further by then.”

She laughed an evil little laugh as she showed herself out of the break room, or at least she tried to sound evil, but it was hard to do that with the high-pitched voice of a little girl. Though…come to think of it, Julie didn’t sound like what she thought a zebra would sound like. Some of the old Journals of the First Ones, from her stable, told stories of chance encounters with zebras on the front lines, or more mundane and everyday interactions with the few zebras that managed to mingle within Equestrian society until things got really bad late in the war, and they all said something about how zebras had this deep, loud quality to their voices that made them stand out in a crowd even if they weren’t immediately visible. Julie, though, even though her voice had a…foreign quality to it, for all intents and purposes if she closed her eyes, she could swear she was listening to a pony and not a zebra. And instead of the more common gray and black stripes of most zebras, Julie had white and black stripes. Did that mean something in zebra societ—

Ahh, there they are, she interrupted her own musings, barely aware of how she had ended up in the dining floor of the restaurant, but she was there, and Max and Mona were right where they’d been left last night. Napping away beneath one of the table booths at the front, next to a window, and seemed content to stay there until disturbed (unwisely) by a stupid pony who should have known better. She wasn’t a stupid pony and deigned to let them stay there.

Rally, who could break a MEW gun apart and put it back together better than it was before, shouldn’t have been a stupid pony by default. But she made the near-epic mistake of slamming the diner’s front door open on her way in, and only a last second-save from a telekenisis spell burst kept the door from smacking into the wall and angering her pups….in theory. She really didn’t know what they would do if they were rudely awakened by a stupid pony, because she’d never done it. Let sleeping dogs lie, and all that.

Maybe Rally could tell her why that was so, actually….

Rally’s head turned towards the door, briefly puzzled by its sudden stop, but then she saw the electric blue glow around it and figured it out. “….pups still napping?”

“Still,” she answered in the affirmative. “Surprised they aren’t up and bothering me yet, actually.”

“I’m sure they’ll find ways to make you wish you hadn’t said that,” Rally grinned back. “Yer mom should be back in a bit. She went to see if a water merchant got into town before dark yesterday. Shouldn’t be more than an hour. I still think we’d be better off raiding all the soda machines we can find.”

As tasty as the stuff was, she didn’t like the idea of having to pee all the time after drinking the stuff, which was actually kind of weird because it was usually supposed to be water and tea that did that. “…ugh, we’d be a lot safer staying here, but if we have to, fine…”

“We might,” Rally countered. “And we’re behind everybody else in town with the same plan. I have no idea how those machines get restocked without anybody seeing it done, but they do, and they don’t stay that way for long. If we don’t get to those machines quickly enough, we might not get any.”

With little else to do for the next few minutes, she went and invited herself into the nearest table booth and sat down, and Rally made a straight shot for the seat on the other side of the table. “I’d…heard, once, that there was a bottling factory somewhere near Withercha with a bunch of robots outside of it. Could be some inside still makin’ the stuff.”

“That’s not too big a stretch, until you realize the plant hasn’t gotten a shipment of ingredients from its suppliers since the megaspells,” Rally’s said, the teen’s cyberleg clinking against the floor in stark contrast to the more hollow clomping of her three remaining organic hooves, which made her a little sad. “Or that nobody’s ever seen a ‘bot strolling about the wastes to physically re-stock the machines in like…ever?”

“Somebody’s still makin’ the stuff or you wouldn’t be seeing fresh bottles ready to be slurped up,” she pointed out, sparing a look at the pups near the front to make sure they weren’t talking too loudly, and so far they were content to keep snoozing away. “So they probably got a clean water supply too, and they could do a lot more good with that than the sodas. That would be worth finding.”

“…hunh, never actually thought of that,” Rally mumbled in slight surprise. “But it makes perfect sense. It’s basically carbonated water and high fructose corn syrup. Take it all out and you’re back to basic H2O. And to still be seeing fresh soda out in the wastes two centuries after the end of the world…yeah, that’d be one hell of a water find. Would explain why it’s such a big secret, so whoever it is is doing a very good job keeping it that way.”

“So what’d you tell her?”

“Tell who what?” Rally countered, sliding into the booth seat on the other side of the table and laying her laser rifle on top of it.

“Mom said she’d ask you if you wanted to stay with us, instead of goin’ out on your own again.”

Rally’s face took on a forlorn frown, and she wasn’t nearly as excited to talk about this as she was old soda bottling plants. “…oh. That.”

“Yeah, that. She said she’d ask you this mornin’. For some reason she thought I might not want ya to, but I was like ‘oh yes please!’ and I even told her not to yell at you for stickin’ yer head up yesterday and almost gettin’ shot! She…she didn’t, right?”

“…wanted to,” Rally sighed. “Look, Elly, the way she put it…I’m starting to think she didn’t mean it the way I thought at first. I….she might have been trying to say ‘I’ll adopt you’ and not doing a real good job of it.”

If anything was going to get her to stop looking at the outside world…well, that would have been one of them. She felt something in her chest turn heavy, deep inside, but not in that scary way that she got whenever somebody started shooting at her. “….wh…wait, you mean like…adopt, as in….family? Like….”

“Yeah, like, ‘I’ll be your mom’ adopt. Which would be super-weird, but….I don’t know. I’ve been on my own for as long as I can remember. I don’t know that I could handle being told what to do instead of deciding for myself. I’ve done okay by myself….”

“Rally, if you’d done okay you wouldn’t have ended up in the mess you were in when we met. What Puck was doing to you….that was slavery, even if nobody called it that. When you told me Mom had gone to talk to him I thought she was gonna kill him for beating you up. She’s done that much to people who just threatened to hurt me. I’m surprised he and his lackey were still walking when she was done with them.”

“I’m not,” Rally muttered back casually. “…not sure I’d call Puck’s condition a “walking” one, but I would have been more shocked if she had just wasted him. He might have been a shady, shifty-eyed asshole with the way he did business with everybody, but he was still running a business in a community and it brought the town a lot of trade opportunities with travelling caravans that nobody would’ve gotten otherwise. You don’t just walk into the place and string the owner up by his entrails on a whim, even for a good reason. She did as much as she could to him without getting the town all riled up at her. Shit, the way I heard it at Miss Shine’s bathhouse they were looking to hang him for what he did to me anyway.”

“Quit cussin’,” her tongue snapped briskly, though she had no real hopes of that happening. Mom never listened, after all. “…in some ways, that’s almost worse. What she did…it’d have crippled them for life, maybe.”

“But they were still alive. Does that not mean anything to you?”

…I think I just made a mistake, said the tiny voice in her head, at a point far too late for her to be able to fix it. So all she could think to do was finish the original thought, the original argument, and see if Rally would start spitting insults at her and storm off or something. “It’s still pain. Life-long pain, that they’ll remember and have to deal with every day from that day on, well past the time when they finally realize how wrong they were to be hurting people all the time. Is that fair?”

Rally’s eyes just stared at her for a few moments, but her face didn’t get to quivering with anger or frustration, and when she finally did speak it wasn’t to accuse her of being a spoiled hypocrite of a stable pony with no courage to speak of. “There’s not much “fair” out here. What she did was a much fairer thing than if she’d just gone and killed them. And that’s a hell of a thing to do to a soul, to take away everything they got, and all they’ll ever have. You know how much that hurts people, to lose someone they care about so senselessly.”

Yeah, big mistake. Just thinking of Kite and Beige, of how empty a part of her felt knowing she’d never hear or see them again, it hurt her in a deep, intangible place that still managed to make her cry. But at least this time, all she did was leak a couple of tears. “….’s why I don’t wanna kill anybody, bad or not. I’d be hurting a lot more people than just that one. Even if I ever had to do it to save somebody…I don’t think I could live with that. I know now what it feels like to lose somebody I care about, and I don’t get how all this stupid war and death could go on for so long. How is it that nobody’s ever stopped and realized that they were all hurting each other like this?”

“I think I’m starting to see why everybody likes you so much,” Rally breathed softly. “But let me ask you this. What would you be willing to do, to save someone you loved from getting grievously hurt or killed? To keep from feeling that pain of loss at the hooves of a raider, or some sicko murderer or mare-beating savage with unkind plans for you? I’m not talking about a neighbor or some thick-headed trader trying to swindle you out of your caps, I’m talking folk who genuinely want to rob and kill you and your family, who don’t care about anyone but themselves and have absolutely no remorse or empathy for the pain they cause. People like the slavers, the raiders and bandits you’ve seen shot to pieces, and the mercs trying to kill your mom and probably me. What would you be willing to do, to keep them from hurting you and yours when talk won’t work?”

…well, at least she ain’t yelling at me, Light Tail smiled with relief inside. She was kinda surprised that Mom hadn’t tried to talk to her about this yet, given that she was the one who’d been teaching her how to shoot in case something happened to her. “I don’t wanna hurt ‘em the rest of their lives. Just make them stop. Bullets and knives tear stuff up, things that don’t always heal back the way they were before. Magic takes so much time and practice it’d be years before I could get the hang of it, so that’s out. Even hittin’ people can do some serious damage if you hit ‘em hard enough in the right place. What else could I do?”

“Nothing. And that means you risk getting hurt, or killed….or somebody you love suffering the same. That’s the crazy thing about it all. You can’t talk everybody out of violence. Just pointing your gun at them and shooting in their general direction, taking care not to hit them isn’t going to be enough sometimes. You’re gonna have to make them stop, and you may have to hurt them very badly before they do. So it comes down to one thing—can you live with standing by and watching the people you care about get hurt, or can you live with hurting your attackers enough to put a stop to it? Even if that means crippling them for a very long time, possibly for life?”

She couldn’t begin to describe how the world felt like at that moment. She’d struggled with that question for what seemed like a lifetime, from the moment she first realized that the surface world was a much more dangerous place than she could have ever imagined all those months ago when she and Mom were being backed into a corner by those ragged looking raider ponies. She wasn’t quite sure, but she thought she’d managed to pull her gun on one of them and shoot at him. She remembered shooting at several people on more than one occasion after that day, though. Those mercs that were working with Saurus, the day he nearly killed Mom….maybe she’d shot one of them without intending to, because she could remember the last one saying something about getting “drilled in the leg” before Saurus murdered him, and she also remembered that when she’d shot at him and he ducked back behind his cover, he didn’t come after her again.

Then there was that group of highway bandits who’d murdered a whole trooper squad on the highway, just to take their place and try their luck at robbing a caravan or a small group that came by. After Mom, Kite, and Beige had killed the majority of them by surprise and the last two behind that overturned cargo trailer starting shooting at them, she’d been the first one to put her gun over the top of that old sky wagon and start shooting back, if for no other reason than to try and make them stop for a few seconds. It worked, too, when Kite joined in.

…..Kite…who, five weeks later, shot and killed slavers when they got too close, or were getting up and trying to shoot them despite being in no condition for a fight…and when a second band of slavers caught up to them, starting shooting at them from across that bridge while Kite struggled to get Mom away….and when that bridge broke in half, and Kite and BJ needed some manner of help to follow them over or risk falling into those ghouls…

….she just…sat there, relatively safe, and watched Mom fail to save either of them...and then blamed her for it and outright accusing her of intentionally dropping Kite to save herself….

…god, I’m such a stupid little hypocrite…at least she tried, when all you’d do is sit there and watch…

She must have been lost and tortured in her own little world for quite some time, because the next time she looked up at anything, the seat across from her was empty and she was all alone at the table.

She reluctantly scooted out of the seat and plodded back to that little break room, but she found it a lot harder to move forward without feeling like she was lugging around a hundred pounds of stuff on her back. And she knew why. She was starting to believe what Rally was saying. That she could pull her gun on somebody, put a couple of bullets in their knees, or turn around and buck them in the face with her rear hooves, and feel okay with it if it meant that Mom or Rally or Maxie and Mona wouldn’t be hurt by that somebody. That she could see them later, laughing and playing, and feel okay that she got to enjoy their company because she’d hurt somebody to save them.

And as she trudged to a stop at her travelling saddle to take stock of her most dangerous tools—her 9mm pistol, her little .357 revolver, and the laser pistol that Rally had fixed—she found herself looking at them in an entirely different light. Before, she’d seen them as “people killers”. That little good could come of her having such deadly things, even though she’d shot at people with them on more than one occasion. Those times, though, she wasn’t trying to hit them, just trying to scare them off. Now she looked at them, thinking back to that bridge, when Mom was trying the best she could in her exhausted, powerless state to save Kite and Beige and all the little scared filly could bear to do was watch…

….now she looked at them, and took in the weight of them as she checked them over, made sure they were loaded and clean. Made certain that the revolver had .38 Specials instead of those super-loud .357s that she couldn’t handle, that the 9mm had hollowpoints and not the round-nose bullets that just went through targets without doing much damage. Made certain the laser pistol was turned on and the safety engaged, though she had no intention of actually using it unless she was out of options.

She looked at them, all the while thinking back to that bridge, that canal of hungry ghouls, and how she just sat there, watching, doing nothing, when she had the capability to try and help them….

…never again, she cried to herself, tucking them back into their holsters, no longer cringing at the unwelcome weight. Never.

The universe was out to make her life miserable. Some unseen power, some far-flung god of the stars, was intensely offended by her, or something she’d done in a past life, in another age, because the best bout of good luck she’d had all week (aside from finding a soul willing to put up with her and lead her about the wastes) had turned into a dud in a single firefight yesterday.

Julie’s little black rifle was a lemon. It had jammed on her three times yesterday—the last malfunction being a particularly nasty double-feed that had her finishing the fight with her 10mm rather than fixing it mid-battle. She’d thought it was the magazine, until she’d unloaded them all last night and found that she’d kept the one with the weak magazine spring set aside in a rear-mounted pouch on her travelling saddle so she wouldn’t pull it by mistake. Then she went to tearing the rifle down, pulling the upper receiver off and dropping the bolt carrier out—which was surprisingly dirty after only roughly twenty-two rounds and cementing her distaste for the M-series rifle in general. But that shouldn’t have been enough to cause the gun to choke so much, so quickly. Recoil spring seemed fine—a bit weak, but not so much as to cause cycling issues. Could’ve been ammo related, but she didn’t think they were under-loaded, at least not from the recoil impulse she felt. Couldn’t rule it out completely, though, not when 5.56mm and civilian .223 measured their pressures differently and the bolt was so dirty from less than thirty rounds.

So that left the gas tube, and she was glad to be a unicorn who could fight difficult-to-remove parts with magic instead of just wishing she could. By luck, she’d had an old pipe cleaner that was sized just right for the tube and spent roughly ten minutes cleaning it out, and by the time she was done the cleaner was solid black and in need of a good cleaning itself. She didn’t think it would fix the epidemic jamming problems by itself, but it was a start.

Hence, her search for a merchant who knew firearms, or rifles at least, while she searched out potential sources of water in the town’s only real structure of worth (and the seedy dance club in the back had her doubting its value). And as she was woefully discovering, that kind of knowledge was not very common.

Or taught, even.

“….you jest, surely,” she droned to the twitchy-eyed, fidgety griffon before her, ignoring the other nine conversations going on in the bar as best she could.

“Ya wish, babe,” the black-feathered, gold-furred male huffed back. “Hell, I didn’t even know those guns had gas tubes you could clean. Or that it was that much of a pain in the ass to pull the forends off.”

An irritable swish of her tail was her only sign of displeasure at being called ‘babe’, and of the fact that she had just received her first sign that today wasn’t going to be a good one. “And you’ve been at this how long?”

“Look, stable girl, not everybody gets lucky and gets an education like you,” he spat at her. “Maybe one in three folk can read, if that. I got by okay learnin’ by error and hard luck, but there’s lots I don’t know. Gunsmiths, real ones, like you? Folk’ll be whoring themselves out to you as their payment for fixin’ their guns up right. I think yer on to somethin’ about the ammo, though. Bolt shouldn’t be that dirty from less than thirty shots. You got wasteland-made or pre-war stuff?”

“Mix of both, it seems,” she replied. “Sad thing is, with 5.56mm it can be hard to tell them apart from pre-war rounds side by side. Always hated that military-contract rounds have that discolored, dirty once-fired look to them even brand new, and wasteland rounds look exactly the same in just about every caliber. I’m afraid to pull the bullets and check the gunpowder ‘cause that’s ammo I might need later, but…”

“Yeah, no real way to tell for sure if you’re not willin’ to go that much trouble,” he agreed. “And good luck with spare parts good enough to use. Ain’t been a workin’ factory pumpin’ out fresh parts since the megaspells.”

“…I heard different,” she said, briefly recalling once that Ada had mentioned that her side of the prairie could make stuff even the Union couldn’t get. Like optics, and gun parts. Gun parts that she desperately needed. “Supposed to be an outfit or two near the big city that can make scopes or fab some gun parts.”

“Not on a regular enough schedule that you can count on it when you need it,” the griffon said with a sour note. “There was a little shop that was crankin’ out scopes, but they shut down ‘bout six months ago. Some piece of equipment finally gave out, and they can’t fix it, so they’re done for unless somebody can find ‘em a replacement. Same with the little ammo plant north of the city, they lost their access to an old copper mine some distance out, can’t coat their bullets anymore and they won’t make ammo that ain’t copper-coated. They say it keeps barrels from getting leaded up and helps ‘em last longer. But you’d know more about that me.”

“And they’re right,” she sighed, growing more disappointed with every turn this conversation took. Either Ada had been lying, or she’d been away from her home range long enough to miss out on these developments, and she was leaning towards her being gone too long. “Smokeless powder is what lets us push past the sound barrier and go super-sonic on our bullets. But at that speed, the rifling in the barrels will literally sheer lead off an uncoated bullet as it’s pushed out. Leaded barrels can have pressure and accuracy issues that are hard to fix without a good, strong cleaning solvent. But copper slides across the rifling a lot easier, lets that bullet scream out like an angry wasp. Barrel quality can have an effect on service life too. Early M-series rifles were known to have crude barrels with a lifespan of roughly five thousand rounds, even if they were chrome-lined, but a good, quality hammer-forged barrel could go for twenty-thousand. Government rifles had the crude barrels because they were easier and cheaper to make and cheaper to replace in armorer maintenance. But even a hammer-forged barrel will let go if it’s worn out and shot too much.”

“…that might actually explain what happened to a couple of burst barrels I’ve seen,” the griffon bemoaned wistfully. Hell, his eyes even glistened a little. “Two bolt-action .308s, three years apart. First one, the owner got lucky and didn’t get hurt. Second dude lost an eye. Gun was worn to shit, so the bolt didn’t hold together like it’s designed to when somethin’ goes wrong and part of it came back at him in the face. What was left of the barrel looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in years, and I remember both of ‘em havin’ cartridges they’d rolled themselves, with solid lead bullets.”

Her left eye twitched uncomfortably, flashing back to a certain griffon and a sharp claw raking across her face. “So now that you’ve crushed my hopes of getting this damn thing straightened out, did any water caravans come in yesterday afternoon?”

“One,” he answered flatly. “Got in just before dark, should be setting up down south of here, in that old lot for farm combines and tractors. They’re here to resupply the town, but they usually carry enough to fulfill a contract twice so they can sell to individual travelers and caravans they meet along the way. Should be plenty to go around for everybody, but they don’t plan on staying long.”

Her heart did an about-face, its constant beat becoming livelier even as caution and past experience reminded her of what happened the last time she’d asked around for a water salespony. “This one for real?” she huffed quickly. “Because some assholes tried to kill me yesterday, saying they were water merchants to draw me away from everybody in town, and I’m not in the mood for a second attempt.”

“So that’s what all that racket was,” he said absently, one of his talons reaching for his water canteen in front of him. “Nah, this one’s legit, got Runners guarding it. But now I’m curious who it is you got so pissed at you. Just faking the water merchant part’ll get you in deep shit with just about everybody. Hurtin’ people’s trust in the one Union-sourced good the Runners will actually protect….bad for everybody.”

“Some outfit of well-armed raiders who named themselves after an old zoo pen—”

The griffon’s mood changed almost instantly, and not for the better. “Oh shit me, Pythons,” he muttered with a startle, his body straightening up in his chair. “…whatever business you got in town, you need to finish it quick and get movin’. You don’t wanna know what they do to folk who kill a few of their friends.”

“I’m trying, believe me,” she huffed as she hopped out of her chair. “How long is this caravan staying here?”

“Long enough, if you quit wastin’ yer time with me and get to it. Hell, those Runners might even be able to sort your rifle out for ya, they use that M-series more than anybody else, ‘sides the Union. You’ll need it.”

Fuuuu—gods dammit why did you go and say that, now I’m definitely going to need it! But she managed to keep her displeasure of his untimely statement to herself, instead focusing her energy into reaching the water caravan and talking them into staying put a while longer.

Which, it turned out, was as easy as simply showing up.

As she neared the end of her five-minute journey, she recognized—or thought she did—at least two of the ponies gathered around a convoy of ten wagon carts, currently parked in that farm combine lot the town “gunsmith” had politely pointed out earlier. Light Tail had gone into fairly good detail about some ponies and griffons she’d thought were either mercs or Pythons yesterday, down to their weapons and the accruements upon them, and two of these souls seemed to match her descriptions pretty close. An earth pony mare, with a green mane and tail and a purple coat that was disturbingly familiar, and her .308-caliber battle rifle mounted in a battle saddle on the left side, was standing guard on the south side of the convoy, and a tan-colored unicorn mare with silvery mane and tail (like Julie, even, just like the squirt said) who seemed to favor a pair of 10mm pistols with extended magazines was the closest pony in sight at the front. Light Tail also mentioned that she wasn’t sure if they were mercs or just well-armed wastelanders passing through because they had no armor, but she saw within two seconds that at least six of the seventeen souls attending the brahmin and their life-preserving cargo were all wearing the Runners’ favored desert camo armored barding, and felt her fears of her next few minutes of life greatly eased. If she was lucky, one of these Runners could at least take a look at Julie’s rifle and see if they knew what manner of voodoo was afflicting it—

—the gunslinger mare at the front threw her off her initial game plan when she raised a foreleg and beckoned her closer upon sighting her, but then again, she was probably also acting as a sort of point contact for the water caravan—

—her assumption was proven correct when she came within twenty feet of the caravan. “How much you need?” the tan mare asked gently, despite the lack of proper introductions.

Not that she was offended. Folk walking up to a water caravan probably only had one thing in mind, so asking “what do you need” seemed somewhat pointless. “Enough for four ponies and two dogs for at least a week.”

“Age ranges, besides yourself?”

Wow, she’s quick with the sales. Must do this a lot. “One other adult, early twenties…two fillies, one ten and one fourteen, and the dogs are huskies, about….five months old, is my best guess. We found them in the east, without their mother or the rest of the litter, just old enough to be weaned.”

“Shit, that’s a lot to be carrying at one time,” the mare commented lightly, turning her attention to a clipboard she’d pulled out of her right saddle bag and began flipping through its attached pages—and then abruptly stopped after the second page and jerked her gaze back upward. “…wait, did you say two huskies?”

Her subconscious began pointing out the weight of her various weaponry spread across her travelling saddle—shotgun on her left side, 10mm forward of the left saddlebag, Grayhawk forward of the right saddle bag, and that sweet .223 revolver behind the right bag, with Julie’s malfunction-prone carbine hanging off of her torso by its sling. For the life of her, though, she couldn’t figure out why she was even worried about the Runners turning their guns on her. “….yeah?”

The mare’s eyes scrutinized her face for a couple of seconds, and swiftly stowed her clipboard away as they widened in some form of inner epiphany coming to life within her brain. “Sweet Luna’s cheeks, it’s you—”

Oh, shit—

“Hey, guys, up here!!” the mare yelled over her withers, turning away from her briefly. “It’s the Saurus slayer!!”

She put it together in the time it took the other five Runners to drop what they were doing and jog over to her position. Ada and Leon had probably managed to get a message or two back to the rest of their group, or at least with these six, maybe as a back-up plan in case she had to flee Rough Port before the two griffons could catch up to her. Have them keep an eye out for her, or at the very least tell them why they shouldn’t be too terribly quick to open fire on her. She should have expected as much.

But she was not expecting the reaction of seeing her in the flesh to be one of near-hero worship.

“For real?” the purple coated mare squealed (squealed!), her happy, bouncing trot giving away her level of glee and joy as clearly as a gunshot in the open air. “The one girl that raping sack of shit couldn’t wrestle to the ground is right there?!”

“Thought you’d be taller,” a griffon remarked aloud, his rifle slung across his chest as he dropped to all fours and drew closer. Pale gold coat, off-white feathers. “But shit, yeah, there’s that Phoenix .44, I’m amazed Ada didn’t hit on you to get closer to it.”

Oh, godsdammit, it’s always the gun with these griffons—

A yellow-coated unicorn stallion, bearing a black rifle like hers and fitted with what looked like a short-range optic and a suppressor, strolled in behind the purple mare with a quizzical look to his eyes. “She said you didn’t have a rifle, that you might need one ‘till she caught up with you but…where’d that one come from?”

“It’s not mine,” Sling answered cautiously, carefully pulling the rifle’s sling up and over her neck as she released the magazine and worked the bolt to eject the chambered round into her telekinesis field. “It’s Julaya’s. She kept it hidden away for emergencies, but it’s not working out too well.”

“So that’s how you got here without using the roads!” he said, a pale gold glow wafting off his horn as he took the rifle into his possession and promptly pulled the retaining pin out on the lower receiver. “That girl could cross the whole prairie and never once come within sight of a road to do it! So what’s the trouble with the gun?”

She watched the rifle’s upper swing off of the lower receiver on the forward retaining pin, allowing the bolt carrier and charging handle to be pulled out for his inspection, though he seemed more interested in the buffer tube inside the stock. “Had three malfunctions in a fight yesterday,” she replied, keeping as close an eye on the stallion and rifle as she could while scoping out the other two Runners drawing closer towards the growing crowd. One griffon, gold fur and stone gray feathers, possibly female judging by her more lithe build compared to the male to her right, with a modified service rifle that had been fitted with black plastic, rounded fore end guards rather than the usual triangle style she saw in the Union’s trooper corps. “Two stovepipes, last malf was a pretty nasty doublefeed that had me beating the stuck rounds out with a cleaning rod and a little rubber mallet I keep in my repair kit. When she first lent it to me I spent a couple of minutes giving it a once-through with a cleaning brush and oiling the bolt carrier, but I didn’t have time to break it down and really clean it, so I can’t rule that out. Ammo was dirty as shit, though, I was coming up with almost pitch-black patches off the bolt carrier last night and I only fired about twenty rounds.”

“Eewww, sounds like old surplus crap,” he remarked with slight disgust, putting the lower receiver up to his eyeball to get a better look into the buffer tube after illuminating it with a light spell. “Stuff will gunk up the rifle really quick and that’s about the worst ammo you can put in an M-series, the way that gas impingement blows all that junk back into the chamber. But twenty rounds shouldn’t have gotten it that dirty that quick. Buffer tube looks okay, so there’s that going for you…”

“Should be. Thing’s sealed inside the stock.”

“That doesn’t always help,” he sighed sadly. “I’ve seen some of these guns get used as a club, and the tube’s not built to take that kind of stress on a regular basis. Any misalignment of the tube can interfere with the recoil spring’s cycle and could cause the malfunctions you just mentioned, or seize it up altogether. Only fix is to rip off the tube and replace it, but I can’t tell if it’s a military or a commercial tube unless I pull the stock off.”

Up until now, she’d not thought there’d be any difference between a military contract gun and one built for a civilian customer. “There’s a difference?”

“Commercial tubes are a little wider in diameter, and the distance between the individual tracks in the threading is the same. On the mil-spec model the distance between the threads gets wider as it moves further down the tube. I work on these things a lot when I’m not wandering the wastes, and quite frankly they’re a pain in the ass once they start breaking down and wearing out. I’m sure they all worked great brand new, but we’re talking two hundred year-old guns that haven’t had fresh factory parts for just as long a time and I’m amazed when one works for a hundred rounds without a malfunction now.”

Sling’s eyes began to see Julie’s rifle in a much less kinder light. A weapon prone to epidemic jamming was almost no weapon at all. “…Julaya’s going to hate it when I tell her she got hosed when she bought it.”

Not finding anything off with the buffer tube, he went back to poking at the bolt carrier group, and this time he didn’t just look it over, he actively titled it and poked it in several key locations, mainly the bolt face and body, as well as the top of the bolt carrier itself. Probably looking for rough edges, or for signs that she might have been over-lubing it. “Doubt it was intentional, not a lot folk know much about guns, much less this model. Ada calls these crew-served weapons, and with all the work we’re putting into them to keep them going these days she’s not far off—”

—his poking and prodding of the bolt carrier finally produced a result. The gas key moved a little when he pulled at it ever so slightly. “Ah, there it is. Gas key’s loose.”

“Good or bad news?”

“Mostly bad,” he sighed. “Loose key means gas is leaking through the gaps and the carrier doesn’t cycle properly, and you start getting malfunctions no matter what else you do to correct it. Old as this gun is, there’s no telling how long it’s been running like that. I can try re-staking the gas key, but I don’t have the tools to do it here. If it really malf’ed that badly on you yesterday, you’re probably better off not using it.”

“You said you got into a fight yesterday,” the pistol-armed mare jumped back in, steering the conversation somewhat back on course. “Any idea who it was you tangled with? Nobody in town’s said anything about raiders so far today.”

Right, moment of truth, maybe they give a shit, maybe they don’t….

“….another merc group,” she answered. “Call themselves Pythons, after a zoo exhibit they live in—”

Six sets of eyes snapped back up at her, and none of them looked happy to hear what she’d had to say. “—aaaaaand who apparently bring up an ‘oh shit’ look when I say their name.”

“Who fired first? You, or them?” the mare asked next. Fair question, actually. They probably didn’t like getting dragged into fights that their “clients” started unless there was a really good reason for it.

“This isn’t our first fight,” she explained carefully. “First fight was back in Rough Port the other day. They weren’t looking for me outright, they’d come to grab this kid that wound up in indebted slavery to a jackass named Puck, and found me by accident. She says she was working on a cache of over a hundred MEW weapons that somebody had found, and she’d been brought in by the original seller to fix ‘em up to working condition while he searched out buyers. When she found out who the weapons were going to, she broke most of them and stole a few for herself. Hid them somewhere and took off, trying to get away from them. How she wound up with me is…a bit of a story.”

“….dammit, we should have picked those up when we had the chance,” the mare cursed lightly, though initially her mouth was trying to spit out fouler words. “We’ve heard some rumors about a weapons stockpile going up in flames in Withercha a while back, and that MEW cache was the first thing on our minds. We wanted ‘em, but not at the exorbitant price the seller was wanting, we’d have had nothing left afterward. But at least the Pythons didn’t get them, or most of us would be dust now. When they came for the kid, how many did you kill?”

“Four. Thought there might’ve been one or two more waiting outside, but I wasn’t eager to walk out into the dark and look around. Another group ambushed me on the west side of town yesterday, had at least one sniper that took my hind legs out, but one in the group had a laser rifle I was able to appropriate and turn on them. Nine bodies in total across the two fights. And I’m worried the next time they come at me, it’ll be with everybody they got in the area.”

“Raina, Tack, stick with her,” the pistolero barked almost immediately. “Consider the Pythons kill-on-sight. Rest of us will finish out the escort contract with the water caravan. Once they’re back in Trotpeka we’ll catch up with you back home.”

The stallion in front of her immediately began re-assembling her rifle, and had it back in one piece in roughly five seconds (including the somewhat tedious step of re-inserting the carrier and charging handle, which always gave her trouble). “Good thing you got almost as many pistols as you do hooves,” he snarked to her face as he floated it back over to her. “Got much in the way of armor-piercing hardware besides that laser rifle?”

“Eighteen rounds of black-tipped 5.56 and a motorized .223 revolver to shoot them through. My daughter’s got a Lightbringer 2000 with a modified barrel, I’m told it can penetrate just about any armor out there, but I don’t have very many power cells for it.”

“Doesn’t need many, coupla shots from an upgraded Lightbringer is usually enough,” the griffon female replied—Raina, she assumed, since the griffon was moving up as if she intended to invade her personal space. “If I know Julie all that well, she probably led you to this old diner on the west end of town. Big sign on top, an actual intact roof, right? She practically lived there for a year.”

“No wonder she was quick to point it out…”

“Lot worse spots to hide in. I’ll fly up and scout ahead, scope out the alleys and shit. We’ll probably meet up again when you’re halfway back. Tack, try to behave yourself.”

Her gut began to fill with dread at the prospect of being left alone with an amorous stallion, and latched onto her nearly forgotten business in hopes that she might end up being spared the trip. “W-wait, I still need that water—”

“You’re covered,” the gunslinger mare replied before she could finish. “Ada and Leon made like, five back-up plans in case something happened to screw up your planned rendezvous in Port. We’re plan number three, and they left us enough caps for a month’s worth of water for twelve souls. But that plan didn’t take into account you pissing off the Pythons….none of them did, actually. So we’re kinda moving into uncharted territory here. I’m sorry to say this, but you’re in a pretty shitty position and I don’t see a good way out of it. We’ll get the water sorted and set aside nearby. My suggestion is to get everyone together, come back for the water, and find a good defensible position to hold out in because that diner’s too big and too exposed. Beyond that, you’ll have to make it up as you go…like you’ve probably been doing all alo—”

A distant groan of thunder lazily made its way across the air, pulling Sling’s attention away from the Runners and towards the source of this new noise that seemed like it was a lot closer than the faintness of it sugge—

“—oly shit, that’s a big fireball!” Raina’s voice echoed from above, and even before the griffon could finish, Sling already knew in her gut what had just happened. “I think they started the party without you, stable girl!”

It had been agreed to start the ambush off hard. After spending the better part of thirty minutes temporarily blinded by that out-of-nowhere exploding light spell (he still couldn’t figure out how she knew their exact position or why she never bothered to finish them off), half the crew wanted to split and leave the stable mare alone, to hell with the twenty thousand caps Life Tap was offering for her PipBuck. The other half didn’t care as long as they got their share of the reward in the end. He was able to keep everybody onboard by adding the take from the sale of the mare’s little brat on top of their cut from the PipBuck bounty. Plenty of folk in the east were willing to pay a lot of caps for a little girl, and he wasn’t blind as to why. But as long as the money was good, he didn’t care what they did to their property afterward.

The plan was a very simple and forward affair. The PipBuck had a fairly short detection range, somewhere around fifty to seventy meters, and from the looks of it when he scoped the diner out with his binoculars, there wasn’t anybody in the dining floor at all. Made sense, really, the back rooms were better sheltered and kept squatters hidden from passing wanderers. It also meant his crew could get a little closer without being picked up right off. Say…sixty meters to the diner before they were detected, for the absolute best margin for error, and they would they break into a hard run, swarm the diner and overwhelm the stable mare before she could get her shit together. Best case scenario was that they wasted her with no casualties, and that was the scenario he laid out, but privately he was expecting to lose two to four based on how quickly she’d taken out Bittersweet’s crew the first time around even with the element of almost complete surprise. And even with her dead, those of them that survived would be looking to take their frustrations out on somebody. Like, say….Rally? He knew what he’d told Bitter, but he figured that if a few of them decided to take her aside somewhere and turn her into a mare—multiple times—before he got back with the bounty for the stable slut’s PipBuck, well, tough shit for Rally.

Ten meters before they were supposed to start running forward, a sharp fwoosh! and the sizzling of a two centuries-old rocket propellant sailed past the group in the form of an RPG, smashed into the diner front, blew the front door and the attached doorframe to bits along with about ten meters’ worth of the front wall around the blast point, and sent everybody’s ears into a ringing fit that drowned out almost all other sound in the world.

A simple, forward plan, and his hastily-gathered crew couldn’t even do that without shitting all over it! It was no wonder that stable mare was having such an easy time with them!

“Who the FUCK just did that?!”

The debris from the point of impact was just beginning to shower the empty lot in front of the diner when the culprit unwisely revealed his complicity in the questionable tactic—an earth pony stallion, light violet coat and purple-greenish mane that had everybody calling him a girl in hiding, and he’d apparently seen fit to break the rocket launcher out of storage at camp when nobody was looking. “You want that stable bitch throwing another damned spell at us?! That last one blinded us for damn near twenty minutes—”

He didn’t even notice his horn wrapping a telekinesis spell around his revolver, but it was impossible to not see the worn, scarred carbon steel .44 magnum coming up and putting two rounds into the launcher tube before the idiot could finish his sentence. The impact knocked the tube about in his grasp hard enough to make him drop the now-ruined launcher to the ground, and probably cracked the bones in his forelegs if his seething shriek of pain was accurate.

“We need that PipBuck intact and working to get that twenty thousand cap bounty!” he screamed back, re-holstering the pistol and turning his full fury onto this pleb who would probably be cleaning the latrine trenches back home with his tongue if he survived the journey back. “We need that little bitch alive and conscious if we want to find the last of the energy weapons she stole from us! We needed the element of surprise you just pissed away to get a shot at either of them without a fight, you ignorant fu—”

A bright, pinkish-red beam lashed out at the object of his rage, scoring a solid hit to the chest and momentarily engulfing his entire body in a brilliant orange glow—

“SPLIT!!” he yelled unnecessarily—everybody was already well on their way to getting out of sight of the front of the diner. He was mostly yelling because the ringing in his ears made it hard to hear much of anything clearly as he took to running himself, somewhere to the side of the diner where there weren’t any big open windows or openings to shoot through—

—at least, not for a dinky little pistol. To a laser rifle, the walls of a house or a diner was little more than a speed bump, and proved this quite harshly as another beam sliced through the side wall and came dangerously close to his face—

--his vision darkened somewhat, temporarily overloaded by the light and energy of the beam itself, but he could still see well enough to keep moving and opted to stop screaming commands and giving away his position to the shooter—

—a couple of his comrades weren’t quite that bright. He could hear them even from where he was. They’d found a side entrance, possibly a fire escape on the other side—

“Here!” a mare’s voice yelled out—sounded like Dusty Dove, one of the younger recruits they’d picked up last year in Withercha. Only half a tail, short mane, violet eyes and gray coat, and about as much sense as a street whore—which was her previous life, ironically. “Come on, le—”

He heard the laser rifle firing a quick volley of shots, four or five, depending on whether he thought he heard a fifth one or just a shifting change of tone in his ringing ears. What he did not hear was Dusty’s voice again, though he did hear a couple of other souls near there cursing and swearing at the weapon fire being directed at them.

Of particular note, however, was that the exit hole for the laser that had nearly burned him alive was a fair bit lower than he would have expected despite it nearly hitting him in the head—

—two more laser beams punched out of the wall a fair bit ahead of him, and this time he had a clear, complete look at their paths and slightly upward angle—

“Rally,” he growled angrily. The angle was about right for her height, given she would be aiming up a bit…

Fine, then. When they had her subdued and at their mercy, he’d rut her himself. To hell with what the boss wanted.

“All at once!!” he screamed to his posse, turning his body towards the closest entry point he could find—a large, glass-less window pane in the side, third one down the wall, and he’d have to climb over a table to complete his entry, but hopefully Rally would be too busy shooting at the others to take a shot at hi—

—a fourth laser bored through the wall and nearly took his left foreleg out, and he would have smacked himself for making the same mistake twice if he hadn’t been more concerned with getting into the diner, so he just pushed ahead with his goal, heading straight for that window and jumping through—

—he was surprised by how many of his guys were already inside and pushing their way through the dining floor. A dozen at the least, and if weren’t an asshole he would have been mildly proud of their restraint in refusing to shoot back despite the lethal laser fire cutting through the building like it was paper. He hoped they would stay calm a few seconds longer, they were almost to the kitchen area and the backrooms beyond—

—a frantic burst of lasers began blasting out towards his side of the diner, mostly aimed at the fire escape exit he’d noticed a couple guys ahead of him plowing through, and he thought he saw a brief flash of orange out of the corner of his eye—

“RUN!!” Rally’s voice screamed frantically amidst the laser fire, confirming his earlier suspicions but also raising a curious question. If Rally was the one doing most of the shooting and screaming out orders, was that stable bitch even here?! Had she parted company and shacked up with somebody el—

—Sky Showers’s lavender body was right at the door to the “employee only” hallway and almost made it in when it burst open seemingly of its own accord and smacked her in the face, and Showers stumbled back, stunned by both the door and the bloody nose she’d gotten from it—

—the culprit wasn’t Rally, or even the stable bitch. It was a little filly, whose coat was a lighter shade of teal blue than the mare he’d come for, and she had the same indigo mane and tail, except that her tail had this really weird and nice-looking streak of electric blue in it that stood out like a glowing light now that she was running at full speed, and even matched with her electric blue eyes. And she was gunning right for that fire exit door to his right, right into the path of two of his guys—

—no, scratch that, just one, he took a really quick look right, and saw the last embers of a pony’s incinerated outline billowing away in the light breeze flowing through the diner’s open windows, and only one other green-coated earth pony he remembered as Nail stood between the girl and her freedom, but that was enough. Kid didn’t look like she had the stones to even pull a gun on anybody. “Hold still you little sh—”

—the kid’s horn began shimmering with a soft electric blue glow, and a 9mm pistol whipped itself out in front of her and let off a single shot at Nail’s right foreleg, scoring a hit on his unprotected knee and turning his command into a shrill scream of pain as he stumbled to a half-standing stop—

—she didn’t shoot again, but she did take half a second to take a swing at Nail, just below the throat, and surprised him a second time in two seconds when the hit caused Nail to drop to the ground the rest of the way, gasping as if he’d just been slugged in the gut, and the filly dashed on past him and out of the door—

Okay, more trouble than I thought, he berated himself. “Four of you, get after that kid—”

—a pair of husky pups darted out of the swinging door to the back rooms and followed the filly’s trail almost exactly, even taking a moment to bite Nail on their way past him as he was starting to recover from the sucker-throat punch and drawing blood and screams in the process—

—he left Nail where he was and started to move forward when a black and white blurry, pony-sized ball flipped over the counter of the open kitchen area, uncurling into a zebra mare with a silvery mane and tail and ice blue eyes, and not even a moment later she simply started leaping forward, zig-zagging through all of his crew and slugging them in the throat or the face as she passed by them—

—when she reached her fourth and final victim two seconds later, she took a brief moment to snap the pin off of one of his grenades and allowed the arming handle to fly off, flipped over him and bucked him squarely in the backside to send him tumbling further into the diner as she made a quick exit out one of the front windows. He barely had time to even process what had just gone down, and if he hadn’t recognized Julaya by the sight of her eyes and her favorite sword strapped across her back, he would have been justifiably angry at his crew for failing to get a shot off. But if any one mare in the wasteland could simply leap into a crowd of heavily armed mercenaries, run and leap her way through their ranks with a few quick blows in just the right place to bring said mercs to their knees, and devise a way to keep anyone from giving chase….it would be Julaya.

“FRAG INCOMING—”

Quickest—and safest—path away from the live grenade was the back of the diner, where Rally was having herself a grand time blazing away at them and where they needed to be right then anyway. Those who could still get up and run, did so in the fastest manner possible, breaking the back hallway door down and leaping over the kitchen counter in a quick stream—

—he himself chose the hallway door, made it through and clamped his forehooves over his ears just as the grenade went off. It helped, a little bit, but did nothing for the three separate screaming voices now coming from the dining floor. He was assuming one of Julaya’s melee victims did not survive the blast…

He counted about seven bodies ahead of him as he scrambled back upright and followed behind them, and no one behind him. Nail was probably still alive but limping, and then there were the three screaming fools the grenade had wounded….subtract three more guys that Rally had dusted with her laser rifle, and he asked for four guys to try and catch that filly that had gotten past them….so it looked like more than that had gone after her instead. Seven?

…well, eight of them would be enough to get Rally. She’d probably drop two or three more of them before they got to her, but when they did….

He was starting to get a little excited at the prospect, despite the deathly violence being inflicted on them right then. Maybe if he’d let Bittersweet claim the prize he’d wanted out of her, he’d have been a lot more careful with his planning…

His guys had crowded the hall, and Rally was not stupid. She just started blasting them through the walls around the door to the break room, and felled one of them with body shots and incinerated another before they could break the door open and swarm in. The first pony through the door died halfway through it, a headshot that seared through his skull and left a sizzling, cauterized hole in the back of his head. The second pony to get through was a little luckier, in that he managed to hop past the body and get inside the room before a .357 magnum lit up the interior, and his ears started ringing from the sharp muzzle blast even from the hallway.

The third pony, a lithe little mare named Rain who’d learned the value of ducking and weaving to live long enough to get close to her prey, finally succeeded by doing exactly that. Ducking her head and body down as she rushed through, probably leaping about to avoid the two gunshots that missed her and went through the wall instead, and when he didn’t hear any gunshots after a couple of seconds he followed her and the rest of his surviving team into the break room—

—and found Rally’s pink body sprawled out on the floor, her nose leaking blood and her odd dual-colored blue and purple mane looking like a disheveled mess. Henric’s laser rifle was on the floor a few feet away from her, its spark battery chamber empty, suggesting that she’d run the battery dry and was trying to change it out when the second pony tried his luck, forcing her to fall back on her six-shot magnum. Said magnum wasn’t that far from the kid’s grasp, but Rain’s jaws were clamped down on the unicorn’s horn and keeping her from using any of her magic to get back into the fight.

That just left that pesky metal leg to deal with….

“You little piss slut,” he spat at her face, pushing the revolver aside with a foreleg while one of his guys shut the door behind them. Seemed they already had a clue what he was planning, and probably hoping they’d get a shot at her. “Been nothin’ but a pain in our ass for months, and now you’ve gone and killed half a dozen of us at least. Any chance of our bein’ lenient on you just got pissed away. Only thing you’ll get from tellin’ us where you stashed what’s left of that cache you ruined is a quick death, and you get this one chance at it. What’s it gonna be?”

Rally wasn’t one to just give up and roll over. She was too feisty and mouthy for that, and she had a habit of sometimes saying exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time. This was one of those times, and he couldn’t have been happier about it. “Fuck you.”

The one eye that could see through her mane—her left eye had a good part of it hanging off the front of her face—widened fearfully at the sight of his growing, sickly grin. “Thanks for the offer, I’ll take it. Get her up on that couch.”

“Oh shi—” was Rally’s last words before Rain yanked her up on her hooves and threw her onto a dusty couch at the back of the room, and rushed in and clamped her jaws back down on the base of her horn before she could start flinging telekinetic punches at them. The two other guys that survived the rush into this room—he couldn’t remember their names aside from the fact that they had varying shades of brown coats and manes—took it upon themselves to immobilize her even further. One had her right leg pinned down with both forehooves, and the other made her sure her hind legs stayed out of the way. He even had her tail in his jaws….okay, yeah, they knew what he wanted. They’d get their turn.

“Thought the boss told us to save her for him,” the stallion on his right mumbled.

“After the shit she just pulled, she ain’t gonna live that long,” he huffed back, taking a moment to soak in the visibly trembling yearling before him. Rain had her face pressed into the couch and had managed to find herself a comfortable seat in the cushion next to her, but kept a foreleg pressing down on the kid’s withers nonetheless. “I can, in fact, clearly remember her taking her own gun to her head and blowing her little genius brains out in front of us. Don’t you?”

“Sad shit, that,” his compatriot agreed nonchalantly. “Make it quick, I want a turn.”

“Everybody’s gonna get a shot, don’t worry about that,” he promised as he drew closer to the couch, and the terrified, gasping breathing sounds she was making was delicious, as were those muffled, pained screams she was letting out into the couch. He just hoped she didn’t piss all over him while he was busy—

—the door shattered apart behind them just before he could get on top of her, and he whipped about to blast this unwelcome intrusion in the face with his .44—

For a short, brief moment, she was back in that tent, with that mangy mare and her zebra boyfriend, being pinned down as the zebra was about to begin his dark deed, and she was pretty sure she’d be pissing herself any moment now. Her only concrete, coherent thought, beyond “Oh my god no” repeated ad infinitum, was that she hoped she’d end up pissing on her rapist in the middle of the deed and make him stop, and at least then they’d just kill her out of spite and be done with it. That bitch biting down on her horn knew just where to bite down and how hard to bite to cause any attempt at casting a spell to turn into a terrible headache, and with her legs immobilized and one of the stallions holding her tail up and out of the way, she couldn’t see any other way out of this mess alive or intact. She was screwed, in literally every sense of the word, and the only thing she could do was deny them any satisfaction they’d get out of her.

Didn’t make the upcoming horror any easier. She was half-certain her own fear and terror would have her pissing the floor before he could start, and then she really would be out of options.

And then Hell walked in.

…well, no. More like she blew the door up, she could hear it shattering and snapping into pieces, and heard chunks of the door flying off and hitting the floor on the far end of the room. And even through her hearing-protected ears, she could still make out the sound of a revolver’s hammer cocking back, and then a second one almost immediately after that—

—Hell screamed, in all of her indignant rage, simultaneously becoming the most terrifying and most beautiful sound she’d hear that day. “You’re all fucking DEAD—”

She thought her .357 was loud in this room, even with that spell on her ears muffling all incoming sound, but what went off behind her was even louder than that. She could feel the concussion of the muzzle blast all the way inside her ribcage—

—the sickos pinning her to the couch all jumped off and started going for their weapons, even as that cannon went off again and spra—

…sprayed…blood and…bits of skull and flesh all over the wall? With some gray stuff mixed in…

The gun went off a third time in about two seconds, and this time she could just barely hear the thud of a body slumping to the floor, and when she finally found the nerve to look over her withers (and get her tail back down where it belonged), she saw that perpetually angry stable mare looking like she was preparing to pull this last living stallion of the group apart, limb by limb, with what looked like a half dozen separate telekinesis spells, judging by the way all four legs were held and stretched out from his body and his head and neck were being forced to look straight up at the ceiling.

The stallion that had been doing most of the talking was clearly not saying anything, ever again. He lay on the floor near Sling, his body convulsing as his head wound leaked crimson into a thick pool beneath his head. Another stallion, much of his brown coat obscured by his forest camouflaged armored barding, was missing a good chunk of the back of his skull and she didn’t want to think on how his face looked. The mare was in a very similar state, though the hole looked bigger on her smaller head.

But for some reason, Sling had yet to kill this last gang rapist, and she was half-hoping that the stable pony was saving that kill for her….

“…you okay, Rally?” Sling somehow managed to say in a far calmer, nicer voice, despite the flow of anger clearly flowing through her face right then. “Did…did they—”

“N-no,” she blurted quickly, her body still shaking and trembling, and she forced herself to lay down on the couch, her limbs folded beneath her in the hopes that staying stationary would work the shakes out, or at least minimize them to the point where she wouldn’t end up wetting herself. “…three more seconds, though, and….”

Five sharp snaps of bone pierced through her muffled hearing, in tune with the stallion’s four legs bending in directions they weren’t meant to bend and his head being shoved back hard enough to snap the vertebrae for what many believed to be an instant kill, if done right. His body was flung off to the side of the room a moment later, though the effort seemed to wind the stable mare out slightly.

Elly did not ever need to know about that part. Her bleeding heart would have conniptions over her mother casually killing somebody like that, but Rally didn’t care. Hell, she would have gone and killed the bastard herself if Sling had decided to let go of him.

With no one left to lay her righteous anger upon, Sling took to collecting as much gear and supplies off of her victims as she could, but not before gathering up the laser rifle and .357 magnum and laying them upon the couch beside her, along with the rest of her stuff. “…I’m sorry,” Sling heaved with a slight breath. “I should’ve been here, shouldn’t have left I—”

“I’m alive, you’re alive, Elly’s alive, that zebra’s alive, these guys are dead, and I’m still a virgin so let’s just leave it at that, ‘kay?” Rally’s voice pleaded of its own accord. Still too shook up to do much of anything, she just lay there and stared at the laser rifle, kicking herself mentally for not making sure the battery was at full charge when she had the time. A full battery could go for thirty shots…unless the capacitor was one of the cheaper, less efficient ones. That was the one kicker with the Mark IV laser MEWs, being able to swap out parts and components on the fly didn’t always mean that all the parts were of equal quality. And she hadn’t had a really good look at the entire weapon just yet…

“…are you good to move? I ran into some Runners willing to help me out…got some water waiting for us, we need to get out of here, get back with Light Tail and Julie and find somewhere else to shack up for a bit.”

Runners? And…wait, come to think of it, if Sling had just watched her kid fly out of the place like her tail was on fire…

“…wait, you…you came for me first? You…you saw your kid leaving and came for me first?”

Sling’s magic focused on her initial would-be rapist, ripping his gun belt and saddlebags off and tucking his revolver aside in her own bags as she rummaged through his stuff. “Julie was right behind her. And aside from that initial explosion, all the shooting seemed to be coming from you. I was assuming none of them were willing to shoot back for fear of killing you before they had a chance to ask about your MEW cache, and they didn’t seem to know if I was there or not. The seven that chased after El-Tee and Julie never looked back, so I sent the Runners to catch up with them while I came here. I was half-tempted to wait and come back once they were safe, but something told me to come here first….glad I listened to that gut instinct now….”

She meant to say something like “no effing shit!”, but what came out instead was a garbled mess that sounded like the wail of a crying foal. Her brain was still trying to process and sort everything despite the fact that she knew what had just gone down, and it was coming to a crashing halt at the part where she was about two seconds away from…

Nononononononono don’t go there don’t go there go somewhere else somewhere else—

“….y’know, if you wanted to take off right now, I wouldn’t stop you,” Sling’s voice broke in solemnly. “…I said I would look out for you and I can’t even do that right….”

“Actually, you’re doing a better job than just about everybody else I met in my life, next to that Union squad that scooped me off the ground after I lost my leg. So…um…that, that deal you gave me? It’s starting to look a lot better than it did when you left, ‘cause if it had been just me…I wouldn’t be walking out of here, ever….”

“You can give me an answer when you’re not scared half to death and thinking a lot more clearly,” the stable mare rebuffed her, gently and probably wisely, so she tried not to be pissed at her and start screaming “hypocrite bitch” at her face. “I ca—”

Sling’s head snapped back up suddenly, staring out at the doorway she’d blown apart, and Rally didn’t need to guess too hard at why she suddenly found the hallway so interesting. That PipBuck, and its E.F.S….

“…those seven turned back, didn’t they?”

“…yeah, they did, shit,” Sling hissed sharply. “No idea if they saw me or if they’re just coming back to see why they heard three gunshots when the goal was to take you alive, but they’re here and they’re close. Get all of your stuff together, we have to leave.”

The highly selfish desire to avoid a repeat of what had just happened proved to be a very strong motivator—once she had her bag and her guns strapped on she practically glued herself to Sling’s path as the mare abandoned her looting and slipped on out the door. From the hallway they could either go right to a side exit, or head on to the left and take a very short hall to a fire exit in the back of the building, near the kitchen—

—Sling decided on left and walked, quickly but quietly, her head on a ball-bearing swivel as she tried to make sense of her EFS readings, but the voices in the dining floor made it a moot exercise—

“Shitfire, are we the only ones left!?” a raspy stallion’s voice howled through the walls.

“Oh, yeah, that’s what happens when YOU DON’T SHOOT BACK!!” another stallion yelled back furiously. “And nobody said anything about damn Runners being on their side, we can’t hide here long—”

“No shit asshole, hurry up and help me dig this bullet out of my leg so I can quaff that potion!!”

Hunh. Sounded like Sling’s Runner friends had taken some potshots at them, probably to “encourage” them that Light Tail and Julaya were not the enticing targets they appeared to be….

Sling’s left forehoof motioned to that little hallway up ahead, followed by a soft press to the lips, as if to say “flee quietly”—

—but she’d hardly gotten within ten feet of it when a pained stallion’s voice rose up in a groan, apparently from a position where he was able to peer into the employee entrance to these back rooms and see her—

“H-hey, movement, th-that damn stable pony—”

“Shit, should’ve have killed him on my way in,” Sling cursed softly, her shotgun sliding out of its scabbard. “Back exit, go now—”

She whipped ahead and through that doorway before Rally could protest or beg her to go back the other way, and in the next instant that shotgun started going off and making any further conversation almost impossible. Part of her wanted to forget what she’d been told and go in after her, help her, kill more of these raping Pythons with the laser rifle and the .357 th—

“—uck me she’s pissed—”

—that she’d totally forgotten to reload, she realized in the next moment. Laser rifle too. She had half a minute’s peace back there and she just sat on the couch like a terrified little filly (which she kinda was but that was not excuse) and watched Sling loot the dead and tried not to think of how close she’d been to being violated and used. And now she could only watch as Sling rushed in, diverted all the attention to herself so she could continue being a scared little girl and flee out the back with her tail tucked between her quivering haunches.

It was almost as humiliating as what they’d tried to do to her, and it was all she could to follow Sling’s instructions and go on ahead, to the left, to that back exit, without her. To kick it open with her forehooves as the gunfire’s intensity picked up and she started hearing pistols and the rapid fire of full-automatic rifles, to keep running off towards the first good piece of cover she could see in the ruined town lots behind the diner—

—flashes of light flickered through the open door behind her, just as a very strange sound began reverberating through the air, like an explosion in the water, but louder, and she turned back to the source just in time to see the diner implode on itself and begin crumbling into a dusty pile of rubble almost instantly.

With Sling still inside.

With. Sling. Inside.

The Sling Shot that had come back for her first and left her daughter’s safety to others.

She was still in there and the whole place was coming down on her and there was no way she could get out in time.

Not until that big, dead sign of a mare’s silhouette tumbled off the shattering room and lurched forward onto terra firma with a screeching crash did she snap out of her stunned state of mind and find any strength and courage to rush back.

Chapter 20

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Dream Interlude #1: Blue Swede

Author's Note

This was originally intended to be part of the 21st chapter, but upon looking it over I decided it would be better off if split off into a separate interlude instead. For the measly record, a good deal of this was based on a dream I had quite similar to this one, with some silly embellishments added here and there because I can. Enjoy the little peek of what sometimes goes on in my head when I'm in dreamland!

Dream Interlude #1: Blue Swede

The vast, open field before her radiated a soft, beautiful light, courtesy of the sun that sat high above the world in the deep blue skies. Clusters of trees and small rolling hills broke up an otherwise flat landscape, and the crisp, clean air around her was like nothing else she’d ever experienced.

None of it could match the awesomeness of her thousands of legionaries charging forward to decimate the dark elven sorcerers for the glory of the Lunar Empress. These weren’t pony soldiers, but tall, strong pink-skinned bi-pedal creatures with no fur, no claws of any sort, and who wore indigo-colored plate armor adorned in dark blue tribal markings, as befitting those who served in the Empress’s legions. They had arms like monkeys, but stood upright and straight, and could talk like ponyfolk. Amongst their number, they fielded even larger-sized bi-ped creatures who looked like the pink-skins, but were made of stone and bore indigo chainmail armor, though she couldn’t imagine why stone colossi creatures with no boy parts would want to wear clothes. She was just thankful their magical lightning bolts were aimed at the dark elves and not her.

To the left and right of her pinkskins and their colossal constructs, mechanical marvels of war and destruction rolled forward, laying waste to the elvish beasts and monsters that served their dark masters. She absently remembered them as tanks and artillery vehicles, gliding forward on thick treads and glistening with brightly polish steel-gray armor two inches thick and enchanted to resist the elvish magic. The tanks’ cannons unleashed blast of destructive arcane beams that exploded on impact and wiped out hordes of the elvish creatures, while the artillery pieces hung back and launched their shells into the back ranks of the enemy. The rather mundane shells did their work in explosive fashion, but compared to the magic employed by the rest of her legion, the decidedly modern tech of the artillery left her a bit….wanting.

Not that it really mattered. The dark elves had no technology to aid them, only their shadow magics and their really incredible agility, and being mean and dark and mysterious and stuff. They were taller than the pinkskins, but had a dark grayish, almost smokey skin color and were more limber and lithe compared to the muscular, stocky pinkskins. Their long, black hair flowed like water off their heads, and their really long, pointed ears were almost comical in their appearance. Their beasts were…well, beasts. She couldn’t get a good look at them from where she was standing, but most of them were quada--…quare…oh, frick it, four-legged monsters that looked kind of like hogs, but with six eyes, black fur, four tusks, and a very long snout with row after row of jagged, needle-like teeth.

Against her tanks, they were mostly just roadkill. Larger sized beasts, dark, nightmarish monstrosities that looked like deer and bears mostly, fared little better.But there was this one elvish unit that had her worried, mostly because it was really big. Like, forever big, or maybe just a hundred feet tall, taller than even her colossi constructs. It was kinda like an elvish version of her colossi, modeled on the dark elves and apparently built to outdo the colossi in scale and power. It hung way in the back, for now, but every large step it took brought it a lot closer to the frontline. But it was taking its time for some reason she couldn’t fathom, so it would take a while to get in attack range.

And as she stared out at the field of battle from her perch atop a hill, at the rear of her forces, she could only marvel at the awesomeness of it all. The pinkskins and their magical stone constructs, the tanks and artillery, the glorious sight of the Lunar Empress’s colors adorning the armor and shields….

…and the sheer absurdity of defeated soldiers and elves flying up and away from battle as they were knocked away, with little cries of “aarrrgghh!!” and “waaaaaah!!” as their bodies turned bright blue and broke apart into millions of square-shaped bits of light. This was the most awesome life-sized board game she had ever played—

“Wait, board game?”

In the time it took her to blink, her world—and all the awesome stuff in it—was switched out with a much less enticing communal showering room and the harsh, prickly touch of a soapy brush running up and down her back. A small crowd of souls around her—griffons, ponies, and a couple of zebras—were likewise busy washing away the filth and dirt of the wastelands, though it looked like a couple of them were starting to take a little more interest in her. Whether that was a good thing or not, well….

“Yeah, like, a board game, but played in an open field, or somethin’,” she answered Rally’s question with a shake of her head to whip her slick, wet mane out of her eyes. Three weeks on the west side of the valley had already taught her how lucky she’d been to be able to wind up in places that had actual running water, let alone soap and working showers. "It was a dream, okay? Doesn’t always make sense.”

“This one sure don’t,” the teen responded from her left. She was pretty sure this communal bathing hall once had stall dividers, but it looked like most of them had fallen off over the decades and so now it was just a few rows of porcelain barriers that adults could still peek over, at least if you were lucky and got to use one of the center stalls. She and Rally had to settle for the wall mounted showers, but at least they could bathe (even though Rally had to take her metal leg off first and was kinda having trouble standing and turning around on three legs). “What the hell do these pinkskins even look like? Or how do you know they got pink skin if they’re all armored up?”

“They…well, they kinda look like monkeys, only they’re about six feet tall, and they stand and walk upright and not hunched over and stuff, and they talked like ponyfolk—”

“Now that’s weird,” a griffon female on her right butted in.

“When have any of your dreams made sense?”

“…continue, kid.”

“Cool,” she snickered. She’d only been in this Runner camp four days, but they were all pretty awesome and most of them were nice, at least to her and Rally. “So, anyways—”

“That giant’s gonna be trouble,” she mumbled, watching the great and dark-shaded monster lumber ever closer with every turn her unseen opponent took. “Why can’t my artillery blast it from here?”

A stallion clad in a black military dress jacket adorned with all manner of medals and insignia she couldn’t make sense of had the answer almost immediately, and his crisp Trottingham accent added a touch of class to his imperial appearance. “Not in range, Legate Light Tail.”

“How is something that big not in range of artillery shells that arc for miles?”

“Give it another two turns, sir.”

“I’m a girl, dummy. Get it right.”

“I’ll try, sir.”

A nearly inaudible growl left her throat out of habit as she took a harder look at her battlefield.Her center legionaries had already taken their actions for her turn, mostly just hacking away at the elves before them. Two of her tanks on the left had to move back a bit to avoid getting blitzed, and she wound up having to use up a couple of artillery guns’ moves to cover the retreat instead of blasting the elves behind the front line like she wanted. But on the right, her tanks moved ever steadily forward—not as many heavy monsters on that side, so they could just blast away at the little ones and eventually clean that out, and then she could start moving them towards the center….

“….eeeehhhh, have all the artillery batteries on the right side shoot at all the elves waiting for their turn up front—”

“Flank, sir. The word is right flank, and it shall be done at once.”

Off in the distance, her ten artillery battery units on the right side of her end of the field turned their guns towards the center and starting sending their gifts to the dark elves in complete unison, leaving her ample time to school her “aide” on proper pony anatomy, at least as much as she knew about it. “No, no, this is a right flank,” she said, turning to face him and tapping her right side with her left forehoof.

“Are you certain, sir?” the aide asked, his face not disturbed in the least by the earth-rumbling roar of the artillery in the distance.

“Yes!” she shouted back, tapping her right side again.“This! Flank! This—”

—at that, she lifted her right leg up a bit temporarily and turned the back half of her body out to the right a bit—

“—this is my hindquarters!” she finished, flexing her leg a bit and tapping said hindquarter, since she was wearing a full set of clothes that obscured her lack of a cutie mark. “This is not my flank! Hindquarters! Blank flank is just an expression—”

The faint whistling of her artillery shells turned into a fantastic crescendo of explosions. “Sir, it is unprofessional to be flaunting one’s rear end in such a fashion.”

That was the…fifth, sixth time she’d been called a boy?! Enough! “Why do you keep calling me a sir?! Ponies don’t even normally wear clothes, you should be able to tell the difference—wait, no, don’t do that that’s creepy! Just…no more sir! That’s an or—”

“All your units have exhausted their allowed actions for this turn. Are there any other actions you wish to take?”

“…really?”

She heard a sharp blip to her right, and when she turned about to face it she found herself staring at a really cool blue overlay screen that floated about in the air, semi-transparent, and which displayed the field before her in a grid-like pattern. Every octagonal hex represented a fixed amount of space, like…she didn’t really know, but her thousands and thousands of legionaries and their colossi and her tanks and artillery weren’t all represented on the board as individual units, but as groups. Her legionaries were counted in groups of…two or three hundred apiece per unit, which still had them flooding her side of the middle of the board with like…twenty units? Thirty? She kept losing count of all the icons, there were so many clustered in the middle of the map. Her colossi were counted in groups of three, and she counted about fifty-two on the field itself so…a little over seventeen units of colossi? There was one that had only one colossal left in it, mainly because it was in the center of the frontline fighting and really getting the crap kicked out of it. Her tanks were numbered in singular units, but she had over two dozen merrily blasting away at the enemy. Her artillery batteries were arranged in groups of three per unit, with a total of twelve, six for each fla—errr, side? Eh, whatever. And behind her rows of infantry….

“Hey, wait a minute, I got archers back here! They haven’t done anything yet!” she shouted, her left hoof swiping at the ten units of archers to the rear of her infantry. She was surprised she hadn’t even noticed them out on the field before now, but now that she was looking at them she could see why. They moved slow, for some reason, probably because they were also hauling carts of arrows along with them, and they used monstrously huge ponies to pull them…

…well, she thought they were ponies. They were really big, like, six or seven feet tall from hoof to withers, and they had no cutie marks and really bland coat and mane colors, mostly brown and black with a few white ones, and with long snouts like the Princess Sisters. They didn’t talk either, they were like dumb beasts or something. But the archers were the really important part, ‘cause she wanted them flinging fire and destruction on the evil dark elves trying to reinforce their friends at the front so she could get her artillery in position to take out that giant before it got too close. And no matter how many times she tried to get them to do it, they wouldn’t budge. “Hey, I was gonna have them start shooting flame arrows! Why can’t I do that now?”

“Because you had to march them into position up until now,” her stallion aide remarked dryly. “Archer and artillery units cannot move and fire on the same turn. If you desire, you may order the archers to begin a fire arrow volley on the next turn.”

“Ugh. Whatever. Fine, I guess. Let’s see what the other player does.”

By this point in the tale, she and Rally had finished their quick—but very refreshing and cleansing—shower and moved on to the mess hall, taking a seat at one of the center tables with a pack of stable rations since the Runners weren’t too keen to share their limited food supplies with visitors unless they did some work for them, which she was thought was kinda fair. She still felt a little guilty for getting to have some real food while everybody else around her made do with awful military rations, 200-year old preserved foodstuffs or whatever could be grown on the surface, but they didn’t seem to mind.

In fact, she noticed a good number of them were finding ways to bring their tables—or their breakfast—closer to the center of the mess hall, just as she’d finished talking about her stupid archers who couldn’t shoot flaming arrows until the next turn….

“….again?” she sighed when she’d taken a good look around her table. There must’ve been like….forty or fifty Runners gathering around her. Griffons, unicorns, earth ponies, four zebras and….two pegasi, whom she still hadn’t managed to get to talk to yet. She remembered enough of these faces from the other day, when she told Rally about this super-awesome dream she’d had about a fleet of spaceships traveling the stars, looking for a single planet to settle, and only had one last warship and its space fighters left to protect them. “This isn’t that dream about the last survivors of a space civilization.”

“We gathered,” that female, gold-furred and gray-feathered griffon from the showers spoke for the crowd, and who had plopped herself down on the other side of the table with what looked like a…spiral-bound notebook, or something, and a couple of pencils? That wa—no, wait, now she remembered, it was Raina. “Still sounds like an awesome mind trip. Keep goin’.”

“Okay, what’s the deal?” Rally shot back over the sound of their ration packs’ cooking enchantments blazing away. “All you guys got a real intense interest in the dreams of a little girl, what for?”

“We spend most of our time in the wastes hunting down raiders, slavers, thieves, murderers, and all manner of things that eat people alive,” another griffon answered back calmly, from somewhere in the crowd closest to the table on her left, and she could see him poking his white-black spotted feathered head up above the crowd to look Rally straight in the eye as he talked. “We see the worst of the worst, on a regular basis, and a good deal of us don’t sleep well at night for it. Then this little filly with the wildest imagination comes along, and the first dream we hear her sharing with you out loud the other day is like…well, shit, it’s like hearing a comic book come to life or something. And today looks like a crazy trip all on its own, by the sound of it. A board game played out before you in life-like detail with outlandish creatures, tanks, artillery, and something about dark shadow magic? Why the hell would we want to listen to anything else but this when it’s a thousand times better than the things we see and do all the time?”

She saw the defiance in Rally’s eyes wither away into nothingness, and her ears wilted a little bit out of shame. Of course a bunch of mercenaries who saw nothing but death and violence for a living would latch onto anything that took their minds off all the evil stuff they experienced. It wasn’t every day that a stable pony who was raised in a normal, peaceful environment came up out of the ground and told them stories of their crazy dreams.If they wanted to listen, she had no problem in telling them. By the looks of their faces, she was already getting their attention and she hadn’t gotten to the good stuff yet.

“Soooo, if yer done fightin’, I’d like to get back to it—”

She wondered what this black and shadow magic stuff was for all of ten seconds before she decided she didn’t want it anymore.

The elvish player had some sorcerer units mixed in with their frontline infantry, and they went right to work casting their dark and evil spells. Some of it was downright destruction—big, black scary balls of magic that exploded and took out scores of her guys in a blast, and other spells defied gravity itself as they picked up guys from the ground and then dropped them back to said ground, with serious or even deadly results. They even cast a spell or two that completely covered a couple of elven infantry in black shadow smoke that made it real hard for her infantry to score a hit. She thought that last bit was cheating, but it was in the rulebook as allowable for units engaged in combat since it wasn’t a pure invisibility spell, just one that greatly enhanced their ability to dodge stuff.

And some of the beast creatures managed to make a mad dash past her tanks on the left side and join in the fighting in the center anyway, and these were the creatures that did the most damage. They had a poison effect that drained a unit’s health every turn until they all died or she had a light mage cast a cleansing spell, and while she did have reinforcements scheduled to show up on the next turn, they weren’t mages or spellcasters, just cavalry and one infantry unit. Her artillery couldn’t move positions and fire in the same turn, but they could re-target and fire in the same turn, so she’d have them re-focus on the flanks and try to kill more of the creatures before they could break free and ruin her legion’s day.

And that giant, hundred-foot-tall elf construct way in the back of her opponent’s side of the field/game board/whatever lumbered ever closer. Still not in range, but she’d be in a heap of trouble when it finally got close enough to start fighting. Thank the stars the game started with the thing all the way in the back.

“I knew I should have picked those pikemen over an extra four legionnaire units,” she grumbled, watching the beastly elven creatures wreak havoc on her pinkskins. In addition to poisoning some of them, the sight of the terrible monsters lowered their morale too, and if she didn’t do something about it soon, they wouldn’t fight as well. “Could’ve blocked those things.”

“Hindsight is 20/20, sir. Your opponent has ended their turn. Reinforcements have arrived on the eastern pass, two cavalry units, as well as one reinforcement unit on the western pass, a pandera unit.”

Her brain was halfway through plotting the cavalry units’ movements (without her even knowing how far or how fast they could move first, even) when her brain tripped up trying to remember what the…panta thing was? Never mind that he called her a boy again, these…p-something things sounded a little more important. “A…a what unit?”

“Pandera,” her aide repeated. “See for yourself, on the left fl--…left side.”

She brought up that blue semi-transparent overlay again, and had the viewpoint zoom in on the leftmost octagon, where this pandera unit was—

She squealed like the ten-year-old filly she was upon first sight of her new allies. They looked like giant pandas, but stood up on their legs and had arms and body structures like the pinkskins, and most of them wore simple, traditional-looking far eastern clothing—black pants and shirts, with those buttons in the middle of the shirt. About a third of them wore this strange martial arts uniform—kinda like a karate uniform, except that it was a lot looser and flowing. These panda people were totally weird, but they had katanas and wooden staves and looked really, really angry…and some of them were brave enough to be unarmed even. “Wow, what can these guys do?!”

“They are warriors of the far eastern Empire of the Dragon Emperor, sent to aid the Lunar Empress and her Legates as per the Crystal Accord, signed in the 112th year of the Solar and Lunar Diarchy over two hundred years ago,” the stallion aide answered. “They are extremely skilled in melee combat, and specialize in an ancient and honorable art of unarmed combat to the extent that it is said they can destroy entire hillsides or roll a drop of dew across their arm without splattering it—”

“Kung fu pandas!!” she squealed with a laugh, hopping about in delirious joy as she finally realized what they were. “Send ‘em in and wreck those elves!”

“They are pandera—”

“I said send in the kung fu pandas and wreck those elves!!” she repeated again.

With a dry, unamused glare in her direction, the stallion sighed and responded in a much less enthusiastic tone than the one he’d used to explain her new allies with. “….the kung fu pandas are marching forth and will engage the enemy in three turns. Also, their arrival came with a booster card that you may play immediately, if you wish.”

“What kinda card?” she asked. Everybody liked getting extra stuff, especially if it was helpful.

“It appears to be a morale boost card,” the stallion replied as she zoomed her overlay in on her new cavalry units, which turned out to be about a thousand centaurs armed with shields, spears, and short swords for back-ups. They had the head and torso of a pinkskin, and the body of a…big not-pony?She almost said ‘horse’ until she realized she had no idea what a horse was. “A perfect counter to the terrifying presence of the elvish beasts mingling amongst your legionnaires. Do you wish to use it?”

“Go for it!” she said, tapping the icons for her two centaur units and then dragging them into the right flank of the elven infantry (it turned out they had the movement speed and range to do it right off). Her tanks were rolling forward and clearing out the creatures ahead of them like grass, giving the centaurs a clear shot to charge right in and start having fun, and even now she could hear them roaring and cheering as they began dashing across the field to engage in mortal combat against a hated foe. Well, one they hated more than her pinkskins, anyway.

“Very well,” was the stallion’s answer, just as a bluish-white pulse of light washed over the entire field, much to the relief of her pinkskins and their colossi. “I should point out that this morale boost induces an urge to chant war cries alongside the music.”

She was in the middle of ordering her archers to start setting things on fire with their fire arrows, and stopped just short of issuing said order. “…the card plays music?”

Her answer came in the form of a neon-colored jukebox dropping out of the sky and into the throng of pinkskins with a mighty, thundering crash, and those in the back of the column not engaged with the enemy flocked to it like moths to a flame, jumping up and down and cheering wildly at the “gift” presented to them by their Legate—

“Praises to the Night Empress and her great lunar cheeks!” came one very enthusiastic shout, and she felt a rush of blood flow into her face. Even she knew what that meant.

Many more voices began shouting out as one of the pinkskins began fiddling with the jukebox, like he was trying to find a particular song. “Our Empress is with us! Our glory is her glory!”

“Her cause is our cause!”

“Our lives for the Equestrian Empire! Glory to the Night!!”

“Get three songs for two, today only, don’t wait, RUN!!”

A rolling roar of laughter washed over the pinkskins—those at the front even seemed to grow more energetic in their fighting, if the uptick in flying, screaming, and detonating elves was any clue. “Play that funky music!!”

“I have found it!!” the pinkskin fiddling with the jukebox cried out, leaping about in a short victory dance before picking up his weapon and shield and turning to face the dark elf horde with renewed purpose and vigor. “Come, foul creatures of shadow, and hear now the song and war cry of our people!! Hooah!!”

A sharp, crackling spark echoed across the battlefield, signifying that the jukebox was coming to life and preparing its song for her legion, in tune with a hearty, earth-shuddering “HOOAH” from the throats of her armies that overpowered every other sound for the second it lasted….

….at least, until they started chanting something completely different along with their chosen song.

“OOGA-CHAKA OOGA OOGA OOGA-CHAKA—”

Her eyes widened almost to the size of dinner plates. She kinda knew this song…and she knew her legionnaires wouldn’t shut up for a while now that the song of their soul was playing out loud for them. “No, wait! I take it back, no booster card—”

“It has already been expended,” her somewhat unhelpful aide reminded her, dashing her hopes for a quieter battle (at least for her, since she was in the rear and away from all the noise until they starting chanting along with the song). “I might add that rather than our usual western minotaur allies, the Empress was forced to plead for aid from the centaur tribes of the arctic north who are decidedly more…barbaric in their traditions and may actually take very kindly to the war cry of your legion, if only to spite us—”

She had to stop at this point, mostly because the tan-coated, dark-brown maned earth pony stallion in front of her, next to Raina, wound up snorting his drink out of his nose, unable to contain his laughter like everybody else, and soon enough the whole room was laughing out loud.

Even Raina had to stop sketching or drawing whatever it was she was drawing, and set her stuff down before she ruined her work, and that was when she saw that the griffon was actually trying to sketch out all the different creatures of her dream as she described them and did a really neat job of it too.

…okay, scratch that, everybody was laughing, even Rally right next to her. And Rally was probably having the hardest time of it all, her forelegs kept banging on the table once in a while, tears streaming down her cheeks—

—Raina fell off of the bench chair, her laughing turning into a series of half-gasps, like she was struggling to laugh and breath at the same time. It took a full minute—and the consumption of a third of her ration pack—before a voice in the crowd could get the breath to say anything coherent. Sounded like a stallion, somewhere…

“O-oh my sweet Lunaaaaaahahahaaa, singing centaurs—”

“Weeeeeelll, they didn’t exactly sing—”

“…barbaric?”

“Very.”

“Like…barbarian barbaric?”

“They revel in all manner of chanting and dance and superstitious traditions, yes. Your troops may very well be unintentionally announcing marriage proposals to the charging centaurs, sir.”

Her left eye twitched, but not at the words that one might have thought. “WHAT.”

“I said your troops may very well be unintentionally announcing marriage proposals to the charging centaurs, sir—”

She knew that last bit was kinda important, but the word ‘sir’ for what sounded like the seventh or eighth time finally struck the wrong nerve, and she began stripping off the officer’s uniform she’d been wearing since this whole crazy thing started. "Okay, that is IT ENOUGH with the sir! I! Am! A! Girl! I’m gonna take this stuff off so you can see for yourself—”

Her moronic aide continued to speak as though she wasn’t even the least bit upset with him over his overuse of “sir” in her general direction. “Dude” she could take, but not “sir”. “Fear not, sir, it is highly unlikely that the centaurs will actually accept such outlandish propositions—”

She’d gotten her uniform off and was just about to toss her hat at her aide for the ninth use of “sir” when she heard a great, thudding crash from the battlefield, and looked back behind her to see a thousand centaurs violently colliding with the elven infantry she’d selected for them—

—and the very last thing she’d expected to hear from the centaurs bellowed into her ears from a mile away as they plowed into their enemies, as though she were right next to them—

“OOGA BOOGA!!!”

“….they accept our troops’ proposals, sir.”

With a wordless cry of desperation, Light Tail slapped her head against her hovering overlay, barely acknowledging the fact that it had turned solid just to allow her to hit it and command her archers to fling flaming arrows upon her enemies.

It took everybody a couple of minutes to stop laughing, which gave her plenty of time to finish off breakfast and toss the empty meal tray into a nearby trash can. She kept the ration packaging, having learned the other day that the wrapper was a pretty decent stopgap solution for “sucking chest wounds” (though when she made the comment that ‘all chest wounds suck’ the Runner was forced to agree with her on it even though he laughed when she said it). She almost gave up on anyone getting themselves back together until she looked around and saw a good many of them slowly getting back upright on their hooves, or paws, or…or whatever.

“….kid, you read way too many Daring Doo books,” Raina finally managed to say, when she’d clawed back up into the bench on the other side of the table and confirmed that her sketchpad was still there and that nothing was wrong with it or the things she’d doodled on it.

“’Specially since we found the third and fourth ones in that little library we found last week,” Rally added in-between some strange sounds that were halfway between a laugh and hard breathing.

“You mean the ones you won’t give back so I can read ‘em again?”

“Let the rest of us have a peek, ya little bookworm!”

“Funny that you say that….”

“—igh on believing—”

Since she was doomed to suffer her troops’ strange and otherworldly tastes in music, she didn’t see any reason to try and pretend it didn’t exist. And in all honesty, it was actually kinda catchy. Just not the kind of thing she’d choose if she were faced with a horde of dark elves and had to destroy them. Or maybe it was? Who could say?

At least her fire arrow volleys were quick to sow chaos and panic within her enemies’ ranks. Even now, she could see the numbers next to their icons on her little floating display start ticking downward at a faster rate than they’d been when her re-energized troops had begun to lay into them like starving hyenas—

“—that you’re in love with meeeee,” her voice sang in tune with her legionnaires’ song, her forehooves re-directing her artillery strikes to once again focus on clearing out the last of the elvish beasts on the right side of the battlefield. One more volley should do it—

“Sir, I must insist th—”

Her head snapped to her left sharply, a very unfriendly and uncharacteristic snarling growl rolling out of her throat that reminded her of Max and Mona when they found something they didn’t like, and she was pretty sure her ears were doing that flattening-in-rage thing too. Her aide’s face, usually stiff and unwavering, began to look somewhat worried and afraid of the little filly glaring death his way, and he finally (FINALLY!) began calling her something else like she’d wanted all along.

“Mmmm….ma…maaadam Light Tail,” he forced himself to say after a couple of uncomfortable failed attempts. “…I must insist that you put your clothes back on. It is unprofessional for a Legate of the Lunar Empress’s legions to appear…naked.”

“Ponies don’t even normally wear clothes,” she whined, turning back to her floating display to begin planning her moves for the next turn while her opponent took his/her turn. “What’s the big deal?”

“It is an expectation of high society that one be clothed, and that one’s….nethers, be obscured from sight by said clothing. Particularly a lady’s.”

She felt her tail flick about irritably, though most of her attention was focused on her display, now that it was the enemy’s turn. It seemed that her legionnaires were really getting a kick out of that jukebox, because their elven foes were getting the crap beat out of them on the frontline to the point where the second line units were having to move up and take the place of a couple of battered, depleted columns that had turned and fled from the pinkskins in terror. On the right side of the field of battle, her artillery and tanks had finally wiped out the elvish beasts of nightmares and horrors and could turn left, start going af—

“Oh crap,” she muttered when her eyes ticked left and spotted the giant elf construct merrily lumbering towards those tanks through her semi-transparent display. The tanks couldn’t turn in place, they’d have to keep moving forward in order to make a turn, and that would take them right into the giant’s new path. And the tanks on the left side of the field were having more trouble with their foes than she’d have liked, mostly because that side had more of the beastly horrors to deal with. But at least her kung fu pandas were enjoying themselves in battle. She swore she could even see one of the girls among them squealing and laughing as she danced about and did her kung fu thing.

“I understand that your previous life as a commoner has had its shortcomings, but I can assure you that any unwarranted attention to yo—”

“Not that!” she shouted back. The last thing she wanted to talk about was her girl bits and now that she thought about it, it was kinda weird that her aide would even bother to call attention to them.It was one of those unspoken rules, where no matter how often you noticed, no one ever said anything about it because it was rude and everybody had the same problem and did their best not to stare if the tail happened to show a little too much. But that was later, and this giant elvish construct turning to crush her tanks was now, and that was probably more important! “That…that giant thing is gonna squish the tanks in about two turns! They can’t turn around that fast!”

“Are you aware that their turrets can rotate three hundred and sixty degrees? It will consume part of their movement range on the next turn, but they will still be able to fire.”

“I…oh, cool! We’ll do that, then w—”

The elvish construct formed a ball of black, smoking energy (how dark shadow magic energy could have smoke effects was never entirely clear) in its hands, came to a stop, and then thrust its arms and hands out to “shoot” it at her tanks, and she could only watch in abject horror as the black ball soared into her company of tanks and annihilated all but five of them in a single explosion. A roar of appreciation rolled across the grassy hills from the dark elvish forces, and the morale boost seemed to help them take their beating a little better, as they stopped losing guys and numbers so quickly.

That was beatable. This giant elf abomination was not. Not when it could just do….whatever it was that it just did—

“…aaaaat the crap?!” she shrieked as the last of the explosion’s concussive wave reached her position, though all it did was give her a nice, refreshing breeze and bat her mane around a little. “Since when could that thing do….that?!”

“It is indeed a powerful attack,” her aide agreed grimly. “It takes the construct three turns to gather the energy to perform it, and is quite devastating. Our foot troops will be utterly destroyed by it.”

Her voice was a garbled mess of words and panic-attack noises as she hastily re-planned her next turn’s movements and actions. Couldn’t do that thing with the tanks anymore now that most of them were gone and scattered all over the place, and though the giant elf thing’s slow, ponderous path would ultimately take it within range of her artillery, it wouldn’t get there until after her opponent’s next turn, and two artillery barrages wouldn’t do enough damage to kill it….

…hunh, most of her centaurs were still alive. Nine hundred and twenty-something out of…a thousand, was it? She supposed she could send them off to peck at the giant elf construct, now that their charge had done most of its damage and reduced the centaurs to being no more effective than her legionnaires. And her troops didn’t like the centaurs being close to them anyway, so using them for fodder would actually make them happier and fight better—

—a soft, misty emerald miasma began to waft its way through her pinkskins, and she immediately noted a marked improvement in their overall stamina, health, and morale. It even seemed to be washing away the poison of the elvish beasts that had until now been something of a problem she’d been having to get around with that booster card that played really strange music—

“What’s that cool-looking emerald mist and where’s it coming from?”

“Ah, yes, that,” her aide explained cheerfully. “The pandera are well versed in the use of an ancient and mystical inner power they call “chi”, and use it to empower themselves in battle. It also has healing properties, and the pandera unit sent to us includes several chi sorcerers which automatically release a healing miasma that heals nearby friendly units and removes poison effects from afflicted units as necessary. Now that the pandera are engaging the enemy, our troops should not suffer from the monstrous elvish sorcery any longer.”

“Oh sweet!!” she squealed happily. “We should get more of these guys for next time, they’re much better than the centaurs that wanna marry ugly pinkskin guys! Speaking of which, they don’t seem to be following my orders anymore, I keep trying to make them move out and charge at that huge elf thing but they won’t do it.”

“They are not close allies of the Diarchy, so obeying your orders is not a high priority. They are also susceptible to bribes from the opposing side, now that their initial thirst for battle has been sated.”

“Wait, hold it, they can be bribed?”

“The dark elves are an honorless, unscrupulous lot who will use any advantage available. But this works both ways, for you can offer the centaurs a bounty to complete an objective. And should they perish in the attempt, you lose no coin.”

That was kind of an honorless thing to do too, when she got to thinking about it, and if this weren’t a game (no matter how lifelike and awesome it was), then she probably wouldn’t do it. But it was just a game, and the centaurs weren’t doing her much good anymore and she didn’t want them getting close to her awesome kung fu pandas and messing with their healing powers. So when her opponent ended their turn, she decided to put up a two-thousand bit reward for the destruction of the giant elf construct, and the moment she added the bounty to the giant’s head the centaurs’ willingness to follow her new command plot on the floating overlay took a very drastic one-eighty turn. They were suddenly all too willing to disengage from combat with their current enemy and go around the huge melee taking place in the center of the field, and charge right at the giant construct with the fervor they’d displayed in their initial charge into the frontline.

“…oh wow, look at ‘em go. They really like money.”

“Fear not, s--…m-maaaadam Light Tail, the centaurs are no match for such a foe and will be scattered into the wind like leaves within two turns, if they live that long. In fact, we truly have no counter on the field for such a foe.”

“Yaaaay,” she mused with far less enthusiasm than the word would normally convey. “Thanks for the reminder, killjoy.”

“Now, if the Diarchy were to grace you with a champion card soon, that could change entirely.”

The word “champion card” suddenly had her ears’ interest, though there was also this odd individual in the battlefield competing for equal amounts of her attention. It looked like one of the panda people, dancing in and out and about the fighting pinkskins with a pair of katanas in its hands, and it sounded like a girl from the happy, near maniacal laughing she was letting out as she sliced and diced dark elves into whatever oblivion it was they were sent to when they flew up and exploded into a million glowing blue dot-shaped bits. “Champion card? What’s that?”

“As a boon for fighting on behalf of the Diarchy, the Solar and Lunar Empresses may offer the assistance of their greatest champions to their Legates in dire need, and I believe the dark elf monstrosity qualifies. Such an asset will make short work of the construct, should it be granted to you.”

She didn’t really have much else she could do this turn, having elected to just let her units keep on doing what they were doing, but she held off on ending it and focused her overlay’s point of view onto the insane panda girl dancing about the frontline just to get a better look at her. Her slender, muscle-toned form and the litheness and water-like flow of her combat moves was somewhat mesmerizing to look at, and she made it look so easy. It was so cool and awesome to look at that she could forgive the game’s insistence on distorting her chest in strange ways. Why it would stretch into a pair of bouncing round bulges was a mystery she didn’t want explained. She supposed it kiiiinda made her a little more mesmerizing to look at, but it was really weird and it actually looked….“off”, was the best way she could describe—

“Ahhh, the pandera have seen fit to send one of their Masters to aid us,” her aide approved glowingly.

“You know this kung fu panda?”

“Rin Jun-Lee, the Tiger Master,” he answered proudly. “She is a prodigy among her people, and well versed in over forty styles of your…“kung fu”. She was granted the title of Tiger Master at the young age of sixteen. At just twenty years old she is the most accomplished of martial arts masters of her generation, and she is quite fond of us pony folk. It is rumored she seeks to serve as a Legate’s personal champion with the blessing of the Dragon Emperor and the Empress Sisters. Given the similarities in your backgrounds, she would make quite an honor guard for the youngest Legate to serve the Lunar Empress herself.”

“Flattery will not get a promotion,” she said with a light grin. “…but it’s a good start to one.”

“Such grandiose delusions are not intentional, I assure you. I should remind you that since you have no legal moves left this turn, you must end it within the next ninety seconds or suffer a penalty for delaying your opponent’s turn—”

Her right forehoof tapped the “END TURN” button on the lower right of her floating display, forcing it to zoom out from Miss Rin and return the viewpoint to the field overlay with all the icons and stuff. “Ugh, gonna hate this—”

She kinda left out the part about the panda girl’s chest and how she found her mesmerizing to look at as she sliced and diced the dark elves into clouds of exploding, glowing blue dots, but even just a glance at Rally’s eyes told her that she’d probably just said a little too much about her Trottingham aide and that little chat about social norms regarding one’s nethers. But nobody else seemed to be paying it much mind, and Raina was hard at work sketching out all the different creatures and people she was describing from the dream. That kind of artistic talent seemed really rare or grossly unappreciated in a land of violence, death, and scarce food and water….

“Wow, you’re really into this today,” Light Tail said softly, so as not to jolt or disturb the griffon from her work. “…and yesterday, too, actually.”

Raina seemed to be waiting for her to say exactly that and produced a few sheets of paper from the sketchpad she’d had with her yesterday morning, and slid them across the table to her. “Oh, yeah, speaking of which, I think I finally got a decent rough sketch of that battered warship….what was it called again? Galaxia?”

“Galactus!” somebody in the crowd corrected her sternly, but that dude wasn’t right either—

“That’s not it either--oh, hey, you got it right here!” she said gleefully when her eyes fell upon the space vessel and its two long, pod-like pylons on the sides where it stored its space fighters, along with the correct name on the front of the visible pylon. “Right on the side of the pylon, and that’s actually a pretty cool looking typeface for that name! Where’d you come up with it?!”

“Eh, seemed to fit, didn’t really think much else of it,” Raina shrugged her off, and then stopped drawing on her current sketchpad and turned it around to show her a rough drawing of th—

….the panda girl, Miss Rin?

“Now, this little minx is something else, kid!” the griffon chuckled lightly. “The way you describe these kung fu pandas, makes them sound like a cross between those pinkskins and pandas, so I kinda just made a combo of the two, but there’s something missing here, I can feel it. Don’t ask me what, it just feels…incomplete.”

She wasn’t going to say anything about the flat chest in the drawing not matching what was in the dream, but the rest of Miss Rin was actually about spot-on, judging from what she could remember from the dream (and she hoped she’d get to go back to it soon, because it was the best dream she’d ever had). The two katanas, the dark kung-fu uniform and the belt sash with a yin-yang symbol, and the black/white fur and the long hair that flowed halfway down her back, with part of it tied into a tiny little ponytail at the back of her head with a couple of thin sticks stuck in it, for some reason….

“Coooool,” she cooed in giddy approval. “And that you drew that in like…what, ten minutes? You’re good.”

“Oh, that’s just a rough sketch, it’ll take me hours to actually clean it up, but it seems…off. Somethin’s missing, I can feel it, and I don’t know what.”

Say nothing, she resolved, though when she looked at the drawing of Miss Rin she was forced to privately agree. As odd as it was for Miss Rin’s chest to be distorted and bouncing like it had been, to see her drawn flat chested….even if she thought it made more sense and looked normal, it also looked incomplete. She just didn’t want to say it out loud and have everybody think she was some oddball or something. She liked these Runners, and they seemed to like her, and she didn’t want to ruin that.

“…yeah, well, anyways—”

“Hate” was a bit mild for what she felt. Was “raging” better? Livid? Furious? Incensed?

Whatever the right word was, it didn’t really change the fact that her hastily re-planned moves in her last turn were going to have to be re-re-planned in light of the carnage she had been dealt.

The centaurs didn’t last even one turn. It turned out that the giant elf construct gained an attack bonus against four-legged creatures, since they weren’t as nimble and couldn’t dodge as easily. It had this big sword on its hip and just cut all the centaurs in half in like, two swings, and then she was staring at a lot of bright glowing blue dots and lines where the nine hundred and twenty-something centaurs had been. The rest of the battlefield hadn’t changed much—her tanks were still struggling against the elven creatures on the left side of the field, and her artillery batteries were still aching for something to shoot at and her archers were re-lighting their arrows for another flaming volley. And Miss Rin was still dancing up and down the frontline, making every dark elf that dared fight her look like a clumsy foal as she tore them to bits with almost zero effort, or so it seemed. Some of the pinkskins seemed smitten with her, whistling sharply as she passed by them, but she only winked at them when they did it and went right on slaying dark evil elves. If anything, she swore she could see Miss Rin stealing a look back at her, like she could see little Light Tail from so far away even with all the fighting going on. Maybe she could…

“Strange, your opponent has ended their turn without moving the majority of their units,” her aide commented lightly.

She didn’t think it was that strange, really. “Why should they? That giant construct lumbering around is more than enough to wipe us out, as long as all our guys are tied up with fighting the elves. Otherwise I could just swarm it and take it out with sheer numbers. All those centaurs did was slow it from charging that super death ball attack for a turn.”

“Ah, yes, that does make more sense. This is why you are Legate and I am merely your humble assistant.”

“Humble my tail,” she muttered under her breath. Sadly, she didn’t really see all that much that she could do herself, beyond what she was already doing. Her tanks had to hold the left side, keep those monsters from getting to her pinkskins and colossi. Her archers were supporting the front line from a safe distance, the kung fu pandas were needed where they were to counteract the poison attacks from the few beasts still savaging her pinkskins, and her artillery was running out of targets they could safely attack without endangering her own units in the explosions…. “Can we draw a support card this turn?”

She had no idea why she said that, or what a support card was, really (that whole “dream world sense” that only made sense when she didn’t think about it), but it turned out to be a really big help. “Ah, yes, of course, it has been several turns since the beginning of the battle.I believe you may draw up to three, if you desire.”

“Three it is,” she ordered politely. If any of those three cards would be of any help, she needed them now—

The world flashed a brilliant gold, ever so briefly, three times before stopping, and a little icon of a deck of cards at the top right of her floating overlay lit up, with a little glowing number “3” on the bottom right of the icon.A simple tap of her forehoof replaced the battlefield view with a line-up of three cards, and her eyes scanned through them quickly. First one was a booster card, a +15% charge attack boost for cavalry units that she didn’t have anymore (not since the centaurs got wiped off the map). Second one was a….

“…an arms card? And with a goldish background? What—”

Her aide’s voice livened up considerably the moment she mentioned it, and she grew to share in his joy when he got to explaining it. “Ah, most excellent!” he exclaimed proudly. “This grants a hero unit a weapon befitting their status as exemplar warriors. Their attack power, morale, and attack speed will greatly benefit and allow them to decimate entire columns of infantry by themselves in some cases. Perhaps the Lunar Empress is sending a hint?”

“…I thought she was sending me cards.”

“No, I mean that she may be trying to signal to you, in less than subtle ways, that she would support your sponsorship of Miss Rin as your personal guard and second and has sent this arms card to empower her with a weapon that would augment her combat skills while also serving as a…”badge of office”, I believe is the term.”

“Miss Rin doesn’t need a badge, she needs a kick-butt weapon!” Light Tail proclaimed loudly, jabbing her forehoof on the glowing golden card twice to activate. It spun in place and vanished from the overlay in an explosion of light, and then the overlay’s viewpoint switched to a close-up of Miss Rin—

—the pandera girl froze mid-swing in combat, her traditional katana flashing away in a brilliant gold light, only to be replaced with a pair of katanas bearing a very sweet looking blade of some dual-colored metal of black and white. One half of the blade was devoted to either white or black, with the two colors coming together in the middle in a curved boundary, almost like a yin-yang. The white bottom half of the blade was further adorned with glowing red glyphs that she assumed was the language of the Dragon Empire. The grips of the swords were laced in black and red strappings, and even Miss Rin’s sword scabbards were replaced with a mismatched black and white scabbard, one on each hip. She looked at her new swords for a couple of seconds in complete and total confusion, during which she managed to avoid being sliced and diced by a couple of evil dark elves only because she happened to step forward in one of her confused moments of wandering and made the elves miss, but she didn’t think Miss Rin did it on purpose.

Then Miss Rin got to twirling the swords about and giving them a cute little swing to test their weight and balance, and her face lit up like a Hearth’s Warming Eve fire. She turned around and swiftly cut off an elf’s head in what looked like an effortless blow, causing him to explode into lots of little glowing blue dots, and then she went right back to work cutting elves to digital ribbons and bits with a maniacal laughter—

—and did so at more than twice the speed she’d been doing it previously, which was impressive to start with. Now it seemed like she was slaying scores of elves like they were paper dolls, while her pinkskins were locked in a brutal struggle for dominance in the battlefield.

“…oh my stars and sunlight,” her aide gasped in shock. “It appears the Twin Sisters have gifted Miss Rin with a special set of katana forged by their personal armorer. The Diarchy’s Light…such a fitting gift for a skilled champion. Yes, this settles it. Luna and Celestia would appear to favor Miss Rin as your personal guard and second. She should be summoned to the Royal Court in Canterlot at the battle’s end for a formal ceremony. What a delightful omen!”

“If you say so,” she croaked fearfully at the sight of the pandera girl happily slaying dark elves like they were standing still—and to her, they probably were. “…still won’t help with that giant elf monster thingy. It’s getting close enough to start wiping out my pinkskins—”

—her forehoof tapped the glowing card icon again, and the overlay went back to the support card screen and shoved the third and last card onto the center. A simple swipe across its surface flipped it over—

She shrieked a filly’s happy shriek at the sight of the prize unveiled to her. “Neeeeevermind! That thing’s a goner!!”

“What i—oh,” the aide said, stopping mid-sentence as he peered over her to stare at the third and final prize of the draw. “…oh my. The Empresses clearly adore you to be offering this level of support.”

She didn’t even hesitate, she just jabbed the card to activate it and summon the hero unit to the field—

—the field around her was blasted by a gust of wind that oddly had no direction or source, and she heard a solid thump! smack into the ground behind her—

—she turned about to greet Celestia’s champion and greatest student of the era—as well as the last three centuries—and felt her little body dip forward in a little cutesy bow out of habit. “Oh, heya, Princess!”

The light, high voice and warmth of Twilight Sparkle’s words filled her with hope, as did the sight of her lavender wings and alicorn-sized stature. “Hello! How goes the battle?”

“Iiiiiit’s…going,” Light Tail answered, turning to point at the lumbering elf construct drawing ever closer to the main battle line. “The direction it’s going seems to be a matter of debate...”

Twilight’s eyes betrayed only a brief moment of shock before a veil of seriousness set in, though her voice remained friendly and conversational. “Oh, wow. They must really hate you to be spending so many deployment points on that.”

“It’s not my fault I’m awesome…is it?”

Twilight allowed herself a short laugh as she gently squeezed in beside her and started studying the overlay, after switching it to the overhead battlefield view. “Well, you probably could have used four units of pikemen instead of extra legionaries beyond what’s already assigned to you, but you did bring in two companies of tanks and artillereeeewhere’s the second tank battalion?”

“Blown to bits. That giant thing just shot this big ball of…something, and most of the tanks on the right side went BOOOSH!”

“Oooooh, it’s one of those,” Twilight mused, mostly to herself, but she stopped looking at the overlay and focused her attention on the giant construct that stuck out like a pillar of death in the far distance. “Fourth one today.”

“…wait, fourth?”

“Yes, fourth. I just came off the battlefront to the south, outside Baltimare. Legate June Bug was having a rougher time with it and actually engaged it with her entire division.Barely stopped it. This one here looks to have been constructed in the likeness of Avaskir, God of the Black Magicks. He’s a very prominent icon in the dark elves’ mythological pantheon, and the source of much of their magical power. I’m not sure what the effect of destroying this construct could be.”

“I’m thinking more of the immediate benefit of not having all my guys squashed like ripe grapes in three turns. I kinda like those kung fu pandas.”

“Yes, but I—oh, is that the Tiger Master herself!?” Twilight squealed when she caught Miss Rin’s body leaping up above the fray briefly, her spiffy new swords drawn back behind her in preparation for a deep swing—

—Twilight’s voice grew into a thundering, earth-shaking beast, the telltale of the Royal Canterlot Voice spell as she reared up on her hind legs and tried to get Miss Rin’s attention with a wave of her left foreleg. “HI RIN! LOVED YOUR DEMONSTRATION IN CANTERLOT LAST WEEK!!”

As Light Tail batted away the grasshoppers that had been terrified into leaping in her general direction to escape the Royal Canterlot Voice, she was surprised to see Miss Rin stop fighting long enough to acknowledge the presence of the Fourth Princess of Equestria with a wave back—

“LOVED YOUR DEMO OF THAT MAGIC FIREWORKS SHOW THE WEEK BEFORE THAT!!” Miss Rin shouted back, somehow, even over the sound of war, artillery guns, the Royal Canterlot Voice, the pinkskins’ jukebox, and what looked like a mile’s worth of distance.

Even with all of that going on, Twilight Sparkle found it impossible to not break into a wordless, oscillating squee at the counter-praise she had received. She even hopped a little in place. Light Tail might have found it funny had a grasshopper not decided that her face was the best place to retreat to and landed on her nose right then.

“Ackpth!” she cried out, shaking her head furiously to dislodge the gross bug and send it back to the earth. “Hey! Equestria to Twilight! Big elf construct of death and stuff!”

“Oh! Right,” the Princess of Friendship muttered, her body shrinking slightly out of embarrassment. “Umm, yes, I can remove it from the battle, but as I was saying, I have no idea what effect it will have. The dark elves may flee in abject terror at the sight of their God of Dark Magick being destroyed, or they may fly into a blind, psychotic bloodlust and utterly devastate your army in a matter of seconds. It’s a fifty-fifty deal.”

“A fifty percent chance of defeat is still better than certain death as long as that thing’s up and stomping around,” Light Tail decided immediately. She wasn’t lying, either, that thing could wipe out her legionaries as quickly as it slaughtered the centaurs, and her tanks and artillery would be too exposed without the infantry to tie up the dark elvish forces. Either the construct went away, or she’d be better off just yielding the fight altogether if she wanted to save the majority of her army. “Take it out.”

“Okay,” Twilight said, though the strangeness of an Equestrian princess taking orders from a ten-year-old filly never registered to either of them. “I’ll take care of this construct and it’s all yours from there while I head to the far northern front! Good luck!”

Twilight’s wings flared out, and the Fourth Princess of the Equestrian Empire leapt forward, beginning a slow climb up into the skies above the battle and veered straight for the huge, dark elvish construct that was turning its attention to the main battle line. A few seconds after she passed over the line of pinkskins on the front line, a massive glowing purple beam of pure arcane energy shot out from the alicorn’s horn and struck the construct in the face. As the construct stumbled and halted its forward stride, Twilight unleashed another spell, a massive purple and blue ball of swirling energy that appeared to contain a night sky of stars within it, and the star ball turned the construct into an exploding shower of rubble and black stones the moment it collided into the monster’s chest.

Just as she said she would, Twilight immediately took off in a northerly direction, leaving the battlefield to ponder her effortless destruction of the dark elf construct in complete and utter silence. All sounds of battle had come to a sudden halt as the combatants—pinkskins, pandera, and dark elves alike—gazed upon the rubble that had once been the most powerful entity on the field until the Fourth Princess’s appearance. It was a very drastic and eerie changed from the chaotic orchestra of war that had been their world only moments earlier. Her colossi just stopped moving, like the big statues they were supposed to be.

The silence was broken by the loudest, most hearty “HOAH!” from her pinkskins she’d heard yet, thundering into her chest cavity as all of her legionaries and pandera and colossi renewed their assault on the dark elves and their monstrous pets (and without fair warning, to boot). The dark elves, visibly stunned and devastated by the loss of their dark god avatar, quickly succumbed to terror and panic as their secondary line flew into a hard retreat to the back of the field, while the primary line struggled to maintain their composure and at least hold her very happy and energetic troops back.

Light Tail couldn’t help but begin to cackle maniacally, ordering her artillery to begin bombarding the retreating dark elves while simultaneously ordering all of her infantry and pandera to converge on the front line and utterly destroy it. Her remaining tank battalion was ordered to circle the infantry line and come at the retreating elves from the left side, though it would take a turn for them to do so. With her moves conducted and carried out, she promptly ended her turn and allowed her cackling laugh to reach a crescendo high enough to carry across the field, likely filling the dark elves with even more terror at the sound of a little girl laughing evilly in their general direction.

“Mwaahahahahahahaa!!” the little filly’s demented, amused cackling roared above the sound of battle. “Go! Destroy all before you! Send these sunless heathens back to their dark shadowy lairs or whatever they live in!! Nyahahahahahahaa—”

“Sir, they’re going for their guns,” her aide interrupted rudely and flatly.

It took a moment too long for her brain to register the words, and when she finally digested his warning her evil and demented laughter screeched to a halt. “--hahahahahaaa…wait, they have guns?”

A dark, foreboding roar of doom and death rolled back across the field at her, and she turned her gaze up to find that the dark elves had not been retreating from the field, but merely rushing to their supply wagons that she’d willfully ignored for the entire battle because she didn’t think anything of them. But as she watched the last of the dark elven infantry rip their prizes from the wagons and cargo crates and begin rushing back to the front line, she saw a very different, very…angry look to them. They were really mad, and had all sorts of guns ranging from the normal and mundane to some really outlandish sci-fi stuff, like rapid-firing energy weapons that fired these big blue comet-style bolts of…of something that quickly proved capable of tearing her tanks apart like a sharp knife stabbing at paper dolls. Some of the elves had something of a cross between a conventional weapon and a sci-fi one…it seemed to fire bullets, but they didn’t spit shell casings, had these really big muzzle flashes and had the absolute coolest firing sound in existence and…even had a small pump-action grenade launcher? Then there were the energy guns that just seemed to shoot lasers really fast, or at least they looked like lasers. They were strange, purple-blue beams that fired like machine guns and had a weird (but cool) zippy-zap sound to it. Of the conventional arms, she saw rifles, machine guns, pistols, and these blocky-looking awesome pistols with big magazines that fired like machine guns—

—a garbled, furious roar echoed out across the field, accompanied by a flash of red that engulfed the dark elves, and they all got bigger and much, much faster, and the dark elves on the front line even seemed to be hitting and swinging their swords much harder and with more power than before. It was like some crazed bloodlust effect had been cast on them to augment their anger and make them impossible to stop….

—and they were turning her guys into a sea of exploding blue dots so fast that the frontline quickly became engulfed in it. Her number of companies were starting to drop like rocks. Twenty, then nineteen, eighteen, sixteen what the—

—her pandera, probably seeing the futility of the fight now that the dark elves had been filled with an insatiable bloodlust, promptly turned and fled from the frontline before the elves could finish destroying the pinkskins and turning her colossi into piles of de-powered rubble. Even Miss Rin seemed to have had enough of it, as the bloodlusted elves were proving to be too much for even her new swords and heightened combat prowess. She flipped over the eroding line of pinkskins and started running straight for Light Tail’s position in the rear like her butt was on fire.

She knew a Really Bad Sign when she saw it. “…I have good news for you, dude!” Light Tail proclaimed, swiftly punching the big “FORFEIT” button on the bottom left of her overlay screen and picking up her hat from the pile of clothes nearby. “I hereby promote you to the position of Field Marshal of the 5th Night Legion, effective like, right now!”

“…si….maaaaadam Light Tail?”

She set her hat upon his head and adjusted it a tad when it sagged to the left to straighten it out. “Congrats, Marshal! Wear the title with pride!”

Her aide took his eyes off her long enough to look at the collapsing front line in confusion, and she took the opportunity for all it was worth. “Madam Light Ta—”

But when he turned back to his Legate, Light Tail was nowhere to be found. She promptly bolted away like a terrified rabbit, down the back of the hill with Miss Rin catching up to her as she made it halfway down. “Flee!”

The Field Marshal of the 5th Legion looked back upon the battlefield—in the time it took him to look down at where his Legate had been, and then back up, the dark elves had overwhelmed the pinkskins, destroyed the tank battalion, and were in the process of engaging the artillery with the large comet-bolt energy weapons even as the enraged sword infantry rapidly closed in on the hilltop with an earth-shattering roar of utter, barbaric savagery, their bodies becoming reddish, whirlwind blurs of rapidly-swishing blades and death.

“….oh, bollocks, I should have been a tailor like mother wanted.”

That was as far as the dream went, because Rally woke her right before the dark elves reached the top of the hill and was probably the reason why she remembered so much of it. Everybody seemed to be getting a kick out of how it ended regardless, though, as they were back to laughing and struggling to stand/breath/live and all that.It gave her a minute to check on her stuff she’d set down behind her, and to make sure that Max and Mona hadn’t up and wandered off to explore like they’d done the other morning. Both pups had managed to stay put this time, despite all the noise in the cafeteria and the lack of attention they’d been getting, and even surprised her by not once begging for a second helping of food like they sometimes did when they thought she’d surrender to their pitiful whimpering and puppy-dog eye look.

As much fun as the Runners seemed to have whenever she had a crazy dream to share (which she was getting a lot of lately), their boss wasn’t quite as enthused with the time she sucked up in telling them the tales. She could almost feel his hopeless presence intruding into the cafeteria, no doubt drawn to the sound of laughter and happy crying, and sure enough when she looked back at the door to the cafeteria he was standing in the doorway. His dark tan fur and eggshell-colored feathers were missing a few patches here and there, and he always had this red beret on his head and his green eyes were looking at all of his Runners like a parent trying to scold their children with a mere glare, like Mom sometimes did.

Then he turned that glare on her, but since he wasn’t her dad, it didn’t really work on her. “What was your little fairy tale this time? Snowy plains and a castle of crystal?”

Some of the laughing Runners closest to her somehow heard him speaking to her, and they didn’t usually like the tone he used on her and were quick to shoot right back at him. “Hell no!” one of the laughing griffons on the floor shouted back. “A battlefield full of pinkskins!”

El-Tee spotted BJ struggling his way into the cafeteria, breaking into a yawn and stopping mid-way when he realized he was walking into the middle of a verbal fight between the boss of the Runners and about forty of his subordinates—

“And dark elves!” another voice added in-between laughs, sounded like a girl….pony?

“And kung-fu pandas!” said a third Runner…male, sounded like one of the stallions at the next table over…

“And a funky jukebox of tunes falling from the sky!” Raina said last—

Oh gods are they gonna—

They did. She just knew they would the moment Raina opened her beak about that jukebox and she was not disappointed in the least when they broke into song in complete unison despite never having even heard more than what she’d managed to tell them—

“OOGA-CHAKA OOGA OOGA OOGA-CHAKA—"

The Chief—at least that’s what everybody here called their boss—knew when he wasting his time trying to talk sense into his underlings and just make them pay for it later, and with a frustrated huff he just turned around and showed himself back out. BJ just stood there in a frozen mid-yawn, staring out at the room of singing goofballs with that perpetually bored look in his eyes—

“OOGA OOGA HOOOOAAAH!!!” came the finale of the funky chanting when the juvenile-like Runners saw their boss departing in defeat—

—BJ’s eyes finally blinked, slowly, and his jaws gradually closed before he turned about and sauntered back out the way he came, and his voice sounded about as tired as he looked. “Way too early in the morning for this shit.”

Somehow, that little snarky sentence had the Runners laughing almost as hard as when she’d told them about the centaurs and how they answered her pinkskins’ singing. She could hear Raina’s body falling onto the floor for the…third time so far (she thought), and she thought it better to just let them laugh until they stopped themselves. For all the death and violence they saw (and dealt), they still knew when to have fun, and they never once laughed at her, but at her dreams and what she saw and did in them. If it did the least bit of good in making them forget the horrors of the wastes, even if only for a little bit, then she’d tell them every last crazy dream she had for as long as they were willing to hear it.

Chapter 21

In hindsight, she should have seen this coming.

It was one thing for her to speak of the difficulties she’d encountered in trying to learn to shoot a rifle. But in the grand scheme of things, the most instruction she’d gotten in the stable was more or less just an old Equestrian Armed Forces field manual on the subject, whereas she’d had free reign for most of her time in security to shoot her monthly allotment of 9mm and 10mm ammo until the stocks had been depleted enough to preclude such privileges roughly two years ago. She’d learned most of her pistol shooting by doing, rather than reading and trying to apply said reading to actual shooting.

She was amazed how much of a difference real, professional instruction made in her shooting ability. On the first day, she was learning the basic take-down and re-assembly of her new backwards rifle, and spent most of the day dry-firing the thing on the range to learn both the trigger pull and how much of an effect said act was having on the weapon. By the end of the day, the rifle barely moved when she did it. Afterwards, the rest of the week was split between rifle training in the morning and helping teach pistol training in the afternoon as a form of minor rehab for her post-coma recovery.

Day two was spent making sure her trigger pull did not move the rifle when live ammunition was involved. Again, the decades of experience the Runners had in actual combat made their exercises and drills much more instructive than a dry, boring manual. This was where the most unintended discharges happened, and with a trigger system that could do both semi-automatic and full-auto fire without the use of a switch or crossbolt button, more than one Runner (and herself) wound up bumping off short bursts of two to six rounds when they meant to fire only once. It happened often enough that somebody suggested that the triggers be re-fitted with a tab or switch that could be pushed in or out to keep the trigger from coming all the way back until the shooter wanted it to. It honestly wasn’t a bad idea, even if it did kinda defeat the whole purpose of the trigger’s unique method of operation. The Runners’ “benefactors” promised to look into it and come back with a prototype within the month.

Something else to ponder concerning their origins and true capabilities.

Day three was the first true day of what the Runners called “combat drills”. Since the Runners didn’t work in large numbers often, they focused more on individual shooting skills and techniques, but group tactics were not ignored. Given day two’s rather high number of accidental full-auto bursts, they started slow and easy with short-range reactive targets (mostly steel knock-down targets that could be reset by simply pulling a rope to pull them back upright). With time and consistent success, they gradually moved up to targets farther away, and by the end of the morning everybody was hitting targets from twenty yards away to over two hundred in a single practice run with only a couple of misses at most.

It also pointed out the weak link in any weapon system—the magazine. It wasn’t that it was a bad design—executed properly, it was as sturdy as any other design, and there was a definite benefit to being able to see one’s remaining ammunition at a glance when the mental round count was lost or forgotten in the stresses of combat or drills. But it was fairly easy to overload the mags with an extra round, thereby making it almost impossible to actually get it to feed. She’d done it a couple of times and were she not a unicorn gifted with excellent skill and strength in magic she’d have cursed and swore a lot louder (and longer) trying to pry that extra round back out. One Runner, on day three, also began having a lot of malfunctions with his rifle—the thing would stovepipe trying to eject an empty casing, and eventually got to where it jammed almost every time it fired. Upon taking the rifle apart, they found that the gas regulator on the barrel assembly was frozen in position and couldn’t be moved or adjusted in any way. When a replacement barrel was substituted, the malfunctions vanished.

Day four, thus, started with a review of basic operation and handling of the rifle, to make sure everybody knew that a hard tap or a slap on the magazine was not going to work like it did on the worn-out black rifles they were used to, and to not lube or oil any part of the gas regulator or piston or risk having the liquids become congealed and gunk up the entire system. Once that was done with, the day went pretty much like the previous one, except this time they were timed on it, and the last ninety minutes were spent working on group tactics. It was too easy to forget muzzle awareness with such a short rifle, and the squad tactics session made everyone keenly aware of it fairly quickly (along with the tricky trigger system). For her part, Sling was not required to partake in the group tactics session, but she did anyway because she had little else to do and she was anxious to get her body used to moving around again. She’d been getting her strength back slowly and surely throughout the week, but figured a little extra physical exercise couldn’t hurt. Her sore legs said otherwise.

Day five, today, was the last day for riflery training, and she’d been given the honor of being the first to take the Runners’ “qual” string on the range. She silently marveled at how quickly and easily she had taken to the rifle once she’d gotten the trigger and handling down with little more than sixteen hours of training. Twenty yards, or two hundred, or even three hundred, she was hitting the target, and often enough that she felt confident she could do it in an actual fight. Not in all the years and failed qualifications in the one-one-five had she ever been able to figure out what she’d been doing wrong, and yet now in five days of practice she’d already matched every security pony’s best scores, and these Runners were far better at it. She didn’t care that she would probably end up near the bottom of the scoring tally with such an obvious difference between her and the lowest-ranked Runner, only that she was shooting a rifle well enough to pass their standards. Even the lack of a bolt-hold open feature on the rifle didn’t hurt her any—if anything, not having to worry about slapping the mag in hard enough to cause it to spew rounds into an open chamber helped her focus on just getting the mag into the gun. It was probably no slower for her than trying to reload a conventional rifle from bolt-lock.

And Ada wasn’t about to let her leave without grilling her over it.

“Your stable must not know a damn thing about how to teach people to shoot,” the large griffon remarked dryly, her eyes focused on the range as a unicorn stallion took up his rifle and waited for the signal to start.

“Not really,” she agreed freely, stuffing her empty magazines into her saddlebags on the ground by Ada’s body. “Most of the time, qualification day was basically a reading of a training field manual before the range session. Same for pistol. I learned the pistol by using my monthly allotment of training ammo every month for six years, and some private practice with my .44 here and there. I was the only one who actually did that.”

“So why not do that with the rifle then?”

With the magazines stowed away, she quickly worked the charging handle on the rifle to ensure there were no rounds in the chamber, and then pulled the barrel off and punched the disassembly block out to separate the receiver from the stock. “Chief wouldn’t allow it. No rifle rounds were to be expended except on yearly qualification, unless he authorized it. He usually only allowed one training day every season on the rifle rounds…except for those who couldn’t qualify, which was me. Said I needed to qualify before he could justify letting me use up unreplaceable ammo to practice, so I was kind of in a nasty catch-22. Couldn’t beat the qualification test without practice, but he wouldn’t let me practice because I couldn’t qualify. And since he controlled all the paperwork, he could control my ability to bring it to the Overmare. Not a week went by that didn’t have me wanting to murder him.”

Ada’s contemptuous snort was impossible to mistake for anything else. “He’d fit right in with the Union. Uptight assholes always do, Colada excepting.”

“Can’t help but notice she’s the only Union officer you guys have any respect for.”

“She hates the slavers as much as we do,” Ada explained quietly, bringing a talon up to tap at a necklace hanging around her neck and causing the attached sapphire jewel to flash several times when the range officer blew into his whistle to signal the start of his compatriot’s run—

—the unicorn stallion’s rifle came up, snapping onto a steel target fifteen yards ahead of him and let off two quick shots in about a second, but the harsh report of the gunfire was muffled by the sound barrier spell embedded in the necklace. True to their word, the Runners’ “benefactors” had an immense use for the hearing protection spell she taught them and had managed to enchant enough necklaces, leg bracelets, and earrings to give everyone who wanted it hearing protection on demand, and even managed to improve on the spell so that it would only suppress harmful noise levels and allow them to converse normally. It was a very nice improvement to her spell, and it was a bit of a relief to not have to cast it anymore, but she learned up on their spell alterations all the same. Her own enchanted sapphire horn ring was connected to her innate magic and could activate on its own with a mere thought…an advantage she made sure to spread to everyone else in her travelling entourage, save for Julie who had to settle for a necklace.

She’d get her half of the “trade” when she got to the pistol range in the afternoon, whatever it was. Rico wasn’t really too keen to share any details.

As the stallion began moving down the range, engaging targets on the move, Ada resumed her somewhat reserved high regard for the Major. “Any other officer would have been strung up by their entrails for the shit she does to them, but she does it in a way that makes it impossible for the slavers to have her punished for it. She’s the only officer in her region that actually makes the guilds hold to the Union’s rules, and they hate her for it.”

With the plastic olive drab stock now all by its lonesome, she pressed in on the rubber-surface buttplate and pulled out the retaining pin that doubled as the sling swivel point, allowing the buttplate to come off and the hammer pack to slide out alongside the small cleaning kit she’d stored in the small cavity at the bottom of the stock. “And she’s still alive after all this time, how?”

“They can’t touch her for enforcing the Union’s rules, even if plenty of other officers let them get away with their shit,” Ada grinned back. “And the one time somebody made an attempt on her life, they made the mistake of trying to hit her at her house, with her kids and hubbie and wife inside at the time. She gutted the dudes alive with a combat knife herself, right in the street, and then had the slave caravan they were riding with wiped out to the last soul. Killed like, sixty slavers that day. Yeah, we like her. If anybody in the Union’s gonna back us if their shit system ever comes down on itself, it’ll be her.”

“If?” Sling questioned, her curiosity growing. “I thought you guys hated the Union. Went to war with them and everything.”

“…I maybe could have explained that better when we met,” Ada sighed. “It’s not that we’re against better trade and access to goods. We just don’t like entire towns being gobbled up into their system at gunpoint, or with a bunch of raping slavers attached to the whole mess. If the Union would turn every last slaver into ash and give towns the option about whether or not they wanted to be part of it, we wouldn’t be nearly so mad at them. For all the shit they mess up, they do just enough good to be a hell of a lot better than going back to the bad old days, when every town was out for themselves and you couldn’t go an hour on the roads without getting neck-deep in raiders.”

It was hard to argue against a position like that. “Kite’s said the same thing, more than once. But she’s not nearly as optimistic, considering the Union allowed the slave system that abused her her entire adult life. I don’t think she’d lose any sleep if the Union vanished overnight.”

“I wouldn’t blame her, given her experiences,” Ada cautioned. “There’s other ways to run farms besides slave labor without making people pay in body parts for the food. But when the Union was just starting up thirty years back they couldn’t afford to spare any people to work their farms and went to the slavers to provide the workforce.”

With the cleaning kit spread out before her on the ground, Sling set to work cleaning out all the gunpowder and copper fouling out of the barrel and receiver. “And yet they’re willing to spare people to guard it.”

“They were gonna do that whether it was slaves or honest folk working the fields,” Ada countered. “A farm putting out fresh, edible food is too valuable to not have a guard force. With the slaves, they wouldn’t lose more than they needed to keep raiders and gangs away from it, and by the time they got large enough to be able to do away with the slave labor, the slavers had found ways to imbed themselves into the Union’s workings to make it impossible to be rid of them. Ironically, the war we started with them just made that little ugly part of the Union-slaver relationship even worse. Most of the old heads of the major trade guilds got killed or stepped down during the war, and their successors weren’t too keen to lose the support of the slavers who were keeping the farms and trade routes open. Even though the trooper corps recovered enough to take over patrols again years ago, the trade guilds remember the slavers’ “help” keeping the Union running, to say nothing of our attempts to crash the slave trade by helping the Underground ferry folk from the Union’s towns to the other side of the valley. There’s no real incentive in the Board to remove them now.”

There’s that “Board” again…. “This ‘Board’, I’ve heard that name before. From Kite. I assume it’s the actual leadership of the Union? Styled after a corporate board of directors of the old world?”

The unicorn stallion on the range finally finished his run—he’d had a little trouble with the four-hundred yard target, but not enough to get him laughed at. In truth, he did pretty well considering he was sticking with the rifle’s integrated 1.5x optic and its doughnut reticle. Most everyone else had gone with the railed-top receiver and put either a 4x marksman carbine’s optic or a zero-power reflex sight on top. “Yup. Nine guys in total, all running the top-earning trade guilds. The Union itself has like…two hundred caravan companies or trade guilds? Really, their whole political system’s a clusterfuck of a mess. There’s only about a dozen outside the nine Board guilds that really matter. The rest are just a bunch of ponies and griffons and zebras trying to get by in the wastes, like everybody else. Funny thing about the Union, half the trooper companies are supported primarily by a trade guild. Colada’s, for instance, is sponsored by the Last Call Trading Co., and they’re one of those twelve other guilds that have any real power in the Union.”

Oh sweet Luna, a system like that’s gotta be chaos on its best day. “…now I’m wondering how the Union hasn’t imploded yet, with a system like that.”

“Sometimes I wonder that myself,” Ada admitted with a sigh. “Ain’t for lack of tryin’. And the shitstorm you stirred up in Trotpeka, and then with the Pythons three weeks back, Chief is a mite miffed we may have to go hardcore on ‘em…speaking of which, he wants a word with you about that. I’ll take you there when I finish my qual run.”

The casual mention of the time lapse had her nearly gaping when she ran it through her head when she took a moment to sort it out. She’d been in a coma for twelve days, and she’d come to last week, on a….Thursday? And that horrible mess in Trotpeka before all of that…it was hard to believe it had been nearly a month since that day. It didn’t feel like it…

Having finished with the barrel and receiver, she went to the bolt carrier group and took it apart to clean the bolt face with a brass bristle brush. “I’m not sure I’m going to like what your “chief” has to say.”

“Just don’t blow his face off with that rifle and you’ll be fine—”

“Ada!” the Runner’s range officer called out suddenly. “Step up!”

The griffon’s body promptly stood up on all fours and stretched out her limbs in a manner more befitting of a house cat than a hardened mercenary. “Awww, hell yeah. Watch and learn, neophyte of riflery.”

Even watching Ada ace her range test with only one miss at the five hundred meter target did not bring her any joy when it came time to deal with the Runners’ “Chief” in his working space twenty minutes later. What Light Tail referred to as their camp was in reality the remnants of an old military outpost, which according to the one sign left intact near the entrance was the home garrison of two companies from the 5th Sunrise Battalion and the 22nd Mechanized Logistics Support Company. While the military vehicles were obviously long gone, the portion of the base dedicated to the infantry companies was more than enough for the roughly two hundred and fifteen Runners who called it home. In some ways, it was really too big, but they kept the main gate guarded and the base itself was far enough out from Withercha that anyone wanting to take a shot at it had to do so across wide open ground offering almost no cover or concealment. As post-war living spaces went, it was probably one of the better ones she’d seen thus far, which had her briefly considering Ada’s recruitment offer.

The Chief maintained his “office” in the primary command and administration building on the first floor, where the Runners also did most of their mission and patrol planning—the other two floors above saw little, if any use. Even now, as Ada led her past the front lobby and through the door next to the receptionists’ desk, she could hear a few Runners in one of the rooms down the hall to her right talking through a mostly shut door. It was too muffled to make out clearly, but she had a sinking feeling in her gut that she’d find out shortly.

She’d barely come to a stop at the Chief’s desk, in a small room on the far left side of the building, when he dropped the first bit of bad news she’d had in over a week. “You stirred up a lot of shit with the Pythons over one wasteland orphan,” he half-growled through his beak, eying her in much the same manner as another chief of security in a past life did whenever she’d done something to displease him. “And got us mixed in with it in the process. You’re lucky you have three trustworthy witnesses to credit you with Saurus’s death.”

So much for us staying here, she decided right then and there. Even though she’d never really seriously considered it, signing up with the Runners had at least been briefly touched on with Kite. The benefits were obvious—safety, a clean source of water, decent bedding, and the unknown “benefactors” who could likely be the only souls in the prairie with any manner of working industrial manufacturing, given the state of the guns they were making for the Runners. But if that meant working for someone who already had a hard dislike towards her, she wasn’t sure how long she would be able to tolerate it. “Then let’s make this a quick conversation. What do you want?”

“I want to be done with it, to hell with the why,” he growled again. “Got a few of my guys working up an assault plan right now, and you’re going with them.”

She almost blurted out a two-word response that would have been almost certain to get her kicked out of the Runners’ base, but managed to hold them back long enough for Ada to jump in in her defense. “Since did you start giving orders to outsiders, Chief?”

“Since we started letting them have brand new firearms from the people we’re now single-sourcing our equipment from,” the Chief fired back. “Particularly when said outsiders also manage to get us involved with their problems without working out a contract, and this one’s a pretty damn big one by the sound of it.”

“I didn’t ask your Runners to get involved with that fight in Hayfield,” Sling countered, in vain, but she had felt the need to at least point out that Ada, Leon, and those Runners she met there had offered their help of their own accord.

“You didn’t turn them away when they offered it either,” he replied, as expected. He was starting to sound more like she expected a mercenary to sound like, leading her to wonder if the eight Runners she had met were the exception in their outfit, or if their Chief was.

“I set up the plan to have Double’s crew watching for Sling’s party if they happened to find her,” Ada cut in, her tone growing a tad more confrontational. “I got us involved in that shitstorm in Hayfield, however unintentional it was.”

“You only helped them out ‘cause of that little filly you and everybody else around here is so smitten with,” he said evenly. “I keep telling you people not to get involved on the fly like that. A lesson that you, Sling Shot, could stand to learn very soon. Sticking your neck out for others out of the goodness of your bleeding heart gets good people killed quickly in the wasteland. You won’t last a year if you keep helping runaways and orphans with their own baggage issues. Hell, that teen’s got a bounty on her head that drove her all the way to Rough Port before she got held up by Puck. I barely understand the mess you got yourself into on that one, and us along with it.”

Sling felt a bubbling, familiar anger rising up within her veins. This Chief reminded her too much of Farsight already. Maybe it was because he felt the need to take the title of “Chief” for his leadership position, or maybe it was because he was starting to sound like a heartless asshole, but she already disliked him about as much as he disliked her. “It wasn’t just Rally they were looking for, they were keeping an eye out for me and my little girl too. It was just blind luck that all three of us happened to be in the same spot when they came to get her.”

“If you believe that bullshit story she told you, then you’re even dumber than I thought,” he spat at her—

—Ada’s left talon lashed and pressed into her barrel, unintentionally jarring her from a hasty and unconscious decision to attach this increasingly infuriating griffon in the heart of his own camp—

--he caught the slight forward jolt of her body nonetheless. “Looking to take a shot at me just for ruffling your coat, stable pony?”

“I’m thinking about it very strongly,” she hissed back, letting some of her anger out through her voice. “I—”

“Chief, if you called her here just to piss her off, I may just let go of her,” Ada warned her boss darkly. “There’d best be a reason for this little get-together.”

This Chief, if he took ill to being threatened by his own mercs, did not show it in any manner of visible body language, and simply continued talking to Sling as though his subordinate was not even there. “I’m serious, who else besides this wasteland urchin can verify her story? Puck? He’s dead, wasted in the crossfire when you went and took on the group trying to catch her. The Pythons? You killed all but one of them, and she probably killed the last one herself to keep you from questioning her little tale. Kids like Rally don’t make it to her age on their own by being nice little ponies like you stable folk. She may have more blood on her hooves than some of my Runners, and that’s not even counting the thieving orphans get up to when nobody’s looking. For all you know she pulled your leg to get you to get into a dust-up with the Pythons.”

She was well and truly pissed now, but in that little speech she also noted a certain…distaste for orphans like Rally that seemed to line up with Kite’s own bias against them (a bias she was making an effort to ignore for Rally’s sake). Apparently wasteland orphans were doing enough thieving and troublemaking just to survive to piss off the wasteland at large at how they did it…and that cemented her little theory on the raiders. More than likely, the vast majority of them were orphans forced to survive on their own, or were the offspring of raiders who’d grown up in very similar situations generations prior. The world had yet to really rebuild itself in the last two centuries since the megaspells, after all. Ironically, it seemed that this “wastelander society” was responsible for the very raiders they detested.

If those same raiders weren’t prone to murdering, stealing, and raping their way through entire settlements, she would almost pity them….

“Either shut up, or explain why I’m standing in your office,” she warned him with a sharp tone. “I don’t have the time or patience for your bullshit.”

For a moment it almost looked like he was going to take her up on her unspoken threats, but he seemingly erred on the side of caution (and getting her out of his sight). “I called you here to lay out the future ahead of you. My guys are getting an assault plan on the Pythons worked out, because now that we’re involved in your little tussle they’re going to be looking for blood from us and I want to make sure they’re in no condition to threaten anything more dangerous than a crawling foal. You’re going to be a part of that plan because it’s your mess and my guys are not going to put themselves at risk dealing with it while you and yours sit here all safe and sound.”

Much as she loathed to admit it, that last bit…it made just a little bit of sense. She didn’t like it, but she at least understood the reasoning.

“Given the treatment you’re giving me right now, ‘me and mine’ will not be staying here for very much longer,” she said back, resisting (mostly successfully) the urge to nudge Ada’s outstretched arm aside and charge into this “Chief” where he stood—

—and at last, she managed to get a response from him other than his harsh, stern (but calm-sounding) distaste. “Hear my options out before you toss them aside, stable pony,” he said with a slight insistent tone. “Because it’s rare that we come across anybody with a working knowledge of arms repair or medicine, and you and your girlfriend have skills we could use. That damn orphan too, much as it pains me to say it. Your little horde could do well here.”

Do not kill do not kill do not kill, she forced herself to repeat in a silent mantra of control, lest she give in to the murderous urges compelling her to make the worst mistake she could make. “A mercenary camp is no place for my daughter, or Blue Jay or Rally for that matter,” she snarled back. “I will help your mercs with their plan against the Pythons, but after that me and my little horde are leaving. I don’t give a damn how safe this place is, if working under you is going to be like this I’d rather ta—”

The office door smacked open behind her—given who had dared to intrude a moment later, Sling wondered if it had been an accident or intentional. “Oh, there you are, was looking for you!” Rico’s voice chimed gleefully, inserting herself into the room and quickly focusing all of her attention on her. “I may have some work for you, very important—”

“Wait your turn, Rico,” the Chief cut her off. “She’s got work she needs to do for me first.”

Sling thought she saw a foul and dark gloominess come over Rico’s face, but it vanished by the time the grim-looking mare turned her gaze onto the gray-feathered griffon behind the desk. “What kind of work?”

“He wants her to tag along with us when we go after the Pythons,” Ada answered immediately, likely realizing the Chief—whatever his name was—might not be inclined to offer the information on his own.

Rico’s frown of disapproval was almost motherly in nature. “Chief, there are more important things that Sling Shot can do than to go running around killing people. She’s not a soldier or mercenary, any one of your Runners could take her place for that mission.”

“She started this little war with the Pythons and she’s going to help finish it, end of story—”

“My number two caravan came back this morning,” Rico countered calmly. “Misty Veil found part of the key we need.”

There was a palatable, if short, silence before the Chief spoke again. “By ‘found’, do you mean she has it in her physical possession, or did she just find its location?”

“…the latter,” Rico admitted. “The key itself is locked in the secure wing of a Ministry of Arcane Science facility in the northwest quarter of Withercha. The terminal that controls access to the wing is non-functional, but Misty found a secondary interface that can be utilized by a PipBuck…which I know Sling Shot has.”

She hoped the jump her heart did didn’t show in her face. “Do you?”

“She walks with a higher step in her left foreleg because she’s worn it for so long her body is not used to being without it,” Rico revealed casually. “And the first time we met last week, there was a noticeable crease in the leg where that PipBuck has been attached for most of her life. I know a stable pony when I see one, no matter how much they try to hide it.”

Ada’s beak snorted something that sounded like an amused laugh. “Told you she’d figure it out in ten seconds, Chief.”

“I’ve also figured out that it may be necessary to alter our business arrangements, if you’re going to start withholding information from us,” Rico countered smoothly, drawing a slight glare of ire from the Chief. “We supply you with ammunition, spare parts for your old guns, and now new-manufacture guns, and at cost, and in exchange we ask you to keep us informed of events beyond the immediate Withercha region. A pony from the last unclaimed Stable in Union territory with an intact working PipBuck is news worth learning and I had to surmise it from meeting with her face-to-face despite her being in the camp for five days when she came to pick up the bounty reward on Saurus. The fact that the first thing you want her to do for you is to go into the city and fight the second largest merc group in the western prairie has me wondering if I need to talk my superiors into holding back on some of that support until you get your priorities straightened out.”

Ohhhhhhh shit, her mind cursed silently. Her mere presence being enough to sour the Runners’ relationship with their most critical—and perhaps only—supplier of arms and munitions was not something she had foreseen this morning when she woke up….

“My priority at the moment is making sure Sling Shot’s problems don’t remain ours for very long,” the Chief bellowed coldly. “Or they could very well become your problems as well.”

Rico’s face began to harden, as if silently mulling over whether to pull her group’s support right then and there instead of trying to argue her point further. “…maybe we need to lay out the larger picture shaping up around us right now, just so you can see past these damn snakes. At one point in time, the Oak Tree manufacturing plant the Scrappers run was the only place in the whole prairie where one could get decent gun parts. They went under three months ago when a machine on a production line finally gave out, and the old Ironshod plant is still locked up tight so there’s no one else who can fill the gap they just left. The Bullet Farmers in the southwest quarter of the city could make factory-condition ammunition, to proper specs, and even had access to a source of lead and copper. Two months ago tribals set up camp near the lead mine, built a prayer shrine at the mine entrance, and have all but cut everyone else off from it. The Radical Angels control the two production plants in Withercha that could still manufacture healing potion, and which are out of operation for reasons unknown, and that was only a month ago. Even the optics shop at the northern edge of the city is having issues keeping their operations going. In short, almost every valuable source of trade commodities that Withercha could still offer the Union is either gone or heading that way. And these Pythons you bitch about so much are sensing an opportunity to shove you aside as the dominating mercenary force in the western prairie, if what Misty reported to me is accurate.”

Sling felt her gut turn cold as the list of Withercha’s problems grew more and more ominous. What had once been painted as a place of freedom from the Union’s slaver-loving clutches was starting to sound more like a region on the verge collapsing in on itself and begging the Union to steamroll right on in. “…this is not the land of Union-free troubles you painted for me, Ada.”

“No, it’s not,” Ada’s voice agreed solemnly. “And we need to fix it, fast.”

“What you need to do, Ada,” the Chief countered sharply, “is follow your sundamned orders and get to Withercha with the others, take those Pythons out or do enough damage that they won’t get in our way again, and that stable pony is coming with you.”

“Did you hear even one word I said just now?” Rico growled angrily. “I just told you that Withercha’s trade and economy has almost ground to a halt and the Pythons are taking advantage of it!”

“You’ve yet to enlighten me on the how, Ricochet.”

“I’m beginning to wonder if it would matter—”

“Let’s get going,” Ada snapped suddenly, with an unusually succinct crispness that was not what Sling was to used to hearing from her. Like her patience had just run out with the whole mess…

Well, if we’re being honest here, I ran out of patience about three minutes ago…

Sling Shot turned away from the Chief’s desk and followed Ada out of his sight, subtly nudging Rico to tag along with a small burst of magic at one of her forelegs. There was a little resistance to her touch, but the dark grayscale mare didn’t delay in joining them.

It took all of five seconds, once they’d cleared his office and escaped his hearing, for Rico to try and make good on her threat. “If your Chief is going to let the whole western prairie tumble right into the Union’s slaving clutches, he’ll do it without us—”

“Not here,” Ada warned before she could finish, quickening her pace and all but leaving them behind in her dust. “I’ll get the others, find you at your caravan later. We’re gonna do this the smart way.”

Rico wisely held her tongue until the two of them had exited the half-crumbling administration building and got roughly a minute’s walk away from it. “I can promise you I am much easier to work for than that asshole,” she hissed through clenched teeth. “Worst chief the Runners have had in two decades.”

So it’s not just me… “So this guy, whatever his name is…he’s an anomaly?”

“The Runners are mercs, but they’re not nearly as driven by caps, vice, and whores as the rest of their guns-for-hire world,” Rico spat. “They’re real particular about making sure their contracts are for good reasons, like wiping out slavers and raiders, or keeping an honest caravan from getting knocked over by a rival. They try to keep people safe and not screw anybody over, and sometimes they’ll just go out and waste whole gangs of thieves and raiders without anybody paying them to. This new Chief of theirs, though…he’s something else. Wants every Runner to work under contract or not at all, no more freelancing about and doing good just ‘cause they want to.”

“That sounds more like a guy who was brought in from outside than one of their own.”

“Sadly, that’s not the case,” Rico said, her words laced with a disappointed sigh. “His name’s Vergil, if you care enough to call him by name. He took over after the last chief was killed on one of those freelance excursions against a road gang occupying a highway rest station, down south. They’d been extorting a settlement of about two hundred souls for food from a royal ration stockpile nearby. It was one of the last ones in the region that still had anything left inside, so four Runners and the chief decided to strike out and take the gang down. Chief caught a couple rounds in the throat when he was clearing a maintenance supply shack. Vergil has made it his personal mission to turn the Runners into a merc outfit no better than the Pythons. So far, his attitude hasn’t taken hold with the rest of them, and I’ve been seeing signs of late that the Runners would rather do away with him altogether and just keep going like they have been, only without anybody really in charge of the group overall.”

…oh, shit, I think I see what you just did back there. “So you made sure they’re going to want to,” Sling finished out loud, but only after taking a quick peek around to make sure her accusation wouldn’t be picked up by anyone else. “Because once they hear that you threatened to pull your support and munitions supply, they’re going to think very, very hard about whether they really want to do away with him.”

Rico didn’t shy away from it in the slightest. “It was a threat my bosses told me to lay down if I deemed it necessary. I wasn’t given any specific scenarios or parameters about what they would accept as “necessary”, so I had to make a gut call. Things in Withercha are pretty dicey right now, and we need the Runners out there doing what they do best. This bullshit with the Pythons is going to soak up a lot of their time and resources and it’s going to get the whole region pissed off at them in the end, because those snakes are worming their way into the city’s economy in ways the Runners would never consider. Becoming the only reliable food source in the region, when all the other major factions can no longer produce any trade goods of any significant interest to the Union, would do far more than just put the Pythons at the top of the power hierarchy here. It could entice the Union to break their treaty with the Runners and start laying claim to the western prairie, or just straight out annex Withercha itself in a “stabilizing” relief effort. Within a year you’d have slavers everywhere setting up shop in every major settlement south of the old mountain pass to the Core, and the Pythons would be in a prime position to benefit from it every step of the way. Simply killing them en masse is not going to get things back to the way they were.”

“I’m inclined to kill the whole lot of them just for sending thirty-plus of their number to run down a fourteen-year old orphan and rape her to death,” Sling fumed, feeling her blood boil even as the slightly hazy memory came back to her in two brief flashes. Four mercs, pinning Rally to a couch and…

“One thing at a time,” Rico pressed gently, just as the silouhette of her wagon train began to appear in the far distance. “Kite has the last of her shopping list in hoof now, you should probably check in with her in your quarters. We can discuss this later.”

“Did she finally settle on something?”

“Not fully,” the gray mare replied. “For the moment she’s decided to try a standard Maretta nine, with a little extra work, but she also picked up a couple of extras along with some Rig-Mayer nines. Total of six guns, maybe she got the spares for your kids if you feel the need to arm them when you’re back on the road. We didn’t have time to do a lot of upgrades on the Marettas. Heavy duty slide, like yours, with green arcane gem rods embedded in the sights and the enchanted ceramic plate in the frame to offset heat and recoil stress. I’m afraid they’ll have to settle for group sizes of between two to two and a half inches at twenty-five meters. And we didn’t have time to cut in the front serrations, but the magazine wells are beveled to help with reloads. For their shooting level, it should serve them well. A custom rig like yours wouldn’t do them any more good than what they’ve got now. You’re probably the second soul I’ve met that could make the most of the accuracy potential of my baby project. The Rig nines were barely touched, just beveled the mag wells, added the arcane gem sights and left it at that. They’re actually a tad more accurate than the Marettas, but the grip screws like to work loose after a couple hundred rounds. You’ll need to keep an eye on them.”

Distant, faint pops began to roll across the horizon, and Sling thought she could see brief flashes of yellow at the wagon train, but she wasn’t sure. “I figured you had a good deal of work put into that pistol, given everything that you knew about it. How long did it take to make?”

“That little beauty? About a month, including the six days that the enchanters in my outfit spent working their magic on every imaginable part. It was originally built for a griffon in the Runners, but he died before we could finish it. It’s….it’s honestly kind of a relief to not have to look at it in the back of my wagon anymore.”

The weight of the custom 9mm on her left side seemed to double in that moment. “…oooh.”

“Yeah,” Rico sighed sadly. “That was the first custom job we failed to deliver on in time. From what I’ve heard, it could have made a difference for him if he’d had it. Take good care of it, okay?”

It was just as well that her brain couldn’t come up with anything to say to that, because she was starting to have a harder time getting her mouth to work when it came to conversation. That…really killed the enthusiasm I had for it…

Fortunately, the ten-minute walk to the barracks building solved that issue, once she made her way up to the fifth floor, and to the room she currently shared with Kite. As Rico had predicted, her new gun was laid out on a table in the corner of the room, slide locked open, though for the moment more attention was being paid to a saddlebag just beside it—

—and completely forgot about almost everything else in the world when she saw that Kite’s left hind leg no longer had that reconstitution brace attached to it—

“When did that that thing come off?” Sling asked out loud as a sort of greeting, but also to get Kite’s attention as she worked her travelling saddle off and set it aside on the floor.

Not that she needed to put in the effort. The mare seemed all too eager to spend any available energy on her, even flexing her leg about to prove it that was back to full function. “About five minutes after you left for your shooting test. It’s just like it was before those ghouls got to me, damn thing actually worked.”

Sling was inexorably drawn to Kite’s position, pulling herself close to the leg as the mare lifted it out and stretched it. She’d never been able to get Kite to tell her what had happened to her leg, and with the brace slapped on it she’d never gotten a look at the injury it was attempting to heal. It was thus rather difficult to tell if there were any real differences from before, mainly because she’d not really been all that interested in scoping Kite out like this. “Does it…does it feel any different from before?”

Out of the corner of her vision, she could see Kite pulling what looked like another Maretta out of the saddlebag, locking the slide back and setting it down on the table. “I remember what was done to it. It may be physically intact, but in the back of my mind I still can’t bring myself to believe it. I feel like it’s going to re-open and it scares me. I’ll do just about anything to take my mind off of it right now.”

Easily done, Sling silently agreed, finally allowing herself a cursory glance at Kite’s pistols. Thicker slide with raised humps on the slide, right where the locking block would be…sights had those green gem rods in them, very bright. Turning the gun over on its side revealed the beveled mag well, and another second’s effort to pull the slide off exposed the blue ceramic insert inside the frame’s dustcover. “Well, if it makes you feel any better, I can complement your choice of pistol. It’ll be easier to clean, at least, even the firing pin channel. Just spray some solvent in there and hit it with a concentrated air blast spell, and blow all the shit out of there without having to take the firing pin block out.”

As usual, Kite was quickly lost and left behind. “…wait, what? What are you talking about?”

Sling turned the slide over until its exposed underside was oriented towards Kite. “That area there, behind the breach face. The firing pin channel can get all kinds of junk blown back into it. Bits of brass, unburned gun powder, gas fouling, things most people wouldn’t think of when it comes to guns. There’s a piece inside the slide that keeps the firing pin from hitting the chambered round if the gun is dropped, and gets lifted out of the way when you pull the trigger. On most pistols that part is captured inside the slide and you have to take it apart to clean the firing pin channel out, but with this gun, I don’t need to do that. Makes it much, much easier to clean thoroughly. I’m kind of hoping Light Tail might want one of these too. That M&A 9 she has is a classic, but that particular gun was put together using the best parts I could find from two separate pistols that I found my first day out of the stable. It’s working better than I expected, but it’s not the ideal way to get a gun running and it’s two centuries old.”

Kite finally took her eyes off the contents of her saddlebag and settled them on her. “You can do that? Just…take a couple of old beat up guns and make a working one out of them?”

“If there’s enough good parts between the two of them, then it shouldn’t be a problem. I’d rather not, though, so many different parts with different wear characteristics thrown together is usually a recipe for disaster in the long term. But at the time, we only had my 10mm, Grayhawk, and that five-shot revolver Light Tail keeps and I wanted her to have something she could reload a lot faster than a revolver in a hurry, so I took the beat up nines and made something workable. Like I said, it’s doing better than I expected, but that’s not gonna last.”

Kite’s throat made a light, purring sigh of approval as a third Marettas was set out on the table, locking the slide open as she put it down. “Then it’s a good thing I got a couple of spares, which Rico modified just like she did mine. Thought the girls could use one, but Light Tail prefers the pistol she’s been using so I just got her a new one from Rico. You may want to look it over later.”

The thought of four 9mm pistols among them that could share magazines in a firefight was offset by the worry of having to buy and carry enough ammunition to keep all the magazines topped off. Assuming every pistol came with five magazines, that would mean roughly seventy-five rounds per pony, totaling three hundred rounds all told. That would mean having to carry at least that much in reserve to reload expended magazines as needed, and that wasn’t taking into account practice sessions that would invariably need between fifty to a hundred rounds for each of them, or the five or so magazines El-Tee had for her 13-shot 9mm…

“…how many magazines did you get?” she asked next, briefly inspecting each of the three pistols to ensure that the dovetailed sights were centered in their slots. She’d have to check trigger pulls in a few minutes with a pressure gauge, make sure they were all fairly close.

“Eight per pistol,” Kite answered, inadvertently blowing her ammo estimates out of the water. “You said once that you preferred having five loaded magazines as a…combat load, you called it? I figure extras would be prudent in case one gets lost or damaged.”

D’oh, yeah, that makes more sense now. Shoulda thought of that. “It would be,” she sighed. “But now I’m worried about how we’re going to carry enough ammo to keep the guns fed. Everybody pretty much has at least one weapon now, when before it was just me, you, and Light Tail—”

“You had most of them,” Kite cut in with a snicker. “Like, four at once? Elly had two pistols, and I had that rifle I didn’t much care for and couldn’t hit well with. Now we can all keep a couple on us.”

“That comes with the problem of having enough ammo on us to reload those weapons if we end up using them. The 9mm alone is starting to scare me with how many guns we have in that caliber, and then there’s the .357s that can also fire .38s, my new rifle, and then my .44 Mag—”

“Which reminds me, look on the bed a moment, you blind ass mare—”

Sling barely felt more than a tinge of irritation at the slight flung at her vision as she half-heartedly complied with the request. “You might want to steal a few extra hours in it while you can, we probably wo—”

Her words died in her mouth when her eyes swept over the foot of the bed. Lying atop the fluffy, inviting comforter sheet was Grayhawk, bearing a new set of red-shaded hardwood grips whose luster and grain pattern seem to shift with the angle of the light hitting it. The old grips, while quite good, were meant for target shooting and much too large for a gun that had thus far spent most of its time in a holster. These new grips were much slimmer and actually matched quite well with the dulled, matte satin stainless steel of the gun. It had been something Rico had suggested on a whim a few days ago, and she heartily agreed to it. But that wasn’t what was stealing every other breath from her lungs.

It was the eight fifty-round boxes of .44 Magnum ammunition piled atop each other next to the gun.

Eight. Boxes.

Fifty rounds per box.

Her body slid across the floor until her chest was pressing into the footboard, and it took her a couple of seconds to register that she couldn’t get any closer than that. Her magic looped over the ammo and scooted the boxes up to the very edge of the bed, and then separated one of the two blue-marked boxes from the group and pulled out the plastic tray—

I am not dreaming, she failed to whisper breathlessly at the sight of the polished brass and the fully copper-coated bullets that, when inspected with a very minute scrying spell, hit her mind’s eye with a small shimmer of mana—

“I’ve almost finished up my examination of your Phoenix .44—”

The bed and its cargo of gun and ammo vanished, a recent memory returning to her in full—

“Almost? You’ve had my gun for five days now—”

“I only get a couple of hours per evening to take my measurements,” Rico defended herself. “Most of my day is spent working out the kinks with the Runners’ new rifles while they train up on them. Training they have graciously allowed you to partake in, I might add.”

“….oh.”

“Yeah, ‘oh’. But I won’t hold it against you. In fact, I do have a question for you, what ammo have you been shooting through it? I found very trace amounts of residual mana in the barrel last night. Nothing harmful, it’s just…odd.”

Her lone box of .44 Mag ammo from home was lifted out of her saddlebags and into a world that coveted every last round of the caliber that could be found and murdered for. “Wait, in the barrel? How would you even know to look for something like that?”

Rico quickly plucked a round out of the box and began turning it about in a telekinesis spell, the glow of her horn pulsing slightly more brightly as she focused on the bullet nestled into the casing. “I could almost feel it in my spell fields whenever I was handling it, so I decided to try a specialized scrying spell I developed specifically to look for this very thing—ooooh, oooh my I think I know what this is…”

“Well, don’t keep it to yourself.”

Rico’s face began to grow into a sick, delighted grin as she put the round back in the box and floated it back over to her. “I believe you may have one of the only known remaining boxes of pre-war .44 Magnum mana burst rounds. They’re essentially regular bullets infused with small, but very potent charges of mana to enhance their power. The downside is that the true effect of the round was a little varied compared to a true enchanted bullet. Usually it was a twofold increase in velocity or explosive expansion, but occasionally they were known to tear off limbs or heads, or blow them up like tiny explosive charges. They were strictly custom-order only ammunition, and were known to fetch as much as one hundred bits per box in the war’s heyday before they were banned from civilian possession—”

Sling’s eyes blinked, and the memory vanished, bringing her back to the room, with Grayhawk, and over four hundred rounds of .44 Magnum ammunition, one hundred of which appeared to be mana-burst rounds…

Four. Hundred.

She stared at the bullet floating before her, almost unwilling to believe such a large quantity of one of the wasteland’s most coveted and sought-after treasures was just lying there in the open like that, but a few taps against the collection of boxes with a slightly trembling forehoof confirmed that they were in fact real bullets and not a figment of her degrading senses. Slowly, and with the care that one might take with a newborn foal, she slipped the cartridge back into its nesting spot in the ammo tray, closed the box back up…

…and heard what sounded like a mouse-like, joyous squeal from her throat as her forelegs reached out and hugged the pile of ammo against her chest. Four hundred rounds of .44 Mag.

Four hundred rounds of .44 Mag! Four hundred FUCKING ROUNDS OF—

A foreign touch upon her withers nearly jolted her from her euphoria, but the voice that followed was calm, even slightly frightful. “S-Sling? Ummm….arrrrrrre….are you doing okay?”

She squealed again, still unwilling to physically let go of the ammo lest it vanish and prove to be a figment of her degrading senses like she was afraid it was. “I’m…I’m good. I’m fine. This is fine….this is fine…”

Her magic reached out, bid Grayhawk to float away and settle down upon her discarded travelling saddle, and she only subconsciously realized a moment later that her precious new hoard of ammunition was streaming in right behind the massive revolver—

—her forelegs, now empty, sought a new object to grab hold of and hug and settled for Kite, latching onto the grape-coated mare’s body and pulling her close—

“Whoa whoa whoa whoa what are yo-oooOOOOOhhh—”

Kite’s protests were cut short by what Sling would later remember as a deep, delirious kiss, much like one she’d received when Kite had finally been freed of the slaver’s cruelty. But she didn’t realize it until what seemed like an eternity of bliss had passed and she found herself lying on her side on the bed, still holding Kite close to her and who looked like she’d just found the equivalent of the heavens herself. To be clear, neither of them were coated in sweat or short of air, but they had clearly just enjoyed a few moments of each other’s company.

How sad was it that she couldn’t remember it because she’d just been gifted four hundred rounds of a rare caliber?

Kite’s tongue, sticking out slightly out of the right corner of her mouth, lapped at her snout before retreating back into her jaw. “….it just couldn’t be flowers with you, could it…”

A light, nervous laugh slipped out of her throat. “Eh hehehe, I uh…I don’t remember what we just did.”

She felt a light, harmless slap at her left ear, probably a teasing burst from Kite’s horn as the other mare squealed with faked rage. “Oh my gods you sick creature are you kidding me?! I give you eight boxes of your precious .44 bullets and you can’t even be bothered to remember the five minutes we just spent making out on this soft and comfortable bed?!”

Five minutes?! She managed not to shriek back into Kite’s face. That would have been bad. “I…remember this period of bliss…does that count?”

“No!” Kite shrieked gleefully, slapping at her ear again as she rolled over to take up a position above her. “You just said you don’t even remember what we did! You were on cloud nine because of the stupid bullets, uggghhhh! You are impossible!”

A rush of shame flooded into her cheeks, mostly because it seemed likely that Kite’s assumption was more correct than she wanted to admit. She almost decided to just let things go at that and get back to the depressing reality of the world she now lived in…

…almost.

And then she began to recall a few choice words of insight that Julaya had freely shared not too long ago—at least, it wasn’t that long ago to her. Namely, insight into why the zebra did what she did. To live, to enjoy the things she could, when she could.

Maybe it was time she started doing the same.

Her body leaned up, grabbed onto Kite, and pulled her back down with her in a soft whump! into the comforters. “I might need an encore, then.”

Kite’s eyes did not lose that perplexing look of glee and frustration that made her look like a dime novel mad scientist. “Don’t lead me on when you don’t even know which way you swing. If you do at all.”

“I said I couldn’t promise it would go the way you want it to,” she corrected gently with a pawing touch at the other mare’s face. “I still can’t. I don’t want to go that far right now. But I had this short talk with Julie, the day before I put myself into that coma, and I found that I had a great deal to learn about actually living a life instead of just surviving it.”

With great restraint and self-control (or maybe she was honestly upset with her), Kite resisted every urge that must have been telling her to go with the flow and pushed herself back up on her hooves. “Maybe later, when the kids are asleep and have no chance to interrupt us at a crude and extremely inappropriate moment. We got lucky these last few minutes, and in my experience it usually doesn’t happen twice in the same day.”

A light pang of longing and disappointment hit her as Kite hopped off the bed and returned to her saddlebags, which were very strange and new sensations to her. She wasn’t a very social pony…or she thought she wasn’t, anyway. It wasn’t like anybody in the Stable had wanted much of anything to do with her…

…and maybe that was the problem. Never having much of any kind of companionship beyond a daughter she’d had too soon and one real friend. She’d had everything she could want in the Stable…except another soul to share her life and time with. Here in the wastes, she faced violent death on a weekly basis, in a world dangerous enough that she seriously entertained the idea of letting children walk about with loaded guns close to hoof and horn…and she found herself feeling more complete when this scarred, abused mare in front of her was near her.

How much of her life had she missed out on…

In a fit of emotionally-driven madness, she jumped off the bed, absently flinging the door lock on with a simple thought into her horn, and made sure that Kite could hear it—

—Kite’s left ear flicked towards the sound of the clicking lock, and she turned her head back towards her—

“That’s what door locks are for,” she said with a low voice, stealing herself into Kite’s personal space with a soft nuzzle, relishing the brief joy that filled her when their snouts met.

She felt Kite’s snout bump her back a little, a soft mewing noise escaping from her lips. “…you really have been thrown for a loop this past month, to be acting like this. First Trotpeka, then that business with Rally and those Python mercs…if I didn’t know you used to live in an underground Stable that shunned you out of its social network I’d be less worried. This is starting to look like an existential crisis to me. Your only real social interaction for the last ten-plus years was your daughter and a single pegasus friend you rarely speak of to me. What you want right now could easily lead into something much more…intimate, if we aren’t careful. You know what it’s like to lose yourself in your passions, it’s how you got Light Tail after all. You have no idea how relationships with other souls really work, and I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You won’t, as long as you keep that in mind.”

“…we’ll see what happens later, when we don’t have work to do,” Kite relented, slightly, before turning back to her saddlebags and pistols on the table. “Did that talk with the Runners’ chief go about as poorly as we expected?”

“Pretty much,” Sling mumbled. Between Kite putting her off and the reminder she’d just gotten about her very unpleasant visit with that damn griffon, any lustful longings she’d been harboring was rapidly draining away from her. “He outright ordered me to go along with some of his Runners to pick a fight with the Pythons, on their home territory no less.”

“The fact that you were able to come back here afterward tells me you didn’t kill him for it, so there’s that, at least,” Kite hummed. “Didn’t even listen to what Rico had to say about Withercha’s problems either, did he?”

“If he heard her, he didn’t show it,” Sling bemoaned. “He doesn’t seem all that concerned about it either way, which leaves us with another problem on top of what we’re already saddled with. We can’t go back east, but things are no better here either and it’s not going to get better without some serious help.”

Kite stopped rummaging through her bags, a disheartened grimace settling into her face. “…so, slavers are looking for you, if you believe what Rally told you—”

“I do,” she snapped, perhaps a little too harshly, but she couldn’t help it. It was the second time she’d heard that line and it was starting to get under her coat. “When she explained how she’d come across the Pythons at Puck’s bar in Rough Port, she also said that they’d been told by a contact they had in the slavers that I’d wiped out a slaver kill squad and that the Union was looking for me because of it. That fight was well away from the populated section of Trotpeka, and the only ones who know about it besides us would be the Union and the slavers.”

“…okay, then, the slavers are looking for you, and apparently are paying the Pythons to help them since they can’t cross the valley without risking the Runners going to war with them. Why?”

She had her suspicions on that, actually. And she was afraid that when she went to see how valid those suspicions might be, she would have a great many reasons to regret it. “Light Tail’s picked up a latent talent for sleuthing that scares the shit out of me sometimes. Let’s go see if she can still do it.”

“How did I know you were going to say that,” Kite sighed in defeat, the glow of magic returning to her horn as she began to pull at the contents of her saddlebags again. “Fine, but first let’s see how this little present of mine fits you.”

“You keep giving me gifts and we may not leave this room again today.”

“Tempt me not, lest I give in to these exceptionally powerful urges to pin to you that bed and let myself go haywire with you,” Kite mused with a small laugh. “Rico had your armor ready when I went to pick up those four hundred rounds of your precious bullets. Comes with a bodysuit and some lingerie to wear underneath it.”

The last fleeting, pleasant thoughts she had left about the next few minutes abruptly vanished from her mind, and a creeping terror began to leech into her chest. “…la…la…did you just say…lingerie?”

“Mostly to keep the bodysuit from chaffing you between the haunches. Let’s just give this stuff a quick fit test, see if Rico’s measurements were off—”

She’d barely spun around and made it two steps away from Kite before she felt Kite’s magic wrap around her hind legs and pull them back towards her. She hit the floor with a hard thump that briefly knocked the air out of her lungs, leaving her with nothing to scream her protests with as she was dragged into Kite’s carefully-laid trap—

“Oh wow, not even a minute ago you were all hot and bothered with me and now you can’t run away fast enough when I bring out the undergarments,” Kite cackled evilly. “You are the most perplexing mare I’ve ever had my heart set on, now get over here—”

A week after Mom pulled out of her coma, she finally had a chance to sort it all out. Or most of it, anyway. There were some things that still didn’t seem clear, but it was looking like it was going to rain soon and she didn’t want to be out in it, so she didn’t have much else to do but put it all together and try to unscramble her brain for a second time. The first time, like, two weeks ago? Or three? Luna’s moon, she couldn’t keep track. She remembered that she lost almost all ability to reason and think, watching Mom get buried under that diner and then trying in vain to move any big pieces of rubble. She didn’t get more than a couple of minutes into it when she found herself pulled away by Ada’s big claws and dropped at Kite’s side, and…

…well, that was it, basically. The only things she could remember about that day after that was a lot of tears and crying, and the oddly comforting warmth of a mare that wasn’t Mom when she finally fell asleep that night. Or maybe it was the combo of wool and fleece blankets. Maybe even both. She did know she hadn’t slept that deeply since Trotpeka, and the wagon didn’t even have anything like a mattress to sleep on.

Might be worth asking about later.

For now, she just focused on her little brain project. The Runners’ had taken up an old military base as a “home” decades ago, and she was surprised by how much of it had managed to stay intact, and how much of the place could be compared to a small city. It wasn’t anywhere as big as Fort Wiley, but at one point it had a royal post office, a track field, some restaurants, and even a neighborhood with houses like in a city. Of course it also had several big buildings that Ada called barracks, and that soldiers who lived on the base basically had a dorm room for a living space. It wasn’t much, really, but compared to some of the places she’d seen folk living in out in the wastes, it was a lot better than most. It used to have a med clinic, but it collapsed a couple of decades ago and the Runners were still trying to organize an actual building or something. Anybody that got hurt, once they were treated, were moved into the barracks to recover. For the first few days of her stay, she’d been sleeping on a cot in a tent outside with Rally, BJ, and Julie, like most of the Runners did. Max and Mona never did seem to mind sleeping on the floor no matter where they were.

And then four days ago, those mysterious “benefactors” of the Runners had brought in a few caravans stuffed full of beds, pillows, blankets and comforters and whatnot, and spent a whole day moving it all into one of the barracks buildings, and after that the Runners were having a field day moving themselves into an actual sheltered living space with a soft bed. She and Rally wound up sharing a room, but it had two beds and it was nice to not be alone in a building full of strangers even if she didn’t think any of them of would hurt her. She let one of the pups stay with BJ in his new (temporary) room, and Max and Mona seemed to switch places there every night, like they were taking turns keeping watch on everybody or something. Julie was staying somewhere in the same building, but didn’t say where. She did mention she had not slept in anything as soft and comfortable as these new beds in her whole life, and that it was making her seriously question whether she wanted to leave or not.

And one of the benefits of having a walled room was having a wall that she could hang stuff on, like a big chalkboard she could write on to her heart’s content as she worked to sort out all of the information she’d learned in the last…three weeks? What a month she’d had…

The first and most important thing on her mind, was home. The Stable. The one-one-five, the one Stable left in Union territory that hadn’t been emptied out, ruined, or claimed by anyone. She knew Mom believed it was gone, but she didn’t—couldn’t—believe that herself, and even if Mom was right, a dead stable was still a pretty valuable find if enough of it was intact. She hoped that everybody in there was okay…and that they could find a decent place for everybody to move to, if it came to it.

The number “115” got the honor of being written into the middle of the chalkboard. She wrote the word “HOME” underneath it, just to remind herself what it was to her. It was the center of her universe, and she missed it.

So….what next….

…well, if she was going to be thinking of safer places for her stable to move to, it wouldn’t hurt to list them out. The Union was the first thing on her mind, but only because it was no secret the Union wanted it. According to Kite and BJ and Ada and just about everybody, they even had a couple of working stables in their territory, feeding them technology and medicines and all that neat stuff. But they’d also heard rumors floating about through the trade caravans that the Union was looking at Stable 115 a lot harder lately. That, Ada had said, was a sign that perhaps one of the Union’s stables wasn’t going to last much longer, and they couldn’t afford to lose the technology advantage. There was still a lot of work to be done to make Union territory truly safe, but at least the potential was there.

She drew a line up to the top, and wrote the word “MERCHANT UNION” and circled it. It felt like the Union…needed to be at the top. They were the most powerful and influential group in the whole prairie, after all, and she even wrote “CLOSEST THING TO GOVERNMENT IN PRAIRIE”. She drew another line leading out between the seven and eight o’clock positions of the Union’s bubble, and wrote in “GOT 2 STABLES, ONE DYING?”. Couldn’t ignore that, despite the fact that nobody could say for sure that it was true.

…of course, the Union let slavers run around. They supposedly had rules they had to work under, but after what happened at Trotpeka she was under no illusions as to how well that was working. A second line from the Union bubble, at the four o’clock position, was squeaked out of her chalk piece, and the words “LETS SLAVERS THRIVE. JERKS” was written out.

…and now that she’d thought about it, the slavers were almost as much their own thing as everybody else…

So to the right of her chalkboard, she wrote out “SLAVERS” and circled it, though she had to keep from spitting at it in the process. She was starting to understand why Kite wanted to do nasty things to a slaver, like peeing on them after beating them up. They did nothing but hurt people, sold them and traded them around like cattle and chairs, like other people meant nothing to them. And under the Union, they prospered enough to be split into five guilds, and were almost like a little faction themselves. To hear Ada tell it, the slave guilds helped keep trade routes open in the Union’s territory during the war a few years ago, and the Union’s leadership, something everybody called the Board, remembered it well enough that they weren’t in any hurry to lessen the Union’s dependence on them.

She could almost believe she could watch them get killed and not feel anything about it…

Another line, at the ten o’clock position of the “SLAVERS” circle, was scratched out, leading up to the Union’s bubble, and in-between the line she wrote out “UNION DEPENDANT ON SLAVERS”, and “SLAVERS HELPED UNION IN WAR”. A relationship like that wasn’t something to dismiss, and it seemed vital to what she was doing.

And then there was the Runners. They got a bubble, on the left side of the chalkboard, and underneath the bubble she wrote out “FOUGHT UNION AND SLAVERS IN WAR, NOT BEST OF FRIENDS” underneath them, and then “SNUCK SLAVES OUT OF UNION”. That was worth mentioning, even if they did it mostly to try and hurt the Union by taking away their “free” workforce. That underground movement they helped set up, the slavers went and utterly destroyed it after the war in the most brutal ways they could come up with…well, most of it. It apparently ran like a railroad or something, started in Stifla and had “stops” along the way. The main one ran through Syrup Mound and right on to Trotpeka, but there were smaller side routes for the smaller towns and settlements to the north and south of Mound too. Only the Runners knew the entire network. Kite had said something about her second master knowing it too, but there was no telling where he was in the seven years since the war ended. They didn’t get the whole route, but they destroyed enough of it to make the survivors really not anxious to make themselves noticeable.

So! All the big pieces of a game board were up there! Home, the Union, the slavers, the Runners….

…now the hard stuff. Little details.

Little details, like…what?

…oh crap, this was starting to be a little more hard work than she’d thought it’d be.

…ooo-kaaay, ummm….well, I know the slavers tried to kill us, after Mom went and bought Kite and BJ’s freedom…

…pretty big thing, really. The way Kite was telling it, it was almost like committing suicide to get caught doing something like that. So under the slaver bubble, she drew out another line almost straight out to the left and wrote, “TRIED TO KILL US AFTER GETTING KITE AND BLUE FREE THE ‘LEGAL’ WAY”—

Wait, no, Kite also said the slave guilds listed all those guys that came after as us “former employees”, as if a slaver could make an honest living buying and selling people like furniture…but everybody knows at least one guild knew what was going on. And it was the guys running that caravan that Mom dealt with, too, so the whole ambush could wound up looking like some petty revenge thing at a glance…

So, she amended that little remark with the closest thing she could draw to an ateisk or whatever that spiky little star thingy icon was called and put down, “GUILDS DENY IT, UNION KINDA BUYS IT”. Kinda. That Major Colada didn’t believe ‘em, but it wasn’t like she was the one in charge.

Still, the slavers came after them. At first she’d thought that those guys had come after them to try and get revenge on Mom (since they couldn’t go after the Major), because it made no sense for a guild who’d just been paid twenty thousand caps for two slaves’ freedom to turn around and try to kill the pony who’d paid them. But then she got to thinking about it all…about how Mom had said that the Union had closed the bridge at the slavers’ request to keep some escapees from being able to flee, and then she began to wonder…why just the bridge? If the guilds were really trying to keep slaves from getting away from them, they’d make the Union shut the whole town up, not just one bridge. Nobody would leave…or get in, for that matter. And they’d gotten into town, only to be stopped at the bridge they’d been trying to get to for weeks?

It was a trap. She’d seen it as one when Mom said the bridge was closed, but now she wished she’d thought of all this back then, and maybe then they could have called that guard’s bluff and pushed on ahead and Kite and BJ wouldn’t have fallen into that canal and…and everything that came after wouldn’t have happened. She didn’t really have any proof of it, but she was almost certain those guards had been working with the slavers to re-direct them, to make Mom choose another way to cross, one that they’d already scouted out. And that’s what had her looking at it so hard. What did they want that was so important that they’d risk the Union’s wrath and try to disguise what they were after? It wasn’t for more money, if used soda bottle caps could even be called that in a sane world.

…and they didn’t stop at Trotpeka, either…

To the upper right of the “115” bubble, she scribbled out the word “PYTHONS”, with a line drawn from that bubble to the slavers, and then added, “TRIED TO KILL US OR CATCH US TO SELL,” and “HAS A CONTACT WITH THE SLAVERS”…

…right, what’s the name that keeps coming up when it comes to that one slave guild? What was it Rally told Mom when those snake ponies came at us the first time—

“Oh, wow, you’re making charts and everything,” Rally’s voice broke into her thoughts right then, and her body reacted properly and jumped about three feet into the air, her little legs flailing and running in place before she landed with a yelp. She even lost her hold on her chalk piece.

Rally’s mocking laughter didn’t help any either, so she let her ears stay flat when she spun around to snarl at her. “Hey! I was tryin’ to think just now!”

“Yeah? About what?” Rally continued to laugh as she trotted past her and went straight for her side of the room, leaping up into the soft bed and practically melting into its blankets with a contented sigh. She never left the thing once she came back from whatever she did in the day.

“Uhhhh…well, right now I’m thinking about how much like Mom you are, ‘cause you’re impossible to get out of a real bed unless you’re bribed with food—”

“I’m nothing like her!”

Inside, she smiled a great big smile, though outwardly she still scowled and glared. “Really? You’re a freak MEW nut, and Mom’s into regular guns, and you both love sleeping in late—”

“….mostly not like her,” Rally amended with a grumbling voice. “…and what’s with the chalkboard project?”

Come into my web, naïve prey! El-Tee cackled silently. “Tryin’ to make sense of everything goin’ on with my life the last few weeks. Slavers trying to kill us, mercs trying to kill us or catch us, and for what? I don’t like not knowing.”

“Get used to it.”

“I’d rather get answers,” Light Tail said, finally letting a little bit of a smile work its way into her mouth. “Like what you told Mom about what you overheard those snake ponies talking about, the first time they came at us. Something about a contact they had with a slave guild…which one was it again?”

Rally almost blew her off until she took her head off the pillow just long enough to glance at the chalkboard from where she was at, and then she started cussing at herself. “…oooh, dammit I walked right into it—”

So did we… “Welcome to the club, comes with membership cards and everything. Now quit cussin’ and tell me! Which guild was it?”

Rally’s body climbed under the blankets and curled up into a small ball, finally sticking her head out and laying it atop the pillow. “….they said they’d heard about you and your mom through a contact they had in Life Tap’s slave guild…”

Life Tap…Life Tap….she’d heard that name before….wh—

--an orange-coated earth pony stallion was wrestling Kite to the ground in the alley, pulling at her mane until he spied the strange mark on her neck—

“—she’s marked! Life Tap’s guild—”

She blinked the memory away, returning her focus to her chalkboard as she plucked another chalk piece off of it (she didn’t know where the first one had flown off to) and started writing again, putting the name “LIFE TAP” out just to the left of the slaver bubble…

Life Tap…his guild owned the caravan that tried to take Kite and Beige out of Colada’s garrison, before Mom bought them free of it…

She couldn’t explain how or why, but she felt like a critical piece of the puzzle had just been slapped down in front of her. This Life Tap jerk, whoever he was—a pony, a griffon, a zebra, or something else—his name kept coming up a lot. He must have a lot of power in the slave guilds…or he was just a really mean pony. He was a slaver.

So…she had another puzzle piece. Next question…why would Life Tap’s guild want to tell the Pythons about her and Mom? Or had the Pythons only known about them because of that person of contact, and Life Tap and his guild actually had nothing to do with the snake ponies trying to catch or kill them?

…nah. This Life Tap was willing to risk being executed by the Union to try and kill Mom, and threw away the lives of his own guys to do it and simultaneously managing to make it look like they did it of their own free will just to satisfy their own pride. There was no way he didn’t know. But he also wasn’t going to be stupid enough to send any more of his guys out like that again. He only had that one chance because of how things had gone down in Colada’s town, and even that was a risky chance, especially if the Union ever found out one of their units helped them do it. If he was serious about killing Mom, for whatever reason, he would have to do it through somebody else on this side of the prairie—

—a hard, metal clang rattled from the floor, causing her to glance over at the source and find Rally’s metal leg rocking to a stop from being dropped off the edge of the bed. “…really?”

“It can take it,” Rally mumbled from her comfortable nest, even as her obscured form was fidgeting about beneath the comforters. Probably putting on that sling that covered up her right leg whenever she took the cyberlimb off of it. “There were times in my life when I didn’t even have shelter to sleep under or a blanket to ward off the cold. This is high living for me and I want every moment I can get in this warm, comfortable bed.”

…oh, yeah…the whole ‘no family’ thing. “…I guess I’d be lazy too if I’d never had a soft bed before.”

“This is the good kind of lazy after a day’s work,” Rally hummed contentedly. “Just lay back, soak in the warmth and the soft…everything. And it’s supposed to be kinda chill tonight, so why not bundle up now?”

Her chalk piece scribbled out “PYTHONS HUNTING US FOR SLAVERS?” after drawing another line between the PYTHON and SLAVER bubbles. “Work? What I hear is, you spend all day giggling and laughing while you play around with broken tech.”

“And when I’m done that tech is ticking along like it’s brand new,” the teen’s voice half-giggled, though by the sound of it she was already well on her way to falling asleep. Or maybe she was just getting really relaxed in that bed and not wanting to do anything to disturb whatever mental state she was slipping into. “And I get so many strange ideas while I’m working too. Someday I’m gonna build a gun that works off a spark battery cell and fires bullets by magnetic propulsion and make it small enough to be used by hoof or magic—”

This part of Rally’s rambling she just tuned out. Cool as it might have sounded, it was still way beyond her and not really helping with her little brain project right now—

—she gave up all hope of having quiet thoughts when the dorm room door opened, and a familiar, warming presence began intruding into her personal space in ways only a parent could. “Oh gods, what are you up to now?” Mom’s voice groaned in despair.

“You say that like it’s a bad—” she started to say, feeling her body turning around to leap into a crushing leg or body hug (it depended on how high she could jump), and then stopped speaking entirely when she saw Mom standing a couple of feet away and….

…and dressed? It looked kind of like a Stable suit, but…it was a darker shade of blue, with these black ribbed sections running down the sides and leg sleeves, and seemed pretty thick around her barrel like there was some sort of special material or inner lining inside the suit itself. It was jarring enough to even see Mom wearing anything that it briefly threw her off. “….thiiiiiinnnng Mom what is that and why are you wearing it?”

She could hear Rally’s bed creaking very slightly, like she was intrigued just enough to lift her head up from her pillow. “Hunh?”

Mom’s head hung low as she huffed a depressed sigh. “It’s…it’s uhh…armor, of a sort…”

“Armor? You mean you’re buying something besides bullets for once?”

“…nnnoooo?” Mom answered hesitantly. “Um…Kite…Kite’s buying it. For me. For…for some reason.”

“That reason being, ‘I don’t want my only friend in the wastes to get her stupid ass killed in another one of her stupid stunts’,” Rally giggled—

“Quit cussin’,” El-Tee snapped back. “Umm…that doesn’t look like it protects a whole lot…”

“It’s based on a Stable suit, but modified with ballistic fiber lining in-between the cloth layers, and body cooling enchantments to offset body heat buildup,” Kite’s voice added, her scarred grape body slinking into the room and taking up space right next to Mom. Like, right next to her. Weird. “The sides, chest, back, and legs can also be fitted with either ballistic fiber panels to improve protection from bullets, or mana reflective panels to partially absorb the energy discharge from a MEW. And this is only part of the armor. She has a bodysuit that goes on under the stable suit that’s designed mainly for MEW protection, and she can strap on some cured leather barding armor pieces over the stable suit if she wants. It’s not the most advanced piece of protection out there, but it will give her the option to employ the armor in layers according to how much protection she thinks she may need, and what she expects to face in terms of incoming fire.”

“That bodysuit will be chaffing me in places I’m really uncomfortable with!” Mom whined.

“That’s what the…wait, should we even tell the kids right now?”

“No!” Mom shouted with a panicked start, shirking back from Kite’s side. “No, j-just, uhhhh…uh Light Tail what are you doing on this chalkboard you little brainiac heh heh?!”

It’s something really embarrassing to her for Mom to switch the subject with a yell, El-Tee grinned inside, looking back at her growing organizational chart. “Ehhh, just puttin’ stuff up where I can see it. Y’know, who’s who and what’s what, what’s happened, how they’re connected…people keep trying to kill you and it’s got nothing to do with Kite or BJ.”

Most people would have been a little disturbed to be talking about any kind of attempts on their life, so the fact that Mom seemed to calm down in the presence of the subject was…really weird. “Ah, that. I have a fair idea what they might be after,” Mom answered, her eyes gazing over the chalkboard. “But let’s see where your little project takes you. You might find something I hadn’t thought of yet.”

“What’s this, here?” Kite asked, her right foreleg pointing at the “SLAVER” side of the chalkboard. “This part about Life Tap and the Pythons?”

Ha! More prey for my web! “Oh! Well, Rally was just tellin’ me about how the Pythons knew who we were, when they came after her in that bar. They had a friend or contact in this Life Tap’s guild who told them about us, and this was like…four days after Trotpeka? C’mon, nobody’s really buying that lie that none of the slavers knew what those guys were doing at that bridge. They were sent there to get us, and the only reason they even tried was ‘cause it was the same guys that that angry major messed with when Mom got you and BJ free. They could make it look like the whole thing was just a bunch of angry jerks trying to get some petty revenge on the only other pony they could get to, and it could work ‘cause that’s what we were thinking when we got to the main bridge and found it shut down…eeehhh, did any of that make any sense just now ‘cause it sounds kinda weird now that I’m saying it out loud and not in my head—”

Kite’s face went dark and serious, and she levitated a piece of chalk off of the bottom of the board and started writing down her own things in-between the “SLAVER” and “UNION” bubble—

“I had a chance to talk to Colada about that, before I left town,” Kite said, as the words “SANDY SHADES” was drawn out beneath the “UNION” bubble, near the part about the Board. “Two days after we left her garrison, a member of the Board, this guy—” she accented her words with a tap of the chalk piece against the “SANDY SHADES” name— “arrived in town, interrupted her day off, and he was asking a lot of questions about how exactly Sling was able to buy me and Blue Jay free after being taken into detention for travelling with runaway slaves. She said he was a lot more interested in Sling, your stable, and where she was than on what she did to some of the caravan’s guards, and that he was very unhappy when she told him that we’d left before he’d gotten there. He had a detention warrant for Sling’s arrest—”

“Wait, wait, hold it, the Union wants me arrested?” Mom cut in, and she kinda had a right to be worried if the Union was after her. “I know they want access to the one-one-five, and that Colada couldn’t hide my existence from her bosses forever, but to arrest me?”

“I couldn’t get much more out of her than that,” Kite said back. “We weren’t there, so he had her send the detention warrant on up to Trotpeka, just in case you ever came back through there. She was only able to delay it a day, mainly because of weather conditions. The platoon she sent to deliver the warrant sent back word of what happened at the bridge crossing and she hurried her ass over as soon as she could. Her troopers went poking around while they were waiting for her, and found Shades was spending a lot of time in areas where Life Tap’s guild had a heavy presence. She made it a point to mention this old bridge on the southern edge of the trade district, which is supposed to have troopers guarding it, and Shades was seen in the vicinity of that bridge with a couple of Life Tap’s minions. I didn’t think anything of it then, but now that I’m looking at Elly’s project it starts to make sense—”

Oh crap, El-Tee managed not to say out loud, because if she’d lost control she might have wound up saying another word entirely. But the look on her face must have been really bad, because Kite stopped talking a couple of seconds later and almost freaked out when she looked down at her. “….E-Elly? What’s wrong?”

“She probably just figured out what’s going on with the slavers,” Mom answered for her, and the way she said it, it sounded like Mom already knew what that thing was. “So what are you thinking, honey?”

…she…hasn’t called me that in a while… “…it’s you.”

She heard Rally rolling about in her bed, and the creaking bed springs were quite loud, so it sounded like she was actually daring to remove herself from her bundled nest to get a better look at the chalkboard. “…we know it’s about her. We’re asking ‘what for’.”

She tried to speak, and found her voice quiet silent for a moment, and she had to force herself to actually use it with conscious thought. Deep down, she knew that once she explained what had just struck her brain, it would send everybody down a very dark and violent path that couldn’t be changed or set aside. But if she was even half-right….

….the slavers can’t get what they’re after…not ever, it’s that bad…

“It’s no secret the Union wants our Stable,” Light Tail began, making herself sit down on her haunches. “They’ve tried to get in before and it didn’t work out, and if a PipBuck was all they needed they got hundreds of ‘em from the two Stables they control. But not just any PipBuck will do. They need one specific to the Stable they want to get into.”

“What are you talking about?” Rally said from behind. “PipBucks can jack into a Stable’s blast door if they have to—”

“Normally, yeah,” she cut her off. “But this ain’t normal. The day Mom and I left home, we broke into this little building at the edge of the first town we came to, crap what was it—”

“A prospecting office,” Mom corrected gently. “I remember, we found a terminal inside that revealed the “office” was just a cover for the local Stable-Tec branch overseeing the construction of the 115, in Equestria That Was.”

“Whoa, really?!” Rally shrieked happily, the bed creaking growing sharper as she finally rolled off of the bed to join in the “group” discussion proper. “How much of the data was left?!”

“Most of it was degraded, but a few entries survived, which I downloaded onto my PipBuck before we left, so we can back up what Light Tail’s about to tell us. The surviving entries detailed the bidding process for construction firms lining up to do the actual stable-building, and the first one that got the job was discovered to be suspected of funneling aid to the zebras in the war. Stable-Tec had to put half their projects in the prairie on hold for a while until they could be absolutely certain about the companies they were hiring to build their stables.”

“And even then, they’d probably put in extra security,” Light Tail added. “Like making sure the zebras couldn’t use anything they might have learned to break into the prairie’s Stables if the war ended the way it eventually did. The best way I can think of would be to make it so that a Stable could only be opened from the outside by a PipBuck from that particular Stable. Something in the programming code, maybe. It’d explain why the Union never got into our Stable all the decades that they’ve been around. None of the PipBucks they have access to would have worked on our door.”

When Rally didn’t say anything right off, she risked a quick look, her body tensing up just in case she had to quickly escape her reach and not get her mane tussled up or something—

—Rally’s body was stone-cold still, a sense of shock seeping into her slightly-open mouth as her left foreleg rubbed at the stump of the right one, which was cupped in a sling to keep the cybernetic graft joint from tearing up soft things like blankets and pillows. “…oh….oh, god, I think I see it….”

“…yeah, ya do,” El-Tee answered her unspoken fears. “The slavers want Mom’s PipBuck. This Shades guy…he’s either paying the slavers to get it, or promising them something if they get it for him, and the slavers know how badly the Union wants the 115. They’re not gonna just give it away.”

She heard a sharp, muffled gasp from Kite’s spot, and she kinda felt sorry for upsetting her like that. “…oh, god no, if they get the one known key to the 115, the slavers could get anything they wanted in exchange for it. I mean anything. A voting seat on the Board, free range access to the west for their caravans and hunting parties, they could practically re-build the trooper corps from the inside out over time…they’d practically own the prairie five years from now…”

Even Mom seemed a little upset, even though she’d probably figured it out at about the same time that she did. “…how confident are you about this, honey?”

Light Tail felt a cold chill creep up and down her spine, and she finally realized what she might have just done.

She might have just started a war.

Chapter 22

Brand new guns, in spotless condition. Fresh, real bullets and not the crap that got made by some of the smarter little merchant factions in the Union’s turf. They could take old, beat up guns, and fix them up to be almost brand new, with new springs, pins, triggers, barrels, whatever other parts a gun had. They could even build custom hardware like Sling’s sick 9mm pistol, or Elly’s spruced up M&A pistol that made it hard for him to decide which one he might want for himself.

And as far as Sling’s rifle went…well, nobody he knew of could make a gun stock like that out of…whatever kind of plastic that it was made of, or make the damn thing backwards. The machinery, the materials they’d need to even make the stock, the knowhow…it simply didn’t exist anymore. Not in the wasteland.

So of course the baby’s theory made much more sense when he thought about those things. Who else but an undiscovered Stable from the Before would even have that kind of tech and knowledge? And the ability to teach that knowledge well enough that they could make brand-new guns and ammo like the Old World two centuries later?

Yeah, whoever Rico said she and her “outfit” worked for, she was lying her ass off to keep something that important a secret, and he couldn’t even be mad at her for it. Not when Elly’s other theory about the slavers and Sling’s PipBuck was scaring everybody. It scared them so much, in fact, that the Runners were willing to completely ignore their boss and just do their own thing once they got right to the edge of Witherc—

“Bored,” Elly’s voice droned aloud suddenly, slapping her book shut and setting it down on the wagon bed they were currently riding in.

A single glance at the book’s cover—Daring Do and the Sapphire Statue—told him how serious she was about her bland statement. As important as the mystery Stable was, it kinda took a backseat to the reality of a bored filly who had no problem with finding ways to amuse herself at others’ expense. “…oh crap, Mom, Sling, she’s actually bored with her Daring Do books. Shut her up.”

“She’s only read the thing what…thirty times in the last two weeks?” Sling murmured quietly from her corner of the wagon bed…wedged right in beside Mom, too, who was only half-awake and seemed to be soaking in Sling’s warmth like a drug. Like, they were practically melting into each other, weird. Maybe she finally gave in to Mom’s constant flirting? “Or the second and third books, gah, what are they called—”

“Bored,” Elly droned again, louder and more insistently as she stared blankly out at the world around her. “Need. Something. Different. To do.”

“Once we get in the city you’ll be too busy walking and watching for threats to care that you were bored for the four hour ride to get there,” Rally countered next, her own eyes focused on her right cyberleg as she had the cover plates pulled off and was messing around with the wires and stuff in it. “And don’t you dare sing that song about bottles on a wall or whatever it was you tortured us with last time.”

Rally didn’t see the death glare he threw at the back of her head, which was probably a good thing. For such a smart girl you can be really, really stupid sometimes! “Oh god no, you just gave her an i—”

“I-deeee-aaaaa!” Elly’s voice sang in a much more lively pitch as her body shot upright, though still sitting on her haunches. “We could sing like, campfire songs and stuff—”

“NO!!” he heard his voice shout back almost in sync with Rally’s fearful cry of the same word and Julaya’s more forceful command. Guess even the zebra’s patience had limits.

“…Sapphire Shores? I think I know like, one or two—”

“If you’re going to insist on singing the rest of the way, make good use of it and get some practice on those old operatics I made you learn when you were…oh, wow, six, or seven?” Sling’s voice cut in innocently, yet deviously, not even looking up from the mysterious pages of her spellbook. “How about that quick tempo patter song? The hard one that makes your tongue twist like a pretzel in the first stanza alone?”

Elly’s face, previously alight with joy at the “fun” idea Rally had mistakenly give her, turned into a disbelieving look of shock and frustration, even staring at her mom with a gaping jaw that made him wish he could take a picture of it. “W-what?! Gods no, not that one, I hate that song! Anything but that!”

Elly’s panicked screeching was enough to stir his mom awake from her listless rest, and her half-lidded eyes struggled to focus on anything in particular as her head rubbed up against Sling’s shoulder and came to rest on the side of it. “….you made her learn to sing?”

An evil twinkle in Sling’s eye was the only sign of the mare’s guilty pleasure at Elly’s misfortune. “She used to have this terrible stuttering problem when she was younger. The stable docs said she’d grow out of it, but she kept getting picked on in class for it and I was tired of being told to stop being an irresponsible, overreacting mare-child and let the school do its job. So I plucked this old book of opera plays out of my personal library collection and had her start learning the songs after school, three times a week until she was nine when she’d memorized them, and the stuttering went away. Now she just has that little quirk of stumbling over words once in a while.”

“Hunh,” Mom said softly into Sling’s neck. “I had wondered about that, it seemed so odd for Elly to be able to think the way she does and yet struggle to say longer words now and then….”

Elly just groaned and flopped back down to the floor, trying to cover her face with her forelegs. Like that was going to help her hide from anybody. “Why, mooooom? Why did you just tell everybody that, whhhhyyyyyy?”

“Maybe it’s payback for all those screaming fits you threw at me yesterday when I finally broke down and told you about every aspect of foal bearing and conception.”

Four heads snapped up, instantly locking onto the scarred stable mare, wondering when or how this Sling Shot could have been replaced with an identical doppleganger. It was something Mom had been bugging her to do, and he’d heard that Rally was ganging up on her with Mom about it too, but he was of the opinion that neither of them were ready to have that “talk” and nobody figured she’d ever get the guts to actually do it and they’d have to do it themselves.

Not that anybody cared what his opinion was, except maybe Elly….

“…oh, shit, that’s what all that racket was,” Kite breathed in a stunned tone when it became clear that Sling was not jesting or kidding around.

Elly just screamed wordlessly a little more, and dug a wool blanket out of her bags and threw it over herself to try and hide more. Now things were just going to be even more awkward around her.

“You told me to,” Sling said flatly, her eyes still locked onto her spellbook as a page flipped over. “You and Rally cornered me when I was down, maybe half an hour after I came out of my coma, and wore me down and finally made me cave even though I didn’t think she was ready for it. Guess what? She kinda wasn’t….neither was I, come to think of it. But it’s done, just like you wanted, and afterward she even managed to figure out that you were subtly flirting with me all this time and I had to have another talk with her about how two mares might go about having a romantic and…intimate relationship even though I have no idea how that might actually work out if we go that far. Maybe you or Julie can fill in the blanks on that one.”

That muffled scream from Elly’s blanket, which might have been amusing any other day, was starting to sound just a little too uncomfortable for him—

“All right all right fine I’ll sing something from that play but not that one just stop making things so awkward and weird and everything and grrrraaaaaah!” the baby finally screeched in coherent speech.

Sling’s demented, quiet laughter rumbled from her throat like a cat’s purr. “Okay then, the sky pirate queen, I think that’s the one you know better than griffon tar? Maybe try it at a patter song tempo, might help you with the evil song that we will not name.”

Elly’s head popped out of the blanket, and then her body began to sit upright again as she wrapped it tightly around herself and shook her mane out of her face before pulling the blanket over the top of her head, leaving only her face exposed to the world. “…oh, that one. Ugh, fine, but if I have to sing it fast I’m doing it my way. It’s easier and I like my version better…pirates are overrated.”

“Yet my first request makes you stumble and cry.”

“That’s the hardest one of all, of course it makes me stumble! It’s so fast—”

“Um,” Rally’s voice broke in nervously. “Maybe let the rest of us know what the hell you’re talking about? Patter song? Griffon somethings?”

Elly’s eyes blinked hard several times, like she honestly hadn’t expected Rally to not know what she was talking about. “…Hilda and Mulligan? Really famous opera play writers? Wrote like, a dozen or so opera plays together a hundred and twenty years before Luna’s return…guh, nevermind, forgot the wasteland doesn’t have a lot of schools and stuff…”

“It was hell teaching Blue reading and writing, to say nothing of basic math,” Mom grumbled, though it sounded like she lamented the lack of schools rather than having to do the teaching herself. “…then again, your school apparently had issues teaching you basic pony anatomy and reproduction, so—”

“Shut up or I’ll sing all the way down to the last bottle,” Elly threatened with a low voice.

Mom shut up.

“Maybe that would actually be better, I’m kinda scared to hear her trying to sing anything else,” he heard himself protesting.

Elly’s mouth huffed her displeasure at him in a sharp hiss. “I can actually do these pretty good when I want to. I even taught a Mister Handy ‘bot to sing one. I’ll bet you your next granola bar that you’ll agree with me when I’m done, too.”

“Ha! Easiest bet ever, my ears still cringe from your serenade of beer bottles on the wall! Go for it, ya light-butt baby, I like those bars and getting to snarf one of yours will be the most delicious ‘told you so’!”

Elly’s response was to suck in a few breaths of air, clear her throat…

…and blow everyone away.

“Ohhh, I know the joy of pegasi, for in big blue skies with wings I fly, away from the troubles of those below, never to bow to those so low—”

His jaw dropped from his skull. This wasn’t the high-pitched squealing of a hundred bottles of beer on the wall that he hated. Sure, she still had that high pitch voice of a little girl, but this wasn’t screeching or screaming. She was…

…she was singing. Well, he was forced to admit to himself, if no one else. Despite the high girly voice she was stuck with until she got older, she made it work.

“—and yet from those whose lands I scorn, do I learn the ways of hoof and horn, to steer my heart to the song it sings, to live and die a pony queen—”

He could feel the wagon slow to a complete stop, and when he dared to look up past the top of the wagon, he could see Rico’s charcoal body twisting around from her perch in the driver’s seat and looking into the wagon’s canopy with a look of either amazement or disbelief—

“Foooor I am the pony queen, hurrah hurrah for the pony queen—”

He heard a soft tap at the wagon’s open end, and a quick glance showed that Ada had propped her head and forelimbs up inside to see where that singing was coming from, and she looked just as stunned as Rico, and Mom, and Rally, Julaya, and probably himself….

…but Sling’s reaction was more of a contented, happy smile as she just laid there and listened.

“—and it is, it is a glorious thiiiiing, to beeee the poooooony queeeeen!”

“Celestia’s solar plexus, you know Hilda and Mulligan?!” Rico’s voice squealed delightfully the instant Elly stopped singing, and he got to laugh at her misfortune when she shrieked and jumped out of her blanket and up like, three feet and came crashing back down onto the wagon bed on her side—

“Oooooowwww, why does everybody keep doing that to meeee—”

Ada’s cackling laughter only lasted a little longer than his, but then, he’d seen her jump like that more than once and while it never got old, it wasn’t quite as funny as it used to be. “No, seriously, that was pretty cool! The singing, not the “jump like terrified cat” thing. Why didn’t you do that back at the barracks when everybody coulda heard it?”

“’Cause then I’d be hounded by everybody asking me to keep singing stuff and I only do it for fun.”

“Or when I tell you to as a very unorthodox form of speech therapy,” Sling amended next.

“Or when you’re really bored and nobody wants to talk to you,” he added, just because he could.

“Or just because,” Rally said last, barely taking her eyes off of her cyberleg. She was using some sort of arcane tech tool on it, the tip of it had this rapidly pulsing purple light and the cylindrical body had all sorts of buttons along the sides. He had no idea what was it or what it was doing, besides flashing that purple tip and making a soft, constant humming noise.

Elly’s eyes rolled back, growing rather annoyed with everybody, and she pulled that blanket back over herself and curled up into a ball like one of her dogs. “Fiiiiiiiine, I’ll be super quiet and bored and invisible. Buncha killjoys…”

“Awwww, I wanted to hear griffon tar,” Rico moaned sadly, and her ears even wilted and folded down. “And…everything else, actually.”

“I’d rather hear more about your Stable,” Sling countered, a pitched question that he’d suspected she’d ask at some point. But not in front of everybody else.

“What Stable?”

“The one that can make guns like the ones you sold us, and with the equipment, knowledge, and materials to make a backwards rifle with a plastic stock and folding grip integrated into a quick-detach barrel. The one that would actually be more valuable to the Union than mine, and which would entice them to just break their treaty with the Runners and roll in wholesale to get to it if they ever found out about it and where it was at.”

He expected Rico to either keep denying it, or get downright hostile about being pressed on the existence of a secret Stable, so naturally she did the exact opposite and stayed calm and friendly. “Which is why I trust you and yours to keep quiet about it. There’s too much at risk to let anyone beyond the Runners know about it. Word may get out in the spring once the Runners start roaming across the wastes with their new gear regardless, but the longer we can put that off the better.”

“…wait, that’s it?” he asked out loud, his brain not quite accepting that Rico was just going to roll along with them having guessed her big secret so quickly. “No arguments, no “get the eff outta my wagon”, just…we’re right?”

“I already knew Sling would likely figure it out just from the guns and ammo we sold you guys,” Rico replied, her ears straightening up once more. “As she has so eloquently pointed out, the technology needed to make the bullpup rifles alone doesn’t exist in any of the factories that still have any working machinery left in them. And to the best of my knowledge, only two other towns outside Withercha in the whole prairie can make ammunition to pre-war standards, and one of them is out of action at the moment. Gunpowder can be surprisingly complex to make and there’s several different kinds of it to boot.”

“Science, chemistry, engineering,” Sling rattled off, finally putting her book down and turning her eyes onto Rico. “You don’t have just a Stable, you have a nearly self-sufficient underground civilization.”

“In that respect, you are entirely correct. But in order to make use of our manufacturing capabilities, we had to eventually step out into the surface world for materials we ran out of roughly twelve years ago. There’s quite a bit of history involved in our exposure to the surface, but it’s enough to say that we encountered the Runners very early on and made a deal with them to get what we needed without exposing us any further than we had to. We make trade runs to some of the communities that have sprung up in the ruined towns around the Runners’ base, but none of them know where we come from. Withercha makes us nervous, though.”

“Between the Pythons and all the other factions you mentioned the other day, I can almost see why. So why risk yourselves trying to crack open an abandoned Ministry facility?”

“I’m personally hoping for technology or blueprints that might help us get our MEW manufacturing online,” Rico answered freely. “But any intact tech that one can salvage from a Ministry is well worth the risk, whatever that salvage may be. Ironshod Firearms was practically a government contractor, so there’s a possibility that we can find a way to get their Withercha plant open in there. The Scrappers will want that very badly. That’s our hoof in the door to getting the city back on track and out of the Pythons’ control. Folks that might otherwise turn the lot of you in to the snakes for a few meals are going to have second thoughts once word gets out that you’re helping them.”

That sounded like a pretty good deal, on the surface, but when he thought about it for a couple of seconds he could see at least two problems that would come along with it, and his mouth was airing them out before he could tell it to keep shut and not get him involved. “And when that happens the Pythons will know we’re in the city and start looking for us themselves anyway. And they’ll start with the first place people say they saw us in.”

He could hear the wagon’s floorboards creaking all around him, like some of the girls were sitting up in shock that he would actually say something like that and not Elly for once. But Sling didn’t seem all that fazed by it. If anything, it only seemed to spark an idea or two of her own. “…this Ministry facility you want to break into,” she said in a half-whisper. “Does it have defenses? Security shutters, blast doors, gun turrets, things like that?”

“The facility itself has multiple buildings, all gated from the rest of the city by a concrete wall and razor wire on top,” Rico replied. “The front office building is the only one immediately accessible via the front gate, but it’s patrolled by Gutsy-model military ‘bots. They don’t shoot on sight, but they don’t give more than one warning to leave before they terminate trespassers, and there’s a few turrets on overwatch along the wall. Normally we just go past the facility grounds and avoid it. So long as you don’t appear to be approaching the front gate they just ignore you, but taking a few steps in their direction will trigger a spot-check for ID. We’ve only gotten inside once, and only because we happened to notice that the Gutsy ‘bots were encountering a run-time error that had them all gathering in the central courtyard, we counted fourteen in all. Took a bit of time to fix the controller mainframe in the administration wing and get them back in service, but it also gave us a chance to see what parts of the facility we could access or what we needed to get into them.”

“You need more than a PipBuck,” Sling leveled back calmly. “Otherwise you would have used your own to get in once you found a way past the robots.”

“That’s going to be the tricky part,” Rico said with a dour face. “We need yours because we purposefully leave ours behind when we come up to the surface, so that they can’t be used to trace a route back home if we’re killed and our bodies looted. The facility divided its security into three levels—yellow, blue, and red. Red is the highest level, and yellow is the lowest. R&D wing requires a red pass card, and there’s a blue-level security wing with a broken card reader. Fortunately, the reader is mounted onto the wall rather than inside it, so with a little creative jury-rigging a PipBuck can jack into it. The reader for the R&D wing still works, but it’s embedded into a steel wall and we don’t have the tools to cut into the wall, so we need to search the security wing for a pass card. According to the few terminals we could access in the administration offices, a few ponies from the R&D wing were sent to the security wing to provide some technical assistance for the quartermaster a short time before the megaspells dropped. There were two communiques from the security wing afterward but they weren’t very informative, just asking around to see what was going on. The only thing we know for sure is that the facility’s back-up spark generators didn’t kick on when the city’s power grid failed, something went wrong in the R&D wing, and by the time the survivors in administration were able to figure out how to turn the back-up generators on manually most of the facility’s staff had died from unspecified causes. The five that were left agreed on a murder-suicide pact to end their suffering early. One volunteer killed his co-workers, then turned his gun on himself. The place has been patrolled and protected by the automated security systems ever since.”

“…that’s messed up,” he grumbled aloud, though he didn’t sound nearly as bothered by it as he felt. “I thought the old world was supposed to be civilized.”

“There’s no such thing,” the angry stable pony grunted, as he expected. “How are we going to get onto the facility grounds without the ‘bots stopping us or shooting at us?”

“We found a few yellow-level cards during our first search,” Rico answered, even going so far as to produce one such item for Sling’s inspection. Didn’t look all that special, just a clear plastic card with a yellow stripe on one end and some writing etched into the center of the card. “Enough for five folks. We’ll need to compose our search party accordingly, no telling what manner of skills or expertise we’ll need if we can get into the higher security wings. For our plan to even work, you and Misty Veil have to go. Misty knows how to jack your PipBuck into the security wing and open it. She can also guide you through the administration and office wings.”

“Some firepower would be a good idea,” Ada suggested quickly. “One if you must, but I recommend no less than two. I can’t go because I’m providing overwatch for the caravan.”

“You just want to play with your new sniper rifle, admit it,” Sling cackled lightly. “Can you spare Leon? I think the two of us can handle whatever trouble might be inside.”

“Sure, I need to break in the new sharpshooter anyway, serve as his spotter so I can see how he fares outside the training course. Leo knows enough combat first aid to keep somebody alive long enough to get them to someone better at it. Maybe take Rally or Kite with you too? More tech knowledge may come in handy, if Rico’s crew found working terminals in just the few sections they could search there’s bound to be more in the higher-level sections with better security. Can’t afford to tie Misty down with all the work. And there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to get anyone back here to Kite if somebody gets hurt in there.”

“If Misty can jack a PipBuck into a security door and force it open, she should be able to handle anything else we may need in there,” Sling answered quickly, purposefully ignoring the defeated look coming over Rally’s face as she spoke. “Kite and I also have an agreement where only one of us goes out on these little group forays while we’re with you guys, so she’s staying here. We’ll make do with what first aid skills we have.”

“I will go,” Julaya’s voice crept from the corner in which she’d been nesting for much of the trip so far. “You still owe me a rifle, crazy stable pony. Perhaps you can find me one in there.”

“…maybe a shotgun would suit you better,” Sling countered, though he didn’t hear her rejecting the zebra’s offer either. “Still requires aiming skill, but if you’re accurate one or two shots on an unarmored target will usually be enough, if you can stomach the weight of the ammo itself.”

“When you find one of equal value to the rifle, perhaps we will talk.”

“Ooo, that reminds me, I got yours ready yesterday, I’ll give it to you in a few,” Rico chirped suddenly, as if the conversation had just sparked the thought in her brain—

“For Luna’s sake how many damn guns do you need?!” Mom burst out angrily. “You got four pistols and a rifle—”

“Three pistols,” Sling replied calmly, as if Mom had not even blown up at her. “Gave the motorized .223 pistol to Rally, she can probably do a better job of keeping it in good shape than anyone else here and it’ll give her a close range anti-armor option that’s a lot handier than that laser rifle that’s almost too big for her.”

Oh, damn, she’s serious, his freshly alerted mind gasped when he spied that sick motorized revolver lying among Rally’s stuff, along with all of its speedloaders, a few boxes of ammo, the repair kit she kept for the gun and even a tech manual that told her how it worked and how to maintain it. It turned out that the gun could be a lot of work, and probably more than he wanted to deal with. But Rally? It’d probably be a game to her…

And Sling just…gave it to her? What was he, chopped liver or something? The girls were getting all the good stuff…then again, he wasn’t comfortable with a .357, and definitely not a gun as heavy as that Ironshod revolver of Rally’s. So Sling was probably not sure what kind of gun he would want…

“And the shotgun’s for you, by the way,” Sling’s voice continued. “Rico demoed it for me Friday and the recoil is not nearly as hard as you’d think, she’s done something with the barrel and stock that’s almost magic by itself. 21-inch barrel, good rifle-style sights, eight-shot magazine tube, and I’m giving you all my shotgun shells in addition to the case of fifty Rico threw in with the gun. Much more firepower than a nine-mil, and 12-gauge shells aren’t too hard to come by. Shouldn’t have trouble keeping it fed, but if your target’s armored you’ll need to aim for any unprotected part of the body you can get at.”

Mom’s fiery wrath diminished into a subdued droll. “….oh.”

“As for you, Blue,” Sling went on, and he actually perked up a bit when he heard her words being directed at him (and he swore he could somehow feel her words too). “You’ve yet to make up your mind on which of the two nine-mil models you want to carry. You were pretty good with both of them, so it would be more a matter of personal taste here. And no, you can’t have mine. I like it too much.”

Fair enough, I wouldn’t give it up if it were mine either. “…kinda tough to choose, really. They both go bang and hit where I aim if I shoot right…”

“The Maretta’s got a safety on it, if that gives you any peace of mind. The Rig Mayer doesn’t, but as long as you leave the hammer alone it’s got a heavy trigger pull for the first shot, just like a revolver. And I notice you like to grab hold of the back end of the slide and rip it back when you reload with a fresh mag. If you do that on a Maretta you’re likely to flip the safety on. For that tendency of yours alone I would suggest the Mayer nine, and get used to using the frame lever to lower the hammer when you stop shooting. I know you got annoyed with the grip screws coming loose when you shot it Saturday, but I set them back in with a minor locking spell that should keep them in place.”

He almost felt annoyed that Sling was steering him away from the Maretta—he figured it would be the next best thing to her sick custom pistol and he’d get a better feel for whether or not he might want one for himself someday. But she knew a lot more about this stuff than just about everyone else outside the Runners or Rico, and aside from those stupid screws she didn’t have anything truly bad to say about the gun she was suggesting to him. Still—

“I’ll take one,” Rally announced loudly, probably to be sure she was heard over this beeping noise her pulsing tool was making. “Draw, aim, shoot, no safety to flick off, just like my .357. Learning a mag release is no harder than a cylinder release in a fight, really.”

“That safety on the other one does give me peace of mind,” he admitted next. “And I find it easier to hit the levers on the side ‘cause they’re bigger. I can practice my telekinesis and make it so I pull the slide from behind instead of over it. Might be good if Mom and I can toss mags at each other in a fight if one of us runs out too.”

“…there is that,” Sling relented, and her magic procured the pistol in question from his mother’s saddlebags and set it down in front of him, along with a gun belt and a few magazines and two boxes of odd-looking hollowpoints before doing the same for Rally. Usually they were just that, a bullet with a hollow core and open tip, but here the tip had a few light cuts in it, like they were meant to segment the bullet into six equal petals when it opened up, and the top of the bullet, when viewed from the side, kind of reminded him of a castle tower or something. And it had this odd bronze coloring to it…

“Rico’s hollowpoints are supposed to be much better at expanding and not fragmenting or sheering off on one side like the ones we usually come across in the wastes,” Sling explained before he could even think to ask. “…not sure how I feel about needing something like that.”

“Save sentiments for people who deserve them,” he blurted. “…like us?”

“Still one short for your search party, and we’re burning time, we’re at the edge of the city,” Rico pressed with a slightly stronger tone.

“We’ll go with just four,” Sling said without even looking back, keeping most of her visual focus on him and the gun and ammo before him as she began to load the magazines. “If something comes up and we need outside help you can send someone in with the fifth card so they don’t have to fight with the automated security.”

“Now you’re sounding like a smart girl,” Rally snarked from his left, and still messing around with her leg. What was wrong with the damn thing? “Take it a step further, see if you can mess with the facility’s mainframe, could be the only key you need for the whole place. ‘Bots, doors, everything.”

Ada’s head cocked to her left a bit, as if thinking it over briefly. “I had a brief thought about flying my ass in to do some sneaky spy stuff with the computers until I realized I have no idea how to even turn the damn things on. So that’s out, unless you wanna come with me.”

“I would need to look at the computer’s OS bef—” Sling started to say, before Rally cut in—

“Standard operating system for the majority of Ministry computer networks is based on a Stable-Tec design, likely to simplify training for new employees and for ease of inter-Ministry communication and data sharing,” she rattled off mindlessly without being asked her opinion, though most of her attention seemed to still be focused on her metal leg and whatever the hell she was doing with that pulsing tech tool. “So whatever backdoor program or debug code you’re thinking of will probably work, but forget the “fly in from the sky” part, the turrets have a 360-degree turn radius and can track a griffon out to three hundred yards, and when it comes to aerial threats they shoot to kill on sight without warning. I know that because I’ve seen the MEW turrets dust several griffon mercs once, trying to come in at it from straight above the facility grounds. One second, these small griffon shapes are diving in, and the next they lit up like light bulbs from the turret fire. Rained ash for about three minutes as the wind dispersed the remains. I have no idea where the sensor array for their targeting system is or how it’s able to get such a wide view of the skies around it.”

“…so it seems that walking up to the front door and waving a few plastic cards in the air actually is the way to go,” Sling finally admitted in defeat, her head lightly dropping onto the wagon bed. “Story of my life…”

“Ahhh, finally,” Rally sighed heavily in relief when her pulsing arcanotech tool or something stopped pulsing in purple flashes. A green diode light on the back end of the “grip”, as she called it, began blinking green at about the same time, so that probably had something to do with whatever she’d been aiming to do. “Was starting to think the tuner was bad.”

“Happen often?” Sling inquired, and he couldn’t help but feel a tinge of jealousy. Figures she’d get along better with Rally than with him.

Then again, it wasn’t like he was making an effort to be sociable himself…

“When it does, it’s usually a sign that I need a new leg,” the teen answered with slight spite, either at her metal leg or at the trouble she’d gone to to fix whatever it was that needed fixing. “Union doesn’t usually do cyberlimbs on kids, so they weren’t sure it would even take. Adults have a stable and known range of magical energy and output that they can work with, but a kid can be all over the spectrum and back again before they’re all grown up. It’s not just my nervous system they were grafting this crap to, it’s my body’s inherent magic.”

He thought he saw Sling mouth a silent F-bomb when nobody was looking (except him, but she probably didn’t care anyway). “…it’s going to be hell getting you back there when it comes time. I’m a little too popular with the Union and the slavers.”

“It’s not a big deal right now,” Rally brushed off, turning her tool off and replacing the plates of her metal leg with a few telekinetic touches. “The time to be worried is when I have to re-tune the mana regulators and pathways twice a day instead of every two weeks.”

He managed to avoid the cute little blurb about a wooden peg leg being a lot less work, and opted to just stay silent and ignored…

…which lasted for about three seconds before Rico’s head popped back in and delivered news as grim as her appearance. “All right, gear up, we’re going into town.”

As with Trotpeka, Sling found herself somewhat…conflicted by the sight of Withercha.

As the second of the prairie’s two “Sister Cities”, Withercha got a later start in life than its elder city, though in the end it ended up being physically larger than Trotpeka. In terms of development, Withercha was much more affected by the war and its ever-expanding need for more of everything—weapons, munitions, new technologies, medical supplies, armored barding, fuel, food…the list could go on for pages. It lacked the magnificent skyscrapers and corporate offices of Trotpeka, but it boasted an industrial capacity unmatched in the whole prairie. Its neighborhoods were smaller, but most families could live within minutes of a school and a medical clinic for routine health care needs. And within the industrial sector sat several factories wholly dedicated to arms and munitions production, including the griffon-owned and operated Phoenix Rising firm and its subsidiary steel foundry, Oak Tree Manufacturing.

Life after the war was not kind to pony-made things, particularly cities. The few skyscraper towers the town had were practically gutted out, with only a few floors still keeping part of their outer walls—those that had fallen apart wound up blocking entire roads and intersections, if not outright flattening the city block they sat in. Much of the infrastructure that they passed by suffered a similar fate, though enough intact buildings remained in some blocks to allow a small population to live and survive there, in whatever way they could. Trading, scavenging, pillaging, and such.

Rico did not want to deal with any of that. She simply drove her caravan around the left edge of the city and came into it from the northwest. The way things were in Withercha right now, she’d been half-afraid the streets would be crawling with raiders, street gangs, or isolated groups of wastelanders looking for anything of value that could be traded for food (or take it from those they thought they could win against). She wanted close to a dozen souls armed to the teeth casually walking alongside the caravan to discourage any spurious decisions to raid her two wagons. Sling personally didn’t see how anyone would be stupid enough to try and attack a caravan guarded by Runners. She wasn’t really even thinking about potential ambushes, even in the outskirts of a ruined city filled with desperate, hungry souls ready to murder for a single meal.

All she could think about right then was how empty and cold she felt without Kite’s body snuggled up against her. It took a great deal of willpower to not abandon her “post” at the rear of the caravan and just jump back into the wagon and lay back down.

Julaya, the perceptive bitch that she was, never seemed to miss an opportunity to tease her prey when it came to her. “So much for “single and straight”, stable pony.”

How did I know she was going to say that?! “You almost sound jealous, stripes.”

“Intrigued, actually,” Julie laughed softly, purposefully ignoring the insult. “What changed your mind?”

“Who changed my mind,” she corrected quickly. “…which would be you, really. That little chat after your…exotic routine in that bar…you were happier about life than me, and I had everything I needed in my stable. Maybe I got tired of waiting to see if things would get better and just started trying to actually live.”

“…and your first act in this new outlook on life is to find a lover in a friend?”

“She confuses me,” she admitted in a fit of exasperation. “I think of her as a friend, but I don’t feel like she is. I…I think she might be something more. Even now all I want to do is jump into that wagon and snuggle up to her, when I should be watching for people who might want to take a potshot or five at us.”

“Then it is a good thing I am watching for the both of us, because we can all see that lovesick puppy look on your face. Do you really want her in your life as something more, or do you still feel guilty for how you did not value her when you thought her dead?”

She almost turned and smacked the zebra in the face for that, but in the back of her mind she couldn’t deny that a part of her had begun to ask that very question. “…god, if you and Kite can see that when I don’t want to admit it, maybe I don’t need to be doing this…”

“It is a difficult thing to judge,” Julie consoled her. “To lose a friend to death, and then have them return to you…it would confuse anyone who suffered from the grief. There may yet be genuine affection for her, but it would be best to take it slowly. Do not jump into heated passions so quickly.”

“And here I thought you’d want to take a run at me yourself.”

“She is important to you,” the zebra returned with a more serious tone than before. “Not just emotionally, but…mentally, I should say? She will know best how to work with your conflicting emotions and desires. And if you should find a soulmate in her in the process, all the better. You grieved when you thought her lost forever, and the fates have given you a second chance to discover if this is something you truly want. I will not get in the way of that. There will be no competition for your affections.”

We’ll see how that actually turns out, Sling doubted silently. “I should hope so. The last thing my journey into the wasteland needs is some stupid love triangle shit that just bogs everything down in pointless drama.”

“Very true,” Julie cackled lightly as one of her forehooves stroked at her chin in absent thought. “You are bogged down enough with all of your guns. Do you really need so many now that you have met Rico and acquired new ones?”

Oh hell, not you too! “She just threw the .357 at me, I’m still not sure what to do with it,” she shot back defensively, letting a touch of telekenisis off to brush against the holstered Ironshod .357 on her left side, and then swiped it out for a short look and a check of its cylinder. Fully loaded, all .357s, naturally…

Even as she raised the gun up to peer down its sights she found herself wishing she could make up her mind about it. She missed that 10mm, mostly for the capacity and ease of reloading. And if this thing jammed on her, it’d take a couple of hours to fix it…

“Yet you were so eager to get a rifle. Now that you have one, it does not suit you?”

“It suits me perfectly, it’s a matter of resources,” she continued, absently touching the adjustable rear sight to make sure it wouldn’t budge from the contact, and it didn’t. “Once we leave Rico’s company we’re back to scavenging or trading for whatever we can get, and we’re already facing a massive problem with all the nine-mils Kite bought for everybody. With trade virtually shut down in Withercha we need to be able to make use of any ammo we come across, and we don’t have a lot of calibers to choose from right now. Nines, .38s and .357s, maybe some .223 and 5.56, and then that shotgun and the two MEWs we can’t count on finding a lot of spark batteries for. And Kite still wants a .45 Auto, the stubborn mare…”

“She has a good teacher!” Julaya laughed joyfully. “And I am miffed that you acquired a gun for her when you still owe me one.”

With her slight curiosity on her .357 sated, she put it away and focused on the road ahead. The broken, crumbled ruins of several buildings had spilled out onto the equally broken street, forcing the caravan to move forward in a zig-zagging pattern as they maneuvered around the debris. “Would you do anything with it if I got you one?”

When Julie didn’t answer right away, she felt a small measure of pride rushing through her bloodstream. “…nnnnnnooooow that you have me thinking about it, the answer appears to be…nooooo?”

“Then why want one? To make up for the caps you spent getting the one I broke?”

“I…would often keep one or two for partners or lovers, if they had a good affinity for the things,” the zebra admitted sheepishly. “As both a measure of protection, and a gift to cement me into their good graces and such.”

Her desire to replace the broken carbine was suddenly much less powerful than it had been earlier. “Oh, is that what you were doing when you lent me that thing? Buttering me up so you could get into bed with me later?”

For the first time since they met in Rough Port, Julaya’s voice and demeanor lost their steady confidence and it was all the zebra could do to speak in coherent, non-stammering speech. “N-now wait a minute, I did not mean it like that, I was…we were not in a good situation with armored mercenaries hunting us I thought the rifle might be of use to you I was not trying to woo you or seduce you or entice you into a playful romp with me or oh gods this is not working is it—”

A soft turn of her head left brought her the most amusing sight she’d see all day—a once confident, carefree zebra rapidly melting into a nervous, shirking mare-child who’d just been caught raiding the cookie jar. The lowered ears, the submissive, teeth-flashing Smile of Apology she’d seen on Light Tail’s face more than once back in the stable, the way her body seemed to be leaning backward slightly…she stared at this sight for perhaps a few seconds longer than she should have, and then burst out in mocking laughter. “Welcome to the other side of your shenanigans, you lust-crazed vampire!”

Julie seemed to take the jab as a personal challenge, and in roughly three heart beats she regained her confident, powerful stride. “I am not a vampire! I drink water and Sparkle-Cola and a little tiny can of crazy now and then!”

“Skip the can of crazy today and get your mind on the job,” Leon’s voice bellowed from the head of the rear wagon in the caravan as it came to a stop roughly a block away from their final destination. “We’re up.”

Julie muttered something unkind in a language she didn’t understand, and probably didn’t want to, the way Leon’s brow narrowed darkly when his ears picked up her words.

She’d never seen a Ministry facility before, not in person, anyway. She’d seen plenty of photographs of them in the many, many reference and history books in the stable’s library. Most of them were just single buildings, but some were multi-structure camps in their own right, and this particular Ministry of Arcane Science facility was almost on par with a military outpost in terms of physical security. True to Rico’s word, it had a concrete wall enclosing the entire facility grounds, complete with strings of rusted razor wire along the top, though time and nature had cut a few gaps here and there. The concrete wall itself was in remarkably good shape, aside from some cracks in the outward facing portion, and bulged columns within the wall marked the hardened towers containing the hydraulics, wiring, ammo feed belts, and power cords for the automated ballistic and MEW turrets that crowned them. A part of her wondered how these turrets were even maintained over the last two centuries with nopony to see to it. A suite of specialized repair ‘bots?

“Ominous and mysterious,” Julaya muttered, mostly to herself. “So! How does my mane look?”

Sling resisted the urge to roll her eyes back into her head as she turned to face her again. “Really? We’re about to risk death by a half-dozen armed, live gun turrets and you want my opinion on your hair?”

“If I am going to die in a storm of angry bullets, I would like to look nice.”

She let her gaze focus on Julaya more intently than she usually allowed, and almost regretted it immediately. There was that damn, mildly pleasant smile of friendliness again that made those ice blue eyes of hers slightly mesmerizing, and that silvery mane of hers had been the recipient of very recent and careful attention. It had been somewhat unkempt the whole time she’d known her, but today it looked like it had actually been washed down and brushed, and she had to admit that the treatment had improved the silvery tone greatly. The back of the mane had been bundled up and coiled into a short ponytail, and the top half of her mane had been pulled and split into several bangs hanging off to the sides, so as not to obstruct her vision, though she couldn’t help but notice a very long, thin braided section dangling about like a loose shoe string. “I…can’t believe I’m just now noticing it…that…actually looks pretty good…”

“Isn’t it?” Julaya echoed back teasingly. “This was Kite’s attempt at an apology for her initial uncouth treatment of me…when she got the courage to ask if I would allow it yesterday. She would like to spruce up that rather mundane braided ponytail of yours, but is not sure how to ask.”

Sling felt a sharp, but brief twitch of jealousy in her chest that made no sense to her. She didn’t want a new look for herself in the first place, and it shouldn’t have mattered that Kite was trying to do something nice for a zebra with an admittedly disreputable past (robbery and murder of caravans associated with slavers, primarily). “So she just got you to ask for her by proxy.”

Julie’s mouth opened, a soft gasp of air escaping as she began to speak, and then caught herself as she absorbed the words spoken to her and realized the truth. “….that sneaky little co—”

Leon’s body leapt off of the second wagon and landed onto the broken street with a hard thud, putting an end to their short moment of peaceful banter. “So who’s ready to tempt fate?”

“Relax,” a pale blue unicorn mare droned back dryly, her equally pale gray-white mane and tail barely moved by the light breeze beginning to pass through the street. “These yellow cards got us out of the facility once we got the controller mainframe back in working order. ‘Bots might give you a little lip until you flash it, and then they’ll scan the card and decide you belong there and just float away, muttering to themselves in binary or something. I’ve put them on neck chains so you can just wear them, no need to go waving it around.”

The mare’s horn began to flow with an eerie (but cool-looking) mist-like aura of magic as she floated out the yellow-striped plastic cards out to each of them, and Sling quickly realized that this was probably Misty Veil. “For all the talk Rico made of you, she never bothered to actually introduce you in person, Misty.”

The mare confirmed her guess with a short rasp of her tongue at her boss’s expense. “Probably because she was too busy gushing and oogling over your big gun to think about it. I hope you’re not nearly as bad as she is with rare guns or this trip might be like being caught in an oversized air shaft with radroaches.”

Flashes of Stable 115 zipped across her vision—red light-bathed halls, strobed by the yellow flash of gunfire and a distant klaxon alarm—that she was able to dispel with a light shake of her head. “That’s worse than you’d think.”

Misty took the slight hint hidden in her tone and skipped any further commentary she might have had. “Everybody got their gear set? Guns, ammo, healing potions, tools and such?”

“Good here,” Leon’s voice rumbled, his arms slinging his new backwards rifle across his back before putting his favored .45 SMG across his chest. His 12.7mm pistol was kept in a cross-draw holster on his left side, and his traveling pack was likely set aside in the wagon in favor of a smaller-sized gear bag attached to his camouflaged armored barding, and equipment and ammo pouches along the sides and chest. The speckled desert pattern wasn’t a particularly good fit for a city environment, but concealment wasn’t the priority for this excursion so it didn’t much matter.

“I am fine,” Julie answered next, though how she could be considered ready when the most she packed was that katana and a small saddlebag was beyond her.

“Ready,” she said quickly, pulling the yellow card up closer to her neck. The weight of her own gear was barely noticeable—her rifle was slung across her chest and her three pistols scattered across her left and right sides in three separate holsters. Her new armored stable suit was a little thicker than she was used to, and the ballistic armor panels attached to her sides, back, and chest were fairly stiff, but they didn’t impede her mobility and integrated with her traveling saddle and its myriad of holsters and gear attachment points very well (minus the saddle bags, which she was forced to leave behind lest they cover the side armor panels). The darker blue color of the suit even matched her coat color better. Without the saddlebags to hold most of her gear, she had to resort to using several pouches to hold her spare magazines and speedloaders, and a single medkit pouch on her back, just behind the armored panel, held two healing stims and a roll of gauze wrap, antibiotic ointment, and a pack of bandage dressing pads. Oddly, it seemed as though the armor had been slightly enchanted to either lessen the weight of things attached to it, or boosted her own strength to allow her to carry the gear for extended periods of time without getting tired out. She’d have to ask about it later. The cooling enchantments were definitely working, though, she was still as comfortable and refreshed as she was when she’d first put it on.

Misty, for her part, was armed somewhat lightly—an M&A 9mm on her right side, and her own bullpup rifle with a short 16-inch barrel and a simple reflex sight on top. Most of her gear was dedicated to her expected workload—a web gear vest loaded with various tools and arcane tech parts and what looked like some sort of portable diagnostic machine roughly the size of a book inside a large pouch attached to her left side. “I’ll take point, the ‘bots should recognize me from the last time I was here. Just keep those cards out where they can see them and they shouldn’t murder you…even the zebra.”

“…wait, ‘even’? You mean they kill zebras outright otherwise?”

“They’re not friendly to zebras, really,” Misty replied, already turning towards the facility down the street and moving into a light trot. “’Bots have no sense of linear existence. Their chronometers might register two centuries of time passing, but to them it’s just a data point in their memory banks and most of them think the war with the zebras is still on. They weren’t meant to run for months at a time without a memory refresh, let alone two centuries. The simpler robots actually fared better than the early Handy models, which were designed to mimic a sentient creature as closely as possible. I’ve seen some Handy ‘bots that were downright psychotic. Handy ‘bots assigned to a Ministry facility got upgraded programming that seems to have held up better, but it’s rare that we come across a robot that isn’t glitched in the memory banks in some way. Just keep those cards visible and don’t pay them any attention, and they should think you’re part of the facility staff and leave you alone.”

Sling felt a rush of air wash over her, and Julaya’s body was almost pressing into her personal space in the next instant. “Very visible, yes, good idea!” Julie quipped with an exaggerated cheerfulness. “Mayhaps if I appear to be good buddy to a pony they will not shoot me, yes?!”

“They might have some morality protocols to spout at you for such an…interesting relationship, but it might work,” Misty cackled lightly. “…y’know, if you really wanna see if they’ll flip their circuit breakers, just kiss her or grope her or something, see what happens.”

Sling jumped away from Julaya’s side almost as quickly as the zebra had appeared at hers. “Oh hell no, I’d rather fight my way through them than put up with that—”

Julie was a quick, agile jumper—it seemed almost effortless for her to simply jump towards her target and end up right next to her again as though she’d never left. “But if we fight, you will use up bullets and risk injury or death and Kite will be very upset with me for letting you come to harm! I promise I am a very good kisser—”

Sling jumped away again, past Leon’s body and going into a faster trot than Misty to try and put distance between her and the increasingly desperate zebra trying to avoid a grisly death at her expense. “You just said you would leave me and Kite alone!”

“I do not wish to accomplish that by dying, crazy stable pony!” Julie yelled back, surprising her again with how quickly she could catch up to her prey, she was practically at the tip of her tail in just three seconds. “The little tail of light would be very sad at that—”

Misty’s laughter hounded her as Julaya caught up to her. “And to think some people pay for this kind of entertainment!”

Sling didn’t pay much attention to how quickly she was getting ahead of Leon and Misty, and it almost proved fatal. She’d hardly been running for ten seconds when she found herself thirty yards away from the facility’s concrete wall and its ruined gate, and she started skidding to a halt as the gun turrets came to life and oriented their weaponry towards her. At roughly the same time, a pair of olive drab-colored Handy ‘bots floated out into the street from behind the wall, each of them pointing a neon-green colored MEW focusing diode at her and raising a second arm fitted with what appeared to be a long, thick blade sharpened to a mirror sheen polish—

“STOP RIGHT THERE CRIMINAL SCUM!” one of the ‘bots screamed out, its synthesized tone somehow conveying an ancient, primal force into her soul. Its voice lacked the admittedly classy Trottingham accent, and sounded much closer to a normal Equestrian dialect. It also bore what looked like a stack of three yellow chevrons on the front of its chassis, with a small, purple star-like symbol underneath that on closer inspection looked remarkably similar to Twilight Sparkle’s cutie mark—

—Julaya’s body crashed to a halt by crashing into her backside, sending the both of them tumbling over until they were splayed out on the asphalt and at the complete mercy of this robotic sergeant and its lack of humor—

—the second ‘bot chimed in its displeasure at the ruckus, and she cursed the designers who thought to give every single robot in a production model line the exact same voice. “WHAT’S THIS, NOW?! A SPY AND A ZEBRA SYMPATHIZER?! THERE’S ONLY ONE WAY TO DEAL WITH STRIPE LOVERS, SERGEANT!”

Oh shit shit shit shit SHIT—

“W-w-wait wait wait wait we’re cleared to be here we’re cleared!!” Sling screeched in a panic, frantically pulling on hers and Julaya’s security pass cards and presenting them to the robots preparing to murder them. “She’s a defector, she’s a nice zebra! Aren’t you, Julie?!”

“Nice nice very nice please don’t kill us horribly!” Julaya agreed in an equally frantic and panicked tone, even forgetting her distaste for contractions for a moment.

The robots’ primary “eye” extended outward, with the visual sensor lens focusing and zeroing in on the offered security pass cards and seemingly scouring it for any signs of imperfections, and after a few tense, terrifying seconds, the eye retreated backward and re-adjusted its sensor lenses. “HUMPH. IT SEEMS YOU DO INDEED POSSESS BASIC SECURITY CLEARANCE FOR THIS FACILITY. CURIOUS.”

Atop the wall, the automated turrets lost their target lock on her frail, fleshy body, and returned to a neutral position pointing outwards towards the city just as Leon and Misty caught up to them.

“Oh, wow, I wasn’t actually sure they’d let Julaya live,” Misty chimed absently as she trotted past them, holding up her own pass card for the robots’ pleasure as she strolled by. “Hell of a way to test their reaction, but it worked. Congrats, I guess.”

“I’d pay you a hundred caps to do that again, that was funny,” Leon chuckled, following in Misty’s lead and moving on with a quick flash of his card to the ‘bots. Surprisingly, the ‘bots paid him almost no mind once they glanced his card despite the fact that he was a griffon.

With a fresh shot of anger flowing into her, she stood back up on four steady legs and gave the armed Handy ‘bots the meanest, most furious stare she was capable of. “Satisfied now?”

“HARDLY,” the sergeant ‘bot bellowed back, unmoved by her visible anger. “YOUR…’FRIEND’, MAY HAVE A SECURITY PASS, BUT THERE’S GONNA BE A RECTAL-LEVEL INVESTIGATION INTO THE BOTH OF YOU. WHAT KIND OF ZEBRA WOULD HAVE ANY BUSINESS WITH TWILIGHT SPARKLE’S MINISTRY OF ARCANE SCIENCES?”

She couldn’t explain why, but a pall of horror came over her when the ‘bot asked that question, and before she could even begin to come up with a cover story to get her past these robots she felt Julie’s forehooves grab hold of her head, forcefully bring her close, and drew her into a deep kiss that turned her shocked cry into a pleasurable gasp within two seconds. She was fairly certain Julie drew the kissing out for a full fifteen seconds just for the fun of it, and she thought she could hear one of the robots feebly attempt to break them out of such a public display of “affection”, but she honestly wasn’t focused on that.

And the worst part of it, was that when Julie finished and let go of her with a comical “MWAH”, she couldn’t make up her mind whether she enjoyed it or not.

“That kind of zebra,” Julie explained to the pair of robots floating before them with a smack of her lips. “Affection can be a powerful magic all its own. And she tastes like…blueberry? Why do all my favorite ponies taste like fruit when I kiss you?”

“…SERGEANT, DON’T THE ZEBRAS KILL ANY OF THEIR OWN THEY CATCH FRATERNIZING WITH THEIR ENEMIES LIKE THAT?” the second ‘bot queried his “superior”.

“WHO KNOWS WHAT THOSE SAVAGES DO TO EACH OTHER OVER THERE,” the sergeant ‘bot grumbled derisively. “UGH, FINE, YOU’RE BOTH CLEARED FOR ENTRY, BUT ANY FURTHER DISPLAYS OF….AFFECTION IN SUCH A PUBLIC MANNER WILL BE SUBJECT TO DISCIPLINARY ACTIONS TO BE DECIDED BY DIRECTOR DARK TIMES. NOW GET INSIDE BEFORE I CHANGE MY SUBROUTINES AND BLAST YOU ANYWAY.”

At that, both ‘bots lowered their weapon arms and returned to their previous patrol duties, but not without a last comment that piqued her interest as they floated around the corner and disappeared—

“—REAT, NOW THERE’S TWO STRIPES WORKING HERE—”

Her tongue flicked about inside her jaw, trying to work out the sensations she’d been bombarded with as she quickly jogged through the broken gate and into the lobby of the main administration building. She thought it very strange that a robot—even one designed to mimic sentient behavior as much as possible—would even make pointless idle comments out loud to itself like that…and that it apparently remembered enough of the facility’s former staff to know their species, if not their physical appearance…

Her musings were briefly interrupted when Julaya sauntered up to her right side, still smacking her lips as if savoring the aftertaste of the kiss. “Why do some of you pony folk taste like fruit when you kiss?”

She made a small leap, just enough to get her some leverage on her target, and her right forehoof rose up and slapped Julie’s left ear before she could stop herself from doing it…but in hindsight, she realized she would have done it willingly anyway. “What the hell was that?! You said you weren’t going to get between me and Kite and then you just go and….and…..what the eff?! You know she probably saw that clear as daylight!”

“….it got us past the robots coming to kill us, yes?” the zebra replied, rubbing at her slapped ear but otherwise showing only a slight hint of pain. “…though I will admit minor ulterior reasons were at play too, yes, perhaps I should not have done that…”

“No shit! And you’re going to say as much to Kite when we get back!”

“…may I go back and compel the robots to kill me instead?”

“No!”

“I’d hate that, you’ve been far too entertaining so far,” Misty’s voice interrupted, jolting both of them mid-step with her sudden presence in the lobby. “But you need to quit it. I’m being serious here, we might have been able to hack the controller mainframe and disable the robots’ access to the personnel files, but if they see two supposed co-workers arguing and fighting they may start glitching and there’s no telling what part of their programming they’ll access to “de-escalate” your little slap fights. I’m honestly surprised they aren’t going haywire right now.”

With that minor, stinging rebuke, the misty-maned pony managed to put a stop to every frustrated thought flying through her head. She wasn’t any less miffed with Julie, but it would have to wait.

“…I’ll strangle her later.”

“Then let’s get moving,” Misty said with a crisp tone, snapping about and heading past the reception desk and towards an open doorway. Piles of broken glass shards were shoved up against the wall nearby. “The main exit on the other side is behind a collapsed hallway, so we’ll have to take a detour through the left side offices and get out through a fire exit. If you know a light spell, use it, this building lost its connection to the facility’s spark generator.”

Finally relieved to have something besides zebras and kisses to focus on, Sling brought her rifle up to eye level and focused her magic on the forward folding grip, which she currently had folded up under the barrel. Her light spell seeped into the hardened polymer grip and projected itself out of the bottom, forming a perfect, bright white cone of light that illuminated the way forward far better than a traditional battery-powered flashlight—

Misty’s tone changed almost instantly when the white beam of light swept across the wall in front of her. “Oh hell, that’s a good use of a light spell. Right on your weapon, lets you see what’s in front of you before you shoot it.”

“The downside is that your weapon will potentially be pointed at something you don’t intend to shoot when the light illuminates your target,” Sling countered her enthusiasm with her usual glass-half-empty outlook, following Misty and Leon through the doorway after applying a second light spell to Leo’s .45 SMG. “How long to the exit?”

“Not very long. This isn’t a very big building, it was most likely just a personnel resources department. Payroll, logistics, shit like that. The real work was done in the R&D labs. But this place is a little big. It’s basically a walled-in city block, far too many buildings for just MoAS research. I’m betting this place might have actually been a joint-Ministry research facility under the MoAS’s administration.”

“Wait, you mean like the Ministry of War or Morale? A combined ministry facility would be one of the most inviting targets the zebras could hit.”

“Might be why the northern half of Withercha got turned into a balefire crater,” Misty confirmed grimly. “The “city” that stands now is only about half the size of the real thing. If we’d gone north another mile and a half you would have seen it. Nothing but rubble and twisted metal, and the radiation at the crater’s center is still dead-right-there lethal. We’re safe enough where we are, but I wouldn’t go too much further north if I were you. With some Rad X and Radaway, you could probably survive a short journey into the Broken Zone, as we call it. Or you might get lucky and find an intact RBC suit. Regardless, go more than two miles into the zone, and you’re better off blowing your own brains out before the rad sickness gets you. You’d need a Steel Ranger power armor suit to be completely safe from it, and have a strong-ass scrubber spell ready when you cross back into the safe zone.”

“Great pep talk,” Leon grunted, his weapon light sweeping over the left side of the hall. Nothing unusual, beyond the broken doors and offices that looked like children had been playing around in them. Stuff everywhere. “You must be a riot at birthday parties.”

“Everyone’s a comedian today,” Misty groaned in reply.

“Perhaps because tomorrow we may be dead,” Julaya suggested with an unusually unsettled tone. “I do not have good feelings about this place.”

“A lot of people probably died here when the megaspells started flying—”

Sling’s eyes swept to her right, following her rifle’s strobing light, and while her light spell showed much the same state of disrepair as Leon’s, she noticed something stand out when she came upon the fifth office down the hall.

Holes in the wall next to the door, and in a somewhat uniform pattern. Some were higher up than others, but they almost looked like part of a…

…a gun fight?

“Those almost look like bullet holes,” her voice commented softly. “How many skeletal remains did you find the last time you were here, Misty?”

“Not many,” came the surprising answer. “We’d find one or two here and there in this building, mostly in these offices, a few more in the courtyard, and about a dozen in the administration wing. Found one at the mid-point of the eastern stairs even. Odd thing was, the bones were scattered.”

For a facility that’s supposedly had almost no unwelcome visitors in over two centuries, that would be odd. “Did the robots move them?”

“We’ve only seen them on the perimeter or in the courtyard. As for the skeletons, it was mostly a concentrated scattering. Most of the skeleton would be in one spot, with some leg bones strewn around it. Some ribs were broken off too. A few skulls had bullet holes in them, and there’d be a broken, rusted out pistol nearby, but their leg bones were still separated from the body. Same thing with the administration wing in the central courtyard. Our best guess is that some of the surviving staff may have turned cannibal in order to survive and murdered others for sustenance, or consumed the bodies of those who committed suicide rather than die of radiation poisoning or dehydration. I’d rather not dive much deeper into it. As it is, I expect to find the majority of them in the security wing.”

Her interest in the violent history of this place vanished almost immediately, her stomach churning at the mental images threatening to force themselves out. “…soooo let’s talk about how you plan to slice into said security wing.”

She turned her attention away from the wall and focused on the path ahead of her as Misty obliged her question. “It’s not that hard. The terminal and card reader that control access to the wing have a secondary interface that a Mark IV PipBuck can jack into and open manually, but since we don’t have one I’ll need to pull the cover plate off your PipBuck so I can hot-wire it into the card reader and a small, portable terminal I have with me.”

A…a what now? “Wait, a what? Computers are too big to haul around.”

“It’s not a computer, it’s more of a diagnostic tool. I’ll be using it to jury-rig the PipBuck and try to slice the door open by making the security system think it’s getting signals from a Mark IV. Your PipBuck is a 300A series, so it’s a bit basic and doesn’t have the advanced features found in later models, but the damn things run forever with almost no maintenance. If you had a Mark IV model with its own diagnostic software and jack plug, I wouldn’t need to do this.”

So this is how the Union would make use of my PipBuck if they got it…I wouldn’t know how this thing would communicate with the 115’s gate console if El-Tee’s right about the PipBuck being a key to the door. “I’m not familiar with that model, these 300As were all my stable had.”

“Not surprising. Stable-Tec was always a little bit weird with the program. The two stable ruins we were able to search had different model PipBucks themselves. Your little theory about some of the stables in the prairie enacting extra security layers concerning outside intrusion would help that make a little more sense. Hard to hack a Stable door from the outside when you’re not even sure what type of PipBuck the door console would be configured for. I’ve no doubt the Union tried this trick with your Stable time and time again, to no effect, or you wouldn’t be here right now.”

At the end of the hallway the corridor split off to the right, and even with the limited light offered by her enchanted weapon grip she could see the other end of the hallway was little more than a pile of broken wood, steel, old drywall and ceiling material, and what looked like the contents of an office from the floor above. One end of a metal desk was poking out from the debris, and several bookshelves lay scattered and split apart atop the pile of rubble. Scores of ruined, unreadable books were strewn about the rubble and hallway.

“…shit, that wasn’t there the last time I was here,” Misty cursed aloud, turning her gaze about the hallway and settling for what looked like a short hallway halfway down that led to a side fire exit. “We’ll have to take this fire exit to the side instead. If we can get access to the security and R&D wing we’ll probably want to take as much as our wagons can haul off, we may not get another chance at this.”

“Perhaps the collapsing building is a sign to turn back,” Julaya spoke up, again lacking a good deal of the confidence she normally exuded. “I loot the ruins of the old world as much as any soul, but I do not believe this place should be touched.”

“Not like you to be spooked by dark hallways,” Leon grunted.

“It is not the darkness here that bothers me. I do not like this place, it feels wrong. We should leave.”

“Then go back to the caravan if you feel that strongly about it,” Misty dismissed her fears. “I—”

“No, Julie doesn’t get spooked often, but when she does, it’s worth considering,” Leon cut her off, coming to a stop to look back at her and the zebra. “Might be worth looking around here first, see if there’s any clues we can pick up on.”

I might have a clue, Sling thought with trepidation. But it wasn’t a clue she could act on yet. “Let’s just get that stupid door open. We’re not gonna learn anything here, any terminals in here are long dead.”

“Shouldn’t take long,” Misty promised, turning into that short hallway and hastening her way to the fire exit. “The longest part will be setting everything up. Just keep those pass cards visible. I don’t know how often the ‘bots take a stroll through the courtyard, and the wasteland likes to screw you over right when you don’t need the trouble.”

“Thought that was just life in general,” Sling mumbled snidely, welcoming the rush of air and overcast light spilling into the hall as Misty sprang out of the fire exit.

Julie’s voice crept up behind her with an ominous, lingering hint of doom that she began to find difficult to ignore. “I fear what we find here will make you wish for your old ills.”

What Sling found, at first glance, was about what she expected to find. The courtyard of the facility was massive, perhaps comparable to the size of an entire stadium or coliseum. Even from the side alley of the personnel resources building, she had no trouble identifying the main R&D wing, for it still bore the mark of the Arcane Sciences ministry over its front entrance and every window on all of its four floors looked to have been sealed off by security shutters from the inside. Off on the left side of the courtyard was a second structure with a similar construction pattern, four floors tall and seemingly covered in marble. A line of withered, dead shrubs and bushes formed a perimeter around both structures, and an equally-deceased clove of tree trunks formed the centerpiece of the courtyard, with park benches and a few tables encircling it. A few chairs could be found scattered about and tipped over, along with a lone tree trunk that had fallen over. And in stark contrast to the stately pale, homely appearance of the other two structures, the black night, metal outer walls of the security wing seemed determined to remind all who saw it that danger still lurked in the world beyond. She also noted that it had been built without any windows of any kind. Above its massive blast door serving as its primary entrance, an intact signboard (amazing!) bore the words “PRIMARY TESTING LAB AND SECURITY”.

Roughly a minute into the trek across the courtyard, as they passed by the cluster of dead trees, Sling absently lifted the fallen trunk off of the ground rather than just bound over like Misty had, and discovered that it had been lying on what looked like a sheet metal signboard that had fallen over and was still in one piece. The dead tree’s weight was tossed aside like a rag, crashing into a couple of tables and breaking them apart in an explosion of wood chunks, and she hurriedly hoisted the signboard up and began brushing off two centuries of dust, grime, and dirt—

“…Rain Song Memorial Joint Research & Development Center?” she read aloud as her eyes scanned over the faded, but readable font on the sign’s front facing. “…Ministry of Arcane Sciences, Ministry of Wartime Technologies, and Ministry of Peace…head administrator Dark Times, Assistant Director…Zulana?”

“Zulana?” Leon’s voice repeated as he passed by her, his eyes scouring the northern building. “Sounds like a zebra name.”

“That already sounds like trouble,” she amended, carefully setting the sign down and rejoining the others. “For a zebra to get any manner of work in one of the ministries, let alone a joint research facility of three of them, they would have to b—”

“They would be marked for death,” Julaya answered gravely. “This zebra…would likely only have been safe from harm within these walls. It would be akin to a prison, really.”

“Now I really want to crack this place wide open!” Misty proclaimed gleefully, now practically racing towards the security wing as she began pulling out the tools and equipment she would need for her work. “Those three ministries practically reshaped Equestria into a technological powerhouse in less than a decade! Putting all that kind of tech research and knowhow in one place like this, there’s no telling what they cooked up in here! C’mon, Slowpoke Sling, the day ain’t getting any younger!”

“So it’s Slowpoke now,” Sling groaned, though her pace stayed the same. “…still, better off than Kite. Rally must be driving everybody insane having to sit so close to this place and not get to go inside it…”

“I spy with my not-so-little eye, something that starts with B—”

“Brick,” BJ droned in reply almost immediately.

“Nnnnooope, try again.”

“Brahmin.”

“Way too obvious, and way wrong. One more shot.”

“Bullet.”

Light Tail promptly balled up the rag she’d been cleaning the surface of her 9mm with and threw it at the colt’s head. “It was you, fool!”

The flat-faced colt didn’t even flinch as the cloth rag bounced off the side of his skull. “’You’ doesn’t start with B, filly.”

Elly’s voice broke into a short, hard laugh. “Okay, I walked into that one. Your turn.”

BJ’s head swiveled around for a few seconds before he spoke. “I spy with my great big eyes, something that starts with G.”

“Greatly annoyed mom?”

True to Elly’s guess, Kite was sitting in the back of the wagon bed, her deadpan, unamused glare promising swift vengeance upon the children for their poor joke at her expense. They’d been at this game for over ten minutes, and they were loud about it.

“…good try, but not it. Guess again.”

“Granola bar? The one you owe me for that song?”

“It’s not even in sight, doofus. Last chance.”

“Griffon?”

“Damn, you struck out. It was that broken gate way out at that old ministry place.”

“Hunh, didn’t even think of that one. All right then, I spy with my not-so-little eye, something that starts wiiiiiiith…P!”

“…oh crap, this is gonna suck. Ummm…pistol?”

“Nuh uh. Two guesses left!”

“Uhhh…oh crap oh crap uhhhh…feck, this is not fun…oh! Paper! I see some of it billowing around down the street.”

“That was my first choice before I changed it, sooo, no. One more try.”

“Pencil? The one Raina’s drawing stuff with right now instead of watching for raiders or Pythons?”

“…oh, crap, yeah, you got it. Hey Raina, what’re you doin’?! The bad ponies are out there!”

The distant, art-talented griffon managed to shout back loudly enough that the streets ringed with the faint echo of her words. “I’m drawin’ out maps of the place, don’t mind me and go back to playing hard-to-get with your little boyfriend—”

“WHAT?!?!” Elly screeched back, her little hooves stampeding across the road as she charged at her object of ire. “He is not my raaaaaaaggggghhh Max, Mona, BITE HER—"

“What th—OWW OH SHIT THEY REALLY DO ANYTHING SHE SAYS SHIT SHIT SHIT—"

Rally had grown tired of their loud, little game of “I Spy” less than a minute into it, but now it was looking like a better alternative than the filly siccing her dogs on people who pushed the wrong button. “…I liked it better when Elly was just super quiet and bored and invisible.”

Kite’s head slowly dropped and face-planted into the wagon bed as BJ’s maniacal laughter sounded out into the streets alongside the angry barks of two husky pups chasing a terrified griffon up and down the road. “And I thought you’d be the one driving me mad this close to a high-tech treasure vault…”

Up until now, she’d been rather ambivalent about her PipBuck being torn open and worked on while it was still attached to her leg, but now that Misty had pulled the faceplate off and was in the process of wiring it to her portable diagnostic tool (and in turn connecting the tool to the exposed wiring of the security wing’s access panel), she was starting to get apprehensive about it. The only things she really used it for heavily was to keep her enchanted saddlebags organized and to keep an out for nearby threats. On occasion she had need of its mapping function, but the thing had erased its copy of the pre-war map of the prairie and had been recreating a more accurate and up-to-date map ever since she got out of the stable. The SATS spell module, she couldn’t recall having used more than a couple of times, she preferred using her own shooting skill over a targeting spell. But the thought of losing it forever to an errant mistake had her slightly terrified, and she didn’t understand why.

“Yoooooou have done this before, right?” she asked Misty’s left ear, watching as the other mare’s magic began pecking away at her tool’s keypad, turning a couple of dials, and flipping a switch or three seemingly at random. The small, green monochrome screen on the tool appeared to be showing a set of frequency waves, or something, and she was apparently trying to get the left wave to match the one on the right.

“Not with a PipBuck,” was the answer she’d been afraid of. “Not entirely sure it’ll work, but it’s all we got. Seems to be working fairly well so far, at least. Just gotta watch for a power spike. The front office building we passed through lost its connection to the facility’s power grid, but the rest of the place seems to be hooked up just fine. But two centuries is a long time to be running with minimal maintenance. We’ll doubtless run into sections with no power, and we won’t be able to restore the power line connections.”

Her apprehension concerning her PipBuck transformed into a deep-rooted worry for her own survival. “…and this…power spike? If one shoots through, what will happen?”

The bored tone that answered did nothing for her nerves. “My little terminal will be fried. Depending on the amount of energy that spikes through, the surge could conceivably make its way to your PipBuck and fry it too. Or make it explode. Or overwhelm the insulation in the brace and fry you along with it. Hope for the best.”

“…please don’t fry me.”

“Shut up and I won’t make it happen on purpose.”

With a tiny whimper of fear, she bit her tongue down and held off on any further speaking of any kind, and watched as Misty fiddled with her tool. A couple of times she cursed and quickly made an adjustment to whatever it was that she was doing, which did not make her feel any safer about the process.

But just like she said, getting past the door turned out to be quicker than getting ready for the job itself, for within a couple of minutes the pale yellow plastic button on the dangling face plate of the access panel turned off, and the green button quickly came to life in vibrant color, and Misty’s hoof tapped the button without hesitation—

--with a loud, guttural screech of metal, the blast door began to retract into the wall on ancient pistons and gears, and Misty’s throat began giggling with the glee of a ten-year-old filly as she hastily disconnected her terminal from the PipBuck and began re-attaching its faceplate. “Hehehehe! See? Nothing to worry about! Now let’s get in there and scope the place out! I’m so hyped up I could jump up right into the clouds!”

Peering past the mare’s head and into the open doorway of the security wing, the faint—but working—overhead lights painted a much different scenario than one of simple search and retrieval.

In fact, it was already starting to look like the zebra might have had the right idea. She never consciously decided on it, but somehow the bright green crystal sights of her 9mm were up and searching for a suitable target almost immediately.

Even Leon didn’t like what he saw, and his .45 SMG was zipping up to his shoulder to take aim into the doorway out of impulse, but he held off on actually shooting. “…oh, shit…”

“Oh shit, wh—” Misty began to ask, turning her head to see what had everyone shell-shocked and pointing their weapons into the building, and then she stopped talking entirely.

A pile of pony bones lay just beyond the blast door, scattered about the entire floor of the lobby and across the reception desk, but that wasn’t what had their attention.

It was the three seemingly intact, if dead-looking bodies mixed in with the bones.

Sling moved her left foreleg, felt the loose faceplate of her PipBuck rattling, and quietly poked Misty in the side with her right leg. “Finish putting it together, please.”

Misty wordlessly complied with her request, even tapping and pulling at the PipBuck when she was done to make sure it was secured tightly, and then backstepped out of her way—

—Sling’s body slinked forward on four steady, smooth legs, her pistol always pointed at the body closest to her as Leon’s footsteps fell in behind her. Passing through the doorway almost felt like she was crossing over into another world, but much of her focus was on the body slumped up against the desk, as if taking a long, deep sleep. And what she saw was almost completely and utterly wrong even by wasteland standards.

The body’s shredded, tattered lab coat exposed enough of the pony wearing it for her to tell that it had been a stallion in life, and the flesh beneath the coat was…well, in some places it had been ripped away by what looked like bites, and dried blood caked the wounds and the hair of his coat. His left hind leg was missing its hoof, and the strips of flesh and leg bone sticking out of the wound sickened her.

And if the body’s condition was to be believed, he’d not been dead long enough for rigor mortis to set in. When she poked the hind leg with the barrel of her pistol, the flesh sank under its pressure as though it were still alive. She thought it an isolated incident, but when she poked the thigh, then his ribcage, and then his hindquarters with the same result, she was certain of it.

And she was certain it was also impossible.

“Fucking hell,” Leon’s voice wondered in disbelief. “I thought this place hadn’t seen a living soul in two centuries, and the lobby’s got three fresh dead bodies in it.”

“M-maybe they’re ghouls?” Misty suggested, but even she didn’t sound all that convinced of her own thoughts.

The mere mention of the word “ghoul” was more than enough to kill any interest she had in exploring further…but it was far too late for that now. “The ghouls I saw in Trotpeka looked a lot worse this, actually, all torn up and shit. Except that their wounds and blood and…ugh, viscera, didn’t look so fresh.”

“Misty, whatever it is you and Rico are looking for, it had better be worth the trouble,” Leon’s voice growled angrily. “From here on, this is a combat zone. Nobody ventures off alone. Sling, since you got the PipBuck that can pick up active threats, you get to take point.”

“Yes, great idea, make the jumpy pony with an automatic weapon the first one to find trouble,” Julie snarked wryly. “Nothing terrible could possibly happen.”

Sling wasn’t listening. Her brain was struggling to maintain any sense of calm as she ran through her available munitions. Five thirty-round magazines on her rifle, not including the one loaded in it at the moment. Six spare magazines for her 9mm, plus the 15+1 rounds in the gun itself. Her six speedloaders for Grayhawk (and Grayhawk itself) were loaded with .44 Mag rounds, with twenty-four mana burst .44s piled up in a storage pouch on her right side. The .357 Ironshod and its six speedloaders were all loaded with .357s. And then there was that survival knife she kept strapped on her right side…

She kept the 9mm out. The green arcane gem sights glowed so brightly they were almost light bulbs themselves, and 9mm ammo was everywhere, or at least it had been whenever she’d gone shopping for bullets. She wasn’t sure that would hold true in Withercha, but at the very least this facility’s security team would have kept some in stock in their armory. She just hoped the ammo cans had been spell-sealed.

She trekked through the scattered bones with the care one would take traversing shattered glass, barely taking note of the three dozen-plus bullet holes scattered across the walls…and the twenty or so holes in the ceiling above. The lobby door into the security wing proper was pockmarked with a few dings, and its glass window had been cracked into a spiderweb pattern by two stray rounds, obscuring the corridor beyond. But a gingerly touch on the hoof-shaped door handle pushed the door open with ease, and she was pleased by the sight of some sight of lighting in the hall ahead, if not the state of the hall itself. The ceiling appeared to be composed of drywall panels, several of which had not aged well and had fallen apart onto the floor. Sections of the corridor walls had been heavily damaged by gunfire and what appeared to be explosions, and still bore aged, black stains and smears of blood in some places. Wooden doors leading into various rooms were riddled with yet more bullet holes, and some of the interior message posters had been partially torn or obscured with old blood, rendering them unreadable. Among them, however, she recognized the silhouette of a pony in Steel Ranger power armor cresting a heavily-fortified hilltop, with the words “ENLIST TODAY!” at the top of the poster.

And there were just as many bones scattered about here as there’d been in the lobby. She saw a few old guns lying on the floor, near blackened, dried blood splotches—mostly M&A 9mms, and a couple of .45 Auto pistols that she discarded almost immediately once she picked them and found that the hammers had been locked back for so long that all spring tension in the mainspring had vanished, allowing them to move freely without resistance. The guns and spent casings only had small bits of rust and corrosion on their surfaces, suggesting that this place was still well sealed against outside moisture despite the two centuries of time since its construction.

“Shitballs, this must have been a hell of a fight,” Leon’s voice cursed behind her, his heavy footfalls coming to a stop off to her left as she eased up into an intersection in the corridor. “Anybody find a map of this place yet? Even just a layout of fire exits would have the basic floor plan laid out.”

“I…I think I might have found it,” Misty croaked fearfully, and when Sling looked back behind her she saw the unicorn staring at something that had been nailed to the wall. Covered in dried blood and almost unreadable, and above was a small nameplate that read “EMERGENCY EXIT LOCATIONS”. Judging by the state of the halls, no one had managed to make use of any of them…

“Or perhaps you could follow these large white arrows on the walls that point you to where you wish to be, if you would look up,” Julaya added, brushing past her briefly to tap said signage with the tip of her katana before sheathing it.

“I…was more focused on the carnage,” Sling was forced to admit with embarrassment, having no memory or recollection of having seen the arrows on the upper portions of the walls despite walking by them and taking in everything she could. Sure enough, the arrows helpfully pointed out the way to various sections or points of interest. The test lab was a good start. “We’ll start with that lab, check out anything that looks interesting along the way. And don’t bother searching out exits, whatever happened here, nobody was able to get out. They were likely locked in.”

“Scary thought,” Leo murmured from the rear of the group as she trotted forward in the direction the arrow indicated. “I’ll pull rear security, don’t get too far ahead.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll be bumping into Misty’s ass quite a lot at the speed I plan on moving at,” she assured him, her eyes scanning over each door they passed by for anything beyond that might hold her interest. So far, just a couple of offices and storage closets.

“So many wrong ways to take that statement.”

“Oh gods the mental images STOPPIT—”

“I was wrong,” Julaya bemoaned. “I am wishing for my old ills.”

“I’m wishing for a—”

Sling’s words halted mid-sentence as she reached a T-section at the end of the hall, turning left as the white arrow on the wall directed, and spied an open door forty yards down on the right from which a faint green-tinted glow emanated—

“--….aaaaaaaasign that may lead to a clue, I hope,” she finished, now laser focused on the room to the point that she only paid a cursory glance at the large open conference room directly to her left, and thus did not note anything more than the fact that there were several large sprays of dried blood on the wall and doorway.

“A terminal?” Misty guessed correctly, as when Sling made it to her destination and quickly swept herself inside, she found a fairly messy office with lots of file folders and papers scattered about the floor. The terminal itself sat on a fairly sturdy oak desk, and a single bullet hole on the wall behind the desk, helped make sense of the worn double-action revolver on the floor. She couldn’t find any signs of a pony’s skeleton, though…

“A working one,” Sling answered sadly. The desk still held an intact photo frame, the picture inside showing a light purple earth mare and a white-coated unicorn mare, their cutie marks hidden from the camera’s angle, and with two little colts and a filly in front of them, blue, red, and green coats….

Misty seemed to know almost immediately what had dampened her spirits. “…diving into these old ruins isn’t always so fun, when you find things like this. It’s easy to forget that bones you’re constantly stepping over were once ponies just like us, with their own families and lives that got ruined when the world ended, because so much of who and what they were are gone, and so little evidence is left that they ever existed at all.”

This wasn’t the unicorn jumping like a little girl to go crawling about the hallways five minutes ago. “You forget often, it seems.”

“Often enough that it’s good to be reminded of it,” Misty said softly, her magic taking hold of the picture frame and secreting it into her saddlebags. “One of our unofficial rules is to try and document as much as we can about those from the old world when there’s a chance we can actually I.D. them. Crack that terminal, I’ll poke around the desk drawers. I’ll try not to crowd you.”

Sling didn’t even notice the other mare rummaging through the desk as she pecked away at the keyboard, mindlessly hacking the password out of the system through the debug program within a minute and filling the monochrome green screen with what looked like numerous work log entries, most of them corrupted.

Well, except for the last three months of the war…

…nothing on her E.F.S. yet, so she could probably spare a few minutes…

She scrolled through the logs until she hit one that looked promising, roughly two weeks before the war ended, and brought it to life:

“The facility’s primary project got green-lit for limited production status today! Dark Times announced the government’s approval for a selective deployment on the frontlines at a conference meeting in the R&D wing two hours ago, based on the performance of the prototypes during the previous trial runs. The only catch is that it’ll take some time to set up the production lines at an approved contractor, and exactly who that will be is still up in the air. Phoenix Arms has a pretty big hoofprint in the prairie, and there’s a half dozen other companies across Withercha and Trotpeka involved in advanced weapons and technology research that are clamoring to get a government contract. Even Ironshod Firearms is looking to bid on the contract, but from what we can tell the plant they built in the city is primarily a repair center for civilian-owned arms. They have manufacturing capability for pistols and some long arms, but nothing on the scale needed for the Alicorn’s Star and it’s ammunition. Reps from Ironshod and Phoenix are scheduled to make personal visits to the facility to get a first-hoof look at the weapon. That’s going to be a swell day.

Maybe I could put in for some time off, keep my distance from that ass-kissing fest. I’m paid to build and test prototypes, not get sucked up to by corporate sluts, and there’s plenty of souls on the project with far more knowledge about it than me who would love to get blown by those greasy slimeballs.”

“Ugh,” she cringed aloud, her tongue sticking out in disgust at the mental images forcing themselves to life in her mind. “Still, think I found something for you and Rico. Some weapon project they called Alicorn’s Star…”

“The name alone already tells me what it could be,” Misty groaned as her forelegs pulled the bottom left drawer out and started pawing through its files. “From what we know about the MoAS, a number of its top-secret projects involved alicorns. We think they were either trying to duplicate the powers of the Princess Sisters, or trying to figure out how a normal pony might become an alicorn themselves. Potions and magical alchemical concoctions would be one way to do it, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume they might try to develop a conventional weapon that would do the same thing. We think that’s how MEW technology came about, but we’re not sure. Most of the leads we’ve found in the past led nowhere, and the few that did lead to something…well, there was a reason a great deal of it never made it to field testing.”

“This might be an exception. It says here that reps from the Phoenix Arms and Ironshod plants were scheduled to make a visit and see the project up close, make bids for a limited production run for deployment on the war front. Rico has mentioned that the Ironshod plant was locked up with no way in, and these entries are dated pretty close to the megaspell event. Maybe this rep guy was here the day the world died…and if he was, anything he brought with him will probably be lying around somewhere. Maybe even a way to get access to the plant.”

“A lot of ‘ifs’ in there…but the payoff will be worth the trouble.”

“I’m more interested in this Alicorn’s Star,” Sling mumbled as she tapped down to the next journal entry:

“Some being of chaos or madness must be loose in the world. Ironshod and Phoenix are now joined by five other firms for next week’s private tour and conference on the Alicorn’s Star Project. The Maretta Group, Mare & Alicorn Manufacturing, the company that makes those weird-ass backward SA-7 rifles for the all-griffon 5th Sky Legion unit out of Fort Wiley, and two civilian-oriented companies that make mostly shotguns and bolt-action rifles and whose names escape me even though it’s part of my job to know this shit because they send us pre-production samples of their arms for analysis and potential approval for government service. That’s seven sets of execs and production managers roaming about a combined Ministry facility with the second-highest security clearance requirements in the Prairie.

Needless to say, my request for time off last week was denied. There’s simply too many “guests” for a single research team to handle, and Dark Times wants this project to succeed at any cost, it could put us on the map and in Twilight Sparkle’s vision if it works. DT doesn’t have a family to disappoint at her house, or relatives that will miss her absence from a family gathering, so working overtime doesn’t bother her. There’s some quiet rumors going around that she and Assistant Director Zulana might be banging each other in their offices, or at home, or…wherever, I guess.

I was going to visit my sister and her kids out by Grainsland, but that’s not gonna happen now. And those little rascals were looking forward to it, if Green Day’s letter was even half truthful about their heightened rambunctious antics. For a barren mare like me, that’s the closest thing to a family I’ll ever know short of adoption.

At least I’ll only have the displeasure of disappointing them by letter. She’s the one that’s gonna have to tell them the bad news in person.”

“Could be more than just a top-secret project here,” she forced herself to say calmly, purposefully putting off any tingling feelings of regret for the soul who’d typed this entry. “Apparently they also evaluated finalized samples of guns that hadn’t been put into production for possible government use. That might actually be fun to sort through.”

“At least we’ll only have to deal with your lust-crazed shenanigans when we find them,” Leon’s voice taunted from the hallway, filling her cheeks with inexplicable shame.

“Nothing in here,” Misty announced immediately afterward, shutting the desk drawer and squeezing around behind her to get to the other side of the desk. “Anything in that computer that might help us narrow down search zones for access keys or whatnot?”

“Still looking,” she hissed lightly, moving on down to another log entry dated roughly a week later:

“I don’t believe it. Personnel Resources re-granted my leave request the other day. No idea why, but I’m booking it out of town like, RTFN! If I’m lucky I’ll catch Green Day and her kids before they leave for their little mystery trip tomorrow. I was supposed to go with them until my time off was canceled, so I have no idea if she can fit me in last-minute, but I’m gonna try.

I pity the poor soul that’s taking my place for the “Executives Day” tour tomorrow, though. Suits and managers from seven arms manufacturers looking to bid for a potentially lucrative production contract will not be a pretty sight. The Alicorn’s Star and a small quantity of ammunition will be moved to the primary testing lab tomorrow morning, before the corporates arrive, and the security department is definitely not letting anyone in their roster take a day off for that.

Because I know of about five other ponies here who know more about the Alicorn’s Star than I do, I’m giving them temporary access to my office terminal in case they need the passcode for the lab and they’ll likely have just gotten notice that they’ll be taking my place at the very last minute. It’s hell getting Maple or Red in PR to get off their lazy ass to get network accounts established for anyone here, let alone e-mail privileges. Took them four months to get around to getting mine set up, but they’re quick as hell to wipe an account from the face of Equestria the moment somebody gets termed and thrown out the door. Figure that one out. Anyways, the passcode for the primary testing lab for tomorrow’s exhibition day is 74656.

Grainsland, here I come!”

“Got a code, 74656, primary testing lab,” she announced loudly, to make sure everyone heard it, though the journal entry also gave her another mystery. If the bullet hole in the wall wasn’t made by the pony in the journal….then who did?

“Good enough, let’s get moving—” Leon commanded—

Odd, looks like three more entries. “No, wait, there’s more here I want to look over first,” she resisted, already loading the next entry onto the screen. “There’s three final entries that can’t be from the pony this office belonged to, it may have some clues about what happened here.”

“Then read quickly, Julie’s getting jumpy and that’s never a good sign.”

“As Blue Moon has been so graciously granted last-minute leave (and I have no idea how many people you slept with to make it happen, you glorious SLUT), I, Even Tide, out of five possible candidates in total, have been entrusted with temporary access to her office and terminal in order to log the events of today’s demonstration and overview of the Alicorn’s Star for later archival and review. So thank you, Blue Moon, for being a pal and being willing to spread your legs for every stallion and mare in Personnel Resources so that you could take a few days off on the most important project this facility has ever presented to the Equestrian Armed Forces. Truly, thank you, because when you get back I’m going to want a turn or four with you in bed to make up for this bullshit. I know you like mares just as much as stallions, so don’t give me that “just curious” excuse.

As for my “work” portion of this entry, the execs are scheduled to arrive within the hour, and I need to get to the lab and verify that the Alicorn’s Star and its ammunition are ready for the test-fire demo later today once the suits finish the main overview and briefing on the project in the R&D wing. Maybe snag one of the tablet prototypes for some “testing” of my own, could really help ease the organizational workload. A portable slate-style computer, light as a book…yeah, that could work. Get something out of this last-minute job detail I got hit with.

P.S., Blue Moon, I mean it, you and I are going to go at it like bunnies. You OWE me for this, and I WILL collect.

ADDENDUM [TIMESTAMP CORRUPTED]: Oh gods, it’s happening. The megaspells, they’re everywhere. There’s reports of explosions all the way past Serenity. The facility was locked down the second the spells starting flying. Dark Times said to stay calm, that she was going to try to contact Fort Wiley or the Maripony facility. Zulana’s still somewhere in R&D, no one’s heard from her or anyone from there in a while, but she can go straight to hell, she’s a striper, she probably had a hoof in all this.

Security’s having a hell of a time keeping everyone from bum-rushing the main gate. If DT doesn’t have answers for everypony soon, though, they may want to get out of here themselves. She’d better have answers. She’d better. If people are going nuts in here, I don’t want to imagine the chaos going on in the city itself.”

“Damn, nothing, maybe the next one,” she mouthed softly, bringing up said entry, even as a single red hash mark began flickering to life, at the far left end of her compass bar. “Heads up, got a mark, to my left. Weird though, it’s just…fading in and out, like a light…”

“Misty, you had better not have screwed up that PipBuck,” Leon growled angrily, but he stayed where he was and didn’t turn in the direction of the threat she’d just pointed out.

Blue Moon’s second entry, unfortunately, had her wishing for just a screwed-up PipBuck at the end:

“It wasn’t just megaspells. Something exploded north of us within a half-hour of the first launch, and there was this big rush of air and force and…and something. I could feel my horn tingling for hours afterward, maybe some sort of magical backlash from whatever hit the city. Maybe it was one of those balefire bombs we were hearing rumors of. If it was, it must have malfunctioned in some way for the blast to not wipe Withercha out completely. As it is, I don’t think anyone at the blast point even physically exist anymore.

And then everything here just…it’s horrible. It’s hard to describe in text, let alone speak it. I think it started in the R&D wing. For a while all the wings were locked down, nobody could get out, and most of the facility’s staff were in the other three wings. It was just fifteen security ponies and some of us lowly researchers here. We tried communicating through the facility’s inter-comm system, but after a couple of successful contacts and requests for status updates there was nothing. We thought maybe the backlash from the bomb might have damaged some of our systems—we’d lost main power within the first twenty minutes, and most of the back-up generators weren’t kicking on, so we were down to the one hard-wired into the security wing.

The first we knew of the internal lockdown for our wing ending was when our…our former co-workers showed up, most of them from the R&D wing. They looked dead, and some of them had died pretty hard. Some were missing hooves, or ears, a few had organs showing through their wounds or part of their guts hanging out, but they were clearly dead and STILL MOVING. It wasn’t until they attacked one of the security ponies and tore him apart, alive, that we finally realized we weren’t dreaming and having nightmares, these are real things happening and we have to kill them.

Only, we can’t. It doesn’t matter how many times you shoot them, or where, their wounds just regenerate and close and they get right back up and come at you again. We were able to hole up in a conference room, across the hall, for a bit, and that’s when we found out that their bites are lethal. We don’t know what it is, some kind of magical infection or curse or whatever, but if you’re bit…you’re dead. Best we can tell, it takes a couple of hours, three tops, but it’ll kill you. And then you’ll come back as one of them. Three security ponies and two researchers turned on us in that room, and it’s a miracle that we even got away from them without getting hurt when the hallways are crawling with even more of them.

We gotta get out. Now. We talked about it in the conference room, before Dizzy and Violet and all the others turned, and I need to meet up with whoever’s left in the armory on the other end of the wing so we can gear up and try. We’re gonna try to break the lockdown that’s keeping the main gate shut, all the fire exits here are sealed up and so are the three other emergency exits in the facility’s defensive wall. The security chief is still alive, he thinks he can override the lockdown with one of the slates from the testing lab. I was on my way to fetch one and just dropped by here to update this journal log, in case somepony else comes along in the future and needs to know what they’re dealing with. Once I meet back up with them, we’re going for it.

Of all the things I was taught I might deal with in a megaspell event, nobody ever told me I’d be dealing with sundamned ZOMPONIES of all things. Story of my life.”

Memories of old horror novels she’d read as a teenager began flickering to life in her head, and she didn’t like a single bit of it. “….oh, shit,” Sling’s brain sputtered. “Um, maybe we should leave, like, right now. Something did go wrong here and we aren’t prepared for it.”

Even as she hurried on and brought up Blue Moon’s last entry, she could see that one flickering rad hash being joined by several more, scattered across the EFS’s compass bar—

“What kind of something?” Leon shouted back from the hallway.

I’m going to sound crazy saying it—

“Something we can’t kill. This terminal is going on about zomponies running around and killing and eating people alive, and that it started after the balefire bomb went off in the megaspell event. And we’ve got several contacts now, all around us—”

“Zomponies? Damn stable folk freak out at the worst times, that’s it, we’re beelining it to the test lab, no more screwing around—”

The last entry was heavy in emotionally draining content:

“It’s over. I’m crying like a little girl and it’s over.

We couldn’t break through. Chief was killed just short of the front door of the personnel resources wing. Some of them were hiding in one of the side offices, and they just dragged him in and…and killed him. Whole hallway swarmed with them right about the same time. I’m pretty sure some of us got separated in that chaos, I could hear gunshots from a conference room across from where the chief was killed. The few of us that got out, tried to get into the administration wing, we haven’t seen anybody come in or out since the megaspells started flying, but main power’s still out and so are most of the back-up gennys so the door was completely inoperable and all the window shutters were activated for some reason. We came back here hoping to find some explosives to blast our way through the defense wall. Ran into more of them, and we got separated. I hid here. Heard some short shooting binges for about an hour, and then nothing.

I don’t know how long I can hide here until they find me, and I don’t want to know. I don’t wanna die that like. I got a couple of bullets left, and I only need one.

I cussed Blue Moon’s name for getting to go on vacation earlier at the last minute. Now I’m glad she at least got to die with family, which is all she really cared about aside from her work and getting laid. My family…I don’t know. And I won’t kid myself, they’re probably dead. I wish I could have seen their faces one more time. Just one…

My name was Even Tide. I died at thirty-five years old, and had a husband named Alleyway, a little eleven-year old filly named Zesty Wind, and a ten-year-old colt named Dreamy Song. And Blue Moon and I…we had a thing going. Alley knew and didn’t care, even got in on it now and then, I think he liked her as much as I did. I don’t think Moon wanted it to be long-term, but I’d been thinking about it a while. I might have asked her, if things had turned out differently. And now it’s all gone.

Whoever finds this…don’t let this die. This may be the only proof left that I ever existed.

Good-bye.”

It took a sharp tap to her right shoulder to bring her back to the soul-crushing reality she lived in, and she was not even aware that she’d plugged her PipBuck’s data-jack into the terminal until Misty’s unique, mist-like magical aura was yanking it out and coiling it back into its storage compartment for her. “Hey, wake up, we’re leaving! You can catch forty winks later!”

She numbly followed Misty out of the room, back into the hall, and her 9mm pistol was out and searching for targets before she realized she’d had it out—

Julie was muttering something in a language she couldn’t understand, aside from the fact that it didn’t sound like Equestrian or the zebra language. Something along the lines of…puke guy? Or something? Whatever it was, the tone she was saying it in was…alarming. She sounded almost terrified—

—and with good reason, she decided when she took a look at the object of the zebra’s fear herself. A lone pony-shaped figure, at the end of the hall and turning the corner, stumbling along in a staggered trot, and a deathly, raspy moan as the head turned to face them—

—or what was left of it. The left eye was gone, and a part of the skin on the left cheek as well, exposing red muscle tissue underneath—

“Still think I’m talking crazy, Leo?” she snarled over the green gem sights of her 9mm as she brought it up, settled on the thing’s skull, and she touched the trigger back an instant later—

—her enchanted horn ring flared to life and muffled the sound of the shot, and the next one, and she had the brief satisfaction of seeing both rounds knock the thing’s head about a little…

…and then, a growing, fleeting terror as the thing’s head simply rolled back into place, and went right back to stalking towards them.

Two bullets in the brain and it was still moving.

“What the…” she thought she heard Leon muttering in disbelief before she re-sighted the gun on the thing’s head—

Two more shots rang out, and when it stopped and staggered about in place, she went and fired another two rounds, and it finally slumped over onto its side with a final, dying groan…

Behind her, Leon was letting loose with short bursts from his .45 SMG, the heavy, concussive beat of the shots bouncing off of the walls, and more of those low moans began to ring out from the direction of his gunfire—

“Shit!” he swore loudly, even as he began touching off aimed, single shots. “Maybe you’re not crazy today!”

She’d just started to zero in on a second, shambling foe emerging from around that far-off corner and squeezed off a shot to the side of its head, but aside from jolting it slightly, the creature didn’t even seem fazed—

“I wish I was,” she answered fearfully. 9mm wasn’t cutting it, not if they were taking head shots and acting like she’d just thrown a rock at them—

—she switched sidearms, going to her .357, and tried again—

—the booming report was rewarded with a much more dramatic effect, she swore she could see bits of flesh and blood flying out the other side of her target as it dropped to the floor—

“Try that fifty-cal pistol or your rifle! You too Misty—”

“We should run,” Julie broke in suddenly, her eyes fixated on Sling’s kills as Misty’s rifle began letting off short bursts behind her. “Find a way out, or find shelter in here if we must. If we stay and fight we will die.”

Leon’s rifle barked a couple of times, and the faint sound of a heavy weight thumping the floor could be heard shortly after. “Hell yeah, that’s better. Maybe bullet velocity counts for something after all—”

—Sling was about to fire on a third target, this one ambling into sight from a room in the other hallway, past that T-section, when she finally noticed that the flickering red hash marks denoting her first two kills had yet to go away…

“…oh gods, no, don’t tell me—”

The wasteland gods seemed to be waiting for her to say exactly that, for no sooner had she uttered her begging prayers than her first kill began to stir, its legs moving to push it upright with a loud, hungry groan—

“What? Tell you what?” Misty’s voice screamed over her rifle fire.

“Not even headshots put them down for long! We need to leave! To hell with anything we could find in here!”

“May not get to, hall’s filling up with the damned things!” Leon shouted amidst a string of shots from his rifle. “Misty, how’s it look to our right?! That’s the way to the test lab, if these stupid wall signs aren’t leading us astray!”

“Got a few!” she answered shakily, and frustration began to seep into her tone. “D-dammit I can’t hit shit all worked up like this, how do you guys do this for a living?!”

“Practice!” Sling shouted, feeling her body spin about and rush up to dislodge Misty from her position. If the hall she was covering was the path of least resistance, they needed it cleared quickly—

—she barely took notice of Leon’s standing upright on his hind legs, firing down his kill zone with careful, precise shots, she’d seen griffon Runners do it enough that it no longer surprised her—

—she amended her slightly optimistic opinion of Misty’s predicament. Apparently her definition of “a few” was not as conservative as most. Sling counted no less than ten walking dead ponies emerging from darkened rooms along the hall, their milky white eyes somehow sensing them as they all turned towards the first fresh meals they’d likely seen in two centuries.

“Dammit, your definition of “few” needs work—”

—her .357’s sights bounced from one head to the next as she fired, filling the hall with a bright yellow flash with every shot. She had to reload at least once, but made great progress otherwise in felling her ten targets in about as many seconds with one more round to spare in case one decided it was done playing dead—

“Hallway clear—”

—Leon’s blasting came to a stop as she sprinted down the hall, and she kept her eyes focused more on what was around her than on the flickering hash marks on her EFS as it was hard to tell which ones belonged to downed targets or ones she’d yet to run into. She also found it hard to focus on the top of the hallway walls, searching for signs that might point them either towards the primary entry/exit point of the security wing or the test lab they’d originally sought out—

—at a four-way intersection in the hall, three separate arrows pointed out three significantly different destinations. Ahead was apparently the cafeteria and break room, and to the right was…munitions development? And a couple of analytics labs? And left…left proudly pointed out “Test Lab #1”…

“Left!” she shouted out to the others, turning into the left hall just as Leon and Misty started shooting again—

“What the hell, can we even kill these things—”

Leon’s remarks had her scowling at the gods. 9mm wasn’t good enough, a .357 could slow them down with a headshot, but not for long, and she was not about to use up rifle rounds she might not be able to replace…the same could be said for .44 Mag, but at least she had roughly 300 of those back at the wagon…

So the .357 went back in its holster, and Grayhawk came out just as another one of them began stumbling out what looked like a restroom, missing strips of skin and flesh along its forelegs and forward torso. Nasty place to meet one’s end…

Grayhawk’s red front gem sight settled on its chest as it turned towards her, and the chest-thumping gunshot that filled the hall left her with a nostalgic longing for mana-burst rounds when she found the effect of a regular .44 Mag somewhat lacking by comparison. It didn’t create an explosion of blood and gore from an exit wound, though it did clearly still track cleanly through the dead pony-thing and drop it to the floor with a tired, gasping noise somewhere between a sigh and a moan.

But at least it went down without a headshot. Strange, but it worked. At least with a .44.

The hall didn’t stretch very far, maybe forty yards at most before splitting into another T-section, with an adjacent hall stretching to the right, this one still marking “TEST LAB #1” as being further on that direction. With all the turns they’d already taken just to get this far, she was starting to see why the initial survivors got separated from each other so easily when these things starting roaming the place.

But at least this turn would be the last. At the end of the hall, a large sign above a steel blast door at the end of the corridor proudly proclaimed the space beyond to be “TEST LAB #1”. She wasn’t sure what any of the other nine doors along the hall were for, but she didn’t care. Once they were in that test lab, they could just close the door and keep those things out indefinitely, start working on a plan for getting out without having to worry about being chomped on—

“Goal! Don’t stop, keep mo—”

She passed the third door in the hall when it happened—the door slapped open, the culprit revealing itself as a mangled, ear-less zompony rearing up to tackle her to the ground, and she barely managed to dodge its lunge and put a .44 Mag through the side of its torso—

—but her leaping dodge put her in the path of door number four, on the other side of the hall, which also promptly opened at the will of the zompony in the room beyond so that it could stumble out on three good legs and what looked like a broken right hind leg and multiple torn strips of flesh dangling from its body and forelegs—

—this one, she shot in the face, at a distance of maybe seven yards, and this time she was rewarded with a small spray of various bits of flesh and bone out of the back of its head, alongside a troubling phenomenon of a faint, ethereal blue shape of a pony’s body briefly floating away from the fallen corpse—

—she was able to discern only a brief look of confusion upon this faint glowing pony-thing’s face before the ethereal form began distort and stretch out into the air, as though it were being sucked up into an invisible vacuum—

—Julie’s body crashed into her and began pulling her along the floor as the zebra raced for the test lab, and Sling nearly lost her grip on Grayhawk in her startled reaction. “W-what just happened—”

“The door!” Julaya screamed frantically, having reached the test lab’s locked door in the time it took Sling to scream out her expletive-laced question. “Open the door, do not kill another one of these things! None of you!!”

Leon’s gunfire drew closer as he slowly made his way down the hall. “Wait, did Sling actually kill one of these things with that .44?!”

“Do not kill them!” Julie shrieked back. “Just get us to safety—”

A quick burst of magic upon the door’s security console immediately brought its monochrome green screen to life, and she barely made the thought to type in the door code on the number pad when a shrill, terrified scream rolled down the hall at her—

—hydraulic-driven pistons pulled the blast door up as she spun around, trading Grayhawk for her bullpup rifle and bringing its iron sights up in search of a target. The scream had come from Misty, who had lost control of her rifle when a pair of zomponies lunged into her, and she was trying frantically to fight them off with her forelegs and jamming her M&A 9mm into an open maw for a direct brain shot—

—Sling’s first shot from her rifle hit a straggling zompony lumbering towards the crowd of twenty collecting near Misty’s position, stunning it in place for a moment, and a follow-up shot tagged another one directly on top of its head as it began lowering itself down to snack on her hind legs—

—Leon blasted one of Misty’s attackers with a string of aimed shots at its head and torso, though when it rolled over on its side it merely acted as though it had decided to take a short nap—

—Misty’s pistol fired, illuminating the inside of the zompony’s mouth for an instantly before it began to sag and collapse on top of her, and she shoved it aside before it could pin her to the floor—

—but as she tried to scramble to her hooves and run down the hall to join up with them, the zompony that Sling had shot sprang to life and managed to grab hold of Misty’s hind legs, and with a speed that defied its undead state of existence it sank its teeth into her hindquarters and began tearing at it—

—Sling traded off guns again, going back to the 9mm she’d started this running gun fight with, and started blasting into the zompony’s skull—

—each and every shot landed almost squarely in the side of its skull, and though it relented its assault and slumped back to the floor, Sling retched inside when she saw the bloody chunk of torn flesh and coat on Misty’s left hindquarter.

But the injured mare still managed to limp her way into the group’s safety, and Leon scooped her up onto his shoulder and carried her into the test lab with Sling practically at the tip of his tail. The instant she was past the door, she turned about and engaged the security console on the inside, resealing the door and even re-locking it to add a little extra security. She didn’t think they could have broken through or forced it open, but until five minutes ago she’d never even entertained the thought that she’d be seeing an actual zompony groaning hungrily in her general direction either. She wasn’t going to discount anything as impossible today.

Especially not when she considered that one of them had bit Misty, Julaya was urging them all to not kill the horrible mutants coming to eat them alive, and that after killing one with a .44 JHP to the head she saw what she would describe as a “ghost” appearing to take physical form for a moment before being sucked away into sun knows where…

A tug in her gut told her to go and grill Julie over her insistence that these monsters not be slain, and turned around and followed the small blood trail through the initial decon chamber until it led her into the test lab itself, just beyond a small room that contained a pair of intact hazmat suits and a pair of lockers along the walls. The word “lab” had her thinking of wooden tables with several sets of glass flasks, beakers, and vials in sturdy oak vial racks, maybe some high-tech optical microscopes and centrifuges or even some thermal cyclers. In an R&D facility wing meant for weapons development and testing, the word apparently meant “high-tech” armory that made Stable 115’s armory and firing range look like a poorly-maintained repair garage. An open-window room immediately to her left was revealed almost immediately to be an office, replete with a small bookshelf filled to the very last inch of available space with reference binders and textbooks, a lounge sofa accompanied by a coffee table, a main mahogany desk at the far corner of the office with two chairs directly opposite of it, and even what appeared to be a fully functional and intact terminal. The firing range for the test lab was very clean, with six lanes that stretched out to fifty yards and with complete electronic controls for sending and recalling targets or even setting how high or low they were relative to the shooter and the range’s backstop. Aside from the firing range itself, the “lab” itself was split into several large rooms on her right, each one clearly labeled with their contents ranging from “Pistol Storage” to “Rifle Storage” and “Ammunition Storage”, and even a room labeled “Computer Tech Lab”. A fifth room was labeled “Project Tech Lab” and pegged as the likely location of the Alicorn’s Star.

Her first order of business was to zero in directly on Leon and Misty as the griffon was throwing the unicorn pony onto a table in the center of the room and stripping her of her gear and armored barding in order to get a clear picture of whether or not she had any other unseen wounds besides the bite mark—

“NNnnnnaaaaaaaagggdammit it bit me in the ass!” Misty cried into her right foreleg as she bit into it to stifle her screams of pain. “Oh gods tell me everything’s still intact back there please please please—”

“Everything’s right where it should be,” Leon assured her with a quick look at her hindquarters and the space between them before he went back to work dabbling her bite wound with iodine from a bottle dropper he’d fished out of his first aid pouch. “Damn but did it bite you good, almost tore a chunk of your butt off, hold still—”

Leon’s talons moved to press the torn flesh back in place while simultaneously preparing a healing stim injection, causing Misty to scream wordlessly into her leg as she braced for great pain, and that was all that Sling could stomach seeing. Satisfied, at least, that Misty wasn’t going to die in five minutes, she decided her time was better spent finding Julie and finding out exactly what was freaking her out besides the fact that the dead were up and walking despite being roughly two centuries past their original date of expiration.

The zebra wasn’t far. She seemed to prefer to sit at the back of the main lab, near a couple of circular conference tables, with her back turned to them and her ears wilted and flattened as if disheartened. That only cemented her suspicions.

“Something you want to tell the rest of us?” she said to the zebra’s back, loudly. Leon and Misty weren’t so far that the conversation couldn’t be heard, and she wanted them to hear this. Misty was short on time as it was, if that ancient soul’s journal entry was at all accurate about how long it took a bite to kill. “Like why you’re begging us not to kill them when they’re trying to devour us alive?”

Misty’s muffled shrieking grew louder, which could only mean that Leon’s healing stim was being jabbed into her wound, and Julie waited until the suffering pony’s cries quieted down before she spoke. “…if you kill them, their soul is consumed by something far worse.”

A…wait, that…that thing, was…a pony’s soul? As in we actually have one? “Maybe you should start a little further back. Let’s try…oh, maybe, what the hell happened to the people here?!”

“Lay off Sling!” Leon roared over Misty’s pained squeals. “Like she’d know anything about that!”

“I would not know specifics, but I could guess at a great deal of it,” was Julaya’s somber, deflated reply. “Did the glowing box say anything related to a megaspell?”

“Only that they were ending the world,” Sling said tersely. “The poor soul writing her last words in it thought a balefire bomb went off inside the city. Said she could feel a tingling sensation in her horn for hours and thought it might be some form of magical backlash from the blast. Why would that be important?”

Julaya’s voice muttered something, likely a string of curses and foul words, in another language before she answered in plain Equestrian. “I can only guess. I do not dare to assume you have any knowledge of zebra magic. But what I have seen is…unsettling.”

“…zebra magic? Really?”

“Yes, really,” Julaya finally said, her tongue growing sharper as she turned about to face the room with a look of fear and horror. “You unicorns are not the sole species gifted with talents in the arcane. Earth ponies, pegasi, griffons, minotaurs, zebras and more, we are all creatures of innate magics within ourselves. My tribe did not practice a great deal of our ancestral ways, but I strived to learn what I could, and I learned well. What I have seen here may be a dark, very forbidden form of the blackest magic known to my kind.”

Parts and bits of information began to come together within her mind. “…Zulana.”

“…if not her, then another zebra who may have snuck in without being detected, but I find that extremely unlikely,” Julaya concurred quietly. “The magic I believe to be at work here is an ancient and foul practice, one forbidden by all but the cruelest of caesars of the zebra lands, and the knowledge was all but lost when the war ended. The ritual in question is…necromantic in nature. It is performed on a rune circle inscribed into the ground, with ten points in the outer circle and a ring in the center in which the caster stands and performs the incantations to trigger the rune’s effects once ten victims are placed in the outer circle. The ritual itself kills them and channels their magic and soul into the rune, which then casts the spell upon the corpses and the caster. If done correctly, the caster of the spell essentially gains control of the bodies of the dead by binding the souls of their victims to them. So long as the caster lives, these walking dead serve as their thralls, and in turn the caster can gain great knowledge from their souls.”

“…wait, wait, you mean these…these things, are actual zomponies?” Leon muttered in disbelief.

“…yes.”

“But then you also say that these zomponies serve as the caster’s thralls for as long as the caster lives, and it’s been nearly two centuries since Zulana’s time. How could any of them still be active?”

“I cannot say for sure. Perhaps Zulana’s ritual was performed when the balefire bomb exploded, and this…magical backlash Sling mentions affected it somehow. In what way, I could not begin to fathom. And if she still lives…we cannot kill any of her thralls. To do so would allow her to absorb the soul entirely and empower herself with it. She may, in fact, have discovered a way to extend her lifespan through the spell by siphoning off the souls of her thralls, replacing those she….”uses up”, with others from her horde, like switching out a battery. If too many are killed, she may become unkillable herself.”

“Maybe you didn’t notice, but we only managed to kill one, and that was a headshot with a .44 hollowpoint at close range,” Sling countered. “My 9mm took at least six shots to put one down for just a few seconds. Even the rifles didn’t put them down for long, and they have the greatest energy per bullet.”

“That is the part that has me believing the magic at work may have been enhanced by the balefire bomb. The spell imparts some …regenerative properties to the thralls to ensure they cannot die easily. As the walking dead are quite slow it would be very disadvantageous to have minions that could be put down so swiftly and easily. Only great physical trauma to the head or total decapitation can destroy them, but the firearms should not have been so ineffective with aim like yours. They could be greatly resistant to most bullets to the point of uselessness. And that may not be the only thing about them that is enhanced.”

Sling’s stomach began to grow heavy. “…the bites.”

“…it is how a thrall afflicts the living with the curse, yes,” Julaya said. “Normally it would take a day, two at most—”

“W-w-wait, what curse?” Misty’s voice stammered fearfully. “W-what curse, what’s happening to me?”

“…the journal entries…mentioned that some of the survivors were bit,” Sling replied when Julie wasn’t forthcoming with the information. “Those that were bit, died…and then they came back…and it took a lot less than a day. Two hours, three at the most.”

She knew it had been a mistake to tell her before she’d even spoken, but had their positions been reversed, Sling would have wanted to know regardless. And Misty’s freakout went about as badly as she’d expected.

“…no, no no no no not like this not like this I don’t wanna die like this!” the misty-maned mare began blubbering—

“Mistake,” she whispered to herself, doing her best to tune out Misty’s cries and tears while Leon tried to calm her down (unsuccessfully). She instead busied herself with reloading her weapons. She’d lost count of the shots fired from her rifle, but if she was right about her 9mm, she had maybe one or two rounds left i—

…fffuuuuuuuuaaaaagggh I’m a dumb ass! She shrieked mentally when she’d ejected the pistol’s magazine and stared at the lone round remaining in it—a copper-coated FMJ round nose bullet, likely a 124-gr military cartridge. The FMJ 9mms would have been making rather inconsequential wounds in her targets akin to ice pick jabs, living or dead. Little wonder it took so many headshots just to make them sit down for a couple of minutes.

Fortunately, it seemed she’d only managed to mistakenly take that one magazine, because the rest of her mags were loaded with Rico’s nickel-cased hollowpoints. In her haste to get geared up for this little dumpster dive she’d likely forgotten to take the FMJs out of her gun from her last target practice session. She couldn’t do much about her rifle, though, FMJs were all she could find or get in any great quantity. But they seemed to be doing the job well enough for the moment.

“…maybe it was the hollowpoint in my .44 that killed that one thing,” she surmised out loud, once she’d heard Misty’s crying dwindling down to quiet sobs. “Dumb ass that I am, I left my nine loaded with ball rounds and it took forever to even stun one for a minute. A hollowpoint may work faster.”

“Might also kill them, since they’re meant to dump all their energy into the target instead of zipping through,” Leon countered calmly. “The rifles took them down with one or two shots, without killing them, but military 5.56 ammo was meant to punch through steel helmets when fired from an LMG and isn't really that great of a bullet. We usually use .223s, and keep the military stuff for practice or shooting through leather barding.”

“Then let’s comb through the storage rooms here, see if there’s any ammo or weapons that might do better for us. We’re not gonna last long if we go back out there with just what we brought in.”

“The hell with the guns, what about me?” Misty cried with a broken, hoarse voice. “I don’t wanna die here, I told my kids this would be my last trip and I don’t want them to think I meant for it to be like this there’s gotta be something you can do! Some counterspell, a healing potion, something—”

Sling’s grim outlook on Misty’s fate started to turn onto roads and pains she knew quite well. It wasn’t much of a stretch for her to imagine how a parent might feel at the thought of leaving their children behind to live the rest of their lives without them, because it terrified her more than simply dying. And she could only surmise one way of changing that for Misty with what little information she had. “…the thralls live so long as the caster of the spell does, right?”

“…under normal circumstances, yes, but this is far from normal,” Julie answered hesitantly. “I cannot say with any certainty what we are facing, only general assumptions.”

“But the one thing you’re reasonably sure of is that it’s likely Zulana’s work.”

“…that much, yes. I know for certain that none in my tribe ever ventured into this city in the time since the Great War, and the ritual I describe was never taught. I only learned of it from reading the few texts of our people’s magic that still survive.”

“Then that’s all I need,” Sling decided in a burst of hardened determination, turning towards the closest gun storage room she could find—the “PISTOLS” room, incidentally—and practically racing for the door. “We find her, we kill her, and we kill the spell that’s empowering these dead corpses, and if we’re lucky, the curse that turns the living into one of them. It’s the only chance Misty has.”

“I am more worried about those beyond the walls,” Julie whimpered hauntingly. “If Zulana has been here for two centuries, she would have had more than enough time to learn and assume total control of this place’s security. She could conceivably open the entire facility and allow her thralls to shuffle into the streets in search of more bodies to add to her undead horde, and there are quite a number of free souls within sight of this place.”

She thought she knew panic. The kind that came with Light Tail’s very life being threatened and being right there to see it, but today she learned a different kind of panic and terror. The terror of her entire world coming to an end in the most horrific way she could think of. El-Tee, Kite, Rally, BJ….everyone she knew and cared about, sitting in one place as a small horde of horror novel monsters drew out of the shadows of a long-dead world hungering for their flesh and bone….

…and she couldn’t even guarantee that she could get herself out of this room in time to save herself, let alone anyone else….

When her gut fell into her bowels at a sudden epiphany hitting her right then, she thought she was about to lose it completely. “…oh shit, what if this is what she was planning for the last time Rico and Misty came here…”

She almost found it hilarious, and might have if not for the circumstances that came together to bring her the sight before her.

Elly, sitting on her haunches, her head down and her ears low, as though she’d offended a great and powerful god, sandwiched between two husky pups slightly larger than she was, in equally downcast postures and all three refusing to even look up at her. To the trio’s right (or Kite’s left, depending on perspective), sat a supposedly adult female griffon, who towered over the filly and stood slightly taller than Kite herself, and yet had hunkered down into a submissive position and fixed her gaze upon the broken pavement beneath her as if it were her sole chance at survival. Her lioness-half was marked here and there with the telltale sign of a dog’s bite mark, courtesy of the two mutts next to her who had eagerly carried out the wishes of their very favorite pony. Her wings were hanging slightly loose from her sides, but were not in a position to allow for an immediate take-off. Most of her gear, save for the rifle slung across her back, had been taken off and set aside some time prior so that she could focus on her map drawing, explaining how the pups were able to inflict any pain on her at all.

And she wanted nothing more than to terrify all four them into behaving like proper, responsible souls for the rest of their stay here.

“Light Tail, you know better than this,” she said sharply, fixing her angry gaze upon the filly in question. She wasn’t the kid’s mother, but she was pretty sure Sling would be doing exactly this the moment she found out about it, and she figured that by doing so she might lessen Sling’s explosive outburst into a much quieter stinging rebuke and punishment. Elly probably didn’t even realize that she was being done a great service here. “Max and Mona are not toys to be played with, or weapons to be used. They are living creatures who will eventually grow strong enough to kill people if they want to, at the rate and size they’re growing! You do not just sic them on people who make you angry, you could seriously hurt someone, and end up with your dogs taken away from you or even put down! Do you want that?!”

Light Tail seemed to physically recoil at the mere mention that her pups might be killed for being misused in such a fashion, and the broken, half-sobbing voice that answered made Kite want to quit being the substitute parent right then and there. “….n-no, no, nooo…”

Stay on the path, she told herself as she went on. “Then don’t tell them to bite someone just because they’re teasing you or making you angry. That is not the proper way to handle a dispute with another person and you know it. Act like it!”

Elly recoiled again, and just nodded wordlessly as she laid down and covered her head with her forelegs. Max and Mona made no noises themselves, having been scolded and slapped lightly on the noses the moment Kite had caught up with them when they were chasing Raina about, and just simply followed Light Tail’s lead, though they first curled up around her, as if intending to shield her from the world by forming a tight ball of fuzz around her to discourage others from approaching.

It was a miracle that Elly didn’t smell like a dog half the time.

She thought she could see Raina breathing a little bit of relief out of the corner of her eye, and decided to burst that bubble sharply. “And you!!” she screamed, whipping about to turn her parent fury onto this grown child. “Where do you get the idea that you can just go push a child’s buttons like that?! She’d just gotten a crash course on the subject of sex and reproduction barely a day ago and you start teasing her about her friendship with my son?! How did you think that would turn out?!”

Like Elly, Raina’s body shook slightly, as if physically struck by the words, and her wings rattled in place slightly and ruffled their feathers. “…nnnnnnnoooot like…this? I didn’t even know she was that clueless, it was just a joke…”

“A poor one!” she bellowed back into Raina’s face, and the griffon’s submissive, wide-smile look was seemingly windswept by the sheer volume and force of Kite’s words. “That damn stable of hers turned the very subject of sex ed into such a taboo concept that she had no clue about anything related to it until yesterday, and I’ve met eight year olds that knew more than she did! She is exceptionally confused and conflicted right now and you only make it worse poking “fun” at her over it! Think before you speak!”

“…wait, really?” Raina squeaked curiously, her head tilting off to one side. “This little precocious detective genius never managed to put 2 and 2 together at why boys and girls have different parts?”

Kite heard a sharp, cat-like hiss escape her throat as her right forehoof rose up to smack the stupid griffon across the head. “What did I just say—”

—Raina’s body shrank back down and sank into a submissive crouch when she realized that the mare in front of her was exceptionally serious about her impending violence. “Shutting up shutting up—”

Somewhere behind her, BJ had been content to just sit there and laugh quietly at the spectacle playing out before him (though when she’d been laying into Elly over her transgressions he sounded more pained than amused). His laughs and minor taunts, however, began to turn into concern and alarm as he finally spoke out. “Whoa, what the hell happened to that guy…”

Since there were no guys directly in front of her, Kite took his words to mean that there was someone farther down the road attracting his attention and she snapped her gaze up to try and search out the object of her son’s interest, along with Raina and Light Tail—

“Wh-what happened to—” Elly wondered aloud, only for her voice to shift into a terrified shriek—

“—oooooooooooollleeeeee crapbaskets why do I hope that’s his thing hanging out under his belly and not his guts aaaaaaaaa—”

Even she had to admit that the sight of the shambling, drunken-like walk of the poor soul slowly stumbling up the road towards them was rather unsettling, and she’d seen her fair share of feral ghouls when she was helping her second master funnel slaves out of Union territory in Trotpeka during the Unification War. She attributed her newfound unease and slightly shaking legs to the recent trauma of having literally been torn open and ripped apart by them and somehow still surviving it in enough of one piece to be put back together. But even as she forced herself to study this slowly approaching ghoul, she noticed a few things that seemed slightly off. The appendage of organ hanging out from his belly did indeed appear to be part of an intestine and not some other body part, though she had to use a pair of binoculars to be sure as it was still some distance out (how Elly could have seen it with just her own two eyes was actually quite impressive). And through the binoculars, she could discern that it’s path was fairly irregular despite having all four legs intact and in decent order with no injuries. She’d known some ghouls that could move quite fast, though most of the ferals encountered in Trotpeka’s river canal had accumulated enough leg injuries that they could only limp towards their prey. Many of them also had a good deal of their manes and tails missing, but this one sported a full mane and tail, but it lacked…color. She’d never seen a ghoul with mostly grayish tones in its coat, mane, and tail, but this one did. It did lack a cutie mark, like most ghouls—it was a rare thing to find one that had retained its cutie mark—

—it’s head rattled slightly, bits of organic material coming out of the back of its head, and it tumbled over and slumped into the ground in a forward posture, it’s rump sticking up into the air. A moment later the echoing din of a distant gunshot rolled across the street and past her position, towards the MoAS facility at the end of the road, and silently thanked Ada and her shooting partner for being so damn good at shooting from extended distances. “…yes, Elly, that appeared to be his innards and not his boy parts hanging out,” she assured the shaken filly, moving her binocs’ view towards the facility’s main gate and spying several more of the things making their way through the open gate and into the streets…

…without being harassed or fired on by the automated defense turrets, and when she looked up upon the walls she realized why. It appeared as though Sling’s group had deactivated the security systems, as the turrets no longer had any active lights on them and made no attempt to even zero in on the strange creatures entering their sight zones. “Oh, that was real damn smart of you, Sling—”

Another ghoul dropped to the ground, felled by Ada’s deadly aim, and she swung her binoculars across the wall, over to the corner at the far left of the facility an—

A small horde of about twenty more grayish-shaded ghouls was emerging from the side street between the facility’s defensive wall and a crumbling donut café, and they were angling towards the road leading up to Rico’s caravan—

—several shots from said caravan began sailing out at the offending ghouls, and within a couple of seconds the bullets reached their distant targets and began dropping them with solid hits to the head and torso. She moved her gaze away from the horde in the side street and went back towards the front g—

—she stopped and zipped back when she saw Ada’s first kill begin to force its forward body back upright, as though it had just awoken from a short rest, and it was shot again the instant it completed its task. As before, it dropped back down in a slump of limbs, and Kite watched it for thirty seconds, even as the gunfire from the caravan began to pick up in volume—

—at a mental count of thirty-thousand-and-one, her subject stirred to life again, and rolled back up to its hooves…and began its drunken journey once more.

She had never seen a ghoul—not even a highly-mutated glowing one—take two .30-caliber bullets to the head and get right back up as though it had merely been shoved to the ground. And as she scanned about the facility’s perimeter, she saw that this behavior was not limited to this one ghoul. So far as she could tell, from the front gate to the side street, every one of these gray-shaded ghouls that had been shot and felled were just getting right back up in under a minute.

Two terrifying, tear-inducing thoughts ran through her brain in the time it took her to count the number of ghouls spilling out into the streets. Her first thoughts were of the ghouls that had nearly killed her, in horrible, horrible ways, and that BJ might end up seeing and hearing it done to her again if these things could not be killed quickly. Her second thought was that Sling was still inside that facility from which these unkillable ghouls were coming from, and might have inadvertently released them into the world when she’d deactivated the security systems…and in all likelihood, might already be dead herself inside that living hell…

Raina's blunt assessment of their near future was rather succinct, if crudely worded. "...we're so fucked."

Chapter 23

The Alicorn’s Star was not what she had expected.

She had imagined, briefly, before the damn zomponies began waking up and appearing from seemingly nowhere, that the Star might be in the form of a pony-universal long arm that could be operated by hoof or horn. Or perhaps a weapon component for a Steel Ranger power armor suit—she knew from research back home that those things could be outfitted with enough firepower to level half a city block. Miniguns, magazine-fed grenade launchers, small rocket launchers, and machine guns of various calibers ranging from 5.56mm all the way up to a .50-caliber anti-material piece. MEW weaponry could even be rigged to be powered by the suit’s own onboard power supply, virtually eliminating the need to ever reload the things. She’d had some old magazines in her little personal library that had her up late at night, back when she had nights to herself, gazing upon images of MEW weaponry patterned after a ballistic minigun and said to be capable of reducing entire platoons to ash in seconds. And there’d been talk amongst military officials, one magazine article stated, of having a platoon of Steel Rangers outfitted with these new weapons for field testing in battle. She could imagine the effect such a sight might have had on the zebras—a line of steel-encased ponies, trudging through the scarred, barren fields of war, with MEW-type miniguns spitting out lasers like water hoses and covering their entire field of vision with lances of bright pinkish-red death. Any living thing in front of them would not have been long for the world.

Project Alicorn’s Star was none of this. In its present form only a unicorn or a griffon could make any use of the squared-butt style revolver grip, though on closer inspection she found that the weapon had been designed with some degree of modularity. The “grip”, as it was, was attached to the weapon receiver by two screws, and could be removed and switched out alongside the trigger group housing with fire control parts more suited to an earth or pegasus pony if needed. In overall design, the whole thing was essentially a large-frame, motorized revolver MEW, with the swing-out cylinder section used to load and remove the cylindrical batteries. There were a total of ten of these batteries, all marked RS-1 through -10 and labeled “PROTOTYPE BREEDER MF-B5”. She didn’t have a deep understanding of MEW technology, but she was aware of a line of MEW weaponry dubbed “Breeder-type” which utilized internal self-regenerating spark batteries to power the weapon. Under normal circumstances, the battery’s charge couldn’t be expended all at once, but slowly recharged itself back to capacity as it was discharged. If the user just pulled the trigger as fast as possible, they would probably get around twenty-one shots and then have to wait for the battery to recharge itself over about thirty seconds, or make do with only getting one or two shots at a time in combat. But the battery was usually an intrinsic component of the weapon and not normally accessible to the operator like this.

The barrel defied comprehension. So far as she could tell, it was six and a half inches long, and it was actually TWO barrels, housed inside a box-shaped shroud, with the small barrel on the top and a much larger barrel underneath. This shroud component stretched the entire length of the barrels and was lined with a few powered light diodes, a pair of rubberized buttons on the right side, and a small display screen on the left that at present was powered off. She couldn’t be certain, but it looked like the lower half of the barrel shroud might have actually been designed to unlock and expand outward—she could see a tiny seam gap in the metal, right in the middle of the shroud, and when she tugged at the lower half she swore she could feel it move slightly.

One nice touch, though, was the engraved full-color replica of Princess Celestia’s cutie mark on the left side of the barrel section, and Princess Luna’s on the right side. A similar engraving of Twilight Sparkle’s cutie mark was also etched in on the rear of the receiver, where the manufacturer’s logo normally would have been. Sling wondered if these cosmetics had been added by the facility staff to acknowledge Twilight’s efforts to duplicate the powers of an alicorn, or for some other unfathomable reason.

The only break she had in the find was that the Alicorn’s Star’s case, despite its keypad being ruined beyond repair, was made of metal, and a cutting torch borrowed from Misty’s gear had the weapon freed of its prison within a couple of minutes. It didn’t even appear to have suffered any serious damage from being left in here unattended with no one to perform maintenance on it in nearly two centuries.

Once she had the Alicorn’s Star and its ammunition tucked into her gear belt she made a more detailed search of the pistol armory for any information or documentation on the Alicorn’s Star…and turned up pretty much everything else EXCEPT that. Her most curious find was a considerable cache of ammunition in just about every pistol caliber she could name, and several that she’d never seen or read about before. The largest stockpile belonged to a shortened 10mm cartridge variant and consisted of FMJs and hollow points in bullet weights of between 155 to 180 grains. The one can of shortened 10mm FMJ rounds she’d opened were of a flat-nose type, not something she was used to seeing in a semi-automatic since that type of FMJ didn’t always feed well. Probably helped reduce deflection if it hit bone, though. She had barely begun to sift through the dozens of climate-sealed weapon cases stacked up against the wall on the left side of the room when she heard Leon’s voice calling out her to from a distant quarter of the lab.

“Sling, firing range! Got some loot!”

She dropped her search of the gun cases and darted out of the room, banking right and charging for the lab’s firing range at a quick jog. Every second gone was one less moment in Misty’s life, and they needed to get a plan in motion in the next ten minutes.

She burst through the firing range door and managed to not freak out or swoon over the collection of treasures that Leon had procured from the rifle armory. Mostly ammo cans, with one popped open already to reveal pristine, brightly shining brass-cased .223 rounds with what appeared to be opaque plastic red tips atop the bullets. There were also a pair of short, strange looking weapons with what she would describe as having…donut grips, near the front of the weapon, underneath the barrel. A long, opaque plastic magazine sat atop the weapon in a horizontal position, with a military drab ballistic nylon sling harness wrapped around the weapon’s stock body at the rear, complete with a snap-in buckle attachment point. That last detail was enough to spark old memories of home and give her recognition of the strange weapons, if not the caliber these particular two fired. Then there was a large, black plastic case, sitting next to a pair of M-type rifles, with quad rail forends and what looked like a pair of hex bolts at the bottom rear of the forend. What little of the barrel nut she could see through the forend’s vent gaps was more puzzling than enlightening, as it was much longer and thicker than what she’d seen on other M-types. Maybe it was doubling as a heat sink?

…and then a stack of what looked like…optics cases? At least, that’s what she thought they were, judging almost solely by the image of a red circle with a crosshair in the center plastered on the sides of the cases. Four in total.

“Sweet haul, what kind of bullets are those?” she asked briskly, moving around him to get a better look at the pile of gun loot he had collected.

She snaked the topmost case off and popped it open as he answered—he went as far as to take a round out of the can and set it on the interior foam of the case while she pried the box-like optic out of its nest. “Was hoping you might have a clue. Never seen these before.”

She split her attention between the optic and the cartridge, though she only gave the bullet a passing glance once she’d studied the tip of it enough to surmise what it could have been. “What else would you expect in an R&D facility? This bullet could be useful, though. Looks like a polymer tipped round, probably to help initiate expansion on impact, without the risk of a clogged cavity like a traditional hollow point might suffer. Does the can say what bullet weight these are?”

“Says sixty-two-g-r-p-t-b, so I guess around sixty-two grains, and…wow, over thirty-two hundred feet per second? These are meant for people.”

Way too fast for that caliber, it’s gotta be overloaded. “Find any kind of documentation on those in that armory? Pressure specs would be good to have if we plan on using these beyond today.”

Leon’s left talon pulled a tattered, manila file folder out from under a couple of rifle magazines and tapped it into her workspace on the table. “Didn’t give it a good look when I found it, but there it is—”

She pulled the folder open and started going through the ten-page report inside as fast as her eyes could read it sensibly. First page was just an overview of the state of .223/5.56 ammo at the time of the war over two centuries ago, second page looked like…weird, a history of gunpowder propellants? It was the fourth page that had her desired information—

“Ah, there we are, bullet construction and pressure specs….wow, just like normal .223 rounds, must be using some special kind of propellant to achieve those velocities without a pressure spike. Bullet looks weird, there’s a cutaway picture of one in here. Solid lead core, no steel tip…looks like the plastic tip is meant to help initiate expansion. Weird thing is, the bottom half of the bullet has a thicker copper jacket that’s manabonded to the lead...”

“…that’s not what I wanted to hear,” Leon mumbled as he took a claw-sized helping of poly-tip rounds out of the ammo can and set them onto the table in a loose pile. “I’m getting a theory about why your .44 put one down for good with a headshot when you started cussing out the walls. Were you using those manaburst rounds of Rico’s by mistake?”

She silently cursed at herself for having made the same mistake with Grayhawk that she’d made with her 9-mil, and both in the same day—she’d only figured it out when she’d reloaded Grayhawk a few minutes ago and did a quick scrying spell on the three live cartridges left in the cylinder, and found a mana-charge imbedded inside one of the bullets. The foul swearing she’d unleashed at herself had caused her own ears to ring for a couple minutes, enough time for her to discern that a third of her .44 Mag rounds were similarly enchanted. Maybe some of them got mixed in with the regular .44s by mistake back at Rico’s stable when they were being packed. “Yeah, and I think I know what you’re getting at,” she confirmed angrily. “If these things are the result of an amplified zebra magic ritual, it’s possible that only magically empowered weapons or bullets will be capable of killing them permanently. The partially manabonded bullets might be an issue.”

“This re-arming plan isn’t working out well so far,” he growled, tapping a claw against the frame of one of the PDWs. “What about these SMGs here? Brought ‘em for you to look at, maybe you know more than me. I think I’ve seen them once or twice out in the wastes, but not in action. Not sure what caliber they are.”

Her magic went back to the boxy optical sight, flipping it about in search of a battery compartment and decided that the cylindrical portion of the sight base at the front was probably what she was looking for. A hard twist on the slotted cap on the left end confirmed her suspicions, though the battery compartment itself was empty. But at least it looked relatively pristine and in working order, for something over two hundred years old. “Had an old, broken one in the armory back home in the one-one-five. There was a small history file with it that called it a Personal Defense Weapon, Project 90-10. So far as I know the project explored several different caliber variants, but the Equestrian military went with a pony-friendly 10mm model to make use of its existing munitions stockpile. Cut the magazine capacity down to like, half of what it was supposed to be, and the early 10mm variant turned out to be a bitch to keep running. It wasn’t designed for the recoil and pressures the 10mm was putting out and they usually only had a service life of 5,000 rounds. The 90-10c revision fixed the durability problem. These two look like an alternative caliber prototype, might fire a .22 caliber bullet, but the magazines aren’t wide enough for a .223 or 5.56 and like every other damn gun in the prairie only a unicorn or a griffon could use it. Maybe something roughly the length of a 10mm?”

The griffon huffed lightly as he spun around and zipped towards the exit. “Don’t think we have time to go through the entire armory here for something I don’t even know the name of. I’ll take one more look around for some better .223s, but if I don’t find anything we’ll have to come up with a new plan in three minutes. Take one of the optics and get your rifle zeroed.”

She scoured the table for tools and any extraneous parts or components related to these new optical sights, and found that Leon had thought ahead and scrounged up two packs of small spark batteries for the pile of attachments he’d found. She threw one into the sight and closed it up, and started clicking buttons on the side until she saw the sight’s reticle flash on inside th—

Ooooh, it’s one of those managraphic reflex sights, her inner, silent voice cooed in awe as she watched the red circle with its center dot float about inside the sight’s viewing window. It appeared to be projecting out in front of the sight itself when she looked through it, though she knew otherwise. She’d have to bug Rally for those MEW tech magazines of hers later; at least two of them had some extensive articles on them and she’d only given them a once-over the other day.

Another day, she might have been ecstatic to find such a valuable piece of technology. But it was hard to be excited about anything when someone was slowing dying to a magical curse in the next room. With a frustrated huff she unslung her rifle from her body and quickly unloaded it so she could clamp the optic onto its topside rail, then turned her attention to the black rifles nearby. While they seemed to be newer-model M-series rifles, there were enough modifications done to them to suggest that significant engineering research and development had been done on these. Each rifle bore the symbol of a winged phoenix inside a circle of flame, the telltale mark of a Phoenix Arms gun. Add in the quad railed for ends and heavy barrel, and the weight balance was probably off, too far f—

…hunh, that’s actually pretty damned light, six…maybe seven pounds, she corrected herself the moment she lifted one up. She still had to put a second telekinesis spell on the forend to hold the thing up, but it wasn’t as bad as it usually was. The sixteen-inch barrel all but consigned the rifle to a life of combat within three hundred yards, but that was still pretty far out for her. The hex bolts on the forend mystified her, though.

Her magic pulled the adjustment tool for the optical sight from its case and floated it over to a bench rest that had been hastily set up in one of the firing lanes, complete with a rifle vice to secure her weapon into it. Given that Leon had thought ahead to have both sight and battery already gathered together when she’d answered his call, she wasn’t surprised to see that he’d also managed to set up a couple of targets on the firing range. Nothing fancy, just a bullseye paper target stapled to a target stand at the end of the firing range, which the black lettering on the floor beneath it proclaimed “25 M”. The hard part was getting a proper sight picture—the rifle vice was designed as a “universal” type, which meant that it didn’t really fit any one particular weapon all that well, and her backwards rifle with its rear-mounted magazine didn’t help matters any. She had to settle for clamping down the buttstock at the back and folding out the foregrip on the gun to stabilize it enough to keep it steady, and even then getting a proper eye alignment with the optical sight, even with its unlimited eye relief and generous viewing window, wasn’t easy. It took her roughly ten shots of her personal .223 supply before she could get the rounds to start hitting the bullseye, and another five shots to confirm that the sight’s zero was set and accurate for the distance.

Then came the fun part—test firing the Alicorn’s Star.

She set the rifle aside and pulled the machine rest off the bench, and drew the AS and studied the frame for a few moments to try and discern its controls. Cylinder latch release was where she was accustomed to seeing it, on the left side of the frame, though the small display screen on the back where the hammer normally would be was not. Neither was the sliding switch directly below it, which was currently set to the left, next to a red square. There was a green circle with a short line in the middle that went upward on the other side, though…maybe that was the power switc—

—the display screen lit up in a deep blue the moment the switch was popped to the right, and shortly afterward was filled with a “100%” in white digits. Directly below the percentage number was a “MODE 1” indicator…

Great, wonder what that’s about….

The sight picture, at least, was exceptionally quick to pick up once she lined up a shot on the target. And the trigger was a straight blade style, didn’t look like it had a lot of travel in it. She pressed it back with a light telekinetic touch, around five pounds, and that seemed to be enough to pull it fully rearward—

The report was quite loud for a MEW, a sizzling, electric-like POW! that had her grateful she’d had the sense to keep her horn ring’s sound suppression active. The shot was a short but dense violet bolt that set the target on fire and quickly reduced it to flittering ashes, though she was pretty sure that was only because it was made of paper and not because of some special enchanted property of the weapon itself. The second target was likewise almost instantly incinerated with the second shot, and Sling took note of the power percentage dropping down to “87%” before slowly building back up by roughly one percent every second. Assuming the cell was on a constant regeneration cycle, she assumed the weapon to be capable of firing between seventeen to twenty shots in quick succession, with a recharge time of about a minute and forty seconds.

An eternity in a gunfight. That had been the biggest knock on Breeder-type MEWs, the user had to space their shots out so as not to drain the battery too quickly, and they weren’t as powerful as a standard MEW using replaceable spark batteries. If that was all the Alicorn’s Star was meant to fix, then she judged the project to have been a colossal waste of resources.

Then she recalled the secondary barrel underneath, and started fiddling about the gun to see if there was some kind of button or switch she could push in an—

Ah, there we are, she noted with satisfaction when she found such a thing on the right side of the frame—a bright orange translucent button, currently dull, and pressed it down—

—the secondary barrel immediately clicked and popped open, extending out the sides and exposing the arcane emitter array within it with a sharp, electric chirping sound. At the same time, the indicator on the display screen changed from “MODE 1” to “MODE 2”, and the orange button was now glowing brightly.

She allowed a childish squeal to escape her throat as she pulled the trigger back and unleashed an intensely bright, orange-hot beam from the secondary barrel with a distinctive buzzing discharge, and on a whim pulled her aim leftward when she noticed that the percentage indicator was rapidly draining down from “90%”—

—the beam wasn’t an instantaneous burst, but a continuous stream, and when she pulled her aim left the beam cut through the target stand’s left arm as if it wasn’t even there at all. The beam continued to cut and melt its way through its environment for about three seconds, after which the emitter array shut down and folded back together under the main barrel. The glowing orange button likewise shut off, and the power percentage indicator flashed with a sharp red “0%”. It took a few seconds for it to start climbing up again, but when it did, it did so at half the rate it had been going before, at a rate of roughly one percent every two to three seconds.

The three-second stream had caused a lot of damage. The beam had cut through the backstop of the firing range and set the damage path alight with small flames, and the arm of the target stand had been partially melted by only a split-second’s worth of exposure to the beam itself.

Rally would go absolutely bonkers when she saw this thing—

A clattering of aluminum interrupted her observations, signaling the end of her work and inciting a tightening feeling inside her chest. As necessary as it was to get moving, she didn’t really want to…

“That was kickass,” Leon swooned with approval, dumping what looked like a pile of magazines and an ammo can onto the table. “Useless for today, though.”

Sling’s magic set itself to work pulling the second pile of empty magazines towards herself, and then began sorting through the ammunition in the can, relieved to see “62gr HP” on the side. “Maybe not. The batteries are marked “Breeder”, so I think they might be a variation of a breeder-type MEW. The primary fire mode is just like any other laser or plasma pistol, but it’s the secondary fire mode that’s got me giggling like Rally will when she sees it. It seems to put a pretty big strain on the spark battery though, the power indicator isn’t recharging nearly as fast as it was when I was just shooting normal shots. Might be why the gun was designed with a removeable battery in case the secondary fire mode had to be used more than once in a short time frame.”

“That’s a bit of a letdown.”

“It’s all we get,” she countered as she began streaming rounds out of the can like a water facet and pushing them down into a magazine. “But the beam mode should make quick work of Zulana. Might even be able to double as a cutting torch for the R&D wing’s front door, we don’t have time to go looking for explosives to blast our way in.”

Her bullpup rifle appeared on her right, being lowered onto the table, and then his footsteps returned to the firing line with one of the black rifles and a managraphic sight. “I guess we’ll find out in about ten minutes.”

Fate chose that moment to have Julaya intrude into the firing range to retrieve her for other preparations. “…you should speak with the misty pony, crazy one. She has been playing with the otherworldly toys of the Before and may have found something of use to you. But she does not look well.”

“Go check it out, I’ll get the black rifles zeroed,” Leon pushed almost immediately before she could come up with a reason to wait until she was done here. She’d barely started getting the magazines loaded!

No time to fight and argue over it, either.

She found Misty on the other end of the lab, inside a softly lit room marked simply “TECH” on its door. The room itself was designed with a much more clinical and sterile motif than the rest of the test lab—sharp white walls and ceiling, with a cool tile floor and several rows of island benches replete with all manner of high-tech tools and monitoring equipment. Misty had concerned herself with two sterilized, formerly-climate sealed wall safes that opened to reveal a pull-out drawer, and which contained about a dozen black tablet-like objects, separated in two rows of six via a slotted tray insert in the drawer. The slots themselves were cushioned with a velvet-lined interior, likely to prevent damage to anything socketed within them. Most of Misty’s attention was focused on a gray-colored computer terminal on a desk near the storage lockers, with a few papers scattered about her work space.

Misty, on the other hoof, was not quite as clean-looking. The bandages on her left hind leg had an ominous, large red stain in the center, and dried blood still creased the side of her thigh and gaskin. And her face, when the misty-haired pony turned to face her as she approached, was moist and matted below her bloodshot eyes, and her ears were almost permanently folded against her head. Given the fate she was looking at in the next two hours, she had every right to be upset.

And still, after crying herself dry, she’d found enough resolve and willpower to make use of herself, if only to take her mind off of her current condition. “…is the Alicorn’s Star in working order?” Misty asked with a slightly husky, hoarse voice.

“It looks good, physically,” she answered, drawing the Alicorn’s Star out and setting it down next the terminal. “It’s basically a MEW pistol, designed like a revolver, but with a dual-barrel arrangement and a kick-ass secondary mode that shoots this beam of pure death. Couldn’t find a cutting torch in the lab, so I had to use yours to get the gun out of its case, the keypad was ruined.”

Misty’s mouth uttered a soundless “Wow” as she briefly pawed at the large stainless revolver. “….the facility staff, or Zulana?”

“Might have been by accident, actually. Found what looks like old liquid stains on the mounting plate. My guess is that somebody spilled coffee all over it and shorted it out. Not sure why the Star was still here waiting for us two centuries later. The gun’s a clear threat to Zulana, but her leaving it right there for anyone to stumble onto doesn’t make any sense. It’d have been a much smarter move to simply take it for herself and keep it someplace that only she has access to…like the R&D wing. There’s a great deal about our little expedition today that’s not making sense.”

“The key cards we found…the last time we were here, you think?”

Sling’s stomach started getting a little cold. Misty sounded awfully tired, considering she’d only been bitten in the ass. Was the curse already taking hold? “Odd that you only found one specific level of cards and not the other two, right? Where did you find them?”

“…in the personnel resources wing, at the front of the complex,” Misty answered, though Sling had already suspected that much considering they hadn’t been able to access any other parts of the facility in their last visit. “They were scattered out across the first floor. One here, another there…usually somewhere where we’d find it if we looked around a couple of minutes. Never in open sight, though. Shit, it’s…it’s so obvious now, I wished we’d thought of it when we’d first found them. We were just too excited about having the chance to organize a proper expedition to this place that we never thought about things like traps and bait.”

“I very much doubt the ponies who used them would leave their only keys in and out of their workspaces lying around and off their person. Find anything about the Alicorn’s Star, other than what I’ve found out through ten seconds of test-firing?”

Misty finally forced herself to focus back on her work, but the slow pace of her magic dancing across the keyboard was anything but encouraging. “Nothing yet,” was the sad, but expected answer. “I…I doubt I’ll find anything by the time you leave.”

Oh shit, she’s got even less time than I think. “…you don’t sound too good. How do you feel right this second? Don’t dodge it, I need to know if I’ve got minutes or hours here.”

“…burning up,” Misty said pointedly. “And my…my head, it hurts, like a migraine from hell. Hard to focus on my work here.”

Shit shit shit— “Julie!! Get in here!!”

Misty’s forehooves rose and pressed down on her ears in pain. “Aaaaaooooww no screaming it makes it worse—”

The zebra’s hooves echoed throughout the lab as she raced over, but she was surprisingly gentle with her entrance into the tech room, and Sling began to suspect that Julaya had anticipated Misty’s condition going south this quickly. “Bad?”

“…maybe,” she admitted after a moment’s hesitation. Another closer look at Misty’s coat revealed a thin layer of sweat bleeding through the skin underneath. “She wasn’t like this five minutes ago, that’s for sure. Feverish, migraine…sounds like her breathing’s being affected too. She was trying to find some more information on the Alicorn’s Star, but she can’t work like this for long.”

“No, she will not,” Julaya promised, already pulling the ailing mare aside and leading her over to a lounge sofa nearby. “Rest here, misty pony. Don’t move.”

“…yeah, be lazy,” Misty gasped softly, apparently fighting through her headache to focus enough to speak. “…sounds good…”

Neither Sling or Julaya offered any further offense to her sensitive hearing, and quietly vacated the tech room. Only when the door had shuttered behind them did Julie dare speak of Misty’s condition out loud. “We must hurry. I had anticipated a short period of illness for the curse but the misty pony’s condition is already beyond what I had expected this soon.”

“…how long were you expecting?”

“I had given her ninety minutes, at the most,” Julaya murmured fearfully. “But she may have half that. Thirty minutes, at worst.”

Her cold stomach promptly iced over. “…it could take us a quarter hour just to fight our way out of this building!”

“Then we should stop playing around and just go,” Julie answered. “Every moment is precious now, we cannot spend Misty’s time scouring for more guns.”

Stop playing around and just go…how long has everyone waited to tell me that? “And what about you? Good as you are at fighting up close, these aren’t foes you want to get close to. And the fact that you weren’t using your sword back there when you could have, means that you’re afraid it might kill those things permanently and I don’t have a workable alternative for you.”

Julaya’s response was predictable, but the sharp edge of her words made her dwindling patience clear. “I will find something suitable, now let us go.”

“You kid, surely.”

Elly’s answer was to simply slap her binoculars into her body. “Look for yourself, then. Take all the time you want, I’m gettin’ sick of lookin’ at ‘em myself!”

Rally’s right leg hoof unlocked and reconfigured into a griffon claw, and she pulled the binoculars free of Elly’s magic and lifted them up to her eyes….and sure enough, beyond the eight-strong line six Runners and two of Rico’s crew firing their rifles was the object of their focused fire.

A hundred-strong horde of what looked like unkillable ghouls, oblivious to any wounds save headshots, and even that didn’t seem to stop them for very long. The horde stretched across the street from sidewalk to sidewalk, and was probably only a few feet deep, but their sheer numbers alone made it impossible to safely blast a hole through them.

And it didn’t escape her notice that the thin line of the living was gradually pacing backwards as the horde drew closer. They’d already moved the caravan back a few blocks to get some distance, but that didn’t seem to discourage the things from trying to get to them.

“…how long do you think it’ll take ‘em to get here?” BJ’s voice croaked fearfully. It also didn’t escape her notice that the colt made certain to plant himself either right next to her, or Elly, whenever one of them moved about any. She really couldn’t blame him, not after what he’d gone through in Trotpeka. Kite was freaking out in private in the back of a wagon…

“Maybe ten minutes, tops, if they don’t stop shooting,” she answered truthfully. “But they will, if only to keep from ruining their barrels. And I don’t have nearly enough juice in either of my two spark batteries for my laser rifle to make a difference.”

“…they’re still in there…”

Rally didn’t let the foul curse on her lips speak loudly, though anyone looking at her face could probably figure out what she’d been saying silently. “They’re not dead. Sling’s got a PipBuck, remember? They’ll know about any threats that get within its range. They’re probably sheltered up somewhere in the facility while they figure a way out.”

“We don’t know that—”

Elly, despite her initial terror from her previous sighting of the unholy monsters before them, still seemed more in-tune with BJ’s thoughts than even the colt was. “Beige, do you really think my mom’s gonna let a bunch of ghouls keep her away from us again? She was like…super depressed, worse than me, and then you and Kite turn out to be alive and now she’s actually kind of smiling and she and Kite were even snuggling this morning like…like…uh, would girlfriends be the right word? Or, ummm…”

“…oh gods, there’s a bunch of unkillable ghouls slowly clawing their way towards us and that’s your biggest worry?!”

“Her point, Blue,” Rally interjected, “is that Sling is happier than she’s been in a long time, and even from what little time I’ve been around her, I would think that she does not give up the things she loves without a fight. What do you think she wants to do, more than anything else, knowing that these things are probably marching up on us for a late morning snack?”

Her intention was to alleviate his fears about Sling’s fate, but when he spoke again, he managed to give her a new reason to be worried. “…oh, shit, she’s gonna blow the whole place up—”

“Quit cussin’!” Elly shouted back almost immediately. “And she’s not gonna do that again, not after last time!”

It was truly a sad, sad thing for a little filly to be able to count the number of times her only parent had blown things up in a fit of rage (even if she’d only been witness to one of them). “They did go in with enough guns and ammo to fight Runners for a couple of hours. Not sure how much that’ll help with the invincible ghouls, buuuut…”

“…I’m gonna go panic and freak out with Mom,” the colt despaired aloud as his hooves scraped against the asphalt in a one-eighty turn. “Have fun watching the walking dead.”

The firing line of ponies and griffons in the streets beyond grew ever closing, and a couple of them continued to fire into the wall of shambling ghouls while the rest reloaded their weapons for a…third time? Gods, that was like, ninety shots apiece? For a grand total of over seven hundred rounds?

And not one kill for all that effort?

“…he might actually have a good idea,” she admitted reluctantly. “A few hundred rounds across the eight of them and all they’ve done is kept the horde moving at a snail’s pace.”

“Seven hundred twenty and change,” Elly quipped nonchalantly, though she suspected the little thing was quite worried deep down inside. “…that’s a lotta bullets to be shooting for almost nothing. You think maybe laser guns would do better?”

“Definitely. Hard to come back from being turned into glowing ash. But we don’t have enough spark batteries for our two laser guns to kill them all.”

“…maybe if we just cut them down to a number we could manage to lure and trap somewhere, keep them in one place, without wasting so many bullets? Like…I dunno, ten maybe?”

“We still don’t have nearly enough spark batteries to do that, and the incineration effect is not guaranteed, it’s almost purely random,” she countered, even though she quickly found it difficult to come up with a viable alternative that didn’t involve them trying to flee from such a large group…and the dangers that would come from leaving them in the streets to roam about elsewhere and really fuck things up. “Still, it might give us some idea of what they might be vulnerable to, if physical trauma is useless. We really can’t let these things get out into the city proper. We might be seeing only a hundred or so out here, but there could be three times as many still inside the place. If they all escape, half of Withercha could be devoured before they could be stopped. If they even can be.”

“Okay, then, s-so I got mine with me,” Elly said with a slightly fearful stammer. Which was fine, anybody would be terrified of intentionally approaching a throng of hungry ghouls. “And all the batteries we got for it. What about yours?”

Rally’s right foreleg was already shifting the laser rifle off of her back and shoulder and across the front of her barrel, making sure to orient the barrel upward so that any accidental discharge wouldn’t hit anything but air or crumbling, ruined office buildings. “Just two batteries. Might get twenty shots apiece. The capacitor isn’t working at full efficiency, but it’s safe to shoot. Body shots will be good enough, don’t get fancy and try for the head, we’re only shooting them to see what effect it has on them.”

Elly’s laser pistol hummed to life with a sharp trill, its light diodes glowing with vibrant red and green hues. “…t-then we should probably just go before Kite gets the idea to come and drag us back to the wagon with her.”

Her right foreleg shifted back into a pony hoof just as she started jogging forward, and she focused onto a path on the right side of the street, where she would have a little room to squeeze into the firing line and start blasting hideous ghouls to ashes. It took a bit under forty seconds to reach them, and her horn ring’s magic had tingled and cast its enchantment upon her ears well before she reached them, muffling the gunshots to a hearing-safe level but still allowing everyone’s words to be heard amidst the gunfire—including, unfortunately, the constant, droning groans and moans of the ghouls as they sought to reach their intended meals.

And what she heard had her doubting that this hastily cooked plan was going to work in their favor.

“—ck their faces should be hamburger by now, what’s healing all the gunshot wounds—”

“—do these things even have brains to turn to mush—”

“—itballs I’m down to four mags already, we gotta split—”

Almost no wounds at all after all that shooting? She stopped a few yards short of the firing line and shifted her cyberleg into a griffon’s talon again, took hold of her laser rifle’s grip and shifted the stock into her chest as she settled her other leg underneath the forend and started zeroing in on a target with the green-dotted front sight post—

—the slight kick of the diverter discharge barely registered to her body, though the sharp, buzzing report of the laser discharge seemed a bit loud given the horn ring’s protective magic. Maybe lasers didn’t fire loudly enough to damage the ears? Eh, whatev, that wasn’t what she was shooting for, it was the damn invincible ghouls, and her first shot had glorious results. It didn’t vape the ghoul—so far as she could tell, they were all various shades of colorless gray, with most of them bearing no clothing or cutie marks but covered with horrendous wounds, so it was hard to discern one from the other. But the laser cooked through the ghoul’s flesh and bone and left a cauterized hole behind as it promptly fell flat on its face, the horn barely scraping over the pavement, and she quickly fired on a second pegasus ghoul that was right behind her initial target—

—shot two went a bit high, went into the nape of the neckline, but the body immediately shifted into a blinding hot orange glow, and for a moment allowed herself a short, evil laugh as the hideous mutant was incinerated and killed for good this time—

Raina’s voice robbed her of any joy she could have found in that small moment. “Dammit kid get back to the caravan, these things are—”

—as the glowing, burning ghoul began to cool down and scatter into a softly glowing ash pile, an outline of the thing still remained standing…or, at least, she thought it was the ghoul’s outline. It was a faint bluish color, almost neon-like in its vibrancy, and it bore none of the leg and torso wounds that had pockmarked its body not ten seconds ago. And it had a face—a lively one—that seemed almost confused, as if someone had just ripped a blindfold off of the thing’s face after a long trip in the dark.

And not two seconds later, the blue pony thing’s…aura? What was it exactly? Whatever it was, it was suddenly just…sucked up, like some giant vacuum cleaner had come along and went on a slurping spree. The thing’s form was stretched out and distorted until it was a thin, blue glowing line, and it was quickly being drawn away from the ghoul horde and towards…the Ministry facility?

Suddenly Raina wasn’t all that interested in yelling at her. “…what the actual f—“

Elly’s laser pistol joined in on the carnage, its report coming off with a sharper pop than her rifle. Its red bolt was a much shorter and compact thing than her laser rifle’s beam, but cut through her chosen target as easily as her laser rifle would have, if not better. This earth pony ghoul, too, dropped in place and stopped moving, followed quickly by a second ghoul to its left, and a third to its right, a unicorn—

—Elly’s third target was suddenly engulfed in flames, and when it flopped to its side the flames died out as quickly as they’d appeared, leaving a charred, burnt ghoul behind and filling the air with the putrid stench of melted flesh that had her promptly regretting her grand plan to test these seemingly invincible ghouls for weaknesses. The bluish, semi-transparent pony thing that stood where the ghoul had been two seconds earlier also got pulled away into either oblivion or whatever was drawing it towards the Ministry complex.

“…oh gross, I don’t think I could do that to a living person,” Elly gagged, trying not to barf all over the ground. “…please tell me these ghouls aren’t actually alive…”

“Not in any sense that we’d call ‘living’,” Rally deigned to answer, even as she focused on a third target herself. It was probably a bad idea to try, but she had to be sure…

A single shot was all it took to incinerate the unicorn ghoul—this one even wore a tattered lab coat with a red-striped clear plastic card on it—and…and it also left behind a glowing blue pony-thing, semi-transparent and looked like a…mare? Like the last two unidentified entities, it too was sucked up by a great invisible vacuum cleaner towards the ministry facility, vanishing into nothingness within a couple of seconds…

“…okay, what the hell? Bullets do next to nothing, but lasers actually put them down?” one of the Runners in the firing line shouted out over his gunfire. Their fancy new rings and necklaces might have been muffling the shots, but between the guns and the constant hungry moans of the things in front of them, the shouting was starting to become a tad necessary.

“The hell with that, I wanna know what those blue things are!” Raina shouted back, and she could hear the griffon’s rifle clacking about as she changed out the plastic waffle mags in it. Over eight hundred shots now?! “And where they’re going so fast!”

“…uhhh, I don’t think this is a good idea, Rally,” Elly squeaked fearfully, her laser pistol lowering towards the ground. “These guys should be full of holes and most of them look like they’ve never been shot. There’s something else goin’ on with these ghouls.”

Rally’s brain was already at work trying to figure out the reason why everyone else’s efforts were ultimately just wasted ammo while her laser rifle was turning them into ash and Elly’s laser pistol was dropping them with single chest shots. No glowing ones amongst the gray ghouls, they weren’t near any radioactive zones so they could rule out ambient environmental healing, ghouls actually thrived in radiation. And still, their wounds were closing up and their bodies coming back for more punishment. Bullets did nothing, but MEWs were—

…wait…

…MEW…Magical Energy Weapon….

…Magical…

“…oh, SHIT,” she hissed sharply, slinging her rifle over her back after snapping the safety back on. “Elly that’s enough shooting we’re making this worse!”

“Gladly, that burned flesh smell is making me sick!” the little filly shrieked, even as the sound of metal scratching across leather signified her compliance. “And quit cussin’!”

By the gods, you do jump my ass for that more than Sling would! “We’re leaving, maybe the rest of you thick-headed Runners would like to join us?! You’re just wasting ammo!!”

“For once, I’ll take orders from a kid!” someone screamed back, a deep-throated male voice, so probably one of the other griffons in the firing line. She didn’t really know these Runners, the only four she could recognize were Raina, Tack, Ada, and Leon, and Tack was still back with the caravan keeping it safe. “Toss some grenades into them, maybe we can slow them down a couple of minutes!”

Ah, crap, grenades, really loud and really not bringing back good memories! She cringed as she turned and darted back towards the caravan, mostly from a flare-up of pain from a right foreleg she no longer had when the first grenade went off about five seconds after she’d started running. It was weird sometimes, how that happened…

More unpleasant memories threatened to form in the near future when she saw Kite jumping out of one of the wagons as they came upon them, and she looked pissed. Almost as mad as Sling, actually. Then again, they had just run up to a horde of flesh-eating mutants and poked them with the proverbial stick in the form of a few laser blasts, so—

“What the HELL ARE YOU THINKING!?!” the scarred grape mare’s voice bored into their souls the moment she thought she was close enough to halt them with the sheer force of volume alone, and it kinda worked ‘cause she was skidding to a complete stop and Elly wound up crashing into her ass doing the same thing, and then the both of them were tumbling about until they ended up in a pile of twisted legs, tails, and manes at Kite’s hooves. Thankfully, their weapons were undamaged from the collision. “You just up and ran up to the deadliest ghouls on the planet and you started SHOOTING THEM!?! WH-GA—WWWHAAAT?!?! WHAT?! WERE?! YOU?! THINKING?!”

Despite the ring on her horn granting her hearing protection, she was fairly certain her ears were starting to ring softly from the sheer force of will Kite was visibly overflowing with, and she made a note to consider herself lucky that Sling didn’t yell this loudly when she was mad at her. “…eeeeeeeeeeeye was thinking…kill one? Maybe two? See what happens, maybe…find…a weakness?”

Elly had barely managed to get her head out from beneath her belly when Kite’s screaming blasted back at them, and the little filly actually tried to hide back under there. “Oh, GREAT PLAN HOW DID THAT WORK OUT YOU COULD HAVE GOTTEN YOURSELVES KILLED AND THEN WHAT WOULD SLING DO—”

“Holy halibut she’s madder than mom,” Elly whispered through her body, somehow. “…oh, crap, maybe not, mom’s gonna literally explode when she finds out what we just did—”

“So if you’re finished screaming, maybe I can tell you and the Runners catching up to us what I just learned? ‘Cause these aren’t ghouls.”

“Really!?” Kite’s voice roared across the street, oblivious to the presence of Ada as the massive griffon glided in on them from her previously hidden perch several hundred yards away. Probably decided there was no reason for two snipers to stay on overwatch when the enemy couldn’t be killed. “They walk like ghouls, they moan like ghouls gods I can hear the bastards from here—”

“Quit cussin’,” Elly’s weak voice protested, but to no avail. Kite just went on like she’d not even spoken (and probably for the best)—

“—they got the same damn singular desire to zero in on the closest meal of fresh meat they can sense I don’t know if they go by sight or smell or SOUND or whatever—”

“Damn, Kite, maybe give the kid a few seconds to explain before you murder her eardrums?” Ada’s voice shouted back in her defense (FINALLY someone did), even as a chorus of hooves and paws were rapidly closing in on them from the street behind her. “Those things were regenerating from head shots in less than a minute and there’s no radiation zones for a ghoul to soak in. She might actually be right if it’s what I think it is.”

“Ditto, let the smart one speak,” Raina chimed in next. “…well, the one smarter than El-Tee.”

“…fine,” Kite seethed deeply, though her fiery, angry eyes promised nothing more than that. “Out with it.”

“I think there’s some magic involved,” Rally said over the grunts and gasps Elly squeaked as the filly squirmed and twisted herself free of this rather compromising tangle of limbs and hair. “The only weapons that had any lasting effect were my rifle and Elly’s pistol, while eight hundred and change of bullets did nothing. Their bodies should have looked like raw, chewed up hamburger after all that shooting and there were hardly more than a few bloody holes in their faces, and I swear a couple of them were getting smaller by the second. And the term MEW stands for Magical Energy Weapon—”

Elly’s left hind leg finally worked itself free and allowed her to start scooting herself out from under Rally’s body, though when she did finally pull herself up onto her own four hooves again she just opted to splay herself out across Rally’s torso and take a breather from all her hard work—

“So only magically powered or enchanted weapons and munitions will put them down permanently?” Ada finished succinctly. “…well, that actually makes more sense than what I was thinking.”

“You seriously didn’t think every one of those things had a soul jar, did you?” Raina shot back with a touch of whining in her voice.

“I did until three of them bit the dust permanently and we saw….whatever that blue speck was.”

Kite’s anger started to subside a little bit. “See what?”

“Hard to say,” Rally answered, rolling herself upright with her legs tucked in, and let Elly keep using her as a body pillow for the moment. “There was this…it looked like a pony, but all transparent and bluish and glowing. I want to say it was an echo of their magic, but they looked…surprised, like someone had taken a blindfold off of them. And now that I hear the word soul jar, it gets me wondering if we saw an echo of the ghoul’s remaining life force, before it got sucked away. But I’m just guessing here. I have no fuuuurreeeaking clue what could have made those ghouls—”

Shit caught that one real close—

“But at least now we know what we need to kill them, so let’s just break out all the MEWs in the wagon an—”

“No, no, see, that’s what we shouldn’t do. If that…that blue echo, or whatever it is, if it’s at all connected to what caused this then killing those ghouls may be the last thing we should do. We don’t know how those things were created, how they’re regenerating from head shots several times over, or even if there’s some kind of top-secret technology in that facility empowering them all. For all we know killing some of them might make the rest of them too strong to kill even WITH MEWs.”

“When kids start making more sense of things than you, you know you got left behind in the brains department,” Raina mumbled in a deflated tone. “Okay, so we can’t kill them, and all we’re doing with normal bullets is keeping the horde from moving more than a few feet per second. We don’t have enough ammo to keep them back for more than ten minutes, at best, and they’d be almost on top of us by the time we ran dry anyway. Grenades seemed to have messed them over pretty good, but we don’t have a lot of those. What’s left?”

“….we could try to make a sink hole in the street with the explosives we do have,” one of the Runners—a pegasus pony, of all creatures—suggested, though most of his attention was focused on the horde of ghouls they’d obliterated with grenades. They didn’t seem to be regenerating just yet…

“We don’t have enough explosives for a hole big enough to hold a hundred plus ghouls,” Tack shot him down. “We just used up half of the grenades we had on us, and we’d need about twenty more pounds of plastique than we actually have on hoof.”

“…maybe some of you could fly in there, try and find out what’s causing this and blow it up,” Elly’s voice creaked. “I mean, those turrets were all lit up earlier and now they’re…kinda not. So maybe they won’t shoot at you.”

“Misty’s party is in the best position to be doing that, if they’re able,” Tack countered. “We should focus on keeping those ghouls contained without getting killed in the process.”

“The ‘if they’re able’ part is what’s got me worried! What if they need help?” Elly pushed on with a pleading voice. “We haven’t heard any gunfire from that facility, they might have gotten trapped in one of the buildings when these things got out. Didn’t Mom say something about leaving you guys an access card in case someone needed to go in after them?”

“…she did,” Ada sighed deeply. “And the squirt’s not entirely wrong either. If they need help, they need it now, and we won’t know that until we send someone in to find out what went wrong in there. At the very least we should make sure we don’t have two separate groups completely unaware of what the other is doing.”

“That doesn’t help us deal with the ghouls five blocks up the street,” Tack reminded them all with a slightly terse inflection in his voice…and he had a point too. “We need to figure out how we’re going to pin them down to one area without using up all of our ammo and explosives, and within three minutes. I think those gray bastards are starting to get some of their freaking limbs back.”

“Maybe lure them into one of these buildings along the street,” Ada said out, mainly just to hear her idea in actual words. Sometimes things that sounded good in her head were a lot more trouble once she got to talking about it and thinking it over more. “Block the entrances once they’re inside aaand no that’s a lot more work than we got people or time for—”

“Whoa, wait, did they just…stop?” Elly intruded into the conversation, and Rally had to kinda shift her neck and torso around so she could turn her head back up the street, an….

…and, sure enough, it seemed as though most of the ghouls, judging by her binoculars, had managed to recover from the grenade blasts in enough of one piece to resume their blind drive towards new food sources…and then just stopped, and stared out blankly into space. If only their deathly moaning had ceased along with their cold march…

A question formed on Rally’s lips and sprang forth. “…when was the last time ghouls stopped their dinner rush to stand there and zone out?”

In the end, they had only managed to load eight rifle magazines, for a total of 120 rounds apiece. But true to her word, Julie made do with the first object she deemed solid enough to serve as a melee weapon—a few lengths of rebar they found in a small storage closet seemingly dedicated to construction materials, perhaps leftovers from construction that they’d never figured out what to do with. She took several pieces in the event that she decided to use one as a stabbing implement and wound up losing it, all tied together on her back with some paracord from a spool they found in the same closet. A few layers of bandaging wrapped around her forelegs, salvaged from a wall-mounted first aid kit, would keep the spiral ribbing on the rebar from hurting her.

Getting Julie her rebar cost her a magazine from the service rifle and about five minutes of Misty’s remaining time. The hollow point rounds worked wonders on the gray bastards, put them down for a good minute or longer, but there were quite a lot of them now that they knew there was fresh meat to be had. That so many of them had been ignored by her E.F.S. when they were making their initial journey into the building astounded her, and she was glad now that she had not allowed herself to grow dependent on her PipBuck like so many of her former security co-workers in the stable had. Instead, however, she had grown too dependent on firearms to deal with her enemies, and the ease with which Julie made use of her borrowed rebar to swat and crack the skulls of the zomponies made her feel like an amateur. The zebra had no inherent unicorn magic, only her bare hooves and limbs…

…and she made the stable pony feel like a spoiled, insignificant speck.

“…my god, does this piss you off that much?” she muttered after Julie’s tenth “kill”—a swift and sudden stab of her rebar into the skull of a zompony that tried to climb over an overturned desk propped up against the inside of the doorway into an office. Perhaps somebody had tried to build a barricade against the shambling undead and failed to completely seal the room off.

Julie barely flinched as the rebar turned the zompony’s eye into a bloody mess of viscera that Sling had to look away from, lest her early lunch decided it was time to come back up. “Greatly,” the zebra answered with a light grunt, waiting until her prey had collapsed over the desk and stopped moving before yanking her rebar back out. How could she grip that thing so well with the inside of her legs and pastern? “Having to deal with the aftermath of such a careless use of necromancy is quite irritating. I imagine you fare no better, having little skill with blades or your bare hooves to fall back on when your guns run out of bullets.”

Godsdamn how do you read me so well? “This isn’t really the time to discuss the skillsets I lack.” A glance at a nearby wall placard with various nameplates bolted onto it indicated that the primary security armory was somewhere ahead of them, though she expected that direction to change at least twice before they actually found it. The next direction might be to their left…

“Then we can discuss how to improve them,” the zebra’s sensual voice answered, causing Sling to groan in despair. Maybe she should have had Leon take point instead of guarding their rear. “Perhaps a minor training regimen each day. The little tail of light seems enthusiastic enough when I teach her things, so I can make it a parent-child class of two.”

“Is everyone looking to have a hoof and claw in how my daughter is raised?” she growled at no one, just before the holographic optic on her rifle settled onto a zompony’s head for a quick shot.

“Is that not what stables had schools for?” Julaya cackled. “We are simply…replacing the school’s lessons with ones more suited to her environment.”

Two more zomponies joined her kill count when they came out into the hallway from the corner at the end, and she could see a placard on the wall denoting the direction to the security wing lobby—to the left, as she’d expected. “I’d rather have her learn how to cure some rampant disease or invent a technique for removing mana radiation from afflicted areas without having to wait several centuries for it to decay on its own. Something that will make a difference for decades to come.”

“She may do that in time, but for now it would be best if she learned skills that would ensure she survived long enough to do so. You could stand to learn some of these things with her. Think of it as an additional bonding experience!”

When they reached the turn into the next hall, she started scouring every name plaque attached to a door when they drew close enough to be able to read it in the glow of her light spell. “Can you think of something that might help our odds of survival today?”

Julaya’s sensual tone returned in force, and she realized she may have made a mistake when she agreed to keep their conversation focused on anything but their actual goal, in case the master of these zomponies’ could hear and see through them through some unexplained telepathic link. “Would Kite’s warm embrace and company in bed suffice? Or perhaps you desire something more carnal than she is willing to provide? I would be happy to offer such a thing.”

“Of course you would,” she muttered softly enough that the zebra didn’t hear it—or she pretended not to. “Look, we’re nowhere near the intimate phase and she wouldn’t indulge me even if I tried.”

Godsdamn her she had to have that uncanny and unnerving ability to be able to read her mind or the things she left unsaid, and all of this while they were shooting and stabbing undead in the face! “She desires a soulmate, and believes you may be such a thing. She also knows your ostracized life in your stable has not given you a good grasp of healthy relationships. She does not want to taint your deepening friendship with heated passions, however much the two of you may desire such a thing. Not until she is certain she would have a happily ever after.”

“So why are you so cavalier about it, then?”

“Me? I have little doubt that I would enjoy a life at your side, but I am not thinking about that. I am thinking that you very much need to get laid and I happen to enjoy such things as a pastime, so I would happily indulge those carnal desires you have kept suppressed for so long.”

“Finally somebody has the guts to say that out loud,” Leon’s voice grumbled from behind, just before he took a couple of shots at a target.

“If the walking dead don’t end you, I might,” she promised with an evil sneer.

“You sure about that?”

“For the fourth time, YES,” Rally yelled back, her attention still focused on the horde of invincible ghouls just milling around the streets like insects. They hadn’t come any further down the road, but they hadn’t gone back where they’d come from either. “Clear plastic, red stripe down one end just like the yellow cards Rico was handing out. She said they’d need a red one to get into the R&D building and the last ghoul I dusted had one on his lab coat, and the coat didn’t burn up with him so it’s still intact! We gotta go get it!”

“Get it how?” Tack pushed back. “We tossed five grenades into the group when we cut and run, there could be pieces of it scattered all over!”

“Grenades blow up and out,” Ada countered smoothly, her backwards rifle pointed towards the horde. She’d swapped out her previous barrel for a longer, thicker one with a bipod attached to it, and was using the hood of a burned-out car as a firing platform She didn’t think the gun would get a kill shot six hundred yards out, but she was itching to see if it could and the situation ironically gave her the best possible conditions to find out. “That mob had already moved forward a few meters when you broke contact and tossed the ‘nades into them. That’d be enough distance to minimize the damage to the card. Not to mention all the ghouls that absorbed most of the blasts. The biggest problem is putting sixty plus of those bastards down to give us enough time to sift through the bodies for the card. Eight rifles firing into the horde couldn’t even push them into a full stop.”

“What about a bunch of bullets really, really fast?” Elly called out. “Like…machine guns, or something? Or do we even have any?”

That filly is getting quite an education in weaponry and tactics, Ada smiled inside. “We got two stowed in the wagons. Light machine guns, belt-fed 5.56s. Three magazines apiece, two two-hundred round box mags and four nylon cloth bag mags of a hundred rounds. But we only have one spare barrel to do a barrel change with, so after the initial barrage we’re only going to get one and a half mags worth of short controlled bursts out of one of them. We’ll need to cut down as many as we can right off, and pray we can find the card in less than a minute after the first ghoul goes down. These aren’t precision weapons either, once the barrels heat up accuracy goes to shit, those things are pretty old. Machine guns weren’t on our shopping list with Rico’s people…maybe should change that next time.”

“If they’re that old, maybe we could do something so we wouldn’t be shooting so many bullets. I bet some of them would go chasing after a snack if it got close enough. Somebody could sneak around behind them through the alleys, or the next street over, and when they draw them out far enough, you shoot what’s left so somebody can grab the card.”

Okay, scratch that, the kid just had a good education period. Lucky stable folk. “Risky as hell, but I’ve heard worse ideas,” Tack murmured even as Ada’s unconscious brain had finally worked out the six hundred-yard trajectory for a .223 match round. She didn’t have much hope for a head shot, not with the center dot on the 4x optic pretty much covering the target at this range. Might still be able to get the bullet on the body, at least. She was thinking maybe pull her point aim down a bit more than she usually would; the reticule was designed around a twenty-inch barrel with a one-in-nine inch twist, so a longer barrel would probably give the shot a bit more range. And there wasn’t much wind so she had that going for her…

When she made her best guess on her hold her claw pressed back on the trigger, being careful not to pull it too far back and end up with a full-auto burst instead, and her patience was rewarded with a carefully aimed single shot that took about three-quarters of a second to find its way into a ghoul’s torso. She couldn’t see the exact point of impact, but she could see the thing shudder slightly from the hit. Had her target been a living, breathing creature, that hit would have probably taken out a lung, put them out of the fight…in theory, anyway.

So, targeted body shots at six hundred yards would be fairly easy with some patience, though at that distance a .22-caliber anything would be hard pressed to be any better than a nine-mil was at twenty-five paces, and any amount of wind would play hell on the windage adjustment. One of many reasons why she preferred a larger-caliber weapon for any distance shooting past three hundred yards. “Any volunteers to be the bait—”

The ghouls finally grew tired of standing in the street, swaying pointlessly, for the horde began to stroll forward again, putting a kink into the plan before they could even finish setting it up.

Oh, shit, I shouldn’t have taken that shot. “…ahhh, shit, now they’re hungry again,” Ada whined lightly. “Tack, Junas, get those MGs, load ‘em with the two hundred round mags, and see if any of Rico’s crew is willing to provide more suppressing fire once we run the MGs out. Lena, Rusty, Sea Wind, help me set up a firing position with some of these junked cars in the street. We’ll need the extra height for the MGs to get headshots without sending rounds over the horde. Last call for volunteers for the bait job!”

“Not a bait job anymore,” Raina said, though she didn’t sound all that happy about it. “Let them get a ways down the road, I’ll swing around from the alley and find that card now that the little horde is interested in dinner again. Just hold your fire until I’m clear, okay?! I said I was sorry about that MRE prank the other day!”

“You’d better be,” Ada threatened sharply. “You kids go back with Vineyard to the wagons, and if I see either of you running around out here again you’ll wish you were dealing with Sling instead!”

She was pretty sure she just dropped a couple of places on Elly’s Cool-Person-List, considering that little gasped “Wha?” that followed her as she took off on all fours with her impromptu moving crew. Better that the kid fume at her now, that it might make Sling’s imminent explosion of motherly fury a little easier to take when she came back. Or maybe Kite was trying her best to be the really scary and angry one so that Sling would look better and calmer later. Hard to say, really. Not that it mattered much right then. Vineyard actually liked a good scrap and she was going to miss out on this one.

“Those two on the left, two blocks out!” Lena called out, even going so far as to mark said cars with a quick light marker spell. If not for her desert camouflaged combat armor, the unicorn’s gray stone coat would have had her blending in with the asphalt and concrete buildings enough that she would have been hard to spot at a distance. “I saw them up close a few minutes ago, the engine hoods are still in one piece! Best shooting position we’ll get for the MGs for your massed headshot volley!”

“Good enough!” Ada replied, and just like that the four of them zeroed in on Lena’s find without another word or even a hint of complaint. This was the thing about people and friends that Vergil never seemed to grasp—that it was a hell of a lot easier and more efficient if people got along all the time so that when the time came, everybody had each other’s backs and didn’t nitpick or fight over a plan that they might not totally agree with. She doubted that even half of her crew liked the idea of burning up two-thirds of their machine gun ammo—and their difficult-to-replace belt links—in about forty seconds’ worth of shooting on foes that couldn’t be killed with bullets. But Misty’s party needed that blue key card, and probably needed it right now, and this was the only way of getting the bastards thinned out enough for one of them to risk their life finding it with a reasonable chance of success. They were going to be a little closer to the horde than she wanted, though…but at least at that distance everyone else could pitch in with their rifles with a good chance of landing meaningful headshots. Might be why Lena pointed out those particular wrecks.

Teamwork. It came through for them every time they needed it to. Vergil didn’t get it. She was starting to wonder if they even needed him, as hard as he was pushing them to focus on amassing caps over good will and friends in distant places.

Questions for later. Questions for now—could she even fly over the Ministry complex’s walls without getting dusted? The turrets looked offline, but they could easily come right back up and fry her before she could turn around and get out of range. Ma—

“Uhhh, I just had second thoughts about rushing into that place, anybody got an idea for how we get the card to Misty’s group?” she called out suddenly, right as they reached their destination and began pushing the junked, rusted-out cars across the pavement. The harsh, screeching complaints of ancient metals scraping across the pavement might have been a lot less tolerable if not for the enchanted necklace dampening the sounds. “I’m not sure those turrets will stay offline for long!”

“Send one of those mutts in with it?” Lena yelled back over the screeching metal. “Unless you’re afraid they’ll just get gobbled up by those ghouls?”

“I am, actually,” Ada grunted as the rotted-out wheel rim got caught in a crack on the street, forcing her to physically lift the car up long enough for Lena to push it out. “And they’re not our dogs to send out into harm’s way. El-Tee’s not gonna send ‘em anywhere near this place, and I wouldn’t either!”

She didn’t hear an alternative until they’d mashed the cars together and set up their rifles and magazines for the volley fire. “Maybe you could tag them with the fifty-cal rifle we got in the wagons,” Rusty suggested as he switched out the barrel on his bullpup with a twenty-four-inch, bipod-equipped barrel. “We found a few AP rounds while you were gone, managed to get it zeroed to a hundred meters with two shots.”

“Shit, seriously? I don’t care how good this spiffy new jewelry is at protecting our hearing, I hate firing that thing!”

“It’s either that or take a chance that the things won’t dust you when you get inside their firing range. Pick one.”

He was right. She knew it.

She hated it.

“…fine. I’ll take ‘em out, you guys focus on the walking dead. But I can only take out the turrets covering the front of the facility, so we’ll have to send a couple folks with the key card through the front door. Guess how fun that’s gonna be.”

“We’ll figure that out once we got time to, get moving—”

Ada had turned about and started dashing back towards the wagons about the time the words “got time” left Rusty’s beak, having already made up her mind about who the first volunteer would be—herself. Part of her wanted to stay with the caravan and make sure the kids wouldn’t get hurt, but she knew Rico would pull her wagons out the moment she thought it was necessary, so that part would be taken care of no matter what. The part of her volunteering herself to leap into the maw of darkness was the part that didn’t want her better half to fight against these things without her.

She reached the caravans thirty seconds later, passing by Tack, Junas, and two of Rico’s crew racing in the opposite direction to join the roadblock team. Her world was now a blurry vision of activity as she raced to get everything she needed in as few movements and motions as possible. Put the twenty-inch barrel back in her bullpup (she had to unload the gun and lock the charging handle back to do it first), find that damn fifty and the one ammo can they’d marked that had the rounds for it, they only had like twelve or thirteen of them so they couldn’t afford to waste any—

“What’s got you so excited?” Rico quipped gently, her binoculars focused on her team at the impromptu roadblock.

The attempt at conversation forced her to slow her actions down, and she was only mildly embarrassed to find out that she had also managed to grab ahold of Kite’s tail in her zeal to wrest the “.50 cal” marked ammo can from the back of the cargo wagon. Kite was not amused in the slightest, but said nothing.

“Need to take out MEW turrets so we can go in the front door,” she gasped between heavy breaths, barely realizing that she’d been winded out from her hard run. That wasn’t going to do her sharpshooting any favors. “One of those things had a red key card on its body when Rally dusted it, we need to get it to Misty’s party, find out what the hell’s behind all this and stop it in the next ten minutes.”

“…because if you don’t, in eleven to twelve minutes we’ll all be ghoul chow?”

Okay, got the gun, got the ammo… “My guys will be. Everyone back here will have about three extra minutes, maybe more if those things stop to feast on our corpses first. Either way, you get the hell out of here and don’t look back.”

“And leave everyone out there behind?”

It wasn’t the thing that the heroes in stories did…which was probably why they were only stories. With a few final huffs she hoisted the ammo can in one claw, grabbed the fifty-cal rifle by its carrying handle with the other, and hopped back out of the wagon and flared her wings open for a quick flight. “If we can’t stop this in ten minutes, we’ll probably be dead in ten and a half. Save who’s left.”

She could hear Kite yelling something at her back as she took off into the air, working her wings hard to conjure up enough altitude to make it to her intended destination. Probably something about scaring the daylights out of the kids with that kind of talk, but whatever. It wasn’t like she wanted everyone to be torn apart and eaten alive in front of each other, but she had to be cold-hearted about these things. Hope for the best, plan for the worst. And worst-case scenario, was that they failed to stop these things and everyone nearby would be dead if they didn’t high-tail out of town first chance they got.

Best case scenario? Sling did her “kill everything I hate” thing and became that hero in the story they needed. Or heroine. Or stressed-out mare who sorely needed to get laid. Really, sometimes that sort of soul could be meaner than a raider.

Now, though? Right now I gotta set up the fifty for at least four half-mile shots after lugging the heavy bitch up in the air with me and then take those shots in thirty seconds! But it was either that or risk being incinerated by MEW turrets. She didn’t want to be incinerated here. If she was going to die, that would probably be the fastest way, though. Instant cremation, a second of or two of insanely unimaginable pain, and that would be it. Probably wouldn’t even see it coming. An—

Sidetracking, dumbass, focus on the now!

Focus became easier when she landed on her target building, on the left side of the street. It was the tallest intact structure from that point on to the facility itself, so she had an unobstructed view of the four MEW turrets that stood watch over the main entrance. The .50 anti-material rifle was a beast in of itself—almost thirty pounds empty, magazine fed, and fitted with a muzzle brake that could blow out eardrums if someone was stupid enough to stand near it without all the hearing protection they could muster. This one was fairly old, and while the barrel was still good, the action wasn’t always cooperative. She’d be lucky if she only had to clear one jam this time around. The one magazine they had for it had lost all of its finish and was basically just bare steel, and the magazine spring was pretty weak and didn’t like being compressed too tightly. Mostly for that reason, they only loaded the mag with three rounds, and even then it didn’t always work right.

But the attached bipod was stable and secure, and the scope was a godsend find they’d scrounged up in an old armory a few years ago. Some finish wear on the adjustment knobs, and little nicks and scratches on the scope body, but the thing always tracked accurately when they tested its zero and the lenses only had a couple of small scratches that couldn’t even been seen when she looked through it. She was secretly hoping this rifle would bite the dust soon so she could claim the scope for herself instead of waiting another three months for Rico to build hers and get it to her.

The ammo can had thirteen rounds in it—true to Rusty’s word, a quick grab inside fished up five black-tipped AP rounds alongside two standard ball rounds, of which three APs were hurriedly loaded into the magazine. A quick slap and tug to get it in the mag well, rack the handle on the bolt—

—the loud, chunky CLANK! that followed, despite her distaste for the rifle itself, never failed to excite her in ways no inanimate object should excite a lady. The AP rounds would punch through the MEW turrets and hopefully damage enough of the internals to render them inoperable, or at least incapable of firing. At this distance, even with the scope, she couldn’t quite place where the tiny sensor lenses were on the things, so hitting the main body would have to suffice.

The street lit up with the rapid rattatatatatatatatat! of two belt-fed LMGs, with short pauses likely indicating aim correction after recoil had drifted them off-target. She hoped that meant that Raina had gotten the key card. Dispersed within the machine bursts were the far less impressive pops of carefully aimed rifle fire. A second reach inside the ammo can produced a pair of old, but serviceable ear muffs designed for a griffon, and she quickly stuck the thing on and touched the enchanted sapphire of her necklace.

First target was to the right of the main gate. Rusty said they’d zeroed it to meters, not yards, which made enough of a difference that she was going to be a little generous with her hold until she could verify it. Brace the stock up against her shoulder, use her left talon to reach under it and hold it there while she settled in for the shot. She also wasn’t sure about the exact trajectory of an AP round. The tungsten tip added a little weight to the front, made it behave differently from a normal .50-caliber ball round in flight. When she had the holdover she would have used for an FMJ round, she adjusted it a tad upward, took a breath—

—the recoil was as bad as she remembered, even with a muzzle brake and nearly thirty pounds of weight on the gun, but thankfully the ear muffs and the enchanted necklace kept the muzzle blast from thumping her hearing. She had to fight the rifle back down on target to inspect the damage from the shot, and was pleased to see a shower of continuously falling out from the hole she’d put in the thing. At the distance she was shooting, she couldn’t see the impact hole through the scope, so it was hard to tell if she’d put the bullet where she intended it, but she did get a good hit, and that was what mattered more.

She repeated the process with the first of the two gate turrets, with slightly different results. No shower of sparks to indicate a power supply unit hit, and as she’d expected, the empty casing got caught in the ejection port on its way out. The bolt cycle did feel a bit sluggish on that shot. Her right talon came up and ripped the bolt back, holding it there while she awkwardly knocked the casing out of the way, and then let it go once she’d confirmed with a visual check that the last round was still snug inside the magazine. Target three, the second gate turret, same hold, and maybe a touch more apprehension on the recoil, she hated shooting this thing—

—the third shot hit her shoulder hard, like a hammer had slammed into it at melee range, with much the same results as her second target. Thankfully, the shell ejected, though the magazine follower didn’t lock the bolt open. Expected, it was pretty old. She took the mag out and loaded one more AP round, reloaded and tried to ignore the giddy feelings the CLANK! gave her as she zeroed in on her las—

—the last turret in the line came to life, a bright red light on the top shining like a beacon of death as the barrel swung towards her. Calm was the answer, not panic, though even as she settled back into the rifle she couldn’t help but feel a little terror at the fact that these things could even get a sensor lock on her at this range. They were going to have to get some hard data on the effective range of these things in the future—

—her last shot ripped through the turret hard enough to kill the light on it, just as it had finished its rotation and oriented its barrel in her general direction. None of the turrets on the left perimeter wall were turning towards her, either. Maybe they weren’t turned on, or maybe they had a limited cone of rotation and couldn’t turn her way even if their controller wanted them to. Important thing was that they weren’t an immediate threat, and that she could finally stop shooting that damn fifty.

She set the rifle aside, took up her bullpup and peered down over the edge of the rooftop, curious about why she no longer heard machine gun fire—

—oh, wow, that actually worked better than I thought it would, she remarked cheerfully upon the sight of…shit, dozens of ghouls, she wasn’t sure about the exact number. But where there had once been a throng of the things shambling down the street, shoulder-to-shoulder and stretching across the entire road, now lay only a string of grayish bodies strewn about like confetti. The peace and quiet might not last very long, but for the moment those damn things were stopped cold.

“Dude, that actually worked!” she shouted down at Rusty’s party.

“Didn’t it?!” Rusty shouted back up. “Raina’s got the card, she’s flashing it at me right now…along with a really rude sign, maybe a few rounds got too close—”

Sure enough, a flick of her gaze to her left showed that Raina was indeed in possession of that stupid piece of plastic, as she was leaning out into view of the street from the cover of an alley not far from a few piles of faintly glowing ash a few dozen yards away from the main horde. She had the card in her right talon, tucked in-between an upright middle claw and the index and ring claw curled inward—

“YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO WAIT UNTIL I WAS CLEAR YOU BLIND JACKASSES I THINK MY ARMOR TOOK A COUPLE ROUNDS—”

“Oh shit, she was still out there when we opened up,” Tack’s voice hissed, and his tone turned more terrified as it sank in more fully. “Oh, shit, she’s adding me to her ‘kill-list’ in her head already—”

“Then you can let her kick your ass or come with me into an ancient pony government agency building full of invincible, flesh-eating ghouls!” Ada shouted down at him as she set the fifty-cal aside on the rooftop and slung her bullpup rifle off of her back and into her talons. Gods did her shoulder ache from that damn thing. Silver lining—her sinuses had been cleared out by the muzzle blast!

Surprisingly, however, Tack didn’t immediately accept her not-entirely-generous offer of salvation. “Damn, tough choice there.”

“If you go in there, she may let you make it up to her later,” Lena suggested sweetly.

“…okay, building of unkillable monsters it is.”

How are boys so easy to manipulate like that... “Then get moving, those things will wake up in about twenty seconds!” Ada shouted, taking flight once more and gliding down towards the street. Her intended landing point was right past Raina, who looked ready to try and take Tack’s life the instant he zipped by her.

And she did try. Maybe fifteen seconds after she’d landed, she heard the pony yelping in surprise as he sped by her, and when she turned to see how badly the attempt went she saw the lithe griffon female pouncing after Tack as he tried to worm his way around her—

“Get back here you team-killing asshole—”

“We couldn’t see you through all those ghouls, girl, we didn’t mean it—”

Do not have time for this! “Raina, give him the card and get back to Rusty’s position! Keep those things back as long as you can!”

“Maybe I should kill him right now, I might not get to later!” the sour griffon screamed back, closing in on her prey.

“If we make it out of this, I’ll make it up to you later however you want, I swear!” Tack begged in turn.

Raina stopped in her tracks almost instantly, and after a moment’s contemplation she uncoiled herself from her low crouch. “However I want?”

“Yes, he will! The card!” Ada shrieked back. “We got friends in trouble in there, we don’t have time for this bullshit!”

Raina’s right talon flicked the card in Tack’s direction, which he pulled down into his combat vest with a tug of magic. “I want a good preening on my wings. The kind that gets me riled up for a good rutting, because that’ll be next.”

“It’ll be the best preening you’ve ever had!” he promised with a nervous, terrified smile.

“It better be.”

Ada’s patience had run out. By the time Tack had worked out the general plan for his reconciliation, she had grabbed hold of the back of his camouflaged armor and started to drag him along with her towards the MoAS complex. “I’m gonna string the both of you up by your tails if this shit goes any further south!”

“If the ghouls don’t kill me, she might!” he defended himself, wresting himself out of her grip before falling into a hard gallop beside her. “I’m just stacking the odds of surviving to tomorrow in my favor!”

“Then turn your brain back on and focus on the now!”

She thought he heard a quiet “eep!” out of him, but she wasn’t sure, and he didn’t say anything else for the rest of the run to the facility gate. She thought it odd that the two patrol ‘bots that had stopped Sling and Julie had yet to appear again, particularly with all the gunfire in the streets outside their patrol route. She’d been half-thinking that maybe Misty’s party had shut down most of the security systems but had turned the turrets back on to try and help fight the unkillable ghouls…

…but she didn’t really believe it. Sling wasn’t an idiot, it wouldn’t have taken more than one or two kills for her to realize she shouldn’t be doing that, particularly if Julie had any insight into the why of it. If they had gained control of the security systems, the MEW turrets would never have flipped back on in the first place. Something about the entire affair didn’t feel right, and that usually meant there was a trap or an ambush lying in wait. Where or how a facility full of unkillable gray ghouls would be setting up a trap for intruders, she couldn’t fathom just yet.

…but I’ll find out in a minute, she ended her musings, coming to a screeching halt before she could crash into the reception desk. To her left, the lengthy, debilitated hallway was curiously devoid of threats, and it wasn’t hard to guess why. Probably attracted to the gunfire further inside the complex.

That still left a question or three unanswered. “Nothing to shoot at? Where’d all the ones outside come from?”

“Maybe a gate on the left side of the perimeter wall,” Tack’s voice suggested softly. She had another, far scarier theory, but she wasn’t ready to air it out just yet. “What’s the play?”

“Quick and quiet, don’t shoot until you have to,” Ada decided for them. “I’ll take point, you watch our six, we won’t waste time with the doors and rooms along the way.”

She heard one of Tack’s hooves tap the floor, and then she raised herself up on her hind legs, waited for her sense of balance to correct itself in relation to her “unnatural” standing position, and then starting stalking forward with her bullpup rifle held low, ready to snap up and take a quick potshot at the first target that presented itself. Normally they wouldn’t go past a room without making sure there wasn’t anybody inside ready to shoot at them through the wall, but these things didn’t use guns, they just sort of…stumbled blindly forward, like zompony monsters from old horror novels. At the worst, they would have the cliché timing ability to appear right as they crossed a door or window and grab at them, so they would have to be quick with the head shot.

This didn’t happen until they rounded the corner at the end of the hall, and had made it halfway up the next hallway to take a left turn towards a side fire exit. A single ghoul groaned hungrily as it shuffled its way into her path maybe three seconds away from her, coming out of an office that still had its window pane intact. The thing was missing an ear and a quarter of its skin on the left half of its face, and about three chunks of flesh from its torso and front limbs, and a bit more flew off the side of its head when she put a round in it anooooOOOAAAA—

—oooly shit I think this dude’s gnads got torn off! she shrieked inside, the inside of her own haunches quivering uncomfortably at the sight of ragged flesh where the stallion’s equipment should have been when her head shot caused the ghoul to drop onto its side in the hall. But perhaps more importantly, the gunshot meant ‘quick and quiet’ was no longer quiet, so there was no harm in talking out loud now. “Tack do not look this guy over you will squeal like a girl,” she warned the unicorn behind her, but—

—but of course warning somebody not to look at something usually just made them want to do it out of spite. “Oh come on, it can’t be that baaaAAAAAAAAAT the hell his…his EVERYTHING got ripped off holy shit biscuits I’d kill myself if that happened to me—”

“Told you not to look, dumbass,” she sighed. Threat gone, move forward, almost to the turn—

“You know that just means somebody’s gonna want to look anyways!” he whined at her backside. “And I have to make sure he doesn’t get back up to bite my junk off!”

“…okay, I’ll give you that one. Fire exit just ahead, get ready.”

There wasn’t a need to lay out the plan here—the person on point would open the door, sweep for threats as they followed the door’s direction and checked behind the door while the second person zipped out and covered their back. And this was where the bullpup really came in handy, much more so than the old service rifle she’d been using. With such a short weapon she could hold it close, almost like a big pistol, shoulder it and just keep it steady on one arm while she opened the door. This one swung out to the left, so she stepped out and started swinging along with it—

—she had a brief glimpse of the courtyard and the threats waiting within it, and she did not like what she saw. A thing stream of gray ghouls were leaking out of the administration wing on the left side of the courtyard, and some of them had already taken notice of her and slowly turned their hungry desires towards her. She had the brief pleasure of watching two of them stumble to the ground after being shot in the head, but there were already too many for her liking. She snapped around the door, checked the space behind it for threats and finding none—

—Tack’s hooves clomped to a stop two seconds after stepping outside into the courtyard—

“Clear on this side!” she called out when he’d stopped, spinning back around towards the courtyard interior, and now she saw an additional three gray ghouls joining the first two for a quick nap. The gunfire was definitely coming from the other side of the courtyard, probably from right outside the security wing. Sounded like two guns, Leo hadn’t taken an M-pattern rifle with him, but it was possible they had found additional weapons and ammo inside the security wing to fight with.

“Shit, now getting strangled to death by Raina looks like a good idea,” Tack mumbled at the sight of the thirty-plus ghouls they could count from their position.

“But that’s not the Raina you came here to impress,” she reminded her libido-motivated comrade. “The Raina you’re trying to survive to get to will let you hump her if you do a good job of preening her wings.”

“…yes, that is a much better way of looking at this, thanks—”

—three more gray ghouls in the conga line streaming out of administration stumbled and fell in about a second’s time, just as a lone stray one oozed into view around the corner of the personnel wing’s outer wall—

—a pistol shot from the courtyard felled this one too, just as she was about to put a round in its head herself, and now Ada knew for sure that Sling was still alive. She didn’t know very many souls in the wasteland that could shoot a pistol that well. She stalked forward carefully, keeping an eye on both the corner wall and the courtyard in front of her, at least until she’d cleared the wall and could view the courtyard in its entirety—

“Oh, hell no,” she blurted suddenly, stopping cold at the sheer number of targets flooding towards the security wing. Leon and Sling were a few yards out in front of the security wing’s entrance, which was shut tight behind them and leaving them with either no escape from the horde in front of them, or protecting them from a surprise attack from another horde inside security. They had likely appropriated their M-type rifles from within security, and Leon was using his to good effect with headshots on just about every ghoul he took aim at. Sling had a little more trouble—even with a weapon sling wrapped around her body to help her carry and steady the weapon during aiming, she could tell the stable pony was still not used to handling a rifle with a forward-heavy balance and seemed to hate using her PipBuck's S.A.T.S. mode at all, and she’d miss about one head shot for every two successful hits, hence the 9mm pistol she’d had out in another spell field. Poor Julie was stuck behind the two—without a gun, she was forced to make do with what looked like several lengths of rebar, and at the moment was busy whacking the skulls of zomponies that were working their way around their friends to attack their prey from the side.

A hundred-plus ghouls were too much for three souls. She doubted she and Tack would make enough of a difference to beat the things back, but they could probably cut a path to them long enough to get a combat plan together. Get inside R&D and find the source of all of this shit, and blow it up.

“Come at them from their left, stay out of their fire zone while we blast our way in,” Tack stated sharply. No longer the laid-back, friendly pony looking forward to a pleasant evening, he was now (finally!) putting his focus into his work, and he could be deadly efficient with it when he put his mind to it. She didn’t expect that attitude to last, but at least now he wouldn’t be playing around with his life truly in danger.

They started their approach just as Sling had reloaded her rifle. Ada picked out a section of ghouls in the horde with the thinnest ranks and started popping heads, and Tack joined in right behind her—

—but the fresh gunfire seemed to attract the attention of part of the horde, for most of the ghouls in their targeted section stopped clamoring for Leon and Sling and turned their attention to the newcomers, as did the string of ghouls filing out of the administration wing—

—Sling stopped shooting and slung her stolen rifle low across her chest, muttering something to the effect of “Eff this”, and her horn began to glow with an intensely bright shimmer of indigo—

No no no no not magic you stupid crazy pony no n—

—a bright, purple-hued sparkling ball of mana quickly formed into existence in front of the mare, then morphed into a solid, building-size slab that stretched out roughly twenty-five yards in width—

—and which the ghouls seemed unable to pass through, as they crammed up against it in a futile attempt to reach their meals—

—with what appeared to be a great surge of mental effort, Sling’s mana-wall surged forward, shoving the horde back and away from them towards the fountain in the center of the courtyard. A few broken and weathered benches were ripped up from the ground and crumpled into pieces in the process, but in a few seconds Ada and Tack had a clear path to their friends and they wasted no time with the opportunity presented to them. A four-second dash brought them all back together—

“Why the hell didn’t you do that when we stepped outside?!” Leon yelled at the stable mare, who by that point had sagged to her knees in exhaustion and was digging into her gear for something to alleviate her condition.

“I literally just came up with that spell, do you see what it just did to me?” Sling heaved back in heavy breaths. “Shit where’s that stim shot Rico loaned me for a test drive—”

Oh, god, those things, Ada bemoaned, but nonetheless found her talons digging into the pouches littered across Sling’s armor to help find the blasted thing. “Don’t get dependent on those. They’re okay for extreme emergencies, but the withdrawal symptoms if you get addicted to the shit will make you wish for death. You might be better off practicing your magic so it doesn’t tire you out to use it in big surges like that.”

Sling found the stim shot first, on her right side, and she jabbed the three-needle device into her neck and hissed in pain as the pneumatic piston jabbed into her bloodstream and pumped it full of the stimulant. “That doesn’t happen overnight.”

“Then you’d better get started on that practice real damn soon—”

“Forget magic practice, what are you two even doing in here?” the mare spat back suddenly. With a final deep breath, she forced herself back up to her hooves, no longer short of air or energy. Hell, she was starting to look like she could sprint for three miles…

Tack answered in the way Ada expected him to. He pulled that red key card out and presented it to the angry mare as if it were a prize. “We have this!”

The expected response—joy and gratitude, for a start—did not manifest. In fact, she seemed more alarmed by the key card than by the hundred or so gray ghouls she’d just shoved away. “…no way in hell that just strolled out on its own like that. I think you got baited.”

“Baited? With the one thing you need to get access to the most secure part of the facili—”

He stopped mid-sentence as it finally dawned on him how incredibly convenient it was that the one access card they just happened to need would somehow miraculously stroll out into the open to be picked up and carried back inside. Too convenient.

“…what the hell is going on in here?”

“We’ll find out in about five minutes,” Sling growled at the card as she snatched out of Tack’s grasp. “How many of them got out?”

“Too many to stop,” Ada answered grimly.

The unkillable ghouls were getting closer.

She’d been watching the Runners shoot them for a couple of minutes, but they didn’t use their machine guns again, and they were struggling to keep them put down. There were enough of them that by the time they got down to like, twenty targets, some of the ones they’d shot would start getting back up and just come at them again. And of course the Runners had to reload, and they did it in a way that meant somebody had a loaded gun to cover their friends with while they reloaded. But they didn’t have unlimited ammo, and they would run out very soon.

Running more ammo to them wouldn’t work. That would be…what, fifty, sixty magazines somebody would have to carry all at once? And the unkillable ghouls were already pretty close to the Runners. Pretty soon they’d stop shooting and just run right back here, if they weren’t about to already—

Oooo, called it, they’re giving up, Light Tail thought sadly, watching the Runners through her binoculars as they suddenly got up, grabbed their two machine guns, and started running back towards the caravan.

“We’re doomed,” her voice announced casually. “The Runners stopped shooting.”

“Probably coming back for fresh guns and ammo,” Rico tried to reassure her, and she actually sounded pretty calm, whatever else she might be feeling. “Cit, get the caravan ready to move—”

“We’ve been ready, just give th—”

But Citrus didn’t get to finish, and the wasteland gods (big jerks that they were) thought it would be funny if some of the brahmin had something to scare them into breaking out of their harnesses and taking off without the big cargo wagons they were attached to.

The sucky thing, was that the something wound up being a few of those unkillable ghouls that had been sneaky and just walked around the block to get to them from an alley nearby. The mutant cows didn’t like that very much, and the moment those things started groaning and shuffling within earshot of everyone, the brahmin’s quiet moos turned into very loud and frightened animalistic shrieks as they started jumping and twisting inside their yokes and harnesses and tearing them apart with frightening ease. Her wagon rattled and shook for all of two seconds until the beasts attached to it broke free of their pony-made shackles, and judging by all the sounds of cracking wood going on outside, a lot of the brahmin were having pretty good luck doing the same thing. A few seconds later, most of them were shrieking and baying and doing just about anything they could to get away from here.

“Shit get those brahmin back here—” Rico started yelling out, jumping out of the wagon even as she started shooting at the gray ghouls with her pistol.

“And do what with them?!” someone further up the caravan shouted back angrily. Sounded like a stallion. “They shattered the yokes, we don't even have time to get the crates of replacements out to put together!”

Rico just started swearing and cussing a lot, like Mom would when she got really stressed out, but she wasn’t gonna say anything this time. She had a good reason to be stressed. Ten wagons and the ponies in them were suddenly stranded and on hoof, and if a few of those things had decided to be quiet and sneaky and get around to them from the side, there could very well be a lot more of them doing the same thing. They might have even been sleeping and hiding all around them the whole time, though why they would choose now to suddenly wake up didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Didn’t really matter. If they didn’t leave now, they never would.

“Everybody, take what you can pick up and carry in ten seconds, we’re leaving—” Rico shouted out loud, though Light Tail didn’t need to hear that. Kite’s paranoia where ghouls were concerned had her insist that they all keep their traveling saddles and guns and stuff on them in case they had to suddenly bolt out on hoof, and now she was glad that she’d listened despite getting three earfuls from her about siccing her pups on Raina earlier. She stowed the binoculars away and jumped out of the wagon, took a quick look around to see where those gray ghouls were coming from and how ma—

“Oh horse apples,” her mouth sputtered. She wished she didn’t have to look and just let someone else tell her what they saw, so she could just imagine it and not know for sure how close those awful things really were. It wasn’t a few, as she’d hoped but feared would not be the case.

There were dozens. Mostly in the alleys to their left an…

...and to their right?! Luna’s stars how could they have been so stupid and just watched that big horde in front of them and never thought to look to their sides too?! They were probably beh—

—the terrified shrieks of frightened brahmin gave way to one beast in particular beginning to scream in fear and agony right when that thought hit her, and she couldn’t help but look behind the caravan—

Yup. A pack of those gray ghouls had somehow managed to sneak around behind them despite the fact that there was a sniper somewhere high up and further behind them that should have seen them coming long before now, unless he’d decided to join everybody down here once Ada had flown down aaaand yeah that was probably how those things had gotten so close without them knowing it. It didn’t do anything to comfort that one brahmin that lagged behind its friends, though. While most of them had managed to escape the hungry lunges of the ghouls, one straggler did not, and a few of the ghouls had latched onto it and started…

…oh gods, no, not now, not this, it was just like what happened to Kite, she fell off the bridge, and then those things got to her an—

Rally’s body leapt out of the wagon and dropped down in front of her, blocking her view of the poor brahmin’s fate. She could just barely see her cyberleg lifting up and pulling her .357 out of its holster, an—

—Rally’s gun boomed once, and the beast’s screams of pain abruptly stopped, though she wasn’t sure the sound of tearing flesh and goopy blood and gore was much better. Those…those ghouls, they were eating the brahmin and for a few seconds they were doing it while it was still alive what was even the point of something so horrible and gross?!

“Eeeugh,” Rally quipped squeamishly. “Uhh, don’t look that way Elly.”

“…good shot,” she replied timidly. “…at least it’s not suffering anymore…”

A brief, distant memory of a dark cave and a flaming, giant pony-killing ant flashed back into her eyes, the screaming bug illuminated by the split-second muzzle flash of a scarred, battered 9mm in her telekinetic grip—

“We’ll be next if we can’t make a hole to escape through,” Kite howled fearfully as she jumped out of the wagon to join them, though the way her new shotgun was shaking about in her magic it didn’t seem like she would be all that good at helping them do that. “They’re fewer of them on the right, take them out—”

Rally’s leg swiped over to their right and started blasting away at the ghouls, dropping one with each shot. El-Tee likewise got her 9mm out, though it wasn’t the old one she’d been using up until recently. It was the same model, though, and looked really nice with the dulled stainless look on it that Rico called a “silver chrome”, if chrome could be silver or something. Gold trigger, really bright green gems for sights, and it didn’t rattle or look scuffed up and broken.

And, she quickly discovered with the first shot, it was a lot easier to hit with. Or maybe those two weeks on the road, when Ada made her shoot a hundred rounds of .38 Special in the morning and again in the evening when they’d stopped for the day, had helped make her better at shooting. Either way, the poor ghoul she shot fell to the ground. She’d have felt a lot worse about it if it hadn’t been invincible, but after seeing what they had done to that poor brahmin she wasn’t so sure about that.

She shot the next one she could get a clear bead on, in the head, and it too fell and lay still. So did the next one after that, and the next, an—

—BJ’s gun joined in on the shooting, but when she looked behind her to see what he was shooting at, she realized that their position was a lot more precarious than she’d thought. Those things were getting across the sidewalk already, and even though he was getting good head shots he couldn’t stop them all by himself, he needed help—

—she jogged away from Rally and got up right beside BJ, and just started shooting the closest ghoul she could see and he jumped a little when she showed up—

All throughout the caravan, gunshots started sounding out, but the hungry cries of the ghouls never wavered or stopped. The only thing that gave her comfort was that Kite popped up beside her and started shooting ghouls too, and her shotgun’s deep, chest-thumping booms made for a very effective damper to the constant ghoulish moans and groans and whatever. It was a pretty neat shotgun, really, it had this metal sleeve on the barrel with lots of holes and some kind of clamp device on the muzzle end that enclosed the barrel and magazine tube, and really good sights on the receiver and the end of the barrel an—

—and the big muzzle flash that shot out when she fired it made her pistol look like a toy cap gun, but it was turning ghoul heads into very bloody and disgusting chunks of chewed-up meat, and would probably keep the ghouls down for a good minute or three. It was hard to decide if she was comforted or grossed out.

Then she looked up to see Kite’s face, and the comforting feelings vanished. She’d expected a firm face, or at least a good attempt to hide fear, but Kite’s face torn between gleeful and terrified, and her wild eyes kept darting from one ghoul to another really fast. She was either grinning in sick delight at blasting ghoul heads, or forcing herself to smile to avoid screaming or crying or…or something. She didn’t look all right.

She was probably as far from all right as a pony could be without actually breaking down into a useless, blubbering mess of a life form. Bad. Very, very bad. Had to do something to help her, but what? One wrong word or action and she might lose it completely—

“Uh, Kite, I know th—”

Kite didn’t lose it, but she clearly wasn’t expecting an attempt at conversation in the middle of a fight with ghouls that wouldn’t die. Her short, high-pitched shriek was almost as loud as her shotgun, and it jerked up high and missed her target completely—

“Aaaaaeeeee—”

“Whoa, wait, bad idea sorry Kite!” she tried to apologize quickly—after taking a couple shots at a ghoul that was about to make it past a street light that had somehow managed to stay upright and intact through the centuries. “I just saw you kinda freaking out and thought—”

“No no no it’s fine it’s fine!” the jittery mare fired back in quick clips as a stream of red shotgun shells was fed into her gun. “…okay, actually, it’s terrible, I’m shooting unkillable monsters with my son and a little girl and I’m surrounded and I’m trying not to think about the last time this many were this close to me and oh gods I want to go back to yesterday and stay there forever—”

Ggggggaaaaaah mistake mistake now Kite’s freaking out for real! “Uuuhhh Rico! Raina! Anybody with a working brain, really, Kite’s losing it and she’s supposed to be looking out for us little kids here an—”

She though the darkening pall falling over them was just panic, despair, and gloominess settling in on everybody as the horde of monster-pony things closed in to gobble them up, but as she stopped shooting at ghouls and turned towards Kite to slap her in the face and wake her up she got a good look at something hovering above that Ministry place down the road…and then she wanted to join Kite in the freaking-the-heck-out party.

The gray skies had finally decided to take on another color. Part of the sky above the Ministry place, it was…wrong. It had come apart, and the individual pieces of cloud were stretching out into thick strands, like…like tentacles or goopy slime, and it was all mixing together in a swirling pattern before it started expanding. At first it was a dull pink, but as the cloud strands morphed together it shifted into a darker, more sinister shade of dark pathos blue, and when it started growing it did so with…with tentacles? It was hard to explain, but the sky was not behaving like the sky. It was behaving like something more organic and liquid an—

—and ghouls are closing in for a snack while you’re being scared by the sky, silly filly! —

—she whipped her attention—and her gun—back on the ghouls, had those bright green sights settling on what looked like a pegasus, and…and then she stopped.

Because the ghoul had stopped. All of them had, actually. And their eyes, they weren’t pale and milky and cloudy anymore, they had…they were glowing some pale, deathly blue light. The fusillade of gunfire that had been going off around her quickly leveled off and then quit altogether, and not because everybody was running out of bullets.

Because the bullets had stopped working.

“—ck they went from unkillable to completely immune to all manner of violence in two seconds—”

“Holy shit the wounds are closing up faster than they got made—”

“What’d they all stop fo—”

“Fuck-mothering Sisters, what the hell is the sky doing?” Raina’s voice trembled in barely contained terror, and Light Tail kind of wanted to smack Raina for that kind of talk against the Princess Sisters, but she could do that later. If there was a later.

And of course now that someone had pointed it out with crude language, every living creature in the street was staring up at the frightening sky and muttering their own little freak-outs, an—

—and the quiet, but high-pitched whines of her pups brought the gravity of their plight down on her. She’d forgotten all about the little fuzz balls, she was so used to them being within ten feet of her, and being all defensive of her against everyone that wasn’t Mom or Kite or some other friendly pony or griffon. They growled at a Union major like they wanted to bite the crap out of her, and they did bite the crap out of that bad pony she’d shot in the knee when all those Pythons started shooting up the diner weeks ago, and they usually weren’t afraid of something as harmless as the sky. But now Max and Mona were whining and scared of the things going on around them and they normally didn’t do that, and that was her big clue that there was something…unnatural, about all of this. She wasn’t going to say supernatural, or paranormal, even if it probably was.

But this wasn’t something that bullets and lasers and explosions were going to solve.

“W-what the fu--….w-what is going on here?” Rally’s voice asked out loud, though she had to have known that not one soul here would have that answer. “Why did they stop?”

Gaaaaokay uhhh…look, look around, see what else changed, Light Tail forced herself into action, tearing herself away from the now-glowing eye ghouls who had stopped for the moment. Look around, and…okay, so they were kinda surrounded on three sides, to the left, right, and behind, and while they kinda had an open route forward to the facility, that horde in the street was back on their hooves and slowly shambling over to them, probably to complete the circle of death around them. Nobody else seemed to be hurt, Rico had like…thirty ponies to her crew across two caravans? She wasn’t sure. Important thing was, nobody was dead, just that one poor brahmin that didn’t get away in time (and those stupid and freaky ghouls were still eating it!). The Runners were pouring water canteens over the barrels of their rifles, watching the steam rise up and grimacing at the sight. She wasn’t sure that was a good way to cool a hot gun down. Waste of good water too.

The sky was doing weird, creepy, and horror-novel like things, and it was centered above the Ministry place…so something inside the Ministry place was probably behind all of this. The ghouls became completely invincible about the time that the sky started doing its own weird thing, all three of these events happening in extremely close timing to each other, it wasn’t a coincidence. There was even that short time where the ghouls in the street just stopped and stared at them, or at nothing, and they stayed that way for a few minutes before they started moving again, and she didn’t think it was because Ada tried to use one for target practice. She would go so far as to say it wasn’t just something doing it…

…but maybe someone?

“…maybe somebody was here before us? Might have messed with something they shouldn’t have and now we got all these problems?”

“Without a security card? The ‘bots would have locked the place down—”

“Help me…”

Light Tail’s left ear flicked slightly, almost not believing that she’d heard anything but her own thoughts. “Di-did anybody else hear that?”

“…god, I was hoping it was just me,” Rally cried softly, and while she felt slightly better knowing she wasn’t going crazy, it didn’t really help any. “First monster ghouls, now ghosts?”

“Not a ghost…help me…”

Okay, okay, brave face, or at least one that didn’t look like she was scared to death (even if she was). “Sooo, uh, you…wanna come out and talk? Or something?”

A faint, shimmering see-through pony figure began to come together in the middle of the street, not too terribly far from her. The figure started life as an outline of dim light, but quickly took on enough features to become an image of a creature in its own right. Four legs, a tail, then a mane, and then the whole thing stopped being a see-through image and started solidifying, gaining a grayish coat with black stripes, and this odd little set of three earrings in the right ear…

And when she heard that voice again, the zebra-thing’s mouth moved and parted in tune with the words. “Help me…”

Kite’s shotgun, Rally’s .357, and at least three other pistols and two rifles all opened up on this zebra-image thingy before it could finish speaking, but the bullets just went straight through as though it weren’t even really there. Even so, the zebra thing’s face went from scared to annoyed the instant the guns started going off, and once everybody realized they were just wasting ammo they stopped. That was still like, two seconds of shooting wasted, and she couldn’t believe they even thought it would work, did they not even see how it just appeared in the first place?!

“Ugh, really?” she heard herself groaning. “No wonder you all suck at making friends, you shoot them before they can even say ‘hi’!”

“I didn’t shoot,” Rico countered in protest. “I know an image projection spell when I see it. Never thought I’d see a zebra using it, though.”

“Not…projection,” the zebra’s image pleaded wistfully. “Everything…wrong. Help me!”

Help? Is…is she stuck inside? “H-help? How? What’s happening?”

“The spell…losing control. Can’t control it. Companions inside, stirring them up—"

A shimmering wave of air began to fly down the street at them, like a heat mirage, but when it washed over them the sky above went pitch black. In the wave’s wake, glowing, smoke-like structures and objects sprouted from the street all around them like plants, and she recognized a great deal of them. Desks, chairs, doors, hallways, and somewhere in the middle of the whole mess were three pony-like figures and two griffons running in place. The objects around them would move past them, then fade out as they came closer to Light Tail’s position as new objects popped to life out in front of them. After a few moments, the running ponies and griffons grew more detailed and life-like and sported armor, guns, and even cutie marks, or what passed for cutie marks on a zebra—she could see the tribal-like pattern on one of them and instantly recognized it as Julaya. Mom’s cutie mark was so familiar that it was like seeing her own face in the mirror. Ada, she recognized simply by her size, as she was a pretty big griffon, and there was Leon right behind her, and that other pony that went with Ada…Tack, that was his name…

…but when she looked around to see how everybody else was reacting to the weird light show that had just been conjured up, she found herself dumbstruck into near-terror by the other change in the environment.

Or rather, the ghouls. They still stood at the sidewalks, forming a circle of unstoppable death around them, but now there were pale blue outlines of ponies superimposed on them. It was a grisly sight, seeing a mutilated ghoul and the image of a pony occupying the same space. With the pale blue faces right on top of the ghoul’s, it became almost a sick game of discovering what parts of the ghoul’s face were filled in by the pony….

…and all of the pony things were…sad…grieving…scared….

…and she swore she could hear them whispering in the hollow wind that was beginning to breeze through. Or that could have been everybody else around her scared out of their wits by what was going on…

“…oh, fuck, me,” Rico gasped in horror, her body walking backward until it awkwardly bumped into Light Tail’s body and almost bowled her over. “Oh no no no no not this not this oh god we’re fu—”

Light Tail spun around and slapped Rico’s left ear before she could drop that curse a second time in five seconds, though she had to jump up really high to do it. “Quit cussin’ and tell me what’s got you freaking out like Kite all of a sudden!”

“It’s soul magic,” Rico blurted, she must have been really freaked out to not even yell at her for hitting her ear like that. “It’s soul magic on a level I have never thought possible. These aren’t ghouls, they’re honest-to-Luna zomponies.”

“…wait, you mean like, zomponies as in the monsters from those weird horror-action novels my mom likes, or—”

“Zomponies as in actual undead slaves raised by a zebra ritual, which is what all those stupid books took the idea from,” Rico answered fearfully. “Only these zomponies aren’t raised from a virus or a space plague and these are a lot stronger than they should be. Their very souls are enslaved and bound to their corpses to serve as thralls, and bullets to the head don’t kill them like they should. There may be no way of killing them without making this zebra witch stronger than she already is.”

…oh…

….oh, god.

Oh gods that was even more horrible than if they’d just been turned into monsters by a flu bug or something equally silly! Endless torment, even in death, never allowed to truly die when it would have been a mercy to them…to be forced to watch as their bodies murdered without cause…

If there was a creature on this world that would make her want to start cussing it out herself, this zebra witch enchantress was coming really, really close to making her do it. She almost did, actually. Turned on this…thing, gloating at them through her projection or whatever she called, as if having all of these dead bodies and their tortured souls do what she wanted was something to be proud of and be recognized for, and the first word that threatened to come out of her mouth was the one that she slapped Rico’s ear over, even, she was just so…so mad at this pathetic creature, this monster! That…that…th—

“That’s messed up,” Blue Jay mumbled in his usual, casual how’s-the-weather tone, strolling up to Light Tail’s side to stare at this zebra creature. “Like, supremely, I bet even slavers would piss on you for this, and they enslave anybody they can catch like it’s a game. What’s the point?”

The zebra image glared down at them as if they were her next victims. “No point now! Help me! Set them free!”

Light Tail felt the hairs of her coat along her spine rise up in terror and her haunches quivering. She didn’t know very much about magic, but the word “soul” being a part of it spelled out what they were looking at. The souls of these zomponies were…it was like they were still tied to their bodies by some invisible rope. And this talking zebra ghost…was she responsible for it, and asking them to fix her mistake? She didn’t really deserve the help, not for something this…this evil, but the trapped souls around them…

“…we can’t,” she piped in softly. “…we can’t even get through these things to help. But there’s some of us inside that could, if they knew where to go.”

“Elly, what the hell are you doing—"

The zebra ghost faded away from the world, though the rest of the projected imagery of the inside of the facility remained, leaving them free to witness the coming spectacle. She had a funny feeling those ghouls wouldn’t move in for the kill for a few more minutes…but that didn’t make their wailing, haunting cries of despair any easier to listen to.

“I hope I pointed the zebra witch to the only help she’ll ever get.”

She hadn’t expected the route to her foe to be so directly laid out before her once they’d gotten through the R&D wing’s lobby.

The halls in this place were much more sensible than the security wing—aside from the main central hall that explicitly spelled out at the end “RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT SECTION 1”, there two more hallways at the left and right sides of the floor that ran parallel to the main hall. There were no side hallways or twisting turns of any kind, and a bright, deathly blue glow managed to pierce through the opaque windows that lined the wall of the R&D section.

They charged right for it. She wasn’t sure if they shut the entrance to the R&D wing before they did, but if they couldn’t stop her soon, it wouldn’t really matter in the end anyway—

—the instant she broke through the windows with a light mana burst sphere and dashed through the empty pane, she found herself face to face with a tendril-laced, blue-shaded transparent form of what looked like a zebra mare with surprisingly well defined features. Her eyes in particular were almost lifelike…

A short burst of gunfire from behind her ripped through the zebra image, but the bullets simply passed through it as though it were air, and the zebra-image’s face instantly fell upon itself in disappointment. “…seven.”

Though the words were spoken with an echo and seemed to come from within her own head, Sling almost instinctively understood them to have come from this…whatever she was staring at. And the first question to spring from her lips was…

“…seven?”

“That is how many times someone has shot me in the face when I appeared before them like this,” the zebra-image responded sullenly. “After the fifth time I stopped showing myself outside the facility and hoped that one might be brave enough to enter, where I could communicate more clearly. That was…so long ago. So long.”

“So you’re Zulana?”

“…yes. We must hurry. I have stalled the horde outside, but I cannot hold them for long. Your friends are in grave danger.”

“Wait a sec, stable pony, we could be waltzing into a trap—” Ada began to protest, only to be cut and dismissed.

“What went wrong with your spell, Zulana?” Julie’s icy tone asked.

“I will explain, but you must come with me now! The thralls are no longer affected by bullets! When I lose control of the horde, I will not be able to stop them again and they have your friends outside surrounded!”

“Surrounded?!” Sling shouted, a tinge of unearthly fear in her voice. Kite would be almost certainly losing it out there, facing something like this. “How?”

Zulana’s ghostly image did not wait for her to agree to its request and simply began jogging further into the corridors of the research wing, forcing her to follow it. “Others outside the facility were affected by my ritual when the balefire bomb exploded, so long ago. Its backlash amplified the spell far beyond my intentions. I have managed to contain them to this small area, but until today none of them were ever permanently destroyed by MEW technology.”

“Yeah, we saw that!” Tack roared at the ghostly zebra’s wake. “Rally and Elly didn’t drop more than three before they figured it out—”

“They WHAT?!” Sling burst out angrily. “Oh my god Kite you had ONE SUNDAMNED JOB--”

“Oh shit,” Ada’s soft voice squeaked before she raised her volume. “Uhh, I think they kinda scooted up to the fight before she even knew they had taken off—”

“Bite their heads off later, if there is one!” Leon cut in sharply. “Focus on making sure you get that chance! Keep talking, ghost mare!”

“The children did not make a noticeable impact on the thralls, but the security ‘bots inside the facility have been steadily felling them throughout the administration wing since they were awakened,” Zulana’s ghost continued as it made an unnatural ninety-degree turn to the left when it reached a T-section split. “The only way to stop them now is to destroy the totem maintaining and channeling the spell, and you will need magic to do it.”

“So you had the sense to anchor the ritual to a physical object, at least,” Julie murmured. “Little comfort to those you murdered.”

“I did not intend to kill hundreds!” Zulana’s ghost wailed, zipping again to the right at the next T-split, and from here Sling could see that the new hallway led directly towards an open security door, its entrance ringed by black-and-yellow caution markings and the words “PRIMARY LAB” plastered on the floor and above the doorway. That eerie, deathly blue glow that permeated the entire area was at its strongest within that lab, almost to the point of being passable as a room light…

She was surprised, however, by how bare the lab itself actually was. Aside from an old, dusty desk in the back and several statis tubes embedded into the wall beside it, there was no other discernable or noteworthy features that would even mark the room’s purpose.

The pile of bodies scattered around an intricately-carved wooden totem in the center of the lab, instead, would have made one surmise that this room’s purpose was anything but what it was supposed to be. So far as she could tell, there were ten corpses in total—just as Julie had said, each body had been placed in the center of a glowing rune etched into the floor, and the totem itself shimmered and pulsed with the deathly blue energy coursing through the runes and bodies. Atop the totem itself was a perfectly preserved body of a dull gray-coated mare, her black mane and tail carefully cropped and curled so as not to spill over the edge. Her face, facing towards them, seemed oddly peaceful, as if in a deep slumber, and Sling’s first impression of her was that of a photo still of a famed cellist from the time of Equestria That Was.

“…all right, what’s this?”

Zulana’s ghost paused as it reached the totem, a left foreleg gently scraping at it in longing desire. “…this, is what my folly led me to. This is…was, Dark Times. Her original name is lost to time. She performed a very dangerous mission for Princess Luna early in her reign, one that required her to fake her demise and assume a new life. I know only that she requested her new form reflect that of a famous cello player, though she never said why. A great deal of magic was involved in her transformation, and it was irreversible.”

Leon’s patience, shortened considerably by the dangers to his life today, began to run out. “Yeah, fascinating shit, does this story go anywhere!?”

Zulana’s ghost stayed at the totem, its head tilting upward at the body up top. “They killed her. The day the world ended…they killed her…”

Sling didn’t need any more information from there. It was frighteningly easy to piece it together, particularly when she considered she might have done the same thing if their positions had been reversed. “…you weren’t trying to murder everyone with that spell, you were trying to resurrect her.”

The ghost’s sad wail would haunt her for months afterward. “…they thought her a traitor, and myself the spy that had turned her against Equestria…me, the zebra marked for death by her own kind for taking a pony lover and aiding the Princess Sisters. They poisoned her morning tea, and she died right here as she was preparing for the day’s demonstration of the facility’s top project. I would not have even known who to blame if one of them had not been so cruel as to taunt me with his complicity in the murder as the poison slew her in my hooves. He was the first I claimed for my ritual.”

“And the rest of your victims?” Julie’s voice sneered at the ghost. “Did you claim them at random out of maddened grief?”

“It was a simple affair to peer into his soul and sift through his memories, once I had prepared the totem and inscribed the runes for the ritual into the floor. From there, a unicorn who had witnessed the murderer’s confession agreed to mimic Dark Time’s voice via a cantrip spell and lure the other conspirators into the lab. I had told him I would keep her killers bound until he could return with agents from the Ministry of Morale office in the heart of the city. And I was not technically lying.”

“So how did your attempt at a resurrection end up turning everyone here into undead cannibals?”

The ghost’s withers sagged considerably, its head hanging low out of guilt. “My entire plan was guesswork. The totem itself was inscribed with the ritual runes for the curse of thrall. I thought it necessary in order to channel the souls into Dark Time’s body and restore her. The rune circle surrounding the totem was my own design. I used symbols intended to represent life and renewal, but I was desperate when I made the circle and did not think it through entirely. I do not understand how they are interacting with the totem, if at all. As the totem drew the murderers’ souls into it, a balefire bomb exploded in the city, and the magical backlash wave from it…I could not have foreseen such an event ever occurring at the exact moment the totem began channeling souls through it. Had the bomb not gone off at that moment, the spell would have only affected those lying on the runes. But the backlash spread its energies well beyond this room and bound my soul to the spell in the process. Almost everyone within this building died from the…”death wave”, as I have come to call my sin, myself included. My body was spared the curse of thrall, as I had been the one to cast the spell, but my soul is anchored to the totem and its magic. Shortly after, the others rose as the undead and overwhelmed the rest of the facility. The only souls to escape the effects of the ritual were in the security and testing wing. By the time I was able to exert any control over the zomponies, only a few survivors remained. I had the thralls capture them alive and bring them here, to be placed in stasis. Given what was happening to the world, it was the only way to save their lives and protect them from the radiation that followed. They had been fortunate that the security wing was designed as a temporary shelter from the fallout of a megaspell blast, if only briefly.”

“Not much of a mercy,” Sling noted bitterly. “How is your lover’s body still perfectly preserved when the victims of your ritual look like the rest of the zompony horde?”

“I do not know, and I no longer care. I only care about ending this spell’s hold over the horde and freeing their souls from their torment. My own soul will likely be utterly destroyed in the process and sending me to a true oblivion, but for what I have done I deserve no less. The survival of your friends outside is paramount to you, yes?”

“What about anyone who might’ve been bitten in the last fifteen minutes? If we were to destroy this totem and the spell with it, would the curse be lifted?”

“I know of the one you speak of,” Zulana’s ghost—or perhaps, soul—answered, finally turning about to face them again. “Though she is not taken yet, the spell’s curse allows me to hear her thoughts as she suffers and slowly dies. If my totem is destroyed before the curse takes her, then yes, she will survive. But her despair weakens her resolve, and she is slipping further away with every passing moment. You must act quickly or she will be lost. And some of the horde in the courtyard have made their way into this building. They will be here soon, and many of the interior security doors ceased working decades ago. There is no way to block them out.”

Translation—stop wasting your time and starting blowing shit up. “Leo, Tack, set up a barricade in the hall, I don’t care what you rip apart to do it,” Ada’s voice barked almost immediately. “I think I can hear the damn things even from here.”

“We cannot just blow it up with a bomb or gunfire, the magic in the totem protects it from physical harm,” Julie muttered as she began scouring over the object in question, even as the boys bolted off to carry out Ada’s orders. “A powerful combat spell, perhaps, but the crazy pony weakens herself when she casts one in anger, perhaps the Alicorn’s Star—”

“You have DT’s project with you?” Zulana gasped in surprise. “Does it work? Some idiot in the test lab spilled coffee all over the case and ruined the keypad the morning of the mega spell event, I feared it might have also seeped into the weapon.”

Oh, wow, I was actually right?! “Doesn’t seem to have been affected by anything. Case was hermetically sealed for two centuries, it’s like it rolled fresh off an assembly line. A quick test fire showed no issues with either firing mode.”

A muffled chorus of rifle fire from the hallway began thumping through the walls of the lab, but they paid little attention to it beyond the fact that it meant the boys had not had time to even implement Ada's barricade suggestion. “Yes, yes, the Sun Stream matrix, that could work if it were focused into the totem’s ley lines—”

“Wait, what is this?” Julie interrupted as she reared up and practically stuck her nose into the body atop the totem. Her attention was drawn to a necklace with a silver oak leaf dangling from its chain.

The ghost/soul of Zulana seemed almost confused by the question’s relevance to their predicament. “It…it is her old rank insignia, from her previous life. It was the only thing from that time that she had left, and she treasured it as a reminder of her service. She never took it off…not even when we made love.”

“Could have done without that,” Ada mumbled with a light retching of her tongue.

Julie was not nearly so disgusted. “Did you ever do anything to the necklace? Or to her? In bed even? Do not be shy in answering, it may be important.”

The absurdity of asking the lingering soul of a long-deceased zebra for dirty tales of its old sex life almost made the situation tolerable. “…we…did sometimes dabble in magic potions and spells, when the mood struck us. I remember the last time we were together when I used a combination of a potion and a mixed zebra-pony spell that seemed to…heighten her experience of that encounter. I used her necklace as a focal point for the spell portion. It was always quite open to enchantments. She even allowed me to use it as practice for a phylactery fo…cuuuuuss….”

Whatever Zulana was—a ghost, a soul with no body—it seemed strange for an ethereal, incorporeal being to even have the capacity for memories, or to have trouble remembering things when there was no physical brain to work with. But hearing its words trail off into silence as realization and shock seeped into it, and it trotted (trotted!) back to the totem and reared up beside Julie to inspect the necklace itself—

“…I am a moron of the highest order known to sentient life,” Zulana howled in despair. “I know what happened now. Her necklace…the phylactery experiment, mother of all fu—”

“What’s a phylactery?” Sling butted in. It sounded very important to what was going on—

“It is an item used in olden times of magic as a…container, of sorts, for a living being’s soul,” Julaya replied calmly, her left hoof poking at the necklace’s oak leaf. “My people used soul jars, but others who practiced dark magics and necromancy in the time of Celestia would use any items that could absorb and retain magic. In necromantic arts, a phylactery would contain the soul of a powerful undead creature. So long as the phylactery was not destroyed, the undead would be nigh unkillable.”

“I never removed the enchantment after I had placed it,” Zulana continued—though her pawing at the necklace and the body that wore it was a bit more disturbing than her faint, echo of a voice. “Had I not been so overwhelmed with grief and anger, I would have remembered it. Her body…it grew cold, but never stiff. Her bodily functions did not cease and soil her corpse. The enchantment was designed to store her soul if she were to be gravely injured, but I had not counted on poisoning to be considered an injury by the spell. By the gods, everything I have done…for nothing?!”

“I would not say for nothing, careless one,” Julie forced herself to say calmly, titling the oak leaf about to reveal a small, bright blue glow covering its underside. “The phylactery enchantment will tell you if it is near a body it is capable of being placed into, and it appears your lover has healed from the poison. This totem you meant to revive her with via murder may have, in fact, been channeling the souls of your victims and using them to repair her body. Now that the work is done, destroying the totem may free her from her slumber. In a sense, you may have succeeded in your intent to restore her to life…at the cost of everyone else around you.”

The heavy guilt and shame that seeped into Zulana’s face and slumped shoulders was almost palpable…for a ghost/soul thing. “I…I had not meant such a thing,” she cried to the floor. “Only her murderers were to pay the price…she would never forgive me for either outcome, regardless, so perhaps it is a blessing that my physical body did not survive.”

"So when we destroy this totem…you go with it?”

“…yes. My soul is bound to the totem, and the spell. It is the only reason I still exist in this form, and can control the thralls to any extent. My ultimate death will be a fitting punishment for the crimes I have committed here. I will show you the ley lines within the totem, a direct stream from the Sun Matrix may be enough—”

“Not yet,” Julaya cut in, dashing towards the desk at the back of the room and rummaging through its drawers for something—which turned out to be some kind of mortar and pestle set, a small brush, and what looked like a cased set of half-empty vials of various colored liquids she couldn’t identify. “I need to add some amplification runes to the circle. We will not have a balefire bomb explosion to enhance the effect of the curse's destruction. The runes will suffice if I make enough of them.”

Leon and Tack came crashing back into the lab right then, and only at that moment did Sling realize that their shooting had stopped seconds ago. “…how bad is it out there—”

The boys had tried to slam the doors shut behind them and bar them, but had only managed to shutter them with their physical bodies when their pursuers began colliding with the doors, all but preventing them from moving away. “…do you have a bad scale that goes below zero?” Tack gasped as he struggled against the increasing weight and strength pushing against the doors. “’Cause the only thing bullets are good for now would be to put us out of our misery before they eat us.”

“No no no no no, need more time than this,” Julie murmured hurriedly, sorting through the vials and plucking out a blue vial and a green one to pour into the mortar bowl. “Need more time, can’t draw the runes in less than a minute, need two at the least—”

“We don’t have even ninety seconds,” Ada countered regretfully. “Shitballs we should never have come here…”

Leon and Tack must have felt they were about to lose the battle at the gate, for they jumped away from the doors and let them crash open rather than be crushed beneath the undead as they began to pour in. And right off, they could all see a major difference in their appearance. Now each zompony had what appeared to be an opaque form of a pony’s body overlapping the actual walking corpse, almost like a second skin. It was an eerily disturbing sight—a hungry, predatory and lifeless glare from the corpse, mixed in with what looked like a crying, wailing face of a pony horrified at what was happening before them.

She didn’t even bother shooting at any of them. If Leon and Tack’s efforts had been wasted, there was no reason to assume she’d have any better luck, even with Grayhawk, and she wasn’t about to make things even worse with manaburst rounds or the Alicorn’s Star. Maybe a barrier spell, but…no, they’d just go around it, she couldn’t make it more than twenty-five yards across and Julie said she needed at least two minutes, not one, shit what else could she—

--other blue-shaded, semi-transparent pony figures began to warp into existence around her—behind her, beside her, a couple in front, and what looked like an ever-encroaching field of wailing, crying ponies in front of her slowly stumbling towards her, and faint whispers slithering into her ears—

“…whoa, Mom?!” El-Tee’s voice shrieked in surprise from her left, and when she shot her gaze in that direction, she could see a filly-sized pony…ghost, or soul form replica of her daughter standing beside her, looking up at her with wide-eyed shock. “When did you learn to do this?!”

Oh Sisters no, I don’t want to kill anybody anymore!

“I’ve lost control,” Zulana cried shamefully. “All I can do now is give you the chance to say good-bye…”

Shit shit shit shit shit no no no no not like this no—

Noooooo my gods noooo not a child Celestia Luna help me I don’t want to see this!

“…good-bye? Who sa—”

“Light Tail, if any of you can get out of there do it right now!”

By the sun she looks like my little girl I can’t take it anymore somebody let me out of this nightmare!

“…leave?” the filly asked, somewhat confused by the request as she stared out at everything around her. “How? We’re surrounded, and all these zompony things are crying and wailing and I think I can hear some of them saying words even. They’re all just so…so sad, like they don’t want to do this…”

No, baby, not like this PLEASE RUN! “Light Tail I’m not joking get out of there!!”

How I wish they could get out of there—

Light Tail’s face froze in mid-thought. “…wait…we can kinda hear them…and I think they just heard you, so…that means—”

—and then her little girl’s face just lit up with a wide, gleeful smile and even wider eyes of joy, as if a great and brilliant prank plan had just formed into her brain. The only thing missing from the sight was a little musical ping sound to go along with it. “Idea! They’re sad and crying and stuff, what if we did something to cheer them up?!”

Oh my gods of all the times she can choose to be her empathic self she picks NOW?! “No, honey, do—”

Light Tail’s body stood up and took a few strong steps forward, and she thought she could see her daughter’s horn begin shimmering and distorting in the process. And then the little one took in a deep breath, cleared her throat out noisily…

…and did the last thing she could have expected of anyone facing down the hungry undead.

“A griffon tar is a soaring soul—”

Never mind that the strange, ghostly images of what looked like Sling Shot, Ada, Leon, Tack, and Julaya had popped up amidst their numbers, that the ghouls (or zomponies) encircling them and closing in had these bluish-shaded outlines of pony bodies superimposed over the corpses. Never mind that the apparition of Sling Shot was having a conversation with Light Tail about the very horrors in front of them and begging her little girl to try and flee when all hope was lost. Never mind that Julaya’s apparition was huddled near a totem with the corpses of ten zomponies collected around it and an eleventh body curled up into a sleeping position atop the carved wood construct, muttering something about needing more time for runes.

Light Tail’s response to her imminent and extremely gruesome, gory death was to suck in her gut, step out ahead of the group…and sing.

Of all the outrageous shit she could remember in her short fourteen years of life, she had never seen anything like what was happening today…and had never seen anyone decide that the appropriate response was to break into cheerful song in a misguided attempt to soothe the souls of the damned.

And yet as the filly’s words began echoing across the streets, aided slightly by the use of a sound amplification spell that she had learned during the two week journey to the Runners’ base camp, as her little high-pitched angelic voice began filling and overwhelming the soft, echoing wails of the dead, she couldn’t help but notice that the horde of hungry undead mutants stopped in their tracks…

…and though the corpses simply stood there, swaying and eyeing their meals, the ghostly pony outline forms all cocked their heads towards the singing filly, as though they were just as surprised as the rest of them to see and hear such a thing…

…and she swore she could almost hear them talking on the frail, gentle breeze passing through.

…wait, is that—

Oh my gods I haven’t heard a child’s singing in so long—

Sweet Celestia is she singing to us, that’s so adorable—

“—soul, as free as a mountain bird—”

She thought she could feel her jaw dropping open in shock that such a thing would even work, but she was growing increasingly numb to the absurdity of her day so far, and so all she could do was stare at this little filly, and then back at the hungry mutant ghouls, and wonder what had gone so wrong with her life that she would find herself witness to such a sight as this.

“—his energetic fist should be ready to resist—”

“What. The. FUCK.”

She was going to have to have a word or four with Rally, if they survived this.

But against all odds (except maybe the unseen godly deity that decided that this would work), her precious daughter and her endless empathy for the suffering of others had yet again found a way to do with words what couldn’t be accomplished with violence. The moment her little night light’s voice began to sing to the undead monsters coming to eat her alive, they all just…stopped. In this lab room, and the streets outside where Light Tail and all the other stood, the walking dead just came to a dead stop, and the poor souls still tethered to their bodies stopping crying and sobbing, and seemed to just…explode with what looked like surprise, and joy, and happy tears, at the sight of a child from the living world trying to soothe their anguish with a song.

And in a damning, dawning moment of clarity, she realized that Light Tail’s song might have been the first truly happy thing they had seen or heard since their deaths nearly two centuries ago. By the gods, she could almost feel the child’s love for life even now…

It was that lofty, tangible love of life that nearly drowned her out to the world, were it not for the simultaneous absurdity that a singing child could bring a horde of undead to a stop in two seconds when bullets to the head did nothing.

“—resist, a dictatorial word—”

Light Tail’s voice briefly broke from the song, amusingly whispering to her mother in a conspiratorial tone in an effort to go unheard by the monsters staring her down—

“C’mon mom back me up here.”

She almost snorted a laugh out of her nose. Surrounded, facing death by dead cannibals and would probably live through enough of it to see them rip her legs off, pull her chest cavity open, and pull her guts out to start snacking on them, and she was being asked to join her little girl in an impromptu singing practice session on Hilda and Mulligan songs.

And by the gods did it seem to be working. The zomponies stopped, and the trapped souls were enamored with the song and anxious to hear more.

“His nose should pant—” Light Tail began the chorus a split second later, and Sling’s thoughts strayed back to afternoons of another lifetime, when mother and daughter sat huddled around a table, reading and practicing this very song in an effort to cure the child’s lingering speech impediments—

“—and his beak should curl,” she sang as Light Tail’s voice faded, and right on cue, her child picked up the next line—

“His cheeks should flame—”

“And his wings unfurl—”

“His feathers should heave—”

“And his heart should glow—”

Aaaaaand—

Just like those distant afternoons, mother and child joined together for the final line of the first chorus, their voices timed together perfectly through practice and a growing, private enjoyment of the moment—

“And his fist be ever ready for a knockdown blow—”

“…uh, Ada?”

Her numb, dumbstruck body could only provide a vague, grunting response to Tack’s question. “…ya.”

“…are they singing?”

“…ya.”

“…why is it working, Ada?”

She finally found enough breath and sense of mind to speak a full sentence. “Beats the shit outta me dude.”

Now that Sling was joining her daughter in her insanity, the two had begun to sing together in perfect sync—the high-pitched voice of the little girl providing an amusing and oh-so-cute touch to the more adult, grown-up deeper voice of the mare. She had never known that Sling’s voice could sound so nice and cheerful and happy and just damned good at singing in general…

…or that such a thing would somehow, against all the odds of the wasteland, manage to bring the swarm of moaning cannibal ghouls to a standstill and turning the wailing cries in the wind into happy little shrieks of joy and happiness at the sight of it.

“His nose should pant and his beak should curl—”

“I’ve gone nuts,” Blue Jay’s voice muttered numbly, his body as still as a rock at the events unfolding before him. “Totally and truly nuts, she’s driven me that crazy.”

“—his cheeks should flame and his wings unfurl—”

Oh! My! Gods! They sound so cute together!

They must be related! Sisters?

That’s the love of a parent and child I can FEEL IT!

“—his feathers should heave and his heart should glow—”

The only words Kite could bring herself to say were not for her little boy’s ears, so she kept them to herself and offered only a pitiful explanation for what they were hearing. “Or we’re dead.”

“—and his fist be ever ready for a knockdown blow!”

Even with her thoughts focused on the singing, on the love and unbridled joy that her years of efforts to correct her daughter’s speech issues had not only borne fruit, but turned out to be saving a lot of lives today, she could still make out—just barely—Julaya’s hasty efforts to paint her additions to the totem’s rune circle, and a quick glance back over her shoulder gave her a rather unflattering view of the zebra’s backside. But she could see a couple of additional runes added to the rune circle, just outside the outer ring, with thick, solid lines connecting it to the original pattern, and Julie’s head snapped back as she carefully cradled the mortar’s handle atop her snout and mouthed off silently, a little longer.

…yeah, a bit longer. I think we can handle that…

Rather than wait for Light Tail to start the second part, she decided to do it herself. She was somewhat curious if El-Tee would do that silly “act it out” bit in the second chorus she used to do when she was like, eight years old—

“His eyes should flash with an inborn fire, his brow with scorn be wrung—”

Ooooh gods that mare sounds good did she teach the filly to sing?!

Oh sweet Celestia, the souls of these zomponies were even starting to look as happy as they sounded! “He never should bow down to a domineering frown—”

As she expected, Light Tail decided to join in on this part—

“Or the tang of a tyrant’s tongue!”

She must have, the two are in sync like they’ve done this a thousand times!

Sweet Luna it makes me think of my little ones, it’s heartbreaking and sweet all at once!

If you think that’s nice, wait ‘till Light Tail starts getting too into it.

She looked down at El-Tee, just to see what the little one would do with her singing parts once she got to them—

“His paw should stamp—”

Right on cue, Light Tail’s eyes narrowed into an angry glare as she picked up on her part of the chorus—

“And his throat should growl—”

Celestia’s teats she’s gonna act it out this is so cute! “His tail should swish—”

And just as she expected, Light Tail put on an exaggerated scowl on her facial expression. “—and his face should scowl—”

She wanted to laugh, she really did. But that would ruin the song, and perhaps its hold on the undead horde, so she just forced herself to smile gleefully at her child’s antics. “—his talons should flash—”

And Light Tail huffed and puffed and stuck her little chest out in a very prideful gesture. “—and his breast protrude—”

Oh gods how she wanted to laugh, and couldn’t. She could be unintentionally cute and endearing and it was simply adorable!

As was the timing at which they could sing together. “—and this should be his customary attitude—”

Hahahaha do you see that little girl that’s so cute—

She is just absolutely precious—

“His paw should stamp and his throat should growl, his tail should swish and his face should scowl—”

She felt a subtle tap upon her left side, where she’d holstered the Alicorn’s Star, and almost looked to see who it was when she heard Leon whispering, “Get ready.”

“—his talons should flash and his breast protrude, and this should be his customary attitude!”

“Done!!” Julie’s voice screamed, her hooves quickly pattering away from the totem, likely expecting an immediate reaction to her cue.

Wouldn’t do to disappoint her.

Sling spun about to face the totem, her eyes drawn to the ghostly Zulana’s foreleg seemingly placed upon the totem, and though no words were spoken, she somehow instinctively believed the disembodied soul to be directly marking the spot to be exposed to the Alicorn Star’s Sun Stream shot. She barely even registered that she’d drawn the ancient weapon, only that she had it held out before her, it’s small display screen reading “MODE 2, 100%” and the weapon’s bright arcane gem sight rods centering in on the ghostly forehoof as the gun’s emitter array unlocked and sprang out into a firing position.

She pressed the trigger back and held the gun into a death grip to keep its MEW stream on target. One second into the stream, the targeted spot began to glow bright red, almost like the oft-described morning sun that she had never seen. Two seconds in, and that same, bright red glow had spread throughout the entire totem, lines and lines of intersecting energy…and embedded with what she thought were bright pink mists of…of something, that seemed to radiate from her own horn, as if it were being drawn towards the totem—

At three seconds into the stream the bright, red glowing energy turned into a vibrant purple as the pink mist touched upon the totem, and then that same, bright purple glow rushed outward and swiftly overtook her body. It hit her in the horn first, and then rapidly spread throughout the rest of her body, overwhelming her senses to the point that she had to shut her eyes to block out the light.

Oh Luna, is it over? Are we free?

H-honey, is that you? Are you the light I’m following?

Sweet moonlight and sun, it’s like every weight is lifting away—

“…thank you…”

She was not prepared for what followed. A dizzying, intense flood of thoughts and emotions began pumping through her brain and, seemingly, her very blood vessels. She could barely describe what was happening to her, beyond the intensity of it. She felt a crushing despair and anguish, and then unbridled joy and cheer for the simple act of living. An equally strong desire to release herself and her feelings came after, and then came…love? Love for her daughter, love of guns and magic, love for…Kite? An intense sense of pity and sorrow for Rally and Blue Jay’s lives, and a desire to better them in any way she could manage, and an equally intense pride in Light Tail for being the empathic, caring, loving soul that she was.

She could discern small tidbits of other feelings and emotions in between. A fleeting touch of horror and rage, then a stream of relief, and then a hot flash of lust at the thought of Julaya, for reasons she suspected to be due mostly because of her eyes and the way Kite had done her mane—

—her body began to shake violently in a quick rocking motion, and then her eyes blinked—

—wait, didn’t I shut them a few seconds ago—

“—ing, wake up dammit, this is getting scary!” Ada’s voice shouted down at her, and as her eyes blinked again her vision suddenly popped back in with vibrant, colorful images of a very large griffon and her forearms shaking her body in an effort to rouse her from a deep sleep she didn’t remember entering.

“…wake up?” Sling heard herself mumble. She didn’t feel tired, or sleepy, or…or anything like that. She felt great. Like she could stand up and fly above the clouds on nothing but wishes and good feelings! She wanted to get up and run, she wanted to bounce off of the wall like a little filly, she wanted to find Kite and throw her to the floor and just make mad love to her right there in front of everyooooooooone wait what?!

“You’ve been out for hours, you bat-shit crazy pony!” Ada half-laughed at her, even in her great concern over her state of being, and that was when she noticed that Ada had stripped off almost all of her combat gear and weaponry, and that they weren’t in the lab anymore being approached by an undead unkillable horde…and then Sling began to notice that all of her combat gear and armor had been pulled off of her as well…and…and were they in some kind of administrative office? There were a couple of bookshelves, and it felt like she was lying on an old couch and there was a desk with a broken terminal on it to her left and pots with dead, wilted plants and trees in the corners of the room—

“…what do you mean ‘out’? I just blasted that damn totem like, ten seconds ago or something!”

“Yeah, Julie and Rico said you might have experienced that magical discharge wave differently, being as you were the one setting it off and the gun’s laser stream was still connected to the totem when it went off, which meant the magic went and flowed right into your brain through your horn,” Ada replied, pulling her arms away now that the bat-shit crazy pony was awake and confused as hell. “Damn thing spread out for blocks, it felt amazing! The first couple of hours seemed to pass by in a few minutes—”

“Did it work?” Sling blurted in the next instant. As interesting as that might have been to hear if Ada was feeling some of the things that she was, she was more interested in whether or not they were going to die in the next few minutes.

“Did it work? Did it WORK!? Girl, those zomponies turned into dust the moment that magical wave hit them! All of them! I don’t understand what Julie did or how it worked, I just know that it worked and we’re all good and safe in the administration wing! Got the brahmin hitched back to the wagons and moved them into the courtyard, Rico and her crew have spent the last three hours going through the place for all the loot they can haul off! Found some good shit too, guns, ammo, meds, Kite even found the medical clinic in the security wing and everything in there’s intact! We can pretty much set up an emergency surgery unit in the safehouse we’re moving to tomorrow, she could take care of anything! Disease, physical impairment, combat injuries, deep surgery, she’s freaking out like Rally!”

Everyone seems to be! “…wow. And the kids, they’re all fine now?”

“Y’know that reminds me, what the hell possesses Light Tail to do the crazy stuff she does?! She like, outright SANG to those things, and it WORKED! She’s Light Tail the Zompony Soothsayer now!!”

Oh gods, that’s going to drive her crazy. “Hero worship of my little girl? Really?”

“For saving all our asses with the craziest idea I never would have thought of? Hell yeah! Any other questions, I’m totally WIRED right now!”

She had a hundred of them, really. What happened to the soul of Zulana, for one, but she had a sinking, depressing feeling that the vague, faint “thank you” she heard from her was her final words as she passed on to either oblivion or to whatever awaited a soul after death. Which brought her, ironically, to the reason that any of this happened at all…

“…the body, on the totem. Zulana was trying to resurrect it, what happened to the body after the totem was destroyed?”

“Oh, her!” Ada quipped excitedly, hopping aside to give Sling a view of what lay on the other side of the room…a gray-coated mare, with black mane and tail, sleeping soundlessly, and with what looked like an active, steady rate of breathing. Her cutie mark was a simple musical record, adorned with a song note in the lower left section of it. It took Sling a couple of moments to remind herself that this wasn’t the mare’s natural born appearance…

“The totem didn’t explode, or anything crazy like that,” Ada continued, watching the sleeping mare along with her. “The way Julie and Rico explained it, we more or less just destroyed the magic within it in a way neither of them can explain to me to where I could make sense of it. I just know that it worked, and that this mare’s vital signs shot up right afterward when Julie snagged her off of the totem and took a pulse. Kite thinks she might be in her early twenties and that she could be out for another day or two, and she’ll be in for an extremely rude awakening when she comes to. There were a few stasis pods in the lab too, but only two of them had live ones in them. The rest all failed over the last couple of centuries. Total of…five bodies. Too decayed to even tell if they were mares or stallions. Rico’s crew got the live ones out of their pods safely, one unicorn mare and one pegasus stallion. They’ll all probably go back with her caravan. Today’s been totally nuts, almost seems like the rest of my life’s going to be pretty tame compared to this.”

“You realize you just ensured the wasteland gods will go to great trouble to make you wish you’d never said that, right?”

“…aww, dammit…”

She stared at this sleeping relic of Equestria That Was for perhaps a few moments longer than was appropriate when the sight of her sparked a new, panicked question that honestly should have been one of the first ones out of her mouth. “Oh, Luna, Misty! Did she make it?!”

Ada’s light sigh was the first less-than-happy gesture in the last two minutes—or perhaps, the last few hours, if she really had been knocked out that long. “She’s alive, but she’s not in great shape. Kite’s pretty sure she’ll survive, but Rico wants to get her back home as quickly as possible regardless, and I don’t blame her. The plan, at present, is for them to haul everything that we need to our safehouse and be back at our main camp by nightfall tomorrow, and then back on the road home the day after.”

“Safehouse?”

“We’ll explain everything tomorrow morning,” Ada assured her. “Kite’s got your sleeping space set up. Two halls over, third door on the left, marked “Litmus Cloud”.”

“Sleep? I feel like I could run laps around the whole damn town.”

“That’s where Kite wanted you to go when you came to. Probably wants to check you over, make sure that magical wave lash or whatever didn’t mess you up too bad. Better safe than sorry.”

Hunh…well, that would actually be a pretty good idea, now that she thought about it. “…yeah. Would suck if I woke up in the morning with an extra tail or a third eye from all this.”

“Wouldn’t it?” Ada’s voice taunted back at her as she showed herself out of the office. A quick look around her showed her to be in the middle of a hallway with several other offices within it, and she opted to go left until she could turn a corner and went right. Ada said two halls down, but not which way that ‘down’ was, so she’d have to guess and she probably should have asked her what she meant first but oh well.

Compared to the rest of the facility, it seemed as though the administrative wing had sustained the least damage, or they had simply chosen a section that was in the best shape for their sleeping space today. The homely, tan-colored walls and oak doors were quite pleasing in appearance and did a great deal to calm down a number of her raging and swirling emotions, though she still felt an unexplainable and urgent desire to find Kite and…do things. She didn’t even feel like fighting it this time, either. She hoped this “safehouse” would measure up décor-wise.

When she passed by the second hallway, she hooked a right and spotted Rally literally hopping her way down the same hallway, giggling and squealing all the while—

“You sound pleased with yourself,” she made the mistake of saying in greeting to the teen, at which point Rally simply hopped about one hundred and eighty degrees with a huge, tooth-filled grin on her face—

“Oh sweet Luna’s cheeks you have no idea!!” she laughed/giggled. “Rico found a few rooms stuffed full of all kinds of tech and I am just so JAZZED! We got most of it sorted and catalogued, but she told me to leave the rest to her and just get some sleep but I’m not going to get any sleep like this so I asked Kite if she had any sedatives or something and she just slapped with this delayed sleep spell that’ll drain all the energy from my body in about twenty minutes so I gotta get ready for bed so Bu-EEEEEEEEEYYEE—”

Without skipping a beat, she turned back around and continued on her merry way until she reached the end of the hall, and then started hopping left and disappeared around the corner.

Kite’s voice squeaked behind her a moment afterward, but somehow Sling didn’t jump up from the suddenness of it. “…oh Celestia I hope that spell kicks in faster.”

“Is everyone like that?”

Kite’s body slipped past and nudged her to follow her along as she made her way towards what looked like the third door on the left, with the name plate next to the door marked “Litmus Cloud”. “More or less, but the effect is lingering on some much longer than others. Except BJ, of course. He’s looking at everyone like we’ve lost our minds. The moment he found a spot in here to hole up in and hide from us he zipped in and hasn’t come out since. Said Light Tail’s song to the undead was all the crazy he could stand to take today and didn’t want any more of it.”

“No shit,” Sling murmured absently. Now that she had what she wanted—Kite within grabbing distance—it had become something of a fight to keep in control until they could get behind that door and shut it behind them. She hadn’t realized she had already made up her mind what to do…

…only that she no longer cared to hold back.

“More worried about you, really,” Kite went on, her magic wrapping around the door knob and twisting it open and oh gods why she did find the mere act of her walking through the door so attractive? “How do you feel right now?”

“…hungry,” Sling replied as she hurried after her prey, her left hind leg pushing the door shut behind her. This particular office was a bit bare. Just a desk with a bookshelf on one side and an old couch on the right, with most of her gear piled up on the desk and two sleeping bags rolled out and opened up to create a crude and not-very-comforting mattress of sorts. The two pillows and wool and fleece blankets thrown upon them were much more promising in terms of comfort, but that was for later.

The sleeping bags would do.

“Figured as much, you’ve been out pretty much the entire afternoon and half the evening,” Kite said, turning towards the desk as her magic began to poke at her saddlebags, perhaps for one of her Stable rations or an MRE. “We’ll get you fed, then I’ll start the examination. I’m not an expert on magical exposures like this, but—”

It took her about that long to put up five sound suppression fields—one on each wall, plus the door—and by luck or happenstance Kite had allowed herself to venture close to the improvised mattress on the floor, and that’s when Sling pounced on her pretty mare and tackled her to the ground—

"Hey OOOOF what the hell is wrong with yoooOUUUUUU—” was as far as Kite’s shout of rage went before she was attacked with a deep, lustful kiss that killed the scarred mare's telekinesis spell and left her capable of only protesting by pushing Sling’s head away with a hoof to break the kiss. “Whoa whoa what the hell Sling?!”

“I’m not hungry for food,” Sling’s husky voice heaved, no longer able to restrain herself as went back on the offensive. “I want you.”

“Wait are you serio—” were Kite’s last coherent words of the night before Sling ended them with another kiss and pinned her partner to the floor with her body weight.

Neither of them ever got back up.

Chapter 24

Of all the ways to defeat a hungry horde of kinda dead ponies, singing Hilda and Mulligan songs and soothing their souls into submission was one of those “WTF” moments, or at least that’s what Rally was saying for the rest of yesterday when it was all over. She still whacked her on the ear for that, ‘cause she’d finally figured out what the F part of that three-letter word stood for and since nobody would tell her what that word meant and got really nervous and had these ‘oh crap’ looks on their faces when they said it she figured it was a really bad word that they knew they shouldn’t be using.

It didn’t do anything for the near-hero worship the Runners were showering her with afterward. They really liked her before, but now it was like “Songstress Light Tail” or “Light Tail the Zompony Soothsayer”. They kept asking her what made her so crazy that she would even consider that a good idea, or how she had any confidence that it would work. She didn’t have any answers for them, only an incredibly important need to go talk to Mom and make her make the Runners give her a little space and peace and quiet and stuff.

She just wished Ada and Rico had picked somewhere else to stay the night besides the once-infested-and-haunted ruins of the ministry place where all those zomponies had come from. Never mind that they’d all crumbled to dust and withered away to the point that there was no sign they’d ever been there. It didn’t make her feel any safer being in a place where hundreds of ponies had been cruelly murdered and several dozen eaten alive. She didn’t sleep all that well at first and wound up squeezing into Rally’s sleeping bag just to have somepony trusthworthy to cuddle with and keep her safe, because Mom and Kite were in the next office down the hall. Rally had a blast trying out all the tech tools and oskiscope-somethings and a lot of other stuff she didn’t understand, but which caused Rally to make high-pitched squealing noises whenever she turned them on and found that they worked. It seemed like some of that stuff was going to work out great for helping keep her cyberleg in good shape. So…at least she was happy. And not freaking out. And not worrying about all the horrible things that had happened here.

Sometimes it sucked to care so much about life.

At least Rally didn’t snore, or complain about having a stupid scared little filly take up space in her sleeping bag and cling to her like a lost puppy. And it was…nice, to have something warm and soft and fuzzy in her grasp that wasn’t Max or Mona or Mom or whoever. What had been a difficult and trying evening trying to get some sleep became a much calmer and nicer snooze once she caved and just crammed herself into Rally’s sleeping bag. Mom would probably tell her to start growing up, but if she was going to be all cuddly and snuggy with Kite, then her words didn’t mean much.

So! Anyway! Morning came, whether she liked it or not. At first it was like every other morning. Wake up, beg for her brain to give up and go back to sleep, and when it failed to shut down, reluctantly leave the warm, secure sleeping bag and stretch a bit. The usual morning routine and everything that came with it afterward. She wound up coming back to the office she slept in with Rally and ate her ration there. It was only a half-hour into the morning when she realized that Mom hadn’t bothered her yet…

Her curiosity overrode her common sense and she went looking for Mom. Her first thought was that Mom had probably decided to just keep sleeping in, like she used to all the time back home in the Stable. Wouldn’t have been that big a surprise even after everything that had happened yesterday. Her second thought was that Mom was already awake and just prowling around, making sure there weren’t any other monsters or threats hiding somewhere. She wasn’t sure about Scenario #2—if Mom found nothing, then of course she would hear nothing, but if Mom found something she’d have heard gunshots before now. She hadn’t heard any gunfire, or explosions, so she hoped that meant good things.

Going on the assumption that Scenario #1 was much more likely, she opted to check the office next door and make sure that Mom was either; 1. Still sleeping soundlessly, or 2. Actually awake and either eating breakfast or doing something else, somewhere else.

She had not mentally prepared herself for the third possibility that Mom was awake but doing something else in that room. And so it was that when she opened the door unceremoniously and without announcement and invited herself in, that was exactly what she found.

Mom.

With Kite.

Buried under wool blankets, using their sleeping bags as mattresses.

Doing….something. Kissing? Or…

Something awkward and really, really private and not for the eyes of anypony, especially those of a ten and three-quarters old filly who’d only just two days ago figured out that Kite was…smitten, with Mom.

Curse her luck and her stupid little voice, she just had to go and say something.

“Ma…maaaooooom what are you doing?”

Mom’s body, though obscured by the blankets draped over her and Kite, jerked suddenly in place and then froze, her head snapping back at the door with this really wide-eyed “OH CRAP” look on her face. Kite was just struggling not to laugh out loud and wound up plugging her mouth up with her forehooves, though she stayed still underneath Mom otherwise.

“I uhhhh….I’m….uhhmmm…K-Kite…a…a little help here…please…please help me explain this.”

Light Tail simply stood there, agape and flabbergasted and confused and everything.

When Mom said nothing after a full ten seconds, Kite had finally managed to stifle enough of her amusement to give an answer that wasn’t a dodge or a screaming order. “Elly, close the door.”

She probably meant that as “leave and close the door”, but El-Tee numbly did exactly as she was told and closed the door behind her. “…’kay, door’s closed what are you doing?”

Mom’s eyes shrank into pin-prick irises, though Kite just snickered for a couple of seconds. “…okay, should have told your broken brain to leave first, my bad, but I suppose some explanation is in order. Unless you can figure it out in the next ten seconds.”

“Kiiiiiiiite,” Mom whined and warned simultaneously, though her exceptional nervousness made her words a little less…impactful, or something. She didn’t care, she just wanted an explanation that wouldn’t make her brain explode.

“Oh come on, she deserves something for her trouble. And if you don’t tell her, I will.”

Kite realized her mistake almost immediately—which was about when Mom made the most of it. “Fine then all yours.”

Kite’s eyes finally lost their mirth and regarded Mom with the disdain she’d show a misbehaving child. Like herself. “Oh, for the love of…fine, you big baby, but you’re going to pay me back for this. Elly, you are aware that when two ponies love each other, they may want some…private time, with each other, yes?”

The puzzle started piecing itself together in her brain, piece by piece—heck, it even made clicking sounds in the process! Mom. And Kite. And Kite smitten with Mom. And Mom kinda smitten with Kite. And now they were alone, in this room, and…

…it clicked suddenly. So very suddenly. As in click, click, BOOM hooolleeee—

I just walked in on them getting freaky and lovey and oh HOLY HORSEFEATHERS—

“AaaaaaHHHH YOU MEANT LEAVE AS I CLOSE THE DOOR SO YOU CAN KEEP HAVING FUN OKAY OKAY I CAN DO THAT HAAAHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA—”

She didn’t know how she managed to do exactly that so quickly—like, one second she was in there, with Mom and Kite, and the next she’d simply appeared in the hallway and tried to slam the door and leave Mom and Kite alone so they could do all the freaky things they wanted for as long as they wanted and she didn’t want to be there anymore only she couldn’t because she felt a cool, slightly tingling sensation wash over her and she realized that Mom was dragging her back in with a telekinesis spell and she didn’t want to go back—

“—aaawwait wait wait wait leggo leggo I don’t wanna sta—”

But Mom wasn’t having any of that. If anything, the moment her body was flipped around sideways, Mom just started…

…it was a weird sound. Like, a squeal and a shriek, and happy, all at once, and she just jumped out of the sleeping bag and started hopping towards her like an uncoiling spring—

“Oh oh oh oh OH OH OH LIGHT TAIL LIGHT TAIL HONEY LOOK LOOK LOOK—”

She heard the word “look”, from a mare that sounded like Mom but was way too happy and cheerful and bubbly, but she saw the forehoof pointing at her body somewhere, so she just started scoping out any part of her body that might have something stuck on it, like her sides, or her tail or h—

The world beyond froze in time when her eyes swept over her hindquarters, and when she didn’t move from her statue-frozen posture for a couple of seconds she felt Mom’s magic putting her down on her four hooves, but she didn’t really care about escaping anymore.

Her hindquarters, having always been blank and filled with nothing but her coat color, were now adorned with a rite of passage that all fillies and colts strived for.

A cutie mark.

Hers, to her eternal delight, had a black eight-point compass rose as a background. In the center of the rose was a brilliantly shining heart made of either crystal or diamond, almost like it was a piece of jewelry. The heart itself had a crack on its lower left surface, and a thin layer of crimson was seeping from it. Like…blood? Weird, but…

…but she didn’t really care because all she could see on her butt right then was that cutie mark that she thought she’d never get and now she had one and today was just going to be SUPER AWESOME and she had to lift her hind leg up and curl it towards her a bit to get a better look at it and it was probably a good thing that nobody was around to see her eyeballing her hindquarters like this but—

“SWEET CELESTIA WHEN DID I GET THAT IT’S SO AWESOME FINALLY FINALLY YES YES YES YES—”

“YES YES YES YES!!” Mom squealed with her, scooping her up and throwing her onto her back as she started hopping out of the room and into the hallway. “You got your butt tattoo at last, you get to be lazy all day and do nothing today I’m not joking we’ll figure out some kind of party later but YES YES YES!!”

“LUNA’S MOON MY BUTT MARK IS AWESOME I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IT MEANS BUT I WANNA SING SOMETHING—”

The only thing worse than Elly screaming like the little girl she was…was Sling screaming like one too.

To hear both at once was…a Really Bad Sign.

With a snarl and a hissed curse at the wasteland gods, BJ stumbled out of his sleeping bag and struggled to walk in a straight line towards the door of the office he’d hid in for the night to escape yesterday’s insanity. Zomponies that wouldn’t die? Elly singing to the damn things, and find it actually WORKED? And then the world went WOOSH! with some kind of surge of magical energy and suddenly everybody was hopped up on a sugar and caffeine high from hell? No! None of that! That was his limit. He grabbed a sleeping bag, two fleece blankets to use as pillows, and locked himself in the first unclaimed office space he could find once they’d settled on spending the night in the Ministry complex and refused to acknowledge the world for the rest of the day.

Maybe he was gonna have to extend that to this morning too. With the racket that Sling and Light Tail were making, he was pretty sure everyone in the building could hear those two no matter where they were at. And sure enough, when he barged out of the office and zeroed in on the source of the commotion, it looked like the two had attracted a hell of a following. He could see Rally’s head poking out from another office, and then there was Mom’s head staring at Sling’s backside as the crazy stable mare hopped down the hallway in his direction with a crazed, gleeful and cheerful smile on her face and it was honestly TERRIFYING—

“A frolicking band of fillies we, who grew tired of boring history—”

No. Oh gods no, it wasn’t Really Bad, it was A REALLY BIG BAD. Sling and Elly singing together in joyous unison as their madness to—

--Sling Shot’s body hopped past him momentarily, and he dared to chance a look up at Elly…and saw something that had not been there yesterday.

A cutie mark on Elly’s butt. It had some kind of heart made of diamond or crystal on top of a compass rose, and the heart was cracked and bleeding a little, and it was weird looking, but did so much to explain their sudden descent into gleeful madness.

“—were trotting about in truancy when we ran into angry bees!”

He didn’t even wait for them to get out of sight or turn a corner. He just zipped back into the room and slammed the door shut, and buried himself back under his sleeping bag and wool blankets, the only shelter available to shield him from Insane Day #2. “Nope nope nope nope nope not dealing with this shit.”

A fleeting glance at her checklist of the haul from the Rain Song facility only served to remind her how close she had come to losing the most important things in a pony’s life.

Misty, still weak and ravaged by the zompony curse that had been laid upon her, was lying in the sheltered cargo wagon draped in a blanket and sleeping bag as though she was attempting to escape a terrible cold. Her vital signs had improved noticeably since yesterday afternoon, but that by itself did not bring her comfort. If not for the day’s work ahead of them, her caravans would already be high-tailing it back home. Sling had been inclined to let them leave, but…

Ada had the right call, even if it put one of her ponies at risk. There was simply too much valuable salvage to leave unguarded now that the facility’s defenses had been more or less permanently disabled. Maybe three ‘bots were left in working condition—a Handy model, a combat sentry ‘bot that had thankfully never powered itself up in yesterday’s chaos, and some kind of bi-pedal prototype model that had everypony mystified. The rest had all been rendered inert, either by the backlash wave or by the central controller mainframe being hit by it. These alone—even dismantled—took up two of her ten wagons. The bi-pedal prototype was coming back home with her expedition, much to Rally’s disappointment, but she had no objections to leaving the other two behind.

Then came the weapons and ammunition, and by gods was this place loaded. The test lab in particular had better weaponry than what had been available to the security team, and might have made a difference in the survivors’ odds had they thought to use them in the hours after the megaspells. Some of this haul was being left with Sling’s party, and some of it was coming with them.

A few minutes prior to midnight last night, they discovered the most important and valuable find they had ever made since they’d started exploring the surface world.

A Steel Ranger power armor suit.

Or what remained of it, anyway. It was missing most of its component pieces, meaning it wasn’t sealed against environmental hazards like radiation, chemical weapons, and diseases. And a few servomotors had frozen up and needed to be replaced—not that the suit would have taken anyone anywhere even if the internalized servosystem had been pristine, as the suit’s onboard power source had gone dry roughly a century ago and needed to be replaced. But even in its damaged and non-functional state, it was a highly valued prize, and at first there had been something of a tense argument about who would lay claim to it, since Sling had already been promised the Alicorn’s Star and half of its spare power cells. Some of her people had been ready to take the power armor by force if necessary, and Ada wanted to keep it for her team and trusting Rally’s unhidden and unbridled giddiness to fix it in the near future. The facility had the tools and equipment necessary to repair and maintain the armor, though moving all of this equipment regardless of its ultimate destination would take up four of her wagons, and would slow their travel speed significantly. Citrus had thought it worth the trouble.

But she gave it up, in the end. If Ada was going against Chief Virgil’s wishes and going solo in getting Withercha back under the control of its residents, she was going to need every possible advantage to succeed. A half-hour she’d spent with Rally cataloguing and organizing the equipment in one of the tech labs had convinced her that the teen had taught herself enough about MEW tech that she could reasonably wing the rest of it so long as she didn’t take stupid risks, and ultimately surrendered the power armor and its associated equipment and maintenance tools to Ada and Sling. The armor’s power core was intact and hot, but some of the relays in the armor itself needed replacement, and it only had the torso component and one right front leg component. Additionally, only two of the eight sets of underarmor bodysuits found in the power armor’s test lab fit Sling, so they would need to be careful with them. And she didn’t want her expedition slowed down on the trip home. Misty was alive now, but she needed medical attention and she needed it as soon as possible.

That hadn’t gone over too well with her expedition. Losing both the Alicorn’s Star and the first working suit of power armor they’d ever found in the wasteland was almost a slap in the face after what happened to Misty. Had Leo not found the blueprints and a full technical data sheet on the Alicorn’s Star and its MF Breeder cells they might have up and tried to take the whole haul by force and hightailed it back home—and she couldn’t have blamed them for it. Two wagons’ worth of experimental guns, ammunition, and three souls who had actually lived in the Equestria Before was a poor reward for all the risks they had endured yesterday, to say nothing of Misty’s survival still potentially at stake.

They were compensated, mostly, by the claim to the cache of MEW weaponry in the security armory, most of the spark battery cells, and a small manufacturing cell with a complete suite of machinery and equipment necessary to produce a MEW weapon, though Ada insisted on a meaningful amount of batteries for the five MEW weapons that Sling’s group had. In addition to Rally’s laser rifle and Light Tail’s Lightbringer pistol, Kite had kept two plasma guns and an AER-12 laser rifle from the two wagons’ worth of loot she had “inherited” from her attempted murderers in Trotpeka. An AER-14 prototype in the facility had at first brought Rally to uncomfortable levels of glee, and then to near heartbreaking levels of sadness when Rico had claimed it for her expedition team. The kid was placated slightly by a couple copies of Tomorrow’s Technology, Today! magazines that had detailed articles on it back when it was being touted as the potential replacement for the AER-12, in direct competition with the AER-12 Mark IV Improvement Program. The -14 offered power and range, while the Mark IV -12s touted an insane versatility and modularity previously only seen in ballistic firearms. But it would take a room stuffed of MEW tech and electronics testing and diagnostic equipment to give her enough to obsess over that the AER-14 would be pushed out of her mind for a bit. Her obsession with MEW tech was getting uncomfortably unhealthy…

…sort of like a certain mare’s predilection for custom-grade firearms, and she had quite a haul to go through today. Those two were more alike than either of them cared to admit. How long until they found out they had the same birthday too?

…probably three minutes, Rico pondered fearfully, finally looking up from her checklist at the chaotic scene before her. With the Rain Song facility’s defenses more or less a no-go thanks to the surge of magical energy ruining their ancient and degraded circuits (along with almost all of the security bots), Ada had opted to activate the Runners’ back-up stronghold in the southwestern corner of the city. On the surface level, it was an old, but sturdy, city fire department firehouse, minus its three assigned fire engines (likely having been sent out to respond to the chaos of the Last Day), and had three floors and lots of space for a platoon of Runners to make a base of operations out of it. It had been fortified over the years with sandbag barriers and two-inch steel plates over its windows, and concertina wire was being added to the sandbag barriers that ringed the firehouse, as well as the outer perimeter of the property itself, to discourage any attempts to charge the place head-on. The garage doors for the fire engines were surprisingly thick and heavy, almost like blast doors, and while the power grid for the area was non-functional, the doors themselves could be manually operated and proved immensely helpful for giving them the room they needed to park the wagons and offload their cargo.

And anyone with even half a brain could take one look at Sling and Kite and guess at how the two had spent a portion of their morning before their departure from the Rain Song complex. Sling was moving about like she was on a cloud, exceptionally chipper and happy and just glowing with positive feelings and vibes. Kite was…less bubbly, but she didn’t have that rough, sharp edge to her mannerisms and body language that spoke of a harshly-lived life.

And then there was Light Tail, whose childhood dream of a cutie mark had finally come true and rendered her a hyperactive bundle of energy and uncontrolled velocity speeding about the place at random intervals until something finally intervened to put a stop to her, and inadvertently found out the circumstances under which the filly had discovered said cutie mark.

That something turned out to be Rally, who did not appreciate being the one to have to calm down a little girl having witnessed a very private moment, and she made sure Sling knew it.

“Next time save it for a room, would you?” the teen sneered at her impromptu guardian as the two were pulling a crate out of her number four wagon from her caravan. Sling used her magic, while Rally was content to simply lift the thing with her cyberleg and awkwardly follow Sling’s lead on her other three legs.

“We were in a room!” Sling protested back, slightly defensive, but a little laugh in her voice spoke to the possibility that her thoughts were already streaming back to her time alone with her new lover. “I just…forgot to lock it. I thought she’d be hanging around you most of the morning.”

“She has been! I only got away ‘cause she finally crashed from all the excitement of her cutie mark and walking in on her parent getting laid and by the way YOU WERE JUST AS CRAZY!”

“Why wouldn’t I be?! She’s been driving me mad with her constant cutie mark crusades since she was six! Now I only have to worry about the rest of her childhood growing pains!”

“Like this blubbering nonsense she was slipping into when she was turning in for a nap? Something along the lines of “ISWEARIDIDN’TSEEANYTHINGIJUSTWANTEDTOLETMOMANDKITEKEEPINGHAVINGTHEIRGROWNUPFUN?! She looks like’s she been driven insane!”

“She’s got a wild imagination, maybe she was involuntarily imagining what she thought was happening when she couldn’t see—”

“By Celestia that’s even worse! Your stable has screwed up the both of you on this stuff, I oughta find her a naughty magazine or four and sh—”

“You do anything of the sort and I’ll turn them into a fire pit and roast your mane and tail over it!” was Sling’s final, angry, and violent rant, at which point both of them stopped mid-step and glared at each other very angrily with bared teeth, like hungry predators fighting over a fresh kill.

This lasted for about three seconds, and then they both simultaneously released their angry faces and burst out into roaring laughter, and Rico’s brain stuttered a little. The pseudo-parent and the yearling, arguing playfully over the little filly’s messed-up sex ed (or complete lack of it) from her stable school? Was everyone here born a screwball?!

“Okay, no, I seriously wouldn’t do that,” Rally laughed as she hoisted the crate back up and nudged it about a little as she tried to find a good weight balance on her three remaining legs. “Even if she’d learn far more from it than she’d ever learn from you.”

“She won’t, on account of the fact that I took the two you had out of your saddlebags when you weren’t looking,” Sling mocked in return with an unsubtle wink before she lifted her end of the crate up in a field of her magic and resumed their journey.

“You did wh—oh gods that’s what happened to those things!? I thought I’d left them behind at the Runners’ base you big jerk what’s the idea going through my stuff like that?!”

“Light Tail was going through your stuff when I stopped her and she nearly found them. Lucky for the both of you that I did first. You can have them back when you’re eighteen.”

“Can you make it fifteen instead? My birthday’s only a few months out.”

“Define “few”. Light Tail’s is in…” and here, Sling had to pause and look up the date on her PipBuck, and her eyes shot open almost immediately. “Oh shit, not even three full months away. Are there any intact libraries in Withercha that you know of? Maybe we could scrounge up some Daring Do books for her.”

“So, her birthday’s in November?”

“November ninth, yes. Meanest four and a half hours of my life, labor and birth are a deep pain I cannot come close to describing.”

“…oh, wow, that’s so cool, my birthday’s like, a month after that.”

Sling stopped cold again, though she wound up getting smacked by the crate when Rally kept going for another second before she followed suit. “…wait, what? What day?”

“….the tenth of December? That’s the only thing I know for sure, from the shitty orphanage in Withercha that I came from…”

Sling’s eyes blinked slowly, as in disbelief, and Rico groaned inside her own mind at the realization that her sarcastic thoughts had just been confirmed to be spot on. “…oh my gods, my birthday’s on the tenth of December too.”

Now Rally’s eyes turned wide with shock as she shared in Sling’s disbelief. “….no ffuuaaaaaat the hell, are you actually serious right now? We have the same birthday?!”

“…well, everybody keeps saying how much alike we are, so…”

“Oooooh my gods this is not real! This is like, some sick joke or something, I finally find a grown-up that’s decent and won’t hurt me and takes me in and shit and she has the same birthday I do what the hell?!”

“…well, at least I won’t forget now,” Sling murmured. “…not sure that I could find you a gift that wouldn’t have you doing age-inappropriate things if your reactions to all the tech yesterday is your usual response.”

“Noooo no no nonono shut up shut up shut up!!” Rally squealed in rage. “Seriously shut up I don’t wanna talk about that I was just having a really weird day, what with the stupid zomponies and Elly singing opera songs to them and it actually worked and then there’s all this awesome and pristine MEW tech and the oscilloscopes and oh my gods I gotta shut up or I’m gonna have problems again—”

“Yes yes yes shut up shut up shutting up let’s talk about this again never!”

“Set it here?” Rally asked next immediately afterward, her indignant rage gone, somehow.

“Yes,” was the entirely calm and collected answer…

…though when they set the crate down next to the other two, the heat in their words came back in full force as they headed back to the wagons to retrieve another—

“Can I get my own room here at least?!” Rally demanded loudly, though there was a rather glaring lack of force behind her steps. “One with a lock?”

“Celestia’s suncheeks, n—”

“There’s three lockable rooms on the second floor, actually,” Rico interjected after taking a look at the crate they’d set down and seeing a crudely drawn “3” on its side, next to what looked like an equally crude drawing of a screwdriver and a gear. Tools and equipment, mostly. Total of five of these on that wagon, so this would be number three…

“Oh cool, I’m claiming one!” Rally chirped happily, even hopping about a little. “And don’t tell me I can’t because I know you and Kite are gonna claim one so you can do whatever you want to each other in private!”

“Nobody’s claiming anything!” Sling shot back. “We’ll draw straws or something, I don’t want an entire floor of our temporary home to be full of se—”

“We’re taking the one at the south end of the second floor,” Kite’s voice sang serenely from an office window overlooking the garage section. “And really, a fourteen-year-old girl should have her own room.”

Rico’s lungs heaved with despair and exhaustion. If they kept arguing about like this it’d take most of the daylight hours to unload the cargo—

“Did you not hear what I just said?!” Sling shrieked upward at her lover.

“I did,” Kite cackled in return. “I don’t care. In fact everyone is in agreement that we should be kept somewhere private and away from the eyes and ears of others, so I hope you’re well practiced in applying sound suppression spells to walls and doors. And a fourteen-year-old girl in the hormone-charged phase of her childhood wants her own room and space, so she gets it. We can work out where everyone will bunk for our stay here later. I’m gonna go put all our stuff up and get to work on getting our new one-stop clinic space set up and running. Rally, I may need your help for that in a bit.”

Kite’s head disappeared back into the darkened office and shut the window, and Rico stifled a laugh when she caught sight of Rally’s victorious expression. The teen even dared to rasp her tongue at the back of Sling’s head—

—which Sling caught and pinched slightly with a quick magical grab, turning the teen’s gloating into a painful grimace. “Ow ow ow ow—”

“Do that again and the rest of your meals today are military MREs,” Sling threatened casually, and Rally’s eyes shrank in terror at the prospect of food better served as an implement of torture. The teen nodded slightly for a moment before realizing that Sling couldn’t actually see her doing it—

“Owowow ‘ay ‘ay stahitleggo—”

The indigo spell field around Rally’s tongue disappeared, and her tongue snapped back into her mouth and started lapping around inside her jaws. “Ow. Ow. Ow ow oooowww…”

Rico’s sigh echoed back at her from the concrete floor beneath her hooves. “This day just keeps getting longer and longer…”

“I should hope so,” Sling’s voice pleaded aloud. “This has been the closest thing to a normal day I’ve ever had up here.”

Rico stifled her remaining complaints. If it brought an emotionally estranged mare with too many guns enough peace and quiet to be happy, then by god she’d deal with the feeling of time dragging its feet at a snail’s pace.

“…so how long are we gonna stay here?” Rally questioned her guardian. “Like, do you actually intend to live here permanently? ‘Cause this place’ll be too big without the Runners once we finish our business in Withercha.”

“That will depend on whether Rico can deliver on her end of our bargain,” Sling replied with an evil grin directed at her, and Rico cursed the stable pony’s existence. If MEW tech alone got the teen filly all riled up, she dreaded the reaction that would be triggered once she learned about this…

“What deal?”

“…I…may have promised Sling and Kite,” Rico began with a dreadful tone, her clipboard rising up to shield her from what would follow. “That I would…try to talk my stable’s leaders into letting you guys in, in exchange for your help with the Rain Song facility and in getting Withercha’s trade back under the control of its residents…”

The reaction was just as she feared. For a moment Rally just stood in reverent silence, and then a soft, tinny squealing noise began drifting into the dead air from her position and her tail began quivering slightly. Sling even had to cast a quick chilling spell on her to calm her down—

“Holy crap what’s with you today?!” Sling cried in exasperation. “…with everyone, actually, now that I think about it—”

“A side effect of the exceptionally unusual magical energies that were released yesterday,” Julaya’s voice creeped in from another of the wagons parked inside the garage. The zebra, for the moment, seemed to be occupying herself with sorting all of the wagon’s cargo by what belonged to Rico’s caravan and what was being unloaded. “At least, that is my suspicion. So much of what happened in Zulana’s lair was unique to that event. Her thrall spell, the totem she used to extend her spell’s control range, and the rune circle she inscribed on a whim, the use of the Alicorn’s Star against said totem, and the little tail of light’s impromptu singing that turned the dark, despairing veil of doom hanging about the air into such a positive vibe…all of that, combined together, at the time you destroyed the totem’s enchantments, released a very profound and unmatched wave of emotionally primal magic across the area that is appearing to have different effects on all involved. In your case, it appears to have dropped your inhibitions and compelled you to enjoy a night of carnal pleasures with your friend—”

Could have just been years of bottled tension suddenly snapping too, stripes. “It could just as well have been the build-up of stress, tension, and adrenaline clashing together, as crazy as yesterday got. The first time I got into a gunfight defending my caravan’s outer perimeter, I had so many thoughts and emotions running through me that the first thing I did when I got back to camp was to duck into the closest tent I could find and screw whoever was in there. Which turned out to be a mare and a stallion sharing a sleeping space. Cit was so mad at me I thought he’d divorce me, but he forgave me in the end. He hasn’t let me run the caravan without him since, though.”

“…that is so much more information than I ever wanted to know from an adult, I’m getting some air,” Rally squeaked quietly, and slowly slinked away through the open garage door and out of earshot.

Sling was not nearly as amused as the cackling zebra, though Julie paid the scowling mare little mind. “For the yearling, it appears to have heightened her already impossible levels of hormones and is beginning to break her self-control. I have noted a rather stark increase of hostility from Rico’s people, though that could also be attributed to the large collection of rare loot we have claimed from the facility. I, myself, am ever more eager to pounce and play with you, and I am already thinking of ways to coax you into it. And the Runners are…more juvenile than usual, and they are already quite childish when they are not working to begin with. Only Blue Jay appears to have suffered little, if any side effects.”

“That sounds like the usual where you’re concerned,” Sling sneered back. “And BJ is…well, he’s more open and talkative than he was when I first met him and his mother, but that’s mostly El-Tee’s doing. He seems to be a shuttered book, emotionally. If this magical backlash of yours was an emotionally-fueled event, it would make sense that someone like that would be the least affected.”

“A fair observation,” Julaya beamed proudly, as if she had just witnessed a student making a profound discovery borne of their own intuition. “I would suggest keeping the children under close watch for the next two days, and establish those sound suppressed spaces your new lover has begged for. Some of the Runners with us are…intimate with each other, for reasons besides boredom. This residual side effect may make them far less inclined to restrain their activities to private spaces and surrender to their passions wherever the mood strikes them. Putting them to work today may be enough, but tomorrow and the day after will be a different story.”

Sling’s mouth cut off its own foul curse as the first letter seeped out, and a foreleg lifted up and smacked across the concrete floor in frustration. “Just. What. I. Needed. A bunch of deadly mercenaries hopped up like horny teenagers. One’s bad enough.”

“I worry most for the little tail of light, actually,” Julaya said, her tone growing more worrisome. “She is a very empathic soul, and while I cannot surmise any unusual behavior from her, I know that the backlash has affected her in some way. I will watch when I can, but consider keeping her close to you. If nothing else, I will refrain from making any inappropriate advances on you in front of your daughter.”

“Make sure of it, or you’ll wake up in the afterlife and have no idea how you got there.”

“Ominous threat,” Ada’s voice quipped gleefully into their midst, slightly muffled, as the griffon shouldered through a hall doorway in the back of the garage. “I like it. But your day off is out of the question, I want you, Leo, and Rusty to head out and get in touch with the Life Givers. We need a steady supply of water if we’re gonna stay here for as long as we plan to, and they run the only two working water systems with an intact purification talisman. You three are the only ones I can trust to get the job done without stopping to mess with each other, seeing as how you’re all practically strangers to each other.”

“Water is good,” Sling mumbled, seemingly only slightly miffed that she wasn’t going to get to relax the way she wanted. “But a life-essential resource like that is bound to be on the Pythons’ list of things they want control of.”

“That’d be like committing suicide, but with others doing the dirty deed for you. The Life Givers are the most well-armed and armored faction in the Western Prairie, after us. And they’re notoriously neutral. They won’t take sides with anyone, not even against raiders. They won’t sell us out to the snakes, but they won’t fire so much as a bullet their way either unless it’s to protect their water systems. All they want is for everyone to have enough water to survive. Any excess water they have is used to trade for things they need. Food, ammo, meds, armor and scrap parts to repair their automated turret systems, shit like that. For the right price, they may even help us get this station’s water and plumbing systems in working order.”

“…what kind of price?”

“That’s what you three are going to find out. Get your gear and meet Leo and Rusty back here in ten.”

“So that’s four groups in Withercha now? The Scrappers, the Radical Angels, the…the Bullet Farmers really who comes with these names?”

“Ponies,” Leon replied pointedly. “You guys got the whole weird name shtick locked down tight. Sling Shot? Blue Jay? Light Tail? I could probably spout some silly nonsense like bookcase and find a pony with that name somewhere.”

The answer fled from her mouth before she could think to stop it. “Uhhh, that…that pony would be…right in front of you why did I just say that…”

Sling’s eyes darted down to her E.F.S. display, almost praying for the deadly appearance of red-marked hostiles to save her from this conversation, but no such salvation came. “…wait, are you shitting me? Your name’s actually Bookcase?”

FuuuuuuuuuuUUUUUUUU—

“Holy shitbaskets that is so wild and weird!” Rusty’s voice laughed at her expense, and she almost willed a surge of magic to burrow into the upturned, broken asphalt before her to dig herself a hole to hide in. “What, did your mom pop you out in front of one or something?”

With the harm long done, there was little risk in filling in the exact details of her first moments of life. “…y-yes, actually…”

A chorus of laughter from her soon-to-be-deceased griffon companions hounded her backside. “Oh wow, we are telling everyone that first chance we get—”

She stopped, spun around, and engulfed her horn in the brightest, angriest surge of magic she could conjure short of an actual casting of a spell—and thus, the normal indigo shimmer had become a bright and intense blue. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you over your inane cackling. It sounded something like ‘kill everyone behind you’.”

She could barely see their faces through the magic glow, but she felt a little better imagining their faces to be an expression of terrified and voluntary compliance and pleasure to do her bidding. “W-w-wait, did we say that? We meant to say ‘not a soul will know’!” Rusty’s voice assured her in a panic. “Right, dude?”

“Y-yeah, sure! Our little secret!” Leon agreed heartily (and loudly). “Not even Kite!”

She almost made the mistake of telling them that Kite already knew that, but stopped her tongue before she could snatch her little victory away. She spun back around and allowed her magic to disperse into the soft breeze, briefly mesmerizing herself with the sparkling flow of mana as it died out around her. “Ah. Thanks for clearing that up.”

“Crystal clear!” came the simultaneous cries of nervous assurance.

“Now tell me about the Life Givers,” she continued, her eyes scanning up and down the street for potential ambush points. Alleyways, distant windows from which a sniper would be perched behind, piles of junked, broken vehicles or hollowed-out ruins of old shops and businesses where a few miscreants could hide from plain sight. “Leadership, how they work, that sort of thing. Rico mentioned almost every faction with a trade resource except these guys, and if they were having the same kinds of problems as the others I think even you would have heard about it already.”

“Not much to tell about them, really,” Rusty answered with a heightened sigh of relief. “They’re led by a pair of minotaurs, one of the only ones in the prairie that don’t live with the main tribe in the northwest.”

Wait, what?! “I thought almost every sentient lifeform besides ponies and griffons might have died out or something.”

“Sometimes I wonder that myself,” Leon admitted. “But these two aren’t too keen to share much about the tribe. The brother handles most of the logistics part, so we hardly see him. The sister’s more or less the muscle and the visible face of the group. She can keep MEWs running and knows just about everyone in the city, real easy to get along with so long as you don’t threaten the water supply. She’s got this huge ass plasma caster gun that I swear was ripped off a tank or IFV, takes both of her hands just to carry it and it cuts through almost anything in one shot. Knows some strange magic, too, seen her cast lightning bolts on some raiders once and she could make it hit several of them at a time with some chaining combo shit or something. She’s probably the second or third most dangerous person in this town, after you and Ada.”

“Damn. But if she works with MEWs, she might just know where we could source some spark batteries too,” Sling surmised aloud. “Doubt she’ll give it up for free, though.”

“Let’s get our water set up first, then we’ll worry about finding energy cells for the five MEWs we do have. Couple more miles, take a right at the next intersection. The quickest point for first contact with them is a pump station. It’s surrounded by armed guards and turrets, can’t miss it.”

At least it’s fairly close to the safehouse, she noted as said intersection drew closer. Three miles, tops. Old maps of Withercha show the city stretching out over like, fifteen to twenty…

…well, the old Withercha. The one that was intact and not partially a balefire bomb crater.

True to his word, the Life Givers weren’t hard to find. She didn’t really know how an urban water system worked, but she assumed the building surrounded by almost fifteen heavily armed and armored ponies, zebras, and griffons to be connected to the system in some way, given that a hoof-painted wooden sign hanging off the side of the building read, “PUMP STATION SEVEN, LIFE GIVERS TERRITORY” in bold yellow. But the furrowed, uneasy glares of the guards put her on guard for potential trouble—

A griffon clad in black combat armor covered in pouches and straps, strode towards them with an analytical stare, keeping his right talon gripped tightly on the carbine strapped across his torso while he walked on the remaining three limbs. “Leo, Rusty, and…new blood? Don’t think I’ve seen this pony before.”

“She’s with us, Gar,” Leon greeted back. “You can lay off the kill stare.”

“After the freaky ass sky shit we all saw yesterday? Whole town’s on edge! Some poor saps near the old ministry got the only glimpse we know of and they didn’t like it. Somethin’ about gray ghouls moaning and shuffling around like they were hungry. None of the usual trade runs are even running today, everybody’s holed up ‘till we can get enough volunteers to go check it.”

“That was us,” Leon said flatly. “A salvage expedition wanted to get in and hired us as security, and we tripped on something better left alone. Everything’s good now, though. No ghouls. Dusted, all of them.”

Though Gar sounded a little relieved, he didn’t dare let go of his rifle just yet. “No shit? How?”

“Long story, no time to tell it today. We need to talk to Taurus or Saber, get our safehouse down south set up for water. We got work to do in the city and expect to be here awhile.”

Gar’s face lost its relieved, pleasant lines and shifted into a hardened, suspicious glare. “Go back and tell Virgil to go fuck himself. Called you guys for help once and we got hit with a contract demand so outrageous I’d have shot him if he’d given it in person.”

“…Rusty, what the hell did Virgil do while Ada and I were away?” Leon growled angrily.

“Got me, dude, this is news to me too,” Rusty replied apologetically. “Gar, what contract? Virg ain’t said shit about you guys asking us for help.”

“The contract that said the Runners were going to take a third of our water system in exchange for getting us the equipment we need to keep it going, along with a ten-thousand cap annual tribute for additional security assistance? That bullshit contract!?”

“Virgil has no idea what we’re doing here, yet,” Sling offered as way of hopeful appeasement. “He thinks we’re going after the Pythons’ main territory in the east side of the city, but we have no intention of doing that at the moment. We need water, so we can get to work getting everybody what they need to get their operations going again before the Union gets wind of how bad things are here and rush to take the whole western prairie.”

“You have any idea how bad things are, pony?”

“Bad enough that you tried reaching out to a merc group known for knocking over raiders and gangs on their own time without being paid to by anybody, instead of working with the other groups in the city who were a lot closer to you. Some of the Runners are here now, so let’s talk about what you need.”

Gar’s eyes flashed off of her momentarily. “This pony speak for you, Leo?”

“She does right now,” Leon answered. “Do you speak for Taurus and Saber?”

Gar’s hard, angry stare stayed locked onto them as he stepped back and let a sharp whistle loose from his beak. After a few tense seconds of silence, a door on the west end of the pump station swung open to allow the large, imposing figure of an earth-colored minotaur to stomp through and emerge into the cloud-covered daylight—

Oh my, she’s huge, Sling mewled silently as she took in her first gaze of a minotaur, the bi-ped creature straightening out into full height after having to duck under the doorway to squeeze through. While most ponies and griffons viewed clothing as optional, this minotaur seemed to believe otherwise, with tattered shorts and a stained, patched-up tunic of sorts with open sides, top and bottom. The minotaur’s overall build and structure seemed…lithe, but muscular, and more than capable of bending steel girders for amusement. The top half of the tunic covering the chest had a pair of rounded bulges underneath it, but which seemed restrained by some bandage wrap. The long, cow-like snout was marked with white stripes on each size of the muzzle, and the minotaur’s horns were a little on the short side, with the tips curled upward…

…and in the minotaur’s left, four-fingered hand was a six-barreled MEW gatling laser, held aloft by the overhand grip, looking much like a conventional minigun in the way it was built and laid out, but the lights and display panels on the main body were a dead giveaway as to the weapon’s true nature. And the amber-colored focusing lenses on the muzzle ends of the “barrels” helped too…

The minotaur barely missed a step once she had slipped outside and spied the foolish newcomers, and strode forward on two powerful legs until she was within ten feet of them, and that was when Sling realized just how truly massive this creature was, for the silly stable pony barely had the height to be eye-level with her belly….

“…the laser today, Taurus?” Leon’s voice greeted casually to the monstrous minotaur girl. “Something wrong with the caster?”

The minotaur girl’s response—or rather, Taurus—was a light, almost dismissive shrug of her shoulders as her low, deep voice boomed into the air. “Ehhh, just felt like a switch today. These type of gatling lasers are pretty rare these days, thought I’d let it see some action. So who’s the new blood scoping out my belly button?”

“That would be Sling Shot, the crazy pony,” Leon answered lightly. “I’m sure word of her has gotten around town by now.”

Taurus bent over and brought her face down to Sling’s to study it a little more closely, putting a healthy dose of fear and terror into the meekling pony she felt like she was right then. “Coooool, so that’s what she looks like. Way those Pythons jerks tell it, she was supposed to be this hyped up, battle-scarred magic mare that could blow people apart with a mana ball or something. Might wanna find another name to call her by in town, though. We might want to stay out of everybody’s business, but there’s enough starving folk out there who’ll throw her to those bastards first chance they get. Now, what business do you have with us?”

The word “business” brought Sling’s senses back to her, if only because Leon had just told Gar that she was doing the speaking for her small group here and she didn’t want to worsen their position in the coming water trade talks. “…w-water. We…need water. The Runners are activating a safehouse, a bit south of here. Plan to stay a while.”

“Ahhh, the old fire station base,” Taurus mused through pursed lips as she straightened upright again. “If memory serves, the underground pipes between here and there have an intact connection to this pumping station. Could get you set up with drinking water in about four days, six if you let us re-do some of the interior plumbing in the station itself. Purification talismans too. You’d be the only other place in town outside our direct control with that kind of luxury.”

Even in her awed, fearful state from being this close to a living minotaur that could rip her in half bare-handed with almost no effort, Sling could sense ulterior motivations behind all the juicy, tantalizing benefits they had just been offered, and focusing on deriving what those motives were helped to lessen the fear factor. “A very expensive luxury, considering how pissed you must be at Virgil for what he tried to pull on you.”

“Oh, the depths of my hatred are simply unfathomable.”

…is this what it’s like for others dealing with me? “Umm…look, all we need is a regular supply of drinking water at the safe house. How it gets there doesn’t concern me much.”

“Yeah, probably not, but it’s a pretty big deal to us when everyone can barely scrap by to get food and water, and that’s with us doing the best we can to get water to people for next to nothing,” the minotaur countered evenly. “Brahamin-pulled caravans have a nasty habit of getting knocked over unless you got a small army rolling with it. If we peel guys off to protect the caravans, we have less muscle guarding the pumping stations and the purification plant. And right now that muscle is needed to keep our operations protected. Folk are going to want to know why their water isn’t getting to them regularly pretty soon, and hungry, thirsty mobs get violent really quick. We’ll kill to keep the water flowing, but we’d rather not have to in the first place.”

Well, shit. Was hoping to get this done in an hour… “Fixing that by getting you your pumps sounds like the right price for the water setup services you’re offering.”

“Isn’t it?” the minotaur girl smiled, revealing a healthy set of omnivorous teeth—canines, incisors, and molars, all. “Unfortunately, it’s not a simple matter of just schlepping on over to the next derelict pumping station and ripping them out. We need enough parts to get four pumping stations back in working order. Normally, we would just salvage anything we need from derelict stations in the city, but with all the gangs infesting the streets lately there’s only one such station we can get to safely right now, and there’s a load of squatters living in it. We can’t just roll in and kill everyone to get to them, even if that would be the quickest way to do it.”

“What do these people want?”

“What they always want,” was the minotaur’s contemptful snort. “Free water, free food, free protection, free everything. They won’t let us in unless we promise to take care of them like children, and the world didn’t work like that even in Celestia’s reign.”

Something feels wrong about all this already. “How is it that the most heavily armed and armored faction in the city has no ability to simple waltz and muscle everyone out without serious injury or death?”

“That would be complication number two. For a bunch of free-loading bums, they managed to scrounge enough firepower together to give us trouble if we tried to move them by force. We’ve had eyes on them for a couple of weeks but haven’t seen much in the way of trading activity or scavenging skills, so unless they had their gear with them to start with we can’t figure out how they got ahold of it.”

…ooooh shit, I think I know where this is going… “Yet they manage to mysteriously end up occupying an area you badly need access to. Hell of a coincidence…if you’re stupid enough to believe it.”

Taurus’s smile widened a little, and her eyes began regarding her with a very familiar look she’d seen on Kite’s face more than once. “Leon, I like this new blood. She taken?”

Godsdammit why is every other female I meet out here hitting on me?!!? “She is,” Sling growled back.

“Awwww, that’s a shame,” Taurus moaned sadly—even her ears flattened out with disappointment. “Still, you’re here on business, not pleasure, so…yeah, we’re not buying it either. Only one set of assholes in Withercha could stand to gain anything from us losing the ability to keep the water flowing, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other suspects. Regardless of who or how, they managed to talk the squatters into moving into that pumping station, and the last time we walked up to the place to scope it out our scouting party got a lot of lead slung at them. Nobody died, mainly because those damned morons can’t shoot straight, but even morons can get lucky once in a while and I’m not risking any of my people or their skills until we run out of peaceful options. So we need a gopher to run back and forth and be the messenger, more or less. So long as you don’t murder everybody in the joint, don’t get us roped into a supply contract with them without my say-so, and don’t let them talk you into coming back to us with a feed-us-and-care-for-us demand, I don’t care how you get us access to the building. You help get our operations back online, and we’ll fix you up with whatever water needs you want.”

“And which way do we schlep to find this pumping station shooting at you on sight?”

Taurus’s snout shifted into a small grin as she turned about and pointed down the street with her free hand. “Keep going east for a bit. When you reach an intersection with a junked-out convoy of old military IFVs, swing south. The pumping station will be on your left, about one and a quarter miles into your walk. I’ll be here all day, got some repairs to do, so just come find me once you reach a conclusion, good or bad. Any other questions before you head off?”

“Nothing worth asking just this second, so we’d better get to work. Close to ten in the morning already and I don’t wanna wander about town in the dark.”

No good-byes or parting words were traded—both parties clearly had work to do and they weren’t exactly friends (although they were hardly hostile to each other, Vergil’s actions notwithstanding). But there were plenty of words to be shared within her own group once they were safely out of earshot of the Life Givers.

“Pythons,” Rusty belted out flatly. “They’re already trying to get control of the city’s main trade routes with the rest of the western prairie. Getting control of the only fresh water supply in the area would be the thing to give it to them wholesale.”

“Yeah, but why bribe a horde of wandering squatters with guns they probably didn’t even know existed and have them sit on top of a pumping station?” Leon countered back. “You don’t just give out that kind of hardware on a whim when it could easily be turned against you. It doesn’t make sense.”

“It does, if you assume the Pythons aren’t the only ones involved,” Sling answered. “They sent out, what? Twenty five? Thirty souls after Rally? All dead now, and have been for at least three weeks. That’s not an insignificant number to be short of when you’re making plans to try and muscle your way into a region’s scavenging economy. And word’s already flying around about a bounty on my head, so they must figure I’m either already here or well on my way. They’d want some help getting more control of the city, to try and make up for the losses in people and guns we inflicted on them recently. These squatters were probably offered the guns and the job of keeping the Life Givers out of that station on the off chance that I might come along to see about setting things right. Y’know, since that’s supposedly what us high and mighty stable folk are prone to doing on the surface?”

Rusty’s beak fired off a short, sharp whistle. “So this is where Light Tail gets her brain from. That’s pretty slick thinking, for them. We can do nothing and let them run the Life Givers out of town over time, or step in to fix things and word gets back to them and they gain intel on where to start looking for you and who else they might have to contend with. No matter what we do, they benefit in some way that works against us down the road.”

“For the short term, yes. But that still doesn’t explain who supplied those guns to the squatters in the first place, I can’t see the Pythons letting go of any of their hardware right now with the losses they’ve taken already. I say we walk up to the front door, see what we can get these squatters to tell us. However badly they might want the bounty on me, they might hesitate to act on it if it means starting a shooting war with Runners. Being right beside me might be the safest place you two can be when we get there.”

“Desperate, hungry folk do strange things they wouldn’t normally do,” Leon warned her. “You hopin’ that was the case when they took in those guns and parked themselves in there?”

“I don’t hope it is, I know it. And if we can get them to talk for just a few minutes, it’ll help me think of a way to get everyone out of this mess.”

In the beginning, there was only darkness. No thoughts, no light, no lingering sensation of self or even the world she inhabited. Just darkness.

And it was comforting.

Fate being the evil bitch that it was, that comfort was peeled away like a blanket and the darkness began to resemble something she would call light. Light would become shape, shape would become form, and soon the forms began to become recognizable objects. Ahead of her, a terribly unkempt wall, almost devoid of paint and speckled with gouges and holes in its surface. Beneath her, a soft but ultimately useless fabric of some sort that did nothing to make the hard floor under it any more comfortable. Above her…she couldn’t tell, but the ceiling had clearly seen better days. It’s only redeeming quality was that it was intact, save for the broken ceiling fan in the center with only one blade left attached to it. She was…

…confused. This wasn’t matching the last memory that she could clearly recall (and she had a damn good memory, thank you kindly). The last thing she could clearly remember was her office, and the old, painful pangs of memory and broken hearts that had become her past that had her chasing herself from her workspace to go bother the one soul she could be her complete self with…

…and that the place was a hell of a lot better kept up than whatever sodding mess this was! She was going to have a word or four with the maintenance department later!

…at least, she would as soon as she could make herself get her lazy old self up and moving.

Lords of Kobol I am getting too old, she bemoaned her fate as she slowly, forcefully and painfully rolled off of her side, her aching logs she called legs still unwilling to bend, and so she settled for stretching them out as far as she could manage and thanked said lords that no one was about to see her splayed out like an awakening cat. Why does retirement always feel so far away…

Ugh. Best not to dwell on it. Better to dwell on…

…on the growing, unsettling feeling that something was not right. Her memory was starting to clear up further. The last place she was at wasn’t her office, it was a clean lab, one of two they kept bare and open for the development and practice of magic, save for a few cabinets and tables and a desk or two—

--her back slammed onto the desk’s surface, her vision rapidly clearing as she watched the zebra’s head pull away from the kiss and zip down further—

She stopped the memory before she could recall any further. Messing around at work with a subordinate was one of those cardinal rules she had been told never to break and while she wouldn’t deny the incredible thrill of such a debacherous act, she had gotten lucky that there were only rumors floating around at work about her and their resident zebra. If rumor ever became proven fact, even her position wouldn’t save her from Personnel Resources. Those bastards were almost as ruthless as the Royal Treasury and Taxation Office.

Still, the situation was clear. She’d been at the lab. One of the desks—the one often used for disallowed acts of debauchery when they could get away with it—was the host of a hoof-friendly tea cup filled to the brim with a very dark wood-colored liquid that tasted quite different from the decaf black tea that was normally her morning ritual, and she had to ask if the cup had been filled with a caffeinated tea by mistake because the doctor had told her years earlier that she couldn’t have caffeine or cheese anymore or her acid reflux would only get worse…

…and that was as far as her memory could go, and no further. Had she fallen ill? Was there something in that tea that shouldn’t have been? Had something else ha—

The familiar, if grating, sound of creaking wood snapped into her thoughts, distracting her enough to make her turn to the door protesting its use, and watched a grape-coated unicorn mare with a short-cut red mane slip through with a small bag held aloft in a light violet field of magic. The pretty thing had barely passed through the doorway when her magenta eyes finally noticed that she wasn’t the only conscious creature in the room, and then she stopped dead cold with widened eyes of surprise and shock that made her magic field flicker briefly.

The four seconds of tense silence allowed her enough observation to realize that she was not where her memories said she was. She couldn’t recall this mare’s face from anywhere in her life, and she would have remembered anyone with as many scars on the legs and torso as this poor girl had. A faded poster on the wall next to the doorway had just enough of its artwork and lettering left for her to discern that it was a fire safety related notice and even had a firepony in full gear as its centerpiece…something she did not recall seeing anywhere in her facility.

And her cup of tea was nowhere to be found. Truly, fate was an evil, vicious bitch.

Her left foreleg rose up and swayed about in a cute, little wave as she spoke…or tried to. “…hi, pretty mare I do not know,” her coarse, husky voice croaked, dry as the floor beneath her.

The pretty scarred unicorn blinked, slowly, and calmly set her red cross-marked bag onto the floor. “…hello, dry husk of a mare I do not know,” she greeted in kind, and her opinion of this mare rose considerably. Witty, but polite…and considerate, if the olive-drab canteen floating out of her little bag was truly filled with worthy sustenance and not a clever way of hiding booze or whiskey or something. “…let’s try hydration to cure your mummy’s voice, and start from there.”

Oh, yes, witty, polite, and smart, I like this one already, she mused silently as her shaky forelegs cradled the canteen between them and carefully rose the open top to her mouth. Should I ask permission to court, or just start the chaaaoooooh wooooooow cold water my old friend where have you been?! All further thoughts ceased as the cold, refreshing taste of clean water washed over her admittedly very dry and parched throat, soaking it in life-giving touches and easing away a pain she had not even realized was there. She kept hold of the canteen until she had drained it completely, and by that point her throat no longer felt like it was choking on dry air. With a forced gasp of air to clear the remaining sensations from her vocal cords, she set the empty canteen down and pushed it out to the edge of her reach before letting go of it. “Ahhhh, sweet Celestia that hit the spot right on,” she said as way of thanks, enjoying the vast improvement to her speaking ability. Sounded like her old self again, she did! Amazing how her voice hadn’t aged a bit over the decades, really.

The grape mare’s eyes stayed wide and on the canteen as she pulled it back towards her…and replaced it with a second one. “…well, drink up. You do need it.”

She wasn’t going to say no to a pretty face offering cold refreshment, so she took the offered canteen and popped the cap off with her teeth, though this time she took the contents at a leisurely pace, to better savor the sensation of such a precious life-sustaining liquid hydrating her parched insides. “Much obliged, stranger, though I’d prefer a name to call you by.”

“…Kite,” the grape mare offered with a slight hint of hesitation. “Your turn.”

“Dark Times,” she answered after a quick sip from the canteen. “DT is fine, too.”

“Feel any pain?” Kite asked next, settling onto her haunches as she popped the center compartment of her bag open. “Lingering aches, nausea, dizziness, things of that sort?”

She took another quick glance at Kite and her bag, and came to a minimum of three conclusions in the one-point-two seconds’ worth of details she could discern. Her scars were not new or recent, but without any context or explanation to go with them there was no way of knowing if they had been the aftermath of fights or the marks of an abusive partner. Her bag was…acceptable, but clearly well-worn, evidenced by the frayed fabric of its carrying strap and the two patches of canvas stitched over the left side of the bag. The red cross mark, as well, was considerably faded and seemed lighter and less colorful than she could recall being standard, but that could have easily been the limited amount of light provided by the nearby lantern. And the fact that she was being offered water in the form of a canteen and not a cup, combined with the decayed state of the room she occupied, alongside the lack of power…

She didn’t want to believe it. She hadn’t even been awake five minutes. But something had clearly happened to her, and then the rest of her world, and she was not where she last remembered being. Another twenty seconds would tell her if she could expect honest answers.

“Just the same annoying problems I deal with every time I wake up from a good, deep sleep,” she quipped, taking another swig from the canteen and feeling her stomach begin to protest against having so much of it shoved down at once. “What happened?”

Kite’s response was both vague and to the point—the kind of answer she herself would have given just to be a snarky pain in the flank. “Any specific event you’re thinking of, or will anything across time and history do?”

She allowed herself a flat, annoyed glare at Kite’s pretty face. “…look, we’re both clearly not idiots here. Let’s stop pretending things were the same as they were when…whatever happened to me, happened, right?”

Kite’s pursed, nervous lips bit down slightly. “…damn.”

Something did happen…

…and a growing, sickening hole in her core began to open…

“…how bad was it? The megaspell exchange?”

There. She said it. She didn’t want to, really. Just keep pretending everything was okay, that she’d just taken a bad fall or something, but…no, she never would have believed it for much longer than this anyway. Better to just be done with it and move on. But she was afraid there might not be any moving on from this…

“…pretty bad,” was all Kite was willing to offer. “Things are…not what you know.”

Then I’ve been out a while? How long? How was I put under to start with? How…

“…what’s left?”

The answer, meek and quiet, was all the more horrifying to her with all that it said, and didn’t say out loud. “Ruin, and a broken world,” Kite whispered. “…take your time getting up. I’ll find you some breakfast. When you’re ready, we’ll talk more.”

Kite took her patched-up bag and slowly departed from the room, leaving her in the flickering light of the lantern, the canteen, and a wellspring of tears that began to bleed from her eyes.

Their first sign of the trouble mid-day would bring was the string of gunshots that clanged into the rusted hunk of a car ten feet in front of her. She chose a closer vehicle just to her left for cover, making sure to duck behind the engine block as her rifle came up in front of her. Hard to tell the exact position of the hostile fire—she was learning quickly that the sound waves enjoyed playing hell with her expectations by deflecting and bending around all of the buildings around her.

Unless, of course, those sounds were coming from right next to her.

“Yeah, I feel real safe being right by your side!” Rusty snarled angrily at her backside as a second burst met her cover, her two griffon companions slamming into cover right beside her.

“Shitfire this whole damn prairie’s out to get me!” she screamed back. “Even your reputation doesn’t help!”

“First burst was way off, second one was spot on if not for the cover,” Leon observed calmly. “Odd as hell, maybe a little advertisement’s in order. See a possible target in the pump station, second floor, boarded window with a gap in the bottom and a peephole in the center board. Controlled joy?”

“Controlled joy,” Rusty replied.

Before Sling could even begin to question what manner of crazy this “controlled joy” plan was, Leon’s body rose up over the top of the engine hood, his rifle aimed at a building that at a glance looked quite similar to the one they’d met the Life Givers at, and let off a short, controlled burst of four rounds as Rusty bounded off for another junked car further ahead. A second burst of three shots followed a second later, just as Rusty reached his destination—

—now Rusty was the one touching off short bursts at their target building while Leon rushed forward. No more than two, three and five rounds each, and then he was ducking down behind the rear quarter of his cover position—

“Wait wait WAAAAAIIIIIIIT!!!” a panicked, terrified male screamed out into the streets from the depths of Leon and Rusty’s impromptu target practice, which quickly revealed itself to be a scruffy, lean-bodied earth pony stallion with a dark butterscotch coat and faded blue mane. His weapon—a rather heavy-looking belt-fed machine gun—was slung across his back and not immediately accessible to him even as she found the floating reticle of her reflex optic hovering over his chest—

“WAAAAAAAIT stop stop we don’t want a fight with Runners!!!” he went on, coming to a sliding stop on his knees and belly as he literally pleaded for mercy. That slide could not have been gentle on his gnads. “We don’t want a fight we just wanted the bounty on that mare’s head stop shooting!!!”

“That depends on you,” Leon returned flatly. “The mare’s off limits. Try that shit again and we won’t stop.”

“Seriously?!” the stallion yelled back. “You know what she’s worth?!”

“Don’t care, she’s with us,” Leon warned angrily. “Last warning!”

What little she could see of the stallion’s face obscured by the window frame of her reflex sight showed a pissed-off, hateful glare as he shot to his hooves, angrily stomping about and faced towards the pump station—

“…dammit, fine, but you get the hell out of here!” he screamed over his shoulder. “Got nothin’ for you!”

“We’re here for the Life Givers, not for us,” Leon called out. “They need parts and machinery from the building you’re living in, and you shot at them before they could even attempt an honest trade arrangement. Turn us back, and they might decide to come at you a lot harder next time. Nobody will come out of that a winner.”

“I’m willin’ to take that chance, and so are my people,” the stallion huffed defiantly, beginning a hasty trot back towards the pump station. “You tell those water pipe nerds if they want their parts so badly, they can start sending us food and water, or take the place from us. We’re not going to be pushed out to starve to death.”

“Yeah, that’s going to be a problem,” Sling shouted out to his back, slinging her rifle across her chest as she grunted up onto her hooves and shook off the dust and dirt that had clung to her. “Taurus already told us they weren’t going to be taking in refugee camps.”

“Then it sounds like option B—”

On target with the second burst, Leon says. Could be a happy accident, or—

“Pretty big gun for a scrawny fella like yourself,” she noted out loud, walking closer towards the building with one eye on said gun and the other on her EFS bar—at present, she noted him being marked as a cautious yellow, while a mix of red, yellow, and green marks began popping into existence in the direction of the pump station as it came within range of the PipBuck’s detection radius. “Bit of surface rust on the barrel and missing a bipod…big-ass receiver held together by what looks like rivets, so I’m guessing an army-issue thirty-caliber model, name escapes me right this second. Disintegrating ammo belts won’t be easy to scrounge up if nobody knows how to make them. Cartridges look like civilian .308 rounds, which are actually hotter than military-spec 7.62x51mm, so if you’re using those to keep the gun fed it’ll wear out a little faster, but you use what you have in the wastes so can’t fault you on that point. Gun firing on us from the second floor, was it a rifle or a dedicated MG?”

The stallion paused mid-step as she began analyzing his weapon aloud, and by the time she’d finished she managed to garner a great deal of interest out of him as he spun about and crossed back towards her until he was practically close enough that she could hit him the face with a hoof if she wanted. “…shit me, you already told me more about the gun than the assholes that gave us the stockpile. Who the fuck are you?”

“I’m Sling Shot, the bounty you just tried to blow away, remember?” she snarked back. “You never thought to ask yourself why the Pythons would pay out so much for one mare’s life?”

“…proposal,” the stallion pursed through firm lips. “Take a look at our guns, tell us what’s what, and if they need work. Only a few of us can read, and not that well. The little books we got with the guns might as well have been written in dragon language for all the sense we make of them. Get us sorted out, or at least on track to getting there, and we can talk about the Life Givers.”

“We can do that, but I’d rather hear what got you into this situation in the first place,” Sling counter-offered. “Might be something we can help with that puts you in a better position, or at least in one where you don’t face immediate death by violence and have the means to keep from starving to death. Start by telling me about the assholes who…’gave’ you the stockpile of guns? Did you misspeak, stallion whose name I don’t have?”

“No, I did not,” the stallion said, one of his forelegs briefly waving about above his head before he turned back to the pumping station and resumed his original journey, now moving about at a slower and more relaxed pace. “Call me Easy, my parents were jerks with my actual name so I don’t use it. And we’re not complete idiots. Nothing like what they offered comes for free, we just ain’t figured out what it is they want yet.”

Only when the red marks on her EFS morphed into yellows and greens did she begin to follow him, and Leon and Rusty fell in behind her in a staggered line. “And who are ‘they’, exactly?”

“They never said,” Easy answered, shouldering the one remaining door of a two-door entrance aside as he passed through it. “Me, I was thinkin’ the Pythons. But these cats were wearin’ enough leather barding armor that any markings or tats unique to the Pythons alone would have been covered up, cutie marks included. Don’t know anybody else in town that could get the hardware they were givin’ us either, ‘sides the Life Givers, and we already knew we weren’t dealing with them—”

“Yo, Easy, what’s the deal?” somebody up above called out, briefly interrupting their conversation. Sounded male, fairly close to that window Leon and Rusty were shooting at—

“The deal is everybody brings their piece down here while these two Runners take up watch for us—“

“One of us will, the other stays with the crazy mare,” Leon amended his order.

“What, you think one of us will take another shot at her?” Easy challenged back—

—to which herself, Leon, and Rusty all answered back in unison. “Yeah.”

Easy didn’t seem to appreciate the lack of trust he was just shown, but having already invited them inside to scour over their weaponry roughly a minute after trying to shoot her with said weapons, he hadn’t exactly left himself a pleasant way out of his predicament. “…fine.”

“I got watch,” Rusty announced immediately afterward. “Might take a short scouting flight—”

“Stay groundside,” Leon pushed back. “So far as this town’s concerned, we aren’t here yet, let’s not advertise it out loud with a sky sighting. Gunfire alone may bring tourists as it is.”

Now it was Rusty’s turn to be disappointed. “Awww, man, my wings are begging for some exercise….”

Sling ignored the grumbling, pouting griffon shuffling off and focused on the machine gun that Easy was carefully rolling off of his back and putting down in front of her. A closer look at the barrel showed that the rust on it was minor and easily scrubbed away with about twenty seconds’ worth of work from a solvent-laced brass brush from her maintenance kit. Thanks largely in part to having practiced on the four machine guns the Runners had at their base last week, she was able to detach the box magazine and pop the top cover for the receiver without any difficulty, followed by the barrel, and a quick cursory inspection showed no rust in the feed mechanism or the underside of the cover. And because the Ministry facility’s test firing range included an armory with a full suite of gunsmithing tools, she now had a quality bore scope with which to inspect a barrel’s rifling and interior condition—

“Whoa, this barrel’s clean,” she whistled in sharp approval as she slowly extended the boroscope's lens down the barrel. Through the objective piece’s viewing window, she couldn’t find much, if any, sign of ill-treatment or neglect, and the rifling looked very sharp and defined, as if it had rarely been fired. There was the expected traces of copper lines along the rifling itself, but not enough to mark it as a heavily used barrel. “Rifling’s almost pristine, too. No corrosion. I’d say the barrel is practically brand new. Got any spares lying around?”

Easy’s answer was both distressing and informative. “…spares?”

Oh lords, these people have no idea what they’re working with! Who would be stupid enough to give them this kind of firepower freely?! “…machine guns are designed for suppressive fire, lots of shooting, very quickly. Quick change barrels are the norm here, not the exception. First barrel heats up, you switch it out with a cold spare so you don’t ruin it by overheating it too much or for too long. Without spare barrels, you’re down to short controlled bursts, and only one ammo belt, if you want to stretch that one barrel’s lifespan as much as possible. Am I really giving you more instruction on this gun than the people you got it from?”

“I am beginning to feel an incredibly offended sense at having been played for a fool, yes,” Easy grumbled. “This is the only machine gun of the stockpile, so…there’s that, I guess. But a lot of the rifles can shoot full-auto too, does this mean we need to be careful with those?”

“More so, actually,” she answered. “Barrels on a rifle usually aren’t easy to swap out without tools, and they aren’t meant to be used as suppressive weapons to start with. I’d stick to single aimed shots. With training and practice, you could probably get away with short bursts on a target up close, but that’s about all the use I have for full auto on a rifle. The two bursts flung my way earlier were taken about as far out as I would try it, myself.”

“…good to know,” was Easy’s nervous, hesitant reply. “…so…what did you do to get the Pythons so pissed at you?”

“Killed over a dozen of them across the span of a week as they tracked down a fourteen-year old girl and tried to kidnap and rape her,” she said with an even, calm tone. So very calm, couldn’t let herself blow up over it at some guy who had nothing to do with it. “Another dozen or so were killed by others with me at the time, but they think I did it all. Wish I had, honestly…”

“And they’d send that many to get their jollies on a kid…why?”

A glance at the congealing green and yellow marks on her EFS had her divert her attention back to her surroundings to see how many souls were bringing their weapons to her for inspection, and after a few seconds came up with a head count of about nineteen (discounting Easy). Seven mares, nine stallions, three griffons, strong mix of unicorns and earth ponies, with two pegasi among the ponies. Most of them seemed to have struggled to get enough food and water through life—thin-framed, a little smaller than average, four mares and a stallion had the faint presence of ribs poking through their flesh and coats, and even the three griffons seemed less physically intimidating than she expected. Having spent a fair amount of time among wastelanders who had considerably improved access to the necessities of life, being faced with the rough reality of how the majority of souls in the wasteland fared brought the imbalance of the east and west prairie into a sharper focus than she’d have liked. The west may not have been rife with hedonistic slavers, but it didn’t have the stability and trade flow that allowed the Union to get food and water where it was needed, either.

She resolved to complain a little less about military MREs.

“She says she destroyed a major arms cache they were about to collect on, when she found out who she was fixing it up for, ran off to escape their anger. Took ‘em a while to find her, and my anger turned out to be stronger than theirs when they did.”

“Girl, your anger scares us,” Leon pestered her with a soft chuckle. “That’s hard to do.”

Guns began piling up next to the disassembled machine gun—mostly rifles, with a couple of shotguns, three pistols, and a bolt-action .308 that belonged to one of the griffons. At least she would have plenty of work to occupy herself with while she quizzed Easy on this “gift” these scavengers had received. “So let’s go back to this group that gave you all these guns. Was there anything about them that stood out at all? Language, where they were positioned, what manner of hardware they had themselves? How they talked to each other?”

“Only one of ‘em talked any,” Easy said as she pulled the bore scope out of the barrel in favor of a bottle of gun oil and some cleaning solvent. One wet patch down the barrel, then a dry one, then she’d start lubing critical points in the receiver, where the Runners had showed her. “Seemed to be the leader, or at least the one picked to do all the talking. If he needed somethin’ from the other seven that were with him, he would look at them directly and tell them. Never referred to ‘em by name.”

Nothing damning there, either for or against her theory. She hadn’t seen anything about the Pythons that would indicate they were this smart when they wanted to be sneaky, but that didn’t necessarily mean they weren’t capable of it.

“As for their guns…eh, not much there that you wouldn’t find in the hooves and claws of most mercs. Ammo, too. Two cans. Marked five-five-six on the side. Looks like military stuff, black-painted tips—”

AP rounds?! “How many rounds, exactly?”

“Me and two others kinda know our numbers, so we gave it a shot. Best guess is close to a thousand, I think. That mean anything?”

“It means whoever gave you this didn’t mean for you to use it on lowly street gangs,” Leon remarked. “Those are armor piercing rounds. Tungsten tip, steel core, and damn near impossible to find now. Armor plates don’t mean shit to these, just cuts right through. You don’t just give that much AP ammo away as carelessly as these guys supposedly did. And that they have that much of it they’re willing to pass out like this, means they got a lot more of it.”

With the machine gun lubed and cleaned out, she reassembled it and set it aside, and turned her attention to the rifles. The five M-type rifles were first, simply because they usually needed the most work and she wanted to know how much of it she would have to do. “How did you come to meet such well-heeled friends out of the blue? None of you strike me as the hard-charging merc type.”

“We had a place, before this,” one of the mares to her left answered, grief underlying her tone. “Families, of a sort. We had that, at least, if not much else. Then everybody in town started…shutting down. The Bullet Farmers, the Scrappers, the Radical Angels, and a few others. Mostly little parts shops. Some folks like us, we got by from scavenging, diving into the ruins of the old factories for anything that looked good enough for the big factions to buy or trade for. But even that got dangerous. Without trade goods going out, food wasn’t coming in so regular, and about a month ago it stopped completely.”

“That’s when our camp got hit,” Easy continued—by then Sling had poured through enough of her first rifle to be satisfied that it was in working order, if a little worn. The barrel had definitely seen some use and the bore had a little erosion, but not at a degree that would hurt accuracy…yet. Trigger pack looked good, no rust, but the bolt carrier group had some excessive wear that suggested a regular lack of oil. A little education would be in order shortly. “There were seventy of us then. Large enough that some of the street gangs thought we had more food than we were letting on. Three of ‘em grouped up just long enough to make a run on us, and most of our guns weren’t in the best shape to start with. Tangent here, with his old hunting rifle, was the only one who’s gun didn’t break down or jam up on him in the fight, but really, we aren’t fighters. Half our group died in under five minutes. Ten more died from their wounds over the next few days.”

“And the gangs?” Sling pondered aloud. It sounded like the gangs barely got along to start with, so maybe…

“Last we heard, they turned on each other when they found out we had even less food than they did. Each of ‘em though the others had conned them into the fight to try and thin their numbers for a later attack. Maybe three or four of ‘em staggered out alive, if that. Pretty much ended their existence as gangs. About the only bright side to the whole thing.”

“The Life Givers and Pythons are the only ones who managed to keep something going out all these months,” the sad mare said next. “For the Pythons, it’s chems and booze, mostly. But they got the east side of the city in their territory, where Union-backed caravans come in, so they’re getting most of the incoming trade now…which means they’re getting most of the food, and they get to set the price for it. Life Givers are the only reason a lot of us in the west side are still alive, they got a couple of trade routes going out west for some of their excess water. What food they can spare after they feed themselves, they’ll tuck in with the water they trade out, nothing extra for it—”

“Manila you know they got to have more than the scraps they’re “giving” out,” Easy fumed angrily. “How else you think they can afford to part with any at all?”

“Could be they’re better people than the lot of us, you daft pencild—”

The second rifle was in much the same shape as the first one, which did not strike her as completely odd, but perhaps if the third one was in a similar state, it might. “So if the casualty count is right you went from seventy to thirty-five, then twenty-five. I’m counting twenty of you in total. What happened to the other five?”

“What do you care?” another voice, a scruffier-sounding male, sneered. “You're just here to run us off the only hope we got left.”

“I’m starting to care less with that attitude, but I need the information regardless.”

“We ain’t sure,” the mare answered testily. “Best we can figure is that they got separated from us or went their own way when the gangs ransacked our home. Been struggling ever since. We’re lucky if we don’t go more than two days before finding a meal somewhere.”

“Then a couple weeks ago, we ran into a merc near the old hospital in the center of the city, asked if we was looking for some work,” Easy said. “I said yes, he told us to meet with his group later, in an alley where a brothel used to be ‘till last year. When we get there, there’s these crates of guns and ammo, and the talking head asked us to go scope out some buildings here in the west half of the city and come back to them with what we saw. Took us a couple days, we tell ‘em what we saw, and they say thanks and that we could probably get us a good deal for food and water if we sat on this place and waited for the Life Givers to try and salvage anything out of it. Maybe it works different in the Union, but out here, just knowing where a claim is don’t make it yours, you gotta be physically sitting on it, like we are. This is our claim, and we ain’t just walkin’ off.”

“So don’t,” Sling hummed agreeably. Third rifle was, so far, holding to the same expectations as the previous two. “Make a deal.”

“You heard our terms the first time, didn’t you? The terms you said weren’t going to fly?”

“Yeah, and you know why they aren’t going to do it? You’re ripping them off. Having to set up and maintain a continuous supply of food and water for access to spare parts in a building they’re only going to visit for as long as it takes them to get what they need? Even you wouldn’t do that and you know it.”

The frustrated, quiet growl in his throat was a good sign, despite the anger behind it. The truth could hurt, whether one wanted to admit it or not.

“And your generous friends setting you up with weaponry and ammunition you usually only see in well-equipped mercs or the Union’s trooper corps? What do you think they expect you to do with that, sitting here and goading the Life Givers into taking a shot at you? You’re being used, and I’d like to think most of you aren’t so stupid that you can’t see it.”

“Oof, savage,” Leon snickered.

“Get to the fucking point,” Easy roared sternly and loudly.

Yeeeeaaah, maybe lay off the bitch mode a bit, you stupid-ass mare… “You survived and bartered for what you needed by scrounging up old tech out of factories and such, right? Go back to doing it…for the Life Givers.”

“You mean go back to where we were when half of us got slaughtered?”

The third rifle's serviceable condition was starting to give her ideas on their origins, but she wasn't willing to to share them with these scavengers just yet. “You said it yourself, most of your guns barely worked then. What your new fair weather friends have given you is looking to be in much better shape than most of the weaponry I’ve come across in the prairie outside of Union control. Somebody wants to take another shot at you, they’ll have to actually fight you this time, if you don’t mind being taught how to actually use a gun in a fight.”

“And this is going to help us with the Life Givers how?”

Considering she was making the idea up on the fly, she wasn't sure it was going to work, but Taurus had asked for a solution that didn't spill blood, and this was probably going to be the only one they'd find in the time frame they had. “Your demands are set on doing nothing but sitting here, but if you work for it they may be a lot more willing to indulge you. The Life Givers are putting most of their people to guarding their operations right now. They’re locked down, can’t get around much to track down parts they might need. But you do exactly that for a living, and you and yours are a prime package deal they’d be idiots to dismiss. You have good weaponry to protect yourselves with, so they won’t have to arm you, and you can get trained to use them effectively in a fight. You can be taught what it is they look for and need for their operations and put your experience to work for the both of you. And you come with almost a thousand rounds of 5.56mm AP rounds that they can stow away for heavy trouble down the road.”

“…hump me with Luna’s moon, that could actually work,” another female voice whispered breathlessly. “Wouldn’t be scraping for food anymore…Easy, we gotta give it a shot. Ain’t like we got a lot left to lose now.”

A growing chorus of approving mumbles around her effectively served as a majority vote on the proposal being laid out. And yet Easy would put a slight damper on it with an unpleasant (but not unrealistic) reality. “Yeah…sounds good, in your head. But feedin’ an extra twenty souls on top of what you gotta worry about already ain’t something you take on lightly. And the quiet goons who gave us all these spiffy guns and bullets…if their aim was to have us shoot the shit out of the Life Givers when they came to claim this place, they ain’t gonna be happy about their investment just walking off and joining up with them instead. They felt comfortable enough to part with this stuff, what do you think they’re packing for themselves? Might be willing to take a chunk out of anybody that messed with their plan. Who’d be first on their list?”

“Hell of a risk to take.”

I did not spend an hour cleaning and lubing guns to leave here with nothing! “There’s risk for everyone, but it’s a solution that doesn’t have you killing each other and gives you a few bodies that can search out parts for you without having to pull any of your other people off their tasks, which you said was a big problem for you earlier.”

Taurus’s body heaved in tune with her deep breaths and long sighs as the massive creature contemplated the risks and rewards the arrangement offered. “Bodies that barely know what kind of firepower they were so freely given, by your own words. Takes time to train ‘em otherwise, time we ain’t got right now.”

“We might,” Leon counter offered. “Had to train up on our new hardware ourselves, won’t be a big issue.”

“…fine, your time to use how you want, but that still doesn’t solve the other two problems I have with this. Whoever gave those scavengers that much firepower is not going to just let it walk off without a fight. I guarantee somebody’s keeping a discreet eye on them and these mysterious jackholes are an unknown I don’t want to deal with without more intel. And then there’s the fact that we might not have the food and water supplies to feed another twenty mouths to start with. That’s something I’ll have to run by my brother, he handles most of the logistics.”

“…and how long will that take?” Sling begrudgingly asked. Damn that stallion, his fears about this whole arrangement were turning out to be spot on…

Taurus’s eyes seemed conflicted, as if she would rather have put this off for later, but reluctantly began thundering off to a corner in the office that overlooked the main pumps and maze of pipes that made up the primary operations center of the station. Sitting upon a patched, crudely hoof-stitched cushion sat a brilliant crystal sphere roughly the size of a computer terminal, which reacted to Taurus’s outstretched hand as she began to rub it in a vertical direction, then swiped her hand off the top of the sphere to her left—

—a deep blue light began to come to life and quickly filled the sphere’s interior, then swirled and bent into virtually every color in the visible light spectrum—

“Please be working and not playing, please be working and not playing—” Taurus begged of the sphere’s light show—

—the swirling spectrum of light and color rapidly spun into the visage of another minotaur, this one far more masculine and ragged-looking than the towering female who had activated the sphere’s magic—

“…sis?” the male’s voice buzzed from within the sphere, slightly distorted by an underlying static. “What’s the deal?”

Taurus’s initial reaction was one of immense relief. “Ooooh, thank the gods above, not playing aHEM uummm Saber, dude, what’s up listen do you happen to have a count on our food and water supplies?”

Saber’s face tilted off to one side like a curious dog. “Uhhhhh…why? Feeling snacky?”

“No, no, we…we might have a solution to our squatter problem. Turns out they’re what’s left of a scavenger camp from Python territory, and they might be willing to put themselves to work for us, but I don’t know if we can take in another twenty souls or not. How’s our incoming supply versus what’s being used up, and such?”

Saber’s head vanished from the sphere, though it continued to carry his voice across time and space along with a heavy amount of paper shuffling. “Yeah, good question, actually, I’ve been meaning to go over income versus expenses and leftover supply anyway, so this would be a good chance to work that out and I got a couple ideas for adding to our incoming stream but we’d have to basically open up an entire new trade route and we don’t have nearly enough caravan partners willing to take on the risk so—”

Taurus’s eyes seemingly sunk back into her skull as she let off a deep, whining sigh to the ceiling. “Oh, gods, here we go…”

Saber’s voice continued to rattle on amidst an increase ruffling of papers and the occasional thunk of a book upon a wooden surface. “—so anyway you know how the Pythons locked down the main trade port in their territory and get all the good caravans, right, and I was thinking what if instead of them having to come in from that one point we could convince a few caravans to swing around to the south and come in from the Scrappers’ territory, I mean that’s gotta be better than being backed up like an overflowing outhouse on a single stretch of decaying highway—”

“Disgusting mental image is real,” Sling’s voice wailed softly.

“Quite,” Taurus likewise wailed in pitiful agreement.

“—it’d bring the Scrappers access to trade goods and get another source of food opened up that wasn’t under Python control but the main reason the caravans go to their territory in the first place is the security so we’d have to be able to offer a similar safe route and trade exchange post—”

Her lingering disgust was gradually fading away as the rambling minotaur’s words began to dance about in her head. Despite not having seemingly taken a single breath in twenty seconds, she was starting to think he might have been on to something there….

“Saber!” Taurus roared at the crystal sphere, and Sling swore it actually shifted a little within its cushion nest. “Focus! Supply on hand! Can we handle twenty new souls or not? Long-term, not just a few days.”

His sibling’s shouting seemed to snap him out of his runaway train of thoughts and brought him back into the sphere’s view. “Oh…right, that. Sorry, um….uhhh, lesee here—”

His head vanished from the sphere again, though this time the shuffling and rustling of paper was much more controlled and thoughtful. “Uhhh…supply cache as of yeeesterday, current head count divided by species, ummm….latest invoice for the last trade caravan with the food parcels and projected acquisition, estimated overflow after self-use—”

Taurus’s left hand began to rub along her brow. “The short, stupid version, bro.”

A long, uncomfortable, but thankfully quiet moment passed before he found the courage to answer. “Weeee….might have an issue accommodating extra workers,” Saber squeaked, directing as much attention as possible to his conversation and not the papers shuffling about in front of him. “Unless we stop setting aside surplus food for trade. If we did that, then we could take them on, but that would mean no longer being able to offset the food crisis on our side of the city. We aren’t making a huge dent in it, but we are helping just enough to stave off outright starvation. It’s basically a ‘lesser of two evils’ question.”

Now both of Taurus’s hands were starting to press against her skull in self-agony. “Some choice. Starvation or dehydration. Death either way, but at least if we can keep the water going we get a few days to try and fix the food problem…”

A pang of guilt hit Sling’s heart and stopped it for a couple of beats. She hadn’t meant for her solution to more or less make things worse in the long run… “…how often do caravans from the Union come out here?”

“A few come in roughly once a month,” Taurus groaned, still in despair that the quest to fix her water system was taking a rather dark turn. “Each caravan that comes and goes makes about two trips a year, so it’s a constant revolving door of new faces and new deals. The next bunch is due in early next week, but rumors floating around the city are saying that the Pythons aren’t buying much of anything besides food, guns, and ammo. And only the food is getting put out for trade in town.”

“And how long has that been going on?”

“…three months now, I think.”

“…I think I have an idea how to get some of that diverted to you,” Sling pondered aloud, once she’d sorted through her thoughts and silent misgivings. “But it depends on whether I’m right about who supplied the scavengers with their guns and ammo, and I don’t have enough information to be one hundred percent certain of it.”

“Naw, go ahead, fill my head with more doubts.”

“I think I know where she’s going,” Leon assured her. “Said it herself. Only two possible sources for arms and ammo outside town—other merc groups, or the Union. And the Union’s got most of the known AP ammo.”

“Fuck me, you mean the troopers are slinking around trying to piss on us now?!”

“Not so directly, no,” Sling explained. “I doubt it’s even the troopers themselves doing the work. But the Pythons did, at one point, keep up a contact of sorts on the Union side of the valley with a rather large and evil slaver guild run by a soul whose name induces a shit-me reaction when I say it—”

Even without directly saying it out loud, just alluding to the reaction she got when she said it was enough to provoke said reaction almost exactly as she described—wide eyes, furrowed brow of shock, even Taurus’s mouth dropped open a bit. “…yeah, that’s the one. Anyways, he…or she, or whatever…this slaver guild may have some under-the-table connection with one of the Union’s Board members. Said Board member would have access to the troopers’ armory stores, and could conceivably arrange for some of the weaponry and ammo to mysteriously cross the valley. Given how much trouble this mystery group went to to cover up any identifying marks or clues as to who they were, they could have been from the Board member’s own trade guild. I’d considered the possibility of slavers or Union troopers themselves in disguise, but there’s too much risk in openly violating the agreement the Union has with the Runners where those two are concerned. A trade caravan would be the only other way to get the weapons and ammo across the valley and through the western prairie without raising any undue alarm. Whether the Pythons asked for this sort of sneaky help, or if this third party decided to do it on their own, I don’t know, and probably never will.”

“…and when our new scavenger workers take all that stuff with them to work for us, their benefactors are going to take issue with it,” Taurus surmised softly. “It’d be your one chance to catch them off guard with an ambush at a time and place you know where they’ll be.”

“Catch them off guard, and get answers to a number of questions I’ve got,” Sling confirmed. “But we’ll only get that chance if you take the risks that come with taking the scavengers on. And I can’t guarantee that the ambush won’t end up with a lot of dead bodies, or that it’ll even get us any good intel.”

“There’s risk in everything, stable pony,” Taurus said with an angry huff. “This is just…riskier than most. But that’s probably what it’s going to take to get control of this city out of the Python’s grubby hooves. So…let’s see where this goes.”

Ninety minutes.

Ninety minutes, one second.

Ninety minutes, two seconds.

Coward, Kite admonished herself at the door, still unable to bring herself to tap upon it with her upraised hoof. All she had to do was tap. The. Door. Go in, visit the displaced pony and relish in that Trottingham accent that made her weak in the knees just hearing it.

And bring that poor girl’s world down upon her head.

At what would have been ninety minutes and seven seconds since she had dropped off the breakfast ration, the door unexpectedly creaked open, filling the open space with the gray-coated mare’s face and bringing attention to the moist streaks of fur under her eyes.

“…hi,” Kite’s voice greeted meekly, her hoof still raised to a door that was no longer there.

A moment of tense silence was broken up by the mystery mare left foreleg slipping through the door and connecting with her hoof, then shaking it briefly. “…hello.”

“…you’ve figured it out, haven’t you?”

A sad, soft sniffle betrayed a hint of the mare’s inner turmoil. “…not the finer details. For instance…how long I’ve been out. And you’re not telling me because you think it’ll break me, so…I’ve been out long enough for everyone to figure out that there’s no help coming from Canterlot, ever.”

….DAMMIT I hate the smart ones sometimes. “Sooo…you’re going to passively aggressively pressure me into telling you over the next ten minutes.”

“I can. Or you can do it the same way you would rip off a bandage, and just get it done with quick and harsh. Won’t be the first time I’ve had to do that.”

This is a terrible idea. This is a terrible idea this is a terrible idea this is a—

“Quick and harsh it is,” Kite agreed, even though inwardly she was already screaming at herself with such ferocity and foul language that even her brain was forced to filter it out of her thoughts. “But remember that you asked for it.”

“I ought to, I strong-armed you into it. Now, where do you want to start?”

Now locked into the terrible idea, there was really little left to be done about it, except get it over with. She released the mystery mare’s hoof from her own and beckoned her to follow along as she sought out the stairs she had just climbed. “The hard part. Let’s take this outside.”

Four hooves gingerly fell into a steady trot behind her as they clambered down the stairs to the first floor, then moved out into the open garage space where Rico’s caravan wagons were still being worked through and presenting the first challenge of the walk. These stable ponies were going to be so damned curious and eager for a chance to talk to perhaps the first known survivor of the Before in the flesh that they’d ever come across outside of the sentient, non-violent ghouls that lived near the balefire crater in the city, and she was going to have to shoo them off very quickly.

Case in point, Rico was checking the last of the cargo being unloaded from one of her wagons, making sure the stuff was intended to be left behind and such, and seemingly brightened up as she caught sight of the mystery mare following her—

Kite waved her off with a sharp swipe of her left foreleg with a silent message of “not one word” and a harsh, disapproving glare. Rico seemed a little offended by the rejection, but her expression softened when she looked back at the mystery mare and then began making the same silent request of the rest of her crew. They thankfully obeyed the request and let the pair pass by in peace.

She purposefully slipped through the front door to the outside as gently as possible, so as not to give the mare a sneak peak at the horror awaiting her. Better that she freak out in the street, where the walls of the fire station might absorb enough of her shrieks that the kids wouldn’t hear it…

She kept watch on that door, and on the mare that passed through, and sure enough, as she began to get her first good look at the new world she inhabited, her worried gaze quickly shifted into a total state of disbelief and shock at the crumbling ruins of the city street around her. Her legs continued to trot forward of their own will for a short distance before she came to a dead stop, and from there just silently stared in horror at the fate of her old world.

Kite just stared in pity and guilt. It wasn’t how she wanted to do this…but the girl did ask for the hard way. So she got it.

The girl’s hindquarters dropped onto the pavement, her shaking hind legs no longer capable of working correctly. “…haa…h-h-how l-long…”

Luna on a stick, here we go…

“Roughly two centuries,” Kite answered softly, nonetheless eliciting a very sharp gasp of shock and horror from her guest.

Now the mare’s body was starting to tremble all over. “F-fuaa…gggaaah how?!”

Kite stole a glance across the road, mainly to stall for a couple of seconds while she put the details together in her brain. “The way we understand it, you were poisoned by somepony in your facility, almost to the point of death. A zebra working there…Zulana, is the name I’m told…she tried to heal you with a ritual spell at about the same time that a balefire bomb went off in the norther part of the city, and the bomb’s effects twisted and amplified her ritual far beyond what she’d intended. Instead of using the souls of your murderers to heal you, it killed almost everyone in the facility and within a few hundred yards of it and…and turned them into zompony thralls. Zulana didn’t survive, but her soul lingered about, tethered to the spell and the totem she used to cast it, kept the thralls under control until we fucked up and triggered them yesterday. The short version of yesterday is that my…friend…broke the spell and destroyed the totem, and your body recovered from whatever it was that brought you down. We don’t know what happened to Zulana’s soul after that…and then, after all that, we gathered ourselves up and whatever we could carry out of the place before sunset, and came here. And now we’re…out here, I guess.”

The mystery mare took most of that quite well. At least, she did at first. She trembled, and tried to speak but all that came out were little gulps and sputters of words, and there was the expected muffled shriek or two. She expected all of that, so she was content that as long as that was the worst of it, for now, she would say the girl was taking the end of her world about as well as expected.

And then, quickly and almost imperceptibly…the trembling just stopped. She stopped gasping and crying, and…well, she just sort of stopped everything. And then her head looked up at the old, empty shop across the street, but it was a slow, casual movement, almost robotic even.

And then the mare’s hind legs stood back up, and she turned around at a very calm and relaxed pace, and began walking—calmly—back into the fire station, and her eyes we—

Oh shit, Kite realized all too late when she dared to study the mare’s eyes. Stern, attentive, searching for…something.

“….ummm…is there something I can help you with?” she dared to ask of the robotic-moving mare.

“No,” came the calm, but crisp reply, and the mare darted through the partially-open door to begin her search.

Her search began amongst the wagons—she would hop into the back, pad about the thing in search of whatever it was she searching for, and leave after not finding it in ten seconds. She did this with three wagons, hopped down from her third search target, and then spotted what she desired in the company of one of Rico’s people.

A large, heavy, gray stone sledgehammer, resting on its head as the stallion used its long handle as a leg rest while he chatted away with another stallion across from him (who was equally lackadaisical in his work responsibilities)—

The mare sauntered into their personal space and wrested the sledgehammer from its owner with the ease that a parent would remove a toy from a newborn foal, slinging it across her back and holding it steady with her right foreleg. “Taking this,” she muttered nonchalantly, walking away from the pair on three legs and, eventually, back outside into the street.

Kite followed her back outside, but kept close to the fire station in wary deference to the mare with her freshly acquired toy. She had an inkling what was about to come, and didn’t want to be anywhere in the vicinity when it happened.

It started with the mare’s entry into the shop. At first she appeared to be studying it, or perhaps attempting to reconcile memories with reality. After a few moments she moved further into the structure, out of view of the doorway, and from there Kite could only listen for any sign of discontent or distress…which turned out to be the least of her worries.

With the sudden fury of a thunderclap, she heard a great, hearty THWACK! from inside the shop…and then another one almost a second later, followed by a third, and the crunch and snap of old wood and plaster among the THWACK—

“You godsdamned motherFU—”

A fourth THWACK!, louder and more violent than the previous three, muffled her curse and the one immediately afterward, though she wondered if that was the effect of her physical exertions or simply the power of her swearing amplifying it—

“—K SLURPING FUCKSHITS YOU ACTUALLY FUCKING DID IT—”

Two more THWACKS! Were accompanied by the disturbing sound of collapsing drywall…and then, the visible shifting of a corner of the shop’s roof, now robbed of the support of part of the structure beneath it—

—she sensed the presence of another soul beside her, and thought she heard some second floor windows in the fire station creaking open—

“—WHAT THE BLOODY HELL DID YOU SHITE DICK SAMPLERS THINK WAS GONNA HAPPEN WHEN YOU BUILT THOSE GIANT PISSBALLS OF DEATH YOU FU—”

More THWACKS!, and more cracking wood and plaster, began to fill the air with as much volume and frequency as her swearing, and soon the THWACKS! were joined by WHOOMP!, and then exceptionally sharp CLANG! as her violence began to come into contact with rebar.

Her caps were on the angry, cussing mare.

Ada’s voice mewled weakly in awe of both the destruction and the swears pouring forth. “…is that…”

THWACK!, and very soon afterward the left front corner of the roof began to collapse into the ruins of the shop, followed by the back half—

“—IF YOU COWARDS WERE STILL ALIVE I’D RIP YOUR SODDING BALLS OFF AND FINISH YOUR SEX CHANGE CHOICES FOR YOU WITH A RUSTED KNIFE UP YOUR ARSEHOLES—”

The THWACK!s, WHOOMP!s, and the occasional CLANG! began to move from the crumbling section of the shop onward to the right, and the intensity and volume of the breaking wood and drywall began to increase in turn—

“…yah,” Kite squeaked in fear.

“—HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS DEAD AND GONE YOU DEATH-LOVING BASTARDS!!! WHOLE CITIES OF FAMILIES WIPED OUT BY YOUR FUCKING BOMBS AND FOR WHAT?!?! WHAT WAS THE SUNDAMNED FUCKING POINT OF IT ALL IF YOU WERE JUST GONNA RAPE THE WORLD OF EVERY LAST DROP OF HOPE FOR PEACE IT EVER HAD AND SHIT ON THE ASHES YOU PISS-DRINKING BITCHES—”

The center of the shop came crumbling down on itself, and the cussing, destructive mare stayed well ahead of her work and emerged into view of the doorway, now covered in splotches of white and wood splinters as she continued her merciless assault on the building. From her side, Kite heard a terrified “eep!”, and then Ada’s body scrambled to retreat back into the fire station, her talons and claws scraping the pavement in the process. Above, she could hear the windows clicking back shut in hurried succession as the onlookers sought to be elsewhere.

Kite just stood there, and marveled at the fury and strength that was demolishing the (admittedly decrepit) shop in less time than most souls spent taking a leak. By this point, the mare’s cussing had degraded into enraged screams, and with a small view of her work through the door and the broken shop window, Kite was slightly disturbed to learn that apparently some of the destruction being wrought was by the mare’s own bare hooves—a few times, she would buck the living shit out of a portion of the wall behind her while she swung with all of her rage and hate at whatever was in front of her. And when the last remaining section of the roof and structure began to come down, the mare came charging out of the shop display window, taking one last mighty swing at the window frame and blowing a pony-sized chunk of wall out in the process—

—the abused, debilitated shop, having been thoroughly abused and assaulted by a single pony, finally gave up on existence and simply collapsed in on itself in a cloud of dust, spilling debris across the sidewalk and into the street as the mare came to a stop just outside of its splash zone, breathing heavily and setting the head of her sledgehammer down to lean into the handle for support.

And yet after maybe ten seconds to catch her breath, the mare’s breathing had settled down into a steady rhythm, and so she hoisted the hammer back across her body and began to stroll back towards the fire station as if she merely been out for a midday stroll.

Kite had lost most self-awareness of her world until the angry swearing mare crawled to a stop a few feet away from her and made a politely-worded request. “Could I trouble you for another drink? I seem to have worked up a terrible thirst.”

If not for the destruction and voracity of her swearing, Kite might have found the sight of this mare overwhelmingly mesmerizing with the way the light breeze was blowing her black mane about. But faced with the aftermath of violence that could be meted out at will, Kite’s desire for survival greatly outweighed her lust. “…weeeee have water, Sparkle-Colas in three different flavors, and a 2-quart canteen of black pekoe tea—”

“Tea sounds lovely,” the mare chirped happily almost immediately upon hearing the fourth option, and gently trotted around her and ventured back into the fire station.

Kite stood there for a few moments, pondering the implications of what she’d just witnessed. She’d thought Sling was a bit of a mess, but this mare was already competing with her for the picture of “emotionally unstable creature” and she’d just met her.

And now she was potentially sharing a roof with two of them.

“…awwww, shit.”

Prologue

So much had changed.

A lifetime ago, the world was so much simpler. Friendlier. Safer.

And then something happened. Somewhere, somehow, the Equestrian ideals of harmony, peace, and friendship were…displaced. Shoved out of sight by far more baser, uglier notions. Lust. Greed. Angst. Rage. Distrust. Malice.

And these notions weren’t contained to Equestria. They seemed to seep into the collective consciousness of every society in every parcel of land. Within a few short years, a concept most ponies could never fathom had arrived.

War. And when it came, ponykind was forever altered. Tainted. Taking a life was something so alien, so unconscionable to ponies, that such things had never even been discussed for generations.

Yet, to her eternal dismay, ponies proved more than willing students in the art of war. The Equestria of today was not the Equestria she’d read of in school. Vast cities of skyscrapers of glass and metal attempting to reach the skies themselves replaced the simpler wood and brick houses. Technology and knowledge progressed at such rates that its impact on the natural world was only just now being realized (but often ignored in favor of survival against the zebras and their allies). New, more terrible weapons were developed and deployed each year with surprising speed and efficiency. Even the more peaceful studies of levitation and conjuration magic gave way to the more straightforward and conflict-centered arts of widespread destruction and misery. Spells so powerful, so devastating in their effect as to be dubbed megaspells, the very name instilling a foreboding doom in the heart.

But the most gut-wrenching, damning thing to come out of all these horrors wasn’t some new method of killing or a world-defiling technology. It was the long-term effects of this new state of affairs.

The Equestria that was, wasn’t anymore. Where friendship, harmony, and understanding once united the unicorns, earth ponies, and pegasi, deceit and conspiracy now began to drive them apart. Rumors had begun to spread that the zebras had sympathizers within Equestria, funneling to them intel, weapons, even unicorns willing to use their magic for the zebra cause. Princess Luna’s ministries were growing far beyond any one pony’s ability to control or contain—even for the Elements of Harmony themselves. Corporations grew to become almost as powerful as any ministry, bringing with them their own ills and poisons upon the souls of ponykind. The darkest of tales told that the zebras even had their own form of megaspells in the form of something called a balefire bomb.

In the bluntest of terms, the world had gone to Tartarus in a single generation, and as much as she hated to admit it, the pegasi were probably more accurate in their assumptions than anypony dared to believe. And she’d done the incredibly stupid thing of bringing a foal into this new Equestria. She did not want her only child to see the fear in her eyes as she read the morning paper, hear the terror in her voice as she spoke with her neighbors over the latest war news, feel the panic that sucked her lungs dry as the rumors of the power of megaspells grew more prevalent with each passing month. She wanted her daughter to know the Equestria that was, and that could be again, if everyone would just put their damned guns down and start working together towards a better future.

But most of all, she wanted her to live long enough to see that Equestria. She had to forcefully bite down on her own tongue to keep from bursting into tears whenever she took to the streets of Hoofville, scowling at all the war propaganda posters that marred the walls of the shops and businesses. She was most disturbed by the images of a pink-colored pony, whose silver-streaked pink mane reminded her of a fluff of cotton candy. Her message ‘Pinkie Pie is watching you FOREVER’ seemed to be the favored reminder of her ministry to ponyfolk, and was yet another reminder of the world she now lived in and wanted to forget.

She didn’t even notice her filly poking at her until the poor thing had to bite down lightly on her left foreleg to get her attention. As much as it stung, she didn’t bother to berate her for it. She had been awfully inattentive right then.

“Sorry, honey,” she murmured quietly, turning her head down behind her where her filly dutifully waited for her. “Got lost in my head again.”

“We should get you a map or somethin’,” her child responded with a touch of disdain. “You get ‘lost’ all the time. What’s wrong?”

Everything, she thought sadly. Aloud, however, all she was willing to utter was, “Just…thinking. Maybe I’ll get better at it if I keep doing it.”

“Hope so, you almost wandered right into that light pole!” her filly laughed lightly, bringing a rush of warm blood to her face as she swiftly hopped off to her right in time to avoid the aforementioned pole.

“Maybe I should leave the thinking to smarter ponies today,” she caved after a moment’s thought. Nearly beaning herself on a light pole she should have seen half a mile away left her wondering if the stress of living in this world was starting to get to her. Perhaps it was finally time to admit to her husband that she did need some help. Just a little bit.

“Now yer talkin’ some sense! We’re supposed to be relaxin’ today, remember? The park’s not far now, it’d be a shame if you missed out ‘cause you banged your head on something that stood still!”

The amusement her daughter derived from her misfortune finally proved to be enough of an annoyance to take her mind off the state of worldly affairs, and she promptly scooped the little filly within her left foreleg and brought her up close for a forced re-arrangement of her mane with her right hoof. “Speaking of which—”

How her treasure of the world got to be ticklish on her skull and crest was beyond her, but hearing the thing squeal and laugh as her morning brushing was ruined never ceased to lift her heart from her heavy chest. “Ahah-hahaha that tickles!” she cried joyfully, her struggle to escape her “punishment” doing little more than giving her mother a decent workout. “Mom that tickles stoppit!”

“Hey, it’s your fault banging your head on something that stood still!” the mare quipped briskly. Her filly’s token resistance to her teasing only prompted her to reach her hoof further down her neck, where the real ticklish spots were.

Her squeals and chuckles quickly morphed into loud, shrilly cries of laughter, drawing the pair a great deal of uncomfortable-looking stares (and a few light-hearted grins), but neither of them paid them any attention. “Aaaaaah! O-okay I’m so-hahaha I’m sorry quit it hahahahaaaa!”

Hearing her teal coated filly cave in, she promptly stopped her tickling assault and released her prey from her grasp, settling her forelegs back onto the sidewalk. The dark, brooding thoughts that had clouded her mind earlier had been completely forgotten—though she had this odd feeling that she’d been upset at something earlier, she couldn’t fathom what, and so long as she could her daughter’s laughter, she didn’t want to. “Apology accepted,” she said with a hint of smugness—

“But the great and powerful Star Shine will get you next time!” the daughter dared to challenge anyway as the pair began their trot once more.

“The great and powerful Star Shine may be missing her daffodil sandwich and hay fries later,” she laughed back. Oh stars the sky looked so beautiful today! Celestia’s gorgeous sun shined through like a beacon to higher lands, its rays piercing through the layer of stubborn clouds that tried to block it from everypony’s sight. She couldn’t believe she’d never noticed it earlier! What wonders her daughter’s laughter did for her mood!

“Not if she gets to her mother’s share of the picnic!” Star Shine schemed aloud, as she was wont to do when she was having too much fun pestering her mother. “A heist for the ages! Or…at least for the week.”

“For the week?” the mare poked back, her body slinking around to the right at the curb. “C’mon, you’ve got to set your dreams higher than that. You’ll never make it big this way.”

“Start small, win big!” Star Shine chimed proudly, no doubt reciting some words of wisdom she’d just gleaned off of a book at school earlier in the week. “You can’t shoot for the stars if you don’t know how to walk there!”

“Sometimes you have to run before you can walk,” the mare countered, briefly recalling how her bundle of life had come into the world—through a hasty (but enjoyable) evening with her coltfriend that would become her husband when she told him the end result. She hadn’t thought it at the time, but Star Shine was the best, brightest thing to ever come into her life.

Even if she’d just been barely old enough to marry at the time.

“That’s just silly!” Star Shine rebuffed. Having grown tired of walking, she’d begun to hop and bounce along beside her mother in a seemingly endless bout of energy, and it was infectious. “Runnin’s a lot harder than walkin’, ya can’t run if you don’t even know how to work your legs in the first place!”

She began to make small hops herself. She could easily outbounce her little star, but that wasn’t the point—she was just starting to feel as tightly wound as her filly, and she wanted to burn off some of that energy before it got to her and made her take off at the speed of light. “It means that sometimes big risks are the only way to get where you’re going. You can take baby steps all your life and never reach your destination, but if you take a chance and just run for it you might make it there before you know it.”

“And yet you tell me to be careful all the time,” Star Shine moaned derisively, though her hopping and bouncing didn’t abate any. “Always ‘Star Shine, watch where you’re going!’ or ‘don’t stand on your hind legs like that!’ or ‘don’t reach up so high on that step ladder!’ or—“

“That’s different!” she said with a slight edge, finally having something with which to focus her building energy—keeping her offspring in line. “I just don’t want you to hurt yourself doing those things. Like when you touched the stove after I turned it on and told you not to touch it. You touched it anyway.”

“Yeah, I remember,” the little filly reluctantly agreed in a grumble, her mood souring at the lecture that had just sprung up out of their back-and-forth playful bickering. She stopped hopping about like a rabbit and resumed her leisurely trot, but her gaze was focused more towards the sidewalk than anything else. “My hoof was sore for days, I could barely walk on it.”

“My heart was sore for weeks,” she continued, trying not to cringe at the year-old memories of Star Shine limping about on a bandaged leg. She followed her child’s lead and stopping leaping about herself. “It hurt me to see you like that, and I was always thinking of how much worse it could have been. I love you to death, but I don’t want that to be literal. I just want to go through the day and know you’ll be okay at the end of it. That’s all.”

“So what’s this talk of ‘runnin’ before I can walk’? How’s that bein’ careful?”

“Like I said, that’s different,” she repeated herself, wondering if she’d even get her point across. As smart as Star Shine was, she sometimes wondered if she was even qualified to be her mother. “Someday you’ll understand.” I hope.

An awkward silence grew between mother and child, and mother began to regret that the light-hearted, cheerful teasing had turned into a parent-knows-better lecture. Hearing her daughter’s squeals of delight was the only thing that kept her going some days, and she always felt guilty when she was the reason it stopped. She tried to think of something to get it going again, something to bring that blissfully ignorant smile back to her face so she could marvel at how much happier Star Shine was without knowing that something was wrong with the world.

But she never got the chance. Having mostly ignored the world around her up to that point, she finally had time to notice that many of the other ponies in the streets were in a rather big hurry to get somewhere. Some were shouting to their companions in high, panicked tones, while others simply raced along the roads as if their tails were on fire. But none of them seemed to be going to any one place in particular, resulting in a rather ugly mashing of bodies in the intersections streets as they began to run into each other in their blind rush towards….whatever they were trying to accomplish.

A few even bore looks of pure terror. As if someone had just told them dire, dreadful news and didn’t know how to deal with it.

“….Mom, what’s going on?” Star Shine asked her, her voice quaking as a general feeling of panic began to grow more prevalent amongst the townsfolk. “Everypony’s scared of something.”

As if it were trying to ensure that her upcoming lie would fail, the town’s tornado warning system began to wail at the world. Once used to warn townsfolk of a pegasi-generated tornado that had grown beyond their control in their efforts to re-hydrate their clouds, it found new use as an air raid warning when the zebra began getting help from the griffons and dragons.

Yet the zebra hadn’t been spotted anywhere near Hoofville for at least a month.

“I-it’s probably just a random test,” came the lie from her mouth—

“They don’t do random tests,” Star Shine continued, becoming both adamant and scared at the pretensions of her own words. “They test it on Wednesdays. Today’s Saturday!”

I know! But screaming the words wouldn’t help the kid calm down. And the town had drilled over what to do when the alarms went off, regardless of the actual cause. “C’mon, Clover Luck’s shop is just ahead, I’m sure she won’t mind us waiting out the drill in the back—“

A mare’s shriek of horror caused her to jerk her head back towards the intersection behind them, saw a bright teal coated pony collapsing onto her haunches as she stared out at something in the far distance.

Something terrible enough to leave her in a state of pure shock, her eyes locked wide open and unable to tear herself away from the sight that froze her.

“Mom, ma-maybe we should go home—“

She turned around and galloped back towards the curb, her heart unable to decide whether to keep pumping blood through her veins or seize up entirely, and she had to focus incredibly hard just to get a steady breathing rate going. Please just be a tornado please please please Celestia please—

She zipped around the hat shop at the corner to face whatever had terrified the mare into a living statue—

Found herself frozen as well, her eyes attracted to the large mushroom cloud of smoke and fire far beyond the horizon of the tall grass fields that surrounded the town, felt her lungs stop sucking in oxygen completely as a cold, bone-numbing veil of fear began to cover her body.

The only city in that direction was Trotpeka. Fifty miles away.

No, everything’s fine, j-just a wildfire—

A sphere of crackling of purple energy, concealed by the mushroom cloud, peaked up over the rising plume and sparked upward into the skies above, so bright and large that nopony could miss it.

Her eyes smashed themselves shut, her breathing turned ragged. I’m not here. I’m in the park. I’m watching Star Shine chase a squirrel to a tree—

Her eyes creaked open.

Another one, trailing off in a different direction and quickly being swallowed up by the distant skies.

Eyes shut, inner voice crying. I’m calling out to her for lunch, putting an apple next to her sandwich—

Eyes open, trying hard not to cry and barely breathing.

A third sparkling sphere, this one in red with a trail of arcane tendrils in its wake, coming downward in a trajectory that suggested it came from lands far beyond the other side of town, barreled straight towards that distant horizon ahead of her at the speed of a pegasus trying to break the spectrum barrier—

Eyes shut again, her mind screaming and begging. I’m showing her the difference between an oak tree and a maple tree, showing her the pecan tree Sugarsweet planted last spring—

Eyes reluctantly open, hoping to see trees, heart refusing to work as intended.

The red crackling spark dipped down beneath the hills beyond the town, and though it was no longer so easily visible, its brightness still splayed its ominous glow upon the straw-colored earth.

Eyes sloshing shut a blurry vision of the street, drowning her vision in pitch black. We’re walking home, orange skies and a gorgeous sunset, blue jays and robins building nests in the trees by the library—

Eyes begged open, pleading to Celestia and Luna for the sunset through an endless wall of tears.

A flash of intense sunlight engulfed the sky for a few seconds, but the line of shops beside her spared her eyesight from any pain.

Only then could her mind finally smash through her denial to acknowledge what she was seeing. No. Oh dear Luna NO—

The screams came again, from another mare somewhere behind her (or a stallion), and she was dragged out of the surreal scene playing out in the skies above just long enough to notice a second mushroom cloud had appeared in the horizon.

That was the point when everypony else figured out what was happening. And then the real screams began. The high-pitched, sorrowful screeches of ponies staring death itself in the face, and finally realizing that this was it. The end of the world as they knew it.

She would’ve screamed with them until her voice went hoarse in complete denial, if Star Shine hadn’t bit down on her hind leg to jolt her out of her stunned stupor. When she inched her neck down at her filly, she saw large eyes, dilated in terror and soaked with salty tears that could’ve come only from knowing what they were seeing. And it broke her heart.

“M-mom…I’m scared,” she cried. “I don’t wanna die.”

A mild breeze helped dry out her watery vision, her only child’s terrified voice becoming her best tool in helping her focus her own fears into something somewhat more useful than ruining her lungs with fruitless screaming.

“You are not dying!” she snapped sharply, hoping to shock the filly out of her quiet crying. “You understand? I won’t let you! You’ll make it through this!”

“H-how?!” Star Shine heaved, choking on her own gasping sobs. “Mommy, I don’t know what to do—“

She hasn’t called me Mommy in years, the mare realized almost immediately. Hearing her filly utter those words began to make her realize just how crippling an effect the mushroom clouds were having on her emotional state of mind—and honestly, if such a young thing could fathom and understand such a concept as a pony-wrought cataclysm, what could she possibly say that would be any good? How could she stand there and tell her little star that despite what was about to happen that everything would be all sunshine and roses?

Worse still, mindless destruction was not the day’s only planned horrors. In her search for answers she dared to look up past her filly, to the horizon on the other side of town in hopes that she wouldn’t see any mushroom clouds in that direction, only to spot a barrage of small rapid moving, rapidly growing green sparkles of arcane energy barreling towards the town from the hills near the creek. And as the pulsing spheres began their final descent, one of them peeled away from the group and veered off towards the crowded intersection of ponies just a few yards away from her.

Her motherly senses subconsciously urged her into motion, pulling Star Shine across the pavement until her body stood between the filly and the coming destruction, and managed to push the terrified thing along for about a dozen steps before she threw herself over her child—

—thunder erupted in the streets behind her, and she only heard a snippet of concrete forcefully crumbling apart before the world vanished into oblivion.

Introduction

Fallout: Equestria
Old World Dreams
By K. Darkwater

Fallout: Equestria concept by Kkat.
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic © Hasbro, Inc. and created by Lauren Faust.
Fallout series © Bethesda Softworks.

War. War never changes.

Ponies have struggled for survival since the first days of known history, when unicorns, pegasi, and earth ponies lived apart in uneasy alliances of convenience. The unicorns, with their magic, brought about night and day. The pegasus ponies, with their wings, brought about the weather. The earth ponies, with their hooves and earthly knowledge, brought about sustenance. Their differences were many, their struggles long and bitter, eventually rendering their homelands inhabitable. Forced to resettle elsewhere, their reunion in a new land was, as expected, unpleasant. But the disaster that claimed their homelands crept behind them, forcing them to acknowledge the futility of their infighting. They sought to reach out, to mend ties which they had neglected, and newfound bonds of friendship defeated the coming storm.

To honor the strength of their new ties, the tribes named their new home Equestria, and spread out across its vast, fertile fields and forests, settling new villages and re-establishing the status quo in a symbiotic circle of self-nourishment and replenishment. In time, two alicorn sisters would come to lead their little ponies, overthrowing an ancient force of discord to ensure their kind could prosper. Peace and harmony reigned across Equestria for many centuries.

In these new lands lived other races—griffons, zebras, dragons, and others untold, lost to the stoic, unforgiving passage of the eons. History, as always, was doomed to repeat itself, and so it was that new differences between the ponies and their neighbors led to the destruction of much of the world, burned in a hail of megaspells and balefire in a total war never before seen by ponykind.

In those dark hours, when distrust and chaos destroyed harmony and balance, those who could took shelter from the destruction in great underground Stables. And when the danger passed, they were to emerge to begin anew, to avoid the mistakes of their ancestors and build a new home from the ashes of Equestria That Was.

But Stable 115, built in the verdant prairie lands at the edge of Equestria, never received the signal from Stable-Tec to begin their exodus, and in the chaos of the Last Day, their communications with the outside world were hopelessly crippled. Thus, each generation a scout is chosen from amongst their numbers to venture out into the world, to discover Equestria’s fate…and its potential future.

None have ever returned.