The Vault Dweller: A Fallout In Equestria Story

Chapter 3: A new Home

Traveling with Cream Pie and Salty had been difficult enough. He knew that it was better to have a group, others to depend on, to help lookout, and keep a person sane by being able to talk. But now that there was ten of them together, well, it made moving even more difficult, especially since three of them were so broken that they barely did anything.

He looked at them, one had bandages where wings had once been. A pegasus without wings, and from what he could see in Salty’s expression that was a terrible thing. Salty still had a wing, but he couldn’t fly. Part of him wondered if there was a way to make a prosthetic wing that would return the power of flight to him. He knew there had been massive movements in prosthetics before his car wreck.

He could remember a man actually getting a set of functioning arms and hands for his missing limbs. They had linked them up to work on impulses, and it seemed to do what he wanted, most of the time, and he seemed delighted to have them. Maybe things progressed some. If that was the case then it could be possible for Salty to fly again. Maybe that mare could again as well.

“Why?”

He turned back toward the sound and saw the mare he was thinking about. Her seafoam green coat and white mane looked matted, and there was lashes up and down her back. Her cutie mark, the one that hadn’t been burned, was of a cloud in the shape of a pony. She looked away from him when he looked at her.

“Why what?”

Slowly she faced him, but her eyes never looked up at him, “Why did you take us? Are… Do you want us to be your slaves?”

He stopped. He heard an annoyed grunt from Cream, but that didn’t matter.

“No, I don’t take slaves. I’m freeing you. I want you to have your own lives.”

She looked confused. Her eyes moved to Lyra who looked positively giddy. Sensing that somepony was looking at her Lyra looked back at the Pegasus and gave her a soft smile.

“He wants to let you have choices.”

She shook her head, like the words were foul.

“No, NO! They do things if we have choices! They took my wings!”

Before her freakout could get worse Lyra had her in a hug, holding her, rubbing her mane, letting the mare cry it out. She looked toward him and shook her head.

“What happened?” he asked.

Lyra held her until she calmed down. She ignored the annoyed sounds and looks coming from Cream Pie, and instead gave him a soft smile.

“She wasn’t quite yet a mare when she came down. I was traveling around a bit,” she gave a small laugh, “See, I had been in Canterlot when the mega spell hit. I was visiting Lemon Hearts, Minuette, and Twinkle Shine there. The Pink Cloud,” she stopped when she saw his confusion, “Oh, right, you wouldn’t know. It was a cloud that covered everything. Anything it touched died. The four of us ran as fast as we could, but it covered us. Twinkle Shine and Minuette just died. I thought that I was dead too, and maybe Lemon Hearts was, but it ended up that we weren’t. It just… changed us.”

She gave a small laugh again, “We found out that we could walk around in that stuff, and we’d be fine. We thought about our other friends, and I of course thought about Bon Bon. She was working for Stable-Tech, and she had been helping prepare the stable in Canterlot. I think she got in. I like to think that she got in,” she shook her head, “Anyway, We traveled around Canterlot, looking for any of our other friends, I found Moondancer in her new home,” she giggled a little, “It’s not funny, not really, but her hooves and nose had merged with a book she had been reading. She always had her nose in her books, but it looked like she’d always have it in there. Anyway, we left, and headed toward Ponyville. It wasn’t as bad there, not really, not quite yet. Lemon Hearts suggested that maybe we should split up, go looking for anypony we knew that might be like us, or still okay. That was the last I saw of her…” she shook her head a little as she held the Pegasus Mare, “Anyway, fast forward a bunch of years and I’m making my cross Equestria tour for the seven hundredth time and I happen to get close to Las Pegasus. Well, I see this pretty teenage filly land, and I knew what had happened in Las Pegasus. I tried to warn her, but somepony jumped and slipped a magic nullifier on me, and they caught her. We’ve been here for a couple of years now.”

He looked at the mare who shook. He knelt down near her, unsure if there was really anything he could say that would make a difference, but he was willing to try.

“Hey, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I can promise you that I’ll do everything I can to help make sure that no one, no one ever makes you a slave again. You’re free, and I’ll make sure that you stay that way.”

She looked up at him, her violet eyes full of pain and hurt, and then she looked away.

“She’s just going to need time. Those three are going to need a lot of time,” Lyra replied.

“Ugh! I’m sorry, and I know I’m about to be as popular as a cock in a tailhole, but we need to be moving. If the Slavers find us I can promise that your promise will mean exactly minotaur shit. We need to be out of here, outside of Las Pegasus, and traveling as far away from here as possible,” Cream Pie said.

“Wow, you’re angry,” Twilight replied.

She looked toward the Alicorn, her eyes narrowed, and she marched over to her, “You haven’t seen angry! Ugh! All of you are idiots!”

“Cream, it ain’t like…”

She glared at Salty before he could finish, “I get it. Bad things happen. These ponies do bad things, lots of bad things, and we’re managing to get out. Cinnamon… She’s stuck back there, but she helped us to get out, and we’ve got to get out! We can’t go back! We can’t cause then she’s gonna to have… I won’t let Cinnamon have died for nothing!”

She pushed Salty away, “We need to get moving…”

“What do you mean died?”

She looked up him, as he stood there, “What do you mean died?”

She looked away, “She’s in one of the slavers camps. It’s the one we escaped from. She came up with the plan, the idea to get out, and she told me that one of us would have to stay behind to make sure it worked. I thought that she meant me, but she pushed me out and told me to get to the surface and out of Las Pegasus.”

“Surface… You were in the sewers?!”

She nodded, “We came out in the basement of that casino you were in. The Slavers are either selling the slaves, or having them work ripping anything that’s useful out of the casinos before coming back down.”

They needed out, he knew it, but knowing that they had more of them locked away, in the sewers, where he was sure there was rats the size of Saint Bernards, that was bothering him. He’d seen cruelty, and he couldn’t live with himself if he was part of it, and he knew that if he did nothing then he’d be part of it.

“Let’s get to that trading post, and once we do, I’m going to do something, something that’s most likely going to be epically stupid.”

He felt a few looks his way, but his mind was made up. He couldn’t just let this go. It’d feel wrong to simply let it go, and besides, if he could make things better for a few of them then it would be a great start. Despite everything else he still wanted to head to this Crystal Empire, but first things first. He was going to make this better. Slowly they cut through the allies, the casinos, staying as quiet as possible. It was after a few hours of their moving that they had to cross the courtyard of a burned out hotel.

He knew that if they were going to be spotted it would be here. He looked up, not seeing anything right away, waved toward the others and then looked at Cream and Salty. It was Twilight that came near them and she looked at everything in front of them. He felt something odd around him, and he looked to see his entire body glowing violet, almost purple, and then in a blink they were on the other side of the hotel.

“What in the hell was that?” he asked.

“What? I just teleported us. I wasn’t sure I could do everypony, but it looks like I could.”

Cream walked toward her, and he could see how she was almost gritting her teeth.

“You could have done this at any time?”

She cleared her throat and backed up, “Ummm… Maybe, I remember doing it before….”

Cream stood there, shaking, her eyes narrow, her teeth gritting hard, “You could have teleported us across Las Pegasus at any time and instead we’ve been trying to keep quiet?!”

He looked at them, and then up. He was certain that if the slavers didn’t know they were there before it was a certainty they did now. He looked at them, walked toward Cream Pie and stood between the two.

“We don’t have time for this. You said it before, we need to get out of Las Pegasus, so let's get out of Las Pegasus!”

She glared up at him, and then turned away, “Lets go.”

The group moved again, and to her credit Twilight did teleport them once more, but she said that teleporting into a building was a little tricky, and she didn’t want to keep pressing their luck and accidentally teleport somepony halfway into a wall. He activated his Pip Boy and brought up the map. According to it they were nearly outside of Las Pegasus, and that meant once outside of it they could relax.

They moved, once more, and managed to see what separated Las Pegasus from everything else. He looked at the wall, the barely guarded wall, and it was Lyra that walked near him.

“Okay, any suggestions?”

Lyra started to open her mouth when a deafening sound could be heard and something sent her tumbling. He looked around to see an unicorn holding a lever action rifle in his magic. It looked, and seemed to operate like any lever action he’d ever seen, but it was obvious that it packed a punch. He jumped, pulled his weapon and the V.A.T.S. came online for him. Suddenly he saw the percentages of where he could hit him. A head shot was only about thirty percent, but a body shot was currently seventy-five, and that was good enough.

He fired off two rounds with the gun he had gotten off of the slaver earlier and both found their mark. The slaver unicorn stumbled, fired another round at him. He tried to move, but he felt something hot hit his arm. He gritted his teeth, fired again, and once more the unicorn staggered around before firing another shot. This time he felt it in his side. He went to his knees, unsure of what was going to happen, and he looked at the unicorn who was cocking the lever on the rifle again. His V.A.T.S. was currently offline needing to build up the charge needed to connect with his vision, and so he took a chance and fired.

The shot caught the unicorn in right nostril, going up the nasal cavity until it hit its skull, busted through, and sprayed gray matter out behind it. The slaver dropped, and he stepped forward. He searched him, taking the gun, what ammunition he had, and then found a small flask. It was a kind of clear rubber, with a stopper in the top, and inside was some kind of red liquid. He looked at it. Unsure of what it was, but noticing that there was a small cross on one side. He silently hoped that the cross meant the same thing it had before, unstopped it, and drank.

The effect was instantaneous. He felt the burning wounds from being shot heal, and then he breathed out. He used his Pip Boy to scan it, and inputted that it was first aid remedy. The Pip Boy, being the wonderful machine it was, didn’t offer any argument, but instead it listed that type of flask as holding a first aid remedy.

He breathed out, but it was short lived. He heard the noise of pounding hooves, and he brought the rifle up. His V.A.T.S. had recharged, and he automatically aimed at the next three slavers. One was caught in the side of the head, sending his body tumbling uselessly along the road, the next was caught in the front left foreleg sending him skidding toward Cream Pie who unleashed two bullets from her revolver into his head, and the last one got a shot that grazed her neck.

He recognised her. The same mare that he couldn’t kill before. Her eyes were wide as she looked at him, and he watched as she stepped back.

“You…”

He looked to see Lyra standing there, her horn glowing brightly, “YOU!”

“No… wait…” she didn’t finish before her body was caught in a golden glow. She slammed hard into the ground, and then again, and again. Finally she slammed against a wall and fell down beside it. She was breathing, barely, and Lyra walked toward her.

“I saw what you did to that filly, how you took her wings!”

“Please,” the other mare croaked, “Please… mercy…”

He walked toward them, about to say something when he heard the sickening crack of a neck snapping. He stopped to look at Lyra who glared at the now dead body.

“That’s far more merciful than you deserved,” she spat.

It surprised him, maybe more than it should have, but he hadn’t imagined Lyra being able to do something like that. Granted it wasn’t like he knew her life’s story, and from their talks while they were leaving could be believed then Lyra herself was well over two hundred years old. He was that old, well maybe a little older, but that was because he’d been in cryostasis. He wasn’t sure what he’d been like if he would have been out in the middle of everything. No, he knew what would have happened. He would have undoubtedly became very comfortable with doing whatever it took to get by.

Humans were like that. They adapted, and he knew from experience how quickly they adapted. Oh, there was things about his old life that had bled into his new one. For one he was used to buying really crappy food when he grocery shopped. He had to guess that was why Sarah wanted to do most of the grocery shopping for them. When he went he got what he had been brought up on. Food that would last for an entire month. Food that wouldn’t spoil, food that didn’t have to be cooked right away, and food with enough salt and preservatives in it to cause a corpse to take up to twenty percent longer to rot than one that had ate nothing but natural food.

Maybe that’s why he was so okay with the Twinkies. They lasted practically forever, and they reminded him of Starlight Mobile Home Park right outside of Las Vegas Nevada.

“Hey, you okay?”

He looked at Lyra who was staring up at him.

“Yeah, yeah, fine. I don’t see anymore of them,” he replied.

She nodded and with that the two of them moved toward the gate. It was patchwork at best, made from pieces of old billboards, bits and pieces of casinos, and even a few shopping carts had made their way into the gates. He tried it to find that it was locked, and groaning he knew what he had to do .

It took searching all of the bodies, but finding some ammunition, first aid remedies, a pack of cigarettes, a disposable lighter that was missing a flint, and about fifteen bobby pins told him that it was a big fat empty. He looked at the gate, walked up to it, and looked at the lock that held it together. The lock looked like a simple padlock. So taking a bobby pin, his screwdriver, and his experiences doing this already he began working on the lock. It had looked simply, and it had looked easy, but looks and what it actually was seemed to be two different things.

He’d broken three bobby pins already, but at least he had a feel for it now. He moved the pin around, feeling the tumblers moving, falling into place, and then he felt the click as the screwdriver turned the lock and it popped open. He pulled it off, loosened the chains, and pushed on one of the gates. Despite it being so big, and awkward looking, the gate was surprisingly easy to open.

The hinges seemed to be well greased, and it rolled open with little trouble. Maybe something would be going there way. Once all of them were through he pushed the gate back, he pulled the chain out on their side. For added measure, he clicked the padlock into place on the outside of the gate. It wasn’t like it was really going to stop them from coming through to get it, but at least it made him feel better.

Once that was done he turned around to see a vast area of nothing. He looked at Cream.

“Where’s the trading post?”

She looked up at him, “It’s out here, that way,” she pointed in a seemingly random direction, “and it might take us a little while to get there.”

He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but having to cross desert before finding this place wasn’t it. They walked in the direction she indicated and his Pip Boy began to pick up signals. Not just the radio signals, but signals that were updating on his mapping system. He looked around to see a little boy bopping from place to place, music spilling out from it, and as it moved further on he noticed the signal began to fade. Still, he switched off of the map, then back to it, and he saw the trading post, but there was a name to it.

“New Thunder Head?” he asked.

Cream looked back at him surprised, “Yeah, that’s the trading post. The pony that runs it named it after some warship of the Enclaves that was destroyed.”

He checked the map again, they were heading the right way, and according to the map it was just ahead. The neared where it was supposed to be, and he could see it, sitting in the middle of a ravine. It floated in place, perfectly in place, held up by some unknown force, and his eyes widened as he looked at it. It couldn’t be real. What he was seeing couldn’t be real at all, there was no way it could exist, but the evidence seemed to indicate different.

The base was a black thunderhead cloud, an old rain cloud, on which there was an entire community of buildings built from whatever could be found. It seemed to stretch for at least a mile, and from what he could see it was easily about as wide. He neared the edge of the ravine, looking at it, and then at an old bridge beside it.

“You’re shitting me right?”

Lyra laughed, walked toward the bridge, and began to cross it.

“Wait, how in the hell do we walk on a cloud?!” he shouted.

“The roads aren’t made of clouds. Come on,” Lyra shouted.

Realizing that at this time asking questions would end up causing him more of a mental strain than he wanted he walked toward the bridge, felt the way it popped and creaked as he walked across it, and silently he prayed to God that if he fell just end it quick. He was so concerned about it that he didn’t even realize when he’d crossed it.

He heard the others, and soon the group of them were standing in front of a droid similar to Donald. It was a little different, for one its round head had two pointy metal ears, it wasn’t chrome like Donald, but instead it had been painted a light blue, and it had what looked like a similar screen to his Pip Boy where its face should be.

“W..Welcome to N...New Thunder Head, I’m Bronco, y...you’re welcoming bot! W….” Bronco’s voice shorted out, and a pegasus floated over, slapping it on the back of the head, “And enjoy your stay!”

Bronco floated off, he didn’t ask, and the pegasus took a seat before rolling her eyes, “Welcome to New Thunder Head. I’m Maple Starlight, no one of my parents wasn’t an unicorn,” she took time to give us all a baleful look, “If you’ve got goods to trade, go right down that street. You’re going to run into the founder of New Thunder Head, Mayor Silver Wing.”

“Miss,” he said as she started to leave, “Yes, what?”

“My friends and I would like to know if there is an inn here.”

She rolled her eyes again, acting like he was demanding the world from her, “Across the street from Mayor Silver Wing’s store is the New Thunder Head’s inn. They’ll get you a room, if you got the bottle caps for it.”

With her peace said, she didn’t wait around for further questions ; the mare lifted into the air with a flap of her wings and took off. He looked at our three ponies that had began to walk, but seemed to treat the rest like slave masters. He wasn’t sure if this was the kind of place that would be good for them or not, but given the state of what he’d seen he wasn’t sure if anything short of the Vault would be a good place. And even then he was afraid the isolation would do worse for them.

Walking in the direction Maple Starlight had said they neared a few buildings, but it was Silver Wing’s Junk, Trade, and General Store that caught their attention. They walked over to it, and an older looking Pegasus stallion strolled out. He looked the group over for a moment before he cleared his throat.

“Welcome to Silver Wing’s house of Junk and goods! If you want it, I’ve got it, and I’m the only one that’s got it for a good three days walk, unless you want to try your chance at Las Pegasus. So, come inside, tell me what you need, and we’ll see what we can trade for it.”

The pre-war money won out of that slot machine, which ended up being about nine hundred bits (Cream Pie had counted and recounted) fetched about two hundred bottle caps. Cream told Silver Wing it was robbery, he reminded her of the long way to sell them some place else. I hesitated for a moment, but I pulled a Twinkie from a box and held it out. He looked at it, unsure of what it was that I had.

“Is that a Banana-Rama’s Banana flavored cream cake?”

I shook my head, “No, this is called a Twinkie, and I can promise you that you’ll love it.”

He held his foreleg up, and his Pip Boy, or it looked like one, didn’t click. His eyes widened, he took the package, and after working it for a moment with his teeth and a hoof, he ate the little cream filled cake. Instantly after he looked at me.

“I’ll buy every single one you’ve got, and I’ll… I’ll give you a thousand bottle caps for them.”

“Four Boxes, including the one you took a Twinkie from, for twelve hundred bottle caps,” Cream Pie said.

“That’s Robbery!”

She scratched her chin with her hoof, “Yeah… I don’t think so, and maybe I’m feeling like I’m not charging enough. After all, these are our rations. We might just get some ammunition and be on our way.”

“A thousand for four boxes,”

“A thousand, and ammunition for our weapons.”

He grumbled, “Fine,” he stuck his hoof out to her. She touched it, and she levitated four boxes out of her saddle bags.

He pushed a bag full of caps toward Cream, then looked at the party’s guns, which he was a little surprised by the Vault Dweller’s, but Cream had been right in that he had shells for it. Soon, the string had around three hundred rounds of assorted shells for everything they were equipped with, and shortly after he sent them out of his store. The Vault Dweller looked as he put up a sign for the Twinkies.

‘Just In! Newest thing! Non-irradiated Twinkies! Only twenty bottlecaps per cake!’

“Damn, I bet that he’s going to make a killing.”

Cream turned and looked at the sign and shook her head, “Yeah, but no where near what he paid. They’ll go up, after the first two or three ponies try them. He wants the word out first.”

They walked over to the building across from Silver Wing’s shop, and there was the hotel. The old mare over it was a pegasus that had an artificial leg. The sound of it was similar to the sounds that Donald made when he moved, and that told him that there had to be something that would help Salty and that young Pegasus mare. After a few minutes Cream had managed to get them two rooms to split among them, breakfast in the morning, and she had managed to do so for about sixty bottle caps.

The room wasn’t much. A bed that was a little too narrow for him, a little short, but at the moment it looked like heaven. He moved toward it when he saw Cream heading for a corner. Groaning he walked toward her, “Take the bed.”

She looked up at him in surprise, “What, no, I’m fine here.”

He shook his head, “Take the bed. If it makes you feel better split it with someone. I used to sleep on the floor all of the time when I was young.”

With that he found a place on a piece of the floor that had some filthy carpet, apparently a luxury, and leaned against the wall. Soon he felt a body pressing against him, another on his legs, and before long there was a small pile. It was actually nice, and in the comforting to have a pile going. Although he never slept like this before. His eyes closed, and for a moment he felt safe, secure, and even at home.

Author's Note

(AN: Wow, a third chapter, Again, a big thanks to L0rd0f7hund3r and MoltenXKid for looking it over, being sounding boards, and making some great suggestions.)