S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Discordant Emissions

Chapters

Prologue and Notes
Chapter 1: The Perimeter
Chapter 2: The Camp
Chapter 3: The journey begins
Chapter 4: Sweet dreams
Chapter 5: Lab X-16

Prologue and Notes

S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Discordant Emissions

The Equestrian Nuclear Fusion Power Plant was an incredible idea, the increase in need for energy due to the development of more advanced technologies was leading to a greater increase in energy production, but it wasn’t beneficial to the land for the main form of energy production was coal burning as the usual solar power that had supplied the land with energy for millenniums wasn’t enough. Celestia knew that there had to be an alternative, so she decided to use her magic to make a miniature sun that could self propagate a nuclear fusion reaction, a feat she could easily achieve, but she knew that she would have to stay close to it to keep it under control. Celestia moved to a remote area near the edge of the Everfree forest that was currently unused by her subjects, the ponies of the land of Equestria.

She requested that it be unknown to the ponies that she wasn’t in Canterlot, the capital of the land, as ponies would move to the area which would be dangerous, only allowing for the workers she would need to control the other areas of the plant to live close to the plant. A few years after the plant had started energy production, there was an unknown incident in the central reactor, the reaction was growing and becoming unstable, Celestia ordered an evacuation of the area staying to hold the ball of fusion as stable as possible until nopony remained in the 30 kilometre exclusion zone she had outlined in the case of an emergency. An hour after the incident occurred and the evacuation order had been given, the reactor exploded in a mix of nuclear and magical energy, irradiating the exclusion zone, a few ponies had been inside the 30 Km radius, but appeared to be unhurt from the emission of energy.

On the same day, unknown sources told the newspapers of Canterlot that the sisters that ruled the land had disappeared and were in the centre of the explosion, leading to a new political party lead by the head advisors of the monarchy to take control of the political rulings of the land. It is rumoured that the sisters are still alive as the sun and moon still follow their normal cycles, but they have not been seen since the explosion. The radiation in the exclusion zone lead to The Royal Guard creating a new unit within their ranks called The Perimeter Guard, these new guards were ordered to create a perimeter to keep ponies outside of the exclusion zone as the radiation was dangerous, and unbeknown to the citizens of Equestria, to investigate the original site of the power plant to see if the royal sisters were there, or if there was any signs of where they were.

The first such foray into the zone never returned, the second, equipped with long range radios cameras mounted to their gas masks, made it half of the way to the power plant before radio reports came back to the perimeter of finding scraps of armour which belonged to the first squad, as was shown through some of the pieces of armour having the new coat of arms created for The Perimeter Guard. It was at this point where the first anomaly was observed as the point for the squad stepped into a whirligig, the squad turned to the screams of the pony to see him being thrown around above the squad, and as the whirligig detonated, dismembered him, spraying the squad with his blood, distributing his body parts over the area. The squad was shocked, as were the viewers of the screens displaying the stream from the squad’s cameras. The squad moved forward slowly, prodding ahead of their path with a stick that was being held by a unicorn’s magic, the squad was then attacked by what the viewers of the stream could only describe as a nightmare, reviewing of the tapes showed that they were attacked by what is now known as a Chimera, the remaining members of the squad were decimated by the Chimera who attacked with high speed strikes and movements, as well as incredible pounces, after this squad, none more were sent in to investigate the power plant.

After a particularly brave and reckless pony had entered the zone when The Perimeter Guard wasn’t watching a particular stretch of fence and had brought back a stone that reduced the weight of objects near it, the phenomenon known as stalkers began to appear within the zone, stalker is an abbreviation of Scavenger, Trespasser, Adventurer, Loner, Killer, Explorer, Robber, they are ponies looking to find these objects that had been given the name ‘artefacts’ and sell them for ridiculous amounts of bits, this lead to the creation of the area now known as The Zone.

The Zone itself is the 30 Kilometre exclusion zone which has been riddled with magical and nuclear radiation after the explosion within the ENFPP, the amount of radiation decreases the further out from the centre of The Zone, this has created different environments within The Zone, as you approached the centre of The Zone the likelihood of finding the rarer artefacts that only exist in the bigger anomalies increases, but this also leads to a higher chance of coming face to face with stronger mutants. It was usually within these inner areas of The Zone where you find most of the best stalkers in the world, those who thought they were good enough to walk into the inner areas but weren't were usually all dead to either the mutants, the anomalies, or the other stalkers or bandits within The Zone. Unknown as to how all the weapons in The Zone had found their way there, with rumours between stalkers being that The Perimeter Guard often resupplied The Zone with guns to benefit from the study of the artefacts brought back from The Zone in working out the nature of it, the ringed nature of the zone usually also found the more powerful guns to be closer to the centre, while the guns that could barely scratch mutants such as chimeras ended up being more common around the perimeter.

Author’s notes: In terms of the crossover with the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series it isn’t based directly off a particular game in the series, mentioning places in each game, the main thing that I draw of a particular game in is the effects of the artefacts, in which I use Call of Pripyat artefacts. I also know realise that I had unintentionally used a similar idea of the Shadow of Chernobyl plot of finding someone, I request you don’t point this out to me as like I said, it was unintentional and I didn’t notice until I thought about this note here and which of the games I was drawing everything from. For the readers who haven’t played the games don’t be afraid to ask questions, I will be checking for comments and questions anyone may have also others who have played the games might answer them before I can. Also you can use the stalker wikia to help with understanding anything you think might be from the games, searching for what you want to know about should get you a page about it, or at least something related to it, but I promise to try explain anything from the stalker universe as best as I can so that you don’t need any prior information. I’d also like to add that because I’m Australian, I’ll be using metric measurements rather than imperial, also I will be using UK spelling (eg. color is US, colour is UK), for an idea of what certain things what I use measurements to describe I’ll list some comparisons here starting with distance and weight for now, might add a couple others if they turn up in the fic.

Metric to imperial rough conversions:

1 meter ~3.33 feet, 1.1 yards

1.6 Km ~ 1 mile

1 Kg ~ 2.2 lb

Chapter 1: The Perimeter

The Perimeter

“Open cell doors”

“Cell doors opening”

I woke to the sound of the guards shouting their commands to each other from across the cell block, all 64 square meters of it, after all, Equestria is a peaceful place, there’s rarely ever been a need for prisons. That is until the incident with the Equestrian Nuclear Fusion Power Plant happened, and the resulting loss of the monarchy from the fight to contain the energy from the power plant, and the area now known as The Zone as a result from the magical and nuclear radiation. Never would we have thought that we ponies would change so easily from a promise of money and supernatural junk found in The Zone.

“Prisoner 012: Midnight Shade, AKA Spectre, unicorn, dark grey coat, silver mane, cutie mark: runic circles, reason for imprisonment: trespassing into The Zone, imprisonment term: two years, date of release, today” shouted the guard at my cell door with the sternest of looks until he smiled at the mention of my release date, no doubt not for my sake, but for the reason that it meant that he didn’t have to spend half of every second day guarding my cell, and watching me while I ate, or walked around the yard for my daily exercise.

“Finally, where can I go to collect my personal items that I wasn’t allowed to have in my cell?” I asked emphasising the personal items part, after all this time they know what particular item they disallowed me that I yearned to have with me for my two years.

“They will be waiting for you to retrieve them in the general’s office.” Replied the burly white earth pony stallion, who seemed to be struggling to refrain from striking me after I gave him such disrespectful attitude as they had called it last time they disallowed my yard time.

“The general’s office? Why is it in there?” I asked; concerned that this general wanted to give me something before I left much like my guards would like to leave an imprint of their boots on my body, not that they’d be noticeable because of my dark coat.

“For reasons unknown to us, he has requested that you be brought to him so he can have a talk with you before you leave back to The Zone to kill more of our soldiers” said the guard as calmly as he could, which wasn’t even close to calm as the sound of his ceremonial armour caused by his rage induced shaking was easily audible, obviously whatever this general wanted me for, he had been thoughtful enough to include that I had to be in some sort of good condition otherwise the guard would have snapped and tried striking me with his baton by now.

“Fine let’s get this over with.” I said before I yelled back to the guard “I don’t see why you seem to ignore the fact that I told you lot that I was planning on leaving The Zone when I walked into that patrol, I didn’t shoot anyone or anything other than the mutants in The Zone” as I was being escorted out of my cell.

My escort proceeded to unlock the chains that bound my legs, and the device that bound my magic as we reached a door labelled ‘General Shine’. The general really was trying to make a friendly vibe by removing my bindings while being in the same room as me, even more surprising was the fact that the escort told me that it was to be just me and the general in there, and that he wasn’t permitted to enter with me.

“Ah, I see they listened to my orders that you were to be left untouched” Said the pony who I’d assume to be General Shine as I entered the room, “Allow me to introduce myself, I am General Spit Shine, leader of the guard posted around the boundary of The Zone” announced this green unicorn, the armour of the perimeter guard, while resembling the royal guard of old, really did look terrible on anyone who wasn’t pure white. He motioned for me to sit in the seat across the desk from where he stood.

“Yeah, okay, now, where’s my box of stuff? And what did you want to discuss so I can leave and go live in peace” I sneered at the pony, after all, it was his soldiers that had caused me such grief over my two years here, also what did I care for what he wanted of me, all I wanted was to be left alone so I can go live in Ponyville and live peacefully and work so I could afford my peace.

“Now now, I know how those guards had treated you over your sentence, but that wasn’t up to me, but because of recent events that lead to my promotion I can at least give you peace in mind that they’ll be on latrine duty for such abysmal behaviour towards a defenceless prisoner, and your personal belongings are here” Said the general with such audible sincerity that I felt that he would remain true to his word as he levitated a box onto the desk, but then, if he didn’t want to cause me more pain, what did he want from me?

“I want to offer you a job” he said when I voiced these concerns to him.

“What kind of job?”

“Information gathering in The Zone”

“I thought I made myself clear when I said that I’m not planning on returning to The Zone, and that I really did just walk into that patrol by mistake, not my fault they were jumpy and one of them accidentally shot another”

“I know, I believe you, but what you don’t realise is that you have a criminal record now, no one will hire you, the only life you have to return to that would be considered ‘legitimate’ is one of a beggar. What I’m offering you is a simple job of finding out what is causing a couple of things within The Zone, and in turn you will be rewarded with a cleared record and enough money to not have to work again.”

Was that true? Would it be that easy for employers to check for a criminal record? I was hoping that I could just forget these past two years and get on with my life, without anyone having to bring it back up. These were the thoughts that were being run over and over through my head as I pulled my belongings out of the box, two of my prized finds for artefacts in The Zone, my various stalker equipment, a saddle bag full of nuts and bolts along with spools of string to be tied to them, and finally my photo, the original reason for entering The Zone in the first place.

“Our best researchers couldn’t work out the properties of those artefacts, they knew that they had some properties and weren’t just a pair of marbles, we figured they were related and the function of one was the opposite of the other, which was our explanation of one being white and the other black, there also wasn’t any mention of them in our databases, nor had any stalkers that we asked know what they might have been. Also we’ve taken your detector to develop our own, so here’s a prototype that we’d like you to test and use while you’re in The Zone” Shine said as he placed a detector that looked similar to my old one except it had a bigger display, while he was also eyeing off my artefacts.

“So what’s the difference between your prototype and my old detector?”

“I’ll tell you if you tell me about those artefacts” he said with a smile, so that’s how he’s going to play it.

“Fine, you were right about them being inversely related and one undoes the effects of the other, but what your ponies wouldn’t be able to discover about them is that they aren’t a natural formation in The Zone, why no one in The Zone knew of them and why they aren’t in your database, I made them. It wasn’t an intentional outcome but it let me develop my magic further, my ability is to greatly empower my spells with runes and runic circles which you may know if I’m in a database. Before I had these I had to draw the circles either then and there or with only a small amount of time beforehand” I said taking my creations and casting a spell on the white one of the two “they allow me to store a book of runes and runic circles in a void in reality, I don’t need to find the page the runes or circles are on, having the book summoned is enough for me to be able to draw power from them.”

“You say they weren’t intentional; then what were you trying to do that lead to their creation?”

“That’s irrelevant to their function. Now give me a rundown of your prototype”

“Ok, can’t expect you to give us everything we want on the first try, our prototype has the ability to find not only artefacts and recognize what the artefact is, thus it will show you where they are on the display, each ring is ten meters, but it can also find and determine the nature of any surrounding anomalies, and also display them and the area that they cover.”

“If it does work, key word being if, that’s a very handy tool, why haven’t you tested it yet?”

“Nopony has been brave enough to walk into an anomalous field to test it yet, but seeing as you’re going to be walking through The Zone anyways; it would be a good time to test it”

“You know I still haven’t agreed to your job yet”

“But you know you don’t have any other option, this job is the only way you can go back to a peaceful life” I looked out the window to the side of the desk, it over looked the main gate of The Zone, I knew I really didn’t have any option, this job was my only choice.

“Fine, but this gear would be in disrepair by now, I need new equipment. Also what information exactly are you looking for?”

“Of course, you have access to everything in our armoury; take whatever you think you will need or just even if you want it. As for the information, we just want to know why the reach of blowouts in The Zone is increasing, over the past three months the radius has increased by 20 meters. Two of the perimeter guards were walking past the perimeter together during the last one of last month and the one closest died as a result, while at the most recent one killed another guard who was four meters away from where the aforementioned guard was, so we’re only guessing where it’s really ending.”

“That is highly unnatural even for The Zone, something is very wrong in The Zone, I can see why you really want to find the source and stop it. Anyways that gives me a new sense of urgency; we should get going as quickly as possible”

Upon arriving at the armoury on base, I could say that I was expecting an incredible array of weapons, but the real amount was unbelievable, they had every gun I had ever seen during my time in The Zone, and more. The room itself stretched down out of sight, and was at least 20 aisles across, filled with racks of guns, body armour, helmets and all the odd bits and pieces you need to survive in The Zone.

General Shine spoke while looking back over his shoulder as he walked towards a lounge set up in the corner of the large room “As I said, you can take anything you want; we have plenty of spares of everything as you can see”

Walking down the aisles I picked out the equipment I wanted for The Zone, I took a basic flak jacket and gas mask combo, though I preferred to leave the gas mask hanging around my neck until I needed it, with war rein attachments. The war rein was an ingenious idea inspired by The Zone, before they were created earth ponies and pegasi were severely handicapped in a gun fight against a unicorn, because while the unicorn could just levitate his guns, the earth ponies and pegasi had to use their mouths, quite a difficult task, after the war rein was created now after the gun is slot into the war rein it was aimed where ever the wearer was looking, while restricting large rifles, it was very effective and was fired by a mechanism made by a unicorn that used brain signals to fire when needed. Although this did give pegasi and earth ponies an advantage for speed, it didn’t allow them to aim properly over distances. I didn’t take anything like an exoskeleton because heavy armour ended just as many lives as it saved, besides I wasn’t staying long, I took a G36, along with plenty of ammo for it, and a desert eagle, also with plenty of ammo. I also noticed a variety of medical equipment and decided that I should take some supplies, as I was putting all my equipment on, and putting my pistol in the war rein and the G36 strapped around my body, I noticed the guards at the door look at me like I was mad when I also put the contents of my nuts and bolts bad into one of the pouches of the flak jacket. Even if they do say that the prototype can detect anomalies, I’m not willing to put my life on the line for it, but I doubt that’s why they think it’s odd, this must be why I’m the one being sent to do this, rather than anypony here, because they’re all inexperienced and would probably die before they could find the information they wanted and get back to the perimeter.

“Alright, I’m set to enter The Zone.” I said looking over my gear one last time before looking over to General Shine.

“Good, I’ll show you to the gate, but before you go in, when you come back to leave The Zone you’ll need to notify the perimeter guard beforehand or they’ll shoot you before you can pass on the information we want, and collect your reward. When you approach just shout twilight and you should get sparkle as a countersign, to make sure that it can’t be an accident they’ll ask for your name, and you just need to tell them your name. It will be enough for them to confirm your identity, or someone you send in your place in the event that you find it necessary” said General Shine as he walked over to the door of the room, motioning me to follow him.

As I stood at the gate I could see the markings as they went further and further outside the perimeter, the range of the emissions were increasing at quite a rate, but the gap between the last two lines seemed to be smaller than the first two, a good sign that it may stop expanding, but it still doesn’t mean that it can’t or won’t happen again. I had to stand and wait while the guards on the perimeter secured the area around the entrance, not like there’d be anything this close, but the evidentially changing state of The Zone could also be affecting the mutants as well. The gate was a large rolling section of the magically enchanted cyclone fencing and barbed wire, with a smaller gate in the middle for small groups to pass through one by one, either side of this large rolling door to The Zone were guard houses with low sandbag walls on their roofs for the perimeter guard snipers to sit and take cover behind. At the moment there were only two snipers on either guard house as the others that would normally be with them were part of the squad on the other side of the fence. It seemed the guards had been busy plugging holes in the guardhouses over the past three months to make them more suitable cover in an emission, what once were probably quite homily looking small cottages, now were covered in bits of sheet metal which had apparently been quite successful in preventing deaths from the emissions.

“Area secured, ready to open the gates” shouted the captain of the guards as he stood at the head of the semi circle based around the entrance.

“Good, you ready to re-enter The Zone Spectre?” asked General Shine as he stood to my side

“Ready as I’ll ever be I suppose” I replied looking towards The Zone, wondering what new creations of Tartarus will be awaiting me on my journey.

The green unicorn motioned me to move towards the gate before he started to shout with magical amplification “The operation has now commenced, Spectre will now be entering The Zone, Captain, you and your stallions will then proceed to leap frog backwards until all of you are outside of The Zone, and in position to close the gate.” Even though by the time he started his commands I was a good distance from him, I still had to cover my ears to prevent any permanent damage.

“Let’s get this show on the road” I said with one more quick look over my gear, and at the small bag with my artefacts and photo to make sure I did bring them before I walked through the gate and into The Zone, where I fancy I felt a slight surge of energy pass through me as if The Zone was welcoming me back. I stood just a few meters inside The Zone while I watched the guard around me moved back one by one back through the gate, locking it shut as the captain walked back through the opening with a quick tip of his head to me before walking back into the guard house next to the gate to take up his over watch of the area. I looked forward down the road that I knew from my previous time in The Zone; just up ahead over a couple of small hills would be the newbie camp, no doubt the beginning of a journey to find a solution to a problem causing further unnatural occurrences in The Zone than normal. With one last look at my photo and a deep breath, I started my short walk to the camp.

Chapter 2: The Camp

The Camp

As I crested the second of the two small hills between the gate and the newbie camp I felt the weight of something pony sized on my back, after bucking it off my back and spinning around ready to fire at the mutant, I came face to face with another pony rather than the mutant I was expecting.

“Oh you’re not dusk, I’m sorry if I startled you, I just thought you were somepony else, I wouldn’t have sat on your back otherwise” said the earth pony mare, who’s coat was a dark blue like the night sky over a well lit city and mane was a confusing tangle of curls, that reminded me of the logo of the old granny twists confectionary company, of a blue like a midday sky, her cutie mark also appeared to be a bass and treble clef. She spoke at a speed that nearly made whatever she said incomprehensible, “you must be new here, let me introduce myself, I’m Lightfoot or my friends also call me Silent Night, and because you’re new here you need to come back to the camp to join in on my daily ‘I survived another day in The Zone’ party I guess for now it will also have to double as your ‘First time in The Zone’ party, but I promise I will throw you a separate party for it at a later date.”

“Sorry to disappoint you Lightfoot but this isn’t my first time in The Zone” I said to her slightly shocked at the mare’s energy, and sure enough she did look slightly disappointed at this new information, until she smiled again.

“That’s alright, it’ll be a ‘Welcome back to The Zone’ party instead then, and if you don’t come to my party now then I don’t know what I’d do, it would be a very sad situation if someone rejected an invitation to a party in these troubled times.”

“You said it was at the camp right? The newbie camp?”

“Yes, I see you know of the camp then? That’s good! Less explaining for me and my fellow mentors to do” and before I could accept or decline her party invitation she bounced off to the left, where the newbie camp was located. I let out an exasperated sigh as I started to follow her path; it seemed like her over active energetic personality could have been a side effect of The Zone with how it left me drained of energy just to be near her for that short time, to me it just felt unnatural for a pony to contain that much energy.

Looking around as I entered the camp, I noticed that it hadn’t really changed since I was last here; the camp was ten old houses, five on each side of the central road. The houses had seen better days, and as such were quite run down now; they had all been blown open in various different places, riddled with bullets, and set aflame. The road lead down to a well and a bunker that had been made to withstand a very big explosion, which is why it is used as storage now, and where the trader is usually located, at least he was two years ago, but things change, the current trader might be a different pony and prefers to set up shop somewhere else in the camp. There seemed to be a few new stalkers here, they always seemed to stand out pretty easily, they were the ponies who didn’t seem ready for a mutant attack to come from anywhere at any time, although it could be forgiven as the newbie camp always has very experienced sentries and powerful detection enchantments all around it. I saw Lightfoot enter the last building on the right, which I remember as being a recreation room, a good location for a party, I just cantered down to follow her into the building. As I walked into the building I noticed that it wasn’t a rec room filled with couches and tables for card games, now it was a bar, they kept some of the old couches and tables but now the room was mostly taken up by the bar and the few stools that lined its length. In these stools I saw a couple other ponies and Lightfoot, and in the booths they had now set up there was just one of them occupied by a few stalkers playing poker, wagering both money and artefacts.

“New meat for The Zone?” I heard someone say, and while looking around I noticed the pony that Lightfoot had sat down next to was the only pony in the bar paying me any attention so I assumed it was this red earth pony stallion. He seemed to be quite large and muscular even for an earth pony, his cutie mark was a whistle; I wonder if he used to be a sports player or a professional weightlifter with his build.

“I’m not new to The Zone, I’m a returning customer” I replied walking over to him and taking the stool next to him.

“I figured, you don’t look like, or have the feel of a new guy, also those aren’t the sort of guns that you find when you first enter The Zone, that pistol is quite rare til you get in pretty deep, I like that I don’t have to teach you anything about The Zone, more time for me to sit in here and drink” he said, taking a swig of what I’d assume to be vodka as he finished talking.

“So, what’s your name then?” I asked the stallion while I ordered a bottle of vodka from the bartender, they were quite handy to have with you bottles of vodka, and somehow the alcohol had properties similar to anti-radiation drugs and was very useful in a pinch.

“The stalkers round here call me Coach, probably because of my role as a general teacher of The Zone around these parts, also I used to coach marathon runners before I came here, so I guess it fits pretty well. How about you? If you aren’t new then you should already have a stalker name.”

“Of course, mines Spectre.” As I mentioned my name Coach dropped his vodka and aimed his gun at me, while the bartender and stalkers in the booth seemed to duck for cover and seemed shocked, the only pony that it seemed my name didn’t have an effect on was Lightfoot who just sat and drank her vodka behind the red stallion.

“Why would you just walk into the camp like this Spectre, you should know that your murderous ways would end up in you being shot.” Coach said as he prepared to shoot me where I sat, but before he could a certain dark blue mare appeared in between us holding the stallion’s gun down and away from anypony.

“Oh silly, he’s not that Spectre, he’s a different Spectre, he just came from the gate where the guard let him in” cheerfully said the mare looking at the stallion; I now had a glimpse into how Lightfoot got her name as I hadn’t even noticed her move in between us, nor had I heard her. The stallion seemed to look at the mare for quite a while before he lowered his gun and turned away.

“I trust your judgement Night; you always seem to know a pony’s story before they tell you anything anyways. What were you doing being let in by the guard then? They don’t associate with us stalkers” I let out the breath that had been caught in my lungs when Coach had turned on me; thank Celestia for this hyperactive mare.

“I’ve been hired by the guard to collect information about The Zone, because over the past three months emissions have been able to kill ponies outside the perimeter, and as such it’s considerably problematic because an expanding zone is the last thing we would want. Anyways who’s this other Spectre then, there should only be one pony with each name” I asked the two ponies noting the looks of relief on the bartenders and other stalkers faces as they went back to their job and games respectively, I must of had the same look on my face after that.

“Nopony really knows who he is other than his story, that he came here originally to recover some stuff that he left here when he was evacuated from the area during the meltdown three years ago. When he got to his old house he apparently lost it and started to burn everything he could before trying to and failing to kill the stalker he took with him before he ran off into The Zone. The stalker said then after Spectre had ran off, his shooting had alerted a few mutants in the area who came to investigate and tore the place apart looking for him while he hid in the closet. Ever since Spectre has been running around killing anypony he finds, rumours are that about four months ago he took off for the center of The Zone.”

“Sounds like quite the dangerous pony” I said looking away, this Spectre knew me, it wasn’t an accident that he had taken my name on purpose; he also took my story and reason for entering The Zone. If what Coach said happened according to this mysterious stalker that was with Spectre, he had also destroyed what I had entered The Zone for, all except my photo. I took out my photo to look at it while I thought about whom this imposter could be and if his trek into the center of The Zone could be what’s causing the expanding emissions.

“I see, he took your name on purpose” said Lightfoot looking over my shoulder at my photo, “the stalker talked about how because of the mutants only half of one of the photos had survived the blaze, and he would have picked it up if he didn’t hear hoof steps coming towards the room so he fled thinking that Spectre was coming back to make sure he was dead. But if you have the photo then you would have to be the original Spectre, I’m sorry that you had to hear about why that’s all you have left of your reason to enter The Zone.” I looked back at her, she had seemed to have changed colour, she now looked like the darkest patch of the night sky, and her curly mane had seemed to have deflated a little. It seemed she really did know more about me than she really should.

“Who was she?” asked Coach also looking over at my photo, he also seemed saddened by the new information and short insight into my past.

“She was my wife, we lived here while I was working at the ENFPP, we were out having dinner for our sixth year anniversary when the call to evacuate came in, we didn’t have time to go back to our house and collect anything, so we had to leave all of our possessions, but at least we still had each other. Half a year after the evacuation and meltdown, we decided that we’d move to Ponyville, our dream location, after getting enough money working while staying at her sister’s house in Fillydelphia, but a week before we were planning on leaving, my wife fell ill, she died just one month later. The doctors said that the illness was brought on by magical and nuclear radiation and that it was too advanced to stop it. I took the job at the ENFPP out of greed because of the high pay, even though she said that we didn’t need to, that we could just find work in Ponyville and budget to get by, but I didn’t want that, by working at the ENFPP we could make enough to move to Ponyville and live peacefully. The result was that by taking that job, I had killed my wife; I came to The Zone to collect those pictures because she said it was her only regret that we couldn’t take them with us.” After I finished my story I looked back to the two stalkers, it seemed the stallion could barely hold back tears and the mare somehow looked even darker than before and her curls were nearly hanging straight down.

“I suppose you’ll probably go looking for Spectre, he seems to be the cause of the expanding emissions because he’s the only pony I’ve heard of that’s approached the center in recent times, and I’d assume you would want to kill him for burning your photos and at least find out why he took your name and such” said the red stallion finally able to recompose himself properly.

“I came to the same conclusion about the expansion, and yes I do want to know who he is and why he took my name, finding him will be my mission for now” I replied looking at the stallion who had stood up while I was talking.

“I’ll come with you, I want to see the pony who’s been killing all of my friends and students in The Zone” said Coach, doing a once over check of his gear to make sure he was ready for a long foray into The Zone. “I need to grab a few things before we leave though, I should be ready within the hour.”

“Thank you, the help is appreciated” I said softly back to the stallion before hearing somepony say something from behind me.

“Glomp” Said the voice and I felt the weight of a pony on my back again and when I looked over my shoulder I could see Lightfoot lying on my back hugging me, “Lightfoot?”

“I thought I told you my friends call me Silent Night or any various combination of it, and I’m not going to let this party be just for the two of you, I’m coming too” she had seemed to brighten up to her normal colours while she was talking.

“Thank you Night; I appreciate your help too. You two should make sure you have everything you need for a long trek through The Zone, it’s quite a walk to the center of The Zone” I said as I placed some bits on the bar to pay for the vodka but the bartender who was almost a blubbering mess on the floor pushed the bits back to me saying that the vodka was on the house.

Coach and Night had decided to go and get a couple of things before we left, so I decided it would be a good time to go test the detector, and possibly find an artefact or two. The stalkers in the bar pointed me to an anomalous area filled with burner anomalies, this far out on the edge of The Zone I’d only expect to find a fireball at most, and while it did provide thermal protection, the fact that it emitted radiation while in use made it useless to me until I got another artefact that draws radiation into itself like a bubble or similar. I found the area quite easily as the scorch marks around the anomalous field showed that there had either been some careless stalkers or mutants around, typically the mutants could avoid the anomalous fields quite easily, but it wasn’t impossible for them to walk into one. Taking a bolt out of the bag, along with the prototype detector, I looked at the display to see where it said the anomalies were. The icon they used for the anomalies were large enough to easily stand out, gauging where the closest one was according to the detector I threw the bolt to where it should set off the jet of flames that were known as burners in The Zone, and sure enough there was a burner where it said there would be. So it had proven that it can find anomalies, but can it find every anomaly in the field, to test it I walked through the field waving a bolt around with my magic to see if there were any hidden anomalies, when I took a quick look at the display I could see it displaying a small green dot about fifteen meters away slightly to the left of directly in front of me, I figured that must be the visual display for an artefact, picking the spot where it should be according to the detector, I walked towards it, still waving the bolt in front of me. When I reached the spot where the detector displayed the artefact I heard a small fizzle and the sound of something hitting the ground, looking down a Crystal had materialised, I put the low tier artefact in my saddlebag, it would fetch a small pile of bits, but they were practically useless, fireballs weren’t that much rarer, and had a greater effect with the only trade off being double the radiation. My search through the rest of the field yielded in no more artefacts, and seeming proof that the detector could find all the anomalies in the field, it was time to head back to the camp and see if Coach and Night were prepared to leave yet.

Not a minute after I got outside the anomalous field did I hear voices coming from the road that lead to the burners, I could also hear their hoof steps growing louder, not knowing who was coming I decided to hide off to the side in the bushes. Just seconds after I had settled into my hiding spot did I see the source of the voices, bandits, as characterised by their leather coats and balaclavas, a stalkers worst nightmare, as they often didn’t ask any questions before they open fire on anyone that isn’t one of them. Where stalkers preferred to help each other out of comradeship and respected the work that it takes to retrieve certain artefacts and such, bandits didn’t care how much trouble you went through to get something as long as you gave it to them if they asked, it was rare to see bandits searching anomalies for artefacts, they normally just waited for us stalkers to get them then either take it at gunpoint, or off our bodies after they had shot us. There was no honour in being a bandit in the zone, they were also considerably tribal, each bandit usually worked for someone above them up to the heads of the different groups or clans of bandits, but they were rarely hostile to each other, only if they wanted something the others didn’t want to give up. The lowest ponies under each leader usually would talk to the other bandits freely and as such were usually all together unless they were doing a job, but the higher ups stayed at the base unless they were on a big job, as it usually wasn’t them doing any of the hoofwork.

“Alright you two get a looking in there while I sit here and wait for you to bring me your findings” said the bandit at the head of the group, obviously he was the leader in this small group, the bandit then proceeded to do as he said and dropped to the ground looking the other way in case another group got the idea to check the field for artefacts.

“Yes boss” replied the two henchponies as they took out their basic detectors and spat the bolts in front of them to check for anomalies in their path. Seeing them having to take a bolt in their mouth and spit them out made me glad to be a unicorn, sure they could just tie a string to them and reuse them, but that method was quite useless in a burner.

“I think somepony has already been through here, boss” said one of the ponies in the field, pointing with his hoof at the still cooling puddle of metal that had been the bolt that I had used to test initially.

“Impossible, we would have seen them leave, and would have heard gunfire from the post down the road if they went the other way” said the bandit leader as he stood to stare fiercely at the bandit who found my bolt, until he saw the pool of metal, “they’re still here, go find them and bring them to me, I want whatever they found here” shouted the leader at the two bandits before peering around at the bushes looking for me.

I didn’t have much time, taking a quick look at my detectors display I noticed the two ponies in the field were in a narrow space between a couple of burners, if they turned to fire at me they’d each trigger one, the only problem was the leader who was looking directly at my bush, eyes closing as he strained to see me. I prepared myself for what should be a short firefight, checking my rifle was loaded and ready to be fired, I wouldn’t need to use any of my spells so I didn’t need to keep it in the mount, or summon my book, knowing that the leader would no doubt see the glow of my magic when I picked up my rifle, I just hoped that I’d be able to raise my gun and fire faster than him. The glow of my magic lit the bush

“There he is! In that bush with the white glow!” shouted the leader as he raised his gun at my bush before his skull was split and the shot that hit the base of his skull to create a feedback of magic resulting in a small explosion inside his skull, causing it to split into its separate fragments and for his head to collapse in on itself as a result, a truly gruesome sight for a unicorn to behold. I broke from my cover, needing to leave as quickly as possible before the other bandits at the post down the road came to investigate the shots. I galloped down the path towards the road back to the camp, I could hear pained screaming from behind me as the two bandits triggered the burners as I had predicted, maybe this detector was going to me more useful that I originally thought. As I rounded the corner onto the road I heard feint shouting coming from further down the road, the bandits had heard the shots and screaming and were hurrying to investigate, I didn’t have much time before they would be able to see me, but a small mound that would hide me from their view was approaching fast slightly to my left, I could take cover behind it and continue my gallop back to camp when the bandits went down the path to the burners.

I leapt over the mound and lay as flat as possible, when I didn’t hear gunfire following me I knew that they hadn’t seen me, allowing me to be able to look over and watch the small group of bandits run down the path, when the last one of the five was out of view I stood and turned to continue my gallop. Little did I know but a sentry that had stayed at the post just in case had seen me when I stood up, he raised his rifle, taking his time to calculate the range and speed I was moving at, then he fired.

Chapter 3: The journey begins

The journey begins

I felt the searing pain in my rear right flank before I heard the report of the gun, I fell, tumbling forward as the wound caused me intense pain as I rolled. Knowing that another shot could be coming soon I took cover behind a tree and started to apply a bandage to my flank, it would only stop the bleeding for now and help to prevent it getting infected. If I just hobbled out to continue my escape I would be little more than practice for the sniper watching my position, it was time to summon my book. Taking out the white artefact in my bag I cast the spell that summoned my book of runes, peeking around the corner slowly and gauging the distance between me and the small wooden tower that I thought the sniper would be in I prepared to cast my spell, as I started the casting process, the required runes from my book floated out as magic, and moved towards my body, becoming almost like luminescent white tattoos on my coat, becoming more numerous as I continued compiling them into the right order for the spell I wanted.

From the snipers tower he had seen the tree the pony had taken cover behind and had seen the pony peek at his position, he would have taken the shot that would have killed this pony if it wasn’t for the gust of wind that had picked up and ruined his calculations, a similar gust of wind had made the first shot go wide and wound the pony in the first place. Now the pony was just behind the tree, that didn’t matter, he had plenty of time to wait for the pony to move, but what was that mysterious bright white glow coming from behind the tree.

I had finished the preparation and gotten the runes together, my body now was covered with bands of white runes that told their own story about the nature of the spell and what they added to it, nopony other than me could read them though, and they read accuracy, fire and destruction. There was a bright flash and loud explosion as I put away the white artefact and brought out its inverse, casting the spell to desummon my book, I injected my leg with a painkiller from one of my first aid kits and looked at the stand that now lay in scattered pieces. The spell was really just a stone that I had thrown, after infusing it with some of my magic and the runes, with a quick peek around his cover, I knew the sniper was waiting for him but he wasn’t quick enough to pull the trigger, the bullet hole in the ground behind where my head would have been. With the pain in my leg dulled to just an annoyance I hobbled off down the road, getting out of sight as quickly as possible before the bandits could see him when they went to check the explosion.

The wound in my flank wasn’t as bad as I had originally thought; the angle was high enough, the calibre large enough, and the shot was low enough for it to be a straight through, if the bullet had stayed in it would be causing further damage as I limped back to the camp. Although, the wound was still bleeding, and the bandage wasn’t enough to stop it, only to stem the flow, the trail of blood would attract any mutants in the area, I didn’t have much time before something found me and I just hoped it wasn’t one of the bigger threats of The Zone. I must have jinxed myself, as I finished my internal thought about my hopes for a smaller threat I heard the bloodcurdling screech emitted by a bloodsucker when they find their pray. Bloodsuckers looked like they could have once been ponies, but now they only had the shape of one, while their outward appearance was a mix of greens and browns, as if they had been taking a swim in a swamp before coming to do for what they were named, along with their glowing red eyes, the real nightmares that came with facing a bloodsucker were their ability to seeming go invisible until they reached a close range on their target, and their mouth, which looked like normal like a ponies until it split down and across the middle, peeling back to reveal their razor sharp teeth that they used to cut your flesh and open wounds that bleed heavily.

“It really had to be now of all times didn’t it” I said to no one in particular, cursing The Zone for its timing and it’s creations under my breath, as I looked around, lifting my gun with my magic trying to see the slight shimmer that was the only chance of seeing a bloodsucker before it pounced on you. There to my right, I saw a slight movement with the peripherals of my vision, turning to face where I thought it was going to attack from, I readied myself to react as quickly as possible. A twig snapped underhoof behind me, spinning quickly just in time to have the opening jaws of a bloodsucker fill my vision, unable to react in time and fire upon the bloodsucker there wasn’t anything I could do to stop it. Then there was a flash of white and I was looking at the forest around the road again, I looked to the ground in front of me to see a white pegasus climbing off a limp bloodsucker, the pegasus took a piece of cloth out of her, I guessed it was a her from the body shape, pack and used it to clean a blade that she had attached to a bracer on her foreleg. It appeared she had flown in behind me and stabbed the bloodsucker in the throat as it showed itself to attack me, the speed, while in flight to accurately find an instantly fatal spot to stab in the short time between when a bloodsucker becomes visible and when it has already started to drain a pony was phenomenal, either this pegasus was incredibly lucky, or she was a very dangerous pony to fight with.

“You right there stalker?” said the pure white pegasus, her coat and flowing white mane seemed nearly to illuminate the area around her, she also seemed to have a custom made flak jacket, not even my military issue one has that many pockets not to mention that it was as white as her coat, the only things that weren’t white about her were her sapphire blue eyes, her weapons, and her stopwatch cutie mark.

“As right as anyone is after being shot, then nearly feasted on by a bloodsucker” I replied taking another look at the bloodsucker on the ground as I put my rifle back in its place on my war reign.

“Oh you were shot? Do you need any medical attention?” said the pegasus rushing to my side, just now noticing the bandage it seemed.

“It’s still bleeding a little bit but it can wait for now, I’ll get it sutured at the camp when I get there” I said as I looked at the pony, to have the skill to do what she did to the bloodsucker, she didn’t seem to be such the caring type.

“Nonsense, I have the right thing to deal with the bleeding here with me” she said as she went into her pack, I half expected her to have a sewing kit in there, but instead she pulled up an artefact I recognized as a flame, a very rare artefact that reduced bleeding at the cost of a considerably high rate of irradiation as far as artefacts go, but then to my surprise she also took out a bubble to combat the radiation of the flame, the result was that the rate at which the radiation decreased was higher than the rate of increase. Just by putting the artefacts close to my body the bleeding was beginning to slow dramatically, when we were both satisfied the bleeding had stopped was when she broke out the sewing kit and sewed the wound shut as quickly as she had killed the bloodsucker.

“Thank you for letting me use your artefacts to heal my wounds, My name is Midnight Shade and my stalker name is Spe- Shade” I said holding the two artefacts out for her to take and put in her bag while almost probably getting myself on the receiving end of her blade.

“No problem, you can keep them, I have plenty of money and artefacts that I don’t really need them, where as it seems like you don’t have much if anything. My name is Swift Strike, I’m one of the teachers at the camp but I only teach a select few, my sort of blade play and speed is dangerous to myself as much as my target, round the camp I’m known as Santa, you can refer to me as whichever you please. Your stalker name, you were about to say a different name before you changed your mind, why did you change and what were you going to say first?” said Swift as she motioned me to follow her back towards the camp.

“I’ll explain when we get to the camp with the assistance of a couple friends, otherwise you may react poorly.” I said as a promise that she’d get her answer but not while I couldn’t have Night and Coach backing up my story.

She seemed to deliberate wether to let it go until we got to the camp or to make me tell her now

“Fine, if you think your name will cause a hostile reaction upon hearing it then I’ll let you explain yourself with your friends, don’t think you can fight me though if that’s your plan, also you’re leading now then” she said as she walked behind me. Being only suspected of evil intentions was a much better result than being convicted of them.

“That’s fine, whatever you feel is best until you hear the explanation, although I am sorry that I have to make you wait but you should know the two people that I want to help me explain, and should know how good one of them is at her judgement of people” I said continuing the walk to the camp, we should be there pretty soon, she didn’t seem to want to reply to me, after all, she didn’t trust me anymore, and if I didn’t accidentally start saying Spectre in the first place then she would still trust me it seemed.

As we reached the border of the camp I heard a shrill scream of joy before I saw Night bouncing up the road towards us.

“Santa is here!” She repeated with each bounce as she made her way towards us. I heard movement behind me as swift

“So who are your two friends? You aren’t leaving my sight so I’ll send Night to get them” hissed Swift in my ear while putting on a normal cheery expression.

“That’s the thing, Night and Coach are the two that will help me explain” I replied as the dark blue pony hopped closer before coming to a stop a couple meters in front of us, then she wasn’t there and the weight of a pony appeared on my back again, except this time she kicked the wound on my flank when she jumped up, the contact caused the pain that was only dull to come back as if I had been shot again and I fell to the ground bringing Night down to the ground with me. Night was about to laugh as she got up off the ground before she noticed my grimace of pain and saw the stiches.

“Oh you’re hurt! I’m sorry! I didn’t know! How did you get hurt Middy?” said the mare looking over the wound making sure she didn’t reopen it.

“I got shot by a bandit when I went to get some artefacts from that burner field slightly south west of here. Don’t worry though, Santa here had some artefacts that she let me have to heal it, she also sewed it up for me.” I told her to put her at ease as she seemed to be looking at me like I was dying.

“Oh thank you Swifty, but why did you help him like that and let him keep the flame and bubble when you’re ready to strike him if he does something wrong?” said Night, looking up to the white pegasus.

“Because there’s something he isn’t telling me that he said you would be able to help him explain, as for why I let him keep them, because it’s what I do.” She said with a shrug, was I the only one surprised by the fact that Night knew what artefacts she had given me, or what she was trying to hide?

“Yes, yes you are Middy. As for his name Swift his real one is Spectre, but he’s not the Spectre we’ve heard about, that Spectre stole this Spectre's name.” Said Night looking back at me as she seemingly read my mind and gave the explanation I wanted to give to Swift.

“I see. You were right to leave the explanation to Night, Shade, I would have killed you where you stood if you had tried to explain it yourself, now you do get to keep those artefacts. Also why are you packed for going on an adventure Night?” said Swift Strikes looking at the various packs and weapons the earth pony mare had.

“We’re going to try and find the Spectre we know so we can figure out what he did to cause the emissions to increase in range and be able to kill ponies outside the perimeter now, Shade’s coming too.” Said a voice behind me, I turned around to see Coach behind me with all of his gear as well.

“So you two are ready to leave?” I asked my two companions and they both nodded at me “Good I’ll just go see the medic and get him to cast a healing spell-“

“We don’t have a medic with that sort of ability here at the moment, you’ll just have to push through it until we find one that can” said Coach

“Really? This isn’t going to be a fun walk” I sighed grimacing at the thought of how painful it’s going to be to walk until we find a proper medic. “Fine, I suppose I’ll just use another painkiller and hope it works until we find a medic then, I shouldn’t take anymore for a day after this one.”

“And you think you’re ready for a foray into the deep zone? If I didn’t join you three on this journey Celestia knows where you would end up” said Swift, who with her valuable artefacts has shown that she’s been quite deep and survived well enough.

“Oh now it really is a party!” exclaimed Silent Night, “we can train while we’re travelling can’t we swift?”

“Of course we can, are you getting better with your blades?” Said Swift, taking to the air in excitement.

“Probably as good as you’ve been getting with your movement” replied Night, who’s mane and tail had started to appear to inflate and she looked like she might float into the air beside the pegasus.

“Ok ready to move off then?” I said after I finished injecting more painkillers into my flank and feeling the pain fade into a dull heat rather than a searing roar. Everypony nodded and turned and followed Swift who took point of our small band as we started our journey into the centre of The Zone, and our search for Spectre.

We stopped momentarily to choose the best path into the centre, at the moment it seemed like we would need to pass through Garbage first as the other ways around from the camp would add days to the journey which none of us really wanted. So we decided that the best path would be to go through Garbage and hopefully avoid the bandits in the area, as Garbage was a hub for bandits to do whatever it is bandits do in their free time. In our way to Garbage was another roadblock much like the post I had set aflame earlier in the day.

“I count eight bandits minimum, probably more inside that building to the right of the roadblock, three snipers in the tower on the left of it.” Said Coach as he put his binoculars away.

“I can take out those snipers from here with a spell if you can get me at least a good guess of the range” I said, finding a suitable stone and taking out my white artefact and summoning my book.

“A spellbook? Can’t you remember your spells or something?” asked Swift looking at me, “by the time you find the spell you want I could walk back to the camp, find a sniper, and pick them off myself”

“It’s not a spellbook, It’s a runebook, something only I can use” I said motioning to my cutie mark of runic circles and runes, “this will only take a minute, I already prepared a few of the runes I’d need earlier today”

“Ok, let’s see what you can do, if this fizzles I’m not too sure I want to go into the centre of The Zone with a unicorn that can’t use his magic properly.” Said Swift watching as I started to draw the prepared runes from my book.

“I estimate the range to be roughly 80 meters, give or take a meter or two.” Said Coach looking at the sniper nest with his binoculars again. My runes were flowing a lot faster than they were earlier today because of the preparations, and by the time Coach had given me the range my body was glowing with the white light of my runes. What the others would have seen was me pick up a rock and the runes on my body start to flow up towards my horn and out of the tip before shooting over to the rock and taking a similar formation to how they were on my body. Peeking over our cover I readied the rock which now resembled a flaming ball of magma rather than a rock and threw it at the sniper nest before I dropped behind the fallen tree again. A moment later there was a slight surge of heat, and a loud explosion as the rock landed, Swift had a look of disbelief, Coach smiled, and Night looked at the explosion like it was a fireworks display, but because of my use of my spells already today the rock fell considerably short and just a little over half way to the snipers nest. I really should have seen that coming I'm surprised that it didn't fizzle or even worse backfire on me.

“I see, those runes of yours are quite the weapon, you have a weak throw though, but now we start the gunfight, another five bandits have appeared, for there now to be a total of thirteen.” Said Swift as we broke out of cover so we could move closer for a better shot.

"Make that ten" said Night, somehow able to pick off the snipers at range, while by normal standards isn't that far at all because of the poor condition of guns in The Zone, their normal ranges have been severely effected, with an AKM-74/U which was renown for its inaccuracy and for having slightly less killing capacity than its rifle variant the AKM-74. So soon after using my runes, even if it wasn't successful, I wasn’t able to lift my gun properly so I had to make use of the war rein, to fire, while my shooting was much less accurate than if I was using my magic to lift my rifle, it was still just as deadly. We didn’t end up taking cover and firing from the position, the explosion had caused enough confusion amongst the bandits that we just ran in and killed the guards at the gate as we ran past them, even though it landed a considerable distance away from them, the explosion was still quite large, larger than a grenade and as such made the bandits wonder what sort of weapons we had. Night's ability to pick off the snipers from rage made it seem like we had a sniper watching us and that we were more numerous than we really were, the remaining four after the initial shots surrendered, dropping their guns to the floor, hoping we would be merciful. Being stalkers and them bandits, even though we were mortal enemies as such, we took mercy on them, they all seemed rather new to The Zone and more or less didn't seem to be like the usual bandits, after disarming them and leaving each one of the remaining five with a knife each, Swift and Night seemed to have enough between them to supply the whole zone with knives, to defend themselves, we started to move again. Suddenly Night disappeared from in front of me and I heard a gasp from behind me, I turned to find Night was standing on one of the bandits back with a blade like Swift’s at his throat.

“Now now, we let you live because we’re nice and not like you bandits, but if you’re going to be like that I guess I’ll just have to kill you. But this time you get a warning because you have no idea what you’re dealing with here and you look a little green, and don’t think like that, you aren’t faster than me or the pegasus.” Said Night to the bandit she was standing on, I saw a look of extreme terror cross his face when she brought up his thoughts, and again I wondered if she could read thoughts.

“As fast as ever Night, come now, we have more walking to do before we reach Garbage, there will be plenty more bandits to play with there” said Swift before turning and taking point again, and once again Night seemed to teleport back into her position in the line, much to the bandits dismay as the display for freakish speed caused him to feint in fear.

Chapter 4: Sweet dreams

After a further half hour of walking we had reached Garbage, and had already hidden from a few bandit patrols. My leg had started to hurt again which slowed our progress; the worst part was that I wouldn’t be able to find a medic anywhere near here that would be willing to heal me because this was bandit territory. The Garbage, as its namesake suggests, was a garbage dump before the incident, now it was a place of large hills of trash, all of which was considerably irradiated and usually had whirligigs or other various anomalies at their peaks along with high levels of irradiation. It was awfully fitting that the trash of the ponies in The Zone had taken up base here and called it home; bandits roamed free here with little threat from us stalkers as we knew to stay away from it due to it being abnormally hostile towards us in the fact that there were only bandits here to shoot at you if you needed help in a life threatening situation or were in need of shelter or a trader to buy food and drink from. Speaking of bandits, Night had spotted a patrol that was coming our way, it looked bad, there wasn’t much in the way of cover here, the low ditch we were hiding in would be useless if they came within even just a few meters of us. We silently hoped for something to catch the eye of the bandits as they approached us, surely they were about to see us.

“What’s that” I heard one of the bandits say, thinking he had spotted us I prepared to fight waves of bandits as more will surely come at the sound of gunfire, “Bloody birds, anyone would think they follow ponies in case they drop dead and can get a free feed.”

“Ignore them, they seem normal at the moment, no sign of an emission it seems, we gotta find the source of those gunshots earlier, personally I suspect it was some new guys from The Reapers being stupid but the lieutenant wants us to check it out anyways” shouted the bandit second in line, he seemed like he might be the leader of this patrol to be shouting at one of the other bandits, looking over his shoulder at the crows and the bandit that was still watching the birds above them.

“You spoke too soon” the first bandit said pointing at the sky.

“Something is coming” whispered Swift; looking at the sky where the bandit was pointing; the murder of crows started to fly rather erratically, this wasn’t a good sign, either a large flying mutant was approaching or an emission was about to occur, and in Garbage, there weren’t any buildings you could safely hide in as a stalker in the event of either, and if we had to shoot at a mutant it would attract unwanted attention from any bandit patrols in the area not just the one in front of us.

“Shit, okay everypony we’re heading back to base, looks like an emission is about to start” shouted the bandit at the head of the patrol “that means double time Feather Wipe, you get caught in the emission don’t expect anyone to come to help you” was the audible part of the berating the bandit who was watching the crows received as the patrol rounded the corner of a trash pile and the sound of their voices and movement faded, it seemed this pony was the leader and the second in line was probably the second in command I guess.

“We don’t have any shelter for an emission what are we supposed to do?” said Coach; a thunderstorm started to roll in, confirming that it was an emission that was coming rather than a mutant, the signs of an emission usually involve a sudden change of weather to a thunderstorm, and as the emission got closer to erupting, the light changed colour to a kind of red as well as the wildlife in The Zone scattering to find cover from the emission.

“Just run, we might be able to find a shed or something over to the right here” I said getting out of the ditch we used as cover before stumbling and ending up on the ground writhing in pain as I realised running was out of the question because of my leg.

“Help, please, anypony!” A distressed voice shouted a little to our front and right.

“Let’s see what it is and how we can help if we can” I said lifting my rifle out of the war reign, in case it was a bandit that needed dealing with before moving towards the sound of the voice shouting the same three words. I stopped at a pile of garbage, which I guessed the owner of the voice was on the other side of, slowly peeking around the corner I saw a mint coloured unicorn mare, trying to drag a rather large brown pegasus stallion, the stallion was severely wounded and didn’t seem to be conscious.

“Stalker or bandit?” I asked from around the corner, startling the mare.

“Neither, we’re loners” She replied looking around for where I was hiding, she didn’t have a gun to raise, how odd for someone in The Zone.

“We’re stalkers not bandits, what do you need help with?” I said; walking around the corner, Night, Coach and Swift following me lowering our guns as the mare dropped to the ground in fear.

“Thank Celestia, I need help moving my brother back to our shelter so I can heal him, but I don’t have enough strength to move him, or enough time to heal him here and now before the emission hits” she said franticly yet somehow her voice didn’t rise over anything more than a whisper. As she was pacing explaining her situation I noticed her cutie mark was a red cross, which probably meant she was a medic that could heal my leg, also the mention of a shelter meant that we had somewhere to wait out the emission and hide from the bandits in the area.

“We will help you, but we need to take shelter during the emission, can we wait it out with you?” I asked as Coach took Swift with him to get her to help him lift the wounded pegasus onto his back so he could carry him to the shelter.

“But of course, we have plenty of room, follow me if that’s okay with you” said the unicorn mare, cantering away, leaving us to follow her.

The light canter didn’t do the pain in my leg any good, it was amazing how much pain a pony can endure when its necessary for survival, but we made it with just a few seconds to spare, as once we had closed the door and put the unicorn’s brother on her patient bed did the telltale rumble of an emission hitting come, along with the sound of bodies hitting the ground as some birds seem not to care for emissions and stay outside when they occur. The unicorn went to her brothers side, her magic taking hold of his body as she used her healing spell on him, probably just in time, he really was seriously injured, his body was covered in blood as it seemed he had been shot no less than ten times.

“Oh crap, a pseudowolf!” Swift yelled, trying to get her gun ready to fire as the pseudowolf walked into the room from a connecting room near the unicorn mare, not trusting that she’d be able to stab the right one once it used its ability to create clones of itself. Pseudowolves were the effect of nuclear and magical radiation on the timber wolves in the Everfree Forest, they were effective hunters and used psychic abilities to make copies of itself that weren’t made of anything solid, but in the time it takes a stalker or bandit to decide which one to shoot it’s usually closed the distance and tearing into them.

“Wait, stop don’t shoot him” shouted the unicorn mare, turning away from her brother for a moment, “He’s our pet”

“You have a pet pseudowolf? How do you tame a pseudowolf?” Swift calmed down and sure enough the pseudowolf sat by the pegasus stallion’s side as he was being healed.

“Don’t know to be truthful” replied the unicorn focusing on her magic, from the look of her brothers condition, he would be fully healed in the next couple of minutes, “we found him when he was only a puppy, it seemed his mother had been shot by someone when they went past. The poor thing was nearly starving to death, laying by his mothers long dead body, we brought him back here and got him fed up, ever since he’s been our pet, and a member of our family. His name is Kyne.” By the time she had finished her story she stopped her spell, and her brother stirred as he came back to consciousness. “Don’t get up Stone, you’ve lost too much blood to be moving around at the moment, you need to rest for the next couple of days, I don’t have any more blood bags here right now, but I’ll be taking Kyne and raiding the bandit camp’s medical office tonight to grab some more” said the mare softly to her brother as he stirred and tried to get out of bed.

“You sure you can handle it on your own?” said the pegasus to his sister, from what she had said I assumed his name was Stone.

“Of course I can, as long as I have Kyne with me” replied the mare before remembering we were standing on the other side of the small room “oh sorry, I forgot you four were standing there, now that I don’t need to concentrate on my magic, my name is Sweet Tree and this is my brother Stone Wall. You’re welcome to stay here as long as you like, I can’t thank you enough for helping me get my brother back here so I could heal him.”

“I wondered how I ended up here, last I remember was the gun fight with the bandit squad out near one of the trash piles. I am in your debt for saving my life and my sister’s as she would have stayed with me if the emission hit before she could get me here” said Stone Wall, looking over at us.

“No problem, anything to help a fellow stalker” I said “the only thing I could ask for from you is for your sister to heal my leg; I’d be willing to pay for your services as a medic.”

“I’d never charge a pony for healing them, besides the only pony I’ve ever healed has been my brother except for one time where I healed a bandit my brother had shot, only for him to be shot again when he tried to kill us, and another time that I don’t want to mention. So what type of injury do you have to your leg?” she asked, walking over to inspect the injury it seemed she had already noticed.

“It was a gunshot wound, the only treatment its had has been that it was sewn up after I stopped the bleeding with a flame that Swift here gave me, and I’ve taken two injections of painkillers so I could walk somewhat decently” I told the mare as she looked at the sutures.

“It should heal fine in time, only there will be some pain for a while, whoever sewed it up did a very good job of it; I can most certainly stop the pain but I don’t have the magical energy to fully heal it. I do have to ask what you’re doing in Garbage, no stalkers ever come through here because it’s too risky” said the mare as she started to cast a spell into my flank to aid the healing process and stop the pain.

“We’re heading to the centre of The Zone to find a stalker named Spectre and-”

“You’re going after that bastard? I don’t care if you like it or not, I’m coming with you” said Stone Wall trying to rise out of bed before remembering the condition he was in, and instead decided to lay back down, propping himself up on a hoof.

“You’ve heard of him?” I asked, surprised that a pair of lone stalkers in the middle of bandit territory had heard of him.

“It wasn’t always just the two of us living together; our older sister also lived with us when we lived in Zaton, further in The Zone. We moved here after our sister was murdered by a stalker that Sweet had healed when we found him being mauled by a chimera. After Sweet healed him, our sister went out to check on a couple of traps we had set to catch some food, the stalker who had told us his name was Spectre snuck out a window in his room and killed her. But that wasn’t enough for him; he cut her head off and put it outside our door with a note telling us what he had done. We spent the next year trying to hunt him down, but after that it was like he had disappeared from Zaton, so we moved here so we wouldn’t have to be reminded of his acts whenever we opened the door” said Stone, his anger in recounting the tale being great enough that it felt as if it was a physical presence in the room with us.

“I don’t even want to kill the bastard anymore, you can have him, the revenge for your sister is greater than my revenge for my students” said Coach; almost shaking with rage after hearing about other ponies Spectre’s insanity had affected.

“But brother, you can’t go outside again for a couple of days, you aren’t fully healed yet, you’ll die if you agitate your wounds too much, I could only heal most of the damage, but not all” said Sweet with tears in her eyes as her brother had brought back terrible memories, and was nearly rushing off to his own. Even Swift and Night were wiping away tears after hearing about the murder of a pony by a stalker whose life had been saved by the family of the pony.

“Would the damage be able to be healed by a Firefly or Flame?” Asked Swift, eyes still watery but no longer crying.

“Sadly no, I just need to recover some energy then I’ll be able to finish the spell, he’s stable for now and the extent of his injuries aren’t as bad as they seem, while he needs to rest so his wounds don’t reopen he doesn’t need a significant amount more healing, I’ll be able to finish it by this time tomorrow. I’d like him to stay in bed another day after that but he’s set on going with you so it’d be useless to count on it” replied Sweet as she sat next to her brother’s bed.

“Would a Snowflake help your energy recovery?” asked Swift, eager to help the recovery of the pegasus stallion, motivated by their story.

“Again sadly no, It’s not a matter of physical energy, but of magical energy, only time can restore magical energy” replied the unicorn mare again.

“Is your healing spell only something you can do?” I asked getting an idea; if I needed to I could learn the nature of the spell and enhance it with my runes, even if she has to be the one that casts it I can still enhance the spell when she uses it again tomorrow.

“I’m certain that it isn’t but it’s a highly advanced medic’s spell, I’m not sure if I could teach it to you like that, and no offence but I don’t want anyone else casting it on my brother in case they do it wrong, while it is a healing spell, miscast it can be fatal.” replied the mare. “What is your talent anyways? What are those symbols around and inside the circles of your cutie mark? I had a look at it while I was inspecting your wound.”

“My talent is the use of runes to enhance the power of my magic, and also imprint certain properties into objects, like turning a stone into a bomb that I can throw.” I replied; referring to the runic spell I used twice during the day.

“Oh I see, I could teach you about the spell if you think you could imprint enhancing abilities into something that I could use tomorrow when I have enough energy to finish healing Stone” Sweet said as she looked between my cutie mark and her brother.

“It should work, I’ve done it before. Also I might be able to work out the casting of the spell I’ll respect your wishes though and not use it on your brother; I’ll leave the healing to you.” I said, eager to be learning a new spell and possibly assisting in healing a pony who seemed to be the next addition to the party of stalkers that will be coming to the centre of the zone with me.

The sun had set not long after I had started to learn the spell that Sweet Tree uses for healing, and it had been a few hours since we started the lesson.

“I have no idea how but you’ve learnt the spell pretty quickly not only for someone who doesn’t already know medical magic, but also for anyone learning any spells. I assume you understand the spell and know how to enhance it if you can.” Said Sweet Tree with a little surprise that I had learnt a pretty advanced spell within hours rather than days, she hadn’t expected me to fully learn the spell, only enough to understand the nature.

“It’s something I’ve always been good at; I tend to learn spells without a lot of study before hand and I have no idea how.” I said slightly proud about her amazement and my accomplishment “I also have a good idea for a set of runes for enhancing it, but they’re pretty powerful and I’ll need to sit for a while to channel them. As for the object for me to channel them into, do you have anything like a glass ball? I need one or something similar for it to work properly.” I said, thinking about the set of runes that I wanted, there were quite a few to enhance the separate areas of the spell, while it was a healing spell, it was really a collection of a few small spells designed to enhance a particular function of the targets body, while also using the magical energy of the caster to rebuild tissues and the like, to properly enhance it I would need to enhance each particular spell within the greater spell.

“We have this snow globe that was our sisters, will that do?” said the unicorn holding a snow globe from Canterlot in her magic.

“That will work perfectly” I said taking the snow globe in my magic, “I’ll get started on the enhancement. Is there a quiet room I could use?”

“Come through here, you can sit in my brothers room as he won’t be in here tonight, you can also sleep in his bed” said the mare leading me to a door down a hallway that was at the back of the lounge where her brother lay.

I thanked her before she left me in the room to show the rest of my party to the guest rooms in the house where they’d be sleeping, looking around the room I had expected there to be a few possessions around the room, but it was bare, I suppose they didn’t have much from their old house if they don’t have stuff to remember their sister by in their rooms, although I had only seen Stone’s room, not Sweet’s, so there might be a few things in her room. Looking at the snow globe it contained a miniature of the royal castle in Canterlot, complete with a miniature Celestia flying into the sky as she does when she raises the sun during the summer sun celebration, a closer magically enhanced inspection also revealed there to be a miniature of Luna and a purple unicorn watching Celestia from the balcony below where the sun princess was, maybe this unicorn was the famous Twilight Sparkle, the first known reincarnation of the element of magic, it was said she was a purple unicorn who studied privately under Celestia’s guidance, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say she’d be close with the princess and reside in the castle with the sisters if not a regular visitor. If Sweet Tree and Stone Wall really didn’t have any objects left to remember their sister by it would have been hard to give me this snow globe, as I hadn’t said that it could possibly be broken or destroyed in the process, even if it won’t be they didn’t know that, they really have no one left but each other. Sighing I put the globe down in front of me as I sat on Stone’s bed while taking my artefact out of my bag and summoning my runebook, opening the book to a particular page containing a powerful circle for enchanting objects with spell enhancing abilities, a similar circle that I used to imprint the runes in my artefacts for summoning and desummoning my book. I began the channel of the runes I wanted and ordering them into a chain that I used my magic to pass into the globe, only needing a little bit of magical energy to infuse the first link of the chain before it would take in the rest of it as I constructed it.

I noticed the door to the bedroom on my left open as the snow globe drew in the last link of the chain of runes, to finish the enchantment I drew out three of the five master runes of the binding circle, ones for sealing, activation and spell binding; ensuring that the rune chain linked to itself at its ends, were sealed within the boundaries of the snow globe and linking it to only containing enhancements for this particular healing spell. Pleased with the result I looked at the pony in the doorway, it was Sweet Tree.

“You’re still awake? It’s already morning” she said looking at the glowing snow globe before it faded back to its original state.

“It’s a very powerful enchantment, it required powerful runes and a lot of smaller runes to be placed together just right, if one rune was out of order it could hinder the spell it’s supposed to enhance” I said looking over to my right where a window was, I could see the sun peaking into the room through the red curtains that hung there. “Although I hadn’t noticed how long it had taken, I tend to lose track of time when I need to focus on my runes for anytime longer than five or ten minutes.”

“Are you sure it worked though? I could see the glow from the runes until just a moment ago” she asked maybe worried that using it will harm her brother rather than assist in healing him.

“I’m sure of it, once the enchantment has been activated the runes become invisible to everyone else, but if I look hard enough I can still see them; and I can’t see anything wrong with the chain, I was careful in the ordering, just as a quick test though I’ll use it on myself to check” I said as I made a small slash on my leg that wouldn’t cause too much trouble if it didn’t work and taking the snow globe in my magic I cast the healing spell as I had learnt it the evening before. The spell seemed to work perfectly with the enhancement, while only focusing on stopping the bleeding the enhancement proceeded to finish the rest of the spell and completely heal the slash, not even leaving a scar. “I’d call that a success, now this snow globe will be permanently enchanted to enhance your healing spell along with all the smaller spells it contains, it’s also a lot more durable now, and it will take a lot to break it.” I said smiling at the unicorn mare, pleased that the enchantment worked perfectly.

“That was quite a way to test it; self-harm is never a good idea for testing something. But thank you anyways; it looked like it could cast the spell all by itself pretty much. I should be able to complete the healing of my brother sometime within the next 4 hours or so, you can rest until later if you’d like” said the mare slightly taken aback by my test.

“Nah it’s fine, when I chain together runes for that long I tend to switch off and pretty much be asleep the whole time as my magic sorts out the right runes” I said stepping down off the bed and passing the snow globe to the mare who just shrugged off the fact that I didn’t need to sleep after being awake all night as she walked back into the lounge to check on her brother; I followed her out of the room and into the lounge to find Night and Swift already up and sitting on the couch across the room from the pegasus stallion who was cleaning his gun and sitting up, obviously an improvement from yesterday.

“Why did you ignore me when I came to check on you last night Middy?” asked the dark blue earth pony jumping to her hooves as I walked into the room looking ready to charge at me if my answer didn’t suffice.

“Sorry Night, I tend to lose all sense of what’s going on around me when I have to channel runes for a while I swear it wasn’t intentional. Where’s Coach by the way? Still in bed?” I said apologizing to the mare before she could smack me over the head for not talking to her while I was channelling.

“Oh that’s okay then, I should have figured that you’d need to focus on your work. Also Coach is outside raiding a nearby bandit camp” said the mare perking up again and sitting back down on the couch next to Swift who was playing with her knives.

“I thought you said that you were going to raid the bandit camp sweet?” I asked the unicorn standing next to me.

“I was going to but Coach insisted that I stay here and he go instead” she replied.

“So he’s raiding a bandit camp by himself? I didn’t think he’d be capable of stealth like that” I said with a shrug.

“Who said he was by himself silly, he took Kyne with him, they’re collecting breakfast and some supplies, Stone said it’s what he would usually be doing in the mornings so Coach decided that’s what he was going to do this morning while we waited for you to get up and for Sweet to heal her brother fully so we can get moving later today.” Said the mare, it hadn’t occurred to me how Sweet and Stone got the stuff they’d need to live without a friendly trader nearby, of course they would be stealing from the bandits stores, it’s what I would do in their situation. “Speaking of Coach, here he comes now” said the mare looking out the window behind her “He looks like he’s been running for a while, he’s redder than normal.” A moment later Coach opened the door and Kyne followed him inside before he closed the door behind himself and dropping to the floor in exhaustion.

“Bloody... bandits... wouldn’t... stop... chasing... just... lost them... in trees” he manages to wheeze out before collapsing entirely and not being able to move for the next few minutes while he caught his breath.

“Seems like it was quite an eventful grocery run” said Stone looking over at Coach on the floor “What did you bring back with you?” the earth pony just slid his saddle bag towards the pegasus rather than giving him a verbal response. Inside the bag when we opened it was a few medkits and bandages, a few cans of spam ham, some energy drinks, a couple magazines of 5.56mm ammo, a PDA and some loaves of bread.

“That should be enough for today, once we get moving again we can go to a friendlier place and buy some food from a trader. What is the PDA for though? The idea isn’t to take everything that isn’t nailed down, just what we can use” I said looking through the bag, I’d take the ammo if no one else took it before we moved on, I have plenty of ammo for now but there’s no such thing as too much ammo in The Zone unless you find enough to weigh yourself down, in that case you’re going overboard on preparation.

“It was the... leaders. It has a couple... stashes marked on the... map” Coach managed to get out, not quite as out of breath as he was when he ran in, but still unable to complete a full sentence. Sure enough, marked on the map of the PDA were a couple of stashes, the bandit leader hadn’t thought to include what was in the stashes but that was part of the fun of finding them, you never know if you’re going to end up with a new gun or more bandages than you would ever need. Looking at the locations that were marked in relation to the path I wanted to take out of The Garbage and out towards Yantar, only one of them was relatively close, the other stash was quite out of the way, I made a mental note to swing past the stash when we moved out.

“SPREAD OUT I THINK HE CAME THIS WAY!” a voice shouted from outside the house.

“I thought you said you lost them” Night said to Coach as he got to his feet to peer out the window, and sure enough there was an eight pony squad of bandits moving in a line rifles at the ready, sweeping the area looking for the stalker who was bold enough to steal from a bandit camp in The Garbage and get caught.

“I think they’ve spotted the house, they’re bound to come check it out, we can’t use our guns or we’ll bring all of The Garbage down on us, even the clans would set aside their differences to kill a single stalker.” Swift said flying out of the room to close the blinds on the windows so we would have some cover from the bandits’ sight.

“Sweet you sure you can’t perform your spell now so we can sneak out the back before they come to look?” Coach asked looking at the mint mare.

“I could try, with the enhancement I think I will be able to, but it will take a few minutes to complete the spell and they’re already on their way” she replied looking out through the gap in the blinds as the leader of the squad pointed at our building and gave his squad various commands that I guessed were something along the lines of go check that building and kill anything that moves. We helped Sweet move her bother down the hall onto his bed so that when the bandits came in they wouldn’t see them.

“Swift and I can ambush them as they come in, they’ll do something else after the point dies or stops responding though, they might just try to surround us until more bandits come but hopefully the lack of gunfire might make them think there’s a mutant in here rather than us.” Said Night as she and Swift drew their knives out and headed to the front door where a unicorn bandit who lead the column of bandits to the building. This was bad, for all we know this unicorn could be a specialist at breaching and might have a spell that could disable Swift and Night before they can kill him, there wasn’t anything I could do though, after enchanting the snow globe I really couldn’t do any magic except one spell, but I didn’t want to use that spell unless it was necessary, the result would surely be met with enough gunfire from any bandits caught in it to draw The Garbage to us. Also whenever I’ve used that spell in the past I’ve been knocked unconscious for hours, if the others had to carry me while running from bandits they wouldn’t be able to get away. Time past, it seemed like hours while we waited for the bandits to approach the door, even though it had probably only been a minute so far, how it had taken them this long to walk about 100 meters to the house I don’t know. All we had was hope that he was just eager and breaching buildings wasn’t his job, we were about to find out as the shadow of a pony could be seen under the door, Swift and Night readied their blades, waiting for the unicorn to enter.

“Okay I’m going to enter, call out in a few seconds and I’ll give you the all clear to enter if I’m able to.” Said the bandit as he gripped the door handle with his magic and opened the door, leading with his rifle, I ducked behind the couch so that he wouldn’t see me when he looked inside for himself. I head hoofsteps moving further into the room and I could see the barrel of the bandit’s gun coming past my cover, then I could see the whole gun, then the unicorn himself, and he saw me.

“What the fu-” he started to say before he was killed instantly by Night and Swift both coming out of their hiding spots near the door that the unicorn somehow missed, covering his mouth so he couldn’t make any more noise.

“Now when they call out to him they’re going to send more in, we need to check on Sweet and Stone and see how long they’re going to be” Swift said taking charge of the situation, moving down the corridor to Stone’s room.

“Thunder!” one of the bandits outside shouted, “Yo Thunder! Fuck, there’s somepony or something inside there, be careful no gunshots means that they’re either very good at hoof to hoof combat, or there’s some kind of mutant like a bloodsucker in there. Starry and Range, I want you two to lead, check every corner before you commit to going around it.” Shouted the same voice, this was very bad they knew to be cautious and they’re only half taking the mutant bait. We entered the room where Sweet was healing Stone just as her spell was fading; she opened her eyes and looked at her brother.

“His wounds are fully healed, we should get moving as soon as possible. Where’s Kyne? Was he with you guys?” She said as her brother got up off his bed.

“Holy shit a pseudowolf” shouted one of the bandits and we heard gunfire “Fuck it was a clone, where’s the real one, OI! SHANK! Thunder’s bodies real torn up in here, I think it was this pseudowolf!” then there was a short scream and a thump that sounded like somepony walking into a wall then another thump. Shortly after Kyne walked into the room with us, blood in his fur; this was good, it gave us a better chance for escape now the bandits would probably think there are a couple pseudowolves in here rather than stalkers.

“Anypony have any psy-blockers to deal with the pseudo? No? Shit. We can’t fight a pseudo in these cramped areas, back off and lets continue our search, that stalker might have made a break for it back towards that camp they have near the gate, if we radio ahead we might be able to get somepony at the checkpoint.” Shouted one of the ponies as we heard hoofsteps leading away from us and outside the door, they even closed the door behind them, their eight pony squad left as just a squad of six.

“Kyne, I want you to check to make sure they really did leave.” Sweet whispered to the pseudowolf, Kyne left the room, making his copies before he left and let them lead around the corner, a very long thirty seconds later Kyne came back into the room, looks like we dodged a bullet this time.

“Let’s get a move on as soon as possible; they might come back with backup to get their buddies effects.” Stone said, stretching out his limbs and his wings, trotting on the spot before he started to gather his gear, his sister also leaving the room to grab her gear before coming back, again without a gun.

We walked towards Yantar, planning to go around the western edge of The Garbage, then cutting east around between the southern edge of The Garbage, and the northern wall of The Bar, which was a small town south of The Garbage where traders went to get the best sales. We expected to find less patrols here, as the majority of the buildings and structures in The Garbage were to the eastern edge, with the exception of a few small buildings on the south western edge, we planned to skirt around these buildings by cutting into the forest that ran in between The Garbage and The Dark Valley before we cut east to get to Yantar.

“Sweet if you don’t mind me asking, why don’t you carry a gun? Not having a gun in The Zone is pretty close to suicide” I asked, curious as to why she walked around The Garbage where if any bandits had seen her she would have no doubt died because she was defenceless, and now when our goal was to reach the centre of The Zone where we would meet plenty of dangerous ponies and mutants.

“I won’t kill a pony or animal with my own hooves, it’s not in my nature” she replied; quite an odd response, mutants barely resembled the animals they once grew from, some of the ponies in The Zone could barely only be called ponies simply only because of their physical structure, nothing about their mental state was a part of ponykind anymore. “I know you may think that I’m silly for it but I just can’t, while you may think the mutants and ponies in The Zone don’t resemble anything of their counterparts on the other side of the perimeter, I believe that even the most corrupt pony can still be healed, as can The Zone and all of its residents.”

“I see, you are quite the medic, ‘there is no such thing as a lost cause’ I read that once in a book, I forget who wrote it but they were passionate about saving anypony who had strayed from the path of ponydom, and would befriend any animal no matter how aggressive they would be to anything they crossed paths with.” I said thinking back to the days where I read books in my family library before I had discovered my cutie mark, while I didn’t really need to study a lot to learn spells even back then, I still enjoyed reading both fiction and non-fiction books.

“Quiet for a sec” Night whispered motioning us to drop to the ground in the ditch near us “I think I can hear ponies coming.” Night was our pointpony, keeping eyes and ears out for anypony or anything that may cause trouble if they decided to attack us.

“I can’t hear anything, you sure?” I said, listening out for any noises that sounded like a pony approaching.

“Shh I said, trust me on this one, I can hear them coming, my hearing is better than yours.” The mare replied waving a hoof at me. “Get in this ditch over here, it’s another patrol, they’re still looking for us, or rather you Coach.” She said as she ran over towards the ditch that looks like it was made by some sort of explosion in the past, it was deep enough that we didn’t have to do much to stay out of sight, just standing normally allowed us to look out without much of our head showing. A minute past and I thought that I should question Night’s hearing, but suddenly I could hear the voices of ponies.

“You’re such a klutz Illu, you’re gonna just keep slowing us down if you fall over like that every time something moves, it’s taken us a minute just to walk fifty meters because you dropped to the ground at the slight movement of a leaf on a bush not just once or twice but three times.” A voice said, so that explains the time difference, when I first heard the voice I wondered whether it was dumb luck or Night could hear ponies from hundreds of meters away, but they were relatively close, and were slowed down by one of their members.

“You know I never leave the base, I don’t even know why I’m here anymore, and I don’t want to be in The Zone anymore, not since I’ve seen the things that live here.” Said a mare’s voice as the lead of the patrol appeared on the path from behind the trees that lined its edge.

“It only took you a week to realise it, you really should find someone who can get you out of here, it’s not somewhere where you should stay, and I don’t want you to get hurt.” Said this lead of the patrol to someone further down the line, it was the same pony we had first heard, unexpectedly no one else in the patrol of bandits spoke up to criticize what the pony had just said, I’d expect bandits to tear him to shreds for showing ‘weakness’

“None of us want to see each other get hurt, personally if it were up to me, this red earth pony we’re looking for would get off with only a bit of a fine and the stolen items confiscated” said a third voice. What kind of bandits were these ponies? I’ve never heard of bandits that don’t like killing anyone who stole from them, or even crossed their paths the wrong way. The rest of the patrol murmured sounds of agreement.

“Yeah, real pity the lieutenant wants his head on a stick; after all we know nothing of this guy, for all we know he might be taking the food to save someone he loves. Who knows how many ponies we are really killing by killing this guy, he could go on to slay a million bloodsuckers that are threatening a city or something.” Said the leader, the whole patrol was in view now. These guys aren’t the usual bandits, how many more bandits are there like these ones? How many ponies had I not thought twice about killing simply because I felt they were evil, but was wrong about them? How many hearts did I break by ending their lives and making sure they wouldn’t be returning to their base? As these thoughts raced through my head I noticed one of the bandits glance over, I dropped out of sight as soon as I noticed.

“Eep!”

“Illu, did you see another leaf move?” said the leader.

“No I swear it was something else this time, it’s over there in that hole” the mare replied. Damn it, she saw me and now they’re going to come to check and we’re going to have to kill them, I didn’t want to have to kill ponies that seemed so... friendly, even if we are at the opposite ends of the spectrum for groups.

“Alright I trust Illu enough to check it, circle around, then close in step by step, if it turns out to be the guy we’re looking for... try to kill him as painlessly as possible, I don’t want anyone to be brought to base alive to be tortured” said the leader.

“What do you want to do about this Midnight?” asked Coach, checking his guns.

“Really, I’d like to say non-lethal force but there isn’t a way for us to get close enough to them in broad daylight for it to be effective... so we have no choi- wait, yes we do, what I want you to do is to just use non-lethal force I’m going to use one of my spells, but I won’t be conscious after I cast it so one of you will need to carry me, anyone have night vision goggles?” Swift and Night raised a hoof each, “okay, you two think you can knock them all out in three seconds?”

“Easily” said Swift

“Oh wow, a whole second to spare, if only I brought an appropriate snack” said Night

“You two will take care of them then, Coach, Stone and Sweet, don’t be alarmed when I cast my spell, just close your eyes for the three seconds, that goes for you too Swift and Night, once you knock out the last one, or just before the three second mark close your eyes and take off the night vision.” I said as I drew two runes into the dirt at the base of the ditch, they were the first two runes I learnt in my childhood, the runes of my name ‘Midnight’ ‘Shade’.

“Brother there’s more than one pony in there, one of them is the target I think” said a voice behind me, I looked to see a bandit aiming down his sights at us.

“Close your eyes now” I said to the others, finishing the last part of the rune and casting its spell. Darkness overtook me.

There was a blinding light, this was new, I shielded my eyes from the light, looking around I discovered that I wasn’t in the ditch anymore, but I wasn’t anywhere I knew in The Zone either, Where was I? Starting to panic I looked around for any sign of where I was and where the others were, had they been attacked while I was out and I’ve been brought to someone’s base? I shot up off the floor and stumbled forward when I overbalanced and tripped over something on the floor, it was a lamp, it looked similar to the lamp I had on my bedside when I was working in the power plant.

“You slept in late today honey, it’s already well past midday” a voice said. It was a voice I recognized but I couldn’t place on anyone in The Zone that I could remember, then I took another look around, I know where I am, I’m in my old house near the power plant. It wasn’t how I last saw it though, it was fully intact, not burnt out and torn apart. “You still asleep or something?” said the voice, the voice that I now know to be my wife’s voice; as I pieced it together she walked out of the bathroom.

“What’s up with your mane and clothes?” I asked noticing her shiny black dress to accentuate her light grey coat, and her blonde mane had been straightened, not that her mane needed much straightening.

“We’re going out to dinner tonight for our anniversary, remember? Our booking at Enzo’s is in forty minutes, so you better start getting ready, don’t take too long in the shower either, even if Celestia is covering our bills for you working here it’s just rude to shower for as long as you try to get away with” said Howling Gale, slightly angry with me for not knowing why we’re going out tonight or that we were going out.

“Oh yeah of course, sorry still tired I guess, don’t rightfully know what day it is!” I said with a smile, she smiled back at me.

“I know, you never know what’s what when you wake up.” She said as she gave me a kiss when I walked past her to get in the shower.

After my shower and little bit of grooming, I put on my suit that I’ve had since our wedding, while Gale doesn’t like me wearing it, it was all I had for formal attire that would get me let into Enzo’s

“Ready to go Middy?” Gale yelled from the lounge where she was waiting for me to get ready.

“Yeah I’m ready, with five minutes to spare including walking time, I think that’s a record, what do you think?” I replied walking out of our bedroom and down the hallway to the lounge.

“I agree, you’re usually getting out of the shower right about now”

The walk to Enzo’s felt shorter than it had been, I couldn’t recall any memories of the walk, but it had taken ten minutes to get here. The waiter showed us to our table, it was out the front of the restaurant the sun hadn’t quite fully set yet and still provided a considerable amount of heat as expected on a late spring’s eve. He gave us a menu each and a drinks menu between the two of us.

“Would you like bread and butter Sir and Madam?” He asked; pouring us a glass of water, with his magic, from the bottle he had placed in an ice bucket to the side of the table.

“Yes please, thank you” I replied and he produced a basket of bread rolls, a small dish of butter and a butter knife and placed them on the table.

“Is that all Sir?” he asked.

“Yes for now, thank you” I replied, and the waiter returned back to his post at the entrance to the restaurant where he decided who could and couldn’t be a patron of the world famous Enzo’s authentic Griffon cuisine restaurant.

“Who thought we’d ever eat at such a fancy place as this; you were right this job was a good idea, at this rate you’ll be able to retire in a couple years, maybe less if you get that promotion, and we can move to Ponyville and not have to worry about money at all.” Gale said watching me as I buttered up a roll for each of us.

“That will be a great day when it comes” I said to her with a smile, I looked around at the other tables, they were empty, I could have sworn there were other ponies here when we were seated by the waiter, who was also absent from his post.

“I was wrong, this job was a terrible idea” Gale said, but it wasn’t quite what she sounded like, I turned to look at her and rather than seeing my wife as I remember her there was a ghoulish corpse seated across from me. “Your idea killed me Mid, we would have been fine for money and you know it, if we moved to Ponyville like I wanted I would still be alive, you killed me Middy. You and you alone are to blame, cooling systems were your job, you failed to keep them up to scratch.”

“No stop it, I wasn’t working that day, Lone was the one that forgot to check the cooling cells.” I shouted at the thing across from me.

“I’m not a thing middy, I’m the result of your decisions” it replied. It may have sounded like my wife but she never blamed me for what happened, she would have told me. “Who said I’m your wife Middy, I didn’t say I was; I’m you. Particularly the part of you that died when you became a cold blooded murderer, if you didn’t insist on swapping shifts with Lone, you would have been able to stop the meltdown and there would be no zone for you to kill ponies, bandits or not, either way it still killed me when you first shot that kid.”

“He was aiming a gun at me, I had to kill him.” I said, rising out of my seat and backing away from the ghoul in front of me, I tried to turn away but it wouldn’t let me I had to stare it in the eyes.

“His pistol was out of ammo, you let him bleed out as well! That’s cold blooded, even for the bandits, the least you could do was finish the job rather than steal his marbles out of his bag after he stopped screaming and died from blood loss.”

“I-I didn’t know what to do... it was the first time I had to shoot to kill since I entered The Zone.”

“You knew he was young, too young to even drink, not like it mattered in The Zone, how do you know his family wasn’t in The Zone with him? Maybe that night you killed more than just a teenager pointing a gun at you.” I couldn’t reply this time, I had no justification for not trying to save the kid after I found out he was out of ammo, nothing that I would accept, I was worse than the bandits that I hate so much. “I know you don’t have any justification for killing us, I am you after all, just wait though, I’ll be back one day, and I won’t be the only one that looks like this when I do return.” As he said his last bit he started to fade and by the end only his words remained to finish his warning, I was finally able to look around again, only to find nopony here with me, just a devastated cityscape. I checked my bags and found my artefacts, they were my reminder to myself that I would do anything to help anyone I felt needed my help and wouldn’t try to kill me. Suddenly I heard a cackling laugh behind me, I spun around to find nopony behind me or in sight; only what I thought could have been a flash of a hoof disappearing around a corner but I wasn’t sure.

I woke with a start; I looked around my surroundings to find myself near a small campfire on a hill near a patch of woods, around me the rest of my party slept except for Coach, who stood guard near the path I assumed they had taken to get here.

“Midnight? You right there?” Coach asked; he was startled by my sudden awakening.

“Yeah, nightmares that I couldn’t wake from. Where are we and how long have I been out?”

“We’re slightly to the north of Yantar; it’s been a day and a half roughly since the encounter with the bandit squad.” He replied as he turned back to watching the path for anypony or anything who thought to attack us.

“How did that go? Was the darkness enough for Night and Swift to knock them all out?”

“They missed one, but they got him after the three seconds were up, one of them was fast though, Swift got a pretty nasty cut when he parried her strike and countered with his own, it’s the reason why we only got here earlier today rather than last night. Sweet was only able to stabilise her but there was still the possibility of it getting worse and if she deteriorated too quickly Sweet wouldn't have been able to keep her alive. Swift started to drift that way until this morning when Sweet finished her spell, she said that it would have been earlier but apparently your enchantment stopped working while you were out-”

“Wait my enchantment stopped working?”

“She said she thinks so; the snow globe didn’t feel the same in her magic she said”

“That’s no supposed to happen, it should function in every situation except when I stop it myself or when I die” I said as I thought about what this could mean, had I died for a short time while I was dreaming about my conversation with myself? Did it have anything to do with the sudden appearance of this version of myself I had never felt before, guilt was one thing but a dead part of myself was different. Now that I think about it, it, he, me didn’t feel like they were a part of me at all but rather somepony else; but that was over now, I had a more pressing issue, if that enchantment had stopped working had the others? The realisation hit me, I took out my artefacts, casting an expert eye over each of them; the runes on them were unchanged, the spell still bound to them. Not trusting that looking the same was good enough, I took the white marble in my magic, and willed my runebook to be summoned, nothing happened but right when panic started to edge in I heard the same chuckle from my nightmare inside my head and my runebook fell to the ground in front of where I lay. That’s the important thing, that my runebook could be summoned still, taking up the black marble, the book desummoned with ease, and resummoned when I tested it again.

“There aren’t any other important enchantments you need to check are there? Also care to explain exactly what that spell was?” Coach asked after seeing how worked up I got over my runebook; I’d think he was pondering what I would have done if an important enchantment had stopped working.

“No, none that I wouldn’t already know about by now. It’s the spell of my namesake, Midnight Shade, as you could probably guess from the name and the effect you saw it’s a spell that surrounds the area a few meters around me in darkness, to people outside the area they see nothing different, inside you can’t see anything at all, except for some reason night vision still works even though inside there isn't any light to enhance. By the way, do you know what time it is? My watch stopped and it says that it’s 19:30 on the 15th, which is either a couple weeks ago, or in a couple weeks” I asked the stallion looking at my watch, what an odd time and date for it to stop on, the 15th of next month would be the ninth anniversary of my marriage to Gale.

Chapter 5: Lab X-16

Lab X-16

I woke again in the morning, it was foggy this morning and I couldn’t see too much further than our camp. I had decided to go back to sleep then Coach’s shift at guard for the night ended and Stone took up his position, rousing the others from their sleep and seemingly the rest of The Zone, as I could now hear plenty of noises coming from around the general area, including the sound of rifles being fired, after all, it just wouldn’t be a morning in The Zone if there weren’t ponies trying to kill each other. When I had properly gathered my bearings I noticed Sweet, Night, and Swift were in the process of stoking the fire that Coach had lit to keep himself warm and were also preparing to cook some breakfast.

“Morning girls” I said getting up from my spot on the ground, yawning as I walked towards them.

“Morning Middy, nice to see you conscious again” said Swift, shifting to her side to make room for me around the fire. I noticed she had bandages wrapped around most of her body, her injuries seemed considerably more dire than I had originally thought, whoever it was that got the counter-strike in was quite powerful.

“You recovered from magical exhaustion pretty quickly, that spell felt like it used a lot of magical energy, and in comparison to your stores you shouldn’t be able to cast that spell safely. To use it, not only in a state where you already had partially depleted stores and not die from it draining your life to make up the rest of the cost is extraordinary.” Said Sweet, giving me a look over from her spot around the campfire with her magical spell, “And yet now, normally after complete exhaustion and then some, it would take days for you to come out of a coma, let alone be up and moving and also have almost half your magic stores back in as little as a day and a half. You sure are a weird unicorn Middy, I don’t suppose you could teach me your secrets could you?”

“I don’t know how to explain how I’m awake and have my stores at half capacity, but the spell is different; while normally using that spell would kill me by draining all of my magical energy and life force to make up the rest of the payment for the casting, my runes are what prevents that. Much like a philosopher’s stone to alchemy, my runes negate any extra magical energy while also enhancing spells, but it still needs enough of my magical energy to cast, so I can’t keep casting spells with my runes after complete magical exhaustion or my spells may fizzle if there isn’t enough to fully cast only partially, or it will break down completely and I’ll be hit by the feedback.” I said to the unicorn who was still studying my body with her spell, trying to find the mystery of my magical energy recovery. “As for teaching you how you can use big spells that you normally wouldn’t, you need an affinity for runes to be able to use them properly, otherwise they’ll kill you just as effectively, but we can give it a shot another day if you’d like.”

“That would be nice.” Said Sweet, releasing me from her spell, unable to find what the source of my recovery could be. “I’d like to be able to use them to enhance my spells as well as maybe use a few large spells that can heal more than just one pony, if I’m shown to have an affinity can I study under you Middy?”

“Of course you can, but only if you have the affinity, I don’t want to be responsible for you killing yourself by teaching you how to use runes” I replied to Sweet Tree. “How are you Swift, Coach told me you got a nasty slash from one of the bandits during the fight, and I noticed how much bandaging you needed” I turned my attention to the pegasus.

“I don’t know how but the leader of that group of bandits somehow parried my strike, then disarmed me and got a good shot at me with my own knife; good thing I decided not to use the poisoned blade so that I wouldn’t accidentally kill anypony. It was one of the best parries I’ve ever seen, even more so that it was against a strike as fast as mine. As for the severity it wasn’t that bad it was just long and a little deep, Night just went overboard on the bandages, even suggesting that we throw some over the bandit base we passed as a prank.” She replied, Night just laughed and smiled when the idea of covering a bandit base with bandages was brought up.

“Actually because she used so many bandages we’re starting to get kind of low in supply of them, know if there’s anywhere in Yantar where we can restock on supplies?” Sweet asked me while sorting through her bag, taking stock of our supplies.

“I agree I need some ammo” said Coach, hefting his rifle back around over his shoulder after it had slipped down and was knocking against his legs.

“We haven’t shot anything since last night when that bloodsucker strayed over to our camp, you can’t have used that much ammo” said Swift, checking her own stockpiles of ammo.

“Uhh... I may have kinda accidentally dropped some while running away from the bandits” said Coach with a slight shuffle of his hooves.

“Aw well, last I was here there was a small settlement, but this place is usually filled with zombies, I’m not even sure where they keep coming from” I said to them, I took out my PDA and checked the map, the region hadn’t changed since I was last here, I don’t think the few ponies that reside here would have moved, nor would the zombies have moved against them, after all they don’t seem to be capable of conscious thought anymore. The ponies that had lived in Yantar when I was first here were a peculiar group of scientists that were contracted by the military to study the effects of a particular emission of something that effects the minds of ponies that go near the laboratory in the southern part of the area. They called these emissions psy-emissions and said they emit psy-waves, probably for a lack of a better description other than it does psychic stuff; they also theorised these waves caused the zombies to act the way they do, as they are unsure of their source, and whether they were ponies who walked too close, or had died too close.

“Hey, the fogs cleared up now, and I can see a bunker with some ponies around it down there” said Night, looking towards Yantar through her binoculars; she had spotted the scientists’ bunker. The scientists lived in a bunker that the military had flown into The Zone, although they hadn’t left any soldiers to protect it and had paid a few loners to guard the scientists while they worked.

“Good, that’s where we’re heading, I wasn’t sure if they were still going to be here, they should have made advances in their work since I was last here. Aw well, maybe they have a new contract and are studying something else now.” I said, standing up and pouring some water onto the campfire, which caused the others also to stand before heading down the hill to go down to the scientists’ bunker.

“Look alive men, seems like we’ve got some bambis coming” said one of the mercenaries under the employ of the military to defend the scientists from the dangers of The Zone.

“Bambis? What?” I asked as we drew closer to the mercenaries and the bunker they were protecting, they all kept their rifles pointed at us, not trusting that we wouldn’t try something against them.

“It’s just something that I call the new people to The Zone, what are you doing here and not closer to the cordon?” the leader of the mercenary group asked us as more of his group came out from around the other side of the bunker, and even a couple from inside.

“Midnight? Midnight Shade?” a voice asked.

“Who’s asking?” I asked nopony in particular, who here would know me; everypony I knew from The Zone would most likely not still be here, if not dead.

“I am, have you already forgotten me?” said a yellow pegasus stallion, with a sun rise for his cutie mark, who had come out of the bunker and was standing on the walkway leading around the top of the bunker. I realised that this pony was my friend from before I had been locked up in a cell, his name was Day Break, and he was the best pony to have at your side if everything went wrong.

“Wow Day, gone a long way from roaming The Zone killing bandits, soldiers and mutants alike to being a guard for the military. How have you been since I left to get out of here?” I asked my old friend.

“Yeah, I got picked up by a patrol, I was given the choice of going to their jail for five years, or come here and guard these scientists til they finished their work. Although speaking of you leaving, what are you doing back here after all that work you put into getting out of The Zone, I wasn’t expecting to ever see you again. I had heard news of Spectre causing all kinds of trouble throughout The Zone, killing ponies without any kind of discrimination, even killing the people who healed his wounds after he got munched on by mutants. I hope that wasn’t you, otherwise I’d have to shoot you where you stand, the spectre I’ve heard about isn’t like the one I know, after all, we hunted the ponies that preyed on the unknowing, the kind of ponies this Spectre is.” Day Break said to me, the mercenaries around him retraining their guns on me when he talked about possibly shooting me after they had lowered them when they realised that we knew each other.

“No that isn’t me, don’t worry, we’re doing the same old thing that we used to, hunting the notorious bandits of The Zone, with Spectre being our target. As for why I’m back here, I got an offer from the military like you, but mine came after a two year sentence, ‘to discover, and possibly rectify, the cause of expanding emissions’. We think Spectre has done something in the centre of The Zone to cause it, so we’re going to check it out and I personally want to see who’s putting my name to shame.” I told him; causing the mercenaries to lower their guns, wouldn’t be good for them to shoot somepony in the employ of the ponies who write their cheques.

“Sounds like a good time to me, I’d love to join you on your journey but, I’m not allowed to leave until the scientists finish their research. I’m sure they’ll let you come in and stay if you need to.” he said to me, opening the airlock for me and my party before walking back inside the bunker from his spot on the walkway around the top of the bunker. “Oh and by the way, come in one at a time, the airlock isn’t big enough for all of you.”

“Let’s see what these scientists have to trade, and I’d like to see what they’re researching if they haven’t finished it in all these years.” I said to the others who had sat back and watched the exchange between me and Day Break, I saw they had questions they wanted to ask me, but none of them voiced their concerns at the moment and would probably wait for another time.

The scientists pointed us to their resident gunsmith and trader for all of our needs for supplies, and also repaired our weapons free of charge.

“So you’re the friend that Day Break told us about when we asked him about his experience in The Zone. My name is Doctor Shield, I make gear to protect ponies from the various hazards of the world; I used to design the armour used by the royal guards to defend them in the event of an invasion. Now I design armour for use in The Zone, one day hopefully creating a suit that protects the wearer from all harm, including the anomalies in The Zone, as well as the brain scorcher that surrounds the lab here and we suspect may surround the reactor in the power plant.” said one of the scientists after we had finished trading with the gunsmith who introduced himself as Hammer Pin.

“Yeah that’s me alright, he told you about our bandit hunting and all that or something?” I asked him; his understudies that were actually doing the research while the doctor talked to us just watched the exchange while completing their work at the same time.

“Yes we heard all about that, although we had known about that since before he came here, you two were an infamous pair, every bandit knew your name, and it was great to see them actually fear somepony rather than just continuing their pillaging of anything that moved. Pity they heard that you had both been picked up by the military, it took that fear away from them and they just got progressively worse.” he said. I was embarrassed by him bringing up our reputation as bandit hunters and how we had killed enough to be known all throughout The Zone.

“So, how’s your research into your armour going? I know that you guys have been here a while, surely you must be nearing completion?” I asked the doctor, maybe I’d be able to test it for them... actually on second thoughts, walking into anomalous fields to test something that may not work sounded like a terrible idea.

“Yeah... about that... we’ve only gotten a prototype for protection against the brain scorcher at the moment, but we have a pretty good idea for how we’ll implement it all, particularly the protection against arms. I do have to admit that our idea isn’t really that intuitive, but the systems required to get it to work correctly are going to be pretty complex. In short our idea is to make a suit rather like the idea of a tank, essentially a pony covered in steel, requiring hydraulics to operate it, and inbuilt life support systems and such to heal the operator in the event they are injured somehow. We’ll call it an exoskeleton.” He said, excited by describing the idea for the exoskeleton to me.

“Sounds interesting, wouldn’t they be pretty expensive to make on a large scale?” I asked, intrigued by the idea of the exoskeleton.

“Maybe, but we have plenty of bits at our disposal, after all, we are being contracted by the military to make these.” He replied. It made sense that the military would cover any costs, and therefore the government would use the taxpayer’s money for it, but I guess it would mostly come from the treasury as the princesses amassed vast amounts of money to cover the costs of anything without having to take money from the citizens.

“So, tell me about everything I’m missing by picking this rather than prison” said a voice behind me, I turned to find Day Break was seated on a couch in the lounge that was opposite the gunsmiths’ workshop. I got the impression he had been sitting there for a little while now, he never was one for interrupting conversations.

“Absolutely nothing, quite a terrible place, the guards tend to take it upon themselves to beat up the inmates” I said, walking over to the lounge where the others were also seated, I took a seat next to Day Break who shifted to make room for me.

“That bad huh?” was his reply

“Yeah, nothing really interesting has happened since I left to get out of this place except for my little mission that I have now, and these guys.” I said to him, motioning to the other five members of our small group when I brought them up.

“What exactly is your mission though?”

“It’s like I told you, to discover and if possible fix the cause of the emissions expanding in size.”

“And you just think this Spectre guy has something to do with it right?”

“Yeah, apparently he’s been pretty deep in The Zone recently, and it coincides with the increase of the emissions radius, so it seems reasonable to assume he did something he shouldn’t have.”

“That and everypony wants him dead, even the bandits think he’s going too far, now that’s saying something about the guy.”

“Does everypony include you Day Break?” asked somepony else from back over where I was talking to the doctor. “I am Doctor Wave, I’m the head researcher here, and therefore everyone answers to me, I’m also in charge of the production of the pieces of our armour that will protect against anomalies.”

“Of course I want a piece of this guy, not only does he steal my friend’s name to perform all of these horrible tasks, but also to restore the old glory of our names as the best hunters in The Zone.” said Day to his boss.

“Ok then, I have a proposition for you then Midnight Shade, test our helmet, and if it works properly, disable the brain scorcher within X-16, the laboratory to the south. After you do that you can take Day Break with you, as long as you promise to also bring back any documents you find in there and any other labs you come across in your journey.” He said to me.

It really wasn’t that hard of a decision, even though it had been years since I had last seen Day Break he was still one of my best friends and I trusted him with my life without a second thought. I didn’t doubt my other friends’ abilities or anything, but my history with Day just made him something that they couldn’t yet be, a reminder of the old days.

Day had also been a worker at the ENFPP, while I didn’t know him then we had crossed paths a couple times, and when we crossed paths in The Zone later and recognised each other we got talking about what we were doing back here; me for my memories and photos, him because when ponies found out he had been here when the meltdown occurred they treated him as if he was carrying a contagious disease. I had also experienced ponies treating me like a zebra in older times but for the most part the ponies in Fillydelphia either treated everypony like that or just didn’t care because they were practically breathing smoke from the factories rather than air.

I stopped moving and took cover near an abandoned wagon as I heard a noise from the hill I was about to crest, it sounded like a zombie or two were on the other side of the rise. This had been the seventh encounter of the other local inhabitants of Yantar since I had left the bunker, while they had once been stalkers and even a couple military ponies, now they didn’t have any allegiances to anypony but each other. I crept up to the top of the hill as quietly as possible, how visible I was in this position didn’t matter. The zombies seemed to lack the eyesight they used to have before being turned into what they are now by the magical radiation, they more than made up for it with their hearing, able to hear the slightest of sounds that even the most alert bandit would miss. There were indeed two zombies a little bit down the other side of the hill, which really wasn’t much of a hill, the zombies, if they were in the right state of mind, would probably tear each other apart as one was a stalker and the other a bandit. Testing to see if my telekinesis had returned to normal strength, I tried to raise my rifle, and easily did so, taking aim at the bandit of the pair as that shotgun he held would tear me to pieces if he hit me with it, where as the stalker seemed to only have an SMG. I planned to spend two shots on each of the zombies, first to kill them, the second to make sure they don’t get up again, as I prepared to fire I noticed one of the bandit’s ears twitch, he had heard something, but rather than turning towards me as I expected him to do, he turned towards the entrance to the lab that I was heading for. The pair of zombies started to stumble towards the lab, along with a few other zombies that had been standing around waiting for someone to approach them.

“What the fuck?” I had nearly said aloud but caught myself in time for it to be only a thought, either something had caught the attention of all these zombies or somepony was controlling them, I was leaning more towards the later otherwise the zombies would be making more of an effort to move towards a sound.

“Midnight, we’re detecting a rather high psy-wave reading, are you in the lab now then?” asked a voice that I guessed was Dr Shield, something was interfering with the signal and had distorted the voice.

“Not yet, I’m about 150 meters away from the entrance” I replied.

“Odd, we don’t usually get these sorts of readings until we’re practically inside.” The voice replied. This was worrying, there was something odd going on inside the lab and maybe the source of the psy-waves had caught wind of what I was planning, maybe even drawing it from my thoughts. That doesn’t explain why the zombies are all converging on the lab though, I think I might have a look around for some documentation of what we were doing here and see if it will give any insight, I’m sure the doctors won’t mind if I read any documents before giving them over.

Celestia damned zombies, after I had entered the lab it hadn’t taken long before I had to start shooting through the undead guards of the complex. I thought I had brought plenty of ammo with me but it seems I was wrong, and now I was running low, either I needed to get lucky that somepony had left some pretty uncommon bullets lying around somewhere or I would have to start using one of the many guns that had been dropped by the zombies I had killed again so far. While I could use them and would most likely be familiar with most of them, they’re all in disrepair and lacked the stopping power of my rifle, but at least there would be plenty of ammo from the other zombies carrying similar guns.

“We- close- to the source- Midnight.” A garbled voice said between bursts of static, I had just finished clearing a small squad of zombies from the office I was now searching; I reloaded my AK-74u that I had picked up off the body of a zombie, now entirely out of ammo for my rifle. I had mended one of the wounds, but my skills with sweets spell may have done just as much damage as healing to a wound in my flank so I decided to bandage the other two and let sweet deal with them rather than trying again, after using it the first time I had noticed a distinctive lack of power and a little difficulty during the casting, it seems I hadn’t actually fully regained my magic. My search of the office yielded two documents, a status report to the mother company of this lab, and a journal entry from a lead researcher; I decided to read the report first.

We have made significant progress on the single unity project; we have discovered that the central unit performs best when there’s an even balance of races in the composition, when there’s a dominant species the unit tends to take on particular aspects of the race of the dominating donor. There have been proposals for three extra units to be made, each one entirely composed of a different race to the other two, for use in other sectors, particularly agriculture and technology for the earth unit, magic for the unicorn unit, and combat for the pegasai unit. Although for our purpose I doubt we will have any use for these, we aren’t trying to make a large scale mass produced product here. We will be ready for production by the end of the week, we will send more details when we think we are ready but for now there isn’t much more to report that we didn’t report last time.

I was beginning to wonder about what they were trying to produce here but the report didn’t contain much information on the project itself, only about what stage the researchers thought they were at with it. I hoped the journal entry would hold more answers for me.

Everything is still in test stages at the moment, but so far the project has been returning positive results and with the inspection next week we might be moving into production stage soon, hopefully the inspector is the one we chose or we’ll be in big trouble and maybe even Celestia herself will come to deal with us. I don’t like the thought of being on the moon for the rest of eternity. We are also having problems with supply, apparently word spreads about missing ponies pretty quickly, hopefully with the end of the next test we will have all the information we need of the characteristics of a pony that made them most compatible with the unit. If we have to keep testing, in a few weeks there won’t be any new places to make into the unit, it would only be a matter of time until the disappearances get tied with the company and therefore us. We are also in need of a new neurologist apparently; Dr Synapse decided that he couldn’t take any more innocent pony lives to be harvested and made into the units and is now on a permanent vacation according to management. At least now we all knew what happened to ponies that want out, although it was to be expected, our use of pony brains to make a supercomputer capable of running everything by itself is apparently highly illegal, no matter how useful our advancements may be to all ponykind, and would earn us all a ‘banishment’ that we would never return from, even after a thousand years.

This is what ponies thought the next step for advancing technology would be? That it was fine to kill innocent ponies to make supercomputers to do our jobs for us? But then... Hadn’t I also taken lives before? While in my opinion they weren’t innocent but I didn’t always know for sure, does that make me just as bad as these researchers? No, no I was even worse, these researchers were trying to improve the quality of life of the nation; I had shot ponies who were in the wrong place at the wrong time because I believed it would improve the quality of life in The Zone. I feel as if I shouldn’t even call myself a pony anymore, no, from this day on I will no longer call myself a pony, I’m just a stalker; maybe even just a bandit, but I will call myself a stalker. Not wanting to read any other entries I decided that I should continue with my mission, I took solace in the fact that there was someone worse in The Zone than me, Spectre, I will redeem myself as a po... stalker, and kill Spectre, and him alone. Figuring out the source of the waves will lead to finding Spectre, Day would be a great help in finding Spectre, he was always a much better tracker than me.

It was a giant brain... These researchers had possibly finished their supercomputer, but the explosion from the reactor had affected it, the central processing unit, the brain, now glowed with magical energies, seemingly able to command anything in the area with the power of its thoughts. Was the collection of brains that had now formed the singular mass of tissue floating in suspension in the liquid filled column that was the centre of the room sentient? Or was this a result of the radiation and magic?

“you there, pony, why do you not bend to my will?” I heard a voice, but it didn’t sound like it came from anywhere particular, I thought that in a large room like this sounds would echo, particularly a loud voice like that. “That’s because I’m transmitting my thoughts to you, you aren’t the quickest are you?”

“You can read my thoughts? And transmit your own into mine?” I said aloud, turning towards the brain, realising that it was indeed sentient.

“Indeed, now answer the question” the voice in my head said to me “also just think about your answer, don’t speak, I don’t have ears to listen so it’s just wasted breath.”

“Oh, right, I guess my helmet stops you from controlling me then.” I replied in thought, if it couldn’t take any direct action on me and just relied on thoughts what was the brain planning to do.

“Would you kindly remove your helmet then” asked the voice, and for a moment I nearly did remove my helmet before I snapped out of it and dropped the telekinetic sheathe around the helmet. This was not good, being this close to what I guess would be the source of the waves reduced the effectiveness of the helmet, and made me vulnerable to its will.

“As you climb the stairs there will be levers, three in total, pull them within 3 minutes of each other and you will force a shutdown” A different voice screamed in my head before being replaced by the first one repeating it’s command. I was horrified, it wasn’t a collective sentience, but a collection of a few still sentient beings being dominated by a singular strong personality. This other one must of broken through for a short while to ask me to relieve them of their torment. Knowing that this pony was in need of help I was easily able to ignore the command to remove my helmet.

“You won’t succeed; I will force you to take off your helmet.” The first voice was back at full strength, he, for I felt that this one was male, knew what I intended to do and would try his hardest to stop me from enforcing a shutdown. I moved towards the central column, there was a metal staircase winding up around it, with three landings with consoles on each landing, this would be easy, I could see the levers from the base of the stairs, I would just pull them with my magic from here. Or at least I tried to, I had underestimated the will of the brain and the only magic I could gather was focused around my helmet, looks like I’m going to have to hoof it to each console. I started up the stairs, fighting my magic trying to lift my helmet off, I reached the first landing a few seconds after starting my climb, I saw the first console and the lever labelled ‘emergency shutdown: level 1’ I readied myself, and started running up the stairs to the next level to pull the second lever.

“Emergency shutdown procedure initiated, level 1 lever starting source, time remaining for level 2 and level 3 to be activated, three minutes” A speaker somewhere higher up in the room broadcasted, the race against the clock had begun. I ran hard, and reached the second level and lever, I had misjudged the distance to this second level and as I pulled the second lever the same broadcast system announced that I still had two minutes to pull the last lever, this would be easy. Or so I thought, I noticed while climbing that I was getting closer and closer to where the brain was suspended, and the fight against my magic was becoming a losing battle. I reached the console, I had crawled over to it from the top of the stairs the presence of the will of the dominating personality of the brain was ever present and starting to feel as if it was a physical force trying to stop me, I reached out to pull the lever.

“You will fail to stop Spectre” the brain had stopped asking me to remove my helmet for a moment, “Spectre will crush you and your friends”

“No, stop it” I responded to the brain, it’s presence and suggestions had paralysed me, still reaching for the lever to end all of the torment of the other personalities within the mixture of the brain. The brain continued to torment me with all of my secrets, feelings and horrors.

“Would you kindly remove your helmet and take a flying leap off the stairs, your wife will be waiting for you in Tartarus.” No. I had stopped myself as I stood near the edge of the stairs reaching for my helmet while also stepping towards the edge. “What? How are you able to resist me?” I stepped towards the console, without the will of the brain hindering me further. “How are you not even slightly effected anymore?”

“Nopony talks about my wife like that” I said aloud as I pulled the lever.

“Emergency shutdown protocols met, initialising shutdown” announced the loudspeaker, I looked at the console, it was stuck on displaying the counter for how long I had to pull the levers, it read 00:01.38. I had only just accomplished the shutdown in time, I doubt I would have been able to do it again, I would have ended up removing my helmet and becoming a slave to the brain.

“Heh, well done kid, I thought I had conviction but you are something else” what, this wasn’t a different voice in my head, the pony who had tried their hardest to stop me from shutting him down had given up that easily? “Kid, many others had come before you, none had ever reached the third lever, I wasn’t being seriously malicious in my intent, I was just looking for that one pony who had the unwavering conviction to push through all that I could throw at them from their psyche. I believe you will be the saviour of The Zone, don’t let your past cloud your judgement, or shape who you are now, that’s all gone, what matters now is what you do with your unwavering conviction, and killing this Spectre fellow seems to be the path for you. All I can say is that your wife was lucky to have such a loving partner, to be honest I thought you were about to fail before you turned around and just strolled up to the lever. In all seriousness though, me and my brother thank you for relieving us of our eternal tomb and for reminding us of the good days, you remind us of our friend, she was just as determined as you and lead us into some pretty hard times and places but we prevailed because of our friendship, so you should keep those friends of yours as well.”

“I... I don’t know what to say... thank you I guess” I was lost for words, these ponies, these brothers were right, I can’t let anything lead me astray from my path, no matter how much blood I had spilt before now, the rest of my path will only be coloured by the blood of Spectre. “What are your names so I can remember you and your advice and give you a proper memorial, even if it is just a personal one for me?”

“I am Straight Arrow and my brother is South Light” he replied “farewell Midnight Shade, we may meet again one day yet”

“Emergency shutdown procedure complete, shutting down” announced the loudspeakers, the lighting in the column fading into darkness, I stood and stared at the now non-functioning brains of two ponies who had given me a new outlook on life, even though it had only changed in the first place a few moments before coming across them, I was still in their debt.

“Middy, can you hear us?” a voice I recognised as Sweet’s came over the radio, of course now that the shutdown was complete the signal wouldn’t be jammed by the psy-waves.

“Yeah, I’ve got a little bit of a story to tell when I get back, I’ll be there soon” I replied, looking around the room from my vantage point I could see that there was a door opposite the one I had entered the chamber through, and through this door I could see daylight so I assumed this was an exit.

I entered the bunker and found all of my friends waiting for me, receiving a tackle that turned into hugs from both Silent Night and Sweet Tree while the others looked on with big smiles on their faces.

“When we heard that we couldn’t contact you over the radio we got so worried that something might have happened to you but we couldn’t go check because we didn’t have the protection from the waves so we had to just sit here and wait.” gushed Sweet Tree, sounding rather flustered. “But then we couldn’t detect the presence of the waves any more so we assumed that you had shut down the source so we got to the radio as quick as we could to try and get in contact then you replied and washed away all the worry, thank you for coming back Middy, I couldn’t take the loss of another friend.”

“Personally I trusted that you’d get the job done, Middy, that’s quite different from the strike fear into the heart of bandits name you used to use.” said Day Break from the back of the group, he was barely stifling a laugh, after all he was right, from being known as the bandits’ worst nightmare, Spectre, to now being called Middy was quite the contrast. “You said you had a story to tell? I suppose you mean the nature of the facility, well let’s hear what happened.”

After I had finished telling them of the details of what had happened, minus the personal details of my conversation with Straight Arrow, I got a bottle of water out of my pack and let the story sink in before waiting for reactions.

“You mean that there are ponies in this world that were making supercomputers out of ponies? And I thought the bandits were bad enough” said Coach who was the first to react.

“As to what they were planning on doing with these supercomputers, I think the answer might be in amongst all these files here, I decided to just take as much as I could but didn’t have the time to sort through it while I was there so I don’t know the details of what I brought back.” I said, handing the stack of papers and folders over to Dr Shield, who was writing down notes about how to improve the helmet so that it would easily resist the commands of a similar system, but was mumbling about how he would test it. He decided that he wouldn’t look into it further unless he heard about a similar system so that he could test his ideas and instead started reading through the files over in the corner of the room, while the rest of us discussed what had happened in the facility and theories on what the supercomputers would be used for. The discussions had turned to where we would go next, eventually deciding on going to skadovsk because Day said he met a stallion who would be able to guide us through the anomalies between us and the ENFPP.

“I found what they had planned on using the supercomputers for. Whoever this company was, they were planning on waging war on somepony, the worst part is I have a feeling that this is a shell company that was under the control of some members of the advisory committee that are now in power. Somehow I don’t think that this will be the last such computer to be made, and that there may be more outside The Zone being built now.” Said Dr Shield, walking over from his corner and interrupting an argument about whether I would be able to traverse the anomalies and whether we’d need the guide.

“Really? It’s a government conspiracy?” said Stone, “Damn it, I knew I should’ve gone with my first instinct.” Commenting on the fact that he had made a bet with Coach about the nature of the supercomputers, he had said that it was a government conspiracy but changed his mind when he noted that this first computer was made while the royal sisters were still around; he had settled on it being spies from a different nation while Coach decided that it was a drug lord making an automated system to run his business as if he wasn’t there.

“Yes, I have fears for what might be going on with our leadership now that the royal sisters are gone. I don’t think I will report the findings of our research just yet, if they found out that we found files that lead back to the producing supercomputers from ponies brains they might eliminate us. I need to think about how to progress before I go saying anything.” Dr Shield said, he was right, after all their effort to keep a project like this quiet if somepony pointed out who was behind it they might end up targets for assassination. “That can come later, for now it’s starting to get rather late in the day so you can rest here tonight before you head out tomorrow, this will also give you plenty of time to pack and resupply Day Break. See you lot later” he said to us before walking away in the direction of his office.

“Speaking of rest, I’m going to sleep, wake me for dinner” said Coach, Dr Wave motioned for Coach to follow him before leaving the room in the direction of the dorms.

“So, I’ve got some questions to ask you two” said Swift Strikes. The next couple hours were spent answering various questions about mine and Day’s past, particularly about how we became such renowned hunters in The Zone, to the point that we had become the number one target of the military and bandits. Before too long the others had run out of questions and we ran out of stories to tell, we decided that it was a good time to grab something to eat for dinner, the rest of us went to the small cafeteria to grab something to eat while Sweet went to get Coach from his room; they joined us a few minutes after we had sat down to eat.

After dinner I questioned Day about what had happened after I had left to escape The Zone, while he asked about what had happened since I had returned to The Zone. We had talked about our new experiences for the next couple hours before I felt too tired to properly continue the conversation, so I took my leave and headed for the dorms, most of the others had decided to follow, except for Night and Swift, who stayed in the lounge talking with each other, possibly about improving their skills. Today had been a rather odd day I thought as I climbed into bed, but couldn’t continue that thought as I fell asleep a short while later.

I was dreaming again, this time though it was as if I was being railroaded through the experience, I couldn’t take control of any actions my body took. Although as I looked at the magic floating the quill as I was about to start writing I had the feeling that this wasn’t my body, the aura of my magic is normally a dark blue, this was close to a lavender sort of colour. I started writing.

“Dear Princess Celestia, after our last fight with Discord I noticed a change in his personality, the first time we fought him it was more of a game, this time he was all business, I fear that the elements can’t hold him properly and that he may break loose again soon. I also fear that he might try something drastic that might destroy Equestria and that we might not be able to stop him this time. To prevent him breaking the seal again I have developed a new form or magic that I want to use to seal him again, but I need to talk to the others about it and also have you and Luna approve it, although I somehow think that may be a difficult task. Your faithful student, Twilight Sparkle.”

Oh okay, my subconscious was writing letters to Princess Celestia as Twilight Sparkle, what caused this though? It wasn’t normal, particularly as I can’t consciously control anything that’s happened but I can monologue all the same. I, or rather Twilight, turned towards a blackboard and studied what she had written on it, I also studied the blackboard, she had written runes from the Harmony Circles on it. The Harmony Circles made particularly strong bindings and very strong seals on the target of binding so they don’t tend to break loose often; the runes that Twilight had chosen were to make the most powerful binding I had ever seen, this binding used not just one or two of the master marks but all six of them. This was the kind of binding that would take multiple unicorns to cast, if one were to try it by themselves, even if she was the most powerful mage of her time, it would no doubt kill them to make up the difference. She turned to the pages of what appeared to be her research that were scattered over the floor, the basis of this research was soul gems, particularly how to make them, what was Twilight planning to do with these magics? Does she not realise that if she makes one false move with these spells that they were fatal? Not even just with the soul gems but also the runes, if she accidentally poured her magic into the master marks when she was writing them down on the board that they would combine and cast the binding even if she didn’t intend it to.