Fallout Equestria: Epilogue

Bourbon: I consider Bourbon to have been my first teacher in wasteland survival. I don’t know much about him, but what I do know is that he is an individual who chooses to live his life on a knife's edge. He lives in the moment from opportunity to opportunity and never looks back. He really isn’t a good mentor for long term survival, but I still picked up some important lessons from him during our brief journey together.

Entry 4: Bourbon Shook me awake the next morning, just before sunrise, I had taken first watch, so I got to sleep from midnight to the morning.

“C’mon kid, let's get going, we got a long way to go if we’re going to meet up with my buddies at The Field”.

I got up and packed up my stuff. Last night after writing in my journal the floodgates opened and I started asking Bourbon all kinds of stupid questions, what was with his accent, what kind of gun is the one he nearly shot me with, where can I meet up with the authority, is the standard greeting really murder or was I just getting a rough start, can he explain to me how guns work, etc.

He answered them well enough even though it was clear he really didn’t want to. He came from a place called Stalliongrad on the west coast far far away in the frozen north, there the air is still so toxic that in order to walk around on the surface you have to wear a gasmask at all times, and everypony lived in the old metro tunnels. He decided a decade ago to leave the dead city and live life on his own terms.

The gun he was using was a genuine Zebra Assault Rifle from the great war, not one of the many knockoffs often built nowadays.

Unfortunately there are no Authority outposts in Apple Hills, but if I just keep making a name for myself sooner or later the authority will catch wind of me and scoop me up.

No, the standard greeting is not murder unless you’re a raider, though murder is pretty much the standard response.

He also walked me through taking my pistol apart, talked me through some of the basics of firearm maintenance, and some proper vocabulary. Then after the Cram was done cooking (it really was A LOT better when cooked), we brainstormed names for my railgun while I ate, eventually we settled on ‘Thunder’.

Then Bourbon asked what I planned to do next now that I slayed a giant beast. I told him that I honestly had no idea. So far I had just been wandering around looking for some other pony, then some other sane pony. I figured I would try and get to the nearest town if there were any that Bourbon knew of. He said he did, apparently there was a whole town built into the ruin of an old 20 story building in the center of Apple Hills’ downtown, it was twice as tall as most of the rest of Downtown and smack in the center, so it was pretty hard to miss (plus my pipbuck placed a marker on my map for the place), but then he offered me a proposal.

You see apparently Bourbon had some friends who were based out of an old Baseball field that he needed to meetup with. He said that if I were to help him get there he would give me his rifle, 100 bottle caps (which apparently they use as currency out here), and hook me up with a safe route to “Baleville” (that town I mentioned earlier). It was a deal I couldn’t pass up, I said yes.

Bourbon had managed to bust into the school clinic’s medical supply room, we took what we could reasonably carry and hid the rest in a vent for later just in case.

We left the school just before sunrise, and moved at a brisk pace. “OK kid here's how this works, you follow my lead, if I tell you to jump, you do it, no questions asked. There’s still a lot you don't know, but if you follow my lead, you’ll be ok”.

I kept my Hunting Rifle drawn as we moved from house to house, alley to alley. Almost as soon as we got clear of the park we started running into bands of raiders. But with my EFS we were able to weave between patrols fairly easily. We were passing through a ruined house when Bourbon stopped and threw a foreleg out to stop me.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“Tripwire”, he said nodding to the small wire suspended over the bottom of the doorframe, my blood ran cold, I wouldn’t have saw that. He started stepping over, “always be aware of your surroundings kid, because shit like this is a great way to deal with the blind and stupid”.

“No shit”, I breathed in agreement.

He knelt down where the string ended, “That goes for other shit too, at the park yesterday you could’ve saved yourself some trouble by actually listening to those signs posted everywhere”, he held up an apple shaped metal thing with a pin on the top, “aand you can also score some sweet goodies too”.

“What’s that?”, I said pointing at the object as he slipped it into his bag.

“Grenade, you pull the pin off, throw it, and ten seconds after you pull the pin it blows up”.

Wow, I was both even more relieved and intrigued at the same time. I’d have to keep my eye out for more tripwires, both to score some of those grenades and for my own health.

We came to a stop at a raider barricade built out of a couple of broken wagons turned on their sides and lined with wooden spikes on the bottom, all the shops lining the street were boarded up or collapsed, and all the other wagons, mailboxes, and everything that could be used as cover were all piled onto the barricade. “Aw shit, this wasn’t here last time, they must’ve just moved in, derr`mo!”, he whispered under his breath.

“What was that last part?”.

He let out an agitated sigh, “I said shit, anyways we’ll have to kill them if we want to get through, otherwise we’ll have to backtrack and go around the raider territory entirely, and that would take us at least two days”. He looked back at me, “alright kid, can you tell how many are over there?”.

I took a look at my EFS, “nine according to my EFS, and they’re all red, so they’ll probably shoot us on sight, but as for what weapons they have or how tough they are I couldn’t possibly begin to tell”.

“*sigh* there's no way we can manage that, they’ll gun us down before we could get halfway down the street”, he looked back down the alley behind us, “hmm...hey kid, you don't have a problem with cramped spaces do you?”.

“I grew up in a goddess damned stable Bourbon, if you could have an anti-fear, I think I would have one for cramped, underground tunnels”.

He stood up and started walking back down the alley, “great, because if there's one thing I learned as a child, it's that if you can't go through or around, you try and go under”, he said with pride as he stomped down on a manhole cover.

I switched on my pipbuck’s lamp mode while bourbon turned on a headlamp and strapped it onto his head.

“OK kid, whatever you do, do not turn your light off. If you get lost down here, no one will find your corpse for decades”, we started trotting down the sewer.

“Do you know where we’re going?”

“East, that's the best you can do for directions down here, I know the Field has a metro entrance, so we’ll try and get into the tunnels”.

We trotted down the dark tunnel, water dripped off of rusty two and half century old pipes, rotting stink and mildew filled the air. The only light emanated from my leg and Bourbon’s headlamp as we went forward.

“Im half expecting to get mugged down here”, I said somewhat jokingly, scanning the vents alongside us.

“By a mutant maybe, when you’re underground like this it's just one huge clusterfuck, one minute you’re in a bandit camp, next room it’s a mutant nest, one wrong turn and you’re dead”.

We exited the tunnel into a round chamber where multiple other tunnels met and poured into a central pool at the center. But that wasn’t what caught my eye first, that was all the bodies. They were piled all over, torn limb from limb and flayed to pieces, equipment scattered everywhere. The walls were also pockmarked with holes, all about ⅔ my size and tunneled deep into the dirt beyond.

“Raiders?”, I said as I looked around.

“no way kid, this, was mutants’, he said as he knelt down over a corpse and started rifling through the pockets, “notice all the shit lying around? Guns, bullets, food, all that shit would be gone if it were done by something with a brain… no these assholes were killed by mutants for lunch, then dragged back here as leftovers”.

“Wait, so we’re in their den!?”, I said startled as I started looking around for the creatures.

“Yeah, so shut up and loot these bodies quick before they get back!”, he said under his breath.

I dropped down and started pulling off scraps of clothing trying to find something useful, I had just found two more .308 rounds when Bourbon ran past and swatted me on the back.

“Quit wasting so much time! Just pat down the pockets and move, if the stuff isn't easy to get, wait until it's safe to loot it.. Which we’re not!”, he said in a hushed yell.

I took his advice and started patting down bodies the expressway, only grabbing the bullets and supplies that were easy to get. I looted three bodies in the time it took me to loot the first one, snagging three shotgun shells, a gas mask, a roll of healing bandages, and a magazine with 13 5.56 rounds. I also heard faint scratching in the walls, and red bars were starting to show on my EFS.

Bourbon stood up when the sounds started and booked it past me, “time to go kid!”.

I ran with him, we were halfway to the nearest tunnel when one jumped out in front of us, it looked like a horrid mix between a rat and a giant mole, with a mouth full of glistening jagged teeth that snarled relentlessly. My PipBuck labeled it as a ‘Nosalis’.

We both shot it on the spot, but immediately more began to pour through the holes. We kept running as the whole cavern filled with the monstrous snarling.

“RUN!! DON'T STOP!”.

He didn’t need to tell me twice! We made a beeline down a side tunnel, shooting any that jumped in front of us. They were gaining though, and my rifle clicked on empty, so I had to pull out my pistol.

“There! The supply room!”, Bourbon yelled looking at the open door on the right side of the tunnel. We jumped through as I fired my pistol blindly in the air behind me to get the things biting at our hooves off of us. The moment I cleared the door I slammed it shut with my telekinesis, but the head of one got smashed into the doorframe as I did so. I kept the pressure on with my magic to keep it from pushing in, and Bourbon bashed his shoulder against the door to brace it shut right as more began to pound against the door.

“Forget the door! Find an exit! Quick!”

I turned and scanned the room, it was a supply closet, no other entrances, and being underground there were (of course) no windows either.

But there was a vent.

I ran to the back wall and yanked on the rusty cover with my magic, it was screwed on but the screws were on their last legs, so I focused my magic on it and started pulling with all my might.

“HURRY!”

The metal groaned, *POP*....*PING*.... *BANG*. The cover flew back and hit me square in the face, but I shook off the hit with a dazed shake and grunt of pain as I jumped into the industrial sized vent, the thing dropped straight down to a grate further below, but I had no idea what was on the other side….

Only one way to find out.

“Come on!”, I shouted back at Bourbon, who at this point was barely holding the door closed. He ran from the door, dropping the grenade as the Nosalises (nosali?, fuck it, I’m just going to say nosalises) flooded in behind him. I held out one of my forelegs to him, the moment he grabbed it, I used my other foreleg to push myself back as hard as I could, pulling us both back and down into the shaft.

We fell ten feet before crashing straight through the vent cover and landing on top of a Metro car. I broke Bourbon’s fall at the same exact time that I heard the room above us explode.

“Mmph, get off of me”, I said into Bourbon’s chest.

Breathing hard, he rolled over and let me breath. I sat up as I caught my breath, we were in a metro tunnel at the start of a steep slope down, with the metro car rusted in place.

And the walls were covered with more holes that were letting out increasingly load snarls.

“Not out of the woods yet kid, ready for the real fun to start?”, He said as he shoved a new magazine into the rifle on his side.

I stuck two shells into my shotgun and slammed it closed, “are you crazy?”.

He chuckled and gave me a smile, “Aren't we all?”, and damn me if I didn’t smile a little back.

He opened a hatch on the top, and jumped in with me close behind. The inside looked to have once been home to a pony at some point, the windows were all roughly boarded up and there was a bed in the corner, but the occupant was long gone. Years old blood stained the floor and bullet holes lined the walls, there were already some holes in the boards, so I had a feeling this was the second last stand against nosalises this car was going to experience in its long lifetime.

I loaded up my rifle with the three bullets I found for it, slapped a fresh magazine into my pistol, and charged up Thunder. I noticed that the only light in the car was coming from my pipBuck, and looked over at bourbon whose headlamp was broken.

“What happened to your lamp?”

“What?”, he pulled it off onto the ground, “oh shit, ah well we’ll still be fine as long as we don't come across any spiderbugs”.

We heard them enter the cave and start climbing on the car.

“Alright kid, let's kick some snout but!”, he shot one in the head the moment it peered through the hole.

I saw one pop up in a hole next to me and drilled a rifle round into its eye. Another started clawing its way through a spot in the wall, earning it a burst of assault rifle fire as Bourbon’s rounds passed through the soft wood to the other side. We continued shooting them off of the sides and managed to hold them off for a good minute.

Then one got in, I immediately switched to SATS and shot it in the chest. Right as I did so another took its place and lunged at me. I smashed my rifle as hard as I could like a bat into it’s ugly snout, splintering the makeshift gun in half in the process. I barely had time to drop the ruined rear half of my rifle before another one dropped onto my back and started shredding into my armored back.

My police vest managed to block its shredding for a good second before its slashes started ripping out bloody flesh, causing me to scream out in pain and lose concentration on my pistol as I was pulling it out, sending it clattering to the floor.

Bourbon heard me and sent a burst into the overgrown rat as I collapsed against the car’s front wall. I quickly swept up my pistol again, switched to SATS, targeted my shots into the heads of three different nosalises inside the car, and let the spell lose to drill them in the head with robotic precision.

Things weren’t going well.

Barely two minutes in and we were getting overwhelmed, for every nosalis we killed two more took its place! Just about all the boards on the windows were gone. Even with bourbon’s assault rifle we just couldn’t push them back, and I was pretty sure the last bullets in his magazine were used to save me.

A nosalis snarled at me from the top of the control panel next to me. I unloaded a several rounds into it right as it lunged. It’s dead body slammed boldly right into my neck, forcing my head to the floor and my attention right onto the pulled emergency brake next to the operator’s chair. I lunged and slammed the lever down to the floor.

Immediately the whole car lurched and started rolling forward. I reloaded as I turned to shoot at the nosalises that had now decided to focus on Bourbon, who in turn was shooting at them from under a seat with a large revolver of his own.

The change was pretty quick though, unlike before the nosalises weren’t rushing in behind their dead brethren, and after we killed the group it was easy to see why. Once the car picked up speed the other nosalises couldn’t keep up and fell behind.

The car was building up speed fast, with the air rushing past like it was flying out a fan unit on full blast.

Bourbon crawled out from under the seat and started running to the front, tripping a little when we lurched onto flat tracks and flew through an old station. “Don't you think we’re going a little fast!?”

“I kinda want fast!”, I said as I gestured to the tunnel behind us, “after all, I think anywhere else is a great alternative to a mutant slaughterhouse!”

“You’d be surprised kid”, he said under his breath as he looked out ahead of us, “at least we’re slowing down now that we’re not on that slope”.

I leaned back against the control panel and ejected the empty magazine from my pistol, only to find I didn’t have any other magazines left, so I just put the old one back in and tucked the weapon away for now.

“You know it's a miracle this thing’s bearings remained in such good condition, I guess they really did build shit to last before the war didn’t they?”

“Uhh kid, are there any brakes on this thing?”

Ok not quite the conversation I had in mind but whatever. “Uhh yeah, the same one I pulled earlier”, I said flatly as I went and yanked on it with my magic. Only instead of applying the brakes the rusty lever snapped off at the base, “....umm, nevermind, we don't have brakes, why?”

He just rotated my head so I was looking out the front window to see us approaching a destroyed subterranean bridge just a few seconds ahead.

“oh….”

We both looked each other in the eyes, threw our forelegs around each other’s necks, and screamed like foals as we flew over the edge.

I woke up what I think was a few minutes later inside the turned over and smashed car, all my barding was off and thrown into a pile in front of me. I tried to stand up but Bourbon’s hoof forced me back down.

“Easy kid, you bled a lot from those nasty gashes in your back and you took a hell of a bruising from the crash, I bandaged you up but it’ll take time for those bandages to work, so I want you to rest for a minute”.

I compiled, for which my aching body was thankful, “where are we?”

“Were in maintenance junction 13 dash 2, if we take the second door on the right we’ll find a ladder, from there it's a hop, skip, and a jump to the field”

“Really?”, I said with no shortage of surprise.

He slapped me on the back of my head, “no dipshit, I have no fucking clue where we are! Seriously what kind of fucking question is that!?”.

“The kind confused people make”, I stared at the floor (now technically wall) of the car ahead of me as we sat there. “Thanks for getting that thing off my back earlier”

“Huh?”, he looked off for a minute in thought, “oh yeah, no problem kid we were fighting and you needed the help…. Really needed the help now that I think about it. Seriously you were shooting all over the place, have you never fired a gun before?”

I scoffed, “I’ve never even held a real gun until two days ago, but it's really not that hard you just point and shoot”, a chilling memory flashed through my head, “oh and I guess make sure the switch is set to on”

“Switch?”

I pulled out my pistol and pointed it out, “yeah the switch, unless this is only on stupid stable guns”

“Actually no, most guns have one, but it’s called a safety, it makes it so you won't accidentally set it off when you’re not shooting. But no kid there's more to shooting than that, a lot more in fact. But the important thing is that you don't shoot until you have a shot lined up you’re confident you’ll hit, sure you could just shoot until your gun goes dry, but you’ll waste a lot of ammo that way, and ammo isn't something you just waste out here”.

“I'll try to remember that at the next nest”, I tried to think of another conversation topic. “What’s this ‘field’ like?”.

“Well… it's a big arena, my buddies arrange fights between groups of ponies that the rest of them watch for entertainment. Pretty soon they’re actually stating their big tournament they have every year to clear out their roster for fresh meat”.

Ponies consider fighting entertainment out here? That sounds like the sort of sadistic entertainment security would enjoy.

Though it did sound pretty cool the more I thought about it, and if nopony actually died then I guess there was no harm done…. Maybe it might be worth checking out? I mean there has to be a petty big incentive for ponies to volunteer for something like that. “Huh, sounds interesting, maybe we could watch a match while we’re there”.

He paused for a second before he replied, “yeah… sure! I think I might even be able to get us some front row seats! Really get in on the action”.

“Dude that’d be awesome!”, he must have some serious pull with the ponies running things, which brought another question to mind, “Bourbon, what kind of relationship do you have with these guys?”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I mean, do you work for them or something? Why are we meeting them?”

“You ask a lot of questions you know that? Its personal, don't worry about it”

You’ve got to be kidding me, “oh come on Bourbon, I just nearly died in a mutant nest and saved your ass, you could at least tell me why”

“Don't forget I saved your ass too! Multiple times!”, he looked down at the floor for a minute before making eye contact again, “you do trust me… don't you?”

That’s an odd question, “yeah I guess, you’re the first sane pony I’ve come across. Without you I would’ve just bumbled around the city outskirts until I got killed by raiders, and even though I’ve come closer to dying today more times than I have over the course of my entire life combined, I feel like you've actually taught me some important stuff too”.

He looked outside the car for a minute before answering, “I work with them, I bring things they want to them and they pay me”

“Like some kind of merchant?”

“Kind of like a merchant, but I tend to deal in rarer, more had to find things, anyways I need money and I think I have something they’ll want”.

“See, was that so hard? So what is it you’re bringing them?”

“You’ll find out when we get there”

I groaned and dropped my head down on the ground, it was better than nothing I suppose. We waited for awhile longer before I was finally well enough to stand up and start putting my equipment back on. As I was doing so Bourbon was removing the bandages on my head and using a little bit of water to wash off any died on blood.

He let out a long whistle, “damn kid, what the hell did this to you head?”

“A glowing rock blew up in my face”, I replied bluntly, “why? Is it still not healed, I know it was bad, but I would’ve thought those healing potions and bandages would’ve fixed it by now”

“Oh it healed all right, but that rock must’ve blown up with magic, because it left one hell of a magical scar on your head”

Oh shit, regular scars can heal away with health potions, but magical scar you were stuck with for life, I had quite a few on my back from the magical energy whip security liked to use. “How bad is it?”, I asked, only to have Bourbon tilt his head and squint for a minute, “come on man, what does it look like?”

“It’s… hard to say. It looks kind of like an…. Anchor with four dots around it?... no that’s not quite right, you can just look for yourself when we find a mirror ok?”

I sighed, “fine, can you at least tell me if it looks stupid or not?”

“It doesn’t look stupid, it actually looks a little cool, and it might help you get some mares too!”, he said enthusiastically, “after all, chicks dig scars”

I looked up from putting on the last of my equipment, “really?”

“Hell yeah kid, now come on, let's get the hell out of this place alive, OK?”, he said as he climbed out a hole in the back of the car. If there was one thing you could say about Bourbon, it was that he sure knew how to make you feel better when he wanted to.

I trotted out onto the concrete platform next to bourbon, beneath us the bottom of the large rectangular room was a quarter flooded with water and had various barrels plastered with radiation symbols floating about.

“If we landed it that we would’ve been dead of radiation in under a minute”, Bourbon said.

“You maybe, I would’ve drowned before that”, Bourbon just stared at me, “what? It's true, it’s not like there was a pool in 54”

He just shook his head and trotted away.

We climbed up a set of rusty stairs and started following the old subway tunnels towards our destination. On our way I started seeing large thick webs and other white, almost fleshy blobs of web covering the walls.

“Fuck! I was hoping to avoid this”, bourbon said as we kept walking, “Thank goodness your PipBuck has that light or we'd be dead meat”.

I saw something skitter across the tunnel in the dark ahead of us, “what do you mean by that?”, I asked nervously.

“We call them ‘spiderbugs’, nasty pieces of work, they’re the size of the Nosaleses we dealt with earlier, attack in swarms, and have tough shells that will shrug bullets off like water”

“Then why the fuck are we going through a nest of them!”, I could see movement in the dark all around us.

“Because light will set them on fire and chew threw them like napalm!”, he said with a gesture to my foreleg, “again, without that PipBuck we’d both be dead meat”

After that little statement we both just kept trotting forward through the tunnel, with bourbon burning away any webs that got in our way using my lighter. At one point Bourbon took out a bottle of vodka, tied a piece of cloth to the neck, lit it, then threw it into the center of a thick wall of web blocking the tunnel. “Molotov, great for if you need a big blast of fire on demand”

Surprisingly we got through the tunnel without incident. After entering a new set of tunnels I noticed a sign on the one we had just exited.

Industrial/Military Supply tunnels

“Hey bourbon, why does the metro system for apple hills go so far underground? I would’ve only imagined cities like Manhattan would have systems this deep and complex”

“That's not a bad question kid”, Bourbon replied, “Apple hills did have a large military base on its northern side, and the south and west sides are almost entirely industrial. But for the most part apple hills was an office town, handling a lot of the bureaucracy for companies before the war, and the industrial district mainly manufactured civilian goods like toothbrushes. None of which justifies the large amount of tunnels running underneath it”

“Really, so why does it exist then?”

“Nobody knows”, he said with finality.

“What!? Are you honestly telling me nopony has figured out why the fuck a seemingly useless tunnel system was built after 240 years! That's insane!”

“Not really kid, most ponies don't have the slightest clue as to why they did what they did back during the war, and even fewer care enough to try and find out. Of course some ponies have tried to find out over the years, but they all end up either giving up or disappearing”

“Disappearing? How?”

“Everypony figures it’s either the mutants or old security systems that get them, once you go below the industrial layer of tunnels to the deepest military level you come across military strength blast doors, automated turrets and robots, radiation, taint, shit like that. It's a death sentence to go down there”. He kept looking at a small map of his every time we came across a turn, “I don't give a shit though, who cares why a giant tunnel system exists, it just does, is full of monsters, and most ponies won't think to barricade them or try to follow me down here”

I guess that made sense. Still it left me wondering just what was down here, what could make it worth building miles and miles of tunnels under an office town?

We kept pace and seemed to be following much more commonly traveled tunnels, there was the remains of a raider camp built into a station we passed. But it was quiet and empty, seemingly abandoned for a while.

I noticed an old camera mounted on the wall tracking my movements. It was probably just set on a motion detector with nopony on the other side. But old habits die hard and I couldn’t shake a feeling that I was being actively watched the whole time as we passed.

The tunnel next to the station was collapsed, so we had to detour through a maintenance hallway. At the end of the hall we entered a sizable storage room littered with bodies. On the other side was a powered down maintenance door.

“Loot the bodies kid, I’ll get this door open”

Bourbon trotted over to the door and started turning the rusty wheel next to the door to manually open it. I started grabbing whatever I could find on the bodies, ammo, medical supplies, gas mask filters. As I did so I felt strange, like a wave was entering the room.

Suddenly I wasn’t in the room anymore, I was in some dark valley with water at my hooves, I looked around and saw bourbon at one end still trying to open the maintenance door, with a wall of light emanating on the other side. At the other end of the valley was a large solid gate reaching all the way up to the top of the valley.

I closed my eyes and shook my head violently, snapping myself out of it. I was back in the room and Bourbon was shouting into the air.

“Come on you crank, if you cooperate I swear I’ll come back and give you a fresh coat of paint. Oh I feel it coming! I hear music!”

What the fuck?

I blinked and I was back in the valley, only now there was a harsh wind pulling me back toward the gate. It began to open and I saw red light emanating from the other side, with millions of whispers escaping to my ears.

I turned and ran against the increasingly harder wind to the door where Bourbon had gone limp on the wheel.

Bourbon was still yelling into the air, “Oh yes I cann hear you! I can hear your beautiful call!”

“Fuck this! we’re getting the hell out of here!” I grabbed him and dragged him under the partially opened door, telekinetically hitting the release and letting the door drop shut.

Almost immediately everything was back to normal and I was sitting at the end of a maintenance tunnel with the door shut at my back and a sleeping Bourbon next to me.

I could hear the sounds of Nosalises swarming into the room we had just vacated. If we had stayed in there we probably would have been torn apart like those other bodies.

I gave Bourbon a rough shake and he started to wake up.

“Ugh, Shepherd? Where are we?”

“The other side of the door, I started seeing weird shit and you blacked out, are you okay?”

He sat up rubbing his head, “all I remember is hearing singing and falling asleep”, he shivered, “Fuck, I wouldn’t wish that singing on an enemy, we must’ve stumbled into a dreamer anomaly”

“A what?”

“An anomaly, don't worry about it for know kid, lets just say a Dreamer anomaly fucks with ponies heads and gets ponies killed. Dammit, I should’ve seen it coming! If it wasn’t for you I would’ve been a goner”, he looked at me for a minute, “wait, were you really not affected by it?”

I thought about it for a minute, “Not really, I mean I still saw things but I was still in control more or less, I could reject it to a certain extent and was aware of what was going on. Unlike you, who went into a trance or something and fell asleep almost immediately”

“Hmm, well I guess I’m the one that owes you now”

“I guess so”

We stood up and headed out on the other side of the tunnel collapse, Bourbon lit up as we approached the station.

“Wait, I think we’re here!”, he ran onto the platform and looked at an old map, “Yeah we are, we made it kid!”

We walked toward the front gate of the Apple Park stadium, every other entrance was barricaded or blocked off with old wagons and sheets of scrap metal. The old paint was flaking but the stadium still largely retained its green color.

Once we got close spotlights switched on and focused on us. Two guards in the post above the gate pointed mounted machine guns at us and a third guard stepped out.

“Bourbon! What an unexpected surprise! I’m guessing you’re here with our money!”

“I’ve actually got more than that. I’ve got something for the Ceasar!”

He squinted and looked at me, “Sorry, but we aint interested in getting involved with the authority”

“It's not that dumbass, let me talk to the Ceasar and I think you’ll all agree that what I got you want”

He thought for a minute, “fine, but the stable dweller waits by the gate”

“Deal”

The gate creaked open and I turned to Bourbon, “what's going on here? why does it sound like the ‘thing you got’ is me”

He put a hoof on my shoulder, “he just thought I was going to let them collect the reward for bringing you to the authority, dont worry, I got a better plan for you. Now let uncle Bourbon have a chat with his friends and then I'll answer all the questions you want, fully”

I sighed, he still wasn’t being completely open with me, but it sounded like he was going to soon. “Alright Bourbon, just don't take too long”

He went off with the guard while I took a seat at the gate. I turned to the guard keeping an eye on me, “so I have to ask, what do you offer ponies that makes them volunteer to fight in your arena?”

“Shut up”

Okay, somepony that was even less of a conversationalist than Bourbon, great.

Now that I was taking a closer look though, I noticed that the guards were dressed pretty rough with barding made of dirty scraps of cloth and scrap metal. It looked a lot like the stuff I saw raiders wearing but better constructed.

I took out my journal and started writing down today’s events. I had gotten to the part with me and Bourbon’s fight in the Nosalis nest when my train of thought was interrupted.

“What are you writing?”, said a middle aged voice right beside me.

I turned and was face to face with a zebra from out of nowhere! I jumped back startled, “gah! Where the fuck did you come from!”

He chuckled, “sorry, I just have a quiet hoofstep. I don’t normally go anywhere near an establishment like this, but I was interested in why a stable dweller was entering a place like this, and my curiosity took hold”

“You do know what they say about curiosity and cats right?”

He closed his eyes and stroked his beard (lucky, I wish I could grow one), “a wise saying, but if one only takes it at face value it also has no meaning at all”

Wait what? How could something be wise and also have no meaning?

Almost as if he was predicting my response, he continued, “If one takes that saying at face value, then they will never explore the unknown, they will never learn, and they may miss out on opportunities to make life better. The saying ‘curiosity killed the cat’ refers to blind curiosity, just pursuing the unknown without a single thought to one’s well being, the consequences of exploration, or how they would return to the place they came from”

“Huh, I guess that makes sense”

“So once again I must ask, what are you writing about?”, he said looking at my journal.

“Oh uh, I’m writing an entry in my journal. I used to write in it all the time back in my stable, and I still like to even though I have other ponies to talk to now”

“You didn’t have others to talk to in your stable?”, he said with surprise and interest.

“Well it was more like I couldn’t talk openly to anypony, the only exception was for an hour with one other pony in the middle of the night, and we didn’t often have much to talk about”, I shivered remembering the surveillance, “The journal just gave me… a way to freely express myself I guess”

“Hmm, well I can tell you from personal experience that a journal can be a powerful tool. As it allows the writer a chance to reflect on previous events, and should something terrible happen to them, then their thoughts and beliefs have a chance to live on through their words”

“Thats a nice way of looking at it, thanks”. Well this was nice, finally I was able to just talk to another pony without them telling me shut up or brushing me off. No pony wasn’t right, he had stripes, he was a zebra.

Wait. he's a zebra…..

He’s’ a fucking zebra!

I jumped back again and stood up, this time I had a damn good reason to be scared.

“What's wrong?”, he said concerned. Yeah of course he would be, I just remembered what he was.

“Dont ‘whats wrong’ me! You’re a zebra!”, I said accusingly.

He looked at me a little amused, “oh this again, it's been so long since a met a fresh stable dweller that I almost forgot”

“Forgot what? That you’re a zebra!”

He laughed, he actually fucking laughed like I just said a joke, “and why does it matter that I’m a zebra?”

“Wha-? Because it was zebras that started the war! Because it was zebras that bombed the shit out of Equestria and turned it into a wasteland!”, seriously, what kind of question was that?

He started laughing even more, once he got his composure back he spoke, “there has long been a debate over which side first started the war, not that it matters in the end. But do you really think I launched balefire bombs on equestria over two hundred years ago?”

I was immediately confused, “what? Of course not, but you’re ancestors did!”

“And are you saying I’m guilty for the crimes my ancestors committed long before I was even born, when there was no possible way I could’ve influenced their decision?”

“Umm, well…. No, I guess not”, I thought back to what I had been told back in the stable, “but zebras are naturally evil, there was a whole unit in school about how the zebra brain wa-”

I was cut off by the middle aged zebra’s hysterical laughing, he was lying on the floor at this point. I was starting to feel more embarrassed than confused when he laughed now though.

The zebra composed himself and sat back up, “I’m so sorry, I just haven't laughed that hard in a long time, ‘naturally evil’, wow”, he caught his breath, “do you honestly believe something can be naturally evil?”

I just stayed quiet for a minute while I thought, I didn't want to agree with a dirty stripe, but the more I thought about it the more I couldn’t confidently say yes.

I sighed and sat back down, “no”

He patted me on the shoulder, “nothing is truly good or evil, it's all relative. For example, a wolf killing rabbits might be seen as evil in the eyes of another rabbit, but in the eyes of the wolf, it is simply hunting food to feed its children. Or to use a more relevant example, the war you mentioned earlier”, he said turning to look onwards at the gate, “Equestria needed coal to power its infrastructure and machines, the Zebras had coal but needed equestrian gems to make talismans that could defend them from the monsters of their own land. Neither side was willing to compromise and come up with a solution that would benefit both parties. So zebras saw ponies as evil, and ponies saw zebras as evil”

That did make a lot of sense, “but why did they teach us to hate zebras in school when the war has been over for over two centuries?”

“Are you telling me you don’t know what propaganda is?”, when I returned his question with an ‘are you kidding me?’ look he continued, “so you do know, well the dirty truth about propaganda is that the longer it persists, the more ingrained it becomes in one's culture. Suddenly what once would have been considered ridiculous is now ‘common sense’. The wartime propaganda against zebras had three decades to grow and take root, three generations”, he said with extra emphasis on the last two words, probably to make them really sink in.

“The overmare is watching”, I said nostalgically as I remembered those damn posters.

“What?”, he said confused.

“The overmare is watching, it was a slogan plastered on almost every wall of the stable”

He started rubbing his beard again, “hmm, normally the saying is ‘All hail the overmare’, interesting”

We both just sat there for a minute, me really processing what he said and him contemplating whatever he found so interesting about what I had said.

Dammit he made a lot of sense, I still didn’t completely trust the filthy zebra, but I liked him. He seemed wise and was nice, he was patient and even found my accusations funny. He wasn’t like Bourbon who tried to get me to stop talking all the time. He could be tricking me, like school said zebras were good at doing, but school also said that security were completely right and just in all their actions, and that any deviation from your role was a defect, so I knew they had lied before.

Did I really fall for propaganda? I thought I was above that, that I could see through it, but now I just felt stupid.

“You know for a stripe you’re pretty smart”, a said half jokingly.

“And for a bonehead you are a surprising quick learner”, he retorted, “so now I must ask, what are you doing in a place like this?”

“Oh I’m helping out this pony Bourbon in exchange for his rifle and some bottlecaps, he’s delivering something to some ‘Ceaser’ in this place and apparently has a ‘big plan’ for me, whatever that is”

He just stared at me with concern for a moment, “Is this Bourbon the first pony you have met out here?”

“Yep!”, I said brightly, “I’ve got to say he’s actually taught me quite a bit since we met yesterday”

“Has he told you what the authority is?”, he asked with a large amount of concern in his voice, “what they do with stable dwellers?”

“yeah, he told me they take in and train stable dwellers...why?”

He glanced at the guard, “no reason, just curious what exactly he has told you”. He stood up, “I really should get going, if I may ask you one more thing, what’s your name?”

“Shepherd, and what's yours?”

“Khan”

I held out my hoof for a hoofshake and he accepted it, “well it's been a pleasure meeting you Khan”

“And you as well Shepherd, may we meet again soon”, and then he trotted away.

“Well that was… enlightening”, I said to myself. I turned to the guard, “so why do you use bottle caps as currency?”

“Shut up”, right, not a conversationalist.

I wish Khan didn’t have to leave, I liked having somebody else to talk to, even if they were a zebra. Maybe when me and Bourbon were done here I would try and find him in this place before he left and travel with him for a while if he let me.

But overall, things were looking up.

Footnote:
Trait perk added: Shielding Mark (Rank 1): 6th sense obtained allowing bearer to sense the presence of anomalies and other unseen entities, and provides moderate protection from mental effects such as induced hallucinations and psy effects.

Level Up!
Level 2
Perk added: Quick loot: Sometimes you just have to grab what you can and run! You can quickly frisk bodies for easily accessible weapons, medical supplies and ammo in under a second, other items would have to be looted like normal.