Fallout Equestria: Epilogue

by Vengencefiftyfour

Rating: mature
Tags: Science Fiction, Profanity, Adventure, Violence, Crossover, Sex, Fallout, Narcotics, Gore, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Death, Alternate Universe
Length: 68009

A sequel to Fallout Equestria, Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons, and Fallout Equestria: Outlaw 40 years later in an alternate timeline where the heroes of the wasteland seemingly vanished when the world needed them the most.

Follow the journey of Shepherd, a Stable Dweller who flees his stable into the harsh equestrian wasteland forty years after the events of Fallout Equestria, Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons, and Fallout Equestria: Outlaw in an alternate timeline where the heroes of the wasteland all disappeared right when equestria needed them the most, plunging the land into a new dark age filled with a whole series of new creatures, factions, and dangers.

Published 2017-12-30 02:50:07 UTC
Last updated 2019-01-05 04:07:11 UTC

Entry 1: A brighter Future, Underground (REVISED)

Fallout Equestria: Epilogue

Book 1: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

A Brighter Future, Underground) If I’m going to tell you the story of my life, and really set the record straight about what I did and did not do, I have to start way back at the beginning.

Life was never easy in Stable 54, but whether I like it or not it laid the foundation for who I would eventually become. I don’t regret leaving that place, although I wish it were under better circumstances.

Entry 1: My morning started out pretty normally. I woke up to sound of my pipbuck’s normal 5a.m. alarm, which I deftly turned off.

I sat up and stretched, looking over the mess that was my bedroom. After the security toss last night, what was already a normally cluttered room of somewhat controlled chaos was now just a mess of spare parts, tools, and work projects.

I used my telekinesis to pull open a desk drawer to grab a notebook and a pencil, and sat down in my seat in the corner underneath the camera (the one blind spot in my room). I ripped out the first three pages of random drawings so I could use it as a new journal.

I had been writing when security showed up, so I didn’t have time to stash my old journal in my usual hiding space. I was forced to quickly slip it into a ventilation duct instead, before it could be found by security. At the time I thought it fell into a vent fan, where it got shredded.

I sighed at the memory. I had written a lot in that old journal. But then again, I was just gonna have to destroy it and replace it after it ran out of pages anyways.

I stowed the new, empty notebook in my hiding space. It was above a loose ceiling panel right above the camera in my room. That blind spot above and below the damned thing was the only area I could find privacy in my room. I also kept a bag of emergency supplies up there, but I'll get to that later.

I grabbed a suit of utility barding from my dresser and put my lucky flathead screwdriver in its proper shoulder pocket. Then I grabbed my toothbrush and trotted over to the buck’s bathroom.

My boss, Ticker, was taking a shit when I trotted past. He didn't bother shutting the stall door, prick. But its not like I could file a complaint against him. It'd be sent to and handled by him, kinda defeating the purpose.

“Good morning sir”, I said brightly with a small smile as I trotted past. I may hate the bastard’s guts, but I’d never let him know that. He was my boss, and it was my job to follow his orders, whether I liked it or not.

I walked over and started brushing my teeth at the sink next to him. For a minute, I just stared at my reflection in the mirror while I figured out what to say. My dull gray eyes were as bloodshot as they always were, and my navy blue coat was still dirty from re-oiling generator #7’s turbine the night before. I ended up running my gray telekinesis through my messy dark brown mane to get it back into that lazy, brushed forward position it's normally in.

Rock looked at me through the reflection on the mirror with a small expectant grin.

Here we go again.

In Stable 54, there’s a hierarchy: The Overmare, the department heads, security, and then all the other residents at the bottom. You only associated with ponies you had to work with for your job. You always look at those around you with suspicion of disloyalty. You reported anyone whom you found suspicious. And security beat anyone who was suspected of being disloyal; or those who didn’t pull their weight.

Productivity and security were the core tenets of life in 54. The Overmare watched you 24/7 for your entire life, through the thousands of cameras posted throughout the stable. You were expected to do one thing, and only one thing, work. Friendships and unproductive activities are looked at with extreme suspicion. The moment you get your cutie mark, you’re supposed to work, and be happy with only working until you die. That’s it.

Since ponies aren't robots, that doesn’t work so well. Ponies get arrested all the time for unproductive, uncivil, disloyal, and suspicious behavior. My Journals would get me lashed within an inch of my life, if they were found. But I still write them. I still write them because I’d lose my fucking mind if I didn’t. I’m not the only one; although in recent years journal writing has been on the decline. Mainly because chem abuse has skyrocketed.

Despite the constant surveillance, there’s always been a small, but thriving, black market in the Stable, mostly trafficking food rations and chems made from waste chemicals from all the machinery. Most of the ponies involved are in the maintenance department. There are a lot of holes in the security system down in the engineering levels.

Every couple of years, somepony will manage to do so well at avoiding surveillance that they manage to spread their chem trade to the majority of the stable. They almost always get caught months later that though.

The current pony to spread contraband throughout the stable is known only as ‘The Shadow’. And unlike all other previous ponies in his position, he’s managed to avoid capture for three years. There is no sign that he’ll be caught any time soon. Unlike previous master dealers, The Shadow doesn’t deal with anyone face to face. He always works through dead drops and notes. Leaving no one to squeal on him to security.

But the real reason he hasn’t got caught, is that the Shadow is a security officer. I know, because I know who he is, Rock.

Security officers are basically trained from the womb to be completely loyal to the Overmare. They exist in a whole other world from the rest of us dwellers. They do what they want to, when they want to, however they want to. They only have two rules: Do what the Overmare says, and don’t put the stable in danger. They’re brutes, and they’re kept happy and well fed so long as they keep all the ponies below them in line, ponies like me.

That is why it is so surprising then that Rock has turned traitor, a security enforcer going against the Overmare is basically unheard of.

Every time security catches a real lead, he’s right there alongside the enforcers. Even after three years, security hasn’t once considered that the Shadow was one of their own.

With all that being said, how do I know him?

It’s complicated, the word ‘friends’ wouldn’t be the right word. Not at all. We don’t like each other. We rub each other the wrong way.

I think he’s a spoiled thug who ought to get thrown out of the stable, alongside the Overmare and all her other cronies in security. He thinks I’m a rezy bug who shouldn’t be whining about how I’m basically being worked nonstop until I die. He thinks I should just be happy being alive, and be proud to do my part.

But we have something in common: a hatred for the Overmare.

We’ve known each other since we were in grade school. He used to beat me up alongside all the other bullies. One day I caught him down in a storage closet huffing dash. We had a little talk. He threatened me, I threatened him back, then we started talking. Over the years we’ve had little private talks regularly in the surveillance blind spots. Our preferred spots are down in engineering, where there aren’t many other ponies and the machinery drowns out our voices. The most common topic: How much we hate the Overmare and the stable.

I guess somewhere along the line someone fucked up in the process of turning Rock into a drone that followed the Overmare without question. I’ve never been able to figure out why. He’s never been straight with me whenever I’ve asked. Unlike me, he actually decided to do something about it. Apparently he thinks that successfully getting all us resies hooked on chems will somehow undermine the Overmare’s authority.

I can’t see it, to be honest I think he’ll get caught any day. I’m not gonna rat him out, I like hearing that tinge of anger and frustration that creeps into the Overmare’s voice every time she makes a chem or Shadow related announcement. But I’m not gonna help him either. When he gets caught, I don’t feel like getting hanged right next to him in the middle of the atrium. Hanging’s are uncommon, but there is always at least one or two hangings a year. With almost 500 residents and enforcers living in the stable on average, it doesn’t affect population too badly.

At that moment in the bathroom, I wanted to tear into Rock with questions. Every night someone’s quarters gets searched randomly by security, and Rock always told me ahead of time so I wouldn’t get caught writing in my journal. But last night he told me I was safe, something that I realized was a blatant lie when Security came knocking.

Security gave me a citation for my room being a mess, and I went down into maintenance to find my journal. I thought all that was left of it was a bunch of fresh paper scraps I found in a vent fan.

Anyways we weren’t in maintenance at that moment, we were in the bathroom, where surveillance was working just fine. So that meant we had to watch our words when we talked until later that night.

We had to keep up appearances, after all, friendships were suspicious, especially between a resident and a security enforcer.

“So how was your night?” The brown bastard said with a slight smug smile

“Oh pretty routine, ate dinner, had a visit from security, and cleaned laundry. Pretty boring overall,” I said sarcastically as I wet my toothbrush.

“A visit from security? Routine? Did you make some friends I don't know about or is your dad finally talking to you again?” He asked before spitting into the sink.

“Me? Friends? Do you know who you’re talking too? And the chief of security has made it pretty clear that he has no son. Actually, the security visit was actually pretty unexpected now that I think about it. I mean, what reason would would you guys have to search my room?”

“You know it’s called a random search for a reason right? It's not like we picked you out ahead of time”, he said.

“So you just drew names out of a hat and I got unlucky, Is that it?”

Damn it. I wanted to ask him what I was really thinking. Why the fuck did you lie to me about the inspection you ass? But the damn cameras made it impossible, and I had no idea how to phrase it without giving us away.

Rock turned punched me in the mouth, “Yeah we did! Now quit butting in on security business!” He snarled.

He didn’t actually hit me hard at all. But I acted like it was a mean right hook and toppled to the ground, lying there dazed like I was seeing stars while he walked off.

As I was getting up, Ticker was leaving. He turned around in the doorway, “Rivet, when you said you ate dinner and did laundry last night, was that really all you were doing?”

I looked at him a little confused, “Yeah, what else would I have been doing?”

“Nothing just… Never mind.” He walked out.

That was weird.

I stood up, finished getting ready for work, put my toothbrush back into my room, and then headed off to the cafeteria.

I grabbed my usual breakfast and started eating. I switched on the stable maintenance channel on my pipbuck and opened the Task menu. Ticker would send all of us maintenance ponies their scheduled work for the day around 5:35.

I knew this because that's how it was, every day. It was routine, and routine was good. Routine was efficient. Routine was the way of a loyal stable dweller.

I wish routine didn’t mean eating the same bland breakfast every morning.

I saw some foals running around the diner, playing tag. Fuck me, I envied them. Kids were the only ponies in 54, besides the overmare, security, and department heads, that got to do whatever they wanted. Kids were able to play games, express themselves, and live their lives.

But the moment they find their special talent, and by extension get their PipBucks and job assignments, that all ends. Once you have a job, you have a role to play. And you were expected to fit that role whether you liked it or not. The kids never adjust well to it. Nothing in their lives prepares them for their first ‘visit’ to security. But they adjust, they grow up, they lose that restlessness and ambition, and they learned to shut up and play their part.

I sighed and looked over at the poster next to the door, a smiling pink earth pony with the words ‘THE OVERMARE IS WATCHING’ plastered on the bottom. 21 years of seeing those posters around the stable and they still creeped me the hell out. Those eyes just always made me feel like they were actually watching me! I knew better than to think there would actually be cameras behind the eyes (I’ve checked), but for the life of me I still got shivers every time i looked at one.

A brown earth pony from maintenance sat down in front of me, just like he did every morning

“How’s the food?” He asked without making eye contact. Just like he did every morning.

“Filling,” I replied dryly.

“Is the generator 7 maintenance done? We need to take another one offline to service today,” He asked before munching on a bland stable grown apple.

“Yeah, its good as new,” I replied.

“Good to hear,” He finished.

I’ve spoken with this same pony every morning for seven years, and I still don’t know his name. He was an average dweller, that was an average Stable 54 conversation between residents. Someone says some greeting, then asks a work question, then moves on.

Today Ticker was 2 minutes early, my tasks for today were:

Fix door to security

Defrag stable mainframe

Meet with head of Engineering (3:30 pm)

Fix door to security

Fuck

I got up and started running for the door, the sooner I fixed that door the less of a chance I would run into da-

WOMPH!

My line of thought and dash to the door was interrupted by a mass of muscle wrapped in Stable 54 security barding. It only took a half second of seeing his burned right cheek to know I was in trouble. Before I could react his security baton connected with my jaw.

I stumbled to the right, but made the mistake of instinctually staying on my hooves and baring my teeth.

“Tsk. I guess one wasn’t enough!” So Brick clocked me on the head again.

This time though I had the wits to go down, and unlike with Rock, I didn’t have to act like I was in pain. While all the security enforcers got a sadistic kick out of their jobs, Brick got an extra sick kick out of assaulting me.

“Brick, what the fuck dude, don't you remember what the overmare said!? You can't keep attacking Rivet without a reason all the time!” Bitwise, Brick’s partner, said.

“Oh shut the fuck up. I’ve got the best beating quota on the force!” Brick boasted proudly.

“No you don't! The Overmare said your beating report doesn’t mean shit when half of the report is just the same pony listed over and over, and the only reason being ‘looked at me funny,’” Bitwise shot back.

“Yeah, and then the Chief said I was doing fine and to just keep up the good work afterward. Speaking of which,” – He kicked me right in the stomach, causing me to cry out in pain. – “I better get back at it!”

“Like hell you are!” Bitwise said stepping between us. “The Overmare said that if you keep this up Rivet will end up dead. And that if you kill Rivet, she’ll have you hanged for depriving the stable of resources. And then have me hanged for letting it happen.”

I looked up and watched them glare at each other for a minute before Brick spat to the side and trotted out.

Goddesses I hated Brick, if the cameras turned off for just one day the, first fucking thing I would do would be to kill him. I don't know how I would do it, but I would find a fucking way. Preferably something as slow and painful as possible.

I looked over at Bitwise, who was still watching the door. “Th-thanks”

She spit in my eye and stomped down on one of my legs, causing me to cry out in pain again. “Just do your fucking job resie,” She said before trotting out after her partner. “And get the damn door to security fixed already!”

Security ponies weren’t your friends.

Stable Maintenance. That was the department I worked in. It encompassed a quarter of the population of stable 54, with security consisting of a third and all the other ponies making up the remainder with miscellaneous other jobs. It's been my role ever since I got my cutie mark, a square computer chip with a wrench and blowtorch symbolized out of circuits on top.

I love tearing apart shit, figuring out how it works, and then figuring out how to make it better. Although I’ve mostly been limited to tinkering with spare parts in my room under the guise of trying to fix them.

So yeah, even though life in the stable sucked, most days I at least liked the work my life would revolve around until the day I died.

Today wasn't one of those.

“I. Hate. This. Door,” I muttered in frustration.

I had almost completely torn the door apart, trying to find the faulty component.

“Just fix it,” the chief of security said. “It’s protocol that the outer door is locked when it’s night and I won't have it ‘mysteriously opening’ again because you didn’t do your job.”

“Yes sir,” I said quickly.

Ah yes, Stable Security Chief Ratchet Bolt, my dad. There were complications when I was born and my mom died. He’s made it no secret that he blames me for it. The moment I got my job assignment and pipbuck he immediately had me transferred out of his quarters.

Ever since then, any time he has had to speak to me, he has always been 100% critical about everything that we are both involved in. But that’s the least of what he does to me. The worst thing he does is make sure I always get the maximum punishments possible any time I get reported.

I had hoped that if I rushed over here and got the job done quickly, I would have less of a chance to run into him. When I arrived here after my impromptu beating, I found that my father was sitting here, waiting for me. I had to work with him looming over my shoulder the entire time.

The screams of pain and suffering emanating from deeper within the security wing were not helping. Like usual, ponies were being punished for deviant or suspicious behavior.

“What's the matter? Having trouble staying focused?”, Ratchet deadpanned, “Getting a little squeamish are we?”

“Well yeah, just a little bit, Sir,” I replied quietly.

Just as the last word left my mouth I received a sharp smack to the back of my skull, “Well suck it up! You wouldn’t be hearing my enforcers doing their duty if this damn door was working right!”

I wanted to tell him that I wouldn’t have been there at all if the door had been working right, but thought better of it and kept my mouth shut.

“Is it the thought of other ponies being disciplined that's got you rattled? Or is it the thought of you joining them?” That last theory was right on the money, “That there is a good sign though. It means you know your place. You remember what I told you the first time you showed up here?”

I swallowed, out of all the scars I had on my back from security, it was those first ones that still stung. They always did. And I clearly remember the last words he said to me before his enforcers got to work that day.

“The old and the weak are doomed,” I quietly muttered.

“That’s right, and it's the duty of the strong to keep the weak in line. You are weak, don't ever forget that,” Ratchet said as he looked over into the security wing, “the mare you keep hearing in there kept falling behind in her work, and is getting a few lashes to motivate her to work harder. The two stallions are queers, one of them is a repeat offender, we caught them getting sweet in a storage room. We’re waterboarding the two, it ought to straighten them out”

I finally found the faulty wire, replaced it, and started reassembling the door. Thank celestia, the less I had to hear about Ratchet’s work, the better.

“How much longer?” He asked

“I’ll have it back together in ten minutes,” I said working as fast as I could.

“You better,” He said, finally trotting back into his department.

Love you too, you fucking bastard.

Ticker’s office was always a mess of broken parts. Hell it looked messier than MY room right now. There was even an old lead pipe which had half of its length sheared off, leaving a sharp point, just sticking up out of a box next to the door.

Most notable of it all was the lack of cameras. They were removed as a sign of trust between the department heads and the overmare shortly after the stable was sealed 240 years ago.

It was 3:30 on the dot when Ticker arrived at his office. Something felt really wrong.

“Hello Rivet, how are you doing this morning?” He asked. That question by itself was weird. Ticker was a model department head. He only ever talked work and trouble when he opened his mouth.

“Alright... the head of security, uh... monitored me, as I fixed the door, and the mainframe’s memory has been defragmented.” Ticker had this angry look on me the entire time, and didn't say a word afterward, so I continued. “So boss... Uhh... what’s going on? My performance review isn't for another two weeks.”

Please don’t be another performance review. I don’t want that finicky generator from last night to earn me extra lashings because I couldn’t make up the time.

“Oh nothing much, just wondering if you want to come clean about something,” He said narrowing his eyes.

“Like... What?” I asked in confusion.

“Well, would you by chance know anything about the Shadow?” He asked.

I was caught a little off guard by that, “The Shadow? Why would I know anything about him?”

“So you know he’s a him then,” he said, sitting up straighter.

What the fuck?

“What the fu… I assumed the Shadow is a him. Could be a her too I guess!” I exclaimed in desperate frustration.

“Okay, how about making weapons? I know your quarters were searched last night, and it probably caught you a bit more off guard than some other pony would have been,” He asked.

“What the hell would I do with a weapon? Security is always a yell away, and the Overmare has eyes everywhere… except in the department head offices of course.” A thought crossed my mind, “And what makes you think I would be a little more surprised than other ponies that my room was searched?”

“Well perhaps somepony in security told you that somepony else was going to be searched last night. Somepony, in security that was a bit shadowy perhaps,” He asked in a much darker tone.

Where the hell is this coming from?

Don’t get me wrong. He was right on the money about everything, but how did he know?

“Okay one, SHADOWY? REALLY!?” I exclaimed in response to his use of a fake word, “Second, those are some pretty big claims, do you have any actual evidence against me? Or is this about something else?”

It was like he had read my journal,

But,

it was destroyed,

“Fair enough. Final question, did you ever start a secret journal?”

“No, why would I?”

It was at that moment that I noticed the holotape recorder on his desk. Oh no.

“LIAR!” He snarled as he pulled a very familiar notebook out from his desk drawer and dropped it onto the top.

The bottom edge was slightly tattered, as if it had fallen into a vent fan.

“Imagine my surprise when I had this little guy fall into a vent fan last night, right after I got done working on it. Lucky thing I was there too, otherwise it would have been shredded for good.”

I felt a chill run up my spine.

“I figured ‘oh Rivet is a good kid, very productive too. I’m sure we can sort this out with the Overmare, and we could set ya straight.’ I even set up this meeting, and one with the Overmare, so I could give you a chance to come clean. And we could go up to the Overmare at 4:00. Then I started really reading what you wrote.”

I tried to plead with him, “Ticker, Sir, you’re right, let's just go to the overmare an-”

“I read about how you knew who the shadow was. I read about all the things you really thought of me, the Overmare, heck, I read everything you thought about EVERYPONY you piece of shit! But worst of all, I read about what you have hidden in your ceiling! The gun! The codes! You should be shot for this shit!”

He got up, put the journal and recorder in his saddlebags, and started walking towards the door. “I just needed that recording, and once I hand these over to the Over-”

In my panic I did the one thing I could think of, I stood up and tackled him down as he passed me.

“You aren't doing SHIT!” I screamed

We landed right on some boxes of parts, I braced myself for him to push back, fight, anything. But he didn’t move for a couple of minute.

I eased up a little, “Ticker… Look… Let's just talk about this… I’m sure we could work something out…”

Nothing.

I slowly stood up and looked at the orange earth pony, he was just starting forward, laying there. He wasn’t even breathing.

He wasn't breathing.

“Oh crap, Ticker!” I knelt down and felt for his pulse.

Nothing.

Did he have a fucking heart attack!? He was only thirty something!

I rolled him over to do CPR, and saw the bloody pipe sticking out of his head.

I killed him! Holy crap, I killed him! I knew I was supposed to feel some form of guilt. But I think the adrenaline of the moment blocked whatever that was supposed to be as a new thought hit me.

Ticker was going to meet with the Overmare at 4:00. The security cameras caught me walking into his office from the hall. Ticker recorded our who conversation, even the part when I tackled him and yelled...”

He fucked me. I was fucked.

He may not have planned to die, but no matter how this meeting went, I was fucked!

I mean, what the hell was I thinking!? Ticker never would have ‘worked something out.’ Tackling him just would have made the situation worse. Though maybe not as bad as it was now, since he died!

There was nowhere to hide in the stable. Oh sure, you could avoid cameras for a little bit here or there. Or hide some contraband in a spot or two. But you can't hide! One way or another, I would be found and executed for killing a fellow stable dweller.

“Oh goddesses what am I going to do!?”, I exclaimed.

I sat down hard and looked at the clock on Ticker’s desk, 3:42. Eighteen minutes to live.

“At least I found my old journal before I…” I said as my eyes drifted onto my old journal sticking out of Ticker’s saddlebag.

Then I remembered the bag in my hiding spot.

I jumped to my hooves and yanked that goddesses forsaken book out of Ticker’s saddlebag with my telekinesis, and flipped to the bookmarked page.

ENTRY 47: Okay, after a week of work I have everything together. Now if some shit happens and I'm ever fucked beyond belief, to the point where I actually think doing this is a better alternative, I can now actually go through with this. Well let's face it, horrible fucking plan.

Escape Stable 54:

1) Get the bag.

I hauled ASS to my room, as I did so I set an alarm on my pipbuck for 4:00. I rushed into my room, yanked the panel out of my roof and took both this journal and the bag. I shoved both journals into my bag, which I promptly threw over my shoulders. I checked the time, 3:50.

2) Haul ass to the door through engineering, check the gun as you go.

I ran through engineering as fast as I could, avoiding ponies and cameras whenever I could. My heart pounded and I had sweat building on my brow as I ran, not from exhaustion (though I was running at a full sprint the entire time), but from stress.

I was actually doing this. I was about to do the unthinkable, and betray every pony in the stable by doing something that hasn’t been done for 240 years.

As I neared the door, I slowed my pace and checked to make sure the magnet gun was good to go. I had built it a year ago, it worked by accelerating a piece of metal inside up to supersonic speeds using electrified rails.

I’ve never actually tested it, but then again I never actually expected to use it.

My alarm went off as I neared the corner.

“Now or never.”

3) Kill the guard, there's only ever one. We’re the only pony in 240 years to even consider this, so why would there ever need to be more than usual?

I rounded the corner and shot the guard with the magnet gun without hesitation.

Actually, more like the entire front of the magnet gun exploded in the guard's direction. Red hot, electrified shrapnel blasted both the guard and everything behind and around him.

I stood there for a full minute in pure shock, holding the smoking back half of my ‘gun’. All that was left of the guard’s front half was bloody paste!

It was the Overmare’s booming voice on the intercom that shook me from my shock.

“ALL RESIDENTS! RETURN TO YOUR QUARTERS IMMEDIATELY! WE HAVE A CONTAINMENT BREACH ATTEMPT AT STABLE DOOR! SECURITY PERSONNEL! ENGINEER RIVET IS TO BE ARRESTED ON SIGHT! ALL SECURITY TO THE STABLE DOOR! IMMEDIATELY! REPEAT! ALL SECURITY TO THE STABLE DOOR IMMEDIATELY!”

“Oh shit!” I exclaimed as I dropped the smoldering back half of my weapon.

4) Close and break the controls to the inner door. You don’t want visitors during the next part.

I flipped the switch next to the door with my magic, floated out my screwdriver, and began unscrewing the panel to the controls when I heard Tulip come in over the intercom, and she was not happy.

“THIS IS A CODE 1 EMERGENCY! USE OF DEADLY FORCE IS NOT AUTHORIZED! REPEAT! DEADLY FORCE IS NOT AUTHORIZED. I WANT RIVET TAKEN ALIVE!”

I got the last screw off, let the panel fall to the floor, and ripped out every piece of electronics between me and the control panel on the other side.

Now for step five.

5) Run the override program on the main door controls.

I ran over to the control panel that stood before the large gear shaped door that separated Stable 54 from the outside world. I plugged in my pipbuck and ran the program labeled ‘Stable Key.’

A long time ago, while digging around in the stable’s mainframe, I had found a backdoor to the stable door’s authentication protocol. Once a stable door is sealed, the only way to open it is supposed to be with the proper passcode, normally held exclusively by the overmare. The encryption and firewalls were too much for me to break, but then I found something odd.

It looked like some kind of backdoor to bypass the passcode, it required audio verification from three different sources.

I had no clue what they could be, so I threw together a little program that would overload the backdoor with a metric assload of audio input in the hopes of overloading the backdoor. When I tested it, I got two of the three verifications and stopped it before it hit three and, opened the door.

“Now I just have to wait,” I muttered to myself.

Authentication 1 … Accepted

I sat there as it really sank in. I was leaving.

I was a little nervous. I had just killed two ponies in the last half an hour. But I was also excited. Sure, I might die the second I got out there, but hey, that would be a second of freedom.

The camera over the interior door was focused on me.

“RIVET! DON'T DO THIS! THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU ARE DOING! YOU’RE PUTTING THE WHOLE STABLE AT RISK! JUST STOP. NOW, WE CAN WORK SOMETHING OUT.”

“HA! Work something out!? How the hell would a murderer be able to keep walking around the stable, living their life as if nothing ever happened?” I said in panicked disgust. Did she think I was an idiot!? I laughed. I actually laughed and said, “Fuck security. Fuck you. And fuck your stable too!”

Authentication 2 … Accepted

I watched through the thick bulletproof window as the first of the security ponies got to the outer door, only to find the panel didn’t work.

They started beating on the window, and one growled, “Stop this! Turn yourself in!”

“LISTEN TO THEM! PLEASE, YOU’RE PUTTING THE WHOLE STABLE AT RISK! JUST TURN YOURSELF IN AND I PROMISE JUSTICE WILL BE AS MERCIFUL AS POSSIBLE.”

“Sorry, but I don’t feel like dying!”

I saw the gun belt on the dead security pony's body beside me. I removed it with my magic, floated it around my waist, and buckled it tight. In hindsight I probably should’ve shook it off first, it was soaked in blood.

I stood up and walked over to a spot between the window and the stable door mechanism, and listened as the claxon started going off. The large cylindrical mechanism slid forward until it connected with the door, then a motor inside the mechanism rotated, pulling the three rods which held the large gear shaped door to the wall inward. Then the mechanism slid back and to the side, pulling the massive cog back and rolling to the side with it.

It left an open door to the dark abyss of a tunnel and beyond.

I stood there, dumbstruck for a moment, before I turned to the equally dumbstruck security ponies looking through the window. Even Brick was among them, with the most priceless and stupid look on his face. It was like a couple fuses popped in his brain.

Adrenaline, fear, and excitement coursed through me. I cleared my throat, and said something along the lines of, ‘Well assholes, I’d say it's been fun. But honestly, I’m willing to take whatever nightmare is waiting for me out there, over staying another minute in here! I know you’d all love for me to stay and so you can execute me, but I really don't want to be executed. So I’ve decided to move on to bigger and better things. So fuck all of you! And fuck this stable!’

I was giddy out of my mind, I had never dreamed I’d get to say something like that to an enforcer’s face!

My glee was cut off by a wall to my right sliding down to reveal a hidden passage. A passage filled with A LOT of security ponies running down the passage with guns. Including my dad, with a much bigger pistol of his own.

“OH SHIT!” I screamed as I ran, with every fiber of my being, in the direction of ‘not here as fast as my legs could carry me.’

Security sprayed rounds at me, their bullets pinging off the metal floor and concrete walls, as I fled out the door and down the tunnel, quickly jumping around the corner at the end.

“SEAL THE DOOR!” I heard my dad faintly yell down the dark passage, “DON'T YOU EVER FUCKING COME BACK! YOU HEAR ME! NEVER COME BACK YOU GOOD FOR NOTHING PIECE OF SH-!”

Then I heard the sound of the door screeching shut.

“Don’t worry dad, I won't.”

I switched on my pipbuck’s lamp function and took in my new world.

I was in a large tunnel almost as tall as the stable atrium. There were two long sets of metal rails running along the length of the tunnel. Behind me was the small passage leading back to the, now shut, stable door. It was still proudly displaying a large yellow 54 from before the war, something that was also printed on the collar and back of my bright blue utility barding. The large tunnel ended abruptly to my left with a cave in, and stretched further into blackness on my right. I started walking right.

While I was walking I decided to double check the contents of my bag. When I packed, I made sure I was prepared. I had multiple packs of freeze dried apples, which I had stockpiled over the course of multiple dinners, five filled water canteens, and even a book for some light reading.

That was until they were all turned into…. Whatever kind of cheese has all those holes in it! It was looking at my perforated pack that made me realize something: I was really lucky not to get shot during that whole ordeal.

I threw the ruined bag onto the floor in disgust as I trotted up to a large, rusty, sheet metal gate. There were tiny holes in it where light poked through. I tried to lift it with both telekinesis and my hooves, only to have nothing happen. It didn't even budge.

Then I noticed the service door next to it. I stepped over and opened it, only to nearly blind myself as pure white light flooded over me from the outside.

“GAH! What the FUCK!?” I exclaimed in pained confusion as I went blind.

I slammed the door shut and dropped to the floor while I blinked hard, until my eyes could see again.

“Please don't be blind, please don't be blind, please don’t be… Ohh good.”

Relieved that my eyes adjusted back to the dark, I sat there for a minute and let myself just process what happened. My eyes were NOT ready for sunlight just yet. Growing up underground around electric lights probably hadn’t prepared them for real light at all.

I checked my clock, 4:45. I could just wait until it was sundown, but would I want to be out after dark? Plus, I kind of wanted to finally see the sun for the first time.

I decided to wait. I could let my eyes adjust more naturally in the morning. But now I had a bigger problem.

What to do?

It was almost five O’clock, right now I would probably be writing in my journal. I did have both of my journals with me after all, so why not? I did have quite a bit happen today.

I walked back over to where I had tossed my bag and pulled out the journals. The old one had been towards the top of my bag, and was holier than a saint. The new one (this one) was at the bottom and was actually completely okay.

Now that I was taking the time to really pick apart my bag, I found that two packs of dehydrated apple slices and one of my canteens were also okay. I took all three and sat down next to the door to blinding light and started writing while I ate.

The light coming through the holes have actually started getting darker now, I think the sun is setting. I’m going to go out there in a little bit, so if I’m dead and you’re reading this, then at least now you know why there's a dead asshole in stable 54 barding in front of you.

But if I’m alive, quit reading my shit! This stuff is private!

But I guess now’s a good of a time as any. Time for a whole new life.

S: 4

P: 5

E: 5

C: 2

I: 9

A: 3

L: 2

Trait added: Kamikaze: Your reckless nature makes you a danger to yourself and others. Action point costs are reduced by 25% but you also take 10% more damage from all sources.

Trait added: Technically inclined: Wow, who knew not having many friends would make you such a nerd! You now have unique options when fixing, hacking, or modifying almost all technology! However, you just can’t seem to crack the delicate art of lockpicking or pickpocketing. Oh well, who needs those skills anyway! (Level 1 of Gun Nut, Hacker, Repair, and Science unlocked immediately, unlocks unique technical options, all levels of lockpick and pickpocket are permanently locked.)

Information

I’ve decided to have level ups in Fallout Equestria: Epilogue and they will be perk bonuses like in Fallout 4. I will work to implement this to try and keep the abilities of Rivet based on this method.

Author’s Note

I want to start by saying that Fallout Equestria: Epilogue takes place 40 years after the climax of Fallout Equestria; Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons chapter 62a; and the climax of Fallout Equestria: Outlaw (The original version). However, it is set in an alternate timeline where the heroes fail and disappear.

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you read the canon fics this story is based on. I’m going to try to make it so you can read Epilogue without reading them first. WARNING: This story contains spoilers for the events in those stories as well.

I’ll leave the links to the fics here.

Fallout Equestria (highly recommended): link

Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons (recommended up to at least chapter 62a): link

Fallout Equestria: Outlaw (recommended): link

Now that that’s taken care of, I want to thank KKat from the bottom of my heart, for writing such a great story and creating such an interesting, intriguing, and satisfyingly dark universe that I have come to love.

I also want to thank Somber and Tofu for writing their own amazing expansions to the Fallout Equestria universe, which have driven me to finally write this story. I can only hope my story can live up to the standards you all have already set.

I also want to give a special thank you to whatever Anon on /mlp/ that proofread an early draft of the first few chapters of this story. I was at a point where I considered quitting because I thought my writing was way too shitty, and I really needed the boost from your piece of constructive criticism to be able to get the ball rolling. I now have a whole outline written for the story and I’m having a blast writing it. I’ll may never know who you are, but if you’re reading this, thank you for the support and the rose, it really meant a lot.

I also want to give a big Thank You to Mindrop, who was a massive help in the major rewrite of this chapter. I think the note he left below speaks volumes for how much of a great guy he is, and I really appreciate the help.

EDITOR COMMENT (from Mindrop): I always love helping fellow writers out. Especially developing ones. I had people pour in a lot of time and love into helping me develop. And as I have gotten better and refined myself to the point I am at, I want to give back. Because you can pick up a book and read a lot of good information about creative writing, and those tips and tricks are essential to learn, but nothing beats a trained editor working through your pieces.

Entry 2: A New Life, Above Ground

Something has gone wrong. We don't seem to have an archived copy of that chapter.

Entry 3: Raiders, Monsters, and Opportunists

Raiders, Monsters, and Opportunists) Inevitably a Stable Dweller is going to make a scene at some point after those initial 24 hours, it always happens. There are many theories as to why, old world courage, stable tec brand stupidity, a desire to do what's right because it's the right thing to do, all of the above, etc. But regardless of what you believe the fact is still true, there's something special about Stable Dwellers that makes it possible for us to do great things if we live long enough, and back then, there were very powerful groups that thought the same way…… and it scared the hell out of them...

Entry 3: It's been a day since my last entry, I poked around some of the blasted out houses near the storm drain. They’re spaced out a good distance from each other, but the amount of houses quickly begins to grow the further you get from the hill. There wasn't much in the houses, actually there wasn’t much left of the houses themselves, just blasted out frames of houses. There wasn’t many signs of pony life either, just the occasional radroach skittering around, I didn’t bother wasting my bullets on the giant mutated roaches, as my hooves had more than enough experience crushing the rat sized pieces of shits whenever they dug into maintenance over the years. Still I was able to get my hooves on a can of some pork and beans, a box of ‘sugar apple bombs’ cereal, a bottle of dirty water, and a tin of ‘cram’. I ate the cram for lunch, it was alright, it was slimy and really salty, but also kinda tasty. I also grabbed some more bits of scrap metal and two broken radios, one of which actually looked pretty salvageable. I decided to wait to go into the outer limits of what seemed to be Apple Hills proper, with far more houses bunched up closer together. But right before I turned around to head back, I noticed a body lying next to a nearby fence.

It was an earth pony mare that had a black hole surrounded by burned off flesh in her neck. Flies had shown up, and there wasn't anypony around either, and by the stench she had probably been killed a while ago. All she had were the rags she wore and her weapon that laid in front of her. It was covered in rust, looked to be made out of old pieces of pipe attached to a rough wood stock with bailing wire, and worked by moving a bolt sticking out of the side up, back, forward, and down to load and eject rounds, at least, most of the time. Like I said, when I picked it up it was clear right off the bat that it was in pretty bad shape, my pipbuck also confirmed that observation by listing my new ‘Pipe Hunting Rifle’s condition as ‘bad’, the bolt stuck, bullets would either not load or they would fail to leave the barrel, it was a piece of shit. But it was still another weapon, and one that fired much bigger and more powerful .308 rounds.

Carrying the rifle with me, I trotted back to my storeroom and spent the afternoon making the place more livable. This consisted mainly of walking back to the junction and grabbing the empty foot locker, medical box, and the comforter and remaining pillow from the tower bed. So now that I had a place to securely store my belongings and medical supplies, and more comforts for my sleeping arrangements, I set to work fixing up the old rifle, trying to clean out some of the dirt and grime from the mechanism and taping the stock on a little more tightly, I was able to get the status from ‘bad’ to ‘very worn’. I also got a good look at how the inside worked, it was pretty simple when you got down to it, almost the same as how the pistol worked, but instead of moving the slide on its own, the user would have to move it themselves between each shot. The magazine also didn’t appear to be removable, as whoever made it had screwed the magazine into the stock itself, so if a pony wanted to reload it, they would have to shove them into the top of the rifle with the bold in the back position.

I then cooked the beans (a small amount of scrap wood from the houses and the papers in the desk made good fuel) in their can and ate them, savoring that yummy thick liquid with those 240 year old beans while I cannibalized one radio for its parts and fiddled with the other. After a while I settled in for the night early, choosing to write a new entry tomorrow when more stuff happened.

And happened they most certainly did.

I woke up to the chime of my pipbuck’s alarm at 6AM, I knew I didn’t need to stick to my old scheduled wake up, but I wanted to head into apple hills proper today and I sure as hell didn’t want to get caught in a storm in the middle of the fucking night again, so I decided to leave early. I clicked my alarm off and stretched, “ungh, this cot sucks. OK, note to self, find an old mattress while in town to steal, maybe two, or even three for good measure, I’ll make a nice stack out of them to sleep on, then I can pitch this piece of garbage into the sewer water”. I floated my barding and gun belt up to me, putting them both on, then I floated up my bag and foot locker. I actually took inventory of everything in another page, I’ll just copy what I wrote here.

Stuff I’m carrying:

my utility Barding

MY Screwdriver

Flip Lighter

Duct tape

Mailbag

Canteen

Journal

Healing bandages

Sugar Apple Bombs

Roseluck Pest Solutions Passcard

Security Belt

Pistol

Pistol Clip x3

Dog Tags

Pipe Hunting Rifle

Stored

Bottle of Dirty water

Scrap metal x3

Scrap electronics

Audio recorder

Mentals (3 tablets) [+1 INT, +1 PER]

Sufficiently geared up, I locked up my service room and went out of the drain and up to the top of the hill. I sat down at the top, facing the east, as I ripped open the top of my cereal. This was the second reason I didn’t want to sleep in again, yesterday when I left the drain, I realized I missed the sunrise, something I immediately regretted. So this morning I woke up a bit earlier hoping to catch it, and thankfully my usual wake up landed right in the middle of that gray time between night and day. I think it was called….. Twilight? Yeah, twilight, a nice name, (I think I’ve heard that name used in another circumstance before but I can't seem to remember it right now). So I sat there on the hill eating the sugary goodness in my box as I watched twilight give way to day as the sun rose over the horizon. I was beautiful, and I didn’t have large clouds or train cars blocking my view, I was able to watch unimpeded, as the sun rose into the clear sky and cast light down upon the dead city of Apple Hills.

It wasn’t a city in the sense of large skyscrapers (though there were some higher buildings farther out), but it was still just as wide, bringing true meaning to the phrase suburban sprawl. I was just beyond the outskirts of a large field of small, almost identical houses.

I threw my empty cereal box to the side and made myself a to do list, as I was in need of some different things.
TO DO:
-Find more food
-Find a real mattress
-Find a spark battery for radio
-Find another living pony
I set off into the suburb proper, walking past the dead mare that was still buzzing with flies, and began searching houses. There wasn’t much, just more scraps of trash, and nothing of any particular value to me. By the third house I found a locked safe (sigh) and a terminal on a desk next to it. I was able to hack in pretty easy, and there was an option to open the safe! I clicked the button and heard a simultaneous click from the safe. Opening it, I found a recipe for ‘dash’, a sawn off double barreled shotgun, a box of 10 12 gauge buckshot shells, and a bag full of bits! (1,000!). I took everything except the note, which I just held over my pipbuck screen for a second or two until I saw a notification saying ‘note added, Dash Recipe’, then dropped it on the floor. It was a of drug made out of fertilizer and chemicals from melted plastic and then put inside an inhaler, it was also Rock’s main staple back in the day. Who knows, maybe I could set up my own drug ring someday, “that is if I can FIND ANYPONY!”, I yelled at the roof.

I listened for a minute, waiting for something to respond, but was just met with more silence, great. I continued picking around the scraps of the suburb, eventually I did find two old belts that I tied together to use as a carrying strap for my rifle. I opened the shotgun and loaded in two shells before returning it to my belt, then took a swig from my canteen as I continued walking down the road. My geiger counter clicked a little with the sip, I was still well in the green, but I still didn’t feel comfortable being irradiated whenever I got a little thirsty.

I walked out into an intersection at the end of a road with some bigger buildings on it. This street had small one story stores lining either side, with a post office towards the middle on the right side, a small police station on the far left corner, a small pharmacy next to me, and at the very end of the street there was a small church, with a three story high bell tower overlooking the street. When I looked at the top of the tower I saw him, a piss yellow buck looking out from the steeple to the east.

“Hello!?” I called out. The pony in the tower looked my way startled, the dropped down out of sight. “Wait! I just want to ta-” the buck popped out holding a rifle!

BOOM!

A straight streak of lightning fired from the rifle into the pavement next to me, sending me sprawling on my side in shock, quickly scrambling to cover behind a mailbox as another shot hit near me.

“I’m gonna fucking kill ya! HA HA!” I heard from down the street.

“What the fuck man! I’m friendly! I just want to talk!”

“Great! It'll make killing you a lot easier!”

I leaned back against the blue box as I muttered to myself, “great, the first living pony I meet up here is a fucking psychopath”. Suddenly a shock went through the metal box, sending me into a five second spasm on the ground. “O-oh game O-ON M-M-MOTHERFUCKER!”

I pulled out my rifle and peeked out from cover, I tried lining up a shot, but had to jump back behind the box when a shot missed my head by an inch, this wasn’t going well. I took a deep breath, then bolted into the pharmacy next to me. The inside was a wreck but I didn’t care until that belltower fuck was dealt with. I jumped over the counter where the glass barrier had been broken down, and ran out the back door, following the alley down to the end.

I took a careful peek around the corner, the yellow buck was staring down the street towards the pharmacy where I’d been. I pulled the rifle up, lining up the crosshairs with his head, then pulled the trigger. The rifle nearly flew out of my telekinetic grasp as the rifle kicked back, the shot went wide though, hitting the wooden siding just under him.

“SHIT!” He yelled as he turned and fired at me.

The white bolt grazed my poor right foreleg as I dove back in cover, making a blistering red burn. “AGHH!”, I yelled, tears formed in my eyes as I dropped the rifle and pulled out my bandages and wrapped the wound. Then I picked my rifle back up, and jumped out from behind the corner, aiming my rifle at… where did he go?

WHAM

I had the breath knocked out of me as I was tackled to the ground. I looked up at the buck in time to have the rifle’s stock bash into my face, breaking my focus on my rifle as everything started to spin. He knelt down on my shoulders as he pressed the lens at the end of his rifle against my forehead, I watched as he rotated a crank on the side, making the glass jar at the end crackle with blue electricity.

“Time to die bonehead!” He said as he moved his right hoof to fire the rifle.

“You got that right”

I telekinetically shoved the rifle to the right and his head towards me a split second before he fired, biting down hard on his ear before he could pull away.

“AGH! GET OFF!” he yelled as he yanked his head back, but I held onto his ear like my life depended on it. I began to taste blood a second before he yanked back hard, sending him sprawling back while leaving his ear behind in my mouth. “AAAAHH! YOU FUCKER!” he yelled in pain.

I shoved him away from me and pulled out my shotgun as he grabbed my dropped rifle.

Click BOOM!

The sounds of his trigger pull and my shot were separated by half a second, but my gun was the one that fired, turning his head into red chunks. I just laid there for a second before spitting out the ear I had bit off. I kept lying there when I saw a notification ‘objective complete: Find another living pony’, I snorted and laughed, “that's not what I meant!” I said through a chuckle, “I meant a sane pony!”.

I sat up and picked up my hunting rifle from the dead earth pony's hooves. Floating it over I tried the trigger… nothing. “OK, cards on the table, I know you fired first”, I said to the corpse, “so why am I not the one dead on the road right now?”. I moved the bolt back and forth, figuring it might have been a dud bullet, only to see an empty casing fall out instead. “What the-” I closed my eyes and sharply inhaled as a realization hit me, “oh I am a fucking idiot! I didn’t put in a new round! You died because of my stupidity!”. I pushed the bolt forward and put another round.into the barrel, reloaded my shotgun, then threw the rifle back over my shoulders, now looking at my new rifle.

I floated the weapon over to me, it was as long as my hunting rifle, with a glass jar that looked to have a small cloud trapped inside it at the end. There was a crank mechanism attached to the back of the jar with a handle protruding from the weapon’s right side. When I cranked the handle it rotated a piece of metal that went through the middle of the jar, agitating the cloud and making sparks of lightning appear inside. Underneath jar was a wood stock that had a flat hoof-trigger on the bottom in lieu of a traditional mouthgrip (no wonder the buck was holding it weirdly in his hooves). When the trigger was depressed, it made a capacitor at the front of the jar make contact with the rod, causing the lightning to arc through the capacitor into a crystal at the other end, which then jolted forward to a magnifying mirror suspended further forward from the jar with what looked like half of a broom handle. The end result was a bolt of lighting fired at an enemy. I looked at my pipbuck, it had named it as a ‘Lightning Musket’, (which was pretty fitting, since it fired lightning). It wasn't nearly as big of a bolt as the one that struck the other night, but it was still a gun that fired lightning! After a test fire or two (or three… Ok several) test shots, I found that the gun had no recoil and that more cranks = more power, but the cloud couldn't seem to get more agitated beyond two cranks. I shot the gun one more time, as a new idea processed into my head. I would need some metal rails and some actual tools, but I was pretty sure I knew what I could turn this thing into.

There was also a string with some pendant wrapped around the stock, with two feathers tied to the pendant, one crimson and the other orange, which I found kind of odd.

I searched the body next, surprised to find that he had been wearing an apple hills police vest, along with some sports knee guards. I took all of them and put them on, since the police vest provided light damage protection and the knee pads gave me... knee... protection. There wasn’t much else on him, so I decided to check out his belltower.

The church was a wreck, with the pews covered in skeletons, all centuries old. They all probably came here to pray when the sirens blared, with no hope for survival they must have seen holy salvation as their only hope, instead of doing something rational like getting to somewhere remotely safe. I got to the back of the church and went up to the belltower.

When I popped out of the hatch I found the bandit’s stash piled on a sleeping bag in the corner. Three cans of cram, a bottle of pure water, two boxes of cereal, three healing potions, two inhalers of dash, a pair of binoculars, and a skillet ‘objective complete: Find More Food’, “yes indeed pipbuck, yes indeed”. I pocketed all of it and walked back down to street level, spitting on the bandit’s corpse as I trotted by.

I took things a bit slower now, going through back alleys and moving from cover to cover when I crossed an open street. I was trying not to run into any more “raiders” as my pipbuck informed me, which turned out to be a good idea as I almost ran into two different groups of them at different places, pretty clearly marked out with camps and buildings covered in dismembered pony corpses. It also helped that my EFS marked them out as red bars on my compass, giving me an early warning, like when I saw a group moving towards a corner ahead of me. I ducked behind a shed, but kicked an empty can as I did so.

“You guys h-hear that!?” shit

I quickly scrambled through a bedroom window above me as I heard hoofsteps run around the corner. I threw myself against the wall and floor under the window. There was no way I was going to be able to kill five of these guys on my own.

“Twitchy, what the fuck you twiggered bitch!” I heard one mare say right before I heard another one get smacked “You nearly gave me a heart attack! Run off like that again and I’ll beat your ass! You hear me!”

“But I th-thought I h-heard sssomething!” she slurred out.

“NO! All you heard was some bullshit you're dashed off head thought it heard you good for nothing bitch!”

“Oh lay off her rusty”, a buck said, “I thought I heard something too”.

“You did!? Then why didn’t you say something!”

“I just did you stupid bitch. Plus pit did find that dead mare the other day with a hole cooked into her neck, and only that gun Lemons ran off with could do something like that”.

“Fuck, I wish we would just find where that little rat ran off to by now! The boss has done nothing but flip his shit ever since his special gun went missing!”. I looked at the gun I had cradled in my hooves, and now wanted to be anywhere else.

“Maybe h-he’s hiding out at-t the park!” Twitchy said brightly, receiving another smack immediately after.

“You dumb bitch! No pony is crazy enough to go anywhere near the park, not even you!”, there was a pause, “actually, I'm not so sure!” I heard a mare get tackled to the ground, then I heard a mare choking “so let me get this through your head. Do. Not. Go. To. The. Park. I don't need you leading something back to kill us all, especially me or Blade. You understand?”, She said in a low, serious tone.

Twitchy sounded like she was trying to respond, but all that came out were more chokes. “I can't hear you!”.

“Yo lay off Rusty, you’ll kill her at this rate”.

“Fine”, she said in an irritated voice before releasing her, “besides, I get to have fun with that new slave back at the Shithole!” She said brightly as they all walked off, with Rusty debating just how she was going to flay that ‘fresh earth pony meat’ alive.

Once the voices were gone I peeked my head over the windowsill. “Wow, now she is a real piece of work”. I thought through what they had said, I had already killed Lemons (also, LEMONS!? I nearly got killed by a pony named Lemons! I don't know whether I should feel amused that the big bad sniper had a comical name, or ashamed that he would have killed me if I had actually used my rifle properly) and taken his rifle, a rifle that some bandit boss wanted badly. There was also some park that the bandits were deathly afraid of, to the point of not searching. I looked at my map, and there appeared to be a clearing in the houses not far to the southeast of where I was.

I knew it was a bad idea, but I placed a map marker on the park and started making my way there. Part of me wanted to see what had these bandits so scared, and a part of me wanted to try and get away from what was clearly bandit territory and back home along a route that they wouldn’t be on.

I got outside the area where the raider’s had their roadblocks and patrols pretty quickly, and soon found myself dealing with just the usual wildlife. The Lighting Musket (It needs, no, deserves a better name), took out most of them no problem as my pipbuck identified them, radroaches, radhogs, bloatsprites (fucking nasty fleshy blobs with wings that shoot stingers), the only touch of trouble I had was when some big wolf thing called a ‘watchman’ almost as big as me jumped out of a ruined house and pounced on me! Thankfully I had started to develop a reaction to at least throw up my forelegs before it landed on me. I jabbed the barrel of my shotgun right into its forehead and blew its head off right next to mine, covering my head in blood all the way down to the blue collar on my barding. I stood up and washed the crimson blood off as best as I could with the water from my canteen and the fur on the dead watchman while the ringing in my ears cleared away. There was still some blood on me, but I wasn’t dripping anymore. The thing looked like some kind of big wolf, but it had four large claws at the ends of its forelegs, two shorter ones at the ends of its hind legs, a mashed in snout, a long rat like tail, and bushy coarse black fur.

I staggered to the side and continued walking. Despite the whole ‘I may die’ part, I was actually starting to like killing things, I wish I hadn’t had to kill Lemons, or that security guard, or Ticker, but one was in self defense, one was on accident, and one got in the way! Shooting the mutants is fun though, radroach, BOOM, radhog, BOOM, I also got in some more practice with my pistol, finishing off the remaining two rounds in my clip and using up an entire other one getting the hang of it. Guns were fun! I wish I knew how the inside components worked, but I don’t want to rip apart something as vital as one of my guns and not know how to put it back together. I did some more thinking as I walked, I wondered how things were going down in the stable, a murder was already a pretty big tragedy, a double murder was unheard of! Plus normally the stable would get retribution by hanging the culprit in the atrium and moving on, but in this case the murderer escaped… I escaped.

That last thought made me stop for a moment, I’m a murderer, even if what happened to Ticker was technically ponyslaughter, I still murdered a security guard in cold blood for doing his job. I even have his gun…. I hope it wasn’t Rock, I mean we weren’t really friends, but he was the pony who opened my eyes to the truth and was the only pony I could ever talk to, and I always felt owed him for that. I mean, I had to do it, there was no way I was going to be able to prove the truth about what really happened to Ticker.

What scares me the most though is the fact that I don't feel bad about killing another pony, I feel bad for being a murderer. I thought maybe it was just the adrenaline at the time but even now, thinking back on it, the minor amount of guilt I feel isn't because I ended another life, it's because what I did was wrong. But deep down, I don't care, and that scares the shit out of me. I had a reason to do it (even if it was selfish), so I did it….. But can I really apply that kind of cold logic to just take another pony's life so easily? I guess so….. Maybe, I just don't want to become some kind of monster out here, killing whoever I like because I feel like it.

My arrival at the park ended my internal concerns, It was a square surrounded by houses, with a school at one end and a pond in the middle with a single forlorn swan boat floating in the center. I hid inside an adjacent house and scanned the park with my binoculars, “ok what’s living in this park, giant radioactive spiders? Mutant ponies? Zombies? Invisible chupacabras with automatic weapons?”. I spent an hour scanning that plaza but there wasn’t anything, no monsters or mutants, nothing. There were signs posted at the end of the street that I came from reading ‘keep the hell out!’, ‘The Authority left something behind!’ and ‘SWAN’ in dark red paint, whatever those meant. As a last test, I threw an empty can out of the window into the road, nothing, just silence.

I made sure my rifle was charged and slowly stepped out, “Hello!? Anything out here!?”. After a couple minutes of silence I dropped my guard, “ok... so much for all the hype”. I started to trot towards the large school building, as I had been scanning the courtyard my attention was drawn to this place multiple times, the windows on the south side of the building were all covered with plates of dark shiny steel, with the doorknob on a side door replaced with a metal rectangle that had a glowing orange light at the bottom. All the metal parts appeared to be fairly new too! Like somepony had placed them within the last couple decades.

I trotted towards the building, pondering why the raiders were so scared of this place. Was there something in the building? In that case I probably shouldn’t go in there…. But I was still going to, because I’m an idiot I guess. The sign said something about some Authority leaving something behind, but it didn’t say what, and the other sign just said SWAN. I stopped across the street from the school and looked back at the swan boat, with its paint peeling and a wing missing. I pointed my rifle at it and fired a shot into it because I could, then turned back to the school.

That's when I heard a roar from behind me that made my mane stand on end.

I turned around to see a giant, two story tall, monstrosity of a pony in the middle of the lake, with giant mounds of white flesh, large tubes running into and out of various parts of its body, a bunch of metal plates built into its body in various places, a metal hatch on the top of its head, the old swan boat tied to its back, and a large glowing red lens for a right eye, with a red beam of light focusing on me.

I screamed, pissed myself, and ran like I never ran before towards the school.

I ran to the closest doors to me (the main ones) with the the thing chasing me, I didn't dare turn around, but I could feel the ground shaking as it caught up fast! I threw open the doors with my magic and cleared the doorway right as a massive, putrid white hoof struck through the door, sending me flying across the main hall and smashing to a halt into a display case. I laid on the floor disoriented as I watched the massive thing try to reach me through the doors, thankfully too large to fit. Red light washed over the room as it looked through a second floor lobby window, narrowing in on me before it let out another roar that could probably be heard all the way across town. It bashed its body against the wall a couple of times, sending concrete dust and pictures frames falling to the floor, before stomping away.

I dug out two healing potions and drank them, healing my bruised body, and stood up. I was still a little rattled, but thankfully the building seemed capable of keeping it out…. For now.

I was in the middle of ‘Apple High’s’ central lobby, with doors leading off to different wings of the school from both the bottom floor and the balconies on the second and third floors. All the doors to the south halls had been covered with more sheets of metal, all except one in the middle of the second floor balcony, which had been removed and replaced with a glowing orange field. I tried to put my hoof through it, but the thing felt like a solid wall right before my hoof was shocked back! “OW! Fucker”, there was a hexagon shaped screen attached to what I assumed was one of the shield’s emitters. It displayed a message ‘SHUT DOWN SHIELD?’, but I didn’t see any buttons. “How do I turn you off!?”, I smacked the screen with my hoof, and the screen changed to ‘ACCESS DENIED’ briefly. I cocked my head to the side and tapped the screen with my hoof again, ‘ACCESS DENIED’, “huh, so you just touch the screen to put in input? That's… actually kinda cool”. There wasn’t any kind of port for me to jack my pipbuck into, so I decided to put that little mystery on hold for now, maybe there was another way around somewhere.

For now I figured I would explore the northern side of the high school, I wasn't going anywhere with that giant monster rhythmically walking around the building, occasionally roaring and bashing itself against the building trying to get in.

I walked down the locker lined halls of the school, the classrooms were all locked and/or barricaded. Looking through the little windows in the doors, I saw piles of skeletons on the floors, but curiously enough none of the windows had been barricaded, just the doors, like they didn’t want something to get in from the hall. There were a lot more loose items lying around, like yellowed papers and schoolbooks. I snagged a copy of ‘The Big Book Of Arcane Science’ off the floor. I also found a skeleton with a ‘Shop Class Key’, and I felt myself get a little giddy, if that room was what I thought it was, I was about to have a great day! (or at least a better one considering what was outside). I continued my trot around the empty halls, halls covered in scattered papers, the occasional skeleton, empty shotgun shells, bullet casings, and ancient explosion marks on the walls and floors. I couldn’t help but think about how my life would have been different if the bombs never dropped. In all actuality I probably would have never been born, (parallel timelines and all of that crap considered). But still, what would I have done? Been a terminal technician? A mechanic? Would a school like this have prepared me for that career or would I have been just shoved through a one size fits all program like I was back in the cramped schoolroom of 54? Probably the latter, since that education system had to of had its roots somewhere. I knew I was just wasting time trying to keep my mind off of the rhythmic thumping that shook the building, but honestly I didn’t have any other options yet.

As I re-entered the lobby and was turning towards the stairs I noticed a glow coming from a large window nearby. ‘Main Office’ a sign read above the locked door (I really need to learn how to lockpick), on the other side of the thick, mesh lined glass, in the far back behind a second glass window was a desk with a small square display case on top of it. Inside it was a rock with a strange glow coming from the other side. My sense of curiosity took hold, and I really wanted to get a better look at that rock. But pounding on the glass and a solid applebuck didn’t even leave a scratch on the window, so I shelved another mystery for now.

I climbed the stairs to the top floor and continued to wander, this time there were no skeletons in the hall, though everything else was the same. I was drawn by the sound of loud music to a janitor’s closet that was open, inside there was one skeleton on a cot and another on the floor in front of me, with a nurse’s uniform and a suit of maintenance coveralls lying on the floor next to it and a music player playing some music on repeat. The closet and skeletons were covered in bullet holes, and there was a pile of empty shells and casings at the doorway. I walked in and switched off the radio, as I turned to leave I noticed the inactive Mr. Handy behind the inward opening door. I switched it on, watching the levitation talisman underneath its round central chassis light up, lifting the robot into the air as its three spider like arms moved into standby position, its three cameras turned to focus on me.

“Mr. Handy Online and ready for service!” it said in a funny butler accent. “Oh my! It appears as though you are skipping class! AND ALL OF THOSE WEAPONS! Why, that won't do at all! I will have to ask you to please wait here while I call security”.

I took a step back, “uh, look, I’m not a student, and I don't think security is coming. So how about you just help me ou-”

“BAH! No response from security, looks like I’ll have to detain you myself!”, He then quickly rotated out an arm with a glowing white talisman on it towards me.

I drew my shotgun and went to pull the trigger as a white light blinded me, “what the-”.

And then I was standing in a classroom and my shotgun was gone, “-fuck!?.... Wait”.

I looked around, I was in a small classroom with the words ‘detention’ written on the chalkboard at one end of the room. My bag and belt felt lighter too, and sure enough, all my guns and ammo were gone, “aw shit, now how the hell did I get here?”.

The room only had desks and the larger desk at the front, the door was locked (of course it was), and on the roof was a white talisman just like the one on the robot’s arm. “Oh so that's what he meant by detain me himself! The fucker had a teleporter talisman!”, despite how bad my situation was, I did have to admit that that was a really effective way of dealing with troublemakers and intruders. I searched the desks but there wasn’t a key of any sort lying around. I sat down on the big desk sitting before the board and started trying to think of options, the door is getting me nowhere, and if the skeleton curled up under the desk was any indication, I shouldn’t expect rescue any time soon, the room didn’t have any other exits or windows either.

I drank my bottle of water and chowed down on a box of Sugar Apple Bombs while I dug through what I had left in my bags. The robot had taken all my guns and ammo, but otherwise I had everything else, though I doubted a frying pan would help me escape.

So yet again I was stuck with time to ponder my thoughts. I wondered where I should go once I got out of there (I was trying to remain optimistic). I could probably wait for the creature to round one side of the building and make a break for it. But after that I was at a total loss, the only ponies I’ve run into are raiders and it only seemed to get worse as I got further into the city. I could try taking my chances out in the open wasteland, but with very little supplies I probably wouldn’t get far. Fuck me I wish I could find somepony to talk to, at the very least so I can get directions.

I kept feeling a draft as I was sitting there, and that’s when I looked up.

I have no idea how I missed the giant square vent above the desk, but there it was! I backed up, floated my screwdriver up to the vent and undid the screws, letting the cover fall onto the desk. I then stacked a table onto the top of the desk and scrambled into the shaft. It reeked of rust and dust (hey that rhymed!), and I had to crawl on my belly the whole time, but I was moving. I checked my local map and I seemed to be on the south side of the building, crawling towards a large space at the very end.

I felt the vent jerk, “oh shi-*SCREECH*-IIIIT!”, I yelled as the section of vent I was in tore away from the rest. Sending the part with me in it pivoting down to a slamming 45 degree halt on a table, and depositing me roughly onto the floor. “Ow... well that could’ve gone better”, I said as I rubbed my shoulder. *SCREECH-BOOM!*, the rest of the vent fell down flat onto the table behind me, “yeah definitely could’ve gone better”.

I switched on my light, revealing the wonderful workshop around me! Tools! Workbenches! Hell there were even thick square rods of metal and scrap parts just lying everywhere! The lightswitch even still worked! There was power! Oh if only I had my lightning musket, I could have made my modifications right then and there! I did sharden the point on my flathead though, I’ve had enough close encounters that it was time I had something I could stab other somethings with.

I unlocked the shop room with the key and stepped out into the hall, there were A LOT more skeletons on the floor, old burn marks from explosions, and bullet holes here. I walked past a cafeteria, where chairs were strewn everywhere and a couple of tables looked destroyed.

Something bad happened here just before the bombs fell, that much I’m certain. I’m guessing the students had barricaded themselves in the classrooms to separate themselves from whatever was causing all the old damage. With the way the skeletons were dispersed, I think it’s a safe bet it started somewhere on this side of the building. Also…… there were explosives? Ok so maybe I’m not the greatest detective but at least it was something.

I continued trotting down the dark halls, all of the windows here were covered and the hall lights were off. I eventually came out the doors to the school’s gym. The court had tall windows that were all covered in metal on the far wall, I could hear the steel supports that ran along the roof groan from rust and decay. The basketball court was covered with metal beds, cages, and pony sized bags filled with what I assumed were more bones. Spotlights were shining light down from the running track on the second floor that ringed the gym. I climbed some stairs in the corner up to the track, where I saw abandoned monitors, desks, and other things that gave the inclination that this was once a serious operation, one that I had a chilling feeling wasn’t to help others.

Despite all the furniture here looking newer than the rest of the school, every desk, box, and container was completely empty. I was about to give up when I noticed a Blue light coming from an active terminal screen on the other side of a window. The sign above the double door read ‘Weightlifting’, but there wasn't any weightlifting equipment in there, that was for sure. The doors were locked, and a stray chair didn’t even leave a dent in the wire-mesh reinforced window, even after several telekinetic bashes.

But there was a vent.

I dropped down into the room in a heap. There was a fan blocking a straight route, so I spent the better part of half an hour trying to find an alternate route, then getting lost, then finding my bearings, then repeating the process. “OK, next time I go into a vent I’m drawing a map”. I looked around, the room was still pretty sparse, but there was a working terminal on the desk next to two large square crates, one of which was labeled ‘EXPLOSIVE’. After some debate I checked out the terminal first. It looked like a more advanced version of the standard Stable Tec ones you normally see, made of that familiar shiny, dark metal. I jacked in my pipbuck and hacked in, it was a five digit password, ‘magic’. Most of the data was erased, but there was a prompt titled ‘READ ME’. Of course I clicked it.

This location, Field Test Site #3, has been officially shut down as of 4/24/2280 by the acting Chairpony Life Bloom. Even though this location is no longer active, an executive decision was made to leave an emergency munitions stash on-site in the event a unit is separated from resupply in the area, as there will be no active outposts in the city following site shutdown. The final subject will also be left behind to guard the premises from intruders.

OK, so this was some kind of research center, at least until it was shut down by some pony called Life Bloom. I turned over to the crates and picked up the large tubular device on top. The thing was heavy, and took a bit of effort to lift with my telekinesis. When I flipped a switch on the side a square screen folded 90 degrees outward, I checked my pipbuck, Authority Rocket Launcher. My EFS showed the ammo count at zero, so I lifted out one of the large, boxy clips from the crate and inserted it into the square opening on the side of the tube, then watched as a panel on the side slid back, allowed a rocket to enter the barrel, then slide forward with a mechanical *thunk*.

“Alright, let's see what you can do”, I pointed the launcher at the window and squeezed the trigger. The Rocket flew out of the barrel and blasted the window in a loud and powerful explosion! “H-holy crap”, I said looking at the launcher as it loaded another rocket, “you are the best thing I’ve found all day, my mind is spinning with the possibilities you’ve just opened up”, I turned to the crate filled with three more clips, each holding five rockets, I scooped them into my bag, “yes… I'll bring your friends too”.

I was about to search the second crate when I heard a loud roar and felt the building shake as the outer gym wall was struck, only this time I saw the wall bend inward through the window. “Oh shit”.

I jumped out of room’s smouldering window back onto the track as another bash sent metal plates raining off of the tall windows. I ran for the stairs down, reaching them just as a finally bash sent me sprawling to the floor from the shockwave as the wall was shoved down.

The red spotlight focused on me, and the giant creature let out a giant roar before charging. I scrambled aside before it rammed into the stairwell, tearing it down in a thrashing rage.

I stood up and started running along the track, firing at the thing as it continued to chase me, occasionally trying to crush me on the track. My shots were going wild as I wasn’t really aiming and the launcher’s weight made it hard to handle, but the thing was big enough I was still hitting it, of course it wasn’t doing much more than charing it’s metal plates! I smacked in a new clip after the first one ran out and was automatically ejected from the weapon. This was going nowhere fast, and sooner or later I was going to get tired or he was going to land a hit! I turned on SATS to try and hit something vital and realized something was off.

First, instead of just slowing time to a crawl like usual, now time was actually still, nothing was moving! Second, I now had a bunch of scrolling text on the left side of my vision, on the right, a message reading Target Lock Available, and at the bottom of my vision, a message reading External Automated Targeting Processor connected.

“OK, this thing thing deserves a to be given a name…. If i survive this that is”, I thought as I tried to target a part of the Authority Behemoth. But that was weird as well, instead of just giving me the usual head, body, and legs options, I know had even more options like eyes, hooves, spine, pelvis, etc. It was even giving me options to shoot inanimate objects like tables! I also wasn't getting any of the usual projections on my chances to hit either.

Well I was getting pretty sick of that blinding red spotlight.

I queued up a shot and fired at its eye. I watched in slow motion as the rocket shot out of the barrel, flew towards the creature, and turned mid flight in an arc that hit the thing dead center in the eye!

The behemoth fell back a couple of steps, roaring in pain as blood and sparks spewed out of the hole I made.

Then it went ballistic.

It started roaring nonstop as it thrashed at the track, smacking me clean off onto the floor below and smashing a support beam in the process, sending a section of both the track and the roof raining down, partially burying the creature, if only for a few minutes. I stood up on three shaky legs, my right hind leg burned in pain like it was on fire, and the rest of my body wasn’t much better, I was getting alerts telling me that my right hind leg was broken, and that the rest of me was about to be. The thing was almost free, and there was no way I would make it to the door, but as I saw small pieces of roof tiles fall my attention was drawn to the red rusted girders above me, and I had a really stupid Idea.

As the Behemoth left the pile, I started scrambling away as I pointed the launcher up at the roof, firing at the supports at the edges, causing event more pieces of roof to come tumbling down as the behemoth started to chase me. Adrenaline coursed through me, helping me to ignore the pain as I let out more speed, running around the gym in a circle as I sent more and more roof raining down. The behemoth was getting hit by continually bigger pieces before a large girder stabbed into its back, sending it to the ground. I smacked in my last clip and kept firing, now dodging a large amount of debri myself as I ran for the door, my last rocket left the launcher and I poured on more speed. I’m not an athlete, not by a longshot, but adrenaline is one hell of a drug, and an entire half of a building falling around you is a pretty good way to get that stuff pumping. I must’ve hit something structural, because the walls and rooms along the sides of the gym were starting to fall inward. I lunged through the doors I originally came from just as it finally all fell down, blanketing me in a cloud of concrete dust.

Then, lying on the floor, with the sounds of collapsing building behind a wall of rubble subsiding, the adrenaline wore off, and I blacked out.

“Uhh”, I slowly opened my eyes, blinking out the dust that covered them, I looked around the dark, silent hall. I started to move and pain shocked through me like lightning. “Ahh!”, tears formed in my eyes as I checked my vitals, I was in bad shape, not only was my right hind leg broken, but the rest of my bones were close to breaking too, and my body was beaten to hell and covered in cuts, some light and some deep, from falling debri. I used almost all of my healing bandages, covering various parts of my body, then focused on my leg. It was bent inward a little, but it didn’t have any bones sticking out, so that had to be a good thing, right?

I pulled out my last healing potion, I could’ve sworn I remembered that there was some special rule when it came to broken bones with these things but I couldn’t remember what. I eventually said fuck it and drank it down, allowing my leg to be mended as well as my body to a certain extent. I wasn't great, not by a longshot, and my leg didn’t seem to heal quite right. It was still bent inward even though the pain was gone and the bones were mended.

Then I remembered that rule from first aid. If you used a healing potion with broken bones it would heal them in that broken position and a doctor would have to re break them in order to heal them properly, “Oh fuck”. Great, now I needed to not only find another sane pony, but I needed them to be a doctor too!

I was able to move on at least, and the magic in the bandages would help the rest of me out over time.

My Rocket launcher wasn’t so lucky. I saw the front of the bent barrel poking out from under the edge of the rubble. I touched my hoof to the cool metal, “aww, why? We could’ve done so much more for each other… You even had a guidance system!”, I let out a final sigh as I mourned the poor, innocent weapon.

Hobbling along, I walked across the cafeteria to the other hall, then made my way up some stairs. Walking by, I peered into the library hoping to find some more books, but found the whole room empty with a sign on the door, Library contents under review by the ministry of image. Ministry of Image? They used to talk about the ministries in school, they were formed when the war began to take a turn for the worst to help run the country. There were the Ministries of Magic (in charge of magical research), Moral (was a government police force that dealt with traitors), Wartime Technology (in charge of all the technical research and industry, obviously the best one), Peace (ran hospitals and charities for those in need), Image (regulated the news), and…. Awesome? Yeah, The Ministry of Awesome, that was definitely the sixth, (I know because it was the one I always thought was the trick option on tests, because who in their right mind names a fucking government branch The Ministry of AWESOME!?). What was the Ministry of Image doing reviewing library contents? I thought they just made sure all the newspapers reported events accurately. Did they check school books too? I pulled out my (240 years old) new copy of Big Book of Arcane Sciences and checked the covers for a publisher, sure enough, despite the large endorsement of the authors at the Ministry of Magic, in tiny print in the back cover was a small message..

Contents approved and published by the Ministry of Image.

I’ve read this book millions of times and I’ve never noticed that, but OK, if they regulated the news, why not branch out to education too? I mean it's not like they did much else.

I put the book away and kept hobbling down the hall, eventually finding another set of stairs, these ones bringing me to hall that had the energy shield from earlier on one end, and a large gaping hole on the other. Walking down to the hole, I took in the large mound of concrete rubble and rusted metal that was once a gym, and the particularly bloody mound that was once a monster that the world was honestly better off without. It was also very dark out, I must’ve been out for a good couple of hours, so I guess my plan of getting back home before dark was a bust. Oh well, at least it was a clear night out, so I could finally look at the stars and mo-

Why is the moon blown up

“What…. The….. Fuck….”. I couldn’t believe my eyes, there it was, the moon, a beautiful cratered ball that gently glowed white light down upon the world…. And an entire quarter of it was blown up…. Leaving a giant crater on one side and leaving smaller pieces of the moon floating next to it like debri! My hind legs gave out from under me out of shock (and a little bit from exhaustion too). I mean…… almost three quarters of it are still there… but then there’s a large round gaping hole in the other quarter!

I just…. It looked so beautiful, more so than I ever could have dreamed, and somehow even the moon itself was broken like the land below.

I let out a mournful sigh and turned back to the hall, hobbling down to the field and finding some kind of weird, glowing cylinder generator in a room next to it, I pressed the button to turn it off and walked back into Apple High’s Lobby.

I heard a familiar robotic voice coming from down below. Looking over the second floor railing, I could see that the main office doors were now open. I walked in and saw the Mr Handy from earlier talking to the desk in the back room, with all my weapons piled on top.

“-I just cannot comprehend why a student would bring so many weapons onto campus!? Oh I wish you would come out so we could discuss the great number of rule violations sir”, One of its three camera eyes turned towards me, “Oh! I see Mr. Rule has let you out of detention. I suppose you’re here to apologize to your principal”.

“Not exactly, I actually wanted to tell you something”, my horn glowed.

“OH! And what did you want to say?”

“You’re fired”, I shoved my shotgun into the space between where the arm for one of its eyes met with its body and pulled the trigger, sending the robot flying to the side in a shower of sparks and crashing into a chair. I levitated the rest of my weapons and ammo to me and put everything back into their places, then cracked open my shotgun only to realize I was out of ammo for it.

Sliding the shotgun back into its holster, I floated up the small display case on the desk, inside was some black rock about as wide as my hoof, with a weird glowing spot on the front of it, every time I looked at it it seemed to get blurry, but I could’ve sworn I could see a symbol. I smashed the case and pulled the rock closer, the light wasn’t hurting my eyes at all, I squinted as I brought it closer. I reached up to tap it with my hoof, “What are yo-”

BOOM

I was surrounded by blackness, the dirt under me was dry and hot. I thought I saw something move in the darkness, something dark and powerful. I couldn’t see it, but it could see me, I tried to turn on my pipbuck’s lamp, only to realize I didn’t have it anymore, I didn’t have anything. I could feel it staring at me, I was confused, I didn’t know where I was or what had happened, the last thing I remember was touching a glowing rock….

And…. did it explode?.... Yeah, I think it exploded!

“Umm, am I dead?”

I waited for something to respond, but I heard nothing. I felt cold and tired, but I kept sensing movement out there.

“Hello… Is somepony out there?”, nothing. Great.

I sat down, trying to think of what to do now. I kicked a small stone in front of me.

“Great… killed by a fucking rock”, I lifted the stone up with my magic, causing the rock and my horn to give off a low grey light…. And then I saw it.

A mass of what looked like black blood twice as big as me mere feet ahead, slowly shifting in on itself, and occasionally giving off a violent shudder. I saw a small tendril snake out towards me, stopping just in front of me. I swallowed, cautiously reached out with a hoof, and gave the tendril a gentle tap.

The moment I did the entire thing gave a massive thrash and flashed green, the tendril wrapped around my hoof. I pulled it back, expecting it to hold firm, but instead went back with me as if it were made of floating water. Where it touched my coat felt warm and made me feel stronger. The tendril then spread up my foreleg to my shoulder and it flashed green again, the mass thrashing even more violently, and making the tendril hot.

Now it couldn’t stop thrashing, and even though it was really hot, it also felt good. I slowly reached out my other foreleg to touch the mass directly. This time a much thicker tendril shot out and paused next to my outstretched hoof… then it shot past it into my heart.

Some blood gushed out from the edges of the hole in my chest where it had lodged itself. I no longer felt my heart beat like normal, instead I felt beating in rhythm with the masses thrashes, I held my hooves to my chest as I felt the heat spread through me. My breathing became fast not from pain but panic and shock.

Then the entire mass lurched and moved at me. I fell to the ground, thrashing as it pushed itself into me, stabbing into my body in various places as I felt a fire light inside of me.

And then It was over, I thrashed on the ground as I felt the thing inside me burn, feeling a primal urge to move with it. I felt it moving inside me too, like it wanted to move with me as well. After a while, its movements became less and less sporadic, and mine fell in tandem with it, until finally we both moved as one, as if it had always been a piece of me, and me a piece of it. But the fire kept burning, It made me want to move, it made me want to use that fire.

I stood up and breathed slow, deep breaths. I felt stronger, wohler, and I noticed one small strip of the mass floating in front of me, glowing a solid green. I stretched out my hoof towards it, inviting it in to be a part of me as the rest had. It flashed back tentatively, then slowly, cautiously reached forth as if our positions from earlier had been reversed. When it made contact I felt a spark, and it crackled with green lightning. It proceeded to wrap itself around my foreleg, then snaked its way around my body, giving off even more sparks as it went, making it feel like something in me was waking up, until it went back to floating in front of me.

Then it flashed like a bolt of green lightning right into my head, above the left side of my left eye. I fell to the ground, limp, as the fire turned into an inferno with no end. I was surrounded by black again, with a small shaft of green light emanating from where the last tendril had entered my head. My vision turned dark as I fell asleep…...

I woke up on the floor of the office with a start, breathing in a sharp breath as the world came back to me. I quickly stood up and looked around, heart thundering in my chest. I was still in the principal's office, there were chunks of the rock scattered all over, buried into holes in the walls, roof, ceiling, and even a piece or two inside my police vest. A trickle of blood fell into my left eye as I became aware of the pain I was feeling on the left side of my forehead. I scrambled over to the nurse's office as I used my left forehoof to try and slow the bleeding.

Looking into the mirror, I saw that that rock had left a nasty gash in my forehead right above the left side of my left eye. I couldn’t get into the medical cabinet (who. The. FUCK. Locks a goddess damned MEDICAL CABINET), so I used what little healing bandages I had left to wrap my forehead. I also removed my old bandages since the healing magic in them had already done their work and closed my wounds. In fact, with the exception of my new head injury, every part of my body was in perfect health, even my improperly meded hind leg was as good as new too, “what the fuck just happened?”

I checked my pipbuck’s clock, 12:35. It was still night, and as much as I wanted to just hole up and sleep I just wasn’t tired, actually I felt pretty energized, but maybe that was just head trauma. I stepped back into the principal's office and hopped onto his terminal, there wasn’t even a password!

There wasn't very much, apparently this school routed most of its files through a central server, one that has been “down for maintenance” for almost two and a half centuries. Still, it seemed that the principle did leave his personal logs on the local drive….

[Special Disciplinary measures]

Cobalt has been placed in a Ministry of Peace juvenile reeducation program following his most recent incident involving the theft of some terminals from the school. Hopefully the program will set this delinquent straight. If not well…. I'm sure his new personality will almost certainly be an improvement.

New personality? What could that mean?

[The Janitor]

Dusky and Ms. Pears have been having an unprofessional relationship on school grounds. I’ve never been able to gather proof, (every camera I have put in his damn closet keeps getting found and “lost”), but I’m almost certain this is the case, the way they look at each other, how they keep “meeting” in that horrid supply closet upstairs, It disgusts me. What does she see in him that she doesn’t see in me? I thought moving her office here would help, but it hasn’t changed anything! Just you wait you janitor filth, I'll find a way to get you out of here.

[Cobalt returns]

Cobalt came back and has been absolutely delightful! Sure he doesn’t talk to anyone besides his old friend Tiny, but he doesn’t cause any more trouble! And in the end, that's all that matters! He even came by and said he was going to find a way to thank the school for everything we’d done for him! I should see if I can't get the board to let me send even more kids to the good old MoP!

Damn, this guy was a real prick. I looked down at the skeleton curled under the desk, with a “Principle of the year: 2076” award curled within its hooves. I turned back to the terminal as I took a piss onto the garbage underneath.

[Saving Money]

I was rewarded with a special commemoration by the board for managing to have the gym and its adjacent rooms renovated for only an eighth of the projected cost! Of course the board has no idea that the way I did that was by going through a cheaper contractor, but honestly, who needs a building to last for 5 centuries!?

[Mr. Handy Failure]

My attempts to convince the board of a rampant “delinquency epidemic” did not have the effect I was looking for. Instead of letting me have the ability to send more kids to the MoP, they ordered a teleportation apprehension system for the Mr. Handy. It’s normally used in prisons, if an individual is being a little too rowdy, the robot simply teleports them to a confinement cell (in this case the detention classroom). However the damn bot considers simply raising your voice to be sufficient to be sent to detention. Finally I had to have the dirtbag janitor (apparently I have to have solid proof of misgivings in order to fire him, fucking union) disable it and put it in storage after it teleported an entire HALL of students into detention at once!

[A gift]

Finally! I have been pestering the board for months ever since that little stripe’s family moved in to get him removed from the school, and finally they’ve done it! He’s going to be given private tutoring, and has been told its because of his high grades, but then it gets even better! He apparently is under the impression that I’M responsible for pushing the board to give it to him! So he came into my office today (his LAST day) and gave me some weird rock with some symbol cut into the front and THANKED ME for helping him! (he thanked me for kicking him out and didn’t even realize it!). I shook his dirty hoof with the widest smile I could as he said some bullshit about how it was a totem from his tribe, that it has to do with some stupid myth from his home, and some other crap I couldn’t care less about, then left. Now I was tempted to throw it out but then I thought, hey, I could keep this as a monument to remind me that no matter what, I'm in full control of this school, MY school, not the board, not the union, ME.

I looked back at the scorch mark on the table, “I think he was trying to kill you buddy”.

[Tragedy]

Cobalt wasn't fixed. The MoP made him worse! He set off a bomb during lunch and now he and Tiny are running around shooting EVERYPONY with rifles and shotguns they snuck into school this morning. I locked my office, they tried to shoot me but the glass held, so then they taunted me, said they would kill me, even executed a few other students in front of the glass. But there was no way I was ever going to open that door. Shortly after it started the sirens started wailing, at first I thought it was a drill, but then the shockwave hit the building. Now the shots have stopped and it’s quiet, I'm not leaving this office, I'll sit here and wait for the police. I mean they have to come right? There's children and award winning staff here that have to be evacuated!

I got off the chair, grabbed the Mr Handy, and walked out of the office, with a lot of the pieces to what had happened here finally clicking into place. I made my way back through the ruins to the workshop classroom and got to work on the design I’ve had floating around in my head since I picked up the lightning rifle.

As I removed the broom handle and lenses that had initially been the barrel, I finally started thinking about that dream (what can I say, tinkering helps me think). I have no idea where that dream came from, I’ve never had dreams like that before, especially never a dream as lucid as that! I mean that had to have been a dream, but, it felt real, my breathing, the heat of that mass, the feeling of it coursing into me, the memory of it is burned in my mind. I don't feel some otherworldly inferno now of course, just some pain in my forehead where the gash was, maybe the end of the dream was because of the pain from that injury. Then there was the question of how my leg got better, was I wrong about healing potions? Was my leg ever really broken? Did I injure my head enough to have false memories?

Do I have brain damage? A concussion? I have no idea what the symptoms are but I don’t think so. I paused as I was grabbing some metal bars from the wall, “can a person with brain damage even realize they have brain damage? *sigh* you know what, I feel fine, so let's just say I don’t have brain damage”.

I cut the square bars down to length, then mounted them onto the rifle where the original barrel did. I pulled the scrapped Handy over next, pulling out various electronics from the body. “*grunt* well this has been one hell of a day don’t you think? I nearly got killed, killed another pony, got a new rifle that shoots lightning, avoided some raiders, pissed off a giant, found a rocket launcher, dropped a roof on the giant, broke the rocket launcher, had a rock blow up, hallucinated-”, I set up the last of the electronics and started bolting the whole assembly together with nice and thick industrial bolts from a drawer, “no wait- had a lucid dream while knocked out? yeah , that sounds about right”.

Finally, I attached the thin plates on the side of the projectile chamber and held up the gun, giving it a couple of telekinetic shakes to make sure everything was bolted down sturdy. Then I gave the crank two good turns and pulled the trigger, watching electricity flash between the rails. After that I took a piece of metal and shoved it into the chamber, with the clips on the inside holding it in place, I aimed the gun at the wall, cranked the handle and pulled the trigger.

click-BOOM

The rifle fired the metal with a white electrical flash, and left the bar sticking half out of the concrete wall. I smiled as I looked at my rifle, my railgun. I had read about the concept in some old engineering books in the stable, the idea was pretty straightforward, if you create enough of an electrical current in two metal objects, you could create a magnetic field to send objects forward at high speeds. I tried to build a weapon like this back in my stable, but I could never get a powerful enough energy source without getting caught, so I had to make it bulkier to accommodate the power supply I had available and was restricted to using bar magnets I stole from the classroom.

But with the cloud-crank mechanism on the lightning rifle I finally have the power source I needed, and as an extra plus I don't need to worry about carrying extra batteries, just crank, load, and shoot. How effective this thing is will depend on what I use for ammo and how many cranks I give it. I pocketed a couple of blocks of metal to use for now.

“Now I just need to find something living to test you on”, I said looking at the rifle.

“As long as it’s not me”, another voice said behind me, making me freeze. “Drop the gun and turn around, slowly”.

I did as he asked and turned to look at him, he was an ash grey earth pony wearing a patched up black jacket, a grey wool cap, two saddlebags, and some kind of harness that had a rifle on his right side and suspended a bit in front of his mouth.

I relaxed a little, “umm, you're not even holding your gun”.

He bit the bit in front of him and the rifle fired three shots into the wall next to me. I jumped and froze when he pointed it back at me.

“You dumb piece of sheit, dont you know what a battle saddle is?”

“Until now I haven’t ever even seen a battle saddle!”

He narrowed his eyes, “Bullshit. How could you not know what a battle saddle is, you would have to be fresh out of your stable to not know that”.

“Well maybe that’s because I’m fresh out of my stable you asshole!”, if I jumped to the side I could get behind a worktable, but I don't think I have anything that could stand up to a rifle like that!

“How fresh? Because fresh stable dwellers spoil pretty quickly”, he said with a smirk in that thick accent he had.

Oh fuck please don't be a cannibal, “Today was my third day outside”.

He kept looking at me for a little longer, almost like he was trying to size me up. Wait, that was what he was doing!

“You’re not bullsheiting me… are you”, he looked a bit surprised, then started laughing, “holy crap! How does some stable snowflake end up looking as shity as you do, do that!...”, he said gesturing to the collapsed side of the building,”and live only three days out!”.

“Honestly I have no idea, and who the hell are you calling a snowflake”, I said, narrowing my eyes.

“You silly!”, he let out another chuckle, “whenever you stable dwellers come out of the ground, I always hear the same sheit. They don't know nothing, they’re imbeciles, they get squemish over the smallest piece of sheit! I mean you didn’t even know what a battle saddle is! I bet you don’t know what an assault rifle is!”. I looked down a little as my ears flattened, I didn’t know, “I knew it, hell, I bet you don’t even know who the authority is!”. He paused after that, a look of realization coming over him.

“What? Who are the authority?”, I asked.

He looked at me with a calculating look, “they’re umm… well I probably shouldn’t tell you this, after all I could probably take advantage of the fact that you don’t know that but… fuck it, the authority are a group with very powerful technology, that like to take in stable dwellers”.

“Really?”.

“Oh yeah, food, weapons, shelter, training, they have it all!”, he said with a smirk.

“But didn’t they make that thing from earlier?”. I said with a gesture towards the collapsed gym.

“Probably, but you’d have to ask them why”.

“So… what are we going to do now? I mean you are holding me at gunpoint”.

“Honestly? Let you go”, he said with a smirk as he turned towards the door.

“Wait, really? Just like that?”, I said a bit confused.

He looked back at me, “yeah kid, I thought you were just another wasteland asshole by now, I didn’t know you were fresh out, I’m camping out in the lobby though, so feel free to join me if you want”, and then he just walked out, I watched his blue bar on my compass as he walked down the hall.

I picked up my railgun and went down the hall and up the stairs, when I got to the hall, I decided to go to the lobby. I knew I probably shouldn’t have, after all just a couple of minutes ago he had me at gunpoint, and something just felt off about him, but he is the first pony I’ve met that has changed his mind about killing me since I got out here.

He had taken a metal trash can, filled it with ruined schoolbooks, and was trying to light it using a knife and some square block by making sparks with them. I trotted up to his side, “how’s it going?”.

“*sigh* could be going a lot better if I hadn’t lost my lighter. I found this on some raider’s body but it doesn’t work for sheit!”.

I let him keep try for a few more minutes while I took off my bag and my holstered rifle, then pulled out my lighter and lit the edge of a book on fire. He looked at me with an irritated scowl, “You could have done that earlier you little sheit”.

“But I wanted to see if you could get it, after all, you were really getting into it for a minute there”.

He threw the fire starter onto the floor in disgust, then sat down and pulled a scuffed up metal flask out of his saddlebags. I sat down and pulled out a can of cram, pulling my railgun in front of me as I took a bite of the slimy, salty, yet still tasty meat.

I noticed he was looking at me kind of funny, “what?”.

“You know you’re supposed to cook that right?”.

“What? But it says fully cooked on the side of the tin”.

“Yeah, but it tastes ten times better when you heat it up”.

“Really? Huh”, I put the meat back into the tin, opting to wait and try cooking it on my skillet, “so what’s your name?”.

“Flask; trader, scavenger, and professional opportunist at your service”, he said with a joking bow, “though my friends all call me Bourbon”.

“Professional opportunist?”.

“Yeah, one of the things I’m best at is spotting a golden opportunity for what it is, and exploiting it, it has landed me some pretty nice paydays and saved my ass more times than I can count”, he took a swig from his flask, “of course it's also landed my ass in all that trouble to begin with, but honestly, I wouldn’t have it any other way”.

“Is that why you didn’t shoot me? Because I'm a ‘golden opportunity’ you can get rich off of?”, I said in a completely flat voice, “of course I don't mind, I’m just curious”.

“Yep, in more ways than you know”, he said with a smirk, “for one I saw that little display from earlier. I normally skirt around the park to avoid raiders when traveling through here and I saw you casually piss off a literal pile of armor and muscle”.

“Wait… you were watching me?”.

“Yeah, anyways I figure you were either some kind of badass who didn’t give a shit, was suicidal, stupid, or all three. Then I had a perfect view of you shooting the giant thing from the catwalk, getting knocked down, and finally dropping down the entire roof on it! I thought for sure you had died!”, he said with a chuckle.

I couldn't help but laugh a little back, “I almost did, the launcher wasn’t so lucky”, I said mournfully.

“Daymn! A buck could do a lot with one of those. *sigh* it will be missed”, he said raising his flask before taking another swig. “Anyways, I came into the building looking for loot just a little bit ago when I was scared shitless by the sound of thunder underneath me! I came downstairs and sure enough there you were firing a gun that shoots bars of fucking metal!”.

I laughed, “yeah this thing is pretty terrifying isn't it? The first prototype turned a security pony into PASTE!”, I said with a smile and getting a satisfying look of surprise from him.

“Yeah well now you understand why I immediately went with the ‘badass’ theory from earlier and drew first, after all you just dropped a roof on a behemoth and yourself, and looked like you had killed a whole lot of other sheit beforehand!”.

“Really? I mean killing that behemoth was pretty sweet, even if I did come pretty close to dying, but what made you think I killed a bunch of other shit before that?”.

He let out a small laugh, “you haven't looked in a mirror lately have you?”.

I looked down at the beat up, shot up, and bloody police vest on my chest, “umm, not really... I mean I looked in the nurse's office mirror to put the bandage on my head, but I didn’t pay attention to the rest of me”.

He just looked at me with a mildly shocked expression, “well go look now”.

“Uhh, sure”, I got up and trotted into the office, I mean I couldn't look that bad. I turned on the light and got a real good look at myself.

“Oh”, it wasn't too bad, but it definitely wasn't what I was expecting, a LOT of blood from that watchman had been left behind on me even after I emptied my canteen trying to rinse it off, so my face was covered in a small layer of dried on blood, my head was wrapped with a bandage that was stained dark red on the left side from my wound (I would definitely need to rewrap it later), my police vest was shot to hell and battered from years of abuse, even my barding looked worse for wear, even though most of it was superficial, the entire thing was covered in a layer of grime and dried on mud, the collar was stained a little red from blood, and it was missing most of its right sleeve, leaving just enough material to leave the small pocket on the top of its side.

Flask walked in behind me, “Damn, I see what you mean, I already look a lot like a dirty surface pony like you! Where's the nearest shower, I if I don't clean up soon I might turn into a savage with a weird accent!”, I said mockingly.

He gave me a light smack on the back of the head, “a dirty surface pony who could kick your ass! Besides it’d take a lot more than dirt to give you a voice as beautiful as mine”, I looked back in the mirror, and he joined me, looking at my reflection himself.

Fuck I was a mess, I couldn’t even imagine what i’d look like a month from now.

My teeth were still white though, so there was at least that.

“Welcome to the wasteland kid, where everything is shit and we kill each other over scraps”, he said with a beaming smile, “now what do we call the wasteland’s newest resident?”.

“Call me Shepherd”.

Footnote:
Perk Added: Nerd Rage: You’ve been pushed around long enough! When your HP drops below 20%, you are able to ignore crippled limbs, gain an additional +2 points in agility, and your strength is raised to 10.

Trait Added: The Argent Mark: You’ve become one with a powerful strength, your soul has been altered into something else, and your body has been branded for life. For now, your strength is in its infancy, but as you grow, so will it. Your damage increases as you kill more targets consecutively up to 25%, but this effect will wear off the longer you go outside of combat or rest. Special perks will be unlocked based on your experiences that will add further effects to this trait.

Author's Note

Author’s Note: I just wanted to take a moment to once again thank KKat for writing Fallout Equestria and Somber and Tofu for writing their expansions to the already large FOE universe. I also wanted to thank all of you, the readers, for reading my story. I’m having a blast writing this and it feels great when I know that someone, anyone, is reading my work.

Entry 4: Bourbon

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.

Entry 5: Partners

Entry 5: I twiddled my hoofs as I sat by the gate, it had been almost an hour since Khan left before Bourbon come back.

He had a big smile on his face.

“Great news kid! My debt has been paid! and I’m even getting a little extra too!”

I stood up, “That's great! Now you promised you would answer my questions”

“And I will, but first let's head inside”, he said gesturing to the inner gate, “hey I gotta ask, where is your stable anyways?”

I groaned, “please don't ask me that, I had an awful life there and I don't want to even think of going back right now”

“Come on man, I’m not planning on taking us on a trip there, I’m just curious”, he said with a smile.

“How about this, you answer all my questions, and I’ll tell you, deal?”, I said raising an eyebrow.

He looked really dissapointed, but still agreed, “fine, but lets get inside and get some sleep first, after all I’m pretty sure you could use a real bed right about now, am I right?”

He had a good point, I really could use some rest, and being able to do so on a real bed would be a huge plus, “alright fine, I suppose we could wait a few more minutes. But once I get on that bed I’m hitting you with every question I got, so you better be ready”.

I started trotting through the gate, as I did so a pony rounded the corner holding a boxy energy pistol with a glowing blue light emanating from the front. Before I could react he shot me in the chest. A magical jolt surged through my body, making me go completely limp and collapse. My whole body was numb, my vision got fuzzy, and I couldn’t even talk.

“Oh I’m ready alright”, bourbon said with a smug grin as he stepped in front of me, “ready for my biggest payday in weeks”

He lifted his forehoof and kicked me hard in the face, causing me to black out instantly.

Partners) One thing I’ve learned out here is that it's important to have someone you can completely trust. Someone who you know will have your back when you need it, and trusts you to have their back when they need it. There’s no better way to travel the wastes than with a real partner at your side. Bourbon was not that partner, but thanks to him I met a pony who was...

I woke up with a terrible headache. I sat up and rubbed my head, “ow”

“Morning sleepyhead, have a nice nap?”, Bourbon said with a sneer on the other side of some steel bars.

I shook myself awake and looked around, I was in a cell! I grabbed the bars, “Bourbon what hell is going on!”

He rolled his eyes, “what do you think dipshit, I sold you! Now my debt is paid and you get to ‘get in on the action’”

My blood started to boil, “so this whole time you were just tricking me into coming here so you could sell me into slavery!”

He started to laugh, “are you kidding me? Of course I did! I would’ve brought you to the authority if they had any bases in this armpit of a city, but after I saw you could fight I realized I could pay off my debt here instead! And to be honest, I really didn’t have to work all that hard to get you to follow me here either, you were just so desperate for somepony to talkto that you just trusted the first pony you came across!”

I clenched my teeth, “What the fuck man! I saved your life! Doesn’t that mean anything to you!”

He leaned in close, “honestly? No”

I yelled and lunged at him, reaching my forelegs through the bars but he just backed up.

“Hey I would calm down if I were you, otherwise the guards might activate your new fashion accessory”, he said gesturing to his neck.

I looked down and touched a hoof to my neck Sure enough, I was wearing some metal collar, it had a small metal box with a little red light attached to it, what the hell?

“That is an explosive slave collar, if you make too much trouble, attack somepony you’re not supposed to, or try to take it off, BOOM!”

I felt a chill at Bourbon’s words, “You Bastard, I trusted you!”

“And I'm amazed you did!”, he leaned against the bars, “I expected so little out of you that I ended up slipping up again and again and again but you never once thought, ‘wait, he’s fucking me!’, even at the front gate when you almost figured it out and I thought I would finally have to stick a gun to your head, you just believed the bluff and walked right in. Seriously, I’ve heard stable ponies have no common sense but you have No. Common. Sense”, he said punctuating the last three words by roughly tapping my forehead. “Good luck in the arena kid, I’m betting on ya”, he started trotting away.

Halfway down the hall he stopped, “I’m guessing there no way you would still be willing to tell me where that stable is would you?”

“Fuck you!”, I yelled.

“thought so”, he sighed and trotted away, leaving me enslaved and thoroughly fucked.

I just sat there dumbstruck for a minute, I was a fucking idiot. All of my stuff was gone except for my stable barding and my PipBuck. The bomb collar chafed with almost every movement, constantly reminding me of what I had gotten myself into.

Dammit, why did I trust him? There were so many moments where I should have realized he was a snake, hell I shouldn't have even sat down and eaten with him. Even his friendly demeanor mostly disappeared the next morning, probably when he realized how little effort he actually needed to get me here.

I ran my shaking hoofs through my main before screaming at the ceiling, “FUCK!”

“Damn, he really suckered you good, didn’t he?”, a female voice said condescendingly from the darkness from the back of the cell.

“What do you care!”, I snapped, looking back into the darkness.

A mare slowly stepped out of the shadows towards me, she had a sage green coat, small crimson pupils, and a long mane consisting of alternating small stripes of rust orange, bright yellow, dark green, and the occasional dark red. She was wearing a pair of old canvas trousers that had been cut off at the knees, turning them into shorts, and had suspenders going over her shoulders. She also had a collar just like mine around her neck as well.

But those weren’t the two things I noticed first though, the first thing I saw was that she was a pegasus, it was hard to miss those feathered wings. The second thing was her weapon, three long claws attached to a crude leather gauntlet and extending outward from the right foreleg she wore it on.

She slowly walked up to me in a three hoof trot, with her claw slowly dragging across the ground, leaving a deep scratch in the concrete.

“What was that?”, she said tilting her head and giving a dangerous looking smile. The look in her eye reminded me of Brick when he was looking for an excuse to beat me, and she looked a little… feral, too.

My head was telling me I should back down like I used to do with Brick, make her lose interest. My body wanted to attack first, and not let myself be a victim to some bully again. I was also still a bit in shock from my new circumstances and seeing a pegasus for the first time.

“Um… uh… are you a… pegasus?”, I guess curiosity won out, huh.

She shoulder tackled me into the bars and put her claw up to my throat. Ok, Kahn can eat shit, curiosity does get cats killed!

“What do you care?”, she said half jokingly as she mirrored my own words.

“Just curious!”, I said quickly, “I mean.. I’ve never met a pegasus before so I thought I’d make sure”

She just kept glaring at me, eventually looking me up and down, Her eyes stopped on my collar and her face contorted in disgust.

She pushed away from me, “Fucking damnit!”

“what's wrong? Was I boring you!?”, I yelled in disgust. What the hell was this mare’s deal!? No matter what it was I decided I wasn’t backing down to this bitch, I was done swallowing my pride, even if it got me killed.

“You’re collar dumbass! See that colored stripe of paint they threw on it? Tell me what color it is”, she said

I took a quick glance, trying not to take my eyes off of her longer than I had to in case she jumped me again. It was blue, “It’s blue, so what?”

“See the blue stripe on mine?”, she said gesturing to her own, “It means we’re partners!”. She was fuming, “they paired me up with some fresh idiot like you so I would have an even harder time living!”, she screamed into the air with a frustration that had to have been pent up for a long time. She turned to a camera in the hall, “WELL FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU ALL! I'LL KILL EVERY FUCKER YOU GOT UNTIL YOU GOT NO ONE LEFT! YOU HEAR ME YOU FUCKERS!”

“Keep it down you twiggerd bitch!”, a buck called from down the hall, “some of us are trying to get some rest”

“Fuck you!”, she yelled, before huffing and storming off back into the back corner of the cell.

I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on but it sounded like she was at the end of her own rope. Of course it didn’t stop me from feeling a bit insulted.

I trotted into the corner where she was sitting on the only filthy mattress we had, “Hey, I'm not an idiot”

She blew a raspberry, “are you kidding? No offense but you’re some stupid stable dweller who fell for a snake even a blind pony would’ve seen coming. You’ve probably never even fought a day in your life, my bet is your ‘friend’ is going to lose that bet of his”

“I’ll have you know I killed two ponies before I even left my stable”, ok, one of those was on accident, but she didn’t need to know that yet, “then once I got out I’ve had to fight tooth and nail to survive for the past three days”

“Bullshit, let me guess, ‘fighting tooth and nail’ means killing radroaches to you right?”, she tapped her free forehoof against her chin, “Though two ponies isn’t a bad start, for a useless idiot”

“Radroaches!?”, my blood came back to a boil, “you think I’ve been killing radroaches!?!? I fought and killed a raider sniper that was armed with a rifle that shot lightning, I killed an authority behemoth, and only celestia knows how many Nosalises I killed when me and Bourbon meandered through their nest!”, I leaned in close to her face, “I am not an idiot, and I sure as shit am not useless”

She roughly shoved me back, “back the fuck up!”, she stood up with fire in her eyes, but I didn’t back down. Not again, even if it killed me I wasn’t backing down again.

We both just stared daggers at each other for a minute before she spoke, “I don't know who the fuck you are, but now I know you’re lying. No idiot stable dweller like you would be able to kill an Authority Behemoth”

I smirked, “well my name is Shepherd, and I’m going to show you just what this ‘idiot stable dweller’ can do when we enter the arena you twiggered cunt”

He eyes turned to magma and she lunged at me in a screaming fury. I tried to punch her but she dodged it and rammed me into the wall in one fluid motion. I tried to lunge at her, but she grabbed me and spun me right back into the wall. She hit me in the mouth with a left hook, I brought up my forehooves to block my head, but she just spun around and bucked me right in the nuts!

I dropped to the ground, curling up into a ball as I held my forehooves to my tender places as they blossomed in pain. She grabbed me by the neck and hoisted me up against the wall, pressing the claw against my neck, “Do you got a fucking deathwish you idiot!”

I spit in her eye, she barley flinched as she held it shut, “I’m done being some asshole’s plaything, I’m done being pushed around by somepony just because they’re bigger, tougher, or faster than me. So if you want to kill me, go right ahead, but I’m gonna die fighting, biting, and clawing with every bit of strength I got left until you, or somepony else, kills me”

She was seething with anger, “ you don't think I won't? I’m already going to be fighting alone with or without you. So what difference does it make if I just save some other pony the trouble”

“Let him go”, a male voice droned through the speaker sounding really bored and mildly irritated, “you’re not killing your partner before his first fight even starts, I forgave a large debt for him, and I expect him to give some fresh energy to the next fight”

She didn’t respond, she just kept me pinned against the wall.

The voice sighed and the mare’s collar started beeping

Beep…

Beep… beep…

The beeping was getting quicker and I had a disturbing feeling I knew what was happening.

Beep… beep… beep…

She let out an angry snarl and threw me to the floor as she stomped back to the corner mattress. Her collar stopped beeping.

I rubbed my neck and caught my breath, looking out into the hall I saw the camera focused on us. They were watching us, it was just like stable fifty-four, but if you stepped out of line here they blew your head off remotely. I had traded one prison for another, only now I had a psychotic roommate and a bomb collar, great.

Said roommate sat back against the corner, she closed her eyes and leaned her head against a wall.

“At least this nightmare will be over soon”, she said faintly to herself.

We were ushered out of the cell by two slavers an hour later. We moved through various passages underneath the old baseball stadium to what I assumed was the arena itself. I saw so many cages, all loaded with varying amounts of ponies wearing explosive collars. The ponies were in varying states of armorment, with some in full armor and armed with all kinds of weapons, and others with nothing but tattered rags and their hooves.

“Why do they let us have weapons and armor? Aren't they worried about a revolt?”, I asked my new ‘partner’.

“Wouldn’t be much of a revolt, they would just blow our heads off and redistribute the equipment in the arena. You get to hold onto the stuff you take”.

We entered what used to be the locker room and a slaver mare trotted up to us, she turned to my ‘partner’ first, “you know the drill Claw, into the box”, she said gesturing to a metal box with an open metal door.

Claw gave her a dirty look as she passed her, before she entered the box she took a syringe off of a table next to it.

“Alright newbie, here's how things work. Your collar tracks your vitals and are displayed on the scoreboard outside, if you don't hear the board sound off after you killed somepony you’ll want to beat on them some more, cuz they ain’t dead. When the round is over you’ll have one minute to leave the field through the gate, if you aren’t out when the timer goes off your collar will be set off automatically. If you leave the arena bounds and go into the stands your collar will be set off automatically. If you take shots into the crowd your collar will be set off manually, if you…”

“Alright I get it, if I try anything funny my collar goes off, anything else?”

“Yeah, if your partner dies you don't get a new one until the current competition is over, and let me warn you, fighters without partners don't last long”, she took a look behind her shoulder at the box before continuing in a hushed tone, “though I’m supposed to tell you that the Caesar will make an exception if you let Claw die today”.

“You want me to kill my partner? Why not just set her collar off and save yourselves the trouble?”.

She rolled her eyes, “because that wouldn’t be satisfying to the crowd, and I didn’t say you kill her, I’m just saying not to stop some other fighters from killing her. The crowd and Caesar are bored of Claw, they want to see her die screaming in pain, and the Caesar is willing to reward you if you don't delay it any longer”, she smirked, “but honestly, I don't you’d be able to do much even if you tried”.

She shoved me towards the box, “you want any chems before you go in?”, she said gesturing to a table heaping with all kinds of needles, tablets, and inhalers of all kinds.

“No thanks”, I said cautiously, I know it might give me an edge, but I wasn’t ready to get hooked on chems quite yet.

“Your loss”, she said with a roll of her eyes as I entered the box. “Oh and here’s a weapon”, she pulled a screwdriver out of her barding and tossed it at my hooves. I picked it up and recognized it as my sharpened flathead, same blue handle, stable tec stamp, and everything. “Be careful, its sharp, you might poke your eye out”, she sneered as she shut the door.

I felt the cage lifted and carried up a ramp, I heard cheering and yelling all around outside.

“They told you to let me die didn’t they”, Claw said as if she knew the answer.

“Yeah”, I told her, she knew anyways.

“Hmph, at least you’re honest, my last couple ‘partners’ tried to keep that little titbit secret”

“So are we actually going to work together or am I on my own”

“You still think you’re actually going to be some help”, she started laughing, “oh you really are funny”

“Alright, well, I guess I’m on my own then”

“Yeah, you’re on your own, that's what it is”, we both just sat in silence in the dark for a minute, “Hey Shepherd?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for making me laugh one last time, because I really dont think Im going to make it past this fight”, she said quietly, and I swear I could pick up a small note of despair in her voice.

Damnit I felt bad for her, she may be a bitch, but I hated the bastards holding us and making us fight for their fucking amusement more. “Can you do me a favor Claw?”

“What kind of favor”

“I noticed some of the fighters in cages had guns, could you try to kill a pony with one and give it to me at the start of the fight?”

“What, do you have to hide behind a big bad gun in order to fight?”, she said jokingly.

“I don't have to hide behind anything, but I’m better with a gun than I am with this fucking flathead”

She sighed, “fine… but they don't give us a lot of ammo, and when they do, it's in the center. I’ll get you some asshole’s gun but fuck going for the center, that’s your suicide if you want more ammo”.

“Thanks, and Claw?”

“Yeah?”

“Good luck”

She started laughing again, “yeah, like you have better odds of making it through this alive”

I heard a male voice come on over loud speakers outside, and loud electric guitar music began to play.

“Mares and Stallions! Are you ready for carnage!”

The cheering rose to a roar. I heard Claw inject herself with whatever chem she had picked up earlier, she let out a moan before throwing the needle against a wall. She started beating against the metal door.

“COME ON! LET'S DO THIS ALREADY!”, she sounded completely feral, whatever was in that needle was some strong shit.

“Today I, Caesar, start our new competition bracket with the first round of bloody qualifiers! Fifteen pairs of partners all thrown into a free for all frenzy, and as always, the last pair standing wins!”, the Caesar said with glee, “Get ready contestants! Three… Two… One… GO!”

There was a click as the electronic lock on the door was released, without missing a beat Claw blasted out of the door into the field. I ran out behind her and took in the scene.

I was on the edge of the baseball field. All around me were haphazardly placed wagons, boxes, dumpsters, toilets, and other piles of assorted crap meant for cover. In the center on top of the pitchers mound were some ammo boxes and a couple of guns and melee weapons. All around me in the stands were slavers cheering for blood, there were also a multitude of shacks built on the rear stands that I assumed some of them lived in. Above all of this was the announcer box where a pony was sitting making announcements over the speakers, that must be Caesar.

I quit taking in the sights when a shot pinged off of the metal box behind me, looking to the source I saw a pony with a pistol running right at me and taking haphazard shots. I dove behind a nearby pile of toilets. The toilets on the other side shattered as the idiot mare kept shooting my cover.

Then I heard a scream from her direction and a loud buzzer went off from the scoreboard. Before I could react, Claw swooped overhead and dropped a 10mm pistol next to me. She was being chased by two other pegasi and didn’t stop after dropping the gun.

I swept it up in my telekinesis and popped up to shoot but the mare was already dead, with her neck bloodily slashed open. I had a feeling I knew which pony Claw got the gun from.

Dropping back into cover I looked up at the scoreboard, there were thirty names up on the screen, each with a pulsing heartbeat display next to it. It also seemed that some ponies names were replaced with nicknames, (it didn’t take a genius to know who the “Stable Dweller” was). Some of the heartbeats were already flatlined and I saw another flatline right before the buzzer went off.

“And that's another pony felled by longtime contestant Claw!”, Caesar called out, only to be met with booing from the crowd. She really wasn’t a crowd favorite, “Don't worry folks, it seems Claw still hasn’t shaken her pursuers, is this finally the day we see the fall of the Hellhound Slayer herself!?”

Interesting name, but I had more pressing issues.

I ran to a new point of cover behind a dumpster as I looked at my EFS, I only had four shots left. A mare ran past and I watched as a pony giving chase shot her in the back with a double barrel shotgun.

I triggered SATS and emptied all four rounds into shotgun pony. I sprinted for the shotgun, at the same time I saw another unicorn jump out of a closer piece of cover for the shotgun as well. He picked up the shotgun with his telekinesis and started reloading as he turned to face me.

Thinking fast I threw my empty pistol right at his horn, it broke his concentration mid reload and he dropped the shotgun and shells into the dirt. I had closed the distance at this point and instead of wrestling with him for the gun I tackled him to the ground and sunk my flathead into his neck repeatedly. He struggled to get away, choking on his own blood as I kept stabbing him, but I wouldn’t let him go as I held him down.

Finally he went limp and I heard the buzzer, “two kills by our stable dweller newcomer!”, a cheer went out over the crowd. I probably would’ve enjoyed it a little if I didn’t have a damn bomb around my neck.

I swept up the double barrel and finished reloading it before firing both barrels into a pegasus mare that tried to charge me from the air with a rusty kitchen knife. I grabbed the bandoleer of shotgun shells off of the original shotgun pony's body before rolling under an apple cart. After loading in two more shells I looked back at the board, already nine of us were dead and there were still lots of shots, screams, and other sounds of fighting going on.

Claw slammed into the ground near to the cart, she looked beaten to shit and covered in bruises and scorch marks. The two pegasi chasing her (one a mare and one a stallion) landed, both of them were wearing power hooves on the ends of their forelegs. Claw amazingly stood up and charged the stallion as if she wasn’t hurt at all. But before she could connect the mare blindsided her and hit her clean in the jaw, sending her rolling onto the ground.

She tried to stand up but her legs gave out and she fell back down. The stallion ripped off Claw’s claw (fuck that’s annoying to write), then stood behind her and lifted Claw up in a hold that immobilized her forelegs pinned her hind legs kneeling dirt.

With Claw pinned facing the other mare (and me), power hoof mare activated her weapons. They really were something, they covered the lower half of a ponies foreleg from the knee down and when activated they crackled with electricity at the ends to deliver a nasty shock.

“Sorry, but we only get our freedom if we make this slow”, the mare said to Claw with sincerity. Claw spit in the mare’s eye and she recoiled in disgust, “and suddenly I don't feel as bad about this”.

The mare pressed one of her power hooves to Claw’s gut and the other to the side of her neck. In a large flash of bright light and sparks she started electrocuting Claw. She screamed blue murder as the electricity coursed through her body, and the crowd broke out it loud cheering. After half a minute of this she backed off and the stallion dropped Claw to the ground. Claw kept convulsing and whimpering in pain as she clutched her forehooves to her chest. She started hyperventilating as she seemed to fight a losing battle for air. I looked up at the scoreboard and saw Claw’s heartbeat going crazy, she was having a heart attack!

I looked back at Claw as she was dying. What should I do? Should I let her die? She may have been a bitch, but at the end of the day we were stuck in this hell together. All the other shooting had stopped though, and I was fairly certain that everypony was watching this play out like the Caesar wanted, so interrupting would probably get me killed. But I wouldn't've even made it this far without Claw keeping her word and giving me that gun earlier.

The Buzzer snapped me back into reality, “AND CLAW IS DEAD! THE HELLHOUND SLAYER IS NO MORE!”, Caesar announced with absolute glee, being met by a monstrous roar of the crowd. My eyes snapped to Claw’s limp body, to the two power hooved pegasi who were both looking at each other in absolute glee. I felt something in me snap as I finally decided what to do.

I scrambled out from under the cart and unloaded a shell of 12 gauge buckshot point blank into the back of the mare’s head. She dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes, and I switched on SATS. In slow motion, the stallion’s eyes flashed from glee to horror and then to pure rage as he locked eyes with me. The mare was probably his friend, maybe even his lover, but before he could even take a step towards me to avenge her I released the spell. I watched in slow motion as SATS blasted his head into chunks.

These fuckers, Bourbon, Caesar, and all the rest of these slavers, knocked me out, took my shit, and forced me, and every other pony in this damn arena, to start killing each other for their amusement while they sat in perfect safety. Even if we won one fight there would just be the next, then the next, then the next, and if we somehow managed to survive all of that, survive being thrown into a meat grinder time and time again, they would still just stack the game against you the moment they got bored of us! Like a colt gets tired of a toy!

I ran over to Claw and started pressing down on her chest over and over. There were only a couple of things I remembered from first aid, how healing bandages and potions worked, how to stop bleeding, how to perform the heimlich, and how to perform cpr.

I reloaded as I kept performing compressions, some gunfire was starting to break out again across the field. Caesar commented something about me avenging my partner but otherwise the rest of the arena wasn’t paying too much attention to us, good. I blew air into Claw’s mouth, then went back to compressions.

I knew one thing for certain though, I wasn’t going to let these bastards win if I could help it. They wanted Claw dead, and they wanted her death to be a show in the arena. I was going to give them a show alright, I was going to make a show out of taking away their victory by saving Claw.

“Dammit Claw, come back, the fight isn't over yet”, I said desperately as I kept performing compressions.

I heard a battle cry from behind me and turned around to see an earth pony charging me with a pool cue. I shot him with my shotgun and he dropped. A second pony rounded the cart with a pipe pistol and wearing some metal armor, and I tried to shoot him, but my shotgun was empty.

He shot me three times, once in the shoulder, and twice in my chest. I cried out in pain and fell back into the dirt. The pony walked towards me with the intent to finish me off.

I swept up the pool cue in my telekinesis and smacked him in the head over and over. The first hit jerked his head to the right and made him waste a shot. The second hit jerked his head to the left and made him drop the gun. The third hit broke the pool cue in half and made him take a few steps back.

He yelled out in pain, “Argh! you mother fu-”. I cut him off by spearing the broken pool cue into his eye. The buzzer went off before he even hit the ground.

I jumped back to my shaky hooves and went back to giving Claw compressions. “Dammit this isnt working!”, I said looking around for another option. Cpr rarely actually saves anypony, it just keeps keeps blood flowing to a ponies brain until first responders can jump start their heart. But how could I do that? I would need something that could give an electric shock, Thunder might have been able to do that, but I didn’t have Thunder, what else could I use?

My eyes locked on power mare’s dead body and the power hooves she wore on her forelegs.

I ripped one off as I gave Claw more air and put it on my right foreleg. I flicked a switch and the hoof lit up in a blue crackle of energy. I gave the ground a soft kick and the hoof discharged a small shock, then I gave the ground a harder kick and got an even bigger discharge.

“Ok so its based on kinetic impact, good to know”, I said. I looked at Claw and sent a small prayer to whatever higher power may have been listening, “Please let this work”

I kicked Claw lightly in the chest where her heart was, nothing.

“Shit!”, I yelled, switching off the hoof and giving her more compressions.

I heard the buzzer go off again and looked at the board, there were only eleven of us left now.

After giving her more air, I switched the power hoof back on and punched her harder in the chest. Her body spasmed but again, nothing.

I yelled in frustration and went back to compressions, “Please Claw!”, I cried, “don't let them win! Please!”. I couldn’t live in a place like this again, with the threat of death always looming if I ever stepped out of line, and being powerless to do anything because the ponies watching were untouchable. If I could bring her back then it meant I still had even a small amount of control, and just that would be enough to keep things bearable.

I saw a pony charging me with a baseball bat but I barely paid him any mind. I switched the hoof back on and looked down at Claw. “You don't get to die yet you hear me! GET BACK IN THE FIGHT!”, I screamed as I brought the hoof down with all my strength, causing a bright flash that disoriented me for a second.

Claw’s whole body spasmed and her eyes went wide as she forced in air with a large gasp. The pony charging me skidded to a halt, staring in shock. Claw looked around frantically as she hyperventilated. Her heartbeat popped back up on the scoreboard and I heard a mix of shack and confusion come over the crowd.

“Uhh, wait. What going on?”, Caesar said confused himself. It felt so good just hear that bastard caught off guard.

“What? W-what the fuck!? What's goingon?”, Claw said still dazed and confused.

I shook Claw by the shoulders, “Calm down!”, I said, “you're fine now, just calm down”

Claw started taking deep breaths as she clutched her forehooves to her chest.

The pony who had been charging me just stood staring, “I thought she was dead!”

Before I could answer Caesar boomed over the speakers, “CLAW IS BACK! She’s been revived by the Stable Dweller!”, he yelled as if this was his plan all along.

The field went silent, the shots and screams stopped, the crowd had gone silent for a minute, Caesar even turned the volume down on the music. Just about everypony was staring at me, Claw, and whatshisface next to me.

I stood up and reloaded my shotgun, “welp… back to it”, I said. I reared up onto my hind legs and brought by powerhoof down hard onto whatshisface’s head. He dropped to the ground and the buzzer went off. “Hide under the cart”, I said to Claw, then I yelled as hard as I could into the air, “YOU WANT CLAW, YOU HAVE TO GO THROUGH ME! YOU HEAR ME YOU DEGENERATE, DIRT EATING, SURFACE MULES! COME FUCKING GET ME!”

The crowd roared in excitement, Caesar put the volume on high, he was getting his show. I swept up the pipe pistol and charged the closest pony I saw. She tried to bring her hunting rifle to bear but died with a scream as buckshot tore into her chest. The buzzer went off, and I counted how many I had left to go. Eight, not including me and Claw.

I picked up the hunting rifle as a pony with what I thought was a large pistol jumped out of cover, I hit SATS and blew her foreleg off. She dropped the gun when she hit the ground screaming. I jumped on top of her and wrapped one of my forelegs around the front of her neck, and the other behind it. She realized what I was doing, “n-no no PLEA-!”, I snapped her neck with a loud crack.

The buzzer sounded and the crowd roared in cheers, “and a brutal execution by the monster from stable fifty-four!”, Caesar called.

Seven left.

A mare jumped onto my back and drove a knife deep into my already wounded shoulder. I yelled in pain and slammed by head back into hers before she could remove the knife. She tumbled to the dirt gripping her head in her forehooves.

My head hurt like hell, but only made me even more angry. I grabbed the knife with my mouth and ripped it out of my shoulder. I looked at the mare while red tinted my vision, at this point I was really embracing the adrenaline coursing through my body, letting the cheers for blood and the loud rebellious chords of that electric guitar music into my soul.

I jammed the knife into her gut and started gutting her. She let out blood curdling screams as I jerked the knife around, causing and eruption of blood and guts onto my face.

“By Luna’s grace! He’s an animal!”, Caesar said excitedly.

As I was doing this I noticed a red bar on my EFS, I glanced up and saw a pony running at me with a machete. Great, more weapons! I queued up SATS and tried to shoot him in the head with the rifle, but the shot missed. Groaning, I stood up, dropped the knife, and shot him with every round I had left in the pipe pistol.

Buzzer, six left.

Three more ponies were coming from my left, one was armed with a single shot pipe shotgun. I dropped the pistol, picked up the machete, and jumped behind my old pile of toilets. I reloaded my shotgun, popped back up and fired both barrels into a stallion, tearing right through his piecemeal armor made of thin scraps of metal and rags of cloth.

I telekinetically slid a toilet into the second pony's legs and she fell to the ground. In an instant I jerked her head up with my forehoofes and slid the machete across her throat. She tried desperately to staunch the flow of blood with her forehoofes before going still.

Two down, two more buzzers, four left.

Wait, wasn't there a pony with a-

Fire erupted down my right hind leg as it was peppered with buckshot. I turned to face the third fucker with the single shot shotgun. He was shaking like a leaf, fumbling with the shotgun and failing miserably to reload it.

I looked around but I didn’t see the other three ponies, and Claw was ok, her heartbeat was still strong on the monitor, and nopony was near the cart she was under. I turned back to the terrified slave in front of me. We were both stuck in the same shitty situation, I knew that, I knew it was true of every other pony I’d killed so far in this field. But I only had the option to save one pony, the pony they didn’t want me to save. Anypony else had to die, I had reached the extent of my control in this situation, now I had to put on a show like the Caesar wanted.

I interrupted his pathetic excuse for a reload by beating him to death with my hooves. I beat his head into a bloody pulp, with every other punch actuated by an electric discharge.

The buzzer sounded off. Three left.

Now where were the last three? I heard multiple cracks from a rifle and multiple bullets whizzed past me. I dove back behind that damn pile of toilets. When they stopped firing I peeked my head ever so slightly around the edge. Two of the remaining fighters were up on the pitcher's mound. One, an earth pony mare, was wearing a battle saddle with a semi-automatic battle rifle attached to one side.

She continued to chip away at my shrinking pile of porcelain crappers with her rifle while slowly trotting towards me, he partner following behind her with a Zebra Officer sword sheathed on her back.

“Thanks for the distraction asshole!”, the mare in back yelled, “we never would’ve got to the center without you drawing everypony your way!”

The pile of supplies in the center, shit! Everypony was coming for me anyways, why didn’t I make a break for that earlier?

I took a look at my EFS and noticed one of the bars was slowly moving to the left, my guess was that the mare with the sword was trying to sneak around while I was distracted. I pointed my rifle to the left side of by shrinking pile and waited. Sure enough, the mare poked her head around a pile of tires nearby. I triggered SATS and fired my only remaining rifle round into her head.

The buzzer went off. Two left.

A pony jumped on top of the toilets, “don't. fucking. move.”, a mare said dangerously.

Dammit, rifle mare must’ve ran up when I shot her partner.

“Now I’m going to take that machete and gut you real slow for killing my sist-AAHHHH!”, something slammed into riflemare and I heard a sickening cleaving of metal and flesh. I quickly rolled onto my back in time to see rifle mare fall to the ground next to the pile. Her rifle was cut in half and three deep slashes of meat were cut out of her side. She was still screaming with tears in her eyes as she writhed on the ground.

I looked up and saw Claw standing on top of the toilet pile, she was out of breath and looked to be having trouble standing, but she was still there. Her Claw was covered in fresh blood and she had fire in her eyes as she stared at the rifle mare.

Claw let out a battle cry and pounced on the mare, tearing her limb from limb as the mare screamed in fear and pain.

The buzzer went off. One left.

Claw stood up and trotted over to me, “Hey, are you ok?”

I stood up on shaky legs, I was lightheaded and my whole body was in searing pain. I looked at my EFS, the bar measuring my overall health was a small sliver. “Honestly?”, I said looking at her, “I think I’m one gust of wind away from dying”

She looked at me with concern, “yeah you look that way, that's for sure”

I looked up at the board, it was just me, Claw, and some other mare. “Where's the last one?”

I heard a bright BEEP-BEEP from nearby, “FINISH HER!”,Caesar yelled, erupting a chant of “finish her!” over and over from the crowd.

“They make ponies collars beep if they are unconcious or are hiding for too long”, Claw said.

BEEP-BEEP

I swept up a large pistol off the ground and turned towards the sound. The moment I took a step forward though I stumbled and nearly fell flat on my face, the adrenaline was starting to wear off, and I started to get really lightheaded.

“Woah!”, Claw said as she rushed to my side and steadied me, “here just lean on me, alright? Don't worry, if you make it to the gate they’ll patch you up. Don't want their fighters dying outside the arena”, she said, with the last statement being through clenched teeth.

“Wait”, I said as I pulled off the armored vest from a nearby body I had speared with a pool cue earlier. I looked at the vest, it had been reinforced all over with pieces of metal, but I could see familiar claw marks roughly sewn back together on the inside of the back, and a tag read ‘Property of the Apple Hills Police Dept’. It was my police vest, they must’ve thrown all of my equipment into circulation with the rest of the arena’s equipment. I strapped it on, glad to finally have some armor again.

We trotted over to the last pony, her stomach was torn apart and gutted like an wild animal tore into it. She was laying a large puddle of her own blood and guts breathing small, weak breaths. Wait, I think I did that… holy shit!

“Umm, hey”, I said a bit awkwardly.

Her eyes locked on me in terror.

“Uhh… sorry about… um… gutting you, I think I got a bit carried away”, damnit, why the fuck am I trying to apologize? Just hurry up and kill her, she’ll quit suffering and I’ll get medical attention.

Tears were coming out of her eyes. I checked to make sure the pistol was loaded, it had a large magazine with 21 rounds of 10mm loaded. I pointed it at her head and pulled the trigger.

The damn thing roared and started firing round after round like a damn bullet hose! I held my concentration but didn’t think to let go of the trigger until it ran out of ammo after two seconds. I took a peek at my pipBuck, ‘10mm SMG’.

The crowd had broken out in cheers and applause. I looked at the mare’s body and saw I had completely obliterated her head, whoops. I dropped the SMG, and leaned a little more on Claw.

“And that's game folks!”, Caesar announced, “will our competitors please exit the field immediately!”

The scoreboard displayed a one minute timer that began counting down.

“Come on Shepherd, let's get out of here”, Claw said helpling me to the gate

“So let me get this straight, you restarted my heart with that power hoof?”, she said pointing to the weapon adorning my right foreleg.

I had just finished telling her my side of how things went in the arena back in our cell. I was still winded, but otherwise I was doing really well! The slaver doctors really knew their stuff, I felt a little bad for the unicorn slave they had use her mending spell on me, they pushed the mare to near burnout healing me before making her get to work again on Claw. But at least she didn’t have to fight to the death against her will.

“Why?”, she asked.

“Well I needed something electrical to jumpstart your heart, and this was all I had”

She shook her head, “no not that!”, she looked at the floor and sighed, “I mean, why did you save me at all. The Caesar would have rewarded you for letting me die and I’ve just been a jerk to you from the moment we met”.

I was a bit taken aback by the question, “well... I wanted to try and show them that they didn’t completely control me, that I still had a small amount of choice. And the only power I had over the situation was whether you died, they wanted you dead, so I wouldn’t let you die”

“So… it was out of spite, nothing else?”, she said sadly, “you didn’t care about me beyond spitting in the Caesar’s eye?”

I sighed. No that wasn’t the only reason, “look, if i'm being totally honest here, I do care a little bit about you too. We’re both trapped here, with proverbial guns to our heads, being forced against our will to kill other ponies in the same shitty boat as us for other ponies enjoyment. Even though you were an absolute bitch to me I could tell you were at the end of your rope, the ponies in charge were stacking everything against you for having the gall to bore them, and I felt bad for you because it wasn’t fair… even if you were a bitch”, I added quickly.

“Th-thank you”, Claw said, “nopony has ever stuck their neck out for me, you know? I’ve always had to fend for myself, every pony I’ve ever trusted has either screwed me or left me high and dry when I needed them. So when I met you, I thought you were just another asshole or a stable idiot who was going to die the second the box opened”, she fidgeted on the mattress for a second, “I guess what I’m trying to say is… I’m sorry, for beating you up and calling you a useless idiot stable dweller”

We both were looking each other in the eyes, “thank you Claw, that means a lot”, I said.

Some tears started to form in her eyes and she started to wipe them away, “wha- aw dammit, why am I crying? I never cry, what the fuck?”, she said laughing a little.

“Well you did just die, I think you’re justified in being a little emotional right now”, I said.

She laughed, “yeah I guess you’re right. Shit, I still can't believe I’m still here”

We both sat in silence for a minute, “hey I’ve got to ask, what's with the whole ‘Hellhound Slayer’ thing?”, I asked.

“Oh that?”, she said, “well at the end of each big monthly tournament the Caesar has the top three pairs all fight some big ‘ending challenge’. In my first tournament I got to the end and we had to fight a fucking hellhound!”

“Uhh, what's a ‘hellhound’?”, I asked a little confused.

“You haven’t heard of a hellhound!?”, Claw said in surprise, “how the fuck have you not heard of a hellhound!”

“Hey cut me some slack, I’ve only been up on the surface for…”, I checked my pipBuck’s clock, “going on four days now, and the first pony that I met willing to speak to me beyond ‘I’m gonna kill the shit out of you’ was Bourbon, and you saw how that went”

“You’re kidding! I thought you stable dwellers were supposed to be soft! You were killing ponies back there like you were one of the raiders from my old gang!”

“Wait, you were a raider!?”, I looked her over again, the constant murderous look in her eye, her almost feral demeanor, it made sense! I thought she was just like that from being locked up in here.

“Hey don't look at me like that, I was just a kid when I joined, I didn’t have anywhere else to go, it was either join up or die in the wasteland. They taught me how to fight, how to survive-”

“By killing, raping, and taking from other ponies”, I deadpanned.

“I was never a part of the raping!”, she yelled in anger, baring her teeth with fire in her eyes.

Woah, minefield, I gently pushed her back, “ok. Lets calm down, I just didn’t realize you were a raider. How long were you with them?”

She took a deep breath and calmed down, “sorry. Uhh, I was twelve when I got kicked out on my own, I’ve been here for two years now, and the doctors said I was about eighteen when I first got here, so I guess about… six years?”

“What was it like?”, she looked at me with a questioning look, “I mean how was it going raider? You spent six years growing up with them so you must have some stories”

“Umm…”, she looked a little uncomfortable, “you know, I’d really rather not talk about it”

She gave me a begging look not to press further and I took the hint, “ok, that's fine, uhh… you were going to tell me what a hellhound was earlier?”

She brightened up a little, “oh yeah! Hellhounds, umm…”, she rubbed her chin for a minute, “how to describe it, take a dog, scale it up to about three times the size of a pony, give it retractable claws capable of tearing through steel like paper, and make it ten times angrier and bloodthirsty than you were back in the arena, and you’d have a hellhound”

“Ohh”, that didn’t sound pleasant to fight.

“Yeah, ‘oh’”, she said, “anyways, it tore through one pair right away, another pair tried to shoot it, but it got them too. That only left me and my partner, we were both pegasi, she had a piece of rebar and I had a knife, not great odds. We charged it knowing damn well we were probably going to die. It swiped at her first and she went down, as it started tearing into her I went and cut it across the eyes. It freaked the fuck out after that, It smacked me out of the air and I went flying back a few yards before rolling to a stop in the dirt. I was bruised but other than that I was fucking fine, none of its claws had touched me somehow”

“What happened after that?”, I asked.

“Shut up I’m going too”, she said, “anyways I charged it again, this time I had a bit of an edge. With it blind and stupid, I could avoid getting hit while I cut the shit out of its head. It felt like an eternity but eventually it dropped dead. I was nicknamed the ‘Hellhound Slayer’ and the Caesar had three of its claws turned into a gauntlet for me to use. I always prefered to just fight with my hooves anyways so it was perfect”

“I bet the crowd liked you back then”, I said remembering the whole ordeal in the arena that spawned from her being ‘boring’.

“Yeah, I was hot shit back then”, she said, “I was fresh blood that spiced things up, and I was popular for a while. But eventually they got bored with the raider that killed a hellhound, and Caesar started promising rewards to any pony that killed me”

“That's what pisses me off the most about this place”, I said looking at a camera, “they already force us to fight against our will, but they also consider it a capital crime to bore them, bastards”

“Yeah, but that's how things work here, you fight until they get bored of you. After that they start pushing the other fighters to target you specifically, and throw you in more consecutive fights more quickly so you don't have time to recover. Hell, I got a nice steak dinner and an exemption from an entire tournament when I killed a boring seasoned fighter myself”, she rubbed her belly, “fuck I wish I could eat like that again. Anyways when my time came up they found I was a lot harder to kill, I’m pretty fucking fast and good with my hooves so I kept living. My partners stopped helping me so I stopped helping them. I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep it up though, eventually Caesar would really stack things against me and he would get his dead body”.

“Yeah I remember, ‘we don't get our freedom unless we make this slow’”, I said with a scowl.

“Yeah, Caesar doesn’t just give ponies stuff as good as four working power hooves directly unless he really wanted somepony dead. He must’ve realized those two pegasi were good hoof fighters and gave them that offer”

“Well maybe ‘The Stable Monster’ and ‘The Hellhound Slayer’ are an entertaining enough pair to get the Caesar to cut you a little slack?”, I said half jokingly.

“Maybe”, Caesar’s said through the speaker.

I looked at the camera, “oh hey Caesar, I didn’t realize you were there, did you enjoy the show?”

“Indeed I did, it was a pleasant surprise. You see, I thought Bourbon was lying to me yet again when he said you were one hell of a fighter. But after a while I decided to humor him and accept you as payment for his debt. After all, even if you did turn out to be useless, I figured just the appearance of a stable dweller would raise a few eyebrows, and you wouldn’t be able to give Claw any help even if you wanted to”, he started chuckling, “but what I got wasn’t what I ever would’ve expected in my wildest dreams! Not only did the crowd witness you bring a pony back from the dead, but then you crushed another fighters skull with that beautiful power hoof and started going on a rampage! Oh and that line you yelled beforehoof, ‘degenerate, dirt eating, surface mules!’ ohh!”, I heard the sound of an air kiss being made with his hoof, “Priceless!”

“You better hope I never find a way to get this collar off, because if I do, I promise I’ll show you and your slaver buddies what a real show looks like”, I said

“Oh I doubt that”, he said nonchalauntly.

Suddenly I felt electricity coursing through me and I screamed. Oh Luna I screamed as my whole body erupted in pain. I collapsed to the ground writhing. Mercifully it only lasted a second before it abruptly stopped.

“Shepherd!”, Claw yelled as she pulled me into her forehooves.

“If you keep that fighting spirit in the arena I won't do that again, are we understood?”, he said as if he were talking to a child.

I swallowed, then replied, “I understand”.

“Good”, he purred, fuck me I wanted to kill him so badly, and from the angry breathing coming from Claw I could tell I wasn’t alone, “Now I must say, when I was given your bag containing your personal effects, I found the entries in your journal funny”

My blood turned to fire, “quit fucking reading that!”

Without any delay my whole body erupted in pain as he electrocuted me again. I tried to hold in my scream but it was no use, I screamed my throat out as he electrocuted me for a solid three or four seconds.

When the shock released I started crying a little, I now had a small Idea what Claw experienced not an hour earlier. Claw held me a little harder, it was a small comfort, one I was thankful for.

Caesar cleared his throat, “as I was saying. When I first read this I thought you had been grossly exaggerating and embellishing everything you had been doing. But now I realize you were being brutally honest, you accidentally killed your boss, murdered a security guard to escape your stable, proceeded to kill the pony that has had Kvass throw a tantrum all week, killed Swan with an authority rocket launcher, fought through a mutant nest, and walked right through a dreamer anomaly saving Bourbon along the way. By all means Shepherd, you were a great catch”

I sat up, “so what now?”, I asked, being careful to watch my tone.

“you really can't just step aside and let me end Claw?”, he asked.

“Sorry but its your rules, the only power you gave me is the choice to help my partner or not, so I’m going to help my partner”

He sighed, “fine Shepherd, I’ll back off for now, but if you two don't give me good shows I will make a show out of your deaths”, the speaker crackled as he cut the connection.

“Alright, now how the fuck did he shock me”, I said looking at Claw.

“Your collar, the ones they got here are more advanced than your regular ones, it tracks your heartbeat, has an electro shock, a position tracker, and has a speaker that picks up on everything you say. Caesar controls everything from a terminal in his throne booth, collars, doors, cameras, speakers, everything. Are you OK?”

I rubbed my chafing collar, “yeah I’m fine, I just keeping finding more and more reasons to hate this place”

“Yeah, you and me both, what I wouldn’t give to skin Caesar alive”, she said with a glint in her eye.

“Hey, when I find a way out of this collar and we pay him a little visit, I'll let you take first crack at him”

“Is that a promise?”, she asked.

“Promise”, I said with a smile.

A hooded slaver dropped a pan of potatoes next to the cell and trotted off without a word.

“Feeding time”, Claw said.

We trotted over to the edge and started eating.

I grabbed a potato and noticed a note on the bottom of the pan. Making sure there weren't any slavers in the hall, I picked up a potato and the note at the same time and sat with my back to the bars and the camera.

Claw noticed the note, “whats that?”.

“A potato”, I deadpanned, I then held up my forehoof and made a silent ‘shh’ing gesture.

She got the message and kept eating while staring at the note.

I unfolded it so we could both read it.

Do not read aloud,
Im working on getting you out
Eat this note before it is found
-Khan

So Khan wasn’t one of them, that was a relief. It also meant I had somepony on the outside trying to help, if we could just stay alive long enough we had a chance.

I saw a small glint of hope in Claw’s eye that probably matched my own, I popped the note into my mouth and took a bite of my potato to help it go down.

Our next fight wasn't until later in the afternoon, which gave us plenty of time to rest up. The mare at the box didn’t give me any condescending lip this time either.

“Alright Stable Terror, you did good last match, but this time you aren't fighting the small fries and newbies, you’re going up against one pair of hardened fighters, so good luck”, she said before letting me go to the box

As I was trotting up to the box Claw stopped me.

“are you sure you don't want to grab something off the table?”, she asked gesturing to the pile of drugs, “it could give you a real edge”

“No thanks!”, I said quickly, she raised an eyebrow wondering why I was so hesitant, “look, I’m just not ready to start shooting stuff into me yet, ok?”

She rolled her eyes and we got into the box, the door closed and we were picked up.

“What are you taking?”, I asked.

“Stampede, it gives you an adrenaline rush and sets your blood on fire like Rage, but also dulls pain like Medx, its fuckin great in a fight”, she said.

“Ohh, so that explains your little freak out before the box opened last match”

She was about to respond when Caesar came on over the speakers, “Everypony! I hope you’re ready for our next event!”, cheering and hoof somps answered a resounding yes.

Claw injected her stampede and she let out an angry growl as it hit her bloodstream.

I had the double barrel, machete, sharpened flathead, and power hoof from last round, I had been in too bad of a condition to grab any other weapons afterwards.

“On the east side! We have the Hellhound Slayer and the Stable Terror! One a long time survivor of the wasteland and the field, and the other a recently released animal whose path of destruction has only just begun!”,Caesar boomed to a standing ovation, I guess we really were popular, for now at least.

“And on the west side! The deadly and beautiful combination of flame and light, Matchstick and Dust!”, Caesar said over the already cheering crowd.

Fuck they never stop cheering do they? Must be having the time of their lives.

“Fight!”, Caesar yelled as the doors unlocked.

We burst out, and I immediately noticed a difference in layout. Most of the piles of cover were removed, and those that remained were shoved close to the center. I knew exactly what they were doing, there were only the four of us, so they wanted to draw us closer together.

BOOM

The sound of thunder echoed across the field as a shot flew past my head at the speed of sound, leaving a brief faint blue trail behind it. I knew the gun that made the shot before I even saw it. An aqua unicorn mare with a surprisingly well kept mane and also carrying a bunch of other boxy weapons was floating my baby, Thunder.

I had made it to a pile of cover and she dove behind a bit of cover of her own not that far away from me. I jumped on top of mine and failed to shoot her peeking head before she took cover again, “that's mine you bitch!”

“Look out!”, Claw yelled a second before plowing into me, driving me back behind cover right before the whole barricade was set ablaze with a loud FWOOSH.

“Whoa, that was a close call!”, Caesar announced.

I peeked my head around and saw the culprit, her partner was an earth pony dressed head to hoof in battered yet heavily reinforced and armored turnout gear. He was wearing a battle saddle equipped with a homemade flamethrower. His partner could pin us at range and he could cook us up close, shit. I tried to shoot him with my shotgun but all it did was piss him off, he responded by sending another burst of fire my way, double shit.

“Claw, see if you can't get Matchstick’s attention, I’m gonna kill his partner then shoot him with Thunder, alright?”, I said as quietly as I could to Claw.

She gave me a nod before shooting off into the air. Columns of flame started flowing all over. I peeked out to see Claw flying circles around him and making fake attempts to get close, causing him to fire.

Dust popped up out of cover with Thunder charged and ready to shoot Claw.

That wasn't fucking happening.

“Oh no you dont!”, I yelled, firing my other shotgun shell at her. It missed and hit the barricade, but I wasn't really aiming anyway, she jumped back behind her cover startled. I jumped out and charged her cover, reloading as I went. I rounded the side with the intent of murder…

And nopony was there!

Wait no, something was there, right in front of me. I couldn’t see it, and neither could my EFS, but I could just… tell. Something was right in front of me. I waved my hoof in the space in front of me thinking I was losing my mind when I felt myself slap a pony!

Dust dropped her invisibility spell and I jumped back startled (also, invisibility spell! Seriously!? She got my gun and could do more than one spell too, great). She took advantage of my surprise and tackled me to the ground. Jamming my favorite gun right into my neck, with my collar between the rails.

“I don't know how you saw through my little trick handsome, but it won't matter now”, she pulled the trigger and an electric jolt surged through me, momentarily paralyzing me.

The buzzer went off, “and the Stable Terror is dead!”, Caesar yelled mournfully.

“YOU BITCH!!”, Claw yelled before plowing into the mare, sending them both rolling away a couple yards. Dust started screaming as Claw ripped her apart.

Two things registered in my head.

1) Dust apparently didn’t know she had to reload Thunder, (in fact she probably just thought it was a lightning musket and not a railgun)

2) I wasn’t dead, I could still feel my steady and hammering heartbeat just fine!

“Dust!”, Matchstick yelled as he ran by me thinking I was dead.

I jumped up and tackled him from behind, I pulled out my machete and sunk it into the back of his neck. The buzzer went off as I severed his spine, and almost simultaneously the buzzer went off for Dust.

I looked up at the screen and sure enough there was a flatline next to my name, what was going on?

The blade was stuck in his neck and I gave up trying to pull it out, instead I recovered my shotgun and Thunder.

“Umm, it seems the Stable Terror is back form the dead! Once again he cheats the grim reaper!”, Caesar said causing a great cheer from the crowd, but he sounded nervous too, real nervous…

Claw’s head shot up and turned to me. She flew over and gave me a bloody hug, “Shepherd! Holy crap, I thought you were dead!”. The hug lasted for a couple more seconds before, she pushed me away, looking embarrassed. “uhh, that didn’t happen” she said quickly while looking away.

I gave her a small hug with one of my forehooves, “it's good to see you ok too”

She gave me a small smile back.

“Alright, well we seem to be having some trouble with the Stable Terror’s collar, umm”, the Caesar still sounded nervous, “but will the competitors please vacate the field immediately”

The one minute time turned on with a beep right as I processed what he just said, I looked slowly down at my collar and saw the light was off. I didn't let Claw walk toward the gate when she tried to leave.

“Shepherd, what are you doing? We have to go or they’ll blow the collars”, she said confused.

I answered by cranking up Thunder, pressing the rails against her collar and pulling the trigger. She let out a small scream as she dropped to the ground in a small spasm. At the same time I heard the buzzer and looked up to see her flatlined on the monitor.

The whole crowd went silent.

“Gah! Shepherd what the fuck!”, she yelled standing up.

I answered by ripping my collar off.

Her eyes went wide, I ripped hers off and she gave a small yelp as I did so. She rubbed her neck and took a deep breath. I had only been wearing mine for a day and I felt amazing. I could only imagine the feeling she was having after wearing it for two years.

We both looked slowly up to the Caesar’s box.

“fly us up there, now!”, I yelled to Claw.

“Shoot them!”, Caesar yelled in pure panic.

I jumped onto Claw’s back and we shot off the ground right before it was riddled with bullet holes. We soared right to the window like a bolt of lighting. We smashed right through the glass, rolling onto the floor.

We both stood up (rather painfully covered in cuts and scratches from broken glass) and faced the Caesar himself.

He was sitting on a large, overly padded electric wheelchair next to the announcer's microphone, he had a terminal flanked on all sides by a large monitor setup behind him. The Caesar himself though, ooh boy, he was the fattest earth pony I had ever seen, he was like a round ball of fat. I don't even think earth pony would be suitable here, he was more like a landwhale!

“Hey Caesar”, I said, noting how I was being broadcast over the whole field, “how's it going?”

“Uhh”, he said absolutely terrified, “n-not great”

“Oh that's too bad”, I said looking at Claw, who was staring at the Caesar with two years worth of raider fury stored up just for him, her claw clad hoof slowly scratching the floor over and over. There was banging on the other side of the thick metal door at the back of the room and shouts to unlock the door, “I see you value a good lock Caesar”

“I-It’s just a bar”, he said as he started wetting himself and his chair.

It was just a thick metal bar held in place by two racks on either side of the door, holding it shut. “Yeah, but no pony is going to break or pick that anytime soon. We have a nice little bit of alone time. Just you, me, and Claw”

I trotted up real close to him, “do you remember my promise Caesar?”, he nodded slowly. “how about you share that promise with the crowd for me”, I said low into the microphone.

“Y-you’re going to give us a r-real show”, he said.

“That is right!”, I said with glee, backing off and to the side. “But first, I have a second promise to keep, Claw”, I turned to my partner, “have at em”

She smiled in sadistic glee and pounced on the Caesar, knocking his wheelchair over as she drove him into the ground. They both started screaming as she began slashing him to pieces. He was screaming in pain while Claw was screaming in intangible tongues, just letting out all the anger and pain she had built up all this time.

I saw a bunch of pegasus slavers flying towards the windows and quickly shut the metal shutters above them. With me and Claw now safely sealed in the room I set to work on the terminal.

It really did control everything, the monitors on the wall around the terminal were linked to the cameras, a lot of slavers were milling about nervously, and there were even more slave fighters in the cages below. They were all already more than armed enough for an uprising, the only thing in their way were the collars.

I input a few commands and watched as all the collars lights died. The slaves slowly began to take notice, and one or two had already pulled theirs off. I turned on every microphone in the field and amongst the cages. I blew into the microphone, getting a nice ring to echo through the whole damn place.

“Hello everypony, this is the Stable Terror, yet another one of the countless ponies the Caesar and the rest of his buddies enslaved and forced to ‘perform’ for them”, I said, “well, I promised Caesar I would give him and his crowd a real show if I ever got free. But I can't exactly do that alone. As some of my fellow enslaved fighters have already noticed, I’ve deactivated every one of your slave collars. Now, I don't know about the rest of you, but I feel like getting me some good old fashioned revenge with my freedom, don't you think?”.

The enslaved fighters began cheering and pulling off their collars, all calling for slaver blood, “that's what I thought”, I said as I hit a button and unlocked every cage and door in the stadium, “break a leg”.

The slaves flooded out of the holding cages below and within minutes the sounds of screaming and fighting broke out all over the stadium. I watched in satisfaction as pure carnage broke out across the screens, now this was a show!

I noticed the screaming behind me had stopped and turned to see Claw bathed in blood and sweat, Caesar was nothing but a big pile of gore.

“Fuck, the fat bastard wouldn’t die, half the time I was just cutting through fat!”, she said out of breath, “now what?”

I noticed my old mailbag sitting on the floor and floated it over. Sure enough, everything I had once had in it was there, my journal, the lighter, the gas mask, some food, some ammo, a roll of healing bandages, my empty canteen, even the book of arcane sciences and my frying pan were there. “Well I don't know about you, but I’m getting out of here”, I said looking to the door as I threw the bag strap over my neck and back to rest on my shoulder.

“Oh come on, we just got free and you don't want to kill some more slavers!? At least let me kill a couple more first!”, she said in dismay.

“You can stay if you want, but I’m putting as much distance between me and this place as I can, besides”, I looked back at the monitors, “I already got my revenge”

“What? Shepherd I want to stay with you”, she said, “Caesar’s slavers killed my whole gang, and even if he didn’t I wouldn’t want to go back anyways. You stuck your neck out for me, you saved my life, fuck you even just gave me my freedom! You’re the first pony that I’ve genuinely trusted in a long time. If you’re going somewhere, I’m coming with”, she said with determination.

I looked at Claw for a minute, sizing her up and figuring out if I really wanted her with me. She was a fighter, that much was for sure, she was good with her hooves, and that claw made her particularly lethal. She was fast too, with a lean body built for pure agility, and wings that let her fly, which was a huge plus. She probably knew far more about the wasteland than I did, and it would be nice to have a guide I could trust. She was… aggressive, but I kinda liked it, she didn’t take shit from nopony and was always ready for a fight.

But most of all, I trusted her, and unlike Bourbon I had genuine reasons to. She saved my life a couple of times in the arena too. When I removed her collar she could have shot off into the sky and left me, but she didn’t. She seemed to genuinely care for me, and deep down, I think I care about her too.

I knew I might regret it later if she really did plan to screw me, but I didn’t care, I wanted this mare at my side going forward. I held out my forehoof for her to shake, “partners?”, I asked with a small smile.

She gave me a small hoofbump, misreading my gesture but still conveying sincerity in her answer, “partners”, she said with a grin.

There were still lots of slavers pounding at the shutters and door trying to get in.

“Now what?”, she asked.

There was a bang as a vent cover on the roof was kicked from the inside. I brought my shotgun to the ready as Claw dropped into a fighting stance. The cover fell down and two striped hoofs shot out in a gesture of surrender, “don't shoot, it's me!”

I recognized that voice! “Claw wait!”, I said quickly, “that’s Khan!”

The middle aged Zebra dropped out of the vent and brushed some dust off. “thank you”, he said, “though I’m surprised to see you two here. I didn’t expect you to escape on your own, nor make cause so much chaos as you did so”

“Yeah well I’m full of surprises today”, I said. I turned to Claw, “Claw, meet Khan, Khan, Claw”

“Hello”, Khan said to Claw.

“Uhh, hey”, Claw said to Khan. She leaned over to me and whispered, “how do you know this porch donkey exactly?”

Porch donkey? I’ve heard stripe before but not that. “Dont worry hes alright”, I said to Claw.

“What are you doing here Khan? Not that I’m not happy to see you or anything”, I asked.

“I was actually coming to rescue you. I knew the Caesar had his door heavily secured, but very few ponies think about the vents, especially these industrial sized ones”, he said gesturing up to the ceiling, “I had been shimmying along when I heard your announcement as you lit the fires of revolution”

“I assume you had an escape plan then?”, I asked as I heard the slavers outside the door yell about getting explosives.

“Yes, we can crawl through the vents all the way to the outside”, he said pulling a table under the opening so me and him could climb up.

“Ugh, I hate tight spaces”, Claw said cringing a little. I couldn’t really blame her, she was a pegasus after all.

The sun was setting over Apple Hills, me and Khan were trotting along the road between stacks of blasted and decayed apartments. Claw was swooping back and forth above us, sometimes doing a small midair loop as she passed.

“You seem to be having a good time”, I yelled up to her.

She swooped down to hover next to us, “are you kidding!? I’m fucking out!”, she said with glee, “thanks again Shepherd, I owe you everything”

“Don't worry about it, I’m just glad to finally have a partner I can trust”, I said.

“So where are we going anyway?”, she asked.

“I figured I’d check out this town called Baleville, its supposed to be built out of a big office building in the center of town. That is, assuming Bourbon was being honest about it”, I said turning to Khan.

“He was being honest”, Khan replied, “I have visited it a great number of times, a town of merchants in a time when trade is almost nonexistent. But the town manages to stay somewhat successful regardless, if it is civilization you seek, it is a good destination”.

“Good to hear”, I turned to Claw, “unless you know a better place to go in this city, that's where we’re headed”

“Sorry, but I don't know shit about this city”, she replied, “I’m from the northeast, out near Fetlock. We’re somewhere in the southwest, somewhere between Las Pegasus, Hoofington valley, and the west fucking coast”

“How did you get all the way out here?”, I asked.

“Caesar”, she said grimly, “he had sent some slavers way out looking for more exotic mutants for his challenges, my gang tried to jump ‘em and we got our shit kicked in. A grenade went off next to me and I blacked out, when I woke up I had a slave collar on. After that they took me back here, fuckers didn’t even lock me in a cage, they tied a rope around my wings and forced me to pull a cart”

“Sounds rough, well hopefully we can wash ourselves off at the river. We might get shot on sight at the gate if we’re still covered in all this blood when we get to town”, I said. We were a mess, my four hooves and head were caked in dried on blood. Claw was completely covered in it after drenching herself in gore, though she actually hadn’t noticed, and had to look herself over when I mentioned it.

“Yeah… I guess I am a little dirty”, she said looking at her blood stained body. She looked back at me, “but after we get to town what do we do then?”

“Find work?”, I replied, “I know a thing or two about fixing and building stuff, so I could probably find a job doing that. Or we can get jobs as guards or mercenaries, we both know how to fight, and I’ve taken a real shinning to shooting things lately. Worse case, we could always find the Authority, Bourbon said they take in stable dwellers”.

But after I finished talking I noticed Khan and Claw weren’t following me. I turned around and saw them both just giving me horrified stares. They both turned to each other.

“I knew I was forgetting something important”, Khan said in worry.

Claw swooped over and landed next to me, she started yanking at my vest. “come on! we have to get you out of that crap now!”, she said panicked.

“Woah woah woah, stop!”, I said pushing Claw away from me, “what crap do I have to get out of? My vest?”

“No your barding dumbass!”, she said terrified, “fuck me I’ve been so stupid, if somepony sees you in that it’d be a dead giveaway!”

“What that I’m a stable dweller?”, I said incredulously, but both her and Khan still looked incredibly worried.

“Yes”, Khan said solemnly, “when we first met, and you told me that this Bourbon had led you to believe the Authority wanted to help stable dwellers, I realized how deeply he had lied to you. Shepherd, the Authority hunts down stable dwellers, and pay a king's ransom to any pony that help them do so”

“Wait, what”, I said as I was hit with what he said, “why would the Authority want to kill stable dwellers? What would they get out of that!”

Again, my companions looked at each other in worry, “that is… a long story, one that coincides with the story of the wasteland itself”, Khan said.

“Could I tell it!”, Claw said brightly, we both looked at her a little surprised from her enthusiasm. Most ponies I met so far besides Khan seemed to hate explaining things, and I could imagine Khan has had a similar experience. “What?”, she said, “I like stories, shoot me”

“Sure, you can tell the story. I’m always interested in hearing other people’s versions of the wasteland’s history”, Khan said, “Though we may want to take shelter inside where where we are not as exposed.

I sat inside the apartment staring at my old barding. It was in bad shape, it had multiple lines torn out of the back from Nosalises, the right sleeve was missing, there were holes in the front from getting shot in the chest, a large piece was torn out of the shoulder from when I got stabbed, and it was covered in dried on blood and dirt. I couldn’t bring myself to burn it like Claw suggested, it's not that I missed stable 54 or my life back there, but it still separated me from the rest of the wastelanders. Wearing it labeled me as somepony who was educated, healthy, and still somewhat civilized, but it wasn’t worth having a target on my back.

Oh well, at least I still had my pipBuck, and there wasn’t anything that would make me give that up.

I stuffed the barding into the bottom of a reclining chair before returning to Claw and Khan, who were sitting next to a small campfire in the courtyard in the center of the apartment complex. I sat down and felt a raindrop hit my muzzle, I looked up to the darkening sky. “We probably shouldn’t stay outside”, I said remembering that storm from my first night out.

“Don't worry, this isn't going to get worse than a light sprinkle for the next hour”, Claw said dismissively.

“How do you know that?”, I asked.

“Um, Im a pegasus, remember?”, she said like I was an idiot. When I just kept staring she realized I still didn’t understand, “oh shit, stable dweller, right. What do you know about pegasus magic?”

“I know you can fly, and you can walk on clouds, because you all used to live in sky cities”, I said.

“Yeah that's most of it, but we can also sense weather, so I can tell the pathetic clouds above us won't be dropping much water”, she said gesturing up, “the clouds behind them are a lot worse, but they’re still pretty far away”.

“Huh, interesting”, I said, “now you were going to tell me why this Authority group wants to kill me?”

“In order to explain that, we have to tell you the story of how the wasteland as it is today came to be”, he looked to Claw, “you said you wanted to tell it?”

“Hell yeah I do!”, Claw said excitedly...

When the war between the Zebras and Equestria ended with, you know, the bombs blowing everything up, the whole world just sort of went dark. For the first 150 years all that was left were bombed out ruins, radiation, and mutants everywhere. There were lots of ghouls too, ponies and other sentient creatures who got irradiated and didn’t have the good fortune to die. Many went feral and turned into mindless zombies, and the ones that managed to hold onto their sanity just sorta hid in whatever dark crevice they could find.

One of the first places hit when the bombs began to fly was Cloudsdayle, the Pegasus capital. The pegasi immediately put the cloud generators into overdrive and completely closed the sky with grey clouds. With the surface sealed away, the pegasi formed a new government, the Grand Pegasus Enclave. They declared the surface “contaminated” and said we could never return there. Ministry mare Rainbow Dash said “fuck that”, told the Enclave to go fuck themselves, then took off down to the surface. The Enclave declared her, and any other “Dashties” like her, traitors. They sent an assassin to kill her, but nopony knows if she actually pulled it off, all anypony knows is Rainbow dash was never seen again.

But the Enclave fucked themselves, you see before the bombs started raining ministry mare Rainbow Dash had built this giant network of weather control towers all over Equestria called the “Single Pegasus Project”, or “Single Pony Project”, who cares. Point is, the Enclave repurposed the towers to allow them to grow food on the clouds. The only problem? It was all remote controlled from a single, heavily fortified sky fortress only accessible by Rainbow Dash and the Princesses themselves, it even had this impenetrable shield that only let those three specific ponies through, and with the princesses dead in Canterlot, and Rainbow Dash missing, they couldn’t get in. Now this was a problem because if somepony else found a way inside, they could destroy the entire Enclave, and there wouldn’t be a damn thing they could do about it. So they built their capital around it called Neighvarro, and threw as many guns, troops, and airships as they could around it to protect it.

Meanwhile, the ponies “lucky” enough to be accepted into the stables were surviving underground. Only they weren't very lucky at all, because the sadistic bastards at stable tec decided that it was a great idea to experiment on the ponies they were supposed to be saving. A lot of stables, at least half, ended up killing everypony inside them. But the other half still managed to survive, and after 150 years most of the stables that were left opened up and their dwellers entered the wasteland, while a hooffull stayed closed. Some dwellers started settlements, some started bandit gangs, some dug through old ruins, all kinds of shit started happening.

It was chaos for the first 40 years, but slowly things became more organized, the roving warlords were reduced to small raider gangs. Trade routes were formed after a group of ponies living inside Tenpony tower finally opened their doors. The snooty basterds were what remained of the scientists and doctors from before the war, and they passed down their knowhow to their kids. They dominated the market with one thing every pony needed, clean water, they took control of all other organized trade and were soon the big “hub of civilization” in the wasteland, and pretty soon they had experts from all sides of the wasteland looking to get in, only making them more powerful. They used bottle caps as currency and pretty soon every other pony was using them too, since you could exchange ten bottle caps for a flat gallon of water, always.

But other groups were also getting organized, with three becoming particularly big and bad. The first was Red Eye and his army of slavers, who were trying to rebuild Equestria on the backs of slave labor. There was the goddess, a Ministry of Magic experiment gone horribly wrong, who was dragging every unicorn she could find to her in Maripony to join her in “unity” and be transformed into an alicorn. That may sound pretty great until you hear about how the process would strip you of your identity, turn your body into one of three types, then dunk your mind into a hive mind where it was dissolved and torn apart. If she had her way, she would have turned every unicorn into an alicorn under her control, and killed every other living thing in existence. Red Eye was helping her for a time, until he decided he wanted to become a goddess himself, but I’ll get back to that. Finnally, you had the Steel Rangers, these mother fuckers. They were what was left of the Equestrian Army, they felt they had a divine right and ownership over anything more advanced than a toaster. They would raid entire towns and stables, and sometimes kill everypony inside, just for their tech.

Things were looking bad, but then a hero emerged from Stable Two, The Hellmare, The Stable Dweller, the one and only “Lightbringer”. She set out looking for her friend, a mare singer named Velvet Remedy who ran off into the wasteland, you can even hear some of her music every now and then on the radio. Anyways, by the time the Lightbringer found Velvet, she had seen how fucked up the wasteland was, and set out to do something about it. She went on a rampage, killing raiders, slavers, mutants, and all kinds of other shit, she even killed a dragon at one point! she was unstoppable.

After rutting Dj Pon3’s assistant, the Lightbringer grabbed a bunch of guns, got some ponies to back her up, and set out to stop the Goddess first, and by stop, I mean she blew her into oblivion with a fucking balefire bomb! She even knew the Enclave were trying to make an alliance with the Goddess and timed it so the bomb killed the Goddess and an entire Enclave fleet! After that the alicorns lost their hive mind and scattered, a bunch were killed, and others went into hiding.

After this, the Stable Dweller found out that the steel rangers were attacking her home stable, so she swooped in planning to slaughter all the Steel Rangers she found. Only when she got there, she found that most of the Steel Rangers were actually against the whole thing and their bosses locked them up, planning to execute them. After freeing them, the traitor Steel Rangers formed the “Applejack Rangers”, with the goal to start trying to help ponies with all their firepower. This started a civil war between the old traditional rangers and the new traitor rangers, and eventually the traitors won out.

The Enclave didn’t take kindly to their fleet getting fucked over by a dirty surface dweller, so they sent down a full invasion force to put the wasteland in its place. They took over Tenpony and started wiping every organized group they found, which put them at war with Red Eye. The Stable Dweller snuck into Red Eye’s compound and found out he planning on turning himself into something like the Goddess, so she bombed him the same way she did the actual Goddess, leaving only crater where his cathedral once stood in the center of the Everfree forest.

Finally, she gathered every ally she had to this dragon’s cave, and came up with a plan to stop the Enclave. The next day went down as the day Fire Rained From The Sky, the Enclave came down on the wasteland with the full force of their military, they blew up the old Steel Ranger HQ in Stable Tec headquarters, demolished the ruins of Canterlot, and started just killing left and right, destroying what was left of Red Eye’s army in Fillydelphia. Meanwhile, the Stable Dweller attacked Neighvarro with all of her allies and a giant, fire breathing dragon!...

“What happened after that!”, I said in excitement, this was great!

“Uhh… well… the Lightbringer... died”, she said sadly.

“What!? Bullshit, she was unstoppable!”

“Well it turned out she was stoppable. She goated the dragon helping her into burning her to ash. I don't know why, a lot of ponies think she was just killing herself after her plan to get inside failed”, she said.

“Soo… what happened after that?”, I asked.

“That-”, Khan began with a short pause, “brings us to the story of how the Authority came to be, and why you are hunted today”. He turned to Claw, “do you mind if I tell this part, I’ve been watching this unfold ever since I was a colt”

Claw nodded and Khan took over…

Immediately following the death of the Lightbringer, the Enclave were far from victorious. They had made great gains, but they failed to achieve the total victory they needed. The wasteland was still a huge and viable threat, and the Grand Pegasus Enclave’s foundation of power was falling apart. You see, the Enclave kept control over the Pegasi population by weaving a careful web of lies, at the center of which was an infallible “truth”, the surface was uninhabitable. But the size and destruction of the conflict shattered this lie, the surface was inhabitable, and the military had been lying to them all in order to stay in power.

A peace was brokered by a group of ponies from both the wasteland and the Enclave, whose words calling for unity, security, and the reconstruction of Equestria to what it once was managed to end the conflict. From the wasteland were Professor Zodiac, a brilliant pre war scientist whose body had been reduced to a brain in a robotic jar, but whose mind was as sharp as ever, Life Bloom, a doctor and skilled unicorn spellcaster from Tenpony Tower who was tired of seeing the resources of Tenpony wasted on elegance and plenty for the few when it could be used to help the many, and Prince Splendid, a member of the remnants of Equestrian nobility, a visionary who had great plans to truly bring order and prosperity back to Equestria. From the Enclave were Ardent Vortex, a pegasus revolutionary who had been nearly executed by the Grand Pegasus Enclave for speaking out against them, and Lighthooves, a high ranking pony in the Enclave’s intelligence division, who had seen their lies first hoof and had grown to despise the military leadership that brutally clung to power.

These ponies gained sweeping support from the pegasi of the enclave and the inhabitants of the wasteland, they stoked the fires of anger and pointed it all at the ponies in power. They lynched the Twilight society, a group of ponies that had been secretly running Tenpony in the background, after painting them as architects to the invasion. Then they publicly executed the remaining Enclave council members in a grand spectacle that was broadcast all across the Enclave, and to any receivers that could pick it up in the wasteland.

Things were uneasy in that time, the cloud ceiling was removed and sunlight was returned to the wasteland, pegasi began trading and gathering resources from the wasteland, and what little excess food the Pegasi had were brought down to the wasteland. But there was unease and tension in the air, and for the most part the new governing body created by this group, “The New Equestrian Authority” was only playing peacekeeper, using the remnants of the Enclave military to keep the peace, killing raiders and the like.

Then, the Remnant attacked. You see while all of this was going on there were still plenty of Zebras surviving in their own destroyed homeland. One group, known as the Remnant, had begun to rise to power around the same time as Red Eye and his slavers. They forcefully conscripted every zebra they could find into their ranks with one goal, “Carry out the Caesar’s final order, and destroy Equestria”. Under the command of the ruthless Legate, they invaded Equestria a second time with the intent to finish a war that had been over for two hundred years. They began wiping out entire settlements and regions, killing every pony they found. A series of missiles struck the remaining pegasi cities, infecting their populations with a deadly virus that turned those infected into bloodthirsty cannibals, forcing the pegasi out of the clouds to live on the surface.

The Authority mobilized immediately, they repurposed Red Eye’s factories in Fillydelphia and had even managed to breach and shut down Hoofington’s automated defenses, somehow eliminated the deadly enervation fields that permeated the place that were capable of melting a pony in seconds upon extreme exposure, and reactivated it’s numerous factories. They amassed a large, well equipped army that put the one from before the war to shame, they were armed with new weapons and armor based on pre war prototypes, they were given cybernetic augmentations that made them, faster, stronger, and better than the average pony, and were given brain implants that immediately granted them the training they needed.

They crushed the Remnant and killed the Legate. But as the zebra army fell back broken and defeated, a shadow fell upon Equestria. You see those brain implants the Authority gave its soldiers weren’t removable, none of the cybernetics were. And those brain implants had a second, hidden function, mind control. With the flick of a switch the Authority had a heavily equipment and completely loyal army under its command.

They destroyed any group that could oppose them and turned many of the cities in Equestria into fortified industrial fortresses, purposely leaving the wasteland as lawless and deadly as they could. Any time a large group would organize in the wasteland with the intention of protecting each other they were crushed, only large raider clans, bandits, slavers, and ruthless warlords were allowed to rise to power in the wasteland so long as they left the Authority’s forces alone.

They gave the ponies of Equestria a choice, give up your freedom and work in our factories under our protection, or live in the wasteland and fend for yourselves in the hell we have created.

The wasteland was made even more dangerous with the creation of the dead zone. You see, a short year after the Authority took a stranglehold over the wasteland, and two years after the attack on Neighvarro, a great explosion of taint and radiation erupted from the ruins of Maripony. This “taint wave”, led to new breeds of all kinds of existing wasteland creatures, as well as the creation of the Dead Zone, a large area where the air is permeated with high levels of taint and radiation, capable of killing anything that isn’t mutated in a matter of seconds within it. It surrounds its epicenter at the Maripony crater in a large area, covering a quarter of Equestria, and reaching far above the clouds. The radioactive taint field is constantly fueled by radio-magical emissions that erupt from Maripony seemingly at random.

These emissions also affect the rest of Equestria at large too, they create powerful Taintstorms that quickly irradiate any pony exposed without shelter, and slowly mutates them after enough exposure, assuming the storm itself does not kill them first. The emissions are also responsible for the creation of anomalies, new supernatural hazards, that can be quite deadly should a pony find themselves caught in one.

The Zone is the one place the Authority cannot enter, as Taint will ignore any form of worn or generated protection field, unlike radiation. The only bright side that may be found from the Zone’s creation is that it provides a safe haven for the post-unity Alicorns, who have been mercilessly hunted by the Authority after finally regaining their sense of selves.

Just after this, a final event occured, the shattering of the moon. One night, a bright light lit up the wasteland, and everypony looked up to see a massive explosion destroying a quarter of the moon. After that, a broken eclipse formed when the broken moon crossed the sun’s path a few days later. The Authority claimed the explosion was an unfired pre-war megaspell misfiring after so many years of decay, and the eclipse was perfectly natural, and I have heard stories that give some credit to that. But everybody took it as a sign, many ponies still looked to the sun and moon and thought of Celestia and Luna, thinking that maybe they were still watching over us in the afterlife. Many felt the eclipse and explosion was the princesses finally turning their backs on us, that we were now alone in the hell we had created...

“What happened after that?”, I asked again.

“After that we entered a new dark age, with the Authority continuing to march forward in the name of progress, forcing everypony to choose whether to live in servitude or try to survive on their own in the harsh wasteland full of whole new threats and dangers”, he said, “there is a resistance that tries to fight back, but very few ponies believe in them. They rarely do anything more than win pyrrhic victories at best, and most ponies have become accustomed to the new world order”.

“The ending was a little dramatic but yeah, that pretty much sums it up”, Claw said.

I really mulled over what they had said for a minute. A lot has happened over the last 240 years, and now the authoritarian government with an army of cyber ponies wanted me dead. But that still left one question…

“Why do they want me dead?”, I asked, “or any other stable dweller for that matter, what could we do?”

“Put simply, they dont want another Lightbringer to arise”, he said, “the Authority actually hunts down any pony who wears a pipBuck, calling them Stalkers, because a pony with a pipBuck is already much more of a threat. With a pipBuck, a pony is suddenly an expert markspony, they know how to diagnose wounds and illnesses as well as the best doctor, they have pinpoint navigation skills, they can pick up and decrypt secure transmissions, and so much more”.

“But stable dwellers are special”, he continued, “stable dwellers grew up in large time capsules of sorts, inheriting all the best and worst traits of the old world to varying degrees. Many inherit some part of the old world that makes them capable of bringing great change to the wasteland, like the Lightbringer, who would be willing to sacrifice everything she had, including her life, to see the world become a better place, or Security, a mare who had the perseverance to endure countless hardships in her attempts to make up for her wrongs and protect others. Even Red Eye, the slaver tyrant, was once a stable dweller, he had a powerful personality that could make even the most despicable dregs of the wasteland follow his orders as he tried to build a better future through pain and suffering. These Stable Dwellers were able to demolish factions who had entire armies under their control and changed the course of history”

“Hell yeah they did!”, Claw said brightly. “if you thought the Lightbringer was cool, wait until I tell you about Security”, she said gushing, “she was the toughest, most badass mare to ever live!”

“It sounds like somepony’s a fanfilly”, I said mockingly.

“She died and was brought back from the dead as a cybermare of death, of course I’m a fanfilly!”, she said.

Wait she what?-

“That’s what scares the Authority”, Khan said getting back on topic, “not Claw being a ‘fanfilly’, but the idea that the Lightbringer and Security represented. The idea that an individual, with the aid of a small group of friends, a pipBuck on their foreleg, and a deep seeded desire in their hearts, can tear down entire empires and bring sweeping change to the world. That, is what the Authority is afraid of, change, and Stable Dwellers are the natural bringers of change, as outsiders and remnants of the old world”

“If that’s true, then why doesn’t the Authority just destroy all the stables? I mean there can't be that many that are still active if what you two said is true”, I said.

“They would, but they don't know where they are”, Khan said, “Stable Tec worked in extreme secrecy to make sure any Zebra invaders wouldn’t be able to locate any stables should they invade after launching their balefire missiles. When the Enclave destroyed Stable Tec HQ, they also destroyed the only official records detailing the stables’ whereabouts. Now they have to search for them, and Stable Tec were very good at hiding their stable’s. If a pony gives the Authority the location of an honest to goodness active stable, they are set up for life, a comfortable home in one of the cities, good food, they would never have to work again in their lives”

“Now I’m starting to see why you two wanted me off the street so bad, and I know why Bourbon wanted to know where my stable was, prick”, I said looking between them. “Why are you two telling me all of this? Couldn’t you two sell me out and live it large for the rest of your lives?”

Claw scooted up next to me and put a hoof on my shoulder, “what kind of partner stabs her partner in the back and sells him out?”, she said, “it's you and me to the end man”.

She turned to Khan, “though I have no idea why you’re not selling him out”.

“I have no interest in luxury or comfort”, Khan says, “What I desire is knowledge, to gain a greater understanding of the world. I am also on a… mission of sorts, and no reward the Authority could give me could aid me”, Khan said looking up at the dark sky.

“What kind of mission?”, I asked, genuinely curious.

“I am sorry but… I do not feel comfortable sharing that just yet”, he said, “you just have to trust me when I say I’m looking for something, something that is extremely powerful and dangerous. If I took the reward I would never be able to continue my search. I would be trapped in a cell of comfort”.

“Plus”, he said looking at my forehead, “I felt it prevalent to make sure your journey didn’t come to an end so soon”.

“What does that mean?”, I said feeling a little uneasy.

“Lets just say you have the potential to do great things, or terrible things, in your future”, he said.

“Oookaay”, I said, not really sure how to take that.

Claw stood up suddenly, and she looked to the sky with a worried expression, “oh no. guys, I think the storm is about to get a lot worse”

“I should be leaving anyways, you have your own path to follow, and I mine”. He held out his hoof for me to shake.

I gladly shook it, “take care of yourself Khan, it's been nice meeting you”.

“And you as well Shepherd, and before I go, please take one last piece of advice: never be afraid to act or make a choice. They are what make us who we are, and those that do not act, fade into nothing”, khan said. He then trotted off through one of the ground floor apartments.

“He’s one wierd stripe, that's for sure”, Claw said, “now what?”

“Now? We head to Baleville”, I said with finality.

“We’re going to Baleville NOW!?”, Claw exclaimed as the rain continued to pour harder, with lightning flashing far away.

“Yes, now!”, I replied, “Caesar had me fight in my stable barding and called me the stable dweller! Even if the slaves won the uprising, everypony will still know there’s a stable dweller nearby! I want to have my pipBuck hidden and be as far away from that damn stadium as I can before ponies come looking for me!”. I gestured upwards, “I’m hoping this storm is buying us some time, and that most ponies aren’t crazy enough to go out in a bad storm like this”

“News flash genius! There are A LOT of crazy ponies willing to do that, and WE are two of those ponies!”, she said.

“Oh come on, where’s your sense of adventure!”, I replied, “or are you scared?”.

“Fuck you! I can handle a storm, but this isn’t a normal storm! This is bad!”, Claw said terrified, “some really bad system is about to hit us!”

We made it to a bridge crossing the rushing river that separated the suburban and residential west side of Apple Hills from the rest of the city. It looked clear enough, just a couple of wrecked skywagons littering the bridge.

Further beyond the bridge, and towering above the center of downtown was a 20 story tall stone building. It looked dilapidated and decayed, but there was light pouring out of many of its windows. The light put it in stark contrast with the rest of the dark dead buildings that were almost all half its size. That was Baleville, Khan said it was the place to go if I was looking for civilization, and right now I could really use some civilization, even if it just meant a shower, a clean bed, and a warm fucking meal.

Claw jumped in front of me, “Shepherd, listen please! every part of my body is screaming that we shouldn't be outside right now. Can we please find some shelter!”

I looked into her terrified eyes for a moment, then really took in what was happening around me. The wind was continuing to pick up, the rain was getting worse, and the booms of thunder and flashes of lightning were becoming more and more frequent.

I was being a stupid pony, Claw was right, we shouldn’t’ve been out in the open in a storm as bad as that. We were partners, that meant we had to trust and listen to each other, and I trusted her.

“You’re right, sorry”, I said guiltily, “we do need to find cover, lets turn around, find a nice place to hole up in while this storm blows over, and get some much needed sleep. We can head to Baleville tomorrow”

Civilization could wait another day, why not?

We turned around and started to trot back when a gunshot ripped a hole in the concrete next to my hooves.

“Don't fucking move!”, at least ten raiders came out of the buildings across the street and held us at gunpoint, shit.

“What do you want?”, I said tensely.

A dirty, rust orange pegasus stallion with a black mohawk trotted out in front of the other raiders, “what do I want?”, the raider said while tilting his head, “I’ll tell you what I want, I want my fucking gun back! The one that Lemons motherfucker took from me!”

Oh fuck, “I dont know what you’re talking about”, I lied.

“Bullshit, you’re lying, and you want to know how I can tell? The feathers of my granddad, my dad, and me are still attached to it”, he said pointing at the feathers tied around Thunder’s stock.

“Umm, Kvass! We might want to get some cover!”, one of the raiders said.

“Shut the fuck up! Are you in charge! No! I'm not afraid of some fucking rain!”, he snapped at the raider.

“Look, I didn’t know it was your gun when I got it, and I’m not giving it up now”, I said, I meant what I said before, I wasn’t backing down to others anymore.

He started chuckling, then laughing, “you think- ha ha ha- you think, I want your gun?”, he said with a smile like I just said a joke. “No, you motherfucking little prick, I WANT MY GUN! THE GUN MY GRANDDAD MADE WHEN HE WAS DRIVEN OUT OF THE CLOUDS DOWN TO THE FUCKING GROUND! THE GUN THAT WAS PASSED DOWN TO MY FATHER, THEN TO ME!”, he screamed.

“Holy shit! Shepherd, we need to wrap this up now!”, Claw yelled over the howling wind, now near blinding rain, and the thunders following the flashes of lightning all around the city.

“Claw I don't think we’re going anywhere right now”, I said quietly (relatively speaking, it was loud enough she could hear me, but Kvass couldn’t over the storm).

“You destroyed it, made it your gun, you cut it up and made it your own. I’m gonna make you pay for that by cutting you up the same way you fucking stable prick!”, he yelled.

I was trying to figure out what we were going to do when lightning struck the middle of the street.

But this wasn’t normal lightning! This lightning was green, and instead of just striking and disappearing, this lightning kept continuously arcing between the sky and ground, slowly moving down the street as it did so! The moment it hit, my geiger counter also started ticking like crazy, I was absorbing ten rads a second.

I immediately jumped back startled and landed on my side when it hit. “RUN!”, I screamed as I scrambled to my hooves. We ran for the bridge away from the arcing radioactive lightning and the raiders.

I briefly heard Kvass yelling behind us, “I’ll get you you prick! I’ll fucking tear you-!”, and just like that he was drowned out by the storm.

The arcing radioactive lightning was striking all over, and we had to sidestep one when it began arcing diagonally over the bridge. The wind was making it hard to stay standing, and the rain was like a flood falling from the sky. But that wasn’t the worst part, all the clouds above us had turned green as well. Even when we weren’t next to the lightning arc I was still absorbing three rads a second and climbing.

Me and Claw braced against each other as we struggled to cross the bridge. “What the hell is this!”, I yelled.

“Radstorm!”, Claw yelled back, barely audible over the noise.“and that's a Taintstorm!”, she said pointing a forehoof towards the north side of the bridge.

I looked north, and I swear to the dead goddesses, I felt my heart stop. To the north of the city, and racing towards us at an alarming rate, was a wall of thick purple clouds completely covered in purple lightning. It stretched from high in the sky all the way to the ground like a flashing purple wall of death that was racing right to us.

“If we’re outside when it hits we’re dead, or worse!”, Claw yelled.

We scrambled across the bridge as fast as we could. By the time we were across, and had some buildings to act as buffer against the wind, the Taintstorm had already reached the edge of the city.

Claw kept a wing touching my back as we ran, so we wouldn’t lose each other. I ran straight for the most solid building I could see with an open door, an old brick fire station.

We jumped in and slammed the door behind us, I threw the deadbolt just to be safe. My geiger counter stopped ticking immediately. We both just sat with our backs to the metal door as we caught our breaths in the darkness.

“I can't… see… shit”, Claw said between breaths.

I switched on my pipBuck’s lamp, the hallway seemed clear. There were no windows on the door or the walls next to it, so we didn’t have to worry about the storm getting in.

“Lets see if this place has anything we can dry ourselves off with”, I said shivering, we were soaked to the bone. At least it finally washed all the blood off of us.

“Wait”, she said.

BOOM

The whole building shook like an earthquake just hit.

“What was that!?”, I yelled.

“That storm wall just hit”, Claw said standing up, “we aren’t going anywhere now”.

I stood up and led the way through the building, “how do we know that taint stuff isn’t getting in here?”

“The taint in a Taintstorm is mostly held in the lightning”, she said, “it hits hard and quick, but goes away quickly, as long as the building blocks the lightning, it’ll block the taint from the storm”

We found a kitchen with a little wood burning stove. After breaking up some wood chairs, and making use of my newly returned lighter, we had a nice little fire going. We found the bunkroom and dragged two mattresses down to the kitchen where we could be warmed by the fire. I fried up two of my three cans of Cram and we both had a nice warm meal.

My stomach did an odd toss, “you know, this stuff is really good, but it makes my stomach feel weird. I know the tin says its full of preservatives, but it might have gone bad”

“Pre-war food never goes bad”, Claw said, “you’re just not used to eating meat. Don't worry, you’ll adjust”

My bag kept most of the water out again, but my journal was still a little too damp for comfort. I found a resealable freezer bag inside a drawer that I could use to keep it dry from now on.

As I was writing, I noticed Claw was staring at my pipBuck. “What?”, I asked.

“Nothing, its just… weird knowing a stable dweller”, she said.

“Well it feels weird knowing a pegasus”, I replied.

This whole time I could still hear the raging storm outside. The wind picked up even more for a brief moment, shaking the entire station.

I looked up at the roof, thinking about the nightmare storm outside. “How do you ponies survive up here?”, I asked, wondering how I was going to do the same.

“We just do”, she said.

Fair enough.

Footnote:
Level Up!
Level 3
Perk added: Telekinetic Focus (Level 1): You’ve gotten pretty good at splitting your focus, enough to help you out in a fight! You can now wield two weapons simultaneously without reduced accuracy, and can wield a third weapon with 60% accuracy. This perk also allows multiple objects to be levitated without any additional focus or AP cost.

Author's Note

Author’s Note: I’m excited to be posting this chapter for a number of reasons.

The first reason is because this chapter marks the end of the “Introduction/wanderer” arc, and the beginning of not only the “Baleville” arc, but also the beginning of the “Apple Hills” major story arc. The story started picking up in chapter 3, and now we should be going full throttle going forward.

The second reason I’m excited is because this is the first chapter I’ve written since going back and improving my outline for the story. I should be able to release chapters much more quickly now, and the overall quality of each each chapter should be improved.

The final reason is because Shepherd has obtained his first companion, Claw. He has also finally received answers about the surface through Claw and Khan’s stories, which finishes “setting the stage” for Epilogue. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about the Authority and what happened to the original heroes of the wasteland, but now we can really move forward with the story.

I’d also like to thank KKat once again for writing Fallout Equestria, and thank Somber and Tofu for their contributions in expanding the Fallout Equestria universe. Finally, I’d like to thank all of you, the readers! Knowing that other people are actually reading this and enjoying it gives me so much motivation to keep going. As always, any constructive feedback is always encouraged and appreciated.

Entry 6: Baleville

Baleville) I had made an enemy in that Radstorm, the night before I got to Baleville. But at the time I was none the wiser. Instead, I was focused on my long awaited arrival at an actual, civilized settlement, the post-war town of Baleville.

Entry 6: My stomach felt like shit all morning. I tried to open one of the equipment lockers in the garage, but they were all locked. Great.

I pounded on the metal, “come on!”.

“Whats up?”, Claw asked, trotting out from the other side of the large metal fire fighting wagon.

“Nothing, just a pre-war obsesion with locking everything”, I said sourly.

“Hey, it means there’s still stuff in there”, Claw said.

She had a good point, the firestation had been almost completely cleared out. I hadn’t been able to find any worthwhile supplies. Still…

“That doesn’t do us any good if we can't get to the stuff”, I said.

She rolled her eyes and stepped forward, “just think of it like a can”. She reared up with her claw and slashed the metal twice around the lock, rending the the metal apart like a knife to tissue paper and separating the lock from the door. “You just need a can opener”, she said stepping back.

I threw open the locker door with a small smile, happy to have finally defeated a lock (even if I needed a little help to do it). Inside was a full set of a firefighter’s turnout gear, a fire axe, and a breathing apparatus to prevent smoke inhalation.

I nicked the jacket and a left foreleg boot, then took off my bag and armor. I put them on, happy to see the baggy sleeves and left foreleg boot completely hide my pipBuck. Plus the jacket didn’t look half bad either.

“How do I look?”, I said after putting my armor, shell bandolier, and bag back on.

“Like an asshole”, she said brightly, “you’ll fit right in”.

“Thanks”, I said. I took a look back at the locker. The rest of the equipment could still be valuable, and there were a couple more lockers that hadn’t been opened yet.

I grabbed the fire axe with the intent to break my way into the other lockers, “alright, how about we load up with the rest of the gear and sell it all when we get to town?”. I started hacking away at the next locker.

“Uhh, how are we gonna carry it all?”, Claw asked.

“Why don't we load up that firewagon and pull it there?”, I suggested, “we could probably loot some of the heavier furniture too”.

She balked, “you want to pull a firehauler Shepherd!? Are you nuts!”.

“Firehauler? What the fuck is a hauler?”, I asked confused.

She groaned and facehoofed, “do you even know what a roller is?”.

“No”, I deadpanned.

“Alright, come with me”, said flying over to hover in front of the large red vehicle. She continued when I joined her, “Rollers, are self pulling carts that were made before the war. You can tell the difference between a wagon and a roller by the front. If it has reigns to hitch a pony up, it's a wagon. But if it has an engine and a passenger compartment with controls, its a roller”.

I looked back at the Firehauler and I saw her point, there wasn’t a way to hitch a pony to the front. The fact it was self pulling made a lot of sense too, the thing was so big. “But how does it pull itself?”

She pulled open a panel under the front windshield, inside was a large engine, “the engine stupid. Most of them run off of flammable gas, like what’s in that tank back there”, she said pointing to a large rusty tank in the back of the room. It was labeled ‘Flux Enhanced Kerosene Fuel. HIGHLY FLAMMABLE’. “But some, like most of the old military ones, are electric, and run on magical energy. You gotta be careful for those, if you shoot the engine on one it blows up in this big magical explosion”, she said quickly spreading her forelegs out wide for emphasis.

She flew up to the side of the passenger compartment and opened the door. I trotted over and looked in.

“A pony would sit in the driver’s seat behind all the controls”, she said pointing to all the pedals and wheels on the left side of the compartment, “the pedals are supposed to control how fast you go, the wheel turns you, and that lever in the middle controls your direction. At least… that's what I’ve been told”, she shrugged, “I don't know how to drive one of these deathtraps”.

Wow, I was impressed, this was earth pony engineering at its best. I would’ve loved to get a closer look at how this thing worked, but we were running out of supplies and were so close to Baleville.

“Alright, how about we grab a shopping cart from the grocery store across the street then. We could still use some of this stuff to trade for supplies”, I said.

“Now that makes more sense”, Claw said.

We set to work cutting open the lockers and piling the axes, turnout gear, and other equipment in a pile.

Afterward, I dropped the axe and trotted over to the fire station’s main hall ready to go get the cart from across the street.

I stopped when I saw three red bars pop up on my EFS.

Claw swooped through the doorway behind me, I spun around, “shh!”

She stopped confused, I motioned for her to follow me upstairs.

We peeked through the broken blinds of a second floor window down to the street below. There was a heavily armored van sitting out front with its engine going, multicolored smoke was billowing from its tailpipe. A pony was sitting in a makeshift rotating turret on the top, slowly scanning the street ahead with a large, belt fed mounted machine gun.

The engine died and two ponies exited the vehicle, trotting around to stand in front of the armored roller and look out at the bridge. The were both wearing battle saddles and armored leather jackets. They weren’t raiders, that was for sure.

“I can't believe we got assigned fucking guard duty while the others get to party it up in Baleville”, a mare spat.

“What do you expect? We fucked up that delivery at the Iron and that mare died, we’re lucky Nugget didn’t burn half our faces off”, a stallion replied.

“Will you both shut up!”, the mare in the turret said, “Just watch the fucking road, the Marauders have been getting pretty bold lately, they might try to cross the border”.

“What should we do?”, Claw whispered to me.

As much as I wanted some firepower like that turret, I didn’t like our odds. “Let's wait it out”.

Claw sighed disappointedly.

“If they don’t leave after an hour or two, then we’ll do something”, I said, “I just don't want to be on the business end of that machine gun if I can help it”.

“Fine”, Claw whispered, “what now?”.

We continued to search the building, scrounging what little scraps we could find. But just about anything of value that wasn’t locked away was taken. That meant the only things we had found were inside those storage lockers in the garage.

I entered the bathroom and tried the sink, amazed to see it still working. “They sure did build things to last before the war didn’t they?”, I mused to myself. I filled up my canteen, it made my pipBuck click, but it was better than nothing.

I was just stepping away when I was hit with a wave of nausea, I fell onto the toilette and puked up my dinner from last night. When I was finished I checked my medical scanner, ‘Minor Radiation Sickness: -1 END, Nausea’.

Oh great. “Claw! I have radiation poisoning!”, I called out into the hall.

She trotted into the bathroom, “Yeah I think I got it too, my stomach’s been killing me all morning. Who knows how many rads we soaked up yesterday in that damn storm”.

I checked my pipBuck, “about 237”.

She cocked her head, “how do you know?”.

I held up my pipBuck, she took it between her forehooves and looked at the screen. “Huh, this doohickey tells you how much radiation you have in you? What else can it do?”.

“All kinds of stuff, it has an automap feature, can sort your inventory, pick up radio signals, an EFS which spots friendly and hostile creatures around me, and it has SATS, a spell that can help me aim in a pinch”, I said.

“Wow, no wonder the Authority doesn’t want ponies having these”, she said.

Putting my boot back on I decided to take a look in the mirror, wow.

I finally got a good look at the scar I got from that exploding rock. It was pretty deep, like somepony had branded me above the left side of my left eye. It looked… strange, I’m not sure how to describe it.

“You having fun staring at yourself?”, Claw said.

“Sorry, I just haven’t gotten a chance to see my scar yet”, I said flustering.

“It fucked up your face pretty good, I hope you didn’t care about your looks”, she said.

I was about to retort something about it looking cool or something when we both heard screaming and gunfire outside.

We ran back to the window and saw what was happening. A raider was on the roof of the grocery store throwing glass bottles, full of flammable liquid with burning rags tied to their tops, down onto the bandits where they shattered into explosions of flame. They had already hit the roller’s turret and burned the guner to death. The other two were forced to take cover, which left them unable to defend the bridge when a large group of raiders ran across it.

They killed the stallion outright, the other was tackled to the ground by a raider. A couple others joined in and they started beating the crap out of her. It didn’t take long for them to rip off all of her equipment. I turned around as one moved to mount her while she screamed for help, I didn’t need to watch that, I didn’t want to watch that either.

I looked to Claw and she was just staring at them as they continued to (I assumed from the mare’s screaming) rape and beat the mare. Claw just had this blank stare like she wasn’t fully there anymore.

“Claw? Claw?”, I asked quietly, waving my hoof in her face the second time I asked.

She snapped out of it and swatted my hoof away. She glanced back down with a look of disgust before turning and trotting down the hall, “I can’t fucking watch this”.

We had waited for about an hour until the raiders had left. When we stepped out to grab the cart the bandit mare was dead on the side of the road, with blood covering her hindquarters and mouth, and a bullet hole in her head. The van was torched, and the machine gun was missing from the turret.

We had been careful to stick to back alleys and avoid packs of raiders and bandits as we made our way to Baleville. Which wasn’t too hard since they seemed to be focusing on fighting each other.

We trotted up to the front gate of the building, all of the windows and doors on the first three levels had been boarded up and barricaded. It was a twenty story tall stone building with a large sign on the front side that read ‘Roseluck Pest Solutions’ in big steel letters. Below it, above the front gate, a new sign had been built and painted in green letters, ‘BALEVILLE’.

We had finally made it to a real town.

We approached the front gate and a giffin holding a makeshift rifle aimed it at me, “what’s your business here!”.

“Trading!”, I yelled gesturing to our cart full of turnout gear and fire axes.

“Alright, come on in!”, he yelled.

I heard the groaning of motors and the gate slid up, we stepped into the barricaded entrance hall and it slid shut behind us. There was a second gate at the other end of the hall, but it wasn’t open yet. The griffin flew down next to us, he was wearing some old faded and patched security guard barding. It put me on edge, I didn’t want to start a fight with this security enforcer, not after finally reaching a town.

“You two new here?”, I nodded a bit tensely. He gave us a small smile, “well uh, welcome to town! Sorry, I’m not really good at greeting newcomers. Uhh, I’m officer Weld, I watch the gate. We’ll open the inner one for you in a second, but first I need to go over some rules with you. Um, first, no starting fights or killing, if you draw a weapon we’ll kill you, if you draw in self defense, we’ll help you. Second, no stealing, we’re a market town and we take theft very seriously. Third, no touching the bomb, ever”.

I nodded very carefully, “you okay man?”, he said concerned, “you seem tense”.

“Just... making sure I don’t offend you officer, the security enforces from back where I’m from would beat you for just looking at them funny”, I answered honestly, hoping he was the type that appreciated that kind of thing.

He looked shocked at that, “security enforcer? Sir, I’m a guard! I’m here to protect you and the merchants. I wouldn’t beat you up unless you tried to hurt someone else”.

“Wait what?”, I was confused, protect me? That was his job!?

“Yeah, if you get attacked and one of us are around we’ll protect you. You should stay out of the warehouse district though, it’s the slums built into the large underground warehouse below the building. We dont send many patrols down that way, so you’d be on your own down there”, he said.

I wasn’t sure what to say, the whole concept of security protecting others was new to me, “Well uh, thanks for the advice”.

“No problem”, he said. Then he waved to a pony in similar security guard armor next to a small electrical panel, “open it up!”.

He nodded and flipped a switch, a motor groaned and the second gate slid up, revealing a crowd of ponies and voices all going from place to place as they crossed the lobby.

I also noticed a large fucking bomb half buried in the center of the lobby, with glowing green light flowing out of an open hatch on the side.

“What. the fuck. is that!?”, I demanded, pointing at it.

“Oh, thats the bomb”, Weld said brightly like that was normal.

“What, kind, of bomb?”, I asked slowly.

“A balefire one”, he replied.

I looked to Claw and thankfully saw a similar look of horror. I turned back to Weld, “and why, exactly, did you put a balefire bomb in the center of town?”, I asked slowly.

“We didn't put it there, it was just here when the founders of this place moved into the building”, he responded.

“And you dont think maybe you should, I don’t know, disarm the damn thing!?”, I exclaimed. What the actual fuck was wrong with these people!? Who builds a town around an active bomb!

“And what, blow us all up messing with it? We have no idea how it works! It’s perfectly safe anyways. As long as nobody messes with it, we’re fine”, he said with confidence.

I just stood with my mouth hanging open for a minute before I just shook my head, “alright, if you say so. Come on Claw, lets go sell this shit”.

We stepped into the crowded ‘ground floor plaza’ and took in the sights. The lobby extended upwards all the way to a set of large skylights at the top of the building (and a large hole in the ceiling from when a bomb fell through it). The walls of the big central shaft were covered with interior windows that ringed each floor of office space. The entire shaft was filled with shacks and balconies that were protruding out of the side walls and connected by rope bridges and catwalks. These shacks were all the shops and businesses of Baleville, and filled the shaft from ground level all the way to the roof.

The Plaza had a large shack with a sign reading ‘Church of the Glow’, a doctor’s office, a newstand with a filly shouting over the crowd about picking up their latest issue, the mayor’s office, a general store, and of course, the weapon of mass destruction sitting crashed smack in the middle. The ponies in the plaza seemed to be ignoring it, but I also noticed that they made a point of not getting too close either, and left a big empty space around the bomb, so at least they still seemed to mildly acknowledge it was dangerous.

Officer weld’s words, and the townsponie’s confidence around the bomb didn’t change the fact that I was still completely, barding wettingly, terrified to be as close to it as I was! But I swallowed those feelings as best as I could. I wanted civilization, and this was the best I was going to get.

A guard asked Claw to put her weapon away as he passed by. She didn’t have any saddlebags, and her shorts had no pockets, so she had me put it in my messenger bag for safekeeping.

We headed for the general store first. The sign above the door read, ‘Baleville General Supplies’. There was also a smaller sign right next to the door that read ‘We don’t serve changelings!’, whatever that meant.

We stepped into the store, a little bell tingled as I opened the door. I heard a startled mare and a bunch of boxes fall down upstairs.

“Uhh, hello?”, I called out.

“I am coming!”, a mare in a funny accent called down.

A side door opened and an aged zebra mare stepped out, she took one look at us and her eyes went wide in terror. “Who are you!?”, she yelled in shock.

I took a step back in surprise, “uh, I’m Shepherd, and this is Claw”, I said gesturing to my partner, who gave an awkward little wave, “we were hoping to sell off this turnout gear and buy some supplies”.

“Ok, ‘Shepherd’, answer me a question then, are you really who you say you are?”, she asked suspiciously.

“No, I’m the reincarnation of Celestia here to cast judgement upon the wasteland”, I said sarcastically, “what the hell do you think?”.

“I knew it! You are dodging the question just like what a changeling would do! I will not do business with your kind!”, she said dropping into a battle stance.

Wait what!? “Woah, hold on! I was joking! I’m no-”, I said before getting cut off as she started shoving me.

“Out! Out out out out!”, she screamed as she shoved both of us and our cart out of the door. The moment we cleared the doorframe she slammed the door shut and locked it.

We both stood there stunned for a minute. Before I could speak Claw smacked me on the back of my head, hard.

“Ow! What the fuck was that for!?”, I said rubbing the back of my head.

“For being a fucking dumbass!”, she said. “No, I’m the reincarnation of Celestia here to cast judgement upon the wasteland“, she said in a mocking, stupid tone, “the crazy bitch was scared shitless about changelings, and your first response is to mess with her, great fucking idea”.

“You should be scared too!”, a filly said out of nowhere from between us.

We both jumped from being startled, “where the fuck did you come from!?”, I said.

“The newstand”, she said nodding her head to the newstand she was yelling from earlier, “I couldn’t help but notice two new and uninformed ponies were in town!”.

“Alright… and why exactly should we be worried?”, I asked.

“That is an excellent question! One that can be answered in our latest issue!”, she said brightly.

“Uhh, I don't have any money”, I said.

“Do you think I’m blind mister? You have a whole bunch on your chest”, she said.

“What?”, I looked at my chest, but all I had was my bandolier of shotgun shells.

Claw whispered in my ear, “we use ammo as money out here”.

Huh, that actually made a lot of sense, in a somewhat morbid way, ammo was valuable and easy to carry. “How much for a paper kid?”, I asked.

“Three shells”, she said. I hoofed over the ammo and she gave me a paper.

Publick Occurrences

The Changing Truth

August 1, 2117 By Pepper

Noodles. We all eat them. We all love them. And Baleville’s Power Noodles in the Warehouse District has supplied this sustenance for the past fifteen years. From the stilted mechanical cadence of Takahashi's programmed Japanese, to the fragrant steam that wafts from each bowl, to the scalding tang of each delicious mouthful - the ordering and eating of noodles is but one of many shared equine experiences. Or is it?

I was struck by this very question as I sat at the counter of Power Noodles last Wednesday night, just after 5:00 pm, enjoying a dinner I had so many times before. That's when I noticed our very own Mayor McDoughnut sidle up to a stool, and engage in the very same ritual. Right hoof extending. Mouth opening. Teeth chewing. Yes, eating noodles. The shared experience of almost every Baleville resident.

But just one week ago late at night this was also the place of a terrifying incident. One of the ponies who survived the incident was brave enough to give me this interview. For her safety, against those in power who wish to keep us in the dark, I will keep her anonymous.

"Oh, I was there all right. Sitting right at the bar, sure as you're sitting in front of me know, and just looking to have a good time. I was safe inside the building - we all were as long as you didn’t get in the Tunnel Snake’s or Savior’s way - so what was the harm? And let me tell you, that Mr. Carver made it easy. He came into town earlier that day, said he was from the coast out west somewhere. It didn't really matter. What did matter was his smile, and his laugh, and the way he'd make everyone feel at ease. That night, at the bar, we all just sort of crowded around him. Everyone wanted to exchange a word, or hear about the state of the wasteland. And Mr. Carver, he was all too happy to oblige. It was just so wonderful. Until it wasn't."

She continued her account of that evening, and the moment when things turned sinister, when the truth about Mr. Carver was revealed.

"We'd been drinking, and carrying on, must have been three hours. Mr. Carver had four or five drinks in that time. He seemed a bit drunk, I guess, like the rest of us. Then something just sort of happened. He was smiling, but the smile sort of went from his face, all in an instant. And then his cheek started twitching, kind of funny. The bartender noticed too, he asked him what was wrong with his face. And I remember watching him, clear as if it happened just yesterday. He reached inside his coat, took out a revolver, and then 'Blam!'- He shot the barpony, right in the head. Didn't hesitate, didn't show any emotion- Mr. Carver killed the bartender as casually as if he were paying him for a drink. But his cheek never did stop twitching. Let me tell you, all Hell broke loose after that."

"After he shot the bartender, that Mr. Carver shot three or four other ponies, too. Like I said, all Hell broke loose. The guards came running, they opened fire, and Mr. Carver he kept shooting, and throwing ponies around left and right. Finally, those guards put him down. But as they did we all knew something was wrong, he started bleeding green, and his body started changing, at one point he had a griffon claw instead of a foreleg! When he finally dropped dead he changed one last time, and what we saw was this disgusting body of a black, pony shaped bug! Its shell all shot to hell, and bleeding disgusting green blood everywhere!”

What she described, and what everypony has heard about, is a changeling. A creature that disguises itself as a pony and infiltrates our numbers. Over time they kidnap and replace our closest loved ones, our friends, our family, and feed off of their emotions for the rest of their lives.

The mayor wants us to believe this was a “contained incident”, but we know better. Ponies have been going missing without a trace for the last month, some after a brief period of “weird behavior”. The mayor has forbade security from investigating missing pony cases in order to “avoid any panic or incidents”, just like how he has forbade security from putting an end to the Tunnel Snake gang for years.

Which brings us to noodles. Specifically, the noodles consumed by Mayor McDoughnut last Wednesday night, in the same spot that Mr. Carver changeling went crazy, and mercilessly killed several people - after spending hours sharing an experience the people of Baleville assumed was reserved for members of an equine race. They were wrong.

Are we?

“Wait, these things can shapeshift!?”, I said to Claw in disbelief.

“Yeah, changelings are bad news, they like to build nests near settlements, then kidnap and feed off of ponies like the parasites they are”, she said, “they’re pretty rare though, I’ve never actually seen one before”, she said.

“We’ll have to keep an eye out then”, I said dropping the paper on the ground (my pipBuck had already scanned it into its memory, so if I ever needed it again I could just pull it up). I looked at our cart of gear, “now where the hell are we going to sell all this shit?”.

“I dunno Celestia, you just got us banned from the general store, maybe you could cast judgement on the dirty stripe and force her to trade with us?”, she sneered.

I scowled at her, “oh ha, ha. Very funny”.

“Perhaps I could be of assistance”, an old buck said as he trotted up to us, he was a dirty earth pony with a big faded white beard and mane. “Forgive my intrusion”, he said putting a hoof to his chest, “but I couldn’t help but notice that you two were new, and cast out by the owner of this establishment”.

“Uhh, yeah, something like that”, I said.

He sighed, “poor Xanthe, she really is a good zebra once you get to know her, but she’s been terrified of the rumors of changelings in the city”. He shook his head, “But that hardly concerns the both of you. You hoped to sell your goods, I am hoping you would be willing to sell them to me instead”.

“And you are?”, I asked.

“Confessor Cornflake of The Children of the Glow, the fireproof nature of this turnout gear would prove quite useful to us, and any extra equipment we could sell to raise funds for our cause”, he said.

“Don’t you crazies worship radiation or some shit?”, Claw said.

“Wait what?”, I turned back to Cornflake, “you ponies worship radiation? Don't you know what that stuff does to you?”.

He chuckled, “you do not understand, the Glow is everywhere now, he is a god that was created from the death of the war. He rose and washed over this land, casting judgement over us all. Those he deemed unworthy he killed, those that had to repent for their sins he turned into ghouls, and those he deems worthy he passes over. I myself have been deemed as worthy, I have walked on many of the hallowed grounds without protection, grounds that are so heavily irradiated you would perish in mere moments!”.

Wait, was he saying he was immune to radiation? If that was true it would be incredible!

He was also completely insane. There's no way something like ‘The Glow’ actually exists. This was a cult, a bunch of nutbags who are buying into this crap to feel special or some shit.

“And uh… what exactly are you doing here in town?”, I asked.

“I am here preaching the word of the Glow and safeguarding this gift from those that would abuse, or worse, destroy it”, he said gesturing to the bomb, “the Glow did not allow this weapon of war to detonate when it was intended to, meaning it is destined to be activated by our messiah on a later day”.

“Your… messiah?”, I asked, wondering who the hell that could be.

“Why the Lightbringer of course! She unleashed the Glow’s power upon the wasteland, and it grew to become what is now called the... ‘Dead Zone’ ”, he said the name with disgust, “what an awful name, spread by those who are unworthy. The ‘Dead Zone’ is full of life that has been touched by the Glow in its most powerful form! and while none of us chosen children have been deemed worthy to enter the Glow’s garden, one day, the lightbringer will return and open wide its gates! She will grant us access to paradise, and wipe clean the remainder of the land!”, he said passionately.

Ok, a bunch of radical cultists with a doomsday prophecy, great! Claw mirrored my feelings, but voiced them a little differently.

“Bull-SHIT!”, Claw yelled jamming a hoof into his chest, “The Lightbringer was a badass! Not some radiation nutbag like you! she did that to blow the Goddess sky high!”.

“The Goddess was a demon, who stole the Glow’s power for her own evil deeds. The Lightbringer was enacting the Glow’s will”, he said calmly, not at all offended.

Claw looked like she was about to blow a gasket. I quickly separated them and changed the subject, “so you said you wanted to purchase our gear right?”.

“Oh of course! You two might have been deemed unworthy by the Glow, but we will gladly accept support and trade from all who wish to help the cause”, he said, “we also offer free radiation purges at the church, I believe you two would appreciate it”.

“Wait, how do you know we have radiation sickness? And why are the purges free? I thought you worshipped radiation”, I asked.

“I can feel it, the Glow knows you two are not worthy, and is slowly killing you as punishment. As for the purges, we normally charge a tithe for them to support the church, but one of the two conditions for our acceptance into the community was that we make them free here”, he said.

“And what's the second condition?”, I asked a little apprehensively.

“That we do not kill every one of you unworthy infidels for not giving this device of the Glow’s glory the respect and awe it deserves”, he deadpanned.

Violent, radical cultists with a doomsday prophecy and a willingness to kill ponies who don't buy into their bullshit, even better!

I cleared my throat and gave him a (slightly nervous) smile, “well I would be more than happy to accept the purges and support such a… righteous cause”.

“I fucking hate those nutjobs”, Claw said as we followed the rope bridges and catwalks between the different stores. The height was a bit of a problem for me, so we stuck to the cluster of stores by the first and second stories for now.

I was never getting another radiation purge from those nutjobs again. There was something chilling and sinister about that dark church, with many followers praying and humming these chilling hymns. The ritual itself involved a unicorn follower (whose coat was discolored, with large bald patches of skin where the hairs of her coat and mane had fallen out from radiation exposure like most of the other Children) performing a spell that pulled the radiation within me into a glowing green ball of energy that was then placed in a bottle.

The entire process felt… dirty, like some magical tentacle was rooting through my body as it ripped out the radiation. Claw barely held her shit together the entire time, she was much more… vocal, about the disgusting feelings of the ritual, as well as her anger over their beliefs on the Lightbringer. I was just happy to clear out of that place as fast as we could when it was over and we had sold our goods.

I was trying to think of where we should go next, we needed supplies for sure, but after that? I was drawing a blank. The problem was I didn’t really have any direction in my life at the moment. It's not like I had some big important quest that prompted me to leave my stable and go on some long, world changing journey. We could leave back into the wasteland, but where would we go?

“I mean who the fuck do those assholes think they are? Butchering the Lightbringer’s name like that. ‘Messiah’”, she spat in disgust, “she was a badass who was always two steps ahead of everypony. Not some crazy who wanted to cook her body in radiation every chance she got. Hey Shepherd, are you listening? Shepherd?”.

I shook my head, “yeah, I’m just… I don't know what to do now, where we should go next. Do you have any ideas?”.

“Sorry man, I’ve got nothing”, she shrugged as she hovered next to the catwalk I was on.

My stomach grumbled and I looked around, spotting a bar across the gap from us, “why don’t we get something to eat! I’m starving, we can throw ideas around over dinner”, I said.

The front door and wall of the bar were built into three of the interior third floor windows, the adjacent hallways had been blocked by makeshift walls, and the hallway walls directly behind the windows had been knocked down, making a nice big rectangular room that was filled with tables and a bar in the back.

The ‘Second Chance Bar’ had a hooffull of patrons eating, a small group playing cards in the corner, and a pony wearing a leather jacket, that read ‘Tunnel Snakes’ on the back, laying face down drunk on the bar counter. Me and Claw took seats at the bar and I rang the bell. When I heard no response I rang it again.

“I’m coming! Hold on!”, a growling voice called out from the back.

I looked at an old poster hanging on a side wall. It featured a pony encased in a large suit of steel armor, with a glowing headlamp on its head, rearing up over a pile of dead zebras.

I read the tagline on the bottom out loud as I heard someone step out of the back room to the counter, “‘You too can be a Steel Ranger!’ Huh, he looks like a walking tank, how the fuck were you supposed to move in all that armor?”.

The growling voice, now behind the counter, answered my question, “The armor does the lifting for you, and then some. Even the weakest pony in Equestria would be as strong as Big Macintosh himself in one of those”.

I turned to the bartender, “wow, that sounds awe-GAH!”, I yelled as I fell back out of my stool. Zombie! The was a griffin Zombie behind the bar!.

“Uhh”, the thing said confused. Perfect it was confused! I could… wait. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”, it asked.

“Uhh, um, well… aren’t you a zombie?”, I asked.

He sighed and rolled his eyes, “great, bigot”.

What? I stood up, “No, I didn’t mean it like that, I’m sure you’re a really nice zombie! I just haven’t met a nice one of your kind yet”, I said giving a nervous smile.

He just raised an eyebrow, “haven't met a nice one of my kind yet?”.

I was about to respond when claw shoved her hoof in my muzzle, “I think what he’s trying to say is he’s never met a ghoul before. He’s uhh… from a really isolated tribe! New to the whole ‘wasteland’ thing”, Claw said quickly as she tried to cover up my ignorance and identity as a stable dweller.

He just sized us both up for a minute with his milky eyes, “so you really don’t know what a ghoul is?”, he asked me. I shook my head and he explained, “Ghouls, are sentient creatures who got heavily irradiated and mutated. We don't eat, breathe, or age anymore, but if we dont keep our wits together we go feral and pretty much turn into zombies. I’m guessing you’ve had run ins with ferals before?”.

“Yeah actually”, I said retaking my seat, “so... are we cool? Misunderstanding dealt with?”.

“Yeah, sure”, he shrugged.

“so you were saying how power armor made a pony stronger?”, I said.

“Yeah, it's got hydraulics and servos built in that makes it carry itself, as well as do any manual labor you need done, like crushing skulls or breaking through walls. The armor itself will shrug off small arms. It's also got an air filtration system, medical injectors, and a self repair talisman that keeps the armor going as long as you feed it scrap metal”, he said.

“Wow, now I want a suit”, I could only imagine the kind of havok I could wreak with hardware like that.

“Good luck finding one, they’re pretty rare”, he said, crushing my dreams in the process. “Now are you two actually going to order anything?”.

“Oh yeah, what do you have?”, I asked.

“Drinks and whatever slop I have in the stewpot”, he said.

“I guess I’ll take a bowl of slop”, I turned to Claw, “what do you want?”.

“I’ll take some slop and rum”, she said.

The slop tasted like crap, and I was pretty sure it was just a bunch of junk food and scraps of meat boiled in a pot, but it was warm and filling. Me and Claw were discussing our options going forward.

“I’ve got years of experience in maintenance, we might be able to get jobs fixing stuff around town”, I suggested before taking a sip of my carroty cola. (whoever came up with this ‘Sparkle Cola’ drink deserved a lot better than a wall of balefire incinerating them to death, that was for sure, because this stuff is delicious!).

Claw blew a raspberry, “Yeah right, my way of fixing something broken is to hit it until it works again. Besides, I want to do something with a bit more excitement involved”.

“And what kind of excitement are you looking for exactly?”, I asked raising an eyebrow.

“Shepherd, I’m a girl of simple tastes. I like my hooves bloody, my blood pumping, and my pockets full of rounds”, she said with a smirk.

“I’ll admit, I do like the idea of doing something more exciting”, I said with a grin, “Maybe we can get some jobs as guards”.

“Too boring, all they do is guard crap. I want to go to where the fight is, not wait for it to come to me!”, she said. Her eyes lit up, “ooh! We could be bounty hunters! Track down some asshole, kick his teeth in, and get paid to do it! Perfect for two hard fuckers like us”.

“Not much work for inexperienced bounty hunters around here, might want to look for another career path”, the bartender (whose name, as I found out, was Carrion) chimed in without looking up from the glass he was cleaning.

“How about we be mercenaries and try to pick up only more… aggressive jobs. That way we would have more kinds of work open to us”, I suggested.

“That could work”, Claw said.

“Now that would be more doable. Ponies are always putting up flyers on the job board for help, most pay like crap but every now and then something good comes up”, Carrion said.

The drunk pony laying on the bar sat up and leaned towards Claw, “I could give you some excitement baby”, he said as he groped her ass with a forehoof.

Claw froze for a second and her eyes went wide. They then ignited in anger as she spun around and hit him with a left hook across the muzzle. Then she grabbed him by his shoulders and smashed his head into the bar. She launched off of her chair into a hover as he fell to the floor, blood shooting out of his nose.

“Who the FUCK do you think you are!”, she screamed as she shook in anger.

He cradled his broken nose in his hooves as he screamed in pain. “You fucking cunt! You broke my nose! You broke my fucking nose!”.

“You’re lucky that's all she did!”, I said as I got off my stool and kicked him hard in the mouth with one of my hind legs.

He recoiled hard and let out an even louder scream. He spit out a bloody tooth as he continued to cradle his broken, bloody muzzle and scream in pain.

The group playing cards in the corner got up and started trotting towards us, and it was only then that I realized they all wore Tunnel Snake jackets as well. “Hey! What the fuck do you think you’re doin!”, the big one at the front yelled at us.

“What? You all want some too!”, Claw yelled back.

“What my partner means to say is that your friend here grabbed her ass, we were just educating him as to why that’s a bad fucking idea”, I said to the group of three.

The lead asshole pointed his hoof at me and wore a shit eating smirk, “Oh yeah? Well let me educate you twos. You see? my pal there is a Tunnel Snake, and we’re Tunnel Snakes, we rule this town. So if he wants to grab her ass, he gets to grab her ass, and there ain't a damn thing neither of ya’s gonna do about it. Ain't that right boys!?”, he said turning back and nodding to his friends, who all laughed and nodded in agreement.

When he turned back at me I was already halfway through swinging my barstool at his head.

The old wood broke against his thick skull and he fell to the side. Before he had a chance to get up I jumped on top of him and started punching him over and over in the face.

A pair of hooves grabbed my shoulders from behind before being ripped away a split second later. I glanced the side and saw Claw fighting another Tunnel Snake, dodging every punch and kick, and returning the attacks with a bunch of her own.

The third Tunnel Snake shoved me off of his friend and onto the floor, but I quickly got back on my hooves. He helped his buddy up, who then spit out a little blood as he gave me a murderous look.

The lead Tunnel Snake reached into his jacket and flicked out a switchblade. “You’re gonna phucking phay phor that!”, he said around the blade in his mouth.

I was about to activate my power hoof when a loud gunshot from behind me grabbed everypony's attention. Carrion was holding a makeshift double barrel shotgun pointed at the ceiling, with a barrel smoking from just being fired.

“Get the fuck out of my bar you Tunnel Snake pricks!”, he yelled in anger.

The two tunnel snakes that weren't beaten up helped their injured friends out the door. The leader put away his switchblade and slowly trotted to the door, the pony whose muzzle we broke was dripping a small trail of blood. The leader stopped in the doorway, “you're gonna learn some respect real soon you old barbecued buzzard. The Tunnel Snakes rule this town!”, and with that he left.

We both just watched the door for a minute before Carrion sighed in disgust, opened his shotgun, and removed the spent shell.

I looked over at Claw. “are you okay?”, I asked.

She looked back at the door in anger before sighing, “yeah im fine… fucking pissed off, but fine”, she looked at Carrion, “hey you got a bathroom? I need to take a shit”. Carrion pointed to a door behind him and she trotted over to it.

I pulled over a new stool and sat back down. Carrion was rooting around behind the bar for something. “Who were those guys?”, I asked him.

“Tunnel Snakes”, he said without looking up from behind the bar, “they’re a gang of ponies who weren’t tough enough to join the Saviors, a bunch of washouts and punks who the mayor refuses to do anything about”.

He finally found a box of shotgun shells and reloaded his shotgun and placed it back behind the bar.

I paid him for the damaged stool and for our food, then went about finishing my slop.

A couple minutes later a pudgy cream colored pony, wearing a patched three piece suit and a trilby hat, trotted in and went to the bar. “Good morning Carrion, not causing any… trouble I hope”, he said to Carrion.

“Just kicking out a couple of Tunnel Snakes picking fights in my bar Mr Mayor”, Carrion said.

“Well since you dealt with the unfortunate situation yourself, there's no need to bother security”, the Mayor said.

“I wouldn’t have to deal with it myself if you just had security get rid of them already”, he said irritated, “they’re all going to be gathered up at their warehouse tonight, all it would take is a team going in and sweeping them all out”.

The mayor’s expression quickly switched to anger, “For the millionth time no! I'm not going to cause trouble around town by provoking a street gang!”.

“Uhh, if all of the Tunnel Snakes are at the warehouse, why not take them all out?”, I asked the mayor.

He looked at me in shock for a moment before quickly putting on a nervous smile, “oh! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bring you into this argument sir, this is just a… professional squabble me and old Carrion here have had for quite some time. I actually came to welcome you and your friend to town!”.

“Really? And why exactly are you doing that?”, I said.

“Why to put Baleville’s best hoof forward of course!”, he says with another nervous smile, “I take pride in personally welcoming every newcomer to town!”.

Claw trotted out of the bathroom, “Who the hell is this?”, she says taking a seat at the bar.

“Ahh, you must be his friend!”, the mayor said, “I’m mayor McDoughnut, elected leader of this settlement by the merchant guild for seven years running! I would personally like to welcome both of you to town with open hooves! And if you don’t mind, may I inquire as to who you are and what business you two have here in our fine city?”.

“I’m Shepherd, and this is my partner Claw, we’re uh…”, I glanced at Claw for a moment, “Mercenaries. We came here looking for work and a place to stay”.

“Well, Baleville is a town of opportunity! And you two seem like…”, he glanced at Claw for a moment, “prime Baleville material! Looking back, you'll find that coming here was the best decision you've ever made for yourselves. Why, this is the safest place in all of Apple Hills! With the strongest community, and highest standards of living available”, he said with pride.

“Yeah, except for the fucking street gang that ‘rules this town’. The one that molests and attacks ponies”, Claw deadpanned.

The mayor visibly bristled at the statement, but held his (now much more nervous) smile, “oh you must be talking about the Tunnel Snakes. Yes, those ruffians do cause trouble, but no city is completely free of crime, and the Tunnel Snakes are a tolerable nuisance so long as they stay placated”.

“Yeah but for how long?”, Carrion said, “they keep getting bolder and bolder lately. We can't keep rolling over to them. Come on McDoughnut, if now isn’t the right time to get rid of them, I don't know when is”.

“How many times do I have to say it, I am not going to stir trouble in the streets!”, McDoughnut snapped at Carrion, “and the holder of your contract agrees with me as well!”.

They both kinda went loose on each other after that, yelling back in forth in anger as they argued over all kinds of stuff that went a bit over our heads. Me and Claw decided to take our leave at that point.

We trotted out the front door of the Second Chance Bar. “now what?”, Claw asked.

“...how do you feel about doing a little… violent community service?”, I asked her.

She looked at me with a sly grin, “I like the violent part, what did you have in mind?”.

I had a couple of things in mind. The Tunnel Snakes had personally fucked with me and my partner. I wanted payback, and I wasn’t going to wait for these pricks to pick another fight in town either, I was going to hit them first.

But that wasn’t the only reason I wanted to take them down. If our meeting with the mayor (and Carrion’s comments) were anything to go by, then the mayor was a spineless coward who refused to risk trouble to get rid of a growing threat to the town. The Tunnel Snakes were one such threat, and I figured taking them down would also make Baleville a lot safer.

“I want to get payback on those Tunnel Snakes that attacked us earlier and put an end to their little gang. We get some revenge and the town is all the safer for it”, I said voicing my thoughts.

“A little bit of wasteland justice huh? I like it”, she said with a grin, “just one question, how’re we gonna find them?”.

I looked down at the catwalk, where a trail of blood went from the door of the bar to further down the catwalk. “We could follow the trail broken muzzle left us”.

We watched the warehouse from behind a dumpster across the street. The sun had just set by the time we had gotten there. The trail of blood had led us out of the front gate of Baleville and down a side street to a small storage warehouse. There were two tunnel snakes watching the front door, as well as light and the sounds of multiple voices pouring out of the small windows ringing the top of the walls.

“This looks like the place”, I said.

“Lets go get ‘em then!”, Claw said excitedly as she gave the sidewalk a small scrape of her hellhound claw.

I cranked Thunder twice, then shot the guard on the right side of the door. His jacket did little to stop the high speed metal bar my weapon fired from blowing a large hole in his chest.

Before his friend could react Claw pounced on him and ripped out his throat with her claw.

I ran towards the door, holstering Thunder and pulling out my double barrel shotgun. The voices inside had become much louder and more confused.

I kicked open the door and immediately took aim at the pony on the other side, filling him with two barrels of buckshot before he could fire his boxy rifle.

The inside of the warehouse was filled with rows of tall shelves all holding various different sized wood boxes, and various large appliances like fridges and stoves.

A different tunnel snake shot me in the side with a shotgun of his own while I reloaded, knocking me onto the floor next to his dead friend and causing me to drop my shotgun.

I swept up his dead friend's weapon and fired it at him.

CZZRK!

Rather than producing a muzzle flash and firing a bullet at the Tunnel Snake, the weapon instead fired a bright pink LASER that instantly burned a hole through the Tunnel Snake’s jacket and deep into his chest! He cried out in pain and dropped to the ground dead. This thing was awesome!

I realized I was in deep shit almost immediately, there were almost a dozen Tunnel Snakes in the warehouse, and they were all taking cover and pulling out their guns.

I jumped behind a rack of shelves next to the wall right before they all started firing, peppering my cover of large wooden crates with many different varieties of white hot death.

I took a quick look at my new weapon, it resembled a long (slightly rusted), metal box with a clamp and battery holder that held a yellow microspark cell, a power switch, a metal stock, and mouthgrip (that I’ll probably never use) all toward the rear of the weapon. My EFS said I still had 29 shots left, and I intended to make them count.

Claw was taking cover in the entrance, waiting for an opening to attack. Meanwhile, the Tunnel Snakes continued to pepper my cover with gunfire. We would never be able to make a move on them like this. I looked around trying to figure out what to do when I noticed the fuse box directly above me on the wall.

I telekinetically threw every switch I saw into the off position, deactivating all the lights and plunging the warehouse into a darkness. The only light coming from the now decreasing muzzle flashes from the Snakes. Claw took the opportunity and flew up towards the roof of the warehouse.

“Shit! Did one of you dumbasses hit the fuse box!”, a mare yelled into the dark. A moment later the same mare screamed out in pain.

“Shit there’s another one! Kill her!”, a stallion yelled before I heard him screamed in pain as well.

This caused all the Snakes to quit firing at me, and instead at my partner. A couple of them switched on headlamps to see. I rushed out of my cover and killed a snake with a headlamp with a couple of shots from my laser rifle.

The warehouse turned into a lightshow of death and confusion. A slowly decreasing number of headlamps swayed between Claw as she flew between the tops of shelves, occasionally swooping down and killing another snake, and me as I ran from cover to cover shooting them with my laser rifle. There were numerous yellow muzzle flashes from the snakes as they tried to kill us, and pink lasers flashed through the air as I fired my new weapon, each one leaving a floating trail of harmless fading light for a half second following each shot. This gave away my position, but it also drew gunfire and headlamps away from Claw.

Eventually, we killed the last pony wearing a headlamp and only had three Tunnel Snakes left. They tried to stop firing and hide, but they couldn’t hide from my EFS in the dark.

I killed two of them before finally running out of charge for the laser rifle. I holstered it on my back using the carrying strap the previous owner had so thoughtfully attached to it.

I fumbled with my shotgun, attempting to reload it in the dark, when that last surviving pony decided to switch on her headlamp and shot me in a hind leg with a rifle.

I cried out in pain and fell to the ground, but before she could attempt a follow up shot the dark silhouette of Claw dropped down from the roof and killed her.

“Fucking bitch”, I yelled standing up, “she hid until I had to reload, then shot me from behind! ow!”.

“Are you okay?”, Claw asked.

“Yeah I’m fine, I just need to bandage this leg”, I said. I didn’t mention that my side was killing me from the buckshot I got hit with when I came in.

“You got a light? Cuz I can't see shit in here”, Claw said.

I patted my bag and managed to find my lighter, I pulled it out with my magic, flicked it open, and lit it, lighting up our immediate surrounding in the soft yellow glow of the flame. “Better?”, I asked.

Claw took the headlamp off the mare she had eviscerated, strapped it onto my head, and flicked it on. “Better”, she said primly, “so do you think we got ‘em all?”.

I put away my lighter and looked around the warehouse watching my EFS compass. Sure enough, two more red bars showed up in the direction of an office, suspended above the warehouse in a far corner. All of its windows had been boarded up, so I couldn’t see inside. “Not yet”, I answered, “there's still two more inside the room up there”.

As soon as the words left my mouth the door to the office flung open. The first pony to walk out was the leader of the Tunnel Snakes from the bar, his face even more bruised than before. The second pony to walk out was different though, he was a pegasus wearing a different leather jacket from the tunnel snakes. It looked the same as the ones those ponies on the bridge were wearing, and it was similarly armored with pieces of scrap metal as well.

He was wearing a battle saddle with a rifle attached to it, he held the Tunnel Snake’s leader at gunpoint as they trotted out of the office and down to the warehouse floor.

“Well, well, well, what do we have here? Two new hotshots in town huh? I gotta say I’m impressed, it takes balls to pull off what you two just did”, he said, “a lot more balls than any of these ponies had”.

“C-come on man! What’re you doing?”, the Tunnel Snakes leader whimpered to the stranger.

I eyed the stranger skeptically, “and just who are you exactly? You dont look like a Tunnel Snake”.

“Me? I’m Nugget, and I think you two would make fine additions to our organization. After all, you did just kill all our rejects”, he said looking over all the corpses on the floor. “well , except for one”, he said before shooting the last Tunnel Snake in the back of the head.

“And just what organization are we talking about here?”, I asked.

“Who cares? Let's just kill him already!”, Claw said dropping into a battle stance.

“Oh that is a very bad idea”, he said calmly, “y’see I’m a member of the Saviors, if you kill me, you’re as good as dead. Actually, if you don't accept my offer, you’re already as good as dead, since the Tunnel Snakes were still… associates of ours”.

“And let me guess… we’d already be dead because the Saviors own this town”, I said rolling my eyes, “give me a break! We literally just did this song and dance with your buddy you just killed. Thanks for the offer, but shove it up your ass”.

Without any hesitation, he bit down on the bit of his battle saddle. His rifle fired…

and everything went black.

I slowly woke up with a pounding headache, my eyes slowly blinked open to see Carrion, Claw, and the starry night sky above me.

“I think he’s coming too”, Claw said.

Carrion knelt down and started snapping a talon in front of my face.

I swatted the talon away and sat up, grunting and holding a hoof to my pounding (and apparently bandaged) head.

“yep , he’s awake”, he growled before standing up.

I stood up myself and nearly fell, but Claw quickly helped steady me. I looked around, but didn’t recognize the street. “Where the hell are we? And what happened?”.

“That Savior shot you in the head”, Claw said, “Carrion said it only grazed you, which is the only reason you’re still alive. After you went down Carrion burst into the warehouse and that fucker took off. We got you out and Carrion patched you up”.

I looked over my body, my side and hind leg had also been bandaged while I was out. “What about the Tunnel Snakes, did we get them all?”.

Carrion chuckled, “yeah, you got them alright. Of course you can’t loot the bodies now. The mayor sent in security shortly after the gunfire died down, and he’s probably going to make it look like they cleared out the Saviors”.

“What!?”, I exclaimed, “that’s bullshit!”.

“Its for the best”, he replied, “the mayor had made it absolutely clear that anypony who tried to wipe out the Tunnel Snakes would be kicked out of town for disturbing the peace. Getting you out before they arrived works out better for everyone. Now the mayor gets another feather in his cap for re-election, the Tunnel Snakes are gone, and nopony gets punished”.

I sighed and looked around. Yeah, it was probably for the best. It still sucked we wouldn’t be able to loot the corpses for stuff to sell though, or at least that that one pony’s other microspark cells. “so… what now?”, I asked.

“Well that depends, you planning to stick around town for a while?”, Carrion asked.

I looked up at the Baleville tower, “yeah, we don't have anywhere else to go, and this is probably the best place for us to make something of ourselves”.

“You got a place to stay?”, he asked in response.

I kicked the dirt, “no”.

“I'll tell you what”, Carrion said, “I’ve got an old house in the Warehouse District that I haven’t lived in for years. You did me, the holder of my contract, and this whole goddess damned town a service. How about we head back to my bar and I’ll give you the deed and the key? I know I’d sure as hell like to keep you around for a while”.

“Really?”, I said looking at the Griffin Ghoul in surprise, “I mean yes! That’d be great!”.

The subterranean warehouse underneath the building was a real shithole.

The entire space had been turned into a shantytown. With rusty sheet metal shacks filling almost the entire floor, and multiple shacks built haphazardly on top of those. There were two deep trenches that ran across the floor of the warehouse from the side with the main stairwell, where two large pipes gushed steady streams of dirty, soiled water into the trenches. The stream of water then flowed through those two trenches all the way to a large hole in the floor next to the opposite wall. This hole went all the way down into the old Apple Hills sewer system.

The trenches stank like hell, and were clearly where the residents down here dumped there trash and… bodily waste. The only two main paths through the shacks lined these trenches, with multiple thin alleyways and catwalks branching off from them. The warehouse was fairly dark, and the only light came from a couple steel drums filled with burning trash, and the occasional small lamp.

So much for ‘highest standards of living available’.

In one of the corners near the entrance was a large, round, two story structure with a Glowing sign that read ‘Power Noodles’. There was also a painted sign that said ‘DRUGS’, and had an arrow pointing down the left trench.

After receiving the key and deed, Carrion told me I just had to follow those drug signs. My new home would be the house directly next to the store.

I followed the signs down the left trench road. Even with it being almost midnight there were still a lot of ponies out and about. The ponies down here didn’t move with the same purpose as those up above though. Everypony down here was dirty, some ponies looked particularly… rough, and many gave me dirty or suspicious looks. Most of them were going about their daily lives, one was cooking some kind of stew, and another was hanging her laundry.

I came to another drug sign, this one pointing down a thin alleyway between two other shacks. We stepped out of the alleyway into a small courtyard that had the concrete side wall of the warehouse on one side, and the walls of other shacks as its other sides. Inside the concrete wall was a steel door with a drugs sign directly above it. Only one of the shack walls had a door on it.

I tried the handle and it was already unlocked. I tried my key, and sure enough it locked/unlocked. Me and Claw stepped inside, the place was a mess, there were empty syringes and scraps of paper all over the floor. The only furniture present was a couch in the larger front room, and a mattress with no blankets or pillows in the small back room. There was a single light bulb hanging from the roof in each room to provide light.

Home sweet home.

“Well this place is kind of sucks”, I said closing and locking the door.

“Meh, I’ve lived in worse...”, Claw said brushing some of the trash off of the couch, “much worse actually. All we gotta do is clear out some of the trash and get some nice stuff to fill it with”.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. It beats sleeping in a drainage pipe, that’s for sure”, I said. I yawned, even though it was only a plain, dirty mattress, it was still a soft place to sleep. “I’m going to get some sleep, goodnight Claw”, I said.

She flopped down onto the couch, rolled onto her back, crossed her hind legs, and crossed her forelegs behind her head, “G’night Shepherd”.

I closed my door and switched on the light. I took off my equipment, tossing it all into a corner.

Overall, I’d say this was a pretty good day. I got to a real town, helped said town deal with its gang problem, and got a free house out of it. I think things are going to turn out just fine going forward.

Although I should really look into getting a helmet, my head is killing me.

Footnote:
Level Up!
Level 4:
Perk added: Markspony (Level 1): Keep your distance long and your kill count high! Attacks with non-automatic rifles are 20% more accurate.

Author's Note

Author’s Note:
As always I’d like to thank KKat for writing Fallout Equestria, and thank Somber and Tofu for their contributions in expanding the Fallout Equestria universe. I’d also like to thank all of my readers as well for giving me motivation to keep going. Any constructive feedback is always encouraged and appreciated.

Entry 7 (Part 1): Civilization

Civilization) I began to learn the ins and outs of my new home. Returning to “civilization” brought with it rules, politics, and of course, the need to find work. I also learned that what I considered civilization was not the same as what the rest of the wasteland called civilization…

Entry 7 (Part 1): There was a sharp knock at my door, followed by a stallion shouting, “what the fuck? Yo, open up!”

“What the…?”, I mumbled as I sat up on my mattress.

I got up out of bed, picking up Thunder as I trotted out of my room.

Claw rubbed her eyes, looking at the front door from the couch. “who the fuck is that?”, Claw mumbled.

“I have no idea”, I said trotting up to the door.

I swung open the door and saw a mare and stallion standing out front. The stallion gave me an easygoing smile. “Hey man what's the deal? Did ya want the flop house fer yourself or somethin?”, he said brightly as he tried to trot past me.

I took a step in front of him and shoved him back, “whoa, hold on one damn minute! Who the hell said you could come in here?”

He took a step back, shocked and confused by my continued obstruction. “Sugar did man, are you already high or somethin?”, he asked as he squinted at me.

“What? No! Who the fuck is Sugar?”, I said a bit taken aback.

“The dude who sells drugs out that storeroom over there man!”, he said with enthusiasm, gesturing to the steel door in the warehouse wall next to my house. “He always says its aight to crash over here for the night. Now if ya don’t mind, me and my girl are about to go to the moon man”, he said trying to trot past me again.

Oh you have to be shitting me. Now I knew why my house was a wreck, the damn drug dealer next door has been inviting his customers to get high in here like he owned the place.

Well he was in for a rude awakening, because he doesn't own this place.

I roughly shoved the stallion back out, “Not in here you’re not, get lost”

“Who the hell do ya think you are man!”, he yelled in anger as he shoved me back.

I responded by taking Thunder and smashing the butt end of the stock straight into his muzzle. He went down surprisingly easy, falling onto the ground outside my door while cradling his bruised jaw in his forehooves and groaning.

“Baby!”, the mare yelled rushing over to his side.

I pointed Thunder at the two of them, and once I saw the look of horror on both of their faces, I laid down the law, “Listen carefully, I live here now, and I'm not having some strung out, freeloading, addicts trashing my place. So tell your friends, and Sugar, that from now on you’ll all have to find some other place to get high. You got that?”

They both nodded and quickly ran off. Once they were gone I shut and locked the door.

Claw trotted up to me, rubbing her eyes and yawning. “You do know we’re gonna have to deal with junkies pounding on our door every night now, right?”, she said with a yawn.

“What’re you talking about? I just told them to tell everyone that this place is off limits”, I said.

“Do you really think those two are gonna do that? and Sugar isn’t losing his flophouse without a fight”, Claw said picking up her claw gauntlet off of the floor, “we either deal with him, or he’ll deal with us”.

She had a point, but we were also in an actual town now, we couldn’t just kill him, but it also meant he couldn’t try to kill us either.

I decided I’d think of something in the morning. “Alright, I’m going back to bed”, I said trotting to my room, “If more addicts come to the door, could you deal with them? We’ll take turns”.

“I kinda wanted to go out for a bit actually”, Claw said gesturing to the door. “And I uhh, need some money”, Claw said rubbing claw clad foreleg against the other awkwardly.

I turned to her and raised an eyebrow, “why? Where are you going?”

“I wanted to buy a bag to keep some stuff in, I think you know by now that my shorts don’t have any pockets”, she said turning to the side and stretching a hind leg for emphasis. Her canvas shorts, indeed, did not have pockets.

“Alright, let me get you some”, I trotted into my room, emptied my own bag, and came back with my mailbag, now only holding our remaining factory new 5.56 bullets, “here, this is 75 rounds, it should be more than enough for a bag right?”

“Whoa, hell yeah it is!”, she said accepting the bag and ammo.

“Could you do me a favor and buy me a pair of saddlebags as well?”, I asked. My messenger bag was nice, but it wasn’t suited to holding large quantities of salvage, supplies, or loot.

“Sure thing”, Claw said trotting out the door, “see ya later!”. She spread her wings, and flew off over the maze of shacks that was the warehouse district.

I shut and locked the door behind her, then I threw the couch against it as well for good measure. After that I went back to bed.

I woke up the next morning to my stomach grumbling. I reached into my pile of belongings and pulled out a box of Sugar Apple Bombs. Then I threw on my turnout jacket and sat down on the couch.

As I ate I noticed Claw wasn’t back yet, where could she be? The thought crossed my mind that perhaps she had taken my money and ran. I shook my head and rejected it, Claw wouldn’t do that, right? We were partners, we had saved each others lives back at the arena, that had to count for something. Of course, I thought I could trust Bourbon up until he betrayed me too.

I kept eating while I tried to ignore my thoughts, as well as the throbbing and burning pain in my hind leg, side, and head. I needed to pay a visit to that doctor’s office today. I wasn’t sure how I was going to keep my PipBuck concealed while he examined me, but I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.

There was a sharp knocking at the door, was Claw home? I set down my empty cereal box and moved the couch away from the door. Opening it revealed a white earth pony with a sandy blond mane.

“Hey man, what’s up? I hear you’re new around here”, the pony said leaning up on the door frame.

“Something like that, if you’re here to get high you’ll have to go somewhere else. I’m the one that owns this place now”, I said. I didn’t feel in the mood to do something more drastic like last night, what with the burning pain from all my recent injuries really flaring up today.

“And uh, what makes you think you can just move in here?”, he said narrowing his eyes and taking a step inside.

I narrowed my eyes right back, “Carrion did, when he gave me the deed to the house”.

“Well that is a problem”, he said before punching me in the head with a forehoof. My vision went fuzzy for a minute, my ears rang, and I lost my balance as I fell back onto the floor.

Okay, I definitely needed to see a doctor.

“You shouldn’t start shit you aren’t ready to finish”, he said standing over me. He leaned down low, putting his face right in front of mine, “now you’re gonna give me the deed to this place, and then-”.

I cut him off by lunging forward and biting down on the bridge of his nose.

“Gah!”, he yelled in surprise.

I capitalized on the surprise by jumping up and tackling him backwards onto the ground. I wrang my hooves around his neck and began squeezing.

He struggled for air as I strangled him, and he began punching me in desperation. He landed a hit to my head, which loosened my grip on his neck. But it was his punch to my side that knocked the wind out of me. He took that opportunity to throw me off of him and stand up.

I stood up myself, my balance was shaky and I was out of breath, but I tried real damn hard not to show it. The white stallion was fighting to catch his breath as he clutched a hoof to his bruised throat. He looked at me with a mixture of shock and anger. He swallowed and spoke, “I’m gonna make you pay you psycho bastard!”.

“Yeah, I’ve heard that one before”, I said a little winded myself, “now get out of here, before I show you just how psycho I really am”. I really hoped he’d just leave, I wasn’t going to be putting up much more of a fight in my current condition.

He didn’t call my bluff though, thank Celestia. “Fine”, he spat, “but this isn’t over, this is my place”. He turned and walked out the door. I walked up to the doorway and watched as he trotted over to the steel door to Sugar’s place. A brown mare was sitting next to said door when the stallion who had attacked me entered.

The mare followed him in, “Sugar what happened? Are-”. What she was saying was cut off by the door slamming shut behind her.

So that was Sugar.

He didn’t know my name yet, but that wouldn’t take long to find out. Besides, he was my neighbor, he knew exactly where to find me if he wanted to start trouble.

The old ‘bite the pony threatening you when they get close’ strategy was still working strong, so at least there was that. Granted, I didn’t take his ear off like that other pony, but it still got the message across.

I closed and locked my door, then collapsed onto the couch. First thing was first, I needed medical attention. Then, I needed to figure out a way to deal with Sugar. When he came over here he wasn’t expecting me to fight back, let alone bite him, which bought me some time. But when he comes back he’ll be ready for a fight. I needed to find a solution before then, preferably a nonviolent one. I didn’t want to be known as the pony who killed his neighbor right after moving into town, (and in hindsight that would be assuming I didn't get thrown out of town, or hanged, for murder).

For the time being though I decided to just keep sitting and wait for Claw to come home.

“Shepherd I’m really fucking sorry, I should’ve been here”, Claw said as I strapped my two new saddlebags on over my flanks.

She had gotten home about half an hour after my fight with Sugar. She had bought me a pair of large, brown, brahman leather saddlebags (a “Brahman”, apparently, is a mutated, weird ass two headed cow thing). For herself, she had bought a small pouch that wrapped around the upper thigh of her right hind leg.

I had explained what had happened with Sugar when she returned.

“It’s fine”, I said, “I’m just glad everything went okay with buying us some bags”. In reality, I was just happy my paranoid doubts turned out to be false, but I wasn’t planning on voicing that little fact. “Where’s the the bullets that were left over? I really need to visit that doctor today”

Claw rubbed the back of her head and looked off to the side, “oh, right, about that…”

“Claw, where’s the rest of the money”, I asked, not at all liking the sound of that little statement.

“Well… after I bought our bags, I checked out the other stores around town, and it turned out someone turned the penthouse on the top floor into a casino. So I… tried my luck…”

I let out a sigh, she had gambled away most of our money. “It’s okay. Honestly, if I had found out about the place, I would have suggested trying our luck there myself at some point. Spending a night at a casino actually sounds like a lot of fun”, I said, “so how much did you lose?”

Claw let out a nervous chuckle, “umm… everything, I lost everything”

I facehoofed, “Fffuuuuck”, I said with a long sigh. “Alright, from now on, I’m handling all our money, alright? If you need to buy something, ask”

Claw quickly nodded, “no problem”.

After making one final check that I had all my equipment and belongings, I opened the front door and trotted out.

Claw followed close behind. “So uh, where’re we headed?”, she asked.

“To the Doctor’s”, I said as I locked the door to our shack, “lets pray he’s the charitable type”

Baleville was a buzz of activity just like the day before. A sea of ponies moved back and forth from place to place, all handling their own personal business. I was sitting on a bench outside of the doctor’s office, just marvelling at the spectacle of society that was all around me. After those first couple days out of the stable, I missed this more than anything.

Claw wasn’t as impressed as I was.

She was laying upside down next to me on the bench, her hind legs kicking the air, and her head and forelegs dangling near the ground. She let out a loud groan, “fuck I’m so bored! How the fuck are you not going stir crazy right now!?”

I looked over at her, “We’ve only been here for five minutes”

“Yeah, five minutes doing fuck all”, she replied sourly.

“I can’t exactly do much while injured Claw. In case you forgot, I got shot in the head”, I retorted, “and the side, and the leg. You might as well get comfortable, the office doesn’t open for another half an hour”

Her eyes went wide in horror. “Noooooo!”, she yelled in despair at the horrifying, crippling realization she’d have to sit still for half an hour. Even now, I still have no idea where she found the inner strength to endure such raw torment.

Claw’s outburst caused a couple of ponies in the crowd to give us funny looks. One such pony, clad in security guard barding, trotted over. “Is there a problem over here?”, he asked.

“No problems here officer”, I said. I knew that the guards here weren’t like the ones back in Stable 54, but I still didn’t feel entirely comfortable around them either. All things considered, I figured it’d be a good idea to still be respectful to the guards. “My friend here is just a bit bored, we’re waiting for the clinic to open”, I continued.

“Hmm, alright then”, the guard said before pointing at Claw, “but keep that one on a tight leash. I know raider when I see it, and none of us would hesitate to put her down if she starts trouble”

“Fuck you asshole!”, Claw snarled.

“Whoa whoa!”, I said quickly standing up and getting between the two (maybe a little too quickly, I nearly lost my balance and face planted). “We’ll keep that in mind officer”, I said glaring down at Claw, “We wouldn’t want to cause trouble in our new home”

Claw just crossed her forelegs and glared off to the side.

“...yeah, let's hope not”, the guard said after a short pause. “Anyways”, he said looking at the front door of the Doctor’s Office, “you better have plenty of cartridges, Doc Church charges ridiculously high prices”

Shit, that was not what my pounding head needed to hear right then. I sat back down on the bench, and looked back out over the crowd. “If you don’t mind me asking Officer, how does a place like this exist?”, I asked.

“Goods and services”, the guard replied, “With talented tradesponies of all sorts up and down the tower, Baleville acts as the hub for all the trade and travel between the other settlements of Apple Hills. Decades ago we used to be a hub for trade caravans going across this entire region of the wasteland at large, but…”

“But what?”, I curiously asked.

“Well…”, he said, “Not to speak badly about our benevolent government, but they’ll destroy any group that gets too powerful out in the wasteland. Outside Apple Hills, anarchy rules, which means no long distance caravans”. He was quiet for a minute before he added, “wait, shouldn’t you know all this already?”

“I'm from a pretty isolated tribe, somewhere out west”, I said sticking to Claw’s cover story, “this is all pretty new to me”

The guard rolled his eyes. “freaking tribals”, he said turning and beginning to trot away, “well let me, or any other officer, know if you need anything”

A thought came to mind, “officer wait! I’d like to report a crime!”

He sighed and turned around, “Is it theft?”

“Uh, what? No, its-”, I responded before being cut off by the officer.

“Then there’s nothing we can do unless we see it go down ourselves”, the guard said.

“What!? That’s bullshit!”, I exclaimed in shock, “Security won’t investigate any crime that isn’t theft!?”

“Yep, that's how it works”, the guard said, “We’re guards, not fuckin detectives. Deal with your own problems”. He then turned and trotted off into the crowd.

“Th-that… Claw, tell me this isn’t normal out here!”, I sad turning to Claw.

She looked up at me in thought for a minute before responding, “It uh… it kinda depends on the town. Some places have security like here, some have security so strict it's like living in a fucking Authority City, and some fall somewhere in between”, she said before muttering, “doesn’t make his answer any less bullshit though”

Wonderful, I traded an authoritarian police state for a guard force that was next to useless. Now I could see how the Tunnel Snakes got away with so much.

“Alright, what’s wrong with you”, the Doctor asked as I sat down on a bed in the front room. The Doctor’s name was Church, he was a white earth pony wearing a dirty lab coat and a negative disposition. The Baleville Health Clinic consisted of a front room with three beds, a back room acting as both an office, bedroom, and a storage room for all the medical equipment, and a cramped bathroom.

“I’m hurt pretty bad Doc, I got shot in the head with a rifle, the side with a shotgun, and my hind leg with…”, I paused for a moment, “huh, I actually don’t remember exactly how I hurt my leg”

“Hmm, the fact you aren’t dead and speaking coherently speaks volumes for the head injury. The other wounds shouldn’t be too hard to fix if no bones are broken. It’ll be 20 new 5.56 rounds for the whole procedure”, he said, “assuming you aren’t looking for a damn handout of course”

I swallowed. “uhh, that was actually what I was hoping for…”, I said with a nervous smile.

He just stared at me for a moment before he spoke, “get out of my clinic”. He then trotted into the back room.

“Wait!”, I got up and trotted after him, “there’s got to be some kind of deal we can work out!”

He shoved me back before I could enter the office, “I don’t wanna hear it. No cartridges, no service”

“There’s gotta be something we can do, you money grubbing fuck”, Claw said stepping forward, “everyone needs something, and we’re mercs. Fix my partner, and we’ll do what you want, no questions asked”

Church raised an eyebrow, “...money grubbing? Is that really how you negotiate?”

“Just ask Carrion, up in the Second Chance Bar, he’ll vouch for us. I’m Shepherd and this is my partner Claw”, I said pointing to Claw, “Just fix me and we’ll do what you want, no questions asked”

He looked us both up and down for a moment, and looking Claw up and down a little slower. Claw worked her jaw and glared at the extra visual attention. He looked back at me and said, “here’s the deal: I need a new defibrillator, and more medical supplies. There’s a medical research facility on the northeast side of downtown. It’s filled with ghouls, which means it hasn’t been looted bare yet. I’ll fix you up and give you directions to the place. In exchange, you’re gonna get me a working defibrillator, any medical supplies you find, and you’re gonna pay me to fix up any new injuries you receive while on the job”

“Deal”, I said holding out a hoof for him to shake.

He took my hoof and shook it, sternly adding, “If you run off without doing the job, I’m never going to give you medical care again”

I stepped out of the clinic feeling as good as new. Luckily, I didn’t have to remove my clothes and reveal my PipBuck. The doctor just gave me a healing potion and checked to make sure I didn’t have a concussion.

“I still think he’s a greedy fuck”, Claw said, “all he did was sell you a healing potion and stick a flashlight in your eyes”

“I won’t disagree with you there, but now we got a job”, I said noticing a small crowd gathering around the bomb, “that’s what counts right?”

Claw blew a raspberry, “A job with no pay? Yeah, great”

“Who knows? we might find more than just medical supplies there, besides-”, I leaned next to Claw and whispered, “It’s not like he’ll know how much medical supplies we’ll find. We could just give him a small portion, and sell the rest somewhere else”

Claw smirked at this, “I could get behind that plan”

“Glad to hear it”, I said trotting towards the crowd, “c’mon, I want to see what’s going on”

We trotted up to the crowd, the majority of which were Children of the Glow who had left their ramshackle church, but there was a decent number of townsponies in attendance too. I took a sip out of my canteen as I looked to see what all the fuss was.

In the center of the crowd, Confessor Cornflake was standing on the bomb.

I violently spit out the water I had been drinking. Confessor Cornflake was standing on the fucking balefire bomb! What the hell was that madpony thinking!

“Brothers and Sisters, true believers of the Glow! We have gathered here today to, once again, preach the glory of our lord to the unwashed masses of this community!”, the confessor proudly proclaimed over the crowd. I found it ironic he called the townsponies the unwashed ones, when his own followers smelled like raw sewage.

The Confessor continued, “Citizens of Baleville, I pray you take heed to my words. For one day soon, as it has been foretold, the Glow’s messiah, the Lightbringer, will come to pass judgement upon us all! She will bring all who believe, all who are worthy, to the promised land hidden in the depths of the Dead Zone, a paradise more beautiful and pure than you could ever imagine. She will also cast judgement upon all the heathens who remain ignorant to our Lord. She will use the remaining weapons of war, like the one beneath my hooves, to purify the world once and for all, to unleash our Lord's glory upon the world once again!”

I looked about the crowd as Cornflake continued his rant (a rant that mostly boiled down to: Join us or the lightbringer will kill you all, which Claw did not seem happy about). I noticed the Mayor watching from the sidelines, away from the crowd, he didn’t look too happy either.

I tapped Claw on the shoulder, gesturing to follow me, and I trotted over to the mayor.

“Hey Mr. Mayor, do sermons like this happen often?”, I asked.

“More and more every day it seems”, the Mayor said somewhat depressed, “They never gain any new followers, which is infuriating the Confessor”

“Really? He seemed pretty friendly to me the other day”, I said surprised.

“The Children are nothing more than raiders with an unhealthy obsession with radiation”, the Mayor said. His eyebrows shot up, and he quickly added as he looked all around us, “at least that's what I used to think! I-I uh... they’ve proven to be upstanding citizens after we brokered a peace with them! F-Fine members of the community”

I looked about myself, but there wasn’t anyone within earshot at the moment. “Mr. Mayor, I agree with you, that cult creeps me the hell out”, I said reassuringly, “what was that you mentioned about ‘brokering peace’ a minute ago?”

The Mayor let out a sigh, then rubbed his temple. “Where to begin? The Children of the Glow originally laid siege to our city upon their arrival. They wanted any of us who wouldn’t join them to either leave, or be executed. The Saviors managed to force a cease fire, and we made a deal. They just wanted the bomb, so as long as they didn’t get violent, and gave their radiation treatments for free, they could stay”, the Mayor said before taking a large, nervous swallow, “but they’re growing… impatient. The Confessor was hoping to have a large line of ponies ready to convert to his religion. I don’t think he realized a religion that forces you to donate all of your property to the cause wouldn’t be very popular in a merchant town. Now he’s threatening to resume the violence if I don’t let him run unopposed in the upcoming election”

“Fucking piece of shit cultists”, Claw spat, “The only way to deal with them is to shoot them”

“Many would say the same about raiders Ms”, the mayor said. Claw visibly bristled at his words, but kept quiet.

“Why not tell these Savior ponies about this? Get them to help you throw the Children out of town”, I suggested, “they obviously aren’t following their end of the deal”

“Unfortunately, the Children are technically still following their end of the deal”, the Mayor said, “What’s worse, the Saviors know about the problem, they instructed me to appease them! I-I can’t do anything!-”. His eyes slowly widened in realization as he began staring at me. “I can’t do anything…”, he said slowly, the gears in his head turning in thought.

“Umm… what’re you thinking Mr Mayor?”, I asked. I had a feeling I was about to be offered another job.

“You were the one who wiped out the Tunnel Snakes, weren’t you? I saw you in the bar yesterday, after that unpleasant situation with Carrion”, he said. Before I could answer he frantically added, “D-don’t answer that! I don’t want to know for sure. But you… you aren’t from here, you aren’t affiliated with anyone, you don’t have a reputation yet. If I… hypothetically asked you to get the Children to leave, I could maintain a safe level of plausible deniability. So.. could you do that?”

“Uh… Hypothetically of course”, Mayor McDoughnut added with a large, forced wink.

I was quiet for a minute. Once again, I was in a position to help out the town. I wanted to just say yes outright, but at the same time I needed money. “Would this hypothetical job come with a reward of some kind?”, I asked.

“Umm… “, he said, “I’ll- I would have to think about it... Doing a good job would certainly influence my decision though”

“Hmm, I’ll think about it too then”, I said trotting away towards the gate.

“So are we gonna do it?”, Claw asked as we trotted through the dead streets of Apple Hills, “kill the Children I mean”

“Okay, slow it down there killer”, I said stopping at a street corner. I turned to Claw, “We don’t even have a guarantee we’ll get paid for doing this job... I need to think about it for a bit”

“So what? We’re not gonna do it?”, Claw scoffed, “where did that spine of yours go? Don’t tell me that town is making you soft on me”

“I didn’t say that!”, I exclaimed defensively, “I’m just saying we should try to play it smart, find a way to get the Children out of town without kicking in the door and killing every last one of them… somehow. I just need time to think on it, alright?”

Claw rolled her eyes. “Fine…”, she said.

I started to walk again when a round buried itself into a telephone pole behind me, and I heard the crack of a rifle from down the street. I turned and saw three ponies wearing armored leather jackets running our way.

“Get that bastard!”, one yelled.

Claw immediately flew up into the air, and I dove behind the corner of a building. No sooner had I done that the group of ponies peppered the corner of the building with a burst gunshots.

I pulled out thunder and began cranking it when I heard the quick rending of flesh and a mare scream out in pain. Immediately after that I heard two gunshots and a similar scream from Claw.

Oh shit

I quickly jumped out of cover and switched on SATS, worried that I might see that Claw was just killed. What I saw was Claw, laying on the ground next to a freshly killed mare, she was clutching her chest and struggling to stand up. Standing near her was a jacketed pony with a pistol in his mouth, readying himself to finish Claw off any second. Next to him was a pony with a pool cue in his mouth, his eyes slowly widening in horror at me in the slowness of SATS.

I cued up a shot at the chest of the raider that was about to execute my partner.

I released the spell, and Thunder fired. The armored jacket didn’t stop the accelerated metal bar from ripping right through his chest. His pistol shot missed Claw’s head as his body was thrown to the side from the impact, he dropped to the ground, dead.

The last jacketed pony spat out his pool cue. “Oh fuck!”, he exclaimed in panic before running away down an alley.

I ran over to Claw, my EFS said her lifesigns were low. I tried to help her sit up. “Claw, are you okay?”, I asked quickly.

She lashed out with her unclawed forehoof and kicked at the dirt with her hind hooves. I was shoved back, and lost my grip on her. She grunted in pain when she hit the dirt again.

“F-fuck Shepherd, I almost killed you”, she said rolling onto her side and clutching her chest. She coughed up some blood onto the street, before standing up. Her breathing was heavy and pained.

“Claw, what happened?”, I asked.

“I… killed that one…”, she said between breaths, gesturing to the jacketed mare next to her, whose throat was slashed open, “then that… jackass with the pistol tagged me..”

I saw blood dripping over Claw’s claw clad hoof, which she was holding the side of to her chest. She was standing uneasy too, as if she were lightheaded.

“Claw, how bad are you hurt?”, I asked in concern.

She gave a me a slightly pissed off scowl. “Don’t worry about it, I’ll be fine”, she said before trying to trot on. She made it about four steps before she fell over, where I managed to catch her and prop her up.

“No, you’re not”, I said, “c’mon, sit down”

She let out a frustrated sigh and sat down. Lowering her hoof, I saw she was shot twice in the chest. She coughed up a little more blood, “I-It’s not that bad, I just gotta tough it out”

“Tough it out? Claw, you’ve been shot”, I said digging through my bag, “fuck! I’m out of bandages!”

I turned and started digging through a Jacketed pony’s pockets. I came across a note, curious, but not important, I pocketed it, then I found some healing bandages in another pocket.

I went back over to Claw and began wrapping it across her chest.
“There weren’t any potions, but there’s bound to be some inside that research center”, I said quickly.

“...th-thanks Shepherd”, Claw said after a moment, wiping away some blood from the side of her muzzle.

“Don’t mention it”, I said resting a hoof on her shoulder, “but maybe we should see about getting you some armor”

Claw quickly shook her head, “No, fuck that, I’d rather just not get shot at all, armor would just slow me down”

She tried to stand up again, and I helped steady her. She leaned on me, using me as support as we started trotting down the street again.

“Alright, but if you aren’t going to wear armor then you better be careful”, I said.

“Yeah yeah”, she said with a smirk and a roll of her eyes.

I pulled out the note as we walked, and I unfolded it in my telekinetic grasp.

“What’s that?”, Claw asked tilting her head.

“Some kind of note, one of those ponies had it”, I said as I began reading it.

It read:
Saviors,
Whoever wiped out the tunnel snakes just made our shit list. I want any patrols in downtown, around Baleville, to keep an eye out for a navy blue unicorn with a weird scar above his left eye. If you see him, kill him and you’ll earn a few extra points.
-Dumbell

“Damn…”, Claw said before coughing up more blood, “two days in… and we already got ponies who want us dead”

“Yeah, this is a problem”, I said.

Another one for the pile it seemed, I decided just to focus on the task at hoof for the time being.

After evading a sizable group of raiders, we arrived at the Angel Chemical Research building. It was a decently sized, ten story research complex covered in flaking green paint. Above the front doors, next to the sign, was a large logo of a smiling bunny. There were two feral ghouls up front, and a dead one on the ground next to them.

Claw had regained some strength, and dispatched two feral ghouls out front. Then she trotted up to the dead one and stabbed it in the head.

“What’re you doing? It's already dead”, I said.

“Fucking stable dwellers...”, she muttered with a roll of her eyes, “ferals like to play dead, lots of idiots get themselves killed by not double checking”

That was mildly concerning, at least until a thought popped in my head, “my PipBuck’s EFS should pick up whether they’re alive or not, so that shouldn’t be a problem”

“Next you’re gonna tell me it can pick your nose”, she said with a joking smirk.

“No, it can’t pick my nose, but it is really useful. It’s too bad the authority has it out for ponies with them, otherwise I’d suggest finding you one too”, I said.

“We’ll see”, Claw said looking at my left foreleg, where my PipBuck was concealed under my sleeve. “Even if it is useful, I think you’re leaning on it a lot. If it crapped out, you’d be fucked”

I blew a raspberry and waved a forehoof dismissively, “please, PipBuck’s are build to be indestructible. My PipBuck ‘crapping out’ is the last worry on my mind right now”

I turned to face the front doors to the research building. “You ready for this?”, I asked.

Claw moved to stand next to me. “I’ve been better...”, she said before coughing out a small amount of blood onto the ground, “but yeah, I’m fucking ready, lets do this”

I opened the front doors, my shotgun and Claw’s gauntlet at the ready, and we went in.

Author's Note

Author’s Note:
Hello Everyone, I’m not dead!
Sorry for the long wait, life got a bit crazy on my end, and I needed time to really get things together. I don’t plan on letting a multiple month delay like this happen again.

In other news, I’ve decided that, in the interest of uploading new chapters more frequently and making longer chapters easier to read, I’ll now be breaking up much longer entries of Epilogue into multiple parts. I should have part 2 of Entry 7 done by the end of November if all goes to plan, maybe a week or two later if not.

I’m also revising the first Entry of the story, and have removed the “Foreword” from the beginning, in order to try and give the story a much stronger, tighter, higher quality opening. So keep your eye out for when I upload the updated first chapter, which should be sometime in the first half of November.

Thanks again for all the support everyone, and as always, constructive criticism is welcomed and encouraged.

Book 1 Intro: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

It’s been forty years since the Stable Dweller died in a burst of flame, since Security went into shadowbolt tower and vanished, since Rolling Thunder flew back up into the skies and was never heard from again….and in that time we have lived in a new dark age, brought about by a horrific disaster, another war, and from the great evil whose rise to power was aided by those events…. But I beg every pony, zebra, griffon, and all other residents of the wasteland who can hear this, Don't. Lose. Hope. Even though our numbers are small we are still fighting back, because we will never lose hope, we’ll keep fighting until we get our moment, our chance, or until a new hero rises. Until next time this is DJ Pon3, hijacking the Authority’s shit to be your voice in the darkness.