Chapter 4: Till the Bottle Runs Out

“Then again…”
/.| - _=-]_______________________________[-=-]

War.

It is a vile beast that, unless somepony quickly puts it down, will consume vast amounts of resources, money, and precious lives until the group or country supporting this monster simply can’t feed it anymore. According to the Guide, Ditzy wrote a small section on the history of some ‘Great War’. It went on for many, many years. Much longer than the comparatively small six year scuffle with the griffons from my history’s point of view. It makes a pony wonder about what could have been if this world’s war was ended peacefully, instead of blowing everything to shit.

Take this city for example. Wicker looked like there was a lot of construction going on, a lot of progress, the potential for great things. All wasted in the fires of war.

I tossed Jester’s book back into her cart as she pushed it across the decrepit highway bridging the gap between North Wicker and Southtown and asked her, “Do you even know what the war was about?”

“Flyboy, I don’t even know how I got these Stable duds I’ve been wearing for a year, you really expect me to know what a two hundred year-gone war was about?” Jester rasped sarcastically. They did look pretty worn, there were more patches and stitches on the stable barding than a quilt.

Her speech had been much more coherent ever since she started eating those mints. She was popping them into her mouth like they were candy about every forty minutes or so, which made me want to know just what they were. I didn’t really look at what the tin said other than “Mint-als!” with the picture of the smiling zebra next to it.

“Hey lemme see one of those packs of mints you love so much,” I said while holding up my prosthetic. Shifting my stance to step easier with three legs, and read the subtext aloud, “Refresh your mind and your breath.”

Hmm, having the wasteland beat the hell out of me for a full day has made my mind a little cloudy as of late. I flicked a mint into my mouth and chewed it up.

Oh my damn.

This must be what Doc feels like all the time. The colors, they were like somepony took the saturation slider and tore it off the meter, I could smell the alcohol on the breath of Jester’s dog, which had lapped up a bit of naughty water that had spilled onto the ground back at the clinic, and a tidal wave of clarity washed over my mind.

I saw why Jester liked these things so much. They were probably counteracting the effects of being drunk and she might be feeling as though as she was sober right now. Though I don’t know how healthy taking these things with alcohol was, I wasn’t that concerned. The physiology of a ghoul seemed to be a bit different than your average pony, seeing as how the back of Jester’s neck was missing most of its skin. She was a child of de Yegua la Muerte, the Mare of Death.

But she isn’t dead, or undead, she just looks that way and calling her that probably isn’t going to go over that well with the ghoul.

Jester never did say where we were going. After I asked her I responded with, “Why are we going back to your garage, so you can shoot me again?”

She raised a hoof from the push bar of the cart and said while waving it, “No, we need guns and I got a couple of shotties back home that’ll help a lot.”

Shotguns?Oh hell yes, thatis something I very much want. “So how much longer till we get to your house?”

Well you see it’s right across the br- Son of a bitch, do I need to make signs that say ‘stay the fuck out’ or something?” Jester asked me as she pointed a hoof at the open garage door of her home and pulled out her rotary .357 magnum, or just wheelgun for short.

“Boy, you swear a lot. But do we have to kill them? I mean they might not know you live here kinda like-“

“Shut up. You had a kid with you and you were getting your stuff back,” She explained as she pointed the barrel of her gun towards the garage, “Those assholes are stealing from me, and for that they’re gonna die.”

Marty growled at the garage and then was calmed down by Jester and she deadpanned back towards me and magically turned the ammo reel on her gun one click.

I kinda wished that those mints helped me be a little more charismatic as well but I don’t think I would need something like that to convince a drunken pony not to kill somepony. Now that I think about it, it might actually be a little tough. “Now hold on here. I’m not going to kill somepony unless I got a good reason. What do you say you let me try to handle this a little more subtlety?”

She sighed before giving in and said, “Alright, but only because I don’t want any more blood on my floor. Abraxo-Cleaner can only do so much.”

What the hell is- whatever. Before leaving I looked to her and asked, “Anything I should know?”

“Well there’s a back door. I don’t think they’ll see you coming even with that mane of yours.”

Well that would have been nice to know when I first broke in, huh?

Jester stayed behind with her noisy shopping cart while I snuck up to her garage. With the mid morning sun on my back and a hope that these thieves haven’t found the shotguns my friend brought me here to retrieve I peered into a small window on the side of the garage.

There were two ponies, both mares, the silver one was a unicorn and the earth pony was some kind of deep blue-green, like a lagoon.

Lagoon turned to her friend, who had a bag full of Jester’s things and was examining the blood stain I had left on the concrete floor and asked, “You sure we should be doin’ this Chase? What if whoever lives here comes back?”

“So what if they come back? We can take whoever comes our way.” That’s a mistake a lot of novice takers make. Getting cocky will put you in the clink, or in this case, you’ll end up eating a lead sandwich from a pissed off ghoul.

Entering through the rear door I could smell how this place simply reeked of alcohol. It was as if the garage had been built from whiskey barrels that had whiskey poured onto it daily for eight years and then left to dry in the sun. Before the stench of the garage overwhelmed me I grabbed one of the many discarded glass bottles lying on the reception desk and threw it against the wall.

I heard Lagoon ask her partner in crime, “What the hay was that? Chase, you’re the one with the gun you check it out.”

I saw the gun enveloped in a blue aura come in through the open door, followed by Silver, who I gave a left hook to the face. The gun in front of us went off, burying a small-caliber slug into Jester’s wall.

“Bam! Nopony expects a pegasus!” I had a feeling that I wasn’t the first one to shout that.

My good leg snaked around her neck as I grabbed the levitating gun with the Snakoil so she couldn’t turn it on me and I directed my hostage towards her friend. “Now we don’t want you to hurt your friend, now do we?”

With a small drop of blood running down her lip she shook her head and released her hold on the pistol

“Jester, you mind getting over here already?!” I loudly asked, knowing full well she could hear me. She’s been popping them brain boosters like they were candy. “I have a situation that I need assistance with and would really appreciate some help!”

“Alright, alright, keep your feathers on Flyboy. Wow, it’s hilarious watching you dominate ponies bigger than you, I mean look at you. You’re tiny,” Jester chuckled as she came into the garage, pointing her unique weapon as well as that blocky 10mm pistol I found. “And it looks like we have a Mexicoltian standoff here.”

A smart drunk pony is still a drunk pony I guess. I sighed before explaining to my new friend,“That’s not what this is. She would need a gun too. This is more of a one-sided hostage situation, and like any hostage situation there’s gonna be some demands. And go to hell.”

With a raspy chuckle the ghoul asked me, “Whaddya have in mind Flyboy?”

I thought for a moment before looking at my hostage and said, “I propose that these two idiots pay a dumbass tax instead of us shooting them both and tossing them in some random dumpster to rot.”

“Pleasepleaseplease don’t kill us!” Lagoon begged as tears began to well up in her eyes and she held her forehooves in front of her face as she lay on the floor resigned to fighting either of the gun-toting ponies, “It was all her idea, I told her looting this place was a stupid idea!”

Waving my newly acquired pistol around for emphasis I said, “Way to sell your buddy here out, and yes it was. Hey Chase? Why don’t you apologize for being stupid?”

She gritted her teeth and angrily asked me, “How do you know my name?”

“Chase these mint things I just ate can probably let me hear a moth fart from across a canyon, and your quivering mass of a friend you have there said your name like five times.”

“Dammit Wink, this is just like Irondale!”

Wink shrugged slightly with a sheepish look on her face as I let go of Chase’s neck and grabbed the strap holding her saddlebag to her body. “Ho now. Don’t want you getting any more stupid ideas and end up hurting yourself now do we? Everything in this bag is now the ghoul’s. I don’t care if your stuff is in it, you’re lucky we aren’t killing you.”

“You might as well be killing us by taking all our supplies!” Chase shouted as she undid the strap to free herself and fell to all fours.

That earned her amouth grip to the back of the head as I shouted, “Did I say you could do that?!”

I hit her mainly because I didn’t want to give Jester an excuse to open fire on the thieves, but it was also because it was kind of fun actually to be the one in charge of a situation for once.“You know what? I’m sick of your faces, get out of here. Go!”

If they ran any faster there might have been a trail of fire all the way back to North Wicker.

“Now that’s over, I’ma show you a couple boom sticks I keep around in case of trouble,” Jester said as she beckoned for me to come over.

Jester moved some shelves to reveal an old electronic wall safe in the back of the garage and she pulled out two shotguns. She levitated the single-barreled one over to me and started to put the double-barreled one in a scabbard before putting it on her back.

“Alright, there isn’t that many shells here so try not to waste them all,” She told me as she passed a small box of shells my way after taking some for herself and put them in the loops on the scabbard she wore.

“This is that pile you taped to the chair, isn’t it?” I asked as I turned the simple yet devastating weapon over, and then realized something. “You took the time to stow this away while I was bleeding to death on your floor?”

The ghoul scoffed as she snapped her loaded shotgun into position and said, “You get that one and you like it, and I put them away after I saved your dumb ass.”

“From you?”

“I have a shotgun you know.”

“And your point is?”

She stared at me with that deadpan expression of hers until she muttered, “Shut up.”

= - \ |\_._/| / - =

The rattle of Jester’s cart filled the otherwise lifeless air of the Southtown ruins with a discordant anthem that haunted my soul. To put it another way I was getting tired of all the noise that damn thing made.

The surly ghoul pony threatened to shoot me again when I complained about her cart so I learned to ignore the noisy cart for now.

She hasn’t drunk anything alcoholic for a while now and her mood has progressively gotten worse as her necrotic liver did its best to process all the alcohol in Jester’s blood (if you could even call it that.)

When those mints wore out it wasn’t pleasant. I ran into the remains of a lamppost, much to my friend’s delight. At least I didn’t have to deal with Jester’s alcoholic stench assaulting my senses anymore.

She did start to sing for some reason, and it was really, really starting to get on my nerves. Jester really shouldn’t sing, it sounds like two undead cats killing each other with jigsaws.

”Your hooves upon a dead pony’s gun and you’re lookin’ down the sights,
you heart is worn, the seams are torn and they’ve given you a reason to fight…”

The lyrics seemed to fit just right in this place, and you really couldn’t have picked a better pony to sing something like this. Actually, yeah, you could. About ten other ponies came to my mind. Again, her voice is just terrible.

Still it filled the air with something other than wind, or bullets for that matter.

/.| - _=-] /-=-]

*BLAM!*

Well, that’s one less… giant… rat monster thing to worry about, now there’s only six or seven more of the bastards!

“Let’s go that way, there ain’t nothin’ down there!” I mocked Jester as I stuffed a single shell into the barrel of my gun, snapping it back into position before hitting S.A.T.S as a ‘Molerat’ as the device labeled it was leaping at me, ready to tear me to pieces with its massive tombstone-like teeth.

Even with a direct blast of buckshot to the face, that only made it fall to the ground and shake its head, making a horrible screeching squealing sound. That was silenced by Jester’s weathered, taped twin-barreled shotgun.

“Yeah, yeah. Shut the fuck up!” she shouted angrily, putting two large slugs into another molerat before loading regular buckshot. Where did these things even come from? Jester told me that there was a local scavenger here underneath an overpass that sold some cool stuff to her and usually had ammo and stuff like that she could trade with him for.

The butt of my gun knocked away another rat and before I was able to load it a pair of teeth locked onto it, yanking it away. I need load my gun faster than that. Suddenly I was pulled into S.A.T.S, and even though I had low AP Stable Mare had more information for me on the use of the PipBuck.

“Oh no! You just dropped your toy! But not to worry, if you have another toy, I can get you it lickity-split!”

By ‘toy’, I think she meant weapon. I could not turn S.A.T.S off and skip this tutorial, so I continued to listen to her. “Just set whatever toys you want for me to give to you and I’ll pull them out for you! I can only set about eight different toys at any given time, so if you want some other toys to be set you’ll have to tell me.”

A ring with nine squares, eight of them empty, flashed in my vision several times before Stable mare told me, “That’s about it for the Quik-Select feature of the PipBuck, and here’s your [Spiked Horseshoe]. Try not to drop it!”

The horseshoe lifted from my bag and into the air so I could grab it as S.A.T.S ended and I snatched it into my prosthetic leg’s hand. Onto my good hoof it went and into the jaw of an unlucky molerat.

My Omni-hoof’s blade extended out and was thrust into the rat’s head, killing it. My shotgun was pulled away from the beast that had it by Jester’s strong, red-colored magic, tossing it towards me as she called out to me to take it.

After catching it I retracted my leg’s blade and pushed the small button on the side of the gun, releasing the barrel as I swung it upwards, allowing gravity to make the shell fall out and stuffed another one in as it fell. With a quick snap of the leg, the gun straightened out and was fired into the side of another molerat.

The number of these monsters was starting to wear thin by this point and I didn’t want to waste any more shells on these… animals? Well, they looked like some kind of animal and- oh yeah, the fight. Anyways, I stowed my shotgun away when I had the chance and punched the last one to death while Jester loaded her gun.

She sighed as she looked over the body of the scavenger, taking a wrench off the pony’s heavy longcoat. “Well ain’t this a shame? Socket here was a good pony. He never gave me any shit because I’m a ghoul.” Jester pulled a bottle of wine from the pony’s deep pockets and uncorked it.

“And you’re stealing from his corpse?” I asked as I wiped a hoof on my clothes and looking to Marty in Jester’s cart, being utterly useless combat-wise.

If I blessed him, like with those other bodies I did, probably wouldn’t give him any kind of help. Especially seeing how I’m not a priest or even go to church that often. But I gave a little silent prayer anyways because you never know.

“He ain’t gonna need this shit anymore. ‘Sides, you like using that gun, right?” She asked, tossing a 20g shell to me. Jester had a point. The dead did not have much use for worldly possessions.

As Jester continued to stuff her pockets with the desiccated body’s things, I looked to the shelves that had been dragged down into this hole, looking through the scavenger’s things and picked up a ridiculous-looking camera. There were several developed photos under the spot from where our photographer had last placed his camera and I decided to take a look at them.

I dropped the camera to the ground, breaking the large flash bulb on the camera as I lifted the photo on top. It was a picture of Molly. It might have been taken from the top of some building or another vantage point that Socket had been on. I could barely see the pony but one could tell that it was her for sure. She was bound in chains and was being lead along by several armed ponies, lead by an… an alicorn. A heavily armored one, at that. It didn’t give any indication to where any of them were going though, but now at least I know what happened to her.

“Aw, you fuckin’ broke it.” Jester complained as she lifted up the camera. I stuffed the picture into my pocket, ignoring the ghoul as I looked through the others for any more information. All the rest were just random pictures of various ruins, and one of them was a picture of some ponies that looked like raiders running from an enormous mutated… alligator... thing.

Still I’d like to know where all these pictures had been taken from so I might try and see what specific highway those ponies that had captured Molly and maybe get a lead from there.

/.| - _=-] /-=-]

Jester didn’t want to go on some ridiculous wild goose chase so it was either have my guide leave me or continue traveling with her.

Did I mention that I was starting to get sick of the sound of Jester’s cart? No? Well I was and I just had to gripe.

“Can that thing make any more noise?”

“I dunno, lemme see.” She started to bash the cart’s wheels on the ground to deliberately piss me off as her dog barked at me. It was working.

When she stopped being a child (How old is she, anyways?) I was eating some gritty cream-filled chocolate cupcakes that were two hundred years old courtesy of the dead scavenger like it was my last meal. Well, in this place, that might be true.

“Any idea what this thing is, Flyboy?” Jester asked me, holding a strange piece of machinery. It looks like it goes to… well I don’t really know. It was like some kind of block thing with four small pegs on one of the faces and when the ghoul maniputated some of the cogs inside the device the pegs moved in and out.

“Lemme see that,” I requested as I held out a hoof. When she eventually did, I turned it over, saying, “I… I have no idea. It looks really uh… mechanical.”

“Maybe it’s part of a gun or somethin’. If it is I’d like to see the whole damn thing, this is huge,” she said as she took her thing back.

Tossing the empty cardboard box aside I took a bottle of Sparkle~Cola, this too from Jester’s scavenger friend’s little nest. I wish that he hadn’t died so I could have talked with him about Molly…

Jester was pestering me about something, and I’d realize by this point that ignoring her or annoying her was generally a bad plan so I finally asked, “What?”

“Your radio. Turn on your fuckin’ radio. I wanna see if DJ- Pon3 is on.”

With some mild help from Jester with finding the radio station, we were rewarded with empty static.

“What?! Oh you have got to be shittin’ me. It’s broken ain’t it? You just fuckin’ break everything you touch don’t you?!” the ghoul angrily shouted as she threw an empty wine bottle towards me, and the already inaccurate and now inebriated pony missed me completely.

“Hey! I didn’t break this thing…” I shook it and nothing was rattling around, so there was that. “Maybe it’s the signal? I dunno.”

“Whatever,” Jester rasped as she left me and went back to pushing her cart.

= - \ |\_._/| / - =

Raiders. Great, and I thought that we were just going to some grocery store. I’m not very sure how we even got into this firefight. Jester just shoved her cart behind a rock and started to shoot at things ,telling me to stay low and follow her. Now here I am, stuck between a concrete road divider and a hard place.

As the bullets chipped away at the concrete road divider (that must have been dragged up here by somepony) we hid behind covered in foul and crude paintings of a pornographic nature Jester took potshots at them with her wheelgun before it was shot out of the air.

“Son of a whore! I spent all day cleaning this thing, you bitches!” the ghoul swore as she stuffed her damaged gun into her bag, pulling up her shotgun, looking to me. “Well? Aren’t you gonna shoot at them or what?!”

“Hold on, hold on, lemme just get… the blood off this gun first,” I requested, wiping at the magazine of one of those crappy little plink rifles that I had seen before, my PipBuck called it something stupid as I picked it up, so I’m not gonna call it that. The small clip with barely any 5.56 rifle rounds was swiftly inserted into the gun and the thin, loose bolt action manipulated with my good hoof, loading a bullet into the barrel.

“You done dickin’ around?” She asked as a lit pipe bomb bounced over our cover and her eyes widened, quickly grabbing it in her hooves, “Oh shit!”

The explosion in front of us nearly burst one of my eardrums and I was barely able to hear Jester’s sarcasm about their failed attempt to blow us to bits. I brushed a bit of rubble from my clothes as I stood up, activating S.A.T.S and aiming my weapon towards our aggressors while at the same time seeing where else we could hide from bullets.

Seems like these ponies had the same idea as the first ones I had met and tried to build themselves a little castle from scaffolding and other construction equipment but they didn’t have enough so they just piled up what they had in front of what used to be just a donut shop. Well, I think it was a donut shop, the sign is mostly destroyed and- What am I doing? Gun battle!

I put two bullets into the center mass of the nearest psychopath before diving back down behind our quickly disintegrating cover. Well, now I have no bullets for this gun. Tossing it aside I told my PipBuck to give me my weedy little .32 pistol and I caught it as it popped out the top of my bag.

“You’re seriously not gonna use that?” Jester asked me in disbelief, plopping some gravel into a piece of some duct-taped plastic piping that was littering the area as she pulled a cigarette from the pack residing in one of her many pockets.

“Says you! What the hell is that?!” I loudly asked, shrinking down lower as bits of stone chipped and flew every which way. “Do you even have the shit to make that work?”

“Of course I do! What do you think I’m some kinda drunk idiot?”

“Yeah, actually I do!”

“Well you can suck it, Flyboy! Suck it hard, because here it is!” She screwed on a cracked cap from the small amount that were scattered about and stuck in a hole in the top with her horn before lighting a cigarette with it and popping it into the top.

“Fire in the hole, you asswipes!” She hurled the dummy grenade over the divider and yanked on my collar as she shouted for me to get up and move. I saw that those dumbasses were actually running away from Jester’s smoking tube full of rocks! I shot one diving back behind a scaffolding platform in the ass before we went into a small living area made from you guessed it, more construction equipment. There was a ruined mattress and a humming refrigerator that had no clear power source here as well.

I took this very brief moment of respite to reload my small gun as I saw Jester pocket a switchblade that was sitting on the mattress. “Oh goddesses what is that smell?! Why did I let you bring me here? It’s so dangerous, I hate you!”

“You really like to complain, don’t you Flyboy?” The ghoul asked me as she drew her shotgun off her back in anticipation for them to get the smart idea to attack us.

A unicorn pony wearing a cut up hard hat as a shoulder pad, holding a hammer aloft with her magic came around the corner and was promptly blasted in the chest by my friend. As she dropped, another pony came around with some kind of chisel in their teeth.

What the hell was with this gun? It was like it was specifically designed to be terrible, because by the time I put three rounds into the Raider before she stabbed into my shoulder. My left hoof went against the pony’s neck, pushing her away from me and head butting her in the face, knocking her back from me. Then I took this time I bought and grabbed the handle of the refrigerator, lifted it up, and threw the door open into the Raider, knocking her completely down onto her side and onto the muddy ground.

“GraaAAHH!” I screamed as I yanked the chisel from my shoulder and Jester finally reloaded her weapon to finish the downed pony off. Great, there was yet another hole in my clothes from which blood pours and ruins them. “I- I- I need… I need bandages! Come on!”

“I told you that gun sucked! Don’t you have some?” She asked, pointing her weapon to where somepony that was either stupid or crazy enough to try a frontal assault after two of their own failed.

Using my PipBuck to quickly locate the bandages on my person and take them out I moved my jacket off my shoulder so I could wrap my dirtied, stained shirt sleeve. With Jester’s slight help I applied the medicated wrappings because it’s actually pretty hard to bandage yourself even when you’re not in a firefight.

“Jester I am in unbelievable pain right now, so could you direct the witty one-liners towards the assholes trying to kill us?!”

“Oh there’s more than enough to go around Flyboy!” I watched the ghoul laugh like a madmare as she looked over to the slim pickings in the open fridge, taking a half-empty bottle of whisky and a box of…Salisbury steak? Not sure if it might even be edible after all this time, I’m not eating it.

We couldn’t stay there forever, so Jester quickly stole everything that wasn’t nailed down and we leapt out from the cover into the rancid-smelling area.

With our shotguns pointed to the store, I shouted out, “Come on you motherfucking- Where are they?”

I looked around, surprised by the sudden lack of gunfire. This was really weird… there were at least four others that went into the donut shop but I didn’t see any of them anywhere.

Peering inside through a gap in the fortifications with my shotgun, I soon had to pull away before emptying my stomach on the ground. What was in there? I didn’t want to find out.

Breaking the bolt off the doors reinforced with bits of ancient wood and sheet metal with that Raider’s hammer Jester went inside first. Her nose isn’t as sensitive as the next pony’s judging from the way she wasn’t gagging or heaving like I was.

She poked her head back out from the donut shop, and shook her head, shuddering. “Yeah well It looks like they booked it out the back door like pussies. They didn’t leave much behind, guess they decided to cut their losses. Smart for a bunch of maniacs.”

“Jester, I don’t know if you noticed, but that knife I was just stabbed with wasn’t too clean. I don’t want to lose another leg, so lemme see that hooch you just pinched.”

After a moment of thought, she reluctantly poured some of the alcohol onto my bandages, and it stung for a moment before she took a drink and offered the bottle to me. I took it and wiped the top of the bottle on my undershirt before taking a drink, which the ghoul took offence to.

“Hey, it’s not because you’re a- I just don’t like drinking from the same bottle as somepony else. Gimmie a break, I’ve been stabbed.”

“Whatever. I’m gonna pick apart this place for stuff before we go,” she rasped before adding with an air of sarcasm, “Feel free to help out.”

Such boundless sympathy.

After Jester dumped her haul into her cart, petting Marty as she did so, we headed out to continue on our way to the grocery store.

/.| - _=-] /-=-]

Marty was growling at the empty campsite near an entrance to an underground metro station that had some bloodstains on the concrete floor. Jester held a hoof over a tire on the ground with blackened and charred boards inside of it.

“Still warm. Wonder what happened here?”

Jester’s stupid little dog was barking at a bent up bed frame with a disgusting mattress on it and when I investigated the dog dragged out a disembodied hoof with a 10mm pistol up underneath it.

“Oh goddesses…” Well that explains the smell. I took the gun up and looked it over before removing the magazine and taking the other one from the cart. As I set them on a table with an ashtray and a cracked ceramic plate on it I wondered where this camp’s inhabitants got all the furniture.

Who cares? I have weapons to blow up and cram together. When I was done the little meter on my PipBuck when I looked up the gun was a bit higher than it was and that was good, right? I didn’t mess it up? Well, now I had enough bullets to actually justify using this thing now.

Into the holster in my leg it went before I turned to look at Jester, who was dismantling an oven, ripping out a pilot light and smiling at it. She was probably planning on selling it.

“So where do we go? I don’t really see anywhere to…” I trailed off as I fiddled around with the PipBuck some more, setting a marker on my map from my list of current objectives and a flashing arrow appeared on my E.F.S. in the diection of the metro entranceway.

“It’s locked.”

“Huh? What do you mean, it’s locked?” Jester asked, starting to get angry.

“I mean that it’s locked, and I’m not a fuckin’ master at this. I can’t pick it. It’s like some kind of electronic card reader thing on the gate that says ‘Auto-Lok brand door locks’. I don’t know how jamming a bobby pin in it will do anything but break it.”

“I- We came all the way out here, just so you can- Oh you better find a way to open this gate Flyboy or I swear I’ll make your life a living hell.”

“What is your deal with getting to this grocery store?”

“Money, Flyboy. In case you haven’t noticed, food isn’t really dropping from the skies, ain’t it?” She pointed across the river to a beam of light shooting up from North Wicker (A spotlight, maybe?) and continued with, “Those assholes will pay serious caps for two hundred year-old shit and I am sick and tired of living in a little shithole outside of town having everything and its mother breaking my doors down!”

That made sense. I wouldn’t want to live out here, either. “Calm down, calm down, I get it. But unless we get that card, we aren’t getting inside this metro through this way, and you aren’t getting your wish granted.”

Jester sighed before putting a hoof on her face, sitting down on the stairs. “I can’t fuckin’ believe this. Come all this way just for this. Can we bust it open?”

“I don’t know…” I said, gripping the grating and giving it a good shake. “Probably not.”

“Guess we have to find this card, huh?” The ghoul said as her dog sat next to her, and was hugged by its owner.

I took a seat next to the ghoul, looking at the lock, and relaxed for the first time in days. “Yep.”

CJ’s pre-recorded voice filled my head. /|| Hey uh, ah reckon you might wanna eat… sugar or whatever it is cyberponies eat ‘cause ya got about uh… where’s the timer? Ya got eighty-five percent power on reserve, hun. ||/

Damn. I thought that it’d be higher than that. All this wasteland garbage really takes it out of you, doesn’t it? I did lose my lunch back there, though.

After a good while of thought, I turned to my hyper-exfoliated friend and started to ask, “Well, if there’s a base… thing here that ponies were living in, they might have had the card? I mean, why build your house around something like this if you can’t even get in?”

“I can think of a couple reasons,” Jester rasped before standing up, “But you’re right. Whoever lived here had a reason to pick this spot. Access to the metro station means that you’d be protected from the rain and wind that comes down from Lake Steerie, up by Detrot.”

A strong hypothesis was starting to come together. “And maybe… whoever has the key card is inside the metro, hiding from whatever passed through here!”

“Son of a bitch… I guess that means we have no choice but to blow the gate. You don’t happen to have any detcord on you, do you?”

“Uh… no. I don’t. We might not need explosives.” I said, leaning forwards, examining the rusty, ancient gate further. “Probably just need to smash it with something heavy.”

“That sounds easy. I’ll be right back.”

I watched the ghoul leave and turned back to look at the gate briefly before gripping my right foreleg since my stab wound was hurting for a while before hearing some noises from the top of the stairs.

“Hey what’s goin’ up up-“ A large boulder-shaped chunk of building thundered past me and into the gate, tearing through it like it was made of paper.

“I don’t know why we didn’t just do this in the first place.” The ghoul said casually as she slowly levitated her cart down the stairs with her dog in it, panting happily with its tongue hanging out.

“You could have killed me!”

She stared at me with a look of haughty derision before asking raspily, “And I didn’t, did I? Now shut the fuck up and come on. It is time to get PAID.”

“You are unbelievable,” I facehooved, rubbing at my cheek before getting up and following the ghoul through the large hole my friend had just made, trying not to get cut by the broken glass from the doors behind the gate.

“You know what they say, it’s all about the way you enter a room,” I mumbled to myself while moving around the boulder, trying to see in the dank darkness.

“It’s pretty hard to see without any light, Flyboy,” Jester rasped in an annoyed tone.

“Alright, I’m on it. Luna,” my attention turned to my PipBuck and soon it was glowing like a lantern in the darkness.

That’s when we saw the first couple of bodies. One of them was partially crushed by Jester’s boulder but it was clear that wasn’t what killed him. Or was it her? A headless corpse halfway crushed by a huge rock is a little hard to identify.

Goddesses, what is wrong with me? I hadn’t looted the body yet, that’s what was wrong.

Letting go of the breath I held I examined the partially-filled magazine of 9mm rounds, then stowed it away in my pack. I didn’t find the respective gun for the ammunition, maybe it was under the big rock? Probably.

The ghoul pulled some different kind of ammunition and some chems, from the other body, who had been disemboweled. The smell was horrendous, but it still wasn’t as bad as whatever was in that donut shop of horrors.

A dimly lit, flickering vending machine was just begging to be cracked open and right about when I was about to open a bottle of room-temperature Sparkle~Cola I saw a couple red dashes on my E.F.S. appear.

Aw hell.

Catching Jester’s attention I told her, “Hey. Hey I see baddies on my thing.”

“Baddies?”

“Red dots, I see red dots. The Eyes Forward Sparkle, shit. Get ready.”

Jester sighed heavily before taking out her shotgun again, Pushing her cart back and her dog whimpering, hiding between some metal ammo crates, “Are you serious? Is there anywhere where there isn’t fuckin’ bad guys?!”

As I peered out into the dank, dark, cavernous void just beyond the archway’s threshold my wings shuddered with an ominous sensation running down my spine. Holding the 10mm pistol in my left hoof, I did my best to swallow my fear and replied with, “I feel ya.”

A sudden, raspy hissing sound erupted from the darkness, followed by many more and my E.F.S lit up more than a tree at Hearth’s Warming.

Then I saw one of them. In a panic I activated S.A.T.S and I was zoomed in on his grotesque features If the poor bastard was missing enough of his skin, coat, and hair to thoroughly convince me that he shouldn’t have been alive.

*BLAM!*

The buckshot tore through the ghoul like it was paper and as it rolled down the stairs and as the shell was pulled from my break-action weapon another one was on its way up.

That switchblade that I saw earlier bounced off the pastel-colored monster as it along with several others rushed up the stairs and Jester cussed some more.

“Flyboy if they kill my dog I blame you!”

Another explosion in the tunnels and my ears were killing me as our combined efforts put down our immediate adversaries.

“Come on, there’s more killin’ to do!” Jester called out as she made her way down the stairs, reloading her gun and lifting up that knife she threw.

“These are ghouls! Aren’t you a ghoul?!” I shouted past the ringing and started to follow said ghoul, swapping weapons, taking out my 10mm pistol.

“Trust me, I’m doin’ them a favor!” she shouted before slamming that switchblade into one that was rushing past her. It seems that they hadn’t registered Jester as a threat yet.

POW goes the gun! S.A.T.S made this a lot easier than fighting the normal way. For some odd reason, it took less energy to select targets than with a melee weapon or a big, heavy gun.

One of them knocked my gun from my left hoof and now that I was vulnerable, I felt that it was best to run before I was surrounded.

Why, oh why is there a rotten old picnic table down here? A metal hoof went up into the chest of a feral zombie pony before a right jab to its grizzly maw, dazing it momentarily, opening it up for a left hook, knocking it down against the table.

I needed higher ground, so leaping up onto the table was a logical choice as several zombie ponies approached the table rapidly, one of them wearing some kind of combat barding that had seen better days.

“Back, fiend!” Kicking one in the face to knock it away from the table I hit S.A.T.S to see what my options were and to check up on what kind of trouble Jester was getting into.

She was in the middle of shooting some tortured soul leaping at her in the face and most of the ghouls seemed to be focusing mainly on me. A few more were coming up onto the platform from some stairs. Yay. More of them.

When I selected one of the ghouls I could clearly see a nail gun in the small wooden crate thing next to me and I was already formulating my attack plan.

An artificially targeted strike to a zombie pony’s temple bought me enough time to snatch up the lethal tool, swatting another one in the face with it.

A light green ghoul’s gnarly teeth clamped down onto my good foreleg, which got a scream from me and a nailgun to its forehead.

*PSHTAK!*

The talisman on the back of the tool flashed and it fell away from my bleeding foreleg with a brass spike poking out from under her horn.

“Send Discord my regards!” It’s a good thing the safety tip had been ripped off, because shooting the ghoul in front of me in the chest a couple times wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t.

I put a bloody hoof on one side of the armored ghoul’s neck to hold it back for a second as several nails were put into the other side, and I pushed the body off the table into another ghoul. That happened to be Jester.

“Way to go, numb nuts!” She angrily spat at me, brushing back the ghoul trying to tear her face off with a hammer and shoving the recently deceased ghoul off her.

“I know you are, but what am I?!” And with another confidence boosting (Albeit foalish) one-liner to push through this terrifying nightmare, I put the last nail in my gun into a ghoul harassing Jester as the denim-clad pony bludgeoned the last one to death with a carpenter’s hammer.

Spotting a nifty yellow box on a shelf with butterflies on it I immediately headed for it, popping the top, ignoring the dirty bottle of water and pill bottle for the roll of medicated bandages.

Actually, washing the blood away from my fur would be a good idea. Uncapped bottle in hoof, I poured it on my wound, wincing slightly as that adorable little meter appeared in the corner of my vision again and a light crackling was heard from my PipBuck. Just like any time I’ve eaten or drank anything since I've got here.

Just what does RAD/SEC mean anyways? You’d think with all the helpful tutorials and stuff my PipBuck’s given me it would have mentioned something about this thing. Oh yes, agonizing pain. I can figure the Rad thing out in a moment.

The syringe of Med-X was in a first aid kit for a reason, so ripping off the cap, I gritted my teeth before injecting myself with it, numbing the immediate area around the needle. So /that’s/ what it is.

Next came the bandages to be wrapped around my hoof and cutting away the now-ruined jacket sleeve. This world was not clothes friendly, I’ll tell you that much.

Oh there we go… the Med-X was starting to take more of an effect and the pain in my right foreleg was pushed far away. A long, relieved sigh escaped my nose as my eyes hung half-open, the only thing really keeping me awake was the smell of the not so fresh bodies scattered about.

Well that and that racket Jester’s stupid cart made as she moved it down the stairs, her useless but a little bit cute dog safe and sound inside.

“Yo Flyboy, get up. We gotta get movin’.”

“Jester I’m exhausted,” I whined to the ghoul, “And how have you not been hurt this whole time?”

The ghoul pony leaning on a cart raised a hoof and rasped with a hint of sarcasm, “I’m just that lucky. And I guess we could use a little break.”

I weakly raised my left hoof in the air with an unenthusiastic, “Yay.”

-=-________________________[|]|.,/=|oO.0l Stable-Tec|l[{/%/}]l|Stable-Tec l0.Oo|=\,.|/[|]________________________-=-
Welcome To Level Five!

Guns increased to 40
Lockpick increased to 35
Unarmed increased to 30

New Perk!

Rapid Reload:
“You’ve got fast hooves son, the kind that’ll get you in all sorts of trouble.” After familiarizing yourself with this land’s weaponry you have learned a few tricks on how to reload Guns and Energy Weapons faster. 25% faster to be specific.

Author's Note

A/N I know, that was a lot of different fighting scenes for a single chapter. If you don't like it you can kiss my big black ass.

Now the city was originally going to be called Nicker, because of ponehs. But... you can see why I didn't do that.