Fallout: Equestria :Where Am I Now?

by Drunken Hoof Style

Rating: mature
Tags: Original Character, Adventure, Crossover, Sex, Gore, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Alternate Universe
Length: 41770

Another FoE Story that was written by someone who had no idea what they were doing.

As you might know, the right pony in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world. The basic plot of every FoE fic. This takes place whenever, when the stable pon is out and aboot. Don't worry I won't do something enormously contrived like meet her for no reason.

This will probably be never finished, and it will probably never be as good as I want it to be, but if I ever do get back to writing, I will take the knowledge that I do have now and use it to make this not a godawful mess.

For now at least, have fun reading a terrible pile of fetid inexperience and incomplete chapters!
Sex tag, mainly tongue in cheek humor, still NSFW an crap.
Gore, par for the course for this kind of story.

Published 2012-08-05 23:54:01 UTC
Last updated 2013-06-17 17:07:51 UTC

Prologue: An Average Day

Prologue: An Average Day

“Things aren’t perfect, but its home.”

/.|-\_=-]_______________________________[-=-]

Waffles,

especially ones with blueberries in them, are delicious. I make them every Sunday morning just because that’s how it has always been. Also, my roommate loves them. I think she just says that just so I’ll give her more free waffles but she tells me they’re the best in all of Equestria.

The smell of the delicious hay batter combining with the perfectly ripe blueberries in the waffle iron was intoxicating. I couldn’t wait to take a bite out of the golden, fluffy, blueberry-y deliciousness that were these waffles. Taking a deep breath as I opened the iron, I beheld the magnificent sight before me. It was cooked to perfection. With a spatula in my prosthetic hand the waffle was flipped in the air, caught with the spatula and set on top of another finished waffle on a plate.

That plate had started to float across the room. I didn’t mind that she took them, because there was plenty more batter and berries where that came from. Over the kitchen’s center island it flew, enveloped in a green magical aura to the hungry unicorn casting the levitation spell. The mint colored pony pushed her teal mane highlighted with white away from her face with a hoof but it just snapped back to its original position

Lyra sat the plate in front of her, nearly salivating with a bottle of syrup in her hooves ready to saturate her food with mapley goodness. She dropped the closed bottle and cursed her lack of opposable fingers as it clattered to the checkered tile floor. I chuckled slightly at her clumsiness which earned me a scowl from her.

With the bottle set upright and the plate I was going to use anyways for a replacement waffle holder, more waffles were well on their way to perfection. The only thing that would make this any better would be double chocolate muffins.

They always made me remember about the day on the TARDIS with my friends. The Doctor, or just Doc as I called him and Ditzy Doo. Those guys were the best, but if it wasn’t for them I think I’d still have all my legs. I’d probably still be doing my old job in Cloudsdayle ever eighty years ago. Oh ponyfeathers, the waffles. Why did I have to upgrade the iron with the Doc’s sonic screwdriver? Who knew it would actually work?

Well that was close. Only a little bit of smoke and that was fanned out the window before it could set off the fire alarm. I really gotta stop daydreaming while I’m cooking.

After turning the waffle iron off so the loft wouldn’t catch on fire I went over to the table with the plate resting on top of my prosthetic. These weren’t the best waffles I’ve made, but flaws are what make life great.

Not wanting to take the time to get a fork I used the blade on my prosthetic to eat my food. Now Omni-limbs don’t normally come with knives, or fingers for that matter. But his was an old military Snakeoil Hoof model from the 1020’s. With a few extra features, mind you. It isn’t common to see old veterans have defanged versions of them from the war with Gryphus, the Griffon Kingdom to the northeast of Equestria.

You up for a little history lesson?

At first I didn’t believe the classified documents either, but apparently there was a bloody six year war between Equestria and them over territorial disputes. You know, Griffon talons are sharp, so you can guess what happened to a lot of the soldiers that went out there.

There was this corporation. Maybe you’ve heard of them? Flimflam Improvements, makers of everything from trains to foal carriages to firearms since 955 CR, they saw this as an opportunity. Behind the Princesses backs they began development on Project Icarus. One of the many under-the-table things FI has tried to keep hidden from the government. I had to leave the place I learned these things before I could gather any information on other projects they might have had.

At first they were pretty simple. Skeletal appendages provided at hospitals to get wounded soldiers back on their hooves and to their families. Then once their profits had taken off the new CEOs of Flimflam Improvements, Shim and Sham (not their actual names), left the city of New Ponyville to go to Canterlot and make their case with the Princesses about Project Icarus.

They were appalled. Weaponized prosthetics? Implants? Their hearts broke for those they sent out to get hurt or worse by the griffons but there were some things you should just not do.

‘The Day of the Red Talon’ is what they called it. A fleet of airships stationed in a base on the border between the two countries was attacked by griffon troops, decimating our vehicular air force. Equestrian casualties were enormous.

That tore it. The Princesses reluctantly agreed with the corporation threatening to cast a shadow over the government. Volunteer test subjects more than willing to whatever it took to get back at the griffons underwent gruesome surgeries that would enable them to use the advanced technology in the new Omni-limbs. Artificial Intelligence cores implanted into a subject’s brain connected to an adaptable connection port allowed full control over whatever kind of prosthetic the mission required. The ponies that were willing to do this to themselves, myself included, weren’t the ponies they were before. Hell, I’m not sure if I could even call myself a pony anymore. I’m just grateful I didn’t have to take part in that Luna-Damned war.

You know why?

A lot of the cybernetically enhanced ponies, who were mainly given strength-boosting prosthetics that allowed them to wear much heavier gear and weapons, were in a lot of battles. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was a common diagnosis among Project Icarus’ volunteers. Therapy could only do so much. Eventually a lot of Project Icarus’ test subjects wound up behind bars, in padded rooms, or even dead by their own hooves. It’s part of the reason why nopony trusts me.

With Shim and Sham’s pockets lined with the blood money of their war-profiteering and the details of Project Icarus hidden from the public eye, Omni-limbs were now available in hospitals as safe, reliable replacement limbs for those who lose their due to accidents or deformities.

They never did make any prosthetic wings for pegasai like me, but even if they did I wouldn’t get them. I don’t think my goddaughter would be able to take it, you know?

Oh yeah, I got a kid to take care of. Her mom got killed and she left her to me in her will. I know I barely even knew Cass. Her name? Comet Jinx Dash. Little filly looked just like her grandmother, she did. All the way down to her rainbow mane and Cutie Mark, which baffled most of the scholars, doctors, and religious officials she had gone to. Cutie Marks were supposed to be unique to the pony they adorned. Take mine for instance. It’s a deep blue lightning bolt with a swirly, symmetrical line going through the middle that connects the poles and a line of darker star shapes spiraling outwards from the center. How many ponies could have that as their mark, huh?

Sure, genetics had a hoof in this kind of thing but the magical attributes of Cutie Marks were special. Some might be similar to another but no two are supposed to be exactly the same!

She hates it. Her whole life she’s been judged on her abilities simply because she looks like the great Wonderbolt Rainbow Dash, the only one that has ever been able to successfully pull off a Sonic Rainboom.

I could relate. You know, the whole being different thing. When I was born apparently my wings never grew in properly and ended up as featherless nubs extending from my spine. It also didn’t help that I didn’t get my Cutie Mark until I was almost fourteen years old. Young ponies can be so cruel.

A glass of tangy orange juice assisted in washing down my emotions as I finished my waffles. It was Lyra’s turn to put the dishes in the dishwasher and she complained like she usually did. Tried to make excuses such as her hooves were cramping up or that she was sick and couldn’t use her magic. Lyra really hated doing chores. Even really simple ones like this.

Heck, I crave the mediocrity of it all. Ever since I was born the past twenty-six years of my life have been nothing but insanity. I mean meeting Lyra involves cryogenics, warring DJs, undercover police ponies, Mare Muerte, and a Lightning cartel for Luna’s sake!

The narrow stairs of the loft to the second level bedrooms were always easier to go up two at a time. Working for those slimy bastards at FI as a courier paid well.

That reminds me, I needed a shower.

Post shower I dried my pure white mane with a towel in my good hoof as the complicated series of gears and locks spun into position, securing my leg to my body. You can get Omni-limbs wet but it’s advised that you don’t submerge the older ones in liquid for extended periods of time. Then I spotted a pair of blue jeans that I liked hanging in the main bedroom apartment on a plastic coat hanger. The hanger broke when the pants were tugged on in an attempt to retrieve them. I knew I should have gotten more wire ones.

The button on the front of your pants is a piece of cake. Buttoning the back of your pants around your tail was always a bit awkward, especially when you’re not a unicorn.

Used to be only prisoners wore these kinds of pants.

Either way, it took some looking but my brown jacket and a white shirt were found underneath one of the beds, completing the ensemble that hid my deformed, featherless wings and looked sexy to boot. My laptop was open on a desk with an explicit video involving female zebras and griffons that had been loaded up on the screen. Now I know I haven’t been using my computer lately. Damn it Lyra.

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

“I don’t think I remember you asking me if you could use my computer,” I scorned Lyra as I fixed my left sleeve over my prosthetic. It was the principle of the matter, “Just ask next time, and would you close it out when you’re done?”

Lyra was getting comfortable on the living room’s couch before she spent her weekend watching television. She nearly fell out when I said that “Oh! I- I uh… Heh. You saw that? Aw crap.”

“Relax, I mean we’re both adults here. But I kinda don’t need Comet seeing that stuff.”

“Come on, she’s fifteen. You really think she isn’t already looking at porn? What about you? Weren’t you a colt at one point in your life?”

It’s hard to be a kid with an absentee alcoholic as a father, a mother who’s too sick to work the two jobs she had to support us, and no way to get away from it all. But I found a way solve (Most) my problems. I stole, stole, and stole some more. Hey, I had a good reason, to pay for my mom’s heart medicine and then eventually a whole new heart. With no real skills and law preventing minors under the age of sixteen from working at the weather factory it was the only thing I could think of.

And damn was it fun.

I was good at it, really good. So good in fact, that’s how I got my Cutie Mark. It represents fluid, lightning-like movement that any good courier (or a thief) needs to do their job well. Anyways, I need to stop getting side-tracked so it’s back to the conversation.

“Hey, I’m pretty down with your- you know,” I decided to change the subject. “Oh, uh have you seen those crystals I’ve ordered?”.” It was forty-eight years ago when Ponyville burned to the ground. Nopony liked talking about it, especially survivors like Lyra. Cryogenic hibernation preserved her body during that time after she was mortally wounded in the days following the sacking of Ponyville until medical science had advanced enough to heal her. Which was about six months ago when I met her at the hospital. Ah what did I just say?

Lyra was flipping through the TV guide until she found the EMC channel to watch the ‘The Trotting Dead’ marathon. “Nope.”

Aw, I ordered these magical focus crystals over the internet from FI but that was over a week ago. They’re supposed to help you tap into your magical reserves so you’ll be able to cast spells but you need to have some kind of conduit like a unicorn’s horn. The Snakeoil might just be the right thing for the job.

“Damn. Just, you know, remember to exit it out next time. Is there any chance that you’re coming on my run with me?”

“No, no I’m not.”

I was looking for my I-Pony everywhere and it was under the couch, of all places. “Oh come on, why not?”

“It’s Sunday, I’ve been working all week, and I’m tired.”

“And I haven’t? Besides, you work at the concert hall and at the radio station with Vinyl! How stressful can music be compared to hauling ass all across the city all day long five days a week?”

“Hey, there’s some stress. You have no idea how annoying Vinyl can be. And that’s what I mean. You’re always running everywhere, why not rest for once?” She stretched like a cat would and smacked her lips.

“Comfy much?” An earbloom plugged into the I-Pony went into my ear, filling my head with corporate advertisements (more like borderline propaganda) on the radio. “I gotta find the Artist. You know that.”

“Seriously? Will you stop obsessing about that guy?”

I deadpanned towards Lyra and said with a grim determination, “No, I have to find him. I-- I just gotta okay?”

“You just can’t get over the fact that you can’t catch him. Can you?” I didn’t see Lyra smiling at me with that smug look on her face as I prepared to go out and scour the city for the Lone Artist. Nopony knows what the Artist looks like, so a picture of his face would be worth a fortune to the papers. We could all use the money, because we haven’t exactly been rolling dough lately.

Damn it where is my camera? Oh, on the coffee table. It’s so small I forget where the little red thing is sometimes. I still don’t know how digital cameras work, but frankly I don’t trust them or the corporation that makes them.

If it gets me that two thousand dollar picture, then I might reconsider. Now I couldn’t use the elevator next to the kitchen area because the four ‘geniuses’ from downstairs blew it up a couple months ago with some kind of bomb. I took a Dr. Hopper from a box in the refrigerator to go and popped the cap off with my thumb. Food gives power to the Omni-hoof using your blood sugar as fuel but sodas and things like that have effects that are more immediate.

*Mmm mmh! That there Snakeoil’s power levels are ninety percent. Have a kickass day Tellis. Or night, I’m not a fuckin clock.* Man I love Cinnamon Jack. That’s Applebloom’s daughter. Automobile Mechanic, tinkerer, alcohol enthusiast, and good friend. She couldn’t deactivate the voice the AI core in my brain transmits to alert me of changes to my prosthetic without turning the whole thing off. Instead she found a way to replace the creepy ass monotone lady’s voice with somepony else’s. She was nice enough to record her own. Better yet she didn’t have to cut me open to do it. It’s kept me from completely losing my mind.

By far the best recording in there is, “Oooh wee doggy! I ain’t seen a Zap-head shake more than you probably are right now. One-oh-five percent, Goddess-damn!”

I told Lyra to lock up behind me as I headed out the door into the hall to hunt me down an Artist. The key ring that held my vehicle keys had a key to this apartment but it was severely damaged by one of Adamant’s (Twilight’s adopted daughter) acid experiments. It’s a long story.

I was already a little winded by the time I reached the bottom of the stairs. I hate my neighbors.

“Argonis!” A green earth pony stallion called out to me. Please bear with me. This guy’s taken a little too many crazy pills and it’s, well, a little bit hard to understand what he’s saying.

“Hey how are you Cherry?”

He smiled as he said, “Things have pretty lookings, my dear Tellis Argonis. What are you down here for? Aren’t you supposed to be getting my magazines?”

The video game magazines Cherry mentioned were lying on the desk in front of him. I wasn’t going to even acknowledge that they were there or he’s just going to keep me here all day talking about them. “Trying to find the Artist, what else? Any progress on that elevator?”

Cherry’s red eyes darted from side to side as his landlord instincts kicked in and he threw together a lie. “Any progress on that rent, I ask you? And yes, yeah. Yeah. I’m right on it. You just be sure that I’m going to fix it right up. Yeah be on it.”

Uh huh. Just like I’m sure that you’re going to ever make any sense. “Later I’ll get some scratch together, we’ll score some hooch and then we’ll talk some more, okay? And rent isn’t due until the Eighth.”

“Oh. Hold on, what’s hooch?”

I go outside into the stony metropolis that is New Ponyville. I live in one of the older parts of town. It was built before the population boom. More hoofmade, a lot more masons and a lot less machines you know? It looked way more natural than other districts and that’s just the way I liked it. In my book cobblestone beats asphalt any day.

The tall building I just exited was slightly younger than the surrounding structures in this part of town. Its straight lines contrasted with the more natural flow of the other buildings. Part of me of wanted to live in one of these houses close to the ground, with their tile roofs and cobblestone exterior walls. Hay had been deemed an obsolete roofing and insulation material a long time ago. With the war that went on and everypony making babies immediately afterwards, it became illogical to build houses with it.

Looking for the Lone Artist mainly consisted of wandering aimlessly around the city using my lackluster tracking skills to follow fresh tags. I have found that the Artist goes out only at night except for Sundays. Lately he’s been painting his intricate murals in the territories of the local gangs. I could probably pass off as one of the Improved but they might know me as the guy that sent one of their recruiters to the hospital. Eh, he was an asshole anyways.

The Improved gang’s members have prosthetics, a lot of prosthetics. They aren’t veterans from the war, oh no. They’re kids that augment themselves with various toys provided by ‘anonymous donors’ as an initiation rite so they can terrorize the city. The New Ponyville Authority pays handsomely for any Improved that you bring in, which means that’s another reason ponies don’t trust me. One dumbass actually knocked me out when Comet made me take her to the arcade to meet up with her friend Hankinson Demarcus Pie and tried to take me into the Authority. I decided to be the bigger pony and not sue him.

I wasn’t actually going to run all the way to Improved territory, so over to the Yellow Tail Building’s parking lot. Most vehicles worked the same way as they did fifty years ago. There were two styles, mechanical and magical. I had a mechanical one because like I said before I’m not a unicorn.

Instead of the old coal fired engines, clean burning liquid fuel created from gemstones (don’t ask me how) called Flimfuel or Flamgas was used in low-flow steam piston engines. A peg key went into the ignition drive. The old girl and I had a lot in common. We’re both from a different time and we’re both missing more than a couple parts, but we’re reliable. Most of the time. My gear assembly is much, much less complicated than hers, though.

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

You can take the trees away, but it’s still the Everfree. It took me about half an hour to reach it at the edge of Improved territory and it bagan to snow. I hid my car in an alley next to a dumpster. Not like anypony’s going to steal the Autobuggy but still.

The best place to probably look for the Artist would be in the back alleys and in the places these punks normally hang out. A pink unicorn colt with an ill-fitting hindhoof was lying on some steps across the street next to another alley with a small glass pipe in his hooves. Lightning.

It’s terrible what’s happening to today’s youth. Just look at him, couldn’t be older than sixteen, getting hooked on drugs, destroying his body for no good reason, becoming an amputee just because a bunch of other loons say that he’s got to do it to join their little club. The kid’s probably getting electrified to deal with the pain his leg’s causing him. Why do they do this to themselves?

The wind had picked up preventing me from being able to hear the clopping of any nearby hooves, but that worked both ways.

Stick to the shadows, move quickly, find the damn Artist, and get my payday. Not an easy thing to do. There were three of them coming out of the back of a building, passing a square bottle of amber liquid around and taking drinks from it. Some kids that should have the sense than to be outside in weather like this without any clothes should know better. Though I doubt that after seeing their various prosthetic limbs, some were very recent. And bloody. Thank the goddesses they weren’t trying to install advanced models like the Snakeoil. Something tells me these kids aren’t exactly brain surgeons.

I hid behind some scaffolding that was never removed after the construction in this area was completed so I wouldn’t be seen by them. Wait a second, who’s that over there? Is it- can it be? Holy crap it’s the Lone Artist. I couldn’t make out any kind of features on him because he was wearing black socks on all his hooves, black lazypants, a black hoodie, a black bag on his back, black ski goggles, and a black bandana over the mouth. He was in the middle of painting a robotic foal wearing a diaper and bawling its beady little optical receptors out over by the far wall. That’s actually pretty funny. He was spotted by the Improved kids, who were drunk and looking for something to take their surgery-related pain out on. There wasn’t anywhere for the Artist to go, he really picked a bad spot to tag.

“You think you can ju-just… I… Get em’!” Looks like somepony can’t hold her booze.

They were on him before he could escape and proceeded to stomp the crap out of him. Oh shit! This isn’t good. I need to put a stop to this, and with the gracefulness as that of a ballet dancer in space.

My hoof got stuck in a bucket. Said bucket had a rope tied to it. Said rope lead up several floors of the scaffolding and was underneath a pile of boards. The resulting racket pulled the gang members’ attention away from their current victim and over to me.

“What the fuck? Who the hell are you?” a yellow unicorn filly rudely asked as she pointed a steely hoof towards me, bloody bandages going halfway up her leg. It looked like an early Grifter’s Swift model. I swear, as Celestia as my witness, I’m going to find whoever’s doing this to these kids and end them.

I got up and shook the bucket away from my good hoof. “Now is that any way to talk to somepony young lady?”

She was not amused. “Kill her.”

Aw, come on. I don’t look that much like a mare! Did I? I’ve had the occasional stallion make passing remarks about what I could do to them with my prosthetic, and then I showed them what I could do with my prosthetic. By punching them. Repeatedly. In the face. You’ve at least gotta buy me dinner first.

A steel hoof slammed into my stomach, knocking the wind out of me. I really need to stop getting distracted. My response to that was grabbing his little face and standing on my hind legs. They obviously want to be treated like adults, right? Let’s give ‘em the full treatment, eh?

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

I was carrying the Artist on my back to my car after punching the drunken little snots out. Well I couldn’t just leave him there, plus I think I can get a way better picture in my car without all this snow.

He had a really small build and was lighter than you would expect. Hmm. I’ll ask him in a minute, just got to get out of the snow for now. Metal hooves do a hell of a lot of damage, even from kids.

I opened the passenger door and put the Lone Artist inside my car with a pained groan from him.

“You okay kid? They sure did a number on you.”

“Shut up Tellis. You know me I can- I can take it,” The artist panted out as his head hung low

Wait, how’d he know my name? and that voice… it can’t be. I pulled the Artist’s hood back to reveal a shortcut pink mane highlighted with black stripes. The artist moved her ski goggles and bandana down with the leg she wasn’t holding on her side with, looked up to me, and there she was with those big green eyes. Molly, Fluttershy’s ‘granddaughter’. Nopony actually knows if this is true, since there’s no birth records for anypony named Molise Shy in Manehattan and Fluttershy’s only daughter disappeared a long time ago. I haven’t really seen much of the little introvert lately. I really should visit her more often.

“So uh, you’re the Artist, huh?” Smooth moves Tellis.

“Well obviously, what do you think all this is about?” she asked me and coughed before tugging on the bag strapped to her back.

I started to go around to the driver side of the car and said to Molly, “Alright, I get it. I like your whole getup there. It’s clever. Y’know, with the all black and the baggy clothes to hide the tail and wings and junk?”

The key goes in the ignition and Molly pulls on the handle on her door to close it. Soothing heat from the vents blast at us and I ask my young friend if she needed to go to the hospital.

She shook her head and said, “No. I- I just need to get some rest. I don’t trust those Flimflam bastards.”

You and me both sister. Normally I would have at least jokingly scolded the yellow pegasus for using foul language but give her a break. Some little assholes just wailed on her for bringing genuine humor into their lives.

And totally dissing them, but that’s beside the point.

“You mind if I crash at your place?”

“Uh, okay? I guess?” Who was I to argue? I mean she wasn’t coughing up blood, was she? Besides, Comet never gets to see Molly as much as she would like to these days. Also, conversations between her and Lyra get pretty raunchy, and did I mention entertaining? Molly’s almost three years younger than Comet but she’s really mature for her age.

“Ah, thanks. I kinda got in a little argument with Granny and she’s pretty steamed. I can’t really go to the old place right now, you know?”

Huh. I’m sure that isn’t a lie.

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

We get home just as Stick puts a knife into a walker’s brain and Barrel shoots a crossbow bolt into another, which was around one in the afternoon. Molly had put clothes into the paint stained bag she had on her back and set it beside the door next to the coat rack full of hats.

“Why do you keep bringing her around? I don’t want that criminal in my house. Didn’t she light your car on fire oh I don’t know, twice?” Oh yeah, I forgot. Lyra has some kind of recent beef with Molly that even she herself doesn’t understand fully. I think it involved something about money, turnips, and science fiction memorabilia. I know, I’m as lost as you are.

Either way, whenever I bring Molly over Lyra tries (and usually fails) to give me enough reasons to kick her out of the Yellow Tail building. My normal quota is twenty or so.

She fell short at eleven, so Molly stays! “Besides, I’m a criminal and you don’t hate me”

“She doesn’t pay half the bills.”

“Oh, point taken. So yeah, me casa es su casa and all that. Help yourself to the fridge if you want and lemme find something for the pain.”

Lyra wanted to know more, now. “Pain?”

“Alright, you know those kids over in the Everfree, the Icarus wannabes?” She’s read the pictures I’ve taken of the documents.

“Yeah? What about them?”

“I was in their territory and-“

“Why the hell were you there?”

I held up a metal hand. “Just let me finish, okay? I was looking for the Artist there and well… I found him.”

It took a couple seconds for Lyra to understand what I meant. “Wait, do you mean…?”

“Yeah.”

“Holy crap. Where is your camera? Where is it?” A green glow enveloped her horn.

“Hey, hey! I’m not- That isn’t my camera!” She let go immediately. It totally was. I just had to say something to prevent her from damaging Molly’s secret identity any further than it has been already. Plus it’s funny watching her blush.

I went to the bathroom to get that plastic box filled with random first aid garbage and saw Molly lying on the couch next to Lyra, who was in a seated position while she had her forelegs crossed. She was grumpy. Molly let out a pained groan which made it a little harder for Lyra to enjoy her Trotting Dead marathon.

“Okay, I have some over the counter crap here. Antihistamines, no, don’t need that, aspirin? Naw. Oh here it is, Motrin. I hope this helps.”

She took one look at the bottle and said with a groan, “Oh, I hate pills.”

“Chew it up then you big baby.”

“Who you calling a baby, dodo?” Oh that stung something awful. That’s just what the kids back in Cloudsdale called me.

I tossed her the bottle. “Just take a pill and watch zombie ponies. I’m going upstairs, call me when it’s almost eight.” Comet had school tomorrow. She tried dropping out before when… yeah. Making her go through school is what her mom would have wanted.

When I reached my laptop, a different site with equally graphic content was loaded up on the screen. Oh for fuck’s sake. Eh, might as well.

That was… rather enjoyable. Hehehe.

I checked my emails, cleared out some spam, took care of Ponybook notifications, poked around on Equestria Daily. Hmm, looks like Princess Luna’s gone a little crazy, again.

That site with the magic crystal things had an alert on the product. It had been recalled! Aw COME ON. It was some stupid crap about ‘public safety’ and ‘missing ponies’. I was so caught up in the fact they were recalled and I wasn’t getting a refund that I didn’t read the rest. I didn’t care anymore, it’s not like it mattered now. I was never, ever going to be able to get the chance to feel what it’s like to be a unicorn. To wield all that raw power at the tips of my hooves, who wouldn’t want that?

After a while I got over it and the hours flew by like they were mere minutes. Molly had snuck up behind me as the Lone Artist in the dark room.

“Yo.”

“Huwha- AH!!” I fell out of my damned chair. “Holy nutballs! What the hell Molly?”

She moved the ski goggles away from her eyes so she could see better and said, “It’s eight, I wanna go with you to see Comet.”

“You know I’m bringing her back right?”

“Yeah, and I’m going with you.”

I could see that if I started this argument that Molly would eventually win so I just gave in. “Fine, you can come with me. Just try not to light anything on fire.”

“Aw, and I brought the Mollies along for no reason.” She put a lot of sarcasm into that but I really hope that she wasn’t serious about having Molotov Cocktails.

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

Molly was talking with Comet on her phone as we drove towards Kostume Kastle, where Hank lived and worked with his mother Lemon. A network of highways and bridges connected the various sections of the industrious city birthed from the ashes of a small town. That’s why the corporation chose a mechanized phoenix as the city’s crest. Other than Flimflam Improvements in red and white you see the crest everywhere you go, except in the oldest parts of town.

Molly had packed her stuff back into her bag and tossed it in the backseat near that spot with the duct tape. She scratched at a clavicle with a hoof while holding a phone to her head with the other and nearly shouted over the radio, “Hey, we’re on our way. Who do you think it is dumbass? Yes, that’s exactly who I am. Guess whose leg I twisted, ripped off, and beat them with it until they took me to see you? Yeah, I know school sucks but the courts say I gotta go or else I won’t be able to live at my Grammy’s. Well that’s relevant because if I get kicked out of my house, I’ll move into yours, and then you’re going to see a lot more of me. I mean a LOT.” The filly laughed evilly into the phone.

She has a point. Molly’s pretty cool but she’s the kind of filly you wouldn’t want living in your place for any extended period of time. I don’t want to go into the details. The only pony around that seems to have enough patience to deal with Molly’s shenanigans was Fluttershy with me as a close second. Lyra’s still pissed with her about that science fiction memorabilia, though.

Molly pulled her phone away from her head and asked me, “What’s up with this truck in front of us?”

A cargo truck was moving very erratically in front of us, and a bit of smoke was coming from the tires. That wasn’t g- holy crap. A tire blew out on the truck, and the sudden jolt downwards smashed the latch off the handle and the small bounce back up released the handle. A stack of wooden crates glowing with pink light fell from a palate and smashed open on the road. Bright, shiny talismans scattered everywhere and in the path of my car. I couldn’t slow down fast enough and I ran over a few dozen of the talismans, popping them underneath the weight of my car. Something very strange was happening, seeing as how a bluish-purple aura enveloped my car and locked it in its current state of acceleration.

Molly was speechless.

I had lost complete control of my vehicle and the aura surrounding my car was completely blocking our vision, but it felt like my car was on train tracks somehow. What happened to the road? I couldn’t see anything through all this light. We’re probably just going to smash right through some wall on the highway and fall to our deaths. Now wouldn’t that be ironic, two pegasai falling to their doom? I wonder if our funerals will be nice.

The bright light finally subsided to reveal… something. What is that? Oh, a wall.

CRRRAASSHHH!!!

Thank Celestia for airbags, am I right? There was something wet and sticky on my forehead and running down my mouth. My vision was blurry and I couldn’t see anything with this airbag in my face! When I moved the obstruction from my face I could see Molly hanging limp in her seat, wearing her seatbelt. Oh thank the Goddesses, she was breathing but I don’t think her left wing is supposed to bend like that. I unbuckled my seatbelt and nearly fell over on Molly. Her neck didn’t look broken, it shouldn’t have been. Her airbag had done its job, right? Right?

I unbuckled Molly’s seatbelt and let the unconscious filly fall over onto me. I was starting to see darkness creeping up on my vision now. I needed to get help immediately. Screw not trusting the hospital, Molly needed one bad.

The door nearly fell off when I opened it and fell to the ground with Molly landing on top of me. Tried standing up, didn’t work. I looked up and could barely make out some kind of grey building in front of me. Every blink was an effort not to go out.

Blink.

I started to scoot to who knows where with Molly’s unconscious body in my forelegs.

Blink.

Fell over onto my face, busted my lip with my teeth, filling my mouth with blood.

Blink.

Something big was moving towards me.

Blink.

“P-princess?”

And just like that, my real story begins.

Fallout Equestria:
Where Am I Now?

/________________-=+[|
Tellis Argonis

Strength: 4
Perception: 4
Endurance:3
Charisma: 8
Intelligence: 7
Agility: 7
Luck: 7

Starting Perks:

Small Frame:
“Grow up big and strong MY HOOF.” Your light build gives you +2 to Agility but your (organic) limbs are damaged at a 25% increased rate.

Bird-Brained:
“But it was awesome right?” Your reckless nature gives you +10 to AP but comes at a penalty of -2 to Damage Threshold. (+10 bonus AP and -1 INT for pegasus ponies.)

A/N Sweatpants = Lazypants

Chapter 1: Welcome To the Wasteland

Chapter 1: Welcome to the Wasteland

“Rise and shine little one… It’s time to wake up and smell the ashes… Come now, breathe…”
/.|-\_=-]_______________________________[-=-]

{When the bombs fell} Air.

We all need it. You just can’t live without it. Heck, some ponies just can’t get enough of the stuff.

I was lying on my back with eyes held shut against harsh sunlight having a coughing fit. The air was dank and musty as high hell but I’m taking what I can get. I could finally breathe again. Felt like vomiting all over the floor from the extreme pain in my chest and it felt like my brain implants have been tore out with some vice grips but still. What the fuck happened? How did I get here? Wasn’t I just in a crash? Oh no. No, no, no! What happened to Molly? Did I really see what I thought I saw? And what was that voice just now?

*Aw damn, I can’t feel your leg. I think its offline. You might wanna check on that or somethin’.*

What? I tried to shade my eyes with the Omni-hoof but only saw my limp sleeve with the stumpy little joke of a foreleg inside. Luna-dammit. That was one-of-a-kind, super customized piece of hardware from the war! If somepony stole my leg they’re going to get the ass beating of a lifetime. There are some things you just don’t steal from another pony. Like the hat off their head, or in this case their body parts. I guess the only valuable thing about it is the war bayonet made of diamond reinforced with steel. My internal rant was interrupted by something moving around just outside of my peripheral vision. Obviously I reacted by instinctively turning my head to see what threat lie before me. It was a large buzzard cocking his head towards the side and looking at me. Beady black eyes full of hunger stared into mine, and I was acutely aware of the bird’s intentions.

“Ah! I’m still alive!” I found that it was quite hard to move my remaining foreleg to shoo the nasty little scavenger away. The reason that bird was so close to me in the first place was probably because I’ve been here a while.

The large black bird screeched at me before it unfurled his wings and flew up and out of the hole in the ceiling. There was something funny going on with my good leg. First off, there was a television strapped to it pushing my jacket sleeve up. Secondly, I couldn’t take it off. It wouldn’t budge, but it didn’t feel like there was anything that should have prevented me from taking it off. The damn thing simply wouldn’t move.

I thought that it was the best thing to take my jacket off so I could investigate this mysterious device further. Because of my physical limitations it took a while, and got a little stuck on the thing on my leg. Oh, that’s better.

Pushing the buttons with my stump did nothing, and turning the dials was just as useless. With stylized letters engraved on the devices frame it read PipBuck 3000. It might as well have been a big paperweight glommed onto his leg. What kind of idiot made this? Oh ‘Stable-Tec’, huh? That’s weird. Never heard of a company called that. It must have been a subsidiary of Flimflam Improvements or something. Still, whoever put this thing on me had to have a good reason, right? Ponies aren’t just giving free leg TVs to everypony in a car wreck are they? Oh, what the hell happened to Molly? Fluttershy’s gonna kill me.

I rolled over onto my stomach and used my good foreleg to push myself up to a seated position. Okay, this place could use some renovations. It seemed to be some kind of abandoned office building as evidenced by the over abundance of ruined desks scattered around forgotten cubicles. Wow, how old was this place? What was left of the ceiling was sagging and peeling like crazy. Now I’m no architect but when the ceiling bows like that it’s probably best not to be anywhere near the building. It was a good thing I couldn’t tell whether I was on the first or fiftieth floor since the windows were coated with so much dust and grime that only a bit of light shone through them.

I turned my head to see some kind of metal statue of a pony just standing in the middle of the floor covered in several layers of dirt, rust, and chipped paint. He spun around on his rump so he could get a better look at the oddly placed pony statue. Faded, scratched up letters were engraved onto its chest. MoT.

“The hell is a MAS?” I poked at the statue with my good leg, accidently pushing it over. With a loud crash it slammed into a desk, causing something in the other part of the room to make a startled scuttling sound. I still wasn’t alone, even more so seeing what happens next.

The statue’s head, which was a big light bulb like structure, shuttered on. Was beginning to think that it wasn’t a statue after all. Especially since it got back up and started talking to me.

“REEBOOTING. LOADING DAILY SCHEDULE. *ERROR* RUNNING OFFICE PROTOCOLS. *ERROR* RUNNING PATROL PARAMATERS. *ACCEPTED* HELLO SIR OR MADAME, HOW ARE YOU TODAY?”

Sweet Celestia it sounded like a cheerful Dalek, that was also female. I didn’t think that was possible!

I really don’t know what to say. The heartless automaton just stood there. Was it actually waiting for a response?

“I um… good I guess? Maybe?” Come on, I could have done better than that.

“ALERT! UNRECOGNIZED VOICE FORMAT. PLEASE PRESENT VALID ID BADGE OR YOU WILL BE VACATED FROM THE PREMISES.”

That didn’t sound good at all. Robots aren’t very well known for their gentle, caring nature. I don’t have any kind of badge, do I? Aw damn, the robot had started counting down from five while raising a hoof with a glowing red tip. I knew what that meant.

“Oh crap,” There was a cubicle wall that was perfect for hiding from evil death robots nearby.

As I dove behind the wall a pink laser singed my pant leg. Aw damn, I was beginning to feel the extent of my bruises.

pZAP pZAP pZAP! pZAP pZAP pZAP!

This thing really doesn’t give up does it? More beams traveled in my general direction, blasting through more flaky, peeling cubicle walls. One of them even caught on fire! Poking my head around the cubical wall seemed like a good idea at the time. Even more pink beams of light pierced through the weak material like it was nothing, each one zooming ever closer to Tellis’s head. He planted a forepaw on an overturned desk and pushed himself up onto my hind legs so I could gain some more mobility in this unbalanced state. I need my leg.

It slowly clunked around the bend as I nearly tripped over what looked like a simple computer that was smashed on the ground. I pretty much fell behind a cubical wall, exhausted. Did I mention how much this sucks?

The robot calmly requested that I leave the building as it fired more laser beams in an attempt to permanently remove me from the premises. There was some kind of laminated card on the desk I was hiding next to and through the grime coating it you could see the picture of a little earth pony filly name of River Berry. Cute name. Cute kid.

Let’s hope this works.

“I’m here with my daddy, honest!” I hate to say it but that was pretty good. Thank the goddesses that my special talent isn’t talking like a little filly. What would that even look like?

“RECOGNIZED VOICE FORMAT. PLEASE PRESENT VALID DAY PASS YOUNG FILLY OR YOU WILL BE REMOVED FROM THE PREMISES.”

Day pass? Aw shit, should have known. Either way, this still might actually work somehow. I picked up the little card with my teeth and hobbled over to the robot to show proof positive that I was a little filly just visiting with daddy for bring your daughter to work day or whatever reason this card was made.

“EXPIRED DAY PASS! PLEASE PRESENT VALID ID OR YOU WILL BE REMOVED FROM THE PREMISES.”

Well, at least I tried.

The deadly machine guarding over nothing started to count down again. This was my chance. This thing was really slow, right?

“Will you stop saying that?!”

I tackled the robot as a pink laser singed the top of my mane. The damn thing was like a turtle. Its simple legs just didn’t have the flexibility to jump back up. It still had a freaking laser that was aiming towards me.

Damn that was close. There was a crackling sound coming from the floor. Oh what now? Where the robot was squabbling on the ground, the floor beneath it began to sag.

I saw where this was going from a mile away. The ground finally gave way, taking the robot and most of the cubicle in front of me with it. When the dust cleared there was a robot with a smashed head and rusted rebar impaling its midsection, did I just win?

Yeah, I think I won. I totally killed a robot without any help from the old gang and I did it all while missing a leg! Alright, alright, alright, I gotta focus. Now that I’m not in any immediate danger I can make a plan, set some goals, all that good stuff.

Let’s make a to-do list while I retrieve my jacket so I can tie it around my waist or something.

Find my leg. Not getting anywhere fast without it. At least find something for a temporary replacement.

FIND MOLLY. For the love of Celestia, find Molly. I assumed responsibility for her the second I let her come with me. It’s my job to ensure her safety and I was failing.

Figure out what the hell this PipBuck thing is, maybe turn it on somehow. You know what? I’m going to do this first. Maybe it can help me. I mean it’s there for a reason right?

Let’s see here…

It looked like a TV, and that reminded me of when I had to program the remote for one when I first set up the loft. Had to hold down a power button for a few seconds so it would connect with the signal thing on the TV, I think. Only there were three unlabeled buttons and some others with acronyms that didn’t make any sense to me at the time. Inaction is the worst kind of action, so I held down the middle orange button underneath the screen with my short leg.

I’ll be damned, it actually worked! PipBuck shone brightly in the dilapidated and grimy office space that smelled like it was chock-full of mold. This place was disgusting. It started to get darker and with a quick look to the ceiling hole I saw that there were a lot more clouds than before. I think I could hear thunder. I don’t remember a storm being in the forecast this week. The PipBuck is way more interesting than some stupid clouds, so I looked back down to see some words on screen.

**…INITIATING BOOT SECQUENCE…**

A veritable flood of data surged across the screen for a time until it stopped and there was a little box in the middle with the head of a smiling cartoon unicorn mare that had a question for me.

*Enable voice?*

Well that was cool. I pushed the orange button with the word ‘Yes’ above it and the little box disappeared. You know, I should be trying to find a way out of here while going through this tutorial.

The mare’s voice sounded happy, really happy. It came from the little speaker on the side of the PipBuck as a mildly animated unicorn wearing some kind of strange barding appeared on screen.

“Hi! I’m the Stable Mare, and today is your special day!”

Lucky me.

“That’s right! Today is the day you get your very own Personal Information Processor or PipBuck for short. This baby manages just about every bit of data about you as possible. That isn’t all this can do, no siree bob!”

What the hell does that mean? I don’t even think that my mom talked like this.

“There are all sorts of things! I can tell you how much what you’re carrying weighs, and show you what condition whatever it is in. I can assist you in administering medical supplies, and even interact with most terminals. Please contact your local maintenance team for information on the decryption devices.” Stable Mare was talking to another mare that looked exactly like her before the image changed back to the one pony. I barely understood any of that.

“A very useful feature of the PipBuck 3000 is the Eyes Forward Sparkle entity detection and Heads-Up Display spell. I’ll bring up the E.F.S for you so you can see it for yourself.”

Holy crap! You know what it’s like to have bug fly into your eye? It was like that, but it completely covered both of my eyes with invisible flies. I fell out of my chair onto the rotten, unstable floor and writhed in more surprise than agony until my eyes adjusted to this bizarre tingling. Some rectangular shapes faded into the corners of my vision and Stable Mare started talking to me again.

“The area on the left of the E.F.S contains your general level of overall health (Which was about halfway full, yay.) and a compass. On the right is your immediate weapon condition meter, ammunition counter, and your AP meter. We’ll talk about AP in a moment.”

What the hell? Ammunition counter and weapon what’s it now? AP? Just what is this thing for, exactly?

Stable Mare continued her lesson, talking to me as if I were ten years old, “Remember if you don’t need to use the E.F.S you can always turn this on or off with just a stamp of your hoof. Okay, now try turning your head and if there is somepony near you they will appear as a small dash. Now whether or not you took their cupcake will determine if they’re hostile towards you and show up as a red dash. Hahaha! Oh look, there’s one now!”

Stable Mare was right, there was a red dash moving around on the compass thing. She just kept on talking as I got up from the floor so I could see this hostile entity before it saw me. Or the other way around. I didn’t want to get ambushed.

“This might be the perfect time to try out one of the coolest things about the PipBuck 3000! The Stable-Tec Assisted Targeting Spell! Need a little help kicking that hoofball? Just can’t get a bullseye on that dart board? Why not use S.A.T.S? It’s neat. It’s just… it’s just neat. Try activating S.A.T.S now! It’s really easy.” I saw a bug over in the patch of fading light being rained on through the large hole in the ceiling. It wasn’t just any bug, oh no. It was an enormous, horrifying creature that looked a bit like a cross between a small dog and a… a…

Aw shit! It was right in my face! Hold on a second, what’s with it being all highlighted in that amber? Did I just do that S.A.T.S thing? That was easy. There was a little box labeled with 87% next to the oversized cockroach. ‘Radroach’ the PipBuck called it. How did this thing know what that was called? Are these common enough that they’ve been documented and catalogued into the PipBuck’s memory? That didn’t explain how it knew what I was looking at. I guess it is a targeting spell, after all.

“That’s your chance to hit whatever you’re targeting! Your PipBuck calculates the exact probabilities for it and everything. If you really want to, select your target and give that bully a big wallop! Now this will cost you AP, or Action Points. When those are spent you have to let the PipBuck recharge before using it again. Some ponies can squeeze out a little more S.A.T.S time than others before running out.”

That’s easy to remember. What even powers this thing anyways?

I weighed my options, leave it alone and have the possibility of it attacking me or kill it to death?

The answer was pretty obvious.

Aw, this was mind-blowing! It was like I drank happiness and then stuck an adrenaline needle into my neck. For a few seconds, I felt what it must have been like to fly. Truly fly. My wings were going crazy with excitement!

Instead of ruining my clothes by doing something as stupid as killing a humongous insect with my bare hooves I lifted up an old smashed in computer with what was left of my forelegs. Then I slammed it down onto the radroach. Popped him good, splattering foul-smelling juices all over the floor. Some bug guts got on my pants, which was rubbed up against the nearest desk to scrape the nasty stuff off. It’s not like I wanted to smell like roach spleen all day. Or whatever that is, I can’t tell.

“Wowie wow-wow! What a shot. With that kind of accuracy you’re a horseshoe-in for a position on the security team. (There are no words to describe how confused I am.) What do you say we move onto the other areas of your PipBuck? Push any of the three section buttons so I can tell you more.”

I can do that in a moment. The rain was starting to pick up and I don’t know how much longer this building could take the abuse being thrown at it. At least I now know this thing is some kind of magic gauntlet that gives you superpowers. This is totally awesome. I can’t wait to tell Molly about this.

I made my way over to a door in the corner of the large room as Stable Mare advised me that I could activate a lantern spell on my PipBuck. Neat. Now if it could just find my leg for me I’d be golden.

The door stuck a bit before the dust, rust, and other things holding it there gave way. A drooling maw of rebar and concrete presented me with a great vantage point of the utter devastation set before me. It was a city, a whole city that had been broken and twisted beyond recognition. Once monolithic skyscrapers that now sat crooked and full of holes or lied flat on the ground, burying smaller buildings underneath their decayed ruins. What was left of a highway created a pathway of T-shaped towers to who knows where. Sweet Celestia how long was I out?

It looked like the building I was currently in was built onto a hill, which was good. I don’t think I have the time or energy to go all the way down a skyscraper. Looking back in the large room I saw a pair of elevator doors. One was forced open by something or somepony. There was a long drop that went down about seven or eight stories. Hmm, the controls next to it seemed to be active. I stood up on my hind legs so I could call the lift to me without falling on my face.

The whole building shuddered, and I saw some more buzzards that were still sticking around fly past the giant hole in the stairwell. Then the elevator car began to ascend from the lower levels with an eerie scraping sound. There was nothing to do now but listen to the sound of the motor on the roof be almost drowned out by the howling wind and rain hammering down on the building.

I untied my jacket from my waist and checked its deep pockets. Inside was a broken I-Pony with the earbloom wrapped around it, a pack of gum, a couple spare bits, and a picture of the Doc, Ditzy, and me when I still had all my legs. When I looked down from the picture I could see the top of the elevator, it had stopped right before it could make it to my level. You could see inside if you got down low and then shone your PipBuck inside. There was a rusted pry bar lying next to a dented emergency access hatch and some kind of large battery wired into the elevator controls. I guess that’s why it’s operational.

I put my jacket back on. With my many months of fruitless Wonderbolt training tucked behind my ears I attempted to drop down inside the car. I am an idiot, seeing as how I tried to grab at the edge of the emergency hatch with a whole lot of nothing when trying not to fall in.

Luckily my ass broke my fall.

Even though it felt like I went three rounds one-on-one with a Minotaur I had to get up and push that button and go to the ground floor. At one point this elevator car had red carpeting, oak rails along the sides of the silvery mirror-like walls, and a working electronic display. Now it’s a big box of rusted panels and ruined carpet. The elevator was moving at a snail’s pace which gave me time to learn more about the PipBuck’s features.

Maybe there’s some more stuff tucked in there that might help me find Molly in this blasted out, extremely hostile land with crazy robots, giant bugs, and more questions than answers. Maybe pushing the button for the Stats section might answer some questions.

An image of Stable Mare splayed and not wearing that barding of hers appeared on the screen. Gee whiz!

“Reconfiguring for new user, please wait for just a moment.”

After a few seconds Stable Mare was replaced by a pegasus pony version of herself. She explained to me that this was supposed to represent me. I’ll say, since the smiling pony’s wings were crippled and she had a prosthetic adapter on the end of her stumpy left foreleg. Wait, what? It’s counting my prosthetic as an actual limb? Okay, I’m just going to let this one go. Stop adding so many questions to the pile, you know?

Little meters with percentages in them were next to her limbs, head, and torso. The one with the gear symbol next to it was empty, as were the ones near the wings. The torso and head meters were about halfway full. I wish it went into a little more detail than that, because brain damage is something I’d like to know about.

I continued to listen to Stable Mare ramble on about the different parts of the Stats section of the PipBuck. The General section caught my eye because it had my name there and a title for me with Stable Mare giving a thumbs up with the Snakeoil and having her other leg on her haunch.

Tellis Argonis – Wasteland Newbie

Wasteland?! Okay, I needed answers NOW. This-this can’t- no, it just can’t be. Wasteland? I have to find somepony, anypony at all that knows what’s going on here. No, Molly first, then I get answers.

The elevator doors opened to reveal a large lobby that looked in even worse condition than were I was before. It was really big. I think the first and second floors were combined to be part of the lobby or something, seeing as how there was a large set of stairs going down from the elevators. The skeleton of a unicorn pony was slumped over the reception desk. That is just nasty. Were those layers of paint and insulation hanging off the ceiling? You bet they are! Smashed glass doors are an improvement in my book, as well as that light fixture that once hung from the ceiling resting in a dried up fountain. My wings hated it.

There was a small safe-shaped hole blasted out of the large desk in the middle of the room which meant it was a really badass safe or that looter didn’t know how to pick a lock. And they had explosives.

I hit the Data button on my PipBuck to start Stable Mare’s lesson on the section while I explored this area to search for anything that could be useful.

Wow, whoever was here before me took pretty much everything that wasn’t nailed down and left. Though, I did find some candidates for temporary prosthetics. It was a choice between a pipe with a valve on the end or a pointy piece of rebar. They are both just the right size and length to cram into my leg but which one to take? Let’s go with the pipe, that valve makes it a bit heavier than the rebar but it also has a wider surface to walk on. Although the sharp rebar would be good if I ran into anything nasty.

[*Tink.. Whir-Tictictictictic. Click*
Like a glove. A long, pointy glove made out of metal.

“This is the Data Section of the PipBuck. Pretty much all the maps, notes, recordings and other things are stored here. There’s even a radio!

With my poor pony’s peg leg I trotted over to the doors. Glass crunched underhoof as I passed through the door and was soaked immediately. I did need to wash this blood off my face. I wouldn’t want to get to Molly looking like that, I have no idea how she’d react.

I see this in the corner of my E.F.S:

You have discovered:

Wicker

Doodle Insurance Firm

Okay, that was weird. I looked at my grand map on my PipBuck and there were a couple squares that weren’t there before. You know how I said I had too many questions about the PipBuck and didn’t want to add any more? Screw that noise! How the hell does it know where I am? What is this ‘Wicker’? The city? Probably.

I looked around the parking lot, destroyed wagons littered the area and the remnants of light posts that shared the same fate as the city were in various states of disrepair. Some blackened spikes that might have been trees adorned the sides of the entrance, and I could see more down the winding road that lead to the rest of the city. Molly could be anywhere. I have to start looking somewhere.

But where to go?

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

Obviously, I went to the wrong way. A barrage of automatic fire slammed into the concrete barrier I was hiding under as some psychopath with a gun in their mouth mumbled explicit threats that I couldn’t hear over her gunshots. The first pony I’ve seen in hours and they try and kill me! Something tells me that I should have trusted my E.F.S.

The red mare leapt over the road divider and in a panic I activated S.A.T.S. Smart move on my part, since this gives me time to plan a way to not die. This crazy bitch had a light violet mane that was hacked to pieces with knives except for two little pigtails in front of her ears. She was wearing armor made out of pretty much whatever was lying on the ground held together with bits of dirty duct tape and twine. Lastly, was that- was her Cutie Mark a skull with a kitchen knife driven through the top and poking out through the bottom? Holy hell.

You can pick specific body parts in S.A.T.S? Okay, plan of attack. Swipe the gun out of mouth with rebar then punch her in the throat. That’ll buy me some time to get away.

The mare reeled back as I shattered her flimsy auto-pistol with a metal stick, Gun parts scattered across the slick pavement as I made a break for it with a brand new hole in my body. Now I don’t know about you but being shot is a BITCH. The only thing stopping me from collapsing from the pain in my hind leg growing with burning intensity was me screaming, the adrenaline, momentum, and blinding fear.

“Oh you little cunt! Get back here so I can drive nails into your eyes!” Celestia! I- wow. Just wow. I don’t think anypony has threatened to do that to me before.

I must have looked ridiculous running away from this psycho shouting various threats (Like impaling me with my own leg and then parading through the streets waving me around like a flag.) as she chased me through the slippery streets. I had gotten up on my hind legs so I could run up to and climbed onto a crashed skywagon and dodge a knife hurled at me. My leg pierced through the roof of the vehicle and I was forced to disconnect from it in order to continue my flight.

Why was this happening? What is this pony’s problem? Her problem is that she’s trying to kill me and I’m still alive, that’s what! I dropped over a chain link fence onto a dumpster lid, and then rolled off onto the hard ground. You probably think being a pegasus pony means I can fall hundreds of feet without harm?

Wrong! Falling down two stories hurts a lot, especially for somepony like me. As you can see I’ve never really been able to deal that well with pain. Why do you think I try my best to not get hit with anything?

So anyways, you remember when I said losing my leg was the single most painful experience in my life? This is about number six on the list with one being losing my leg.

I rolled on my back to see Pigtails bashing on the fence, too far out of the earth pony’s reach. I’d tried to shout something really clever but all that came out of my mouth was, “Hah. Yough isht meanst or- uruh. Magm… tag ‘em!”

I had no idea what I tried to say.

“Just you wait until I get down there! Your mine, bitch! You hear me?!” Gee, I wonder what got up her ass. Also, I believe that she thinks that I am a mare.

Inheriting my mother’s lavender coat, amber eyes, and white mane really weren’t doing my any favors right now. Well, at bars if I play my cards right I can trick drunk idiots into buying me drinks so that’s a plus.

And there she goes to find an alternate route down to me so she could murder me. All the while watery bullets rained from the sky, pummeling me without mercy. I really needed to get out of the rain.

So here I am, soaked to the core, spilling more of my blood in hell, with three legs dragging my sorry hide through the streets past the smoldering, cannibalized wreckage of what appeared to be a double bladed gyrocopter. A bolt of electrified death struck one of the gyrocopter’s blades and caused it to fall near me.

Even inanimate objects are trying to kill me now.

Crawling around won’t get you anywhere anytime soon so I grabbed hold of the gyrocopter’s front side and pulled myself up. There were a couple bodies in there, one a pilot and the other… I don’t really know. The pilot wore a flight helmet that was, along with her face, was halfway torn away. She also wore some kind of dark colored military barding. The other pony looked like what I thought ponies saw me as, a monster made out of metal. (Or maybe a gang member.)

But this looked more like it was heavy armor that could probably withstand something like a gyrocopter crash.

That is if you weren’t impaled by a gyrocopter blade. I’ve seen my share of bodies with the Doc, so I’ve come to expect to see them in a situation like this. Although, it’s never been this bad with him. There was something vaguely familiar about these corpses, but I couldn’t quite put a hoof on it. Well neither of the pegasai looked like Molly so to hell with them. I had too many priorities and too many things trying to kill me to take the time to mourn two strangers.

Well, at least a little blessing to help them on their way. “May Celestia guide you to the Hereafter and beyond, my friends.” I stopped leaning on the glass and put my good hoof on the ground, ready to find shelter from this punishing rain.

I turned to see Pigtails in the distance with a couple other ponies that looked equally deranged. I hit S.A.T.S so I could get a better look at them. The dirty green colt(almost a stallion) to her left wore a helmet made out of pieces of scrap metal attached to a colander, flight goggles with broken lenses, part of a wagon wheel tied to his back, a necklace made from… teeth. There was a rusty light machete in his mouth and I don’t think he’s going bushwhacking with it in the traditional sense. Such a shame too, he seems like the kind of pony I’d go for. The orange unicorn mare to Pigtails’ right wasn’t wearing anything, but she had painted strange symbols on her coat. They were different colors of paint that must have been dry long before the rain had started to fall. Do something with that mane of yours and we’ll talk. Oh damn. She started to float a simple revolver out of a holster on her leg as I left S.A.T.S and I turned to be a coward some more.

A bullet flew past me as I limped around the gyrocopter to run into another alley on my hind legs again. It’s slower but you should try trotting on three legs. And I’m pretty good at it.

That is, when I don’t have a bullet wound.

My mane, slicked down with water, was getting into my eyes as I ran through the alley. Like an idiot I collided with some empty drums but pushed them aside with my good leg. There was a fence in the middle of the alley, which was a problem. The red brick building with a rounded corner next to me was mostly destroyed except for the fire escape that went over the tall fence. Didn’t take a genius to figure this one out. I clambered up onto a conveniently placed dumpster and wrapped a leg around a slippery rung and gradually climbed the ladder.

“Aw fuck no! That cunt’s tryin’ to make a break for it! What the fuck are you doin’, Splat? Shoot her ass!”

Splat sure is a lousy shot. The only bullet that tagged me hit my PipBuck and bounced away as I landed on a rotten, damaged crate. It shattered into pieces and a broken shard of wood went into the upper part of my good foreleg. The excruciating pain of the wooden spike caused tears to run down my face. The ponies trying to kill me shouted explicative after explicative at me from the other side of the fence. I think that Splat was out of bullets! Yay.

I was busy pulling the piece of wood jammed into me out with my teeth while they began to fight over getting onto the rusty old dumpster to climb the ladder. That green idiot with the teeth necklace slipped and fell, knocking his two comrades down with him to the ground.

That is a lot less blood than was expected. I think it’s because that piece of wood didn’t go in too deep or it missed an artery or something. I’m not a doctor. Either way I could really use a Miracle Tonic right now. Hey that board looks like it’ll fit into my leg. Heh, what do you know? *Thok. Whir-Tictictictictic. Click*

I reached the end of the alley and looked back. That painted pony named Splat fell from the fire escape and, with nothing on the ground to break her fall, broke a leg instead. I know this because she was shouting, “For fuck’s sake! My fucking leg is broke!” These guys sure say ‘fuck’ a lot. Do I hear music?

Anyways, this made her two friends think twice about going that way. She called out for her allies to help her as they climbed down from the dumpster and Pigtails silently glared daggers at me in the rain. I wasn’t a mind reader but I’m pretty sure she was promising that she’d be back to kill me. That was definitely music I’m hearing. An upbeat, brassy tune, something that would be in a parade or an advertisement for some miracle product the corporation is selling. I didn’t have enough time to figure out where it was coming from before it stopped.

Then the unmistakable zortchy crackle of a laser burst past me and towards the lightly-armed ponies on the other side of the fence. One of Pigtails’ pigtails was cut away by a beam, as well as part of her ear before she turned tail and ran away with Smiles as Splat angrily shouted for her former comrades to help her.

“Aw, screw this!”

A tinny, mechanical voice said loudly over the rain, “Yeah you better run! Are you okay miss?”

I didn’t know if the flying robot I was looking at meant me or Splat there on the ground. But with my track record, he probably means me. My internal smartass drive had kicked in and I said as I held up my plank to the little flying robot, “Never better. Now who the hell are you?”

“In a second, first you might want to pay attention to that Raider behind you.” It bobbed to the side as if it was looking past me over to Splat and I took the hint. I turned to see her raising a metal pipe with her magic, ready to bash my brains in with it.

Raising my PipBuck to deflect the blow as I activated S.A.T.S, I wondered what was going through Splat’s mind right now. Surely she wasn’t still trying to off me immediately after breaking a leg? Priorities, Splat! I targeted her head with the plank and swung with all my might, which considering what I’ve been through recently wasn’t that much.

Though it was in slow motion, I’m pretty sure that Splat had shouted, “Piss on your lungs!” before I made contact.

Seriously? The board broke? Great, now it’s too short, and it broke in a way that it wasn’t even pointy. I disconnected the plank from my leg and let it drop to the ground before turning back to the flying robot that looked a little bit like a parasprite.

I had to catch my breath before looking up to ask, “So yeah, back to what I was- Where’d you go?”

The little robot had flow in through a large broken window of a dingy old store and he called out to me, (Sounded like a he, but hey, I look like a she.) “Over here, thought you might want to get out of the rain!”

That thing did have a point. I painfully trotted across the street to the store with that pipe as my new temporary leg and went in through the front door. “So who the hell are you?”

“I’m a friend. Well, really more of a passing acquaintance.” It was almost as if he were pausing for dramatic effect before he finally said, “You should probably call me Watcher.”

I pointed my pipe leg at him. “That is a cool name. I really appreciate you chasing Mean and Nasty away for me Watcher. By the way, I’m a dude, so yeah…”

“Woah! Oh, I mean uhh… hehe. Sorry dude.” For not being able to show emotion in his words, Watcher was doing rather well at sounding embarrassed. He cleared his ‘throat’ before continuing, “It was the least I could do sir.”

“Oh, there’s way more you can do for it to be the least you could do. Like helping me find a Miracle Tonic. I’m not appreciating this little hole those ‘Raiders’ as you called them gave me,” I said while pointing at the bloody hole in my pants with my good hoof as I sat in a chair. I know I was being a little rude to Watcher, but I had been shot. My polite-o-meter had officially run out by now.

The little robot floated over to me and said, “Well, I can see that you’re in pain, I think there’s a medical box over there in the back room. There might be a healing potion in there. I don’t know about any ‘Miracle Tonics’.”

All the way back there? I cringed at the thought of having to put more weight on my leg. But a pony’s gotta do what they gotta do right? Besides, the faster I heal myself, the sooner my pain goes away!

“Okay, here goes nothing.” I must have looked like an idiot hopping around on two good legs and a pipe to the back room, seeing as how Watcher was laughing his shiny, metaphorical ass off.

I came back with a yellow box adorned with three familiar-looking butterflies, which reminded me about Molly. Her mark wasn’t the same as her grandma’s like with Comet. I’m pretty sure it was a broken chain. Hey, it’s not like I stare at her flank all day! I mean she was pretty loud about when she got her Cutie Mark a couple weeks after her twelfth birthday. That was a few months ago, a lot of fireworks were involved, it was awesome.

Inside the box was some gauze, a bottle with some purple liquid in it my PipBuck labeled as a Healing Potion, and a dirty bottle of clean water. I pocketed the gauze and the water, and pulled the cork on the healing potion out with my teeth, spat it out, then drank the potion down.

Found that it worked exactly like a Miracle Tonic, if only with a slightly different taste and color. A soft, gentle glow emanated from my various wounds as I began to heal. I felt muscle tissue in my leg realign itself and zip back into its original position while new tissue grew to replace what was lost. The same thing happened with my shoulder. By the time I sat back down my small laser burns were disappearing and bruises from that nasty fall were as well. You have got to love magic.

I closed the box with my pipe leg. I needed to know some things from this robot. “Okay, I have some questions for you that need answering.”

“Shoot. But be quick about it, I don’t have that much time.”

“What are you? And don’t say robot, I’m not that stupid.”

“I never said you were stupid. But do you mean the sprite-bot? Oh, I’m not the bot. I’m controlling this one here from a remote location. Pretty neat, huh? I’ve been using them to communicate. And to look around, find ponies like you.”

“Don’t I feel special? So what was that music I heard? I did hear music right?”

“That noise? I cut that off the second I jump into a sprite-bot. It gets old. Fast.”

Now to more important questions like, “Have you seen a yellow pegasus filly anywhere around here? She has a pink mane with black highlights, and has this look in her eyes that makes you think she’s going to light something on fire.

Watcher was silent for a moment before he said, “Can’t say that I have, I’ll be sure to tell you if I do. There aren’t that many pegasus ponies around these parts. I’m guessing she’s somepony special to you?”

He chuckled, which was less disturbing than you’d expect.

“What? Oh no, she’s just a friend,” I looked at Watcher with a deadpan expression. “Who is twelve.”

“Oh. Sorry about that.” His happy chuckle sounded more nervous now, wrought with embarrassment. “Crap. I’m starting to run out of time. Like I just told this other pony, you’re going to need some things if you want to survive. A weapon or two, some armored barding, a little guidance, and… this is the important part, you need some friends.”

“Well it’ll be a bit hard to use weapons without my leg.”I held my pipe up to add to my point. “You don’t know where it is, do you?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. Is it about as long as that pipe, with fingers and stuff?”

Holy crap. “Yeah! Yeah it is. Can you tell me where?”

“Yes. And I think you’ll be killing two radroaches with one shot here. You like books, right?”

“Yeah, I guess so.” I scratched at my chest with a hoof.

“Okay. There’s this guidebook for people that want to travel through the Equestrian Wasteland. I think I saw the one that took your leg have a copy with them. They went to a garage deeper into town…there you go.” And lo, there was a marker on my map. “There’s a tag on your PipBuck on how to get there. I’d ask you how you got one but there isn’t any time.”

There’s that word again. “This really is some kind of apocalyptic shit going down, huh?”

“You don’t look it but you really don’t know what’s going on, do you kid?”

“Not really.”

“I wish I had more time to explain the situation more thoroughly, but I don’t. Good luck out there, and I’ll keep an eye out for your friend.”

I rested my pipe on the bobbing robot’s frame. “Thanks Watcher, you’re a real life saver.”

“You’re welcome. You sound much more appreciative of my help than this other pony I talked to earlier.”

My past self didn’t want to look like a pansy to this robot, or rather whoever was behind it. So I did what any rational crazy pony would do, make hollow and slightly cryptic threats. “But so help me Luna you better not be stiffing me.”

The sprite-bot floated backwards as if it were surprised. “What? Aw come on. And I thought you were genuinely sincere there for a moment.”

“I am, but my skepticism tells me that I shouldn’t fully trust you. Right away at least.”

“Why would I betray you? I mean what would I gain from it?”

I rubbed a hoof on my chin and said, “I don’t know, maybe you’re insane. Or maybe that’s me. Either way, I should get going.”

“Yeah, you sh-“Static cut Watcher off before the sprite-bot started to lazily float out of the window into the rainy wastes. A thought popped into my head while watching it leave. I wonder what makes it fly.

I now had a sense of direction, a path to follow in order to survive in this hostile land. Given to me by a robot controlled by a stranger, but hell I’ve taken directions from an oversized flower before.

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

I smelled the Raider camp before I could see it. The sickly sweet smell of death mixed with the unmistakable scent that has haunted my dreams for the past two years stuck to my lungs and I thought I was going to throw up what little was left in my stomach. You know what that particular aroma is? Burning pony flesh.

There was a nice little vantage point from some tall, shady ruins overlooking the camp. Better yet the smoke from their fires was being held back by the rain so it didn’t blow into there. I didn’t want to think about who was being burned. Please, please, please dear Celestia let it not be Molly!

One advantage of all this damn rain is the gloomy ceiling of dark clouds wasn’t letting that much light through so it was relatively easy to sneak around. The U-bend on this pipe was really useful in climbing the sharp, rusty spines of rebar covering the ruins. This is a good hiding place, and dry too. Must be why there was somepony already up here. They hadn’t noticed me yet, thank the goddesses. But what can I say? Infiltration is sort of my thing.

Getting out is the hard part.

She was scratching at her dirty blue mane with a black hind hoof while sitting near her crudely mounted hunting rifle affixed with an Ill-fitting scope held on by mostly duct tape. Hey do you want to know how to really take a unicorn by surprise? Grab. Their. Horn.

This candy cane-shaped pipe is coming in pretty handy. Sniper never saw me coming. I yanked her head back with the pipe and covered her mouth with my PipBuck before she could shout. Sniper sure has a lot of fight in her. She actually tried to bite me while I wailed on the back of her head with my pipe!

I dropped Sniper’s unconscious body to the ground. At least, I hope I knocked her out. After I lost my leg I became a pony of peace, in the sense that I wouldn’t cause the death of another pony for as long as I lived. Vows of nonviolence, Shmows of nonshmilence.

After thoroughly robbing Sniper I was rewarded with several 9mm rounds, a belt with a knife in a stubborn sheath, half a healing potion, and a metal tin that all the paint on it had been scratched off and used as a container for bottle caps for some odd reason. That was tossed aside along with the empty box of chewing gum found in the pockets of Sniper’s ratty vest.

I was about to remove the rifle from its mount as a yellow earth pony stallion poked his head in through a concrete entranceway. My eyes widened as I saw his head reaching for the gun on his foreleg. I hit S.A.T.S and my heart racing in slow motion felt odd, but good. Leaping up from the ground to give him a nasty left hook, the barrel of his .32 pistol flashed and hit me in the chest. The bullet went past my ribs and out through my side into my foreleg. I fell over onto the pony, screaming bloody murder.

I’m sure nopony heard that.

Pressing down on his cheek with a hoof to squeeze the gun out of his mouth I slammed my forehead into his neck. I didn’t have anything else to hit him with! Instinctively he opened his mouth to breathe deep through a bruised windpipe. The gun clattered to the ground and was pushed away as a yellow hoof pushed upwards to push me away. I could feel the bullet buried inside my foreleg shift as he did so and I’m pretty sure that I wanted to murder this guy.

My vision blurred from the immense pain and tears welled up in my eyes. I brought my PipBuck across Yellow’s rage-filled face and a pipe into his receded stomach. I don’t think he’s just going to spring up from that so I crawled away from him over to his gun to have a chance to heal myself. Put the gun in my pocket, not the best place for that kind of thing, I know but now he can’t get it.

A familiar voice called out from the concrete halls and I wrapped my legs around Yellow to pull him into the room. I think it’s time for some James Bronco badassery. I pulled Sniper’s rolled up belt out of my pocket and opened the snap on the sheath with my teeth to get the knife from inside.

“Yo Bramble? Jade? You in here? I heard- OH FUCK ME!!” I had stabbed Pigtails hind leg as she came into the room. A tiny spatter of blood landed on my cheek as I let go of the knife to let Pigtails fall to the ground in agony. A pipe to the head stopped her from screaming any more death threats at me.

I’m really starting to like this pipe. Still, the Snakeoil beats this thing by a landslide. What is that… oh yeah, bullets. I’m so soaked I forgot that I was bleeding. The warm blood felt kind of nice after all that cold rain… What am I doing? Where’s that potion?

Okay, that postponed Mare Muerte’s final call for now. Healing always made my wings feel funny.

I left the knife in Pigtails’ leg, since that’s probably the only thing holding the blood inside her body. But who needs a knife when I have a gun? Wiping the bit on my jacket was useless, so I just stuck the weapon into my mouth.

I haven’t held a gun like this in a long while. Almost forgot what it felt like. The other Raiders are probably not going to immediately come up here, seeing how I took out their scout.

Apparently I was wrong. There was another dash moving erratically in a small space. Now I’m not sure but I think that means they’re pretty close to me. A pink unicorn mare and Smiles stepped in from the hall to investigate the violent noises coming from the concrete sniper nest as my S.A.T.S became ready for use again.

I selected a shot without even looking where I was aiming and fired. I hit the mare in the neck, causing her to fall to the ground and begin the process of bleeding to death.

Smiles got more bullets, but they were more directed towards his flank. Instead of falling over when dealt massive damage like all his other comrades Smiles tackled me to the ground. His machete got caught in the bend of my pipe and I used that as leverage to move my gun under his jaw.

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

I felt awful for what I’ve done but what I saw next made me take back every empathetic emotion I had for these motherfuckers. I had gotten a good long look at the Raider camp while removing the rifle from the mount. It was… oh I can’t even find a word bad enough to describe how horrible it was. Severed heads on pikes made from rebar and scaffolding poles, splayed torsos and headless corpses chained up on the corrugated metal walls, and everything covered in crude graffiti. Filled with righteous fury I felt a fiery need to avenge whoever those ponies were that these bastards have killed and use them to build a castle.

After taking all I could from the Raiders and hitting .32 pistol guy over the head with my pipe leg, I was ready to face whatever remaining forces that were holed up in the small fortress. According to my E.F.S there were only three hostiles left and… one non-hostile. Crap. That means I can’t just go in there guns blazing. Now I have to worry about the yellow fellow on my E.F.S as well as the dreaded reds.

There was a supply cache behind a nearly destroyed closet door with a couple healing potions, a capped syringe of something labeled “Med-X”, some duct tape, and a bottle of Sparkle-Cola. It looked like one of the classic bottles from when I was a colt. This is a weird place to find one of those.

Methinks my pipe leg needs an upgrade. With a little duct tape and some time, it now had a rusty machete attached to it.

Well back to kicking psycho pony ass. I went downstairs to a room that led to a tall ladder. This ladder went down onto a platform bridging the gap between the ruins and the construction site fort. But there was a much cooler way across. A cable attached to this building that lead right to the end of the platform caught my attention, and I looked at my hooked pipe.

As I slid down the cable, I almost dropped the hunting rifle while shooting at a Raider on one of the scaffolding towers with S.A.T.S. That would have been really cool if I had hit him. Untangling myself from where the cable met the fortress wall of sheet metal reinforced chain link and scaffold platform walls while being set upon by a knife-wielding maniac. Too bad hunting rifle beats knife.

It was really awkward to work the bolt action in my current state, but I made it work. I took aim at the guy in the scaffold while doing my best to dodge his and his other friends’ bullets and pushed the weapon forward with my left leg and pulled back slightly with a hoof.

A disappointing click was heard. Come on, only two bullets? This is ridiculous. Tossing the rifle down and ducking behind a large concrete slab seemed to be the right course of action at the time. Bullets pinged off of the grey shield while I fiddled with getting the .32 pistol out of my pocket. I forgot to reload it, didn’t I?

Four bullets in the cylinder (I dropped one) and I was ready to shoot some more ponies. Stony shrapnel bounced off my face as a bullet hit dangerously close to my head.

I’m really relying on my PipBuck to help me aim. I hit the raider with the duct tape wrapped .32 pistol in the chest and then the neck, dropping them.

A bullet from the scaffolding tower grazed my leg as I ran towards the pony with a small bolt action rifle that made a plinking noise every time it fired. After five shots the Raider had to reload his weapon, while I still had two bullets in my gun.

Only one of the bullets hit him, the other grazed his broken wagon wheel cutie mark. This hurt him enough to interrupt the unicorn’s reload, which bought me some time. I ran over to the raider I had just killed and retrieved his weapon from the muddy ground. According to my E.F.S, it had four rounds left.

Simply allowing the empty gun to fall out of my mouth I went over to an old forepony’s office in the middle of the camp. With bladed pipe raised and a hoof on the door’s handle, I pushed it open. There was some stuff lying around on tables that was overlooked in favor of the pile of orange hair on the dirty floor. Was that crying behind this door? It was locked, but not for long.

I had to disconnect yet another leg when my leg got caught in a large part of the broken door. I looked up to see a tan unicorn filly chained to a bed frame and lying on her stomach on a ruined mattress. Her teary eyes were shut tight and there were hoofmarks around her flank and blood underneath her tail, which had been cut.

I started to frantically search the room for a key or a saw or… this gun could work.

*BANG! BANG! BANGBANG! BANG!*

The broken chains were pulled away with my teeth and the pins on the rusty shackles were removed. I lifted the little filly off the bed, carried her into the main room and sat her on a couch.

“Hey drink this,” A healing potion was held up to the filly, who said nothing as tears ran down her face. Clearly I was going to have to do this some other way. With some potion soaked into the gauze to make some jerry-rigged medical bandages. I applied it to one of the filly’s forelegs to try to soothe where the shackles had cut into her. She was startled when I touched her with the medicated cloth, but then she calmed down when she knew what I was doing.

“Are you thirsty kid?”

She barely nodded her head before she wiped her eyes with a hoof. I pulled the sealed bottle of classic Sparkle-Cola from my pocket and curled my lip at the bottle cap. It mocked me with its stubbornness and I set the bottle on the cracked coffee table, “I’ll be right back. I need to get my leg.”

The pipe was ripped from the machete and I came back into the main room on all fours.

I pulled the bottle cap off with the pipe’s tip and held it up to the filly. “Here you go. So what’s your name?”

She lowered the almost empty bottle and exhaled shakily. “P-pin. My name’s Bobbi Pin.” There was a bag of hay chips on the counter and I ignored my growling stomach while giving Pin the food.

“Bobbi Pin, huh? I like it, makes you sound kind of mysterious.”

“I guess,” Pin said without a smile. I don’t think this kid is going to smile for a long, long time.

“So uh...Pin? How did you end up here?”

“I—I don’t want to talk about it.” She started to tear up again and I sat next to her on the couch. She picked the bag of chips up in her hooves and devoured the contents within a minute.

I rubbed at where the bullet had grazed me earlier and “Oh okay, I can understand that. I have to get going. Do you know where your parents are?”

"What?"

I thought it was obvious, but apparently I needed to explain the reasoning behind my goodwill. "Well I can't just leave you here."

“Oh, they- they’re waiting for me back home.” That tone wasn’t too reassuring.

“Oh okay, where’s your house? I’ll take you there.”I held out a hoof to her, bringing up the map on my screen. I don’t know what I was expecting, for Pin to know how to read a map maybe?

“I think it’s somewhere near that arrow?” She tapped where Watcher said the garage would be, and since I didn’t have any reason to call her out on it I took her word for it.

“Hey I was going that way anyways. Come on, we should get out of here. It’s raining but I have a feeling you want to get as far away from this place as possible.”

-=-______[|]|.,/=|oO.0l Stable-Tec|l[{/%/}]l|Stable-Tec l0.Oo|=\,.|/[|]_______-=-
Welcome to level two! (Apparently.)

Guns increased to 30
Unarmed increased to 25
Sneak increased to 30

New Perk!

Confirmed Bachelor:
“Gentleponies.” You do +10% damage to the same sex and gain access to unique dialogue options with certain ponies.

Author's Note

I want to thank Kkat for creating the Fallout Equestria universe and if she ever happens to see this I hope she likes it. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and the Fallout franchise is protected under copyright law and I do not claim to own any part of either. I want to give thanks to Regolit for encouraging me to continue the space/time displaced cyberpony’s quest for survival with his kind words and advice. Please, don’t forget to rate and comment on this story. It’ll only get better if you do.

Chapter 2: Some Assembly Required

Chapter 2: Some Assembly Required

“I’ll win with both my wings tied behind my back, and a hoof to give you a fighting chance.”
/.|-\_=-]_______________________________[-=-]

Finally.

It’s stopped raining. Only the high winds remained but I’ll take it over the torrential downpour. I was pulling a cart with rusty-axles that I had found on its side and with a skeleton in it. It took a while to get the right wheel unstuck but at least I didn’t have to carry her or all the guns and stuff I stole from the camp before we left. Some sheet metal had been set up inside of it to keep Bobbi Pin out of the rain. Didn’t want her to catch pneumonia in addition to everything else she’s going through.

She had fallen asleep in the cart as it rattled down the broken pavement and around the rubble of buildings destroyed by a catastrophe I didn’t fully understand. I don’t think I actually wanted to know what happened to Wicker. I needed to find Watcher to find out more. Plus he owes me an explanation for sending me through a Raider infested hellhole.

Was it maybe because he thought I would be able to rescue Bobbi Pin? Why the hell didn’t he tell me in the first place? A little heads up would have been nice, don’t you think?

I did get some of the things that Watcher told me to get.

The only piece of armor that might’ve given me some protection was a yellow rectangular road sign pounded into a shoulder pad that didn’t fit me and a bloody colander helmet that wouldn’t do much anyways. So I didn’t have any armor.

I was however, the new owner of an assortment of knives, crap guns, and a rifle that looks like it’s going to break if I shake it too hard. That wasn’t all, there was this forest green saddlebag that had some supplies stashed away inside of it, like bandages that were actually medicated this time and a Sparkle-Cola.

Bobbi Pin was a little disturbed by that thing that happens with my left eye when ponies like me consumed stimulants like soft drinks or alcohol. You see it temporarily contracts my pupil to the size of a small button as a result of a side-effect of Icarus implants. None of the doctors or mechanics knows what really causes it, but I don’t care, it’s not like it’s hurting anything.

When you’re soaked, wind-chill has a much bigger effect than it normally does. Stepping around with wet clothes kind of sucks, have you ever worn wet blue jeans? I parked the cart next to the wall of an abandoned building and a large pile of rubble in order to remove my heavy, waterlogged clothing.

“Mama?” Bobbi asked with poked her little head out from the shelter that was built for her and saw me as I struggled with my shirt getting caught on the end of my left leg. While I swore at the white shirt trying not to tear a hole in it the filly rubbed her eyes with a hoof and stared at my back in disbelief.

When I turned to get onto the cart so I could take off my pants without rolling around in the mud I caught Bobbi giving me a look I was all too familiar with.

“Look kid, you don’t want to know, it’s a long story,” I kind of explained to her while waving my left leg around to enunciate what I was saying. It wasn’t really, but I just didn’t want to talk about why I don’t have the required amount of limbs a pegasus pony should have. There was a lot on my mind right now. Where’s Watcher when you need him?

“He’s probably out there, watching things, leading other ponies into deathtraps,” I spitefully thought out loud. What about that other pony he mentioned? He’s probably putting whoever that is through hell.

With all my clothes removed and hung to dry in the wind on some of the rubble next to me, I picked up a couple of the .32 pistols and started thinking. Now I’m no firearms expert but it looks like there’s good and bad parts for both guns and I didn’t think that more duct tape was going to help them. Maybe I could salvage the good crap from both to make a better gun than before? I didn’t have any tools though, just a bunch of kitchen knives, and a broken screwdriver.

Well, the ‘Repair’ thing in my Inventory seems helpful. Maybe it can tell me how to take it apart? I selected one of the pistols on the list. My PipBuck glowed and lifted the pistol into the air, taking it apart before my very eyes. Isn’t there anything this thing can’t do?!

All but forgetting about the world I watched as the bad was separated from the good and fell into my hooves. It was enchanting, “Wow! This is the one of the coolest things ever. Who cares why there’s a freaking part stripping spell on this? It’s awesome!”

Just when I thought the PipBuck could get any cooler it helped me replace parts on the gun I was repairing with parts that were slightly less awful. Did I mention how much I love this thing?

It even worked with a few of the kitchen knives. It ended up reinforcing the handle on the cleanest, sturdiest blade, leaving a bunch of pieces of rusty metal and rotten wood lying around the cart.

Bobbi was trying to get back to her restless sleep despite how loud I was being and the howling wind.

A wrinkled, torn poster with a very familiar pink pony flew by and caught on the rusted web of metal near where I had stopped. I could barely make out some of the letters before it blew away. “P----- -i- -- -atch—g you, ---ever!!”

Was that…? No, it wasn’t.

My weapons looked like they were cobbled together by somepony missing a few bolts in their brainpan but give me a break, I did the best I could with what I had. And that spell takes some getting used to.

Brrgh, why did I take off my clothes? I’m freezing to death here. This plan wasn’t very well thought out.

I really had no idea what to do. Molly was still missing without any leads on her whereabouts, and every second that passes she could be getting into serious trouble.

On top of that my leg was on the other end of the ruined city, I’ve murdered like seven ponies, during the course of all that I’ve been shot repeatedly, and Watcher or any sprite-bots were nowhere to be found. This was shaping up to be an excellent day.

Now there wasn’t anything to do but screw around with my PipBuck until my clothes dried out enough for me to be able to wear them. What time is it? I haven’t been able to find a clock anywhere on it this entire time. There it is! Makes sense that it’d be in the Data- What the hell?!

My heart dropped into my stomach as I read the tiny lettering in the top corner of the screen. 77. That’s a little vague. But how did I… without the TARDIS? I didn’t think it was possible. The date had to be wrong. It—it had to be. Watcher did say he’d explain more about what was happening.

Even though my clothes stilled looked like they were soaked I had wasted enough time. Wringing the clothes out to the best of my abilities I put the damp white shirt on and stored the other garments on the cart. I checked on Bobbi Pin to see that she was curled up on some old curtains that had been previously hanging in what was left of an abandoned store’s window.

Taking the damaged, knotted leather strap and putting it around me, I continued my pull to where Bobbi said her house was.

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

“Answer me, you bastard!” I shouted at the hovering sprite-bot blasting its brassy music at me and Bobbi watched in confusion as I continued to yell at the robot. We had almost reached the waypoint on my ever-expanding map when a sprite-bot started to float on by. So far it hasn’t done much more than play its music and it was starting to really get on my nerves.

“Dammit Watcher I’m about ten seconds from smashing this thing so hard your grandkid’s r/c car is gonna burst into flames!” Yeah Tellis, threaten the unresponsive robot with death, I’m sure that’s going to loosen his metaphorical lips.

The music cut out with a bit of static. “-lm down, calm down, I can see that you’re angry.”

Oh I’m angry now? I’ll show him angry. “Damn right I am! Why the hell did you send me through that deathtrap? I mean look at me, I’m missing more parts than a- than- Ah I’m so mad I can’t even come up with a clever metaphor! How did you expect me to survive all those Raiders? I killed most of them but that’s beside the point! ”

There was Watcher’s usual brief moment of silence before he “Hold on a second there kid you need to slow down a little. What’s this about Raiders?”

An electronic whistle rang out from Watcher’s speaker when I let him know what went down the last couple of hours. “You took on a whole Raider camp, by yourself?”

“I didn’t have much choice did I?” I loudly asked as the sprite-bot hovered in place, saying nothing, “Wait, I did, didn’t I? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I- You have a map don’t you? I don’t see why you didn’t just go a couple blocks over and then around all that. But it looks like it’s a good thing you went the way you did,” Watcher said as he moved slightly to his left to see past my face over to Bobbi.

It’s time for him to stop wasting time, screw this idle chatter. With a wave of my temporary leg I said, “Yeah, yeah, I’m a big hero. Now tell me what the hell is going on, the whole shebangabang.”

Instead of telling me he annoyingly asked, “Hey what’s your name?”

I let out an exasperated sigh and told him my name. There wasn’t any point in wasting time arguing why he wanted to know my name. He’ll probably stop calling me “kid” now at least.

“What kind of name is—you know, I’ve heard weirder.” I find that a little hard to believe. Watcher continued to say, “You might wanna sit down for this Tellis because this is some heavy stuff I’m about to lay on you.”

Feeling that I could take whatever he could dish out I said, “Just get on with it. We don’t have all day.”

The wind had died down some and the robot’s voice was clearly audible among the decaying ruins of the city. “Alright. Let’s just say a long, long time ago a certain series of decisions were made. The kinds of decisions made from stupid pride, greed, fear, and hatred. These decisions were ultimately responsible for destroying everything along with most of ponykind.”

He was right, that was kind of heavy. After thinking for a bit all I could ask was, “So somepony fucked up, huh?”

“A lot of someponies fucked up. Big time as you can see,” Watcher spun around to add emphasis, for he lacked any sort of opposable limbs except for that little laser underneath his frame. What a funny little robot.

Being humorous doesn’t change the fact that Watcher still hasn’t given me a straight answer about what exactly happened to Equestria before he timed out. What kind of fuckup on such a grand scale could have went down? Whatever the real reason is that this calamity befell this once fine country doesn’t really matter by this point anyways. The wandering automaton continued its mysterious broadcast, but this time there wasn’t any music. It was a different voice, one with a smooth, charismatic attitude that sounded friendly but at the same time made you feel like something was a little off. A little bit like my lawyer, now that I think about it.

“Good afternoon Equestria. As a friend and as a leader I come to you with a special announcement. Great strides are being made in the rebirth of our once majestic and beautiful nation but progress is regrettably slow. I have begun to enlist assistance from benefactors in the East in order to continue that progress. Their generosity will bring about a new age of peace in this vile, wicked land we all reside.”

Okay that just happened. What the hell did happen? Seriously, throw me a freaking bone here. A different marching band-type song started to play as the robot floated off once again to who knows where. No point just standing here in the wind so onto bigger and better things, eh?

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

Aw hell. I felt really sorry for Bobbi Pin. The front door of the decrepit brick building had been broken down and when I went inside I found her parents. The only way I could describe what the Raiders did to them was that they had been butchered, like-- like they were just pieces of meat. I closed the bedroom door and went back downstairs.

I had one question. Why? These ponies didn’t seem to have any kind of weaponry; they weren’t any danger to anypony! They didn’t antagonize those sick fucks in any way! And they—oh Goddesses they smelled worse than the camp the Raiders lived in. I’m not even going to bother looking for anything useful, I’m taking Bobbi to the nearby garage, feed her some kind of lie as I get my leg, and find a way out from this hellhole of a city.

“Why can’t I see my parents?! Let me through!” Bobbi demanded as I fought with her to keep her from going inside her house, which was surprisingly hard to do. She shouldn’t have to see her parents like that.

“Look, Bobbi I-“Oh sweet Celestia, what was I doing? I couldn’t look at her face as I said this with a hoof on her shoulder, “They weren’t there. I couldn’t find them.”

“Liar!” Bobbi shouted at me as a tear ran down her face and she pushed past me and into her house. I couldn’t keep up with the little filly as she rocketed up the stairs, fueled by adrenaline and desperation. Damn this pipe! I removed the dented and bloodied piece of metal from my leg and trotted up the rest of the stairs.

Reentering the bedroom I found Bobbi Pin collapsed against the bed and sobbing next to what was left of her mother. I continued to push down my emotions as best I could as I approached the crying pony.

I got low to the ground and said to her, “We have to go. Please.”

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

‘Lug Nut’s Garage, we fix wagons!’ read the burned out neon sign. My PipBuck argued against the sign, saying that it was ‘Jester’s Place.” So which is it?

Whatever it is Watcher says leg’s in there, so I’m going in. This should be easy enough. Thought about it for a minute and didn’t see much reason to go in through the big door, it would have made too much noise. Besides it was locked and I didn’t have anything to pick it with. The door with the black and white pony skull wearing a jester’s cap worked just fine.

I had an evil sensation going on with my underdeveloped wings as I turned the handle and pushed on the door. A single-barreled shotgun mounted to a chair with a whole lot of duct tape and rope fired with a fizzle and a spark. I patted at my chest with a hoof to check myself before looking up to the gun in the chair.

“Huh.” I had been saved by crap ammo. Praise Celestia! That shotgun seemed to be in there tight but after taking the duct tape off the only thing holding it there was a simple knot. A 20 gauge shell was loaded into the barrel and the gun closed with an audible *Click* and I looked brand used weapon over. It wasn’t in too terrible condition, but it could use some serious work.

As I looked around I saw that the tiles were cracked, what few windows available were tiny and covered with dirt, and the air smelled like… whisky? Yep, it was just like your average repair garage.

Bobbi had followed me inside despite me telling her to stay in the cart and as I shushed her I almost stepped onto a bear trap set up on the floor. Now where did this come from? It had been placed in the space between the desk and the front of the reception area. Where would somepony get a bear trap in a place like this?

“Hold on. Uh… okay Bobbi? See that little couch over there?” I motioned my head across the room and asked her, “Could you reach me a cushion off of that?”

I am about to do something clever. *Chi-whuff*. Ha! I laugh at your bear trap.

“Wait here,” I ordered Bobbi, to which she asked why. My response was, “Well cause I don’t know what’s on the other side of this door, that’s why.”

There weren’t any traps behind this door, thankfully. The wind rattled against the garage door at the far end of the room, drawing my attention to it. I saw the corpse of a blue unicorn mare with a black mane and illuminated by a light bulb powered by one of those batteries that I saw in the elevator. She was wearing barding that looked a lot like the kind Stable Mare was wearing, except there was a little “56” around the collar. There were many empty glass bottles scattered around the floor and near the bed and there was one clutched in her hooves. I’m no medical examiner but judging from the amount of decay she must have drank herself to death not too long ago, poor girl.

My leg was poking out of a cart next to her and I hurriedly hobbled over to it. I set the shotgun against the cart so I could get my leg on and a small dog, corgi I think, came out from under a cloth inside the cart and blinked at me in confusion. My leg clinked into place as the dog barked at me and a raspy, wheezing gasp sounded out behind me.

I turned to see the pony I once thought to be dead pull a strange gun from a holster on a table next to her bed with a red aura, the same color as her left eye. The other one was milky and colorless and I could see that both of her ears had a bit missing from them, as if she had been attacked by some clawed beast. The weapon being pointed at me looked like a small movie reel had been combined with a thin pistol. I barely had time to raise my forelegs before the mare opened fire. Her aim was simply terrible, she completely missed the first two shots, and then started hitting my forelegs. The PipBuck and the Snakeoil took most of the damage but then she got lucky when I got hit square in the chest.

Falling over backwards onto the ground, I heard Bobbi scream and the zombie-pony drunkenly asked what the hell was going on as she popped the catch on her gun and swapped the empty rotating ammunition reel for a fresh one off the table she sat next to. She looked over to the filly, then to me and said, “Aw shit. Marty, call… call the… get Cutter cause I think I…” I blacked out before I could hear the rest.

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

Welcome to Level Three!
Guns increased to 35
Repair increased to 25

New Perk!

Mare Killer:
“Ladies.” You do +10% damage to the opposite sex and gain unique dialogue options with certain ponies.

A/N Eh, I don’t know why I’m making this one really short compared to the other ones. Guess I’m lazy.

Chapter 3: Drink Deep

Chapter 3: Drink Deep

“Alcohol’s magic, it makes all your problems go away!”

/.|-\_=-]_______________________________[-=-]

“Hey!

Look who’s alive.” The deep blue zombie-pony was the first thing I saw when I woke up, and she appeared to be moving her forelegs back and forth in a manner that was not unlike dancing. She was acting like I was a friend she hasn’t seen in a while, like she didn’t shoot me.

The light directly above this pony-like creature was burned out but the one next to it wasn’t, so you could see her features pretty well. Like the small crack on her horn.

I tried to lean forward so I could stab her in the face with the Snakeoil but I stopped short. I had been strapped down to the cot with leather belts, worn duct tape and faded bungee cords, making me wonder why so many were deemed necessary.

I wasn’t complaining, my pain was little to none, yet I was a bit colder than usual. I soon found out that my jacket and shirt had been removed and my midsection had been wrapped in medical bandages, quality ones at that. Nothing like the ones I found earlier.

“Cutter. Hey get over here! She’s awake,” (SHE?) the zombie-pony beckoned for somepony to come over with a particularly healthy-looking hoof and a begoggled pony poked her head around a metal frame with a sheet draped over it. Her fur was a lighter hue than the zombie-pony’s and the color of her mane along with that coat reminded me of somepony I once met. What was her name? She had a really big hat and wouldn’t stop talking in third person. It was pretty annoying. I couldn’t have been happier to leave when she signed for her package.

This pony’s mane was a bit curlier and shorter than hers, though. And she wasn’t wearing a padded surgical mask with heavy buckled straps either. Sweet Luna’s ass that thing was heavy duty.

She flipped a switch on a bulb attached to a battery, illuminating her white medical barding and causing a glare on the smiley face pin covering the pink letters on the small breast pocket. “Wowie-zowie! I knew that would work! I’m such a genius.”

“You duct taped a light to a battery, amazing,” the zombie-pony rasped before turning her face upwards and gulping down some apple-scented amber liquid from a bottle with a faded label.

“Can it Jester, just let me have this,” Cutter said with that bouncy, light voice of hers as she adjusted her goggles with her magic and looked at me, “So, how you feeling flyboy? Yes Jester, the patient’s male. Stop asking.”

How did she- I guess she did see my wings and she is a doctor. Is she? I yawned as I looked past her, the blackout curtains covering the windows preventing me from seeing what time of day it was. “D’know, I mean you’re the doc, Doc. You tell me.”

The “doctor” pushed a long curled bang away from a goggle lens and leaned in closer to examine my wrappings after removing the binds that held me to the cot, “Well you’re not dying anytime soon, but by the way you look and from what Jester’s been telling me you shouldn’t be alive.”

I wonder what she’s been telling her. Probably that the mottled mule shot me!

“Vertibirds are notorious for being deathtraps for whoever’s inside when one goes down but you?” Cutter said as she pointed a hoof towards me, “My ghoul friend here said she saw you fall out of a hole blown in the side of one by those meanie Raiders in the middle of Rhinestone Junction in Southtown.”

There was a notification in the corner of my vision with Stable Mare’s face telling me that my map had been updated. Cooler and cooler all the time.

Jester levitated her bottle over to the small table with the cobbled lamp and rasped “Yeah. I saw you fall into that big ass insurance building and when I found you… you looked pretty dead to me.”

I almost couldn’t believe my ears. “Whoa, hold on a second there Sunkeyes Crackhorn. I was dead?”

Jester seemed to take offence to me calling her that, since she told me to go fuck myself with an iron stick. “At least I have more legs than you. I bet you get all kinds of ass being a crippled freak.”

“And I bet you have stallions busting down your door with that face.” Apply sterile bandage to burn.

“Alright you guys, cool your jets,” Cutter said as she got in between me and the ghoul, “What’s this about you being dead, Flyboy?”

It seems that when the ghoul managed to make her way to me, she found me in a less than advantageous position. She tried to check for a pulse but since she didn’t really know what she was doing she couldn’t actually find a vein. I was bloodied and battered and from that she assumed I was dead, took my leg as a souvenir, looted what she could and blew the safe free from the reception desk with explosives. After selling the safe and other stuff to the ‘local assholes’, she returned to her house just outside of town to get drunk, and pass out to blow through the storm that was brewing with ease.

“So Jester told me that you had a filly with you? Orange mane?”

“Yeah, I did. You don’t by any chance know where she is, do you?”

Bobbi was eating a lollipop in the “waiting room” of Cutter’s clinic and sitting on a ruined couch next to my bag when I came in. I was pulling a jacket sleeve over the Snakoil with my teeth while trying not to fall down, Jester found this quite hysterical judging from the spine-chilling raspy wheezing that must have been her laugh was heard.

She came in with her bottle floating in a red aura beside her and tipped it towards a terrified Bobbi Pin, “Eyh you broke my nose with a toaster, you little cunt.”

“No! Bad pony,” Cutter scolded Jester as she sprayed her with a spray bottle as the alcohol-saturated ghoul complained loudly, “Bad. You don’t call little kids names like that.”

“Give me that damn thing!” She swiped the bottle from Cutter’s magical grip with her own and tossed it into a small dirty trashcan. “I’m not a fuckin’ cat! Where did you even get that?”

Cutter briefly moved her mask down and foalishly stuck her tongue out at Jester, who was scowling back at her.

“So what do I owe you, doc?” I asked with the hope that Cutter saving my life was on the house.

Cutter pulled out a piece of paper and a pen from a desk and started to scribble on it. “Well there’s the Dash I used to keep you from going septic, mixed with the buttload of Med-X to stop you from thrashing around the first time you woke up and I charge per bullet taken out. So that brings it to around three hundred sixty-five caps.”

“Three hundred what now?” My mind flashed back to the small tin full of bottle caps I threw away from before and all the empty bottles scattered in the streets. And did she saw Dash?

“You got potatoes growing in your ears? I said three sixty-five caps!” She said as she held up the paper to show me her “calculations”. All I saw was a crude drawing of a stick pony eating a cupcake with 365 written in large text with several circles scrawled around it.

“Why do you want bottle caps? You’re a crazy pony,” I thanked her for healing me and motioned for Bobbi to come with me. She was already by the door, raring to get away from Jester.

I felt a tug on my jacket as Cutter called out, “No you’re crazy for thinking all this stuff is free! You owe me flyboy, big time.”

After digging around in my jacket pocket, all I could produce was two bits.

“Look, this is all I have and-“ The bits were enveloped in a light purple aura and lifted out of my Snakeoil’s palm before I could finish what I was saying.

“These are shiny! Where’d you get em’?” Cutter placed the coins on the lenses of her goggles as she oohed and ahhed at them.

Truthfully, I didn’t know where I got them. Like some kind of idiot I said, “My pocket.” And she laughed at me.

“I guess you can pay me back when you get the scratch. I mean it’s not like you’re gonna fly off anytime soon!” Cutter laughed even more after saying that. “But just in case, Jester? You’re not planning on doing anything today right?

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

Jester had taken us to her favorite place in town. For one, it was ghoul-friendly as long as their caps were good. Apparently it is money. I suppose their coin-like nature and the fact that there’s so damn many of them everywhere led to them being used as currency. Besides, I highly doubt bits are being minted anymore.

There wasn’t any guns allowed at the Grassy Ass so when they searched me for weapons I started to make a scene telling the door pony, “Any concealed…? Bitch I am a concealed weapon! Do you not see the big fucking hunk of metal glommed onto me or are you blind? See this? This is your gun. Now lemme through.”

Quickly stuffing the gun back into the holster on the confused pony’s foreleg I headed on inside with Jester chuckling behind Bobbi and me.

“So what is a ghoul?” I asked Jester as she returned with a frosty mug of beer and sat down at the table across from the booth Bobbi and I were sitting in. How did they make it cold? Probably a spell or something, I don’t know.

Somepony with a guitar and sitting on a stool in the corner of the bar had started to strum a little tune and a nearby patron called out to him, “Yo Mando!I can barely hear that thing. Turn it up a little.”

“Maybe if you would stop shouting then you might hear it,” The pony resumed his song.

“Yeah you tell him, Mandolin,” Jester turned to us and set her mug down, the smoky atmosphere of the bar and the dim light making her slurred raspy speech seem somewhat mysterious, “So you wanna know what a ghoul is, eh?”

It isn’t my top priority, no, but I kinda want to know just what the hell Jester is and why she can drink enough alcohol to kill an elephant daily. Okay, that might be a bit of a stretch but in the short time I’ve known her there hasn’t not been a bottle within five feet of her.

“Yeah.”

“You don’t know what a ghoul is?” Bobbi asked from beside me.

I turned to her and said, “Well excuse me for being ignorant, but I’ve been a little busy lately just trying not to die. Go on.”

Jester rubbed at her nose with a hoof, a small pop was heard and then she scratched at her mane before starting her lesson, “Well we’re mutants, I guess. When somepony gets cooked by radiation a little too much but they don’t croak they turn into something like me. Well not as sexy,” She said as she winked her creepy dead eye before taking another swig from her mug.

“That’s pretty much it, somepony like Cutter might know more but- hey buddy you mind?” A green unicorn stallion had stepped in front of Jester. He wasn’t moving.

“We don’t take t’ kindly t’ your kind ‘round these parts, zombie. You better get outta here,” He drunkenly slurred before taking a drink out of his bottle.

Instead of blowing up, she sighed, looked him square in the eyes and said, “How about no? I’m talkin’ to somepony here. Now buzz off jackass.”

He smashed his bottle over Jester’s head, who fell out of her chair onto the ground. “You don’t fucking tell me what to do! Nopony does! Especially. Not. Some. Zombie. Bitch!” The raging drunk stomped down with each word, and I was already on him. The thing about unicorns is when you have their horn in your hoof they’re pretty much your bitch for about two seconds. That was more than enough time for slamming his head down onto the table and then punching him in the face with my free hoof before pushing him away from me.

I caught the handle of the hatchet he swung at me as his two buddies came over to assist him. The green drunk tugged on his hatchet and I let go. The heavy hunk of metal struck his horn, chipping it slightly and stunning him momentarily.
I saw somepony in my peripheral vision with a bottle in their teeth preparing to swing at me. Drawing the .32 pistol hidden in my pocket and pressing it against the earth pony mare’s neck, I earned myself a hostage.

Jester painfully groaned and swore some more as she pushed herself up onto her haunches. Rubbing at her head with a hoof a small piece of bloody glass was knocked loose and clinked on the ground and she wiped her hoof off on her barding.

That Mando pony kept strumming his guitar as this fight went on and the barkeep seemed to actually be making wagers with his patrons on who would win this fight.

“Now miss, if you don’t want a fresh new hole to breathe from I suggest you drop the bottle and walk away,” my hostage obliged and she motioned for her deep violet stallion friend holding a wooden chair in his hooves to stand down.

“Thank you,” I stepped over to Green Drunkard, still keeping my weapon pointed at his two friends. “Jester! Put that axe down!”

She had Green pinned to the floor magically with a chair and was floating a hatchet above her horn, ready to strike. “Why the fuck should I?”

A loud bang from the bar answered her as everypony’s attention was directed towards the silver stallion wielding the smoking shotgun pointed at the ceiling. “Now what’s this, then? Are you actually harassing my best customer? You there, with the leg, would you kindly escort these ruffians from this establishment for me?”

Jester lifted the chair from Green and looked at the hatchet as she said, “I think I’ll keep this.”

I lifted Jester’s attacker up then stood on my hind legs to bring him even higher and said, “Now what do you have to say for yourself? You should learn to pay more respect to the fairer sex, ‘cause I ain’t so fair.” That might have came out wrong.

It must have looked silly seeing such a small pony lift that big green stallion up and threaten him, because Jester was laughing at me.

“Ah, what do we have here? Abupbupbup, yoink!” Lifting the bag off the leather harness the pony was wearing and shaking it a little in front of his face I thanked him for his generosity and with Jester’s assistance we threw him out on his ass with his friends following behind him.

“You better get outta here,” I held my Snakeoil up and extended its scary blue knife. Holding up the bag I called out, “Barkeep! Another round if you will? And some snacks! I’m starving.”

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

“You didn’t have to do what you did, but thanks,” Jester said as she stroked her dog’s fur with a hoof, “I don’t know many ponies that would do something like that to help a ghoul out.”

We were just south of Highway 57’s massive intersecting ruins that was the primary trade hub for the town. It was also the only way you could get across the river to the other part of the city, why anypony would ever willingly go there is beyond me. And Jester’s house or whatever is over there! Maybe they don’t let her live in town? Oh yeah, I should say “you’re welcome or something.”

I waved a prosthetic hoof and said, “Aw it was nothing. That asshole had it coming, didn’t he Bobbi?”

She nodded as she petted Jester’s small dog. I think Bobbi is actually starting to warm up to the ghoul. That was all the third party insight I needed to justify taking Drunky’s cash. He had somehow fit sixty-odd bottle caps into that bag of his and we blew about thirty-five on the food and drink. Still I was well on my way to paying back Cutter for saving my life. What I needed to be doing was find Molly instead of dicking around beating up drunks to help another drunk.

I don’t know why I haven’t told Jester about Molly yet, I guess somepony like her wouldn’t have seen the kid. I mean she’s plastered at all hours, hell Jester probably still thinks I’m a mare.

It couldn’t hurt to try, right? “Say Jester?”

She was picking her teeth with a knife when she looked over to me and asked, “What?”

“You haven’t seen a pegasus, a Yellow one with a pink and black mane?”

“Nope. In fact you’re the only turkey I’ve seen for a long while.”

Now hold on, what does she mean? Didn’t Watcher say something about that? Why weren’t there any pegasai anywhere?

“Heh, and you’re grounded! Ain’t that a trip?” She started to laugh, then cough violently and dropped her knife where it stuck in the damp ground. When she got a hold of herself Jester wiped the spittle from her receded jaw and said, “That assface really did a number on me.”

“Yeah, you might want to see Cutter about those bruises, they look pretty bad,” I advised as I picked up the white book labeled The Wasteland Survival Guide and underneath that read By Ditzy Doo.

Ditzy? No fucking way, this isn’t possible. She couldn’t have written it! I mean, what year is it, something seventy-seven right? Besides she’s with the Doc right now doing who knows what! It had to be some other Ditzy Doo.

I flipped through it, occasionally reading passages here and there. There was stuff I already kind of knew about like cannibalizing weapons for their parts, bat shit crazy Raiders, small pockets of civilization such as this fine place, killer robots, ghouls and ‘feral’ ghouls with an artist’s rendition of a feral ghoul pony. It was some scary shit, right up there with weeping pegasai.

“This world is damn dangerous,” I said as I put the book back into Jester’s worn out, ratty cart full of metal boxes, bags, and bits of metal, “There was a whole chapter in there just on landmines. And you’ve written a hell of a lot of stuff in there on the sides.”

“Yeah I got a lot of time on my hooves,” It was starting to become hard to understand her raspy speech now all that alcohol she had consumed was taking effect. A normal pony would be puking their guts out by now, but Jester isn’t you average pony. I only had half a beer, where my new friend drank various hard liquors and the rest of my beer. It was as amazing as it was horrifying.

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

We were on our way back to Cutter’s clinic when something caught my eye. A pegasus stallion wearing one of those old military harnesses that FI used to make and like the ones I saw drawn in the Guide by Jester. What was it called? Battle saddle! There were two big honking long rifles attached to the sides and he was wearing a dark Stetson that was damn sexy.

Through the crowd I saw a small grey unicorn wearing barding similar to Jester’s call out to the pegasus pony. I looked over to the ghoul and asked, “Hey do you know this guy?”

“What guy?” She looked around before she uncorked a fresh bottle and took a swig.

“Wait, don’t you-“ I looked back to see where the cowpony was, but neither him or the Stable pony was anywhere to be seen. Damn it! I might have gotten some answers about the PipBuck if I talked to that other Stable pony, because Jester’s was just about useless when I asked her earlier and she just mumbled something about “Radhogs” and how many caps one owes her.

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

Cutter counted out the thirty-three caps and put them back in the bag they came from, “Wow! Ponies don’t usually start paying me back this fast.”

“Well I don’t like owing ponies for too long, tends to end up badly for the guy owing,” I said as I took a candy from a bowl on a shelf. There sure is a lot of candy all over the place in Cutter’s clinic. It was like a friggin’ candy store.

“You know, Southtown is just full of shit that these assholes would sell their firstborn for,” came a raspy slur from a ghoul behind the ‘reception desk’ and sitting in a padded chair with more than a bit of duct tape applied to it, “I’m speaking from personal experience here.”

I put a piece of hard candy in my mouth, tossed the wrapper behind the chair I was sitting in and said, “I barely got any of that.”

“Okay makin’ it simple for ya. Losta shit down there, treasure everywhere… be up to our necks in caps…” Jester passed out before she could say anymore while her little dog Marty slept nearby.

Cutter was sterilizing a needle with a shot glass of some of Jester’s stronger alcohol and from heating the needle up with the tip of her horn before wiping it with a cloth. I didn’t know if that actually worked or not, but hell I’m not a doctor nor do I claim to be one.

A curious little filly came up to the masked doctor and asked “What are you cleaning those for?”

“There’s this dummy who sells all kinds of Chems in the market and she pays me for any needles I can get her. I don’t want ponies getting sick from dirty needles so I’m trying to sterilize these,” She explained as she replaced a protective cap on another needle before setting it on a handkerchief.

I was thrown by the strange word. “Chems?”

“You know, chemicals, drugs and stuff. Where are you from?”

“What? How could you sell needles to somepony supplying stuff like that to ponies? And I’m from somewhere that’s uh, far away.”

Cutter sighed as she moved her padded surgical mask. “Like I said, medicine isn’t cheap. I don’t like what Jump Jet does, but I need all the money I can get in order to keep supplied.”

“What about all this candy here?” I asked as I picked up a cracked bowl, spilling a wrapped treat onto the floor.

She quickly replaced her surgical mask before saying, “I… I don’t have to pay for that.”

I just stared at her for a moment before setting the bowl back down. “Whatever, I don’t care. I have a lot of shit on my plate right now and I just don’t have time to data mine for candy sources.”

What time is it? I’m not tired at all and I want to pay off Cutter as soon as possible so I can continue my search for Molly. Everypony was closing up their shops when we all came back anyways and I don’t really know the lay of the land around here if you know what I mean. I also didn’t have any of my tools with me.

That doesn’t mean I can’t improvise.

“Cutter? Can you do me a favor and Watch Bobbi?”

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

There was an eerie quiet that went on at this time of night in North Wicker.

Walking through the streets was kind of awkward when a patrolling lightly armored guard couldn’t stop staring at the metal things poking out from my jacket sleeves. “You want to stare all night or are you gonna go do your job?”

Telling that pony off felt good, but I probably shouldn’t have been so rude to her.

Where was I going? I was just wandering though the muddy path and into alleys behind where many of the merchant’s closed up stalls was located and away from the lantern light.

An unconscious pony lying on a ruined mattress on the ground caught my eye. There was small inhaler in her hooves and she was shaking slightly, I knew drug abuse when I saw it. I took the dark cloth on the ground next to her and tied it to my head to hide my mane. Not sure why, but there was that evil feeling in my wings again and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be spotted snooping around back here.

Whadya know, a couple bottle caps next to some empty bottles on a crate, I pocketed the pseudo-coins and for some reason I decided to check inside the trashcan next to that and found a spiked horseshoe. Okay… I’m not sure if I want to know why this was left here. In my bag it goes and I move on.

There were four ponies sitting around a drum filled with fire and they were talking amongst themselves in an empty lot. I hid behind a wagon with a sleeping- Oh this thing is just disgusting. Why does it have two heads? And the smell! Pinching my nose with my prosthetic, I tried my best to listen in on the conversation.

“I fuckin’ swear I’m gonna kill that fucking zombie, and that little cyberpony bitch too,” That was certainly a familiar voice, what are the chances that I happen to eavesdrop on these ponies in particular?

A gruff voice responded to the pony’s angry promises, “Damnit Reach, I’m about tired of your shit. We told you not to fuck with that ghoul but did you listen? No you didn’t! Now look at you, your horn is fucked up and all our booze money is gone because of you.”

“Hey don’t blame me! That little bitch took my money!” I’m really starting to get real sick of everypony calling me a mare.

“And whose fault is that? Yours!” I looked under the wagon to see a mare angrily waving her forelegs in Reach’s direction. It was kind of funny.

“Shut up you two! I hear something over there,” The large violet earth pony shushed his comrades and pointed a hoof in my direction. What do you say about leaving immediately, Me? I say, that is a capital idea Me! Shall we? Lets!

“Hey who is that?! Get back here!”

Like Jester said, “How about no?”

Now I can’t fly out of trouble, but remember what I said about improvising?

*Chck-whirBANG!*

My dirty bandana came off as I reeled myself up to a windowsill of a brick building, and just because I’m so lucky the brick I held onto came loose. Reach broke my fall, so that’s okay I guess.

“Get the fuck off- You!” He attempted to grab me and got a blue blade in the foreleg. I pulled my leg out of his as Reach screamed from the intense pain he was experiencing. I punched him again for the fourth time tonight as he fell over onto the ground. I prepared myself for the big earth pony guy to attack me, but instead that yellow maniac with the blue mane jumped me from behind.

She was a mite bigger than me, and she was trying her damndest to beat me to a pulp. My answer to this was pulling on that wavy mane of hers and dropping to the ground, bringing her with me. I quickly popped the spiked horseshoe onto my good hoof and punched at a foreleg that was attempting to stomp my head in.

Yellow reeled with pain which gave me an opening. Placing the open palm of the Snakeoil on her chest I fired Cinnamon’s “Grappling-hoof” once again. She slammed into the nearby wall of the dead end alley. It took a second or two to reel my leg back in place and by that time I was up on all- er… threes? Well now it’s all four.

I hauled ass past the violet pony dressing his friend’s wound over by their wagon and reassuring him that he’s going to be okay. What a night this is turning out to be.

I didn’t stop running until I got back to Cutter’s Clinic.

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

“Wake up you big dummy!” Cutter shouted as she shook me awake while dumping a bucket of water on my head. If you want to wake somepony up, I’d say that’d be the way to do it. Too bad I decided to sleep up in the rafters of the clinic. I wasn’t fast enough to grab the rafter with my Snakeoil and down I fell to the hard, unforgiving tile floor.

“Did you almost kill two ponies last night?” She pointed at a bandaged, pissed off-looking pony with a hoof as I got up from the ground.

Quickly, lie! LIE!“Pffft! Me, stab anypony? That’s ridiculous. He must be hysterical.”

“I know that’s the mare that-“ Oh that is fucking it!

“For fuck’s sake I’m a stallion! Are you that stupid that you can’t tell the difference?! I say you deserve that stabbing just for being that big of an idiot!”

“So you admit it!”

“Oh no, you attacked me. I was acting in self-defence while you idiots chased me down that alley!”

Jester came into the room holding a hoof to her head and started to ask, “Will you dumbasses keep it d- Hey! It’s you. Ha ha, you got hurt. I have what one might call a ‘world-class hangover of epic proportions’, so would you kindly shut the fuck up?”

I step over to Reach and say to him, “Look I’m sorry about you and your friend but when you attack me you better be ready for a fight. Especially if you still have a bone to pick with my friend here.”

He looked like he was going to say something that would be regarded as fighting words but held his tongue.

The violet Stallion came out from the screens behind Cutter and said to me, “We’re all sorry about my friend hurting yours but was that really an excuse for hunting us down in the middle of the night and spying on us?”

“Now that was just a coincidence, I really didn’t know that any of you were there. I heard ponies talking and I got curious.”

He grabbed me and forced me to look at what was behind the screen he came from and I saw her. The mare’s midsection was wrapped in bandages and she was lying in a cot with an aggrieved look on her face, maybe that horseshoe was a little unnecessary.

"Look at her, her name's Ginger and you. hurt. HER! Now I can barely give a rat's ass about Reach but I care about that mare, and you're going to pay for every cap it takes to make her better."

“Mister, I promise I'll pay you back as soon as possible," I choked out from underneath the pony's deathgrip.

“Damn right you are son,” He said with a deadpan expression as he let me go and jabbed me in the chest with a hoof.

I really have to stop owing ponies money. “Alright, alright. Let me talk to the pony drinking a bit of the hair of the dog over here.”

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

Eight hundred sixty-eight caps. That’s how much I owe these ponies added to my current debt. It’s a good thing Jester has a “plan” to get us some money.

“Whadhya mean you can’t open it? I blew the hell out of it with dynamite, that had to loosen the lock or somethin’,” Jester loudly asked the appraiser determining the value of the safe she pulled from Pokey Insurance Firm.

The blue stallion pushed his ill-fitting glasses up on his muzzle before saying, “I’m sorry, but unless we can get this thing open I can’t tell you what it is worth. And maybe if you didn’t reek of alcohol every time you came here with some random lockbox you say you ‘found’ in Southtown I might be able to help you more. Sadly that isn’t the case, now thank you for wasting my time, take your dirty safe elsewhere and have a good day.”

“Hey! I didn’t technically steal this when nopony’s owned it for two hundred years!”

Two hundred years?! So this is 229 years in the future, for me at least. But that didn’t make any sense, I’ve been to year 1500 and there wasn’t any Goddess-damn apocalypse!

“Yo Flyboy, you wanna take a crack at this damn thing?” The ghoul asked as she tossed aside a bobby pin that had snapped in two, “I have no idea what I’m doing.”

She was surrounded by a random assortment of tools, most of which had nothing to do with safecracking. The bobby pins being used as crude lockpicks was pretty resourceful, but they simply weren’t as good as the real thing. I guess you have to make do with what you have in this kind of place.

“The name’s Tellis, and yeah, I’ll have a go,” I thanked her as she tossed a small orange tin of bobby pins to me and I got to work. The lock was too small for me to use my Omni-limb’s knife to apply torque so I used one of Jester’s flathead screwdrivers.

“You mean like ‘tell us’? Yeah, I ain’t callin’ you that,” Jester said as she uncorked a half-full bottle of apple whiskey and sat on the bench next to the safe.

It took some doing, but with my crude gear I got it open. “Behold, your treasure. Some tins of mints I guess, bits, and blocky pistol.”

The PipBuck identified the gun as a 10mm Pistol, which was a definite upgrade from the weedy little pea shooter I’ve been carrying around. The ammunition counter on the E.F.S let me know that there were seven bullets inside the pistol.

“Aw come on! The only thing that was worth anything was the pre-war money, and there was barely any of that. I feel cheated,” Jester grumped as she tossed the empty safe into a dumpster as she took a mint from one of the tins and placed it on her tongue.

She popped some joints in her neck before saying, “Oh, that’s a lot better. You know I remember a way we can get some quick cash now.”

“And that is?”

“You ready to do a little grocery shopping?”

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

Welcome To Level Four!
Unarmed increased to 25
Lockpick increased to 30
Sneak increased to 30

New Perk!

Foal at heart:
“Am Not!” Meeting Cutting Edge has gotten you back in touch with your inner foal. Experiences and interactions with children are greatly improved and you sometimes have unique dialogue options during conversations.

Chapter 4: Till the Bottle Runs Out

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.

Chapter 5: Underpassage

Chapter 5: Underpassage
“A fool, leading another fool, to go out and do foolish things.”
/.|-\_=-]_______________________________[-=-]

Ten

minutes flew by like they were nothing and I felt slightly less like garbage.

A rack of nails slid into my new gun, as did shot shells and small pistol magazines into their respective break-action barrels and

loading areas. The place was picked clean by Jester and we were ready to move on, more or less.

Underneath the platform, following the waypoint on my E.F.S compass into a train car that looked like it allowed access into the tunnels

behind it, I decided to point out the elephant in the room, “Uh yeah, so… what if there isn’t anything there at the grocery store?”

“Then we sell everything we get on the way there at town, get drunk, pass out…” She trailed off, tugging on a collapsing door, which

collapsed and fell into the car with a glassy crunch.

“I’m starting to think that you don’t know how to open doors without breakin’ them,” I commented slyly, following the deeply sighing

ghoul inside.

“Oh goodie, more bodies,” Jester sarcastically rasped, lifting up a battered, beaten gun from the ruined body of some raider.

I however, was taking an interest in the fedora atop the skull of an ancient skeleton, slumped over in its seat from when the metro

crashed. The prospect of a sweet hat distracted me from how terrible this entire area smelled. They must have used this car as a bathroom or

something.

As if it were some kind of sick cosmic joke, the top half of the hat tore away from the dirty, cracked pony bones as the rim of the

rotten woven hay hat stuck to its skull.

I scoffed at the cadaver wordlessly mocking me, tossing the dry rotted mass back to it disdainfully. Whatever, it would have looked

stupid on me anyways.

“Whatcha got?” Jester asked me as the scavenger combed over the cramped, angled car, tossing a bent, rusted tin can aside. It was a good

thing her cart was kind of small or it might not have fit in here. Then again, it still squeaked and squealed more than a rat that’s been lit on

fire.

A shrug, “Nothing but a bunch of useless crap.”

“Same here,” she muttered, putting a lead pipe into her cart, next to her dog who was keeping a lookout for trouble.

There weren’t any red dashes on my E.F.S, just some flashing arrow on it as if were pointing the way.

Forcing another door that was a bit stiff and worming her cart through the doorway Jester cussed and cursed her way through with me in

tow.

I didn’t like how quiet and lifeless these tunnels were. There weren’t any other sounds other than the ones we made as we made our way

through them.

Which creeped me out. A lot. It made me think that something was going to jump out of the shadows at any moment.

So when a chunk of rubble from a wall fell to the ground I jumped about ten feet out of my skin. The horrid laughter of my friend was

heard before I deadpanned towards her.

“it’s not funny.”

“You’re right, it’s hysterical,” she smugly rasped.

As I approached the hole in the wall with a bit of far off light coming from around a bend I grumbled, “I hate you.”

It seems like the raiders here had smashed their way through into some kind of... metal-y place. And from the random bits of gore and blood spattered about around the area, I’d say that’s where the ghouls came from.

Covering my nose as I poked my weapon in, aiming it around the corner, and nothing on my E.F.S, so I headed inside to look around.

I opened a bizarre door that opened from the middle when I turned a latch and it fell into the floor, being very loud. Who designed

this? If I wanted to close it, and I’m not sure if I even can, it’d be super hard.

Just what is this place for, exactly?

Some bed frames without mattresses on them, a couple heavy lockers with a few caps and a coffee mug in them, and other random things

made from metal were in the small room. There were these big crate things in the corner with no visible way to open them, which only made me

more curious to what was inside them. The next collapsing door wouldn’t open and there was this folded up terminal thing next to it, humming

slightly.

Password protected, of course. And it was all green text on a green screen for some reason. Uh… let’s try ‘password’.

I didn’t think that would work. Maybe there was a simpler way to open the door?

After fiddling around for a while with the door, I discovered a small removable panel where there was a pickable lock on it.

“Whacha find?” Jester asked from behind me, tapping a wrench she found on the light fixture above us, stopping its flickering for a

moment.

“Door here won’t open. Trying to crack it.”

“Oh, well tell me when you’re done, I’m gonna look around a bit.”

“Don’t get lost. I’d hate to go and look for you.”

With a roll of the eyes, Jester left the room and pushed her cart down the illuminated metal hallways of the service areas.

The door’s mechanics ate my bobby pin when I finally coaxed it to open, slamming to the floor and revealing… a closet.

Well an unlocked medicine box with a small roll of bandages and some chewable vitamins is nice.

I stuck a pill in between my lip and teeth so I could suck on it for a while to get the taste of vomit out of my mouth Then, I took a

heavy battery and a few nuts, bolts, and a couple small gears from a tool cabinet. My PipBuck aptly named the small pile of scrap in my hoof

‘scrap metal’.

Maybe Jester could get some use out of it.

Anyways, it was time to move on after one last sweep of the room. There's been some slightly useful stuff and I didn't want to miss out on anything that might help.

Bathroom with nothing useful in it except for a half pack of cigarettes in the trash, (Don’t ask me why I dug through that, but hey.) a

couple of unreadable scribblings from two hundred years ago on some crumpled paper, empty syringes on a table, a busted ham radio, and random

small caliber bullets stashed everywhere.

It makes me think about why somepony would stash a small box of 9mm rounds in a desk with some kind of computer bank next to it. In a bathroom. What? I'm confused. I'm just going to leave.

When I found Jester, she was gutting a robot that had long powered down, and she had a bottle of something and was drinking from it like

it was the last bit of water on the planet. Of course she was.

That stupid little dog was asleep in the cart as I sat down in a ruined chair to check my bandages. They weren’t falling off at least.

And now the Med-X was starting to wear out. I gotta tell you, I wasn’t feeling too great, but the bandages were helping.

“Hey can I get a drink of that?”

“Here, ya bum.” a bottle enveloped in a red glow raised into the air and I took it.

The label said that it was scotch. Weren’t you supposed to sip this or something? Whatever. I took a small drink of the smoky liquid, which had immediate positive effects of me feeling better.

But there was also my PipBuck letting me know that I was slightly dehydrated. I definitely wouldn’t have realized that on my own that I

was thirsty. Thanks PipBuck, you’re such a pal.

I ate a few more vitamins from my already small supply before offering it to Jester, who declined my offer with a sneer.

Whatever, more for me.

Maybe it was a bad idea taking a bunch of vitamins and drinking scotch, but so was letting myself get stabbed. Besides, they were

vitamins, how bad could they be?

Quite bad, as it turns out. As I uncontrollably evacuated my stomach onto the metal flooring, my PipBuck was telling me that I had

started to become malnourished. Today was really coming together, huh?

“Dumbass.” Jester rasped with a shake of her head at my weak stomach.

Maybe I shouldn’t have taken them with alcohol. I didn't think that vitamins plus alcohol equals barf. I don't think it was the vitamins.

Either way, this whole vomiting thing is really becoming a problem. If I couldn’t get it together soon I’d probably die or something.

And I can’t find Molly as a corpse.

After we cleaned the area out, me and Jester here decided to continue searching the halls for more loot. If you could call coffee mugs

and an empty bottle of hydrogen peroxide, that is.

That probably would have been worth a lot to Cutter. Even if there was only a little bit left she might have paid out the ass for the

antiseptic solution.

But what can you do but wonder just who used it and for what exactly?

Tossing the glass container to the dirty floor I looked to the little flashing arrow on my E.F.S, which told me that I was going in the

right direction, generally. It’s been leading us to the opposite end of this place as the pony flies.

I found a small amount of caps tucked in the small scraps of clothing the dead ghoul holding a chewed up leg in a death grip. No idea

why I actually searched the body, but hey. Money.

Hell, Jester’s doing it. Then again, I don’t think she has the same standards as the average pony.

This whole process was taking too much time. I had to hurry things along. “So what, we’re just going to dick around or are we going to

move on?”

“Well ain’t you impatient all of a sudden? What’s your rush?” Jester asked, casually placing some electronic scrap into her cart.

“My friend is out there, in goddesses knows how much danger, and here you are, picking through the guts of a computer when we should get

going.”

She dropped the terminal to the floor. “Fine. I just love the shithole I live in now. No, no, don’t bother to help out a gal but

you and your mare-lookin’, big-eyelashed, flightless, selfish ass can just go on and leave to chase after your tail.”

“For fuck’s sake, Jester. Will you just listen to yourself? You’re acting like a total foal. This is a kid we’re talking about here.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, I hate kids. My position stands. We either go my way or my way. I’m not going anywhere else with you until

we get to the store.”

“How do you know if there’s even anything there? How do you know that all of this isn’t just a massive waste of time?”

“Because shut your fucking face. If I say I’m going to do something, I’ll do it. Now I’m going to the store, and I’m going to find a

shit ton of stuff to sell back in town, and then I’m going to drink until I pass out in my luxury penthouse at the tippy top of town.”

“There’s a penthouse for sale in North Wicker?”

“Well, no. Fuck you Flyboy. My point is I’ll be living behind the walls, not outside of them.”

“Fine, fine. I get it. Can we just please get this moving?” I asked, starting to become very irritated with Jester about now, “You don’t have to take literally everything that isn’t bolted down, and then unbolt that stuff.”

“Besides, shouldn’t you be trying to keep that cart light?”

A grumble directed at me before the ghoul shook her head, reluctantly agreeing with the tactical decision to not weigh her cart down

with broken terminals.

“Not worth that much anyways… was gonna pick them clean later.”

“I do not care.”

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

“You care that I screw around with computers now Flyboy?!” Jester shouted over the sentry fire pinging off the metal walls of the small

corridor, doing its best to fill us all with holes in the alcove we hid in.

The ghoul was doing her thing with the computer with a surprisingly effective hacking tool (a freaking hammer of all things) lodged in

the side paneling of the collapsible terminal. It was holding a bent panel open, where jester had done some interior decorating.

It was barbaric and brutal, but she somehow made it all work. For some reason, the black maned mare kept restarting the computer, but I

was a little busy hugging the wall so I wouldn’t get a lot more religious if you know what I mean.

Some flying sparks from bullets striking metal bounced off my clothes, but also singed my face slightly. (Beats actually getting hit.)

There really wasn’t room for two ponies, some shelves, a shopping cart, and a dog here.

And then, there was nothing. No ear-splitting gunfire from the ceiling, no immediate threat of death, and no sassy remarks from Jester.

For now, at least. She seems more focused on seeing if her dog is fine than anything.

“I’m okay too, if that matters at all.”

“Eh,” she waved a hoof in my direction while hugging and petting with her dog. It looked like it just oozed stupidity with that glazed

over look in its eyes with its tongue lolling out, not a care in the world.

What the hell was wrong with that dog?

“So. How’d you…” I waved a hoof at the terminal.

“Mostly luck. I was sure I was gonna break it with the hammer. But yeah, basically I unplugged the power cord for a couple seconds and

triggered a security reset. From there I pretty much whacked it with a stick until it let me in and I turned the gun off.”

So Master Hacker Jester just bludgeoned her way in huh?

“I’m just glad it worked. Come on, we’ve got better things to do.”

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

“How long’r you gonna take Flyboy?” Jester asked me as she stood by her cart. She pined over the contents within while periodically

taking a moment to wool around with her dog.

“Well, opening a locked door takes a while. Give me some time. By the Goddesses.”

According to the nifty little map on my PipBuck, this door is pretty much all that lies between us and our goal, maybe. Or not. I don’t know, it doesn’t go that far.

With a click and the sound of complicated metal workings sliding around I pulled back from the access panel near the metal door to

release the catch in the middle.

“What is the point with all this security? All the locked doors, the Goddess-damned automated sentries. It all seems ridiculously

unnecessary.”

The ghoul stopped to open up a metal cabinet in the short hall with blue painted walls. It sure was stark contrast to the green tinge of

the previous corridors. Hopefully this was the end of all this tunnel bullshit.

Nope. Not an exit.

What is this? It doesn’t really look like it’s part of any kind of metro. The room was essentially a huge box with scaffolding out the

ass and strange machines with no obvious function on the ground floor.

There was also this kind of ambient humming coming from somewhere, but I couldn’t really tell. From the machines? Inside the walls? Who

knew? There was a light visible in the corner, so that could be investigated.

After a bit of tactical chatter, Jester left her cart behind to follow me and to act as backup if things got nasty. She held her gun

close as I took mine out, doing my best to keep quiet while sneaking against one of the blockier machines.

Creeping around the corner of the machine I could see the source of the light was a desk lamp powered by one of those big batteries and

some wires.

Next to it was a ghoul pony slumped over on the desk in a chair. Judging from the stocky build I presumed he was a stallion and the fact

he was wearing actual clothes and not cobbled together scraps and trash armor he might not be feral.

Well, the small hole in his skull told me he wasn’t up for any kind of talk. I lowered his head from which my gun held up but not before

sliding out the journal he used to pin down.

“Wonder who killed him?” Jester asked, looking around, trying to see if anypony were on the catwalks.

“Dunno, but John Doe here might have died not too long ago

“What Doe?”

“You never-? Well on TV I see like these hospital scenes or cop dramas and if they don’t know who the dead guy is they just call ‘em

John Doe,” I casually explained, trying to make out what John’s last entry said. The blood coating the page made it kind of hard to see.

“What? I’m more confused than ever. What the hell is a TV? Cop dramas? Just who are you?”

So we’re having this conversation? Okay.

“I’m not from around here.”

“Well that’s obvious, Mr. Robot-Leg.”

“Look. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

She raised her weapon to point it towards me, “Humor me.”

Aw crap. “Woah now, let’s not get dangerous now.”

The hammer on the gun pulled back as it floated somewhat nearer towards me. “Where are you from?”

“I’m a traveler,” Well, that isn’t not true. “I don’t exactly have a hometown.”

“And this kid you’re looking for?”

“Her name’s Molly and she’s a friend. Can you put the gun down now?”

“I have more questions, so no.”

Damn.

“What is up with the robot leg?” She motioned her weapon in the direction of the object she was referring to.

“I found it. Had some ponies put it on me. It took a lot of surgery to make it work and it’s worthless to anypony but me. It makes me a

lot less like a tripod.”

That seemed to satisfy Jester for a moment, as evidenced by her lowering her weapon. “What’s a tripod?”

Am I going to stand here all day explaining shit to her? “A camera stand. It has three legs.”

“Oh.”

I thought that it was time for a subject change. “So about the dead guy. What do you think happened?”

“Well from my amazing detective skills I can tell you that he was shot. With a gun. That fires bullets.”

“You’re hilarious. I mean what specifically happened.”

A shrug, "Beats me. What's with Deady's book there?"

"Some kind of journal, maybe. But there's a whole lot of blood soaked into this, and what I can see is gibberish. I don't speak math."

"Neither do I. Put it in the cart, we'll figure it out later. This room's givin' me the creeps."

I took up the lamp and the battery as well as a pack of cigarettes from John's vest before tossing the lot into the cart.

We lifted and pushed the heavy container up the stairs of the catwalks, and around the edges of the room to a door illuminated by a

bulb on its last legs.

Pointing our weapons at the door, we opened it. Big surprise, there was a dimly-lit hallway lined with metal.

Jester took a moment to investigate some shelves in an alcove for anything of value. All she found was useless dead weight, plates,

wooden boxes full of junk, even an iron.

I ignored the shelves with the oddly-placed items on it to scout a bit ahead when a couple red dashes appeared on my E.F.S. Well it

looks like nap time's over.

It might just be another one of those- gyuh- radroach things, but still, it doesn't hurt to have a nail gun out.

Getting low I made my way through the tunnel to a corner to hear a voice.

"I mean, where the fuck did those things even come from?"

The sound of something heavy being pushed around was heard before a second voice said, "Don't ask me, I wasn't in charge of the

diggin'."

"Well then who was?"

"Does it matter? We gotta get outta here already. I think I hear somethin'."

I tensed up, ready to hit S.A.T.S in case things got actiony.

"Ah you're just hearin' things. It's all these damn pipes."

"Well I don't like it. It gives me the creeps. Makes me think those zombies sniffed us out. Hey where's the key? I wanna lock the door."

"It's right here, stop worryin' you baby." The distinctive sound of a unicorn's horn becoming enveloped with magical energies was heard

before a metallic sliding sound was heard. Well I wasn't going to be locked out, so I leapt out from around the corner, activating S.A.T.S.

A nail goes into the guy on the left's foreleg and the door falls back down with a slam.

"Jester! Get over here now!" Tackling the other pony was surprisingly easy, maybe his buddy being shot distracted him? Whatever the

reason, I was taking advantage of this moment by smacking across the face with the brunt of my nail gun.

It was slightly hard to counter being smacked in the face with some heavy metal object. Especially for an Earth Pony. Finally, Jester

comes running, armed with her cart and a yapping dog.

She rammed into the first pony with it, knocking him over so she could get a gun on him. The ghoul looked to me on what to do next.

"Should we kill them or what?"

Looking them over, I saw they definitely wore the uniform of psycho killers, but from the way they were talking earlier, they might just

be cowards.

"We'll see. Don't do anything stupid." I poked at my hostage's chest with the exposed nail at the end of my weapon, causing him to wince

and jolt back slightly.

I turned to the others, there was some kind of key on some kind of strap around his neck. Well isn't that convenient?

When I got low to the ground to retrieve the key, the sound of clopping hooves was heard behind me.

I whipped around to see that paranoid idiot running away, then the barrel of Jester's gun hover next to me.

"No wai-" *BLAMBLAM!*

And of course she fucking hits him! The first round of buckshot tore into his hind leg, while the other slammed into his side, downing

him as his buddy called out his name. I couldn't hear it over how loud it was.

"Son of a motherfucking whore, Jester!"

"What? He did something stupid!" The ghoul shouted back, expelling the smoking shells while rubbing at her ear with a hoof.

I made some kind of whiny groan when I approached him. He was still breathing? Celestia gag me with a banana. What do I do?

"We gotta help him." I held a hoof in the injured pony's direction.

Jester made sure that his friend wasn't trying to do something as well by pointing her reloaded shotgun towards him, asking me, "Why?"

"Because! You shot him!"

With a wave of her gun, "And? You shot this guy."

"Not to kill him!" I flailed a bit before continuing with, "Give me some medicine or some shit! Luna give me fucking patience!"

Jester looked like she was about to laugh, "Uh, no. He's dead, that's the end of it. I ain't helpin no raider asshole."

All I could manage was, "What? What?!"

"He picked the wrong team, Flyboy." She motioned her gun towards the pony who's breath became more shallow as the blood began to pool

around his wounds, "They both did."

She slammed her weapon into the raider's head, rendering him unconscious. "Not worth the ammo..."

Yelling at her for doing that wouldn't have solved anything so I turned back to the pony that was on the fast track to being dead. I

couldn't help but feel guilty about him being shot for some reason.

He was scared, that much was sure. You didn't have to have hawk eyes to get that from him.

I looked to my prosthesis.

No.

I'm not a murderer.

But would it be better to just end it here and now? He could lie here for hours and still be alive, suffering.

"You gonna stand there all day or what? I thought you were in a hurry."

Train of thought derailed and focus drawn away from the raider in front of me, I turned to Jester, who had already taken everything of

value in the room and put it into her cart.

"We can't just leave him here."

"Of course we can. Just watch me. He deserves it. I bet you a hundred caps these are the bozos that popped ol' Johnny boy back there.

Come oan." And with that, she opened the door that led into what looked like a metro tunnel from here.

Looking back to the pony for a moment, I took a step away from him before hesitating, then joining with Jester.

After a stretch of awkward silence expect for the sound of our hooves on the concrete floorings, I realized I left the nail gun back at

the room.

"Aw hell I left the-"

"Right here, dumbass." Jester lifted up the nail gun in her hoof before setting it back down in the cart.

"Oh. Thanks. I um, I guess I'm sorry for yelling at you back there."

"You better be."

"I'm trying to apologize here, damn. Why are you such a hardass all the time?"

"Because I am."

The fact that there was a lack of a bottle near or in the ghoul's mouth dawned on me. "Aw you're cranky because you ran out of silly

juice."

"Shutup."

Hiding my guilt of leaving somepony to die with making fun of Jester, I continued with "What's the matter? You need a sippy cup?"

"No I mean it, shut up." She held up a hoof to stop her dog from barking. "Something's happening."

"Aw what now?" I was really starting to get pissed at the endless torrent of shit being dumped on my head today.

"Shh!" The ghoul shushed me, flailing a hoof in my direction while looking to the ceiling.

There was a light crumbling noise from above and then a visible crack appeared on the ceiling. A small piece of rubble popped out and

fell, impacting with the side of my muzzle and stinging a bit.

I reacted accordingly, holding a hoof to my face while making a silly-looking expression of irritation and pain.

"We should hurry the fuck up, Flyboy. I'm like eighty percent sure this place is about to fall down on our heads."

"Oh that's just perfect."

"Yeah, it is. let's pick up the pace just a little."

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

The ceiling and walls kept making ominous groans and creaks as we hurried through the tunnels. They seemed to go on and on and on. If we

had any kind of transport, we'd be able to move quickly through these ancient, abused tunnels that have had zero maintenance for the past two

hundred years. But we don't, so trudging along like this is the only way through this damn place.

At the end of a curve there was a short upward slope that appeared to open up into a station ahead. Me and Jester didn't waste any time

rushing up and into the large room.

So far, there weren't any nasty red dashes on my E.F.S. Good. I was exhausted anyways.

There were signs of a camp scattered around, cinder brick fire pits filled with ash, a million empty soda bottles everywhere, and the

pungent aroma of the residents that last visited this area lacked proper facilities.

Jester held a hoof over the ashes in the pit, "Cold. Nopony's been here in a while."

"That's weird, where'd you think they went?"

A shrug, "Who knows? Maybe whoever was here just got tired of the scenery or maybe it was just time to pack up. Or maybe the ferals got

'em."

"A hundred different reasons why we should get topside. What do you say we do just that?"

"Alright."

The gate barring us from exiting was pretty simple to open. There was a big release lever on the inside portion of the thing. Probably

for emergency exits or when the power's out. I guess this situation kind of counts as both.

I did the honors, pulling the gate open for Jester like a gentlepony, asking her about that whole area we went through earlier.

"I dunno. Who knows what half the shit around here is?"

Trotting up the steps to find nothing wanting to kill us, just a big plaza-type area with a bunch of boarded up stores that had either

collapsed upon themselves or became buried in rubble from other buildings that had fallen.

There was a few that might be enterable but the main point of interest was the large cargo wagons near the center of the plaza. They

were covered and filled with construction equipment. Paydirt.

Before I went off and rushed over to the wagons, a hoof stopped me. "Hey dumbass. You got a death wish or somethin'?"

"Wha-?"

I felt my head being grabbed by something and forced slightly downwards. I saw little red lights. and creating these lights were dirt-

colored disks on the ground near the treasure-filled wagons.

"Landmines?"

"Those are landmines?" the comical spiked sphere where my mind held an image of a landmine was replaced with these weird tan pucks.

"Huh."

"Just stay away from those wagons. I'll take care of the mines. Watch Marty and stay out of trouble."

"Will do. Come on, you." I began to push the cart away from the wagons and Jester as Marty whimpered and whined for his master.

Cracking open a vending machine flickering in the night I took a swig of some lukewarm, hyper-aged sodie pop and boy was it radioactive.

The PipBuck's Geiger counter make a soft little tick with every sip, but with it really being the only source of sugar around here I couldn't

complain.

Well, I could, but where would that get me?

Not asking why there were still drinks in the machine, I tossed the empty bottle to join its siblings on the ground, pocketing the

bottle cap that held the bubbly drink inside.

The cola only gave me a temporary boost in energy, soon my eyelids were heavy again and to top it off my good forelimb was starting to

hurt pretty bad again.

I tossed the empty Med-X needle back into the medicine box, sighing contentedly. That really hit the spot.

Reaching one of the stores that appeared to be intact I took up a weapon and carefully opened the door. Well, apparently there was

electricity from somewhere because most of the lights on the ceiling were on. There wasn't anypony home, though. Strange.

There were a lot of empty cans and bottles and stuff on the shelves but I did find a bit of food and other things here and there. Jester

was going to like this.

By the time I left, I had a pretty decent haul. I didn't comb over every inch of the place like Jester would have, I didn't even go for

the basement door. Who cares what's down there? I didn't want to go underground for a while.

Returning to my ghoulish friend, she was tossing stuff around the wagons, "Fucking useless! There's nothing here. Just a bunch of

ladders. Who the fuck needs ladders?"

"Well, the bombs were worth it I guess?" I motioned over to the pile of deactivated mines.

She shrugged for the umpteenth time, "Yeah I guess those'r good too... whacha got there?"

"Just some random crap, nothing much. Well I did find this." I presented a bottle of beer to the ghoul.

"Gyuh, anything else?" She seemed disappointed that it wasn't hard liquor but took it anyways.

"Well you suck," I quietly said while the ghoul slowly drank the beer, acting like it was poison with every sip. "Alright time's a

wastin', let's get a move on."

"Which way?"

I pointed a hoof where my E.F.S compass told me and we headed out.

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

I surveyed the area as Jester picked apart the blown open robot that had been wandering around, babbling with a Trottingham-type accent.

It resembled some kind of robot octopus thing with those metallic tentacles, it was really weird.

Just glad that Jester popped it before it could cut my head off.

Goddesses, it was quiet.

There was one big light in the distance that was catching my attention and my E.F.S was pointing me straight towards it. How it knew

exactly where I was supposed to go was still a mystery. I just wrote it off as one of those things that I'll never know before. I listened to

another pre-recorded message play in my head alerting me of my diminishing power reserves.

Turning and raising my prosthesis for emphasis, I started to complain to Jester, "Hey you done there cause we-"

something small and hard hit my prosthesis, causing it to bash into my head. Which hurt, a lot. "Gah! What the fuck?!"

I was pulled down by Jester's magic, "Holy donkey dick Flyboy, you're lucky!"

Huh? What does she- Turning my hoof, I could see that there was a heavily flattened round embedded into the casing of my Omni-hoof. It

was simple enough to pop it out, leaving a small divot in my hoof. Great.

Jester's dog was in the pony's hooves and another round pinged off the powerless robot acting as our cover's shell. We needed to get

somewhere safer.

I watched as she took a Mint-al from a tin to chew it up before she started to talk loudly at me, "Alright this guy is shooting pretty

suckishly so if one of us shoots at him, the other can bolt over there to that crappy little wall. See there? Go there! I'll shoot bullets!"

Jester raised up a .32 pistol with her magic. Guess that little pop gun has a use after all.

While my comrade provided a distraction for me, I galloped as fast as I could without dropping any of my stuff from my bag or hurting my

damaged leg any further. This whole building, which simply screamed 'apocalyptic ruin' with its grey interior/exterior, lovely piles of slag

lying about, and lack of most of its structure, save for a concrete coated steel skeleton of a building.

Whoever was at the top of these sad ruins sure was persistent, and had a lot of ammo apparently because he wouldn't stop trying to shoot

his way through the wall I hid behind.

With my single shotgun over the wall I blind fired into the air, which bought Jester a few seconds while I pushed a new shell into the

barrel with my teeth while the spent one fell to the ground.

The ghoul nearly fell down when she got up to me. "Took ya long enough! So I got these!" Jester held up the box she was keeping the

mines she disarmed in while doing her best to console the barking canine in her hooves.

"What good are those?" I asked, holding the shotgun's barrel in my good hoof so I could pull out a shell and insert the fresh one with

the same hoof. I pocketed the empty hull, it's not like these are raining from the sky, right?

"Well lemme show ya!" She armed one of the little bastards.

"Whadya- I'm right here!"

"Don't worry, you're friendly to it," Jester 'explained', hurling it over the wall.

After a few seconds of tense silence, another gunshot rang out to slam into the wall. "I don't think that worked."

"Well no shit!"

"Any other ideas?

"I could throw you over the wall."

"I hope you're joking. You're joking, right?"

"Kinda," the ghoul bared her gnarly yellow teeth at me. Was she smiling? I couldn't tell.

"But seriously, do you have a plan or not?!" I shouted, blasting another volley of pellets at our assailant. Still, there came a steady

flow of bullets our way. What is with this guy? And why does he got so many got-damn bullets?

I spent my last shotshell with some more blind fire and I tossed my weapon down to the ground, "Damn ALL! Jester! Plan?!"

The ghoul tapped at her chin with a hoof, "I'll cover you while you go up and kill that guy."

"So... Exactly what we've been trying to do?!"

"Pretty much."

"Gah. Alright. Don't get me killed, alright?"

"I won't! Now move ya ass, go on. Get."

There wasn't time to get a good look at the sniper, hell he nearly grazed me when I tried to look up before reaching an area that had a

staircase leading to a second floor, which provided me with ample cover. It was still pretty terrible, but I wasn't decapitated so there was

that.

There was Jester's mine, laying in the mud, the little red-orange light highly visible at night. There was no way that I was getting

near an active landmine so I checked my E.F.S.

When I barely moved around the red dash swung around violently. He's probably above me. Why doesn't this thing say that?

I noticed that my dear comrade wasn't providing me with cover fire at the moment. "Jester what are you doing?!"

"For fuck's sake gimmie a second!"

Soon, beefier shots than before erupted from the ghoul's position. Seems like she swapped out weapons. I made haste up the stairs to the

second floor and across some boards acting as a bridge to a pillar with some floor around it.

A lonely island in this sea of decay. there was more refuse bridging the gap between this and the other side of the building and I was

surprised that I haven't been shot yet.

Maybe our sniper can't hit moving targets that well?

Up some more stairs to the third floor and, using the E.F.S, I quickly spotted the sniper limping along, trying to get to a more

defensible position. One of us must have winged him.

I didn't have that much in way of weaponry, so I did the only sensible thing. I hauled ass across the decrepit floor that felt like it

was minutes away from collapsing like a madpony. I whipped out the 10mm pistol I had and I was planning on shooting the raider, who was

evidently female and was a unicorn to boot. She also wore some rather raggedy clothing, but that was beside the point.

Crazybitch McSniperface swatted my weapon from my hoof with the hunting rifle she carried! She tried to smash the gun into my head next

but that was hard with me grabbing her club while my other hoof impacted with her chest.

I dropped her weapon to the ground and took advantage of how terribly she took my punch to plant my forehooves on the ground, turning

about and bucking into the pony. She fell over backwards onto the ground, near her makeshift sleeping area made from cardboard and raggedy

sheets.

When I turned about, I saw the pony trying to get up again. I tensed up again, assuming a fighty stance in case I had to punch her

more.

"So how about you say-" Before I could finish, a loud crumbly snap was heard, followed immediately by the floor my sparring partner was

on decided to become a slope.

Being standing already I was able to stop myself from falling over and I tried to reach out for the pony, but she had already tumbled

off the edge and was now falling to the first floor through the fresh hole over the second floor. This was immediately followed by an explosion.

That must have been Jester's mine. Damn.

Scrambling back up to where the floor was slightly more solid I looked around, doing my best to ignore that I just killed yet another

pony.

There was a ham radio that was turned on and a static-filled voice was emanating from it. "Yo Green, what the fuck's goin on up there?

Green? Hey Green? Come on, you're not still mad about that last haul? Boss gets first dibs, you know that."

Her name was Green? Strange, seeing how she wasn't green, more of a magenta.

I turned off the radio and tossed it out the window. Not sure why I turned it off first though. Let's let them believe their sniper's

still alive.

Found the odd bit and cap here and there, dismissing random junk the scavenger would just weigh her cart down with. I pocketed every bit

of ammo I found, and the most interesting kind were the bullets left over from Green's little shooting spree.

My PipBuck identified them as Hollow Jacket .308 Rounds. Not sure what that meant, but it seemed to be some kind of special ammunition.

Cool beans.

After that I found some hyper-preserved snack foods, and the gun that was being fired at me so much. Luckily my pistol was still on this

floor after being batted away from me like it was.

When I returned to Jester with my loot, she was fairly neutral with her greeting. She asked if I found any liquor, I hadn't. She didn't

care about the fight nor did she gloat about her mine killing the sniper. Guess she just wanted to move on.

I was still trying to get over that I had killed a pony like this. I mean, this wasn't some frothy psychopath with a bloodied pony skull

hanging from their neck while forcing themselves upon some innocent pony, Green looked fairly sane. And I had kind of wanted to not kill her at

the end there, and I kill her anyways.

Like swatting at a fly then trying to let it out a window only to crush it with the window.

This kind of sucks.

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

"Well somepony had a lot of time on their hooves." Jester mused at the tremendous amount of graffiti on the concrete block wall. I

couldn't very much tell what half of it was, but some of it was definitely clear.

I turned away from the explicit pornographic graffiti with a slight blush, clearing my throat.

"They sure did. So how much longer do you say it'll take before we get to this damn store?"

"Hell if I know. I just know the general direction it's in."

"How do you know that?" I asked Jester, staggering along on my hind hooves and massaging my injured leg with my prosthesis. Those

bandages sure were doing their job. The magics in the medicine that had been soaked into them slowly mended my bite and stab wounds and my knife

hole felt like it was nearly sealed up.

Should probably not mess with it any further. Don't want to tear it open and be back where I was hours ago.

"Ponies talk, I listen. A lotta talkin goes on at the Grassy Ass."

"Guess that makes sense. Whenever I hear somepony talk about a place this thing here puts a marker there for some reason. I don't know

how it works."

Jester eyed the PipBuck on my leg for a moment while pushing her cart along, "I told you something, you tell me something. Where'd you

get the PipBuck?"

I shrugged, "Wish I knew Jester. If I did I'd tell you."

"Guess we both got things we'd like to know more about."

"What do you mean?"

"Can't remember anything past a year ago, when I was ghouled."

"Ah. That's gotta suck. At least you know where you're from, right?"

The ghoul looked to her raggedy stable barding with the yellow 56 on the collar before saying, "Yeah, maybe. Cutter says I might just

have been wearing it when I got all hyper-exfoliated."

It was my turn to shrug, "Anything's possible. After we find Molly, we'll see to looking for that Stable of yours. Might get some

answers then."

"Thanks, Flyboy."

Continuing to fiddle around with the PipBuck's features and settings, I quietly responded with, "No problemo."

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

Lockpick increased to 45
Unarmed increased to 35
New Perk!
Iron Hoof (1): “if it doesn’t work, try punching it.” You’ve been in enough hooffights to know where to hit somepony where it really hurts.

Unarmed attacks now do +5 damage.

Author's Note

Fok it, I'm breaking the chapter off here.

List of delays. School, internet, procrastination, power outages, writers block, TF2, work, writing this list.

I'd like to thank [Kkat] again for creating [Fallout: Equestria] and for inspiring me to write this. I'd also like to thank [regolit] for making so many comments and hopefully I'll be able to [write] more unless life has other plans. which they most

assuredly do. [brackets]