Fallout Equestria: Fireflies and Ire

Chapters

Chapter One: Amber Rigging
Chapter Two: The Ministries of Fear
Chapter Three: Pale Explosions
War Never Changes

Chapter One: Amber Rigging

Jars filled with fireflies and ire
Such a fragile light to guide us
The ignorant will fail to see the path
Fumbling, screaming and fighting
Jar after jar breaks into darkness
The fireflies leave, the spleen stays
Everything we love we leave behind
Dead grasp
Light's out

Pale Explosions -The Moth Gatherer

“Maybe it needs a new vacuum tube?” Amber Crown asked to nopony, talking to herself as she tried to work her way through the all-too-familiar troubleshooting steps of small electronic repair. “But that wouldn’t make sense… You’d blow one of the capacitors before you blow a tube.”

She was hunched over a work desk inside of Bunny & Crown, the small-electronics repair shop that she operated with her friend, colleague, and business-partner Bunny Sunbeam on the north side of Fillydelphia; working on an antique radio that kept getting sent in for repairs.

“Might as well just replace it anyway, with how many times this radio has come back we’ve practically rebuilt this thing from scratch. What’s one more part?” She complained to herself before calling out. “Hey bun, do we have any more vacuum tubes? Maybe in the back?”

“We used the last one two days ago on the Flankerson’s terminal,” a voice answered from the back of the shop. “we’re supposed to get a new shipment in sometime next week.”

“What do you mean next week?” Amber called back. “We’ve been behind on this order for a month now. First the output transformer, then the speaker wires, then the antennas. We’re losing bits on this order!”

“Well, what can you do?” Bunny’s voice said casually. Amber could almost hear the shrug in her voice.

“Scrap it and tell them it’s unfixable?” Amber groused. “Sell them one from this century?”

Bunny didn’t respond. She must’ve tried that already.

“I keep telling you to stop accepting these antique radios.” Amber said against the silence. “You know these old mares don’t like change and replacement parts get harder and harder to come by.”

Still Bunny didn’t respond, knowing Amber would eventually run out of steam and return to her work.

Amber looked at her reflection in a nearby mirror and threw her hooves into the air in a way to suggest she was asking ‘Can you believe this?’, as if the coffee-colored mare in the reflection could do anything but copy her movements. If it could however, it would most likely shake its head and say ‘no, I can’t. I’m tired of fixing this fucking radio’.

She sighed and moved all of her components to her soldering station at the end of her workbench. She turned on her soldering iron, and while she waited for it to warm up, she debated if she wanted to turn on the light to her magnifying glass as well. Even though there was enough ambient morning light coming in from the shop’s front windows, the building ultimately faced away from the sun and she wouldn’t be getting any direct light for six more hours at least. She shrugged and flipped the switch on her magnifying glass and her work area was completely illuminated by the intense light.

Finally, she slipped on her pair of Unicorn Gloves, a piece of arcano-technology made by The Ministry of Arcane Sciences that allowed earth ponies and pegasi to facilitate the small and precise movements granted to unicorns by their magic. Amber didn’t really know how they worked. Something about magic gemstones amplifying the wearer’s natural magic and focusing their intent, or some other unicorn jargon like that. All she knew was that it allowed non unicorns to perform tasks once thought impossible and opened them up to new professions. Ones like surgery, fire-arm manufacturing, jewel crafting, or in her case, electronic repairs.

Amber picked up her soldering iron, which levitated in front of her hoof as if held by some kind of invisible hand, and began to heat the solder holding the legs of the capacitor that she suspected to have been faulty.

The radio didn’t have a printed circuit board, nor was it constructed in any way similar to what she was familiar with. It was too old, and made well-before Equestria began ramping up its production to compete with the zebras; so, nothing was standardized yet. To say it was a mess would be an understatement. When Amber first opened the back panel, everything sort of just fell out of the back like somepony had spilled a plate of Spaghetti. Bunny had nonchalantly whistled her way in to the back of the shop so the radio, by choice or not, became Amber’s project.

Even the electrical diagram was faded beyond recognition., Amber could barely make out the symbols of the components and how they hooked up to each other, but as for any legible writing or voltage information?

it took her the better part of a week to sort everything out. There were so many tangled wires and unlabeled components that she pretty much had to take the entire thing apart and rebuild it. Resistors and diodes were just directly soldered to the wires. Most of the components didn't even have ratings on them. Some of the capacitors were so old they just had the word ‘Condenser’ written on them in aged hoof-writing. The most frustrating thing of all though was the fact that all the components were just crammed back into the chassis and closed up without a second’s thought.

Amber didn't know who worked on this radio last, but she wanted to push them down a well.

She pulled the capacitor off the wires once the solder had melted but paused for a moment because she didn’t actually know what to replace it with. She took a peek at the electrical diagram, but the writing was unsurprisingly illegible so she couldn't see the ratings on it either. She could make out the number seven, maybe the V for voltage, but that was about it.

She was flying blind and had to think hard about what to replace it with. A larger than needed capacitor wouldn’t have any real effect, but If it was under voltage it would fail faster; or if it was undersized it would throw off the radio’s tuning. She nickered in frustration and soldered on a capacitor that she believed would be a suitable replacement and switched the radio on…

Silence.

Annoyed and out of patience, Amber shouted ‘to Tartarus with it’ and began to jerry-rig the radio; using parts from the three separate junked radios she had laying nearby to supply parts for this project. She began Frankensteining them together. Swapping out components, bypassing certain transistors, jumping resistors, even shorting a few problematic sections of circuit that had been giving her trouble all month, until eventually, after an hour’s worth of work, she flipped the switch again.

Silence still. Amber pursed her lips in frustration and glowered at the radio, and after a few moments of seething silence, the warm orange light of the radio’s ammeter began to flicker and glow, followed shortly after by the loud brassy cacophony of an old jazz song.

♫Keep your spirit way up high, Look up to the sky,

Stand up and shout "Hallelujah, oh-oh! Hallelujah, oh-oh!"♫.

Amber always heard jazz coming out of this radio whenever she turned it on. The old bat always tuned it to this station. Always. No news, no talk shows, no entertainment, no live show. Just jazz. The radio was on this station for so long, that Amber wouldn’t have been surprised if that was the reason why the dials were stuck when it was first brought in.

♫If that Nightmare Moon should grab your hand, Here's one thing that she can't stand

Shout sister, shout sister, shout! Oh Celestia! Shout! Oh Celestia!♫

Amber had heard these songs so many times over the past month that by now she knew almost all of them by heart. Worst of all, she actually was starting to like them. She didn’t even know why either. Maybe it was the high-timber sounds of the trumpets, saxophones, and trombones, maybe it was the otherworldly feeling the music seemed to inspire in her, or maybe it was just that it sounded like an old record player. Amber didn’t know. All she did know was that the sounds of these songs were the sounds of victory, and amber began to sing along victoriously as The Hoofswell Sisters crooned from the radio.

“Just tell old Nightmare Moon how you feel, Get that old Devil right off your heel! Shout sister, shout sister, shout! Oh Celestia! Shout! Oh Celestia!”

However, Amber had to stop herself from celebrating too much. Before she could officially declare the radio to be repaired, she had to perform her final quality inspections, a procedure put in place by Bunny as a way to ‘ensure the efficacy of the repair’. Amber always hated the tedium of quality inspections. She felt it was an unnecessary step, or a just a way to bill more time to the customer, but they were partners, so they had to compromise somewhere.

Amber let out a small nicker.

At least in this instance, all she had to do was to check if the radio would consistently turn off and on and tune to other stations. So she flicked the switch, turned to a random frequency, and flipped the switch back on.

There was another delay in activation, same as before. Amber’s ears drooped, wondering if she used too many resistors, and began to feel a flash of fatigued anger begin to rise in her at the thought of yet again having to open the radio back up, but the ammeter began to glow again and Aber exhaled a sigh of relief as the radio picked up a broadcast from a local radio station; albeit with very high gain.

“...just to go out for an entire night, they were all right there behind her, and after all that time her horseshoes were on backwards. Anyway, good morning and welcome back to WHNY, The Whinny, here at the top of the seventh hour. Coming up next, we’ve got ‘Ain’t Misbehaving’, the newest single by the one and only Sapphire Shores, but before that a bit of local news. A police carriage got stuck in a tree this morning in downtown Canterlot after a demonstration of local zebras turned violent…”

It wasn’t perfect, there was a low grade static in the signal and the sound was about twice as loud as it was supposed to be, but Amber figured out loud “that old hay-eater wears hearing aids, she won’t notice it anyway.”

Even if she did, Amber didn’t care, she wanted to be done hoofing around inside of that radio. As far as she was concerned, it was good enough to go out the door, and if it burnt out, they had a perfectly functional modern Honeybee Radio they could offer as replacement. They were not accepting this job again... At least Amber needed to convince Bunny that they weren’t going to be accepting it again.

Amber turned off her equipment, removed her gloves, and triumphantly cantered into the backroom. She was about to tell Bunny about her victory over the radio, but when she rounded the corner into Bunny’s workshop, she found the cotton-colored mare tinkering with her own project. Her honey-gold mane was tied back in a ponytail and she wore a pair of goggles equipped with several magnification lenses, and she was staring through them with a practiced attentiveness as she placed tiny components into some kind of device that Amber had never seen before.

“Hey Bun,” Amber said, maneuvering past Bunny’s stacks of testing equipment and leaned backwards against the workstation. “I got that radio working.”

“I can hear.” Bunny said without looking up from the device. Amber could get a better look at it from this angle now, and it seemed to be some kind of terminal device attached to a hollow gauntlet.

Bunny was wearing her own pair of Unicorn Gloves to fit a tiny microchip onto a circuit board inside of the terminal device. Her hooves moved in a steady, almost mechanical, motion as she delicately fit the component into place and affixed tiny beads of solder to each of its legs. She was always the more meticulous of the two, and it showed in her work.

“But uh…” Amber continued. “If that thing comes back in, don’t take the job.”

“Why?” Bunny said without looking up from her project. Instead she continued to look through her eyeglasses, following the copper traces on the board to another section of the circuit. “Did you Amber-rig it?”

“...maybe.” Amber replied meekly.

“You know a tube’s gonna blow in like, a week tops, right?” Bunny said in a more knowledgeable tone. “Or a capacitor is gonna pop, or some other component is going to break and the whole thing is gonna be fried?”

This clearly wasn’t the first time they had a discussion like this.

”Well what was I supposed to do?” Amber bristled. “That thing is over a hundred years old. The diagram is so faded that I can’t even figure out what kind of capacitor to use.”

“How hard is it to fix a radio?” Bunny responded with a sassy chuckle. “It’s a loop antenna running through a couple tuning capacitors, then into an oscillator, then the vacuum tubes and I.F. transformers, a potentiometer for the volume controls, an output transformer connected to a loudspeaker, a rectifier tube, a dial lamp. And a switch…. And a bunch of wires, diodes, and smaller capacitors in between.”

“I know how a radio works.” Amber grumbled. “But what I don’t know is what that schematic says, because all the writing has faded away. I also don’t know if anypony besides us have been inside that thing in the last hundred years. I replaced almost every single component in that thing and couldn’t get it to work until I amber-rigged it.”

“Maybe it was a capacitor inside one of the IF transformers.” Bunny probed around inside the terminal with a voltmeter. “They are inside a metal casing afterall, did you try checking there?”

Amber’s shoulder’s sunk, she obviously didn’t. “I guess that would explain why it worked after I rigged it, I must’ve changed out the bad part without even realizing it.”

A silence formed between the two. Bunny was too engrossed in her project to maintain the conversation. it was clearly much more advanced than an antique radio, and so Amber looked around the room while her friend worked rather than continuing the conversation. Knowing not to disturb her once she was wrapped in focus.

Bunny’s work-area was practically filled, floor to ceiling, with electrical testing equipment. Boxes on top of boxes covered in nobs, input jacks, and dials. Some had tiny, graphed screens on them, while others had analogue gauges to measure… something with. Truth is, Amber had no idea what any of those boxes did. She would watch in awe as Bunny spent most of her time messing around with these bulky grey things. Looking at the graphs they made, performing mathematical calculations that related to electricity in some way that was so far over Amber’s head that it gave her a headache just thinking about it.

Bunny had so many of these boxes in fact, that the only light in the room was a single fluorescent fixture she had hug over her main work bench and the back door she had propped open for additional light. There weren’t even any windows, or there might have been, but they were converted by these measuring monoliths. Amber always asked her why she chose to work back here, as it was such a stark contrast to the picturesque city scenes Amber could see from her workstation at the front of the shop, but always got the answer that Bunny just preferred the seclusion. Something about how there were less distractions, so it helped her focus on her more difficult tasks; one of which she seemed to be working on at that very moment.

“What are you working on anyway?” Amber finally asked.

“It’s some top-secret contract from that Stable-Tec corporation on the other side of town. “They sent out this test kit to work on as part of the preliminary screening process.”

“What kind of contract?” Amber balked. “What the hell is that thing?”

“It’s called a pip-buck, has something to do with the vaults they are building.” Bunny answered matter-of-factly. “They sent the thing over in pieces, almost like one of those build-your-own-circuit kits that foals would get, and they said if we’re able to assemble it and get it working according to their specifications then they’d award us with a permanent contract. There’s some pamphlets and other information in the safe they sent it over in”

Bunny motioned her hoof towards a bulky blue safe that sat against the wall by the back door. The safe looked more like a steamer trunk than any traditional safes she’d seen, except it had some kind of digital keypad lock on the front instead of a clasp and padlock.

“But why us?” amber asked. Ignoring the safe.

“I guess it’s because of how close we are to their headquarters? They didn’t say much in their correspondence but if we do it well enough then we could become ‘Pip-Buck Technicians’, as they call them. We’d be repairing the broken ones they’d send in, or aid in the manufacturing of the terminal computers inside of them.”

“But why you?” Amber said more to the point. “How come I’m not working on one? You keep saying ‘we’.”

“Oh shit, sorry.” Bunny apologized. “I was more or less repeating back what the email said.” She then went on to explain how she was contacted though her connections from graduating the Canterlot Institute of Technology.

“I’m still pissed they wouldn’t let me into that school.” Amber groused.

“Don’t be so down.” Bunny said looking up from the Pipbuck for the first time. “At least you got accepted into one of the stables. Have you been assigned to one yet?”

“Yeah, Number 54.” Amber said, still in sour spirits. “The one they’re building into the hills outside of town.”

“At least you got accepted.” Bunny said compromisingly, flipping her goggles up to her forehead, revealing her emerald-green eyes. “I haven’t even gotten word that my application has been received yet, at least if we land, haha sorry, if I land, this contract, then there’s a pretty high chance they’d make me a technician inside your vault!”

Bunny smiled reassuringly but Amber only sighed.

“I mean, you have a point.” Amber sounded defeated. “But that’s not what I’m mad about. It still would have been nice to go to school with you. But they wouldn’t let me in.”

“They wouldn’t let you in because you bombed the entrance exam. Literally.” Bunny’s tone sharpened. “You Amber-rigged that securitron.”

“I got the thing working didn’t I?” Amber snapped back.

“It blew up!” Bunny exclaimed, “you cratered that auditorium!”

“It took a few steps first!” Amber said empathically “All we had to do was get the thing to POST, activate, and walk around, which It DID!.” Amber thrusted her hoof at the air to emphasize her point. “So as far as I’m concerned, I passed the test!”

This wasn’t the first time they’ve had this argument. Bunny knew how passionate Amber was about this sort of thing, but a small part of her wanted to put this argument to bed once and for all.

“I’m not trying to be mean, but that’s probably why I got contacted for the contract and you didn't.”

Amber stared hard at Bunny.

“I mean, you can’t even properly fix an antique radio.” Bunny elaborated. “Something so simple with parts available to everyday ponies. This is a Stable-Tec creation!” She motioned to the Pip-buck. “A blended fusion of Archano-technology, Unicorn tech, and electricity. These things are designed to survive a Balefire Bomb, could you imagine what would happen if you Amber-rigged something like this?”

Amber didn’t respond, she simply scowled at Bunny.

“And the contract isn’t to just simply repair it.” Bunny continued. “You have to follow their schematics, service the parts up to spec with specialized tools and limited supplies, because if we ever end up inside one of those vaults, Celestia forbid, we can’t really order new parts.”

Still Amber did not respond. She simply kept staring, shooting daggers with her eyes as she looked from Bunny, to the Pip-buck, and then various other things in the room. The whole while Bunny’s words bouncing around inside her head.

“Do you know how stupid you make me feel sometimes?” Amber finally said. “I know I didn’t go to CIT like you did, but do you have any idea how this kind of shit makes me feel?”

“How what makes you feel? Bunny said stupidly, thrown off-guard because she was expecting a more explosive response.

“THIS!” Amber motioned to Bunny and the Pipbuck. “Your lecturing, you getting all these advanced projects…” She paused to breath. “Do you know how many opportunities I’ve missed out on? I couldn’t get a job doing this stuff while you were off getting your Masters at CIT. I had to do hard labor.”

Bunny blinked, listening.

“Dock work,” Amber continued.” field service, carpentry, warehousing... I could never learn the things I wanted to learn on my own, like how any of these boxes in your office work.” She did a wide sweeping gesture at all of the testing equipment. “I couldn’t go to school for it, it was just a rehashing of what I already knew, like basic circuits and components. There weren’t classes for somepony who knew what they wanted to do, they were for ponies fresh out of High School who thought “electrical engineering might be cool, I wanna try that!’” She imitated; her tone venomous. “I wasted so much time chasing degrees and certificates that didn’t suit me and working jobs for ponies that didn’t value me that sometimes… Sometimes it feels like I missed my chance, like it’s too late for me. Like I’ll never again get that runaway excitement that made me want to do any of this in the first place.”

This time Bunny was the one who didn’t respond. She was stunned into silence by her friend’s ranting. This wasn’t anything she hasn’t heard before, she heard bits and pieces from different conversations, but having them all fit together at once painted a very grim picture.

“Like, that entrance exam was my only shot.” Amber started again. “and bombing that exam and being barred from ever applying again… “She paused, searching for something to say “It was like I just fell off, and everypony just continued on without me.”

Bunny was silent for a long time, processing everything Amber had just said. They both sat in relative silence until Bunny finally spoke up.

“For what it’s worth.” She said. “For all the shit I give you about Amber-rigging everything, I do think it’s kind of impressive how you can do it.”

“Oh yeah?” Amber said, skeptically.

“Yeah, like, you’re not dumb, you clearly understand how things work on a rudimentary level, which allows you to quickly put things together, and somehow… somehow they work!” Bunny was getting a little more emphatic. “It’s fucking amazing really, awe-inspiring if I’m exaggerating. Like you said, you got it to work. That Securitron all the applicants were supposed to build? You got it to POST, activate, and walk around an hour and a half faster than anypony else did! I mean, you missed all the ancillary stuff put in there for user safety, which is why it exploded, but that’s just it. You saw past all the extraneous components and systems and were able to quickly accomplish your task.”

Amber opened her mouth as if to say something, but Bunny continued.

“You’re not stupid. You clearly have the capacity to understand, you just need to practice.” Amber’s ears perked up at hearing this. “That’s why I asked you to open this shop with me. That’s why I made you work on that radio all month because I know you. I know eventually the pieces will fall into place.”

“Well thanks for being one of the only ponies to believe in me”. Amber said darkly, looking past Bunny, thinking about something that made her feel world-weary.

“I mean it.” Bunny persisted. “Your amber-rigging? That’s a skill in of itself. I’d never be able to do something like that because safe circuit design has been beaten into me. I’m sure in a pinch, some kind of survival situation maybe, it’d be an invaluable skill. But for normal everyday ponies? Longevity is more important. They want their stuff to last.” Bunny looked at her workbench for a specific example “Like this Pipbuck, it’s supposed to last, a long time, so understanding every component and how they interact with each other is crucial for what this device is designed to do… You get what I’m trying to say?”

Amber let all of her frustration out in one large exasperate sigh.

“Yeah, I guess.” She said.

Amber then went a long time without speaking. She simply stared at, or rather, stared past the Stable-Tec steamer safe, her gaze a thousand yards away. Clearly thinking about something distressing, as every once in a while, she sighed again, but still she did not speak.

Bunny was no stranger Amber’s moods. Growing up together, going to high school together, running a shop together. They’ve spent a great deal of their lives together, save of courts attending CIT together, so Bunny fully understood why her friend was upset. She knew from experience there wasn’t anything wrong with Amber, well, there might be, she could be suffering from some anxiety-induced depression, but she understood that Amber’s shutdowns were a simply a way for her to process whatever she was currently thinking about. Bunny sometimes likened Amber to a Terminal that didn’t have enough RAM or was running a program that was coded incorrectly and created some kind of error, causing a memory-dump. Sometimes the whole system simply becomes unresponsive, halting all unnecessary process while the processor tries to catch up with itself.

Bunny scoffed darkly, surprised by her the comparing of her friend’s emotional issues to an overloaded Terminal, but just like an overloaded terminal that was given enough time to process, Amber finally spoke again.

“...Could I try it on at least?”

“Of course!” Bunny said to Amber’s surprise. “I actually need to test to see if the modules I just installed work like they’re supposed to.” Amber grabbed the Pipbuck and carefully slipped it over her left hoof, fastening it tightly and then immediately slapped Bunny across the face.

“Awwwhatafuck was that for?” Bunny reeled.

“I don’t know!” Amber yelled. “I was frozen in place for like ten minutes. I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t move!”

“Well what the fuck did you hit me for? What were you thinking?”

“I said I don’t know!” Amber’s eyes were crazed, like a frightened deer. “You were glowing green, and something on your face said 100%. Now you’re glowing red!” Amber rubbed her eyes vigorously with her hooves, trying to blink the Pipbuck’s effects out of her eyes “What the fuck is this thing?!”

“No, literally” Bunny said, trying to contain her rage, “Like, literally what were you thinking? Before you put the pipbuck on.”

I was thinking about the conversation we just had and started getting angry about my life” Amber said in a defensive stance, seeing the glow around her friend turn from red to yellow. “about everything that’s happened in my life, how everything seems to come so easy to you and sometimes I want to hit you for it…”

“Well I guess I know I assembled it correctly.” Bunny rubbed her sore cheek, and began speaking in a calmer tone, subsequently changing from yellow to green in amber’s eyes. “You somehow managed to trigger S.A.T.S. right as you put it on, it’s thought activated, and the colors you see are part of the Eyes Forward Sparkle system.”

“The what?” Amber asked.

“Eyes Forward Sparkle.” Bunny elaborated. “They are like digital contacts. It shows any nearby ponies and whether they are friendly towards you or not.

“Pipbuck? Eyes forward sparkle?” Amber questioned. “Unicorns sure have some of the dumbest names for their technology. I swear to Celestia.”

Well, Pipbuck is an acronym of sorts. Personal something device? Hang on, it’s on the pamphlet somewhere…” Bunny picked up a nearby paper. “Personal Information Processor.” She recited. “And I guess ‘buck’ because horses. But yeah, they’re kinda dumb.”

Or unicorn glovers? Amber continued to joke “like come on ya egg heads, come up with more creative names than the kind of horse you are!”

“You’re buying me lunch for that slap.” Bunny picked up her goggles that flew off her head when amber slapped her, ignoring her friend’s dumb, or possibly species-ist comment.

“I’m really sorry for that, I didn’t mean to actually hit you, I was just angry.” Amber said. “what do you want?”

“It’s okay. I'm just glad it worked cause it was such a bitch to put together.” Bunny re-situated her goggles on her head. “I hate spell matrixes, and anything with romaine lettuce. The super-market downtown has really good sandwiches, I’ve been craving one all day!”

“Yeah sure thing.” Amber said, going to take the pipbuck off. “I’ll go right now, I’m hungry anyway.”

“No don’t take it off” Bunny protested. “I need to see how well those modules hold up under load, so just do some field testing on your way there and back. You know, toggle them on and off a bunch of times, see if it fails. You know, normal QA type stuff.”

[img][/img]

Footnote:
New Perk: Amber Rigging-- Repair any item, ignoring it's repair check, at the cost of reduced durability

Chapter Two: The Ministries of Fear

Bunker to Bunker
Have all the rations you need?

What's the judge say?

Armed to the teeth
Get a good sleep on the eve
Of your doomsday
- Doomsday Today! Big Business

A notice flashed across the upper edges of Amber’s visions as she stepped out of the front door of Bunny & Crown.

New Location discovered: Fillydelphia

The notice was displayed in bold green letters, the same color as the screen of the pipbuck itself. Strangely enough, however, the projected words weren’t the least bit obstructive to her overall vision.

If she focused her eyes on them, sure, they’d fade prominently into view, but if she focused her vision on something else, like the row of parking meters in front of her shop, the words faded and remained comfortably on the upper edges of her eyesight. The words reminded her of those augmented reality glasses that she wanted to buy a few years ago, the ones that beamed an image directly onto the retina to create a virtual HUD, but never purchased a pair because she didn’t want to be called a “glass-hole”. It certainly seemed to be the same technology, but there wasn’t anything projecting images into her retinas, they were already in her retinas.

Amber felt like she could almost reach out and grab the little green words right out of the air, if it weren’t for the fact that they disappeared every time she blinked or closed her eyes, and just as quickly as she cast her gaze across the street the notice faded from her vision entirely, leaving only a small transparent compass bar on the bottom of her periphery.

She was facing West.

“I don’t get it...” Amber said looking around “Unicorns make some of the most impressive shit sometimes…” She watched the compass track her head’s position from North to East to South. “… yet they come up with some of the most stupidest fucking names imaginable. What’s the deal?” She turned North and began to walk down the sidewalk.

Fillydelphia was quiet that morning. Calm and sunny.

The sun had just started its slow ascent, casting shafts of horizontal light that filtered through the buildings as the sun climbed into the sky. Amber’s shop wouldn’t see direct sunlight for several more hours though. The manufacturing district, where amber’s shop was located, sat in the shadows of Filydelphia’s skyscrapers for the first half of the day.

The entire city was built atop the coastal hills of the Celestial Sea. The manufacturing district, the first and oldest district of the city, was built out of brick on the flattest valley of the hills Northwest of Downtown Fillydelphia. Built so it could easily service the trainyards in the early days of Equestrian trade. As the years passed and construction technology evolved, large skyscrapers built out of steel and glass and insulated homes of wood and vinyl were constructed on the hills surrounding the valleys, overshadowing the manufacturing district and much of the foal mountain valley. What once was an unobstructed view of the rising ocean sun became a slowly forming shadow that covered the manufacturing district in cold shadows between the hours of 6 and 11 am.

Amber’s block specifically sat in the shadow of the Stable-Tech Skyscraper and wouldn’t see sunlight until at least late-morning when the sun would finally be able to crest its monolithic roof-top and become West-Fillydephia’s problem for the rest of the day.

The air was cool and crisp, and Amber shivered as she stepped through the pools of morning shade from the buildings that neighbored her shop; relishing in the warmth of the shafts of sunlight as she crossed the alleys between buildings.

She was the only pony on the street.

Most of the town’s population resided in the hills, where the shopping and residential districts were located. The manufacturing district didn’t usually see much hoof-traffic, a mailpony here or there, a police pony making their rounds, but that was about it. Most of the traffic in this part of town were either delivery-wagons, trains, or business-owners taking inventory back and forth.

She wouldn’t see another pony for at least another mile when she would cross into the more metropolitan areas of town, so until then she walked silently past brick buildings, garages, fenced-off lots, and construction equipment as the various carpenters, steamfitters, plumbers, masons, HVAC techs, and other trade-ponies conducted their daily operations.

Amber walked past a few of the newer buildings made from steel and glass, constructed to meet the necessities of the Equestrian war effort and stood out garishly amongst all the old brick buildings and their faded ghost-signs from decades past. One in particular, a large steel building that was constructed a few years prior, was built into the neighboring factories. Large pieces of manufacturing equipment and subterranean machinery were brought in on military transports and construction lasted for months. Nopony knew what the building was even designated for until the last days of construction when a sign was installed on the front yard that read “Ministry of wartime Technology: Now Hiring.”

The sidewalk came to a large hill and began to ascend, and Amber walked briskly up what felt like a near 45-degree angle until the sidewalk flattened out again at the top, bringing her to the intersection that marked edge of the manufacturing and recreation districts, divided by a large tree-lined boulevard that cut the road in half; an old windowless brick building with a renting HVAC company on one corner and a steel high-rise with large-paned windows enclosing a dance studio on the first floor on the other corner.

It was then, while waiting at the crosswalk did Amber finally see another pony, a mare and her friend exiting the dance studio and crossing the street towards a waiting cab on the other side. However it wasn’t any of the ponies themselves that caught her attention, rather the green blips of light that appeared on the compass in her bottom periphery were what had stolen her gaze..

Amber looked down at the compass and watched as two little dots crossed horizontally across the bar as the mares trotted across the street, joined by a third dot as the cab-pony rounded his carriage to let the two mares inside. She watched as all three blips moved together as the taxi took off into the street until eventually disappearing all together when they got far enough away.

Amber crossed the street and stopped dead in her tracks as she stepped in front of the dance studio window. Inside were about 10-15 mares, led by an instructor, and they were performing a simple foxtrot dance routine. Left hoof forward, right hoof back, step to the right and everypony move together.

It was a common dance routine, one that everypony already knew by highschool, more than anything they were most likely performing it as a warm-up to a more complicated routine they would practice later on, but Amber wasn’t watching the mares dance, she was staring at her compass. More specifically, she was watching their Pipbuck representations dance along the length of the compass bar ;Bobbing and swaying, back and forth, flitting around like fireflies inside a swamp.

Amber was entranced, watching the little green dots flit about her vision so intently that she hadn’t even noticed she was staring blankly at two mares, who were now staring back at her as she stood awkwardly in front of the windows, staring inside, her mouth agape in awe.

One of the mares waved aggressively at Amber, breaking her trance. She blushed hard, finally realizing how weird she must’ve looked, and hurried down the street, turning east onto a block of restaurants and joined the lunchtime crowd that was moving down the sidewalk.

Amber was less mystified this time, as the group of pedestrians appeared as a solid green rectangle in her compass. She was partly interested when the crowd in front of her had dispersed yet the crowd of dots in her vision did not. It took a few moments of looking around before she finally lifted her head to see they were coming from a group of ponies eating lunch on a roof-top cafe.

“Huh, interesting.” Amber mused to herself as looked down into the empty flower-shop on the ground floor yet still seeing the dots displayed on the compass. They were above her, but they moved irrespective of whether or not they were physically in front of her. “Seems like a glitch… Maybe I should let Bun know about it later.”

Quest Added: Tell Bunny about Pipbuck Glitch

Another notice flashed across her vision. There hadn’t even been any haptic feedback from the device. She looked down at the Pipbuck on her hoof and was shocked to discover that it had activated itself and was now displaying a small user-interface with a single line of fading text in the upper lefthand region of the screen. Quest Added: Tell Bunny about Pipbuck Glitch it said before it was replaced by another line of text: Username Undefined

This line of text was permanent. It was displayed underneath an icon of a generic looking male pony in the center of the screen, smiling as he walked in a looped three-quarter walking animation. Above the stallion was a menu that stretched along the top edge of the screen, reading STAT, INV, DATA, MAP, RADIO. The device was displaying the STAT menu, and beneath it was a submenu with the words Status, Special, and, Perks. Along the bottom, on both corners of the screen were lines of small text reading ‘HP Module: locked’ and AP Module: Locked” respectively.

The screen itself was set into garishly brown chassis, which was made of, judging by the weight on her outstretched hoof, some kind of hardened metal which curved at the angles; obviously pressed from some kind of mold. On the top right of the device was a dial wheel with its dial positioned to STAT, at the top of a list of words identical to those of the on-screen menu painted directly onto the chassis. Amber switched the dial to INV and the screen flashed to an empty screen, save for the top menu that remained the same. She switched back to STAT and the idly-walking stallion returned. Amber wondered aloud to herself why something so high-tech needed to have an archaic analog dial. Switching the dial to MAP and seeing a similar blank screen, the words ‘Map Module: matrix error’ sat alone in the middle of the screen.

“I guess because some ponies use their mouths to turn dials?”

She tried turning the dial back to DATA with her teeth and was met with a surprising amount of resistance. The dial clicked and the Pipbuck displayed a similar screen and message ‘Data Module: not installed’. She preferred using her hoof instead, the dial hurt her teeth. Flipping the dial to RADIO she was met with the same message yet again ‘Radio module: not installed.’

Amber fiddled with the analog radio dial, not at all interested in its durability. She’s been using horse-safe technology for years. What she really wanted to know was how that last notification came up. She turned her hoof around and looked at the device from every angle. The only thing of note she saw was a large retractable tape-deck on the top back end of the device.

She didn’t know anything about unicorn tech or how it worked. She’d heard of terms like ‘arcano technology’ or ‘spell matrix’ in conversations before but was never given any real explanation about what the fuck a spell matrix was, or how arcano technology worked compared to normal technology. Was it analyzing her blood? Was it casting a unicorn spell that read her mind? What the fuck was it doing? Bunny had said earlier that it was thought-reactive, but how was it reading her thoughts?

She shook her hoof in the air, as if shaking the device would produce any answers.

“Maybe I’ll ask Bunny if there’s a manual” Amber sighed when the notification popped up again, this time with an addendum.

Quest Added: Tell Bunny about Pipbuck Glitch
(Optional): Find Pipbuck Manual

Amber nickered. She was obviously not winning this one.

Amber finally decided to rejoin the crowd and returned to her previous task of heading to the supermarket. She had lost count of how many ponies had passed her on the sidewalk as she was looking through the Pipbuck, not like she was counting anyway, but she figured she outta move anyway. She was only halfway to the store after all, and if she spent any more time playing with the Pipbuck then she wouldn’t have much of a break left.

Amber shook her head.

“Shit, that’s really programmed.” She remarked quietly to herself. For a moment she had forgotten she owned her shop. She was the boss. She could take however long a break she wanted. Because who’s going to complain if she does? Bunny? She can do whatever the fuck she wants too. She doesn’t answer to anypony anymore either, and she had already completed her portion of work for the morning anyway. So who cared if she takes a long break?

Amber’s chest puffed as she walked and silently argued with herself. Determined to win her battle against some imaginary boss-pony from her past. But how could anypony blame her? After ten years of grueling labor jobs, being fired for working too hard, having her co-workers shun her for being too focused, giving more than 100% of herself to some corporation only to be paid less than 15 bits an hour while sitting through meetings where the company announces billions of bits of yearly revenue; it started taking a toll on her mentality.

Maybe it had something to do with coming home exhausted every day, never having enough energy to do any of the activities that actually interested her, let along even cook a meal for herself. Maybe it was the stress of her own financial troubles constantly hanging over her head while she worked. She didn’t know. All she knew was that over the years she had somehow slipped into this permanently aroused state. Hypervigilant for a boss that might be around the corner, or a co-worker that might be spying on her, over-focused on doing her jobs perfectly for the sake of not being criticized for her work, sometimes being so anal-retentive that she missed glaringly obvious small mistakes and was criticized anyway.

Sure she knows how to build with wood now. Sure she knows how to electrically wire a house. Sure she can work on small engines and figure out the repairs easily enough, but what did it gain her? Anger issues? Anxiety? A possible-personality disorder?

Amber hadn’t realized that the whole time she had been brooding, her outward appearance had slowly become more aggressive. Her chest was puffed out, her ears were flared back, her jaw was clenched, and she was breathing very heavily as she walked; so much so that the pony in front of her moved out of her way, looking back disgustedly as if Amber had been directing her emotions at him the entire time.

Something about this made Amber incredibly angry. She wasn’t angry at him before, she had been so focused on her angry daydream that she forgot the crowd even existed at all. But looking at him now, seeing his face twist into scornful scowl tweaked something inside of her, and in a heated second she wanted to slap that disgusted look off his face. Another second later, Amber realized she couldn’t move. Nopony was moving in fact. The entire world had come to a complete stop, and the stallion’s head was glowing yellow; [95%] displayed over his stupid scowling face.

In her rage, Amber had accidentally activated S.A.T.S. again, and despite not being able to move she had to strongly resist the impulse to actually strike the stallion She didn’t want a repeat of earlier that morning when she had accidentally vibe-checked Bunny across her face. Something told her he wouldn't be so forgiving if she did. He might even hit her back.

She looked around frantically. Frozen. Unable to move. The city around her stood equally still and slightly out of focus save for the stallion in front of her. Other ponies had similar percentages displayed across their bodies. The closest ones were in the 90s and decreased proportionally the farther away they stood from her. Amber was starting to panic.

She felt like she had to fight with herself to stop herself from hitting this station, as if her anger had frozen too, except frozen at the same emotional height it was at when she first entered into S.A.T.S., like the servomechanism that holds the throttle of an engine at a certain RPM to maintain a steady speed.

That’s what her anger felt like in that moment, the constant rev, the pinned needle of a motor placed in cruise control, unable to move, unable to fluctuate, unable to recede. Just the constant buzz in her head, constant churn in her stomach, constant tightness in her chest, constant hot flashing across her neck and back, constant tension in her hooves.

She felt stuck, but she could also feel her dominant hoof wanting to raise up and slap him, ready to strike,. Fighting the feeling gave her instant, major anxiety, like the adrenal response before the body goes into fight or flight mode. The queasy, twitchy, frantic feeling that builds up in the hoof-pits and compels the body to move. Amber wanted to scream, but she couldn’t move her jaw, it was frozen too, clenched tight from her previous angry thoughts that she couldn’t even remember now. All she could focus on was trying to stop her body from assaulting this stallion, the scowl on his face tightening her already tense muscles every time she looked at him. Every impulse in her body was screaming at her to punch him. To kick him. To grab his face and slam it into the pavement. To grab the flashlight out of the purse of the mare next to him and beat him over the head with it.

Amber’s mind was screaming. The world was frozen, her thoughts were racing. The dissonance between these two states made her feel lightheaded, she was becoming increasingly more anxious the more she became aware of her frozen body. She didn’t want to hit him, but she was losing the fight with her own body. Her hooves felt light, they felt twitchy, they felt ready to strike, and Amber didn’t know how to deactivate S.A.T.S.

She got out of it last time by striking Bunny across the face, and she was about to do the same thing again. She didn’t want to hit anypony. All she wanted to do was exit S.A.T.S…

And with that thought the world began moving again. Immediately. Amber stumbled forward, as she was mid-stride when S.A.T.S. had deactivated, and she had to fight with her own sense of balance to stop herself from falling completely forward. Several ponies in the crowd turned to look at her as she hobbled as disgracefully as a newborn deer trying to walk for the first time; and she slinked off embarrassed. Taking her final corner as she turned south again, crossed over a pedestrian bridge, and entered into Downtown Fillydeplhia; the heart of the city.

New Location discovered: Downtown Fillydelphia

The difference between downtown Fillydelphia and the manufacturing district was unparalleled. Where the latter was dusty, dry, and quiet throughout most of the day, the downtown area was the most advanced, modernized, and technologically developed part of Fillydelphia. ‘Where all the fancy stuff is’ Amber once heard one of her customers describe.

While ‘old town’, as Fillydelphians liked to refer to her part of town, still relied on Equestrian antiquities such as horse-drawn carts, hoof-delivered mail, and other facsimiles of early-modern Equestrian life, downtown had automatic carriages and industrial equipment powered by nuclear fusion. While old town was mostly squat and square brick buildings constructed during the foundation of the city, downtown was constructed entirely out of towering skyscrapers and retrofitted over the years with polished-silver steel and tempered glass.

Amber hated this part of town. It always felt wet, with a cold oceanic wind that ripped through the miles of straight-line streets and ignored all but the most insulated of clothing. The towering heights of the skyscrapers reflected the sunlight off of each other at every angle, so no matter where you looked the sun was always in her eyes. The alleys smelled like garbage, sewage, or dead animals. Worst of all though, it was loud. Too loud.

There was so much noise in this part of town, in fact, that Amber couldn't decipher one source from another, it all simply blended into one nonstop cacophony of discordant noises and random scraps of conversation:

The clopping of horseshoes on concrete.

“...this is a bistro!... salad and…. Half of the distrai...”

Several sirens from far-off police wagons.

The whooshing of rubber wheels on wet pavement.

“I...have to… s a gorgeous day tomorrow...”

Water steady falling from a skyscraper above onto the ground below

“no I don’t think… without them we’re gonna… get those down...”

Taxis and pedestrian carriages honking at each other in the streets

The straining whine of a hydraulic garbage cart in an alleyway

“It’s not supposed to be like this….. warm around yester...”

There were too many ponies here. The crowd Amber was in alone had already doubled in size as other smaller clusters joined in from crosswalks, neighboring shops, and some, for all Amber knew, had probably manifested out of thin air simply because they were downtown.

Feeling claustrophobic, like a fish in a can, Amber cut down an alley at her first chance to escape. She trotted hurriedly past piles of garbage and a leaking grease dumpster at the back of a restaurant, holding her breath as not to gag at the acrid foulness in the air, and emerged on another boulevard in full view of a large wall of the Fillydelphia Rec center, covered inch to inch in a woven patchwork of propaganda posters from the local equestrian ministries.

Every single Ministry had found representation along the lengths of this wall. Ministry of Morale on top of Ministry of Awesome, next to Ministry of Arcane Sciences on top of a sideways Ministry of Peace and a half torn Ministry of Wartime Technology. Even The Ministry of Image, as illusive and secretive as they were, featured themselves prominently on every poster with a "Created by the Ministry of Image" slogan in the corners of each poster.

The posters themselves weren’t anything new. They were never new. In fact, Amber had walked past several dozen of the same posters repeating the same messages so many times that she didn’t even notice a single one of them on the walk up from her shop alone. She had seen them so many times that they pretty much faded into the background of the city at this point, like the billboards nopony looks at anymore, and everypony pretty much stopped noticing them. Except for one pony, fed up with the posters, who had graffitied “This used to be a mural” in black spray paint with a thick arrow pointing to a section of torn-back layers of poster; revealing colorful swaths of painted brick underneath.

Amber laughed solemnly. Nopony liked looking at these posters. Amber herself always felt weird when looking at them. Their only purpose seemed to be to be telling her what to do, who to trust, or who to hate.

‘Wipe the Stripes’ one of them said, depicting a ragtag group of zebras shooting up at soldiers of the Equestrian army. ‘Join the Equestrian forces today’ it said along the bottom. ‘Your home is next’ another one said from the same Ministry, above the image of a burning town and a leering zebra in the middle.

“Learn! Knowledge is our future” The ones from the ministry of Arcane Sciences seemed innocent enough, simply saying ”Join the Ministry of Arcane Sciences” with a picture of a Twilight Sparkle reading from a large book.

“Mares of Equestria, come into the factories” Said the Ministry of Wartime technology

“REMEMBER: We are all in this together! Care for one another.” The Ministry of Peace preached.

“Look to the sky, where will they fall?” The Ministry of Wartime Technology warned

“Join the Ministry of Awesome” The Ministry of Awesome said.

By far the most prominent and infamous, of all, were the posters from the Ministry of Morale. “Pinkie Pie is watching you, forever” they said, with a picture of Pinkie Pie herself looking gleefully at you. Although some variants had different facial expressions, like angry, sad, or even disapproving. However, the one that was displayed the most was of Pinkie Pie’s giant exuberant beaming smile and a stare that seemed to follow you; which was easily why this poster was the most vandalized. Several of the posters on the rec-center wall had their eyes scratched out or were torn in half leaving only Pinkie’s smile. Absolutely nopony seemed to like this poster, and Amber disliked it greatly as well

Even though Equestria had been in a decades-long militarized conflict with the Zebra nation, ponies simply didn't like feeling like they were being watched. Nopony knew if it was supposed to make them feel safe of threatened. Nopony knew if they were trying to be kept in line. All they knew is they were always watched, and Amber knew was that it was weird as fuck that there was always a cluster of security cameras somewhere nearby Pinkie Pie’s posters, or there’d be a row of phone booths, or a fast-food drive-through; anywhere there was a microphone or camera, Pinkie Pie’s smiling face was never far away.

The Ministry of peace, ironically enough, made Amber feel the most confrontational.

Every time she read “War? Fear? Death? We must do better’ she felt her body stiffen up like a board. Like it was her fault Equestria went to war with the Zebras when she was a filly. Like it was her fault those four Wonderbolts were killed by those pirates. Like it was her fault coal-prices shot through the roof and those four strike workers at the Hippocampus Energy Plant got shot. She didn’t tell those guards to kill those Zebras outside Luna’s Academy. She didn’t tell that Zebra to bomb that school.

“What the fuck do you want me to do? I’m an electronic repair pony.” She swore at the poster, earning her some questioning stares from passing ponies. But she didn’t care. She hated this yellow mare on the posters. She hated her stupid sad face, looking at the viewer like some kind of late-night infomercial parading around a starving foal or an abused animal asking for donations. “It’s your fault!” Amber continued “You did this to us!”

Amber made a rude gesture to the poster, hoping the two zebras in the background would strangle the yellow mare to death with her own hair, and walked away with angry thoughts in her head.

Nopony really seemed to care that she had just yelled at a poster. On some level they probably agreed with her. Why else did they just walk past her without a second glance? Why else were the posters constantly vandalized? Everypony hated them. They made ponies uneasy. They put them on edge while they walked to work or just went out to get a fucking sandwich. The posters didn’t have to tell them things were bad, everypony already knew it.

There was an energy crisis, there was a war. Celestia abdicated her thrown after ruling for over a thousand years, and now there were six ministries telling everypony, everywhere, that things were bad. So bad that they needed to join the ministries. So bad that their homes weren’t safe. So bad that some zebra might be around the next corner, waiting to put a gun or a knife under their ribs, so everypony walked around mistrusting the ponies standing next to them. Are they a zebra sympathizer? Are they a spy?

Newspapers are telling the world that ponies are hungry for peace, yet the local news and radios report on this zebra’s violent crime, or that pony’s homicide, or the chaos that happened at that protest, and then next day The Ministry of Moral puts up new posters telling everypony they had to do better, and if somepony tore them down? Another poster appeared to replace it.

The world was going crazy, and the ministries of fear wouldn’t even let Equestrians take back what little control or agency they had left after covering every inch of their public spaces with their propaganda. So now everypony was seemingly one incident away from a psychotic break. The tension was always there, brewing just underneath the thin veneer of polite society and was never going away.

The incredible fear of the Zebras, whether real or manufactured by the Ministries, was ever-present in modern Equestrian society. Equestrians almost didn't see them as ponies anymore, almost like they had reverted back to some tribal pre-classical hatred of their Equestrian cousins. It was almost like they were aliens from another planet and their whole purpose was to destroy Equestria and the Equestrian way of life.

That’s what everypony was taught to believe. At the earliest age of five, fillies and colts were taught about The Wonderbolt Massacre, Shattered Hoof Ridge, The Littlehorn Massacre, The Manehattan Missile Crisis, the Zebra internment camps, The energy crisis...They were taught that Zebras were their enemy. That they needed to fear the Zebras. That Zebras wanted to kill them. Everypony believed it so strongly in fact, that when the Equestrian government commissioned Stable-Tech, a small Terminal start-up company, to start researching and constructing Stables to protect everypony from Zebra attack, they were flooded with residency applications less than twelve hours after they were announced to the public.

Amber didn’t apply for a shelter, despite her parents applying on her behalf without her permission. Something about the Equestrian government’s contract with Stable-Tec didn’t sit right with her. The Stables they were commissioned to build were originally intended to be simple underground storm shelters that a pony could build themselves with two to three rooms, a latrine, an air circulation system, and a water purifier. However, breakthroughs in construction techniques allowed for bigger and better Stables to be constructed and somewhere along the line they turned into these gargantuan underground bunkers designed to house hundreds of ponies, to be built exclusively by Stable-Tec, financed at the expense of the average every-day pony through the sale of high-yield junk bonds.

Even then only about a hundred Stables were constructed, allowing for less than 0.1% of the population to be saved from a possible apocalypse. All the same, the entire project seemed highly suspicious. Although everything the Stable-Tec corporation did seemed suspicious, from their work with the Ministries, down to their own press-releases. Everything they did was shrouded in some kind of corporate secrecy and presented in double and triple meanings woven into their corporate jargon.

“We here at Stable-Tec are committed to the mutually assured safety and longevity of the Equestrian nation and blah blah blah” Amber mimicked one of their latest press releases to herself. “Yeah? Well what are you going to do about the waste-products your company produces that leeched into Baltimare’s ground water?”

Amber waited for a crosswalk signal and took some time to think about other things. She wondered if she was either highly perceptive or just highly paranoid, and then wondered what the difference was as she stepped into the road. What is paranoia but perception going into overdrive? Like prescription pills when you’re misusing them. Sure you can take a couple allergy pills to treat your seasonal sniffles, but take ten to twenty of them and you find yourself talking politics to a dog-sized spider with a baby’s head while you wait at the bus stop. Or at least that’s what’s she’s been told, it sounded insane but also who the fuck would mainline allergy medication like that?

Amber’s mind was wandering, what was she thinking about? Stables? Ministries? How the hell did she go from survival shelters to substance abuse? She shook her head silently in an attempt to re-shuffle her thoughts, like somepony slamming down a game of boggle, and when her thoughts resettled, they landed on one of the field-trips she took during highschool to one of Stable-Tec’s stables.

It was one of Stable-Tec’s earliest vaults. Vault 0, built in the basement of their HQ building in Fillydelphia as a demonstration, and she was part of a guided tour to show what life would be like underground in the event of a catastrophe.

They were taken room to room. Shown the atrium, sleeping quarters, common rooms, and were even given little crackers and ration pouches and told ‘These are what you would be eating down here’. The entire trip felt very contrived, and more of a publicity stunt to investors than anything educational. The entire group was made to stay behind blue and yellow velvet ropes, guiding her class around the vault as if they were in a museum. Beyond the ropes she could see other rooms with computers and lab equipment, and doors leading to areas like maintenance, Electrical, and Mainframe that the tour group weren’t being shown. Every time she tried to sneak away, walked into any room not part of the tour, or would touch anything beyond the ropes like the Terminals on the outside of the pneumatic doors she would be scolded; eventually being forced to sit by herself on the bus outside for “hacking” into a terminal, even though all se did was reboot the terminal into recovery mode and used a default admin password to reveal a list of maintenance logs.

Thinking about it now though, there wasn’t a whole lot of thought about the Stables back them, at least not to her. There wasn’t the great big deal of fear like there was today, There wasn’t the anger that was always present, or the open hostilities that made a pony learn to hate the zebras from the earliest points of their lives.

As a filly, Amber at most thought the zebras were just bad ponies, but of course, that’s probably the same impression they would have of her and her kind as well. Celestia only knows what thoughts the Zebras had to be harboring about pony kind. Did they make their own propaganda of Ponies burning down their jungles, huts, and villages? Did they take their school-children to bomb shelters instead of zoos or museums on school field trips as well? Instead of tornado or fire drills did they have Duck and Cover drills and learned to hide under their desks in the event of an attack? Did the Zebra empire cover every inch of their collective thought spaces with imagery telling everyzebra ‘this is your enemy, this is who is going to attack you, be afraid!’

For all Equines knew, maybe the Zebras thought the same thing. Maybe they were afraid that ponies were the ones who were going to attack them.

New Location discovered: MoWT Surplus

Amber finally emerged from her thoughts to find that she had managed to walk an extra three blocks past the grocery store and found herself standing in front of the Ministry of Wartime Technology’s surplus store. A lone single-story building at the base of a larger skyscraper which served as the logistical headquarters for the ministry’s Fillydelphia branch.

Surrounding the store was a palisade of cardboard standees of Ministry soldiers in mechanical suits of armor, standing battle ready next to advertisements of the store’s wares; guns, ammo, belts, bags, hoofwear. The one closest to the open door had its advertisement taped over with a hastily scrawled sign reading ‘Join the Ministry of Wartime Technology today and receive a free pistol!”

Out of nothing more than morbid curiosity, Amber stepped into the store and was immediately greeted by another round or propaganda posters, albeit these ones were more on-the-muzzle with their violent depictions of Zebrakind. ‘Better wiped than striped’ one said, showing a power-suited soldier making his last stand against a pack of zebras with nothing more than a sledgehammer in his hooves. ‘Negotiating with savages’ another said, showing a pony tied upside down to a spit, roasting alive over a roaring fire amid an audience of hunger-crazed zebras.

“Welcome to the Ministry of Wartime Technology” said a gruff looking grey stallion behind a glass firearm counter, boredly practicing a rehearsed greeting. “Are you here about the promotion?”

“I guess so.” Amber said, walking up to the counter, standing in his shadow.

“Now what does a little filly such as y’erself need to be getting a gun fer?”

“Well you’re offering aren’t you?” Amber said rather sarcastically, earning a raised eyebrow from the stallion behind the counter. “Why are you just giving them away?”

“Orders from corporate” The stallion stiffened, seemingly irritated with Amber’s nonchalance. “In response to this morning’s riot in Canterlot and the escalation of Pony-Zebra conflicts, our Ministry Mare felt that common folk were ‘itchin to protect themselves.’”

“I don’t even know why those striped bastards are even still allowed in Equestria” a voice rose up from across there store, belonging to another stallion stacking ammunition containers on a back wall.

“Not while there’s customers in the store, Fallstripe.” The grey stallion reproached.

“All I’m saying Folsom is that they’re nothing but trouble.” Fallstripe returned. “I got a friend who has a cousin that works for the sheriff of Trottingham, says just last week they found a stallion half-dead down by the train-tracks. Said a buncha Zeebs ‘napped ‘im, beat em, took his horseshoes, and left ‘im by the tracks to freeze to death.”

“That didn’t actually happen!” Amber interjected. “Did it?”

“It mays as well have,” Folsom answered. “The way things are going as of late, I suspect it’s only going to get worse.”

“They crippled that cop in Canterlot this morning” Fallstripe said. “Drove a wagon over ‘is backhooves during their little demonstration”

“That’s brutal!” Amber said aghast.

“So it goes.” Folsom shrugged, shooing his coworker away before pulling out a sign-up sheet. “I’ll need yer signature, then we can run yer background check, and we’ll be done here.” He wasn’t even attempting to hide his disinterest.

Amber roughly scrawled her name and associated information on the signup sheet and Folsom disappeared into a backroom with it. She heard the clacking of Terminal keys and the screeching of a dot-matrix printer and shortly after Folsom returned with a stack of paper.

“H-allright” He said through a sigh. “Looks like yer background check was approved. Just gotta run you thorough the standard on-boarding paperwork we do for every new member, and you can git yer gun.”

Folsom began to drone out his Ministry’s corporatized on-boarding rhetoric to Amber with a total lack of interest in either the bureaucratic process, Amber herself, or a combination of the two. He gave a spiel about the Equestrian government, the war with the zebras, the creation of the Ministry of Wartime Technology, it’s dedication to overseeing the manufacturing of weaponry and technology for the war against the zebras; sounding like a living, breathing propaganda poster. Amber wanted to roll her eyes until he started describing how the Ministry created a system of sorts, a network of business lending materials and services to contribute to the war effort for the good of the Equestrian forces.

He slid a packet of papers across the counter to her, said it was her copy of the paperwork, a page detailing what her duties would be as a ministry member, a bunch of wartime propaganda fliers, and began to talk about the free gun she’d be getting, reading from another rehearsed disclaimer that the one she would be receiving would be of low quality since it’s coming from the Ministry’s surplus reserves

“Since production is better put to supplying weapons to the front lines,” Folsom said. ”any weapons available to the public are either obsolete or a phased out model that is no longer in service due to better alternatives becoming available. After that the weapons get recycled to the rear-lines, homefronts, and training units. Blah blah. Now for the exciting part” he said, dipping his head below the counter and producing an open container of weapons “Which one do you want?”

He was beaming with pride, seemingly the first time in the entire conversation he had shown any other emotion besides marked disinterest. In the container was an assortment of laser, plasma, and ballistic weaponry, all tossed in with general disregard. Folsom pulled out one of each, describing their perks and downsides.

“In general, it comes down to personal preference.” Folsom explained. “Laser weapons have higher fire rates but have lower damage per shot. Plasma weapons pack more of a punch with each trigger pull bur the shots have a noticeable travel time which makes them harder to use at long ranges.” He began explaining how each one of them worked at a fundamental level, down to how each component worked in relation to another but paused when he saw Amber’s eyes swimming in confusion at all the techno-jargon “I think you’d be better suited for a standard ballistic” he said with a chuckle.

“I think so too” amber said.

He fished an inferior quality 10 mm pistol out of the container and set it down on the counter, “these things are crafty, lightweight, and easy to repair.” He said after putting the container away. “For basic defense it’s all you really need, although I’m privy to Plasma myself. Lastly, here is your ID card that’ll allow you to get ammo from any of the Ammo vending machines. Should you need it” he said the last but with a dark tinge to his tone “Limit one transaction per day.”

He produced a small saddlepack, with the Ministry’s emblem, a set of gears and sparks, bisected with a blade, embossed into the leather. He tucked the pistol inside, followed by all of her documents and hoofed it over the counter to her. When Amber slung the pack over her torso and tightened the strap under her tummy, a flurry of notices appeared in her vision.

[Item added to inventory] 10 mm pistol

[Item added to inventory] Ministry of Wartime Technology ID card: initiate

[note added] MoWT onboarding paperwork

Amber paused to read each notice as they appeared in her vision and Folsom followed her gaze to the wall behind him, upon which hung a large fully modulated AER9 laser rifle, complete with a full stock, sniper barrel, and an electronic recon scope

“That’s not for initiates” he chuckled.

As the notices faded away, an idea had formed in their stead.

“Can I sign up a business with the Ministry as well? I run an electronic repair shop and we might be very interested in joining in and helping the warfront, repairing the electronic weaponry and whatnot”

Folsom perked up a little at the mention of Amber’s business.

“I saw on your form that your employer was Amber & Crown, I didn’t know you were one of the owners!” His entire tone seemed to change. like he suddenly saw her differently, like he s might’ve been impressed by her.

“like you didn’t see my name on the form” Amber said under her breath

“To officially join the war effort, you’d have to formally register your business at the MoWT headquarters in Manehattan.” He wrote down a note and he gave it to her. “They handle all the bureaucratic stuff like onboarding and whatnot.”

[note added] Ministry of wartime technology Manehattan address

“It takes a couple weeks for the registration to be processed,” He continued “After that they’ll start you off with small jobs here and there until eventually you start getting bigger contracts and start making real money.” Folsom sang her praise about how awesome it is for her to be joining the war effort and wished her luck on getting her business registered.

Footnote:

New Perk: Instilled Work-Ethic-- Learning and work comes easy at the expense of your mental health. Perception +5, Intelligence +6, Increased chance developing a stress-related mental illness (depression, anxiety, etc)

Author's Note

Cool references in this chapter:

Network [Screenplay] by Paddy Chayefsky | II - We Made God

Slaughterhous Five by Kurt Vonnegut | So it goes - Nebula

Chapter Three: Pale Explosions

I behold the broken world
A storm rides the sky
Pale explosions illuminates the time
The age of violence is upon us

Pale Explosions, The Moth Gatherer

Amber turned onto the block of Bunny & Crown, a pair of sandwiches poking out of her little Ministry of Wartime Technology saddle-pack. It was sized appropriately to fit her new gun and a case of ammunition, but it wasn’t large enough to accommodate her lunch as well, so the two sandwiches poked out of the bag like the ends of baguettes.

The mocha-colored mare had resigned herself to not telling Bunny about her new pistol. She had never a gun nut, and just as much had never even fired a weapon before, but something told her it was going to be too hard to explain why she had a gun. She herself didn’t really know why she had gotten it, but with the way Bunny had been patronizing her lately whenever she started talking about stressful things, she didn’t want to sit thought any insinuations about what she might do with a gun.

“If she asks, I’ll just say it was a free promotion,” Amber huffed, moving down the hill at a half-trot while she rationalized to herself.

“They were handing out free saddle-packs and I grabbed one to hold my tools” That certainly would explain the existence of the bag. “But what if she sees the outline of it?”

Amber twisted her body around, trying to put different types of strain on the bag. She lifted her back hoof, arched her back, and stuck her torso out, leading with the saddle-pack, trying to see if the iconic shape of a pistol would dare to emboss itself from inside the bag. Fortunately for her, the pack was made with premium-enough leather that it did not show the shape of her gun or the complimentary box of ammo she had received from one of the vending machines. Another Ministry of Wartime Technology promotion, a free box of ammo for every new inductee. Amber didn’t even have to leave the grocery store either, the MWT vending machine was right next to the Sparkle-Cola machine next to the cart-corral right before the exit.

“But what if she sees the emblem? She’ll know I have a gun then!”

Somewhere in then back of Amber’s head, in the the sanest part of subconscious, something kept asking why she was feeling so guilty about having a gun anyway. It was her right as an Equestrian citizen after all, not that it mattered, and she had gotten it for free after all, why was she feeling so insecure about it? Amber couldn’t answer herself, not because she was out of reasons to justify the purchase to herself or her imagined accuser, but because a vehicle that was parked in front of her shop had stolen her attention.

It was a hulking mass of grey steel, as tall as the first story of her shop and as wide as the entire sidewalk. It had two large domed headlights, a little higher than the wheelbase, and a large metal grill that made the front of the vehicle look like an angry dragonfly. Higher up, set a little further into the vehicle, was a large picture-window of a windshield that wrapped around both sides. The body stretched far enough back that a third axel had to be installed either for overall stability, or more reasonably, to support the top-mounted tank barrel that sat on a swivel at the very top of the vehicle.

The letters EAF APC were painted on the side in bold white letters.

She knew by virtue of the light blue star painted below the letters that it was a vehicle belonging to the Equestrian Armed Forces, but she didn’t know what APC meant. Another unanswered question, because as she stepped in front of her shop’s windows, she saw two ponies in mechanical armor and full helmets talking to Bunny in the back of the storefront. Bunny had a look of consternation on her face and pointed towards the front of the shop at Amber, and both armored ponies turned to look at her.

“They’re here for you” Bunny answered the questioning look on Amber’s face as she stepped into the store. “Something about the vaults, but they won’t tell me anything else!”

“We’re soldiers from the Equestrian Armed Forces, Ma’am.” Came the muffled electronic voice of a stallion coming from a speaker somewhere on the soldier’s helmet. His gruff stallion voice sounded slightly far away, like the radio announcer on the old mare’s radio that was still playing softly on her workbench. Either Bunny had turned it down, or the output transformer was dying. “We’ve received orders to take you to Vault 54, immediately.”

Amber looked between both, not being able to see their eyes behind their visitors so she looked into the fish-eyed reflection of herself in each of their helmets, feeling a heat forming on the back of her neck.

“Immediately” the second soldier repeated with a mare’s voice, seeing the look of fear that was spreading across Amber’s Face.

“W-why do you have to take m-me to the vault?” Amber stammered softly.

“Time is a factor.” The mare amended sternly as they both started ushering Amber towards the front of the shop, the chocolate-mare dug her hooves into the floor.

“Wait… Stop!” Amber’s voice worked up into a worried shout as she tried in vain to resist being pushed, but she was simply too weak for the pneumatic power of the mechanical suits, and the soldiers pushed her effortlessly towards the door as if she were a shopping cart. “What’s going on?”

The radio answered for her.

“Followed by... yes, followed by flashes. Blinding green flashes. Sounds of explosions... We're trying to get confirmation, but we seem to have lost contact with our affiliate stations in Cloudsdale and Canterlot... W-We do have... We do have coming in… confirmed reports. I repeat, confirmed reports of Balefire detonation in Manhattan.”

Amber went limp. The radio began playing an evacuation notice as she was pushed outside by the female soldier and into the vehicle after twisting the handle on a side-panel door, and she was guided into the cargo compartment of the vehicle. The mare left Amber in the cargo-area and galloped up a three-stepped staircase into the open cockpit and began a complicated series of flipping dials and switches. the fusion engines underneath the cockpit whined as the vehicle started up and the stallion soldier entered the vehicle and closed the door. Amber caught the slightest glimpse of Bunny exiting the shop and frantically galloping to the left before the door fully closed.

The Stallion ascended the staircase and took his seat beside the mare and the vehicle lurched forward. Amber was thrown to off balance and fell backwards as the vehicle began acceleration at what felt to be incredible speeds. Amber got to her hooves, climbed the staircase, and grabbed onto the back of one of their seats to avoid falling back into the cargo space, and as she got eye-level with the windshields she could see the skyscrapers of Downtown Fillydelphia rapidly approaching.

“What happened in Manehattan?!” Amber shouted above the whine of the fusion engines that were now directly beneath her. The vibrations at her hooves exacerbated the growing adrenaline in the pit of her stomach. Her chest and hooves started to feel twitchy. She had started to sweat, and there was a tightness in her throat. The soldiers ignored her, sitting stolidly in their seats as the mare took a sharp turn into the city. She asked a second time, then a third time, and finally a fourth time before the mare politely asked her to stop so she could focus on her driving, And then the mare swore, slamming on the brakes, and throwing amber forward into a control panel that stood between the driver and passenger seats.

“Fuckin ponies are already in the street!” The mare shouted as she hooked the vehicle onto the sidewalk, jolting the vehicle again. As amber got back to her hooves, she indeed saw a crowd of ponies and the beginning signs of a mass-panic through the windshield.

Pedestrian ponies galloped into the street with no regard for oncoming traffic, others ran from the streets onto the sidewalks in aimless panic and the mare swore every time she swerved to avoid hitting one. Amber saw ponies abandon their taxis and vehicles, even saw a mother mare abandon a clearly occupied stroller, and they ran into buildings or disappeared into alleys as the tank sped past. Flits of green and yellow crowded the navigation bar in Amber’s vision as the chaos was slowly starting to ripple through the city like a hive response.

Amber wanted to say something, maybe dumbly ask about Manhattan again, but she couldn’t find her voice. Her throat was too dry. Instead, she watched a stallion shove an elderly pony as he ran into a crosswalk. Saw a group of three mares struggling to all squeeze through the single door of a Hooficure Spa at the same time. She also saw ponies standing still, staring blankly, like her, at the unfolding chaos. Numb. Unable to react.

A flash of green stole amber’s eye as the vehicle turned and she looked up at the visor of switches above the mare soldier.

New Location discovered: Fillydelphia North Suburbs

The vehicle flew past rows and rows of equally proportioned houses and a thankfully empty street. The only ponies they passed were a dotting of frightened residents running from their grassy yards into their houses, presumably into their basement shelters. The suburban street they were on was one of the flattest in the north suburbs so the APC covered a surprising amount of ground as it screamed down the road, and before the previous notice could even have a chance to disappear, another popped up right underneath it.

New Location discovered: Vault 54

Amber’s stomach sank. She couldn’t believe it. She was being taken to her vault. That is what they told her they were doing after all, but that was less than five minutes ago, and with all honesty Amber’s brain was still trying to process what APC meant. As the tank started up a small hill Amber tried hopelessly to ask one more time what happened to Manehattan, but she saw for herself as the vehicle crested the top and line of green flames and a large green and black cloud of smoke came into view from across the bay. The Manehattan skyline was in flames.

“No” amber said softly, imperceptible above the straining whine of the fusion engines and vibration of the mare’s off-road driving as they hopped over a sidewalk curb and through the open hoardings of a construction site set into an exceptionally large hill. They drove past scattered machinery and variously related construction equipment and parked in front of what looked to be the entrance to a mineshaft, and the stallion got up and guided Amber outside.

“Shit.” The stallion swore through his helmet as he did a quick scan of his head. “We must be the first ones to show up. The staff vehicles aren’t even here yet.” The stallion looked up at his partner who was looking back down at him, Their faces remained invisible, but she was surely looking at him with impatience.

“We have other residents we need to assemble, Ms. Crown.” He dashed back to the open door of the APC. He motioned to the mine-entrance behind her. “Go through that door” he instructed. “Step inside the big gear-door and wait for the staff to arrive. They should be here any minute.” And the mare hooked the tank into reverse before the stallion could close the door and sped down the hill back towards the suburbs.

Wh.. wh.. what the fuck!” Amber shouted.

The APC was swallowed up by a cloud of light-brown dust it had whipped up as it sped through the empty construction site. Amber looked around frantically. She watched as a trailing line of burning rocket fire sliced through the sunny cloudless sky over the bay and several pale explosions flashed along the burning Manehattan Skyline. The shockwave reached the vault quicker than Amber could react to it and the pressure waves knocked her backwards. She scrambled through the mineshaft entrance and into a machine-dug cave, her ears ringing from the blasts as she ran over boards placed over the rocky floor. She followed a line of work-lights, generators, ladders, and various work-equipment into an inner-chamber with a flat solid-steel wall and a reticulated gear-shaped opening in the center; the door of the vault wide open, waiting for her.

With little time to think Amber galloped, almost automatically, up the scaffolding, across a metal walkway hugging the wall, and up to the giant steel threshold of the gear-shaped door. She threw herself over the metal sill, ran across a metal catwalk, and into a large metal room. She had time to look around maybe once before she heard some kind loud rumbling coming from somewhere outside the cave, followed shortly by a huge explosion that shook the entire vault and sent a blast-back of dust into the chamber.

“Unusual seismic and radiological levels detected, emergency closure protocol activated,”

a robotic mare’s-voice called over an intercom system, immediately followed by the blaring of emergency sirens and the flash of strobing lights. A metal arm extended down from a depression in the ceiling and extended a large drill bit into the gear door. The contraption slid sideways, rotating the gear across a track on the ground and pushed the door into the matching gear-shaped depression. The entire room vibrated violently as the door slid closed, the spelling whine of metal-on-metal stinging Ambers ears.

Amber, unable to move her hooves as the violent tremor ripped its way through the vault, dove under a nearby maintenance table and threw her hooves over the back of her head, ducking and covering like she was so routinely programmed to do as a school-filly in preparation for this very event. She closed her eyes, grit her teeth, and prayed that the metal maintenance table above her would be study enough should the vault decide to collapse.

Seconds passed.

The mechanical arm retreated up to the ceiling. The vibrations all but ceased save for a few tiny aftershocks and the sirens stopped their blaring. Amber looked up, not knowing if it was safe or not yet; There wasn’t a teacher to tell the class when the drill was over this time. When the strobing lights finally stopped, Amber took that as her cue and crawled out from under the table. A tepid silence had filled the vault.

There air put a strange pressure on Amber’s face. Her body felt light and heavy at the same time. She didn’t move. She didn’t speak. The vault groaned as the hill settled. She looked left and saw the windows of the maintenance hut. Looked right and saw the metal catwalk. Up, the mechanical drill on the ceiling. She was the only pony in the vault, and she simply stood there, dissociating.

Grey. The walls were grey. The ceiling was grey. The pipes and cables coming out of the floor were grey.

Amber was grey too.

Her body was grey, her horseshoes were grey. Her mind was grey.

She felt nothing and stared out at nothing, like a rabbit in a field. Only the hot grey buzz of her empty mind, her internal monologue gone silent.

She stood on all four hooves, swaying gently as her eyes registered that she was looking at the number on the vault door.

Her eyes traced the ridges in the number. The steel was darker inside. Set in a circle of yellow steel. Painted, and she could smell the paint. Not the paint on the door, the memory of paint. She blinked.

She looked at something else. A cube. With flanged sides. Resting on one side, was another cube, tossed aloft. She looked at the back wall, a line of rectangles. The floor was made of squares as well.

Power. the first word to come back into Amber’s mind.

Shattered stereoscope. Dream. Crushed dream. Too much power, alternate current right. Direct Current Wrong. Shining. Overturned. Explosion. Crown. Staring. Giggling.

Amber blinked again. She was looking at the computers in the maintenance hut.

Sewage. Leverage. Gasses. Oil pressure nominal. service parts. Message. Mainframes. Fuselage. Cannisters. Leaking containers. Storage reserves low.

Scraps of long forgotten terminal entries sprang forth in her mind.

She looked at a toolbox on a table. Saw the handle, the hinges, the screws in the steel. A tool bag lay across the table, and she could feel a familiar heaviness.

Her back felt heavy, like the elastic tension of the last ten years finally snapped. stretched too far.

She looked over her shoulder, instead of her tool bag there was black leather pouch hanging off her right flank.

Don’t tell Bunny.

If she asks… say it was a free promotion

Something about the vaults, but they won’t tell me anything else

Her neck twitched. Somewhere a fluorescent light was buzzing.

She looked back at the terminals in the maintenance hut and mental images began to flashback into her mind.

Bus seats. A Big Book of Science. South Fillydelphia boulevard. The East Equestrian Highway. The Gates of CIT. A box full of circuit boards. A table full of wires, sprockets, and flywheels. Schematics. Bottles of turpentine.

Seemingly random images from her past flashed through her mind, accompanied with seemingly un-associated words arising in tandem.

Hallways. Classrooms. Robots and half-built terminals.

Broken differentiator circuit

Gymnasium. Ponies. Lab-coats. Protectrons in various stages of assembly.

Ignition control unit missing.

Magnetic pickup assembly, improperly aligned

A large LED wall timer. Less than a half hour remains.

A familiar hot flash surfaced in Amber’s back.

Rushing. Skipping steps. Errors on the terminal. Other Protectrons already walking. Feeling trapped, claustrophobic. Breathing fast.

Mal-aligned gyroscopes.

Shorted electronic ignition system.

Un-calibrated Pulse modulators.

The memory fully crystallized out of the dark recesses of Amber’s subconscious. She saw her Protectron in the gymnasium of CIT, it’s back panel open and several wires running like wild snakes out of the back into a terminal on the table. Several errors were reported on the screen of her diagnostic program but as she looked up, she had less than five minutes left to activate the Protectron and complete her entrance exam. Other ponies had already finished and were sitting in the bleachers, watching her. She felt self-conscious and panicky. The administrators and exam proctors were looking at her, expectantly. She swallowed hard. She was out of time. She bit her lip, disconnected the robot from the cables and wires except for the ignition feed; and pressed enter on the terminal.

The bootloader on the terminal ran, reporting more errors than passed checks. She watched the robot take a few steps, her heart fluttered, but then the robot started walking diagonally. The gyroscopes weren’t aligned properly, and the robot was leaning heavily to one side. The robot collapsed, kicked around, started shining like the sun, and exploded. Raining debris and motel slag across the entire auditorium. A mare closest to the explosion’s lab coat was covered in blood. Amber was ushered out by security.

Amber blinked the memory back into her subconscious and looked around, her eyes landing on the vault control mechanism, and glided over to it like a ghost.

The vault door was closed. It was open when she came in with the rest of her class.

There was a flashing terminal screen on the door control panel.

“Emergency closure protocols activated” the screen blinked its message. “please attach Pipbuck to begin override sequence”

Amber looked down at the device on her hoof, another flood of crystalline memories rushed back to the front of her mind.

A radio being repaired. A pair of unicorn gloves. A mess of wires. Bunny in her workshop. Amber slapping her. Walking downtown. A wall of posters.

The memories came flooding back faster and faster as the parts of her brain that handles short-term memory re-activated.

The Ministry surplus store. A free gun and saddle-pack. Walking back along the Celestia Sea Boardwalk. Then she remembered turning on her block, seeing the APC, and the soldiers who abducted her. Bunny running away. Ponies in streets. A city burning. Explosions…

Something stirred inside Amber, but she couldn’t understand what it was. A yearning. Some kind of longing. An emptiness in her chest and an ache in her heart. A queasiness in her stomach. She stared hard at the blinking screen and struggled to parse her thoughts to understand what she was feeling, but a block of text appearing in her vision explained it for her:

Quest added: Find Bunny

She looked down at the device on her hoof, struggling to see it clearly through the tears that had suddenly formed and were streaming down her muzzle. She fumbled with the Pipbuck, not knowing how to even attach it to the door control panel, and in a fit of aggravation whacked it against the panel, chipping the Pipbuck’s glass and dislodged a plug on a wire that hung from the back of the gauntlet.

She plugged the Pipbuck into the panel and pulled the switch…

Nothing happened. She looked down at the screen

Attention! Unknown signal detected…

Decoding…

Signal decoded…

Pipbuck signature identified…

Hello User Undefined…

Connection established…

Initializing system. …

The screen showed a stable-tec logo which was soon replaced by another message:

high levels of radiation detected; anti-radiation suit required for door opening.

“Fuckin, come on!” she pleaded desperately with the machine. Looking around frantically, she saw through that haze of her own tears a row of lockers on a lower level. She hurried down a metal ladder and began digging through the personal affects of staff ponies who were never showing up. Fortunately for her, each locker had its own radiation suit. She found one in her size, stepped her hooves into the stiff yellow rubber. Fumbling with the belt on her saddle-pack attempting to reattach it once she had the suit on proper.

She stuck her head inside of the domed helmet and zipped up the suit. The material pulled at the hairs of her underbelly and felt clammy against her body. She inhaled, her breath filtering through canisters attached the back of her suit and snaking through black corrugated tubes into the sides of the helmet. She winced as the strong smells of rubber, chemical sealants, and carbon filled her nose, and she lumbered up the stairs. Trotting uncomfortably in the bulky stiff suit back over the door control panel.

Radiation suit detected, opening sequence authorized. Recommended exposure time: fourteen minutes.

Amber pulled the switch, wincing as the sirens began to scream again and the mechanical arm began to swing down to open the vault door.

Footnote:

Warning: Your Pipbuck had detected heightened levels of Cortisol and, prolonged exposures to stress hormones can lead to a psychotic break. Limited exposure to stressful situations is highly recommended.

War Never Changes

War.

War never changes.

In the time of antiquity, the gryphons waged war against the fledgling Equestrian territories; wielding their economic and militaristic might against the largely pacifist equine tribes. Lusting for gold and territory.

In response, Celestia, princess of Unicornia, declared war in return. Uniting the battered territories of Earth Ponies, Canterlot Unicorns, and Pegasi into the single unified nation of Equestria. Under this new banner, the gryphons were forced back into their homelands.

Beneath the might of the Equestrian army, Gryphonia’s pine forests were destroyed, their golden cities razed to the ground, the precious-metal mines that shaped their entire economy were annexed, and Gryphonstone, the last remaining gryphon territory, was left in destitution as Celestia marched her armies home into a century of peace and prosperity.

But war never changes.

In modern-day Equestria, war was fought over resources. A globally unsustainable economy built on coal began to collapse as tensions rose between Equestria and the Zebra nation. Leading the Equines to develop alternative energy sources such as gasoline, diesel, electricity, plastics, and nuclear fission.

War was also fought in the factories. Rapidly increasing tensions between both nations sparked an Equestrian industrial revolution, which in a few short years introduced guns, computer terminals, automated carriages and vehicles, stealthbucks and mechanized suits of armor into Equestrian society.

War was even fought with words. After a massacre at Luna’s Academy for young unicorns, Celestia abdicated her thrown, leaving control of Equestria to her sister, Princess Luna. Shortly after, six ministries were created. Tasked with assisting the war effort and protecting Equestria, yet they did little more than to further divide the already splintering society with unbridled nationalism, protectionism, and propaganda.

And finally, for two brief hours, war was fought with balefire bombs. Necromantic megaspells that rained devastation from the sky, reducing most of Equestria to embers and ash. The land was violently reshaped. The cities were drowned in oceans of nuclear fire and radiation. Equine-kind was almost completely extinguished.

Few ponies were able to reach the safety of their survival shelters or the large underground stables before the bombs went off. In Fillydelphia, a lone mare, a simple electronic repair pony, leapt into the shelter of her Stable as the world outside erupted in hellfire, but when the giant steel door of Stable 54 re-opened, she emerged into the nuclear wasteland to find that:

War never changes.