Fallout Equestria: Ballad of a Rogue Ranger

Chapter two: Last one out…

Alarm clocks were great, ya know? I mean, they might have been the bane of my existence while working and having to get up early. Though like anything good piece of tech they had a job to do and they did it well. Since I was younger… or am I still? Anyways I’m getting off subject.

Alarm clocks! I used to have an old-style bell and hammer version on my nightstand. Was it crude compared to the ones that had all sorts of different alarm tones you could put in? Yep. Did the ticking get annoying when you were actually awake in your room if you paid too much attention to it? Double down, yes sir. Though would it be loud enough to wake up a pony from a few centuries’ long coma? You bet your ass it was.

Although in leu of a clock, the entirety of a stable shaking under your back was another solid replacement. These things were meant to not be near any seismic activity, kinda defeats the purpose of an underground haven if that very ground is the thing that brings the whole party to its knees. Anything that could move a stable like that to its very core was something to be paid attention too. With a reluctant set of hooves, my body dragged itself from the bed, still hoping all this was a dream.

“Six hours…” I looked at the clock from the Pip-Buck, it wasn’t much, and it certainly wasn’t the ‘sleep’ I’d gotten on ice. Though it would have to do as I slid the pistol in the holster, and started to make my way out the quarters.

Some cryo tubes failing wouldn’t cause that sort of response in the stable, at least I really hoped that they wouldn’t. Alas, I wasn’t going to find any answers up here where the crew of this place kicked their hooves up. If there was anything to give me answers in this place, then I’d have to go all the way to engineering.

Was I involved with the design? Nope. Thankfully though, I also wasn’t stupid when it came to common sense… sorta. Another trump card in my favor was seeing a few of their designs in magazines from before. The company might not have shared all their secrets, for obvious reasons, and they couldn’t have been all of the same design in the end. Although come on, let’s be honest. If you were to draw up a structure like this from the ground down, where would you put the power supply?

Further down the stair case I went, passing by the wings of those residents’ long since dead. Part of me wanted to double check just to see if perhaps any of the staff keeping this place running was still breathing. Ya know, get some extra help to figure this all out. The other part of me though won out, and continued down my path to the various maintenance areas. Yep, right at the bottom, just like I thought.

The first hatch was sealed up tight by a lock somepony like myself without tools didn’t have hope to access… what were you keeping locked away if all of your residents were on ice? I’ll add that to the dumb questions that I would never get answer to list. I looked around for any sort of key hole, but all I saw was the same reader I’d grown familiar with over the years… and I had just the thing for it. Thank the princesses I grabbed that card; cardio wasn’t my strong suit, and I didn’t feel like making that trip back up those stairs.

‘What am I even looking for?’ truth be told, I hadn’t a clue.

There was hope it’d be a big monitor, with clear instructions saying ‘push to fix whatever broke’. Anypony in the field of Troubleshooting can tell you right now it’s never that simple. Especially in engineering. Hey, a colt can hope right? Then again, I don’t need to be an Engineer to know this.

That many errors on terminal screens around the room couldn’t be a good thing…

The prototype spark reactor hadn’t been on the market all that long when the stable was finished, I made sure I kept up on those news articles. A marvel of technology it sure was, and the ones after that got even better the more the designs were tweaked. Yet, even in other more refined versions that were produced, there’s no way it should have been making this much power!

Even behind the sealed reinforced glass shroud for what had to be the control room. Inside the lonely room with only one access point, I could see the ambient glow and bolts of energy that surged around the very core of the machine. Arcing back to the metal enclosure that housed it and likely sent those pulses of energy back into the stable itself. That was made fact by the numerous output readings jumping from yellow to red every few minutes before going back down. With many of the red reaching the end of their limit probably meant it was more than could be measured.

No wonder things were on the fritz!

The terminal didn’t give me much to go off of either, it was for monitoring and imputing simple setting adjustments. A useful tool to the engineer that watched over this place, you know like the one that laid dead on the staircase. Something that certainly wasn’t in my skill set. All I had was a list of numbers and a key pad to work off of.

“Command settings… Input control… Data logs…” no matter how much it might feel like it, banging on keys doesn’t ever make the computer work better, “How about a how to guide?”

When one terminal locked up from either wrong input keys or lack of credentials, I went on to the next. There were enough of them in this room alone helping run the show to give me a whack at the problem, but no such luck of solving it. Whose ever card I had; they clearly didn’t have the clearances needed to outright modify that critical a piece of the Stable. I needed an Off switch, and I wasn’t going to find it here. Another torrent of power came from the reactor, and from my wrist I could feel the Pip-Buck spike with a different reading to tell.

Caution: Minor radiation exposure.

As if I needed any other reason to leave.

I looked back at the core, its strange aqua glow getting bright just before every surge released from itself. This thing wasn’t happy being trapped underground, and I didn’t like being down here with it for the ride. There wasn’t much I could do from this terminal; I didn’t know how to shut down a reactor! Not in my job description. Even if it was, would that have made a difference at all? No matter what I might have been able to do at this point to help it, it wouldn’t have mattered. The whole stable seemed dead anyway, it was just me here hanging out like a ghost of what once inhabited this place.

A few taps of the keys later and the data logs section popped up on screen…

Data entries corrupted…

“Shit!” my head shook, hell my whole body shook from this wrench being thrown into my existence. My life went from simple, to lovely, to terrifying, to freezing, and now to oh fuck in seemingly a snap.

Never the less, something had to have happened down here that caused this. The terminals down here had to be all connected to the same control system that ran the stable, nearly every bit of data was stored here. I knew that much, and I knew whatever had happened to this place it would be in the numbers. The plug from my Pip-Buck went in to the side of the terminal as I brought over all the data files I could hold. Which thanks to the ridiculous storage on these things, was all of them.

Once the data had finished moving, I knew this place wasn’t long for the world. It had been less than a day, and I already had a meltdown on my hooves. With a quick toss of the place, I ran around the engineering area to get a lay of the land. There hadn’t been an official medical department, everyone’s asleep, ‘why would you need a Band-Aid?’ I assume was the mindset in the budget meeting.

Never the less, the few boxes of medical gear down here in maintenance for the pony awake did have something useful. A few healing potions, Med-x syringe, Rad-Away, a RadSafe… it was a start. Didn’t do the pony on duty much good in the end.

With a haphazard bag of a tool utility pack across by back the sputtering reactor beckoned a little more pep in my step. Lights around me were starting to flare up, as some gave way with a wicked pop, and my hooves brought me back to the stairs not even looking back as I flew up them. Back in the residential area, if you could call it that, I went back to where I had killed those roaches.

Those bugs might have gotten in a decent amount of the goods stored, as evidence from the wrappers around the common area. Alas, a few packages of canned apples or even oats were a gift from the princesses. A sealed can or two of purified water joined them in my bag, and for a moment I caught myself looking back at the atrium.

“What happened here…” a really stupid thought to have at the time, especially given the circumstances. I’d already overstayed my welcome, and the reactor was sure to remind me it was time to check-out. Another shake of the stable erupted, and I made my way up the stairs to the upper most level of the stable.

The main entry area of the stable wasn’t anything to be noted really. A few containers holding old jumpsuits, the occasional desk where entry screening was done, and various arrows on the ground telling even the ineptest pony where to go. What caught my eye from the flickering lights was the yellow box with the pink butterflies on the wall. A quick check later nabbed me another Med-x.

Now the next big hurtle… a very big, heavy, hurtle.

The stables’ door was something of pure over engineering in the best case imaginable. The hulking gear remained there since the start of our little retreat. Now I just needed it to release me. A covered red button in a place like this could only mean one thing, and with my plug hooked in to it the cover opened up. An overzealous press of the button later and…

Nothing.

Not a damn thing.

‘Stable-tec I will burn you to the ground,’ come to think of it, given what I’d experienced, the thought had probably crossed quite a few others minds too.

There was still enough power in this place to move it, hell there was more than enough power. Looking back at the tool belt, my horn picked up a few of those aforementioned tools and went to work. One thing I always like about machines and tech more than ponies, if it was broken, all you had to do was find the problem. Some ponies were just impossible to fix.

The panel on the control felt loose as I fiddled with it, almost as if somepony had opened it up already. There inside a lose wire dangled from the main release, free from its connection from years of neglect. Gotta love when it’s simple. With a tightened screw later and a little reassembly, I could almost smell the air once more when my hooves tried the button again… if it opened that is.

The terminal next to the button came to life after the second attempt at least, and from it posed one very simple question.

Breach detected.

Warning. Outside environment at hazardous levels! Are you sure you want to breach containment? Y [] N []

Umm… Yes!

With another press the hydraulic arm that went to the door swung down with a deafening squeal, something needed a lot of grease, but the hydraulics did their job and pulled the door free. One other tab blinked on the terminal however, Operation data log. A click shown the same corruption error, but what else is new?

A download later and I stepped up to the edge of the door, looking at the elevator that brought us down here all those years ago. It probably was wasting time, and absolutely stupid for wondering it, but at the end of the day I was getting ready to step out in to a new world likely far different than what I had left.

‘… Let her have the same chance.’ Those words replayed like I’d heard them yesterday. “I’ll try to…” My answer fell on deaf ears.

Over the threshold my body went, followed quickly by another rush of power that blew out a couple of the bulbs that were left in the access room. Even the terminal fizzled and cracked by the surge… which in turn was followed even hastier by the mashing of an elevator button, and the steady close of a safety gate.

Goodbye Stable 100, hello world.