Fallout: Equestria - Common Ground

Epilogue: Fifty Years Later

… I still thought it was the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen.

The pen paused in Doc’s griffin talons, hovering over the page. Setting it down on the desk, flipped through the remaining pages of the book, the few there were that remained blank, before bringing them back to where he’d left up. He took the pen back up, then with a small smile began to write again.

As for what happened after. Well, that’s a story whose details I’ll keep just for me and my family.

The elderly pony gave out a long sigh of relief as he set the pen down with finality. It had taken him years, but he’d finally managed to complete his account of those first two eventful years of his life spent in the Griffin Commonwealth. No small part of the process had involved him relearning to write, since he now had to control writing implements with his claws rather than levitating them. Then it had taken a long time to get all his thoughts and recollections in order and put them into words. That, alongside all the other events of life. Nothing as tumultuous as his life since leaving Stable 85, but hectic in its own way. Almost mundane, though probably not exactly as things had been before the Last Day. After all, it was a post-megaspell world he lived in.

Once he was certain the ink was dry, Doc closed the book and ran his hoof over the cover. Rael never could have guessed what Doc would do with the journal he’d given him that first New Year’s they’d celebrated together—when they still barely knew each other, it seemed now. Rising creakily, Doc took up the journal and carried it over to his bookshelf, sliding it in with the other random books and bric-a-brac that had collected there over the years. He wasn’t sure why he’d been compelled to put his experiences to paper, but he hoped someone might read it in the future. Perhaps it was self-conceit, but he thought the chance someone would want to learn how things had been back then and what the first marshal of Duskshore had done and thought about them was quite good. He only hoped they didn’t make a religion out of it. These days especially, Doc felt he could understand Rok better than he ever had before.

“Grampa, Grampa!” a lavender-coated unicorn filly with a curly golden mane shouted as she burst in through the door. “You gotta come see!”

“What do I ‘gotta come see?’” Doc asked as he trotted away from the bookshelf and toward the filly.

“I dunno, but Gramma said you’d wanna see!” the filly proclaimed.

“Hey, no fair!” a white-coated pegasus colt with swept-back blue mane shouted as he too burst through the door, tiny wings flapping frantically to hold him above the ground. “You can’t just poof around with your magic to get here first!”

“What’s happening, Zest?” Doc asked the colt while the filly stuck her tongue out at her brother.

“I dunno, something about E-kes-tri-a,” Zest replied, sounding out the word.

“Equestria,” Doc corrected him gently.

“Yeah! Everypony’s gathering atop the mooring tower,” Zest reported.

“Race you back there!” the filly challenged before her horn lit up and she vanished in a pop of light and sound.

“Hey!” Zest shouted and shot toward the door before pausing in the frame and looking back at Doc.

“I’m coming,” Doc assured him, and the colt zipped out of sight.

Doc cantered out the door after Zest, stepping into Duskshore and trotting along the street. It had sure grown a lot in the last half century, though nowhere near the rate it had in those first days. Ponies and griffins had come and gone, but most came to stay. News of a settlement with guaranteed independence from the Commonwealth’s grand marshals drew attention. Most of the Steel Rangers had returned to Trottingham and succeeded in their revolution to institute more benevolent rule of the Isles, though a few still remained. They’d taken to adding red paint to their armor recently and calling themselves “Applejack’s Rangers” instead, which Doc had gathered was due to a schism across all Ranger contingents in Equestria. The troubles going on there were distant to the ponies and griffins of Duskshore.

On his way to the mooring tower, Doc couldn’t avoid passing the large Church of Rok that had been constructed shortly after the town’s founding. Though it seemed Rael tried to avoid it, there was no stopping his religion’s leadership from frocking him, ending his time as an acolyte, and making him a full preacher. Apparently they’d approved of him changing his mission to leave Moonraze and follow Doc and were happy with the results. When he preached in Duskshore, he often included references about his time traveling with Doc in the Commonwealth alongside the words of Rok. The griffins, and even some ponies now, who came to listen to him had nothing but praise for his approach.

Alongside the Church of Rok was the synth mission, a simple structure that housed the pondroids and griffdroids who visited Duskshore and studied the way of life of “the organics,” as they called the flesh and blood beings they were based on. “Young” synthetics, some of them looking older even than Doc did now, would come to Duskshore to learn how they lived here, part of the Consortium’s program to acclimate to the Commonwealth (rather than impose themselves on it) through information and technology sharing. It was rather like what young Rokkists went through, but that wasn’t a topic that was often brought up in Rael’s presence. In addition to themselves, the synths brought other useful things to the town. A novasurge reactor now provided Duskshore with all the electricity it could ever need, and MEIRPAL emplacements at the edge of town disabused raiders or the warlords of Castoway from thinking they would be easy pickings.

At last, Doc reached the mooring tower and began climbing the switchback stairs to the top. He was getting old, no denying that. He’d have taken those stairs two at a time during the battle with the Steel Rangers here, but now he puffed after the first few flights and his joints ached. Especially tender was the connection between his prosthetic arm and his flesh, which seemed more and more tenuous as of late. Summer Sunrise assured him it was normal, that his flesh just wasn’t regenerating at the same rate as before and the graft with the prosthetic was a weaker connection. It was a limitation of even Wartime technology, but Doc still hated the thought that one day his arm could be unusable, little more than a peg to hold him up.

Several members of Doc’s family were gathered at the top of the tower, as he saw when he reached it at last. Zest and his sister Peaches, of course, but also their parents: Headwind and Doc’s daughter Flaring Sparks. His son Stardust was there too, but no sign of the rest of the family. At the edge of the platform, looking through the telescope that been installed there, was Sage, and she looked back at Doc with moist eyes before stepping aside to let him take a turn.

Cautiously, Doc looked through the telescope, out across the ocean’s waves. At first, he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be looking at, and then it hit him. The cloud cover was gone. He’d been so accustomed when staring out through this telescope to seeing the constant blanket of clouds that shadowed Equestria, but now it simply wasn’t there. It its place, he could barely make out the remainder of a multicolored aura fading away into nothingness. Speechless, he stepped back from the telescope.

“What does it mean?” Flaring Sparks asked her parents. “What are we looking at?”

“I think,” Doc said, and the corners of his mouth curved into a slight smile, “it’s the end of somepony else’s story.”