Fallout Equestria: Lionheart

Twilight Sparkle ran through the ruins of Manehattan, but they were faster, and they were gaining on her.

Her purple body bleed from countless small cuts, her teary eyes were tired, her pink-striped dark mane was haphazardly chopped short...

This little filly felt as broken inside as the cracked horn atop her head.

They were gaining on her. Raiders were gaining on her.

Raiders, the denizens of this chaotic hellish world who abandoned their principles and values at the first sign of difficulty, throwing their sanity away for a nihilistic, brutal, pleasure-seeking and short lifetime of theft, murder, and rape. Improvised armour of spiked leather pads, studded straps, BDSM gear looted from fetish stores, kitchenware, and crushed tin cans adorned their ritualistically scarred flesh. Their patchwork armour suits were not only impractical due to a lack of resources and armoursmithing techniques, but also due to a culture that fetishized fearlessness above all else.

In the barren sandy wasteland under sickly-green skies, surrounded by the ruins of a long-dead civilization, cruel desolate winds and the gallop of echoing hooves spurred on by lust and hatred for all things good and pure provided the soundtrack for the horde of murderers that chased down this helpless Unicorn, their latest target, soon to be their latest victim.

Twilight Sparkle couldn't remember why she was here or who she was. She simply ran like her life depended on it, because it did.

“Help!” She cried, and nopony was around to care. “Help! Please!”

Spotting her salvation a hundred yards away, a wooden apple cider cellar that could serve as a makeshift survivalist bunker, she screamed with effort as her horn sparked and shimmered and smoked, struggling to form a steady purple glow around itself and the lock. Turning towards it and rushing with every fiber of her being, struggling to focus despite the stabbing pain in her skull that split her world in two...

The cruelly cackling Raiders caught up with her, surrounded her, some even overtook her, she couldn't tell how many there were thanks to her newfound double vision, yet nopony made a move to pin her down, not when there was time to savour her fear as she ran, to laugh in her face, to shiver at the sensation of her terrified screams meeting their twisted ears.

“We're gonna get you!” Laughed one Raider.

“We're gonna fuck you up!” Laughed another. “Gonna split you wide open!”

“We're gonna bleed you dry!”

“I'M GOING TO RAPE YOU!”

She had opened the lock just in time to open the doors and slip through, slamming the doors shut behind her and locking them once again.

She heard the Raiders slam their hooves on the door behind her, swearing and screaming and seething.

“FUCK!” A Raider yelled, and many echoed his sentiments with other profanities. “Why does this keep happening?!”

With the sturdy doors locked safely behind her, Twilight sighed in relief and collapsed, crying.

“Maybe we should just shoot ponies instead of running after them until they're exhausted?” Asked one Raider from behind the door.

“Fuck that, what if they die from blood loss while I'm fucking them? My name's Corpse Eater, not Corpse Fucker. Making bitches exhausted means they struggle less. Just enough to be cute when they try to get me off them, not enough to matter when they get me off.”

Finally...

Finally, she was safe.

She glanced around her new home, spotting a skeleton cattily curled up near a hoard of beans like a Dragon with a hoard of treasure. But in this hellish world where bullets and cruelty were more plentiful than food and sources of clean drinkable water, these beans were worth more than the treasure hoards of a thousand Dragons!

Not only that, but the corpse had a diary!

Finally, something she could sit down and read in the middle of a dangerous situation!

She heard the sound of an axe meeting the wooden door behind her, and flinched. Slowly turning her head to look over her shoulder, she saw an axe pierce the door, the only thing protecting her from the world outside.

“No!” Twilight screamed, struggling to do anything with her sparking horn and failing. Why hadn't these Raiders already broken this door open sooner for the treasure inside? Why did they have to break the door open now?

The axe pierced the doorframe again, and again, and again, until there was enough of a hole in the door for a Raider to put his scarred rapeface through the door. “Heeeeere's Bloody!” He grinned.

"Move it, Blood Fucker!" Yelled a Raider who shoved him, only to be shoved back.

"Fuck off, Kill Mongrel!" Yelled another Raider. "You're not fucking her until I've fucked her, got it? We drew straws over this for a reason."

Why? Why would those be the last names she'd hear? Why did they all have such stupid names like Bloody Knife and Gore Fucker and Kill Mongrel?

As they continued hacking at the door with renewed fervor, and she witnessed her end coming, Twilight fearfully curled up in the corner of the room, out of options. What was she supposed to do with a broken horn? Pick up cans of beans with her hooves and throw them? Maybe if she pulled the can's pullable tag off and threw that away before throwing it, they might assume the can was a grenade and flee?

A fifty-caliber fuck-you pierced the air to herald its subsequent semi-automatic successors. Twilight covered her ears, closed her eyes, clenched her mouth tightly shut because she didn't want blood splatter in her mouth and she knew she was powerless to shield herself. Raider screams filled the air around her as they panicked and tried to flee, only for machine guns floating fifty feet in the air to soar over their heads like trained attack birds, chasing the Raiders down before gunning them down. Crimson seemed to splatter across her whole world, as geysers of blood erupted from every last Raider skull, yet more Raiders still flocked to her, the horde of hundreds summoned by the sound of gunfire.

“Get away from her!” Roared her handsome Unicorn savior as he teleported behind the battered Unicorn to protectively stand proud outside her cider cellar, his horn aglow as a full orchestra of over fifty guns floated around him, their silencers doing little to dull the deafening din of his elegant and ruthless steel symphony.

The Raiders never stood a chance, and never stood again, because with that many guns under his metaphorical belt and more belts of ammo than anyone could ever need, he had gunned them all down as easily as one might pass gas.

“Sparky!” The Unicorn cheered, getting up and hugging his left foreleg, too exhausted to stand tall. “You're here, Daddy!”

“You finally called me father!” Sparky beamed handsomely at his adoptive filly daughter. He was a mighty and sexy Unicorn with a flowing mane as gold as sunlight, eyes as gold as a golden wristwatch, and gold fur as long and perfect as a Golden Retriever's. He pointed at her heart. “Don't be afraid, dear. Even when I'm gone, I'll always be in your heart.”

“Next time, you should be the bait!” She snapped, as he passed her a health potion that she downed like a protein shake after an hour of exercise, curing all her wounds and fixing her horn on the spot. It was a good thing potions like those were somehow more plentiful than bullets in this post-apocalyptic wasteland.

He chuckled. “I can't imagine them chasing me down with that level of ferocious depravity, or wanting to do to me what they'd do to you if they could.”

Sparky felt a cold barrel press into the side of his head from some invisible twat with a gun. “Game over, you fucking sack of-”

Sparky's long whiplike tail wrapped around the Raider's skull and effortlessly crushed it like a watermelon between a hot Earth Pony mare's thighs. “I wonder what I'll have for tea tonight.”

“Don't look at me,” Twilight shrugged as she finally got up, “You're the one who carries all our shit.”

“Language!” He chided her.

She smiled. “Anyway, I'm curious. How does your PipBuck store over three hundred pounds of guns and armour and crap, anyway?”

Sparky shrugged and made a noise that indicated how little of a fucking idea he had as he checked the inventory of his customized diamond-studded PipBuck with a high-definition widescreen display that boasted over two hundred and fifty six colours. “Magic, I guess. Let's see here... With this sweet score, we've got enough nonperishable preservative-laden canned goods to last us a few weeks, some fresh vegetables that were fresh a few weeks ago... We're running low on gun oil.”

“Who cares about gun oil? None of our guns ever need maintenance or cleaning.”

He ignored her. “We've got several months of military rations only they're the flavours nopony likes... We've got some candied crap so tainted with dark magical energies from the day Equestria got blown up I'd probably grow a sixth leg if I ate any, and some-”

“Wait, sixth leg? You only have four legs.”

“That's not what your mother said last night,” Sparky grinned.

They both laughed.

“By Princess Celestia's sexploding turboner's boiling alicum, you're such an asshole!” She laughed. “Thanks for helping me get over having dead parents.”

“No problem, my child.”

“Stop talking like that, weirdo.”

“No, my child. Anyway, this hunt for supplies has been fruitful. I wish you could still teleport, but amnesia wiped out all your memories of every spell more useful than telekinesis.”

“I know. Why are you reminding me?”

“Maybe if you feel bad enough about not knowing magic you'll remember something useful. Maybe you could magic me into eating anything but food? There's plenty of not-food out here. But hey, now you can go back to being the strongest telekinesis-master alive in the Wasteland. We should have all the food we need to make the trip to Sanctuary Falls, and then-”

“Wait, we're actually going to Sanctuary Falls?” She was shocked. “You said that city was for pussies and posers!”

“Yeah, back when I was a young buck with something to prove to a world that hated me for being alive. But then I got into enough life-or-death struggles to realize I really, really don't like killing. I'll do it to protect those I care about, but the sexy-sounding babe on the radio claimed this sanctuary's accepting anyone ready to give up violence as a way of life and start farming.”

“But it's always been your dream to die in a blaze of glory!”

“Yeah, maybe it'll happen along the way. Who knows? Listen, filly, you're the first pony I've ever gave a rat's ass about ever since my parents died. I don't know why you showed up out of the blue without any memories, Twily, but I'll protect you or die trying.”

Twilight started to cry. “B-but we were supposed to kill every last Raider there ever was!”

“I said that when I was a younger, hungrier pony. Now I'm full, and tired. We can't go around looking for trouble any more, Twilight. Only deal with trouble when it finds us. Now help me get these beans in my Saddlebags, we're moving on. Time to make a dangerous trek to a land of safety!”

“But that skeleton of a dead pony has a diary under him!” Twilight insisted. “I just noticed it, and we need to pick it up right away and read through the whole thing and-”

“NO!” He snapped, before his old face softened. “No. I'm sorry, Twilight, but there's no time. Every second we spend out here brings those hunting us closer. We have a destination, and we need to get there. No detours, no delays, no getting sidetracked hunting for old records or computer terminal text documents.”

Twilight gathered the beans. “I just hope we meet enough wacky characters willing to give up everything they've ever known and cared about to join us on a dangerous journey to the other end of Equestria. That's what usually happens in this kind of story.”

“Stop talking like that, Twilight,” Sparky chided her. “It was cute at first, but it's getting old. This is no story.”

And now that I've got that action-packed prologue out of the way...

This is our story, and the story of my life.

Once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria, everypony you know and love failed everypony counting on them and everypony fucking died, the end.

But that was not the end of this tale. Rather, it was only the beginning of a newer, bloodier chapter in Equestria's history.

Six mares were gifted power they were not ready for, and though they did their best, each succumbed to their own fatal flaw in their own unique way.

Future generations would be haunted by the fallout of their sins, their greatest accomplishments, and their worst mistakes.

But their failures laid the groundwork for my success.

Legend foretold the coming of one greater than any other, one who could solve the problems of the past with the greatest solution of the future, one surrounded exclusively by adoring sycophants and ass-kissing cheerleaders who existed solely to sing his praises as he obliterated shallow strawmen with the depth of cardboard cutouts while providing half the challenge stationary bowling pins could pose when it came to combat.

Some say that was me.

Some said I was too great for any one Element of Harmony to consider him its embodiment, because he was the embodiment of the newest and greatest element of harmony: Perfection.

Some said I was, and still am, the ultimately powerful multitalented chosen one with the biggest muscles, the best gun, and the hottest ass.

At twenty years old, I knew one thing was true. The universe might hate me... But all the bitches loved me. Even Lady Luck loved me, though in her own strange, cruel way.

I was simply allowed by the universe to succeed where others would naturally fail, even if I (rarely) made terrible choices that should result in failure, and did result in failure when they happened to others.

My story is a legend full of might and gunpowder, of purges in purgatory, and for me, friendship was an afterthought, for the only magic I weaved was the magic of horrifying violence. Twilight was my rock, anchoring me to this world and caring about it. Twilight was the one who'd die happily if it meant defending another.

Me? Well, I'd kill to protect her smile.

So you can imagine what I'd do to protect her life.

Well... No, you can't.

But you can read about it.

I'm not in this for some kind of revolution, and I'm not looking for redemption. After your body count starts to rival the death tolls of natural disasters, redemption's nothing but an answer for crossword puzzles.

Armed with nothing but the magic of believing in myself – and a cool gun I found – I shot my way through the apocalypse-themed shooting gallery outside my Stable until sufficient violence had cleared the path to a magical golden throne hidden at Paradise Falls that, when sat upon, made me the ruler of everything, magical enough to simply wish the world back to normal.

But before I tell you all about that...

First...

I need to tell you everything there is to know about PipBucks. Because that's what you're here for, right? If you want to know how Equestria fell, I'm going to drip-feed that knowledge to you over the next two million words. But for now, it's time for some PipBuck trivia.

PipBucks. From Ponypedia, the free Encyclopaedia at EQ.Ponypedia.pon.

Not to be confused with PipFucks.

"PipBuck" and “Littlepip” redirect here. For other uses, see PipBuck (disambiguation).

This article is about the series. For a specific version of the iPod, see PipBuck 1.0, PipBuck 2000, PipBuck 2000 Mark IV, PipBuck 3000, Pimp-Fuck 690,000,000,000, Pip-Boy 3000 Mark IV, Lil' Pip 3000, or Super Pip-Buck.

For the pony named Littlepip, see Littlepip (Toaster Repair-Pony).

The PipBuck, or Personal Inscription Pad, is a line of portable multimedia multi-purpose computers with features including but not limited to: A wireless radio, sonar-powered mapping tools with the option to keep track of your objectives and lead you to your destination, a Display Augmentation Guided Readout (DAGR) that indicates your current health and the location of life forms, a word processor, hacking tools, an enemy-detecting compass, magical equipment storage, aim assistant programs, a multimedia player, and a built-in flashlight. The PipBuck was designed and marketed by AppleCorps, a subsidiary of the Ministry Of Technology. The first version was released in

“Are you fucking joking?” Demanded Sparky's elderly blonde literature professor as he tore a page from the novel, prompting the entire classroom to laugh with their teacher at the object of his ire. “Next chance I get, I'm using this as toilet paper!”

“Did you like my cold open, followed by exposition necessary to understand the world and setting?” Wondered the golden-eyed half-Unicorn Lion who ignored their laughter, his sharp horn piercing through his long golden mane, as he helpfully prodded the older 'Gentlepony' into saying something more useful, something he was more likely to give a shit about.

“Kill yourself, you narcissistic egomaniac!”

“No. Now what did you think of the story, professor?” Sparky repeated, wondering where the teacher's maturity was. At least he didn't get far enough into the story to see the part where he wrote whatever random bullshit popped into his head to pad out the word count, like the part where he flirted with some babe by giving her his used culinary implements, the spontaneous musical number featuring slaves in a mine singing about how slavery is bad, the uncreative song covers, or the part where he repeated “Teleports behind you” and “Pow, right in the kisser” over sixty nine times each.

“Your assignment was to write a short story about the fall of Equestria over nine thousand words in length. Why is this novel OVER TWO MILLION words long, why does it take place two hundred years AFTER Equestria fell, and where are all the sex scenes?!”

“You said those who write over one million words get extra credit regardless of the story's content, I thought a modern setting would make for more exciting firefights unrestricted by military doctrines of the period and LunaCelestian Era laws involving war crimes while letting me drip-feed the audience trivia about the war as characters the audience has a reason to care about comment on what they read in computer terminals and the diaries of environmental storytelling skeletons, and... Bruh. Ew. I'm eleven.”

“That's no excuse! Some of my favourite fanfiction erotica writers online are suspected to be eleven!” Snapped the Professor. "Or fourty, and nowhere in between! You've completely misunderstood the assignment!”

“Really?” Sparky wondered. “What was the purpose of the assignment?”

“To test your ability to write exactly what I want you to write, nothing more, nothing less!”

Sparky raised an eyebrow. “And that is?”

“You're supposed to figure that out for yourself, college-boy! And to think, some call you a teen genius.”

“Yeah, when they see what I can do to computers,” Sparky smiled, his primary source of self-confidence, that which stood true no matter how many bitter adults spat bile at him. Did this idiot really think he'd be in any of these 'Equinities' classes if they weren't necessary for a passing grade? He was only here because learning to improve his writing sounded more useful than learning about underwater basket-weaving or earning a degree in The Subtextual Appeal of Six-Pack Shapnir. “Did you know I was hacking Pokemon roms and making basic HTML websites before I turned ten?”

“What's a rom? Never mind, none of that shit you just said matters to me. Your story gave me AIDS, son! Cancer and AIDS! And cancer with AIDS!”

“Really? So, what did you hate the most about my story?”

“Everything! A country brought low by war, instantly saved by a sufficiently bloodthirsty little shit from a bunker in the middle of fucking nowhere with fucking filly Twilight Sparkle at his side? Like that's ever going to happen! This story cannot happen, because Twilight Sparkle is already dead! What a load of-"

“It's fiction, does it really have to be believable?”

“Only if I don't like it! Then it has to be so scientifically sound, even hyper-specialized scientists couldn't nitpick anything in it, even with decades of free time to spend trying!”

“Are your favourite pieces of media this believable?” Sparky wondered.

“No, and they don't have to be, because I don't want to find fault with them!”

“Huh. If you say so.” Sparky wondered if any of this was worth it. But alas, this was the only way he could get genuine writing instruction out of this old fart. If he wrote something normal, it was ignored. But if he wrote something that pissed off the smug elitist critics whose entire life revolved around attacking and insulting and dogpiling artists who tried breaking into what they saw as 'their' field, no matter how insular and famously hostile they made it, he could ignore all the hate and focus on rare comments with something worth saying that could actually improve his future writing endeavors.

“Seriously, Sparky, your story is a load of shit! I know you just turned eleven yesterday, so my expectations were lowered, and they were already low for any work penned like a mindless meat-munching half-breed war-beast like you, but holy fuck! This novel isn't even remotely salvageable! What were you thinking, writing characters who actually have something to say about the random documents and audio logs and diary entries they find? They shouldn't respect the privacy or sanctity of the dead, they should nosily gobble up and binge all the exposition they can for no real reason, even if it never goes anywhere important, even in situations where it is clearly dangerous to do so, before moving on to the next exposition or opportunity for a firefight? Don't waste time characterizing your characters with their reactions to the stories of others, or differing interpretations of these stories, or inter-party arguments over clashing opinions of them! Just get to the next session of bullshitting the audience about moral greys and virtues, or get to the next clear-cut hyper-violent morally-black-and-white fight scene already!”

“Uh huh, and what else?” Sparky questioned.

“Don't write with an actual end goal in mind, that keeps the story from dragging on forever involving whatever ultimately-pointless wild goose chase you send the heroes on to pad out the word count! Don't make your character fucking SHRUG when he's asked how his PipBuck works, he needs to spend over a thousand words overexplaining every last possible detail and feature of the device so that we readers feel smart when we commit all of this to memory during chapter one and wait over two million words to see most of these features come up again, if at all! And don't establish your hero as a formerly bloodthirsty killer searching for redemption with an actual goal in life! That's fucking gay because I said so! You shouldn't give him anything holding him back from the bloodiest executions like having a filly to protect. And what were you thinking, giving him a vulnerable little filly to protect like that? His filly should be invincible, full of spunk and quips and well-deserved feelings of invincibility! Write him as a roaming killer with nothing better to do than go on killing sprees at a moment's notice based on nothing but rumors and the possibility of bloodshed ending in sick loot! Make him risk his life and the lives of friends he never truly cares about to search for shit he doesn't need for the sake of idiots he has no reason to care about with nothing on the line except stakes that rarely if ever truly matter!”

“If you say so,” Sparky shrugged.

“And what were you thinking when you made our POV character male? I don't want to get inside the head of a male, I want to be inside the head of a little mare!”

“I thought so,” Sparky struggled not to laugh.

“Two meaningful protagonists is too much to keep track of. Combine the murderous guy and little filly into one, already! In your rewrite, make the new hero a small, cute, helpless little mare with a tragic past involving a childhood full of being bullied for being a pussy! A real self-insert character for all the wimps out there, male or female. Then validate the fuck out of them by making her a bloodthirsty hyper-efficient ultra-tough near-invincible cold-blooded murderer who acts like she's controlled by a completionist tabletop gamer utterly detatched from the potential consequences of his actions whenever there isn't some hot female ass for her to stare at! If her friends are dying to death from poison because they chose to accompany her on a retarded killquest as she made all the wrong decisions, she should ignore their agony and focus on getting as much killing and looting done as possible before she has no reason not to move on to the next visually-exciting setpiece! And remember, your setpieces must be unusual, even if that comes at the cost of logic! Write like you're rolling dice with a random encounter table and shove meaningless samey fights into the middle of your story just to pad out the runtime! Make your heroine seek out opportunities to spill blood like I seek out hoof pics online, and give her the telekinetic force of two deities, and give her enough luck to get better dice rolls than a living four-leaved clover rolling loaded six-sided dice with a six on every face! Your hero is WEAK! WEEEAK! If I ever feel like your protagonist is in any sort of danger, be it physical danger or mental danger or spiritual danger or social danger, or any other kind of danger, you're not trying hard enough!”

“Good, good, keep it coming...” Sparky would be taking notes if he could afford a pen and paper. Then again, would he actually take any of this advice on board, when so much of it flew completely in the face of his vision for what he felt his story should be?

“Honestly, it's as if you're trying to piss us off for some reason! Just give up on your dreams of being a writer, little Lion. They're not for you.”

“Don't you have anything else to say about my story?”

“No. I'm done giving advice you're clearly not listening to, little beast. Writing isn't for you, it's for us. We herbivores are cultured, brilliant, wickedly intelligent with a nihilistic sense of humor! And the Nobles, even moreso! And that's something a straightforward and simple meat-munching monster like you couldn't possibly hope to understand. We wrap ourselves in fine clothes and manners like true intellectuals, while you naked monsters make do with a complete lack of any filter between your brain and mouth! This Stable isn't a place for little kids with something pitiful and pathetic like beasts with dreams. It's a place for good little worker-beasts who stay quiet and do as they're told!"

The crowd of herbivorous students cheered their teacher on, and Sparky wondered when society had gone so wrong in this apocalypse survival bunker. Maybe when those in charge of every “Stable” like this one decided this one should be forced to put a potion-based mutagen in the water supply, transforming every Earth Pony, Unicorn, and Pegasus into other animals. Well, aside from those immune to the concoction for a reason scientists had been executed for speculating on.

Looking back, he would call his memories of today a formative memory.

Because it was one of many memories that solidified his determination to leave this Stable's society some day soon, once he had what he needed to survive outside the walls of this gilded cage.

But then life came along, it gave him responsibilities, it took his father from him, and left him with an adopted sister to care for.

And though his dreams of leaving the false society of this prison for the brutality of the outside world faded, they never truly left him.