Fallout Equestria: Lionheart

Sparky hoped he'd said the right thing to Luna.

He hoped she felt better.

Maybe it was weird for him to say he wouldn't mind dating her, despite his father's desire to adopt her upon the death of her family, only for his death to pass her on to him.

Damn it, why couldn't he be a perfect being who never made mistakes, never said anything weird, and never fantasized about his adoptive sister?

Why couldn't he be a perfect being with enough power to single-pawedly move mountains and annihilate the entire Noble army in an instant before teleporting every Noble to hell himself?

Why did he have to have flaws?

Why couldn't he be a perfect god who could never be harmed by enemy fire, never had to fear about what tommorow might bring, and could shoot anything hyper-accurately with big guns before crushing it outright with overpowered magical might?

Why couldn't he be the greatest there had ever been, will ever be, and could ever be?

Why was he just one foolish Lion Unicorn hybrid burdened by a desire to save everyone, yet able to save no one at all?

Anyway, right now, he had to visit the bathroom and fake taking a shit.

He decided to walk into the disabled bathroom because it was bigger, quieter, cleaner, and overall, it was nicer.

His two colleagues loved to try using the staff bathrooms here standing up, failing miserably to do so due to a lack of phallic length, splattering the floor and seats with piss, but he didn't have to worry about that in this room because they weren't allowed in this one.

There was less of a chance that he'd be interrupted with a knock on the door.

He decided to enter the bathroom and close the door behind him, lock it, rear up on two legs, and lean back against the clean ceramic tiled wall.

Reaching for the dangling brown thread near him, he pulled it and released it, turning off the light inside the toilet's room.

A fool new to this workplace would have considered putting the toilet lid down, but there was a sensor inside the toilet to check how long it was down for, how long people sat down for, check how long they spent shitting and pissing, and send an electric current through the cold metal seat if the on-board AI was dissatisfied. The toilet was also tilted at an angle designed to induce incredible pain in anyone who sat upon it for too long, and the more you weighed, the less time you had to shit before the pain kicked in.

It was just like the toilets in the non-disabled rooms. Only it was more likely to be clean.

As someone with narcolepsy, he was allowed in here.

He had also been diagnosed with autism as a child, but he had no idea if that was accurate or not. He was pretty sure that out of the two of them, Luna was the autistic one.

Though he often felt like his big brutish beast body was his real disability in this stupid unjust society of sheep and liars.

Certainly more of a disability than his on-again off-again relationship with prolonged bouts of insomnia and practically-comatose nonconsensual sleeping sessions, even though it hovered over his shoulder like grim death's cruel spectre, waiting silently for its chance to strike. Any day now, it could strike him unconscious at the worst possible time in the worst possible place, and he could end up dead or robbed or both as a result.

There were close calls before.

Sometimes his narcolepsy caused him to fall asleep in the hallways, and sometimes it caused him to fall asleep in front of others.

But at the same time...

There were times when his narcolepsy wasn't currently fucking him over, and was only threatening to do so.

He couldn't say the same about his species.

It wasn't like he'd asked to be born or anything.

And it wasn't like he'd asked to be born part Lion, and part Unicorn.

But fate had plans for him, and he felt like he had no control over any of these plans.

If bitches didn't want him for how he looked, only to discard him once they'd tasted his meat, they hated him for how he looked and whose genes he carried.

Still, he was all alone now.

The darkness surrounding him...

It was comforting.

It was nice.

It was almost like a cool spring breeze on a warm day, probably.

That was probably what cool breezes felt like.

This room lacked heating, so it was cold, and that was a nice change of pace for this irritatingly stuffy Stable.

It was nice to get away from the irritating sounds of shitty lights and their goddamn burning brightness.

It was nice to get away from everyone else for a while.

Within darkness, he didn't have to pretend he was anyone else.

He didn't have to pretend to care that some sneering shit-fetishizing rich bastard or adamant supporter of the rich bastards would turn up their nose at an expression so “Edgy”.

He never cared about that sort of shit anyway.

He didn't care when the Nobles booed, because he'd seen what perversities made them cheer.

Their idols were astroturfed celebrities as false as a golden cow statue, their preachers were paid experts unwilling to lose their careers for telling the truth, and their enforcers were thugs who cracked down harder on mentions of democracy and freedom and anything other than aristocratic bureaucracy far harder than they cracked down on serial cub molesters.

What the hell was it that encouraged so many fools to eagerly worship these rich freaks and try so hard to become just like them in ideology and goals, even if they could never become as rich or famous as them?

After the hypocrisy he'd seen from each and every one of them, he struggled to even consider them living beings.

They certainly didn't act like individuals, with their own views.

They were drones who relied on their masters to think for them.

And if their masters allowed them to think they could treat poor people of lower classes however they wanted, they did.

It was as if they knew they'd profit more from an unjust system than they'd earn in a fair system, and didn't care about what it forced them to give up, or forced others to give up.

He wished there was a better authority in charge, to give these naturally-authoritarian fools the moral guidance they needed and a better system of laws than the ones that currently restricted everyone, but restricted his people more than any of them.

He wished there was no authority in charge, and living thinking breathing beings simply had rights and the means to defend them by whatever means necessary, willingly associating with those they liked for their own mutual aid while shunning degenerates and gunning down enemies.

A chaotic world of anarchy and strife would be better than this cruel dishonest society.

This society was a sham.

Why did he put up with any of it?

His mother was a beautiful face in his father's old photographs...

And his father had taught him to never hurt anyone who didn't deserve it, he said it was something he and his wife believed in...

But it seemed like so many bastards these days deserved everything he could ever do to them and worse.

What was he to do?

He was already working two jobs, or three if you considered prostitution a real job, or one if you considered his second job prostitution and therefore not a real job. Wasn't that enough?

He was doing good wherever he could, even if it meant going against unjust rules and regulations now and then... Wasn't that enough?

How was he to defend himself without hurting those hell-bent on his enslavement or destruction?

None of this madness made any sense.

He turned the light on and left the bathroom.

His shift would be over soon.

Thankfully, it concluded without anything interesting happening.

Except...

There was a black Sheep that walked in, looking at PipBuck models for a while, seemingly looking to replace her old PipBuck 3000. The sheep then sat down in the middle of the store, eating from a bag of Bobidos(TM) Extra Spicy corn chips between sucking down a bottle of Mountain Blue(TM) Baja Blast soda. Upon finishing her pricey meal from a Vending Machine owned by the Moca-Cola Monopoly, she stored the empty bottle and empty bag in her PipBuck before picking up a PipBuck 8K, which was like the PipBuck 3000 only blue and with a slightly bigger screen and slightly better processing speed, so naturally, it was more than four times the price. Merrily trotting over to Sparky, causing him to pay enough attention to her to notice the white shirt on her body with "Overthrow society, all hail Nobility" on the front, she demanded the PipBuck for free.

"Are you joking?" Sparky asked. "That thing's pricey for a reason. It's brand new, it's cutting edge, do you know how expensive it was to buy these in bulk?"

"Why are you making me pay for this?!" The cat demanded, as if this was some great injustice and words and logic couldn't convince her otherwise. "Why can't you give everything away for free?"

"No, seriously, is this a joke?" Sparky asked. "Which of us is actually having a stroke right now? Listen, buddy, I just work here, I have no control over what things cost."

"Why do you work?"

"Because a poor person like me needs to work to live."

"You should just ask your daddy for money whenever you need it," She smiled.

"Unlike you, my parents aren't rich. Never were, never will be. My parents are dead."

That wasn't what she wanted to hear, so she started reciting poetry for no reason. Well, to her, it was a form of poetry, practically a mantra, a prayer to the ignorance she worshipped. To everyone else, it was arrogance. "We must do away with the spurious notion that everyone must earn a living wage! We must cast aside the fallacious dogma that dictates people must earn what they want! What makes you feel entitled to make money?"

"I don't feel entitled to anything. When you wanted food, you bought it, right? Stuff costs time and effort to make, they're made out of parts that take time and effort to be built from resources that take time and effort to mine and manufacture, figuring out how to make better shit takes time and money, staying alive while doing that instead of doing steady labour costs money, not to mention the opportunity cost and the risk you're taking, so... if you want that machine from my store, buy it."

"But whyyyyyyy?" She whined.

"Because this is a store," Sparky explained, as if a tiny little cub was before him, rather than an embarassingly old thirty-something sheep that really should have known better by the time it became a teenager.

"It shouldn't be a store! Stores are exploitative! They should share all their profits with the workers!"

"Why do that, when workers don't share the losses either?" Sparky raised an eyebrow.

"Huh?" She was completely stumped.

"Every night, this business pays a janitor to come in here and clean the floors. If there's nothing unusually hard to clean, he is paid his standard rate. If somebody vomited or shat themselves in the store floor, he is paid his standard rate. If this business made a million sales today, he would be paid his standard rate. And if this business made no money for months and months on end, he would keep being paid his standard rate until the business went under and he had to be fired. He could run his own cleaning service that can be phoned up to clean places on demand, he could take ownership of his own labour and start his own business, eating all the profits and eating all of any losses. His labour and how to manage it would be his own responsibility, unless he paid someone else to handle this for him. But he chose to work here, for a steady paycheck, because he wants the certainty of knowing he will always get a certain amount of money each month, in the good times and the bad times."

"Yeah, well... uh... Why do businesses need so much money, anyway?"

"Businesses need to make money by meeting the needs of the customers to keep afloat. It needs to make money before it can afford to keep the lights on, pay rent and taxes on the store's land, pay taxes on the business's continued existence, pay for our wages, pay the wages of the janitor, pay for the training of any new employees, and pay for all the crap in this store right now and whatever we'll want in here in the future. It needs to make money so that it can afford to stay afloat even when times are tough and it's not making as much money as it used to. Even if it's making no money at all, if the manager is rich, he or she can afford to keep this place afloat. It's the dream of getting rich from being an entrepreneur, along with the allure of owning your own labour, that makes us take the risks involved in being real entrepeneurs."

"Well then, after you make enough money to cover your costs for the month, you should give everything away for free!" The sheep insisted. "Hoarding excess money is evil!"

"Hoarding excess money is called saving up for a rainy day. You know, a bad day where you're making no money? If we did what you said, who would willingly pay money for anything in this store when waiting for everything to become free would always seem like a better option for them? You know, until our business collapses because nobody was buying our stuff, and everyone was waiting for us to just give it away."

"Animals won't do that!" She insisted petulantly, foalishly stomping the ground.

"They obviously will, said the retail worker to the... Remind me again, what makes you qualified to think you know better than me when it comes to economics?" Sparky asked her.

"I've been at college for ten years! I know everything there is to know about how evil and exploitative businesses are!" She insisted.

"Oh, so you hate zero-hour contracts?" He asked.

"Huh?" She tilted her head like a confused dog. "I've never heard of those before in my life!"

"You know, that thing where you have a job, on paper, but you're only paid for the hours you work and you've not no guarantee how many hours you will work per day?" He asked.

"I've never heard of that but it sounds lovely! The less time you have to spend working, the better!"

He rolled his eyes. "Oh, sure, zero hour contracts are wonderful, unless you've got bills to pay and no fucking clue whether you'll be working zero hours tomorrow or too damn many, meaning you've got no idea how much income you'll have at any given time."

"You shouldn't need money to live!" She insisted.

"Really?" He wondered. "Then how should I be able to afford to own land and eat?"

"The government should own all land and feed you!"

"Putting the land argument aside for now, who should it take the food from to feed me?"

"Those greedy fucking food-hoarding farmers!" She screeched. "Those filthy peasants must have everything taken from them at gunpoint, they must starve so my kind can feast!"

"Riiight... As if your people aren't feasting already. Why should they be farmers, if there's no profit in it for them?"

"Because the government wants them to farm!"

"Should these farmers have the right to pursue other, more profitable careers?"

"No! They should do as they're told for the good of our society, or be sent to a work camp and worked to death farming anyway!"

"That's the kind of person you are? That's the kind of society you want? A society full of slavery?"

"Yes!"

"But slavery is bad!" He pointed out.

"Slavery's only bad when you meat-eaters do it! You invented slavery, you deserve to be slaves! That's only fair!" She insisted.

"That's not fair at all! Also, do you really want a society that has total control over what everyone eats? Wow. What if people don't like what the government feeds them, or how much they're fed?"

"They should suck it up and put up with it!" She insisted. "The farmers must be forced to farm, the builders must be forced to farm, every worker-class peasant must have a gun put to their heads by us Nobles so they will be forced to do as they are told, for the sake of glorious stability! Stability at any cost!"

"Why should they sacrifice their freedom of choice over the course of their lives?"

"So I won't have to work or pay for anything, duh!" She insisted. "Fuck freedom! Only filthy rebels want freedom! You know, the bad kind, the kind the radio calls terrorists, not the good kind like me and everyone who wants the system overthrown."

"Wait, you want this system overthrown?" He blinked. "But you lot are in charge of this system!"

"We want it overthrown and replaced with one we're even MORE in charge of!" She shrieked. "As a Noble, I am a proud Utopianist."

"The fuck's that supposed to mean?"

"It means I want a Utopia, and anyone who disagrees with me doesn't want one!"

"You really think you're special enough to create a utopia, just by trying hard enough, no matter what everyone else wants or thinks?"

"Yes!"

"So your idea of a Utopia is one where you're in charge of everything, huh? Sounds more like a caste system with slavery and extra steps to me. What exactly makes a world like that a utopia?" He wondered.

"It's a utopia for me and Nobles like me, and that's all that matters! I want a utopia for me and my fellow Utopianists, and a nightmarish Dystopia for everyone else!"

"Really? What makes you matter so much more than anyone else? Do you produce more food others eat, pay more taxes that feed others, or serve more hours in service of others?"

"No, I've spent more years than the average prole being turned into a genius expert at college! That makes me an intellectual qualified to manage everything!"

"Riiight..." He wasn't sure what to say to this sheep. "Listen, that PipBuck you're holding was designed by a team of expert designers. The crack-proof touchscreen? Designed by an expert in touchscreens. The patent for the plush material used for the interior was purchased from a private inventor. Marketing experts were consulted for the advertisements that tell everyone how great this is in the most effective way possible, without outright lying, because that could get the company sued. Chips used in the device's creation were manufactured by smaller companies that specialize in small-size high-power consumer electronics chips. The best of the best, at the top of their respective fields, pooled their collective knowledge for pay to produce this marvel of engineering that would have been fundamentally inconceivable years ago. If you went back in time with even a shit PipBuck on your wrist, the ponies there would consider it as alien and futuristic as the magical laser rayguns and fully-automatic AK-style 50 BMGs they sell at Beagle's Big Guns. The PipBuck you want has supply shortages, because everyone wants it right now. The supply can't keep up with the demand, and we'd be sold out in seconds if we changed our price to make it lower than our competitors. Imagine a world where we just let anyone who shows up take our entire stock of these on the cheap, before auctioning it off at an even higher price once nobody can rely on us to have it in stock any more! That's called scalping. But by keeping the price up, we put a high price on owning it, making it possible for those who want it so badly, they'd pay anything. We sell older PipBucks for a lot cheaper, because while having one could be called a necessity, owning the best one is a luxury, like wearing a solid gold diamond-encrusted wristwatch. If this PipBuck was something just about any of us could afford, scalpers could buy hundreds, then sell each one for a massive profit when the common consumer has nobody else to turn to. But soon enough, the supply-demand radio won't be as fucked. Why? Because soon enough, newer PipBuck models with different, superior features will exist, as more companies and inventors test out new innovations. We can vote with our wallets to decide which innovations are valuable to us, and which ones are not. Eventually, fewer people will want this PipBuck model. Eventually, we will want this gone more than we want to make the maximum possible profit from selling it, because keeping it around will take up store space we'll want filled with more profitable things. Eventually, this PipBuck will be cheap. But it will never be free unless we have nothing to gain from keeping it and something to gain from tossing it away, okay? We'd sooner toss it in the trash or scrap it for parts that could be used to repair the PipBucks of others. I hope you enjoyed an economics lesson that won't put you in debt you'll spend the rest of your life paying off."

She didn't seem to understand any of what he just said. "I didn't understand any of what you just said, money-worshipper, but I know you're just saying that because you're just greedy!"

Sparky's blood boiled, and he felt the urge to display that in a language she understood, but he restrained himself. "You might not know what responsibilities are or what it means to have someone else rely on you, but I've got an adopted daughter relying on me to bring money home at the end of each day."

"You shouldn't have kids or adopt them, they should die and decrease the surplus population! We need another Holodomor! Only Nobles like me should survive!"

"You realize you'd all starve to death if we weren't around growing food for your government to steal, and you'd all be poor if you didn't have us doing all your real work only to be robbed by the tax collector, right?"

"Nuh-uh!" She replied petulantly, except she took about two hundred extra words of cruft to say it, mixed in with a lot of arrogant assertions of supposed rightness and cheap shame-slinging tactics while babyishly pooh-poohing him over and over for not agreeing with him. By the time it was over, he'd counted more than six logical fallacies from her, seven baseless accusations, and eight attempts to write off any dissent on his part as a pathology, a mistake, a mental error, a symptom of some disease or disorder. This lunatic who considered free food for her more important than the lives of innocents seemed to genuinely think you'd have to be crazy to not agree with her, even if you were one of the innocents whose lives she'd ruin for profit, power, or simple cruel fun.

Sparky rolled his eyes. "You're not fooling anyone, you freeloading thief. Get the fuck out of here."

"Aha!" She pointed right at him. "You're silencing me and taking my free speech away by removing me from a public place!"

"No, that's what you lot do to us when you send the cops after us, call us terrorists for raising our voices against you, send us to prison, harass our bosses into firing us if we have any, and remove our right to give and receive money digitally if we don't have bosses so that we can't make a living on our own. You use violence, censorship, and terrorism against us, and when we criticize that, you call it terrorism and beg for the government to save you from it with overwhelming authoritarian tyrannical force. This is a store, and if you're not going to spend money here or browse for something you might buy, you don't belong here. We've got a sign in the back that says we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, and I don't feel like servicing you. Besides, don't you lot regularly say censorship is fine when private companies or individuals do it?"

"Yes, but... It's only okay when we do it to you! Not when you do it to us!"

"This is a store. We're here to sell shit and make money so we don't starve. Your ideology won't find supporters here unless they're so fed up with their job and boss, they've stopped caring about their livelihoods. Besides, do you actually believe in free speech?" Sparky raised an eyebrow.

"Yes... with restrictions." She said dishonestly.

"So then you don't believe in free speech at all," He understood.

"I do! I just don't believe in freedom from consequences for your speech!" She insisted. "Everyone who doesn't agree with me must be punished! They must lose their right to privacy, their right to work, their right to own anything, and their right to do business! They must be slandered and beaten with clubs and stabbed with ice picks and bombed and killed for the good of our society! They must not be allowed to spread their ideas or speak freely, or else people might believe them and want what they want instead of what I want! They must be silenced and hurt and punished and forced to apologize for dissenting or punished harder! They must be used as examples to show the world what happens when you resist or reject our authority! ...For the good of our society!"

"Oh?" Sparky raised an eyebrow. "I know you mean your control over society when you say our society, but let me get something straight... If you make it clear that you're an enemy of me, my people, my freedom, my fundamental rights as a sentient being, and the civilization the ponies built before your kind took over, and you make it clear that you consider violence a legitimate part of the political process necessary to keep unacceptable thoughts from spreading, you make it clear that you want me dead or starving for the sake of your caste system, and you make it clear that leaving you alive lets you continue your war on my rights and constantly push society further in your desired direction, what consequences are you owed?"

"Nothing violent! Only filthy poors are owed violence if they do not respect my authority! I shouldn't be a part-time cheesemaker at a pop-up store my rich daddy owns, I should be important!"

"Wait a second, you're a cheesemaker?" He laughed. "No cheesemaker could afford the clothes you're wearing."

"Daddy only pays for all my shopping trips if I keep a steady job down." She sighed. "But why should it matter if I get fired for refusing to work sometimes? Daddy only has to do another phone call to get me another job! He's important, he can do that! But I should be more important! I should get to decide who lives and dies! I believe everyone who doesn't believe what I believe should be silenced by cops and private businesses, attacked in the streets, or LINED UP AGAINST A WALL AND SHOT!"

"So then why should I respect your rights?"

"Because I'm more important than you!"

"In your dreams, tyrant." He rolled his eyes. "There are others relying on me, and you'll never know what that feels like because- You know what? Fuck this, you can't be saved if facts and logic mean nothing to you. I'm going on my break, bother someone else."

And so, as she turned around and screeched nonsense at his co-workers who desperately wished she would leave, he returned to the shitter as he wondered what disorder made that sheep like this. He spent his time alone thinking about the future, and what a future in a Stable like this truly meant for his future, and for Luna's.

It wasn't as if he could just leave the Stable. The collar around his neck would detonate if he tried to leave. Luna's collar might detonate, too, if the Noble in charge of that felt like being particularly Noble about it. And by Noble, he meant Evil, because all Nobles are Evil. They might insist that Noble is a synonym for good and therefore they are good, they might insist that their enemies believe in the exact opposite of Nobility and therefore must be evil, but when have pedophiles ever been honest? When have serial molesters ever been honest? When have cub-murderers ever been honest? Ordinary Nobles on the street proudly supported their corrupt governors as they voted in ever-crueller monsters to take and take and take from the meat-eaters. That was unjustifiable. All those old-money families that had purchased control over this Stable would be nothing without their loyal brainwashed voting caste there to enjoy some (but not all) of the spoils of their war on the poor.

He thought about Cymbal...

Would anyone risk having a public funeral or two for him?

Would the cops allow it?

Would that bitchy sheep call the cops on him for what he said today, and have him arrested?

Eventually, his shift was up, and he was forced to move on with his life.

Soon...

He was going to find this Twilight Sparkle mare, and see how deep this rabbit hole went.