Fallout Equestria: Luck

By Gun Shot

Chapter 2: Ruin

"of all the things that could have happened, this is the. Worst. Possible. Thing."

We had hunkered down in some wreckage of carts on the beach. Now that I think back, that must have been the caravan that started this all. Emerald had cried himself to sleep, so we stayed the rest of the night there. I couldn’t sleep, the scene of my father laying in the grass, staining it red, his eyes lifeless, and my mother and sister burnt to black char filling my mind. So I went poking around the wreckage for supplies. I had grabbed the bag Emerald had on my way out, but most of the contents had spilled out on my way out or had been left behind when Emerald was digging through it. It was picked clean, all that was left were some glass balls and some books.

In my frustration and pain I kicked the stack of books down, they made a hollow sound when they hit the ground. That got my attention, as these wagons had had their wheels taken, they were flat on the sand. Sliding the books aside I spotted a loose board. Lifting it up revealed a locked metal box labeled ‘Black Book’. I had no intention of sleeping, so I spent the rest of the night struggling to open the box.

The sun rose, or I think it did at least, hard to tell when the sky is covered in a mass blanket of gray. There was no blue sky, just gray clouds, ashy water, and blackened sand, were it not for the colors of Emerald and I, I'd have thought I’d gone colorblind. The atmosphere was just as depressing, the air out here seemed to sit heavy, like a weighted blanket, it didn’t feel right. When Emerald woke up, he was very confused. Looking around like he just woke from one nightmare into another. I explained to him what happened, and he took it rather well. He still sobbed for the next hour, but I was expecting worse.

After comforting him, I went back to the box, I had long since given up on breaking it open, and I had no picks to pick it. All I had was- and then it hit me, I may not have brought my toolbox with me, but I always bring my screwdriver. This, by the way, is no ordinary screwdriver, I modified this screwdriver to be a compact multitool in my boredom. It consisted of varying screwdriver sizes, a terminal access tool(never used it but it looks cool), and some strange key-looking thing that I put in because a hammer wouldn’t fit.

I pulled it from my tail, yes I store my screwdriver in my tail, don’t judge me it works wonders. And not that kind, damn it, get your head out of the gutter. Anyway, this screwdriver has many tools built into it, including a smaller screwdriver. So I placed that into the lock ever so delicately and prepared my expert unicorn magic to pick it. Wait… I’m an earth pony, and this obviously isn’t a dream. So I just jammed the screwdriver further into the lock, snapping the inner mechanism. Click. The box popped open and out poured icy cold fog. I waved the fog away to reveal… “What the buck?!” it was a hideous monstrosity of a book, I’m pretty sure it had teeth on it in several places and it felt like it was made from pony skin. “What the buck is this?? And WHY was it locked up and not BURNED?? Sweet Celestia, WHY DID THEY HAVE THIS??” Emerald startled from my sudden shouting. I picked up the ‘book’, tossed it in the air, and bucked it as far away as I could. Something made my eyes follow it as it fell, noting where it landed. At the time I attributed it to disgust and wanting to make sure I didn't step on it later.

I looked towards the pass back home and quickly dove back into the shelter of the covered wagons. At the entrance back home stood two of the devils who invaded, one red and the other light blue, looking around as if searching for someone. Oh, Luna, they know we’re here, I thought, they began to creep down the hill, towards the beach, towards the caravan, they saw me, we’re going to die like the others and it's all my fault. But if they knew I was here, they definitely weren’t smart, both of them went around towards the front of the caravan rather than trap us in. I was smarter than them.

“Come on, Em, we gotta go,” I pulled him along until he got up and trotted alongside me. “What’s happening?” he asked, i motioned for him to be quiet. Together we snuck out the back of the carts and I started running. Whether it was to see if the raiders were following us or to see if Emerald was coming, I have no idea. But something made me stop. I turned around and did both, Emerald was slowly catching up, clearly still tired, and the raiders had just spotted us and were now tripping over books trying to run through the carts. Then something caught my eye, poking up from the darkened sand was a horrible bunch of flesh amassed into a book. Without thinking, I swept it up and tangled it into my tail. Then grabbed Emerald, he was too slow. Throwing emerald on my back I ran like our lives depended on it, which they did.

My legs ached after about ten minutes, I slowed to a trot, then a walk. We had to have lost them now, I at least couldn’t see them, and the surprisingly gentle waves washed away our tracks. I slid Emerald off my back, thanking the water for the cover. Then we walked, even if we lost them, there was no guarantee that was permanent. Two hours of silence, nothing but the sound of the waves. What once was a gentle, calming noise, had become an annoying static like that of the radios back home. Beyond that, it had become a constant reminder that nothing was normal anymore, and never would be. Just as the depressing, monotone, grayscale landscape sucked all hope from me, only I could still hear the waves when I closed my eyes. Tears had again filled my eyes as the waves carried me back to the days when all was good.

The days when birds sang their songs, filled with hope. The days when ponies would talk, filled with love. The days when foals would run, not out of fear. Heck, even the days when Ruby schemed to find out what I knew. Every wave brought back memories and details. Every wave filled with sorrow. Every wave crashed down, like the world I knew. Every wave filled with hate for the raiders. And yet every wave filled with tranquility.

We continued to walk, when Emerald got tired I’d carry him, and when I got tired we’d rest. But we didn’t speak, there wasn’t anything to talk about, if we talked about what just happened? we’d cry. if we talked about the old days? we’d cry. if we talked about the future? Well, that looked just as bleak as our surroundings. So we just walked. We encountered nothing for a long while, no ponies, animals, food, not even grass, there was nothing but long stretches of sand. Sure there was the ocean on one side and the unknown on the other, but frankly, I didn’t want to look over the hill that lined the beach. There weren’t any birds singing either, it was eerily quiet the whole walk, aside from the waves. So we had nothing to distract us from the fact that we didn’t have any food and the ravenous rumbling of two hungry stomachs.

A day or two of uneventful, silent, torturous walking later, Emerald spotted something in the distance, he stopped and stared with awe. I turned to look at what he saw, my jaw dropped at the sight. Just over the hills stood towers of brick, cement, and metal shooting high into the sky, like slim mountains. Imperfections of various sizes covered each as if a giant had taken bites out of them. The battered remains of signs and advertisements jutted out of the beautiful buildings. It was like looking at an old painting. “A city!” I exclaimed, “like the ones from dad’s stories! Maybe even Ponyville!”

Filled with blind hope and ignorance, I ran toward it, Emerald following. I was expecting to find civilization and food. My father had said that Ponyville was a welcoming place to survivors, always helping those in need. Instead, we found a graveyard, the streets were crowded with wagons and rubble. Walls were constructed out of random vehicles and rocks, metal and wood poles sticking out of the tops of them like spikes. A shudder went down my spine as my gaze climbed the posts, topping each one was a skull, several had multiple. One of them was recent, meat still clung to the bones, and the stench of death filled the air. I hurled, my empty stomach only sending up stomach acid. My throat burned. “What kind of psychos did this??” I screamed, “ isn’t this place supposed to help ponies??”.

I forced myself to look away from the wall, my gaze instead was pulled to the towers. They were much bigger than I thought, reaching upward as if they wanted to touch the sky itself, to taste its blue nectar, only to be blocked by the dark clouds. It felt strangely welcoming, like looking at the mountains at home. At that notion, I turned to look back, I could still see the mountains. They were so small from this distance, like hills, only these hills could reach higher than the buildings, they knew the taste of the sky’s sweet blue. I chuckled, realizing how far we had traveled. “Alright Emerald, time to find a way in,” I turned toward him. He was giving me a look that said, ‘you want to go in there? Behind the skull walls?’ I just smirked, “what’s the worst that could happen?” He rolled his eyes but went towards the building. He pointed at a wall, or rather, a small hole in the wall. A window, a glassless window, perfect size for us to climb through.

The building was empty, aside from a whole bunch of metal desks that had been pushed against every door like barricades. A second wall of desks formed a circle in the center of the room. “Ah,” I sighed, “a perfect place to rest, protected from whoever put the heads up there”. I could feel Emerald’s glare, but I wasn’t sleeping in the open here. I ran over to the circular barricade, using the running start to jump over and in. I twisted midair to land in the perfect position to just lay and relax.

Crunch is not the sound one wants to hear upon jumping into anything but a pile of leaves. Worse, this was the distinct crunch of breaking bones. My first instinct was to check my own bones, they all seemed functional. I lay back, relaxing again. Only I couldn’t relax, something was uncomfortably poking into my back. I tried to ignore it, shifting to a different spot. Emerald came over and looked into the desk walls, a look of horror and shock grew in his eyes. It was then that I realized whose bones had crunched. I shot up to my hooves, bones crunching as I stepped around trying to avoid them. Skeletons, a pile of bones, I’d been laying on, destroying, bones. Emerald was looking at me, his eyes seemed to say, ‘look before you leap.’

After repeatedly apologizing to the bones and the spirits that once called them home. I settled for sleeping in the far corner of the room, away from the unblocked doors. It had taken the better part of two hours to fall asleep. The first time I’d slept since the incident a few days ago. So the nightmare that followed was packed full of choices, and it used them all…

All was dark, void of anything but the floor and me. The floor was just as dark as the void around me. I call out, but I don’t even hear an echo. I was alone, completely alone. I wanted to run, to find an end to this darkness, to find a light. But my hooves wouldn’t move. Growing on the ground in front of me was a white shadow. There was light behind me. I went to turn, but instead, the void itself rotated, revealing a small fire. I began to walk forward, I wanted to stop, I knew what I’d see. I focused my entire willpower to stop my legs from moving, but the void just brought the fire to me.

It grew closer and closer, it was no longer a candlelight, it was a torchlight. A campfire. A bonfire. A pillar of fire shot high into the pitch black sky. It created no light and no warmth, and yet it burned to be this close. My fetlocks began to singe. I watched my coat burn away on my legs, the thin line of fire slowly climbing to my chest. Under, my skin itself seemed to bubble and melt, the pain was excruciating. I looked up, unable to bare seeing that. Only I didn’t see the barn, outside it, I was in the barn. There, standing in the void was… me? I then realized I was not me, I was Flu. I was betrayed, left for dead, and above all else, burning to death. I tried to jump out of the roost, and get clear of the fire. If I could save dream Flu, maybe I could forgive myself. But I couldn’t move. I turned, or rather, the world turned. In front of me, I saw the broken, burned-

The world dissipated like a cloud of smoke. I was left in the void again. Alone. But not alone, there was a bubble floating towards me. I stepped towards it, it seemed to glow faintly. I reached out, touching the floating ball, and as expected it popped. Only, it didn’t pop so much as explode, blasting me back and leaving a white cloud behind. The cloud condensed into a square screen, a window. Through it, I could see Flu, but she wasn’t burning, she was dragging our mother out the back door of a flaming barn. A shadow loomed over her, created by fires I could not see. A cage floated into the view of the window as it dissipated. Again, I was alone.

I woke with a yelp, still processing what I had just seen, and wondering why I could still feel the burn. Emerald was already awake, assuming he had slept at all. He was sitting by the window we had climbed through, staring back at the distant mountains. I decided it was best to leave him be and poke around the building a bit. There wasn’t much on the first floor, just a bunch of skeletons and the walls of desks, but there were stairs. One set up, one set down. Curiosity led me up first, the second floor was empty. Scratch marks on the floor suggested this is where the desks came from, and piles of office supplies sat in the corner, collecting dust, with them were broken terminals, beyond repair.

The third floor wasn’t much better, though only half of the desks were missing. But those that were there had been piled up in the center of the room, almost as if they’d been dropped there. The rubble and the hole in the ceiling told me, they had. The next floor had a gaping hole in the floor, it looked familiar, almost like I’d seen it on the floor below. I made a mental note that this probably meant the upper floors weren’t as stable as those below. I slowly and carefully crept up the third set of stairs. This one was blocked at the top by a door with a single hole at eye level. The door had once been chained shut, but something left it shattered on the ground. Or at least, it was chained shut, something had left the chain on the ground, shattered.

Opening the door had not been easy, something was barricading the other side, making me all the more curious about what was within. A few good bucks to the door and it opened just enough for me to squeeze through, a tight fit. I recoiled when I saw the barricade I had pushed past, a skeleton held in place by its metal armor. A single hole in its skull lined up perfectly with the hole in the door. The rest of the room was filled with machinery, terminal-like structures built into desks covered with switches and lights. Whatever purpose they once had was now lost to time, it hurt me to think of that, somehow more so than the skeleton soldier. In the center of the room, however, sat one terminal. Its screen still glowed that beautiful green color, like a melon’s shell. I practically leaped over to it, I needed to know what secrets it held.

Back home we only had two terminals, one was used to record our harvest each year, and the other was to replace it in case it was ever damaged beyond repair. In my spare time, I’d fiddle with the spare, I had learned how to speak its language, how to make it do what I wanted. After all, it wasn’t like anything would ever break the main one, the thought hit me that both terminals were probably reduced to scrap by now. Regardless, I had one right here to crack. I opened it up and was hit with an unfamiliar screen, a password. My head slumped in disappointment.

I slowly made my way to the next level, grumbling to myself about secrets and passwords. There was another door here, but it was busted off its hinges and dented inward. The broken doorway led to the roof of the building. A sickly breeze blew in, sending shivers down my back. Somehow the rancid air was worse up here than it was filtering through the shattered remains of windows. About halfway up the stairs I heard a distant rumbling, short yet loud. It echoed through the city. From the top of this tower I had a pretty good view of what lay ahead of me, though only in a straight line. Rubble and piled carts lay strewn everywhere. Blockades had been fashioned out of piles of them. The towers surrounding mine were all much taller, obstructing my view of the other streets.

The roof itself had very little on it, there were large metal boxes with broken fans inside them, I tried to imagine the harmonious whirr they once emitted. There were more of those armored skeletons, frozen in place like gargoyles, I averted my eyes from them. Seeing the bones of a pony felt like seeing the pony naked, it just wasn’t right, it felt… intrusive. There were also two strange machines. One of the machines looked like a terminal, only without the screen, coming from the top of it was a thick wire that snaked its way to the edge of the roof and off the edge. The wire crossed accross the allyway and connected to the neigboring tower, climbing the wall in such a way that it felt intentionally wrong. The wire looked as if somepony had put it up on such a path that nopony could see it from the inside and barely from the outside.

The other strange device was a large one, it easily took up half of the roof. The arched bottom half was covered in dark metal, that was covered in a faded blue paint, chipped and peeling. Above that was a rich wood, seemingly untouched by the years and destruction that had devastated the world. Draped over top the odd shaped thing was a wonderful, gorgeous, colorful fabric. Like a massive blanket, it covered every inch of the top, in some parts it spilled over the side like a graceful waterfall. Just looking at the untattered remains of cloth and the beautifully painted, even when faded, wooded section filled me with a sense of wonder. I climbed the outstretched boarding ramp, but the entrance was covered by the cloth. I tried to move it aside but it was surprisingly heavy, I struggled to pull it up enough to squeeze under it.

The inside was constructed entirely of wood. Poking their tips out of unseen windows were cylinders of steel, strangely menacing in appearance. Barrels were stacked in one corner, crates of metal balls were stacked in another. Everything was caked in dust, clearly nopony had been in there in a long time, likely not since the skeletons. As much as I wondered what those were, I didn’t have time to investigate. I continued through the structure, there was a set of stairs that led to a tent-like room, likely the roof of the structure just covered in the cloth. My eyes were drawn to a fancy door. I walked passed several more of those dark metal cylinders.

The door was a lavender colored wood with golden inlays, the design perfectly matched the red tinted wood of the rest of the structure. It was obvious the door led to something important, so of course I busted it open. Or, actually… it wasn’t locked, I just pushed it open… Inside was very dusty, fancy decor, a mahogany desk with more gold inlays, shelves covered in books, pots full of withered flowers, fancy cushioned chairs, a big window from floor to ceiling on the back wall. On the desk sat a terminal and a small vase, the vase had a singular, not withered, blue flower. I reached out to pick up the flower, but it was covered in a surprisingly clean and hard to see glass cover, held to the desk by a hinge and electronic lock. The terminal, still functional, was my next target. This one had no password, and only three uncorrupted files.

The first entry was an audio file, I played it. “Captain’s Log #784:,” the voice sounded feminine, “can’t we actually do something important? We have enough firepower on this vessel to turn the tide of the war, but no, we’re stuck running these luna-damned cover-ups for the Ministry of Propoganda. Anyway, just in case those suits decide to actually listen to this, today’s mission was successful, another striped bastard sent off to the MoM. Yes, I know that wasn’t the objective, we were only supposed to shut the press down, but hell if i’d let that bitch get away. And yes, we were not noticed, as far as the public knows there was a freak accident and the press had to shut down.” there was a pinging noice over the mic, “oh, lovely, another bucking mission”. The log ended with a click, so I opened the second file.

The second file was a message, “

NEW OBJECTIVE

Captain Gold, you are to shut down Heart Radio, located in Vanhoover,
they have not answered any of our requests to cease in the spreading of misinformation
Remember to use upmost caution to remain undetected by the general public, this should not be a problem for you with your camouflaged airship.
It is also with my deepest apologies to inform you that due to budget cuts we cannot provide you with any tools beyond what you already have.
Hopefully you have found that terminal key you had lost on mission #776.
Yes, we actually listen to those, and would appreciate it if you controlled your temper, we’d hate to see you removed from your position.

“. A terminal access key? I have one of those! The fact that it took me that it took me as long as it did to realize that was embarrassing. I had what I needed to get in that terminal all along.

The third file ran a code that unlocked the electronic lock on the vase cover. Why there was so much security on this one flower was beyond me, but I shrugged, might as well take it. The flower was beautiful, ten petals and four stamen it had a faint blue glow to it. I positioned the blue flower behind my ear for safe keeping. A little bit of pollen floated down, causing me to sneeze.

Author's Note

Footnote: Level Up.

New Perk: Keen Eye - your aim with ranged weapons is equal to that of a sniper pony, increased chance to crit in SATS on targets over 50 meters away.

Quest Perk: What a Laugh - You have encountered killing joke and it has blessed you with a joke destined to end in death.

Quest Perk: Lousy Luck - even a whole patch of four leaf clovers couldn’t bring you good fortune.

credit of Fo:E goes to kkat, it was one of the most inspiring stories i ever read, most of my OCs live in the world they created
and hasbro obviously owns mlp