Fallout Equestria: The Ajax Directive

Stone Vane

After being called so many terms in the days since waking up, more often then not 'Strange Flank', it was oddly refreshing to be addressed by my name. Even if the voice behind it was raspy and a bit muffled through the fabric of the jumpsuit, for the briefest of moments things seemed normal, like returning to a familiar house. It wasn't quite like the subtly terrifying familiarity from looking at the Nightmare Moon card, no emotions followed the realization beyond confident familiarity in my identity. I waited for just a second, hoping against hope that something else would fall in place. Remembering my name might help with me remembering somepony else talking to me, or recalling a purpose, or even my destiny behind the cutie-mark I bore.

But nothing came. Just a single piece of the puzzle that was me falling into place, but revealing nothing else.

“How do you know my name?” I asked the mysterious stranger, not willing to show even the slightest hint of the realization.

“You don't remember anything?” The ghoul pegasus turned to the side, kicking the ground in frustration. “Sweet Merciful Luna!” He gave a long drawn out sigh mixed with a bit of a growl, cursing a bit more under his breath.

“You said you were to take me to Baltimare. Where is it, where is Baltimare, why should I care about that city?” I took a few steps toward the side, looking him right in the cloth covered face.

“The situation is different now.” He brought his head back up, meeting my gaze once more. “Since you don't actually remember anything, this makes things a lot harder for both of us.”

“What do you mean? Who sent you?”

“I'm not allowed to disclose that. My orders said that if you were suffering from amnesia, I am to assist you in whatever endeavor you were performing here in this valley as supply and support.”

Wonderful. I let out a grunt in annoyance, turning on my hooves to face my two friends. Their response was initially wordless, though Spice Chaser broke that with a wave of his hoof, motioning for me to come closer to the duo.

“Stone Vane? What kind of name is that?” Amber asked aloud as I dipped my head next to theirs in a triangular huddle. “If you're one of those ponies that picked up a new name after getting their cutie mark, I'd expect something like Knife Spin or something like that!”

“The base of the knife on his cutie-mark resembles an old weather-vane Amber.” The unicorn replied in my stead. “They're still used today by a few crazy ponies to track the 'ever changing weather'.” My unicorn friend punctuated his sarcasm with a roll of his eyes before focusing them on me. “Does this bring back anything, your family, job, where you were born?”

I shook my head. “No, no. I just know that's my name, it's just...that's all.” Frustration filled my brain from not recalling anything else. “Do you two know anything about Baltimare?”

“Half of it's radiated to tartarus, the other half I heard is part of some cult. I also hear that lots of Zonies come out from there every few years, even had one of them join us back when I was with the gang at the Marshalling yard. Shit shot though, didn't last two weeks.” The ex-raider mare trailed off with that.

“I don't know about any cults, but ghouls...” Spice Chaser grimaced a bit. “Some of them don't work right in the head. They typically got caught in the bombs at the end of the War and the Zebra's necromantic spells keep them in a state between alive and dead. Most of them are hyper obsessed on a certain desire or something from before the war. They confuse living ponies for dead ones all the time.”

“What about the ones that came after the war?” The mare cut in. “Think he could be one of them?”

“No way. Look at him.” All three of us raised our head from the huddle, giving him a shot as the mysterious ghoul had detached his massive rifle from his saddle, giving it a deep inspection as it lay on the ground. “That's old Equestrian wartime tech. And more importantly, that suit. It's a dead-ringer of the old Shadowbolts outfits they used back in the war, just like on the old Ministry posters. Probably an old wartime grunt that was a fanboy.”

I didn't know quite what he meant in his last sentence. “Shadowbolts?”

“Remember how we told you about the six friends that stopped Nightmare Moon, and were later appointed to help run Equestria in the war?” I nodded, encouraging my Unicorn friend to continue. “So one of them, the pegasus Rainbow Dash, didn't really care about running anything. She was big on a old stunt team that got wiped out early in the war, and used her new political power to bring that team back under the name 'Shadowbolts', with her as their leader. They'd go out and perform stunts and tricks on the battlefields but were more of a morale boost then anything else.”

“He probably worships Nightmare Moon.”

“Amber!”

“What?” The mare exclaimed, pointing toward the pegasus once more. “I say we drive the cooked chicken off before he sells us off to his Enclave buddies.”

“No Amber, if it wasn't for him, we would be dead right now.” The mare lowered her eyebrows and gave a harsh glare to her partner, grasping the handle of her spike maul in her mouth again. “As I was saying, this is probably some old pre-war military pegasus that was obsessed with the Shadowbolts and found one of their suits and guns, and now flies around pretending to defend Equestria. And he wants you to go to Baltimare! That city took a Balefire bomb point-blank, spending any prolonged period of time there would be a death sentence!”

My friends had two separate reasons with the same conclusion. Don't trust the ghoul. Either because he was some cultist, or he was a two hundred year old zombie with a barely functioning mind. But he knew my name, and that implied that he had some greater knowledge about me, rather from personally knowing me or just knowing of me. And he had said that there were 'orders', which inferred that there were other ponies beyond him that knew me, that knew who I was and how I ended up here.

Or he could just have gotten lucky with my name and his brain was as fried as his skeletonized wing.

“Well for now he says that he'll help us. I'd rather have a ghoul with that much firepower on our side rather then against us.” I stood up and turned to face the pegasus once again, not interested in hearing any further arguments from my friends. “Silver, that's what you said your name was?” The ghoul looked up from his partially-disassembled rifle, holding a screwdriver in his mouth, giving a nod before spitting the tool out. “You said that because I don't remember anything, you're just here to help me with whatever I'm doing?” The ghoul gave a simple nod in affirmation.

“Do you want him to charge in and blow apart everypony's brains back in the village, if he hasn't already?” Amber suggested. “He better not have touched the big one, he's going to be my kill.”

“I can be your support and supply, but you're crazy if you think I'm going to charge in and try to take on two hundred ponies myself.” The pegasus shouted at us. “That shock and awe approach will only work once. They'll be expecting me to do such a thing again.”

Speaking of 'they', my thoughts turned to the village once more. The attack had let us escape, but there was no way that Glowing Ether would let us just hang out in the mountains. She still had my friends' cutie marks, and once order was restored to her village, it would only be a matter of time before she would have Water Margin send scouts out to bring us back.

“Can you find us a good vantage spot to look down at the village from?”

Our flight from the shootout had taken place in the morning as the clouds began to brighten up. The cloud-cover was light today, the lightest I had seen since waking up. Between the daylight coming through brighter then usual and the vantage point on a plateau halfway up a mountain, Silver Sight had found us a perfect vantage point of the town, it's factory, and it's cropfields with the Tree of Woe.

“There are two guards, looks like a Unicorn and an Earth pony, and they're both infront of the middle house on the right side of the main road.” Spice Chaser remarked, holding the scope to his eye in his magical grip.

“That would be Doctor Soothing Constant's house.” I responded, familiar with that building's location within the village after spending my first few days awake in it. My focus never left the ghoul, who had unzipped the suit around his head and exposing a face that was horribly burnt and splotched with tufts of silver hair, similar to his mane which was also mostly gone except for several splotches suggesting a once full mane of red hair. He was taking the graphite I had lent him and was sketching in Glimmers of Truth, promising that he could mark three locations in the surrounding mountains that should be both accessible to earth-bound ponies like us while also being out of the way enough that no search parties would be able to find it.

“I never thought dried apples would taste so good!” Swing cut in, scarfing down the contents of a recently unsealed bag of food. Silver Sight had brought rations for just a few days, initially under the idea that it would just be enough to keep me fed while escorting. But those rations had now been re-purposed and were giving the three of us our first proper meal in days.

“Here, here, and here.” The pegasus spat out the graphite and pointed to the three 'X's that he had drawn on the map of Our Town and the surrounding mountains. “This one will have the best view from the west, this one is where we are right now, and this one is a cave that overlooks the entire valley, but it's only a few yards below the cloud-cover. If you're going to go there, pace yourself going uphill and downhill, let your body adjust to the changes in pressure.”

I nodded with loose understanding, trying to crunch numbers on how long it would take to go from hideout to hideout.

“There is one other thing though.” The ghoul said in a tone closer to a whisper. “Supporting you while you were still here was only half of the mission.”

I looked at his milky dead eyes, nearly impossible to read. “Of course.” I sighed. “If things are really as bad as they seem out there, you're not going to come out here from the goodness of your heart.”

“After the bombs fell some of our old benefactors came through here. Most of those old ties have been severed, but a large book had been left here. 'Health and Recovery in Equestrian War and Beyond'. It's a medical tome that had some spells cast on it to keep it from falling apart under heavy use.”

I scoffed. “Sounds like the kind of book that would be everywhere in a post war hellhole. Why would you care about a copy here?”

“Because every year it was updated, but the final run had an extremely limited distribution because of the bombs. Unless we find a special undamaged Ministry of Image library, this is one of the few known locations of a copy.”

“Ah! Movement! Somepony's coming out.” Our brief conversation was broken as all three of us turned our focus back to the unicorn among us, waiting for word on who it was. We had already confirmed the presence of Glowing Ether, Woe Tree, and Tempered Iron, and just wanted to verify the presence of the last pillar of the village's leadership. “It's him, the pegasus. He's talking to an old looking pony just outside the door.”

“That would be the doctor.” I remarked, looking at the map that had been sketched in.

“And they've separated now. The pegasus is going back to the head mare's house now, and he's accompanied by those two guards.”

“That confirms all of Our Town's leaders are still alive, and probably working together at least on the surface.” I took another bite of the dried pastry that made up the meal that had been given to me.

“Why couldn't you have popped that bitch earlier? Or hell, why not even now?” The long female among us asked the ghoul.

“I was told to get Stone Vane out of here. When I saw you two tied up with him, the best choice of action seemed to be get him free of his captors, and I assumed you two were with him.” He contorted his mouth into a devious grin, milky eyes giving a dead stare towards the mare. “Next time I'll spend a week figuring out who's the leader before saving my target's friends.”

“We don't want him taking anypony out right now.” I cut in. “Our best choice of action is to let things settle down, and then turn the four of them against each other.”

“That's a great plan. I like that plan.” The unicorn garbled through a mouth full of food. “But there's one problem.” His tone darkened as he wiped away crumbs from his mouth. “How are we going to turn anypony against anypony if we'll get strung up the moment we go down there?”

I flipped a page back to the list I had started making before I even met Amber or Spice. Grabbing the graphite between my teeth, I once more began adding to it.

Our Town

Cutie marks: Two lines, akin to an equal sign.

Population: ~~200-250~~ 227, split into three shifts. No significant interaction between these shifts outside of morning singing and evening meal.

-Glowing Ether (Unicorn, female), ??

-Woe Tree (Unicorn, female), Wants more food and-or cutie mark, determine reason why

-Tempered Iron (~~Unknown~~, assumed male), Earth Pony) ??

-Water Margin ~~(Unknown, unknown)~~ (Pegasus, Male) ??

Contacts:

~Fair Smiles (Pegasus, Female)

~Soothing Constant (Earth Pony, Male)

Goals:

Primary: Get Cutie-marks back, Find each leader's desires

Secondary: Kill Tempered Iron

Talk with Woe Tree about Trade

~~Recover Weapons~~

With the list having been added to, I sat the book on the rock that next to us and spun it around, showing my friends and the newcomer pegasus what was inside. “We all saw that those four ponies don't work in tandem. Ether gave Woe Tree and Water Margin a harsh tongue lashing in there, and Woe Tree was the first pony down there I've heard raising any suggestion of getting their cutie marks back.” I pulled my hoof back as Spice Chaser magicked the book up into the air.

“Do those lines means that the words sound different?” Amber asked, turning toward her mate.

“No, it means that those things don't matter anymore.” Spice Chaser replied.

“What are those curvy lines that have a dot?”

“That's a question mark. Remember? If it's at the end of a sentence, it means the sentence is a question.”

The earth pony mare stared at the book blankly for a few more moments. “Glowing Ether...” Her brow furrowed and she looked right at me. “I know she lets her tail cover up the bits, but how do you not know that whorse is a mare?”

“You know what, maybe this is too advanced for you to read right now.” He brought the book more in line with his own eyesight. “This doesn't answer my question though. If you want to know what they want, us being up here won't help with that. Do you plan on just waltzing down there a third time and ask kindly?”

I gave a deep exhale. This plan was forming in my head only slightly quicker then I was thinking of it. “I won't. You two will.”

That statement made even the ghoul pegasus turn his head to look at me, the section of his head where an eyebrow should be shifting as if raising it in confusion. That was nothing compared to my friend's reactions.

“WHAT!?” They shouted at me, in perfect sync.

“They already think that I'm the ringleader here. After Amber lost control of the talk down there...” The mare wanted to say something, but the unicorn stallion raised his hoof and shook his head, keeping her from blowing her top. “...I made it seem like I was going to force you to join my raider clan, which they still think exists.”

Spice Chaser picked up on it. “So Swing and I go on down there, tell them a tall tale on how we escaped, and suddenly want to shack up with them?” His eyes starred off, following the same steps in his mind that I was making up in the moment. “We use that to get close to the leaders of the village, and find out what they personally want?”

I nodded. “I'll sneak down there as well at night. If Water Margin has search parties searching for the raider band at night, they won't be thinking of checking their own village for me.” I stood back up and tapped the book through the unicorn's magical grasp. “If you turn one page forward, you'll see the map Silver and I had been working on. That circle about halfway between the factory and the village has a big rock pile, and hidden inside that pile of rocks is a tunnel into an old forgotten room. We can meet up there at a set time any night you two have any new information.”

I could visibly see the mare going wall-eyed, not even remotely keeping up with what the two of us were talking about. Spice though had no such issue. “Then we get close and convince them that letting your raiding clan outside can help them achieve their personal desires?”

Shaking my head, I pointed to the Unicorn. “No. That's where your Manehattan contacts come in. I don't care if you have to promise the moon and then walk it back later. Anyway that you two can prove that there's something to give from the outside should help with winning them over. When I'm down there at night as well, I could also start sabotaging things to make each of their tasks for running the village difficult, which should further strain tensions.”

With a thud, Amber Swing fell on her back, hooves pointing toward the sky. “Too...much... brain...hurt...”

“I can help with providing goods, if need be.” Silver Sight spoke up, using his feathered wing and mouth to close the jumpsuit around his neck and head. “Anything in particular?” He asked before cloth covered his face once again.

“Food. The best food you can get!” Spice Chaser spoke up with a hint of excitement, before immediately his stance declined into a more depressed one, legs barely holding him up. “Maybe Sugar Apple Bombs, or something?”

“Ew.” His marefriend remarked, still back down legs up on the ground. “You always were bitching about Apple Bombs, something about being large when produced, and that you wouldn't wish a diet of them on your worst enemies. What changed?” The unicorn merely turned and looked at her without shifting his face from that depressed gaze. “Oh. Right.” She raised a forehoof and made a zipping motion across her lips.

“I have this.” The pegasus opened up the sack on the left side of his battle saddle with his still feathered wing, using those feathers as set of large fingers, pulling out a half-dozen cylindrical tins. “Imhoof has enough foal's breath to replenish magic reserves and leave you flying high for hours, and it's the best tasting chocolate on the market before or after the bombs.” All six tins bore the same striped pattern radiating from the center, the stripes only stopping far enough from the edge to define the brand and chocolate types, Milch Schokola, Koffein Schokola, and Einhorn Schokola. The fist of the three was distinct by being blue and white in pattern, while the other two were black and red. The 'Einhorn' variant had a eye-catching graphic in the dead center, a black triangle with a black unicorn's head and red pegasus wings stretching from the longest side with a large red diamond sat in the triangle's center. “Don't use this one unless you're in a pinch.” The ghoul tapped the two Einhorn tins with a hoof. “Two piece of normal Imhoof can fuel a heavy recon-and-smash mission itself. But the Alicorn one has enough Dash to leave you fighting imaginary timberwolves the next day.”

“Why would you put Dash in a chocolate?” Swing asked, swiping one of the Einhorn tins, balancing it on the frog of her hoof while giving it a sniff. “Half the fun of taking Dash is feeling your lungs burn with that first inhale.”

“Rainbow would kill me if she wasn't already dead.” The ghoul grumbled, before turning back to face me. “If you're planning on doing snooping down there at night, maybe you could appreciate this more then me.” Out of his sack he pulled out a small box with his wing, and I reached out to receive it. When he dropped it onto my hoof I was caught off guard by the weight, the box of bobbypins feeling way heavier then I had expected. It dropped onto the ground with a clang.

“What in the?” I pushed the box with my hoof, revealing a piece of paper taped on the top of the box with the words 'Weigh these' penciled on it.

“They're made of Equestrinium. Some scavenging ghouls had the idea of making bobby pins that were denser and wouldn't snap so easily.” Using his still-feathered wing, the pegasus began zipping the top of his jumpsuit over his head once more. “Turns out they're no less fragile then normal pins, and they weigh a good ten times more then regular pins. But at this point you guys would have more use for them then me.”

“Thanks.” I deadpanned, biting down on the box and dropping it into my satchel. “Does your commanding unit have any talented spell-casters?”

The ghoul gave me a short stare through the opaque eyeholes of his jumpsuit, as if weighing possible responses. “Why?”

“A friend and I, not these friends-” I briefly motioned towards the duo that were splitting up the chocolate tins. “-found a large and elaborate spell-casting circle forgotten and tucked away down there. It's the only hint of large scale magic use down here except for the spell that they use to strip ponies of their cutie marks. Something tells me that the two are probably connected in some way.”

The ghoul gave a nod. “I'll see what they can do.” He turned around and extended his wings, preparing to depart.

“One last thing.” I questioned, taking a few steps forward and positioning myself beside him. “You said your name is Silver Sight? S.S.?”

He looked at me blankly again. “My initials?”

“Would you happen to be the S.S. that was here a long time ago?”

“I've never been in these mountains before.” He gave a single flap of his wings, gaining a bit of altitude. “I'll return four days from now, in the morning. Meet me outside the Vault in the morning. If it gets to noon and you're not there, I'll assume you've been captured and killed.” And with that, he departed.

“SS? Really?” Amber Swing asked, clopping up next to me. “Those initials could mean literally anypony. Signed Sheets. Singing Summer. Shiny Surf, Sunset Screamer. Sudden Soon.” The last name was so bizarre I couldn't help but look at the mare with a raised eyebrow of my own. “What? You think just because you met a pony with familiar initials that he's the one? If I had a cap for every pony that had my initials I'd have four more caps!”

“I know...” It seemed a bit convenient that I had met some pony that was more then two hundred years old that had the same initials as somepony who had a big impact on the town, and I couldn't help but ask. But Amber wasn't there, she wouldn't understand.

I turned back to my unicorn friend, who was sitting on the ground, staring at the pair of blue and white tins sitting on the ground in front of him. Amber rushed over to his side, plopping down to his left side.

“It hurts.” The unicorn squeaked out to his marefriend, levitating one of the tins up to his face. “Knowing you've spent your entire life looking for anything of your family history, and when it's staring you in the face...” He trailed off, cutting his telekinesis and letting it drop back on the ground. The mare leaned into him, placing her still-helmeted head on his shoulder.

“May I ask?” The duo both looked at me for a moment.

“No, no. It's not your concern.” The unicorn shook his head, inadvertently shrugging the mare off his shoulder as well. I was reminded of what Soothing Constant had said my first night awake. “You're already trying to do so much to get us our cutie marks back, and the meeting for food. Heck, you even are trying to satisfy Amber's bloodlust.” He shook his head again. “It's not fair to burden you with a personal struggle.”

My response was a simple question “What if it's not a burden?” It was so easy to remember the village's doctor briefly waxing poetic about friendship beyond what the lilac book spoke on. That memory encouraged me to push a bit harder. “You can trust me. That's what friends are for.”

The Unicorn tilted his head up to look at me, his eyes conveying an emotion somewhere between exhaustion and depression with only the smallest hint of hope.

“Oh Celestia, you males are going to get all sappy and cry over eachother, aren't you?” Amber stood up. “I don't do that shit. Spice, if you need some mare to hold you close while you whine about your cutie mark I'm your girl.” She stopped for a moment with her mouth open, then smirked. “IN fact, why don't you two get to know each other better. He can whine about not having his memories and you can whine about not having your cutie mark.” The mare walked up next to me, before placing one of her hooves solidly on the base of my neck and pushed me toward the unicorn. “Then after you males have a ugly cry you can flip the smart stuff back on and figure out how we're going to get our cutie marks back.”

And with that, she trotted off and down the edge of mountain's plateau. The unicorn and I stared at each other for a moment, before he gave a few blinks and wiped the edges of his eyes with his foreleg. “Don't worry about her. She's just tired of me angsting over loosing my cutie-mark.”

“You can angst to me if you'd like.” I smiled, taking a seat to his right side. “We have plenty of time.”

“You have enough on your plate as it is.”

“I can take some more.” It was an instinctive response, out of my mouth before I even put any thought in it. Accurate, but a bit more sudden then it probably should have been. “Remember, I've only got a few days worth of memories up here.” I tapped the top of my skull with my right hoof. “More then enough room to hear somepony else's problems, especially a friends'.”

Again he leveled a stare at me, his eyes making very small darting movements within the locked gaze, arguing with himself on if he should elaborate or not.

“Ok then.” He sighed, and I smiled to keep the encouragement up. “Only because Amber insisted.” Another moment of silence passed, Spice Chaser obviously struggling with it.

Understanding that we weren't going to get anywhere with trying to let him open up, I decided to start prying a bit “I saw what it looked like in Ether's book. A baker, or something like that? How'd you get it?”

“Just like anypony does. It was my father's birthday and I wanted to surprise him with something nice. My entire family line has been bakers, and I always wanted to follow in dad's hoofsteps.” He smirked. “So while he was out gathering food, I made a horrible mess trying to surprise him with a birthday cake, because he told me that's what they did while he was growing up in his stable. He came back earlier then I wanted, and was so close to loosing it because of how much food I had wasted. But when he smelled it he held back.” Spice raised his head up, reminiscing with a nostalgic smile. “And when he tasted it, a small cake about the size of this tin.” One of his hooves rapped against the tin of chocolate. “I'll never forget that smile. It wasn't like the smile when he tucks you in, or the smile you give to a customer buying some food. He really liked it. I don't know when it happened exactly, but while he helped me clean up he pointed it out.”

I merely stayed silent, shifting my gaze to the flank that merely had the cruel double-line instead.

“Ever since then, I always wanted to make better food. We had a bit of a falling out later on. He wanted to make cheap food for anypony to enjoy, but didn't have the resources, let alone the desire, to do anything greater. I just wanted everypony to have that same great food experience, expenses be danmed. IN hindsight, he was right, there was no way we could both support our small village with our different ways of looking at it. So I left, and started looking for anyway to make the greatest confections in the Wastelands. And that's how, eventually, I came to Manehattan, and Tenpony Tower. After all, if the most civilized and richest ponies can't afford and appreciate the greatest confectioneries made, well, then nopony could!”

“Sounds like you made it.”

“Oh yeah. I got lucky, an entire shop opened up inside Tenpony Tower a few weeks back. Owner was caught raiding and his kids were shipped out of the tower, and the one that did the reporting apparently had no interest in owning the shop. So it went up for auction, and I had done enough favors for big ponies inside that they were willing to help balance the books in my favor.”

“So why did this give you such a reaction then?” I asked, nudging one of the tins with a hoof.

“Like I said, I come from a long line of Bakers. Only we're not just Bakers. We're confectioners, Konditors. Our family history can be traced way back. Before the Princesses, even before Discord. Our family was one of the last Earth Pony clans to leave the old lands and migrate to Equestria, apparently we didn't even stop using the old language for our names until the bombs fell. It's a proud legacy, my father always said. But I think he cared more about using that legacy as a talking and selling point back home. When he left his stable he didn't bother taking any of the old family recipe books except a basic one, and when I found that old stable it had already been turned into a town of it's own, and those books had been traded off years prior, with the trail long cold.”

My unicorn friend snorted. “I've spent years since, looking at Equestrian history like a madstallion. Maybe I'll find a journal entry talking about a Imhoof cake inbetween ramblings of politics, or a package of doughnuts with the Imhoof name in the background of an old picture. The worst one was a memory orb, where I could taste the individual ingredients of a pancake stack, so loaded with fruits and sugar that I replayed it over and over, inadvertently memorizing the details for an ammunition production line's single month of profit and losses from the conversation, just so I could try and figure out what went into those pancakes and try to make them myself.”

Telekentically he raised the two tins once again. “The biggest name in our family, so my father said, was Imhoof. Supposedly he had a bit more of a taste for chocolates then confections, but during the entirety of the war his chocolates and confectioneries were one of the few things that could help make ponies happy. And now, for the first time in my life, I've got some of it.” The tin twitched in his grasp. “And I can't do anything with it. My sense of taste? Gone. Those dried apples tasted just as bland as that watery potato slush they called food in that village. I can't even remember that old ammunition profit because the memory is so tightly tied to those pancakes in my mind.” From the corner of my eye I could see the equal sign virtually pulse with energy, actively suppressing his memories. “It is a special kind of hell to be taunted with something you've wanted your hooves on for so long, and when you get it, you're made too dumb to even appreciate it.”

The two of us sat in silence for a moment, the unicorn looking up at the mid-afternoon clouds as they floated above us. I followed his gaze and took note, briefly thinking about this was the first time I could see discernible movement above our heads rather then just a shifting of the density of the same piece of cloud-cover.

“I'm just terrified that I'll never go back to normal. That I'll never be able to see another pony enjoy a cake or anything like that again. I'm not worried about Amber. Her calling is to be an angry bulldozer of a mare. She could totally ignore the smithy and be perfectly content with just killing ponies with blunt force from her thick skull, roll in the hay, sleep, and then waking up to do it all again. That's something no spell can overcome.”

I stood up, shaking some of the stiffness out of my joints. “Here's what we're going to do Spice.” I nudged him in the shoulder. “In the middle of the night, you're going to go down there with Amber. You two are going to get in close with some ponies, and I guarantee you.” I nudged him harder. “That we'll find those marks, that ghoul will come back with information on how to restore your marks. And then you'll be able to make the best pastries in all of Equestria all over again.” Spice Chaser looked at me, his eyes asking the question his mouth wouldn't.

“Yes. Really.” I leant a hoof out, offering to pull him onto all fours. A fragment of a smile came over his muzzle, and he reached out, wrapping the edge of his right foreleg around my non-splinted one. “But if we're going to do all of that, you better convince me on your family name. And I'm not talking about those chocolates either.” I yanked him all the way up. “I'm coming with you two back to Manehattan, and you're going to make us the best cake in the Wastelands. Deal?”

The smile totally overtook his face, mirroring my own confidence. “It's a deal.”

We were sleeping in shifts. I had just woken Amber up, having the mare join her partner while I went ahead and caught a few hours of sleep. Anxiety mixed with nervous excitement was keeping me from catching any sleep despite having been running and hoofing it across the mountains and the village's valley for nearly a full day.

Rain had completely overtaken the mountains shortly after Amber had rejoined the two of us, and that had forced us to a small recession in the rockface, one that was too shallow to be a cave and would be offering us no protection if not for the breeze from the west that was keeping it from raining onto us.

“Fuck, it's still raining?”

I merely nodded toward the mare, standing on the vague border between rain-soaked rock and dry rock, giving my body a shake from head to tail to try and remove some of the excess rain from my coat. IN hindsight, I probably should have asked the mysterious ghoul for a poncho, but time had long passed for that. “It'll probably be raining for the next several hours. Hopefully the temperature drops enough and the wind picks up enough to push the worst of it away by midnight.”

She uttered a wordless grumble, stepping out into the rain to take a stand next to her partner. I had insisted on the two of them taking the first two shifts for sleeping roughly four hours each, a pair of us watching the village to determine the best time to send the duo down to the village below and to reduce the chance of them getting caught on the way down.

I opened Glimmers of Truth once more, taking a look down at the plan that had been sketched out. It didn't take much convincing the duo that the plan was the best one going forward, though for different reasons. Amber was still satisfied by the suggestion of inflicting a brutal end on Tempered Iron, though any deeper inquiry on why was firmly rebutted by her outside of a general insistence that everything he did was wrong. Spice Chaser was the hardest to convince for good, his insistence on working out trading between this village countered by a lack of confidence at this point after two attempts at talking, one with and one without me, had gone sideways. The only thing that won him over was the simple fact that while we now had a few rations, they were not enough to last three of us four days, and counting on me sneaking back and forth each night to try and find Ether's book myself was a high risk.

The plan itself was simple enough. Once it was midnight and we had determined the location of Water Margin's mountain-searching group, my two friends would depart back into the village. It was a big guess that the town's pegasus would be going out and searching the mountains for my mystical raider gang, or at least to find us if that wasn't possible, and doing it all at a similar timeframe that we had likely seen them the prior night.

“Why should we do it then?” Amber had voiced a question both of them obviously shared after exchanging another one of their knowing looks at eachother.

“You said you were part of a raider gang, right?” She had nodded in response. “Imagine if it was the middle of the night and a random pony snuck right into the heart of wherever it was you all were sleeping.”

“Wouldn't happen. There's always some colt or filly hyped up on Buck, Dash, or Mentats overnight that would see them.”

“Yes, but imagine if it did happen. Wouldn't you all be pretty angry at those ponies who were supposed to be awake to keep watch?”

“I'd run a spike right through each of their knee and keep hammering it until I was bored.”

“You would do that to anyone who would piss you off.” The Unicorn remarked with an exasperated tone.

“Well, yeah...but so would everypony else in the Gang!”

“And that's what everypony down there will want to do as well when you two show up unannounced.” I pushed another piece of dried apple into my mouth. “But unlike a Raider Gang, they can't bring on new raiders, if they weren't already scared of outsiders they definitely will be now.”

“Imagine if you just walked into Tenpony Tower, fully armored up and blood-stained, and walked right into the hidden rooms that DJ Pon3 stayed in, chilled with him for a good hour, and then just lounged around the tower for a solid hour afterwards, acting nice but still bloodied. Wouldn't everypony be really angry that they just let a violent Raider in?”

She blinked in shock, the implications finally hitting home for her. “Oh!” Whether or not she understood the anticipated reactions didn't really matter in performing this complicated and drawn out plan, but it would be easier to manage her if she understood the reasoning and was onboard with it. That was one piece of crucial information that Spice had shared with me after our earlier talk.

I was a bit surprised that neither of them asked about them being imprisoned. But it wasn't hard to understand that throwing them back into the mines wouldn't be pointless after we had already broken out because the two of them could escape again if they wanted, but dragging them off to be killed in the middle of the night wouldn't be possible either because the two of them were going to intentionally make enough noise to wake up the residents of the houses on the opposite side of the town to Ether's, meaning that their presence couldn't just be written off as a capture. Most importantly though, showing friendliness to the common pony would hopefully make any choice to just kill them unpopular.

Rolling onto my side, my back turned to my friends and the town below, I stared at the book once more, rolling the graphite in my mouth once more as I turned the page with my hoof. In the dwindling light I could just make out the weather recordings I had made before being tossed into the prison mine. Sighing around the black rock between my lips, I went ahead and left a large chunk of open space from the last entry I had made, signifying the skip in the days before I began writing down today's weather.

Slightly muggy, light cloud-cover with visible movement in the morning gave way to thicker rolling clouds from the west in the afternoon, rain in the mid afternoon coupled with a West-to-East wind. I had enough confidence in my mouthwriting that even in the dark my scribbling would be legible for me to go over later. I didn't bother to turn the page again and see the repeated recordings of my dreams while I had been in the prison, instead shutting the plastic-binded lilac book and placing it and the graphite back in the satchel, placing it under my head afterwards for a makeshift pillow.

A silent sigh slipped from my lips. I didn't want to sleep. It wasn't due to being full of energy, the constant trekking with interspersed with a bit of running and the stress of the conflict in the village left me physically and mentally tapped of energy. My concern was of what would visit be while I was sleeping. I had only started dreaming when I was in the caves, the recurring dream honestly just a nightmare, an extension of the namesake that haunted it. A dark alicorn hurling the moon down at me, the few ponies I did know all mindless and ignorant of the doom targeted straight at me.

One odd part stood out. In all the days I had been awake, I had not seen the moon. Briefly I spoke with the two ponies that had become good friends with me in the last few days, and both of them knew exactly what it looked like, apparently because small holes in the cloud-cover would appear and disappear from time to time, enough that ponies knew what the sun, moon, and stars still looked like.

That moon had been crystal clear in my mind, maybe the remnant of an old memory peeking through and imprinting on me. It's right side had been almost entirely devoid of marks, a whitish silver looking smooth and round, while a few sparse craters that were just slightly off colored marked the left half, the faintest hint of shadow holding onto the leftmost sliver of it regardless of its' position in the night sky.

“Why is the moon wrong?”

“It's the millennial anniversary of Princess Celestia sending her evil sister to the moon.” The blanket was tucked right underneath my chin by the yellow stallion. “The Princess made it up to look different tonight and is performing a special play to commemorate it, which is also why she's waiting to raise the sun.”

“There wasn't anything in the program about a play.” Mom remarked, only for Daddy to give her a harsh look, the same he always did when she said something he didn't want me hearing. She bit her lip and looked up at the ceiling. “Maybe we were told the wrong information?”

“Comm-comm-comemoate? What does that word mean?” The word made me yawn, it was so big.

“It's like remembering. And right now, you need to commemorate going to sleep.” Daddy leaned down and gave me a goodnight kiss on my forehead. “We'll wake you up when it's time for the second part of the act.”

“Don't worry if you wake up before it happens though.” Mom said, running her hoof through my mane shakily. The two of them turned and began walking to the door.

“Goodnight Mom. Goodnight Daddy.”

“Goodnight Son.” He smiled, mommy put on one of her fake smiles as well as they stepped through the doorway, shutting it behind them. Rolling over, I looked at the moon again, feeling weird about it.

The bed didn't feel right, it wasn't like back home. The pillow was too hard. But mom and daddy started fighting again, something about being cursed and the dark not-princess we saw earlier today. That was still the same, even if now mom was shouting about our trip rather then bits.

My eyes were getting harder to keep open, the moon without it's mare just as bright as it was before. It was wrong, more wrong then the pillow and bed.

I opened my eyes, not remembering going to sleep. Not now, and not then either. The argument that had been going on was instead replaced by silent whispers, Amber and Spice both audible but not discernible through the rain. The dark of night had totally enclosed everything around me, but the two of them hadn't woken me up yet. Maybe if I fell asleep again I'd dream of something else, something other then that danm moon.

- - - - - -

Achievement Unlocked: Contact – Make Contact with a mysterious ghoul.