Author's Note
Fallout: Equestria belongs to Kkat
The artwork in the cover art, which this story is inspired by, belongs to Sherathoz.
The character Gavra belongs to jakukuro, although her personality is entirely my own spin.
Hope you enjoy the story!
Also, I forgot that bomb collars in the Fo:E universe have a controlled explosion, so fuck off. They big explosion now. Big, big.
Chapter 1
The mission was simple: kill the target.
Gavra had done it dozens of times before. All you do is run in, do a bit of shooty-shooty, and collect the bounty. Simple, right?
No. Not that simple. Not according to Girder, who was once again lecturing her about the importance of tactics, picking your enemies off one-by-one without making your presence known, not shouting, “Eat lead bitches!” before running in guns blazing, blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda, can you please stop eating that…
Laying on her side with her head propped by a talon, she used the other to fiddle with the lapel of her brand new jacket that required total fixation. She’d looted it from the corpse of a New Canterlot Republic pony she killed, thinking it looked nice but was profoundly disappointed to discover the small tear from where one of her bullets grazed their chest.
Sigh.
And here she thought she’d look spiffy in the Wasteland.
Well, she kinda already did? It complimented her armor superbly, which she always thought was on the tacky side. It was a simple bullet-proof vest with “08” printed on the collar, indicating that it wasn’t new, but—sigh, again—looted from somewhere. Oh, why did she have to get stuck with the trashiest group of Talon mercs?
“Gavra!”
Hearing her name, she jolted, pretending as if she had been paying attention the entire time.
A middle-aged griffon, forehead creased into a frown, glared at her. Girder took the cigar he was puffing on out of his beak, tapped it once so that grey ash sprinkled to the dry earth, and replaced it. Puffing… puffing… “Care to repeat everything I just said?”
Gavra waved him off in a way one would ward off a pesky fly. “Yeah, yeah! You’ll take control of one of the towers, while Gel blows some shit up to put a dent in their reinforcements, then I go in shooty-shooty and maybe punch that shithead Kestral in the face, maybe some crying will be involved, maybe he begs me not to shoot him, maybe I shoot him anywa—actually, I will shoot him anyways cause caps, which who doesn’t like that? Aaaand we go home and crush a few apple whiskeys. Did I cross all my Is and dot all my Ts?”
He stared at her contemplatively. Gavra was young. Somewhere in her early twenties, if he remembered correctly. He had expected someone her age to be reckless, but cocky? It pained him to admit, but she earned the right to that cockiness. The two submachine guns dangling along either side of her hips bared the names “Spray & Glaze” for a reason. Once over with Spray, twice over with Glaze, and with cunning precision. Also, she was hot as fuck, and she knew she was hot as fuck, so she used that to get what she wanted. But said recklessness would eventually get them all killed, and he wouldn’t have that.
“You’ll follow the plan, or you’ll wait here,” Girder said. “Your call.”
She sat up, mocking a scoff. “Listen, has a plan of mine failed yet?”
“Yes.”
“Shush, hoe. Anyways, I’m just saying that you need to live a little.” She pranced up to Girder and plucked the cigar from his beak. He didn’t budge, but he did let out an annoyed groan. She bit down on its end and puffed… puffed… puffed…
She turned toward the hill and splayed out her right wing before doing anything else, swiping Girder’s bullet casing “model” of the prison off the cinderblock in the middle of the merc trio. Gelato, a chubby griffon at least a decade older than Gavra herself, also let out an annoyed groan. He was half-tempted to shove a grenade in her mouth and tie the pen to something mobile. Maybe his tail? Nah, she’d just make muffled comments about how fat his ass is getting. Even with volatile explosives in her mouth, she’d still be annoying.
She rocked her hips side-to-side, swinging her tail like a pendulum. Halting at the peak, she plopped her butt to the ground, took another puff from the cigar, and stared down at the prison.
Four guard towers.
She pointed a talon in the shape of a gun at each one and made explosion noises. “Bang, bang, boom! Blow up the towers. They can’t snipe us then. Better lend me some of your explosives, Gel!”
Gelato hugged the bag of explosives close to him. “As if! You’ll only get everyone’s damn attention if you’re lucky enough to not blow yourself sky-high!”
“Oh, you don’t trust me?” Gavra said, still looking down at the prison.
“I’d trust my worst enemy with my life more than you!”
Gavra turned her head back toward him slightly, the barest hint of seduction apparent on her face. She flicked her tail, showcasing her ass, and with rose petals in her voice said, “I’d appreciate it if you lend me a few C4s, Gel. It might be worth your while.”
Gelato inhaled air through his nostrils, stiffened, and adjusted the bag of explosives that he was hugging to hide something else close to bursting.
Girder sighed. “You can’t bribe us with sex every time you want something to go your way, Gav.”
“Why not?” Gavra came up to the older griffon, beak inches from smooching position. She puffed on the cigar one last time and pulled it away, butt soggy from leaving it in her mouth for too long. She placed it back into his mouth and pressed a talon against his armored chest, her breath hot against his face.
“I haven’t heard you complain before, so why now?” she whispered in his ear.
“Because you could get us killed this time…” he whispered back nonchalantly.
Her claws pranced up his vest, toward his neck, and ran her fingers through his feathers. “And why is that?”
He grabbed her talon and peeled it away, simultaneously placing his other talon against her own chest and pushing her back. “Cause this time we’re fixing to attack a fortress, complete with armed guards, weapons bigger than our own, and numbers beyond our counting. A tactic is the only way we can get to the target unscathed. Not by blowing shit up like it’s Tuesday.”
“Pffhahah! Are you saying that you don’t respect my abilities?” She wiggled her rump in front of him, intending to show off Spray & Glaze, who (yes they have pronouns) dangled along either side of her flanks, but she was mostly showing off her assets. Sometimes she found the humor in being a cocktease. “What I’m getting from you is that you’re too afraid of a challenge. How about I prove ya wrong?”
She bowed and lifted her tail, trying to look as if she was just stretching her body—and putting on a damn good performance into that yawn—but mostly showing off her pussy. She spun back around to him. “How about instead of whatever safe, boring bullshit of an idea you had, we go with my plan. I go down there by myself, blow some shit up, give the good ol’ Spray & Glaze treatment, and if I get into trouble you just snipe 'em down from here, and you can say I told ya so? Sound good, eh?”
She plucked the cigar out of his beak and put it back into her own. Puffing… puffing… puffing into his face.
“Come on,” Gelato said. “Let’s just tie her to a fence post or something and come back for her when we’ve taken care of business. She’s not worth arguing with.”
“Gelato, give her your bag,” Girder stated simply.
The chubby griffon blinked. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me, give her your bag. She wants to take care of this herself, we’ll let her. She dies, she dies, but at least she’ll put a hole in them.”
“You cannot be serious!”
Gelato stood up, threw the bag over his back, and marched up to the middle-aged griffon. “She’s going to wake up everyone with a gun in prison! How are we getting to the target then?”
Girder reached into his saddle bag, taking out another cigar. “Well, guess luck will decide for us,” he said, striking a matchstick and hovering the flame over the cigar’s tip.
Gelato scoffed. “I can’t believe you… fine!”
He tossed the bag at Gavra, who caught it with an enthusiastic, “Yipee!”
“You get swarmed,” Girder said, puffing… puffing… “And that’s where your fun ends. I start sniping.”
Gavra smirked, flinging the bag over her back and already flapping her wings to take off for the prison. “You’re on!”
The plan was simple: blow some shit up.
Gavra was prepared to follow that plan to every bullet point; because bullets were pointy.
The southeast tower only had one guard, who was more occupied with watching the prison yard than keeping a lookout for outsiders. It was a unicorn mare wearing the shittiest jacket Gavra had ever seen! Crap, was it provided by the prison itself—wait, ah, yes. Inmate numbers on the back. Go figure.
She landed on the roof, unholstering Spray and attaching a suppressor. Dipping her head below the edge, she scanned the nest for the back of the mare’s head… which happened to be the opposite way now. The guard had changed positions and was now staring directly into her eyes, muzzle to beak.
There was only one thing a quick-thinking Talon merc such as Gavra could do in a situation like this: she kissed the mare on the lips.
The unicorn yanked back, on the verge of yelling but sputtering instead.
“Oh come on!” Gavra shouted. “My breath doesn’t smell that bad!”
The mare’s horn ignited, a riot shotgun in the corner of the nest glowing a similar color of lime. Gavra wasted no time in whipping Spray out and popping two rounds into her forehead, a third grazing her cheek.
Stuck in a silent scream, the mare fell. Gavra dropped down, peeked toward the stairs to see if any guards would come running up, and turned her attention to the yard down below. She flipped her mane away from her right eye and took out a pair of binoculars.
Thank fucking gosh this place has lights, she thought. She wouldn’t have any idea what she was up against otherwise. Not that she couldn’t improvise something, but fun shooty-shooty was best played when all her targets’ locations were known.
Four watchtowers in total, three left, one sentinel each, and each sentinel not expecting a griffon—a cute one at that—of all things to sneak up on them. They were too occupied with making sure none of the slaves ran away. Trailing down, she saw at least a dozen convicts littering the ground below. Some of them, mostly the ones wearing the shitty jackets—gosh, hers was so much better—carried weapons while a few others wore detonation collars. The convicts were using the prison as a slave depot.
Smart fellas. Take over the prison, turn it into a settlement, and then turn that settlement into a prison. Such is the way of business.
Bomb collars… Gavra thought. What are the chances that one of these guards hold the detanator that blow all of their noggins skyhigh?
Just like that, Gavra’s own inkling of a plan began to incubate.
She took off, but not before wiring a C4 explosive to the tower. She didn’t want to risk someone climbing it during the fighting to get a height advantage.
The guard of the southwest tower didn’t notice her dangling off the side of the parapet. Gavra’s head peaked over, the first thing to grace her eyes being a stallion’s tail. She wasted no time.
With swift, cat-like reflexes, she skittered over the parapet, dashed toward the guard, and banged their head against the low protective wall to daze them. Grabbing a lock of mane, she pulled him by the scalp, his rump sliding along the floor as they made their way toward the center of the nest where someone down below was less likely to see them.
A combat knife pressed against his throat, although he was still recovering from the concussion she’d given him.
“Aight bitch, where’s Kestral holed up?” she whispered in that same threatening way that Girder whispered to let Gavra know when she’s stepped over the line. She was getting good at that whisper.
The stallion muttered something unintelligible.
Gavra put more pressure on the knife, slicing a narrow valley in his neck. “What was that?”
A hoof slapped her face. It didn’t hurt, but there was an audible clap. Before the stallion could do anything else, she forced the knife down hard so that the valley leaked streams of blood. The last thing to come out of his mouth was a gurgle.
She wasted no time in wiring an explosive to the tower and moving along. The next pony would try to kill her despite the fact that she was sitting on his chest with a gun to his temple; the one after that tried to scream for help but was shut up with a quick snap of the neck. Sheesh, some of these guys had trust issues.
Finished, she whipped out her binoculars again and scanned the yard for more ways to even the playing field. Her eyes landed on an area sectioned off next to the administration building by a fence. A group of slaves, perhaps six, were in there. All of them were wearing bomb collars.
An idea struck her. There was a very good chance that Kestral would be hiding somewhere in that building. The moment the shooting started, he’d send guards to watch the front door. They wouldn’t be expecting a hole to be blown in the side of the building. It was the perfect second entrance.
“Hey, do you any of you know where Kestral is?”
Gavra knew what to expect when landing in a slave pen. This wasn’t her first rodeo, after all. She had expected them to grovel at her feet, begging her to free them. That didn’t mean she wouldn’t be any less annoyed about it.
“Oh please, please, you have to save us!” A scrawny mare with her ribs showing wrapped a hoof around Gavra’s ankle. The griffon gave a disgusted look and yanked it free, stepping out of reach. “Yeah, yeah, sure. Just tell me where Kestral is, or better yet, tell me who has the detonator for your collars.”
A foal at least half her age ran up to her, hugging her other leg. “You mean you’re going to get us out!?”
Gavra stuck her leg out, trying to shake him off. “Yeah, something like that.”
She grabbed him by the scruff and peeled him off, the foal looking like an oversized puppy when she held him up. She flung him aside as if tossing a morsel to a peasant.
“Just point me in the right direction, and I’ll get you out of those collars.” Adding quietly, “Or something, something, another…”
Someone cleared their throat, and Gavra turned her attention toward a stallion standing by the fence. He had no mane, his body spotted with rashes like a demented-looking dalmatian. Flimsy stick between teeth, he poked it through the holes of the wire mesh.
“A couple of guards roo-teen-lee circle the perimeter to make sure all of us are behavin’.” His voice was scratchy, sounding if he had gargled nothing but sand for nine consecutive years. “If a rev-oh-lution starts one radios his buddy and theys blows alls our noggins off. If we team up, ya can take one while I take on the other with muh lance.”
Gavra’s eyes homed in on the stick, which she immediately assumed to be his “lance.”
“Thanks, but I think I got it from here.”
Her wings lifted in preparation to take off, but a sudden realization hit her: she had no idea what the two guards looked like. This thought was immediately followed up with an idea.
She turned back to the rashy pony with a stick in his mouth. “Hey, I know what you can do!”
Less than ten minutes later, a stallion in full security armor walked by.
The rashy stallion slammed into the fence, rattling it. “Hey, hey, come over here!”
The guard sighed. He pretended to ignore him and kept walking.
“Hey, we’ve got sick in here!”
The guard halted, turned, and walked up to the fence, banality etched into his eyes. He looked at the group of prisoners pinned up. “Is this another one of your games, Slim Jim?”
He heard something drop behind him, and before he could see what it was, his head was smashed against the mesh.
“Motherfucker!” he shouted. His helmet protected his face in case Slim Jim felt partial to pony cheek that day—which he had been before—but the guard was still very dazed. He was about scream for help when a knife pressed against his throat.
“Do you have the detonator on you?”
“Fuck you!”
Gavra dug the blade into his nape, a rivulet trailing down to his chest and soaking his vest. “I’ll ask again, do you have the detonator?”
“Fuck no!”
“Does your buddy have the detonator?”
“P-probably!”
“Radio him.”
“How?”
With her tail, Gavra patted his body down, searching for a walkie-talkie. She found it dangling from his flank and held it up for him to speak into.
“Tell him to meet you here. If he says he’s busy, come up with an excuse why. Tell him your horny and like it beneath the tail for all I care, just do what you gotta do.”
She held the button down, and the guard spoke. “Hey, Red…”
A gravelly voice that sounded more gravelly through the static storm responded. “Yeah?”
“We’re having some issues with the pests. Think you can come over?”
“What issues are you having?”
“A fight. Big one.” He tried hard to look back at the griffon, but she kept him pinned against the wire mesh. “Looks like someone is about to die.”
“I’m heading over right now.”
Gavra planted the walkie-talkie back where she found it.
“So,” the guard said. “Now that that’s over with, are you going to—”
Thick, bubbly gurgles escaped his gullet. The rivulets became geysers that shot out in small spurts. The guard rustled beneath her as some of the prisoners screamed at the site, the mare with her ribs showing covering the foal’s eyes, who already had a traumatized look on his face. In less than a minute the pony beneath her went limp.
Gavra let go, the corpse slumping against the fence face-first, blood sprinkling out of its neck. She holstered her knife, and without looking back at the prisoners, took off toward her hiding spot on the ceiling of the administration building.
A couple of minutes later, the second guard came running in. “Hacksaw, what’s—”
He froze.
The realization of what he was looking at didn’t hit him right away, but when it did it was already too late. Gavra jumped down, onto the guard's back so that he took the full force of her weight. The two tumbled to the ground, and it was over just like that. One simple snap of the neck, and the second guard was dead.
“Alright…” Gavra said, getting up and patting down the corpse. “Let’s see if it’s… here!”
Gavra held the detonator up triumphantly.
Hope brimmed in the eyes of several slaves as they stared at their savior, the purple griffon, who looked spiffy in her new jacket. It really tied together with her vest!
“Now they can’t kill us the second we escape,” the mare with her ribcage showing said. “Just break the padlock on the gate and we’ll find a way out.”
Gavra allowed the slyest of smirks to become notable on her face. “Yeah, about that… I’ll need to cause a distraction, and I don’t want any of you to get caught in the crossfire. How about you lot hug the wall of the building there, and I’ll focus on clearing an escape route.”
For a moment, she thought they would see through her rouse, but the ponies happily obliged.
Stuffing the detonator in her jacket’s inside pocket, she took out Spray, removed the suppressor, and replaced the mag with one full of incendiary bullets.
It was time for fun.
The ground shook, the air roared, the towers crumbled, ponies everywhere scrambled to safety as they tried to figure out what was going on.
Spray in one clenched talon, Glaze in the other, Gavra opened fire.
Several of the convicts fell to the ground in a fiery blaze, the ones who weren’t lucky enough to die instantly rolling in agony. The slaves working out in the open weren’t spared either. They ran around the yard, flames trailing them like capes.
The popping of gunfire rang across the yard. Through the hailstorm of bullets and smoke, many didn’t know who to shoot at and blind-fired in any direction. Some hit their own crew in the process. Gavra thought this was hilarious, and it took lots of effort to not break down laughing in the center of all the chaos.
Eventually, someone realized that the cute purple-headed griffon with a nearly-pristine NCR field jacket didn’t particularly blend in all that well with a group of convicts in shitty prison jackets.
“Hey!”
Gavra whipped to her right in time to spot a green unicorn with a sawed-off floating beside him. She threw herself to the ground, dodging a wave of silver shrapnel, then rolled backyard to avoid another wave that exploded the earth, flinging dirt into her face.
She blinked, struggling to open her right eye, a beady tear already forming. Without thinking she brought up both Spray & Glaze and released a ruthless torrent. Bullets peppered the unicorn caught while trying to reload, rattling him. If Gavra wasn’t so desperate to not die on the spot, she would have ended it there, but she kept firing even as his body caught fire, and kept on shooting as he charred to a black husk.
The body only fell over when both guns clicked, and Gavra took that as an opportunity to rub one out, as they say. She blinked her eye open slowly. It burned a little, and it was probably red, but that was one less distraction out of the way.
Replacing the empty mags with some full of hollow point rounds, she scanned the area. Corpses surrounded her. Some of the charred had cracks running through them that glowed with smoldering ember. Gunshots still rang out across the yard, although Gavra knew that it was only a matter of time before someone got a head on their shoulders and noticed how out of place she was.
Better do something before somepony notices me… she thought.
Pulling out the detonator for the slave collars, she pressed the shiny red button. Several screams echoed around her, and several ponies in the crowd exploded, taking several more guards out with them. Within seconds, the yard was littered with the rubble of destroyed architecture, potholes, severed limbs, and corpses.
She walked past an earth pony with a stub of bone sticking out where his left foreleg should have been. He was crawling away from her, and when she cleared her throat he practically skittered across the ground like a flailing snake. She laughed.
The explosion from the collars had blown apart the fence that sectioned the slave pen off from the rest of the prison yard. Gavra stepped over dead bodies and loose appendages, one of them being the half-annihilated head of the starving mare that groveled at her feet. She’d have felt bad if—no… on second thought, she wouldn’t feel bad. Not at all.
She stepped into the freshly-crafted entrance and called, “Hey Kestral, you in here?”
A bang, and something whistled past her. She dived behind a desk, gunshots ringing across the room. Taking a grenade from Gel’s bag of explosives, she threw it backward. The shooting stopped.
“Grenade! Get the fuc—”
The floor vibrated, the desk rattled, and a violent explosion ravaged her ears. When the chaos died down, all she could hear was an ongoing ring.
Gavra got up and listened for the pop of a gun, a shout, an indication of any kind that there were more ponies she had to deal with. Only ringing.
The ponies that fired at her lay in a pool of blood and guts; one was knocked back by the explosion and hit his head hard against the concrete floor, his cranium surrounded by a red halo. The other pony… one-half of a body. She stepped over their mangled forms and pushed onward, her tail wrapped around Glaze’s hilt so that she didn’t have to use her talons and could freely roam.
The griffon came into a hallway and slowed her approach. The ringing insisted its stay. She tried fingering her ear to pop it but that didn’t do much good.
She walked up some stairs at a snail’s pace, hugging the wall. The rapid tapping of hoofsteps scrawled down the next flight up—the only giveaway to Gavra the vibration—and the moment a unicorn popped his head out Glaze let loose a brigade of bullets that shredded the stallion’s skull.
“Fuck!” she screamed after the muffled motor-like drumming of her gun stopped. She holstered him and whipped out Spray, continuing her trek upward.
She turned the corner, still hugging the wall, and continued up the next flight. The ringing—oh that irksome ringing—continued to blister her ears like an annoying friend that couldn’t be rid of.
Gavra halted in the middle of the stairs and yelled, “Hey Kestral you fuck, I’m down here! If you don’t pop your head out by the time I reach the top, then I have some bad news for ya, pal!”
If a response was given, she didn’t hear it. The mercenary waited a few seconds. She tried waiting a full minute, but a minute without shooty-shooty was far too boring, so she continued upward.
And in her rush, she failed to notice the trip wire at the top.
Gavra let out a grunt as her talon snagged on something, then she looked down. “Oh shit…” she muttered.
Two metal apples clanged to the floor in front of her. She lurched back, intending to backpedal down the steps but falling instead. The world became a blur of lights as her mind struggled to catch up to the chaos of the situation; meanwhile, she struggled to keep her tail wrapped around Spray. Then, came the explosion.
If she wasn’t already falling down the stairs fast enough, the force of two grenades was enough to throw her back completely. Blurring lights zoomed by, Spray clattered down the steps, and its wielder hit the wall hard; squawking hellaciously as she felt the humerus in her left wing snap.
Gavra slumped to her side, tasting copper. She spat red onto the shitty floor tiles, her eyes—filtered through a haze of dizzy—trailing back up the stairs.
A threstal wearing a sheriff’s hat and darker than the night itself stood at the top, his slitted eyes of crimson looking upon her. He traversed down the steps with an eerie calm and terrifyingly playful smile on his face. He stopped in front of her.
“So,” Kestrel said. “You’re the shitstork that blew up half my prison.”
