Fallout: equestria, hard steel

"Equestria isn't what it was anymore, you look at the wrong pony the wrong way, and they will shoot you"

A whole day.

It took those armored behemoths all day to get out of stable 310. Clearly murder wasn't their only plan or they would not have taken so long. I only knew that they had left because the sound of them talking was loud enough. And I guess my luck hadn't run out just yet because they were headed in the other direction. whether they saw me or not on their EFS and just chose to ignore me we'll never know. Maybe they just assumed the wasteland would chew me up first.

I watched them leave, but I waited a good hour before I headed back into my stable. They had taken what looked like 20 to 30 ponies with them. I had to find out what they were going to do with them. But first I needed food and at the very least a weapon. When I got in, I could already see they had opened every door, and every storage container. That must have been why they took all day to get out. Was that the only reason they attacked? to get stuff they probably didn't even need? That only made things worse somehow. As though the idea that they killed us for no reason was somehow better. Either or, there was no valid reason for this. Whether or not they just decided they wanted to kill us and took the loot as a bonus didn't matter though.

Debating their moral choices was something I could do another day however, for now I needed to see if they left anything. I wasn't expecting the security room to have anything left at all but to my surprise there where a number of small arms and bullets to go with them. At the very least I would be armed, the part that scared me was the idea of actually using said arm.

I choked as the dread started to set in, almost everypony I knew was either dead or captured, I had no useful skills other than cooking and to top it all off? I had no idea who those ponies were or where they were going. I lied down on the cold steel floor. I just wanted to cry until I starved, but there was something in me that wouldn't let me, at least not until
I starved. I for what felt like hours before I got up and sucked in my terror, for now I would just have to ignore it.

I grabbed a 10mm pistol in my magic and stuffed it in one of the security bags, then levitated the bag over my back. I also grabbed all the ammunition I could find, with regrettably wasn't much. So with my bag full of, well not much, I set back out into the wasteland.

I had been walking for about 3 hours, according to my pipbuck Stable 310 had been in an apple orchard (what was left of it anyway) in Applosa. So far I hadn't run into anypony else, friend or foe. But something told me that if I headed in this direction long enough I'd reach something like a town at the very least.

Then I saw it over the horizon, It was what looked like a ram shackle circle of huts, made from scraps of metal and wood. I trotted close and my Pipbuck labeled it as "Up'ore" looking at the large sign that had been moved there from Celestia knows where, I assumed Up'ore must have been Super Store at some point but over time the letters had fallen off to spell Up'ore.

Trotting inside I was met with one red bar and 7 yellow bars on my EFS, a pony the color of rotten apples wearing jagged metal armor and wielding some kind of hoofmade gun was firing into what looked like my own stable food shop, if it had been made of rotting wood and smeared with dirt and blood.

"Come on out pretty little ponies! I just want to put a few holes in you!" The rotten apple pony shouted. He looked rugged smeared with blood and as though he had just been in a large fight. At that moment I knew one thing, that anypony fireing and not being fired at, probably wasn't up to anything good, so I drew my pistol, and fired a shot into the air.

"Hey!" What in Equestria was I doing? "Put down your... gun? and we can all go home safe" I was hoping that me having a gun would deter him, after all if the ponies in the shop front had had weapons, they could easily have taken him. Apparently, I knew nothing about the wasteland, because he flew around and started shooting at me.

The first 3 bullets flew right past me and off into the wasteland, the 4th and 5th however struck me in my un-armored flank. It was the most pain I had felt yet, you never felt anything like this back in stable 130. It was as if somepony had well, shot me. I had nothing to compare it to.

I activated SATS, something I knew not how to use, but was going to try anyway, I targeted his head and BLAM! one Shot was fired and that one shot hit him in the left eye. I felt sick, even if he had just shot at me, as his limp body hit the dirt I felt as though I had violated nature, and worse yet part of me knew I would have to do it a lot more. So far this surface stuff was just horrible, but at this point I was all in.

A filly no more than 4 popped her head out from behind the store front, only to have it stuffed back down by another hoof. Clearly they didn't want to take any chances. I Limped over and looked over the counter. Two foals, a filly and colt, the ponies I assumed where their parents, the shop keep, who I could tell was the shop keep due to the 200 year old name tag he wore, and two mares that looked terrified out of their minds.

"are you ok?" I asked, biting back the tears I had yet to spill both from my situation and my fresh bullet wound. "I'm not going to shoot you if that's what you're worried about, I'd rather do less of that if possible". And with that the filly popped her head up again and gave me a wide grin.

"You saveded us from Mr. Boom Stick!" Mr Boom Stick? I suppose he did have a gun, with was in essence a stick that went boom, but really, Boom Stick was a name for somepony with dynamite, something I ad read enough about to know it's explosive power.

"What did he want with you?" I asked. It was weird to suddenly feel so protective over ponies I had no connection with. Part of me wanted to believe it was something all ponies would do in my place, but I already knew they wouldn't. The armored ponies and this armed lunatic had showed me that.

"Want'd our caps, said he's kill us if we didn't pony up, then when we did, he started shoot'n us anyway". Well at least I could feel a little better about removing his eye from it's socket, I still wanted to puke though. "you're not from here though, anypony with half a brain would have seen that raider and shot on sight." So they where called raiders, I guess that made since given what they did.

"Yeah I'm not from here I'm from stable 130". I was hoping that honesty would get me somewhere, in hind sight it got me swindled, but I didn't blame them, they had just lost all their caps. "This is a store right? Do you sell medicine?". If they did, great. If not, I'd have to get directions to somewhere I could find some.

"Sure! for 30 caps I can get you a healing potion!" Said the store clerk as he spung back up. Also wait, caps? Did he want bottle caps from me? Apon further discussion, yes that was exactly what he wanted, in addition it wasn't the same as my job in the stable where I sold food and drink and that was that. Here I could buy and sell, all I needed now was something to sell, well trade, they had no caps of their own at the moment.

"could I work in exchange for some food and healing potions?" This I knew how to do, fair labor for fair pay, assuming they had fair labor, like cleaning or cooking, no murder, with I was starting to think was a very real possibility in this new hell I found myself in.

The junk yard was a few miles south of Up'ore, now marked on my pipbuck. I had one job, get to the junkyard and bring back enough scrap to fix the hole in the fence that the raider had made, and once back fix said hole. Now I knew nothing about fixing things, I knew yeast and flour. But how hard could it be? Put in the right ingredients and do the right stuff and you'd get what you want right? Well first I had to get the scrap.

I entered the junk yard, there were stacks of old sky carts and wagons surrounding a small hut. looking around noted the lack of ponies, so at least they hadn't sent me into a death trap. But that begged the question, why even go through the trouble of letting me do it for pay when they could have done it free and in half the time?

As if to answer my question for me, 4 red bars appeared on my EFS, not raiders but horribly mutated animals that looked like a cross between the few cats I'd seen in books and some kind of bag of waste. With a snarl the two of them lunged at me as the other two burrowed into the ground. I brought up SATS, and this time I knew somewhat how to use it. I targeted the first Mole rat (as it was now labeled in my pipbuck) and locked a shot on it head, then I targeted the second Mole rat and locked a shot on it's torso. Time unfroze and the first shot tore into the Mole rats head leaving a bloody gash in it's face and exposing the brain matter underneath. The second shot landed but didn't kill rendering the animal wounded and unfortunately still hostile.

The other two burrowed out of the ground and up behind me, I was surrounded, and not in a good way either. The one with the bullet wound jumped and landed on my horn, while the other two started clawing at my back. It felt like being in an apple dicer. They tore into my hide and as the world started to get fuzzy I heard the sound of that same armor, the same armor that had torn my friends to pieces. And then I blacked out.

Footnote:

Level up!
New perk: Observant rank 1, You've been bitten and shot before, now you know what to look for! EFS range increased by 15%
Level 3