Fallout Equestria: S.T.A.L.K.E.R

Chapter 44: Hazard

"For lack of guidance a nation falls, but many advisors make victory sure."
Proverbs 11:14

Before magical hellfire rained down across the sunny plains, glistening mountaintops, magical forests, and bustling cities of the world and sounded the death bell for tens, if not hundreds of millions of sentient creatures, the political climate of Equestria was something of a bizarre tinderbox. Lapsing faith in one, perhaps a few particular ponies led to the decentralization of economic and military power.

Perhaps in any other world, in any other timeline this could have, this should have worked out for the better. But it did not. Colorful little equines who more often then not acted on emotion than reason or a reasonable desire for peace and prosperity. In the end it all came down to a few prideful creatures: Zebras, dragons, ponies alike, that pushed things to a breaking point at the wrong place, and at the wrong time. They made paradise into hell. They were given every opportunity to thrive, to live in peace and harmony with one another. But absolute power corrupts absolutely, when that happens good intentions can become warped into something unrecognizable. There is an impossibly fine line between pure, venomous evil, and what is reasonable for a civilization to do to prevent its extinction.

A discovery of a new physical or quantum mechanic can be used as either the means or the justification to kill countless. A new spell or a doctrine can do the same thing, with fewer or greater limitations. None of that mattered so much any more.

Of course this would be ironic to any outsider looking inwards from the outside. But to Nikolai, to all the ponies that lived atop the moldy ruins of long lost generations, it was all very real. It was just life. They didn't necessarily understand it, they didn’t have the time to understand it, but it was life, and it was undeniably real.

**

The first signs that they were approaching the old frontlines came when they spotted a row of unarmored, open topped trucks filled with crates and metal boxes on route to... Somewhere. In less than a half a kilometer the road had gone from mostly stable patchwork asphalt to a crater filled mess. Somewhere off to their far side an old plane sat nose down in the dirt.

"Hey, Nikolai-are those trees?" The Stalker strained his eyes on Aurora's behalf as they shimmied down into a little embankment.

"No, those are artillery pieces."

They skidded into a pile of rusting brass casings, around them sat the smashed remains of three field guns, their gutted barrels stretched skywards. A skeleton littered the ground here or there, clothing decaying on the ground around them, along with armor and rigging that was shredded beyond use. They kept going.

"Why are we headed this way?" Aurora asked him, keeping up pace with Nikolai.

"Well, we're here for a eh... a reason."

"What reason is that?" They started down a small imprint in the terrain that turned to a trench after a hundred meters.

"It's a warzone, an abandoned one. Full of cool stuff. Stuff that we could use that I refuse to pay for.” Nikolai told his compatriots, picking up pace. "The fighting has been over for a long time. But the weapons and all the other cool shit should still be here!”

"And if somepony else got to it before us?" Willow pried. Nikolai stopped, and led them past more skeletons and more craters. All of a sudden the earthworks branched out into separate, cruder side passages. Finally they stepped out of the trenches.

Out ahead of them lay what Nikolai thought the French-German border must have looked at the end of The First World War. Out past rows of rusting barbed wire lay more and more craters, ruined buildings turned to rubble, and bodies. Not bodies, skeletons. Corroding, rotting skeletons. Hundreds, thousands of them lay across the length of scorched land between where they stood and the enemy lines, which must have been less than a kilometer away at their closest. Spread out in sporadic pockets across the landscape were the remains of armored vehicles; tanks, mobile howitzers, armored troop transports. They also saw the ruined hulks of robots and automatons that had met their end centuries earlier. The grey and black forms of Equestrian weapons stuck barrel or buttstock up out of the mud beside the glimmering silhouettes of enchanted zebra weaponry.

Far, far south, towards the Zebrican lines, were craters. Vast gashes in the earth that burned and glowed with a sickly green. The telltale scaring of Balefire bombs. About a half kilometer away was what Nikolai thought was a downed plane. It was only after some quick investigation through his rifle scope that he realized that it was really the body of a long dead dragon.

"Now this, this is something." He turned to Aurora and saw her mouth hanging open.

"This is it." She whispered under her breath, her wings flaring a bit in distress. "This is where it ended. Somewhere beyond those hills is Zebrica."

The Stalker turned to Flashpoint, who was eyeing the scene in front of himself, eyed it with morbid curiosity. Nikolai took a knee and pointed off at the distant craters. "I don't suppose you guys would be up for visiting another country today, eh? I hope you brought your passports."

"Something doesn't feel right." Willow bounded up into the air and hovered a few meters off the ground. "It's too quiet."

"Is it the good kind of quiet or the bad kind of quiet?" Nikolai reached up and poked at one of the thestral's hooves.

"I don't know, it's just quiet." Nikolai turned and looked back out across the battlefield. He had seen conflict before, yes. Plenty of it. But he wasn't a soldier, he had never actually been to war. Of course The Exclusion Zone and The Wasteland were fair comparisons but-he had never come across a battle with thousands or tens of thousands of combatants on either side in any one place. Even if they were only colorful, dogmatic, magical equines.

"Time is ticking, and god only knows what kind of stuff prowls these place at night time. Start hunting, we will work our way up through this trench system-and then head out across no mans land-"

"Don't you mean No Pony's Land?"

He thought Aurora was only joking with him, she wasn't. But The Stalker didn't say anything about it, they wound their way up past a boxy tracked thing that looked like a cold war era anti aircraft battery- only... Upon closer inspection, they realized that the gun barrels weren't barrels at all, but rather emitters with large, razor sharp tips on their ends. Aurora deduced that they were some kind of beam weapon, long neglected, and past unusable.

Nikolai kept having to remind himself that that this, as much as it looked like something a fellow might see on the news or on some war documentary, this wasn't the remains of a human conflict. There were things here, weapons, devices, which defied normal understanding. He found bolt action rifles beside automated magical turrets, and advanced optical targeting systems and smashed computer displays besides discarded pens and quills.

"Anything in particular we should be searching for?" Willow floated back down to the ground.

"Exotic weapons. Explosives. Remember those fellows back at the Megamart? How they were talking up the Core? I'm not entirely convinced what we have on us will be enough to keep us alive in there. Here, look at this." He patted the frontal hull plate of a medium tank in a hull-down position, with only its turret visible from the surface, partly buried in the mud.

"What happens if we run into something like this?" His next set of words flowed naturally.

"We run away!" He surmised loudly. "We run away, because that is how you stay alive. I am not an infantryman like... These unfortunate fellows around us. I, am a Stalker! And a businessman! We stack caps, not bodies, yes? Work smarter, not harder." He stepped away from the tank. Aurora ran a hoof along the side, examining the Equestrian flag painted against it.

"Do you think it still works?"

"Doubtful." Flashpoint replied, but Nikolai waved the comment away. He was already busy crawling up onto the turret ring, using the main gun as support while he shimmied up towards the commanders hatch. With a jolt from his crowbar the hatch came unstuck and he threw it open and shined a light down into it.

"Hey, Flashpoint. Hold this fine gentleman for me, will you?" Nikolai reached down into the hull and pulled the skeleton of the tank commander out of it's resting spot.

"Anything?" Nikolai made his way down into the cramped, interior and came up a few seconds later.

"I just remembered that I don't know shit about tanks, it's a shame-but... I doubt that anyone could get this thing running again. Oh well, it was worth a try. Let's keep on going."

Nikolai looked out across the frontlines as they trekked westwards. He was thinking... Contemplating something. Nothing philosophical; his eyes studied the carnage for anything useful. Granted there was plenty of useful stuff to be found out there. But he was searching for something specific. The problem was that he had no idea what that specific thing was.

A ways out, perhaps just a hundred meters from the trenches, on the side of a cratered road near a pair of two story bombed out brick buildings sat a collection of bodies. But they weren't just any kind of body. They bore uniforms and armor that Nikolai had never seen before. They were clustered behind the sleek remains of what must have been an infantry fighting vehicle.

"What is it?" Willow asked him.

"Do you hear anything?" The Stalker crouched behind a splintered oak tree.

"No. Nothing."

"Do you smell anything off? Sense anything?"

"Nope."

"I make break for those buildings over there. I want what is on those bodies. You guys cover for me, yes?"

"Um..." Aurora stared blankly at her E.F.S. and began giving out orders to Flashpoint, who galloped a short ways down the trench and stopped near an old light machine gun nest they had passed a little while ago. Nikolai looked both ways, then ahead, then up at the sky, and finally, back at his destination. He exhaled heavily though the filter of his mask, and took off in a sprint.

Nikolai's rifle rocked from side to side in his grasp. He stepped past a lump in the road and something began to:

Beep. Beep. Beep!

Bang!

A proximity mine detonated behind The Stalker. Dirt, shrapnel, and a pressure wave jetted up into the air behind him. He kept running, another mine beeped and detonated off to his right, but he was already too far out for it to end in any damage. He bounded and landed off the road near the first bombed out brick building, a few meters off from the wreck.

"Hey, Nikolai!?" Aurora called out, her voice full of grateful surprise. "Are you wounded?" Her voice lost meaning as a burst of red beams singed The Stalker's coat, and an olive green insectoid drone hovered out from the second ruin, weapons dangling from limbs along its underside just ready to try and fry The Stalker. Nikolai raised his rifle to fire on it but-just then, it lost interest. It's targeting diode stared right at him, and ignored him.

"It doesn't know what I am! It doesn't see me as a hostile!" His mind cried success. He raised his rifle and fired at the drones unarmored, exposed underbelly. It crumbled to the ground in a smoldering heap.

"Nikolai?" Aurora's voice finally cut through the commotion. "Are you ok?"

The Stalker froze in mid step and cocked his head towards Aurora. "What kind of debil makes landmines that tell you that you're whenever you get close to them? It's a nice curtesy but-really... it makes for a poor weapon, don't you think? It defeats the whole purpose of a landmine."

He stepped over the drone's carcass and knelt down besides the discarded equipment and skeletons bearing his reward. He fumbled with his tools and quickly got to work unfastening the straps of a set of combat armor. He held it up by its shoulder pieces. It was fairly hefty for its size, he banged on it with a clenched fist, it felt solid enough. The skeleton it belonged to bore a helmet identical to the one Flashpoint wore. Was it aramid? Kevlar? Metal? Some kind of enchanted plastic? He couldn't quite tell.

A body a little ways away from the one he was ransacking had clearly met a less unfortunate sort of fate, with several bullet holes stitched across it's skeletal frame and a big glossy dent in the armor near where a heart once was. Nikolai knew that last bit because he had, unfortunately grown fairly familiar with what the innards of a pony looked like over the past few weeks. He dug his hand into the armor, feeling only slightly disrespectful and jokingly hoping that the soul of the poor sap who had met his or her end here didn't mind. He examined the name plate on the side of the armor but the paint was too flaked to make out any of the lettering. He wiped it away, and looked back at his compatriots who were all now clustered out along a twenty meter length of trench, waiting for Nikolai to finish whatever it was he was doing. He finished strapping the bits of old armor to the back of his rucksack and waved them over. Willow grabbed Flashpoint and glided him over the mined road.

"What now?" They skidded in behind the wreck of the armored personnel carrier.

"You know those fancy-schmancy zebra rifles? I want one of them." Nikolai pointed off to their left, where they had come from, then traced the distant glow of the balefire craters with a finger. "They stand out besides everything else! They're just sitting there. Waiting to be taken! It's a goldmine that's just sitting out in a field!"

"So what... You're just going to run out there and get them?" Flashpoint asked incredulously.

While Nikolai conveyed his plan, Aurora soared up and perched herself atop one of the highest points on the bombed out building, near a smashed-in window sill facing south.

Nikolai turned to Willow, "Unless you want to fly out there and grab it for me, then... Yes." The bat pony's ears perked up when he heard his name, and he nodded curtly.

"Sure, just eh... Tell me which one you want me to snatch." The Stalker rubbed his face through his mask and rested his rifle against the side of old armored vehicle. He peered through rifle optic, set it on something at the edge of its ranging chevron, and held it up to Willow's right eye.

"That one, right there." He pointed to a conspicuous looking one in between two shredded trees about two hundred meters away.

"Can you get to it?"

"Well provided nothing shoots me out of the sky, sure!" He remarked lightly. The thestral removed his cloak and darted off into the shadows. About ten seconds later Willow appeared back in Nikolai's field of view, flying low to the ground. He stopped and skidded to a halt near the zebra rifle, then turned and waved to the others, pointing to his find. The Stalker waved a thumbs-up above his head and motioned for him to dig it out of the ground and bring it back.

Bang! Pop!

Something burst and crackled in the distance, and all of a sudden Willow dropped to the ground.

"Oh-crap! Crap! Blayt!" Nikolai cursed and examined his friend through his rifle optic. He looked unharmed. So what happened? He watched for a few more moments. Willow was alive, but he sure looked concerned about something. He didn't have a radio and, well... They couldn't risk trying to call out to him from almost a quarter kilometer away. This all concluded with the realization that Nikolai would have to go there and bring him back on his own.

"Aurora?"

"Yeah?"

"Stay here with Flashpoint." He took a swig of vodka, then stuffed the bottle away and unstrapped and unslung his rucksack, setting it to rest up against a freestanding chimney inside of the second brick building. He fumbled with the contents of his pack, and retrieved The Cottonburn Artifact's lead lined container and affixed it to his thick leather belt.

"In case things go sideways, I have a backup plan... for my backup plan."

He gave the magazine of his rifle a firm tug, set his eyes on the grey-green-brown thing that constituted his friend, and stepped out from behind the chimney, advancing down the dirt road. At around halfway the road devolved into a mess of crater-ponds filled with fetid water. A ghoul squealed and reeled in one of them, Nikolai put a bullet through its head and kept on going. His pace quickened: He didn't want to exhaust himself if he had to turn and run back to the others with his compatriot over his shoulder.

"Hey, Willow? Willow!" He scrambled around a crater and squat-walked over his his friend. "Are you ok?" The bat pony looked up and him and pulled him to the ground.

"Shh..." He jabbed a hoof over at a horizontal crater a few meters away. There, at the threshold of the hold was what Nikolai could only describe as a miniature tank. Topped with...

Fwoosh!

-A flamethrower.

K-thunk!

And a grenade launcher.

Nikolai grabbed Willow under his forelegs and began to turn to run. When he suddenly realized that he had almost forgotten the Zebra rifle. There is lay, caked in a mud cask.

"Blin, does it still function? It's in rough shape-ah Babuska, help me!"

He watched as the tracked abomination's launcher whirled and sent an explosive round high over The Stalker's head. Willow pulled his sawn off shotgun from his chest bandolier and fired a spell matrix disruption shell without taking the time to aim. The shell went low and fizzled out in the dirt.

The tracked machine kept on getting closer. Nikolai brought up his AK 101 in one arm and fired two shots until his rifle jammed. He didn't have time to clear it, so he dropped Willow and dove for the zebra rifle. The thought of it not working didn't cross his mind. He pointed the barrel at the little rover and pulled what he assumed was the trigger. An azure muzzle flash left the barrel, and an enchanted slug melted struck the flamethrower assembly. The bot rumbled and came to a halt.

The two looked at one another, then at the bot.

"Let's split before those grenades start cookin' off."

"Da, yes, agreed!"

Back at the bombed out buildings Flashpoint and Aurora watched all of this unfold at a distance. They waved their friends on as the two trudged back to the ruins.

"Did you get what went out there for?" Flashpoint pressed his friend, who replied with a dazed blink and a jab of a wing.

"Take a look, at what Nikolai's got on him."

He held his AK in one hand and the zebra gun in the other. Aurora marveled at it with what must have been stars in her eyes. They all clustered around The Stalker as he set his rifle down beside his rucksack and began to fondle over the strange looking rifle he had just pulled out of the dirt. It looked like a sort of weirdly elongated AK, almost like a Dragunov marksman rifle-but with a shorter gas system and a strange stock and grip. Everything-except for maybe the trigger, the scope, and the barrel were all covered in black and white stripes. Nikolai peered through the glass of the optic and found a giant crack running right down the middle-and a fuzzy field of view. All of the nitrogen gas inside of the scope had leaked out long ago, making it all but useless. It made sense that two hundred years in the ruins of No Man's Land wouldn't be too kind to any firearm. Much less the work of art Nikolai was now holding in his hands.

"Does it still work?" Aurora pried. Nikolai sat back against his rucksack and stuffed Cottonburn back into it. "Oh, is it operational, you ask?" He wheezed. "Does it function-Blya it melted a hole in the side of a robot! This thing! And it did it quietly."

"Amazing." She whispered, drawing closer. Nikolai flipped the the rifle around in his hands, showing it off, feeling a little proud of himself. He felt the same way he did all those years ago when he had first picked up a shotgun, when he had found his AK 101 back on earth, when he had found his plasma carbine in Canterlot. The Stalker glanced down the iron sights, which glowed ever so slightly. He scrapped some of the muck off of the action and trigger mechanism, then fumbled with the center of the gun until his hand fell upon a paddle which turned out to be the magazine release. With a firm tug, it came loose and was able to examine the contents inside. Normal looking ammunition. Copper jacketed Five-five six by forty five. He pulled back the rifle's unmistakably familiar action and looked into the breach.

"My god, look at this! It's almost pristine after all this time."

The interior of the barrel and the bolt were laden with shards of glowing crystals and alien-esque runes. He stuffed the magazine back into the gun and began to look around for something that he could shape into a sling. He ended up taking one off of an old rifle laying up against one of the skeletons. He looped one side around the hand-hoof guard thing, and the other around what must have been the stock, finishing it off with two very stubborn looking knots. He scrapped as much mud and grime away from the action as he could manage with the blunt side of his knife and slung it over his shoulder alongside his rucksack. His friends watched the whole debacle unfold as he heaved and pulled and nearly lost his balance in trying to fit all that weight on his back. His muscles and shoulders and spine didn't seem to mind after all he had been through.

"I wish we could take more of this stuff, but eh.." There was a pause in his voice.

"I am not being superfluous!" The Stalker insisted, "I'm being practical. I can carry all of this stuff with me-so I will. Once we get back to Megamart I'll determine what to do with what, ok? Ok."

"Are you sure?" Flashpoint asked him. "I haven't seen this much firepower since that armory outside of Whiskey Springs."

"Grab a bandolier off of one of the dead bodies then." Nikolai insisted, "And as many magazines as you can carry."

They began to backtrack towards the old Equestrian lines by taking the dirt road that they were already on back over the hills and into Hoofington. Now partway through they found an old collapsed bunk tent. Burned and scorched by a magical missile strike and looted long before the group ever arrived there.

Just beyond some telephone poles a little further away from the collapsed tents stood an overturned armored supply truck. Nikolai shined his weapon light underneath, half expecting something to try and jump out at him, he saw nothing. He moved to the next truck, which had once been filled with crates of rations, now long since expired or looted. He found a few depleted spark packs... And a large lockbox which looked liked it had seen other opportunistic passerby's. Nikolai climbed up into the truck bed and looked at it for a few moments, then fished out his crowbar and heaved the top off.

"Well, what is it?" The others pried. Nikolai dug through the interior and pulled a dust collection of sealed letters from within.

"It's mail."

"What kind of mail is it?" The Stalker figured that whoever these letters were addressed to had long since passed-so he picked up the first one he could find, ripped open the top, unfolded the little paper within, one topped with a stamp of a white winged unicorn and a few rolling hills, and began to read it to himself. There was a listed address, and what must have been a zip code, and then it began:

//

My Dear Sweet Rock,

Oh, it's been so long since our last correspondence! We all miss you back at home, the pumpkin vines in the backyard are coming in great! And the local jam shop just isn't quite the same without you. Victory and I finally gave into the demands from the local Coltscout group to take them spelunking-we're leaving for the old mines tomorrow. Anyhow, we all hope you're ~~staying safe~~ giving those zebra's hell! And we really hope that you'll be able to go on leave soon!

P.S, I finished paying off the house and I hope you like those pictures I took for you!

Love, Honey Crisp

//

There was a photo attached to it. A green-yellow earth pony mare in a hard hat with a little lantern by her side. Nikolai chuckled, and rubbed his forehead through his mask.

"Goodness gracious." He felt around the bottom of the and pulled out another photo of something he really didn't want to see.

"Eugh! Ah! What the fuck man? That's nasty!"

He tossed 'less than modest' photo back into the pile of letter and looked back at the letter he held in his hand. He felt a bit conflicted. There must have been dozens, hundreds of other bits of war mail just like this here. He didn't want to read through all of them, but he didn't just want to leave this little bit of history where it was. He couldn't take it all, that would be pointless. So he took the letter and he took the photo that was in his hands and he stuffed it into a coat pocket. He sealed the box and buried it in the little rut beneath the truck he had found it atop. The little bit of the past he had come across would remain preserved and lost forever.

"Nikolai, come check this out!"

The Stalker moved away from the truck and followed the sound of Aurora's voice. He paced into a raised command structure and found a great big pile of surplus clothing. No armor, but-amidst it was several sets of large military saddle bags. Forest green and nearly brand new. They were more space-efficient than they ones they currently wore, and they were much larger. Not too large, just right. They unbuckled and undid their old packs and donned the new ones almost as quickly as they had come across them. Aurora took the mainstay of their rations, Flashpoint and Willow dealt with random scrap, medical supplies, and explosives. Nikolai held onto anything unique, and most of the group's ammunition. He explained it like this: There were no unicorns amongst them, if push came to shove-which it always did-he could move and manipulate his weapons faster and make more accurate shots than anything that stood on four legs and didn't have opposable thumbs ever could. It was almost like cheating. If winning the biological lottery could be considered cheating in another world.

As for their small fortune, they divided their caps up amongst each other for the sake of convenience. They had no easy way of actually hanging onto thousands of little tiny chips of metal- and in all honesty The Stalker wished their was some safe place they could stash it all. But they were always on the move, so that wasn't an option. They carried their entire livelihood on their backs.

They took a short break about a half a kilometer from the trench lines to eat a small snack before going north again, away from the ancient battlefield. Curtesy of Nikolai's PDA map they had already agreed on the route they would take back into to the Megamart. It was through an old military district that would take them up and onto a raised highway, then back down through some ruins, and-finally west-northwest to the edge of raider territory where the marketplace stood.

"Do any of you fellows know how to swim?" The Stalker looked about.

"Nope." Flashpoint shook his head. "I never had a need for it."

"There aren't many swimming pools up in the clouds." Aurora curled her wings beneath her cloak. She kept up pace with Nikolai as they neared a turn off on flat ground that would bring them into a bit of wrecked suburban sprawl.

"But I suppose I could if I tried." Nikolai fidgeted with his AK 101's charging handle and kicked up dirt near Willow.

"Well?"

"Well what? I asked you a question-do you know how to swim?" Willow laughed. "Yep. I learned a long time ago when I was still with my den. Underground aquifers and what not. But it's been about a decade."

Nikolai thought long and hard about his next question. "Cows."

"Excuse me?" Aurora must have looked surprised when that word came out of Nikolai's mouth.

"Ok, you have all seen brahmin, yes? Well a cow..." He was gesticulating in the air now, formulating the rough shape of a bovine with his hands and fingers. The others watched with amusement.

"A cow is a brahmin that hasn't been given the ugly duckling treatment by radiation! It has fur! And one head! And blayt, it tastes like heaven if you prepare it right."

"Nikolai we all know what a cow is. I've only ever seen then in picture books,"

"Same here." The zebra and the bat pony repeated in unison behind them. Aurora pulled her visor away and looked at The Stalker with eyes that read: "We need to talk." But in a funny sort of way.

"Nikolai, Stalker." She started with a heavy tone of sarcasm, rolling her head back and forth as she went. "Of all the things that we could be talking about right now. All of the things, any number of them. The Hoofington Core, Enclave history, The Great War, those sentient trees that you claimed you saw in The Everfree Forest. You buffoon! Please, I beg of you... Ask me about anything but cows and brahmin! Or any other livestock for that matter." She was panting now, the poor pegasus was sympathetic, yes. But ranting was not her strong suit.

"How about a joke?" Nikolai offered. She frowned and retreated back under her visor and mask. "I'm all dad joked out for today."

"Impossible!" Nikolai pointed up at the clouds, mimicking Plato. "How about a counter-rant?"

"Shoot."

"A picnic."

"What?" They all uttered in surprise.

"A picnic, the remains of one. That was what this place is. Suppose you are an ant. An ordinary, normal ant. Not the mutated variety. Say you are this ant, and you watch as a group of fellows pull up to your little patch of grass in this metal machine, they do their thing, eat their stuff, maybe they change some engine parts-and then... A big fire comes out of nowhere, and torches them. You emerge from your little hole in the ground or- maybe you come from the depths of the forest. You look over the blackened ruins. You see apple cores, bread crumbs, bits of aluminum, kitchen knives. Of course, you don't know what these things are. How could you? You are certain, certain that these things are valuable, that they must be important. But they are only the leftovers of what once was. A boneyard, a graveyard, if you will. Only, if you are lucky-or... Perhaps unlucky, you will find a ghost or an apparition to tell you about the time before this fire. In a sense, this world, this Wasteland... Is like the remains of a picnic. And we are the ants left to pick through the rubble and figure out how to make something of it."

Aurora stopped again. She turned and looked up at The Stalker.

"That's...deep and...thought provoking."

"No, no," Willow burbled suddenly. "She's a pegasus. They all live above the clouds! She wouldn't be an ant, she'd be a wasp! Because of that barbed tail!"

Nikolai turned and looked back at the thestral through the lenses of his mask. "Willow, if she's a wasp then you're a fluffy mosquito. And so we are right back where we began, only now... We are talking about parasites instead of useful creatures. It's funny, is it not? See. I knew how to make you laugh, even if you did not want it."

**

Raiders. They were everywhere. They didn't know that for sure of course but-there were few well traveled routes on this side of "The Hoof", that being-well traveled by ponies and creatures who still retained some thing resembling civility. They looked like little ants from far away; little silhouettes which moved and congregated erratically and occasionally pounced upon one another. The sound of gunfire in the distance was a non-stop constant.

All at once Nikolai noticed that something was wrong. It stopped, the gunfire stopped. And in the distance he and the others heard a single, earsplitting growl. That's odd, normally growls aren't earsplittingly painful to hear. Howls can be, screams and screeches-depending on the creature can be incredibly painful, and even dangerous to one's eardrum-but this was a proper growl, and it made the hair on the back of their necks stand up. It wasn't a growl like you might hear out of any other monster in the Wasteland-or The Exclusion Zone or... Any old horror film. It was raspy, hollow. It sounded like a mountain lion that was trying to sound intimating while choking on a beaver. It was unpleasant, jarring-and... Really a bit disgusting.

Willow was the first to snap out of it, he kicked Nikolai in the shin and almost made The Stalker tumble over. He held his hoof up to his maw and pointed at something in the middle of the road.

A stone statue of a unicorn with it's muzzle pointed right up into the clouds, with a face that was contorting into something resembling fear.

"Huh." Nikolai whispered to the others. "Now why is there a statue in the middle of the road? Guys, what do you think?"

"It's just a statue." Aurora said plainly. "What's so scary about? It's not like it's going to come to life and jump at us." Nikolai stared at the statue, biting his dry lower lip. "There is a statue in the middle of the road. Out here, without any graffiti. Without any weathering. With an appearance like that? I don't buy it and you all should not either."

A cloud of dust rolled across the road and Willow spotted a cluster of ponies about a hundred meters away, moving across the road. They were scraggly, worn and looked about ready to snap. One of the ponies, one armed with a pump action shotgun. Suddenly stopped and swung his gun around. The four put their fingers, hooves, and teeth on their triggers and took aim.

Scree!

The pony fired, but not at Nikolai. The stallion fired a shot into the dust cloud, and then another. The other ponies with him opened fire, and then- Snap!

Willow's ears recoiled back.

Something lunged itself from the side of the road and ripped the stallion apart.

"Reaper, Reaper!" Everyone around him frenzied and scattered. But that didn't seem to dissuade the creature. It flew from pony to pony, tearing whoever it made contact with limb from limb. Nikolai and Willow got a close up look at the thing through their scopes.

"Is that a pegasus?" Aurora poked The Stalker with a forehoof. Willow and Nikolai shook their heads simultaneously and beckoned her to stay quiet.

What was going after the ponies ahead of them was anything but... it sure looked like a pegasus, if you didn't stare for too long. It was all white, with a long serpents tail, big leathery wings, big glowing yellow eyes, and a scaly carapace that rattled and crackled and shifted with every lightning fast movement. One mare shot the creature point blank in the face, but the round flattened against its scales and bounced away.

The yelling and gunfire was replaced by desperate screaming. The mare with the revolver made the mistake of looking the abomination directly in the eye. There was a flash and a crackle, and she turned to stone.

"Cyka... bylat! Ми не йдемо цим шляхом! We are not taking that path!" Nikolai looked back at his compatriots and announced; "Well friends-we're uh... We're going a different way. Let's put as much distance between that thing and us as possible."

A spider-bot fired a burst of pink magical energy at a radroach, turning it to dust. It turned, and a crowbar sent it crashing to the ground in a heap of scrap. Nikolai sheathed it against his pack and waved his compatriots onwards.

They didn't see them at first, they heard them. They heard one, to be specific. As they skylined over a hilltop and came to a short, wide valley that was choked full of ruins, with more roads running off into the city on the far side. He could see a billboard near an old fire station that bragged about Sparkle Cola, another one that promised military enlistment bonuses. It's probably sounding like this portion of the city was chocked full of urban sprawl but it all relatively spread out. Up ahead was a field of dead grass, a lake of golden brown, but every single blade stood erect, they looked almost frozen in time. And there, near to where the had stopped was a cluster of ponies. They didn't look like raiders and-based upon the lack of cages or bomb collars, they weren't slavers either. But they all certainly looked miserable.

Nikolai cupped his hands around his mouth and called out, "Hallo!"

"Hello, who's there? Oh my..." A mellow reply from one of the ponies, seeming not-to-concerned by the sight of the weird bipedal thing that had suddenly shown up amidst them. Nikolai stumbled down the hillside ahead of his compatriots. Flashpoint and Willow followed, Aurora came down last. It was only once they were all out in the open that Nikolai realized that they weren't looking at a group of ponies, they were looking at zebras. All of whom were now staring expectantly at Nikolai and his compatriots.

"Hello, name is Nikolai." For perhaps the first time in his history with coming across random groups of travelers, he saw a welling of genuine fear amongst them. But it didn't quite make any sense. He looked over his shoulder in case there was anything behind them. No, nothing. They must have been referring to him.

"Please, please, friends. I mean no ill-neither do my compatriots. We're just passing through." That didn't seem to help, so Nikolai did the next reasonable thing. He yanked Flashpoint up off the ground and set him down at the forefront of the group.

He fazed off the shock of being picked up and set down by Nikolai so suddenly and looked around at the strange zebras.

"Um... Hello?" He looked about at them, swishing his tail from side to side. "Is something wrong?" Evidently something was wrong but they only seemed interested in clarifying that through pointing a half dozen carbine barrels at Flashpoint and backing up, very slowly.

"Strangers," One of the zebras asked aloud, "How much do you know about this Remnant here?"

"Eh?" Flashpoint cocked his head and wrinkled his muzzle. "Remnants? What are you talking about and why are your stripes red? Did I miss something?" Willow cantered up to his friend and pointed at the cluster of zebras a few meters away from them.

"Flashpoint, they're separatists. They think that you're here to kill them." Flashpoint's green-brown eyes flew from Willow, to the zebras, and then back and forth again. Until Nikolai suddenly guffawed and snapped his fingers, pointing at the red-striped equines ahead of them.

"Blin-we're not here to kill you! Goodness gracious, that's asinine! Look, you know our names-That's Aurora, by the way." He pointed back in the general direction of the hooded figure now standing defensively at his side. "She is also not here to kill you! Put your guns down and introduce yourselves."

"You're a Foal of Balefire?" The eldest pointed at the radiation trefoil insignia on Nikolai's coat sleeve. The zebras lowered their weapons.

"I get along great with them." The Stalker offered.

It wasn't a complete answer, or even an answer at all, but it seemed to suffice: for someone who had just pounced out of the brushwork, he was completely defying their first impressions of him.

"Cetus," The older female zebra told him. "It is nice to meet a friendly face. I apologize if the others are not as forthcoming." Willow plodded forward and glanced at the necks of a few of the zebras. Nikolai noticed them, and the funny thought of him "browsing for his next meal" popped into his head. Of course that wasn't what the bat pony was thinking about at all. Flashpoint noticed the sores as well.

"Bomb collars? Those sores look recent." Cetus nodded solemnly. Nikolai took his hands from his pockets and set them back on his rifle. "Cetus, we need to get going. Now. My compatriots and I almost had a run-in with some raiders a kilometer or two west of here. They were wiped out by something they called "A Reaper".

"What did this Reaper look like?" Cetus asked him.

"White, glowing eyes, scaly, bat wings." Nikolai listed off all of the defining features he could recall. The surprise of the zebras knew no end.

"Then you are very, very lucky he did not notice you. That was Gorgon. He can turn you to stone if you look him right in the eye."

Nikolai blinked and tapped his rifle's handguard. "I noticed. I'm glad we're in agreement, now I would love to get back to Megamart before sundown, it's a trading post that is maybe a two or three hour walk from here, how does that sound to you?"

"That sounds like a great idea," Cetus smiled at him. "Lead the way."

They smelled the change in the air before it fell from the sky. It was getting colder, wetter. Before they reached the valley it was drizzling, by the time they reached the valley it was borderline storming. The whole time, Nikolai's Geiger counter let out soft welling beep after soft welling beep. The ground flattened out near-to the valley.

Screaming, shouting. There was more of it up ahead. The Stalker sprinted ahead of the group to a point where the road gave way to patchwork dirt and grass and stopped besides an old wagon, he fished out his binoculars and scanned the forefront of the valley. He looked about, adjusted the lenses, and finally lowered them. They were unnecessary. He looked, he looked some more. A pony trotted out of the ruins of an old homestead. This pony, a blue unicorn, began to trot about, Nikolai watched her leave the fence line and start towards the field.

"Should I say something?" He asked himself, deciding that he would. She wasn't armed-and she wore nothing but a bulky green overcoat.

"Hey!" Nikolai called to her.

The mare noticed him, stared blankly for a while, and began to walk towards him. Nikolai's Geiger counter stopped cold, it went silent. Which was something that almost never happened out in the wild. Not this far from settled areas. There was always some degree of ambient background balefire radiation to make the counter tick. But now there was none-it had just gone dead silent. Could the battery have gone out? No. Those things were meant to last for decades. Had it been broken? No, that didn't make sense. It had been working only moments ago. Was it suddenly overloaded? No, Geiger counters displayed the maximum rated dose-count when they overloaded, they didn't just stop working.

She reached the blades of abnormally uniform upright golden grass and began to push her way through them, all of a sudden she slumped towards the ground and began to cough and wheeze. Nikolai picked himself up out of his hiding spot and stood upright, looking at her. His eyes furrowed as he took a quick step forwards. "Don't come any closer! Go back-"

The air didn't look right.

She began to melt. Melt, like a living popsicle left out in the sun for too long. But there was nothing there, there was no pink cloud, no nothing. His Geiger counter and gas analyzer were dead quiet. She just began to melt. She wailed and flailed around on the ground, crawling towards Nikolai as sores and raw spots enveloped her whole body. Nikolai's anomaly detector began to emit beeps, beeps which turned into whines. He retrieved it and stared at the screen in shock.

"Help! Please! Agh! Help..." The mare's voice twisted and faded.

Nikolai didn't move forward any further, he took a knee and began to shimmy back towards the group. Aurora trotted forward but The Stalker held her back with an open palm.

"Stay here." She looked at him like he had just committed a cardinal sin, but once she saw, and her mind processed what was happing in front of her she didn't need his advice at all. It was almost too much to bare, she nearly threw up inside of her helmet.

Nikolai held the screen of his detector upright, pointing its broad little antenna in the direction of the valley and the blue unicorn. He could hardly believe what he was seeing. The array on the detectors screen flashed and burbled with a field of pulsating green, from just a meter away at its closest all the way out to its maximum range, probably even further than that. He wheeled around like a turret. There were splotches behind them as well. They had wandered into the edge of a vast field of Enervation.

"Everyone freeze!"

"Stop! Do not move a muscle! Enervation!" Unfortunately "Enervation" seemed to be the straw that broke the camels back, the zebras fled off into the ruins in the opposite direction. Even Cetus. Now, it was just Willow, Flashpoint, Aurora, Nikolai, and one horribly disfigured unicorn still clinging to life some twenty five meters away.

"Willow?" His friend teetered over to him. "Can you go see if you can find those zebras and make sure they're not trying to flank us or something? Just in case? If they want to go some other way then don't try to convince them to come back, I don't want to wait for them." The bat pony nodded knowingly and took off, leaving the others behind.

"We need to find him a radio." Nikolai told the others as the bat pony disappeared behind him. "We really need to find him a radio." The Stalker looked back at the Enervation field.

"Unnavigable, undetectable, highly lethal." The ponies at The Megamart had said. The late and final revisionist pages of The Wasteland Survival guide said the same thing. Well, undetectable until now. Nikolai held in his left hand a device which gave them a path through the field of magical energy. A convoluted path, but it was a path.

How did Enervation work? Was it fluid, or-was it some sort of stationary magic? Could the field change form all on its own? The Stalker had answers to none of these questions.

"Flashpoint, take... Eh, two steps forward, and then run as fast as you can to me. I want both of you to back right up against me, as close as you can. Go!" They bunched up behind him. Willow arrived a moment later, and Nikolai repeated the instructions.

"Alright, everyone move forwards-slowly." They creeped forward as one until Nikolai ordered them to stop, the beeping on his anomaly detector dimmed a bit.

Willow looked up at Nikolai and rolled his eyes. "At this rate we'll be here all night." The Stalker turned to see the zebras watching them from the ruins, giving him his very own unwanted audience.

"Nikolai!" Cetus' voice faded out of earshot as they traversed their way deeper into the field, the zebras left and disappeared from view. Nikolai began to see evidence of other things that had tried, unsuccessfully, to navigate it. He saw skeletons, not only of ponies but also of other wild animals. A few he didn't recognize. The bones were all charred and bleached a dull grey, like a fire had passed over them. But there were no signs of a fire, not even an old one. After a minute they reached the body of the now almost lifeless unicorn, they were only a pace away from the blue unicorn.

"Hey! Are you dead?"

"Kul-meh..." The thing resembling a unicorn rasped. Nikolai stopped Willow from raising his shotgun, and instead reached into his pack and withdrew Cottonburn. He uncased it from its lead lined container and held the pink, glowing hunk of crystalized dark magic in his hands.

"Here, hold this!" He then gently passed it to the mare, rolling it gently through the upright blades of dead grass and towards her left forehoof. As soon as it touched the last remaining follicles of fur around her hoof it began to work. The pink magic hummed and crackled across her body, rewinding and reconnecting and restructuring things. It seemed to stop around her right hindquarter. They waited, and waited some more. And the mare lapsed out of consciousness. A flare of indigo magic hissed and crackled until she looked almost brand new.

"Is she dead?" Flashpoint asked him. Nikolai examined the body of the mare very closely. The 'melting' had stopped and almost completely reversed itself.

"Get me a long stick."

"How long?" Aurora asked him, Nikolai pointed to the mare on the ground a little ways away. He looked around: No sticks to be found. He tied a length of climbing line to his knife and-

"Nikolai watch where you throw that-" He sent it right through the mare's jacket, he gave it a tug and hauled her body all the way up to the tips of his boots, retrieved his blade, his rope and Cottonburn and dusted his hands off.

"Hey, friend? Stranger? Are you alive?" He gave her a gentle kick and knelt down to check for a pulse. It was there alright, steady and resting. But she was still unconscious. That pink cloud artifact really could work miracles.

"Well Nikolai, since you saved her you volunteered to carry her." The Stalker looked at her, then down at the detector he was still holding in one hand, then finally his shoulder blades reminded him of the weight he already carried on his back.

"Fine." He threw the mare over his shoulder. The seventy something kilogram mare. He almost fell flat on his back when he attempted it.

"No. No-your packs are all mostly empty. I've got all of the heaviest stuff. No, Aurora-Flashpoint, drape her over your backs, drag her if you have to."

The next two hours weren't nearly so interesting. It looked like a game of hopscotch where the squares were visible only to Nikolai through that little screen on his detector. They never saw what was trying to kill them, never heard it, never smelled it. The field of arrow-straight blades of dead grass was dead quiet, nearly peaceful. It was a little time capsule that not one soul would ever willing go through if they knew what was waiting for them once they got inside. The deeper they got into the field the worse the density of lethal magic got, there were portions where they just had to sprint or gallop as fast as they could and come to a dead stop on a dime again and again and again, before the Enervation had any time to effect them. There seemed to be a little grace period before it began to effect biological life, and they exploited it to its fullest. Now they were less than ten meters from the end of the Enervation field, it was beginning to thin out.

"Huh? Ah!" The mare that was being carried by Flashpoint and Aurora squirmed on their backs, they set her down and let her cough and shiver, they all clustered around her and watched as her eyes fluttered back over and she sat up.

"What happened? W-hy can't I feel my legs?" She stared up at them with big, pitiful eyes.

"Ohohoho!" Nikolai pumped his fist and clasped his hands together. "I did it! Hah! Success, I say! She's not dead! Wait-you can't feel your legs?"

"No-No... They must've fallen asleep."

"Fallen asleep?" Nikolai pulled his mask off of his face. The rain had stopped by now, his hood fell down around his neck and the unicorn got a good look at the person who'd saved her. "What are you? Oh, I-whatever-Who are you? Where am I, how did I get here?"

"You walked into a patch Enervation and started melting, my compatriots and I saved you. You're welcome."

"Why?" She croaked. "Why'd you save me?"

Aurora started to say something but Willow got his words out first: "Because we going that way and you weren't dead yet."

"How did-" She coughed into her hood and Aurora held her upright. "How did you make out alive?" Aurora looked at Nikolai, who stuffed his detector back onto his belt.

"Luck, I suppose. A lot of luck, and I do mean, a lot of luck." It was a lie, but The Stalker said it so convincingly that the mare had no trouble believing him.

"You should try gambling then, you'd probably win big." She smiled at him.

Nikolai smiled back. "I'm Nikolai, the mare next to-" The unicorn turned and looked at Aurora's face, or rather, she turned and looked right into her emotionless visor. She had never seen power armor before in her life, and that included the particularly menacing pattern that the Enclave used.

Aurora, whose armored hoof had just made contact with one of the mares coat legs, suddenly came to a grave realization. The mare tried to remove her jacket, and she winced as it caught ahold of something. That thing was her skin. Part of the jacket had fused with her flesh when it had been melted by the Enervation, and that was something which the Cottonburn Artifact couldn't remedy. She shrugged off and managed a smile: "At least I'm alive."

"At least you're alive." Aurora's mechanical voice filtered through her mask. The unicorn looked around at the three equines and one human. Her green eyes wandered from Nikolai's pale face to Flashpoint's stripes, to Willow's catlike pupil's and the big bushy ears that poked up through his deep green mane. She had already gotten a look at Aurora's visor.

"A monster, a bat pony, a zebra, and a robot." She chuckled softly. "It gets crazier every day." Without another word Nikolai stomped over to her, picked her up, and set her on all fours. She wobbled, Aurora held onto her until she found her balance. Nikolai kneeled and wiped the dirt off of her jacket.

“Oh I may wander but when I do, bum bum bum bum, I will never be far from you, you’re in my blood and you will always be… Sweet Ukrania, you run deep in me."

Nikolai turned down the volume on his radio and gestured to the mare's body. “See, up you go, good as new!” She wobbled around like a newborn on her legs. “How?”

“Magic!” Nikolai announced, “It was magic! There, have all of your questions been answered? Probably not! But you’re not dead, eh? Now let’s get going before night sets in and all the creepy crawlies show up." Nikolai pulled his mask back up over his head, looking back at the unicorn through the lenses of his mask. The mare swallowed and coughed.

"Do you have any water?"

Nikolai fumbled with the side pouch of his rucksack and grabbed a canteen. "Waterfall it miss, but please. Tell me your name first."

"Cobalt Wrench." Nikolai nodded and passed the canteen over into her magical grasp. She took a short sip and looked up at Nikolai with an expression on her face that asked if she could have some more, The Stalker motioned for her to tip it back, and she graciously did, finishing the canteen with a gasp of relief.

"Thank you."

"You're welcome." Nikolai said loudly, snatching his canteen back. Not rudely, just loudly. Cobalt looked over at Aurora, then over at Flashpoint.

"You're a zebra."

"Yep." Flashpoint said quickly.

"With a PipBuck." Flashpoint shifted the blocky device strapped to his foreleg. "What about it?"

They had started to walk again, Flashpoint easily overtook the unicorn, but slowed down when she saw that she was limping along at the end of the line. Then, to his surprise, she rolled up one of her coat leg and exposed her own PipBuck to the open air. Flashpoint's eyes went wide with curiosity, and he took a few steps closer and craned his neck past Cobalt's muzzle to get a good look at the screen.

"Where did you get it?" He asked her.

"For my tenth birthday," She said jauntily. "I worked on an irrigation system back home. How about you?" It didn't take Flashpoint very long to connect the dots. It turns out that Nikolai had already beaten him to that conclusion. He swung his head over his shoulder on que. "What was that I heard? Your tenth birthday? Cobalt, you came from a Stable?" Willow and Aurora looked back, and Flashpoint pointed to the PipBuck strapped to her foreleg. She laughed sheepishly and curled her head away from Flashpoint.

"Really?" Flashpoint asked her.

"Yeah, really." She pulled her coat leg all the way back.

"Which one?"

"I don't know."

"What kinda Stable Dweller can't remember the Stable they came from?" Willow asked incredulously. "Tell me honestly, are you lying to us?" Flashpoint kept pace besides Cobalt, whose eyes went wide when she heard Willow's words.

"I'm being honest, really."

"You look, what? Willow, tell me how old you think she is." Nikolai asked the bat pony beside him, who sniffed the air and stared at Cobalt for an uncomfortably long amount of time, "She can't be any older than twenty, maybe twenty one years old."

"So young. Ponies live their whole lives in those Stables, right? How can you not remember it?"

"I mean-I can, little bits of it, I mean. I don't remember it entirely. I remember what I did, I remember the last meal I ate there, I... Um... I can remember the way the hallways looked. But I can't remember The Overmare's name or it's number."

"Do you remember where it was?"

"Near Baltimare, the last few days have been... A daze. I was wandering, I-discarded my old uniform for this jacket I found in a cabin not too far from it."

"What were you doing out on the surface?"

"Taking soil samples... I think."

"You think?" Willow pressed her. "Don't you think that you're an awful long way from. Cobalt, I hate to break it to you but Baltimare is a weeks trot that-a-way, how did you even get out here?"

"I... Don't remember."

"How did you stumble into that Enervation field?"

"I don't remember."

"How did you make it nearly a hundred kilometers-sorry, fifty, sixty something miles from your home, unarmed, and only just now stumbled into trouble?"

"I don't know! Ok?"

"Are you being truthful?" Nikolai slowed his pace until he was right beside her.

"Yes! I am! I don't know how I got there or what I was doing there! That Enervation must've messed with my mind..." Her voice trailed off as the possibility of her having sustained brain damage sunk in, she slowed, and trotted along with Flashpoint in silence.

"Hey, don't worry about it." He bumped her on the shoulder. "There's a doctor in Megamart who might have an answer for what happened to you."

Cobalt managed a smile. "Thanks."

Flashpoint smiled back and gestured to his own PipBuck."Canterlot, a ghoul fixed it up for me."

"A what?"

"Goodness gracious!" Nikolai cried, "You've got a lot to learn! Tell me you have not lost your ability to read, you can read, right?"

"Yes." Cobalt snorted with a little chuckle. "I can, my memory isn't that foggy."

"Then I've got a book to give you once we get to where we're going. Until then, why don't you tell us what you remember about your life in your stable?"

**

"Why'd you send her to me? I'm not a brain surgeon. What's that? You pulled her out of an Enervation field? She was in there how long? Good Goddesses."
-Bonesaw, Megamart doctor for hire

Nikolai picked a gun up off the body of a dead raider, let Flashpoint show her how to use it, gave her a copy of The Wasteland Survival guide, and sent her on her way. She certainly had some interesting things to tell them, but they were burdened down as it was-and they couldn't have a unicorn with faulty memory traveling with them, so Nikolai went with the tried and true method of leaving her with Thrifty Goldenhoof and bidding her goodbye. It was a bit strange seeing her leave, they had barely gotten to know her, but they figured that she would be better off in Salt Cube City, in a relatively safe community where she could find relatively stable employment then out in the Wasteland with her saviors.

The Stalker stood out in the old parking lot, looking at the ponies clustered under open canvas flaps and around fires. He heard the faint creak of one of the turrets on the wall, he checked his watch and headed back inside. The others were busy trading in their items for more caps. A stern faced griffon in leather armor marveled at the zebra rifle on The Stalker's back, and offered to buy it off him. Six hundred caps: It was worth more than that, he was sure of it. Bottlecap wound her way through the few customers that remained until she stood behind The Stalker, who had found himself back at the weapons merchant in the store, debating over what to do with the marvel of magical engineering.

"It sounds like you've been busy." The salespony commented. Nikolai turned slowly with his hands pressed against the table. "Finding everything to your liking her in the Hoof?" Nikolai laughed and ran his hands through his oily hair.

"Yeah, I am. By the way,"

"Yes?"

"Did a group of zebras come through here earlier, led by this one lady named Cetus?"

"Nope-I don't have the time to learn every customers name but I think I'd remember a bunch of zebras, why? Are they looking for you? What'd you do to them? Or did they do something to you?"

"No-They just ran off at the edge of an Enervation field, I haven't seen them since about, eh... Four hours ago. They were escaped slaves. This place runs twenty four seven, yes?" He got a curt nod in return.

"I can't really help you with that, you should hope they didn't end up in Flank or Brimstone Falls or Paradise." Bottlecap changed the subject.

"That rifle, I don't suppose you'd be willing to tell me where you found it?"

Nikolai held it upright by the magazine well, letting her get a good look at it. "Information is valuable, like you said. I'll trade you a secret for a secret." He took a knee and whispered something into her right ear, she arched an eyebrow and laughed, then frowned at him. "You're serious? That's what you wanted to know?"

"Yes. Now do you want to know where I found this? It was the old frontlines of your ancient war with the zebras. There's so much stuff there, just lying around."

"Most of it's just too worn out to use." She replied." Two hundred years of wind, rain, mud, and radiation tends to reek havoc on stuff any way you slice it. It's surprising that the one you found still works. I wouldn't sell it if I were you, those things are worth their fair share of caps. I'm no weapons expert, but looking at that think I'd say it's worth as much as a minigun in pristine condition, maybe even more. Look around, how many other enchanted guns do you see? None. You want my honest answer? Trade in that plasma carbine you've got and keep the zebra rifle for yourself." It was a conundrum, to be sure. He felt a little attached to both of the guns.

"Tell me," He asked the gunsmith. "Could I trade it in for something else?" He looked across at something, something that caught his eye.

"How about that?"

"Good, thank you for your time. He trekked on over to the armorer, a unicorn stallion who was just about to close up shop for the night when he saw Nikolai making a beeline for him.

"Can I use your workbench for something?"

A bit of dust rolled across the ground in the cool night air. Quiet, except for the ever-present distant crackle of gunfire and the smoldering coals of barrel fires in the lot out in front of the Megamart. Out stepped Nikolai, jolly as could be.

"Where have you been..." Flashpoint's voice trailed off when he saw his friend in the firelight. New armor plates covered The Stalker's upper legs and shoulders, his vest had been patched up where it had been torn before, and in his hands, he held a break action grenade launcher with a skeletonized stock, a faintly glowing ring-ladder sight, and a sleek black polymer body.

"Eh? Eh? Pretty cool, right? I took a load off, sold all the stuff I've been hoarding for a while, and bought myself this-it took a little bit to make the adjustments and it's still a little stiff around the joints, but I think I look fucking awesome!"

"A knight in shining armor." Willow commented with a laugh from out of the shadows.

"It actually feels great. Some leather straps and, well I barely notice the difference in weight. I don't know who manufactured this armor but, they did a good job. And for something that can stop rifle rounds-ohoho!" He pounded his fist against one of his shoulder plates. It didn't actually protect his shoulder, just his upper arm. The area the plates covered was miniscule compared to Willow's exaggeration, he just wanted a bit more protection. He had made some modifications to his belt as well, adding a few more pouches and two large ones for something that he planned on doing when he had more time and patience. He took a seat by a fire and began fiddling with his new launcher, he set it aside along with his AK 101, and pulled out his PDA instead.

beep beep beep.

It booted up, and he began to look over its glowing map, studying the layout of the Hoofington downtown and one particular military base. "More questions, fewer answers." He muttered to himself. "How many things happened today, what did I spend my time doing? How close am I to making it into the Core?"

"Nikolai?" Aurora's shook him out of his train of thought. He lowered his digital assistant and looked over at his friend with a mild expression across his face.

"What is it Aurora?"

The pegasus took a seat beside him. "We've been through quite a bit, I can trust you to keep a secret... right?" He raised an eyebrow. "Where are you going with this?"

She pulled back her hood and removed her helmet.

"Nikolai," Her ears drooped a bit. "This could cost me my life. Promise you won't tell anyone."

"Alright Aurora, I promise." He looked over his shoulder and made sure that no one was listening in on the exchange. "What is it?"

She took a deep breath, and whispered:

"I'm not really Corporal Aurora Borealis."