Fallout Equestria: The Ashlands Timeline

Tuesday, 10/26/2077 AE
POV: Twilight Sparkle
The Ashlands

Kamikaze dropped her heavy guns to lighten herself, not bothering to pick up anything else in the room. She took off and zipped over Twilight, grabbing Spike in her forelegs as she flew towards the cave entrance. Twilight almost grabbed him back with her magic, but realized Kamikaze carried him because she thought Twilight was new to her wings.

Twilight followed behind her, straining to keep herself in the air as they reentered the sandstorm and banked towards Canterlot. They had been inside a cave on the same mountain as Canterlot, a few thousand hoofsteps from the glowing dome of Canterlot's shield, not far from the road that one would normally take to get there. They could already see a huge cloud bank on the other side, the shield shimmering with impacts from arcane weapons. It was a good thing they approached from the opposite direction as Cloudsdale; it'd improve their chances of going unnoticed.

Twilight surmised Cloudsdale created the cloud cover that stretched for miles around them to keep from being an easy target of Canterlot’s city-destroying ranged attacks, or at least augmented the clouds that the weapons already made. Twilight never thought she’d see the weather factory used as a flying fortress in an epic pony war.

“Hey!” Spike complained, “I'd really rather ride with Twilight!”

“Yeah, no,” Kamikaze grumbled, “Sorry, Scaly. I don’t trust a pint-sized war machine like you with her. Besides, only I get to ride…”

"I appreciate it," Twilight cut Kamikaze off as she struggled to keep up. "But I'd rather keep him on me."

Twilight moved beneath Kamikaze and looked up at her. She noticed that Kamikaze's metal hooves buzzed quietly when they held something, some kind of energy source emulating the 'sticky hooves' localized telekinetic field that most ponies used to manipulate objects with their hooves.

"Fine!" Kamikaze grumbled, but dropped Spike onto Twilight's back. "It's your funeral."

Twilight cast a shield around herself and Spike to keep safe from radiation. As they neared the city’s shield, Twilight tried to think of questions she could ask without sounding suspicious. Her mind went back to her brief dream, and in particular that Nightmare Moon called her a student.

"Do you know Nightmare Moon's status?" Twilight asked, deciding a question about her 'mentor' wouldn't seem out of sorts.

“Nuttier than usual, no offense,” Kamikaze grumbled. “According to Spitfire, she’s tearing chunks out of the Moon and throwing them at the Badlands, screaming gibberish about ‘changelings’ being behind the war.”

Kamikaze spoke of changelings as if she didn't know what they were, which was strange. Nightmare had mentioned that she knew Twilight wasn't one, so at least some ponies were aware. She didn't pursue the conversation if Kamikaze didn't.

"And how will we get through the city’s shield?" asked Twilight, hoping it wasn't an obvious answer.

"I'll extend the bypass field on my armor," Kamikaze said. "You rarely ask this many questions, ya know. Kinda feels funny for YOU to be asking ME what's going on. Guess that’s what ya get for soaking up all those rads."

Twilight faked a look of embarrassment to let the conversation die; it was causing more questions than answers already. She just needed to get that spell. Precise teleportation would be impossible with the radiation interference, but once she had the spell, she could still get them to another random location in case the city exploded. Maybe? She had to try.

Twilight’s attention returned to Kamikaze’s magitech body. Replacing a wing was one thing, but the amount of augmentation she had shouldn't be possible. She had so much replaced, yet stayed light enough to fly, had some strange readout in her eye, and her head apparently produced enough energy to power disintegration rays.

The technology on Kamikaze was too advanced. Kamikaze mentioned studying the Cutie Map, but that couldn’t account for this. In fact, backward engineering the Cutie Map alone would require frightening magitech. She'd studied it herself and not scratched the surface of the magic behind it.

Even what Kamikaze mentioned of a bypass field on her armor seemed impossible. Twilight studied bypass enchantments, but hadn’t created a working spell. Without the ability to analyze millions of frequency combinations in seconds, it couldn’t work. The time it’d take to get through a shield might be greater than the lifespan of the one behind it.

It hadn’t been two decades since the timelines split, so how did ponies go from the most basic magitech to having an advanced grasp? She considered the necessities of war might account for sudden advancements, but not all this.

As they arrived at the barrier, Twilight filed the impossible in the back of her brain for later and got a better look at the shield. It was intense, the energy sending shivers through her even from a few dozen hoofsteps distance. The spherical shape was dimpled around the edge of the city as if emanating from a tower system surrounding it. It was definitely not a conventional spell.

The shield dissipated the windy haze around it, so Twilight got a better view of the sky above. The Moon hung in the middle of the sky, but Kamikaze was right. It was cracked and broken, a good quarter of it strewn across the sky, and another quarter missing. Twilight looked southward toward the Badlands and saw the bright flash of city-size impact explosions.

So, Luna really was targeting the changelings. It was interesting that Luna just found out about them; maybe that was what she'd been trying to contact the other Twilight about when she accidentally hit Twilight's dream? Kamikaze didn’t know about them either, which meant that changelings never invaded Canterlot directly in this timeline. Yet, according to Luna, they'd definitely done something.

None of this made sense!

The Sun appeared normal, though if the coronal mass ejection that Spitfire mentioned was what Twilight suspected, that might change in an instant. Only a hoof-size ball of solar plasma would be needed to wipe a city off the map. As soon as they exposed it to the environment, it would expand rapidly and encompass the entire city. Yet another impossible feat that somehow became possible.

“Stay close,” reminded Kamikaze as they approached. “And be ready for incoming sniper fire. No guarantee our shields will stop what they shoot at us.” She looked at Spike. “You get ready to rain fire.”

“I’ll try?” Spike was unsure, “Not exactly great with long-range attacks.”

“Got a sore throat or something?” Kamikaze asked. “This isn’t a good time to call in sick, ya know.”

Kamikaze treated Spike as if he should be as combat-ready as she was, and it made Twilight wonder what Spike was like in this world. Twilight hoped to Celestia they didn’t meet the other him, or the other Starlight. The more she thought, the longer the list of ponies Twilight hoped they didn’t meet became. And here she was without a pen or parchment to make a list.

With her current luck, they’d meet all before this was over. Just once, she’d love to have a crisis that turned out way easier to fix than she initially thought it would be.

All the same, Twilight prepared for incoming fire. She didn't know how to block a weapon of the same power as Kamikaze used with a simple shield, so she opened a portal beneath them facing the city, leading to another she placed above them. She figured it would make them harder to see from the ground, and if anyone spotted them, it would channel the attacks through the portals. It was a decent idea; Twilight reminded herself to write it down later.

"Portals?" Kamikaze smirked when she realized what Twilight did. "I do like your holes."

Twilight really wished she'd shut up about their unlikely relationship. Spike groaned above her, equally distraught at the comment.

They stopped at the shield and Kamikaze placed an armored hoof against it. There was a beeping sound as her armor devised the proper frequency, but then a buzzer when the shield suddenly shimmered, the shade of blue shifting ever slightly.

"Damn it!" Kamikaze grumbled. "They must shift the frequency every few minutes. Hold on."

She tried again, the same process beginning, then a ding like a kitchen timer going off. The armor’s field expanded around Twilight with Spike and they all slipped through the shield. Twilight tried not to think about what would have happened had they shifted frequency with them half-way through.

The great city of Canterlot now sprawled into view beneath them. It was a mess.

Fires raged, strange magitech turrets blasted pegasi out of the sky, and aerial snipers from Cloudsdale blasted griffons that seemed to have allied with Canterlot. Troops charged one another on the ground: earth ponies, yaks, buffalo, and zebras, fighting mostly for Canterlot it seemed, though there were racial exceptions on both sides. Where did they even get so many yaks and zebras? Had their faraway homelands been destroyed?

One corner of the battlefield summed it up not-so-nicely. There was a large billboard with Tree Hugger’s sad face on it reading ‘War? Fear? Death? We must do better!’ at the top and ‘Ministry of Peace’ at the bottom. It had fallen over onto the ground, and ponies were now standing atop it fighting. Green goo splattered over the words in a small river as a pegasus downed by magical turret fire disintegrated into mush. Twilight couldn't help but think of how that pegasus' family would never even know what happened to them, if they had a family left.

There weren’t only soldiers, but civilians in the city. They streamed towards the royal cathedral at Canterlot Tower where in Twilight’s timeline so many of her deeds were preserved in stained glass. On one side of the entrance was a large billboard stating ‘Stable 27: A better future underground!’. There were familiar grinning faces on either side of the billboard, Flim and Flam, each holding up a hoof in approval.

A shelter? Too bad they probably wouldn't let her in. Then again, a shelter built by the Flim Flam brothers might be more dangerous than the city.

The evacuation was disorderly at best. As Twilight watched, the guards at the cathedral chased away a pair of civilian pegasi, waving their guns at them.

"No ID, no entry, featherbrain!" one guard screamed.

Even though the pair had an infant with them, they forbade them entry. The couple went down the line of hopeful entrants, appearing to beg pony after pony to smuggle their foal into the shelter. Twilight wondered if the ID was that important, or if it was just because they were pegasi. She wanted to dive into those guards and shake them in rage for letting a foal die because it had wings.

Twilight knew more than ever that she couldn’t fail. She had to undo this.

The pegasi teams from Cloudsdale came in waves and dive-bombed the city in precise formation. The formations inevitably broke because of incoming fire, but they were concentrating on their formation instead of firing back. The teams sported armor with an even more advanced look than Kamikaze’s, shimmering brightly as if a hundred enchantments were buzzing through the fabric. Were they attempting a formation rainboom to set off one of the 'radboom' devices Kamikaze had mentioned? If so, these were literally suicide bombers.

Twilight was brought back to the moment as several shots buzzed past them, or through them thanks to the portals she was holding open. Every shot of bluish looking plasma would have been a direct hit had it not been for her portal-shield, one aimed squarely between each of their eyes.

Twilight caught the source as a timid looking earth-pony with a nasty looking sniper rifle. Great, so now Marble Pie, the second most adorable pony in existence, was trying to murder her. Marble must have a good eye to catch the shimmer of their movement through the sky at all, much less target them so precisely at their speed.

“Horse apples!” Kamikaze blurted out, “Deadshot has us in her sights, evasive maneuvers!”

They moved lower, putting buildings between them and Marble. Despite that, several more shots rang out, blasting right through the solid buildings and flying through the portal shield again, once again three shots aimed precisely at each one. Marble eventually figured out how Twilight was avoiding the attack because her next shot targeted the edge of the portal where it could slip around. Kamikaze cried out as a shot tore through her good wing.

“Rainbow!” Twilight cried out instinctively, diving quickly to catch her fall.

But rescue wasn't necessary. Kamikaze fell briefly, but righted herself within seconds, her wing bleeding for only a moment before the flesh knitted itself back into place. Twilight had her own alicorn healing factor, but it was nowhere near that fast. If Kamikaze had that ability when she lost her limbs, she must have flown into terrible things.

“Don't fret, your favorite part is still intact,” Kamikaze grinned back at Twilight as they zeroed in on the archive.

"Ugh," Spike groaned, more perturbed by perversion than peril. "Twilight, make her stop that!"

Twilight wanted to, but telling her 'wife' to stop flirting would be more suspicious than she already was. It didn’t matter anyway, because they were finally there and it seemed Marble had given up on targeting them further.

Kamikaze dove, and Twilight was close behind as they approached the archives, aiming for the doorway. Twilight braked when a griffon exited the archive, but Kamikaze charged forward. The metal wing crackled with energy as it visibly heated to a fiery red, Kamikaze holding it stiffly as she zipped past the griffon and into the door.

The griffon reached for his weapon but fumbled, beak falling open as his eyes widened. A few seconds later, the griffon’s head separated, the razor wing slicing through his neck like a hot knife through butter, the heat instantly cauterizing the stump. The griffon crumpled in front of the door, thrashing momentarily before ceasing forever.

Twilight shrieked and dodged the head bouncing down the archive stairs, seeing his eyes still dart around in panic as it rolled away. She gagged at the sight of another spent life and wanted to scold Kamikaze for another blatant murder, but reminded herself that this was war. A real war, something Twilight never imagined. Perhaps she should commend Kamikaze for choosing a relatively quick murder method.

This was so bucked up.

Kamikaze stood just inside the door, posing dramatically as if expecting Twilight to rain praise upon her from the awesome kill shot. Twilight galloped past her instead, ignoring her own heaving stomach as she darted towards the Star Swirl the Bearded wing. She didn't have much time; she had to grab the scroll and book it before this whole city went up in rainbow flames.

"Hay!" Kamikaze grumbled from behind. "I'm being awesome back here! Thanks for not noticing!"

But Twilight couldn't stop. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears as she pushed herself harder than she ever had. On the plus side, her head was crystal clear now with the surge of adrenaline. She kept in mind where the scroll had been in the library before, hoping that it was still there.

Kamikaze’s metal body must have had limits her flesh body didn’t. She couldn’t move as fast as before around sharp turns, so she was well behind when Twilight arrived. Twilight rounded the corner into the Star Swirl wing, only to shriek as an earth pony nearly took her head off with a kick. It was as if they somehow knew she was about to turn the corner.

Twilight dodged to one side, skidding across the floor. She couldn’t maintain the portal spell indoors with so little space, so erected a more traditional shield instead, charging it as quickly as possible.

Twilight found herself faced by two earth pony soldiers in Canterlot armor, helmets off so she saw who they were. It was Pinkie and Maud Pie, of all ponies. Damn it. If even Marble went commando in this world, these two would be a serious problem.

They wore similar armor to Kamikaze’s, if drearier in coloration, gray instead of blue and emblazoned with Celestia's cutie mark. They sported the same straight-haired mane-style, the one Twilight learned could mean ‘beware’ when Pinkie wore it. Their uniforms also had their cutie marks, and while Maud’s was the same as Twilight remembered, Pinkie’s was now a stick of dynamite. That didn’t bode well.

Each of their right front hooves had metal contraptions wrapped around them with a shimmering screen attached. Twilight assumed they were a communication device, but the screens flashed a small map of the immediate vicinity, complete with cutie mark emblems for all the combatants in the room. So that was how they saw her coming around the corner.

Thinking fast of a way to defend herself without seriously injuring them, Twilight tilted the bookcase next to them over with her magic. Pinkie’s tail twitched the same instant that Twilight thought of the plan though, pushing Maud and herself out of the way.

“You expect bonehead tricks to work?” Pinkie grinned menacingly.

A gun barrel hanging over her left side buzzed to life, and Twilight stared down the barrel of Pinkie's bright pink mini-gun. On Pinkie’s other side, there was another large firearm, shaped like Gummy of all things, the pet alligator Pinkie had in Twilight’s timeline. It opened its hinged mouth for a large barrel to emerge. Something that looked suspiciously like a missile locked into place.

No way she'd be insane enough to use that in a closed area right? Oh wait, this was Pinkie! Twilight was so dead.

“Not in here, Pinkie!” a voice spoke from behind the Pies. “These books and scrolls are priceless!”

It was another on Twilight's list of ponies she didn't want to meet: Starlight Glimmer. Their Starlight Glimmer. This would be hard to explain to Kamikaze, but at least this one had a healthy respect for books. That was one moral high-ground she had over Twilight’s Starlight, but hadn't Kamikaze implied that this Starlight worked with Daybreaker?

Starlight stood in the back corner of the room. She lacked a uniform, her only piece of attire a head-piece that wrapped about her head and flipped a screen over one eye. She too had a smaller bit of metal around her left foreleg, though it didn’t have the screen that the Pies’ had. Instead, there was a small projection in front of her eye, a 3D map version of the Pies' flat-screen that looked like a mini-Cutie Map. This one had also assigned a cutie mark to their positions, with an emblem of Spike’s head for his.

Starlight and the Pies’ symbols shined bright green on Starlight’s display, while Kamikaze and Twilight’s were bright red, so it possessed friend or foe identification. Spike’s was the odd one out, fluctuating yellow between greenish and reddish as if the system couldn’t decide which side to assign him. Fortunately, Starlight didn't have the other Spike with her, which meant they wouldn't know to target Twilight's Spike with attacks.

As much as Twilight wanted to marvel at the mini-Cutie Map, there was something more important. Starlight had a scroll floating in front of her, the exact scroll that Twilight was looking for. Twilight didn’t know or care why this world’s Starlight wanted it, but she needed it, and didn’t have time to wait for Starlight to finish.

“Starlight! I need that spell!” Twilight called out. “Please believe me, the fate of the world rests on this!”

It was pointless to say, as if this Starlight would believe her more than her own. Starlight’s eyes met Twilight’s, then flicked aside to glance at her wings before Starlight’s face twisted with a rage that would put her other self to shame.

“It was you!” Starlight screeched. “You murdered her! Rip that fake alicorn’s heart out!”

“Heart retrieval. Got it,” Maud said with a dead calm as she pulled her own weapon from her back. It was a sledgehammer with… was that a mini rocket attachment? Surely not. Who would be so overkill as to attach a rocket to a giant hammer and then give it to Maud?

Before she could swing, Kamikaze arrived and plowed into the Pie sisters, landing against Maud’s back with all four hooves and shoved her into Pinkie. Pinkie saw it coming despite not even looking in that direction, leaping over her sister and landing a kick square between Kamikaze’s eyes, sparks flying as Kamikaze staggered back. Despite the heavy weapons she carried, Pinkie moved as if she barely held anything.

“Filthy pegasi traitor!” shrieked Pinkie. She devolved into gleeful laughter as she sent a flurry of kicks at Kamikaze. The two were soon pounding one another with such heavy impacts that one might have mistaken the noise for gunshots.

“You mean awesome pegasi trai-” Kamikaze started, then blinked as she glanced at Starlight, “Minister Starlight? Hey! Making a copy before you even die has to be cheating!”

Maybe Kamikaze didn't need an explanation after all, and even Starlight didn’t seem particularly confused by Kamikaze’s sentence, but Twilight didn't have time to consider why. She filed 'unsurprised at surviving disintegration' away under ‘things that make no sense’ and concentrated on the situation at hoof.

Twilight turned to face Maud to see if she was okay, then remembered that Maud was about to murder her. Maud stood on her hind legs smoothly, her emotionless glare locking onto Twilight as she held the monstrous hammer in her front hooves. Kamikaze’s cyber-kick should have broken her back, but Maud didn’t even limp.

Maud triggered a switch on the handle of the hammer and the rocket on the opposite side of the head blazed to life as she swung it. Twilight’s force field now at full strength, it should have easily deflected the hit, but this was Maud, the pony that punched boulders into pebbles. The energy shimmered as the hammer forced its way through the shield and impacted Twilight squarely in the horn. It sent a rush of agony through Twilight’s body, shattering the magical shield and throwing her backwards.

Twilight cried out as she landed on her back, flailing. A strike to the horn was excruciating for any unicorn and even a tap would stop most spell casting. As she'd never taken a hit to the horn like that, Twilight thought her horn had snapped at first due to the stabbing pain tearing through her body. It hadn’t, though the hammer might have shattered her whole cranium if not for having to punch through her shield.

“You made my hooves numb,” Maud said with typical monotone.

Maud sounded bored, but seemed to experience minor surprise that Twilight survived. The feedback from tearing through an alicorn’s force shield with a metal bludgeoning device should have sent Maud flying too, but it had merely given her pause.

As Twilight tried desperately to recover from the daze, Spike grabbed Maud’s hind leg. It stopped her from immediately unleashing another more lethal blow, but he was still effortlessly kicked away. He flew in Starlight’s direction, who caught him telekinetically an instant before he collided with her, once again distracting her casting.

“Spike! What are you doing here?” demanded Starlight. “It’s not safe! I told you to guard the Ministry of Magitech!”

Before the chaos in the room continued, the room rattled with an explosive boom so intense that Twilight thought the whole city had exploded around them. The air charged with solar magic, a purer variety than Twilight had ever sensed.

When the light faded, only Cloudsdale had exploded. The energy deflected off Canterlot’s shield as the entire cloud city went up like a moth in a flame, the cloud cover shattering around it before reforming from bits of the disintegrated city. At first, Twilight could have sworn she heard thousands of shrieking souls as their very being was ripped apart, but she quickly dismissed it as a panic-induced hallucination. Twilight felt sick at how many ponies just had their lives ripped away, but more disgusted at herself for being relieved that it was them and not her.

The relief was short lived though. The blast of light blinded Canterlot's defenses, and another boom followed as the final team of pegasi within the shield landed their attack. Twilight could see out the door and windows outside as the center of Canterlot exploded in a wave of incandescent rainbow, like an insanely supercharged version of the sonic rainboom. It was so powerful that reality itself seemed to warp around the event, the pegasi team that activated it instantly torn into ribbons of flesh.

“No!” Starlight screeched not unlike her other self, holding the scroll close and trying to finish casting before the blast wave hit them.

Energy covered Starlight as she finished the spell, encompassing her to pull her back through time. An instant later the blast wave hit the library, shattering the outer wall, and the aura of magic around Starlight absorbed the initial wave of energy. The magical aura spread, encompassing the room and the others in it. The energy surrounded Twilight and Spike an instant before the blast might have incinerated them.

Even then, every cell in Twilight’s body was aflame with burning agony as her entire world turned into light. She instinctively pulled Spike away from Starlight and cradled him close, curling her body around him protectively and straining to reengage a shield as they floated off the cracking floor.

The room faded into darkness and Twilight felt the all-too-familiar glow of the time vortex around her. It differed from before though, condensed as time raced past much faster than before. Worse, it didn’t feel like they were going back. They were surging forward, farther from where Twilight desperately needed to be.

Darkness again.

"Why have you returned, Paradox?!" Nightmare's voice shrieked at her again out of nowhere.

The dream was different now. There was no realistically detailed throne room or grand entrance by Nightmare Moon, only Twilight floating in a void with the disembodied voice booming through it.

"Returned?" Twilight called out. "Luna, please, you have to listen to me this time!"

"Answer my question!" demanded Nightmare, her voice strained as if it took all her energy to hold even this meager dream together. "What are you?"

"I don't know!" Twilight cried out, unsure of what else to say.

“No, you don’t know what you are,” Nightmare’s voice faded into something sounding more like Luna. Whether it was sincerity or deception, Twilight couldn’t tell. “I have touched your dreams once again, Paradox, but I cannot hold this connection even with the methods I’ve found to boost my now-meager power. It has been far longer than you know, and I am trapped on the edge of life and death. You must act swiftly to-”

The darkness faded back into reality as Twilight woke upon the hard marble floor of a ruin.