Chapters To me it was only yesterday that I was doing a thing most gamers could only dream of: surviving in a nuclear wasteland. And now? Now I'm in a little girls dream.
Equestria, they call it, land of unicorns, pegusai, and earth ponies ruled by Princess Celestia. I’ll believe that she raises the sun when I see it; I've always been sceptic towards myths and gods.
To be fair though, I'm stuck up here in Canterlot for the most part.
Once again I level the rifle ad aim down the scope at my adversary, the dreaded watermelon, and placed my finger over the trigger. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Hold and-
“Human” –miss… these ponies have brilliant timing; the guards must have nothing better to do than call you in the middle of something important. I tell you, this had better be life changing, I NEVER miss a shot.
“Human, the Princess had requested your presence, you are to follow me to the throne room immediately!” with a sigh I put the rifle on safety and sling it over my shoulders, it seems only Princess Celestia has the courtesy to call me by name. No matter, I’ve grown used to it. None the less I begrudgingly allow the guard to lead me to the throne room.
It’s kind of sad really, I must have been here for about three years now and I still need an escort between rooms. I personally blame the now long dead architect for his poor planning; the place is a damn maze (So much for public access).
One five minute walk late, which I swear was completely different last week, and we arrived in the throne room. Now let me make one thing absolutely clear about Princess Celestia, even without her horn adding an extra six inches or so, she dwarfs me. I’m about five foot nine, and the average pony is about stomach high compared to me. Celestia is well over six feet tall. Any wonder she refers to her subjects as her ‘little ponies’?
“Ah Marcus, how fair you this hour?” she asks pausing from her afternoon tea. I’ve sad it once and I’ll say it again: superimposing the image of Prince Blueblood over a melon and blasting it repeatedly with explosive rounds is far more effective stress relief than comfort eating. To each their own, I suppose.
“I am well” I reply with a bow, “however I do not believe you called me here to discuss the weather” while I was never one for pleasantries, you tend to pick up a bit about etiquette when you liv with royalty.
“Indeed Marcus” she sighed slipping in to what I’ve come to know as ‘the royal poker face’, marred only slightly by a crumb of cake she’d missed, “Does the name ‘Grim Tidings’ mean anything to you?”
The name did ring a bell, but I wanted more information before I made up my mind. A rash decision had brought me to Equestria after all. I recalled the name fitting a pony I saw in a dream, an odd thing for a survivalist like me to be dreaming of; I wanted to know if this was the same pony.
“Can you describe their appearance for me, Princess?”
“Unicorn Stallion, iron grey mane and white coat, hourglass cutie mark” she lists, and this definitely sounds like my guy (Don't you dare take that the wrong way),
“I sis recognise the name Princess, and by your description, he matches a pony I met in a dream who introduced himself as such”
“I see” all is silent as she regards this information, planning her next move around it like a chess master, as it so happens I did play chess with her at one point, most humiliating minute of my life.
“Markus!” I snap to attention at the sudden noise, I must have been reminiscing for too long
“Grim is an old friend of mine,” she continues in her normal, softer voice; she stands up and motions for me to follow, “He has asked to meet you, I know not why, but you will be heading to Ponyville this afternoon, along with my faithful student Twilight Sparkle.”
Twilight Sparkle… Twilight and I have a bit of a ‘rocky’ relationship: She loves to study and torture me with endless questions, while I prefer to mess around and annoy her with unusual and more-often-than-not cryptic answers. Nothing personal, but we just wind each other up unless we’re focused on the same task, an extremely rare occurrence.
This was not going to be fun.
“Now before you protest,” but that’s one of my hobbies, “The two of you will only be going to Ponyville together, Twilight has her own task to do this day”
This was preferable, only marginally so, the two of us would be at each other’s throats in minutes, and I don’t rate my chances if she drags her assistant in. It’d be two on one and the little dragon has a very sharp set of teeth, never mind the claws.
Still it’s not like I can disagree, the Princess as spoken and her word is law. ‘Sides, I had overheard Twilight speaking of what the Princess did to somepony calling themselves Nightmare Moon, and I wasn't in a hurry to suffer the same fate.
And thus by the powers of royal convenience we found ourselves in front of a waiting chariot (One of the pegasus pulled ones I jokingly referred to as planes) with Twilight and Spike packing one of Twilight’s notorious mile long check-lists.
“So… see you again tomorrow, maybe?” I'm a bad conversationalist, even with six months of social coaching
“It’s rather hard to tell with Grim, I felt it better to play it safe and order the maids to pack a week’s worth of your possessions, they should be arriving any minute now”
And sure enough (once again by the powers of royal convenience) out of the northern tower walked a young mare struggling under the weight of luggage. I felt a little chivalrous and decided to carry the suitcase instead. Judging from the sweat on her brow, somepony may have ‘accidently’ dropped some of my personal armoury in there; probably better than leaving it for Blueblood to kill himself with. Given he's the source of many of my day to day problems, I shouldn't class that as bad thing,right? This is why I spend so much time on the range; blasting fruit is so much easier than making life changing decisions.
“-and lastly, a box of self-replicating magazines and some jerky” I announce, describing to Twilight the contents of my pack.
Now, before you blow a fuse on my possession of a meat product in a land ruled by vegetarians, let me be clear on the fact that eating meat is not illegal, it’s just frowned upon by the nobility. As for how I acquired it… well its part of an agreement for my Equestrian citizenship. The gist of it is, is that I’m only allowed to claim one non sentient creature for food per year. I usually go with a deer, they’re large enough, that when the meat is preserved (such as in jerky) it will last me the full three hundred and sixty-five days of the year.
You might also be wondering what a self-replicating magazine is, right? Well after all the confusion of me arriving in Equestria I got excited at the thought of using magic, as it turns out, however, the only branch of magic humans have the capability to use is runes, a somewhat obscure art that most don’t even bother to learn about.
Princess Celestia however agreed to teach me, alongside Twilight, on the condition that I would not use the knowledge to directly harm one of her little ponies. I agreed, not like I had any need to bring harm to her subjects.
And this is where a little human ingenuity comes in. After getting my ass kicked in a bar fight on my eighteenth (not my proudest moment), it got me thinking: what’s my best skill in a fight? Marksmanship, and I can’t exactly bring a lethal weapon around with me every time I want a drink. No there needed to be an alternative.
And then it hit me (Well to be fair I got electrocuted but that’s just a technicality) what if I re-purposed a handgun to fire a smaller round, little more than a metal BB, and put a stunning matrix on it? A little paralysis never hurt anyone, right?
and It didn't stop there either; shockers, freezers, and flares to explosives, should I ever have to misfortune to come across a hydra; but my crowning achievement was the self-replenishment rune, which in theory and principal, should not have worked. I'm serious, Celestia, Twilight and myself, the only three in the world who could claim the title of rune master, looked at it and we still couldn't come to an agreement on how and why it worked.
Hell, the only things I haven’t been able to self-replicate are shotgun shells (for some unexplained reason, I mean they're essentially the equivalent of a magazine) and biological entities, which means no clone army for me. as much as I would love a clone army, what would I even do with it?
Now I'm getting off topic, and we just landed in Ponyville. After promising to head to the library to help plan for Nightmare Moon after I was done with Grim Tidings, I grabbed my far to heavy pack and disembarked the chariot, and headed out towards his home… or at least what I thought was the way. It’d probably be a good idea to check.
And this is the part where I run for my life.
Since I apparently look like a diamond dog, the residents decided to form a lynch mob than risk me enslaving their children. I suppose this is the price I pay for letting myself fade into obscurity.
Thus far it has been a combination of luck and agility born from hobbyist parkour that has kept me out of their hooves, I’ve been sticking to the alleyways since I started to tire; I’m probably lost by now. It’s a small mercy that Ponyville’s population is predominantly Earth Pony; I sure as hell couldn’t out run a Pegasus or a unicorn.
I think I might have lost them…
“There he is!”
Damn it Murphy, why have you forsaken me?
Common sense would tell me to ditch my bag and weapons and hightail it out of there, but I wouldn’t even trust my mother with some of that gear… were she still alive. I miss my family.
Once again I’m running, a fair bit slower this time, relying more on misdirection and knocked over bins to slow down the horde, pulling off a front flip as I vault over a mint green unicorn mare in a mad dash across the main street and back into another ally.
Judging from the commotion back there I’ve bought myself another ten seconds.
“Human, get in here quickly!” a voice calls from my left. I’m taking a risk by listening to it, but I’d sooner face an unknown who knows me than a lynch mob with a case of mistaken identity.
And how ironic is this? My saviour just so happens to be Grim Tidings himself, ‘bout time I caught a break I reckon.
“So mister Tidings” We now found ourselves in his living room my luggage on the floor in front of me, discussing the daily news over tea; good tea too, not the overpriced sludge found almost exclusively Canterlot, this is apparently a generations old recipe, similar to what is served in the palace.
“Please, Call me Grim” his voice is… oily would be the word I would use to describe it, the silver tong well versed in politics.
“As I was saying, why was it you asked the Princess to send me out here?” moving the conversation straight to business. This practice is yet to fail me.
He sighs, deliberating in a manner I’ve only seen in Princess Celestia, regarding me while he forms the words,
“If I may be so bold, I’d like to ask you a bit about yourself; what was it like in your childhood how did you arrive in Equestria, and what was it like back where you came from” It’s funny. To date I have told no more than three ponies what Grim wants to know… if this keeps up I should probably write a book.
“It’s probably a good idea I start by telling you a little of my family, you might want to get comfy though, this will take us a little while”
Dad was a computer technician, and very paranoid; racist to a large degree as well. Dad would keep documents of cultural, socio-political and technological interest backed up on flash drives hidden in a giant lead box in the basement, so that ‘when the great shitstorm comes, someone will have the means to rebuild’. It pains me to say it but I didn’t have much love for my old man; he would send me out daily for jobs that didn’t exist (we were in a recession, jobs were difficult to come by at best), and use the fact I came back empty handed as ammunition for his crusade against ‘undermining immigrants’
Mom was quite tomboyish, holding the rank of Staff Sergeant in the armed forces. Given we lived on site at Moms barrack; it was no surprise she would teach me to fire a gun in her down time. She might have been grooming me to join the family tradition.
And then there was my little sister Jenny; I’d do anything for her, she was a good kid, very quiet… shame about what happened to her though. But I’m getting ahead of myself, that’s for later in the story.
Dad had every right to be paranoid; the 2030’s very unstable times: the war machines of America and China, two of the world superpowers were slowly waking as the last reserves of oil were starting to become depleted; Al Qaeda, a terrorist organisation, thought disbanded in 2015 was back with a vengeance claiming possession of a dozen nuclear missiles, weapons of mass destruction, think a miniature sun; and Europe had all but become the world’s cesspit. Hell even Africa, regarded as a third world country, had a higher net income than many E.U. countries.
Dad felt the need to turn our basement, which at the time was my ‘lair’, into a fallout shelter. It was the smartest thing he ever did.
I was thirteen when I was dragged from my room, accompanied by the sounds of chaos, into the basement. We sat in there for days waiting for the explosions to stop. While I spent many a weekend down there playing war games like battle field four or COD:8… it… those were… it’s difficult to explain, it hits closer to home knowing that it was all real and that there would be no respawn if I got caught up there.
It took a week for the silence to begin.
The world above us was gutted, although the UK had one of the best anti-missile networks of the era, a few of them got through, they were mostly centred around major cities and London, the head of the political state, I’m not sure of the death toll but I’d estimate it to be around 30million. What was left of the country would have been done in by the fallout.
We didn’t particularly want to head out there into the wastes, and by consensus we agreed it was for the best to remain in our bunker. Dad reckoned he had enough dried food stored away to last us ten years.
We did not have the most extensive array of medical supplies however, and that is where the problems began.
It was shortly after my fifteenth birthday, and what a fun day that was (mom and I had gone on a scouting run into town, just to see if there were any signs of life, or whether nature had begun to reclaim the land), when Jenny was struck down with the sickness, we didn’t have any anaesthetics available. Did I tell you how I’d do anything for jenny? She was a good kid, real shame about what happened to her.
Mom gave me a gun, Berretta 9mm, still got it, named it after her. It’s a human thing, naming weapons; I won’t even try to explain it to you. Mom broke into the armoury, took an MP5, and then we set off into town.
When we went scouting days before we noticed an encampment, the weapons were just a precaution; I wasn’t expecting to have to kill anyone. But life has a habit of throwing you when you get into a routine.
We were ambushed in the pharmacy; I was just putting some morphine into my backpack when he came round the corner.
He was crazy, no question about it: dishevelled appearance, smelled like shit, and mumbling to himself all the while carrying a grenade, that’s a hand held explosive, pull the- oh, ponies have grenades? Fair enough.
He told me how I had been judged as unclean, and he pulled the pin on the grenade. I froze up, my short life flashing before my eyes, as mom tackled him and his grenade into the back room… that was the last time I saw her.
I was sick right then, my inability to react cost my mother her life. I would have honestly taken my own life. But that wouldn’t have got Jenny her medicine… have I told you I’d do anything for Jenny? Not even death could stop me from ensuring her safety.
It was dark when I finally got back home. All the lights were out, which was odd, we had a backup generator courtesy of dad’s paranoia. Turned out we’d been raided.
I found dad lying in a pool of his own blood, his chest all but liquefied by a shotgun blast. I respect the old man for being able to hold out for so long, the gang had attacked shortly after Mom and I had left.
They’d taken my sister. Have I told you how I would do anything for Jenny? How I would personally murder anyone who even thought of harming a hair on her head? The gang had done more than that, they raped her, killed her then cannibalised her. After I was through with these guys, the boogieman would be checking under his bed for me… I became a monster; for a year I was little more than a wild beast, scouring the country for them, anything linked to that one gang; I destroyed it.
I started coming to my senses after a year, I felt cold inside. Avenging my family had brought me no peace, no closure, just emptiness. I began to wander aimlessly. It’d be another week before I came across the singularity.