Fallout: Equestria - Purity

A Fo:E side story by StormbadgerXIII

Chapter 2 - Descent into the Darkness

"This is my world. You are not welcome in my world."

Until I opened my eyes, the fall was pretty... relaxing. No fears, no worries, no emotions... just simply letting yourself fall, in the grip and at the mercy of gravity.

Training for cloud-drops in the Enclave taught you that after a second of free fall, you have to right yourself so you can fly properly again. Instinctively, I kicked myself into gear, snapped my eyes open, and nearly screamed! All around me was an inky blackness; drops of water splashed against me from all sides, and distorting my already poor vision from the visor of the armour. I had no idea where I was, nor whether I was upside down or not.

After my moment of panic, I stopped, hovering in place as my wings flinched with every rain drop hitting them. The coat on my muzzle felt damp. Despite my panic, I realised I had to move, or else I'd be more than screwed if the officers decided to pursue me. I drifted forward, relying on my HUD to keep me from flying into something painful.

The EFS in-built into the armour systems, unlike most EFS's, told me not only which direction I was facing from the ground, but like a lot of Enclave systems, it also factored in your flight angle. I kept myself level, flying a little bit to the east.

A little blip appeared on the compass, ahead of and above me. It was Final, I thought, and I sped up towards its general direction.

Final sped towards it too.

Before we could stop ourselves, we slammed into each other, becoming a temporary tangle of metal, cloth and feathers. I yelped and spun out, my world returning to a blur of rain and darkness, until my training kicked in once again and I steadied myself, fixing up my facings and turning to Final, who, too, had recovered from her own tumble.

I called out to her. "Final! Are you ok?" After a second, a tinny reply came through a speaker next to my right ear.

"I've had worse."

I sighed with relief. "Ok," I responded at a normal volume. "Hold your position, I'm en route."

"Roger that, si- Nimbus! I mean Nimbus."

Stifling a chuckle, I drifted towards Final, who was hovering in place, the rain splashing on her creating a light mist around her body.

"Ok, now that we're down here, where the hell do we go?" she muttered, looking around at the darkness. "I can't see anything."

I shrugged. "Well, why don't we just fly down? Maybe we'll get a better view on the surface."

Final nodded. I took a breath in and flapped my wings, pointed downwards. Fortunately, I knew that I was at least going the right direction, not just from the navigation display but the rain falling towards the abyss. My feathers felt heavier than I wanted them to be - I'd have to dry them later on. Final matched my speed, flying beside me. I flicked my suit-mounted flashlight on.

One of the first few things pegasi learn about is clouds. I never consciously thought about it, but the clouds above us were cumulonimbus clouds. Or, in laypony's terms, great, big thunder clouds. And with those, came thunder. A flash of white light and an almighty boom resounded behind me, nearly giving me a heart attack. However, one positive it had was to illuminate the surface world below, even if it was for a split second. We were extremely high up from the ground, heading down into a flat, scorched and sodden plot of land, with a single, partially ruined building among it. To the east, there was a large area of what was probably the city of Vanhoover that my father mentioned in his terminal entries. To the west, there was a mountain, thought I didn't see much of that particular feature. I relayed most of this info to Final, and we adjusted our course as needed, using the other flashes of lightning to make sure we were still on the right path.

Soon enough, the ground came into proper view, and I hovered just above it. I was, naturally, a bit apprehensive to land. First of all, I had never stood on anything more than clouds - would this be like that? Not only that, but the moment I stepped on the ground, I would be putting the final nail in my Enclave career's coffin. It was true I couldn't go back anyway, but this just guaranteed it.

Final, however, didn't even seem to think twice, placing all four hooves on the ground and folding her wings up. She looked up at me, a small smile on her face - or was it a smirk?

Reluctantly, I lowered down, gingerly placing a hoof on the ground. As soon as I had placed it, I felt both immense relief and a sense of dread. I couldn't feel it through my armour, but it didn't seem lethal. I put my other hooves on the dirt and mud-covered ground, and I sighed.

"You ok?" Final asked.

I nodded, catching my breath a little and folding my wings in. "Just a little..." I trailed off as I looked around. From the occasional flashes of the overhead lightning, I got a better sense of the sheer scale of this place. It didn't look too big from the clouds, but we were very high up. That mountain had to be at least twenty miles away. A little closer, though not by much, was a white, narrow tower jutting up into the clouds. I had seen the top of it from a distance away when I was up in Feathertip, but never the rest of it.

"Well, at least you're not freaking out," Final chuckled, nudging me in the shoulder, snapping my focus back to the world. I briefly looked up. No holes in the clouds, no angry officers hell-bent on trying to kill us. Good.

"Ok, we need to find shelter for the night," I said, pointing to the structure I had seen from the air. Now that I was on the ground, it actually seemed like a fair trot away. Part of the roof looked like it had caved in; in fact, half the building looked like it had given way to time and gravity. "That looks like our best bet."

Final turned to face where I was pointing. "Uhhhh... that building?"

"Yes."

She turned to face me, an unimpressed look on my face. "Seriously?"

"Yes."

After a second, her face rolled into a smirk. "Alright, cool. Let's go!"

If we had no idea, from second-hand evidence, what life was like down here, this introduction would have been one to send me flying back to the Enclave, back home and curled up in my comfortable bed.

"Tear the flesh! Salt the wou-"

Zzap!

The foul, yellowed-eyed, insane pony with a rusted pipe in his mouth fell down to the ground, half his face dissolved into a puddle of glowing green muck. I had never seen live targets being hit by magic plasma, and so I had to stifle a gag as the foul reek of burned flesh rolled past. Red blips appeared on my EFS, as I turned and tongued the trigger of my plasma rifle again, another glowing bolt of green death spewing forth and slamming into another savage pony who had been firing some sort of automatic slug-throwing weapon at us. Most of the shots missed, but the ones that did hit were so pathetic they did barely anything.

Final had taken to the air, flying around to attack from behind. I got another bolt off into the autogun pony, the only pony who had actually seen Final move, and his bleeding body tumbled down onto a mare with a spiked baseball bat in her mouth, pinning her down and cracking her jaw. Another pony, armed with some sort of pistol with a revolving mechanism, jumped up and snapped some shots at me, forcing me to duck into cover. I checked the charge on the rifle - it had enough to get a couple more shots off before I needed to reload. After I heard the loud blamming stop, I leaned out of cover and fired a couple of suppressive shots. One shot grazed his body by accident, but he still ducked quickly back into his own bit of cover. I leaned out, trained my rifle, and waited... and waited... and waited...

Geez, how long does it take to load a ballistic weapon?

He finally poked his head out, and I sent a shot flying right into his face. It didn't kill him, annoyingly, but he did stumble and stagger back...

Right onto an orange disk.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

"Oh fuck!" was the last thing he managed to say before his body was violently ripped apart by an explosion, limbs and chunks of flesh scattering grotesquely as the mine below him triggered. The baseball bat mare had finally extracted herself from under the autogun stallion, but was greeted by a hoof, then a plasma pistol bolt, to the eye. Needless to say, she didn't live long.

I checked my EFS. Nothing was showing up. All contacts neutralised. I carefully stepped forward, being careful not to trot onto any orange disks, of which a few remained. Final was already rummaging around, pulling stuff out from cupboards and drawers. I blinked, floating up to her.

"Final, what are you doing?"

"Repurposing."

I looked at the stuff she had piled up. Pens, bottle caps, clipboards...

"Final?"

"Yeah?" She turned to face me, a pencil in her mouth.

I gestured to the pile.

"Yeah?"

"That stuff's useless, you know."

She shrugged. "Could be valuable to the ponies here."

I gave the pile of random crap a skeptical glare. "I don't see how that stuff would be valuable."

"Hey, if there's this much crap here, they have to have been hoarding it for something."

I looked to the dead stallion who had fallen from the roof. "I don't suppose it occurred to you that these guys are insane, right?"

"Yeah, and?"

I facehoofed, before trotting up to the savage and poking at his weapon. "So that's what ballistic weapons look like..."

Final glanced over. "Oh, those guys might have valuable stuff on them."

I groaned, rolling my eyes. "Final, we're not looting their corpses."

"Why not?"

I could have barked that it was an order not to loot corpses, to stop further questioning, but that would have undermined pretty much everything I had been saying about us being friends, not me being her superior. I sighed, turning to face her. "It's just wrong."

Final looked at the bodies, then back at me. "Think about it this way, Nimbus - if the good ponies here buy guns, then we can give them or sell them or whatever to them, so that bad ponies don't get them and they can shoot the bad ponies themselves."

I balked, but she had a really good point. "Alright, you win." After a second, I added; "but you carry it."

Final saluted, then flew between the bodies, pulling stuff from off them. I, myself, began packing the gear Final had piled up into the saddlebags, letting the armour's auto-sorting spell organise it all. I decided to leave the clipboards where they were, taking only the bottlecaps and writing utensils - why these might be valuable, I had no idea, but Final seemed to have a good one. Once I had finished, I sat down on a dilapidated chair, opened a canteen and took a sip, leaning my head back.

I was greeted with the face of a mare, her face contorted in fear and blood caking her dead eyes and mouth.

Nearly choking on my water, I shrieked like a filly, falling back with the chair, scrambling away from the body suspended from the roof by chains, my back and wings pushing against a wall. Something gave, and I tumbled through what I now realised was a door, bumping my head on the ground. I snapped my eyes open after my three-second daze, and saw what could only be described as a nightmare.

Pony bodies everywhere, pony body parts not attached to their owners, blood and other vile substances over the walls, painting crude images of pornographic or sadistic things. A mare's body, blood and a disgusting yellow-white substance dripping from her flanks, lay limp on a bed with an iron clamp around one ankle and a hole in her head. A colt suspended from the roof by his hooves, a particular part of his anatomy nailed to his forehead. A stallion, nailed to the wall by his ears and forehooves, his body the scarred canvas for a masterpiece of cruelty. A filly's head in one corner, covered in just about every substance you could name that the pony body produces, the rest of her body in another corner, burned, scarred and brutalised in ways I couldn't fathom.

I threw up before I could shriek in sheer horror, an acidic taste filling my mouth. Who in their right fucking mind would do this sort of shit?!

A pair of hooves grabbed my flanks and drew me away from the room. I envisioned a savage pony we had missed dragging me off to beat, rape, dissect and mutilate me. I screamed and bucked behind me, missing my attacker.

"Woah!" Final shrieked, before flying up to my head and smacking me in the face. I staggered for a moment, lost my balance and fell over, and after a half-minute of trembling, I sighed with relief.

Final had told me I looked pale, and had found a (thankfully clean) bedsheet and wrapped it around me. I still tasted bile, even after a whole canteen of water. Images of the savages' sadism flickered in my mind. I kept staring into space, my thought drifting away; I knew that it wasn't making my conversation with Final any easier, but I couldn't get that fucking scene out of my brain.

"Were they a family?" I shakily asked myself, out loud. "Were they just a normal happy family heading to Vanhoover or from it, when these... fuckers... got them...?"

Final wrapped a hoof around my shoulders. "I dunno, dude. I dunno..."

"Why would ponies even do shit like this? What did this family do to deserve it?"

Final sighed. I was asking questions nopony except the ones we had just shot could answer. I shuddered as the image of the filly's head flashed through my brain. Final got up, patting me on the back, before trotting off.

"Where are you going?" I asked, scared something would happen to her... or me. Though, we had shot all the savages... right?

"I'm only gonna be a sec," She replied softly, before trotting off. She returned a minute later with a large bracelet in her hooves.

"What's that?"

"A PipBuck," she said matter-of-factly. At my somewhat perplexed look, she added "a mini terminal that goes around the leg. Should be handy to help find our way around here."

I nodded, before asking "where'd you find it?"

"In a cupboard."

Seemed legit. I looked at the metal cylinder, and saw that a map was on the screen, showing the entire area. I leaned in, getting a better view. "Well, whoever owned this was heading to... Stable 73?"

"The hay is a Stable?" Final asked. I explained what I knew about Stables - they were life-preserving underground shelters made before the megaspell war. We had been told that they had failed, killing thousands of ponies, and that there was nopony down on the surface. But there was some evidence in front of me that the Stables had worked. My friend nodded, before standing again.

"Alright, let's go!"

"Wait, what?!" I stood up. "We're going there?!"

Final nodded. "Unless you want to sleep in here."

I shook my head quickly, but then turned my head to the room - the door had been closed for my sanity. Didn't quite help. "Though, we can't just leave them here..."

We stood at a distance, watching the room of horrors glow orange from the window, smoke wafting from out of it. I wondered if giving the victims this sort of funeral was respectful, but I couldn't bear to look at them, let alone touch them, so a burial would have been an absolute nightmare.

And I was sure I'd have plenty of those already.

I had said a few kind words, and some curses to the savage ponies who would probably burn along with them. Final, despite herself, said nothing.

After a while, I returned to my path. I had entered the coordinates to Stable 73 onto my EFS, and followed the marker on it. Final flew up to me after a second.

"Nimbus..."

"I'm fine," I croaked.

Final looked away from me, off into the rainy distance, and muttered under her breath "I hope you are."

I could understand her concern, but it wasn't worth worrying about.

The rain had picked up as we flew along, water drops splattering against my visor. The thunder rumbled above us, occasionally illuminating the hillsides with a flash of white. It might have been my mood, or perhaps the scene in front of me, but everything just seemed... bleak. I started wondering why we had even come down here in the first place, if the only thing we'd be greeted to was rain and horrible murders.

Soon, we had found a small, wooden door, and the label to Stable 73 on the PipBuck flashed. I had to see about copying the data onto my suit's map at some point. Final heaved the door open and gestured to let me in first, and I entered, turning my flashlight on. There was a narrow stone path leading up to a steel panel. I gulped. Everything just seemed so... tight.

Final landed beside me, grinning. "Well, at least we're out of the rain."

I nodded, stepping forward and up to the door. It had the number '73' painted on it, and next to it was a small control panel. The two of us looked at it; it was a small thing, with a lever and a keypad.

"Huh. Just a lever?" Final asked, before pulling down on it. Nothing happened at first, but then... nothing. I blinked. "Try it again."

Final did, then when nothing happened again she began randomly pressing buttons and pulling the lever and so forth. I stepped forward, looking further at the door. It was huge, and made of steel, but other than that it-

UWAAH! UWAAH! UWAAH!

The klaxon rang painfully in my ears, as flashing, spinning lights next to the door saw fit to blind us. I turned to Final, who had a bundle of wires in her muzzle. She grinned at me.

I tried to say "What the hell were you thinking, that could have locked us out of the damn place forever!" but the alarm didn't help. Soon, the horrible tortured screech of metal grinding on metal filled the tiny cavern, and I had to cover my ears to stop myself going deaf. The door slid back, then to the side, and then the alarms and lights finally died, only silence and dust remaining.

I looked inside the Stable. It was dark, but not pitch-black, with a couple of humming and glowing orange lights on the roof. And it looked... small.

Final let out a low whistle. "Alright, let's go in and get some shut-eye."

I turned to her, raising an eyebrow. "In here?"

"Yeah."

"What if the ponies here don't take kindly to us?" Images of the raider camp flashed through my mind again.

"Then they can talk to us or taste plasma."

I shrugged, then felt my eyelids growing heavy. It was at least 2 in the morning and I desperately needed sleep, I had no desire or energy to argue with her plan. Final wasn't looking so good herself, and with weary hooves and wings we moved into the Stable, looking for a good spot to stay.

"Maintenance or Clinic?" Final asked.

I thought for a moment, trying to get a coherent thought through my fatigue-clouded brain. "Clinic has beds."

Final nodded, yawning. "Let's go and meet some ponies."

We hadn't even seen a living pony in here yet. The clinic was devoid of staff, the halls were empty, and everything just seemed eerily quiet save for the constant hum of the lights. I yawned, staggering into the clinic after Final, and shut the door. I slid my stealth suit off and flew onto one of the beds. It was by no means a cosy, comfortable cloud, but it was the best I had, so I went with it. Final remained clothed, save her helmet, which lay on the table beside her.

"Aren't you going to take of your suit?"

"Nah, it's comfy," She replied, wriggling around on the second bed. "'sides, I don't want to make you feel awkward."

"We're both military, Final," I yawned. "It shouldn't matter."

"Still, I think I can cope."

"Alright," I said, shutting my eyes after a while. I began some slow breathing exercises to help my body relax after the stress of combat, the horror of the savage's room and, of course, leaving my entire previous life and my home, Feathertip, behind. Tomorrow, I could go find my father, maybe go into Vanhoover City itself and see what was going on there and how I could help. But for now...

I needed sleep.

"Good night, Final," I murmured. She mumbled a vague reply back, as my mind drifted away into the land of sleep; I smiled.

We might be hundreds of miles from home, but I always knew my home would be where I knew I felt like I belonged.

And, as long as I was with Final, I always had home with me.

Footnote: Level Up.

New Perk: Confirmed Bachelorpony -- +10% damage to the same sex and unique dialogue options with certain ponies.

Author's Note

For those of you who found the 'Raider Room' to be horrific and disturbing, don't worry - things'll get a lot more horrific and disturbing later on. Mwahaha.

Thanks to Filthma and SigmatheAwesome for proofreading this, you guys are awesome :)

Well, hope you liked this chapter and are looking forward to the next one I'll be releasing a new chapter every week until I run out of chapters to post.

~StormbadgerXIII