T.R.O.T.T.E.R. Shadow of Cheernobyl

"But that's just it," The young unicorn Komodo spoke. "Sure, lots of crazy things happen in the Zone, but there's gotta be limits."

"Well of course there are," Razor retorted. "What's your point?"

It was game night in the Hundred Rads Bar. Erik and Razor were playing at the end table. Despite their complaints that checkers was getting boring, neither remembered the rules of this "chess" game very well. Their endless arguing over moves and demands for arbitration by Snitch had turned the match into a spectator sport. At this early hour, however, there weren't too many other patrons around other than a few random ponies, a Duty earth pony named Snitch, and Komodo himself.

"What I think the kid means," Snitch cut in smoothly, "is that the stories some ponies tell are... pretty far-fetched even for the Zone."

Komodo nodded in agreement. "That's it."

"Anypony with half a bottle of sense knows that," Erik argued, scooting a pawn forwards with his hoof. "Your move, Razor."

"I don't mean all the bragging," Komodo insisted. "We've all heard trotters come back from a day in the Wild Territory and say they found some artifact nopony's ever seen. I'm talking about the... the weird stories. The stuff that's even scarier than the Brain Scorcher or bloodsuckers."

"Oh," said Baldy. "You mean like what that one colt claimed he saw over at the Agroprony last winter, how some poor foal got sliced up with a knife held by nopony?"

Komodo nodded. "Exactly... Or how about the ghosts in the old Dark Valley labs, how somepony met one and it told him to stop disturbing their work. That couldn't be real, right?"

"I doubt it," said the blue pegasus Sonic. "I remember back when Freedom was still set up there, they had a colt in their bar who'd tell that one all the time."

"Yeah..." Komodo glanced at Snitch. "What do you think?"

"I dunno and I don't care," Snitch replied stiffly. "Unlike some ponies, I have no time to waste pursuing every rumor, myth and legend which passes through this place."

"Never through I'd hear that from you," Erik sniggered through his gas mask. "The one and only dealer of choice information passing up hot stuff?"

"Ahem," the earth pony cleared his throat. "I deal in facts, not fantasies." He cast a brief look at Sonic before taking a swig of his high-caffeine energy drink. "Speaking of which, there are plenty of stories in the paper. Changelings attacking Canterlot, the Crystal Empire returning..."

"Not interested," Erik said curtly, keeping his eyes on the television set behind the bar. "We know all about that."

Razor moved a pawn of his own, sliding it diagonally and removing one of Erik's pawns from the board. "Your turn."

"Oy, you can't do that!"

"Yeah I can. It's called an 'in passing' capture." Razor looked to Snitch. "Can I?"

The one in the coat nodded wearily. "You can."

"Fuck..."

"Hey Barkeep," Komodo called from the end of the bar. "What do you think about all the stories?"

"Me?" The burly earth pony, bottle for a cutie mark, rested a tattooed hoof on the bartop. "You know I don't go out all that much. I hear the same stories you do."

"But you've been here since the Disaster," the teenager pressed. "You must have some stories to tell us."

Barkeep shook his head. "I just run this place. Sid would be the one to ask."

"Sid, huh?" Sonic wiggled a hoof under the lip of his mask and scratched his jaw. "Either a genius or the world's luckiest fat bastard... Come to think of it, Barkeep, didn't you originally work the other side of the Zone perimeter? You must have heard some juicy tales back then."

"I wouldn't call it juicy," Barkeep said gruffly. "I did handle some transactions for the early trotters, no secrets about that. Back in those days nopony was quite sure what to think of the Zone. Anypony could make a claim and somepony else would believe it... Mind you, I was nopony too important back then - it was Sid in the Cordon who ran that whole show, running supplies through the Quarantine."

"Wow," Komodo sighed wistfully. "I wish I could have been a trotter in those days. Fortunes from a single artifact, boldly blazing new paths into the unknown..."

"Hah!" Razor's tone was scornful. "You wanna know about that? Go find Night Stalker. I'm sure he'd be overjoyed to tell you all about it."

Erik and Snitch glanced at him apprehensively. Some of the other ponies in the bar also took curious glances at him.

"Uh... Night Stalker? Who's that?" The young trotter inquired. However, the curious glances he was getting were starting to answer the question on their own.

"You... don't know who Night Stalker is?" Razor uttered disbelievingly.

Komodo shook his head.

"... An old trotter." Snitch explained curtly, obviously not wanting to elaborate.

"You're probably too young to remember him. I... guess I could tell you a bit of the story." Barkeep hesitated. "As much as I know, anyway."

Komodo's eyes lit up. "Could you?"

"You really want to hear an old pony reminisce?" The pillar of Hundred Rads rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "The true story, you say. Well, it starts the tale of how I first came to the Zone... But I'm a bartender, you know, not a storyteller."

It was Razor who took the hint and leaped to the occasion. "Another round of drinks for everyone," he announced, stepping away from the chessboard long enough to place a bag of bits on the bartop. "I want to hear this."

"Well, if you insist." Barkeep pocketed the money and set a row of fresh cans and bottles on the bar. "Help yourselves, boys."

Once the others had picked their poison of choice, he cleared his throat. "It was right before the Running of the Leaves, not quite twenty years ago now... I remember it very well because I was staying with my brother-in-law at this little clinic where he worked with his twin sons, a ways up the river from Stalliongrad. The Cheernobyl Disaster was on the sixteenth, so.. it would have been roughly a week or two after that. We were trying to figure out what the hay going on when we got a visit from some military types, who requisitioned the place for their own use, treating Mareines who'd been caught in the infant anomalies."

"And they let you stay there?" Komodo asked.

"Yeah. I was no doctor, but they needed every hoof they could get." Barkeep frowned. "Some of those colts were real pushy; that hasn't changed. Now, one of the patients was a lieutenant named Lightening Blitz. He'd fallen into one of the first documented burner anomalies and gotten pretty roasted. His superiors didn't figure he'd survive, so they told me to just ease his pain until he passed."

"Did you?"

"As best I could. He was the tough sort, staying awake almost to the very end. And he shared something interesting with me." Barkeep paused for a moment in thought. "You know, maybe this would make more sense if I told it chronologically... Yeah."

Barkeep opened a can of soda and took a sip. "Here, let me back up and start from the beginning. Night Stalker and some of his friends were playing in one of the small swamps outside Ponyiat when the blast came. They tried to run and get help, but there was no way they could warn the others. One was caught in the open and instantly melted to goo. The second was incinerated without a trace. The third, though... that was Night Stalker. Son of a station worker."

"I'm impressed," said Sonic. "How'd he survive?"

"Night himself didn't know," Barkeep replied. "But a week later, Blitz and his squad were patrolling along the south edge of the Zone when they spotted the starving Night Stalker crawling through a field of gravity anomalies. The officers wouldn't risk a PTR or Crocodile to save one little colt, so Blitz dropped his hoofrifle and magazines to the grunt next to him and started filling his pockets with stones."

"Stones?" Komodo echoed.

"Didn't have a bag of bolts handy, did he?" Barkeep took another sip. "It took the lieutenant an hour to work his way out there, and another twenty minutes to follow his hoofprints back with this kid over his shoulder. Carried him all the way to the transport, in fact. The higher-ups assumed the lucky filly might know something, so they whisked him off right away and sent the soldiers back to the Quarantine. Then the first emission moved the border and Blitz got burned."

"A good colt, no doubt," the one Duty trotter present weighed in.

"That's the funny thing," Sonic mused. "I guess everyone expected him to..."

The narrative trailed off as an earth pony walked into the room, wearing a long coat with a hood. He had a Moosin hoof-rifle on his front leg, just like the one on the old military recruiting poster above the chessboard. As he quietly approached the bar, the others glimpsed the a Browning cannon tucked into the vest he wore under his coat and a black artifact detector clipped to his belly.

Barkeep nodded politely. "There you are. Good to see ya, Strelok."

"Sorry I'm late." Strelok's voice was as soft and unobtrusive as his physical presence. "I have what you asked for," he went on, indicating the metal strongbox in the crook of his left leg.

The owner of the establishment motioned to Garik, head bouncer of Hundred Rads, who stepped aside long enough to give Strelok passage into the back of the bar.

"As I was saying," Barkeep said when he had gone, "A particular mare from Ponyiat survived the Disaster by hiding in a cave, which promptly got blocked off by the blast aftershocks. A cave filled with poisonous snakes, no less. She survived off them for a while before some ponies heard her and dug her out. The story got out and they called her Snake Eater ever since."

"I've heard of her myself." Razor looked up from the game board. "Wasn't she some government spy or something?"

"Whatever she was, Snake came across Night Stalker after the military truck carrying him crashed near the Cordon. Guess the filly had been tortured for some reason or other; Sid told me later that his horn and two of his legs were broken."

"Wow..." Komodo whispered, "Those bastards actually tortured a foal?"

Barkeep nodded and shrugged.

"Interesting," Snitch commented. "How do you know all this about Night Stalker?"

Barkeep replied. "I met him myself years later, when I was getting knee-deep in this business. That was after he had grown his... well, reputation as a trotter who could sense anomalies and butcher entire military platoons by himself. He wanted to know the best way to get past the army patrols and out of the Zone."

"Out of the Zone?" Komodo repeated.

"That was about the time when things started to go bad for us - Clear Sky vanished into thin air, and famine hit the Zone after Sid's suppliers in the military got ratted out. And then came the Battle of Limansk. Night Stalker banded Duty and Freedom together to get supplies moving back into the Zone, and got themselves in a war with a battalion of Celestia's finest. The whole city burned to the ground in the fighting."

"You mean they fought the military head-to-head? Sounds exciting!"

Erik turned his head away, his eyes falling to the ground. "Not really."

"Well, Night Stalker got himself captured, along with his fillyfriend Raindrop. A few days later, a couple trotters launched a raid to save him only to find the base burned to ashes and Night gone."

If Komodo had been sitting down, he would be on the edge of his chair. "Where is he now?"

The earth pony shrugged, "Night Stalker was never seen again after that. But Neo knew him much better than I do. You should ask him if you want to learn more."

"Speaking of Neo, I haven't seen that colt in a while." Sonic commented.

"I heard he was in the Cordon just yesterday." Razor moved another piece, prompting a curse from his opponent.

"Is he still alive?"

"You mean Neo? Oh yeah." Barkeep paused to finish his drink. "Don't know what he gets up to most of the time, but he's certainly around. Kind of a solitary pony, though he supposedly did some work for Clear Sky back in the day. Anyhow, that's all I know for sure."

"For sure?" Komodo perked up a little. "There's more?"

Barkeep leaned over the bartop. "Only a rumor which I heard once... Some ponies claim that Night Stalker may still be alive after all these years. The more superstitious say that his soul was condemned to eternally wander the Zone as a ghost, biding his time until he can claim revenge against Equestria. Others say he died out there and got himself revived though some kind of black magic... But that's all just rumor and hearsay."

"Black magic, eh? Sounds like somepony who'd fit in with those zebras." Erik made his move. "Check."

"Wow..." Komodo shook his head. "Either way, thanks for telling me all that."

"My pleasure," Barkeep grunted. He turned as Strelok reappeared from the back room. "Good colt. You want the usual?"

"Yeah." Strelok wandered over to the bulletin board and scanned it placidly.

"All set." Barkeep placed a bundle wrapped in waxed paper on the bartop. "Anything else?"

"No, thank you." Strelok picked up the bundle and walked out, quietly humming a song. Had the patrons been watching the chess game and not Barkeep, they might not have noticed his coming and going at all.