Fallout: Equestria - Uriel

I skipped breakfast. There was something just unappealing about the cloud-altered synthetic carrots that turned my stomach. I left them behind in the building I’d slept in, trying to ignore the bodies of its former occupants. The sun was hidden in the pink haze but it was definitely morning. I still didn’t really know what to do with myself, but anything was better than skulking in a house full of corpses, so I went for a stroll and tried to clear my head from the strange dream I’d had. I couldn’t remember it, but it seemed to have been something about the Equestrian army.

My counting told me that it was now precisely a week since the bombs had fallen. At this exact time a week ago I was disembarking from an overloaded cruise liner in Fillydelphia, trying desperately to get to the suburb where my parents lived. Of course the bombs had dropped when it was sunny. As a rule, bad things happened on the most beautiful days. There were a few shambling ghouls sitting aimlessly on a pile of rubble as I passed. Their bars were red so I killed them with some well-placed shots from the hip. I really needed to get some kind of sidearm for close-range kills.

I considered going back to the ministry towers, but the pink cloud was ridiculous down that way. It got so thick that you couldn’t aim through it. I might be impervious to its effects, but I couldn’t see through it. Instead I headed for an imposing church just out of the centre. From the design it appeared to be Lunar, but I was only interested in the height. It was much easier to kill ghouls from high up.

Unfortunately, I was about halfway up the spire, heading for the belfry, when something snapped and I fell off. It took me about six seconds to hit the ground, but more annoying was that I’d have to climb it again. This time I was more careful about where I put my hooves, and got safely into the tower. The bells were cracked, which gave me something to ponder as I set up B’ruch and checked the sighting. I had a good view of the east side of the city, but the damned ministry towers were in the way and I couldn’t see anything on the west side, like the waterfalls. Oh well.

My PipBuck gave me the heading of the ghouls, and then I just checked the scopes for their precise location. There were two in a bedroom somewhere, probably used to be a couple. The shot was tricky, through a shattered window, but I got them both. I started on a bottle of Sparkle-cola as a reward. The bottles were so indestructible that it seemed like nearly all of them had survived the bombs. They were easy to get out of the vending machines that still stood around the city.

Being a sniper in a bell tower seemed like a barrel of laughs, but the ghouls weren’t stupid enough to just wander the streets. I only got one more that morning, an easy one as it tried to cross one of the main thoroughfares. I barely needed to aim. But six confirmed in one morning was just boring. I mean, She didn’t give me a second chance so I could average just twelve kills a day. I was doing better than that during the war.

But my attentiveness did pay off after lunch. I spotted a pitch-black coated ghoul trotting around in the Celestial Park. The trees had been killed by the cloud, so I lazily lined him up. I’d never actually seen a stallion quite as black as this one, though. No relief in his colouring, just black all over. Oh well, his blood would probably still be whatever colour a ghoul’s blood was. But as I got everything line up on his head, he stopped and put off my aim. I pulled the crosshairs back, got lined up again, then realised he was looking right at me. Both eyes were fixed on my scope. So I checked my EFS. Damn it, he had a blue bar. A sentient ghoul, just my luck.

Then he started trotting towards the bell tower, heading for the most direct street. I kept my scope on him, wondering what he was up to. It took a pony with immense eyesight to spot a sniper at that distance, especially with the cloud and the lack of sunlight. As I predicted, he ended up coming right up to the base of the tower.

“Are you okay up there?” he asked in a weak voice.

“I’ll come down in a second,” I replied, packing up my scope and storing it in my saddlebags. Then I slid back down the roof, dropped for about five seconds, and ploughed into the concrete.

He seemed concerned that a pony had just killed themselves right in front of him. Until I got up and brushed myself off, checking that my rifle was okay.

“Hi,” he said, trying what looked like a smile. Up close, I noticed that he was terribly thin. Like he hadn’t eaten for days, even weeks. His ribs were clearly visible at his sides and his face was sunken and gaunt. His coat and mane still looked healthy though.

“Hi. Sorry, I thought you were a ghoul,” I told him, chuckling a little. “Glad I checked.”

He nodded. “I’m probably more glad than you are. What’s your name?”

That made me pause. I’d had a name before the war. Then when I joined up I was a Private, serial number 774655. Everyone called me Private. Then I was dead. Now what was I called? As with anything, if you didn’t use it, you lost it. And my name hadn’t been used for quite some time.

“I don’t know what I’m called,” I replied. “I used to be a Private in the Equestrian Army, but then I died and came back and I can’t remember what they called me.”

“Huh, that’s funny. I have the same problem. I wasn’t in the army, though. But I’ve decided to call myself Asteroid.”

“Why?” I wondered if I was being too blunt.

He just laughed, and we began walking somewhere. “First word I found after coming back from being dead. Asteroid breakfast cereal. Exciting, huh?”

I nodded.

“I just didn’t like being nameless, so I picked it. Nice to meet you.”

I shook his outstretched hoof and then made sure B’ruch was safely strapped to my side. “I don’t know what to call myself.”

“Pick something. Nopony around to judge you. Anything you like.”

I thought about it as we walked. I didn’t know where we were going, but I was glad that there weren’t any ghouls around. The pink cloud was quite thick here, so I suspected it had probably killed everypony instead of ghoulifying them.

When a scrap of paper blew past, I trapped it under a hoof and read it, looking for a word I liked for a name.

“How about Agricultural?” I suggested. Asteroid laughed.

“Really? I don’t think I can spell that.”

I turned the paper over. “Ultra High Voltage?”

“Voltage might work.”

Voltage didn’t suit me. I threw the paper away. “Nope. Something more elegant, I think.”

“Elegant, huh? Fancy schmancy.”

“So why are you so thin?” I asked as I tried to think about my name. “Have you not been able to find food?”

“No, I found food. I eat as much as the next pony. I just don’t get hungry, and now matter how much I eat, I’m never full. On my first day here, I ate a whole store cupboard of tinned food in an hour and didn’t put on an ounce.”

Asteroid was pathetically weak-looking, but he still seemed to be able to walk at my pace. Maybe there was truth in his story.

“Oh yeah, and I can eat anything. Name it, I’ll eat it.”

I pointed at the ground. He pulled up a handful of loose gravel and munched on it with a blank expression.

“Okay, you’ve convinced me. You can eat anything.”

He spat out some dirt. “I can eat it but it doesn’t mean I like it.”

We stopped again at a vending machine to get him something to wash out his mouth with. He slurped down the Sparkle-cola, and I wondered about a name. The soda had interesting names.

“Heh, before the war, I always had Valentine soda. I think it’s just cherryade, but I liked it so much more than everything else,” Asteroid told me, trying to get one out of the machine. “I thought they’d discontinued it because cherries came from out west and they needed to free up the rail network.”

“You can call me Valentine,” I decided. “I like the sound of it.”

Asteroid shrugged. “Well Valentine, best celebrate with a Valentine, eh?” He handed me the bottle and I tried it. Absolutely disgusting. But I drank it anyway to keep him happy.

Asteroid seemed pleased with my choice of name, since he kept using it whenever a chance presented itself.

“Hey, Valentine, so where are we going?”

I shrugged. “Don’t mind.”

We just stood stock still on the corner of a street. I stared idly at an open sewer grate, before a hoof appeared.

“Stay back,” I said carefully, pulling out B’ruch and aiming it. Once the ghoul’s head appeared, I blew it apart, then swung around to kill another ghoul who was skulking in a nearby ruin.

“Sorry about that,” I said, reloading the weapon. “Celestia-damned ghouls.”

Asteroid just stared at me. “I think we need a chat.”

I sat down at a roadside cafe, pondering the pointlessness of the parasol, while Asteroid took some bits and cleaned out a vending machine. He handed two bottles of Sparkle-cola to me and had two bottles of Valentine to himself.

“I’d kindof like to know how you just killed two ghouls in the time it took me to blink,” he said, casually throwing the bottle caps into the road. “And how you can survive in this pink gunk. And why you have the bad-assest gun in the whole world but you’re not a unicorn.”

So I told him about my army service and my meeting with Celestia. He just listened, pouring the drinks down his throat.

“Wait, so she told you that you have to kill anypony without faith?” he eventually asked, leaning forward. “How can you possibly tell?”

“I’ve just been killing red bars so far, only ghouls. I have no idea how to tell.”

He sniffed. “Well, if you’ve told me, then I guess it’s only right I tell you my story too.”

I took my turn to sip carefully at the cola while he spoke.

“I used to live in Manehatten, way down in the docks. My pop was a docker, it went back many generations. Of course, in the war it suddenly became a top target for zebra infiltration. One of the striped fuckers fooled me and I recommended him for a job. Of course, the recommendation was traced back to me when the stripe let slip, and I was out of a job. One-way ticket to Hightower Jail.”

“Nastiest place in Equestria. The only reason I wasn’t summarily executed by the mean bastards in there, once I’d had my memories taken by the Ministry of Morale, was because I could cook. Well, I’d always been able to cook a bit, but I could turn the crappy prison rations into something worth eating. The bigger stallions didn’t stamp on my head because then their next meal would taste horrible instead of bearable. I eventually volunteered for military service to get out of there. My crime was minor enough for me to get an exemption, so long as I volunteered for dangerous service.”

He laughed, and I wondered what dangerous service entailed. In my days, dangerous service had been doing suicidal stuff like trying to defuse bombs and crawling around under zebra-controlled bridges. Nopony ever came back, mainly because they were all MoM-approved traitors. An efficient way of executing them.

“Did that kill you?” I asked.

“I wish. Nah, I worked as a ship’s cook on the HMS Alligator. The convict ship. We kept getting sent into stupid-dangerous bits of zebra waters but we always came out on top. Most of the ponies on the ship were just ones who’d done minor offences, stuff like desertion or insubordination. The lowest of the low were the cooks and engineponies. If the ship went down, we were as good as dead. It never did though, the Alligator was just invincible. I got a week of leave as a reward when the ship rammed a zebra vessel.”

“Of course, that’s when the bombs fell. Everypony was going to some stable, but I knew I didn’t have a place so I just went back to the Alligator. Sat there and finished off three bottles of Sweet Apple Acres before the bomb hit. Then I died and everything, but Celestia saved me. Told me that if I had faith, I’d go back, but I had to bring famine. Eat everything I could find in order to restore the balance,” he finished, looking at his empty bottles. “I drank everything in that vending machine, in case you’re wondering.”

I shrugged. “If She told you to do it, then do it.”

“So now I’m immortal, but I’m cursed to look all thin and useless like this. Heh, more than I deserve, I guess.”

So I’d found one of the elements of suffering. Famine was sitting opposite me, scratching his mane with sighs of relief.

“We’ve got Death and Famine. We just need War and Conquest, right?” he asked me, drumming his hooves on the metal table. “At least, as far as I remember from the Celestial scriptures.”

Death was pale, Famine was black.

“What colour is War?” I asked, trying to recall that bit of the scripture.

“Red. So if you spot some kind of red pony wandering around, try killing them,” he laughed, winking. “You’ve got that down to a fine art.”

I had no idea where to go to find War. But we had more pressing concerns, which was mainly about how best to carry out our respective duties.

“I’m bored of killing ghouls,” I told him. “We should move on to somewhere new.”

“Somewhere with living ponies. I mean, it’s only a week since the bombs hit. There must be loads of ponies who survived. But how do we tell if they have faith?”

“Maybe if I make a banner, telling ponies to renounce their sins and embrace Celestia. If they don’t, I can kill them.”

We raided the Ministry of Image for stuff to make a banner out of. The turrets blasted at us all the way through, but apart from the occasional vaporisation, we lived. Asteroid designed a poster and printed it, the same way all of the propaganda was printed during the war.

It had a large picture of Her in all of Her glory, with ‘Embrace Celestia’ printed underneath. Exactly what we needed.

Canterlot was left behind us as we headed for the coast. Asteroid carried the poster on a stick, and the plan was to show it to ponies we encountered, before killing them or not killing them. He still ate all the food he could find, including medical supplies and stuff growing in irradiated fields.

The plan worked perfectly when we came across a travelling caravan laden with stuff, probably technology. There was a single pony driving it. Asteroid trotted up with the poster and said a few words, getting derisive laughs for his trouble. Then I popped up and shot the driver in the head, spreading his blood all over his wares, which Asteroid promptly ate.

“Huh, well that was a bust,” he told me. “Nothing edible there, just guns.”

I shrugged. There would be more. I scratched the kill onto B’ruch and smiled. It was my first pony kill, since ghouls didn’t count.

“If you want, we can swing by the old Alligator. I wouldn’t mind seeing it for old time’s sake, and you never know what might be around there. War sounds like he could be an ex-convict,” Asteroid speculated.

“Maybe we should try Hightower then.”

“No chance in hell. I wouldn’t go back there for all the bits in Equestria.”

We decided to sleep in a cluster of rocks. I suspected that we could have gone on indefinitely, but it seemed proper to get some time for sleep. I’d felt less tired all of the time I’d been with Asteroid. But he was snoring before long and I was looking up at the clouds, trying to drop off. Maybe I’d go back to those disturbing dreams about the army. Something felt unresolved about my service.

--

Tonight, I wasn’t me. Well, I wasn’t anypony. I seemed to be some kind of floating spirit, able to see and hear but not able to go anywhere. I spotted the black stallion who now called himself Asteroid cutting up some carrots and putting them into a pot, wiping his brow. It was stiflingly hot below decks.

A shot alarm sounded and he dropped his knife, leading me through some small cabin doors and up stairs to the decks. There, one of the most awe-inspiring sights of my life met me.

The Alligator was floating on a bright blue ocean, engines whining under the exertion of going as fast as possible in a straight line. Asteroid dashed towards a machine gun emplacement, strapping himself into the seat as many ponies ran past towards their own posts. A scrawny little earth pony, who looked like he was barely a stallion, appeared at Asteroid’s side.

“Hey Crate. Ready?” the scrawny one asked, picking up a giant belt of ammunition.

Asteroid shrugged. “Suits me, Cheese.”

I glanced around. There were tropical-looking islands around on the horizon, and I wondered exactly what it was we were going to be shooting at. Then I spotted a larger-looking island that was much closer, and the Alligator was aligning itself to give it a broadside, all eight cannons pointing at it. Hundreds of smaller pony craft were on their way to the island, and I thought they looked like landing craft. Small explosions of grenades were going off on the beaches. It was some kind of paradise being invaded by ponies.

Paradise predictably turned into hell as soon as the Equestrian Air Force arrived. Giant stallions with wings to rival Hers appeared as black dots in the sky, flying at extreme altitude with bomb trailers behind them. Their ordinance fell with red explosions on the island, blasting apart trees. The Alligator opened up, eight shells whistling towards their targets and the ship recoiling.

“Griffons, nine o’clock,” the radio buzzed, and Asteroid deftly pulled his gun around to face them. A wing of the creatures, which I had worked with but not against during the war, came swooping down in dives, most of them targeting the landing craft. A single hit and swipe of their talons was enough to turn the cluster of ponies in the craft into a red blob.

Once the braver griffons began to assault the battleships, Asteroid opened up. A young-looking griffon dived the deck of the Alligator, clutching a bomb in his talons. I couldn’t tell whether it was Asteroid or the other machine gunners who got it, but the inexperienced Griffon’s flight paths was too predictable and his wings were torn apart on approach. The bomb slid into the ocean harmlessly and the gunners killed the griffon easily. Then they turned to other low-flying threats, trying to cut them down before they could get any more landing craft.

Asteroid was quick and turning and firing but it was nearly impossible to hit anything. The Alligator’s gunners didn’t hit anything else as the battle raged, but laid down impressive levels of fire to keep the griffons at altitude. When they did dive, the concentrated fire from the battleships usually annihilated a few of them.

“More ammo, Cheese,” Asteroid grunted. The little pony rammed another long belt into the side of the gun, and again it began chattering away.

A gigantic explosion caught my attention. It happened way up in the air, just above the island that was being assaulted. It seemed that one of the pegasi with a bomb trailer had been hit by griffons before discharging his load and it had simply exploded in mid-air, killing the pegasus and a number of griffons.

“They’re strafing,” a panicked voice screamed down the radio, and Asteroid’s neck snapped around as he turned in time to watch a machine-gun armed griffon blast away at the decks of another battleship.

A similar attack was made on the Alligator, the griffon having dark brown plumage and twin guns that ripped up the metal deck and killed a few ponies at a machine gun emplacement near the bow.

Asteroid’s line of fire arced towards the griffon, seeming to hit one of its guns and disable it. The griffon made some kind of noise and ejected the gun, but the action left him vulnerable and the fire from the Alligator cut him down. He hit the deck, already dead, and some ponies quickly stripped the other gun and dumped the body into the sea.

The griffons began to retreat, merely heading for altitude since none of the battleships possessed anti-flight weaponry. The island appeared to be slowly taken, and the Alligator resumed its heavy bombardment of the island, Asteroid sighing in relief.

“Not bad, Cheese,” he said between the cannon blasts. “Back to the kitchens?”

The scrawny pony nodded. “Hope they don’t attack again, my nerves aren’t really up to this.”

As Asteroid made his way back into the gloom inside the ship, I felt it all fading away, leaving the tropical sea behind.

--

“Sleepy, huh,” Asteroid said, shaking me with his hoof. “It’s already morning, so we should move.”

“Who was Cheese?” I asked, rubbing my eyes and picking up my belongings.

“Cheese? He was my partner aboard the Alligator. Why?”

“I think I dreamed one of your memories,” I said carefully.

“Oh, that’s okay. I dreamed one of yours,” Asteroid replied nonchalantly. “You were assaulting some kind of zebra battlefield outside Hoofington.”

“You were in some tropical place I couldn’t identify. Griffons were attacking,” I told him as we resumed walking.

“Probably Zebrai’i. Tough little nut to crack.”

“Why was Cheese on the Alligator?” I asked, unable to come up with a convincing reason myself. “It was the convict ship, right?”

“Oh, yes. He never really told me the details but he was never really stable, you know, psychologically or whatever. I think he snapped under the war stress and killed a load of his classmates at some school. They had no proof it was him and his lawyers argued it was a zebra infiltrator. Morale got him but didn’t get any of his memories, I think he was too insane to remember it. So they stuck him on the Alligator and hoped he’d die, probably.”

“What happened to him?”

“He snapped during a tough firefight near Ponigawa and went weird. I calmed him down but in the next wave some griffon strafed and hit him. Poor kid.”

Asteroid didn’t seem to want to talk about it very much, but I had one more question.

“Who was Crates?”

“Crates? I have no idea. Maybe somepony who worked down on the docks with me, with a name like that. Nopony on the Alligator though, as far as I know.”

The banner plan failed when we came across a weird encampment of ponies just sitting there on the side of a hill. They seemed to be interested in Celestia, but couldn’t make up their minds. I had all blue bars, but they wanted to take a vote or something. If I left them and they lost faith, I’d be failing. But we didn’t have all day.

“Come on ponies, make up your mind,” Asteroid grumbled, sitting heavily on the ground. “It’s not exactly difficult.”

I polished B’ruch and watched their discussion. They were handing around little pieces of paper with boxes on and everypony ticked one before folding it up and handing it back. It was the most boring process I’d ever had the misfortune to watch.

Eventually, after about three hours, their leader came up to me. “We took a democratic vote on the matter of ‘Do we embrace the Celestial Religion?’. Thirty six votes were counted. There were two abstentions. Of the thirty six, fourteen voted to embrace the Celestial religion, twelve voted to accept it as a recognised religion but not embrace it, and ten voted not to recognise it as a religion.”

This really meant nothing to me, but he continued.

“No option reached the required majority so the ‘nay’ voted were eliminated and the second options were distributed. Subsequently, there were sixteen votes to embrace the Celestian religion, and twenty votes to recognise it. So the decision is to recognise it but not embrace it.”

I shrugged. “So what? Are you believers?”

He didn’t seem to know, and I didn’t want to sit through further discussions.

“Okay, anypony who has faith that Celestia will save their soul, please stand over here. Anypony without that faith, stand over there,” Asteroid said, pointing his hooves. They split into two groups of roughly equal size.

Asteroid went over for a quick discussion with those who had faith, while I adjusted the scope and began systematically working my way through the ponies in the other group. After I’d killed ten, they got a bit scared and scattered, but the remaining ten didn’t take long.

“Glad we got that over with,” Asteroid told me as we headed towards the ruins of Manehatten. “Took far too long.”

I agreed. “At least we’re finally enacting Her wishes.” Asteroid had eaten their entire food stock with relish.

“There should be plenty of food in Manehatten, but a lot less ghouls. That cloud seemed to have the knack of making ghouls.”

“We need a better system for finding out if ponies have faith or not,” I said, looking forlornly at our poster.

Total Score

242 Zebra

2 Dragon

85 Ghoul

21 Pony