Rail's Journey no. 3

by Gcdemon

1. Finding my place

Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like.”
Lemony Snicket

Imagine that you’re a simple person living on a surface. Maybe you’re travelling or simply living in one of the shacks nearby the road. You walk slowly, thinking about simple things, when suddenly you notice someone. Green pegasus with yellow mane running as fast as he can, not looking behind and trying not to fall on the ground. He has some simple clothing and few scratches on his body. Probably you wonder – what happened to him? Why is he running?

Well, that’s me. It was a really dangerous situation, few slave hunters tried to capture me! They thought it would be easy catch a pony, that travels alone without any weapon, but they also didn’t expect I had a knife. I managed to hurt one of them and quickly run away… I was slightly wounded too, but luckily still able to walk by myself. That one time I looked back and noticed they were still after me. I bit my lower lip and had no other choice, but to run – run even faster than before. My hooves did hurt even more with each next step, but I tried to ignore that. Nobody said that living in the wastes is going to be easy… It was my choice after all.

It took a while until I managed to escape them, I was really happy, but there was no time for fooling around. I needed to find a safe place, where I could hide for a little longer, recover and store some supplies. I looked at my bag – there was only a rusty knife I mentioned before, few cans with some weird meat and finally half a bottle of dirty water.

I don’t need to hide it, I’ve never had lots of caps, just enough to make a living and stay out of trouble.

That’s what I wanted to do that day too. As it turned out, I found myself in a really unfamiliar place. And, what was even worse, it was getting darker. You can trust me, night is the worst time of the day here. I sighed quietly, for now finding a shelter was my priority. I looked around, trying to find anything that had at least three stable walls. Finally I noticed a weak flame from a distance. For a second I thought it was just my imagination, but it really was a flame! I walked there slowly, trying to catch my breath. I was tired from running... I just needed a place to sit and hide and that was the only thing that was in my head.

Finally I reached the place. That light source… It was a broken gas pipe! First I was a little scared, but I managed to fix it the next day. I found here some empty wooden boxes and thrash, but they were just enough to serve as my new bed. First, of course, I checked if this place wasn’t dangerous. It was typical for raiders to hide mines in abandoned houses and then just collect all equipment from burned corpses. I didn’t find anything like that, no bear traps, no mines… Totally safe, maybe it was a little weird, but I felt that the fate has smiled upon me at last.

Maybe it wasn’t the most luxurious place, but it had its advantages, as it turned out a little later. I stayed here for the first few days and nobody even came close to the building. There was a big hole in one of the walls, anyone could come inside without any trouble. But nothing happened… There was no glass in windows too, but they were really useful anyways. I had a great view at the main road. Lots of ponies were passing by – raiders, traders, ordinary ones… They usually were busy with their businesses and never even looked in my direction.

One day before that I made a little trip around, to check if there’s no raider camps or radscorpion nest (for example, I truly hated these creatures!). First I thought it was too perfect to be real, but I only found an old camp (it was easy to notice that it was unused for a long time) and few wild dogs. So no bigger danger!

I even saw something bigger in the distance, maybe a town? But it was still too early for me to go on an expedition. I felt much better, but still needed to rest at least two more days.
Later I created a small fireplace and a hiding place to store my supplies. It may be a little weird, but I found some food buried underground. Looks like I wasn’t the first one hiding here… I just hoped that the previous occupant won’t come back.

That was a moment, when I decided to call this place home.
"At least for now…" I said to myself, looking at the weak fire.