> Fallout: Equestria - "Kiss Equestria Goodbye"
>  by DamnfoolBrony
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Chapter One: Out of the Cradle
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Chapter One: Out of the Cradle


“... all under the watchful care of loving, approved mares and stallions.”



Free.

I breathed deeply, resting on cool, bare concrete, borne up by the skeletal remains of some Pre-War office building beyond the Wall. I ignored the smoky, industrial pollutants that wafted lazily through the air; ignored the red sky that shone tirelessly down upon me. My euphoria surged, eclipsing my fear for a brief moment before it was quickly quenched by the cold prickling of sweat beneath my mane. I’d done the unthinkable.

I was free.

Slowly, quietly, I got to my hooves, suppressing the urge to jump up and buck the air for joy. There would be a time and a place for that. Later perhaps, when I was less worried about being spotted by a griffin aerial patrol. As it was, my escape from the high-rises that our illustrious leader had repurposed for "the education of our nation’s youth” would not go unnoticed.  

“Every child is precious.” Ha! Horseapples from my own ass. Children to Red Eye were like any other thing: resources to be exploited and, when they had exhausted their usefulness, discarded. I looked back at the leathery, hairless patch of tissue that had been my cutie mark. "Unity is liberation. Freedom from the shackles of cutie mark tyranny."

We’d loved him like a father, and sometimes he would even chat with us as if he actually was. A thousand colts and fillies, filled with admiration and burgeoning loyalty to this powerful, charismatic stallion who had rescued us. The leader of a thousand and more. I had wanted to be just like he was. Strong like he was. Needed like he was. To that foal in that room high above Fillydelphia, in a world where control came at a premium, pain was a small price to pay . Eventually, the time came for him to ask. We gave freely, and without hesitation.

Those who had spoken out, or who had declined Red Eye’s offer to remove their cutie marks “in the hope of a unified Equestria” had disappeared over the course of a few weeks. We, the scarred, hopeful majority, remained, drinking in his words like water.

I never did learn what happened to them.

I took a long pull on my canteen to steady my nerves. Feeling much recovered in spite of the poor air quality, I slipped it back into my tiny saddlebags, deciding to do a little gear check. Looking at my right hoof, I examined the aged Stealth Buck that gripped it. Every time I looked at the old piece of Pre-War magitech, curiosity needled me. The secrets held by its smaller, more delicate internal components had mystified me for a long time now, and, unfortunately, things would remain that way for a while yet. I couldn’t risk breaking or damaging the delicate and extremely old Ministry of Arcane Science technology, not when it was the only thing that made my escape from this hellish place possible. I wiggled the makeshift magical interface in the side to make sure it was secure, then turned my gaze elsewhere.

Grasping the laspistol on the ground next to me with my magic, I levitated it up to eye-level and checked the small pair of green crystals that glowed softly within the guts of the machine. Using the same magic I had used to breathe it to life in the first place, I reached out to the gems, a small spark jumping from my horn to them and back again. 

Hmm, I thought to myself. Twenty-six? Twenty-seven? Lightly huffing, I hoped that would be enough.

Trotting down the stairs, I moved as silently as I could to the nearest open window before flicking my Stealth Buck on and darting to the next building.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

When Red Eye’s organization finally decided to take me off the barracks rotation schedule, the idea of escape was little more than a wispy, morbid fantasy. Long repressed memories were only just beginning to reemerge from beneath the layers of routine and custom I had obliterated them under. Everything was still as I had been shown oh so long ago when I rolled into Fillydelphia on that ill-managed cart: I was to remain here and think only of the things put before me. Any movement to change that state of being would result in punishment suited to my sedition. 

Still. Even with such terrible deterrents hanging over my head, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t at least try. Small seeds of defiance, and the little acts to support them. It was only now, when I'd finally grown out of primary -- gotten my own private quarters! -- that I could really get away with it. It was only now, with someplace to call my own, that I could truly grasp the interplay between the Bosses, the Teachers, the Talons, and the Students like myself.

With somewhere to stockpile, I could play the game properly. A spare Mint-al here, an extra Buck capsule there. A few packs of cigarettes in trade for an unopened bottle of applejack. The quiet system everyone fed into, and off of. There were so many of us who need the augmentation -- and the relief -- provided by the medicines that got us through the Badlands and behind the relative safety of the Wall. I still remember the posters on the walls, styled after those old Ministry of Peace ones. "Be Kind!" over a stylized drawing of foals sharing colorful little dots, drinks and other snacks. "Share!"

That was my first break, I'd say. Avoiding dependency. A quirk of lineage, and a remnant of stingy captors. The quarrels I witnessed over such things... I could almost thank them for those lasting impressions. Almost.

I found my next opportunity in the way they allowed us relative freedom in the fields of study we were allowed to pursue. It was structurally unavoidable in that our purpose in the organization was to become the next generation of researchers-- thought leaders, even, if one had the right temperament. I'm sure there was an additional line of reasoning behind it, showing us the advantages of a bond of mutual trust between us and the organization. 

Of course, I was happy to manipulate the hell out of the system. And not even feel bad about it, to boot! I absorbed every scrap of knowledge on Pre-War arcane science, earth pony mechanics, and spell-matrices that I could get my hooves on. Unsurprisingly, that was what got me noticed. 

I hadn't been keeping good enough tabs on which projects they were headhunting for. Not a lethal mistake, but certainly a stress-inducing one. The Bosses were a kind of outsider, similar to but less predictable than the Talons, and this would be my first longitudinal engagement with them as an individual rather than as a member of my cohort. Starting off on the backstep did little for my confidence.

When asked, I told them a curated truth. I did have a vested interest in the lost arts of the days before the megaspells had scoured Equestria, after all. Then I let them infer what they wanted to see for the rest. Since there were no current reasons for them to doubt me or my intents -- there wasn't a Student alive from my cohort who hadn't whined for home when they were a foal -- why waste resources and time with suspicions? Though the knowledge I was arming myself with might make it possible to escape, it was also the same skillset needed for the ongoing development of the Radiation Engine and other more directly-military marvels. 

There was some needle-threading to be done. That I understood even at this stage of my development. Even though they had what my cutie-mark had been on file, I’d deceived them into thinking that my talent was understanding magical weapon theory. Just theory. Not the personal application of said theory. To them, I was the perfectly loyal lost cause. Weak willed, but intelligent.

They didn’t know I was capable of gem enchantment.

I pored over Applied Gemstones and The Big Book of Arcane Sciences, extracting precious knowledge on how to make use of my concealed special talent. I learned the basic theories behind the spell matrix and how gemstones were integral to the manufacture of magical energy weapons and other devices that ran off of stored magical energy. Tender Love and Care for Totally Lost Causes was my bedside companion for months. I made light annotations in the margins of each book, often forgetting to erase them when it came time to return them to the library. I was certainly remonstrated for it, but I still can’t determine whether it was this that got me noticed or my damnably predictable patterns of research.

Either way, about a month later I received a letter from what appeared to be Red Eye himself.

To My Loyal Student Lucky Charm,

It has come to my attention that the books you have been checking-out from the Student Library are of a interestingly old nature. Things related to the arcane sciences, earth pony mechanics and such. As I do with all my students who show an interest in the repair and maintenance of Old World technology, I am organizing a little demonstration of your learned abilities for a month from now. It will consist of a small test of your ability to understand and evaluate various pieces of Pre-War technology. It is imperative that you study hard and make sure to pace yourself for the upcoming evaluation as it would give me great pleasure to see you succeed.

Your Loving Mentor,
Red Eye

… it was typed, of course. 

In retrospect, I know it was an automated response to actions of my kind. I should have remembered that Red Eye had been at this a long time. Long enough to have had quite a few waves of his “Loyal Students” pass through and graduate into his “Army of Unity”.

Unfortunately, that’s not how the brain of a young stallion works. The request was so sudden -- what kind of pony gets a message from Red Eye directly? -- that the wits just flew out of me faster than I could grab them back. Immediately, I checked out as many books as I could get my hooves on. I was determined to learn enough to intentionally succeed with only the bare minimum necessary to be considered ‘still useful’ and, hopefully, return to my futile planning and dreams of escape.

It looked like I was about to become a victim of my own success.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Back when I’d first used the Stealth Buck, I was under the impression that being invisible would be an oddly cold experience. Trotting into the lower levels of what looked like a largely-intact residential high-rise, I flicked my Stealth Buck off. There was still some gratification in knowing I had the right idea. Under the effects of the jury-rigged PipBuck peripheral, the redirection, negation and creation of light produced a small but -- to me, at least -- noticeable sensation. Patterns that reminded me of how the magitech felt to test and to work with.

I smoothed out and redirected my wandering mind. There were other things -- things more pressing than arcanotech musings -- ahead of me.

As I moved about the moderately damaged foyer that made-up the lowest level of the residential building, I noticed several things. Foremost among them were the skeletal pony remains that littered the floor. Morbid reminders of what had taken place two-hundred years ago, preserved by the very balefire which had slain them.

Second was the prominence of the scorch-marks that twisted like fell vines and danced across the walls and floor of the foyer, all leading back to the main entrance. A common symbolic vulnerability for War-era bombing wards due to high traffic. A shame. And yet there was a terrific beauty to the site. All these shapes elemental destruction left in the wake of its unleashing. If I'd been under no time pressure, I'd have studied it for far longer.

Third was the presence of a floor above the first that hadn’t been rendered unreachable by architectural damage. The past ten buildings had precious little in the way of areas to explore and I decided it might be prudent to satisfy my curiosity and explore some of the abandoned residential apartments.

Maybe I might even find something useful.

It took me about ten minutes or so to get up the stairs. Down near the bottom there’d been a wrecked elevator, but despite its potential utility, I hadn’t had time to investigate very thoroughly. When I finally reached the first residential floor, I was awestruck at how intact it was. Sure there was a collapsed wall or two, but the carpeting looked no worse for wear for having had to endure two-hundred years of weather damage.

Softly, putting one hoof in front of the other, I made my way over to the first door. Grasping the doorknob with my telekinesis, I turned it to the right and wound-up wrenching the already loose thing from its socket with a soft squeak.

Okay. Maybe my initial assessment had been a bit presumptuous. Erring on the side of caution, I decided to peer through the small eye-sized hole I’d left in the doorknob mechanism.

Rubble was what stared back.

I sighed a little, the mix of apprehension and disappointment rushing out of me. I was almost hoping that, on my first try, I’d run into something special. Now I supposed not. Moving on to the next door, I tried the doorknob. The knob jiggled back and forth, but wouldn’t budge any further than a centimeter or two. Knowing what I’d have to do, I set my laspistol on the floor close to my left hoof.

This called for a little lockpicking.

Reaching out with my magic, I plucked a bobby-pin from my tail. I’d learned a little bit about picking simple locks by reading books (abridged, of course. Red Eye was encouraging, not stupid.) Apparently, the simpler ones could be picked with just a bobby pin and a light application of pressure. I figured my telekinesis could function as the torsion wrench and apply pressure while the majority of my concentration would be devoted to raking the bobby-pin across the two or three tumblers present in the rather cheap-looking lock.

On the first two attempts I failed, applying too much pressure on the bobby-pin while raking it across the tumblers, breaking it. On my third attempt, however, I was successful. It was a satisfying feeling, knowing that you’ve solved your problem by the work of your own hooves. Center of gravity low, I pushed the door inward and walked into the room as quietly as I could, levitating my laspistol back to my side.

That’s when I heard the growl.

It was a low, crackling thing. Like it was emitting from something that didn’t have the right kind of vocal-chords to pull-off a growl. Unfortunately, that made it much more frightening than if it had been a low, uninterrupted predatory thing. No, this growl was almost like a pony’s imitation of a growl.

I froze. Froze, and hoped very, very deeply that this could be explained by some harmless leftover of the War.

That was when the abomination strode out from around the corner and turned to face me. It was a sickening thing; a mockery of the equine form. It held its head low, forelegs bent, with a spinal curve that wasn’t the natural downwards slope of a healthy, adult pony. No, this thing had it in reverse. It kept its hindlegs tall, forelegs and head down, tail in the air, all wrapped in the rotting tatters of some sort of metallic barding.

Milky white eyes locked straight on me, filth-caked teeth bared and looking ready to poun--

I was standing still. Shit! Why was I still standing here!

I reversed direction at what I was sure was record speed, levitating my laspistol close and galloping down the hallway. The pony-thing was in hot pursuit, its strange three-beat lope-jump carrying it towards me with alarming speed. 

Turning my head for a moment, I fired my laspistol at it, green beams of magical energy flying at its rotting, mangy hide.

As was damnably typical of my luck, not a single one connected.

Turning to run again, I noticed an open door coming up and altered my course so I could dash in and close the door behind me.

Everything went exactly according to plan. I rushed in, closing the door behind me with my telekinesis and locking it. Turning, magilas pistol levitated menacingly, I faced the door. Beyond, I could hear the pacing hooves of the horrendous not-pony on the hallway carpeting.

I breathed a deep sigh of unabashed relief. What was that?

Slowly, my brain emerged from “runrunrunrunrun” mode and settled back into its usual rhythm. I began to think about what I had seen. Equine form, tattered clothing, lack of hygiene; briefly, tidbits from conversations I’d eavesdropped on flitted close, but...

… nope.

I hadn’t a single idea as to what was pacing on the other side of that door and, honestly, that seriously bothered me. In the books I’d read there hadn’t been a single mention of anything even approximating this; not even in Celestia’s Codex Equestria, which was supposed to be the compendium of all pony knowledge. I was fairly sure I would’ve remembered something like that. Yet, somehow, it existed. If it existed, there had to be an explanation. A reason for why it walked the world and did what it did.

I pondered the question for a little while longer, my mental strokes growing broader and broader as the scratches and huffs of the rotted pony’s hooves finally disappeared, tired of its futile door-scratching. Finally, I decided I’d better just make a note of it and return to the issue later on. As it stood, the real problem was escaping my ill-fated expedition into the higher levels of the Fillydelphia ruins.

Apparently it was a jungle up here.

Deciding it was probably safe to turn my back on the door now, I strode out of the entryway and into the apartment proper. It was a rather small thing, space wise, but it had been warmly personalized by its former occupants. Well, I assumed it had been warmly personalized by its former occupants, judging from the erratic fire damage and various silhouettes burned into the walls and ceiling.

As for rooms, this was the only room. The layout was actually quite similar to the barrack rooms I’d seen and lived in for most of my life. Bed near the window, small table in the center, refrigerator, and a small water closet for one’s more personal biological functions.

I felt a little bit of nostalgic dissonance as I walked into the kitchen-area. Sure I’d had some good times in a room like this, but Red Eye cast a long shadow. Recalling those memories stirred bittersweet feelings and always brought the unsettling foundations of the Academy to the forefront of my mind. 

There was a soft schunk as the seal on the refrigerator opened and allowed me access to whatever rotted horrors lay within. Much to my surprise, the thing was filled not with food but with various alcoholic beverages. Applejack, vodka, brandy and even a bottle of summer wine.

I frowned to myself. This had been common among the Students as well.

Alcohol had plenty of use cases for somepony in my situation, but it was heavy, and this was hardly a time for me to be blotting the world out with intoxication. Perhaps for its disinfecting properties, then. If I found something to carry it in.

A little bit disappointed and, understandably, a little hungry, I closed the refrigerator and turned towards the bed near the window. The blankets and pillow (and even a little bit of the mattress itself) looked like they’d been torched away by stray balefire from the window. As I moved closer, I realized where the skeleton of the resident was. There, piled on top of the bed in a charcoal black crater, were the charred remains. A curled arrangement of blackened bones.

"Sorry," I said as I turned away and started rifling through their stuff.

The rather modestly sized dresser hardly looked, at least at first glance, promising. Fortunately, my undying desire for clothing more useful than the rapidly dirtying Pre-War vest I was wearing pushed me to open all three drawers. The first and second yielded no returns. The third, however...

Jackpot.

Inside was a set of military saddlebags adorned with Ministry of Peace colors. The way the jungle green canvas clashed with the curving pink and yellow streaks down the sides and the iconic three pink and yellow butterflies in the middle was... iconoclastic. Silently, I wondered just a little...

I dispelled that swiftly, though, telling myself I didn’t have time to question what Ministry of Peace saddlebags were doing in the top drawer of some random pony’s dresser. Sure, I was the first pony to look a gift-horse in the mouth, but that didn’t mean I had to do it every single time. Marveling at this small token Lady Luck had left as an apology for spurning me all these years, I levitated it up over my head, dropped my ratty old schoolcolt-sized bags, and firmly fastened it to my midsection.

That’ll do, I nodded to myself, satisfied with the snug fit. That’ll do nicely. 

Popping them open, I had a brief peer at their contents.

They were empty. That was fine, though. I supposed that, if there had been anything inside the saddlebags, it probably would’ve gone bad with age. The way I looked at it, I’d been saved some clean-up time. 
Quietly, I transferred the meager contents of my previous saddlebags, canned goods, canteens and bandages all finding their own pouch or section in the bag. Done with it forever, I placed my previous saddlebags in the drawer and shut it. Hardly a fair trade. 

Still, though, I thought. A healing draught would’ve been nice.

… speaking of healing draughts.

I ambled over to the water closet. I knew that they actually had fold-out mirrors (the kind that you could use to get an almost three-hundred and sixty degree view of your head and mane) over the sink that doubled as small reflective medicine cabinets. Opening the door, I was surprised to find a totally smashed toilet. My initial reaction was that of confusion. What reason would anypony have to do that? My secondary reaction was that of caution. The floor was strewn with shards of broken porcelain and pools of rancid Fillydelphia water.

If I had suddenly lost every bit of information I had gleaned by eavesdropping on mercenary conversations from The Wall, I would have remembered this one, small tidbit of information about untreated, unfiltered Fillydelphia water.

Prolonged contact could kill you.

With that in mind, I carefully angled my neck so as to have a clear line of sight to the cabinet and started manipulating it with my telekinesis. It was slow going at first, but, finally, I pulled back on the rusty hinges and opened the damn thing. Inside, I found a rather interesting assortment of items.

Lifting the used syringes, I placed them in the medical-waste pocket of my saddlebags. Taking them was probably safe, seeing as they’d seen two-hundred years of quiet after a balefire tendril had reached in through the nearby window.  As for the other objects...

… well, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of them.

Most of them looked nothing like the universally recognizable healing draught beaker or radiation-purging brew flasks. They were these complex hypodermic delivery systems, all linked together so that the contained chemicals only mixed right as they entered the bloodstream. There was also a tin of Mint-als. That, at least, I recognized.

I read the bottom of the tin, the words spelled out in small, slightly dirtied white letters: 

Improve perception and cognitive processing ability! 
Take two a day and feel your fears melt away!
HEAD MEDICAL ADVISOR’S WARNING:
Do not ingest any more than the recommended daily dose.
Mint-als have exhibited signs of forming physical and psychological dependency.
If symptoms of psychological or physical dependency manifest, 
cease taking Mint-als and see your physician right away.

If there were Mint-als here, then all these other things were probably performance enhancers too. I mentally sifted through the names of the drugs I was familiar with: Mint-als, Buck, Dash, Med-X. The strange hypodermics dredged-up no memories, though. I wracked my brain, finally deciding on the only solution that made sense. These were probably combat drugs.

I now saw the Ministry of Peace saddlebags in a completely new light. My conjecture began by styling the previous owner as a drug smuggler siphoning useful chems away from the war effort for personal use and profit (or at least a pony psychologically and physically dependent on drugs to keep themselves in a semblance of mental stability). The whole thing smacked of lost hope and utter tragedy.

I need to get out of here.

Placing the assortment of what I was now certain were valuable psychoactive chemicals in my saddlebags, I turned towards the door and considered my options.

Option one was, of course, unlock the door and face the creature on the other side. This I might have considered for longer than a brief moment had I any sort of healing potion or magical bandage. As it was, it was a non-option. Facing the nasty thing head-on was to be a last resort, then.

Option two was wait the creature out. If it really couldn’t get in, eventually it would get tired and frustrated simply waiting for me to come out and would move on to better, less intelligent prey. Maybe a radroach or something. This option was, in my eyes, little better than the first. I needed to capitalize on the carnage wracking the world behind The Wall. If I listened closely, I could still hear a faint explosion or two. It most definitely wouldn’t stay that way forever.

Option three was, by my approximation, probably the best of the three options I’d come up with. I was only on the second floor of the building and there was a window I could climb out of. In all likelihood, most of the Talon mercenary patrols that Red Eye usually had combing the area were embroiled in combat with the mysterious intruder -- maybe even intruders, if anyone could possibly be that death-seeking -- whose brazen assault had disrupted the day’s blood games. Even if I couldn’t find a way of mitigating the damage a fall from this height would incur, the damage inflicted would, in all likelihood, be considerably less than lethal. No internal bleeding or broken bones, at least.

I hoped.

Walking over to the window, I took a brief peer out at the ground below and reminded myself that falls often looked much higher than they actually were. Still, the idea of falling from this height still gave me the willies. Mustering my courage, I grabbed the blackened drapes near the edges of the moderately sized window with my teeth, cringing a little at the taste, and tore them down.

Hopefully the fall wouldn’t punish me for my arrogance.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

It was the day of the examination and I was nothing but a stack of nerves on four legs. My own penchant for considering the different scenarios that could arise from a single situation had gone haywire, assaulting me with contingencies ranging from having to disassemble then reassemble a A93 Magical Plasma Caster to having to program a Security Automaton right then and there without the assistance of even a small notecard of programming prompts.

“Mr. Charm, the Board of Pre-War Studies will see you now.”

I did a quick check and recheck of myself in the mirror: Same dark brown mane with that one feisty tuft in the back sticking up; same slightly unkempt light-blue coat; same unassuming brown eyes. I sighed at the number of bags that had accumulated under them.

“I’ll... I’ll be right there.”

The walk over to the examination room was a lot more stressful than it had any right to be. I fretted needlessly, plucking at small fibers in my vestment and other things of superficially small consequence. I knew it was all just a futile expression of stress at an examination that could make or break me in the eyes of the organization, but I couldn’t help myself. I needed to tread the line very, very carefully if I wanted to maintain the level of lax observation that I had enjoyed for so long.

The earth pony mare that I’d been following down the hallway stopped in front of a familiar door. If memory served, this was where some of the advanced lectures on the Arcane Sciences were held. I supposed that there was no more fitting place than a lecture-hall in which to conduct an examination.

“If you would, Mr. Charm,” she intoned, motioning for me to open the door and enter.

I thanked her briefly, but sincerely, for her time and pushed the door open with my telekinesis, walking into the room beyond. 

The lecture hall itself was actually rather small and more than a little bit homely. There were enough desks to seat about twenty or twenty five ponies, and several aged chalkboards, which had been added in after the room had been restored, were positioned behind and to the right and left of the main lecture pedestal and professor’s desk.

Along with a set of implements for the maintenance of various Ministry-standard guns, I noticed there were three magi-beam pistols on the professor’s desk. Considering the nature of the test, I was probably going to be evaluated on my knowledge of some quality of theirs.

“Ah,” I heard a mare from the back of the room say, drawing my attention away from the exam desk. “Mr. Charm. Please, step inside.”

Positioned in the sea of desks, as though they had been talking amongst themselves, was a rather odd interspecies trio. Off to the left was a rather old looking, brick-red, gray-maned earth pony stallion wearing a lab coat with “101”’s emblazoned on its sides. I tried to make it seem as though I wasn’t staring at his bionic forelimb by examining his rather tired looking face. He regarded me rather coldly. To the right was a sleek, stoic looking griffin in Talon combat armor with one white band on each of the pauldrons; a lieutenant. I couldn’t make a proper estimate as to age, but the plumage alone was a strong signal that the pronoun "he" applied. The spellfire pistol tucked into his holster suggested he was resident weapons expert. 

In the center was the earth pony mare who’d spoken to me. She was of average height and build, wearing a crisp and clean-cut Pre-War suit and a pair of reading-spectacles secured against jostling by a pewter chain. Her coat looked to be a type of pale ochre, and her mane was a pomegranate color that had lightly faded with age. 

“Ah, yes,” I assented, moving further into the room. “I’m... er... here for the examination. The Board of Pre-War Studies, I presume?”

“You presume correctly, Mr. Charm,” she assured me. “I am Petunia Bitt, and these are my fellow board-members. To my right is Dr. Craft Rosegold, our Chief Arcanist. To my left, Lieutenant Gallows of the Stern's Talons, our resident Applied Gemstones specialist. We will be the ones to evaluate the progress you have made with your learned and inherent skills while under the tutelage of your teachers.”

There was a brief pause as I waited for her to continue.

“As you may have noticed, there are three civilian-grade magical energy pistols and a set of maintenance tools on the desk to your right. We will be evaluating your ability to restore one or more of these non-functioning weapons to a usable state without the use of reference materials. When I finish speaking, the test will have begun and you will have an hour and a half to use the materials present on the desk to reach your objective.”

“If you have any questions, ask them now.”

The objective was fairly straightforward. I didn’t have any questions that I thought were worth voicing, so I didn’t bother.

“Begin.”

The ninety minutes period that followed was the most harrowing span of time that I’d ever experienced. It was obstacle after obstacle, nerves against ability to stay cool-headed under pressure. All three of the magi-beam pistols were in horrendous condition. Rusted structural pins, brittle energy-transfer tubes and two broken firing mechanisms were some of the horrors I’d encountered. Eventually I’d decided that I could only save one of the three pistols and began completely cannibalizing the other two for spare parts, carefully removing circuit-boards and pliable energy-transfer tubes to restore the one magilas pistol to working condition. It was only in the last twenty minutes that I realized one of the main firing systems in the almost fully-functional magilas pistol was about three shots away from shattering irreparably.

I needed to recalibrate the focusing crystal.

I smacked my right forehoof into the desk in futile anger.

I heard someone put their pencil down.

“Is there a problem, Mr. Charm?” Petunia asked levelly.

“Oh! No,” I responded nervously. “Just thought I’d do a little... percussive maintenance.”

Ah yes. Well done Lucky, you blithering idiot.

“If you felt it necessary,” she replied in the same level tone. “There are fifteen minutes left until the exam is concluded.”

Fifteen minutes. I had to work quickly.

Levitating a screwdriver, I levered the damaged crystal out of the focusing alcove and placed it down near the mound of useless bits I’d torn out of the other two pistols. Using the screwdriver to chip the other focusing crystals out of their rusted alcoves, I inspected them for cracks or internal impurities. One was full of energy, but had cleaved along a fault-line. The other was in perfect condition save for the fact that it was without any magical energy.

I ground my teeth in thought.

While I was more than capable of transferring the energy of one crystal, damaged or not, to another, the effect this would have on the examination board would most-likely be profound. I was now dangerously close to revealing my hidden talent to them. That would most certainly put an end to my dreams of escape.

… but there was no other way. 

I had to chance it.

Levitating the two gems up, I touched them to my horn. Using my horn and inherent magic as a conduit, I transferred the energy from the damaged crystal to the undamaged crystal, filling it with a green internal luminescence.

I placed the exhausted crystal in the junk pile with the improperly calibrated one and levitated the now properly calibrated and charged crystal into the focusing alcove of the restored magi-beam weapon. Levitating the screwdriver back up, I re-affixed the chassis, covering its relatively delicate insides.

My repair job was done.

“That’s time, Mr. Charm,” I heard a deep-timbered stallion, presumably Dr. Hoofson, say. “Now it’s time to evaluate your performance.” “

“If you would, Gallows.”

There was a slight creaking as Lieutenant Gallows stood up from his desk-bench and stretched. I noticed that his footfalls were much softer than those of an equine. Lacking hard keratinous hooves apparently did wonders for the volume of your steps.

Reaching out with my magic to the laspistol, I levitated it to Gallows handle-first. Muzzle discipline and whatnot. Grasping it with his talons, he opened the munitions slot and inspected the contact-points for corrosion damage. Making a satisfied grunt, his tail reached up to a small ammunition pouch located near his left forelimb and plucked a small spark-pack from within. After a brief pause during which he inspected the contact points again, he inserted small spark-battery and took aim at a moderately-sized target that had been set-up for the occasion.

Zwip, zwip, zwip, zwip.

The beams left four glowing holes neatly clustered along the neck base of the pony silhouette that made-up the center of the target.

Transferring the laspistol from his front... talon to his tail, he whipped it around and placed it neatly on the corner of the desk behind me.

“Good job,” Gallows curtly congratulated me in a rather mild-sounding tone.

I felt a little intimidated that Gallows could make such precisely clustered shots with such a poorly repaired weapon.

Turning to face the Board of Pre-War Studies, I awaited their final decision.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Sighing with relief, I watched the charred mattress hit the ground below the window with a cushy fwump.

Good. That’s well within my range.

Now, I would have to aim this just right. The mattress was remarkably well cushioned for something that’d come within a hair’s breadth of being incinerated, but if I hit it at the wrong angle the springs inside could definitely cause me some serious distress. Gauging the angle of my decent and the arc in which I would have to travel to hit the mattress, I figured that I needed to fall rather than jump.

Oh.

My nerves frayed a little at the thought of having to fall onto a mattress from the second story of a building. Deep breaths, Lucky. Deep breaths.

Hop.

Skip.

… and I was out the window and in the air.

“... aaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGUH!”

Thud.

I groaned, my side and limbs aching. Certainly not the most graceful fall I’d ever taken, but the mattress had certainly done it’s job. Reaching my right forehoof up, I checked my Stealth Buck to see if it was still in one piece. Yep. No sprockets jutting from the sides or sparks leaping out.

Standing, I winced slightly. Whiplash hurt, especially when it was from hitting the ground at an odd angle. Reaching out with my telekinesis, I flicked the Stealth Buck on and watched my whole body flicker out of the visible spectrum.

Time to move on.

Trotting out onto the sidewalk, I looked back in the direction of The Wall and almost had my jaw drop off at what was occurring in the skies above the crater. There, floating near the high-rises, was what looked like a giant shield-spell. I squinted, staring up at the... battle, maybe? Attempting to get a better look, I stepped a little further out into the street.

As it turns out, changing your viewing angle can really improve the clarity of far-away details. Now that I was up and no longer bleary-eyed, I could see the faint silhouette of a pony inside the shielding. An equine form that large could mean only one thing.

An alicorn.

Nopony that I’d talked or listened to knew precisely what the alicorns were, aside from “Children of the Goddess”. All that we knew was that they were damn tough, came in several different flavors, weren’t prone to small talk, usually served as Red Eye’s personal escort during public functions, and got fucking huge when exposed to large amounts of radiation. Where they came from, however, was far less of an intractable mystery. Every so often a cart of unicorn slaves would depart from the crater, returning empty. This, Red Eye said, was the price paid to the Goddess of the Unity.

It was a pretty steep price, if you ask me.

As I watched the super-alicorn do battle with what I assumed was the infiltration team (who I wanted to thank quite profusely later), I felt a little bit of dread. Call it a premonition, if you will.

When the giant, glowing shield-bubble crested a second-time over the rooftop of one of the many nondescript Fillydelphia high-rises that dominated the skyline, I felt the faintest itch beneath my right hindhoof.

One-onethousand.

Two-onethousand.

Three-onethousand.

Four-onethousand.

Ding.

There was roiling flash of green and gold inside the shield. It boiled and frothed almost like a living thing before breaking the shield open like a wet paper bag and sending its green tendrils out into the sky, igniting the wispy industrial pollutants that wafted above the crater.

Then came the sound, rolling like a clap of thunder smug in its own ability to scare young foals.

The MEP hit afterwards.

I looked down, feeling oddly drained and...

… visible?

“Oh shit.”

I tapped my Stealth Buck with my left forehoof repeatedly, hoping that, somehow, through sheer force of will, I could make the jury-rigged PipBuck peripheral come back on again. I knew it was futile, though. The words of the Big Book of Arcane Sciences echoed through my head:

“Balefire matrices, as side-effects of their detonation, produced amounts of magical radiation so vast that they affected nearby, unrelated spell matrices (...)” - Chapter 26: Balefire

Apparently, the radiation had been enough to short-out the gem-based spell matrix inside my Stealth Buck. Throwing some numbers around in my head, I reasoned the detonation had been produced by something like... uh. 

Shit.

Who was I kidding? I couldn’t have estimated the number of balefire eggs detonated if I’d had a convenient reference book! It was all the way over there, for crying out loud! Who devotes attention to the section on balefire detonation with that kind of application in mind? Being that close to a balefire egg detonation is basically suicide with extra steps, anyway. The figures made that clear enough.

All that struggle to put together the makeshift PipBuck stand-in allowing me to use this precious arcanotech device wrapped around my wrist, and for what! Honestly, I couldn’t even believe it. Fucking sky-goddesses didn't give with both hooves, I guess. But would it have killed them to overlook me just a little longer? Would it have mattered? Dead old biddies.

"C'mon!" I shook my foreleg, then instantly regretted it. I cradled the StealthBuck with my other hoof.

I didn't even have the right tools to open the motherless thing up. With how balefire, specifically, interacted with third generation matrix tech like the PipBuck and her peripheral attachments, there were numerous points of vulnerability in the etheric channels and runic circuitry. In essence, either the system showed her resilience by shrugging off the adversity, or she suffered cascade failure and needed some gentle but sustained persuasion from a purpose-built key, or a dogged and properly equipped technician. Neither of those things described me or my current toolkit.

In laypony’s terms, I was fucked.

I’d been counting on my Stealth Buck to keep me reasonably well hidden until I reached the outskirts of Fillydelphia. Now those plans were, summarily, in the shitter.

Faintly, in the distance, I could hear the unnatural growling noise similar to that of the aberration I’d faced earlier.

… save multiplied a hundredfold.

I was up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

Opening my saddlebags and removing my laspistol, I mustered my flagging courage. Try as I might, though, I couldn't stop shivering. Everything felt itchy. Felt wrong.

Mistakes. So many mistakes, adding up. Missed opportunities and their costs.

I was only just beginning to fight, wasn't I.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Footnote: 
Trait - “Pariah Pony” 1 Rank: If only it came as easily for you as it did for the others-- learning how to forget what it was like before they took you behind the Wall. Perhaps you could have stayed until the end, then. Decrease combat skills by 5, and increase non-combat skills by 5. Improved dialogue options with other outcast creatures.

Trait - "Old World Understanding" 1 Rank: You were raised in a faction that made an extensive study of the works of the Ministry Mares. Their technological marvels never cease to amaze... and terrify. From the humble Owl Bot to the illustrious Steel Ranger Armor, it's easier for you to understand and subvert Pre-War and War-era technomagical wonders, effectively decreasing their skill difficulty by one step.

Level Up.
New Perk - “Book Bound” 1 Rank Prerequisite: CHA 4, INT 8: Little lights flung into the future. Windows into a world that's all but rubble now. The key must be in there; in the lessons they left us with such care, and the ones they prayed we'd never see. Gain five skill-points from books at the cost of one less skill point per level. This perk is mutually exclusive with “Bookworm”, "Egghead" and “Retention”.
> Chapter Two: Redmane
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------


Chapter Two: Redmane


“It’s the water. It’s the air. When you’re out there, you can’t escape it.”



Apprehension.

When they’d stopped mumbling amongst themselves, Petunia turned and addressed me.

“Mr. Lucky Charm, it is this board’s decision that you be allowed to continue your studies of Pre-War Equestria with the stipulation that you, in parallel, continue your studies of applied gemstone theory.”

I felt a lump form in my throat.

“It is the assessment of the members of this board that you have shown remarkable aptitude in the manipulation of gemstones and gemstone enchantments, a skill necessary for the proper maintenance, repair and, potentially, the manufacture of magical energy weapons.”

Oh.

“As for your examination, you passed with flying colors. Very few of Red Eye’s pupils were able to repair even one of the three laser pistols to our satisfaction.”

Oh no.

“While the majority of those who failed at the primary objective of this examination were still found to be quite useful in the eyes of this board, it was the minority capable of restoring the pistols to a working state that interested us the most.”

So I’d failed, then.

“You, as a member of this minority, shall be granted every courtesy. Access to the restricted texts of the library relevant to your field of study, increased rations and even a larger apartment in your barracks. If you find any of these things to be a hindrance to the furthering of your studies, or you require more privileges, you may file a request with your barracks secretary.”

The whole thing had been one giant trick-question, and I’d answered correctly.

“Well, Mr. Charm? Do you have anything to say?”

Head bowed, I swallowed the lump, smoothing my facial expression from one of despair to one of calm and delight.

“I assure you,” she laughed in an attempt at genuine mirth. “Your statement will be kept off the record.”

“... well,” I began. “For one thing, I must say I’m rather relieved.”

I felt my gut twist at the lie. Relief was the furthest emotion from my current state that I could think of.

“I studied a whole month for this exam,” I continued, forcing a chuckle myself. “I think I ought to just go and sleep for a whole day, now.”

“Yes!” she chuckled, earnestly this time, in response. “I think that’s a marvelous idea! The exam is concluded, Mr. Charm. Go and get some rest.”

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Several back-alleys, more tenements than I cared to count, who knew how many city blocks, and slightly less than twenty laspistol-shots later and I’d made it. Where I’d “made it” to, I didn’t know. Honestly, it didn’t matter much. What I’d seen of Fillydelphia had been homogeneous in both architecture and lethality. On top of that, the old street signs had been corroded beyond recognition by regular rainfall, and I sure as hell wasn’t about to risk my flank to read the little inscriptions on the sidewalk.

I scuttled into what had once been a beauty boutique and had just successfully forced the lock on a metal crate behind the cashier’s desk when the first distinguishable echoes reached me. The background noises of the Fillydelphia ruins were... strange. Lively. The sounds of ponies fighting like carrion birds over what slim pickings were left on Filly’s rotted corpse, the implication being that ponies had died, would die and were dying around me every day. I never saw them, or knew them, but they died all the same; they rotted all the same. Ponies died in the Wasteland every day, and the Ministry of Peace member whose saddlebags I now wore had been only one of many.

Wow.

Forcing my worldview back down to a more manageable size, I cautiously returned to my scavenging, accidentally breaking the lock on the other storage box. The ruins had had returned to their softly-humming silence, but my mind had not returned to its tenuous tranquility. In fact, something new bothered me. I realized I hadn’t given so much as a thought to what I’d do if I ever found myself in a faction crossfire.

That was when I heard it.

From down the street came screams of pain; automatic gunfire; dogs barking. Altogether, a death sentence for someone who was doing what I was trying to do. Unfortunately, even though I could hear the noises, I couldn’t pinpoint where they were coming from nearly as easily. Straining my ears, I swiveled them about in an attempt to get a lock on the origin point of the sounds.

… there.

Somewhere about nine, ten o’ clock, maybe? From the sound of it, the person firing the weapon was only a block or two away. Reasoning further, I guessed that the poor soul firing away was probably on the second or third floor. That would be the ideal place to hold out against a horde of the ravening madponies I’d become ever so familiar with. As silently as I possibly could, I emerged from the beauty boutique, tucking a sheaf of magazines and a Sparkle~Cola into my saddlebag, the one not filled with medical supplies.

I felt a little relieved as I noticed the lonely beauty of the ruins surrounding me. The eternally overcast sky reflecting the crimson of Red Eye’s slave pits. Empty buildings everywhere I looked, populated only by shadows and long-decayed memories. Granted it was morbidly poetic, but I was still filled with a strange sense of gladness I’d seen the poetry in the first place. 

I regarded the rusted personal carriages that littered the roads with a sort of passing fascination at the fact that they’d endured two hundred years of rain, wind and snow. My hoofsteps echoed ever so slightly as I made my way down the sidewalk, ears perpetually peeled for the hollow growl that signalled that I’d been spotted. It wasn’t paranoia when you’d gone through what I’d gone through; it was fully justified fear and suspicion.

Hmm.

Muzzle flashes reflected off of the broken shards of a window on the first floor, followed almost instantaneously with the echo of near-distant gunfire. Pity. I guessed the pursued individual hadn’t chosen -- or hadn’t been allowed to chose -- their battleground with any particular care. Knowing the loud noises produced by the gunfire would have drawn in every pony monstrosity from the surrounding three blocks, I tilted into a full gallop, levitating my laspistol out beside me. Flicking the munitions slot open, I examined the weak glow of the crystals contained within with a touch of disdain.

Great. I scolded myself, grinding my teeth a little. Should’ve checked before I left the boutique.

Well... I was stuck not knowing the precise number of shots I’d fired. It was “know you have around ten shots” or “take the time to check and let this opportunity slip through your hooves like so many others”.  I mused at the self-motivational question; as far as I could remember, I’d only answered it in one way.

My gallop dying down into a canter, I snuck-up against the side of the brick building. This one looked like another apartment complex. As far as I’d observed, all of them had the same basic idea behind their construction: build tenements to accommodate the truly staggering number of unskilled workers that had migrated into the great earth pony manufacturing centers near the end of the war. Ergo, floor after floor of closely packed small apartments. From what I knew of packing large amounts of ponies closely together with relatively poor access to medical infrastructure, I was surprised disease hadn’t wiped everyone out by the time the megaspells hit.

Quietly, I shuffled into the main entrance.

Fillydelphia tenements always seemed to have a wide opening floor for some reason, and there was just something about that sheer intractability that piqued my interest. It’d been on my mind quite a bit since the first foyer I’d experienced. Was there some facet of the climate that necessitated this large holding space? Maybe the hot summers I’d read about; plenty of room to sit, talk, and enjoy a breeze.

Again, muzzle flashes and the moderately familiar sound of minigun fire. This time, the smells and spent casings lead up the stairs.

As I paused a moment to devote a little extra thought to the situation, it didn’t take me long to reason-out that stealth would be of the utmost importance. If the “pony” -- and I assumed “pony” from the wholly intelligible whinnies I’d heard over the gunfire -- was packing the kind of battle-saddle I thought they were, I didn’t want to end-up another nameless apartment-building skeleton. I certainly hadn’t escaped Red Eye’s vise to be killed by some Fillydelphia passer-by’s gun.

Reaching out with my magic, I tested my Stealth Buck tentatively. Flicking it on and off, I sighed inwardly as the matrix failed to respond. Damn. The MEP had been a whole lot more damaging than I’d anticipated. Now I couldn’t be sure whether or not the nigh irreplaceable piece of Pre-War magitech had been irreparably damaged unless I cracked its casing open and mucked around with its insides. 

Yeah. Like I’d be able to take a pit-stop for that.

With only the faint clop of hooves on concrete, I moved up the steps as quietly as I could, watching where I placed my hooves so as not to crush the occasional piece of dislodged drywall or ceiling and thus give-away my position.

This time I could hear the gun quite distinctly as its barrels warmed up and opened fire. While I’d had only a few chances to see The Wall’s defenses in action, the sound was unmistakable. It was eerie as I trotted up those steps. It stirred-up memories. Suddenly, the sound of bullets stopped. All that was left was the spinning of barrels.

“Fuck!”

A growl, then the sounds of a struggle. Grunts. Some crazed, some accented and moderately feminine. I heard the thud of a blunt object hitting flesh and a harsh graah as -- what I assumed was -- the not-pony was struck with something heavy.

“Motherfucker!” I heard the mare holler as she was hit or bitten or something.

“Get off!”

I’d seen what those creatures could do with their teeth. She was in trouble and as she struggled, I weighed the pros and cons of helping her overcome her foe. I stood in that hallway for a short eternity, my brow slowly creasing as a surprisingly potent wave of self-loathing washed over me.

… not again.

I sprung around the corner, laspistol levitated close, and took a mental snapshot of the two parties embroiled in combat. The mare was squaring off against a particularly savage-looking beast-pony with a glowing-green tint to its skin. Unable to reach for a sidearm more well-suited to fighting in close quarters, she’d been fending off its vicious attacks with the long barrels of her minigun battle-saddle.

Judging from the red that stained her milsurp combat barding, it hadn’t been going so well...

… but it wasn’t as though her opponent had gone undamaged. Prominent among his myriad other injuries was a chunk of oozing, glowing green flesh that hung from his left hindleg, looking for all intents and purposes as if it had been torn out by some sort of sharp-toothed animal. A dog, perhaps. Fortunately for me, he was almost completely unarmored, the threadbare remnants of a Pre-War vestment like mine being the only thing even approximating protective clothing that I could see on his body.

Again, the mare smashed her minigun into the glowing pony. Again, the creature was knocked back. Finally convinced of the futility of its current course of action, the abomination switched to circling the armored mare while he decided what to do. I surmised that, on some level, there was intelligence behind the animal instinct I saw at play. How much, I couldn’t say. Whatever was going-on behind his milky-white eyes, the maneuver put him dead in my sights. 

Breathing deeply, I took aim.

Pew, pew, zwip, pew!

The shots had an interesting effect on the combat dynamic.

… and by “interesting” I meant “did a fair job of screwing the pooch”.

Somehow, in this strange backwards world, shooting the thing in its unarmored haunch with a magical energy weapon had only served to piss it off. Now it was angry and less than two meters away from me. At this point, the fact that I’d also drawn the attention of the heavily armed and armored mare was trivial at best, irrelevant at worst.

“Fuck.”

I turned, and I ran like the wind. My mind ran contingencies through my head on how best to avoid becoming mealtime for the glowing, ravenous beast that was almost breathing down my neck. I certainly couldn’t take the stairs down back to the lobby. All he would need was to pounce and, just like that, I’d have to kiss my jugular goodbye. No, I’d have to take a different option.

I ran up the stairs.

Fillies and gentlecolts, another stellar idea from Professor Lucky Charm.

Honestly, it was a fine idea for the short-term. I had at least four more flights of stairs until I reached the roof and the gait of my pursuer wasn’t exactly the most well-suited thing to stair climbing. Curiosity getting the better of me for a moment, I wondered what their lope-jump thing was actually useful for besides being intimidating. Taking a tactical pause, I stopped, took aim, and fired another burst at the thing.

Zwip, zwip, pew, click!

… click?

My blood ran cold.

No amount of profanity in the equine language could have adequately expressed the mixture of fear, anger and despair I was feeling at that precise moment. The one weapon I had even a modicum of experience using had run out of ammo right when I needed it the most. I didn’t have time to reload, and I certainly couldn’t call a time-out.

Nope.

I had about one and a half flights of stairs before I’d have to play the shortest game of hide and go seek in my life involving hiding on an empty, flat roof then dying violently in some terribly demeaning and bloody manner.

… and all of this could’ve been avoided had I simply listened to that little pony inside of me that had said:

“Her problem isn’t your problem.”

Last flight of stairs.

I swore to the dead Goddesses if that mare didn’t show up and give me a proper “thank-you” via the violent remonstration of my pursuer, we were going to have some very harsh words.

Telekinesis; door handle; open.

I saw the sky stretch out for miles in every direction, broken only occasionally by a high-rise or water-tower, as I ran for the edge of the rooftop. Unfortunately, I had no time to appreciate its beauty. No, I was far too busy dealing with the ferocious thing nipping at my tail. Faced with my own mortality and violent death, I felt my resolve peel like an onion, layer after layer cleaving off until all I was left with was the tough root base that was only suitable for consumption if you were desperate.

I was pretty desperate, and that tough root-base was what I clung to for dear life. Silent, and out of places to run, I felt a calm fill me. It wasn’t the kind of “sip tea while you read” sort of calm. It was more like a “battle-calm”. The calm a desperate stallion felt when his violent death came to meet him on an empty rooftop somewhere over Fillydelphia.

I whipped around to face that death.

I turned and faced it despite a stomach full of black despair and a mind overflowing with doubts and fears. I knew I was little more than a squishy student without my laser pistol. I knew that if this thing bit me anywhere I’d probably die of an infection even if, by some miracle, I managed to stem the bleeding. I knew it wouldn’t relent until it was dead and broken on the ground. I knew that, even if I managed to get it on the ground, I might not have the strength to deliver a bone-crushing coup de grâce and finish the thing off.

I knew this.

So much for the plan.

Snarling and slobbering, the glowing reaper leapt from its position and lunged straight at me. Center of gravity low, I tried extending a telekinetic field around it; the magic flickered and died before it even left my horn. Too big; too much external stress; too much magical exertion. The descent happened in slow motion to my eyes, my own actions seeming sluggish as I whinnied, reared up and attempted to bring my hooves crashing down in an ill-conceived defensive measure.

Crack!

With that, he took my legs out from under me, smashing into my left hindleg more powerfully than my right. For a brief moment, I felt the knee strain then- 

Crrrk.

The “Augh!” heaved its way up my throat like bile, fire shooting-up my left hindleg. I was completely staggered by the sheer intensity of the pain; mind reeling, muscles and viscera protesting this utterly unfair treatment. As the body of the husk bore down on me, the tears of pain came unbidden, as did the sobs. For somepony whose experiences with pain in any significant amount had faded with the memories of early foalhood, this was a crash-course in the realities of straining your tissues beyond their breaking-point. Finally surging past my leg, the fire pooled in my gut as I tried to buck the hollow-eyed beast off of me.

It was only after several seconds of agonizingly painful, panicked bucking with my hind legs that I realized the beast hadn’t reacted to a single one of my kicks to its guts or ribs. It lay there, stock still; jaw slack with a little bit of glowing ooze dribbling down its muzzle. As fast as my body would let me, I rolled out from under the glowing corpse, smears of glowing ichor leaving long streaks on my coat. Panting and shaking with exhaustion, I struggled to stand on my wounded left hindleg. The monster didn’t so much as stir. Panic and curiosity mixed to give me one last reserve of strength. Stumbling over to the corpse of the beast, I inspected it for cause of death.

Bullet entry-wound.

Base of the skull.

“Thanks fa' th’ help back there,” I heard a vaguely familiar voice call out to me from the open roof-access door, words enunciated around a trigger guard.

… and there she stood. The mercenary mare was there in the doorway, facing me and the fallen abomination, finally allowing me to get a proper look at her. Beneath the combat barding and battle saddle, I could see her coat was a deep charcoal black. She wore no helmet, instead opting for a green bandanna that, presumably, kept her already short-cropped shock of red mane out of her eyes and ears. She had the rugged soldier-of-fortune look down pat, but there was something about her that softened the normally rock-hard visage that had epitomized all the mercenaries I’d encountered before. 

It certainly wasn’t her posture, however.

She was at least two-hands taller than me, with the stocky build to support it. She was... intimidating, to say the least. I’d probably have been more frightened if fatigue hadn’t been overriding just about everything else. Toting a heavy battle saddle and decked out in combat barding, she struck me as a hardened Wasteland warrior save for one thing that I couldn’t quite place my hoof on.

My squinted eyes followed her, hoping to gain that last insight, as the strength in my legs drained out, leaving them achy.

She’d just holstered some sort of revolver, presumably the source of the Crack! that had ended the creature’s life, and was now moving in my direction. Looking between her and the fallen glow-beast, I felt another pulse of exhaustion combine with the beginnings of a headache to assault me.

“Name’s Redmane. Pleased ta’ meetcha’.”

Looking at her, I almost managed a pleasant smile.

Instead, my forelegs gave-out from under me.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

When I finally jolted back into the world of the living, I found myself on my side, left hindleg neatly splinted, elevated, bandaged and aching considerably less than it had when I’d last been conscious. From my prone position, I could see that Redmane (or at least Red-something) had been watching me the whole time while simultaneously tending to her own wounds. She’d probably known I was awake before I had.

… or not.

Taking a moment to think, I realized her facing my general direction was probably more of a precautionary measure against me being a total psychopath than a real attempt at surveillance. She was busy with her own problems. Problems that involved blood and measures against infection from the festering bites and scratches of the non-ponies. I was only being monitored in passing.

So I lay there.

I breathed the dirty, industrial Fillydelphia air, feeling my left hindleg ache in pulses. My heartbeats. My heartbeats were causing me pain, and those painful heartbeats drove home that I was still alive. In that brief moment, the filthy air became perfume; the deadly water, sweet cold cider. I was alive.

Life was sweet.

“So. Where’re ya’ from?”

I spent a moment longer staring off into space before Redmane’s heavily accented words finally registered. Snapping back from my journey to the center of the mind, I turned to face her.

“Huh?” I began, my vapid stare quickly solidifying into something more cogent. “Oh! I’m... er, I’m sorry. I was... uh. Yeah.”

Redmane lifted her head up to regard me, a little peeved.

“Where’d ya’ come from?”

For a brief moment, I debated telling the truth, lying and playing dumb. The truth was potentially dangerous; if I told her that I was an escapee and she tried to bring me in, I’d be in far more trouble than I’d be able to handle. Lying was almost out of the question; while I had a general sense of geography and location from the time before the war, I had no ideas what settlements had sprung-up in the two-hundred years since.

Playing dumb, however? 

“I... uh... I don’t really know. Just kind-of wandered through here and-- well, here we are.”

Hmm. Bad lie?

“So ya’ mean ta’ tell me you, an unarmored and poorly-equipped young stallion, just happened ta’ wander into Central Filly -- past all th’ mercenary patrols, Steel Rangers, raider scum, husks, an’ Goddesses know what else -- fa’ no reason?”

Eeeeeeeurgh...

“Yeah. I’m thinkin’ of a word that starts with an ‘H-’ and ends with ‘-orseapples’.”

I tried to cover my flank with a sheepish grin.

“Now, what ya’ did back there, that was nice. Most ponies out here, they woulda' left me ta’ die. That put me in ya’ debt. Then, after that, I ran up th’ stairs an’ I saved ya’ sorry flank. That makes us even. Then I go one over an’ I splint ya’ hindleg with healing bandages. You do th’ math.”

I could see what she was saying, though I found her “math” metaphor a little grating.

“Now, that’s not ta’ say I don‘t like ya’ and appreciate what you did; nopony had a gun to ya’ head tellin’ ya’ ta’ save me, but if we’re ta’ take this little workin’ relationship any further, I’m gonna’ need answers. Lots of ‘em.”

A little bit threateningly, she trotted up to me.

“... and no lies this time.”

I fretted a little, then, only catching myself enough to supplant hyperventilation with deep, noticeable breaths. She took notice of my apprehension and -- well -- decided to take a different tack.  

“If we’re gonna’ make it outta’ here alive, we’re gonna’ need at least some trust between us, buck.”

“Trust. That’s what you want?”

“Yeah,” she said before explaining her rationale. “It’s a lot easier ta’ survive when ya’ aren’t worried about ya’ companion stabbin’ ya’ in the back or runnin’ off. Believe me. I’ve had my share uh trash teammates.”

Clearly she’d already drawn some conclusions and made some assumptions about my origins. From what she’d just said, I feared she was correct.

… at least partially.

I chose my next words carefully.

“Redmane, right?”

She nodded.

Right. Bullet dodged there.

Getting to my hooves, I rose to my full height. Scrounging-up as many powerful emotions as I could, I lamented that our heights didn’t quite stack-up, even as she fell into a controlled slouch that said loads about the way she regarded me. I gathered my defiance, trying to instill my next words with the same feelings my memories of service to Red Eye filled me with. I couldn’t be verbose. I couldn’t be too loud.

Brevity. Level tone.

“Lucky. My name’s Lucky,” I opened, grimacing only slightly. Perhaps being candid would help my position. “And… please leave me to die out here, miss.”

“Buck.” She grimaced back, clearly looking on me as quite pitiable now. “C'mon. Ya’ got guest’s rights fa’ now. Stand up fa’ ya’self a little, at least?”

She pointed her right hoof at my splinted and bandaged leg. “Ya’ welcome, by th’ way. It’s not like I have medical supplies ta’ spare uh anythin’.”

I looked back at the bandages wrapped around my joint with the full knowledge that they were precious enchanted medical supplies. Redmane had seen fit to, more or less, restore my ability to fend for myself...

“Think uh it as, ehhh...” she continued. “My good graces lettin’ themselves be known. Don’t waste ‘em.”

With a neat little swish of her tail, Redmane made an about-face and walked back over to her detached battle saddle to perform some maintenance and, presumably, rest.

Quietly, I resumed my lying-down position and submerged myself in my thoughts. I wasn’t quite sure how to make it clear to Redmane that she was thinking of me as more obsequious than I actually was. Embarrassing. But, dying was more embarrassing by far, I supposed.

This was a partnership of convenience and -- I continued in the interest of not kidding myself -- necessity. While I was done being anypony’s slave, the shackles of necessity could be just as strong as those of iron. I had no illusions of competence; couldn’t afford them. This was my first foray outside the protection of The Wall and I needed a guide capable of increasing my chances of surviving Central Filly.
 
I was learning how to fend for myself, I just wasn’t doing it fast enough. That, or I was forgetting something important. Fundamental.

Damn.

Redmane struck me as too pragmatic a mare to take-on dead weight; that was something I knew I was frighteningly close to being. So, even with her mention of “guest’s rights”, there was something about me that had made her go through the trouble. Maybe it had been my choice of armament-- rare and deadly (when in good condition, anyway, but chances were she couldn’t exactly tell). Maybe it was that I was a unicorn; it could be quite beneficial to have a telekinetic around. I also couldn’t entirely discount the notion that she felt sentimental because I’d helped her out of a real tough scrape, either. 

Or perhaps it was simply that she needed a moderately tasty looking distraction with a convincing scream.

I really hoped it wasn't that last one.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~
 
A half-hour later and I was still trying to puzzle out her motives. The question of what Redmane wanted me to stick around for was a baffling one. I’d made more progress at frustrating myself with my incomplete understanding of the fundamentals of Wasteland veterancy than I had at actually discerning Redmane’s true intent. I’d just about given up for the moment when she addressed me directly.

“Alright. Break’s over. Swellin’ an’ cartilage should be okay now, so it’s time ta’ get a move on.”

Move on? I’d been under the impression that we were going to wait-out the Fillydelphia night (which, I assumed, was at least twenty-percent deadlier than the Fillydelphia day) in the room she’d brought me to. 

“Wait. Aren’t we going to wait out the night here?”

“An' sleep on th’ filthy floor? Pass," Redmane scoffed. "There ain’t even a lock... or, fa’ that matter, a door. Hah!”

She was looking at me with a sort of insincere, condescending skepticism after quickly debasing the underlying assumptions which had made me think the location we’d rested in was safe during the night. Seemed she was having a little joke at my expense. Lovely. The levity in her voice left soon enough, though.

“No. It ain’t safe ta’ stay here,” she said levelly, looking me in the face. “We need ta’ get ta’ one uh my safehouses before dusk or we risk becomin’ midnight snacks fa’ whateva’ lunar damned nasties hunt Filly at night. Now! Use some uh that fancy unicorn magic an’ undo ya’ bandages so we can get movin’.”

I obliged, casting my gaze back and undoing the knots affixing the splint to me quite deftly. Letting the splint fall, I levitated the used bandages into my pack while simultaneously stretching my hindleg out. The bandages had done their job, and while I still felt a little twinge of pain every time I put weight on it, I was able to move about the room at a good clip.

“Heh. Lookin’ good, Lucky.” She smirked. I was hardly in any mood to return the sentiment. “Time fa’ a field test. Follow me.”

… and like that, we were off.

Redmane knew the area like the back of her hoof, leading me through sorts of back alleys and short-cuts. Her sense of direction and ability to identify landmarks was impressive, and now that I think about it, her guiding of me through Filly probably saved me weeks of directionless wandering. Honestly, I was much, much safer with her than I’d ever been on my own.

The price of protection, however, was steep. While I felt relatively safe from Filly’s lurking horrors, I also felt like I was under threat from my protector. From the way she’d handled my rescue and the way she used her splinting of my leg as leverage, I could feel her favored “strong hoof” approach pushing me along. It was a real quandary: stay and live, or go and die in any myriad number of unpleasant ways?

If I was being honest, the answer was self-evident. Her personality still rubbed me the wrong way, though.

I was in the midst of brainstorming how to make my laser pistol both direct interface and spark battery compatible when Redmane suddenly stopped me with one of her hindhooves. After a moment of tense silence, she motioned for me to walk-up to her shoulder and inspect whatever it was that she’d stopped moving for. As silently as I could manage, I moved parallel to her and took a peek at the thing at her feet. What I saw was a pile of manure. Deadpan, I turned my head to face her. 

“Manure?” I whispered harshly with a deadpan glare.

She motioned for me to be quiet. Husks, she mouthed.

Oh. I mouthed back, face going slack in surprise. Where?

In response, she began sniffing the air.

While I certainly hadn’t been observing Redmane’s every move with full arcanistic rigor, I knew we’d been travelling for about an hour and that the grimy back alley we’d found ourselves stopped in was somewhere east of our initial position. The monotonous cityscape had remained as tall and imposing as ever, so I felt it was fairly safe to assume we hadn’t moved very far from downtown Filly. Dusk was rapidly falling over the city, shadows growing long as the sun set, paltry beams fading to black, all of it transpiring from behind the perpetual cloud-cover. I stared up into the festering red of the clouds above and looked for the poetry that night usually entailed. All I found was apprehension.

… this hold-up was costing us precious time.

“I smell it,” Redmane whispered as she lowered her head down to my level.

I raised my eyebrow inquisitively.

“They’re nestin’ here for th’ night,” she explained. “Right in our fuckin’ path.”

Shit.

Literally.

I understood the dilemma. The sun was already beginning to set, and yet we were still who knew how many hours away from the safehouse Redmane had been heading for. Suddenly, like some sort of bad novel, an obstacle crops up in our path and we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. A real “damned if we do, damned if we don’t” sort of situation. Knowing I’d dread the answer, I asked the necessary question of Redmane.

“So. What do we do?”

Silently, I turned responsibility for my life over to her and watched the command decision wilt her boughs a little. She wanted trust? There. Trust enough. Besides, there were only two viable options: Try to sneak past the husks or double back and try another route. Only one of those would get us to the safehouse in time to lock the door on all the horrors just awakening from their slumber.

Ugh.

“I really don’t wanna’ do this, but I think we’re gonna’ have ta’ sneak past ‘em.”

“Fantastic,” I exhaled, exasperatedly kicking at the ground with my right forehoof.

Looking over at her, I cleared my throat softly. “I don’t suppose you have a Stealth Buck on hoof, by any chance?”

She didn’t answer.

I sighed and forged ahead, making sure to keep an eye out for any husk-pies in my path.

I supposed it was just as well, seeing as I quickly lost myself in sizing-up nearby buildings for their potential to house a husk nest. Redmane was right, though. The distinct whiff of fresh manure, along with several other more metallic and smoky scents, floated on the air. If I just kept quiet and followed my nose, I was reasonably sure I’d be able to figure-out where the husks were bedding down for the night.

Reasonably sure.

Walking out onto the street, I realized how incredibly devastated the buildings of central Filly were. Judging from the skeletal wrecks that stood silently in front and behind me, this had been one of the districts with buildings that hadn’t gotten around to being retrofitted with the magical and mundane reinforcement combo that had made the wealthy high-rises near the epicenter of the blast able to weather a megaspell and two-hundred years of decay and still remain livable.

Somewhere in this mess of rubble and partially collapsed multi-storied buildings was a nest of mindless killing machines simply waiting for us to trip-up and alert them to our presence... and you’d have to be mindless to even consider bedding-down in one of these for the night. Turning my eyes skyward, I stared high into the hanging rubble about four storeys above the ground. Barely illuminated in the rapidly dimming twilight, I saw what I interpreted to be rustling brown-black forms move ever so slightly in the deepening shadows of the large, ruined cement structures. My eyes must’ve thought I was in the mood for humor or something.

I moved on, increasing my pace while watching the ground to make sure I didn’t cause too much of a racket; alerting the husks to our presence by knocking little chunks of concrete around or crunching two hundred year old carriage-glass underhoof was the last thing I wanted to do. It was these little bits of attention to detail that had saved my hide when I’d snuck towards The Wall; to forget them was to impale myself on easily avoided mistakes. Anxiously, I looked over my shoulder for Redmane. Quiet as a mouse, even in all that armor, she kept a respectable distance from me and was more concerned with keeping herself from disturbing any noisy detritus than she was with monitoring my progress or sniffing for husks.

It took us a few minutes, but we made it across the street with little more than the occasional crunch of aged concrete gravel beneath our hooves. I was taken aback at how impressively wide the disparity between the structural integrity of the buildings on this side of the street and the ones of the side we’d just left were; these were piles of rubble, not buildings. Still, traversing them was necessary and I quickly discovered that climbing mounds of rubble quietly enough to escape notice was by no means an easy feat.

We tried anyway.

Like she had with everything else we’d encountered together, Redmane seemed to know a better way past this obstacle. Calmly, she plodded up the hill of wrecked building material as I followed closely behind, she finding her footing with practiced ease and me trying not to start a rock slide or make more noise than a dropped Sparkle~Cola bottle.

In the almost-darkness, the debris that constituted the small to medium sized mounds we were now puzzling our way through began to cast long, creepy shadows. I watched our flanks intently out of both fear and caution, peering over my shoulders and swivelling my ears about. I could tell Redmane was on edge too. Her ears flicked back and forth, seeking any noise that wasn’t our own. The smell was getting worse.

Casting the occasional furtive glance up at the towering skeletons of buildings, I marveled internally at how suddenly the terrain had changed. One cross of the street and Filly had transformed from a ghost-town into a ruinous rubble. I supposed the ages had acted on every part of the ruins in a different--

Trk, tirk, tik, tik.

… what was that?

I stopped flat. Redmane followed suit less than a second later. For a moment, we stood there in silence. Night was almost upon us in earnest, and the two of us were nervously eyeing every shadowed nook and cranny as though a monster was about to burst out of it and take our heads off. We were two travellers in Fillydelphia at night without backup or nearby shelter; we had every right to be afraid. I heard the sound again, this time softer.

Trk, trk, trk.

The chunk of concrete fell close to my hooves, landing with a loud Trk! before crashing to to rest against a half-exposed garbage can. Looking up at where I assumed the rock had come from, the irregular shapes of the ridge, the waning light of day and the encroaching shadows of night conspired to make it difficult for me to figure out if there was anything above us. Instead, I kept my eyes peeled for pony-like shapes and movement.

As I peered up at the ridge, a light wind picked up, throwing ridge dust in my face and the overpowering scent of manure into my nostrils. I closed my watering and irritated eyes, blinking furiously as I tried to purge them of both physical irritants and rancid fumes. Seeing Redmane tuck her head down and bring it back defensively, I assumed she was attempting the same. We stood there, silently vigilant, as the wind finally died down. The dust stopped, but the smell lingered, heavy in the air.

We’re right on top of them, aren’t we?

Any way we turned, we were likely to find their nest or at least disturb their slumber. Anything louder than a whisper would probably get us chewed into a slurry of pony mincemeat. I felt the deep coldness in the pit of my stomach that was fear, but I pushed against it with all of my strength. The world was the path ahead of me. The world was escape. I could think of no worse place for us to freeze-up.

“We have ta’ keep movin’!” Redmane whispered harshly back to me, perhaps sensing my hesitation, encouraging me to soldier onwards as she began her cautious forging of a safe path past the nest. “We’re dead otha’wise.”

… but how could we move past it when we didn’t even know where it was?

Judging from the way the scent of manure only became seriously apparent when there was wind to stir it from the depths of wherever it was, the nest was probably somewhere inside one of the partially-destroyed buildings. Eyeing the four concrete skeletons closest to us, I made a couple guesses as to which one was hiding the husks. The weakening light diffused by the cloud cover, the ruined structures, imposing even when it had been brighter, were even more disconcerting as silhouettes. Narrowing it down, I put my bits on the pair of collapsed apartment and office buildings to my right. Seeing as their exposed structural supports were the least degraded from the two hundred years of weathering, it was a fair assumption that their foundations and, thus, their basements were the least damaged and, therefore, the most habitable, if a bit dank.

I was pretty sure husks were okay with dank.

As quietly as possible, I voiced my concerns to Redmane. She nodded in agreement, but, aside from that, did not respond. I got the message: “Keep noise to a minimum.” As to the issue of escaping the nest, we were making fair progress for a pair of ponies heavily concerned with walking quietly on loose rubble. Hoofstep by hoofstep, Redmane was leading us out of the den. From a pragmatic standpoint, then, my “trust” was certainly not misplaced. She was doing the job that kept both of our hides from being flayed. Now all we had to do was make sure neither of us screwed up.

Yeah. Right.

All it took was just the slightest touch of inattentiveness. A furtive glance over one’s shoulder. A rechecking of the ammo-belt loaded into one’s battle saddle. Anxiety over having forgotten to reload one’s laser pistol...

… kicking a Sparkle~Cola bottle that just happened to be in your path.

It started with a growl.

Both our heads flicked to the right, searching the almost darkness with eyes not yet adjusted to the freshly fallen night. The sound was like it was before; not quite right. It was echoing, and that mitigated some of the perverseness of it... but the memories stirred, and that was enough to make the cold pit that had been stewing in my gut jump straight into my throat.

“... to the right!” I squeaked at Redmane, throat constricted, before I forced my rationality before my fright. “One o’ clock.”

“I see ‘im.”

I reached my magic out for the laser pistol in my saddleba-- it was out of ammo. I’d have sworn more colorfully if I hadn’t been so preoccupied with backing up behind Redmane and weaving my gemstone enchantment spell. I fell into the rote of spellcasting, blanketing and hopefully smothering the churning sea of fear with hundreds upon hundreds of hours of practice. 

Breathe in.

Crack! Crack!

I flinched at the sound, but managed to keep it all together. 

Breathe out.

“Fuckin’ A! There’s like ten of ‘em!” Redmane shouted as, I surmised, more husks emerged from or near the mound she’d opened fire at. On account of me having forcefully shut my eyes closed to concentrate, I couldn’t tell whether or not she’d killed the first husk. Her tone, however, told me everything I needed to know about our progress in general and from the sound of it, things as a whole weren’t going well.

“What th' hell are ya’ doin’, Lucky? I need some backup here!”

Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack!

Chk. Tink, tink, trnk, tink, tink, chink. Shk. Chk.

Find the vertices and will your energy into them.

The roar of her minigun warming-up joined the growing roar of the husks, the cacophony fraying the edges of my concentration. How close were they? How close was I? How close was Redmane?

“Ya’ betta’ be cookin’ up some lightnin’ up in that lightshow back there or I’m gonna’ be pissed!” Redmane yelled at me as I stood there, easiest target in the world. Quite quickly, panic built beneath the blanket of concentration that I’d quelled my fear with. It stoked my efforts, adding passion and urgency to my already strained psyche. I couldn’t cast any faster, dammit!

I felt the dam strain, threatening to break and overwhelm the fragile thought-will-magic-matrix with the very real fear of being eaten ali-

Don’t think about it. 
Don’tthinkaboutit.
don’tthinkaboutit 

I forced myself to will my overglow into the storage crystals in my laser pistol, listening to the comfortingly regular hum of Redmane’s battle saddle. Whirrrrrrrrrrrr -- Almost there. I was mere moments from fully charging my gems.

Then she opened fire.

It was like being punched in the muzzle, having a needle stabbed into your eardrum and walking into a brightly lit room from a dark hallway all rolled into one. Of course the spell imploded, half of the energy I’d been about to will into the laser pistol lost in the sudden destruction of my concentration. The single layer of overglow receded at the speed of thought, signifying that I was no longer attempting to cast an intensive alteration spell. 

I’d only managed half charge. 

I didn’t waste time trying to check; it was a gut feeling. I only had around fifteen shots before the crystals went dry again. Thankfully, my levitation hadn’t failed me; at least I could rely on my oldest cantrip. I could sense my magic manipulating it in the air next to my head.  All of these things were split-second inferences; they’d become second nature as I’d aged and practiced my hidden talent. Now, I figured, it was time to face the music head-on, eyes forward.

I forced my eyes open.

For a brief moment, the world froze, illuminated by one of Redmane’s muzzle flashes. A quartet of vicious looking husks were bounding towards us, hollow milky-white eyes and gaping, slobbering muzzles reflecting a little bit of the raw light that was being emitted from Redmane’s battle saddle. I knew more were soon to follow. Hopefully Redmane had enough ammunition to deal with all of the ones that chose to follow after us when we started running.

I didn’t think I’d be able to pull-off that half-charge thing again. If it’d been that harrowing just trying it when the husks were waking-up, I didn’t even want to imagine what it was like when they were in active pursuit. Backpedaling, I tried to make my shots count. Redmane was beside me, matching pace, as her long minigun barrels peppered the scene with hot death.

Beside her, my laser pistol discharge was barely a whisper...

… yet, she seemed to be holding back.

Redmane fired her weapon only sporadically as she backed up, retreating and shouting for me to follow. The sound and fury of her fully-automatic weapon stayed the teeming horde with its flashes and ear-splitting noises, mercifully keeping us from being overrun. However, what worked to our advantage simultaneously subverted us; the same deterrents the saddle produced also served to attract more husks from every direction on the ground and, as I quickly learned, in the air.

Can they use magic, too? I mused in frustration as I fired one of my precious blasts at a winged husk that had decided to harass Redmane from above. It proved to be a better shot than I’d anticipated, burning a clean hole in the rotting, winged equine’s neck. Reacting from what I assumed was pure flight-response instinct, it used its last gasp of energy to soar out of sight, trailing an off-colored ichorous substance from its partially cauterized neck wound.

If this kept up, we’d have more than just one nest on us.

“Lucky!” I heard Redmane holler at me as I reflexively turned my head to face her. “We’re runni-- shit!”

She was looking in my direction -- almost directly at me -- when she pulled her revolver from its holster. I was barely able to turn my head fast enough to catch a glimpse of the thing swooping down out of the sky before its impact threw me to the ground.

“Lucky!”

Crack!

It was too late, though. I was out.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It was bright.

It was bright and it was in my eyes.

I was a foal in a safe bed, so I woke-up like a foal in a safe bed, languidly stretching in the pile of clean hay that was my bedding. I took my time before cracking my right eye open and catching a glaring eyeful of the sunlight pouring through the small crack in my boarded-up window.

Moments like these felt special to me for some reason.

I’d lie in my bedding and just let the sun stream in...

… for however long that lasted.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“Fuckin’ a’, Lucky!” the voice softly shouted, words intruding on the edges of my aching consciousness. “Get up! Get up!”

Then I remembered where I was.

On my hooves with a grunt, I winced as a sharp, momentary pain lanced up my left hindleg, simultaneously scrambling for my laser pistol with wide eyes and wild telekinetic grasping. I didn’t scream like I had before; it wasn’t nearly as intense, but it was still hard enough to burn and smolder behind my left eyebrow. I faltered, but I needed to ignore it and push on. I sliced the pain into easily managed chunks, compartmentalizing it until each piece was small enough to deal with on its own. That was how I normally dealt with pain.

New situation, old technique.

“Where are they?” I asked her in a serious and pained whisper. It occurred to me briefly that I’d lost some time along the way, and perhaps with it a bit of memory. The word “concussion” floated around in my head for a bit, but I wasn’t willing to jump to conclusions so quickly. Self-diagnosis was a tricky thing, and I wasn’t exactly flush on examples of what a concussion looked or felt like. 

“Shush, dummy!” she interjected, unknowingly drawing a moment of my ire for the precious thought she’d interrupted. “Pay attention. Watch fa’ th’ glowin’ ones. Or worse, the unicorns.”

I mumbled expletives as the smoldering ache grew in intensity, the jolts of pain from my hindleg becoming less and less noticeable in comparison. This headache was killing me and my attempts at coherent thought. Time and distance were hazy passings, lost to the ache and ring of the concussion. Yeah, I was pretty sure that I had one now, but it was a little late for a “eureka” moment. If keeping steady while following at Redmane’s heels had become a chore, I didn’t want to bother with pointless internal gloating. 

We went on like that for a long time... or a short while. I couldn’t quite tell while I was in the moment, but of my observations that made it past the haze that had fallen over my senses, they seemed to support the latter explanation. However long it took us, an hour or a minute, the mounds of refuse and concrete stood eerie vigil over my little delirious trot, cast in blood-red outlines and bleak shadows.

Funny how the words come when you’re uncertain.

“Hey Lucky,” she said, suddenly stopping. “Through here; stick ta’ this side. Don’t stray.”

It was dark, and I couldn’t help but be a little bit scared, but I went anyway. The building had fallen sometime ago, I imagined. Perhaps when the megaspells had fallen, or some short time after that. Even to my bleary eyes, I could tell the building and its sideways hallways and offices had had a long, long time for rot to claim them.

“Damn,” I heard Redmane say, looking back at me. “You don’t look so good.”

I tried to respond with an “I don’t feel so good”, but lost it somewhere between the smell of mildew and the sound of water trickling from who-knew-where, driven by some lunar-damned water-talisman deep in the sideways bowels of this hellhole Redmane had decided was of some use as a short-cut or resting place... or both.

“Here,” she said, proffering what looked like a blurry line in her mouth and what I assumed was a syringe of something to keep me going. “Some X. Should clear ya’ head right up.”

I levitated it -- with some difficulty -- from her mouth and into my own, tasting metal and a touch of her sour spittle, as I struggled to recall a map of veins and vessels suitably large enough for injection while simultaneously figuring-out how much of that mental-map was just a concussion-induced mirage. Briefly, I wondered what I was getting myself into with this syringe-in-my-mouth pounding-headache ordeal, struggling to discern the wisdom of me trying to clear it up or at least dull it down with some two-hundred year old painkillers.

Then I stuck myself in the shoulder and pressed the liquid into my veins.

It took a few minutes, but the bleariness and ringing faded, and with them went the aches and pains. Slowly but surely, I felt as though all the fatigue of the past day had been suddenly lifted from my frail body, leaving me at my peak and returning my breath to me. I knew that it was all a sham, though. That my aches and pains were simply secreted away in spare cupboards and under beds, waiting for me to forget about them before they jostled their way out and leapt at my throat.

Didn’t stop it from feeling good.

Ah...

Still as the grave, I rode the rising high like a hot air balloon rides an updraft, up and up and up and-- quietly, I forced myself down to the world below. The world resolved itself into audible sound and coherent form, the faintest touch of light where the crimson of Red Eye’s Fillydelphia poured into the building through time’s myriad ravages. Little bright red wisps, trickling like blood through bed-slats, spreading out for my eyes to drin--

… that’s enough of that.

Gingerly, I removed the syringe and placed it in one of my saddlebags. Redmane seemed as though she were a thousand miles away, not so much as batting an eye at my conspicuous yet absentminded hoarding. I stood, and eventually sat there in darkness for some length of time, waiting for the drug to return my sense of time and distance to me, if slightly distorted and only for a short while. It probably took a  minute or two.

“Feelin’ better?” Redmane asked me, having both returned from her mental journey and discerned via some mysterious means that I was feeling much more mentally coherent. Maybe she’d noticed that I was finally focusing on the now clean lines of her tall, bulky silhouette.

“Much. Um, what happened, exactly?”

“Pegasi husk ya’ hit in th’ neck came flying’ back with a vengeance. Knocked ya’ inta’ th’ ground, an’ from there, inta’ dreamland.”

“How long?”

“Couldn’t uh been more than a few seconds. Ten, give uh take five uh so.”

“How come I’m not husk-food, then?”

“I chased 'em off." She shrugged. "Soon as that pegasi got ya’ an' started callin' over the others, it was a pretty clean shot fa' me.”

She motioned towards a corroborating stain of ichor. I rubbed my eyes, suddenly feeling... quite tired.

I took a little bit longer than I needed, piecing together the scraps of memory and errant behavioral clues fluttering around my fuzzball of a brain, before I finally re-initiated conversation.

“Where are we, Redmane?”

“I don’t know what they called ‘em before th’ war, an’ frankly, I don’t care,” she said, something in her voice making me think she’d had to recount this to someone before. “They’re ruins, Lucky. Just a place ta’ hide.”

“... and what makes you think there aren’t husks waiting around the next corner to engage us while we’re severely disadvantaged?”

“‘Cause I booby-trapped th’ path I plotted through this place a little less than a week back. Th’ only husks we’ll be runnin’ into are dead ones.”

“... oh.”

“Yeah. I’ll be goin’ first, then. Stay close.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Initially, we moved at a painfully slow pace.

Redmane said was fairly sure she remembered where she’d placed her mines and swinging rebar tripwires, but she was taking it slow just to be sure; I didn’t blame her. The strange, diffuse redness of what light trickled down into the crooked corridors we walked played tricks on my eyes, making me guess at which things were shadows and which were silhouettes. If she wanted to take it slow for a bit while she guessed where she’d laid all her deathtraps, that was perfectly fine with me. I was a bit too preoccupied with my not-quite-disappeared headache to be of much use anyway.

As we picked-up speed, I realized that I hadn’t bothered to properly reload my laser pistol. I groaned inwardly a little, ruining the night-vision I’d allowed to develop with the faint glow of my horn as I used it to call the pistol out of my saddlebags. Allowing myself to fall a little bit behind Redmane, so as not to ruin her ability to keep us both out of harm’s way down in these dim corridors, I focused on the storage crystals I’d more fully integrated into the sidearm. When I’d gotten my hooves on it, it had become more than just the mass produced tool it had been before. Now it was mine.

Though I did need to focus on the enchantment, being outside of an immediate combat situation allowed me to divert at least some attention away from the mostly-intuitive magic that I was now weaving. At least I could walk and keep my eyes open this time.

As the glow on my head increased in intensity, so too did my casting require more intense concentration. While my senses were okay on the surface, there was something about the combination of Med-X and light brain-damage that was throwing quite the wrench into my spellcasting. Eventually, though, the weave was right and energy flowed from my horn into the gemstones. In the time it had taken me, though, I’d fallen behind more than I’d anticipated.

All this time, Redmane had been forging a path forward slightly faster than I’d been moving to catch-up with her. We’d both become a little self-absorbed in our downtime preparations, and for that I couldn’t fault either of us. After all, it wouldn’t do for her to do a sub-par job navigating her trap web or me to let my laser pistol sit in my saddlebag at slightly less than half-charge. I only wish I’d learned that inattentiveness breeds trouble the first time around.

When I finally noticed how great the difference between us was, I did something stupid. It’d have been almost unforgivably stupid if we hadn’t both made it out of the building in one piece... but we did, so there was that. When I saw how far Redmane had gotten ahead of me -- two to two and a half meters -- I ran to catch-up to her.

Big mistake.

Redmane had given-up on constantly setting and resetting her traps about ten minutes back, figuring she’d probably need to save her strength for when we finally emerged from the building. Instead of actually clearing the way, she’d begun muttering where the traps were located and how to avoid them at a volume that would’ve been intelligibly audible had I been standing where I should’ve been. Under normal circumstances, I suppose, she would’ve noticed my rather conspicuous absence. Instead, it looked like she’d become preoccupied with something; presumably the something that’d been bothering her earlier when she’d given me the painkillers.

That, combined with my reckless running through a corridor I knew was heavily booby-trapped, was a recipe for disaster. I hadn’t even felt the tripwire until it’d snapped across my hoof and triggered the grenade bouquet above my head.

I heard the three near-simultaneous Chk!’s, though.

“Oh fuck!” I shouted, suddenly dropping into a full gallop. “Redmane! Grenades!”

She didn’t even yell back. All she did was look over her shoulder at me, briefly, then start running as fast as she could, encumbered as she was. I did a temporal reckoning of how much time had passed between my triggering of the trap and how long it’d taken me to cover the distance I had.

I still had a couple seconds.

Senses heightened by imminent danger, eyes trained on Redmane, I watched how she navigated the corridor. Mimicking her as perfectly as I could, I felt the dread and tension build as my internal countdown flickered closer and closer to zero. Just as it ended, I felt that same itching beneath my left hindhoof, albeit lessened by the numbing effects of the Med-X coursing through my veins. Diving behind a filing cabinet that had fallen to the wall-turned-floor, I covered my ears as best I could.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Footnote: 
Level Up.
New Perk - “Canterlot Canter” 1 Rank Prequisite: Firearms 35 or MEW 35: Like the gentlecolts of old, you’ve learned to make your aim steadier than your heart. Firing (or returning fire) while moving quickly has become a great deal easier for you. Accuracy penalties for using a levitated or mouth-held firearm while moving quickly are reduced.

Level Up.
New Perk - “Sleight of Hoof” 1 Rank Prerequisites: AGI 5, Firearms 45 or MEW 45: Wait. How did you do that? You reload your weapons 20% faster, and make less noise when doing so.