Fallout: Equestria - Long Haul Reviews: Chapter 1

Video Made by Me.

Yeah, I'm re-visiting old fics I've reviewed a lot lately, and this is one that I enjoyed last time I reviewed it.

Thankfully this time isn't going to be completely blind since I have started reading this fic since the last time I reviewed it. It's a good story and does a good job of telling what story it wants to tell.

Well, I don't really know what else to say here, so lets just get started. I hope you all enjoy the review.

---Chapter 1: The New World---

So after getting knocked out last chapter, Night Flight wakes up and finds himself back in the classroom.

Video Belongs to, someone.

With that there's the sound of a Siren and Night panics, ducking under the desk along with Salt as they're afraid that there's about to be an explosion. The rest of the class don't seem to care, instead they're just laughing at Night as Shimmer teases him for not being able to fly, yeah, real nice ponies. His father tells him that he doesn't love him anymore and Night is thrown down to the surface as there is a flash above him where the town was.

Yeah, this one was the dream, he wakes up with a scream. He finds himself chained to a bed and blindfolded so he has no idea where he is or who was trying to calm him down. It seems that somepony had found him and brought him here so that he could be healed. That's when he realizes that everypony back at Four Peaks is dead now.

A pony comes into the room, or at least we assume it's a pony, if it is it's probably about the size of Big Mac.

“Hello there.” The new pony spoke, it was the voice of a stallion… I think. I was a bit off, but it didn’t sound hostile. More so, with the way he’d said just those two words, he sounded like he was fascinated. “And how are we feeling?”

Night is obviously still a little scared as he asks the pony whether or not they're going to kill him, Night starts to calm down a little when he asks his name. The stallion asks Night what the last thing he remembered was and he answers honestly, then of course he asks the obvious question, where is he?

It seems that Night Flight is in the medical room of something called Inuvik, we aren't exactly told what that is yet, but he asks where it is in relation to Neighvarro. When they ask where he's from, we get this moment of realization from him:

“Four Peaks?” I sniffled thinking about it, sharply coming to the memory of what exactly happened. “It… it’s gone. It’s all fucking gone!” The thought of dad being dead was just too much. “How could this have happened?” I whimpered like a filly between my tears, once again uncaring what anypony thought of me. I was alone in my life. Everything I knew was gone, and I’d never see any of it again!

Yeah... things aren't going to be easy for Night Flight, but we'll see how that goes from here.

We learn at this point that something has happened to the Cloud Cover and suggests that he might be one of the refugees from the Enclave, so things aren't exactly going well for them. It seems that this fic is set at some point after Sunshine and Rainbows given the fact that the Cloud Cover is now gone. That's when he realizes that Salt is still trapped back where he left him, he tries to struggle to escape but the stallion tells him to stop or he'll have to be sedated.

He finds out that he'd been unconscious for four days at this point, which likely means that Salt is dead by this point. He wonders why this had to happen to him and why he had to lose everypony he had ever known. He's also at least 300 miles away from where he had been found, which of course raises some interesting questions about where he is, but we'll get to that later. Night Flight demands to be taken back, the mare says that she can take him back, but she doubts he'll find anything.

The blindfold is finally removed and Night gets his first look at where he is, and who he's talking to:

As my eyes adjusted, the first things I took notice of were that the walls were a solid, rusting metal. This place didn’t have the design of any cloud building I’d ever seen. Moldy ceiling tiles sagged and drooped from the rusty frames that held them up, and the old light fixtures flickered every now and again. Overall, this place shared more aesthetics to the cave in four peaks than anything I would call a ‘building’ in Neighvarro City or Four Peaks.

Along with the odd construction, sat the ugliest pegasus I’d ever laid eyes on. Her discolored grey muzzle drooped with sagging skin, and her curly red mane frizzed out every which way from around her long, drooping ears. She glared at me with an uncaring look that burned through the old, scratched up pre-war cat eye style glasses that she wore, reminding me of the annoyed expression my teachers had when they were interrupted.

“Care to get the keys to his cuffs, Mrs. Delilah?” The doctor spoke from beside me. I turned to see why the air around him had felt so displaced, and I froze at the sight of what I found. “Is there something wrong, Mr. Flight?”

Before me, sat a massive black and white monster. Set on two normal sized hind legs, it stood twice as tall as any pony I knew, and had forelegs the thickness of the tree’s I’d flown past. At the end of them, sat appendages with incredibly large claws. His muzzle was slender, and his jaw ran with jagged peaks that felt to me like they could rend me in half all on it’s own. Sharp, triangular ears sat perched on the sides of his head, seeming just as attentive as his pale blue eyes.

So we've got a donkey and what's called a Snow Dog but I'm not really sure, yeah, interesting first exposure to the Wasteland for our hero. Night is freaking out and tries to tell himself that it's all just a dream... yeah, good luck with that Night. The Snow Dog asks if there's anything he can do to help, but Night is still freaking out.

Yeah, I admit that's completely understandable, he has no frame of reference for this kind of thing, so it's terrifying to him. The Donkey comes back in with a set of keys that the Snow Dog takes and uses to free Night from his restraints while the Donkey tells him that she understands what he's going through and says that he can ride with them back to where they found him, which is probably the first real indication of what exactly he's on.

Night asks why they had helped him, and we get a good answer from the mare:

“You aren’t the only pegasus to grace our presence in the last few days.” She canted her head back toward the door. “The wasteland is a harsh place, and you’re a young stallion. It’s not going to be easy for you to get back on your hooves out here, but I figured that you could use a hoof.”

So, yeah, things are pretty bad around here for Pegasi, but that's pretty much a given by this point. Night is still unsure about exactly what's going on here, but he offers to help as best he can until he can get back to Four Peaks. They finish up and Night heads out with the mare in order to learn more about where he is.

He looks around as he gets an idea of what's going on, realizing that he's not in anything like an Enclave Raptor craft, but it's definitely mechanical in nature. The Donkey mentions that they're waiting on a delivery to be made, and he wonders exactly where he is since the name of the place means nothing to him, and when he asks more about it, he gets a better answer:

“On E-deck.” She muttered back nonchalantly. Slowly, she came to a stop and glanced back at me. “Or did you mean to ask where ‘here’ is?” I simply nodded to her. “We’re aboard the Inuvik. She was a prewar Icebreaker that was escorting a freighter through the northern sea. The day of the bombs, the two of them got stuck here, and the crews banded together to form a community, working along with a scientific outpost to the northeast of here in order to survive.” She looked over me and sighed. “That about do it for you?”

So yeah, it seems the Inuvik is a ship of some sort that is being used as a settlement, that's actually pretty clever. Anyway, she tells Night that she arrange for him to get back to where they found him when they reach Fort Mac, which was apparently named for somepony named Macaroni Salad... I can't make this stuff up. She introduces herself as Delilah and asks Night if he'll find her son who is apparently a bit lazy, we also get this kind of funny line:

“Go find him and get his lazy ass up to the bridge for an update.” With a roll of her eyes, she pushed her old glasses further up her muzzle and grumbled. “And no, that wasn’t a donkey pun.”

Delilah gives Night directions to where her son probably is at this point and offers to answer any other questions he has before heading off. He starts looking around for any clues on where to go as he finds himself on D Deck, he finds a dark colored Pegasus stallion next to a recreation room. He asks if Night is there for the room and seems to be expecting Night, which confuses him, but he goes along with it and goes into something which has been roughly labeled the Wreck Room.

Apparently, he found himself in some sort of on board combat arena, apparently they had confused him with an Enclave soldier named Bombay who had volunteered to fight the champ. He finds herself in the middle of the combat ring to the roar of the cloud, facing off against a huge monster of an opponent named Rosey. Yeah, real fair fight here, but to be fair there was a mix up so you can kind of let it pass at this point.

Once the rules are explained, Night tries to take advantage of the rule of going down so he dives for the ground, but of course it's not that easy because where would the fun in that be? The fight begins and Night starts to run to try and avoid getting killed by Rosey. He tries to explain that there was a misunderstanding, but Rosey's not exactly listening. He basically gets his flank handed to him by Rosey, which isn't much of a surprise, but for a moment he thinks he sees his mom.

Rosey suddenly realizes that Night isn't a mare (is this going to be a running joke or something?), Night screams in frustration and kicks out, and then gets thrown and knocked out again.

Here we go again.

He wakes up after an unknown amount of time with one heck of a headache and in a room that he doesn't recognize. There are two mares in the room that have been checking on him. One of them that is called the Captain seems interested in why he had taken part in the fight, and when he tries to explain what happened, she silenced him. And once again there's a bit of confusion over Night's gender, but the Captain actually seems to be okay with it.

“I have seen plenty of stallions that look like mares. It is something that they most of the time embraced and wore proudly.” She paused as she stood at the light. “If you do not want to be seen as a mare, I understand. I know however, that some out there will be cruel and hateful about your looks. Know that here we do not judge.”

Well its good to see that he found a very understanding faction.

Night gives the Captain a brief summary of how he wound up on the surface, and we get a mention of Littlepip's actions. It also turns out that the Captain of the ship is a Ghoul, she gives him the usual advice that ponies tend to get around here, find friends or even better a family. It turned out that the Captain had wound up on the ship after leaving the cloud cover 200 years prior, becoming a Ghoul along with a friend. There's a definite sense of family on board the ship, especially from the Captain.

The Captain asks Night to join her on the bridge when she gets an incoming message and they head that way. The ship's interior is actually pretty nice, it has a definite feeling of a home or a settlement despite being an old vessel instead of a town, points for creativity here.

The message is from the Ice Station nearby:

“This is ice station. The package you requested has been loaded on the motor sled.” The voice on the radio crackled slightly through the old console.

“This is boat, good copy on that and good job.” The captain nodded with a sigh. “You boys have a beer for me tonight. We’ll contact you when the sled arrives, over and out.” Stiffly, she shoved the microphone back to the radiopony and turned toward one of the other ponies down at the other side of the bridge. “Signal Flare?” She spoke up, catching the attention of a well looking red coated stallion by one of the windows. “Contact the Empirica, the motor sled should be here in a couple of hours.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He nodded and turned around to the console he stood by, hoofing a pair of headphones over himself. He reached a hoof up to a button on the console and started to press it repeatedly. As he did, a small light next to it flashed whenever he depressed it.

With that finished, the Captain asks Night what he plans to do now and he mentions that Delilah had asked him to find her son. The Captain points him in the direction of the bar on B deck not too far from where her cabin is. She also tells Night that he needs to talk to Rosey to make everything good between them after the fight. He even considers staying on board the ship given that Four Peaks is no longer there any more.

He heads towards the saloon as he runs into another Pegasus mare who is drunk and recognizes him as the pony that had fought Rosey and says that Bombay is inside. And that's when he meets up with the pony that he had unknowingly taken the place of in the arena, and she apologizes for him having to go through that. Night just lets it pass and asks about Delilah's son, now that he knows where he is, he asks her about the pony he had seen before.

“Don’t have to yell it.” She whined, “But yeah, I came here with her.” Once again, my heart skipped a beat. That was the best news I’d heard all day! “Her name is Serene skies. Fucking bitch tore my heart out to go sleep with Gale, the prick.” Waving her hoof angrily, she changed her voice to a mocking tone. “Oh, Slipstream, you’re too uptight for me. Gale knows how to ‘really’ have fun.” With a groan, she flopped her hoof down against the bar again. “Fuck her, and fuck Gale.”

That… wasn’t my mother's name. Nor to my knowledge did my mother care for other mares. Even though it was encouraged, I’d been the only one in my family to follow the Enclave’s suggestion to keep to the same sex. Honestly, it wasn’t that I exclusively liked stallions, there was the occasional cute mare I saw back at my old school. However, something about stallions just made my heart flutter. Now I’m off track again, and I really should get away from this mare before I somehow make her angry at me.

Yeah... that raises the obvious question as to why she seems to look like Night's mom. He goes over and picks up Delilah's son and realizes that he's going to have to make a decision about his future.

The chapter ends as something is still nagging at his mind.

---Character Analysis: Night Flight---

Night Flight is a pretty interesting character to say the least.

In some ways he fits some of the standard Fallout: Equestria tropes, being from an isolated community is similar to the Stables, and he is into ponies of the same sex, but at the same time he's pretty unique.

At the same time you get this feeling of loneliness, he's lost everypony he's ever known and is forced to come to terms with this in the best way he can. He wants to get back to Four Peaks, but he's not sure if that's really the best choice for him. He's a cool character, and I hope to see more of his development in the future.

---Final Thoughts---

Yeah this was a good chapter, and a good fanfic overall at least so far.

This chapter gives us a bit more worldbuilding which is always good, I didn't even touch on all the details like the Captain's history of how she wound up on the ships. There's only so much I can put into a review after all, and you guys really should read it more to see what I mean.

This is a great idea for a settlement and for characterization and I highly recommend checking this fic out if you haven't already.

Chapter 1 gets a score of 4/5, not a lot in the plot department, but a great story.

Original Fanfic.

Fallout: Equestria belongs to KKat.
Fallout: Equestria - Long Haul belongs to Gamma Deekay.

Next week, we take another trip to explore a more, unique take on the world of Fallout: Equestria, nothing else to say really other than, I'll be back.

Video Made by Me.