Fallout: Equestria - Project Horizons Reviews: Chapter 3

Video made by me.

Sorry about last week guys, I just wasn't feeling well and didn't work on the review over the week for some reason, so here we are. I'll be trying to get all caught up this week.

So this week we're coming back to Hoofington to see what our friend Blackjack is up to... and by Celestia is this going to be an interesting review. I've actually been reading this fic a lot more lately, and I can honestly say I like it, even if it has some issues here and there, but no story is perfect.

Lets get back into Somber's Project Horizons.

---Chapter 3: Learning Curve---

So we start out in the Withers Public School where Blackjack is, well, she's been shot twice so she resembles either a mummy or a less burned Joshua Graham at this point. There's a map of the area on the wall leading up into Hoofington, and also some posters of the Ministry Mares as usual (thank goodness there's no "Pinkie Pie is Watching you FOREVER" poster), though these are more geared towards foals than the propaganda we usually see.

Also we get this line:

It might have been unfair of me, but I hoped that they’d done more to try and end the war than just make pithy quotes for posters.

Even though its a really dark fic, Project Horizons sometimes makes you laugh, which is always good.

Blackjack also acknowledges that its rather depressing that a filly like Scoodle who doesn't even have her cutie mark yet can handle a weapon better than an adult. She's not wrong really, the Wasteland forces foals to grow up fast, that's something that rings true regardless of the wasteland.

Scoodle suggests that they could take apart some of the weapons instead of carrying them around and Blackjack manages to do so, repairing one of the rifles with parts from the others. Blackjack also questions how the PipBuck knows how much the rifle will be worth, which is of course a valid question and is something that everypony should probably wonder about at least once.

Scoodle gives them a quick run down of what to do with the stuff, take it to sell or leave it basically, except of course the bottle caps which can be used as money, which of course confuses Blackjack a bit since, well, its bottle caps and they're being used as money, that's strange to anyone who's just entered the Wasteland.

Apparently they weren't supposed to tell them that though since one of the other foals says that they were supposed to say they were just worthless junk. Blackjack points out that Scoodle had likely just wanted to be helpful, and they head back out and start heading down the road. There's a brief encounter with some sort of, spiny things which she and Scoodle takes out, dismissing any of her concerns about traveling with the foals.

Only once Scoodle and I had finished off the last of the strange mutated animals did my worries about them fade. If it hadn’t been for my E.F.S. I wouldn’t have known where any of the others were hiding. Once the danger was past the Crusaders came out and at once carefully carved off some pieces of meat, wrapping them in some scrap paper from my duffel bag.

I tried to hide my disgust as I asked, “What are you doing with that, Scoodle?”

“Huh?” She looked up with a bloody knife clenched in her jaws; I did my best not to shudder. She stuck the tip in the corpse and answered brightly, “Oh, this? Radhog is good eatin’!”

Huh, so Blackjack is more hesitant about eating meat than say LittlePip... I'm not going to make any jokes here, it feels way too easy at this point.

They have some more run-ins with Radhogs and Bloatsprites, and Blackjack and Scoodle talk about the Wasteland more. We learn a bit more about the Crusaders that they tend to look out for their own unless a pony needs help. Of course P-21 questions how they could take care of themselves since, well they are just foals, but its clear from Scoodle's response that they are not helpless.

We also learn a little about a group called the Finders who seem more interested in caps than anything else, and Blackjack asks who might be able to help them find information on who had attacked Stable 99. When she describes Deus, Scoodle suggests that he's likely what she calls a Reaper.

“Reapers is what happens when raiders grow up. They’re the baddest of the baddest. Don’t take shit off nopony. There’s only a hundred of ‘em, cause the only way to join is ta kill another Reaper hoof to hoof. Monsters one and all,” Scoodle said darkly.

Sounds like a fun bunch of ponies, I'll have to invite them over for tea.

This also marks the first mention of a pony named Arloste who had been one of the first Crusaders, Boing suggests that she may now be with the Reapers, though Scoodle isn't so sure. We don't learn much about the Reapers other than that they make their home in something called the Arena and will only really help when it gets attacked.

DJ Pon3 gets a brief mention since, well it is the Wasteland and apparently Hoofington doesn't have its own DJ, then there's the first mention of the Society, who sound like a bunch of stuck-up nobles. There's also something about college ponies that are trying to help the Wasteland, but there's not a lot of helpful information there.

And then of course we get to the Steel Rangers... yeah, I'm sure I don't have to say more if you know anything about the Steel Rangers, they seem to be more interested in the robots in the Core. Yeah, the Core, that'll be important later so lets just file it away for now.

And then... oh dear Celestia its the Enclave, they always seem to come up don't they?

“The Enclave are pegasus ponies! They’re gonna swoop down and save us all!” Boing cried with a little cheer. A few of the other fillies also looked hopeful.

Kid... just... I'm going to move on, there aren't words for this right now.

So yeah we get a mention of Ghouls and a place called Meatlocker, and that pretty much wraps up our exposition dump on the factions. Blackjack asks about the core and it seems that it was where Hoofington got hit by a Megaspell during the war... or it might've been something made by the Ponies, or Celestia may have sent them all to the moon, or a dragon.

Yeah, I don't think we're going to get an accurate story here.

Blackjack asks P-21 what he thinks and he comments that they should be quieter unless they want to attract more Radhogs. Blackjack says that they need to get more information on Deus and on EC-1101, and she's reminded that she has some files that had belonged to the crazy Overmare, which she'll check later.

They pass through an area filled with bones that is very creatively called the Boneyard, which is where ponies escaping both Hoofington and Manehattan died. They're told not to touch anything because there's ghouls and something called Tiara, well that's not ominous at all is it?

Blackjack briefly suggests taking some of the ammo with them but Scoodle is very insistent even though Blackjack says there's nothing around. Blackjack, being the genius she is, decides to grab an ammo box, and they get attacked by Ghouls.

Video belongs to Fox.

Our heroes fire at the Ghouls, aiming for the heads since, well they're zombies and that's the sure fire cure for zombies, a bullet to the head. And then... oh dear Celestia... two of the Ghouls grab Scoodle and rip the filly in half!

Why? Just, why?

Okay, I need to take a moment to explain the issue with this kind of death, and sadly this won't be the last time we encounter it in Fallout: Equestria stories. The basic concept we have here is the shock death, in this case its intended to show that in the Wasteland, anyone can die, even a foal. While this isn't necessarily wrong, the fact that its ONLY meant to shock both the main character and the reader is an issue, especially if you've come to like a character, and Scoodle isn't the only example either in these stories or even the worst.

You basically took a potentially interesting character, a filly who works hard to take care of her own and help where she can, and killed her off in a gruesome way for the point of shock. While I like Project Horizons, this is one issue I take with it, its basically the Walking Dead or Game of Thrones levels of shock deaths here.

What makes it worse is, as Blackjack points out, it was all because Blackjack was an idiot, and she realizes that she'll likely never stop seeing that image, as she should. Blackjack at this point goes crazy and just starts shooting at the Ghouls, and she takes them out fast, eventually having to resort to using her rifle as a club.

And then Blackjack makes the mistake of thinking that things can't get worse, those words are cursed!

And then, things get... weird, yeah, things get weirder than what's already happening. I'll just let you read it for yourself:

The scream from a nearby bonepile froze us all in place. A luminous green light spilled forth from a ghoul pony that at once started my PipBuck clicking. “Tiara!” the ghoul screamed, looking down at us with its baleful gaze. The presence of this glowing abomination was tempered by one saving grace: its presence made the hordes of ghouls back away momentarily. “Tiara? Is that you?”

Step by step, it approached, and my PipBuck began to click faster and faster. I glanced behind me at the scratched and clawed Crusaders. If there was any way I could get them out of this nightmare, I’d take it. I put on my best smile and approached the glowing ghoul pony. “Um… yes. It’s me. Tiara.” I looked at the glowing cutie mark etched in her blackened flank. Was it a mirror? No… A rattle? No…

“Really? I think I lost my glasses.” Up close, I could see that the glasses weren’t lost: they were melted. Glistening glass clung in cracked, fluid shards, the blackened metal frame now seared to the flesh. Behind them, eyes glowed. She raised both her hooves with a creepy smile, then frowned as I hesitated. What was she doing, holding them up like she was going to do a… a hoofshake! I immediately tapped my hooves against hers. Instantly she smiled. “Bump, bump, sugarlump, rump!” she intoned, not seeming to notice me scrambling to match her moves. “Oh, it is you, Diamond Tiara! I’ve missed you so much!” She pulled me into an embrace, my PipBuck clicking like mad.

So, it seems that Silver Spoon has actually survived after all, and she thinks Blackjack is Diamond Tiara... I don't even know what to say to that. Silver Spoon gets the Ghouls to leave them alone, and they start walking again, and Silver Spoon goes back to crying out for her lost friend.

As they leave the Boneyard, Blackjack is still feeling guilty over Scoodle's death, and then the Crusaders are gone for some reason, and Blackjack and P-21 hunker down in a house by the road so P-21 can heal her. When she starts to say that she wishes she had died, he chastises her, saying that if that was the case she should have just given herself over to Deus to begin with. He manages to snap her out of her self-pity for now, reminding her that if she died it wouldn't bring Scoodle back.

When Blackjack says that she's sorry, he has this to say:

“Then prove it, Blackjack. Live and don’t ever fuck up like that again. Learn from this, because if you ever kill another pony through stupidity then I will fucking end you.” He shoved his head under my shoulders and turned me over so I no longer stared into that terrible void above… only now I had an equally vast void within and I couldn’t look away from it.

Yeah... Blackjack really screwed up here, and she's going to have to pay for it big time, there's nothing worse than a guilty conscience.

So yeah, Blackjack is in really bad shape from all the radiation, and she has some very disturbing dreams that I'm not going to recount because... well they're disturbing.

And then we come face to face with Watcher, again. He asks her if this is going to be the point where the Wasteland breaks her, and he says that while yes she messed up (though in different words), he's known ponies who messed up and killed millions. She admits that she's not sure what to do and asks Watcher for advice, and honestly I like his response.

“You do everything you can to make up for it, knowing that you’ll never succeed in getting rid of the guilt. You devote yourself to spending every second trying to do better despite the fact that it will never be enough. And you pray with every single good act you do that somehow when your life is over that your lifetime will come close to making up for the wrong you committed.” Watcher spoke so clear and true that I couldn’t stop smiling and crying at the same time.

Guilt will eat you up inside just as much as radiation Blackjack, you've still got a lot to learn.

Anyway, they get directed to a Ministry of Peace wagon that hadn't been raided yet because it was a nest for Radigators, what a nice place this is! She manages to take out two of the Radigators thankfully, but now she's out of ammo since, well, we still can't have an easy time, but thankfully she manages to take out the last one with a grenade.

When Blackjack says that she's sorry that she didn't let him help her, he snaps at her, saying that he had spent his entire life being ordered around by mares. He basically calls her out for her life in the Stable that she didn't really want to be more than what she was, and honestly, he's kind of got a point. He asks her what she'd do if she didn't have to be in Security, and she admitted that she had no idea.

She does ask him what he wanted to do of course, which is the logical thing to ask him if you think about it, and he replied that he wanted to be a teacher. However the Overmare being... the Overmare refused to allow it other than sex education in his breeding rotation.

Have I mentioned how much I really don't like the Overmare of Stable 99?

There's a pretty good moment as they find the RadAway where P-21 admits that Blackjack was probably one of the better Security mares. He admits that Blackjack does have a tendency to be brave and think of strategies that even he wouldn't have thought of and he's a much smarter pony than she is. They find a Memory orb and the chapter ends on a strangely hopeful note:

“So. Does this mean next time I see Watcher I can tell him we’re friends?” I was only half serious, but the other half was curious about his thoughts.

“No,” he replied firmly, and then gave me a grudging smile, “but we’re closer to it than we were.”

“Well. That means I’m improving.”

---Concept Analysis: Crusaders---

When you grow up in the Wasteland, you generally only have a few choices.

You can either bury your head and hide from the outside world, become consumed by the Wasteland, try to change it, or band together to make some sort of better life for yourself and others in your group.

The Crusaders are in their own way the last of these, its ultimately what happens when you get foals that have lost their families to the Wasteland, and they have to survive somehow. They're young but as we saw with Scoodle they can be very skilled at survival, the problem being that sometimes they have the odds stacked against them.

The challenge here is to see past them just being children, ultimately they are just ponies who want to survive in the Wasteland like anypony else. We'll see more of this down the line, and we'll get to that when we do.

---Final Thoughts---

Now I'm not going to say this chapter was perfect, like I said before Scoodle's death was a pure shock death moment which is problematic, but many stories can be prone to this.

Ultimately its not actually a bad chapter even if part of it is basically one big exposition dump, but we'll learn a lot more about the factions later on so we can't really fault Somber on that. Its also probably one of the shorter chapters of the fic, which should be a sign of how huge this fic is if you don't know anything about it.

Ultimately, its not a bad chapter and overall it does a nice job of progressing the story a little, but it's not perfect.

Chapter 3 gets a score of 4/5.

Read it here.

Fallout: Equestria belongs to KKat.
Fallout: Equestria - Project Horizons belongs to Somber.

Next time, which will hopefully be this week, maybe tomorrow, we venture back out to the Big 52 as a filly searches for her mom.

Video made by me.