• Published 25th Jun 2012
  • 2,060 Views, 101 Comments

Fallout Equestria: Old World Dreams - KDarkwater



Nearly 200 years after Equestia's destruction, a stable mare and her daughter are forced to the surface in the remains of the southern prairie. Their search for a new home will change them--or destroy them.

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Chapter 20

She didn’t remember dying, but she felt like she had.

Her mind had been a blank canvas—even now, as her eyes tried to follow her brain’s instructions to open and attempt to at least look awake, there were no active thoughts streaming about, no images of days long past flashing before her, and no awareness or recognition of where she was or even her actual physical state beyond a deep, pulsing ache that reached every bone and muscle in her body. Someone could have wandered by and whispered into her ear that she’d spent her night enjoying the carnal pleasures of five mares, six stallions and a zebra, and she would have believed every word of it. It seemed to take hours for her body’s senses to even realize she was lying on her side, covered with a warm and cozy wool blanket, and its enveloping touch teased her to return to her dreams.

When her body tried to free itself of this temptress and wiggle out of its embrace, she found her world tipping about dangerously, as though she were not lying on the ground, and stopped her egress almost immediately. But the movement was enough to awaken more of her senses and bring awareness to herself and her place in the world. She could feel the blanket, and a sharper, deeper pain in her side, and her legs felt like lead weights, and it felt like she was lying on some kind of tough nylon or polyester fabric. Better than the ground or a hardwood floor, but not exactly the super-comfortable bed that she had become addicted to in the Stable.

None of this was the last thing she remembered. The last thing she could remember was exceptionally murky and unclear, but she was pretty sure it involved gunfire, explosions, and the screams of the dying.

This time, when her body fought for its freedom from this wool and polyester cocoon, she managed to get a foreleg out, only to feel it slapping into a cold, metallic pole, weighted down with fluidic accruements of some sort. It clattered to the ground and simultaneously induced a very sharp and painful stabbing sensation in that foreleg as it pulled something out of her skin, to the point that she screamed and shrieked in pain and bit down on the affected wound site to stifle her swearing into a muffled yell.

This worked for about two seconds, and then the sound of heavy cloth being batted aside accompanied a sudden stab of light (or what passed for it in the cloud-covered wasteland) into her eyes, and even this occluded amount of light was enough to sting them and keep her from focusing her sight on anything important—

—but the sounds that came after made her forget every physical sensation she was being hit with, in favor of the numbing feeling of complete and total shock. “Sling? Are you awake?”

Her eyes fought against the light and peeled back open, refusing to believe the purple-coated mare before her was even there, or that it had just spoken to her in a voice she had finally resigned herself to never hearing again. Her mouth gaped open in some vain attempt to respond, producing only a loud gasp.

The purple-coated mare dared to come closer with slow, careful steps, with one of her hind legs stuck into a locked position by the presence of a full leg brace bearing what looked like a pair of small liquid storage cylinders on each side of the gaskin and giving her a limping gait. Scars crisscrossed her sides and forelegs, and her cherry-red mane had been cut short and tied into a small tail, with the front of it spread apart into several lengthy bangs framing her facial features. Her eyes….magenta, she thought, and full of life….

….life….how could the dead be full of life?

“….Sling? Bookcase, say something….”

A watershed of tears began to flow freely from her eyes, unbidden and unimpeded. “….o-oh, gods, what is this….”

The mare finally came to a stop right in front of her, her forelegs coming up and curling around her neck. “….I’m sorry, but I gotta do this.”

Her mouth and throat were barely able to garble a “what” when the mare’s face became all she could see, and her open mouth was assaulted and pulled into a vicious, stiff struggle with a strawberry-flavored, fleshy intruder that brought back memories of a previous time she found herself in such a situation….and with this very pony, no less….

Even though she had no active recollection of it, she knew that the last time this happened, she had simply shut down from the sheer shock and was practically rendered into little more than a living statue. Even without being there in almost every sense of the word, she knew that the strawberry-flavored appendage was another mare’s tongue…..and that in the days after Trotpeka, she privately lamented once that that mare had never gotten anything more than that fevered, joyful kiss. This time, she knew it was happening, and despite the disbelief flooding her thoughts at the impossibility of her departed friend returning from the dead for another kiss, she decided that she didn’t want her returning to the afterlife without something in return.

So she kissed back…at least, she tried to, as little experience as she had with such matters. But it didn’t take very long to catch on and simply mimic the efforts of the other, and within a few moments they parted abruptly from one another as the kiss began to try and lead them down another path. Those few moments, however, were the most pleasing and fulfilling that she could remember having to herself in ages. The brief marvel at how much she enjoyed it, how much of herself lit up at the touch of another, was now quickly overwhelmed by an intense combination of both delirious joy and maddening grief she’d not thought possible to feel at once.Such a deep, primal feeling of passion, however misguided, was simply not possible in her dreams. Nor was the warm, moist, and sweet strawberry that she had hungered for and never realized until now, because its source had been taken away from her in the cruelest of ways….

….this wasn’t a dream, or a terrifying nightmare of things that could have been. That kiss, that tongue, that bodily warmth….

Her world was shrouded by a slightly fuzzy chest as the mare’s forelegs hugged her close to her, close enough that she could both feel and hear the beat of her heart, and though it hadn’t been mean to do so, it moved the stable pony into a broken, soft howl as she tried to cry and failed miserably.

“It’s okay, I’m not a dream,” Kite’s voice whispered softly, right into her waiting and wilting ears. “I’m right here, it’s okay now….”

She was about as far from okay as she could feel right then, but in a good way. Despite the howling and quiet sobs, her hot, sweet kiss and the warmth of her hug was all Sling cared to have as evidence that the voice was not lying. Her friend was alive. She wasn’t imagining it.

Kite was alive.

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She’d known from the start what she wanted to do. The moment that damnable stable mare woke up, she had wanted nothing more than to pin her to her back and throw herself at her, to lose herself in her maddening feelings and pray that the stable pony would forgive her for it.

She also knew how that endeavor would end, and even after all she’d been through she didn’t think she could live through that. So she made herself promise that she wouldn’t go that far, no matter how badly she wanted to. What she really wanted, really needed, was to just kiss her again, to taste that blueberry sensation and see if it was the reason she’d managed to hang on for as long as she had.

She got her wish when she heard the IV machine getting knocked over from her perch outside the tent, and hobbled in as quickly as she could manage, and it took all of her mental strength and willpower to keep from squealing and crying like a lost foal at the sight of her awake and moving, even if she was still so out of it and lost that she likely had no clue where she was. Even when Sling’s eyes finally focused on her and her face started to get this incredibly deep look of shock and disbelief at what was approaching her, she had to force herself to be calm, at least until she got close enough to grab hold of her and kiss her. And it was everything she remembered, only better. That timid fear, the pulse of her pumping ceratoid arteries as she hugged her prey close to her, and that moist, warm, oddly sweet-and-bitter blueberry taste of the stable pony’s tongue, it was all there.

And then she received a surprise that nearly threw her back to her original plan. Sling kissed back. She was so surprised by the act that for a few seconds she went merely on desire and instinct and played with her partner’s feeble, but eager attempts to return the favor, and while she certainly wasn’t very experienced with it, she was quick to pick up on the ministrations being given to her and improved a little bit. As much as she wanted to keep it going, though, she knew that Sling was nowhere near the right state of mind to be making any manner of serious decisions like that, if she was so emotionally destroyed that she momentarily forgot that she wasn’t even into mares.In fact, going in and kissing her right off started to look downright immoral of her.

That feeling only got worse when Sling lost any semblance of control on her emotions and just started crying, and so she just hugged her friend close and hoped she could at least muffle the sounds so that no one outside the tent would hear it. She was relieved that the stable mare could barely manage a sound higher than that of casual conversation, and so for a quarter hour she just sat there on her haunches and let Sling turn her torso into a wall of wet coat hairs and heated skin. And for a little bit after that, she just laid there in her grasp, silent, not even knowing or caring that she was basically being held upright in her cot by a soul she’d long thought dead. She relished the chance to just sit there and hold her close without a single care about the world, and it gave plenty of time to organize all of her information and answers to the questions that were undoubtedly coming.

The first one being, naturally: “H…h-ha….how?”

“…luck,” she replied into her friend’s mane. She was going to hate herself for telling her this…. “From what I’m told, after the slavers chased you and Elly off, they sent a few bodies down into the canal to drag me out.I’m not sure how there was anything left of me to find. The things those ghouls did to me….I don’t think I’d wish that even on a slaver. There were troopers close by when the slavers sprung their trap, they got there….maybe ten, fifteen minutes after you left, and the slavers tried to fight their way past them. The slavers lost that fight too….”

She could feel Sling’s body tense up in her grasp, leading into Question Number Two. “….what? Y-you mean….we could’ve stayed and been fine—”

“Sling, stop, there was no way you could have known that would happen,” she cut her off quickly, before she could have cause to start crying for entirely new reasons. “None of us could have known.I don’t blame you for leaving….shit, that’s why I let go to start with, so that you could leave, and the last thing I can remember thinking about clearly, was that at least you and Elly would get out of there alive. I came to in Trotpeka’s hospital maybe….four days later? It’s actually the old Celestia’s Mercy hospital, the best one in Union territory outside the stable-supported clinic in Stifla. No other facility anywhere in the prairie has the medical tech that the Mercy has. The troopers found me barely alive, stuffed in a wagon the slavers were trying to haul me out in, and I managed to survive the trip to the Mercy, and all the surgeries and work that was done on me after. Three of my legs needed these devices they call reconstitution bracers….the one you see on my hind leg is the last one that I’ve yet to be rid of. It’s powerful tech, supposed to be able to regrow a leg from a bloody stump if it’s slapped on within a couple of hours of the injury. But they take a while to work, and this leg got the worst of it. I’m not sure it’ll ever truly heal.”

She felt Sling’s face finally brush itself against her chest until it had pushed itself off, presumably to stare at the aforementioned hind leg and the stiff, tech-heavy leg brace that immobilized it. “….and…and BJ? Did he….did he make it?”

Question Number Three, just as she predicted. “He’s fine. Hell, just about anybody else is probably in better shape than either of us are right now. Which, ironically, brings me to….you.”

“What…what happened? I can barely think right now….”

Question Number Four….also as predicted. She would have preferred to be wrong. Fuck, here we go…

“Okay, so…you were hurt, badly. Again, you reckless fool—”

A tiny, goatish squeal eked out of Sling’s throat, but the stable mare offered no protest or challenge otherwise. Cute.

“You took out several mercenaries at once with a single magic blast, with you at the center of it, and it almost killed you when it brought that diner down to the ground, it broke every gun except your revolvers when it collapsed. It….when we found you in the rubble, you were still alive, but unconscious, and since your body is resistant to healing potions we were only able to get three injection stims to work on you. We tried a fourth and it didn’t do much more than seal up a couple of cuts on your belly. I think you fell into a coma—”

She had even correctly predicted the freak-out moment almost to the millisecond, as Sling’s body jolted with shock and she even felt a shiver of terror through the stable mare’s coat. “W-what!?”

“Calm down,” she soothed gently with a tightening, reassuring hug. “I know it sounds bad, but you were actually in a better state than most of the comatose patients I’ve seen. They all required ventilators and intensive care in Stifla’s clinic and wouldn’t have survived anywhere else, but you were still breathing, almost like you were in some manner of deep sleep. The biggest challenge was keeping you hydrated, among…other things. It took us a couple of days to get to the nearest town with a medical facility we could search for salvage, and I found a couple of intact IV kits.”

“Wa-wait, days? How l-long was I out?”

Damn, I’m good at reading her head, that’s five in a row I’ve guessed right. “…twelve days,” she answered hesitantly. “We’re at the Runners’ main camp, we only got here three days ago. You’ve missed quite a few adventures.”

Sling’s head began to slump down, having had enough of examining her braced leg as a hollow, guttural rumble groaned its displeasure from the stable mare’s body. “….more worried about all the food I didn’t eat….”

She’d anticipated this earlier in the morning when she’d done her customary morning examination and found Sling’s eyes to finally be resuming normal REM, and her magic pulled up a pair of Stable MREs onto the fold-out tray stand next to Sling’s cot and tore off one end from each package, then dumped the meal trays out. “Yeah, the IV kits helped keep you hydrated, but even that was a challenge, and we didn’t have any vitamin or nutrient packs to go with it. You’ll need a few days to get close to a hundred percent. Don’t try using your magic for at least another day. Might make you sick.”

Sling’s eyes lazily glossed over the meal cooking itself before her. “Then how am I supposed to eat this?I can barely move my legs, I feel like shit…”

This part of the conversation wasn’t in the Great List of Post-Coma Questions that she’d come up with, so it didn’t count. And Kite couldn’t resist a mild laugh at the stable mare’s expense, and even nuzzled her cheek with her nose in a teasing gesture. “Awwww, don’t worry, I’ll feed you. Between you and Elly, you still have about….three months of these left, so there’s some to spare, and you will be eating the rations I give you if you want to escape malnutrition.”

Sling barely responded to the nuzzle, but at least her head didn’t move to push her away. “…she’s okay, right? I mean…you’d have probably said something if she wasn’t….”

Question six was the first slip-up—she was expecting to hear about Light Tail around question nine, but now that she’d had a moment to think about it she was honestly surprised it wasn’t the first thing on Sling’s mind. “Once she got herself past “emotional train wreck” stage, she calmed down. Sticks to Rally like a tick….come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen those two apart from each other for more than ten minutes.”

“….good,” Sling’s murmured somewhat absently. “Th…that’s good…wonder if she’s made her choice.”

“Oh, shit, she wasn’t making it up,” Kite’s voice mumbled a moment later, all too quickly realizing her mistake once she’d had a couple of seconds to analyze it. Of course Sling would have latched onto Rally’s predicament and did everything she could to fix it after Trotpeka. The screams she must have made when those ghouls started tearing into her…Elly was still crying in her sleep and getting nightmares over it, even with that Snowy plush toy of hers in her grasp at night. Sling’s “mother bear” mode would have kicked in much harder afterward, to the point where she would’ve found herself feeling better about things if she went out of her way to help a soul in Rally’s position. Not exactly the healthiest coping mechanism, even if it did end up helping a child who truly needed it….

“Making what up?” Sling asked next. Kite noted that her words were no longer uttered in a low, distant tone. She was well and truly awake, and clearly not happy with her.

She abandoned her Great List to the infinite cosmos. Nothing in that list had ever taken Rally into account, and if Sling wanted to look after her…well, that was just the way it was. “She…she said you offered to take her in, if she wanted it,” she squeaked, almost embarrassed with herself now. “….my experiences with orphaned wasteland children haven’t been very good ones, so that may have…colored my opinion of her.”

“Which makes me wonder if half the raiders I’ve killed were once down-on-their-luck kids with no parents, no guidance, and no help from anybody to survive but what they could for themselves,” Sling countered, her tone shifting into a subtly sad hue.

“…that’s probably more accurate than anybody’s willing to admit,” she said hoarsely. “Julie should be back with the kids soon, if she isn’t already.”

“Julie?” Sling remarked with a slightly guarded tone. “So you haven’t tried to strangle her yet?”

“You…did tell me once to try and be nicer when speaking about her, back in Galesville. On account of the fact that it was her caps stash you used to get me and Blue out of the slave trade. And…it helps that we both kinda like you…and…that’s something we need to talk about, actually.”

Talk about, that’s all, she told herself again. Talk about. Don’t go and kiss her again, you dumbass…

Sling’s eyes got slightly lost within her thoughts. “I’m as clueless as El-Tee when it comes to relationships. The only soul I could come close to claiming to care about was her father, and I was just a stupid fifteen-year-old kid with no idea what she was doing. I have never had a serious, deep relationship with anyone, ever. I don’t know how to.And nobody was giving me a fair shake in the stable anyway…”

She sorely wished that the one-one-five had survived, just so she could go back there and kick all of their asses for all the emotional trauma they’d inflicted on this poor soul. “…I know I’ve been….difficult, to deal with at times,” she said, turning her gaze to the stable rations as they finally began winding down from their cooking enchantments. “The stares, the flirting…that kiss, when you bargained me and my son out of the slave trade, for good, and then this one just now…I know it’s not your thing, and I’m sorr—”

One of Sling’s forehooves managed to bumble its way to her snout and clumsily clamp it shut with a weak push. “Kite….let me say something before you finish that sentence.”

Try as she might, she couldn’t help but feel a painful tug on her heartstrings at the coming rejection, but she had already accepted that she would never, ever get to get any closer than this. So with her words muffled and cut off, she could only nod weakly and wait for it.

“…when you were gone, and all I had left of you were memories, I cried at night,” Sling began, her hoof falling away from lack of energy rather than by any conscious decision on her part. “I kept thinking of that kiss, and this…this taste of strawberry, and a part of me kept wishing that I had let you have more than just a kiss, if only because you deserved to have gotten a lot more in your last few weeks of life. I kept thinking of you, hugging me to death in that kiss…and I realized too late that I felt more alone without you than I’d ever felt in that damn stable. And now here you are, having cheated death by what sounds like a series of miracles lined up in a row for you, and I don’t want to fuck it up again. I still don’t know what I want in my life….but I know now that I don’t want to go through it alone anymore. I had a glimpse of what waits for me down that road, and it’s terrifying. I can’t say this will go the way you want…but we can see.”

Her heart—and her lungs—skipped and fluttered, leaving her breathless and at a loss for words. She’d expected something emotional….but not this. Not…

a chance, she realized, taking in the stable mare’s tired, pleading eyes. She…she’s willing to give me a chance….

“Wha…what was that you said once, about being straight?”

“I don’t get antsy and…and eager, thinking about mares,” Sling answered. "…come to think of it, I haven’t had much of a sex drive since my pregnancy. But I do care about you, in ways I have never felt about anyone, not even my only friend in the stable. So…maybe I kinda swing that way, at least for you? It’s…weird. Need some time….”

….okay, then, if she wants to try, then let’s try….and even if it doesn’t work out, I can’t see myself not being a part of her life for the rest of our days anyway….

“….then I guess we should start things simple,” she hummed, nosing the cart closer to the edge of the cot. “I believe you stable ponies would call it a…dinner date?”

Sling’s head began to force itself off the pillow and lean out towards the cart in a futile attempt to reach it. “Shut up and feed me.”

One of the plastic sporks from the stable MREs began to sink into the hash brown casserole in Sling’s tray, while another spark of magic from her horn began enveloping a pair of canteens and popping them open. “When we’re done here, I’ll be moving you to some better accommodations. Most coma patients take time to come out of it. They don’t normally wake up for more than a few minutes the first time, and you’ve already blown the record out of the water, so it’s probably safe to move you.”

Sling’s jaws sucked in the spork’s contents the second it hovered a little too close to her. “Feeling pretty cozy here, actually. This cot is loads better than all the hard beds and floors I’ve slept on these last…four months? Gods I’m losing track of time so bad.”

The mere mention of the word “time” caused her to stop the spork’s return to the meal tray as unbidden, terrifying memories began to come back to her. “...let me tell you something about time….”

--------------------------------------

Endless, unintelligible echoes haunted the edge of her dreams and nightmares. She thought they had once been understood, but she could no longer recall their original meaning. For a time, when the words had become garbled noises, she could have still made out various emotions, like grief, or pain, but now even those little bits of soul had been stripped away.

Within this black void of foreign tongues, there was this ever-present feeling of weightlessness. She could feel herself, her brain, drifting about in various directions, as if she were lying atop a cloud or a raft in the water. She couldn’t, however, bring herself to command any part of her body to move, or even twitch. She could only sense that her…consciousness, or her mental thoughts, or something, was all that was moving, and she couldn’t even control that.It was a terrifying sensation.

She couldn’t smell anything, or feel anything physical. She was essentially a floating thought, drifting away for what had felt like centuries. She had lost almost all hope of ever being anything more, and had resigned herself to a pitiful existence of being aware of nothingness, if such a thing were possible. But a single, internal sensation did manage to keep her sanity going, something other than black, void space and thought. A warm, lingering, and slightly sweet touch of warm….

….blueberry?

Whatever it was, it gave her some sense of pleasure and awareness, as if she had something left of herself, and so she clung to it whenever the approaching wall of absolute oblivion began to close in on her. It became at first a comforting presence in the endless eternity of black, and then a necessity, like a foal’s security blanket or toy. Eventually, it became her center, her one ray of hope when all seemed lost and Oblivion was at hoof. So long as she could feel this warm blueberry, she was still….something. Not whole, but not lost.It was a very strange existence, but compared to what she would be if she surrendered to the Oblivion….she clung to it as hard as she could manage. Which, when she considered that she was essentially little more than a floating mental consciousness, was quite a feat.

She existed in this state of aimless mental floating for so long, time had lost all meaning. Centuries? Maybe longer. Eternities was a thought that once seemed appropriate for a time, but even that had become a pale comparison. She had once pondered the state of her empty, shell-less existence, and the very nature of existence and life itself, but whatever conclusions she had reached had been for naught, and after a time she’d forgotten them. She briefly contemplated re-visiting the topic, for about….two years? Five? She couldn’t really say. Were it not for that lingering, bitterly sweet blueberry sensation that hung at the tip of her consciousness, she would have slipped away and ceased to exist in any form, and then what Oblivion do to amuse itself? Ponder that, uncaring gods, she’d once roared in the silence of her own thoughts.

Now she just floated about the endless black void, wondering when even the blueberry would fail to entice her to stay. Maybe that was the gods’ answer to her defiance. Just wear her down, spiritually and emotionally, since she seemed to have no physical form to abuse. It might take another eternity, but they were patient assholes. Eternity was nothing to them. Or her, really. It was merely a matter of who blinked first, if formless entities could even do so.

But with nothing better to do, she just resigned herself to another lifetime of quiet contemplation. She wasn’t sure what topic to explore this time. The eternal struggle of balance between light and shadow? The nature and form of love, in all its confusing meanings and variations? Or perhaps she would delve into the possibility of examining one’s existence as simply one little speck in a universe of stars all interconnected in some ethereal or cosmic bond of karma, good and bad, and relate that to the aforementioned struggle of light and shadow. To be one with the universe could be seen as being one with one’s own self, their virtues and their desires. There could be no good without evil, for then what would the force of good have to force itself to improve and better itself and the lives of others? Likewise, without the presence of good, evil would simply foster itself into an unsustainable orgy of destruction that would ultimately end in its demise anyway, and without the chance for redemption from the agents of light. Good needed evil to struggle against and stay strong—evil needed good to struggle against or it would simply destroy itself for lack of other targets, and evil tended to destroy itself on a regular basis to begin with anyway, so….

….hunh. Perhaps the struggle of light and shadow was interconnected with the overall order of things in the universe, of good and ill.She held out some hope that she might actually enjoy this particular life-period of philosophical musing….

…and felt that hope begin to recede in the face of a rising horror as the endless black around her began to change.She had trouble believing it at first, she’d been here so long, but even after an eternal existence of pure thought she still knew what the color white looked like. And the ever-encompassing black was gradually shifting into a very dark and pale white, which in turn began to brighten at the behest of forces and desires beyond her understanding. Was this finally it? Had the gods grown so bored with her that they would snuff out even her non-corporeal existence as a floating consciousness? One last flash of white, and that was it?

Panic and terror began to set in. She wasn’t ready. She didn’t want the white, she wanted the blanket of dark and to stay as she was until she could honestly and truly say, “FUCK IT, END ME”. But stuck in this…formless form, she could naught but watch as the white began to expand and overtake the black, gradually filling all that she could see before her. In time, the center of the white began to grow even brighter, gaining a slight sense of….

….of…warmth? A sense she had not known since time ad nauseam had finally returned, and it tingled with warmth? Oh gods, this was it, this was that light at the end of the tunnel everybody talked about it, it was going to flash any second now and then she’d be absolutely nothing at all, not even a floating ball of thoughts and emotions, she wasn’t ready, she wa—

—the light’s warmth continued to grow, and a stinging sensation began to jab into her personal space, causing her thoughts to become sound in the form of a pained gasp—

—and when the bright, warm light suddenly pulled away from her, the endless black void did not return.In its place were a couple of….blurry rods of light?Somewhere….up….as in above her….

….and jutting itself into the light rods’ path was a vaguely familiar shape of a…a head, and a mane, but that was all she could understand—

“Oh my holy shit me—”

The head blob jerked away as the swearing, feminine voice carried itself away from her and into the distance, though another one quickly appeared before her returning vision, and she began to feel something else reaching into her growing sea of senses….a….a poking sensation? Somewhere behind her, or…somewhere, something, she wasn’t real sure…..

“—ny choice of words, Vanilla—”

The first voice didn’t answer directly, too intent on shouting something unintelligible to other souls, and shortly afterward she began to hear a cascade of voices around her.Some male, others female, and she could barely comprehend what they were saying. It sounded like five different conversations were taking place at the same time, the participants shouting to each other and somehow able to talk to their intended target without confusing another conversation’s words for their own.

What they were saying didn’t matter. The fact that there were other voices speaking to each other in her presence was probably the second or third most important thing she could think of right then. She wasn’t alone anymore….

….so was she dead, and just crossed over into the After? Or….

…or was she being tortured more, she wondered, when a very bright and intense light was flashed into her vision, blinding her in hot white and making her wish for the black once more.

She was surprised when said wish was granted, if only briefly. The black popped back in, obliterating the white completely, and when it went away, the light that returned was a much softer and gentler tinge upon her senses that didn’t threaten her for staring at it. The dizzying myriad of voices that had been around her had also mysteriously vanished, though a single voice, humming slightly to itself, buzzed about nearby—

“Ah, was hoping you’d come to again,” the voice broke into her world, its feminine quality soothing to her ea….

….ears….

…ears?

Something about her must have attracted the voice’s attention, for it continued to speak to her as though she had said something, or was worth speaking to. “I won’t begin to pretend I know your position, so I’ll break it down for you. You were gravely injured in an attack, to the point of death, even…actually, scratch that, what you endured has killed ponies much tougher than you, it’s a miracle you were even alive when they found you.”

...alive….alive?

She was….aliv…

“Ah…a….alive….” said a meek, barely audible voice, from the center of her being….perhaps it was her own voice, struggling to come back to life after an eternity of silence….

“I’m not sure I would call the condition you were found in living, but you still had a pulse and were still in one piece, despite the….injuries. What do you remember?”

…remember? This voice was asking what she remembered, when she had spent what felt like half an eon, or longer, being nothing? “…dark….so dark….”

The voice didn’t answer immediately, but it did eventually speak again. “…all right, then, I’ll walk you through it from the beginning, bit at a time, while I work some healing spells in, wake you up a bit. You came here….five days ago, I think, with a friend. Do you remember her name?”

She could feel a strange, itching pulse in her consciousness, like it was something she was supposed to know instinctively, and she could also feel a slight horror within her as she tried and failed to grasp at her memories for the answer. “….fri..friend? Fr….”

“Yes, a friend. Do you remember?”

Something warm began to touch upon her, though she couldn’t quite feel what it was. Only that it moved across her vision and down below it, though she did briefly enjoy a refreshing, cooling sensation washing over her and revitalizing her once-invisible form. She thought she could feel something akin to legs again…. “…fr…friend….name….”

“I believe her name was Sling Shot. Had like, three pistols on her alone, explains the name I guess. For some reason you tried to get out of the city through an old warehouse, and…that’s where things went teats-up on you. You were….well, you didn’t come out the same way you fell into that canal—”

She had a brief, but horrifying flash, maybe two seconds long—of herself, being dragged across the interior of an overturned bus by heavily irradiated, dead-looking mutant ponies, one of them biting a chunk of her right foreleg clean off as she tried to swing at them, while watching two more catch one of her hind legs as she attempted to kick at them and begin splitting it apart like a wishbone—

—her senses shot themselves awake, as though she had been struck by lightning, and suddenly every nerve in her legs screamed in agony as they relived the moment she had just flashed back too—

—a heavy, strong weight pressed into her, pushing against her as she tried to fight herself free of her new prison, and at the same time she could feel a heavy, sloshing weight on her hind legs and right foreleg that made it very difficult to move them—

“Whoa whoa easy, easy,” the voice commanded calmly into her right ear, her vision suddenly filled with a dizzying combination of dim light, gray slabs all around her, and what looked like a light pink blob pressing her warm, slightly fuzzy body into her. “It’s over, you’re safe here—”

—her old friend, the blueberry sensation, returned to her as she recalled the last time she felt such a warm, encompassing presence against her, and a flick of her tongue through the inside of her mouth stirred up another, more pleasant flash of another lifetime. A dark teal coated, indigo maned mare, held tight against her as she threw herself into a deep kiss and tasted that mare’s tongue for as long as she could hold herself back from doing more—

“You’re in the old Celestia’s Mercy hospital, in Trotpeka,” the pink blob went on softly, now recognized as a rather slender mare as her vision began to clear up some. “You’ve been here nearly five days, almost all of it in the IC unit. Four surgeries, a hundred healing potions and injection stims, reconstitution braces and…well, shit, it’s a miracle you were found alive at all. Every surgery you survived was one more on top of that. After the third one we had hope we could rebuild you whole, so—”

Much of the mystery mare’s words buzzed through her head without much effort spent into memorizing them. They registered well enough—her memories recalled a place called the Mercy in Trotpeka, and that alone stirred further memories that told her it was the Union’s best medical facility outside Stifla. What she really focused on was that blueberry tasting tongue, and how much she longed to taste it again if that was the sensation she had cling to for such a long time in the limbo of the dark. Warm, moist, malleable blu—

--….blue….blueberry….blu…

….oh, gods, B—

“M-my boy….w-where—”

“He’s fine,” the pink mare’s voice answered in that same, calming tone that exuded patience and understanding. “Some broken bones, probably from the bus seat he was crunched inside of, but it kept the ghouls from getting to him long enough for the troopers to get him out. We’re guessing you did that right before they got ahold of you and…um….well, we won’t go into that, it seems you remember enough of it. But your kid’s fine. Up and walking, even, as of two days ago. We’ll bring him in in a bit, give you both some peace of mind.”

A tangible wave of relief flooded her psyche, clearing out the fog inhibiting her thoughts and memories, and what felt like an age of exhaustion began to recede from her limbs as she relaxed herself from the tensed, terrified shock that had taken hold of her seconds earlier. “….and….Sling Shot? What happened to her?”

“We…don’t know,” the pink mare replied hesitantly. “Trooper corps isn’t allowed past the canal, and they were much more preoccupied with getting you and your colt back to us in time to care about anything else. Best guess is that she made it across but was forced to leave without you…probably thought you were dying to those ghouls, the poor thing…and she wasn’t really wrong, either.”

Her heart pulled itself deeper inside her, heavy as lead, her mind replaying the last thing she’d heard from that mare’s mouth….a heartbroken, wailing scream as she purposely jerked herself free of the stable pony’s grasp before they both fell into the ghouls….

….and…and Elly would’ve heard what those ghouls had done to her, very shortly after….

Oh god, I gotta find them….

She might’ve marveled at how quickly her brain was firing back up from what felt like eternity, if she hadn’t been filled with a desperate, eager need to get as far away from this place as possible. It saved her life, but she would never, ever forget that these bastards sanctioned the very thing that had abused her her entire adult life. “I-I need to leave, quickly—”

“Not happening,” the pink one shot her down almost automatically. “Not today, at the very least. I wasn’t kidding, it really is a miracle that you were alive to start with. Even with all the work and healing potions that went into you, you’re still not one-hundred percent.”

A dark voice in her mind taunted her with images of her impending future—most of them ended with her shot to pieces by Sling’s new enemies, or slung out over a bed in a slaver’s whorehouse while every pony with fifty caps to spare had their way with her. “I shouldn’t have ended up in here at all. This stupid mark on my fucking neck was supposed to be a warning that I was untouchable on pain of death and now I’m looking at a mountain of debt bigger than this stupid building—”

Another cooling, refreshing pulse flowed through her, starting from the tip of her horn and seeping deep into her veins and muscles.A fairly average strength healing spell that was doing wonders for her thinking and senses with every passing moment—

“You needn’t worry about the expenses,” a new and familiar voice assured her as the sound of a swinging door popped into the air. “Even though all of your attackers mysteriously lost their employment with the slaver guilds the day before you got into town, the fact that I can ID three of the bodies as being with the caravan your freemark was purchased through is enough circumstance for us to press the guilds into reimbursing us for the cost of the medical care you received.”

This new healing spell coursing through her was also clearing her vision up somewhat—when she craned her neck about to look past this pink mare by her bedside, she caught the unmistakable sight of a dark blue coated mare and the olive drab beret on her head that was the mark of a Union infantry officer. A twinge of lustful longing tugged at her, as the sight of Colada’s coat, while not exactly like Sling’s, reminded her enough of the stable pony to make her wistful. “….Major,” she forced herself to say politely, if not calmly.

“Dead mare walking,” Major Colada greeted back, unfazed by the slight fire directed against her, as another, larger form followed in behind her and quickly morphed into the unamused body of a tan-furred griffon. “Least that’s what everybody here’s saying. If not for the reconstitution braces on your legs, I’d call them liars. Never thought I’d see the day the colonel here would let them out of storage, they’re so rare.”

“Irreplaceable, if I recall. They’re strictly one-shot use. Supposed to be able to regrow a leg from a stump, if they’re slapped on soon enough. What’s the time frame…..two hours?”

“More or less,” the pink mare confirmed, an opaque, light blue glow shimmering to life around her horn and adding another pleasant healing spell to the one now fading away from her. Every pulse of it filled her with a continually renewing sense of a cool breeze billowing over her. “If you had arrived later than you did, you’d be a quad-amputee, or dead. We almost put you out of your misery until the troopers told us about the freemark and the slavers trying to haul you out to Luna knows where, and then we busted the braces out of storage, but your right hind leg was a close one, took two of us to…to fit the brace. Didn’t really have time to run by Granger’s office for permission, but our standing directives in the event that a freemark soul is injured by slavers is to use every available means to save them and return them to good health. Never thought it’d actually happen, to be honest.”

She had to bite the tip of her tongue to keep from seeing flashbacks of ghouls doing unholy things to her limbs, and she nearly retched despite her efforts. “….I’m sorry to be the first. I didn’t enjoy what happened to put me here.”

“I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemies.We’ve seen our share of combat injuries. But you….well, let’s just say the first responding medical team lost a few meals. You had a good forty-plus ponies working on you 24-7, that’s how much work it took to get you where you are now. Until six hours ago there were never fewer than four of us in here tending to you.”

“....so what happens to me now? Once I’m done here?”

“We’ll go over that in a minute,” the griffon answered, finally injecting his presence into the conversation with a healthy, experienced authority in his voice. “First, I want to know why you tried to cross the canal up near the no-go line.”

“We had to,” she began, reorganizing and collecting her memories of that day as she spoke. “We came through the main checkpoint on the highway, and then went straight to the central bridge. We didn’t make any stops along the way and it wasn’t our intention to stay in town at all. But when we got to the bridge some troopers were barring it off from passage, and….and we were told that some slaves had escaped from a caravan the night before we arrived, and that the slave guilds wanted all roads in and out blocked until they were found….”

The griffon’s eyes became somewhat perplexed as she laid out the events at that main bridge. “…no reports of runaways were ever made to my troopers that week,” were his ominous, shit-inducing words. “The roads were only locked down roughly an hour after your unfortunate incident with the slavers. Otherwise you wouldn’t have even gotten through the highway checkpoint.”

“Then ho—” she started to protest, though her voice quickly died in her throat as her thoughts leapt onto the first horrible implication she could think of—that the troopers guarding the main bridge had been bribed or paid off by the slavers to keep them from passing and forcing them to find another way across….a path that the slavers had already scouted out and were watching….

….and Colada seemingly put as much trust into the “system” as she did, because the Major did not flinch away from airing that possibility out loud. “Colonel, what squad had bridge duty that day?”

“Bravo Squad, 4th Platoon, Gainful Strides Trading Co.,” the griffon growled menacingly, the hackles of his shoulders rising in fury. “Gave me a report that day of some issue with the bridge, had it closed for a couple of hours while they checked it out, one of the troopers in that squad has some construction experience and knows what to look for. And Gainful Strides is a little mushy with Life Tap’s guild.”

“….told them this shit system was gonna rot us out,” the Major mumbled angrily, mostly to herself. “I have some additional intel that might explain things further, I’ll write out a report for you shortly—”

“Major Colada, this problem is yours to deal with if you wish, in whatever way you wish to,” the griffon blared back suddenly and without hesitation. “No sense in getting in your way if you know more than we do here.”

“Colonel, under those directives, there won’t be anything left to deal with when I’m done with them.”

“I’m counting on it, for both our sakes,” the griffon noted grimly. “The way you deal with slavers could see us both mustered out if anybody else’s word but yours gets heard. Make sure it doesn’t.”

“There may be a problem on that last part. I’ve an awful lot of circumstantial evidence that suggests one of the Board might have his slimy hooves involved in this mess. Nothing concrete, but his presence keeps showing up everywhere my troopers have gone poking around for some clues. If he’s involved in any way it may severely limit my responses.”

“Fuck your precious Board,” Kite hissed back, feeling her frustration snap briefly as the conversation began to veer away from her. “I just want out of here, quickly, before a trooper magically wanders his way over and kills me in my sleep.”

“If the nurse says you don’t leave, you don’t leave,” Colada pressed back briskly. “I read enough on your treatment case that I had to stop before I lost it. Those braces won’t come off until their work is done, and that could be days away still.”

The pink-coated nurse had apparently had enough of being ignored too, because she chimed in with her own uninvited two bits. “…you could walk tomorrow, if you had to,” she suggested softly. “A crawling foal could probably catch up to you, but you could walk without risk of permanent limb impairment provided you took frequent breaks. But you could only go short distances, like to the bathroom and back here. What do you think your chances are like that? You’re much safer in here than you’d ever be on the road.”

“Am I?” Kite bit back. “S-Sling, she…she has all my stuff. I have nothing, not even a dull butter knife. I won’t last a day on my own like this.”

“Ah, yes, about that,” the griffon countered as he dug a small notepad and an intact pencil from the pocket of his faded desert camo fatigue top and set it atop the blanket of her hospital bed, with what looked like another folded sheet of paper attached to the notepad via rubber band. “A very nice collection of weapons and equipment were confiscated from the bodies and the few slavers we captured alive. Actual body armor, wide range of firearms in good working order, quite a collection of laser rifles and pistols…even a few working plasma rifles. As restitution for the attempt on your life, the whole lot of it is yours to do as you please. A full itemized list is on that sheet. Colada can escort you to the storage lock-ups for an inspection if you wish.”

Kite’s brain, having been solely focused on getting herself and BJ back on the road and as far away from the Union as they could manage in her current condition, derailed into a mentally-salivating mess at the thought of such….expensive loot just being casually handed off to her. If she’d known that getting attacked by slavers as a freemark would have been this profitable, she’d have goaded them into it the second they got into Trotpeka. The caps from the energy weapons alone would be enough to establish a nice, comfortable standard of living in a place of her choosing for a few years….assuming she could catch up to Sling and Elly and talk that stubborn mule of a pony into staying put somewhere instead of wandering up, down, over, and under the wastes like most stable ponies were prone to doing.

But first, she had to actually get to them. And she wasn’t all that keen on selling this little collection right off, not to anybody that called Union territory home. She couldn’t carry much of anything in her current state….but if she could track down a freelance caravan, talk them into hauling her new inventory with them into the west in exchange for passage and a cut of the profits from whatever they could help her sell…..

“….if I could get a caravan to take me and my son on as passengers, help me haul my new stash of stuff around, would you let us out of town?”

“And exactly how do you plan to go looking for a caravan when you’re bedridden and not at liberty to move about on our own?” the griffon challenged immediately….

…to which she could only offer back an emotionless stare as she fired back, having expected that response. “There’s one I’d trust more than others right now. They were in Galesville about two weeks back, with a unique cargo of new wool blankets they apparently source from a farm way out in the west. Sling was so happy to see them she bought like, a dozen of the things, passed a few around and kept roughly….six, for herself? Last I knew, that caravan was heading here. They left Galesville a couple of days before we did, planned to stay in Trotpeka about a week. That would mean they’d have been caught inside when you locked the town down, and they’ll want to be leaving for home. I want out, they want out, and by the looks of this list I’ll need somebody with wagons and a taste for business to help me with selling it. They’ll do it.”

“How confident are you of that?”

--------------------------------------

Her answer, if she could have crossed time and space in an instant, would have been, “very”, and maybe even kissed Sling again for good measure. But she settled for simply helping her finish off the last of her ration.

“…wow,” Sling muttered almost breathlessly when the last of her spell-preserved lettuce had been sucked into her stomach. “…it…it sounds like you had a hell of a time just catching up to me….”

“It took most of the next morning to find that caravan and get my haul loaded up,” she went on, collecting the refuse from the meal and piling it together. “By the time we were ready to leave, Ada and Leon had made it into the city, after the Colonel lifted the lockdown, and found us as we crossed the main bridge. From there it was a race to find your trail and catch up with you…which we did, not long after you brought that diner down on yourself. Hell of a reunion with Elly.”

“I can imagine,” Sling said quietly, her eyes more focused on the floor than anything else. “…so close, the whole time…”

“Don’t think about any of that,” she advised her. “Don’t let yourself get hung up on all the small shit. We’re all alive and back together, and that’s all that I really care about. Now that we’re done with dinner, it’s time we got you moved.”

Sling’s body rolled back into the cot and struggled to shift the blanket back over her, but she managed well enough. “I told you, I’m fine right here—”

“They have beds here,” Kite assured her. “Real, soft beds. I’ve never slept so well in my life. And they’re big beds too.”

Sling’s interest in her sleeping arrangements took a sharp, one-eighty degree to the expected direction…and added in a wrinkle that changed her world. “…big enough for two?”

It was fortunate that she’d barely begun to pull the nearby stretcher over to her, allowing her magic to fizzle out and leave it where it lay. “…what…”

“Kite, I can’t move on my own, not yet.I….I’m going to need help getting around for a bit, even for simple trips to the bathroom. Just…just thought it’d be easier if I didn’t have to send for you, is all….”

A loud snort flared loose from her nostrils, the remnants of a laugh she’d managed to mostly stiffly. “Well, I always did want to sleep with you—”

Their reunion, brief and peaceful as it was, was brought to a loud, crashing end with the sudden (but welcome) interruption of three children and their zebra foalsitter—

“—e’s not outside, maybe that means Mom finally woke up like she said she would this morning—” Light Tail’s voice squealed excitedly as her little body bounced through the tent flaps, then stopped dead in her tracks when she spotted her mother’s awake and slightly alert body staring back at her—

in two, one—

A happy shriek pierced her ears (and Sling’s), and in what seemed like a heartbeat and a rapid clomping of little hooves, a light teal blue body crashed into the weakened mare resting in the cot despite the adult begging for mercy and time—

“Yeah, that sounds like her happy scream,” BJ’s voice droned as he trudged into the tent in her wake. “Least she’s squeezing somebody else to death for once.”

She does love her hugs, Kite mused when her throat tinged with an uncomfortable ghostly feeling of the last “hug” she’d been subjected to from this little filly. “I told you not to move last time—”

“Like that matters,” Rally cackled deviously, somehow managing to make it inside and within grabbing distance of the happy, half-crying little girl hugging her mother to death. “Yo, El-Tee, you’re gonna finish the job if you don’t ease off.”

For a moment, however, it seemed as if Elly had become oblivious to every voice and sound imaginable. But a soft, gurgling choke from Sling’s throat seemed to finally catch Light Tail’s attention where words had failed, and with a shy, sheepish laugh she finally relented and loosened her death grip on her mother’s throat.

“….eeeh, oops,” the little one squeaked.

“Forgiven,” Sling’s voice gasped painfully, though it sounded fairly weak and scratchy.

“But isn’t this great?!” Elly half-shrieked, her voice perking up into a bright (if slightly overbearing) joyousness. “I mean, I’ve had like two weeks to let it sink in, but it must be like a lightning bolt to you to see them again, right?! Who gets that lucky in this stupid wasteland?!”

“Very, very few,” Kite murmured softly. The filly wasn’t quite as ‘over it’ as her words might have indicated—now and then, Elly still felt the urge to just drop what she was doing and try to crush her in her tiny hugs, and it was hard to blame her for it given the circumstances. She hoped she’d grow out of it in the long run. “Be gentle, she’s in no condition to be taking care of herself right now.”

“…oh,” Light Tail’s face faltered slightly when she took a look at the empty meal trays nearby. “…oh, yeah, forgot…that whole coma thing…are you gonna move her?”

“From a cot to the rare, soft beds that have been offered to me and her to ease our individual recoveries, yes.”

“Don’t,” Elly spat almost immediately, which surprised the hell out of everyone because of all the souls in this tent, she’d have figured the two stable ponies would be the first to jump at the chance to rest in the kind of bedding they were used to. “You’ll never get her out before noon. I’m serious, she’ll practically melt into it and you’ll be lucky if she even wakes up tomorrow.”

“I could only hope to be that lucky,” Sling moaned in despair, a sense of longing and desire in her tone at the prospect of a soft bed in her near future.

“She has a point, there is such a thing as too much sleep,” Kite countered. “Might even explain your little excess weight when we first met.”

As expected, the slight jab at her initial physical state provoked a strong and immediate response. “I am not pudgy!”

“Not anymore,” she grinned back. “Face it, a jaunt in the wasteland was probably the best thing to happen to your physical figure. You look like a proper, fit mare now…if you overlook the scars you’re building up. You have a new one, on your left hind leg where the bone was poking out when we finally got you out of the rubble. Thank Luna you were out cold or setting it back in place would have had you screaming bloody murder.”

Sling’s face fell into her pillow with a despairing groan. “…maybe the coma was a blessing in disguise….”

Despite her playful and sometimes child-like demeanor, Julaya had proven to be quite perceptive of others’ moods and emotions and seemed to know exactly when to give a soul space and when it was necessary to make them confront things they’d rather avoid. In this case, she seemed to sense that all of this attention on a pony who had just begun to wake up from a short coma was probably more than necessary, and decided to play the part of the serious “foalsitter” for once. “Come along, little ones, the crazy stable pony needs time to recover properly.We can bug her to death in the morning.”

“Aaahh…actually, I…wanna stay another minute,” Rally protested somewhat nervously, and Kite’s gut churned slightly. She already knew what the teen wanted to say, and it wasn’t like the two of them had gotten along that well these past two weeks. “…something I gotta to talk to Sling about.”

“We’ll wait,” Julaya said, already turning to head back out of the tent.

Kite’s magic engulfed the filly trying to smother her mother with hugs and nuzzles, and it was mildly amusing to see her little legs flailing and running in place as she was lifted away from her parent before flat-out stopping and seemingly falling limp with disappointment. “Awwww….”

“You will have plenty of time to kill her with love tomorrow, little tail of light.”

Cute, Kite snickered silently. It was a little rare for Julie to call her anything else, and it tended to get under Elly’s coat and make her forget what was bothering her. “Light! Tail! Two words, is it that hard?” she cried out as she chased after BJ and Julaya, her aptly-named tail disappearing beyond the tent flap.

Perhaps knowing that Light Tail would be too busy with BJ and Julie to hear anything that might escape the tent, Sling went right to the heart of what had Rally’s attention right then. “…this about that thing we talked about?”

“….yeah,” Rally confirmed fearfully, though Kite was in disagreement over which of them was more terrified. “Um…I don’t suppose that offer comes with a…trial period?”

“…something wrong with the few days we had before I got knocked out?”

“Yeah, that was before…well, you and Elly were messed up, lost your friends to ghouls…or so it seemed at the time,” the teen said, sparing Kite little more than a sideways “don’t trust you” glance. “…and Kite has managed to make you look agreeable compared to that.”

Saw it coming and I’m still not looking forward to it…

“I’m….sorry,” she managed to force herself to say gently. “My…experiences, with other wasteland orphans haven’t been good ones. Mostly from the five months I spent with my sixth master, in a little shantytown next to an old junkyard. A squatter in an old roadside motel looked after the orphans that wound up there, and it didn’t take long for him to organize them into a pack of thieving rats. They’d go around town or stand by the bar and the three merchants and try to steal from everybody that walked by them. Turns out to be a pretty common thing elsewhere too, and the first three times I got pilfered got me in enough trouble with my masters to make me weary of kids on their own like that….”

Rally’s hardened stare faltered somewhat, which surprised her almost as much as what she said next. “…oh, that guy,” she whispered quietly. “…sick creep.”

“You…you know of him?”

Her sad little smile was not all that reassuring or pleasant, but rather a sign of repressed memories best left untold. “…after I got my new leg, I was back on my own, and I’d heard about this guy in a junkyard town that would take care of orphans and it seemed like a pretty good deal to stupid eleven-year-old me, who barely knew what sex was or what it entailed. I got there, and heard some nasty rumors about a couple of orphans who’d disappeared recently. Some of the squatters in town figured they’d went and picked the pockets of ponies who didn’t take kindly to being robbed, but a couple guys with more brains than the rest thought they’d been sold to the black slave market. The one that trades in kids, that the guilds say they don’t support per Union rules but everybody knows different. I didn’t stay too much longer after I found that out. Guy looked shifty as hell. Heard later that some pony finally offed him in his own “base of operations”, some stable pony with less patience than Sling here. But…yeah, if that’s what you based your view of orphans on, it’s…kinda hard to blame you for it. Some of ‘em do stuff like that on their own anyway, so it’s not exactly undeserved…”

This was…a lot less painful and uncomfortable than she’d thought it would be. Smart and reasonable? It was almost like looking at a snapshot of Light Tail’s teenaged years…

“Please say this means you’re done glaring daggers at each other,” Sling begged. “Because I don’t want any more trouble than I’m already looking at…”

“…no daggers,” Rally said cautiously. “Yet.”

“Better not be, ever,” Sling warned. “She…she’s important to me.”

The look in Rally’s eyes betrayed her own inner worries about her near future. “…didn’t figure you swung that way.”

“It’s…complicated.I don’t even know how things with her will turn out. But the two of you will be dealing with each other a lot, if you do this. But there’s some side benefits in the mess.”

“Such as?”

“…well, she’s medically trained, and having that metal leg grafted to what’s left of the organic one has to have health issues of its own, to say nothing of whatever other ailments are floating around out there.”

Oh gods, here it comes—

“Trust me, I’m well informed on her med skills. Light Tail practically shoved me at her a couple of days after she calmed down and said “Check her out”.”

Sling’s face almost fell into a bout of laughter. “…snnrk…not even a week in her company and she was already giving you orders.”

“Says the adult who had two-thirds of her meals in her stable whipped up by said child, if she’s even half-truthful—”

“My “med skills” worked out quite well for you when it came to that budding yeast infection,” Kite blurted in a mischievous fit of impatience.

If a pony’s skin could be seen under their coat, Rally’s face would have probably been flushed red with embarrassment, and her tail tucked itself in tight between her legs. “Oh my god, tell everybody why don’t you?!”

“Won’t need to if you keep talking that loudly.”

Rally caught her tongue in time to turn her harsh words into a strangled, frustrated scream, but afterward managed to calm down just long enough to finish the subject at hoof. “…guess if I’m torn between bitching about this or nearly being gang-raped, I’m a pretty lucky girl….”

To say nothing of the nightmares you’re getting where they actually go through with it…

“…you’re gonna need to promise me something, if I…if I stay…”

“You remember what I said?” Sling said. “That you needed to be sure you wanted this, because I would not let you go back to the life you had afterward?”

Kite felt the lump in her gut jump up into her throat. She hadn’t realized the stable pony meant it to be that long-term—

“I remember, and…honestly, there’s lots worse deals to be stuck with, but you need to do something for me, and I’m not talking about putting a lid on that short fuse of yours.”

Sling’s body tensed up slightly, or at least as much as it could given her present condition. “…what is it?”

Rally’s left foreleg came up, pointing in Kite’s direction. “If this…whatever this is you got with her, if you’re even remotely serious about it…then you need to grow a set and tell Light Tail how sex works. Soon.”

Shit, you had to make it a hard one…but…

Sling didn’t like being told such things, certainly not with the…colorful language that Rally used to get her point across. “That’s my business, not yours—”

“I’m with her on this, actually,” Kite heard herself speak out loud before Sling could finish. “Maybe things between us don’t go any further than where they’re at now, maybe it does. Either way, it’s long past time that she learned. The sooner that happens, the less awkward it’ll be if things progress to…heated moments that might be hard to explain otherwise.”

Sling’s stubbornness on this rather important discussion was not unexpected, but it was also becoming very exhausting and pointless, given everything that Elly had gone through these last three and a half months. “It’s…it’s not time—”

“Sling, she has seen people killed in front of her, some of them by your hooves,” Kite fired back. “She has seen you shot and nearly killed, more than once. She has shot at people in gunfights and hit a few of them. And the last time we got into a fight five days ago, on the way here, she intentionally shot three raiders in the knees who managed to make their way to the wagon you were riding in, so I’m starting to think she no longer has a problem hurting people trying to hurt or kill those she cares about. And even after all this, she has managed to stay mostly the same in that she still refuses to outright kill anybody and even left those three raiders bandaged up and with a day’s worth of water before we went on our way. If she’s not ready now, when will she be?”

Sling’s mouth opened briefly, as if in the process of speaking, but no words or sounds escaped. The fiery defiance in her eyes rapidly died out, and what little fight there had been in her body language faded away. She looked—and probably felt—defeated, probably at the notion of her little girl intentionally knee-capping people with a gun…

She wished she could have felt happy about it. “…so this is what it feels like to kick a puppy…”

“Look at it like this,” Rally added anyway, throwing in that last proverbial kick to make sure the point stuck. “Do you want her to learn from you, or from a gang of sick screwballs looking for a girl to play with? You can’t count on being able to bust in at the last second and kill every last one of them, and we’ll eventually stumble into an intact library and she’ll go looking for books on the subject now that the idea finally came to her the other day.”

The long, agonizing ten seconds of silence almost made it look like Sling would just tell them to piss off and leave her alone, but for once in her life she finally just gave up the fight and sank into the cot, as if she were trying to retreat from the world. “….I….I’ll…try to….”

--------------------------------------

Within two days of waking up from the longest nap she’d never remember having, she had regained enough strength and magic control to be able to take short walks and perform basic living and hygienic tasks on her own. And since her visit to the Runners’ main equipment suppliers didn’t involve any strenuous actions or shooting drills (or wasn’t supposed to), Kite had begrudgingly allowed her to go and collect her “bounty” reward for Saurus’s death but insisted on coming along to make sure she behaved and didn’t do anything stupid.

The walk wasn’t a terribly long one—a few minutes, at best, and the quiet trek was a welcome change from the hectic two days she’d spent catching herself up on everything she’d missed.

Like Light Tail willingly knee-capping people who got too close to her when they were clearly threats to her. Even if it was an appropriate reaction, she still had a hard time wrapping her mind around it. Rally and BJ were different—they’d been born and raised in this hellish, lawless landscape, and had learned harsh lessons in survival that no child in a sane world would ever even fathom. Light Tail? The stable was as close to a stable form of law and governance that could be found in the wastes (the Union barely counted since they allowed slavery to flourish). Until they’d left that damn place, the biggest worry in her life was homework and whether she’d get to spend any time playing with her friends. That Light Tail could learn—however reluctantly—when it was time to stop trying to talk her way out of a fight and fight, was….heart-breaking? Even though she’d been the one to teach her how to shoot, she didn’t expect her to actually hurt anyone, but…in hindsight, she should have realized it a lot sooner. At least she still drew the line at killing a person.She hoped she would never cross that line.

But the moment she spotted Ada’s large body waiting for her at their destination, talking with a mare and stallion near one of the wagons and an array of covered tables, she pushed the thoughts aside and focused on the upcoming task at hand. She and Kite had talked about it last night before bed (it still felt weird to have a pony her own size sharing her sleeping space), and while neither of them were ready to completely commit to the plan, it was worth a shot to know if it actually could be done first, once they got the bounty reward on Saurus taken care of. Knowing one way or the other would aid the decision-making process.

Thankfully, Ada was a much more social soul than she was and would inevitably make the morning’s ordeals a fairly painless one. “Yo, crazy pony!” the griffon greeted loudly as the pair drew within speaking distance. “You might want to escape the building before blowing it up next time.”

Even now, Sling Shot could barely remember what had really happened in that diner after she’d slaughtered those four Pythons trying to gang-rape Rally. She could only remember gunfire, screams, and an explosion that sounded like that mana sphere spell she’d used to crush Saurus under a bath house establishment. Maybe she’d charged up a similar spell and simply forgot to dial back the power? She could believe that, if she was anywhere near as angry as she’d thought she’d been. “I’m…not certain I even intended to do that.It’s pretty muddy, really. Don’t know that I’ll ever remember for sure.”

“Yeah, getting a roof dropped on your head can do that,” Ada chuckled, then turned her gaze back to the pair she’d been conversing with earlier. “So! This is Ricochet, and that’s her hubby Citrus—”

“Rico will do fine,” the mare added, giving Sling a quick once-over. Her dark gray coat was broken up by a web harness bearing several utility pouches, and her black mane had been cut short at the base of her skull while her tail was tied up at the dock. The only bright spot on her was her cutie mark—a bronze-colored bullet smashing its way through a black line. “You might want to consider some armor if you want to avoid more scars in the future.”

“Hon, be gentle,” Citrus scolded lightly. Like his name suggested, his coat was a sharp orange and his lemon-shaded mane and tail were likewise cropped short in a manner similar to his mate’s, and even his cutie mark bore a sliced orange and lemon lying together as if on the ground.

“No, actually, she’s right,” Kite chimed in perhaps a little too quickly. “Healing potions don’t work as well on Sling as they do most of us, so some manner of protection would probably be in her best interest.”

“We’ll see what we can do,” Ricochet said, finally breaking her grim appearance with a small smile. “In the meantime, I believe we have some business to work out. I’m not sure if it’s been discussed with you, given how quiet they want to be regarding our existence, so I’ll give you the short version. My outfit and the Runners have been partners going on eleven years now. They keep us informed of events beyond Withercha and our operations safe, and we supply them with as much ammunition and equipment as we can. We’ve been blessed with some great luck the last four years that have enabled us to step up our manufacturing capabilities considerably, and you’ll be the first outsider to see the fruits of that labor. Has Ada filled you in on the bounty details?”

“….Leon, actually,” Sling answered with a quick and unamused glance at the towering griffon, who could only grin nervously at the mental slip-up. “He wasn’t very specific either. He mentioned only a pistol and rifle, a .45 Auto and a 5.56mm, no mention of make or model on the latter.”

“Oh,” Ricochet muttered in surprise. “W-well…I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m afraid the .45 is not available. Despite our production improvements, most of our capacity was focused on delivering what the Runners requested and then some, and that didn’t include .45s. You’re welcome to whatever sidearm fits your fancy, we have more than enough to fulfill our contract. As for the rifle…well, we have several varieties, if Ada’s initial suggestion is not to your liking. Cit, if you would, please.”

With a sly grin of one anticipating the reaction to a special surprise, Citrus’s jaws began pulling the thick fleece blankets off of the tables, three in all, and Sling’s heart stopped momentarily just spying the massive array of ballistic hardware on the first table. Several models of both C and N-series 10mms, a dozen M&A 9mms, another dozen of another type of semi-automatic pistol with a squared slide featuring a stepped cut down the middle of the slide and cobblestone-type plastic grip panels, close to two dozen Ironshod revolvers of different models (all blued steel), a few 12.7mm pistols and even a couple of 14mms….and then there were a few large semi-automatic pistols that appeared to have a triangular-shaped fixed barrel and accompanying shroud….and a half dozen more pistols with long, open-top slides exposing most of the barrel—

A foreign hoof gently pushed her hanging jaw back in place before she could start salivating. “Down, girl,” Kite’s voice admonished her right ear.

Ricochet couldn’t help laughing at her expense, but she was easily ignored. “Fond of pistols, are we?”

“It’s…what I’m best with,” she managed to say…after knocking Kite’s hoof off her jaw, anyway.

“Pistols are decent up close. But if you’re going to insist on fighting your way across the wastes, you’ll need a much more powerful weapon with some reach to it, which brings us to—”

Citrus had been hovering near the second table, apparently just waiting for his cue to unveil its contents, and Kite’s hoof came back up to her jaw to keep it in place as she took in the array of rifles presented.It had likely been decided earlier in the morning to only place one of each available model on the table in order to display the wide variety of weaponry available for her choosing. A bolt-action .308 was the first weapon she could pick out simply by virtue of what appeared to be an unvarnished and unscarred walnut stock, complete with a black forend tip and a stainless jeweled bolt body. This particular rifle had iron sights installed on the barrel, fitted with green arcane crystal tube inserts for low light shooting conditions….

….but…the stock was built for a griffon…

…come to think of it, all of these guns are griffon-centric.

“I…don’t think I’ve seen a gun yet that could be operated by a pony’s hooves,” she noted aloud, pulling herself closer to the tables (and away from Kite’s insistent hooves).

“A lot of the Runners are griffons,” Ricochet explained, walking along behind the tables until she was behind the rifles. “And some of the unicorns among them prefer griffon-style firearms, they tend to be more streamlined and easier to handle than a pony-specific model which tends to have magazines in odd places, like the side or the top. We make pony-style firearms on a per-order basis for the Runners, and keep a few extra on hand just in case, if you would prefer to look at one of those—”

“No no, this is fine,” Sling assured her quickly before the mare could start pulling the precious firearms out of reach. “I…I prefer the griffon-style myself, I was just…curious. Pony guns seem pretty rare in the wastes is all.”

“There’s a fairly good explanation for that,” Citrus’s voice broke in from the third table, which was uncovered and appeared to be mostly a pile of magazines and spare parts. “From the few records we’ve been able to recover here in the prairie, it would seem that the majority of arms manufacturers here were griffon-run firms, and pony-style firearms were routinely shipped in from the Core. Ironshod did have a secondary facility in Withercha, but it was a smaller operation and was more of a repair center than a factory. It did have the production capacity to churn out pistols, however.”

“It’s funny that my husband brings that quirk of the prairie up, because there is one rifle here that was originated entirely from a griffon arms factory and yet was also manufactured for ponies, if they so desired,” Ricochet added, her horn’s magic enveloping the weapon in question and lifting it up towards Sling—

Whoa….this th—

“What the eff, the whole thing’s backwards!” Sling’s mouth sputtered as she scoured the “rifle” over. It was far too short compared to the bolt-action or even Ada’s black rifle. She would go so far as to say it was shorter than Julie’s rifle, and as previously shouted….it seemed backwards, and wrong. The magazine was set behind the trigger and grip, to say nothing of its construction, which appeared to be entirely plastic save for the magazine spring she could see through the translucent, bronze-colored mag body….

“It’s a bullpup,” Ada said from her left side, one of her talons reaching out to point at the ejection port above the magazine as she explained the concept being presented to her. “The action and mag well are basically moved back into the weapon’s stock to cut about a foot of length off the overall package.

“Umm…why?” was the next question out of her mouth.

“An all griffon-unit in the Equestrian military, based right here in the prairie,” Rico replied, turning the weapon up and setting it down on the table stock-first. “They weren’t happy with the weight and length of their issued weapons. This particular unit also happened to be an aerial assault battalion, so they had some special requirements for their mission profile. Weight and length had a big impact on their ability to maneuver in the skies, and could also impact mission flight time as they embarked on patrols or launched an offensive from a staging position. At the time, they worked with what the government issued, but I think we can agree that a twenty-pound machine gun and ammunition can be a lot for a flying griffon to contend with when they’re already saddled with fifty pounds of gear.”

“No shit,” Ada grumbled with an uncomfortable shudder. “Even I would have a problem with that much weight.”

The strange, backwards rifle began to rotate in place, turning towards them and unfolding its forward vertical grip into position—another oddity of the increasingly bizarre weapon that was throwing Sling’s conceptions of a conventional rifle out the window. “So they petitioned the arms firms setting up operations in the prairie to come up with some solutions. One request they made early was that they wanted a weapon that could serve several roles at once with a minimum of parts changes, and preferably without tools. Rifle, close-quarters carbine or SMG, or even a light squad support weapon or designated sharpshooter’s rifle. One early attempt by a pony firm was based around a common receiver that you attached components to and turned out to be too expensive and time-consuming to manufacture. It wasn’t any shorter than the weapons in government service and the number of parts needed to reconfigure the weapon from rifle to machinegun and whatnot was more logistics and inventory work than the aerial battalion wanted to deal with. A griffon firm, however, came up with this rifle, and it’s a fit of engineering genius. They cut a lot of the length off of by moving the receiver and barrel into the stock, so it’s shorter and handles better in close quarters, and isn’t too cumbersome to strap to the body during flight—”

A button lever on the underside of the receiver, just behind the forward folding grip, was pushed down by a touch of magic, and then the grip—and its attached barrel—was pulled free from the receiver, and right away Sling could see that it wasn’t a cut-down barrel like she’d initially assumed, but a full 20-inch rifle barrel…

…a twenty-inch barrel that she just pulled out of the gun like a kid’s toy block set, oh my gods that will be so damn easy to get to for cleaning—

“…oh my, I like that,” she murmured, or thought she did. She was pretty sure a little gurgling found its way into her words somewhere. “So painless to get out…”

“The barrel assembly also houses the gas block and regulator, so the assembly will always be tailored to the barrel length. This is how the rifle is changed from one role to another. I can slide a shorter barrel in if I expected to be working in city environments, or, if I wanted to, I could—”

Rico’s magic pulled another barrel assembly off the table, one at least three or four inches longer than the one she’d just removed from the weapon and which was quite a bit thicker and even had its own bipod attached to it—

—and slid it into the weapon’s receiver in one smooth motion, twisting the forward grip down into position and locking it in place—

“—throw on a twenty-four-inch machine gun barrel that can also work as a designated sharpshooter’s barrel in a pinch. Say…one and a half-inch groups at a hundred meters, with practice and the right optic, but we’ve churned out sixteen and twenty-inch barrels that could do an inch at a hundred with the right match ammo and a twelve-power optic. You’ll likely get two inch-groups with a four-power optic, but that’s still loads better than an M-series rifle with a government barrel.”

“Sling, if I see one sign of exceptionally inappropriate arousal we’re going back to quarters,” Kite’s voice promised her ominously and immediately, causing a rush of blood to flood into her face.

Rico, at least, managed to stay on track and purposefully ignored the nurse-maid at her side. “There’s some drawbacks to the package. With the ejection port so far back, shooting around corners from your left side can get you pelted with hot brass, but that’s mainly an issue for griffons and non-unicorn ponies. Trigger will be long and heavy, at first, and it’s got quirks of its own. The aerial battalion wanted a strange mechanism that didn’t require a fire selector switch, so the firm designed the trigger to do both semi and full-auto depending on how far it’s pulled. A light press halfway through lets off a single shot, and for full-auto you pull it all the way back. You can go from aimed single shots to short controlled bursts at close contact targets on the fly, but it requires a good deal of training and constant practice to get it down right.”

Her enthusiasm over the rifle started to wane a little. She wasn’t terribly good with one to start with, and the idea of having to learn one with a trigger system like this was not a very enticing prospect. “…that’s…a little intimidating…”

“If you can shoot a milk bottle from twenty-five yards and then pop one of the flying shards in the same second, with a motorized pistol you’d never fired before, you can learn to shoot a rifle,” Kite chastised her. “What was it you told us once? Shooting well takes practice?”

“Could be a matter of balance too,” Ada chimed in. “You told me once that you were never any good with a rifle. How did you sight them in in your previous life?”

Sling noted right off that Ada had taken a little care not to mention the fact that her “previous life” was a stable pony, and deigned to let that illusion stand. If Ada didn’t feel comfortable telling these “benefactors” of her outfit who she really was, she wouldn’t offer that information up herself. “….machine rest,” Sling answered. “Slap it in and tighten it, and I could usually get the sights zeroed at a hundred yards. But as far as shooting it myself, unless the target was about twenty five to thirty yards out I didn’t have much chance of hitting them.”

“…that doesn’t sound right,” Rico pondered aloud. “By that logic, your levitation shouldn’t be working that well on a pistol either—”

“I use telekinesis,” Sling correctly quickly. “I tried using a levitation spell when I first started shooting, but I found I was too tempted to go easy with how I handled the gun and wound up with terrible recoil that I could feel hitting me in the head through the feedback loop in the spell field. I went to a telekinesis spell that forced me to really get a hard, stable grip on the gun and it worked out a lot better for me. Side benefit is that with the telekinesis spell, all the gunpowder and brass residue that a pony might normally get from firing a gun through their bare hooves or a levitation spell gets caught in the spell field and never makes its way to me or my face. I’ve been shooting that way ever since. And it helped me develop my telekinesis over the years as I worked to improve my shot groups. I can put out over a dozen separate telekinesis spells in a small area at once, but I mostly just used it to tickle torture my daughter now and then.”

“Ehehehehe, I’d love to see that,” Ada laughed. “But I think you just confirmed what I think the problem is.”

“Really?”

“Weight balance,” the griffon grinned back. “I know just enough about how a unicorn’s magic works to know that when you use telekinesis it’s sort of a dual-edged sword deal. You can muscle stuff around with your mind, but you can also feel the weight of it through your horn, right?”

“Basically, yes. I’ve learned to tune it out most of the time, but now and then I do notice it. Especially with things I’m not used to handling.”

“So when you pick up a rifle, the weight balance throws you off, doesn’t it?”

Sling’s tongue stayed still in her mouth when she tried to speak, leaving her open-jawed in silent thought as she mulled that over, trying to recall the last time she’d bothered to take note of how a weapon felt in her spell field….

…and decided on a whim to test that out by plucking one off a table. A black rifle, M-series, with a twenty-inch barrel and what looked like the slightly longer fixed buttstock and rounded forend guard of an E2 model rather than the triangular E1 style—

There, she noted almost immediately as she brought the weapon up to her body until she could sight down the iron sights embedded in the top of the fixed carry handle. At a bit under eight pounds empty and over three and one-quarter feet long it was a bit of a log, but what surprised her the most, now that she was actively allowing herself to feel the thing in her spell field, was that a good deal of the weight was spread out in the receiver and barrel, out forward of her….and she was forced to utilize a second telekinesis spell on the forend to keep it aloft and the sights aligned. And despite her years of “practice” tickling Light Tail half to death with several telekinesis fields at once, keeping the sights lined up well enough to get a good shot beyond her usual pistol range wasn’t as easy as she’d have liked. And Light Tail was heavier than a gun by far, what was she doing wrong….

“…it’s not exactly natural, no. And this thing’s not even loaded, a full magazine would add more weight out front.”

Ada’s arms gingerly reached out and slipped the rifle out of her spell field to take hold of it herself, shouldering it and taking aim at the empty wasteland beyond the line of tables and wagons. “I gather that’s something you’re not used to, being a pistol mare. But for argument’s sake, I’ll lay out what you already know. Conventional rifles have the receiver and barrel forward of the stock, so us griffons and unicorns are forced to hold them up and away from our center of gravity in our bodies. I can lean forward if I stand up, put my weight behind the gun to tame the recoil in full auto a bit, but I can’t use it to support the weapon, I gotta use my arms to do that. After a while holding it like this, it can tire me out, so most of the time I just sling it across the body and practice getting it up and into a shooting position as quick as I can. Unicorns got it a bit easier in terms of manipulating it, but you have the same basic problem. You can put your body weight behind the gun when you fire, if you practice the technique you use to do it, but you have to aim and support the weapon with your magic when you’re shooting it since the gun’s center of balance is out in front of you. Same with your kid, only her weight is a lot more concentrated and rolls around as you’re tickling her to death.”

“That’s the one benefit of a bullpup nobody seems to grasp just by looking at it,” Rico chimed in, pulling the machine gun barrel out of her weapon and re-inserting the original twenty-inch barrel before locking it in place and floating the rifle over towards Sling. “By moving the action into the stock, we’re not only cutting eight to twelve inches off the overall length, but the gun’s center of balance changes and it’s a lot closer to your body. You now have two centers of balance working much closer together, and Ada doesn’t have to depend entirely on forward arm strength to hold and aim the weapon. She can put more of her own weight behind it and in a manner that allows that body weight to partially support the weapon. She can move about with the weapon’s weight evenly distributed in her arms, in a ready position for firing snap shots almost immediately for much longer than she could with a conventional rifle, and she can switch from one target to another with less muscle strength from her arms and using more of her body weight to accomplish it. This is what most of the griffons in the Runners are going to be switching to.”

Sling’s magic slipped over the rifle and pushed Rico’s influence away, bringing the gun closer until the rubber buttplate was pressing into her shoulder to give her a down-the-sights view of the optic that was mounted on the receiver on a pair of backward-swept legs, ostensibly to give it enough clearance to line up with a griffon or pony’s eye—

—right away, she could tell the difference in how the weight of the gun was distributed compared to the black rifle she’d been handling a minute ago. True to Ada’s word, it was now much closer to her body, and even though it actually felt heavier than the other rifle, it wasn’t hanging out in front of her as much and thus not tugging at the tip of her horn, but more to the middle of it like she was used to noticing when she was handling a pistol. On a whim, she allowed her forelegs to wrap around the rear and forward grips, allowing them to take over the job of supporting the rifle and leaving her magic free to work the various operating controls as she poked about for them. The charging handle was stiff, but smooth, and she prayed it wasn’t the reciprocating type. The magazine release was located behind the magazine, designed for a griffon’s talon to press it in as they grasped the mag and pulled it out, and she noted that unlike an M-series rifle, there wasn’t any need to rigorously slap it in to make sure it locked. The moment the plastic mag was seated there was a distinct, sharp click—the mag seemed to press the release in as it was inserted, and the release button would snap back into position once the locking tab on the back of the magazine was secured in place inside the mag well. And the plastic, translucent mag had a side benefit of allowing her to see, at a glance, roughly how far empty the magazine was, if she had time to look at it.

What she didn’t like was the optic. It was either a no-magnification scope, or one so low as to appear as such, and the reticle was a simple doughnut in the middle. “Hunh…Ada’s right about the weight balance, this feels more familiar…not sure about this little scope though.”

“The sighting system can be tailored to whatever you find preferable once the Runners get you trained on the weapon,” Rico assured her quickly. “My suggestion would be to go with a dot reflex optic until you get more comfortable and familiar with taking shots at typical rifle distances. We can change out the receiver to one with a flattop rail, like a marksman carbine, and that will have backup flip sights installed in case the optic fails. With the flattop receiver, you can switch out optics at your leisure if they were designed to mount on the rails. There’ll also be a second strip of rail on the right side of the receiver, at a forty-five degree angle, that can mount a laser module if you find one.”

Her chest was afloat with trepidation as she mulled over the choice between a more conventional rifle she was familiar with (at least as far as repairs went), or this strange, olive drab rifle and its backwards layout that she’d never seen before, and which apparently could have a damaged barrel replaced in a few seconds and without a vice grip and torque wrench…

…and that, really, was what had her willing to at least try it.If the gun was as brand-new as it looked, she couldn’t see herself needing to do any real work on it for quite some time. “…I’ll give this one a chance,” she said at last, setting the rifle back down on the table. “I don’t see how I could do much worse with it than I do with any other rifle I pick up.”

“Trigger control will be tricky and really important with that dual-mode trigger, but I think you’ll be fine,” Ada said with a slight air of approval. Not surprising, if she’d told Rico to show her this rifle first before getting to the others. “It’s the pistol that’s got me worried, if you’re as good as Kite says you’ll be hard to please.”

“Is there a caliber preference?” Rico asked next, moving back over to the pistol table, and Sling trudged along as best she could. She was starting to feel a little winded out.

“I’ve been shooting a 10mm N-series for most of my adult life,” Sling replied, going back over the weapons laid out before her. “I used to shoot a .44 Mag more regularly, until I was down to about one box and have had a hell of a time finding ammo for it. Think I’m down to…thirty-six rounds? I do have some .44 Specials, but I’m not fond of them. I mostly have them just to have something to shoot through the gun that I can bear to part with.”

“Actually, you now have around…fifty? One of those mercs you killed when you…got Rally out of a tight spot had a .44 on him,” Kite explained, finally finding an opportune moment to set her enchanted travelling saddle down and start pulling stuff out, starting with what looked like a worn, blued steel large frame Ironshod revolver that she immediately recognized as the Inspector model, with its 6.5-inch barrel. “He had a few rounds on him, and if it’s not too much trouble could you guys give this a look and see what work needs to be done on it? Sling usually handles that, but I don’t want her working her magic too much just yet. She’s been in a light coma for about two weeks and just came out it the other day.”

“I’ve been told as much,” Rico confirmed, already taking the Inspector into her care and clearly pleased with its outward condition, at the least. Or maybe she just liked Ironshod revolvers in general. “Looks to be in remarkable shape, given its age. We’ll go over it, see what needs care and whatnot, no charge. You don’t see very many of these out in the wastes anymore and this is just a classic—”

Okay, settled, revolver freak—

“You should see the crazy pony’s .44,” Ada chipped in unnecessarily, and then quickly derailing the conversation with what, to Rico, was a bombshell. “Phoenix Rising custom, matte gray finish—”

Rico’s hold on the Inspector faltered to the point that she had to catch it when it fell out of her magic grasp, and shakily set it down on the table and looked back at Sling with wide, almost glassy eyes. “W-What?”

Even Citrus knew just how badly Ada had screwed things up. “….oh godsdammit—”

Kite, for reasons that escaped logic and sound reasoning, opted to accede to the dark-shaded mare’s unspoken desires and casually presented Grayhawk to her from its holster, even popping the cylinder open to show that it was empty—

“H-hey hey, wait, stop, stop that, that’s mine—”

Sling’s protests were ignored completely as Rico took Grayhawk into her temporary possession, at once flipping the gun about until she was staring at the serial number on the right side of the frame under the cylinder and simultaneously taking a pencil and paper and writing it down—

“Holy shit, ENT-1701, first one of the series what the hell—”

“Oh sweet Celestia, nooooo,” Citrus groaned in despair, his head drooping low. “Now you’ve done it—”

“For real!?” Ada squealed, zipping around the table to peer at the gun over Rico’s shoulder. “I never noticed that the last time she let me see it!”

“For real!” Rico squealed as well, though Sling wasn’t sure that it was appropriate—or sane—for such a grim-looking mare to have a look of near ecstasy on her face. It was decidedly….unsettling. “It’s got the proof handler’s cartouche on the frame, just above and ahead of the trigger guard, look—”

“Luna’s moon cheeks, you’re right holy hell—”

“I need an adult,” Sling squeaked meekly, slowly backing away from the table. She wanted as little to do with the increasing degree of madness as possible.

“Oh, don’t worry, I’ll protect you from their molesting hooves and claws, my fair maiden,” Kite laughed quietly.

“I should apologize,” Citrus sighed deeply, moving away from the spectacle himself as the two blubbering females gawked at Grayhawk like a dirty magazine. “You just met the two biggest nerds of the Phoenix Rising fan club that gather here in the Runners’ camp. There’s like…thirty of ‘em, I think? My wife got roped into their madness years ago and it’s only gotten worse as she’s shared what we’ve uncovered in our forays into Withercha’s industrial ruins.”

“…wait, fan club?” Sling whispered, lest Ada and Rico hear her words and try to drag her into their increasingly unstable world.

“Not so loud!” Citrus hissed back fearfully, stealing a look back to make sure the words had not reached their ears. “…yeah. They know almost everything that can be known about the firm and its guns, and their revolvers in particular. You ask me, Ironshod revolvers were better quality, but a Phoenix Rising gun is damn near indestructible the way they’re built. Most .44 Mags the Runners bring in on the rare occasion that they find one is a Phoenix model of some sort. I think that Inspector is only the third Ironshod .44 we’ve seen in ten years. We can make those ourselves, brand new, but Ironshods from the Before are not that common. And by the sound of it you just handed my wife the dream gun of the fan club, supposedly only around a hundred of that very model were even produced from their custom shop—”

“Sling Shot, I’d like to borrow this .44 for a while,” Rico announced suddenly, causing Sling and Citrus to briefly look away from each other and eye the dark-shaded mare with suspicious glares. “It won’t be damaged or fired in any way.”

“What for?” Sling questioned darkly.

“Measurements,” Rico answered, though she had to suppress a giddy squeal midway through her reply. “By the looks of it, this gun is in damn near mint condition, perhaps only a few hundred rounds through it. I want to take as many spec measurements as I can. Cylinder length, chamber wall thickness, forcing cone, barrel, frame and top strap, I mean everything. If I can fill in missing data on our archived blueprints back home we may be able to reproduce this model—”

“O-oh screw me half to death I’m gonna have a girl moment here—” Ada gasped, with perhaps just a little too much information than anyone asked for.

Get that gun back before they take off and make love to it! “I don’t thi—”

Rico didn’t even seem to acknowledge that she’d begun speaking, and instead casually lifted one of the heavy-framed double-action revolvers off the table and floated it out into Sling’s personal space, where the stable mare could immediately identify it as an Ironshod Deluxe Officer’s Magnum, just like Rally’s….

…actually, just like it, even down to the barrel length and front sight blade, except that the blued finish was polished up and the grip stocks looked like they were brand new, and very nice looking—

“Let me do that, and I’ll open up the rare pistol stock for your perusal and even throw in this .357 Ironshod, with six speedloaders and a fitted holster,” Rico finished with a slightly quivering voice, almost like a child begging its mother for a little more play time before bed. “10mm isn’t as common in the west as it is in the east, but you can find .38 and .357s all over the place, and they’re usually a little cheaper than a ten millimeter.”

…there is that issue of cost, Sling admitted silently, taking a quick, but careful inspection of the .357 to make sure it was in proper working order. Cylinder seemed tight and in proper alignment, but she had a go/no-go gauge in her pack she could check that with later. No nicks or scratches on the gun at all, hammer was smooth and showed no sign of snagging or hanging up when she cocked it, trigger press was very good in both single and double-action, better than Grayhawk even….

…and all she had to do was let this batty mare do a detail inspection on Grayhawk? Hard to turn that down, actually. She could find a 10mm N-series just about any time she wanted to, and she was curious about what kind of firearm constituted “rare” to these two ponies if they had such immaculate guns to start with. “What kind of rare stock are we talking about?”

Rico promptly set Grayhawk down on the table (very gently, as if cradling a newborn foal), and hurriedly floated out a table from the back of the wagon behind her and unfolded it into position before she began to pull pistol cases out of the wagon and setting them down on the new table. After the sixth box case was laid down, she began popping them open to reveal the so-called “rare” stock—

Oh…my, Sling’s thoughts trailed off as she soaked in the new arms. At a glance, they seemed to be custom-made variants of the standard models on the main pistol table—checkered wood grips, better sights, better-polished finishes, and things of that nature. But one stood out from the rest simply by how much different it looked from its standard-issue cousins nearby, starting with the stainless steel trigger that managed to shine a little bit even under the never-ending gray skies—

“What did I say about inappropriate reactions?” Kite warned quietly, breaking her out of her daze and forcing her to slap her tail back down with a heated blush in her face. “And you have the gall to call out Rico and Ada on it, even. Luna’s moon what is wrong with you girls…”

“Show me another group that can manufacture firearms to factory original specs and in new condition,” Rico snarked back, but took notice of Sling’s interest in the third pistol from the left and scooted the open case closer to her. “Or customize them, like this one here. Based on a heavy-duty variant of a Maretta BM-9, but this one’s…special.”

Thought I recognized it, Sling didn’t say, taking the pistol into a spell field and popping the magazine out for a quick check of the magazine well, and was pleased at how easily even an empty magazine dropped free of the weapon. The slide was an open-top style—to her knowledge, this was the only pistol designed as such. While she personally didn’t like exposing a good deal of the barrel to the elements, the upside was that there was no ejection port for a spent casing to get lodged into and any stovepipe malfunctions could be easily cleared. The barrel itself was a polished stainless steel piece, maybe five inches, and was paired with an equally polished stainless steel guide rod. Where the slide started to deviate from a standard model was in its slightly thicker (and therefore heavier) width, presumably to strengthen the slide for a longer service life. The slide also boasted front serrations, virtually identical in pattern to the rear serrations, and as she recalled from the data entry on this gun from her firearms recognition book, Marettas used a locking block on the barrel to mate it with the slide. The raised hump on each side of the slide where the barrel was locked in place with the slide was probably intended to reinforce this part of the slide…

…and rather than an integrated front sight blade like a standard model, this slide had a dovetail slot for both the front and rear sights, and the distinctive, bright green glow of arcane gems cut into tubes and sealed into the sights popped out at her almost immediately, as did the feeling of slight magical enchantments embedded in the gun that made it almost instinctive to manipulate it in her spell field. “…I think this this the first gun I’ve ever picked up that felt like it was working with my magic instead of just being used by it…”

“We put enchantments on every part of the pistol, from the frame, slide and barrel down to the roll pins and springs, to quadruple the durability and prevent the gun from being damaged by bad or overcharged ammo,” Rico explained. “Standard Marettas with stainless barrels also aren’t usually chrome-lined, but this one is, so cleaning will be easier. And we’re able to do this without sacrificing accuracy as well, so don’t worry about that.”

It began to strike her, right then and there, how incredibly well-off these guys were to be able to manufacture firearms to old-world quality levels and magically enchant them, and at a large enough scale to be able to outfit a mercenary group that was one of the most feared in the prairie…

…and it suddenly became very important to her to start asking questions as to how these guys were able to do this. She couldn’t do it outright or she’d jeopardize any good standing she had with them or the Runners. But if she did what Light Tail did all the time, and asked the right questions about the guns they were willing to sell her, she could glean some intel from their answers. “What’s the usual spread on these?” Sling asked, turning the pistol about to get a closer look at the grips. They’d struck her as looking…off when she’d first glanced at them, and by the looks of them, they appeared to be a high-grade cocobolo with stippled synthetic material panels comprising the bulk of the gripping surface. The synthetic panels themselves were inset into the wood grips and secured via the stainless grip screws, so they weren’t going to come loose during firing…

“We’re working on achieving a three-inch spread at fifty meters for regular production,” Rico replied, a touch of pride creeping into her tone even as Sling felt a sting of shock striking her heart. “This one, however, will get one-and a quarter inches at twenty-five meters.”

“…is that good?” a befuddled Kite pondered.

“That’s insanely good,” Sling heard her voice mouth in disbelief. She wanted to see this particular claim put to the test before she would believe it. “In fact, you’re going to have to prove it. Two inches I could believe, but not what you just quoted me, not at that distance.”

To her surprise, Rico’s reaction was a sick, evil grin as her magic tossed a loaded magazine out in Ada’s direction, which the griffon caught almost immediately. “Ada, help me set up the machine rest down by the firing range.”

Ada’s right talon gently pried the custom 9mm out of Sling’s spell field, and then the griffon turned and walked off towards the firing range about forty yards away from the wagons and tables full of guns. Sling half-hobbled along as best she could, with a little physical assistance from Kite’s body moving right along with her, and as she caught up to the Runner she was able to conjure up a short-lived version of her hearing protection spell on all of them. It’d work for a minute, at best—

“Oh, wow, a sound suppression spell for the ears!” Citrus’s voice cried out with joy. “Do you think you could show us how to do that? There may be yet another trade opportunity in it for you!”

“We’ll talk about it in a bit,” she assured him, though she was privately surprised that they were willing to offer more business in return for simply teaching a spell. Only once in Union territory had she met anybody willing to make such an exchange.

Rico trotted past her with what looked like a portable machine rest for a pistol floating along behind her, and quickly set it down at Ada’s table and began to lock the legs into place and secure them to the table surface while Ada set to installing the pistol into the vice rest after loading it. The target, nailed to what appeared to be a plat of plywood and which was itself nailed to a target stand made up of PVC piping, was a simple sheet of paper with a red circle painted in the middle. On the ground, at the left edge of the firing range itself, looked to be a series of old highway mile marker posts that had been repurposed to serve as distance markers, their numbers presumably chosen to represent the distance they were intended to be set at. Mile marker five, for instance, appeared to be serving as either the five-yard or five-meter distance marker, with the next marker appearing at ten, fifteen, and so on, with the target set at the twenty-five marker line. By the looks of the range, it looked like the distances went out quite a ways—the farthest marker she could make out clearly was fifty (they weren’t very large markers), but could count two dozen more markers beyond that for sure.

“How far out does this range go?”

“About a mile,” Ada rattled off immediately, peering down at the target through the pistol’s sights and adjusting the vice in small increments to satisfy her eagle’s eye of her sight picture. “Target’s set at twenty-five meters.”

“Rest is clamped down, how’s the sight picture?” Rico called out.

Ada’s reply was to adjust the vice slightly to bring the muzzle up, and after eyeballing the target for a couple of seconds she stopped fiddling with the sight adjustment knobs and finished securing the pistol inside the vice. “Dead-center, or as close as my awesome eagle eyes can get. Clear the firing line.”

Rico’s body scooted away from the table and took up a position just off to Ada’s left, just as the griffon racked the pistol’s slide to chamber the first round and flicked the slide-mounted safety forward—

—her right talon moved to a lever on the right side of the machine rest and gently pulled it back, causing its attached trigger bar to come back into the trigger and fire the pistol. Sling’s eyes were fixated on the target, watching a tiny black hole appear in the center of the painted circle even as Ada repeated the process four more times. The hole grew slightly larger with each shot, and by either luck or a miracle from the gun gods, the five-shot string was completed without any of the rounds going astray from the rest. Usually when she did a five-shot group she’d get one flyer out of the bunch unless she used a mechanical rest…and sometimes even then she got a flyer anyway.

“As you can hopefully see, the hole should be no larger than an Equestrian bit,” Rico said proudly as Ada’s body lifted up off the ground and slowly flew off towards the target to retrieve it. “And those were 124-grain military ball rounds, which are known to be loaded very hot, beyond the maximum pressure holds you would find in civilian market rounds. The majority of 9mm ammo you’ll find in the wastes will be much closer to actual pressure specs, so this pistol should hold around two inches in your telekinesis grip regardless of whatever ammunition you stuff in it. The standard model will probably group closer to three inches with anything except the military ammo.”

Sling’s mouth had barely begun salivating when a light, telekinetic slap whacked her on the head from behind, snapping her out of her slight daze. “Oh my god, if I’d known this was what turned you on I’d have tried it a long time ago, you demented mare,” Kite admonished her with a bemoaned cry, and Sling felt her ears wilting out of shame.

“…holy shit,” she squeaked still, if only to make a show of her inner pleasure at the pistol’s brief performance. “One inch! And a quarter. Twenty-five meters! Which is…what would that be in yards, I hate this dual distance measuring shit the old world had, but…seriously! That’s only found in competition oriented pistols! Guns that are not supposed to see combat! And this one is clearly not a race gun!”

“I believe it would be close to twenty eight to thirty yards, roughly,” Rico answered. “And that’s not entirely accurate. The slide comes from a competition oriented variant of the standard Maretta, but the designers made every effort to keep the specs from going too far away from its combat service pistol origins.It should be just as reliable as a standard model, provided you don’t go sticking the thing in mud and sand like an idiot. We’ve also made a small number of improvements of our own.”

That’s the opening I was waiting for…. “Looks to me like you’ve made plenty of those already.”

“This gun has a couple of drawbacks you won’t find in other pistols,” Rico began, pulling the pistol from the machine rest and turning the disassembly lever down before pulling the slide off and lifting the barrel and guide rod out, showing off the attached locking block on the barrel. “The locking block helps keep the barrel in-line throughout the entire firing sequence, so there’s no slight vertical stringing of shots like you might see in other designs that drop the barrel down and back slightly on the rearward stroke. But that block also takes a lot of stress, and when it breaks it can damage the slide, hence the durability enchantments we’ve placed on the weapon in addition to stronger forged steel. The best solution is to replace the locking block before it has a chance to break with a fresh, brand new one. We also installed a cold enchantment inside the dustcover, embedded in a blue ceramic insert, that should keep the gun from heating up in sustained shooting. Less heat on the gun means less wear and longer service. So long as you replace springs and parts as per our preventive maintenance guidelines, we expect this gun to survive a quarter million rounds of military pressure 9mm.”

Oh my sweet Celestia, I’ll never live long enough to wear that thing out, Sling half-swooned in her head. Despite the fact that it wasn’t a 10mm, this pistol was already looking like a very sound substitute for it with a Celestia-level service life like that. And since 9mm ammo was literally everywhere she’d ever looked for ammo, and about the cheapest round she could get besides a .38 Special…well, she’d never be short of bullets, unlike a certain revolver with its own name….

“….I…think you just sold me on this thing,” she managed to say once she had regained enough motor function in her mouth to speak. “…and maybe another one, if you have one.”

“Sorry, that’s the only one,” Rico said apologetically, dashing all of her hopes of getting one for Light Tail anytime soon. “…and to be honest, that’s the only Maretta we’ve ever built like that, and it wasn’t easy. We could probably build a few more, but it would take a few months and won’t be cheap. Four thousand caps and up.”

“Then make do with the one you’re getting as payment for Saurus’s dead ass,” Kite butted in before she could start trying to haggle something out. “I assume that’s it on that end?”

“Aside from about a dozen magazines for each weapon, yes, I believe our business on the Saurus bounty is concluded,” Rico answered. “You mentioned getting some armor for your girlfriend, I believe?”

“She’s not…well, yes, the armor is something she could use, but I have questions as to what kind of bartering you’re open to. If you’re able to manufacture guns brand-new like this—”

A second light whap to the back of her head snapped her back to the world, right when she was about to start losing herself in the custom 9mm before her—

“—and at a level that makes this idiot forget her silent vows of celibacy, what could you possibly need from anybody out here?”

That second hit was probably a little overdone—her head started throbbing in mild, painful aches from the back that reached out into the depths of her brain, and she wasn’t liking it. “Ooooooww…stop hitting me…”

“Depends on what you have to trade,” Rico answered, wisely staying clear of any personal comments she might have been harboring. “MEW weaponry is at the top of our list, but if you happen to know anyone who can fix ‘em up, that kind of expertise could be exceptionally profitable, for both you and the expert in question. We’ve got quite a number of laser and plasma weaponry that need work, especially after the largest cache in Withercha went up in a flambé a while back.”

Rally’s little snit fit with the Pythons is starting to get too well known. “We may know of someone with the skills you’re looking for,” she moaned painfully, rubbing along the back of her skull in a futile attempt to soothe the pain. “But I need to know what you mean by “profitable”. Are we talking food, water, heavy clothing for the winter, what?”

“If you have other firearms you need looked at, we would look at them,” Rico replied. “Replace them with new manufacture parts from our stock, if we have them available.If it would be cheaper overall to simply replace the entire gun, we could do that too. Armored barding is another opportunity for you, and would probably be wiser for you to take that trade first. Ammunition would also be on the table. Food and water supplies would be a mite expensive, but we do have some available we would be willing to part with in exchange for work. Medical supplies are not an option at the moment, we’re having a bit of a shortfall on those ourselves.”

“And what about straight bartering?” Kite asked next, producing what looked like a sheet of paper from her own saddlebags and floating it forward. “This is a list of the contents of two wagons the Runners have been nice enough to let me park here, minus the three items I crossed out. I’m looking to offload the vast majority of it.”

Rico’s magic took hold of the offered list, and her eyes began darting about the paper. “Ooooo, nice…ammo, guns, military-grade armor…and a few energy weapons….I was under the impression that most of the old military armories had been looted over the last two hundred years. Where’d you get this?”

“Restitution from the Union, when slavers tried to kill me and Sling and nearly succeeded. I got to keep all the stuff the slain and captured slavers had on them. How much of this holds any interest to you?”

“The MEWs for sure. The rest, we can manufacture ourselves. We do have a separate caravan that makes forays to the inhabited towns in the immediate area, then comes back here, and I know at least three places that would love to get ahold of this stuff. I can have the outgoing caravan haul your wagons along and see who’s willing to buy your cargo and at what price, in exchange for a ten percent cut. What are you planning to do with the caps?”

“I’m still deciding that,” Kite answered guardedly. “You’re welcome to look through the wagons for an inspection, see if anything else besides the energy weapons are worth your time.”

Rico floated a second, blank sheet of paper and began copying Kite’s list to it in measured, careful strokes of her pencil. “We’ll do that. Once we’ve made a proper inspection we can go over it in detail, set up what’s worth what.”

Kite took a few seconds to look over the tables of guns before she responded. “…can you bring a list of your available merchandise as well? I may be open to a little arms dealing myself.”

“I can bring a list and a few pieces for physical inspection as well.I can meet you in your quarters in the recovery ward around…lunchtime? Or shortly after?”

While a part of her was almost relieved that Kite was actually looking into buying something besides food and water with their caps for once, it also wasn’t something they’d even discussed and the plan had been to simply ask about the possibility of trade later on. “I—”

“Sounds good, we won’t be going anywhere,” Kite affirmed the meeting time, nudging Sling into turning around with hooves and magic…and taking the 9mm pistol out of her grasp and floating it back over to Rico. “You can bring her prizes along then.”

“Awwww,” Sling’s voice cried mournfully. “I wanted to study it a bit….”

“You’ll have plenty of time for that later, you sick creature,” Kite’s exasperated tone promised her, grunting a little as Sling’s body weight leaned into her for support on the short trek back to their quarters. “We need to talk about Light Tail.”

Oh, gods, get off my back about that! “I told you the other day, I’d try—”

“And I’ll make sure you hold to that, but that’s not what I mean. She’s been having some…weird dreams of late.”

What felt like a block of ice dropped into her guts, chilling her soul at the implications that Kite’s words could hold. “…what…kind of weird dreams?”