The Ponies’ Republic of Stalliongrad was a city reborn, and I’d been amazed when I’d first seen the extent of the rebuilding. I imagined Towers was on par with Wartime Stalliongrad, and even Primary Square and the Western Block were leaps and bounds better than the majority of settlements I’d been to in my travels across the northern Equestrian Wasteland. The Stacks were nothing like the other three friendly, glittering districts.

If it weren’t for the PRS wall surrounding it and the patrolling PRS soldiers, one could almost believe it was just another part of the Stalliongrad ruins. Hardly any buildings had been reclaimed, and those were either factories, border posts, or lodgings for PRS soldiers. Stalliongrad was a city with many factories, but they seemed particularly concentrated here in The Stacks. The smoke I’d seen drifting up from the district was from great exhaust stacks, but not all of the smoke and fumes escaped. It seemed to pool and drift throughout the ruins, sticking to clothing and leaving a bad taste in your mouth and scent in your nose. Around the more noxious factories, makeshift scarves were all the rage. All the fresh steel, concrete, and plastic used to build up the rest of the PRS came from here, where ponies toiled in terrible conditions. Labor was intense and dangerous, and the PRS soldiers scattered about the district as overseers didn’t allow anypony to shirk it or slack off.

It was here that Overmare Peach Cream had sent me for my “rehabilitation,” though I didn’t expect to ever be allowed to leave voluntarily. Bizarrely, I was glad that the alicorns had taken all of my possessions; it meant there was nothing for the PRS to confiscate from me, other than my visitor pass, which wasn’t of much use to me anymore anyway. My PipBuck they let me keep, after modifying it to record my contribution credits automatically like those from Stable 124.

I was marched rather roughly to The Stacks, the soldiers escorting me avoiding the festivities going on. I doubted that anypony would help me if I called for it anyway. I was an outsider, and who would stick out their neck for me when they would likely share my fate if they did? Soon the promising reconstruction of the other districts was behind me, and I was pushed through a border checkpoint into The Stacks.

The PRS officer in charge of “processing” me looked rather bored (and disappointed that they couldn’t be out celebrating) and rushed me through as quickly as possible. All in all, my first impression of The Stacks was not a good one, and it only went downhill from there. More than anything else, the entrance reminded me of Burnside, as if I were entering a prison, which I supposed I was in a way. I was put to work immediately, pulling wagons full of scrap metal to a foundry. By the end of the day when I was allowed to lie down on a patch of floor in a partially intact building, I was incredibly sore and exhausted.

I was awoken the next morning by blaring horns. The speakers seemed to be more prevalent here than in the other districts, even if they were more jury-rigged. As the others shuffled off to work, I was pulled aside by a PRS soldier and taken to an old donut shop turned into the headquarters of PRS “labor officers.” One of them ran through a list of questions with me, over a hundred in all, to determine what job I was best suited for. I had to find a way out of here, there was no doubt about that. For now, I had to play nice if I wanted to survive, and I answered all the questions.

“Hm, your skills seem concentrated on weapons and using terminals, though you’ve also got a natural ability with picking locks,” the labor officer said after looking over my results, “Dangerous skills to let you use here, but we can find some use for them with the proper supervision. Report to Labor Officer Sandy at the Department 7 Office.”

My PipBuck pinged to alert me that the location had been added to my map, and I quickly left the room. I was surprised that nopony seemed like they wanted to escort me to my destination, and I didn’t hang around long enough for the soldiers’ stares to turn into violent action. If I’d wanted to, I could’ve vanished into the ruins of The Stacks and nopony would’ve been the wiser, except that I was pretty sure they could track my location using my PipBuck now.

I’d started my life in The Stacks in the south, the closest to the rest of the Ponies’ Republic of Stalliongrad, where a lot of activity was going on. Every factory that could produce goods of value to the settlement had been reclaimed, and everywhere in the streets were ponies either laboring or traveling to and from their labors. Scattered about were also makeshift “goods distribution centers” where one could trade in their contribution credits for food and other things. Gone were the vast sums that Rare and I had acquired; I now only had enough from my half-day of labor to get a single food item: a box of Dandy Colt Apples packaged during the War.

There were still factories, overworked ponies, and goods distribution centers as I traveled north to Department 7, but they became more spaced out the farther I went. Sometimes, when there was nopony around, I could hear creatures moving about in the ruins around me. I knew they weren’t just my fellow ponies because EFS marked them as hostile, and it was not marking the PRS soldiers as such anymore. Though technically they were my enemies now, they weren’t likely to attack me unless I provoked them, and EFS was now marking them as friendly, even if it didn’t fully capture the situation. Once, I heard gunfire and spotted a group of workers in an alleyway firing at a pack of feral ghouls while PRS soldiers watched without firing their own weapons, keeping them pointed at the workers in case they got any ideas about trying to free themselves. That incident and the many other times I detected something moving in the ruins reinforced that The Stacks may have been within the wall of the Ponies’ Republic of Stalliongrad, but it was still untamed and may as well have been just another part of the Wasteland.

I finally reached the Department 7 Office, which had once been an outpost of the Bureau for the Regulation of Armaments Magical and Mundane. It had been appropriated by the Ponies’ Republic of Stalliongrad, and the PRS flag now hung over the words Magical and. The PRS soldiers standing in front of the building were suspicious at first of my presence, until I told them I was here to speak to Sandy.

Labor Officer Sandy turned out to be a tan-coated earth pony mare with a crisp and clean uniform jacket over her Stable 124 jumpsuit. It didn’t take long for her to find a job suited to my talents, and I was sent back out into the ruins of The Stacks with a duo of guards and a weapon. The weapon she’d had one of the guards retrieve from somewhere in the building was a ripper, though not like the one I was familiar with. This one required fuel to operate, and I had to carry the generator on my back in a makeshift battle saddle. I wouldn’t be able to use it to free myself from the guards on the way to our destination, however; they were carrying the petrol needed to power the weapon, and the blades wouldn’t spin without it.

“Alright, here we are,” one of the guards said as we reached another looming building among the many in the area.

According to my PipBuck, we were standing in front of the Magic Mare Marvelous Munitions Factory. Above the main doors was a giant sign of a winking unicorn mare levitating a pistol and the letters MMMM. I couldn’t help but think that the name seemed more like something a pony would say when eating a particularly good meal.

“Okay, comrade, here’s the deal,” one of the guards said as the other began to fill the fuel tank of my ripper, “You go in there, kill everything inside, and don’t come back until the job’s done or you need more fuel. Don’t even think about trying to attack us with that thing either, or we’ll shoot you before you get close enough. Got it?”

“Got it,” I replied, sure that with their battle saddles and PipBucks they were quite right in their assessment of the situation, “Comrade.”

The guard harrumphed, but apparently accepted my response and motioned me toward the door. I stopped as I reached it, my path blocked by a chain and padlock running though the handles.

“Do you have a key?” I asked, “Or maybe some bobby pins?”

In response, the unicorn of the pair threw me a pair of bolt cutters.

“Right,” I said, and severed the chain before tossing the bolt cutters back.

Red pips began to appear on EFS as I entered the factory. Clearly, there had been a reason that somepony had secured the door, and I was waiting anxiously to find out what it was. My hoofsteps sounded incredibly loud to my ears as I trotted through the empty ammunition factory, especially as I kicked bullets and shells across the floor by accident. I passed a few of the pips, their owners likely on floors above me or below. EFS wasn’t going to be of much use here.

Finally, one of my enemies showed themselves. A radmoth fluttered out of a doorway and, upon spotting me, instantly flew my way. I pulled the cord to start the generator on my back, and the ripper roared to life. As the radmoth came in range, I swung at it, easily cutting it in two and splattering myself with bug juices. My PipBuck’s radiation meter clicked softly.

The sound of the generator echoing through the ruin quickly drew the attention of more of the mutated bugs. Radmoths practically poured out of the walls, and I fought to keep them away with my ripper and kicks of my hooves. Without my jumpsuit and doctor’s coat to protect me, the razor-like hairs on their legs were able to scratch me and their clicking mouths were able to nick me. I was soon covered in dozens of small injuries, but nothing serious.

Eventually, the radmoths stopped coming and I was able to take a breather. According to the gauge conveniently located on the handle of the ripper, I still had a half tank of fuel, and there were plenty of red pips still on my EFS. I inspected the far corners of the ground floor first to make sure I didn’t miss anything (and cut down a few more irradiated insects) before venturing up to the second floor.

I was following the trail of pips on my EFS, determining which were on this floor, when I came across a manticore. When it spotted me it began to growl, and I considered my options. With only this clunky version of a ripper, I didn’t stand much of a chance against such a beast. This was a munitions factory, so there were weapons around, but many were in partially constructed states or had no associated ammo nearby, so I wasn’t going to be getting much help there.

The problem of the manticore was solved and another reared its head as a massive creature unlike any I’d seen before emerged from the shadows at the other end of the room. It spread leathery wings as it lunged toward the manticore and sunk two huge fangs the width of my foreleg into it. The manticore roared in pain and tried to strike the large monster with its stinger, but the creature didn’t even seem to feel it and folded its long, hairy ears over its eyes to protect them. With a disgusting slurp, it sucked all the vital juices from the manticore, which crumpled in on itself before being thrown away.

As the new monster turned its massive head toward me, I cast SATS and ran for it. While I ran, I noticed that SATS was able to identify the monster and named it a vampire mutbat. Having a name to put to the massive, gore-stained face didn’t make it any less terrifying. After SATS wore off, I could hear the vampire mutbat pursuing me and feel it as it shook the building with its movements.

I ducked through a partially collapsed doorway into a hall and turned around only to witness the mutbat’s head plowing through the wall. I stumbled backwards as it tried to squeeze its body after me and was partially successful. A locked door blocked my mistake, but it was made of wood, and I smashed it apart with my ripper and knocked the remains out of the way with my body, impaling myself with several splinters in the process.

As I limped over to a terminal sitting atop a desk, I considered that I needed to be more cautious now since I didn’t have any medical supplies to patch myself up with. I was relieved to see a comforting green glow coming from the terminal and fired it up. The mutbat’s progress in breaking down walls to reach me was a constant distraction as I hacked in, but I managed to do it before the monster reached me. The factory had a security system that I was able to activate from this terminal, and when I did, turrets on the factory ceiling began to fire on the mutbat. It scampered backwards to address the turrets, and I considered what to do next.

On the shelf behind the desk were several model ships within bottles. I grabbed one and hastily removed the ship before filling it up with some fuel from the tank of the ripper generator. I tore off a strip from the flag hanging in the corner of the office and stuffed it into the bottle, completing my Maretov cocktail. I thanked Celestia that everypony during the War had smoked as I dug through the desk and found a lighter.

As the turrets went silent and the mutbat came barreling back toward me, I lit the incendiary. I lobbed it at the huge, hairy head as soon as it was close enough, and the fire spread quickly. The mutbat thrashed around trying to put it out, and the ceiling began to collapse around me. I ducked under the desk to avoid being crushed by falling tiles and plaster until the desk was suddenly shoved farther into the office.

Jumping out, I fired up the ripper again as the mutbat’s snout pulled away from the desk and it opened its mouth. One of the fangs punctured the desk with a screech, but the other I sliced through with the ripper. As I cut through the mutbat’s gums, my PipBuck loudly warned me of the presence of Taint. So, this vampire mutbat was like The Beast. I had to try to avoid getting its blood on me, but if it came between that and not dying, I’d have to take the risk of touching Taint.

I cast SATS as it tried to crush me with its huge head and rolled out of the way. Detaching the ripper generator from my back, I pushed it toward the mutbat and prayed my plan would work. I held the ripper at the end of my magical reach, putting as much distance between myself and the mutbat as possible, and jabbed the spinning blade into its eye. The mutbat screeched so loudly I thought my ears were going to start bleeding, but I continued to shove the ripper deeper in. It tried to get away, but had trapped itself with falling debris and wasn’t able to extricate itself before the ripper started chopping up its brain. Its good eye went glassy as its mind was scrambled, and the head fell to rest on the floor. I switched the ripper off as its mark disappeared from my EFS. More red marks remained in the building, though, and I hoped they were nothing like what I’d just faced.

Things continued much the same way that day and the two following days. Equipped with some weapon, I’d be escorted by two or more guards to some abandoned structure and sent to clear it of vermin. Once in a while, I’d see another worker like me being sent to do the same task. I knew by the bodies I’d found in some of the ruins that not everypony came back from this job.

When I wasn’t working (which was most of the time), I was sleeping among my fellow workers in the “Department 7 Living Area,” which was a fancy name for an old parking garage with filthy mattresses scattered on the ground. It was cold, dirty, and run-down, but it was still an improvement over where I’d slept my first night in The Stacks. There was very little privacy, unless you were lucky enough to have built a cinder block wall around your mattress. Some ponies had, and if they didn’t return from their labor at the end of the day, there was a frantic scramble to claim the cinder blocks.

I stayed out of it, not wanting any trouble, and most of the other ponies here tended to leave me alone in kind, though I saw some of them eyeing my PipBuck. That’s why it was so odd when a unicorn with both a blue coat and mane approached me one night and motioned for me to follow her without saying a word. I wasn’t sure what to make of it or if I should follow, but eventually curiosity won out over caution. She wasn’t red on EFS, at least, so she wasn’t outright hostile … yet.

“Let me see your foreleg,” she said once we were standing in a stairway, at a point where no cameras could see us.

I had a bandage wrapped around my right foreleg, which I’d hurt earlier in the day, and started to raise it tentatively before the mare produced tools from the pouch at her side. They were tools meant for working on a PipBuck, and I quickly swapped which leg I was presenting to her. Carefully, she cracked open the case and began to fiddle around before looking up in surprise. She reassembled the case and tucked her tools away before speaking again.

“Yes, I think it should heal alright, so long as you’re careful,” she said for the benefit of the cameras that couldn’t see us but could still hear us, “I’d like to give you a more thorough examination though, so you should come with me.”

Perplexed, I followed the mare as she headed up the stairway to the fourth level of the parking garage. She led me around cinder block walls and past ponies who watched me suspiciously. It wasn’t until after we passed them that I realized they were standing guard. A group of ponies were gathered together in the corner of the parking garage, and they looked up as we approached.

“Are your PipBuck’s microphone and camera broken or did you disable them yourself?” the unicorn mare asked me, and I looked around, “Don’t worry, the cameras here are all disabled; you can speak freely.”

“I disabled them myself,” I said, “I have a friend who’s good with fixing and modifying Wartime technology; I guess I picked up a few things.”

“And where is your friend now?” an earth pony stallion with a long braid asked.

“I’m not really sure,” I admitted, since the alicorns could have lost hope in my success by now, “Safe, I hope.”

“What did you do to end up in The Stacks?” a young earth pony mare with a brown coat and lime green mane asked.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“Well, you obviously didn’t just get your cutie-mark and get sent here because of that,” the filly said, gesturing at my flank, “So, what did you do to end up here?”

“I stole secrets from the Ministry of Morale … and the Ministry of Technology,” I admitted, “And I berated Chairmare Peach Cream about her attack on Railyard.”

“Any enemy of the Chairmare is a friend of ours,” the braided stallion said, “Pull up a crate.”

“What brought you to the PRS?” the filly asked as I did so, “Before you ask, I know you’re not from here because of how beat-up your PipBuck is.”

My foreleg-mounted computer had taken quite a beating from my time in the Wasteland; it was really a miracle that it was still working perfectly. Even more miraculous was that the screen was still intact, likely the reason PipBucks weren’t more widely used.

“Originally I came here looking for a pony that destroyed another settlement,” I said, “This time I was looking for the Ministry of Arcane Sciences Hub … to steal from the PRS again.”

“Well, you found it,” the very blue unicorn who’d brought me here huffed as she took a seat as well, “That spire to the east, the one with the giant six-pointed star at the top, that’s the Ministry of Magic.”

I tried to look for the MAS Hub but couldn’t make it out among all the ruins in the dark. Maybe in the morning I’d have better luck.

“You ended up here much the same way I did,” the unicorn continued, “I was a PipBuck technician, a high-ranking Party member, but I made the mistake of speaking out against Chairmare Peach Cream and her decisions. The next thing I knew, I was ‘reassigned’ to The Stacks and marched off here against my will. The name is Meridian.”

“I’m Scrap,” the braided stallion announced proudly, “Used to be a raider, second-in-command in a gang east of the PRS, until their soldiers stormed our camp, rounded up the survivors, and put us to work here.”

A raider! He certainly seemed like an okay pony, even if I was now noticing or imagining a slight hint of madness in his eyes. Had The Stacks somehow changed him for the better?

“My name is Willow,” the young mare introduced herself, “I was sent to The Stacks when I got my cutie-mark for building. My family wasn’t high enough in the Party for me to be assigned to rebuild the other districts, so I ended up here. I’m the leader of Department 7’s dissidents.”

“You are?” I asked in disbelief. A mare so young leading all these ponies around me?

“She may be young, but Willow has been here longer than any of us,” Scrap said defensively, “She knows how to work the system, how to hurt the PRS in small ways that go unnoticed but eventually add up. Death by a thousand cuts and all that. ‘Comrade’ Sandy trusts her too, which makes it all the easier.”

“Not to rain on your parade,” Meridian said, “But as great as that is, the Ponies’ Republic of Stalliongrad is a behemoth that’ll take a billion or more small cuts to kill. I don’t know about you, but I’m not content to spend the rest of my life here.”

“We’ve been over this, Meridian,” Willow sighed, “We don’t have the strength for a sustained rebellion, nor a way to escape and regroup after an uprising. There’s no way out of The Stacks except through the Western Block and Traders’ Lane. We’d never make it.”

“Actually, I might know a way out,” I spoke up, and everypony turned to look at me, “I was in the tunnels beneath Stalliongrad a while back, and there was this creature down there that burrowed its way into them from the MAS Hub. Some of those tunnels lead outside the PRS’s walls; we could escape if we can reach them.”

“That would require going through the MAS Hub, though, and that place is full of technological and magical traps,” Willow said, “We’d never make it through.”

“The Wasteland Doctor could,” one of the ponies in the circle said.

“Don’t believe everything you hear on the radio. We have to take care of ourselves, and can’t rely on some mythical figure coming to save us,” Willow berated him, “Besides, why would he help us? Didn’t you hear he was working for the PRS?”

“I’m not anymore,” I said, “Yes, I’m … the Wasteland Doctor, but please just call me Doc.”

“We don’t need you to save us,” Willow repeated herself with a frown.

“I’m not here to,” I assured here, which caused the excited faces of some of the ponies in the circle to fall, “I mean, look at me! If I’d intended to free everypony in The Stacks, I’d have brought weapons and friends … and likely still wouldn’t win. I can’t save you, but I can help you escape, at least, if you’ll let me.”

“C’mon Willow, you can at least let him help,” Meridian said, “You know we can use all the help we can get, and this is the best chance we’ve ever had for getting out of The Stacks.”

“Fine,” Willow said resignedly, “I’ll see what I can do.”

The next day, things were changed up a bit. Instead of marching me off to a random ruined factory to clear out irradiated monstrosities, I was escorted to the MAS Hub. I was sure that Willow had something to do with my reassignment. Goddesses, she worked fast; I could see why the dissidents had chosen her to be their leader. I was also given a gun this time instead of the gas-powered ripper, though the guards with me still limited my ammunition.

No mutated insects inhabited the MAS Hub, because any that had entered had been cleared out by the building’s security. Large, powerful robots patrolled the halls and magical energy turrets hung from the ceiling. The Ministry of Magic had been serious about keeping what they’d been doing here secret. I had plenty of time to learn what that was as I was often called upon to hack terminals (under the supervision of PRS soldiers). Magical energy fields generated by the security system blocked the way constantly, and I had to dispel them before we could advance any farther.

Over the next four days, I worked to clear out the tower. Some of the floors had been cleared out before I’d arrived, but much remained to be explored and discovered. The Beast had come here as the result of experiments, I was sure of it, and soon I was able to identify another Wasteland creature that had been created by the scientists here, I hoped by accident. One floor had a giant hole in the wall and logs on testing Impelled Metamorphosis Potion exposure on bat populations. Several horribly deformed corpses of vampire mutbats completed the picture. I counted to make sure that all the “specimens” were accounted for, but came up three short. Two more vampire mutbats were out in the Wasteland, and I hoped I’d have my weapons and my friends the next time I encountered one, if I ever did. I also hoped they were unable to reproduce.

As I explored laboratory after laboratory, I became disheartened at finding the spell the alicorns had asked for. Most of the research here seemed to be on weapons or on IMP, with very little dedicated to spellcraft, including megaspell research. There were only a few floors left by the time spell research showed up, and I eventually got ahold of a list by a supervisor on exactly who was researching what spells where. The spell to block long-range telepathy was being researched on the second floor from the top, and I eagerly awaited reaching it, even though I wasn’t sure how to copy the information to my PipBuck without the guards watching me catching on. Any information on the terminals had to be copied over to a data tape entrusted to them before wiping the segment of the maneframe it had come from.

That’s why it was both agonizing and a bit of a relief when the PRS soldiers stopped their upward progression the floor before the spell research and brought me down to the building’s sub-basements instead. I wanted to reach the research badly, but I needed to figure out a way to steal it before I could do that. Turns out, I wouldn’t have time for either. As we ventured deeper under the building, we encountered the tunnels I’d been expecting, dug by The Beast.

As I walked closer to the giant hole in the floor, my PipBuck began to warn me of the presence of Taint, and the guards following me backed off. I stood ready for some horrendous beast to show itself, but EFS remained completely clear. Looking around, I realized the barrels stacked in the room, some oozing a glowing rainbow-colored goo, were the source of the warning. Why would somepony store barrels of Taint here? I looked more closely at the label on one of them.

Impelled Metamorphosis Potion: batch T-3301.78 Failure

So, IMP, the magical formula that turned ponies into alicorns, and Taint were one and the same. Or, maybe it was just the failed formulas, the ones that turned ponies into horribly twisted monsters instead, that were Taint. Either way, it explained why my PipBuck had detected it in Stable 137.

“We’re gonna have to seal this place off,” I caught one of the guards escorting me saying.

Seal it off? That would mean the end of the escape route I’d promised the others. That just wouldn’t do. We’d have to move soon if we wanted to make it out of The Stacks. Of course, I kept my mouth shut about it until I was able to meet with the dissidents that night.

“We’ve got to move quickly,” I told the group after explaining what I’d found, “We’ll need explosives in any case if they’ve sealed up the entrance to the Stable tunnels, but it’ll be better if we only need enough for that. Can you get explosives, and if so, how quickly?”

“They keep dynamite for demolition at the Department 7 Office with the weapons,” Willow answered, “Getting it and the weapons won’t be a problem, but staying alive long enough to escape will be. As soon as we break into the office, soldiers from all over The Stacks will be sent here to quell the rebellion. I’ve seen it before.”

“We’ll need a large enough riot to keep them occupied and their attention away from the MAS Hub for us to make our escape,” Meridian said, “If we can barricade the border posts to slow reinforcements from the other districts, that would be good, too. Willow, weren’t you talking to somepony in Department 1?”

“White Shoe? Yeah, but I don’t know if he’ll be willing to help us out unless we can get some of his ponies out, too. It’s a long way from the south to the MAS Hub. and there’ll be plenty of PRS soldiers in the way,” Willow responded, “I’ve already established alliances with Departments 4 and 9, so if we can guarantee their help, we might just be able to pull this off. Yes, if the ponies from 1 barricade the border posts, 9 and 4 can sweep in and secure a path at the same time before drawing everypony back to the MAS Hub. Once we drop into the tunnels, though, our movements are going to be restricted. What’s to stop them from just chasing us in and slaughtering us before we can get outside the walls?”

“I’ve got some ideas,” I told Willow, “Leave securing our retreat to me; you just get everypony ready to move, tomorrow night if possible.”

Once again, Willow was some kind of miracle worker. Everything was ready by the following night. I also had everything prepared for our escape. During the day, I’d once again been sent to clear out floors of the MAS Hub, but the guards assigned to watch me also had to watch the workers bringing in materials to seal off the hole in the basement, and I was able to get away with more. I wasn’t able to make it to the floor where research on telepathy-blocking spells had been going on, but I had been able to find a terminal connected to the building’s security system and entered a program into the maneframe I’d execute when I arrived here tonight. It would cause the remaining robots to relocate to the building’s entrance and target anypony with a PipBuck bearing the PRS’s unique code. The workers who were rebelling would be destroying their PipBucks when the rebellion started to keep the soldiers from tracking them, and I planned to remove the code from my own, so the plan should work.

The Department 7 Office was only a few blocks away from the Department 7 Living Area, but it seemed as far away as Luna’s moon while we quietly made our way through the dark. We’d departed the parking garage after everypony who wasn’t a dissident and might raise an alarm was long asleep. Scrap took out the cameras along our route with a sling he’d fashioned from garbage. There were more than enough concrete pebbles for him to fling at them. No alarms seemed to be raised by the time we reached the former BRAMM outpost, so that was a good sign.

There were two guards on duty outside the office, but the floodlights around them ruined their night vision and kept us hidden until it was too late. I held a railroad spike in my magic and shot it off as if it were a bullet leaving a gun, as I’d practiced. With a little help from SATS, the spike struck the rightmost guard right between the eyes, nearly silently killing him. His friend turned to look at his body in shock before turning back to face an oncoming wave of ponies.

“Get back!” she yelled, levitating her shotgun.

She fired into the crowd, hitting somepony, but the rest continued on and quickly overwhelmed her. Her own weapon was turned on her and fired more times than was strictly necessary before it was tossed to Meridian, who caught it in her magic. Lights were coming on in the building by the time a burly earth pony with a shaggy mane and beard pushed through the crowd and kicked the door in with a buck of his sizable hooves.

The rebels rushed into the building, meeting the guns of the PRS officers, and I was swept along with them. I saw firsthoof how devastating SATS could be from the outside, and I managed to pick up a submachine gun from the floor to help out, using my own spell to even the odds. Labor Officer Sandy was cornered in the back room, trying to lock down the weapon safe, and was cut down by the ponies she’d worked mercilessly for years. Everything was happening so fast, it was hard to keep up.

The workers had overthrown their overseers and taken their weapons, but it wasn’t over yet. There weren’t enough weapons to go around, and there would be more PRS soldiers coming soon from elsewhere in The Stacks; Sandy had managed to raise an alarm before her demise. Meridian got the safe open, and Willow and Scrap began distributing weapons to everypony and dividing them up into groups.

“I’m headed to the Ministry of Magic to set things up. I’ll see you there,” I called to the leaders of the revolt before I left, and Willow nodded.

Pushing against the tide of ponies anxious for revenge and freedom, I left the Department 7 Office and headed toward the MAS spire. As I left, somepony on the roof fired a flare, a signal for the other departments joining us in our rebellion to rise up and do their parts. I hoped that it would be enough. As Meridian had said, the Ponies’ Republic of Stalliongrad was a behemoth, and a much smaller group of poorly equipped ponies, however motivated, would have a hard time facing them. That’s why it was important to fight only when necessary and withdraw through the tunnels as soon as possible. I just hoped everypony remembered that and didn’t go after immediate revenge instead.

I ducked into an alley as a squad of PRS soldiers approached, coming from the direction of my destination. They passed by without noticing me, apparently not using the EFS that came with their PipBucks. I emerged from the alley after they passed and fired my SMG into the back of one’s neck. The other two gasped and jumped away from their comrade’s body, spinning around to face me. One had a magical energy rifle in a battle saddle and the other was levitating a revolver. I cast SATS and targeted the one with the magical energy rifle, but quickly changed targets as the other sped up, having cast SATS themselves. Her shots barely missed me, my Wasteland-honed reflexes and agility being the only things to save me. I fired my SMG at her, swinging my weapon in a wide arc that also hit the other PRS soldier before he could cast SATS himself. As time returned to normal, it was just the two of us, though she had another instant of SATS and managed to hit my ear with her next shot, tearing a chunk out of it. I fired my SMG at her until she fell down dead before gingerly touching the bloody hole in my ear. I searched the PRS soldiers’ saddlebags for medical supplies, and was able to find some bandages but no healing or regenerative potions. I wrapped my ear up, resigned that the damage was probably permanent, before continuing my journey.

The MAS Hub was unprotected when I arrived, apart from the usual robotic sentinels that patrolled the halls. The first order of business was to find a terminal from which I could enact my program that would turn the security against the PRS. The one I’d used earlier that day wouldn’t do, since its connection to the maneframes had been terminated, and I didn’t have time to seek out where the maneframes physically were. Instead, I headed up and hoped I’d find one on the same floor as the telepathy-blocking research.

As I reached that floor, a robot rolled into view and began firing grenades at me almost immediately. I used SATS to rush through the hallway and ducked into some offices. I held my SMG aloft as the automaton pursued me and cast SATS again as soon as it was visible. I aimed for its targeting sensor, a small exposed nodule, and managed to hit it after a couple shots. The machine went berserk, firing randomly, and I dove behind a desk to keep from being hit. As it rolled back into the hallway and away, firing in all directions without sense, I peeked back over the desk. Across the hall was a door marked security office, and I ran across to it once the robot wandered into another room and I was no longer in immediate danger. The terminal within allowed me to connect to the security system and I enacted the program I’d hidden away, causing all the robots to head down below. I heard a crash and rushed out into the hall to see the one I’d caused to go berserk had chosen the fast way down and rushed out a window. It was now lying destroyed on the ground below, which was probably for the best since it wouldn’t be able to differentiate between PRS soldiers and workers after the damage I’d done to it.

Out the window, I could see fires here and there in The Stacks where the riots were taking place. From my mental map, they looked like they were spreading to more than just the Departments we’d involved, and I wondered if move ponies than we’d been expecting would try to escape. That wasn’t something I needed to worry about at the moment, and I turned away from the window.

A spell was a tricky thing to bring to the alicorns. It wasn’t a physical thing like supplies or weapons. Even the megaspell I’d brought to Chairmare Peach Cream had had a physical form, but this spell wouldn’t be like that. Instead, I needed to bring data, whatever the researchers here had copied down, and had to hope that they could piece together a spell from it. If they couldn’t, I hoped the alicorns would be understanding that I’d done what I could. I copied everything I could to my PipBuck, which I hoped would be enough. From what I could tell, the results were promising, but I was no spellcrafter; that would be the job of the pseudo-goddesses.

I headed down to the basements as I finished pilfering yet another Stalliongrad ministry of its secrets. Ponies were starting to arrive, mostly ones I’d seen in Department 7, but a few new faces too. They seemed hesitant to approach the crowd of security robots now assembled out front but got over it when several of them fired missiles simultaneously at a PRS sniper, turning their perch to rubble.

I accompanied the nervous workers as we headed deeper into the building. I could tell they were worried that they were walking into an enclosed space they’d never escape from, but I was hoping to provide them with a way out. The hole I’d found led down precariously at first before becoming more level, then dipping down again and repeating several times before it reached its end. There I found Department 7’s leaders stacking dynamite against a door that had been walled up.

“Do you have any idea of the way out?” Willow asked me as I joined them, glancing at my ear briefly.

“Once we’re in and I can plug in, I can pull up a map of the tunnels,” I said, waving my PipBuck for emphasis, “After that, it should be easy to find the way.”

Willow nodded and went back to stacking the explosives. Once Scrap proclaimed that there was enough here to take down the wall twice, we backed off and he detonated the dynamite. The workers surged into the tunnels, the Department 7 leaders and me leading the way. Immediately, a shot rang out, and one of the workers fell.

They knew we were here! That was my first thought, but it proved to be not totally correct. One pony knew we were here, a frightened PRS guard who’d been assigned to patrol the tunnels and just so happened to have been trotting by when we’d blown down the wall. The pistol held in his shaky magical grip fell as the workers retaliated, cutting him down before he could raise any alarms. There were likely to be other guards here or ponies that had heard the explosion, so we still needed to move quickly.

I located a plug-in point as soon as I could and accessed the tunnel network. We were between Stables 107 and 76, as I’d suspected, in a side passage that looped northeast and ended just north of the PRS fields. I hoped that it wasn’t just a dead end, but an exit, and directed the ponies around me to follow it to what I prayed was escape. Scrap stayed behind, saying that he had an idea, and a few minutes later a second explosion rocked the Stable network. He’d closed off the tunnel behind us, protecting us from the PRS guards from the Stables. Cut off from attacking us through the tunnels or the MAS, we had a good chance at getting everypony out.

At last, a ladder appeared at the end of the tunnel, and the workers eagerly ascended it. It led out to an old candy shop that had been completely stripped of anything useful, but it was definitely outside the walls of the Ponies’ Republic of Stalliongrad. The wall was visible not too far away, rising up like a monolith over the Wasteland. Before, it’d signaled some kind of safety for me, but not anymore. Now it was a prison.

I ventured out of the shop and was nearly hit by a sniper’s shot from atop the wall. Right, I’d forgotten about them. Everything around the candy shop had been razed to the ground, giving the snipers a clear shot at anything that emerged from it. We hadn’t escaped The Stacks only to be cut down by PRS snipers just outside the wall.

“Now what?” Meridian asked as Willow tried to stop more escapees from coming up and filling the building.

“Now … I don’t know,” I admitted, looking for a way out of this and seeing a sniper suddenly fall from the wall, “Wait a minute.”

I crouched down on the floor and looked up through a broken window, hoping the PRS snipers wouldn’t spot me from this angle. Another sniper went flying from the wall, and I caught sight of something flying by this time. At first, I thought it was a griffin, but as another sniper was thrown off I recognized the attacker was a pegasus, and not only that, but a pegasus I recognized.

“Doc!” Ache called from outside the building.

Cautious that I would be shot but eager to confirm my eyes and ears, I stepped outside of the shop. Ache and Rare Sparks were approaching the building while Roaring Thunder picked off the last of the PRS snipers. My friends!

“I knew it was you I saw!” Ache exclaimed.

“What kind of trouble did you get yourself into this time?” Rare asked, “Can’t we leave you alone for a week without you turning the most populous settlement in the Wasteland against you?”

My friends. Everything was going to be all right.

Level Up
New Perk: When All Else Fails – You’ve learned how to make the best of situations where your usual weapons aren’t handy. +10 to Unarmed and all improvised weapons do double damage.
New Quest: The Voice of a Goddess – Bring the research on long-range telepathy blocking spells to the Stable 137 alicorns.
Medicine +2 (68)
Melee Weapons +6 (92)
Repair +9^* (72)
Sneak +2 (80)
Speech +2 (95)
Unarmed +15 (49)

^{*The Tinkerer}