//------------------------------// // Chapter 48 // Story: Fallout New Vegas: Unexpected Friends // by Sleepyted //------------------------------// Twilight woke with a yawn, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hooves. She winced as she touched her tender eye, quickly pulling her hoof away from the pain. Grumbling she got off the bed, having not even bothered to get under the covers. Leaving the bed room she made her way towards the small dining room the suite had, grabbing a box of something called Fancy Lad Snack Cakes along with a clean bottle of water that was in a broken fridge. After shoveling down the sweet and stale foods that crumbled in her mouth before chugging down half the bottle of water to follow it. “BOONE!” Twilight yelled out, feeling too sore to even bother getting out of her seat. “WHAT!?” A voice called back from elsewhere in the suite. “HAS ANNE COME BACK?!” “NO! SHE SHOULD STILL BE IN THE FORT!” Grumbling, Twilight put the lid on her bottle as she sat back in her rickety wooden chair with a creak. “IMMA GO OUT AND GET HER IN A BIT!” “I DON’T CARE!” The purple pony princess left just before midday, heading towards the old fort in Freeside. She knew where it was as her and Anne had passed it many times while being around New Vegas. The castle looked old, its dull light brown stone bricks crumbling with age but still looked strong enough to stay standing for hundreds more years. She went up to the old wooden door, which had definitely been replaced in the past few years, before pushing on it firmly with her front hooves. Inside was rather bland. There were a number of dusty and old looking tents with tables and chairs scattered around with people sitting and/or eating on. There were tired and dirty looking people being helped by kind looking people in lab coats, there were sick and hurt being cared for. There were a few guards around but they didn’t look threatening, more there just in case anything went wrong but not much more than that. She was looking around but couldn’t find or see Anne anywhere. Going up to a woman in a lab coat and a thin Mohawk on her head. “Eh? Oh are you that horse that I’ve heard about on the radio and around the fort?” She asked tilting her head to the side. “Probably…” Twilight said with a shrug. “Right now I’m just trying to find a friend of mine, I was told that she had come here yesterday. She’s a woman, white hair, scar above her right eye.” Twilight said trying to describe her friend. “I think I know who you’re talking about. Yeah she’s here, she came in yesterday asking about if we would take in a new member, a Great Khan who loved to read. But she was so messed up we offered to help her and although she was against it at first she’s now recovering in the tent over there.” The woman said pointing over to one of the closed canvas tents. Twilight’s eyes widened. “Anne’s in trouble?! She’s hurt?!” Twilight yelps out in panic, jumping up on the woman and taking hold of her collar. The woman managed to keep standing up but now had a pony face. “She’s not hurt. Well not really anyway.” The woman said trying to calm Twilight down. “She was hooked on Med-X, you could tell just by looking at her how fucked up she was. She wanted some more and since we actually want to use our stuff to help people we wouldn’t let her. She got a bit violent and we had to restrain her. We’ve been giving her fixer and a set of things to help get her over her addiction.” Twilight let go, landing on the ground in shock. Her friend was going through a problem and she didn’t have a clue or notice it. She buried her head in her hooves, tears building up in one of her eyes while blood in the other. “I-I didn’t know…” The woman kneeled herself in front of the pony, resting a hand on Twilight’s shoulder. “It can be hard to tell sometimes. She probably didn’t want you to worry about her, she didn’t know how much of a problem she had was.” She said solemnly. “She’s strapped down to one of the beds in that tent. She’s free to go whenever you want to take her, we just didn’t want her to try and steal our medical supplies. We can give you some fixer for her, it’ll help with the withdrawal, but you cannot let her have any more painkillers, if she kept going at the rate she was taking them she would probably be dead sooner rather than later…” She said before standing up. “If you need me I’ll be around.” She said. Twilight wiped her eyes and looked over towards the tent that was gestured at. Going in through the tent flap she spotted two people inside. A bored looking mane with blond hair, bent glasses and a lab coat sat in a chair reading a book. He had an angry looking black eye where his glasses were bent. The other person was Anne. The state she was in left the pony is shock. She had her stuff in a neat pile in a corner of the tent but she could tell that was done by someone else. She was tied down to a gurney with leather belts, one on both her wrists and ankles. She was only wearing bare minimum clothing with no blanket. With the amount she was sweating even with the cold air she seemed to be overheating. She had deep bags under her eyes, and although her eyes were half closed her pupils were wide. Her hands and feet were twitching faintly and they curled and gripped the dirty bed under her. Twilight saw the state she was in but what really took her aback were the large number of scars over her body, many looking painful even after they healed over. There were horrible burns along her chest and neck, many gunshots along her whole body, one of her feet were torn up with more scar tissue than actual flesh from when she stepped on a mine. She looked horrible. “You’ll find she isn’t one to hold a good conversation right now.” The man said idly as he turned a page, never looking up from his book. “She’s going through withdrawal right now and isn’t going to be thinking clearly.” “What… Happened to her?...” Twilight asked in shock, she didn’t want to believe her friend had gotten this hurt while she was with her even though the pony herself was in quite a state as well. “She came in like that.” He said flatly. Twilight didn’t know what to say, just sitting there on the floor as she looked at her shell of a friend as she looked at the roof of the tent, not having any reaction to what was going on around her. “Is… There anything you can do?” Twilight asks hopefully but from what the other woman said they had already done what they could do. “I’m not a doctor, just a researcher.” He said, not really seeming to care about his job. “What are you researching?” Twilight asked, trying to drag her eyes away from the form of her friend. “Oh, you know. Finding alternative treatments for common illnesses and injuries. Stimpaks out of barrel cacti and other fantastic improbabilities. As far as fruitless wastes of time go, it's quite noble in its aims.” He says with a shrug as he closed the book he was reading. “You don’t seem too happy about it, why aren’t you healing people then?” “Not all Followers are ‘people persons’. Besides, someone needs to do research. I have no problem with Julie sticking me back here. Out of sight, out of mind. There are worse things one can be, though I do admit, it is a bit boring. Though it has a noble goal, I don't think this research will yield much fruit. No pun intended.” “Why stick around then? We could always do with another member of our friendship group…” Twilight asked. “I’m having a hard enough time comprehending a purple unicorn in front of me as it is right now, don’t know if I’d really follow you around, epically after your friend gave me a mean right hook last night and broke my glasses.” He stated. Twilight’s horn glowed brightly, the same glow surrounding the belt glasses and after a few moments it bent its way back into its normal position, the crack going along the lenses seeming to fade away and soon the glasses looking like they were brand new. Taking the spectacles off the man looks them over in surprise and confusion. “Well I’ll be, I must have really took a harder hit than I thought to the head…” He said. “We have members of our group who know different things. We have Boone, who’s a sniper. We have a robot thing ball that I don’t know what it’s called. There’s me, who is, well, me. And there’s Anne…” Twilight said looking over at her immobile friend in worry. “We… Could always do with a proper person with a science background like myself.” “You? I didn’t think a horse would understand science.” “I’ll have you know that I was trained by some of the best minds in Equestria, Princess Celestia included.” Twilight said with a huff. “You do know that I have no clue what any of that means right?” He asks before sighing. “Fine, I’ll go along with you but I want to make one thing perfectly clear. If you plan to help Caesar's Legion, this is going to be a brief relationship. I may not have all the answers for how to fix Freeside's problems, but Caesar taking control isn't part of the solution. Fair?” “You won’t need to worry about that, I have no intention to help that… man…” Twilight said, her face twisting into one of disgust. “For someone as skinny as your friend here you’d think she’d be a lot lighter.” The man that introduced himself as Arcade Gannon said as he dragged the limp form of Anne through the large doors of the Lucky 38, the woman being covered in some dirty sheets to try and cover some of her remaining dignity. “Try carrying all her stuff, I didn’t realize how heavy her stuff is. I have no clue how she drags all this stuff around every day without seeming to get affected by it in the slightest.” Twilight groaned, a pile of guns strapped to her back along with a different type of armor Anne must have picked up along with weapons Twilight had never seen before. “I wouldn’t know.” Arcade grumbled as they managed to get into the elevator and pressing the button for the presidential suite. The door opened with a soft ding sound, the small group making their way out of the moving platform. “I would have expected this place to be a bit cleaner on the inside, it looks like the carpet is mostly covered in mold.” Arcade observed as he hauled Anne onto the main bed of the suit, groaning as he stood up and stretched his sore back. Twilight dumped all the stuff at the end of the bed and fell to the floor on her stomach. “I’m going to slap Anne so hard when she gets through this.” Twilight grumbled. Her pouting was interrupted as she heard a quick number of beeps before the weird Ball Bot shot through the open doorway and floated next to Anne, nudging her with its face plate. “An Eyebot?” Arcade said, looking slightly concerned. “It would probably be a good idea to get rid of that thing, you don’t know if you say something that would set it off to go kill crazy.” He warned as he took a step back from the little ball. “I’m not going to do anything about it until Anne wakes up, I don’t know if it’s important in some way I don’t know of yet.”