//------------------------------//
// 2016 project - Fallout:Equestria Land After Time - Prologue 
// Story: RoMS' Extravaganza 
// by RoMS 
//------------------------------//


“Fly little bird. Fly where your wings can carry you. Here is no place for a colt anymore.”



[ α Ω α ]


Tall Tales was a large town south-eastern of the major city of Vanhoover. It was boring before the war, and the war itself did change nothing about it. Fillies and colts did get bored around the town. It was a place of grown-ups, where skyscrapers grew and germinated all over the place as what the adults called military-industrial complex drove the city at its historical peak of development.

Fillies and colts did get bored around that town. There was nothing much to do but attend the prestigious schools that had settled around the city. Everypony here had had a big education and served their country very well. It would have been a shame if the youth could not follow in their parents’ hoofsteps.

That’s why a young colt called Lolly Soda hated Tall Tales. The buildings were so tall that ponies from the outside would have called them tales. That was a specific part of the city. Nopony entered it. Nopony could leave it. At least not without a passport and paperwork as his father told him.

Lolly Soda’s father was a perfectly normal father. Even though he was not a lot of time at home, as mother, he was working on big projects for the government. He even had promised him to go visit his working place one day. Lolly Soda was waiting for that day impatiently.

Meanwhile, Lolly Soda, with his always scrawny and dishevelled chocolate brown mane and scruffy beige fur, hated school. Once a day they had to drill around. Rush to their stack and get horribly heavy masks to put on. Then they had to head to the basement. He hated that place. Everypony was always grumbling and there was the zebra poster looking at them all down there. Hammered on the wall, the two-pony tall piece of plastic sported a massive Zebra mare with golden ring around her neck and brightly red eyes. It had been facing some armoured ponies, the rangers. Both were as scary as they could get, grey and black, shooting lasers and bullets around. Lolly Soda sometimes wondered what would happen if the ponies and zebra on the poster would suddenly get alive. As one colt he disliked was always standing next to it, the Earth Pony colt had always hoped the rangers on the picture would nip on the bully’s ear and drag him to the zebra to be gobbled up. Well, zebras had to gobble up ponies… It was written on the poster.

“
If you don’t want to be gobbled up by evil zebras,
Talk to your parents, donate to the M.W.T.,
Fight the war.
Remember: zebras are evil.
”

That had always felt silly to Lolly Soda. His father worked for the M.W.T., the Ministry of Wartime Technology. Now that the colt had learnt the meaning of the three letters and had made the connection with his father’s job, he had been happy to tell his few friends.

All his friends’ parents worked for the M.W.T., which did not help him stand out. From time to time, the Unicorn fillies and colts had a mother or father working for the M.A.S. It was about magical stuff. Not some Earth Pony thing to mess with. In fact, Lolly Soda wasn’t interested in magic. It was gross.

“Hush now, quiet now, it’s time to go to bed,” he whispered over the ambient dim as he closed the heavy metal door.

“I’m not a baby anymore,” Lolly cried.

“For me, you’ll always be my baby.”

He closed the door. The world lit up in one fiery white hot flame, and the chaos of Tall Tales went abruptly asleep.