//------------------------------//
// Tribal 
// Story: Fallout Equestria: Skyward 
// by romantis 
//------------------------------//



I wasn't dead.

It didn't feel like a relief to know that.

I'd been lying down on an air mattress - a surreal thing to wake up to, one which brought to mind distant camping trips and slumber parties. My injuries had seemingly vanished, and for a moment the illusion that I was dreaming returned. I wondered if I'd ever truly be able to shake the notion. I rubbed one hoof along my leg, feeling for where the ghoul had bitten me. Blood and fluid flaked from my coat.

Rather than try to get up and go looking for ponies, I decided to stay exactly where I was. The likeliest answer was that - for some reason - the Rangers had actually stopped to fend off the zombies. The fact that my injuries were gone indicated that somepony'd administered a healing potion (or several, depending on how many further injuries I'd sustained before they'd pulled me out), and the Rangers seemed like the kind of organisation to be hoarding large quantities of medicine. They hadn't taken off my raincoat, which seemed like an oversight to me. My saddlebags had been left in a heap by the door - again, did they just not care?

There was a certain spell to lying there. My legs ached.

I was in an office, it seemed. Whoever had worked in the room before had made an effort to add personal touches - dust-caked plastic models lined the shelves, and faded posters covered the walls. There was a neat-looking Wonderbolts print on the back of the door, one I didn't recognise. It seemed... sombre. Not like the usual Wonderbolts designs at all.

The window cut the sunlight from outside into a neat beam full of sparkling motes of dust. I wondered if the clouds had parted, and the desire to look out of the window was almost enough to bring me to my hooves. Almost.

A lot of time passed as I stared at that sunbeam, watched as the light crept inexorably off the poster and onto the wall beside it. The light ebbed and flowed as the clouds drifted, almost imperceptibly.

I wondered if Spiral was okay.

Several times, I almost got up. I'd had weekends like that, I recalled, in another life - weekends when I'd wake up and not move an inch. My mind would reach out for a reason to get up... something I needed to do... only to realise there was nothing. And it would only be then that the thought would occur to me that there had always been another option.

I'd stare at my alarm clock, which I hadn't set, and I'd think about nothing.

The door would be closed. My eyes would be closed. I would wait for the world to come for me.

On those weekends, the world didn't.

Eventually, I'd need to get a drink or go to the toilet or something, and that would be enough to break the spell. Reality would reassert itself.

I heard heavy hoofsteps approaching the door, and rolled to my hooves just as it opened.

"Ah! You're awake." Porridge sounded amiable enough. He was still in armour, a fact which struck me as strange. Did they wear that stuff everywhere? "Excellent. It seems we have much to discuss."

"What happened?" I asked. After a moment of standing there awkwardly, I sat down on one of the office chairs. A plume of dust rose from the cushion.

Porridge continued to stand rigidly where he was. I suspected that the armour could lock in one position, supporting its wearer. "You couldn't keep up. Spiral convinced me that you were worth saving." His eyes were invisible behind that mirrored visor. Still, his helmet gave me a level stare. "We took a risk on you. On Spiral's word. Believe me, were the assertion not already so unbelievable, so specific, I would've declared it a lie and left you to your fate. So tell me, Backlight... why in Celestia's name do the doors of Pendulum Laboratories open for you?"

Oh. Well, there was the answer. A sinking feeling settled over me, as I realised I was about to lose my bargaining chip. Still... "Okay. I can do it, but I have a condition," I replied, and Porridge laughed in my face.

"I can guess," he said, malice in his tone. "Let me make this crystal clear... you are not in a position to negotiate. You are alive at my word only."

There it was.

He continued. "You are in our debt. I suspect you care about continuing to live far more than I care about getting into that particular mausoleum. Both of those things can happen, if you so choose. But you still haven't answered my original question... why?"

Something told me that telling him about Site Two would be a very bad idea. "The biometric spells... they work on genetics." True enough. "It's not supposed to be the case, but if you're directly related to one of the ponies the spells are keyed to, you can get in too. It was a... known vulnerability, one I'm sure M.A.S. was working on. But our spells had to be keyed to a whole bunch of different ponies, meaning the vulnerability's huge." What I wasn't telling him was that M.A.S. had, as far as I could remember, succeeded in re-calibrating the spell.

That got a long stare from Porridge. "So you're saying that the security flaw... should be one that almost any of the tribals in the area can exploit?"

"Oh, uh... I don't know."

"You don't know?"

I really didn't know what he wanted me to say.

Finally, he sighed. "You're lying. I don't know who you are, but you seem about as comfortable here in the Wasteland as an earth pony on clouds."

"I-"

"It seems unlikely that you're a Stable Dweller, based on the state of all the known Stables in the area. That leaves the more... esoteric explanations. So I can say, keeping in mind where we found you, with some degree of confidence... well, that we finally know what Site Two was for."

I felt like I needed to say something, to lie, to do anything to salvage the conversation - but it was far too late. "Site Two... is buried. Ruined. I barely escaped alive."

"I see."

I didn't know what to say to him, to try and convince him that Site Two was worthless... to convince him to do the right thing. Instead, I asked, "Where's Spiral?"

Finally, the armour moved again. "Down the hall. I'll show you the way."

He led me past a few closed doors, until he came to one with a key in the lock. The key clicked as he turned it - such a tiny object in his club-like hoof.

"I'll leave you to it," he said. "Consider your options. If you're hungry, feel free to join us in the mess shortly - lock the door behind you." It was always so strange to me, hearing a pony speak with such casual deliberation. I'd never been much good at that.

He trotted back in the direction we'd come. I pressed the door handle, hesitated there a moment, then gently pushed the door open. "Spiral?"

It was an office, much like the one I'd been in, only the shelves and walls that had been filled with models and posters in that room were bare in this one. The grey mare sat on the other side of the desk from me, in a decaying office chair.

"Hey," she said, not looking in my direction, spinning herself first one way, then the other. She seemed... restless? "What did he say to you?"

I took the other seat. "He knows everything. I tried to cover for Site Two, but that only made him work it out faster. Says there's no way he's letting you go, and says he'll kill me if I don't get him into Site One."

"Fuuuck. I'm so sorry I dragged you into this."

"I mean, I'd already be dead, otherwise. So."

A tiny nod. Finally, she turned to face me, and upon seeing me she laughed a little, and I felt like shit. "You look like shit," she said. I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen my reflection. I glanced at my hooves. They were dirtier than they'd ever been. If I smelled, I didn't know it. "Y'know, like, when I left... it didn't even occur to me how much I'd miss the showers. Stuff like that, you just don't think about it, like."

"No, I guess you don't." I realised that, when I'd first run into her - bloodstains aside - she'd looked kinda like I did. Now her mane and tail were tangled, her cloak was ruined... she looked a mess. She looked like she needed a hug, but I stayed where I was. "Sorry," I said, and she frowned at me.

We sat in silence for a long moment.

Eventually, she spoke. "Y'know, like... for a moment I really thought you were dead, like. I couldn't find your pulse, and you were bleeding a lot, and... yeah. It fucking sucked." She crossed her forehooves and rested them on the desk. "Should've warned you about the ghouls. I mean, like, I don't know if it would've helped you, but at least... I don't know. I wasn't thinking." I started to say something, but she carried on. "Fuck, they made such a big deal of... of having cleared the area. There were talks about expanding the base here and stuff. And I was thinking, like, that's my chance - go to Skyward, grab a load of supplies, then head up west and join the others."

"Others? Other whats?"

That snapped her out of it. "Oh. Yeah. Uhh... apparently some of the other contingents are getting, like... I don't know, it was just some rumour I heard. A whole bunch of Steel Rangers leaving. And I was like, fuck, if they're doing it, so can I."

"So you were gonna try and... meet up with them?"

"Fuck, yeah, but it all went to shit. None of this was supposed to happen."

My mane itched, so I reached up with one hoof and scratched at it. "You can't give up," I said. "I don't know... maybe there'll be something in Pendulum we can use against Porridge. Then we hightail it out of here, go find these- these mutineers, I guess."

A trace of a smile passed over Spiral's face. "That what you call a plan? Like, if there isn't anything at Pendulum, then we're so royally fucked. And we just don't have the kind of resources for a journey like that."

I shrugged. "Best I can think of."

She rolled her eyes. "Well, maybe we can pull something out of our ass." After a momentary frown, she corrected herself: "Asses."

I stifled a laugh. There was a small part of me that thought I should say that everything would turn out fine, but I didn't. Instead, I asked, "Do you want me to stay with you? Here?"

The question seemed to surprise her. "Why? Like, do you have somewhere to be?"

"I haven't eaten in-" I briefly thought back, but with the time I'd lost unconscious, I struggled to make the calculation "-a while, and Porridge was offering food in the mess hall." After a moment, I added, "I can try to bring you some too."

"Yeah, okay." Her eyes flickered over me. "But seriously, like... you should get a shower first. There aren't any in this building, but they knocked through to next door. There's a block there they've got working..." Her horn flared green as she grabbed a dust-caked piece of paper and pencil to draw a little map for me. I tried my best to memorise her instructions as she did so.

"You'll be fine while I'm gone?" I asked. She nodded. "Okay then. See you later."

I needed to go up two flights of stairs to reach the passage into the building next door. It was hard for me to orient myself, as I'd never really paid much attention to the building before and it continued much deeper than the exterior facade would suggest. I wouldn't have been able to say how many floors there were - maybe six? Eventually I found the right corridor. No effort had been made to clean up the jagged hole in the brick wall, though the debris had been swept away. From the signage on the other side, I quickly deduced that the M.W.T's neighbour had been a hotel, with a rooftop pool and a full gym on the top floor. There were two baskets near the showers - one was full of towels, the other was empty. A hoofwritten sign indicated that wet towels were to be placed in the empty basket; it seemed I would be the first to take a shower since the morning.

I finally shucked off my raincoat. It was ruined - maybe if I went back to my apartment, I'd be able to salvage some of my old clothes? There were a couple of jackets I had in mind, but after two hundred years I wasn't holding my breath. Still, did I even want to go back to wearing that stuff? Everything was different now. What did ponies in the wasteland even wear? Other than leather armour, and power armour. Spiral had her cloak.

The water came through a little colder than I'd been used to. It ran red across the sloped tile floor to the drain in the corner. I screwed my eyes shut and shivered. No soap. I warmed to the water, and it warmed up a little itself. A haze surrounded me, and that was when I smelled it. That same smell from the room in Site Two, of a rotting corpse - maybe ten times weaker, but no less disconcerting. That was me. No wonder the Rangers looked down on... what word had Porridge used? Tribals. Celestia, what must Spiral have thought?

My mane prickled, and I glanced over my shoulder. A sudden image had planted itself in my mind, of a ghoul shambling around the corner. Stupid. One near-death experience, and suddenly I was a colt again.

I wondered how long it would take for that feeling to go away.

A while passed before I stepped out of the shower - and even then, I only did so because I was starting to worry I was using too much of their water. Then again, why did I care? I dried myself off as well as I could and picked my raincoat back up off the floor. I wasn't going to be wearing it again, but I didn't want to leave it there.

Somepony was waiting for me as I left the changing room. I dropped the raincoat in surprise and took a couple of steps back.

"Yo. Tribal." The unicorn was leaning against the wall. She was short, with a purple coat and mane, and she leaned against the wall. She was wearing some weird-looking red robes that seemed a bit too big for her- or perhaps that was just how they were supposed to be.

"Aaaa..." I tried to formulate a response, but got stuck on the first letter of the alphabet.

"What did you say to her?" She took a step forward. I was acutely aware that I was still sort-of dripping.

"Who?" I managed. "Spiral?" Who was this pony? Had she followed me? How long had she been waiting? What did she want? I was thoroughly weirded out.

"It was you, right? You're the one who got her to leave."

"I- I didn't! We only just met."

She snickered at that. "You just me-et," she echoed. "Oh, the way you say it... pal, you don't have the slightest idea, do you?"

She's right - I don't know what to say to that.

"I don't know what I did wrong," she said, her voice suddenly hoarse. "I don't know what she wanted."

She took two steps forward, horn angled at my face, and in my head I heard bone crack, saw a bolt of lightning and a bleeding stump - but she wasn't looking at me any more. She walked past me, robes brushing along the floor.

I wiped my mane out of my eyes. They were still stinging from the water. "You're gonna kill her," I called after her.

"...She deserted us," came her reply.

"Seems to me like she had a pretty good reason!"

"You don't know anything," she said, standing at the top of the stairs. "You don't belong here. If you knew what was good for you, you would leave Skyward and never come back."

I stayed there for a while, coat damp, and eventually the hunger in my stomach won out over the straining in my lungs. I navigated my way down to the mess hall, jumping at every shadow. When I arrived, a buck who wouldn't meet my eyes served me a bowl of oatmeal, and I sat down apart from all the other ponies to devour it. I could feel their eyes on me, and I wanted to shout at them, ask what was wrong with them, that they'd kill one of their own without compunctions. But instead I just sat there and ate the gruel, and when I finished it I seriously considered going to ask for more, just to fill the snarling hole inside of me. Anxiety got the better of me, and I made to leave, but then Porridge was there, hoof holding me in place.

He told me what I was going to do.