//------------------------------//
// 05: Broken Bones and Pride 
// Story: Bear, Scribe and Paladin 
// by Speven Dillberg 
//------------------------------//

Vault 101, mid-2278

The three Outcast Defenders stood at the door that separated the great Vault door of Vault 101 from the rest of the Vault itself. “You guys hear that?” one of them asked.
“Yeah, what is that?”
“Sounds like... duct tape?” The three power-armoured soldiers looked at each other before the door was ripped off the wall, courtesy of an earth-shattering explosion. It flew into two of the Defenders, pulverising them and compacting their armour. One was left standing, and he quickly fell to a bolt of plasma sent right through his visor as he tried to see who was responsible.
“Knew I’d find a use for those missiles,” Dom smirked as she stepped in to admire the carnage. The explosion would get everyone’s attention, she knew that. That had been her goal. With any luck the Outcast responsible for the attack would send troops to see what had happened. She holstered the Novasurge and picked up her Gatling Laser, Vengeance, that she had brought along with her. She stood there, waiting for the first Outcasts to come investigate. 
It was only twenty seconds later when the first group came into view. One of them, obviously not expecting something hostile, didn’t even have his helmet on. He only briefly managed to look terrified before a stream of crimson death impacted, and tore through, his skull. The other three quickly suffered a similar fate, their armour and bodies riddled with new holes.
Dom had decided that this would require a different approach, and wanted to make the last moments of every Outcast one of pure terror. To that end, she had donned a set of Enclave Tesla Armour. The sleek metal plates and the horrible insectoid helmet, combined with the frighteningly sparking coils on the shoulders, was more than enough to inspire fear. The woman inside the armour was just icing on the proverbial cake.
She stepped over the corpses and deeper into the Vault, smiling behind the helmet as she heard the sounds of scared Outcasts yelling at each other. When she stepped into the atrium, she was greeted by a dozen of them, each frozen in varying states of preparedness. “Alright, you sonsa bitches!” she yelled as she opened fire. “Eat laser!” 
Later, she would muse that it sounded much better when the line was ‘Eat lead’.





Dom let out a sigh. “Fine. Let’s get this over with. Got something I can use?”
“You’re going to go through with this?” Shining Armor asked, sounding worried. 
“If I don’t, I’ll never hear the end of it,” the ghoul replied.
“What’s going on?” Veronica had finally decided to stop gawking at the locals and rejoin the rest of the humans. 
“Three of them want to fight me.”
The Scribe looked at the Paladin. “Oh neat! Can we watch?”
Before anyone else could say anything, Thomas spoke. “I swear you were depressed a few days ago.”
Veronica shrugged. “A little hard to stay depressed in a place like this, even if I can’t understand a word anyone says.”
“That is some rather impressive armour you’re wearing,” Grimfeather said, looking Veronica up and down.
“Thanks.”
“Are you absolutely sure you want to fight three Griffons?”
“So I’ve only been fighting since I was nineteen,” she shrugged. “I’ve been forced into a war simulation, enslaved, abducted, anal-probed, lobotomised and ghoulified. I can manage easily enough.”
Veronica, Shining Armor and Grimfeather stared at her. “You’ve been lobotomised too?” Thomas asked. 
“You weren’t lobotomised, you had your whole fucking brain pulled out. Anyway,” she said loudly. “I’m going to need a weapon, something I can use to crack some skulls with. Also, I want to talk with Shining alone.”





Five minutes later, Dom emerged from the armoury with a large training sword. While she would have preferred a sledgehammer or even a Super Sledge, it was the best they had. “Let’s do this.”
Shining Armor followed her out, looking at her worriedly. “Just letting you know, you can still back out.”
“Fuck that,” she said harshly. “I’m gonna teach them that you don’t piss off the Lone Wanderer. Besides,” she continued as she rolled her shoulder, “I’ve been cooped up in a freaking Vertibird for weeks. I need to stretch.”
“I’m afraid we have another problem,” Grimfeather said to Shining, knocking him from his musings. “One of your unicorns wants to take a crack at our flesh-rotten friend as well.”
Shining let out an aggravated groan while Dom chuckled. She muttered something about someone called ‘Daring’ Dashwood and went over to the other humans. “This won’t end well,” the stallion muttered.
“Yes, you’ve got that right,” his counterpart said.
“No, I mean for your Griffons and the unicorn,” Shining clarified. “Thomas, the one with the dark skin?” Grimfeather nodded, showing he knew which one he was talking about. “He faced three Night Guard captains in combat, left two of them unconscious.”
“What of the third?” the griffon asked in a whisper, not entirely sure why he was keeping voice so low.
“She surrendered.”
The sergeant began to splutter. “S-surrender!? Impossible! Why, the reputation of the Night Guard is one of complete - ”
“What makes any of our higher ranked soldiers so dangerous is the healing amulets built into their armour,” Shining explained. “Without them, they’re no more a threat than any other pegasus or unicorn.”
Grimfeather blinked. “Isn’t that classified?”
“Not really. All the soldiers know, and they’re free to tell their families. What is classified is that those things have limits, a... well, a set amount of injuries they can heal with the magic contained.” Shining shuddered. “He fought so hard, they ran out of power.”
“Oh merciful heavens,” the griffon muttered. Then he blinked. “But that was him.”
“I get the feeling the ghoul, as she calls herself, is even deadlier.”





“All right, anything you can tell me?” Dom asked as she swung around the padded training sword.
“Well, Grimfeather over there told me that a Griffon’s claw can slice through metal,” Veronica said cheerfully. “And that they’re fast.”
“Go for the wings,” Thomas said. “If they get airborne, you’ll get tackled like before.”
“What about the unicorn?” Dom asked, removing her weapons and placing them on the ground.
“Unicorn?” Thomas asked back. When the ghoul nodded, he face-palmed. “Well, they’re completely fucked then.”
“Why?”
“For reasons I have yet to determine, their magic is identical to gamma radiation,” Thomas explained to the Scribe. Her eyebrows disappeared into her fringe and her jaw dropped. “So, while me and you are fucked without a lot of Radaway, Dom is practically invincible.”
“How does that even makes sense?” Veronica asked.
“Guess I didn’t need Shining to pump me full of radiation, then,” the ghoul muttered. 
“What? I thought you had to be in radiation to heal,” Veronica said as she picked up her jaw. “I don’t think you can use stored radiation to heal yourself.”
“I’ve been like this for years, I’ve picked up a few tricks,” Dom replied cryptically. She reached into her armour and pulled out her pair of Lucky Shades. “Let’s do this.”





Standing across from the three feathered killers and their unicorn companion, Paladin Esposito felt confident. True, she had never found herself in such a situation before but, as she had learnt shortly after leaving Vault 101, she was very adaptable. 
The griffons were wearing little armour, instead relying on speed and agility. What armour they did wear was mostly leather barding with metal plates over the more vulnerable areas. Their heads were completely uncovered.
The unicorn was a member of the Day Guard, a mare at that. Much like every member of the guard, her armour had rendered her a clone of her compatriots, though there was a purple star set in the barrel. She was wearing a fierce scowl that, were it actually possible, would probably melt Dom’s left arm.
Around them, and separating the combatants from the spectators, was a shield erected by Knight-Commander Shining Armor. It was a translucent, colourless bubble, approximately twenty yards in diameter. He assured her that it would keep anything within the shield safely contained, meaning they could fight as viciously as they liked. He made it abundantly clear that he did not like the notion.
“Alright, chaps, the rules for this shall be simple. No gouging, no excessive clawing, no ripping out throats, no disemboweling, no magic above third tier spells and no killing. This is a friendly fight, I do not want to be the one to tell your families you died in a spar. That would just be embarrassing,” Grimfeather groused as he hovered above the dome. “Now then, I believe you want to get this over and done with, so I won’t delay your insatiable bloodthirst any further.”
“Did you really have to say that?” Shining asked as the Griffon alighted next to him. 
“Well, it is the truth.”
Before the unicorn could respond, there was a horrific sound from the bubble. Two of the Griffons had managed to take flight and had moved as if to tackle the ghoul. One of them dove over her head, providing a distraction for the second. Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned for the flying beasts of myth.
Dom had expected something like that, and had brought her padded sword right into the second griffon’s flight path. Unable to abort, he flared his wings in an attempt to slow down. It succeeded, but that only gave her a chance to bring the sword down onto his head with a mighty two-handed, overhead swing.
While the padding may have prevented the blow from doing too much damage, more than enough was done when the Griffon hit the ground. He now lay unconscious, a crack in his beak marking the point of impact.
The audience could only watch as the textbook maneuver failed spectacularly. The two remaining Griffon combatants immediately switched things up, going in for a no-bars-hold beating. The ghoul could only do so much to block the damage, but her armour took a heavy number of scratches, as did her uncovered arm.
Without warning, she let out a horrible, gravelly scream as she dropped her sword. One of the Griffons had managed to grab hold of her right arm and, using enough force to snap a charging manticore’s neck, broke it.
The Griffons backed away, while the unicorn simply watched in disdain. “So, the great warrior falls to a broken arm,” she sneered. “How pathetic.”
Shining resisted the urge to facehoof. “Why is Captain Starburst in there? She hates non-ponies.”
“Honestly?” Grimfeather asked. “I was hoping your friend would show her some humility. Heavens knows that arrogant mare needs it.”
“You think I’m done, don’t you?” Dom asked as she stood, seemingly ignorant of the pain she was surely in. She brought her injured arm up and held it out for a moment. Green fumes seemed to rise up, much to the confusion of everyone watching. Without warning, the arm snapped back into place in a completely unnatural fashion. “What the fuck!?” Thomas exclaimed, looking horrified.
“That’s not normal,” Veronica claimed in an unusually small voice.
There was the sound of at least one audience member throwing up, but apart from that there was silence. Captain Starburst gaped, her confident expression gone. “W-what are you?” she stammered.
“Let me introduce myself,” Dom declared to her shell-shocked audience. “I’m the Lone Wanderer.” She bent down and picked up her sword. “Now I’ll show you how we do things in the Capital Wasteland.”





Author’s Notes:
Are the bits with Dom’s past unnecessary, or are they fun bits of extra information?
Also, thanks to my good friend Beese for making Grimfeather’s lines so very British.