Ten minutes later.
"I've never seen a mutie like that before. Maybe an experiment the Enclave sent through the portal?" Vargas said as he cleaned the disassembled AER-9 before him. The group had taken a tally on their equipment and supplies, and found they were drastically short on provisions. Aside from the T45d on Kodiak and Dusk's backs, they had no armor, and only three microfusion cells for Bryan and Vargas' Laser Rifles. Kodiak's Gatling Laser was entirely inoperable, due to damage sustained from being shoved in a locker. Harris, who sat away from the group, particularly because of Dusk, searched through the FM frequencies to see if they still got Galaxy News Radio wherever they were. Static and the crackle of the dying fire provided white noise for the Lyons' Pride-minus-three-plus-one.
"I dunno, it could talk, and it brought us food. Maybe we should try to speak with it when it wakes up?" Bryan popped one of the mushrooms they'd miraculously found scattered on the forest floor into his mouth.
"I'm not against it, but I'm not risking it until we can restrain it. And we have no restraints." Vargas continued his maintenance as the group made what essentially amounted to idle talk.
"What about my armor? With the reactor powered down, I can barely move in it. And that mutie looks weak. No offense to ya'." Kodiak prodded the unconscious pony with his foot. Slowly, its eyes peeled open, taking in its surroundings. It squeaked once more;
"None taken!" And promptly collapsed back into the cold embrace of artificially-induced slumber.
"Girls, Pinkie really should be back by now. It's been..." Twilight raised her hoof and glanced at it, "Nearly ten minutes. She never takes this long!"
"'Guess it'll be one heckuva party, am I right?" Rainbow Dash said.
Applejack frowned, "Rainbow, ain'tcha just a tad concerned for Pinkie? She has been gone a while."
"Pinkie can handle herself. Wherever she's disappeared to, I'm sure she's fine. It's not as if some cabinet monster abducted her or something." Rarity said, as she rolled her eyes.
"Cabinet monster... oh no! Pinkie must have been abducted by a cabinet monster! Sorry to cut this day short girls, but I've got to get the the library!" And with a purple flash, Twilight disappeared.
Rarity sighed. "And here we go again. I'm heading to the Boutique for some tea. Spike, would you be a dear and help carry my bags?"
Bryan and the gang huddled around a tree stump at the edge of the clearing, unconscious mutant stuck to an unusually sappy tree. Vargas began the briefing.
"Alright, here's what we've got food-wise. Both of the suits of armor can reconstitute liquid waste-"
"I-I-I'm not drinking Dusk's piss. For all I know, she poisoned it." Harris stammered, cowering. As usual.
"How would I poison my urine?" She said, face scrunched in part anger, part confusion.
Harris blurted out, "Well you would-" Vargas cut him off with a very raised voice.
"AND WE HAVE THREE MREs SO WE'LL BE OUT OF FOOD IN ABOUT A DAY. DUSK AND WILKS ON SCAV DUTY. DISMISSED. Please." He was nearly in tears by the end.
Dusk and Bryan prowled through the dense, dark forest. It was humid enough to be indistinguishable from a jungle, and the fauna didn't help. Nearly everything they'd found was hostile or looked too phallic to consume with any dignity. The smidgen of hope they'd found upon finding what seemed to be an apple was crushed when a swarm of spiders exploded out of it. Spider with wings. They definitely weren't on Earth. Even post-apocalyptic God wouldn't be that cruel.
"We should split up." Dusk said.
"Okay."
"Did... did you really just agree to split up in a dark jungle full of hostile creatures? That was kind of a formality. We're not splitting up."
"Okay. Bitch. Hey, bi- er Dusk, what the hell is this?" Bryan prodded a bright yellow box that lay on the floor.
"No idea. You should pick it up." And so, Bryan picked it up. "Holy shit Bryan! Don't just pick up random crap on the floor. It could be a trap, or explosives, or-"
"Filly Scout Cookies."
"Huh?"
"That's what the box says. Filly Scout Cookies. And it's full! Floor cookies, yum. Well, it's not like we have a choice." He ripped the top open, and plucked one out. The cookies were plain, golden-brown affairs with slightly-burnt edges and soft centers. They were extremely stale and approximately three years past expiration. They were the best thing Bryan had eaten since giant fire-breathing ants had killed his family. And he could see another box lying ahead in the forest. "Dusk, I think we've hit the motherlode! Follow me. And eat a cookie. They're orgasmic." Bryan moaned out in-between cookies.
They continued down the trail, following random boxes of Filly Scout Cookies, until they came upon a dead end. A cave. With a wooden door. That meant inhabitants. Smart ones. Possibly the same kind of mutie that had ambushed their camp. Dusk smirked, and cocked her rifle. Bryan, AER-9 in one hand, and cookie on the other, kicked the door open. Inside, huddled around a dimly lit table, was a swath of the same mutants as earlier sporting different colors.
"For the Brotherhood!"
"Suppressing fire!"
"PEW PEW PEW PEW!" Every single mutie was dead, caught by surprise. Behind the chaos and debris, another light came on, revealing another mutant, this time clapping its... wrist stumps, slowly.
"Well well well, it seems we have some intruders. I am Canterbury, leader of the Solar Alliance. We seek to depose the demon Nightmare Moon from pow-"
"PEW PEW PEW!" Said Bryan's Laser Rifle, as Canterbury dissolved into a butt of ash.
"Alright, Dusk, go search through the cave, I'll scavenge the bodies." Bryan ordered, as he chewed on another cookie. He quickly checked through the bodies, realizing that he couldn't really retrieve anything from the piles of ash that were left of the mutants, and sat down on a stool left from the mutant base. He reminisced. About things he had no right reminiscing about, since he wasn't there for them, but hey, it tells the backstory.
"O'ER THE YONDER AWAITS THY FOE, MOVE FORTH AND CONQUER THY ENCLAVE SCUM. DOETH SO FOR THY CAUSE OF LIBERTY, FOR THOU SHALT GIVETH ME LIBERTYETH ORETH GIVETH METH DEATHETH." Liberty Prime 2.0 bellowed, a collective groan sounding from the Brotherhood soldiers fighting alongside him.
"What's wrong with Prime!?"
"Is that supposed to be... poetry?."
"Hey Prime, your poetry sucks dick!" The Enclave soldier who shouted this received an eye-laser blast to the face, and was vaporized near-instantly.
The gargantuan front yard of the Plantation housed many a dividing wall or gazebo, leading to lots of very flimsy cover for lots of not-that-well-equipped Brotherhood troops. Enclave Plasma Caster nests in the ruins of the mansion or foxholes in the yard mowed down squad after squad, bursts of caustic green melding armor to flesh. Liberty Prime, who was supposed to be leading the charge, had been standing useless behind the battlefield spouting anti-Enclave poetry.
The soldiers' saving grace came in the form of the Vertibird of the Lyons' Pride, belly open and belching Mini Nukes towards the Enclave positions. With the bombs went the Lone Wanderer, Kenneth Chambers, who smashed through the roof of the mansion, and broke the metaphorical camel's back. First went the roof, as it collapsed inwards on itself. The extra weight of the no-longer-supported rooftop the brought down the next floor, and next, until all the remained of the mansion was a pile of rubble. Kenny crawled out of the wreckage, half a dozen Stimpacks protruding from his chest.
"Who knew the Enclave stored their medical supplies in the attic?" He said, as his voice bled with a veritable tsunami of sarcasm, and yanked their needles out with nary a care.
"Uh, we did, sir. Our recon teams told us. That is why you jumped out of a moving Vertibird into the mansion, right? Because you knew there would be Stimpacks to heal you as it collapsed? Right?" The soldier who asked these questions was new. Very new. Most everyone knew that Kenny 'Loggins' Chambers was nigh-immortal, and possessed the luck of a mutant Irishman whose mutations caused excess luck.
"Actually, I dropped a bottlecap. I think." Behind him, the Pride's Vertibird hovered over the new hole in the ground they'd created, which lead directly into Vault 104. Power Armored soldiers fast-roped/fell out of the VTOL, and it then descended to land in the midst of the surviving Brotherhood soldiers in the front yard.
Sergeant Skywatch of the Royal Guard lay in wait, a full twelve-pony squad with her. They'd just arrived at their destination, a terrorist base in the Everfree Forest, home to the self-proclaimed Solar Alliance, unfortunate misguided ponies who were manipulated in their fear of Princess Luna into joining a cult. Their leader, known only as Canterbury, had a track record in these kinds of things, and whenever he was found he used his current cult as a meatshield to escape. But this time, they had him cornered. They'd tracked him to make sure he was at the base and they'd found the two escape routes he'd built into the caves, with a battlemage stationed outside each of them.
In a harsh whisper, Skywatch began her pep-talkspeech, "Alright you sorry bags of blubber, here's the deal. This guy has been getting mostly innocent but really misguided ponies killed for nearly four years. Today, we have him cornered. We're going to charge in there, and take'm by surpri-"
"And then I said 'Now I know what a TV dinner feels like,' and then he- what the shit? Does that one have wings?" A pair of bipeds waltzed out the door, which on second inspection was already splintered from being bucked in. One of the bipeds, who carried a box of Filly Scout Cookies, raised some kind of steel rectangle towards them and backpedaled into the cave while bright red lasers flew from the tip of the rectangle. The other biped, which was clad entirely in some sort of suit of armor, charged towards Skywatch, the only visible Guard member, a similar contraption in its steel claws. It raised it towards the Sergeant, and, with the ponies now knowing what to expect from the device, immediately charged out of the forest at the beast. The two Unicorn artillery-ponies pinned her in place with a joint stasis spell as the four Pegasi and Skywatch flew in circles, forming a tornado out of the loose branches and grime coating the forest floor. The remaining Guards, all Earth Ponies, simply charged and started bucking, to no avail. Whatever that armor was resisted their strongest attacks in near-entirety, and a slight dent and a hoof-full of pockmarks that may have been there before were all that marked their combined efforts.
The Sergeant barked a chain of commands, and the mages released the beast from their grip and shoved it back with all their might, the Earth Ponies scattering to avoid the bombardment. The creature flew halfway back to the cave entrance where it slid across the ground for a few more meters. From within the cave, more lasers flew out, this time more accurate, and took out one of the circling Pegasi, his armor melting into his fur. With the loss of one of the supporting weather-controllers, the small tornado quickly grew out of control and spiraled into a tree, where it dissolved and flung two more Pegasi into the tree with it, a dull clang marking their incapacitation.
"Dusk, you good?" Said the beast in the cave, as the other struggled to its feet under the magic bombardment from the Unicorns.
"No, I'm not! They can't get through the armor, but I can feel the heat through it! Pick one of them off for me, will ya'?"
"Anything for you, honey!" A flurry of lasers once again flew out of the cave, which clipped one of the spellcasters and gave Dusk the chance to disappear into the trees.
"We'll meet up back at camp, don't die!" Dusk's rifle barked out alongside her shouts, and two of the scattered Earth Pony guards fell, gaping wounds in their unarmored necks.
"Duly noted!" Not wanting to be outdone, the thing in the cave loosed even more lasers, incinerating one unicorn and sending the last Pegasus crashing into the Sergeant.
"Royal Guard, fall back! We're not prepared for this!" The surviving Unicorn fired inaccurate blasts at the cave as she backpedaled away, as the Earth Ponies grabbed the wounded and intact dead.
Once the survivors had reunited with the two lone battlemages at the exits, the three live Unicorns prepared healing charms and pain-relief spells for those unfortunate enough to survive a hit by the laser. Both of the fallen Earth Ponies were dead by the time the Unicorns got to them, and one of the Pegasi that had hit the tree had broken her neck and died near-instantly. The one whose armor was melted to their flesh merely groaned in pain on a makeshift stretcher. The Pegasus that had hit Skywatch was missing half his head, and Skywatch herself had broken a wing in the fall.
"Wallflower, prep a letter." She said to a battlemage, "We need to report to Princess Celestia about those... things. And from what I heard, there's more of them. Take note."
Like an hour or something later.
Back at the Humans' camp, Harris and Bryan idly chatted over the Filly Scout Cookies, while Vargas, Kodiak, and Dusk played a primitive game of Texas Hold'em, utilizing different kinds of leaves with scavenged weapons from the cave as betting material.
"You say that had... invisible laser rifles?" Harris asked.
"Yeah, there was two of 'em with horns that just shot stuff right out of them. Seems like they're multitools, too, they were able to pin Dusk in place and then throw her a good ten feet." Bryan replied, munching on cookie number twenty-something.
"Uh huh." Harris fiddled with his Pip-Boy some more, still trolling the radio waves, when he came upon an actual station. "Ah hah! Let's see what we've got here... isolate the signal, enhance, and... yeah! Everyone, listen up, I've got something!"
"...and rumors of a new gang based in the Everfree Forest near Ponyville have sprung up. We've heard about this from Guard members to Hoofball moms, is this just another boogeymare fad or something far more sinister in the peaceful heart of Equestria?"
Bryan sighed. And shook his head. And sighed a few more times for good measure. "What...? Anyone heard of Equestria? Or Ponyville? Or Hoofball? And come to think of it, what the hell are Filly Scout Cookies?"