Interlude 1: Birth of the Wasteland
Time.
Time takes a long time to go through, and sometimes even longer to talk about. If I were to fill you in on every single detail of my two hundred years in the wasteland, you'd be as old as I am by the time you finished reading it, provided you lived that long. Since I'd like to focus on the important stuff, I'm going to abridge a few parts of the story. Don't worry though, I'm only going to gloss over the things that are too long, boring, or unimportant to worry yourselves about.
After we finished our excursion to Manehattan, May and I returned to Ponyville. May's intent was to tend to any refugee survivors that might head there after hearing Turntable's announcement. As for me, Ponyville was the closest thing I had to a home after the destruction of Cloudsdale and the closing of the sky. Going above the cloud ceiling didn't strike me as a good idea; my kin up above wouldn't know what a ghoul was, and would more than likely shoot me on sight.
Not that I minded so much; I had a couple new friends to pass the time with. When we got back to Ponyville, May and I found that Gizmo had moved on. Raider told us that his forced communication with the MASEBS had crashed the Stable-Tec terminal beyond even his ability to repair. Gizmo had left with the intention of finding a Stable-Tec facility with better equipment, hoping to confirm as much as he could about the Stables. He had evidently built himself a new custom firearm from the parts at Ironshod before departing, leaving That Gun to May.
We stayed in Ponyville for the first year after the apocalypse, May holding out hope for more survivors to come. We stayed in the loft above Sugar Cube Corner, and I finally got to bake some fresh muffins. Sadly, only about a dozen other ponies ever came to stay. A few others passed through, while some came only to try and get into the Stable beneath Sweet Apple Acres. One group tried to force their way into the shelter, and had to be forcibly discouraged by Raider. The former warrant officer ended up starting a relationship with one of the mares who came to take refuge in the small town.
A few months after the apocalypse, we faced the first winter of the wasteland. Without the pegasi managing the weather, it was wild, fierce, and unrelenting. Being a pegasus myself, I was able to alleviate some of the difficulties, but it was still beyond rough. It was also drawn out longer than any winter I had previously experienced, its end hampered by the weakened sunlight and megaspell fallout. It didn’t help that the snow itself was radioactive. Everypony aside from May and I was confined inside their homes, and we had to make frequent runs to distribute RadAway. An elderly earth pony that May had rescued on the first day of the wasteland did not survive the season. A few times I thought I could hear noise coming from up at Sweet Apple Acres, but didn’t want to leave town long enough to investiage.
Turntable continued to bring the news and music to the wasteland, taking up his aunt's title of DJ P0N-3. There wasn't really much for him to talk about though, since much of Equestria was dead quiet in the wake of the holocaust and subsequent winter. There was the occasional report about a skirmish over dwindling safe places to live or food sources, but they were few and far between. Sadly, this was because the ponies left on the surface were also few and far between.
The best news to come from Turntable's broadcast was shortly after the end of winter. Gizmo had apparently made his way to the former Stable-Tec headquarters in Fillydelphia, where he had accessed their central maneframe. According to what he found, ninety-six of the one hundred and one Stables built by Stable-Tec had successfully sealed, and an estimated eighty-five thousand ponies had been saved inside them. We neither saw nor heard about Gizmo again after that, leading us to believe that the radiation from the megaspell that destroyed Fillydelphia had taken his life in exchange for getting the word out about the Stables. We took comfort in the nobility of his sacrifice.
After a full year passed, May grew restless. It had become clear that nopony else would be coming out to the small town in search of refuge, so she decided to set out and help anypony she could find. I decided to go along with her, not wanting her to have to face the wasteland alone. Raider stayed behind to look after Ponyville. He and Honeydew, the mare he had been taken with, promised to keep the town alive as a haven for survivors.
For the next few years after that, May and I went in search of other small settlements of survivors and refugees. We found a few dozen scattered across the Equestria Wasteland, although most had populations under twenty. Most shot at us on sight, forcing us to flee without being able to help. But there were a few who were more willing to accept us ghouls. Between May's medical skills and my knowledge of weather management (which was admittedly not the greatest, but still better than nothing), we managed to ensure the survival of several small pockets of ponies.
Days turned into years, and then into decades as May and I wandered the wasteland. Most of those we encountered were other ghouls like us. Many of them were feral, like the buck who had been trapped in the Mantehattan Hospital's cafeteria cooler. This eventually lead to May's decision to study, and hopefully someday cure, the ghoul affliction. At the very least, she wanted to find a way to stop the mental degradation that led to ghouls turning feral.
In the meantime, that condition allowed us access to certain regions that other, non-mutated ponies could not reach. Any time we came across an intact (or even mostly intact) MoP or MAS facility, May used whatever equipment was available to further her studies. Progress on the ghoul front was excruciatingly slow, although she did discover the mutation that slowed our ageing process. After forty years, I was beginning to wonder why I hadn't keeled over yet.
A trip to the Pie rock farm that same year revealed that Blinkie Pie had passed away. We buried her out in the fields, and prayed that she would be reunited with her lost family. The farm, unlike most of Equestria, was still relatively safe, and the well out back was deep enough that the radiation had yet to poison it. Eventually, some other family would come and make it their home.
The next big leg of our journey began when May decided to branch out from her studies on the ghoul mutations. She started studying the long term effects radiation was having on the flora and fauna of Equestria. After several generations, the animal species of Equestria had either died out, or began to take on the forms that they currently hold. Two particularly tenacious species were cattle (the predecessors of brahmin, but with only one head) and swine.
May wanted to see how radiation was changing things in Equestria, but I would soon learn that the effects of time can be far more ravaging.