//------------------------------// // Chapter One: Kicked out and Kicked in. // Story: Fallout Equestria: The Sound of the Wasteland // by ZKPony //------------------------------// Fallout Equestria: The Sound Of the Wasteland By: ZKPony Ch. 1- Kicked out and kicked in ~~~~~ ‘          “Where should I start? At the beginning, of course! But the beginning is too far away, and not relevant enough. It would take too long to get to the heart of the story. So. A long time ago, in the magical land of Equestria, there were two sisters who ruled. Celestia, the older sister, was the goddess of the sun. She governed the daytime. Luna, the younger sister, was goddess of the moon. She watched over the night. But Luna grew unhappy. See, everypony loved the daytime. They worked and played and learned during the day. But at night, all the ponies slept. Luna thought it was unfair that ponies never get to see her beautiful night. This went on for a long time. One night, Luna got so tired of everypony just sleepin’ through her nights that she declared that night would last forever. She wouldn’t let the sun rise. Celestia pleaded with her to let the sun rise, but Luna refused. Celestia had no choice. Without the sun, the ponies couldn’t grow food. Celestia banished Luna to the moon for a thousand years.” But grandpapa, that would make Celestia a big meanie! How could she do that to her own sister?! “Now calm down and let me tell you the rest of the story… See, it broke Celestia’s heart to send Luna to the moon. Luna was just lonely, she figured. So while Luna was away, Celestia strived to make Equestria a better place. She focused on teaching her kingdom friendship, love, and tolerance for those who were different. She started trade relations with the zebras, griffons, and even dragons. Even invited some of them to stay in Equestria. She worked very hard, day and night, to make Equestria the best it could be for when Luna returned. For one thousand years she did this. She even trained an apprentice to help transition her people back to Luna. Twilight Sparkle! Yes, children. Twilight Sparkle. When Luna finally did come back, however, she was… changed. So long in isolation had allowed her dark side to take over. N-nightmare Moon! She’s scary. Let me finish. Nightmare Moon had taken over Luna’s heart, letting only her darkest, nastiest thoughts and feelings through. She was not a nice pony. But Twilight Sparkle was ready. She and her friends used the Elements of Harmony to free Luna, and everypony rejoiced. But not all was well…”                ’             ~~~~~         I recognized the room I woke up in. It was the Council room, where the ruling council for Stable 92 met. I’d been in here a few times as a young colt. Never for anything serious, mostly for broken equipment, but I had seen the Council a fair few times. It was a tall room, the ceiling as high as the Atrium, with a large bench set above a lower sitting area. There weren’t any ponies on my level. Five faces looked down at me from the Council Seat. Five faces that didn’t match up to my memories. This wasn’t the Council, unless the Council had gone through a radical change since I’d…         “Are you awake?”        Three ponies sat on the Council that I recognized. Crescendo still looked older, but now he was joined by Blue Runner and Soundbyte. They looked older as well. Did time pass? How could that be?         “He’s awake. No doubt still sleepy from that tranquilizer dart. Why don’t we give him some more time to wake up before we-”         “No. No more putting this off. We have to get this on record, and then dispose of him. If we wait any longer-”         “Enough!” Crescendo shouted, focusing all of the Council on him. My eyes started to drift shut.         “We don’t have much time. Accoustic, do you know where you are?”         “I’m… in the Council room. But what-”         “Do you know who you are? What Stable you’re in?”         “Well, yeah. I’m Accoustic. Stable 92… That doesn’t-”         “You are hereby sentenced to death for the following crimes: You’ve…”                I couldn’t hear what Crescendo was saying. Sentenced to death? How is that poss- Darkness claimed me as I slumped forward.         “Wake him!”        A hoof viciously tore across my face, clawing me into wakefulness. The gears in my mind immediately started turning, grinding my questions and thoughts against my consciousness, waking me up. “What’s going on?!”        Crescendo sat straighter, putting on a scowl. The first I’d ever seen on him.         “We are sorry, Accoustic.  You were doing so well, and then this. We have no choice. We appreciate your technical services for these past years, but it’s past time for you to be put down. Your little episode yesterday proved that beyond a shadow of any doubt.”         “Crescendo…”        One of the Council I didn’t recognize gestured with a hoof.         “He obviously isn’t in any condition to stand trial. Look at him.”         “He is cognizant and awake, which is more than I can say for some of you. Besides, he may lapse again. Any objections?”                Crescendo turned and looked each of them in the eyes. Nopony raised a hoof or spoke up.         “Then it is decided. Guards, take him away.” A pair of hooves grabbed me by my forelegs and lifted me up, half dragging me. I didn’t even know I had been on the floor… ~Are you going to just take this? I mean, sentenced to death… Pretty heavy, don’t you think?~         “I still don’t understand what’s going on…”        A grunt and jostle from one of the guards.         “Answer me!”        The unicorn and earth pony just looked ahead and walked. There was no answer. Only silence. A deeper silence than just one devoid of noise. No, this silence was more profound. It was in the chains as they rattled against my hooves. It was in the floor as the guards stepped casually, as if they were simply bringing another drunk back to his room. But we weren’t going anywhere as nice as that. The silence was in me, in my breath. It pushed the pause button on my thoughts, and stole my resolve. The silence was deafening. It was suffocating. It was smothering. I hated silence. ~Well, looks like I was wrong about you. Not going to fight back? Just let them take you?~         “ You heard Crescendo. He’s sentenced me to death. What can I do?”                If the guards thought my talking to no one strange, they didn’t say anything about it. ~Coward. What happened to the fearless earth pony who doesn’t afraid of anything?~         “You’re not making any sense. I was never fearless. You’ve got the wrong pony.”                An odd anger sprung up in me before I’d even finished the sentence. It wasn’t the wild, uncontrollable hate from back when I killed all those ponies, but it fought to push to my surface. It boiled in me. ~There you go! Get out there and destroy!~ My hooves found purchase on the floor and I lifted from the guards’ grasp. The unicorn guard lifted his baton in a rose colored aura, but I smacked it away. A sharp hoof to his noggin sent him sprawling on the floor. Out. His companion took the opportunity and leapt on me, I guess trying to pin me to the floor. He swung his baton as he landed on my back, but I was stronger than I thought, and held up. His baton passed over my head once before hitting me on the backswing. It hurt, but I’d felt worse. I bucked, sending him flying into the wall, where he slowly tried to lift himself back up. A well-placed kick to the head stopped that. Then the anger left me. In a cold wash of clarity, I realized what I had done. I had attacked ponies again. Thankfully not killed them, but I had lost control again. All of the questions that had been stored in the back of my mind bubbled their way to the surface… ~Hey, no time for that. Get going! Somepony is bound to have heard-~         “Aaaaaaah! He did it again! He’s a murdering psychopath! Run!”         I barely caught a glimpse of a pony rounding the corner. It was so short, I couldn’t even tell you what color he or she was. But I could hear the screams. I sat, dumbfounded for a second. Red alarm lights dropped from the ceiling and sirens blared from the speakers, waking me back into my thoughtful self. I needed to run. Guards were going to be coming for me, and this time, they wouldn’t give me a trial. I ran. Turning randomly, I almost tripped down the staircase, and kept running. I was a lot slower than I remembered being… And then a guard rounded a corner.         “Hey, you! Stop right there, criminal scum!”        I did the only sensible thing and changed direction. He started after me with a shout. I kept running. Turning. Eventually, another guard rounded a corner, and I was trapped. I ducked into the nearest room I could and heard the door close. I glanced around for anywhere I could hide. I had run into a Sound Booth, a recording station, by the looks of it. There were two desks, both with way too many wires for me to hide under. A closet, filled with neatly organized wiring racks and mic stands and- The speakers clicked on as red alarm lights started to flash. “This is an emergency broadcast. Please remain calm. All ponies are to report to their rooms at once, and stay there until instructed otherwise. Stable 92 will enter emergency lockdown mode in… 5… minutes. Message repeats. This is an emergency broadcast. Please remain…” Another voice from outside the door. A thumping against it. Shouting. A familiar voice took over the speaker in the booth.         “Oh, Accoustic, you have been one bad little pony.”         “Crescendo?! What’s going on?”         ~There’s that stupid question again. Just stop and think sometimes.~         “Oh, don’t act like you don’t know. We can’t have you running around, hurting and killing ponies again. The last time was an accident, or so the old Council said. But this time…” The red alarm lights flashed brightly.  More thumping on the door. It sounded like ponies were ramming against it…         “I don’t know how you managed to lock that door, but we’ll be in soon enough. I really wish it hadn’t come to this. We were friends, once upon a time. I wanted to believe that you’d changed, but I was wrong. A lot of ponies were wrong.” *doomth doomth*                 That would be security… I had to do something. I started pulling wires out from the sound-boards. Maybe there was something that could- The red alarm lights flashed brightly. I sat at the desk, head hung and resolve faded, and realized how stupid my plan was. A way out? Really? The only way out was through that door. And through the security ponies behind it, the rest of the Stable behind them, and then what? Everypony knew it was death to go outside. The red lights flashed brightly.         ‘Should I fight? Oh Celestia, I don’t want to fight!’ *DOOMTH DOOMTH* The red light flashed brightly. Here I was, going to die, and never even knowing the real reason. This was like some crazy storybook nonsense. The blue light flashed weakly. ‘Maybe if I give up…’ The red lights flashed…. Wait. A blue light? A couple seconds later, I saw it again. Coming from under the desk. Under the… floor? There was a tile open, just enough for the blue light to get through. I wouldn’t have seen it if I wasn’t already  looking under the desk. The emergency alarm?  I went under the desk, my flank awkwardly raised, and I was able to lift up the loose tile. There was a hole just big enough for me to squeeze through. How… convenient. After I squeezed through, I closed the roof (floor?) and looked around. The door (roof?) clicked as it locked behind me. A long hallway only barely lit up by that weak blue light, and a staircase at the end of it. I heard the Sound Booth door crash in, and gunfire filled it. Shouts. The blue light flashed weakly. ”Nowhere to go but down…” ~~~~~         The Stable was a clean place. Ponies took turns, called cleaning rotation, to clean the Stable. Even then, most of the main areas had automated cleaning robots.  Everything was spotless, most of the time. It was very pleasant to live in. No dirt. No grime. Nothing to get in the way of our beautiful music. The complete opposite of where I was now. The floors and walls were piss yellow, with splotches of black. I idly wondered if it was safe to breathe down here. It looked like nopony had cleaned this place in forever, which might very well be the case. I guess secret passages weren’t given the same priority as places like bathrooms, which is what this hallway smelled like. I still heard the alarms above and below me as I trotted on. No soundproofing here, whoever had built this had skipped a few steps… Water was leaking from the ceiling, too. How wasteful. The blue lights continued to flash, echoing in a strange, hypnotic rhythm down the hall. I fit it to some old beat in my head. After my little song ended, I tried to figure out  where I was going. No luck. The water had formed a slight film on the floor, and I took off running. Then, with a small jump, I slid down the hall in a foalhood whimsy. A couple throws later and I was bored again. Then I saw the hallway open up. A ladder at the end. I made a mad dash, hoping that I had finally found the way out. I skidded at the end of the hallway, just in time to trip and fall flat on my face.         “Owww…”        My head… I rubbed my cranium with a hoof and gently pushed myself up. There was something stained and scattered lying in front of me. It was sprawled in the same way a pony might lay…        I poked it with a hoof. The bundle crackled and fell to the floor, making a distinct clattering noise. The kind bones make. These were bones. Unmistakably pony bones. My eyes went wide as I skittered, backing up and finding the wall. Pony bones. There were the bones of a pony down here. Somepony had died down here. I suddenly became interested in everything but the middle of the floor. The little alcove I’d found had a ladder going up, and a ladder going down. A terminal and crate in the far corner. They looked almost new, but for the grime and nastiness covering them. I edged along the wall, past the hallway, and next to the terminal. The bones remained in the middle of the floor. I stole a glance at the glowing screen. ‘ Terminal lockout-Timeout. System reset.’         I pressed a button and the screen erupted to life with lines of code. They were… entries… Data files. Some of the titles looked to be corrupted, with random letters or number or even symbols interjected into them. I opened the one at the bottom. Line after line of gibberish flooded the screen. When it ended, I pressed the ‘enter’ key again. This time, only one entry showed up o the screen. I pressed the back button, but nothing happened. ~You’re so good with technology, Accoustic. Well done.~         “Shut up…”        I clicked on this one good entry. ‘Darling, I don’t have a clue if you’re ever going to get this, and I really hope you never do, but it’s here anyway, just in case. I added this section to the Stable after it was inspected, so nopony knows but us, Octy. If you’re reading this, then the emergency alarms have gone off. The only reason for that is… the NOISE. Look. Stable-Tec… lied to us. The Stable wasn’t designed to keep us safe. It’s part of some sick experiment to make us kill each other! I was rooting  around in your  files (sorry, I was bored!) and I found it. A sound file. The documents with it made it sound like it would create the perfect soldiers. But that’s not what it does. Remember Blues? I had been playing the file in his quarters for about a week when he killed that other stallion. It’s bad news, Octy . It makes ponies mad enough to kill, babe! If it’s been released to the whole Stable...  I want you to be safe. There’s a gun and some supplies in the crate over by the wall. I have the terminal locking an escape hatch. Live, my love.        V. Scratch ‘ The entry ended with a click, and the screen returned to the one I had just seen. Just this one entry, titled: Octavia. I heard the distinct sound of a door unlocking. Was this for real? Everypony knew about Octavia and Vinyl Scratch. They were the first and second Overmares. The first ponies on the Council. Would that make… I looked back over to the skeleton. Could it be? The pony was in Stable 92 barding, much like my own, except far less clean. She, I guess it was a she, had a saddlebag and gun holster, and on her leg… It was a Pipbuck. Pipbucks were small armlet-like computers that fit around your foreleg. They managed a huge assortment of data, and could do some pretty amazing things. Our Stable books told us that Pipbucks were common in other Stables, but in Stable 92, they were rare. Only ponies in high ranking positions or security were given them. I had never held one, much less owned one. The closest I’d gotten was that time I tried to steal one from storage, back when I was a foal. Good times. The Pipbuck sat slightly open. Only loosely clasped to the bony leg of the pony. I carefully stepped over to it. If this was Octavia, our founding leader… Would it be a bad thing to take her stuff? I mean, she was dead. She wouldn’t need it. I might. But was it sacrilege? Close enough? I took the Pipbuck out from under the bones, and they clattered to the ground. The skull tilted, as if questioning me.         “I promise to bring this back, Octavia.”                I felt stupid right after saying it. Blushing, I slid the miniature computer around my leg and smirked. It looked good. Then I realized that I had it upside down, and felt immensely stupid. After righting it, I closed the clasp around my left fore-hoof. I felt a strange sensation course through me. It was like I was being stabbed with a needle, and it traveled from my new Pipbuck through my leg, and then spread over the rest of my body. I briefly wondered if I’d made a mistake, but then my suspicion was confirmed when it reached my head. It stabbed my eyes, my brain, my tongue, my ears. My mind went numb. My eyes shut. I prayed to Luna and Celestia to end the pain, but no sooner had I thought their names did the pain go away. *DING* I opened my eyes, and… saw things. Things that weren’t there before. Things that were very distracting. A box in the left-bottom corner of my vision.         >This shows your current health. HP BAR< “Who’s there?!”        I turned around and saw the middle box at the bottom of my vision move. S turned to the left and W came into center view.         >This shows direction and destination markers. COMPASS<        Okay, that voice was really annoying, but at least I knew it was coming from the Pipbuck. An empty box in the bottom-right.        >This shows your currently equipped weapon and ammunition status. WPN< A small X sat in the center of my sight, and as I wandered over the skeleton lying in the middle of the floor, a word popped up above the… compass? ‘Chrysanthemum’ I assumed it was this pony’s name. Not Octavia, then. *BING*                >New audio file. Check the NOTES section.< Notes? What the heck? The Pipbuck itself was very simple. A large screen, one large knob, one spinning knob that clicked, and three buttons. The buttons were marked: STS, INV, and DATA. I pressed the DATA button, and tabs opened up on the bottom of the screen. There, second from the right, was NOTES. The scrolling wheel knob turned once, twice, and there it was. An audio file. *click*         ~Oh Celestia, it’s over! I’m trapped! I was just cleaning the floor, how was I supposed to know there was a fucking hole here?! I got locked out of the terminal, and the crate won’t open either. Some kind of link with the terminal, I think!  Oh Luna, I’m going to die down here! I’ve been screaming for days, and no one has heard me… Oh, Red… Why don’t you save me? I tested the collar just like you asked, you said you’d protect me, why why why WHY WHY WH-~ *click I ended the recording, not wanting to hear anything else that might be on it. This mare… She’d been trapped here and… what a way to go. A glint caught my eye and I bent over her bony form. Around where her neck would have been, there was a small band. Studded on the inside with gemstones that shone faintly and clasped together with a simple catch, it sat there. I assumed it to be the collar mentioned in her final recording. Did I hear that right? She tested this? What does it do? I took it off of Chrysanthemum and tried to place it around my own neck, but it was too small. Into the saddlebags it went. I looked through her other belongings, now that I knew it wasn’t Octavia, and found a bottle with some purple liquid inside, two syringes marked ‘Med-X’, a small gun, and a box of ammunition. The saddlebags went over my back, and I removed the worn holster from Chrys’s leg, and strapped it to my own. It was slick and loose and I decided that it wasn’t going to stay there, especially if I wanted it to. I made a quick trot around the room, and as per my expectations, it slipped right off. Fixing it more across my shoulder helped a little, but I just knew that it’d be falling off eventually. I stuck the pistol in my new (-ish) holster, and looked around for a way out. *BRIING!*        *CHK*         > 1 - Healing potion added. 2 -  Med-X added. 1 – 9mm  Pistol added. 25 -  9mm rounds added. 1 – Unicollar added.< After looking through the Pipbuck and finding no way to turn the noises off, I resigned myself to just suffering through it. I ambled over to the crate, my new, unfamiliar accessories making me stumble like I was drunk. The crate was empty, so I decided to check out my last two options. The ladder going up had a steady stream of water running down the rungs, and was the most rusted thing I’d ever seen. When I placed a hoof on the first rung, it seemed to melt away in an orange and black flood. There was no way I was going up. Looking over my shoulder, that left only one option… Down. Amazingly, the rung felt solid. Slippery as all Tartarus, but solid nonetheless. I slowly made my way down into the dark depths, the blue lights flashing every few seconds. After what felt like an eternity, I finally stood on solid ground. The blue lights ended as I beheld a new tunnel, carved from rock. It was dimly lit by a decaying wooden door at the far end of the way. Light peeked through the rotted planks, and I slowly walked towards it. Outside… We’d always been taught that the Outside was death. Radiation so intense that we would burn as easily as a candle. Monsters looking to make a meal of anything with four hooves. No water, no food. Death. I stood before the decrepit wooden barrier, only seeing the light breaking through. There was no chance for me to survive if I went back. Was there one if I went forward? I felt the breeze flowing in from Outside. It was soft, and carried no hint of death. It cooled me, slightly. Would it burn as I hit it full force? I heard the cacophony of sounds that belong to the mouth of a cave: dripping water, moving door, tumbling wind, crooked floor. There were other noises coming from beyond the door. Carried by fast winds, from far away was shouting, gunfire, cries. Was there death beyond this door for me? Possibly. But what was behind me? Silence. … I hate the silence. My hoof pushed open the rickety door, which decided to collapse in on itself in a broken heap, and I cried out as I was blinded by the light surging through. Well, at least it won’t be quiet. ~-----~ Special stats: Strength: 3 Perception: 7 Endurance: 4 Charisma: 6 Intelligence: 8 Agility: 4 Luck: 8 New Perk! Sound Tech- Years of working with sound equipment has raised your sensitivities to in-pony levels, even if you can’t remember all of it! Your repair skill gets +15 on every repair attempt, and when your head is uncovered, you get +2 Perception!