FALLOUT: EQUESTRIA
HEARTLESS
Chapter 1
Searchers don't often come back home. Going out into the Wasteland isn't healthy. Quartz Quest and Ruby Do are the only ones who've come back to Outpost after going on Search, and neither of them stayed. The Search is a destiny. You can't walk away from it. The kinds of ponies who go on the Search wouldn't want to. No matter what they find.
Or don't find.
My name is Spinel Stride. I'm a Searcher. The Lost Heart is out there somewhere. My cutie mark is two curved black lines that make the hollow outline, marking out where the Heart is missing. It doesn't mean I'll find it. But it means I'll try. Everyone's counting on me. So far as we know, there aren't any other Crystal Ponies left outside the ice. We've got an empire waiting for us to save it.
For me to save it.
It's a heady feeling. I've been training for it pretty much all my life, though. Ever since I got my mark, I've known what I have to do. Find the Heart. Find an alicorn whose love can empower it. Restore the Crystal Empire. Save everyone. So I've read the journals Quartz and Ruby left behind, and I've trained relentlessly. I know about raiders, about radigators, about balefire phoenixes. I'm the best hoof-to-hoof fighter in Outpost, and I'm a pretty good shot with a rock.
Yes, a rock. I've practiced kicking them up and bucking them at range until my hooves were sore. Outpost started out as just that, a border outpost between two friendly countries. There weren't a lot of weapons there when the Empire fell, and a trainload of refugees didn't haul along any carts of ammo either. If we had anything that anyone wanted, the place would probably have been overrun in the early days, but it's a long ways off from the main body of Equestria, and the only real thing we have is fresh water, from snowmelt. Water's heavy. The few raiders who've come our way were in poor shape by the time they got to us, and they couldn't get through the Shining Shields.
I should probably explain that. It's a Crystal Pony thing. Nowadays, at least. Just because we lost our crystal coats doesn't mean we lost our affinity for crystals. Radiation seems to count as a 'crystal' for our purposes. Maybe we just got irradiated enough to mutate a little. We won't know until we get some of our ancestors out of the ice and compare. Anyway, those early ponies didn't have much in the way of guns or explosives, but they were trained by Shining Armor himself. They formed the Order of the Shining One to keep his teachings going, and developed a fighting style based on what he taught them. It's a defensive style, but martial anyhow. You defend until you have your chance to defeat the guilty. The Shining Shield is an outgrowth of that. You learn to feel the radiation around you and pull it together, and drive it back with a buck. It takes shape for just a second or two, but that's enough to block a rock, a kick, or a bullet. It takes training, but enough ponies at outpost can do it to keep the place protected as long as it takes.
Be worthy of the one you love. A simple enough phrase, but it encapsulates everything you need. I’ve long since taken it to heart. If I ever do find the Lost Heart, I’ll have to be worthy of a love strong enough to empower it. That’s a tall order in the Wasteland. Just surviving by any means at all is a tall order in the Wasteland.
Take that first day. Not really the first day outside of Outpost; I’d been outside often enough, patrolling, learning to sneak around, things like that. But there’s a long trek from Outpost to the Wasteland proper, along the path the train once took, and there’s a tunnel it passes through. Hidden in that tunnel is where you leave a few days’ worth of food and water, so if you find the Heart and make it back that far, you’ll have the supplies to finish the trip. When you step outside the tunnel, that’s really when you’re in the Wasteland.
I almost got shot before I got out of the tunnel. It wasn’t even anyone shooting at me, swear to Cadance. I heard a mosquito-whine go by my ear and dropped to my belly while I was still inside the tunnel, on top of the old rail ties there. A slow creep forward and I got my first look at the Wasteland while I listened to more gunshots than I’d heard in my life put together.
Two bands of raiders were duking it out. Maybe one of them was defending their turf from the other, maybe they just ran into each other out there and started fighting, maybe one of them was running out of supplies and was getting desperate. I didn’t know enough about raiders then to even tell who was fighting who. They were all done up in, well, raider gear. Scraps of barding, skulls, bones, blood, war paint, whatever they felt like. A couple of them were already down, bright red pools spreading under them.
That was my first quashed noble impulse. I wanted to charge out and win the battle for the good guys, whoever they were. The reason I quashed it then was that I couldn’t figure out that crucial detail. Now I know there weren’t any. Just two batches of bad guys. So I laid there quietly, mostly hidden in the tunnel mouth, and watched ponies killing each other. It was… educational. I hadn’t appreciated the idea of ‘rate of fire’ before then. I could already tell that their tactics were terrible, though. The whole thing was a free-for-all, and everypony was so busy going wild attacking that they weren’t using cover properly.
I was a little busy being horrified at the time to take it all in at first, but that passed while the bullets were still flying. The journals made it very clear that life is cheap in the Wastelands, so I’d been intellectually ready for it, and I suppose I might not be a very nice pony in some ways. I don’t think it was more than three minutes before the fight was over, and that seems like a short time to make that kind of emotional leap. There were only three raiders left breathing when they were finished, and one of those three wasn’t going to last much longer even if the other two hadn’t come up and stomped on his head. That did rattle me again.
The two survivors didn’t seem to much care that their friends were dead too. Or their compatriots, anyhow. I don’t think anypony can really be friends with a raider, even another raider. In any case, they searched all the bodies, took what they wanted, and then just walked off, bristling with even more weapons than they’d started with. I wasn’t too eager to test my hooves against guns just yet, so I waited and watched them until they’d gotten out of sight and stayed there a good half-hour.
Then I went down to search the bodies myself. Yes, it was a bit gruesome, but that little display made it very clear that you don’t leave anything useful behind in the Wasteland. Even so it never occurred to me to take their armor; not only was it thoroughly disgusting, but I wasn’t in the habit of dressing up and I had an innate confidence in my Shining Shield over barding. The two survivors had taken all the ammunition and all of the guns that weren’t on the verge of falling apart, but they hadn’t taken everything. One of the raiders (who’d ended up with a hole right between his eyes) was carrying two entire bandoliers of grenades.
I didn’t think I’d be able to do much good with the guns, and these were particularly disturbing models – the raiders were holding them in their mouths and using their tongues to press the triggers, and given what those raiders looked like I was in no hurry to put my mouth on anything they’d been holding. I took a decrepit rifle anyhow, on the off chance I might come across bullets for it and want to learn how to use one in an emergency. The grenades were much more up my alley, though. More or less the same size and weight as those rocks I practiced with, and yanking the pin with my teeth wouldn’t be hard at all.
I practiced. Once. I’m happy to say I took to it like a unicorn to telekinesis. Grab the grenade by the stem to pull it from the bandolier, catch the ring with my tongue, flick the grenade over my shoulder, give it a buck to send it on its way, and boom goes the target. I didn’t have enough to waste more than one, but I didn’t think it would be a clever move on my part to try it for the first time when I really needed it.
I never did find out what those raiders were fighting over, or why they’d come that far north already. I didn’t figure they were likely to know anything about the Lost Heart, so I didn’t try to track them. For all I know, they blew each other’s heads off ten seconds after they walked out of sight.
From there, I didn’t have much in the way of a plan, other than ‘not follow the ponies with all those guns.’ My cutie mark gave me destiny and motivation, but not a lot of specific useful information, so I just started walking south. I assumed if the Heart was somewhere near the tunnel, one of the earlier Searchers would have found it and restored the Crystal Empire by now.
Footnote: Level Up
New Perk: Searchin’ General – You are adept at finding things ponies tried to hide. You have an additional 20% chance to find items when searching bodies or containers.