//------------------------------// // Now In Technicolor // Story: Fallout Equestria: Dark Shores // by SwimmingEagle //------------------------------// The remnants of tobacco smoke drift through the open door of the saloon. I was sitting in a corner booth, comfortably alone. It was that magical time of day between last call, and breakfast is ready. Ponies were either still waking up or too wasted to pay me any mind. I’m was doing what I never thought I’d see myself doing. I was drinking orange juice from a box. the thing was probably a hundred years past its expiration date, but the mare across the counter of the bar assured me it was fresh. I took her word for it. Sorbet and Éclair were still upstairs snoozing. No amount of noise I made getting ready even registered with them. To their credit, this place was really kitted out in the comforts department. Seeing as Summer Sunset was a tourist hotspot, luxury was one of their highest priorities. The tobacco was making my nose itch, so figured I’d stretch my fins outside. I walked towards the front door and gave the counter girl a nod. I breathed in the morning air. The first rays of sunlight stretched over the sea and onto Diamond Harbor. Just like that, the whole place just lit up. It shined like… well a diamond. The sight just made the corners of my mouth turn upwards on reflex. “I see you’re a pony who enjoys his mornings,” a voice said next to me. A stallion with a greying black mane and a thick mustache was sitting down by a bulletin board. There was a hammer and a box of nails next to him, along with a stack of papers. “Nothing wakes you up better,” I replied to him. “On that, I can agree with you,” he said to me. “It’s a bit early to be working isn’t it?” I asked him, motioning towards the tools next to him. He looked down at them and smiles back at me. “Oh it ain’t too much. I’ve been working from dawn till dusk for thirty years now. Never missed a sunrise,” he replied, nodding at me. “What are you doing, by the way?” “Oh, nothing much, just changing out the adverts. I've got about nine more after this one. You buy space on the board for a week, after that you either gotta buy that space again or you’ll drop your spot.” “Hrmm… anything about work?” “We’ll there’s an open job at the distillery, and the Avina Avis is looking for extra hooves for their next fishing trip,” he mentioned. “Not exactly my kind of jobs,” I said with a weak smile. “Well there is always the Mason’s Guild. They’re always looking for folks with skills. Of any type,” the stallion replied. “I’ll look into it if I’m free. It was nice talking with you.” I said. I looked on the bulletin board. A symbol was on one of the ads. A horseshoe overlaid by a hammer. The tagline was Build the future, join the Mason’s Guild. “You have a good one, son,” he said to me returning to his work nailing up an ad that said if you're looking for a good time... look for Candy. I turned back into the saloon. The girls had finally decided to come downstairs. Éclair was fighting off a serious case of bedhead. Sorbet was rubbing the sleep from her eyes. I walked up smirking. “Sleep well?” I asked looking at the slight bags under her eyes. Sorbet stretched her eyelids while she formulated an answer. “I think I slept so well it bounced back into a bad night sleep.” “Think you’ll be good after breakfast?” I inquired. “Most definitely,” she replied with a nod “Hope you both don’t mind, I ordered for you. The food should be out in a minute.” “No, that’s fine,” she said. I brought them over to the booth where I was originally sitting. She reached into her saddle bag and pulled out a map of the islands. It was annotated with several markings on certain locations. “Alright, so where exactly do we need to go?” “Here.” She pointed to an ‘X’ on the map. I was a little bit inland from diamond harbor. It was a smaller town that didn’t even have a name on the map. “How far is it?” I asked. “Oh not that far.” --- --- --- --- I collapsed on the ground and rolled on by back. I couldn’t feel my hooves. My tail was throbbing with pain. The girls stood over me with smiles on their faces. “Oh come on, that was only six miles. we still got another mile to go,” Sorbet chided me with her smug grin and her unexhausted face. “You. have. four. LEGS!” I said between gasps for air. I knew I was in for it when the smoothly paved roads and tall buildings gave way to bumpy dirt paths and heavy foliage. It was rather sudden actually. The only sign that we were even at the city limits was that there were the outlines of cleared away buildings and a sign that said, ‘Now Leaving Diamond Harbor.’ The main road after that sign had disintegrated into gravel and felt like I was putting my underside through a cheese grater. It’s not a fun feeling dragging your nether regions through hundred year old broken asphalt. Thankfully, it petered off into regular dirt roads. Much less painful, but longer in scope. The buildings that seemed so ubiquitous from the shore were just a trick of the sky line. The areas off the beaten path were a thick tropical jungle. Palm leaves and banana trees up the wazoo. I put my hooves back under me. I could see the town we were headed. It had a pleasant name. “Sunnydale” read the faded sign. The forest saw fit to reclaim what was theirs in the last hundred or so years. In the well maintained streets of Diamond harbor, there was maybe a weed or two in the sidewalk. Here, those weeds were full on trees and underbrush. The buildings were crumbling from centuries of rain, wind, dust and other exposure. Vines covered walls, and the parking meters that still stood were nearly rusted in half. “There we are,” Sorbet pointed ahead of us, “That’s our lab.” The building at the end of the street was larger than others. The front portion looked like it was once made up of windows. Only vines and roots filled the empty frames. The revolving door at its entrance refused to budge, however, the panes of glass had nearly disintegrated with the ages. We walked through, and my hooves instantly stepped in some stagnant pond. The interior proved to be more durable than its exterior. About twelve chest high poles stood up from the murky pond in front of a line of counters behind shattered glass. Between each pole was tattered fabric that was strung across from each other. “Well, it makes sense to hide it here, I guess. Lots of security in a bank,” Éclair chimed in. Sorbet nodded at her daughters comment. I looked up to some greenish letters embossed under the counters. Bits & Berries Bank. “Ten caps says it’s in the vault,” I said smiling, “I’ll start there.” Sorbet nodded. “We’ll check the offices. If it’s locked up, we’ll need a key or something. Be careful, this place looks like it’d fall over from a good sneeze.” I nodded as I went behind the counters. That’s generally where the vault is. The Godmother series hasn’t led me astray yet. I walk behind the counter. The natural light disappeared, though I could make out the outline of a huge door. My horn lit up the room. The door was made of solid metal, barely any rust on it. Had to give it to the ponies of old. They knew how to build things to last. Next to the vault door there was a lever, relatively free of foliage. “Hang on… this is too easy,” I had to say. Then my eyes were drawn to a gleam in the corner. It was a turret, suspended from the ceiling, covered in almost entirely in moss and mold. “And there it is.” I backed up slightly and made the wheels in my head turn. I nodded and pulled out a rope I had stashed in my saddlebags. After tying a noose around the handle of the lever, I exited the room. I gave it a swift tug. The lever jerked towards me. The entire room started to screech with metal scraping on metal. The massive door slowly and painfully inched open. Once it stopped. I peeked inside. Nothing besides the vault door had moved. “Nice job, Riptide,” Sorbet said. She walked into the room. “No! Wait, there’s a-” “Turret? They put a work order on it to get it fixed. It’s not gonna shoot at anyone,” she responded, turning back around. Éclair walked in behind her. “Oh… well now I feel stupid,” I said. I walked into the room ahead of Sorbet. “Well that’s the proper reaction to a turret. It just doesn’t work.” She says, patting me on the back. Then something prodded me in the side. Éclair was looking up at me. “We may have a bigger problem than turrets,” she said to us, pointing forward. My face fell as I saw glowing hot metal. A circular section of the wall had been melted free and lay on the bottom of the vault. A hallway illuminated by halogen lights and a staircase downward were beyond the hole. “Someone used a laser to cut through the wall,” Sorbet said, poking at the heated circle cut from the wall. “Recently.” “I’m going to venture a guess and say they didn’t cut that hole to leave,” I sighed. My blue aura wrapped around my machete as I drew it from my back. “I’ll take point.” I slowly walked through the hole into the hallway. The lights would flicker ever so often. The floor was metal grate. Wires and pipes ran underneath. The stairs lead to an open chamber. A cross walk was suspended over a pool of water. Four pistons submerged in the pool churned and spun. They stuck out of huge metal boxes I assumed were generators. The water itself smelled of iron and copper. I figured it was probably not safe to swim in. Suddenly, my head was forced to the grate floor. I looked at the source to see Sorbet on the ground shushing me. She pointed to our left. I saw the air warp slightly as the heat from a small jet kept an orb of metal floating. It had three manipulators hanging from it. Each arm had something I wish a robot didn’t have; A flamethrower, a buzz-saw, and a pneumatic hammer. It floated in front of us slowly, but with purpose. When it was finally out of sight, we moved quickly to the other side of the catwalk. The grate floor gave way to metal plates. The hallway had four rooms on either side. Each was an office. I looked back to the other two. They nodded at me and split off into the first two rooms. I went into the remaining office on the left. The office itself looked like most everything had been rifled through. There was a desk in the middle of the room with a back row of filing cabinets. A makeshift cot was in the corner. Papers and files covered the desk. The papers themselves were full of nonsense, just a huge collection of strange looking formulae and symbols, or an assortment of squiggly lines. I set them down. The filing cabinets yielded little either; their contents were most likely already upended on the desk. I exited that room. The girls were a little busier than I was. Sorbet was aiming her rifle down the hallway we came from. Éclair, on the other hoof, was staring rather intently at a terminal monitor. I went into the other office. Despite a security drone lying on the ground with its faceplate melted off, this room looked almost identical to the other room. The only real difference was that where the last room had a cot, this room had a safe. Thankfully our predecessor had already cracked it. I slid it open. And I thought this place was going to be boring. The safe was stashed full of film reels. The kind you needed a projector to play. They fit my home theater system quite nicely. I stashed the reels into my saddle bags and strutted out of the room. Sorbet and Éclair were waiting for me at the catwalk. “Anything interesting?” I asked the girls. “Nothing I could make any sense of. Except for a few memos, everything looks like it’s in code,” Sorbet said holding up a couple long strips of paper with random assortments of letters. “I’ve got some film reels. They look like they can fit my Super Eight,” I mentioned, lifting one slightly out of my saddle bags. “I don’t think our predecessor is interested in the research.” “Or more likely they’ve gone to the source,” Éclair chimed in, “The terminal in there was already accessed. It was left open to a file. It had a six numbah code on it. 775613. It was to a ‘Mainframe Core Room.” “Let’s get there before this guy sets off any security or accidentally damages any data we need,” Sorbet said. I nodded at her. I’d really hate if this turned out to be a lost cause. I took point again, keeping low. The girls right behind me. I looked around. There was no sign of that patrolling hover bot from before. I went down the path to the right of us. The hallway stopped rather abruptly. The door that now stood before us was rather elaborate. It was thick steel with interlocking bars. It looked like it was designed to take an explosion to the face and not care. There was a key pad next to the door. I dialed in the number Éclair told me with my machete. The keypad beeped at me. It wasn’t a very nice beep. “Riptide. We have a problem!” Sorbet said loudly. I whipped around. The floating robot was floating down towards us slowly yet alarmingly fast. “HALT!” It said in a booming monotone, “PRESENT IDENTIFICATION! YOU HAVE TWENTY SECONDS TO COMPLY!” “Uhh…” I found myself saying out loud. Think Riptide, THINK! “SECOND REQUEST PRESENT IDENTIFICATION! YOU HAVE TEN SECONDS TO COMPLY!” it boomed again. THINK DAMNIT!! “Look! A distraction!” I pointed behind the robot. Smooth Riptide, smooth. The robot turned around. For a fraction of a second I was dumbfounded. I wrapped my magic around my spear. Gritting my teeth, I thrust it into the jet exhaust port. I was rewarded with a pneumatic hammer to my face. With a resounding CLANG, I was sent sprawling end over end into the door. The crack of Sorbet’s rifle produced a neat little hole in the robot’s plating. I righted myself and rushed towards it. The whirring of the buzz saw stopped me. Its spinning blade descended towards my head. I brought my machete to meet it. Sparks showered me. It suddenly got very hot. The robot brought its flamethrower to bear. The fire singed my hair as I brought up a barrier with my magic. The pneumatic hammer swerved around my barrier. I beat it back with the blunt end of my spear. Over the noise of the grinding metal and burning air, I barely noticed the subtle fwip noise of Éclair’s pistol. I was then greeted to tiny flakes of glass landing on my nose. Suddenly the robot started spinning. Fast. The flames started flying everywhere erratically. I wrapped my existing barrier around the robot to contain the fire. It continued to beat and saw at my barrier aimlessly as I enveloped it in a bubble. I held it fast. Then I got an idea. I made the bubble smaller. And smaller still. I started to hear the crumpling of metal. I closed my barrier like a trash compactor. I stomped as I smashed the compressed robot into the ground. Slumping over, I released the barrier. The ball of robot twitched and sparked. I started to turn away when a jet of flame shot out at me. I encased it in a barrier again. Screaming at the top of my lungs I smashed it into the ground. I smashed it over and over again. I lifted it over the pool of water in the central area. I dropped the crumpled robot in the water. Sparks shot out from it as it sank to the bottom. Smiling a little, I walked back to the girls. “Well that’s done. Now can you figure out why this door won’t open?” I asked the girls, specifically Éclair, “I put in the code.” “You didn’t press enter after you put in the code.” Éclair said flatly. I stood there for a moment. I felt my head tilt to the side. I smacked myself in the face. Éclair shook her head, calmly put in the code, and pressed the green enter button at the bottom. The door screeched open. A hallway stretched before us. The air was slightly cooler than the previous rooms. There was a frosted window in front of us with a flickering light. A pony was outlined by the light. It was moving around and messing with a massive terminal. The door was next to it. It only had a push button to open it. Everyone had their weapons ready. I pressed the button an- “I’m gonna give it everything I’ve got!” A radio was blaring a fast pace song. I had to actually clamp my ears shut. The radio was on a desk nearby. “Lady Luck please let the dice stay hot!” the radio continued to scream the music into my earlobes. I moved towards it. “Let me shoot a seven with every shot!” the lyrics themselves seemed to be pushing me away. I was almost upon it! I reached towards the off button. “Viva~! Las Pegas!” It was inches away! “Viva~! Las Pegas!” allmooooosssst! “Viva~! Viva~!” I pressed the button. All was silence at last. “Las Pegaaaaaaaas~!” Sang a mare unassisted by the radio. I followed the sound of the voice to what I thought was a mare. She had her head in the air and her eyes closed. Her mane was halfway shaved off. In place of the shaved part was a bunch of cables that drooped over an eye like bangs. A glossy chrome plate ran down the base of her neck and over her spine. All four of her legs were metallic. Sprouting from her shoulders were manipulators much like the floating robot from before. Her eyes opened. They glowed in the dark slightly. Her head turned our way slowly. One of the manipulators held a bottle of cola. We stared at each other blankly for an eternity. “Fuck!” She screamed dropping her drink into a pile of twelve empty bottles. She whipped around toting a boxy cannon like thing almost as big as she was. Red death exploded from the barrel. Everything went white as it rocketed towards me.