Fallout Equestria: Old World Dreams

by KDarkwater


Chapter 8

8

She’d never seen anypony get killed before. Hard enough to accept that she’d witnessed it firsthand in less than twelve seconds. Sure, they were bad ponies, and they scared her. They leered at her and Mom in ways she couldn’t understand, and yet which also terrified her to her core. They stalked her like hunters closing in for a kill, and the one thing she thought might offer some degree of resistance was shaking so badly that the bad ponies had probably not regarded her as a threat.

She didn’t even recognize her own voice when she cried out for her mother. The voice that sounded out could have belonged to a five-year old for all she knew.

And then Mom changed. As if hearing her cry like that set something off in her. She just…stopped. No more shakes, no more flicking tail or a scaredy-cat voice. Just…one second terrified, and in the next she was blowing them away with her guns as if she’d done it a thousand times.

In fact, once she started, it seemed as though she didn’t even want to stop. Too angry to try. She had to beg Mom to stop, more than once, before the message soaked in that she was crossing a very ugly line. She could live with slaying a bug. Disgusting little critters.

But….ponies? She didn’t know what to think about that. It bore repeating that they were bad ponies that wanted to hurt her, and had probably hurt and killed others if their terrible, twisted cutie marks were any indication of their true natures. She couldn’t really blame Mom for what she did—she was just protecting them from the bad ponies.

But she still killed them. And she could not wrap her brain around how Mom had found it so easy to do….or how far she was willing to take it once she started. She honestly believed that if she hadn’t run up and did what she’d done, that Mom would have blasted that poor stallion’s head apart until the gun had run out of bullets.

At least Mom’s common sense had kicked in when it had. There was no need to shoot a bad pony that wasn’t a threat anymore, dead or not. That was murder. She knew Mom understood the difference between killing in self-defense and doing it out of rage or some sick, deranged desire to see something dead. She’d just gotten so angry, so hateful, that she forgot about it until it was almost too late.

One way or another, she was going to get Mom to say something to her before they left this little office. She wouldn’t take another step forward into the world until Mom had gotten all that crap from the Stable off her chest and out of her mind.

When she’d stopped sobbing and crying into her forelegs, anyway. They’d been here like this for a while now. Mom just…laid there and cried, and at first El-Tee couldn’t bring herself to leave her like that. So she just lay down beside her and waited, and even fell asleep leaning into her for a bit. And when she woke up to a motionless and silent mother some time later, she decided she’d waited long enough.

But it was best to start with something simple and disarming. Ease her way in, and just let Mom decide when she wanted to start spilling things to her. “….gettin’ kinda hungry,” she said, feeling her stomach rumble slightly within her. Not surprising considering she’d hurled her breakfast back in the Stable….

Mom’s body stirred slightly, and shifted in place as her legs began to fold in beneath her. A shimmer of light enveloped her horn as she began to drag her moist saddlebags across the floor to her and began to rummage through its spacious confines for something edible, eventually pulling two air-tight olive drab packages out alongside a canteen and two drinking cups. El-Tee’s eyes quickly scanned the front of the closest package when the black lettering began to come into the light of Mom’s horn:

“MEAL, READY TO EAT
MENU ITEM #7
CHEESE TORTELLINI, WHITE RICE, SALTINE CRACKERS, WHEAT BREAD
STABLE #115 ISSUE”

El-Tee’s stomach did an about-face of attitude as old horror stories of military MREs from the War began to recount themselves to her from long afternoons in the Stable’s dust-free library. “….oooor maybe this is a good time to start dieting….”

Mom must have been thinking of the same thing she was, because she actually kinda laughed through her nose even though she was in anything but a cheerful or happy mood. “….these aren’t military rations,” she said quietly, placing the package down in front of her along with a metal drinking cup. “Trust me, you can actually eat these.”

El-Tee’s magic began to poke at the tightly-wrapped package, half-expecting it to bubble and gurgle from the touch. “….are you sure about that?”

Mom’s magic tore open one end of her package and pulled the plastic tray out, setting the tray down in front of her as an underlying enchantment began to react with the contents—in effect, the food was being cooked and prepared by a pre-applied magic enchantment set to activate when the package wrapping was removed. Or so she’d read in the library once. “Pretty sure. The one I ate last week wasn’t bad….”

As Mom’s MRE cooked itself before her, she began to shake out the remaining contents inside the package wrapping, and El-Tee quickly lost track of the amount of stuff that clattered out. Several different packets of condiments, a spork, something that looked like a candy bar—

“Whoa!” she squealed in awe when the last packet hit the floor in a tinny smack!. “What is all that stuff?!?”

Mom seemed grateful to have something to talk about other than the killing spree she’d indulged in earlier that morning, and she began to separate the packets in turn as she pointed them out with a shift of her magic. “….this one’s a fruit-flavor packet for a cup of water….cherry, I hope,” she began, tucking said packet up against her drinking cup. “Supposed to be loaded with electrolytes and stuff you can’t get from water alone. This one’s a sharp cheddar cheese spread, this one up here’s a pack of saltine crackers, we got salt and pepper over there…ummm….I think this one’s a granola bar of caramel, whole grain oats, and peanuts….decent snack, I guess—”

That was all she needed to hear! She promptly tore off one end of her MRE and dropped her tray down in front of her, and allowed the remainder of the package’s contents to fall to the floor around it as the magic enchantment began to prepare the meal. Sure enough, she got a lot of the same stuff, only…

“….berry blue rush?” she wondered aloud as she floated her fruit-flavoring packet up into slightly better lighting where she could read its lettering. “What’s that?”

“Try it and see,” Mom said, her eyes now locked onto her food tray as portions of it began to glow bright blue. The scent of fresh, warm cooked veggies and pasta began to waft into their noses, and El-Tee’s opinion of the MREs began to soften. It wasn’t home cooking, but it actually smelled kinda decent. Like care was taken to balance out the nutrients and taste as much as possible. From what she’d read in the library, military rations were all about the content with no care given to how it tasted….

“...so are the military rations really as bad as those old journals said?”

“Worse,” Mom snorted with contempt, physically shuddering at the thought. “Had to eat a couple as practice for how the Stable-made MREs worked. We always called them the Pack of Three Lies in security—‘It’s not a Meal, it’s not Ready, and you can’t Eat it’.”

Light Tail’s chest promptly exploded with laughter at the joke, though her forelegs were quick to muffle them into a low rumble lest they attract more bad ponies. “Oh Luna, that’s terrible!” she snorted in brief chuckles. “Terrible yet hilarious!”

“You think that’s bad?” Mom snickered slightly, and she even began to sound a tad more uplifted now. “The military had tons of names for them. Meals Rejected by the Enemy—“

El-Tee had to fight her guffaws down her throat, choking on them at least once. She could believe that one!

“—Materials Resembling Edibles—“

She didn’t fight this time. Not at first, anyway. “HehahahahasnRRK….”

“—Morsels, Regurgitated, Eviscerated—“

Okay, that one was gross! Funny, but gross! She even gagged a bit! “Hehehahah—grrk, okay okay that’s enough of that!”

Mom stopped almost immediately—and appropriately enough, their respective meal trays stopped glowing at that moment and faded away, signifying the end of the spell’s work. Lunch time.

And to her surprise, it actually was quite edible. Nopony would ever mistake it for what she was capable of making with the right, fresh ingredients, but if somebody had come along and told her that these Stable-made MREs were all that she could look forward to eating for the rest of her days, she wouldn’t really complain all that much. The white rice was rather plain, but the cheese tortellini actually tasted like…well, cheese tortellini, and not some gross misinterpretation of distilled water and goop. The fruit flavoring packet, on the other hand, was something of a mystery to her. She simply couldn’t place what it was supposed to taste like. Certainly not blueberry, and yet it had a slight sweetness to it that eluded her taste buds. It was really weird tasting.

Fulfilling, too, once the main and side dishes were taken out. Perhaps just enough room for the granola bar and crackers—

—Mom’s empty tray and a collection of opened packets flung themselves into a smashed, rust-spotted trash can next to the desk, breaking the filly’s attention away from the remainder of her meal. “Finish up quick,” she said softly, shifting her telekinesis spell around to encompass their saddlebags. “Another gun lesson.”

With a disappointed sigh, El-Tee went back to her snacks, gobbling them down in about the length of time it took Mom to collect all their guns and bring them over to where they were lying. Her refuse joined Mom’s in the trash can, and the empty drinking cup was floated away and off to the side to make room for the lightweight revolver being set down in front of her. The rainwater had long since wicked away, leaving light, barely perceptible streaks across the matte-silver steel.

A moment later a small black box settled down beside the gun, its latch popping lose to reveal a small set of wire brushes and a thin brass stick with a threaded hole in one end, and several different sizes of screwdrivers and drift punches. “….what’s this?”

“Cleaning kit,” Mom answered, her magic opening a much larger box in front of her, which contained a lot more brushes and several different sized brass sticks along with what looked like a screw-top can of oil or solvent and a small cloth bag of squared linen patches. “Take care of your weapons, and they’ll take care of you when you need them. This is going to be complicated at first, so we’ll take it slow.”

Wonderful, the filly moaned to herself, already beginning to dread the next couple of hours. I get to find out exactly what Mom did all day at work… “….how complicated?”

“You’re going to have that pistol broken down into several pieces in a few minutes,” Mom said, taking her massive revolver out in front of her and emptying the cylinder of all of its bullets down onto the floor in front of her. “You need to be careful with how you handle them, or you could end up damaging them to the point of breaking the gun. Just take it slow, and everything will be fine.”

--------------------------------------

The next hour and a half went a lot better than she’d expected. It took El-Tee several tries to get the gun broken down into its main sub-assemblies—trigger guard, frame, cylinder, and grip—but otherwise proved to be a quick learner. She didn’t care for the sharp-smelling cleaning solvents, or the mundane nature of the task, but unlike the short target practice they’d had earlier that morning she didn’t complain or try to talk her way out of it.

And the monotony of it helped take her mind off of….

No, she decided the instant before she could start to remember the grisly details, and doubled her focus on the pair of nine-millimeter pistols in front of her. With Grayhawk and the 10mm cleaned and wiped down, all that was left were these two “trophies” of the surface. Two heavily abused and degraded pistols, each with an equal number of broken and damaged parts, and a handful of decent ones. One pistol had no front sight and a partially rusted slide with a shaky external extractor, but the barrel was spotless in the interior and its exterior finish was only slightly burnished. Its grips were broken, and its hammer was cracked, but the trigger assembly was in decent shape. The other pistol had a lousy, worn out bore and the muzzle crown had been worn down almost to the tip of the rifling, but its slide had intact front and rear sights, with glowing green arcane crystal inserts to boot. The extractor didn’t rattle in place, the firing hammer looked solid, the grips were in one piece, and the frame seemed to have straighter slide rails than the first one. And best of all, the locking lugs on the barrel from the first pistol slipped in the locking recesses in the second pistol’s slide far more smoothly, as if the two disparate parts had been meant for each other but wound up getting installed on different pistols instead. Both recoil springs and their respective cam bars seemed serviceable, so she kept one set as a spare. The springs were well known as a “wear” item.

It took her all of three minutes to sort through all of these disassociated parts and gather the ones she wanted to keep, and then swiftly began reassembling them into a single, complete pistol. Within five minutes, she had one functional, cleaned, lubricated, and durable weapon and a smattering of bad parts that found a new home in the trash can. A quick function check of the slide and trigger confirmed the weapon’s working status, with the added bonus that this particular gun did not seem to have a magazine disconnect safety, unlike the 9mms she’d worked on in the Stable. Made it a lot smoother and lighter to pull.

In fact….

“Here, try the trigger on this one,” she said, floating the pistol down to her lazing daughter, who had been content to just watch her work after she’d finished cleaning and re-assembling the lightweight revolver.

“….won’t that break it?” El-Tee resisted momentarily, though her magic wrested the pistol out of her mother’s spell and hefted it up in front of her for a clear look down the sights. “You had two guns broken up into a couple dozen pieces and just slapped one back together from that mess—“

“It’ll be fine,” she assured her gently. “I doubt there’s anypony out there making fresh gun parts, so the next best thing I can do is cannibalize other guns for parts in better shape than the ones I want to replace. It shouldn’t hurt to try the trigger a few times, just keep it pointed at the wall.”

Sling waited with slightly baited breath as the filly’s hold on the pistol solidified, bringing up the sights on a distant section of the wall in front of them, and then watched the gun begin to waver slightly—

“….what the…Mom, I think you broke it,” the filly muttered, straining slightly under the increased pressure she was exerting on the trigger, and only then did she realize her mistake. “The trigger won’t move—“

“Cock the hammer first,” Sling said quickly. “Sorry, I forgot to mention, that gun’s single-action only.”

“….guns are really confusing,” El-Tee spat in disdain after a moment’s silence, her magic pulling back on the hammer. “It’d have been a lot easier to just make ‘em shoot one way, all the time. How many different kinds are there, anyway?”

“More than you’d believe,” the mare replied, just as the trigger pressed backward and let the hammer fly back onto the firing pin with a healthy click!. “Good thing about that pistol, once you start shooting, the slide will cock the hammer every time when it kicks out the spent casing and strips a fresh round off the top of the magazine. So that trigger will work the same way, all the time. Just like you want.”

Light Tail played with the trigger a few more times to confirm or deny what her mother had just told her, and then started to float the pistol back to her. “…not sure I want that yet. It’s so easy to squeeze I’m scared I might shoot it by mistake.”

That, she could understand. It was a pretty light trigger without the magazine safety. She could still remember the first time she’d unintentionally fired a second shot out of one of the 10mm pistols in the Stable, the first time she’d started shooting eight years back. Broke one of the overhead lights and maybe two percent of her hearing when Farsight tried to yell her tail right off her butt. “….it’ll take practice,” she agreed, snaking the 9mm back over to her saddlebags. “Eats ammo pretty fast too, you have to learn not to get trigger happy with it—“

her body barely noted the raindrops pelting her coat, she was half a trigger-stroke away from putting a 10mm slug into the freshly-castrated stallion’s brain KILL THEM ALL

She snapped back into the world with a forceful shake of her head, but her sudden departure from reality did not go unnoticed….nor did the choking stutter of her heart as it tried to comprehend what she’d sorely wanted to do when all her inhibitions were tossed aside.

Kill them all.

“….mom, you okay?” El-Tee’s voice broke into her thoughts with a soft, tender whisper.

The mare’s response was sudden and automatic. She simply stood up and trotted over to the one window that looked out towards the vast, empty wasteland beyond the town’s ruins, and laid her head down upon a pair of shaking forelegs thrown up onto the substantial windowsill. She didn’t want to go back to that street. To the deep-rooted, sickening rage that had taken hold of her without her even realizing it.

The filly, as usual, was not deterred. She simply grabbed the desk chair and shoved it around until it crashed to a stop next to her mother, and once she’d hopped up into it her little forehooves began to pester her with soft pokes at her withers. “Mom, please….don’t do this now.”

“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Sling choked, refusing to see the tiny smears forming at the bottom of her vision as she stared out at her first rainstorm. A brilliant bolt of lightning lashed out at the broken world in the horizon, filling the land with its white light for an instant before it vanished—

“You need to,” El-Tee insisted gently, her own voice becoming wracked by her own haunting thoughts. “….by the moon, I need to, first Ballast and n-now this…just…just say something. Anything….”

She couldn’t refuse to acknowledge it now. By the stars how could she have been so careless as to forget that her daughter had witnessed that and didn’t know how to process it? She was already torn up over what she’d seen with Ballast and now….and…

….and now her mother’s become a killer and she had to see it with her own two eyes....see all that hate just…come out...

“….I wish I knew where to start….”

“I’ll make it easy, then. What were you thinking out there? When that stallion wasn’t a threat and you still wanted to…to shoot him, right there, and end up no better than him…why?”

A crack of thunder rolled over the land, melding with the constant patter of water upon the world around her. The roof above her, the window in front of her, the muddy ground beyond this little office….

“I don’t know that I was,” she whispered to the storm. “I just….felt things. Felt angry at him and his band of savages for what they were about to do to us, what they’d probably done to dozens of others before us. Felt angry at the stupid stable ponies that kept treating me like a stain on the wall they couldn’t scrub off…it’s like the whole world just cut me off and I couldn’t get back in no matter what I did. And I still don’t get why. And then….I hear you crying out for me like the little foal I still remember and I just—”

KILL! THEM! All!! And a charging stallion’s head splattered into several disfigured pieces with the squeeze of ten pounds of pressure on a trigger

A salty streak began to roll down her left cheek, the wind outside howling its way through the ruins. “….I just wanted them to die, so they couldn’t hurt you. And I feel more rage than I’d ever thought I had. I never thought about it, I just did what I did. And if you hadn’t jumped in and gotten in the way I wouldn’t have stopped until I’d cleaned his skull out with the last seven rounds in that mag.”

“Because you weren’t just angry at him,” El-Tee murmured, the touch of her head beginning to rub across her right shoulder. “You were angry at everypony that ever hurt you, and me, when I told you what Sun Star said to me last week, even if you weren’t thinking about it. You keep it so bottled up that it gets out when you don’t mean to let it and this time you almost murdered somepony for it.”

a gasping, whimpering whisper from the dying stallion as the sights began to waver, her little girl’s wet eyes screaming at her to stop

A second streak of stinging water bubbled in her right eye, dribbling down her face and blurring her vision of the dark, wet mud outside. “….maybe I already have….”

“….what you did…you probably had to. But you have the sense to know the difference between saving yourself and murder and you lost sight of it ‘cause you were too mad to think about it when it was over. You’ve been blowin’ up at me all mornin’ and you’ve never done that before, ever. You gotta let it go, before you lose it again.”

She tried, and succeeded, in keeping her mind’s eye from showing her one of her five kills—she only vaguely recalled that it was a mare shot by Grayhawk. She couldn’t bear to look at the world outside anymore, and just buried her face in her forelegs. “….I am so sorry you had to see that,” she cried into the windowsill. “S-so sorry….”

Her night light’s rubbing grew stronger, leaning into her and eventually staying put against her slightly sobbing shoulder. “…..it’s okay, mom. I…I know you were only trying to keep us safe. Just…let that rage go. Don’t let it stay inside you anymore, you’re better than that.”

Gods alive it was hard to stay sore at this kid for more than a few seconds. Made her feel even more ashamed of how often she’d yelled at her over things that weren’t even worth fighting over. Now she could stand to stare out the window, but only because she suddenly started to recall every angry word she’d thrown at her filly today and the only escape was the rainstorm outside. The window was just low enough that she could settle down on her haunches and just sit there staring at the rain. So that’s what she did.

And she found that if she just wiped her brain clean and focused on the world through that window, she could forget just about everything else in her life. The slurs, the constant shunning and ignorance, the isolation of being stuck in a metal cage for most of her career in security, it all vanished in the pouring of the rain. All she saw was the waves of water washing down the two hundred-year old glass, and out further than that, the darkening clouds spilling thick sheets of rain upon the earth in a seemingly endless torrent. And in the sky itself, constant flashes of lightning, sometimes small and insignificant, and sometimes splitting the air in two with bolts like an ivory tower. Even the loudest cracks of thunder that resounded like gunshots failed to startle her from the window.

Light Tail’s presence never left her side, even as she soaked in the bewilderment of her first hard look at true, unbridled weather, of rain and lightning. Things both of them used to dream about at night, the kind of thing they once only thought existed in ancient books, written by equally ancient and long-dead authors.

And now it was outside. Neither of them had ever taken a moment to really take in the fact that they were out on the surface where a pony belonged. To really see with their own eyes the world they’d stepped into, however unwillingly the decision had come.

El-Tee’s nuzzling took on a softer, bewildered touch, and her voice brought back to mind that lingering, tinder moment when they’d woken up in the morning, and came out of that short, sweet daydream of wheat fields and moonlit skies. “….ooooh, sweet Celestia that is beautiful….”

Sling had a minor disagreement with that statement right then, but all she could bring herself to do to air it was to hug the little filly close to her with a foreleg, and just stare out at the storm beyond. Nothing else seemed to matter right then. Just them, the storm, and the wonder of seeing their first sight of water falling from the sky instead of a two-hundred year old sprinkler system or a shower stall.

She lost track of how long they’d spent just watching nature at work, and only when El-Tee’s body began to slump and struggle to stay upright did she even notice that what little sunlight there’d been in the day had long ago vanished, leaving only eternal darkness whenever the lightning wasn’t lighting up the world beneath the storm clouds. Her tired, tiny yawn was infectious, spreading her dazed, sleepy state of mind to her mother, and she was grateful to put the day behind her. The sooner they got to sleep, the better.

The heat-dry spell she’d cast on their sleeping bags hours ago had long since done their work, but still retained some degree of warmth and fluffiness to them when she rolled them out onto the floor behind the desk. It was a simple task to put El-Tee inside her bag and close it up on her, and she might have fallen asleep right there had there been a pillow for her to lay her head on instead of the inner layers of the sleeping bag. But it was still a better alternative than the hard floor. After slipping inside her own bag and zipping it shut, there remained only one last thing to do before sleep claimed her—

“….hrmm, gonna be hard to sleep,” Light Tail complained sleepily, her body shifting around inside her sleeping bag as she tried to bring it closer to the mare beside her. “Miss Snowy already….”

Sling’s magic silently reached out to her saddlebags, and gently pulled the arctic fox plush out of its confines, floating it up against Light Tail’s face to make sure the filly could not mistake it for her mother’s mane.

And her contented, grateful squeal brightened the mare’s mood better than anything else in the world could have after the day she’d had. “Snowy!” the child cried happily, carefully whisking the fox plush from her mother’s spell field and into the sleeping bag with her. “…oooooh, I shoulda known you wouldn’t forget to pack this thing….”

“And watch my little girl have nightmares all the time without it?” Sling replied, her eyes slowly sliding shut in preparation for the coming oblivion of sleep. And it was true—for whatever reason, whenever El-Tee didn’t have the plush in her grasp when she went to bed, there was usually a nasty nightmare that came after. But as long as she had that fox with her when she slept, she never dreamed of anything but good things. And she sorely needed a good dream after what she’d seen today.

And still, the filly saw a need to scoot herself as close to her mother as physics would allow, practically pressing their sleeping bags together before she stopped trying to close the distance and settled into her bag with her most treasured possession in the world safely tucked within her forelegs. “Best mom in the world, right here,” El-Tee whispered tiredly, the call of slumber already stealing her away. “….love you, mommy….”

No matter how many times she heard it, or how often she heard it per day, hearing those words would always bring tears to the mare’s eyes, and the lingering presence of her daughter’s weight pressing into her brought her enough comfort to be able to close her eyes and drift away as well. “Love you too, honey….sleep tight….”

“….and don’ let the bed bugs bite….”

--------------------------------------

The first unpleasant surprise of the day came before they’d even had breakfast.

She thought it had been the first ray of the dawn’s light that had awakened her, and found it hard to resist her little girl’s excitable mood at the prospect of seeing actual sunlight for the first time in their lives. But giddiness was swiftly replaced with dismay and confusion when they actually stepped out and saw the truth. The endless, forever-stretching canvas of dark gray clouds remained, and though the difference between night and day was exceptional it was still overcast and dim. Not a sliver of sunlight could be seen poking through the abysmal sheet of gray.

It cast a gloomy mood on an otherwise normal spat of morning activities, and as she closed the office door and reset the lock behind her she began to wonder if hideously mutated wildlife was only one of the many aspects of the world that had gone horribly wrong. She’d read enough of the weather ponies’ history in the library to know that a storm this size required the efforts and coordination of hundreds of pegasi, from the weather factory workers to the weather control teams themselves. She’d expected to see them even now, zipping about the sky and clearing away the gloomy clouds to allow the light and warmth of the sun to reach the ground below.

And as her hooves began to clomp onto the darkened, wet asphalt of ruined streets, not a single life form could be seen in the air. Even for two ponies squirreled away in a massive underground fallout shelter all their lives, it was an unnerving sight.

“…..this isn’t right,” Light Tail murmured fearfully, treading along behind her as they trotted away from the only known safe haven they’d found thus far. “Nopony’s up there clearing the skies. It’s like they want it to stay.”

“….for all we know, the pegasi may not even control the weather anymore,” Sling surmised in reply, her eyes fervently scanning every possible opening from which a threat could ooze out. Alleys, windows, doors, husks of ancient sky wagons and piles of rubble spilled into the street from the crumbled buildings that had once stood tall, anything that could hide something as large as a radroach was eyed with suspicion. She would not be caught off guard again. “It may have taken on a mind of its own.”

“That’s crazy,” the filly rebuffed with disbelief, her optimism refusing to allow for the possibility of a worst-case scenario. “That’s…that’s unnatural. It’s just wrong. There’s no way the pegasi would let anything like that happen.”

That’s exactly what I’m starting to be afraid of. But there was no need to air such an ugly, horrific thought. That there were no pegasi left to control the weather. After all, the megaspells that ended the world had to travel through the sky to reach their targets, and the pegasi lived in cloud cities. In the sky. “….let’s just find a way to the other side of town, get back on the road.”

“Why not look around first?” El-Tee pondered aloud. “I know you’re not thrilled at the idea after yesterday morning, but—“

“That’s exactly why I want to leave. I’d go around the sun-forsaken place if I thought we could get away without being spotted by any more of those….those things—“

“Hear me out for at least ten seconds, would you?” her daughter snipped back gently, and Sling began to feel that awful, blood-boiling tingle in her limbs. The one that told her that her will and desires were more important to her than whatever her little girl wanted, because she just wanted her to be safe and whole.

The one that had caused her to snap and bite at her all morning yesterday.

“….go on, then.”

“They….they looked like scavengers,” Light Tail explained, and the mare could almost taste the fear in her voice as she spoke. “And who knows how long this town’s been sitting like this? There can’t possibly be very much left to find in it.”

“Which is why they were so interested in us when they saw us. Which is why I want us to leave, now.”

“No, think about it a second. If that’s the case, why hadn’t they up and left long before yesterday? Why would they stick around in a place that has almost no supplies or necessities? It’s suicide.”

“They wer…” She began to answer, only to find that within about two seconds’ worth of logical thinking she couldn’t come up with a good answer to that question.

In fact, the more she thought about it….

“….they weren’t scavenging at all,” she uttered, her hooves coming to a full stop as the obviousness of it all began to hit her in the face. Their quiet hoofsteps, the way they’d just slinked out into the street from seemingly out of nowhere, it all suddenly made sense. “They were waiting.”

She could only imagine the satisfaction her filly was feeling at that moment. “Which means other ponies come here, and they’d only come here if there was somethin’ worth visitin’. Like a little camp or settlement somewhere in town where other ponies are holed up. We just gotta find it.”

“By Celestia’s sun you are too smart for your own good,” an elated Sling gasped, surprised at how quickly and effortlessly such a small thing had come to the conclusion while the more experienced adult had to be hoof-led to it. “I’m supposed to be taking care of you.”

“….family helps family,” El-Tee said, finally darting past her mother in a quick trot towards the intersection ahead. “‘Least that’s what Aunt C always says.”

Her short-lived euphoria was sucked out at the mention of Windy, but Light Tail’s blinding swish of her indigo-colored tail with its electric blue streak in the middle helped snap her out of her brief daze, and she began to chase after her little girl in an effort to put herself between the pair of young eyes and the impending sight of the five bodies of ponies they’d left in the street just around the corner.

But when the pair turned right into the street of slaughter, all that awaited them were small crimson stains that hadn’t been washed away by the torrent of rainfall. No grotesquely mutilated bodies, no shell casings from her 10mm, no discarded weapons. It was all gone.

Even the scattered bits of the head she’d blown to pieces.

She would always remember with a wistful sadness how suddenly both of them had drawn their respective pistols, barely a day out of their stable, at the sight of empty space where bodies had been expected. “….why don’t we skip the argument this time and just squeak through like little mice?” El-Tee quipped softly, the lightweight revolver wavering slightly in her magical grasp.

“Stay close and keep an eye out behind us,” Sling murmured in agreement, moving past her to take the lead, and for the next quarter hour mother and daughter slipped across what little sidewalk was left as they snaked through the decrepit roads and dismembered structures. Their bodies crouched low in hopes of being less recognizable as a pony at a distance, and their pace was quiet but agonizingly slow. What little they could make of the surviving, decayed signs that were still attached to their parent building suggested they were traveling through the business district of the town. In a pre-war settlement of this size most of them would have been locally owned and operated, though a few Equestria-wide corporations no doubt managed to have a shop or office squeezed into the small rural community. But if they were here, she never saw any sign of their existence. Either their identifying symbols and signs had vanished, or the buildings themselves were amongst the house-sized piles of debris they passed by on occasion.

In time, after managing to sneak through roughly nine city blocks’ worth of terrain, they finally stumbled into a pock marked street that offered some remote hope of sensible supplies in the vicinity. Only a fraction of signboard was still intact, at the right end, bearing the word “TORE”, but it didn’t take much imagination to read it as “STORE”, which at one point it probably had been. Across the street lay the tattered remains of either a wooden pull cart or a street-side vendor’s stall, though all that was identifiable was a broken wheel and its three attached, inward-poking spokes amongst a slab of rust-colored metal and the aluminum framework of an overhead awning. Interestingly, however, there was a fairly large water-logged hole on the other side of the metal slab. Time and weather erosion had likely enlarged it over the decades, but she could imagine it being a bullet hole when it started based solely on its unusually circular pattern. A natural crack or tear would have looked a lot more ragged and elongated. In theory, anyway….

But the debris and the state of the road around it wasn’t really important, in the end. The store was. She didn’t expect to find anything truly useful after untold decades of other souls raiding it for supplies, but it didn’t hurt to look. After all, that hidden Stable-Tec office still had things in it.

El-Tee had the same idea, as both of them had begun to quietly trot towards its front door with utmost caution for a couple of seconds before the filly resumed watching out for threats behind them. The storefront window had been shattered long ago, and the door was hanging onto its frame by the barest of margins along the bottom hinge. After a few seconds of meticulous eyeballing she finally began to creep through into the interior, and into its rows of bare shelving and the trash-littered floor.

Light Tail’s coat brushed against her left hind leg as the filly squeezed inside herself, and the first challenge of the day presented itself to her in short order as the tiny thing packed her pistol away and began to dart up and down the four aisles of the store.

Keeping the excitable child from hurting herself in her happy rush to find or discover something she’d never seen before.

“Honey, watch where you’re going!” she admonished the little pony sharply, swinging around to look out through the shattered storefront for any sign that they might have been followed. “There aren’t any nurses or doctors I can take you to if you get hurt—“

But the kid wasn’t listening—at least not to her. “Canteens, all gone, water cleaning stuff gone too,” Light Tail muttered aloud, as if reading out all the shelf labels she came across in her mad search for whatever had taken hold in her mind. “Lesee here, no foodstuffs either, no first aid stuff, no …no compasses? Awww, make it hard on us why don’t ya Luna come on where is it—“

“What are you looking for?” she finally deigned to ask, the 10mm’s orange-inset crystal sights wavering slightly at the bottom of her vision as she swung her gaze off to the right to peer down the street they’d come in from.

“A map!” the precocious squirt grumbled in frustration as the object of her search refused to turn up after she’d frantically searched a second aisle with no success, her short legs batting empty tin cans out of her path. “Ya complained about the map on yer PipBuck bein’ overwritten, I was hopin’ we’d find one in here. All we have is that topa…topo…..arrgh, what’s the word—“

“Topographical map,” Sling replied immediately, dark thoughts beginning to creep into her voice at the breakfast-time discovery of the largely useless map in her saddlebags. They needed a map with cities and roads, not a snapshot of the landscape from three centuries ago when it was abundantly clear that the world had changed so drastically as to make such a map near worthless except as a historical document. “A really old one, it was made back when the prairie wasn’t settled or inhabited.”

“That’s the word! That one’s kinda useless, the prairie was pretty flat all through. Even just a map of town would be a good start, but there’s nothin’ here!”

Sounds about right, considering my luck. “At least stop running around like that, you’re making a lot of noise kicking those cans around.”

That was enough to get the squirt calmed down to a point where she wasn’t zipping around on a sugar rush and making enough of a ruckus to attract every four-legged predator within earshot (savage ponies included). Her search of the third aisle yielded similar results, and halfway down the fourth she began to mutter dark musings about the nature of the universe, or something. She clearly wasn’t happy to have her quick search turn up nothing but trash and broken trinkets.

“I don’t know why I thought there’d be somethin’ like that still lyin’ around,” the electric-blue eyed filly spat in disgust at her wasted efforts, kicking at the counter on her left when she stopped for a breath. “Guess that prospecting office got me hopeful.”

“It wasn’t a bad idea,” Sling admitted, her eyes still focused on the street beyond the store. “Just not one that worked out this time.”

But El-Tee was not willing to give up without one last ditch effort to find what she’d sought. Seeing that the store shelves were offering nothing useful anymore, she turned around and darted back up alongside the counter, the sound of her hoofsteps disappearing behind its rotted, molding planks—

“Whoa, wait a tic, I found somethin’!”

Sling’s ears perked up as her filly began to drag something around the floor. “What is it?”

“A book!” the little one squealed, the mystery object scuffling across the wooden floor and flopping about as she tossed it up onto the counter, presumably with her magic. “Cover’s all faded out but some of the pages are intact!”

The hefty thud of the object as it smacked into the wood finally roused enough curiosity for the mare to take her eyes off the road, and there was indeed a lithe, thin book atop the counter, tufts of dust already spreading out into the air around it. In the three seconds it took her to reach the book she could discern that the cover was, indeed, illegible, and that its pages were considerably discolored along the edges. But a simple flip of the cover showed that the main content was still somewhat intact, as evidenced by the sheet paper cover page underneath:

“Fields & Dreams: A Tourist’s Guidebook of the Prairie”

“…..you little imp, you’re going to get a cutie mark in exploration at this rate,” Sling blurted after three wordless seconds of staring at their turn of good fortune, and she quickly began flipping past the copyright pages and into the table of contents. More than likely it was just a book on the natural landscape and various landmarks scattered about the region, but it was entirely possible to find at the very least a snapshot map of local roads and highways of specific areas, which was exactly what they needed.

They also needed some time to go through it. Even with no sign of danger over the last twenty minutes, she wasn’t willing to linger any longer in one place than was necessary.

“We’ll take it with us,” she decided in a snap, pulling the book from the counter and dropping it into her left saddlebag. “Once we find somewhere safe to stay for a while we’ll look at it. Anything else you were hoping to find in here?”

“….a million bits and a pillow….and now that I think about it ya grabbed a couple of pouches of jingling stuff yesterday, what’s in ‘em?”

“Later,” Sling insisted more strongly this time, emphasizing her position with a quick chamber check on the 10mm pistol. “If this settlement of yours even exists, we need to find it. Same deal as before, slow and steady. Watch the street behind us.”

--------------------------------------

As much as she really, really wanted to get inside that book, she didn’t want Mom yelling at her again, so she simply resigned herself to the long, fearful walk ahead. She barely registered the weight of the revolver in her magical grasp. Every few seconds she’d take a good look behind them, but so far all she’d seen this morning was ruin after ruin, wet asphalt, and a complete lack of life of any form. No insects (thank Luna!), no animals, no nothing. But after yesterday morning, she didn’t see that as a completely bad thing.

She’d rather see nothing than find more bad ponies. Bad ponies that Mom would kill if she saw them and thought they needed killing. She didn’t want to see that again.

The remainder of the morning’s journey, thankfully, turned out to be a rather short affair. Only a few minutes after leaving the old store, the general structure and purpose of the buildings began to change. Whereas before they were walking through what she assumed to be the “downtown business” portion of the town, she was beginning to recognize some semblance of a “neighborhood” around her. Brick-and-mortar, squared buildings had gradually given way to less imposing and threatening-looking houses of strong, solid wood, and she was surprised to see a lot of them still standing. A few were smashed and broken down into little more than a few pieces of standing framework, but for the most part the houses were intact and livable, if not homely looking. The confusing grid-like pattern of streets became simple lanes of road with curved bends here and there and the occasional intersection to connect to other neighborhood blocks. There were still a few official looking buildings though—they quickly came across one that sat in its own half-acre lot, with a five-star symbol on its front above the main door. She took it to be some sort of law enforcement building, though with every conceivable sign of identification gone there was no way to be sure.

Not even five minutes after they entered the neighborhood they both began to feel uneasy, as if unseen eyes and predators were watching their every move. It became something of a struggle to find the source of these prying eyes, however, as no matter where they turned or how hard they looked they couldn’t find a single source of movement or life in any place where somepony might be hiding and watching from. She figured they were watching through a window curtain.

And then, as they took a right turn at the fourth intersection they came across, they finally figured out where those ill feelings were coming from.

The street appeared to lead into a section of the neighborhood that had been divvied up into a little commercial sector of its own. Those squared, concrete and metal buildings lined the street on both sides, and that same grid pattern of streets was probably in the midst of them as well. Ponies—ponies that didn’t want to maim them—were milling about in a crisscrossing pattern of hoof traffic to various destinations of their choosing. Some wore odd-looking war-era clothing that had seen decades of use, with tears and gashes peppered all across the fabric. Others shunned clothing in favor of a pony’s natural state of being, though their coats were spotted with splotches of dirt and grime. Many seemed to sport an ugly scar of some sort here and there….and it quickly became a rare sight to see a pony without a weapon of some sort strapped to their sides in a holster or crudely-constructed bag. Most of them were blunt or bladed objects of one sort or another—a piece of lumber or old water piping, or a kitchen knife, or this really weird looking stick that was fat at the base but grew thinner further down to the tip. Some had small guns like hers, but a quick look revealed them to be in terrible shape otherwise, with rust and patches of their outer finish scarring them up.

The real threats—perhaps the source of those “prying eyes” they felt earlier—were perched on the roofto—

Her hooves stopped moving, her face bumping into Mom’s hind leg as she stared up at her first griffon. She’d never seen one before, except in books and pictures of the few griffons that had been among the First Ones when the megaspells started flying. They’d only lived a couple of generations before dying out—something about there not being enough “compatible” mates or some such. But her first living griffon was much like the ones in the pictures. As one article had put it, “half lion, half eagle, and all awesome”. And even with the same lack of hygiene as the ponies on the street, this griffon still looked majestic and powerful.

And so did his gun. The second he spotted them, they had his full attention for the remainder of their walk through the streets, and he never let go of his gun.

“Don’t stare,” Mom’s voice warned quietly as she flipped her gun’s safety on and stuck it in one of her many holsters. “Don’t talk to anypony, and stay right beside me.”

The revolver floated back into its holster on her left side as Mom started trotting forward again at a very deliberate pace, and the filly quickly found it preferable to stay within two inches of her once some of the ponies and rooftop griffons began to notice them. And once they did, they didn’t stop staring.

Too clean looking, the bad pony said yesterday morning….

Oh stars, everybody that sees us knows we don’t belong here!

“M-mom, maybe you were right,” she whispered fearfully. “We stand out too much.”

“It may also get us some answers,” Mom said back, keeping her eyes forward….and above, and to the side, or wherever somebody with a gun happened to be. “Just stay close and do nothing unless I tell you to.”

El-Tee had to swallow the air that lodged in her throat in order to breathe again. Staying within touching distance of Mom and shutting up wasn’t going to be that hard this time. As awesome as it was to see some sign of non-hostile life at last, they were still intimidating enough that she didn’t want to do anything stupid. A tall order for a ten-year-old filly, but she could manage.

She hoped.

She tried hard not to stare for more than a second or two as she continually scanned the environment around her, taking extra careful note of anypony with a gun (which turned out to be a grand total of six). Those with knives or other sharp looking objects were next on the Don’t Provoke list. Surprisingly, as they entered the block proper and into the midst of the mingling ponies, she started to see other fillies and colts close to her age. Some younger, some a bit older, but they were there. Those that were alone seemed to recoil from Mom’s gaze whenever she saw them—those that were near another adult pony would sometimes hide behind them, or said pony would nudge them back into walking on about their business while giving Mom a less-than-pleasant stare.

And then two ponies made a mistake.

Apparently too curious to be sated with merely observing her and her mother walk by them, the two stallions began to dart out from the sidewalk to meet them in the street.

Her breath turned icy with terrified anticipation of the next few seconds. O-oh Luna no no no you stupid ponies don’t do that

“Heeey, yer new ‘round these parts,” one of the stallions said with as casual a tone as two ponies could muster when they weren’t being….well, casual-like. He just so happened to be one of the six ponies she spotted wearing a gun, too….

“Astute observation,” Mom quipped back, snapping a quick look at the other stallion but continuing to trot along. “Now walk away.”

Ooh gods

“Hey, we just wanna talk a minute—“ the other stallion started to say, but Mom was having none of it, not after what happened the last time strangers tried to box them in like this.

“I’m not interested in talking,” Mom snapped sharply, coming to a dead stop as the latch on one of her holsters snapped loose from the touch of her magic. “Walk. Away.”

“Whoooa, hold on there missy,” the stallion with the gun said, his voice growing alarmed at how quick Mom was to threaten violence, but in her defense, she did tell them to go away twice already and they weren’t listening. “This cold withers thing mighta worked back where yer from, but this ain’t home—“

El-Tee’s lungs let out a gasp of air she hadn’t realized she was holding, terrified that her mother was about to snap again and start blowing them away—

“Walk away, or be carried away,” Mom’s voice sneered. At least, she thought it was Mom, but it was so….so dark…

“Is that what you told those bodies we picked up downtown yesterday afternoon?” the second stallion shot back, catching mother and daughter breathless with the revelation. “Or was that all just some incredible misunderstanding of fatal proportions?”

….o-oh Lu…don’t take her away

“S-s-she didn—“

“I told them to stay back,” Mom answered first, cutting off the terrified filly before she could try to stop it. “They didn’t listen. Just like you’re doing right now.”

The gun stallion and Mom locked hard, unreadable gazes into each other for what seemed like an eternity, and Light Tail felt like time itself had just stopped. Like it was telling her that this moment with Mom might be her last.

“Walk with me,” the gun stallion stated flatly, and the tone of his voice suggested that it was not a request. “Got somethin’ to show you.”

“How many times do I have to tell yo—“

“Walk with me,” the stallion repeated, his voice raising slightly as the griffons on the rooftops shifted their attention (and guns) onto the argument he was having with Mom. “Because in case it’s escaped your notice, what little law there is in the wasteland only exists in little towns like this. I don’t normally afford strangers this much warning. Heed it. Walk with me.”

--------------------------------------

The “walk” took them through a hundred-strong crowd of ponies and into an ancient debilitated building that at one time had been the town’s tax revenue office, according to the partially faded lettering on the front desk’s plaque. Now the building’s hallways, offices, and records storage rooms served an entirely different and unintended purpose for those that came after.

A makeshift medical clinic. A few ponies sat in the lobby near the front desk, a couple of them pressing dirty rags against unseen wounds that oozed crimson onto the floor. The rest seemed to suffer from a disease of one sort or another. A wet cough, a stuffy nose as they made idle conversation, the occasional sneeze or a shiver of the body seemed to be the more common symptoms, but she couldn’t say what they were suffering from, or whether it was contagious. An orange-hued earth pony mare behind the front desk was busy sorting through an old milk bottle crate that seemed to contain jars of pills and antibiotics….of which there were very few. Perhaps just enough to treat or medicate those in the building, and that was assuming that the “doctors” or “nurses” here even knew enough of medicine to know who needed what.

Her guides strode through without bothering to check themselves in with the mare at the desk, nudging a door open to the left of the desk and trotting on towards…whatever it was that they sought. She followed them down the paint-stripped hall, passed at least two rooms in which lay several appropriated stretchers for use as beds. While a couple of them were empty, most had an unfortunate soul or four occupying it as they recuperated from their ailments and injuries. At least one pony was missing a foreleg, and very recently, judging by the red-stained gauze bandaging that capped off the stump of his right foreleg. His breathing was labored, heavy, almost as if he’d had no anesthetic or painkillers whatsoever, while a dark pink unicorn mare busied herself with a task on the other side of the room.

She didn’t bother to see what that task was when she noticed the bone saw and medical cross cutie mark on her hindquarters.

Two rooms later her guides finally deigned to enter a door on the left side of the hallway, the word “MORGUE” crudely etched into the wall next to the doorway with a pointed tool of some sort, and only then did Sling catch on to what lay beyond the door.

“El-Tee, wait out here,” she barked quietly as she paused outside the door for a moment to further instill her wishes of where she wanted the filly to park herself. “….you’ve seen enough already. No need to see it again.”

“So why do you have to, then?” Light Tail questioned in return, though her hoofs stopped moving almost immediately.

“….I did this. Nothing I see of what came after will be worse than knowing that I was responsible for it. You don’t have that burden, and I’m not letting you take it. Wait here.”

Sling passed through the doorway without another word, and felt a slight relief in her lungs when she didn’t hear tiny hoofs following along in her wake. It was the only break she would get in this place.

Splayed out on five separate gurneys and covered with aged, frayed bed sheets were the bodies of five ponies, lined up in a single row against the left side of the room. Aside from an overhanging oil lantern for light and a small end table with a few medical instruments, there was little else of interest except for a few empty rolling stretchers crammed into a corner in the back of the room.

She would never understand how she was able to calmly approach the five dead bodies without completely freaking out at the distinct lack of stench in the room. She barely noticed the faintly glowing runes imbedded in the sheets, which she recognized as a pattern for a smell suppression spell.

A decent alternative given the lack of refrigeration capability.

Without waiting for her to ask (or asking about it themselves), the gun-armed stallion simply clenched one of the bed sheets and peeled it away from the corpse beneath it—

“—ouped up out of the muck for a while. We’ll need some entertainment—“

—the 10mm-castrated stallion’s lifeless shell sat still against the underlying sheet of the gurney, eyes mercifully closed and sparing her the accusing glare of the departed. If she’d never run into him before today she wouldn’t have known him to be a savage, heartless monster with a penchant for ravaging mares and little fillies for kicks.

“Large caliber bullet took out his nads,” the gun-armed stallion relayed needlessly. She’d done it, after all. “Likely a hollowpoint judging by the mess it made of his internals afterward—“

“Ten millimeter, one fifty-five grain jacketed,” she corrected for him almost robotically. “Full-power load, not that reduced-recoil crap that cops preferred in the war.”

The stallion’s eyes glared back at her in the castrated corpse’s steed. “So it was you, then? What’d they do?”

“What haven’t they done?” she questioned back, beginning to less and less secure as the conversation began to take on a slightly accusatory direction. “Be honest with me, if their mockery of a cutie mark is any indication they weren’t exactly shining examples of ponykind to start with.”

“Humor me a spell anyway.”

Asshole, she almost spat in disgust.

Still, at least he cared enough to ask. More than she could say for herself at that moment.

“….they must have been hiding out in the alleys. They came out when I was arguing with my daughter. She saw them before I did, and it was the only warning I got. They kept asking me about a…”

She had to word this carefully. She didn’t want every soul in the settlement to know she knew nothing of the world around her. “….they kept going on about this stable under a mountain—“

“The one-one-five,” the stallion injected casually, just before he tapped her PipBuck on her left foreleg. “Your stable, if that number on this thing isn’t a typo.”

Fuuuu….gods DAMN IT I’m an idiot! she snarled accusingly, throwing a hateful glare at the betraying mark on the PipBuck. Didn’t matter that she’d left her Stable suit and its useful pockets stuffed inside her saddlebags to try and hide her origins when the stable’s logo was plastered on the hermetically-sealed PipBuck on her leg that could only be removed with the use of tools.

“I’m gonna venture that when they saw you in a Stable suit you’re not wearing anymore, they figured you’d just come out and wanted to use you to get in. What’d you tell them that made them change their minds?”

There was no further point in trying to skirt the issue, now that he’d already figured it out through subtle observation of the two clues she’d neglected to cover up. “The truth,” she sighed in defeat. “….the stable is gone. Radroaches swarmed in, killed the power. My daughter and I were the only ones close enough to the blast door to get out. Everypony else was trapped in the lower levels with no way out in time.”

Both stallions seemed to freeze in place at those words, though she paid little mind and went on with the tale. “After that, they….they seemed to get other ideas. Ideas I would not let them carry out on my only child. And since begging them to go away didn’t work, I blew them away.”

The unarmed stallion found his voice, but only after taking a quick look at the five corpses lined up against the wall. “…just like that? Bang bang, all on your own?”

“I believe it,” the armed stallion said next, pulling the sheet back over the body and sparing her any further glances at the life she’d taken. “Only the stupid or skilled carry a .44 Mag with the intent of actually usin’ it in a fight. Might be a little of both if that kid in the hall really is hers.”

It took a hard bite to her tongue to keep her from thrashing him into the wall in a single telekinetic sling of magic. “Are we done here?” she seethed through clenched teeth.

“Not quite,” the gun stallion replied, giving the sheet one final tug to make sure it wouldn’t flop off of the body before turning towards the door. “Come on down to my office. There’s some things you need to know while we get the bounty squared away.”

The imminent promise of information on her immediate surroundings was hung up by the word, “bounty”, and what it foretold. “….w-wait, a bounty?”

“Dead or alive,” the stallion confirmed nonchalantly, as though the concept were part of him and life in general. “We’ve been lookin’ for these scumbags for three months, and the whole town had a party when we came back with your mess.”

--------------------------------------

The stallion with the gun finally gave them his name. Blue Star. His name matched his blue coat and silver badge cutie mark, and that probably made him the closest thing to an old world cop that they’d ever find. He even had his own office!

…..okay, office space, stuffed in the corner of an inn with its own little store and bar, judging by all the stuff behind the front desk and by how many tables had been set up in the lobby in which they sat, but beggars couldn’t be choosers in a world like this. And Blue Star even had—

“Six hundred caps,” he mumbled through the two bags in his mouth, and dropped them on the worn wooden table right in front of Mom. “A hundred per head, plus a hundred extra for getting the entire group at once.”

Mom’s face seemed to almost drain itself of its color and luster as the paint-faded, bent bottle caps spilled out of one of the bags when it rolled over to its side. Her mouth tried to utter some kind of sound or word, but all that came out was a wordless gasp of shock.

So naturally, Light Tail jumped right in instead of waiting for Mom’s senses to come back to her. “….a buncha bottle caps? What are you, a collector?”

Blue Star chuckled at her response as he lowered himself onto his hindquarters on the other side of the table. “Somethin’ like that,” he laughed. “Bits might’ve run the world before the war, but today’s currency is bottle caps. Don’t ask me how it got started, nobody knows.”

Light Tail’s laughter was trapped within her throat before it could escape, and all that left her mouth was a muddled snort. “….you trade around soda bottle caps for money?”

Blue Star’s eyes stared back at her in disbelief, as if the concept of other forms of currency were foreign to him. “….everybody does. Kid, this ain’t the world you mighta learned about in your Stable. It’s the wasteland. You use what you can find.”

She wanted to keep laughing at this strange custom of using bottle caps like cash, except that the word “wasteland” soured her mood. “….wasteland? You mean it’s like this everywhere? Even Equestria That Was?”

“Everywhere that we know of,” Blue Star answered calmly, and El-Tee didn’t fail to notice that he didn’t sound too broke up about it. It was like he’d grown up knowing and believing that, and he would have had time to look around to see for himself. “The towns, the farm steads and their fields, the cities, even the twin capitals of the prairie, it’s all in ruin. Has been since the end of the war.”

Twin capitals? What di—oh, wait, he meant….

“The sister cities are still here?”

“What’s left of them,” Blue said, cocking his head towards a mare approaching the table from behind with what looked like a glass bottle of dark-colored liquid. “Trotpeka got hit by a megaspell, one of the few the zebras had. Didn’t hit dead center, though. Section of town near the south is still pretty intact, but the closer you get to the crater, the worse it gets. Radiation’s not near as bad as it was decades ago, but it’s still lethal at ground zero. Withercha got it worse, though.”

Getting hit by a spell meant to end everything in its blast radius was pretty bad by itself. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know how much worse it could get, but not knowing would probably be worse in the long run. “…..what’s worse than gettin’ fried by the worst weapon we ever made?”

The mare left Blue’s bottle of…whatever it was that was in that bottle, down in front of him where he could get to it, and even stuck a straw in it before leaving with a hoof full of bottle caps in her saddle apron’s chest pocket. “Gettin’ fried by one the zebras built on their own,” he said over the top of the bottle. “Balefire bomb.”

Balefire, balefire, balefire, the filly repeated in her head, trying to rack her memories for any tidbits or nuggets of knowledge she might have read or seen in the stable library in the last couple of years, but to avail. The First Ones weren’t exactly up-to-date on the latest zebra happenings when the war ended in brilliant flashes of mass destruction.

At least, she thought they weren’t. The mention of a zebra weapon seemed to be the spark that snapped Mom out of her stupefied gaze, because she finally stopped staring at the bags of bottle caps and looked up. “….I thought those were just old war time myths….”

“They were real,” Blue muttered darkly after taking a sip through his straw. “Nopony knows how they were built or how they managed to sneak one into the city, but they did, and it did a number on Withercha. Polluted the land for dozens of miles all around, nothing grows there anymore. Winds and storms must have carried the fallout out all over the Prairie, there’s places where the land just…died. No plants, no grass or trees. Little river that used to run through here dried up sometime in the first century after the war. The lake just past the valley to the west, all the fish turned carnivorous, I’ve seen them gobble up ponies alive down to the bone in three minutes. Some even grew arms so they can prowl around the lakeshore for prey. Lotta wildlife in the Prairie died out, and what survived….changed. We got one problem animal roamin’ around in the wastes outside of town even now—“

“Does it look like a big, hungry bear in a foul mood from bad mange?” El-Tee interrupted, flashes of the creature that nearly caught them yesterday morning beginning to force themselves back to the front of her mind. Terrifying, hideous images….

For some reason Blue seemed to find her short, apt description funny, because he wound up snorting some of his drink out of his nose. “Hehehaha, never heard a yao gaui described like that before,” he laughed. “Yeah, I guess it would look like that to somepony that’d never seen one. How you’d two get away from it?”

“Luck,” was Mom’s blunt, brief answer. “….how bad did the prairie get it?”

“Pretty bad. Won’t bore you with a history lesson, what you see here’s pretty accurate for what you’ll find everywhere else, and this is one of the more intact towns in the region. A few stables here and there emptied their populations over the decades….’cept yours, naturally. Something you oughta know, there’s legends of the one-one-five floating around out there on account of only one o’ you comin’ out every twenty to thirty years.”

“What about the last one?” Mom asked next, perhaps a little too quickly, but she couldn’t blame her for wanting to know what happened to the last Overmare. “Five years ago?”

“That one?” Blue asked seemingly of himself more than Mom, his eyes going slightly glassy as he began to scour his brain for memories. “Passed through here the day she left the stable. Stayed a coupla weeks to get her bearings, then went off towards Trotpeka. Never came back. A coupla traders I know there said she’d talked of looking for a way through the valley to Withercha, but never heard back from her after she left. She never left anything behind, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

An idea in Light Tail’s mind came to life, quickly forming into a question born of both curiosity and opportunity. “What’s this about a valley past Trotpeka? Ya mentioned it twice already.”

“It’s what left of the major river that used to run straight through the middle of the prairie,” Blue Star replied with another sip of his soda. Or booze, she didn’t really know. “Before the war, the pegasus cloud city would use it to suck up the water they needed for their weather factory. It’s said that during the megaspell exchange they sucked it all up before it could get contaminated, left almost nothing behind. Now and then the storms will flood the basin for a coupla days but it stays pretty dry otherwise.”

El-Tee could feel a rush of bliss flowing into her blood at the news of the pegasi’s survival. “Serenity survived the war?!”

But Blue didn’t share her enthusiasm or good cheer, and cast a hateful glance at her for her outburst. “Sadly,” he spat in disgust. “Nobody knows why, but within the first half hour of the megaspell exchange the pegasi started covering the entire sky with a cloud cover nopony’d ever seen before. As far as ponykind could reach and then some. Some kind of extremist government takeover up there’s kept them all skyside ever since. They don’t come down ‘less they’re lookin’ for some wayward pegasus found his way down to the ground, and they don’t mess with the weather. They just let it go.”

El-Tee’s brain actually ground to a halt trying to process that. How could weather just….behave “wild”? How could the clouds and the wind do rainstorms and snow and stuff all on their own? It wasn’t right. Wasn’t natural! Pegasi made the weather! They always had! “….that’s not funny.“

“’Cause it ain’t a joke,” Blue retorted sharply, causing the filly to snap back out of shock. “They blocked out the sunlight and left us to rot. Weather’s lost its way, like the rest of the world. Far as we’re concerned, Equestria died in the blasts.”

Light Tail began to grow fearful of the long road ahead. Ruined cities, leftover radiation from the war, more mutated wildlife, cut off from Canterlot and whatever survived the war, no sunlight, no….

…..no pegasi? That’s not cool at all. They were part of Equestria That Was. We all were….how could they just abandon everypony like that….

In a fit of frustration and a spark of idle curiosity she pulled that topographical map out of Mom’s saddlebags (without asking), and quickly unfurled it onto the table in front of her. Neither Mom or Blue seemed to take much notice of what she was doing or why, and let her go about her business undisturbed. She returned the favor and stayed out of their conversation as much as she could, but kept an ear tuned to them regardless.

“…how do you survive in the ruins like this?” Mom’s voice inquired softly, only mildly disturbing the filly’s thoughts. “How do you get food, water, ammo—“

“Mostly trade for it, if we ever find anything in the town worth using.”

“What could you possibly have left to trade in, in a world like this?”

This question got Light Tail’s full attention, not least of which was the fact that there didn’t seem to be very much left that was worth anything to start with. “Whatever’s still in one piece,” Blue said back, his straw suckling growing louder and sharper, signifying the imminent demise of his drink. “Old world tech, intact books, guns, bullets, meds, junk parts that the smarter of us can make into something useful. Food’s the tricky thing, up ‘till now most of us have been gettin’ by on the food stores left behind by the government after the war, but those are startin’ to dry up.”

“You mean to tell me that entire generations have lived their lives subsisting on two-hundred year old spell-frozen provisions that go stale after a shelf life of ten years?”

“Gross,” El-Tee blurted the instant the thought of eating a two-century old fruitcake came into her mind. Even with a spell preservative there was no way any piece of food could still resemble an edible object for that long! Ponies would’ve had a great deal of….digestive issues their whole lives or starved out into extinction! “Leave a soda out long enough and it turns into some disgusting goo that ain’t fit to be drunk by anything. I don’t wanna think ‘bout how the food might turn out!”

“It’s all we got left,” Blue murmured solemnly. With the last of his bottle slurped up into his stomach he nudged it aside with his snout towards the edge of the table, probably for that waitress mare to pick up the next time she came around. “And it’s not as bad as you’d think, whatever the government did to the stuff to keep it preserved seems to have worked really well, still edible even today. But like I said, the supply’s startin’ to dry up. Probably why the slave trade picked up in the last coupla years.”

El-Tee had just started to trace the distance between the big blue line and one of the smaller ones that lead out to the right and dipped down around one of the lighter tan lines, and the mere mention of the barbaric practice killed all the interest she had in trying to figure out exactly how far away they were from this valley. The idea that a soul—pony, griffon or otherwise—would be pressed into a life of forced servitude to another like property or livestock….that a soul was worth some finite amount of bits and no more….

Even Mom had trouble believing it, if her shocked tone was any clear sign. “….s….slave trade?”

“What little food that can be grown is farmed by slaves,” Blue explained calmly and casually, as if merely discussing the scheduled weather for the week. “Cheaper than paying ponies to work the fields and less trouble for the owners. Slavers have always been a problem, but it’s gotten worse the last two or three years. They’re all over the place, even paying raiders to haul in anybody they don’t kill outright. My advice, don’t take the side roads. Just stick to the main highways, and don’t travel at night unless you have to. If you get caught…you may never get out.”

pay!? Ponies get paid to catch other ponies for this—

“Y-you just let them do this?” Mom said with a hoarse voice, and El-Tee could almost taste the bottled rage coming off of her words.

“Ain’t a matter of lettin’,” Blue stated firmly, rising up from the floor at last. “Plenty of folk have tried to change it. An’ they’re all dead to the last stallion and mare. Their kids too, just to make a point. The slavers made it clear—push on ‘em any, and they’ll kill every last onna us first chance they get.”

No.

No no no NO. This was not what ponies did! They were better than this! They—

….were better, the little filly realized in a sickening moment of irony when she analyzed her own thoughts. They were better, back in the day….but if they had really been that good, they wouldn’t have blown the whole world up and then some. This was just the poison that had killed their good natures, taken to the most extreme ends one could fathom. This was what ponykind had ultimately turned into.

A bunch of savages beating each other to death for the last scraps of the old world their ancestors had destroyed.

“…..I don’t know what’s worse,” Mom hissed angrily. “That those kinds of savages exist or that you let them.”

“I’m partial to livin’,” was Blue’s excuse as he began to walk away from them. And good riddance, she’d had all the horrible, bad news she could stand to listen to today already and it wasn’t even ten A.M. yet. “If I’m a coward for it, so be it. Stick to the highways. And don’t let ‘em take ya, whatever it takes.”

--------------------------------------

Bottle. Caps.

Those poor souls had been mutilated, violated, tortured, and killed. Over a safe with a pitiful bag of BOTTLE CAPS that somehow replaced the Equestrian bit as a form of cash! She’d been paid in CAPS for killing five savages yesterday morning!

And ponykind had now taken the concept of property to mean other ponies if they were caught and beaten into submission?! “Property” bought and sold with BOTTLE CAPS?!

Leave. Now. As far away from the prairie as our legs can take us.

“Wait here,” she barked the moment she saw Blue Star slink out the front door. The inn’s concierge desk being used as a bar also seemed to double as a “store” of sorts, she’d seen all sorts of junk stuffed onto barely-standing shelving behind the kiwi berry-colored stallion sitting behind the counter, and she swore she thought she saw what looked like ammo on a couple of them. “I’ll be back in a minute. Stay in sight, don’t wander off.”

Y-you stay in sight,” her electric-blue eyed night light shot back, now studying the topographic map she’d stolen out of her bag with the intensity of the doomed.

Good. No wandering child to worry about.

She trotted off towards the “store” at a quick pace, just as a griffon with a bolt-action rifle strapped across her back had concluded her business with the kiwi-shaded stallion. A brief glance at her left hind leg as she walked away showed a pair of slash scars scratched across the outer thigh, but a small, thin cardboard box in her beak gave her a glimmer of hope when she hear the distinctive, quiet rattle of rifle cartridges bouncing about inside.

That hope quickly turned to guarded caution when she herself approached the desk. The kiwi stallion’s faint purple mane was tied back behind his head in a single tail, and his blueberry eyes were already hard at work taking in every detail in front of him that he could see—

“Wow,” he blurted the moment his eyes fell upon the PipBuck on her left foreleg. “Don’t see very many of those, and most of ‘em are broke. Where’d you get it?”

“Somewhere else,” she shot back before he could start asking all kinds of questions about the Stable. “I’m looking for ammo. Do you have any left?”

He stopped looking at her PipBuck and switched his gaze upward, peering into her eyes with what looked like a disinterested or disdainful demeanor. “Do I have ammo? Yeah, I got some. Am I sellin’ to some dainty mare that can’t be bothered to show a fella some manners? Nah, I don’t think so—“

“This ‘dainty mare’ has four hundred caps to spare,” she interrupted with a curt clip to her voice, despite the rising, boiling rage that told her she was better served by tearing his face off with two minutes’ worth of a telekinesis spell. “If you don’t want it, I can find somepony else willing to take the business.”

Disgustingly, the mention of the potential payoff was all she needed to drop to get this stallion into a more agreeable mode for bartering. He stopped glaring daggers and spite at her and allowed a more serious glint to come into his eyes. “….well, I ‘spose we can’t all be saints, missy. Whaddya lookin’ for?”

“Nine and ten millimeter, .38 Special, and .357 and .44 Mag,” she snapped off crisply. “Magazines too, if you have any.”

“Yeah, you and me both,” Kiwi Stallion laughed in return. “Ain’t seen one fit to break down for parts in months, and .44 Mag’s hard to find these days. Not too many of those guns around anymore. Got a bit of the rest though. Nine mike-mike and thirty-eights run you a cap per round, .three-fifty-seven goes for two. Ten-mil will cost you three.”

She sensed something amiss already—he’d only mentioned the calibers, not the type of bullet, and she was looking for more than just standard jacketed ball rounds. But if he didn’t seem to know the difference…. “Got at least a hundred each of the nines and thirty-eights?”

“If that’s what the lady wants,” Kiwi smirked, ducking down behind the desk for a couple of moments before coming back up with a pair of 9mm ammo boxes clenched in his jaws. She deftly pulled the ammo carrier free from its cardboard packaging and plucked a few rounds out, impressed with the fairly clean-looking (if burnished and scratch-marked) brass and the presence of an actual copper coating on the bullet. Even the primers were impeccable in shape and condition. Four of the seven rounds in her grasp were FMJs, but the other three were hollowpoints, suggesting a mix of both round types existed in these two boxes. No way of knowing how many of each were inside without taking the time to count them, and she would rather do that after the purchase in case he did understand the difference. “Good. Copper coating seems intact.”

“Won’t find that on most post-war manufacture bullets, ‘less you know how to do it yerself,” Kiwi agreed, after bringing out two additional boxes of .38 Special for her inspection. “A lotta the wartime stuff’s been used up, but there’s still some left here and there if you look hard enough.”

A quick look of the .38s showed similar details—copper coating, clean brass with no smudges or grease build-up that might stick to the inside of a chamber after firing, and no primers looking like they were popping loose from the shell base. A quick count of two hundred caps of her blood money changed hooves, giving her night light a chance for some more practice in the very near future. Sadly, he only had twenty .357s and one box of 10mm, fifty rounds total, but they were all in as good a shape as the 9mm and .38s. Another hundred and ninety caps left her bag, making it considerably lighter than it’d been five minutes ago.

If she hadn’t gotten this nagging feeling that she would be needing the rest of the “bounty” in the near future, she’d have dropped it all right here, as sick it was making her feel to be carrying it around. Just knowing there were ponies willing to put a price on another pony’s head, even for evil deeds committed, was eating away at her inside. That she’d been paid for killing them only made it worse. Never mind that she’d never even known there’d been a “wanted dead” decree on them.

She didn’t get to dwell on her moral compendium for very long, thankfully. She’d barely concluded her business with the kiwi earth pony and trotted away to her daughter when the excitable thing began peppering her with whatever thoughts had built up in her head. “Hey, I think I know where we are!”

Had the last twenty-four hours not proven the kid’s seemingly natural luck at finding stuff out of the blue when the mood struck her, she might have just brushed it off and told her to pack up and get moving. And with what little information Blue Star had given them about their immediate surroundings, it wouldn’t have been that difficult to get at least a rough estimate of where they stood by staring at that old map long enough. “Can you tell me in ten seconds or less?”

El-Tee’s forehooves went right to work, tapping a big blue line that cut down the middle of the map and had several smaller lines spiraling out from it, much like a leafless tree. “This is the biggest river on the map, so that’s gotta be this valley Blue kept talkin’ about!” the filly began, her tail swishing about rapidly as she blabbered on. The electric blue streak quickly began to leave an imprinted image in her vision when its brilliant shade grew into a singular blinding blur, so Sling drew her eyes away from her daughter and towards the map she seemed so enamored with at that moment. “And if it’s west of Trotpeka then one of these smaller rivers have to be the one we walked over across that bridge when we first came into town yesterday! Trotpeka’s somewhere west o’ us, and after we get through that valley we could just shoot up northwest if we wanted to find a way up to Canterlot or Ponyville in the old Equestria Core! Skip Withercha altogether if it’s that bad!”

“….that was closer to fifteen seconds, but not bad,” the mare snickered, her eyes already spotting at least three smaller rivers on the map that could be a close match for the one that used to run right around the town. “That’s still a minimum of sixty miles to walk just to reach the riverbed, though. And if this wasteland is as bad as Blue says it could be a very long walk.”

“We’ll just stick to the roads like he said,” Light Tail countered, losing some of her excitement now that her mother had gone and dropped reality right on top of her grandiose ideas of surface world exploration. “An’ we’ll keep an eye out the whole time. So what were you lookin’ for at the bar, anyway?”

--------------------------------------

BANG!

—an ancient, empty milk bottle shattered into dozens of jagged pieces atop a four-foot wall, the only remaining evidence of a two-story building that was still standing—

BANGBANG!

—another milk bottle lost its nozzle top and tipped over behind the wall, while her third and last shot flew high and smashed against the pile of brick and framework debris that had collapsed on itself decades ago—

—the slide refused to snap back into place, and she immediately began pushing around the trigger guard for that button that Mom told her to h—

—a sharp pop signified her success, causing the now-empty magazine to fall out of the gun, which she caught within her spell field and floated back towards her side before swapping it with a loaded one and slapped it into the grip—

—and instead of hitting the lever at the side like she’d done the first time, she shifted the spell field at the top of the gun slightly, causing it to wrap around the back half of the slide and pull on it before letting go—

—the slide racked back into place, and though it took her a second to get the sights back on that last milk bottle, once she did the trigger squeeze was almost instantaneous, and she was rewarded with a shower of chalky-white bits as the bullet smacked into it.

“Wow,” Mom’s voice cooed softly with pride, and hearing the praise made the whole affair of learning to shoot better….better. Not great, ‘cause she knew that at some point she was going to be shooting something that lived and would never be comfortable with it. Except bugs. She could live with shooting a bug even if she’d rather just toss it aside and run away like the little filly she was. “You’re a natural with that thing.”

“Don’t want a cutie mark of a gun,” Light Tail sputtered with slight disappointment at herself. “That’d be a terrible thing to have. Like…like what those bad ponies had, I don’t want that—“

“Hey, don’t talk like that,” Mom soothed with a nudging caress of her cheek. “You’re nothing like those savages. They enjoyed hurting others. I have to force you to learn this just so you aren’t left defenseless and helpless if we’re ever separated. You don’t get cutie marks for things you don’t like doing. Nopony has.”

She wasn’t quite sure about that—Aunt C’s cloud and tornado cutie mark seemed to be almost an accident, considering there was only one room in the entire Stable that had the space for a pegasus to fly around in it. But then again, she was always down in that room when she wasn’t working or hanging out with her or Mom, or whatever else adult ponies did for fun. So maybe there was something to it.

And she wouldn’t admit it out loud, but just shooting at targets like milk bottles and paper targets was kinda fun in its own way, to see how well she could control a bucking object hurling a little piece of metal at insane speeds out in the opposite direction and make it hit something. And at least with this “nine millimeter”, she could do that with far less effort and concentration than that little lightweight revolver she’d shot yesterday morning. She liked that it could only fire one way, so there was no heavy pressure needed, and the thing even had a safety she could turn on when she wasn’t using it. And it was a lot faster to load a gun with a magazine than it was to put the bullets in individually one at a time.

“Think that’s enough for now,” Mom said as Light Tail carefully shifted the spell field around the hammer to catch it the instant she squeezed the trigger back—

—her heart stopped briefly the moment the hammer began to fly forward, even though she caught it exactly as she intended to and carefully lowered it down until it was back in its little nesting spot in the back of the slide. She wished she could have done that with the safety on, or that the safety would lower the hammer too when she turned it on.

She also wished she could be back in the Stable, like things used to be, but the funny thing about wishes was they didn’t always come true when you wanted them to.

It took Mom maybe a minute to re-load all the magazines she’d emptied and put them back in these little pouches on her travelling saddle, and even put a couple more in the one loaded in the gun to “top it off” before floating back over to her—

“Keep it,” Mom said, her telekinesis poking at one of the empty holsters on the filly’s saddle. “We’ll clean the barrel later, when we’ve found somewhere to camp for the night.”

She took the hint and stuffed the gun in the holster, and the mood for conversation died as quickly as those milk bottles as Mom began to move down the road at a quick trot, eager to get out of this ruined town and away from any other bad ponies that might be hiding somewhere in the rubble.

Instead they seemed destined to run right into them.

They’d only gone a few blocks away from their improvised shooting range outside the settlement of civilized ponies when Mom’s ears began to flick as she strained her neck out, as if trying to extend her hearing a little bit further. Which was silly, because ears didn’t work quite like that.

“….Mom, if yer neck itches that bad just scratch it,” El-Tee snickered quietly, going so far as to trot up next to her and start rearing up to try and reach said neck with a forehoof. “It’s not li—“

Mom’s right forehoof swiped across the air and planted itself on her snout, shutting her up rather abruptly (and rudely!) as she came to a full stop. Without the soft clomp of their hooves taking up a part of her hearing, El-Tee could finally start to hear what it was that got Mom’s attention. Another set of hooves somewhere up ahead seemed to be running at a hard gallop, ringing down through the streets and alerting anything within earshot, friendly or not.

When Mom started moving again, it was with very deliberate and soft steps, with her body hunched down low like they’d done earlier in the morning, and El-Tee shut up without further comment and followed suit the best she could. It was kinda slow, but after yesterday she didn’t want to be telling every living thing exactly where she was if she could help it.

They did this for roughly two minutes, sticking to the sidewalks and alleys, and it was easy to keep track of the galloping pony because he/she/it would stop every few seconds before taking off again. Probably looking around to see if anything was following, so it was a good thing she and Mom weren’t in sight or his paranoia would be justified. And that would be a bad thing. He—or she—would probably mistake them for bad ponies and shoot them, and make Mom have to shoot back….

After those two minutes the galloping slowed down considerably, and seemed to grow louder and closer with every passing moment—

—a stallion with a sage blue coat and a reddish-brown mane and tail darted out into the street from an alley some distance ahead of them, wearing some sort of crudely made barding of leather on his torso and a strange-looking gun strapped across his back. If not for the ancient husk of a sky wagon that had crashed into the road upside down between them he could have turned his head and seen them out in the open in an instant. Mom took that as their cue to stop walking and scrunched herself up against the husk as much as she could, and El-Tee did the same thing, her eyes now focused on the road behind them while Mom risked a peek through the passenger section of the sky wagon to see where the stallion was going.

The four seconds between their stopping and his speaking felt like an eternity. She felt as though she had the time to soak in every detail of the ruins in her view—the numerous cracks and craters in the road, the barely-standing, wind-eroded buildings and the crumbled remains of the ones that had fallen to time, the twisted, bent street signs at sidewalk curbs and along the streets. And if she let herself zone out enough, she swore she could feel the despair and hopelessness that the sight before her represented.

Or hear the ghastly echoes of those who had seen how the town got this way.

The stallion’s voice was briefly welcomed—it snapped her out of her daze and reminded her that she wasn’t in a safe place anymore. “Hey!! We gotta get outta here—“ he shouted out to seemingly no one.

“No one” turned out to be a very mean-spirited and unpleasant “someone” when the stallion’s careless yelling was answered almost immediately. “Shut up, you idiot!” a deep, rumbling voice roared (roared!) back. “You wanna attract every brainless raider with two bullets to their name?!”

“No, we gotta leave, now!” the stallion yelled right back, ignoring the mean-sounding voice almost completely. “I just found why bit pieces and his crew didn’t show up yesterday afternoon! They got wasted, all o’ em!!”

There was silence for a couple of seconds, and then the meaty, weighted thump of a body landing in the street, and El-Tee’s curiosity got the better of her for a moment as she sneaked a look around Mom’s head to see what was going on—

Through the doorless passenger section and the rusted frame of the sky wagon’s chassis, she could see a stretch of asphalt and a half-collapsed two-story building beyond, with the sage blue stallion on the right and a very large, very imposing griffon standing maybe two feet away from him—

—and in the grasp of his talons he held a purple-coated mare with a few scars streaking across her sides, and a little blue-shaded pony….

a colt, she noted with slight embarrassment upon confirmation of his gender. Not a difficult task considering he was being held by the scruff of his neck, like a misbehaving kitten. The mare kept her tail tucked in and her ears lay flat down on her head.

And neither of them were willing to look at either the griffon or the pony in question. Probably because they had these awful looking metal collars around their necks that made it hard to move their heads where they wanted.

“Wasted how?” the griffon’s voice rumbled through the streets, sending shivers down the little filly’s spine.

“Shot up all to hell,” the stallion answered back, somehow managing to remain stiff and unafraid in the scary griffon’s presence and anger-laced voice. “Knicks’ head was blown clean off, bit pieces bled out, machete got a second through-and-through asshole front to rump—“

Mom’s throat seemed to tighten up on her with every horrible death mentioned, though El-Tee had no idea what the stallion meant by as—

Oh! the filly realized when the word “rump” played back through her head at the thought, and her haunches quivered in disgust. ….oh gods, that’s gross, I just learned what a cussword meant and it’s a gross one! Adults are weird!

“I get the picture,” the griffon’s voice boomed, unwavering and still clinging to the two ponies in his….talons. Or forelimbs. So odd how he used them, almost like a monkey’s arm. Then again, griffons were supposed to have been some of the best soldiers in the war. Using their forelimbs like that let them use guns so much easier than earth or pegasi ponies. Only unicorns had an easier time of it. “Any idea who?”

“Not a clear one, but I thought I saw those damned runners in town this morning,” the stallion answered, moving forward just enough that his hindquarters came into view through the sky wagon’s doorways, and she could see what looked like a…..

…..a whip, tipped in red….on his left hind leg…..

Her stomach began to grow cold and sick at the sight of it, and what it meant. Oh stars, Blue wasn’t lying….

“Get the crew on their hooves,” the griffon stated, finally dropping the ponies onto the ground as his wings unfurled from his sides and began to lift him off the asphalt with massive, powerful strides and flaps. “I’m gonna scout their likely search route and rig it, should slow them down enough to give us a clean break. Whoever isn’t ready to move by the time I come back gets left behind for the runners to find!”

The griffon’s right forelimb clutched at a satchel bag slung over his body as he took off, and the leather-barded stallion’s attention shifted to the poor mare and colt left behind in his charge. “Get up and back inside, and stay put!”

Light Tail’s heart started skipping beats. He spoke to them like they were pets, and bad ones at that, and when the mare was a little slower to rise up than he liked he smacked her in the stomach really, really hard, and after that the mare was fighting back tears as she hobbled her way back inside the partially-exposed building. The little colt hounded her every step like a shadow…

….just like she did with Mom….in fact, he probably looked about her age….

When the trio vanished through the doorway, Mom broke away from the sky wagon and immediately began sneaking away from the street and the poor souls as quickly and quietly as she could. “We gotta get out of here, before they find us—“

Now the filly’s heart was beginning to stop altogether. After yesterday, after everything she’d said about her being better than a murdering monster, Mom was still willing to just….

…..no….

“No,” Light Tail’s voice said flatly, and not in the squeaky mouse voice she thought was going to come out. “We’re not doing this.”

Mom’s head snapped back swiftly, staring down at her with that parent-patented “NO” look that often struck fear and submission into little fillies and colts. “You don’t have a say in the subject,” Mom whispered quietly, but the harsh sting of imposing authority was unmistakable. “We’re leaving. I’ll tie you to my back if I have to, but we’re leaving.”

“And leave those two back there like that?” El-Tee whispered back, ignoring as much of her fear as she could and trying to sound, if not cooperative, than at least reasonable. “We just saw how they treat her, what about that colt? What are they doing to him?”

Mom’s magic began to reach out at Light Tail and pull her from the ground, and it took every ounce of her own magic to keep her rooted to the concrete. “We’re not doing this here—“

“We can’t leave them like that!” she snarled back, her hooves scratching across the road as she began to lose her fight with Mom’s telekinesis spell. “We gotta help ‘em!”

“How!?” Mom shot back harshly. “There’s no telling how many are in there and I can’t outrun a flying griffon! I will not put you in any more danger than I already have—“

Push harder, the filly decided when she heard a slight break in her mother’s tone. Push a little harder

“If that was us in their place, would you want somepony to leave you behind?!”

Bingo. Point was sinking in—Mom’s pulling faltered, and her short journey across the pavement came to a stop. And for some reason, Mom started to find it really hard to look at her as harshly and sternly than before. She knew the “little filly” was right.

Keep pushing.

“Would you want them to help you get away from the worst kind of pony you can imagine? Would you want them to at least get me out of there, if not you?”

A soft whine was Mom’s only initial reaction. Her eyes began to bounce slightly, shifting in one direction and another as she tried to think of something to say—

—the poor mare became her third and final argument. A feminine cry of pain curled out over the sky wagon and into their ears, followed very quickly by a frantic plea for mercy that the bad ponies didn’t have—

“Noooo, please—“

Another stallion’s voice, deeper and lower in tone, “Shut it and take it like the sl—“

The leather-clad stallion’s voice cut in—but not to save her from whatever it was that his friend wanted to do. “Take it upstairs and make it quick! And don’t hurt her, we don’t get paid for damaged goods!”

The poor mare’s cries continued on, wailing for her captor to stop, to not do whatever he was about to do, for some higher deity or one of the Princess Sisters to save her, and every shriek of terror made it harder for El-Tee to stomach hearing the next one.

She was saved—momentarily—by the familiar, deafening presence of Mom’s hearing protection spell as it dampened her hearing to the point where the poor thing’s screams weren’t so audible anymore. But when Mom physically began stuffing her inside the passenger compartment of the overturned sky wagon she began to realize that she may have just done something incredibly fatal for somepony.

Even if they were bad.

“Stay here,” Mom warned fiercely, her magic already drawing out her 10mm pistol and checking it to see if it was loaded. “Stay quiet, and don’t come out. If I’m not back in five minutes, run back to the settlement as fast as you can and find Blue Star, tell him what happened here.”

O-oh crap, NO! “M-mom, wai—“

“Tell him! And if you have to run, you shoot at anything that gets in your way until you get to Blue Star!”

Mom’s face, barely visible for a second, showed an unusual mixture of fear and rage that scared El-Tee more than the sight of her gun, and when she darted away and out of sight, the filly’s heart began to beat hard against her ribcage.

Gods alive, for the second time in two days, something she said set Mom off, and more bad ponies were going to get killed.

The wasteland was already eating her soul alive.

--------------------------------------

The screams brought her back to that bedroom. The eviscerated stallion, the violated and ravaged mare, the stench….the horrors and pain inflicted upon them before they were granted the cruelty of death’s peace…

She wanted to hate herself for wanting to leave the poor mare to her fate, for wanting to avoid being in that position and watching her daughter suffer the unspeakable abuses about to be heaped upon the screaming female in that ruined building. El-Tee was, as usual lately, more right and morally-centered than the mother that was supposed to be teaching her right from wrong.

Because if it had been them stuck in the grip of that cursed griffon, she’d want somepony to help her.

The hate, she had to leave in her mind, and not let it be part of what she was about to do. She’d done that once already, felt sick to her very soul afterward, and still felt less of a pony for it after she’d cried herself dry. Whatever excuses El-Tee could make for her, she’d killed those five savages with hate as much as fear. She would live with the self-imposed image of murder until the day she died. She didn’t want that feeling getting any worse.

She was surprised the building was still standing—part of it looked like had fallen apart only days ago, creating a conveniently placed pile of rubble upon which she could climb up to a hole leading into the second floor, though that meant exposing herself to the view of anypony down in the first floor rummaging through its contents. But it was the quickest way up, and speed mattered almost as much as stealth. And going through the front door was simply not an option. She wanted this done with as little bloodshed and gunfire as possible—any signs of a fight would bring that griffon right back and that was not a fight she wanted to have. Aside from some obvious inclination towards explosives if his talk of setting traps was anything to go by, he had at least one sidearm and a magazine-fed long gun strapped across his back. All she had was a 10mm pistol and a .44 Mag that bucked like the dickens. He’d tear her apart.

But maybe if she could get ahold of that shotgun that leather-clad stallion had….

No. Getting it would require a gunfight I don’t want.

So. Sneak and kill impending rapist it was.

She crossed the street in a little under five seconds. With the ruckus the fools were making in there, a quick little trot of her hooves went largely unnoticed by the slavers. The poor mare’s constant screaming helped cover up her approach too. Unfortunately, the closer she got, the less her hearing protection spell drowned out—she was already starting to recognize words and phrases again—

“—ing to my mom?” a high, child-like voice asked nervously. Probably the little colt—

“Yer mother’s fine, kid,” another stallion’s voice answered, somewhat thinner and higher than the shotgun-armed stallion that had walked the mare and colt inside. “It’s what mares are around for. You’ll see someday. Just gotta break ‘em in a little.”

“….sure,” the colt’s voice replied, sounding more resigned than accepting….though it didn’t sound like this had been the first time he’d been told that. And therefore, not the first time something like this had happened.

That hateful, soul-sickening urge to barge in and paint the walls red with their blood began to take hold in her legs, and she had to fight herself to get up the slope of debris towards that hole in the second floor wall.

On the other hand, it did make it easier to justify killing the savage she was sneaking up on….

By fortune or the luck of the Princess Sisters, none of the slavers downstairs bothered to look out the broken window frame near the debris pile, more concerned with collecting their few possessions and travelling gear in preparation for a road trip. Once she slipped in through the hole and got a good look at the second floor’s layout, her impromptu plan started to look a little better.

The building was simplistic in design and scope—a short hallway measuring only ten yards, at the other end of which was a staircase to the first floor. Only three rooms comprised the majority of space up here—two were on the left with broken doors, while the one she wanted to be in was on the right, and the sadistic slaver had not even bothered to close the door behind him after dragging his victim in with him.

Perfect.

She snuck up on the open door, using every ounce of willpower she had to avoid barging right in as she began to hear the sounds of various objects being carelessly dropped onto the wooden floor. What sounded like a pony’s body was first, and then the popping of buttons and straps as a set of armored barding slid across a pony’s coat and slapped onto the floor. A faint, opaque glow of neon blue signified the use of a unicorn’s magic, but was of little concern to her. With this stallion’s attention focused on more carnal urges, he wouldn’t be much of a threat if she could stay quiet long enough to get within striking distance. All she needed was a clean shot at his head—

or his knife, she smiled inwardly when she poked her head through the door for a quick scan. Thankfully, the stallion had oriented his prey towards the wall, and with both of their backs turned to the door neither of them even noticed the teal blue unicorn eying his barding for the survival knife attached to the left side of the armor…..nor did they take notice of the slight sheen of her horn as she took hold of the scabbard and started to tug at the knife hilt—

“Dooon’t,” the sobbing, prostrate mare begged, her captor’s forehooves beginning to find purchase along her withers as he prepared himself. “Please, don’t make him hear this—“

“Just keep yer mouth shut, this won’t take long at all—“

Sling used his voice as a cover as she unhitched the blade from the scabbard, twisting it around for a downward stroke as her body slipped through the doorway—

“Nooooooo—“

—at the last second, just as her tail passed through the doorway, the unicorn stallion’s horn shifted its magic field and latched onto the door to pull it shut—

—she leapt upon her target just before the door slammed shut, the banging sound drowning out his brief, pained gasp of shock as the partially serrated seven-inch blade sunk into the back of his neck and plowed clean through the vertebrae and trachea—

—the instant loss of nervous and motor control past the neck caused the stallion to collapse on top of his victim, and the splash of blood that splattered across the mare’s withers as the blade tip cut through the front of his neck caught her by surprise, eliciting a shrill-pitched shriek that Sling quickly silenced with a forehoof to the snout—

—the slavers below took her scream to be a sign that her abuser had begun his foul deed, filling the first floor with laughter and more than a couple of whooping cheers. The thud of his body slipping off of her and hitting the floor was likewise mistaken for other actions.

With the kill done and her presence still masked from the rest of the slavers below, Sling’s magic took hold of the gurgling, dying stallion’s body and pulled it away from them, shoving it quietly into a corner where neither of them would have to see it anymore.

And through it all, the mare remained in her prostrate, rump-raised position, almost as terrified of her rescuer as she was her abuser. Her grape-colored coat shook in repeated waves of trembles and shivers, and her tail continually rattled in place as she stared back at Sling with wide, terror-filled eyes and a partially-blooded neck.

“We don’t have very long to talk,” Sling began to whisper after bringing herself as close to this poor thing as she dared to without risking a full-blown panic attack. “When I let go, I need you to speak quietly, and bang the floor or the wall about once every two to three seconds so they don’t think something’s up. Got it?”

The grape-colored mare’s head nodded—shakily—twice, after perhaps a second’s hesitation, her wild eyes trying to comprehend what was happening around her. Sling’s hoof pulled back, and the mare’s gasp was short, but soft, and she began to tap the floor and the wall in front of her with her hooves and forelegs at a regular pace to keep up the pretense of being ravaged.

“How many are there?”

“F-f-five,” the mare gasped after fighting with her lungs for the breath to speak. “….i-including the one you…..”

Four left…

“What kind of weapons do they have? Guns, grenades, knives, things like that?”

“A co-coupla guns….I-I think one had a grenade but I’m not sure…one just ba-bashes things to death with his bare hooves….”

“Any kind of armor or spell casters?”

“….j-just one unicorn left…they all got barding of some kind….and the one you knifed….he left his gun downstairs….”

“What’s the kid’s name?”

The mare didn’t speak right away, probably not sure if she ought to be telling a stranger—even one that had just saved her from a most unpleasant act—the name of her child….

“….y-you first,” she stammered at last.

Fair question. “Sling Shot,” she answered.

The mare’s eyes briefly glanced down at her hindquarters, probably to see if her cutie mark matched the name in any way, but if she suspected anything different she didn’t show it. “….Kite,” the grape mare squeaked—

—and sure enough, Sling could spot a blue-colored kite and string on the mare’s right hind leg—

“….m-my son…Bee-Jay. As in the letters….”

“BJ? Odd name.”

“….I didn’t name him. I just call him that ‘cause….”

The mare seemed to stop herself at the last second, and Sling decided this was a good time to get things back on track. “Tell me another time. Keep up the banging a bit longer, then take the barding and get out. There’s a pile of debris at the other end of the hall you can slide down to the streets.”

“N-not without my boy—“

“I’ll get him out, but I can’t risk you getting in the way down there, I don’t know how this is going to go down. Keep up the act until I move in, then take the armor and get out. Got it?”

The mare accented her slight frustration at being told to leave her child in the hooves of a stranger with a particularly hard slap to the wall, but her body remained where it was. “….it doesn’t look like I have much choice…..”

Sling took that as her cue to get moving with the most difficult part while the slavers were still unaware of what was actually going on. She turned and slinked back to the door, popped it open quietly and slipped back into the hall, and then pulled the door back into the doorway, stopping just short of actually closing it before teetering on towards the stairs—

“—ing on, he ain’t usually this quiet,” the leather-barded, shotgun-armed stallion murmured with some touch of concern. “Oughta be filling the walls with screams.”

“So what?” another male voice rebuffed over the sound of a weapon’s action being manipulated. “Let him get his freak on however he wants and be glad Saurus ain’t said nothin’ about messin’ with his whore the last three weeks.”

The decidedly unpony-like name—and the implication that the mare had been kept purely for personal gratification—only further cemented Sling’s desire to stay as far away from that griffon as possible. The urge to slaughter everything in the central room down stairs was beginning to grow stronger than her will to overcome it. And if she let herself go, there was no telling if that colt would survive the crossfire.

Or herself.

Surprise them, maybe. Off one with a headshot, might get lucky and startle the other three into backing off….or….

“I’m goin’ up,” the shotgunner declared, his hooves clomping with speed and purpose as he quickly neared the bottom of the stairs she was only now descending. “Slips, watch the stairs—“

An uncouth and foul curse left her lips as she pulled the 10mm free from its holster and flipped the safety off, her plans to resolve this with minimal gunfire dashed in an instant—

“Didn’t take you for a voyeur—“ one of his fellow slavers called out after him, just as his head poked into her pistol’s sights as he bounded up the stairs—

—the moment his eyes swept up and spotted the gun leveled at him he stopped moving and stumbled back down the stairs, crashing into the floor of the central room—

“Hahahahaa!! Clumsy ass foal—“

Seeing a slim opportunity to get the drop on the rest before the shotgunner could find his voice and warn them of her coming, she leapt down the remainder of the stairs in quick, short hops to land at the base of the staircase just as the shotgunner began to find his hooves—

—pumped two rounds into his head just as he started to shout at them, one round completely penetrating his skull and splattering the floor with bits of brain matter and blood as his body sank into an odd sitting position with his legs folded in beneath him—

—of the three slavers left, only one—an earth pony with a mange-ridden coat of pearlescent blue and an unkempt orange mane—had a weapon mounted onto his armored barding, but his attention had been focused on his saddlebag on the floor instead of the stairs. In the time that it took for the gunshots to register to his senses she had already settled the sights of her pistol on his skull, and she squeezed back the trigger just as he snapped his head towards her—

—the bullet smacked into his head, just above his eyes, and his body tumbled over and slumped to the floor on its side—

—two bodies collided into her, building up momentum as they carried her into the wall and slammed her into a decaying bookshelf that splintered apart on impact. A sharp, stabbing pain shot through her right foreleg and scrapped her across the top of her withers, just below her neck—

—she reached up with her left foreleg and smacked one stallion in the throat as he pinned her to the floor, her gun having been tossed aside in the collision and clattering across the floor as they struggled. His clean, but scarred pearl-colored body began to stumble as he struggled to breath cleanly, but his mango-colored partner was not nearly as deterred by her feeble strikes against his barded chest, a chunk of wood embedded in the limb making it difficult to even move it without it screaming in fiery pain. He reared up over her, preparing to smash his forehooves into her face with the full weight of his body behind his attack—

—a furious, feminine scream of unadulterated rage drowned out the sound of the knife that cleaved into the side of his neck, and the gurgling, choking gasps as his throat began to spurt streams of crimson, his body tumbling backwards as he lost his balance and toppled over.

Those screams did not, however, block out the sight of Kite furiously bringing that knife back down on the bleeding stallion at just about any spot that wasn’t being covered by his barding—his forelegs, his face and neck, anywhere that could be struck with great effect, she sank that serrated survival knife into with what looked like years of pent-up rage and fury at all the unimaginable abuses she must have suffered under their hooves. Before long her grape coat began to grow dark purple with all the blood she was being splattered with, and the metal collar around her neck looked more red than aged stainless steel.

And Sling could not bring herself to look away, no matter how horrifying it became to witness this savage act of revenge.

Because if she looked hard enough, she swore she could have seen herself in Kite’s battered eyes as she stabbed and sliced at the one tormentor left alive for her to take it all out on. Seen all the hate she harbored inside exploding at the first available opportunity and just letting loose until it was all expended.

Kite was done in all of about twenty seconds, and the stallion had stopped breathing and struggling within the first ten. Sling had never gotten a clear, good look at his face in the chaos of her failed surprise attack, and what Kite had left when she was done couldn’t have been recognized as a pony at all. One foreleg was almost completely severed at the leg joint, and the other one had so many cuts and stab wounds that all she could see was a red, dripping covering.

Kite stared at the carnage she’d wrought for only a couple of seconds before she spat on the bleeding remains and kicked the body with a foreleg as her magic sank the knife into his jaw one last time, just to be absolutely certain she hadn’t missed anything important. “I’d piss on you if I had any to spare, asshole.”

“Jeez, mom, didn’t have to all psycho on ‘im,” the colt muttered dismissively, and to Sling’s horror he did not seem all that bothered by what he’d just witnessed. “How are we gonna get these collars off now?”

“Not now, son,” Kite heaved in heavy breaths as she pulled the blade free from the stallion’s corpse and re-sheathed into its scabbard that she’d tied around her torso with a leather strap. “Can you still walk?”

As much as she wanted to question the colt’s ambivalence to all the brutal deaths that had just taken place in front of him, the more pressing and immediate concern was to get this piece of wood out of her leg and get back to her little girl before that griffon came back to check on the gunshots. “Need a minute—“

—her magic wrapped itself around the wood chunk, and after a careful testing tug, yanked it out of her leg as fast and as hard as she could. Thankfully, only a half-inch’s worth had stabbed into her and missed the bone, but it cut deeply enough that even after the initial, excruciating pain that set her limb on fire, there was still a deep, sharp pain that manifested itself whenever she attempted to move it. She quickly drew out a pair of healing potions from her saddlebags and drowned one down her throat, and the pain subsided almost immediately. She didn’t dare look at the liquid spell’s work as it mended all the muscles, blood vessels, and tendons in her leg back together into their original state.

She was sickened enough as it was.

“Saurus’ll be back any minute, we have to go,” Kite insisted strongly as Sling began to poke about the room with her magic. Her 10mm pistol was the first item retrieved and holstered, and as the first healing potion’s effects began to fade the pain in her leg crept back into her nerves, and so she drank the second flask on the spot and tossed it aside before resuming her search of the bodies—the shotgun, the one grenade she could find on the four bodies, another 9mm pistol, ammunition—

And she decided that she’d plundered long enough when she began to feel this indescribable itch at the back of her neck. “Guess that’ll do. Go on, I can make it from here now—“

“We can’t,” Kite interrupted before she could start giving them directions towards the settlement she’d left about an hour earlier. “….and…and you’re not a bad shot. Think our chances are better if we stick with you.”

“Plus these collars still got bombs in ‘em,” the little colt blurted in nonchalantly, and Sling’s heart froze at the revelation. “So….y’know, it’d be all kinds of awesome if you could get ‘em the hell off sometime.”

Sling’s eyes zeroed in on the collars around their necks, her stomach growing queasy at the thought of seeing them detonate without warning, and particularly anywhere near her or El-Tee. “….are they….safe?”

“Saurus deactivated the signals ages ago, so no one could use us as a sacrificial bomb from a distance with a transmitter,” Kite answered, just as the second healing potion’s effects began to wane thin. Sling risked a quick glance down at her foreleg and was relieved to see the wound completely healed, with only a minimal amount of scarring left behind as evidence that she’d been hurt at all. “But the explosives are still there. Can we maybe talk about this once we’re somewhere safer? Saurus is bound to have heard the gunfire.”

El-Tee…..

Yes, this was definitely not the place to be talking about removing exploding collars. She promptly galloped past the mare and the colt and back into the streets, eying the overturned sky wagon for any sign of her daughter’s presence. “El-Tee!! C’mon out, it’s time to go!!”

Light Tail’s teal blue body fell out of the confines of the sky wagon and immediately scrambled to her hooves in a mad dash to return to her mother. “Don’t gotta tell me twice—“

—a harsh swoosh of air above was the only warning anypony heard before the dark-feathered griffon’s body landed on the sky wagon at almost full speed. The harsh crunch of metal and centuries-old concrete surprised the little filly into a tumbling roll forward with a shriek of surprise—

—his right talon gripped a pistol, leveling it at Sling and cocking the hammer back—

“I’m going to assume that you wasted most of my crew seeing as how my property is walking out with you covered in blood,” the griffon bellowed with a growl. “That’s a very expensive mistake you just made.”

Shit shit shit! Her legs began to buckle slightly, her mind racing about for some way out of this mess, some trick or last ditch idea that might at least see her daughter’s freedom for another day, but nothing useful came to mind. Trying to draw a weapon would just get her shot mid-draw, and no soul alive could outrun a bullet, he was perched on the only meaningful cover in sight….

“So here’s what I’m willing to offer, in light of the costs you’ve extracted for your little rescue,” the griffon continued, his unusual-looking pistol still aimed at what she assumed was her head. Fairly long barrel, stainless steel, with a matte-black open slide design exposing most of it. “You drop all your gear in the next ten seconds—“

—and his pistol swung downward until it was leveled at her precious little girl—

“—or I splatter her little brains out right in front of you,” he finished, his eyes never wavering off of her as he spoke. “Countdown starts now.”

It was just like before. All her fear vanished. All her thoughts stopped. There was only this vicious griffon, holding a gun and threatening her daughter with it if she didn’t surrender herself to the same fate she’d just risked her life to pull Kite out of.

KILL HIM.

Her precious night light, stars bless her, had learned something from last time, and from the two mornings of gun lessons she’d given her so far. With the griffon’s attention focused on her, he failed to even notice the filly’s horn coming to life until she’d smacked the magazine release button and bolted away like a rabbit. His gasped, cliché “Wha?” lasted only as long as it took to fire the one chambered round uselessly at the spot she’d been lying in a second earlier, but it was all the opportunity Sling needed.

The pump-action shotgun she’d taken off the dead slaver flung out and forward, the stock coming to rest against her chest as she reared up on her hind legs and hooked her right foreleg around the curved pistol grip section, bracing it solidly and lining up the bead sight for a quick shot—

—the griffon’s wings flared and flapped to take him into the skies, but it was too late to completely escape the blast of buckshot that exploded out the barrel. His right wing was caught in the cloud of pellets, folding in on itself in exceptionally awkward angles and turning his ascent into a rapid fall onto the ground behind the sky wagon, a puff of feathers flittering through the air behind him. The recoil from the shot bucked her fairly hard and almost pushed her onto her butt considering her unbalanced and unnatural shooting position, but she ignored her teetering body and simply shucked the fore end hard, kicking out the spent shell and chambering a fresh one for a second shot—

—a distinct and unmistakable snap! smacked into the street somewhere behind her, a tell-tale sign of a bullet hitting its mark, and the griffon took off on all fours, surprising the unicorn with the sudden burst of speed even as she sought to swing the bead sight on his rapidly shrinking form—

—he disappeared around the street corner just as she fired, the buckshot sailing into air instead of his hind legs, and as this second shot succeeded in knocking her off balance and onto her back, the sound of a third gunshot rang out from a considerable distance away. But when she failed to hear a bullet impact within the next three seconds as she fought herself back upright, she began to understand what had just happened.

Someone, somewhere, had taken a shot at the griffon at the same time that she had, and from a great distance because it took a little over two seconds for the sound of the gunshot to reach her. Had El-Tee not done what she had, it was entirely possible that this unknown shooter could have taken the griffon down where he’d stood.

And the little one knew it almost immediately. Her shaky voice tried to put out an air of humor, but the shock and adrenaline rush that had hit was already beginning to loosen its grip on her, and if anything she sounded more fearful than jestful.

“…..o-oh, crap, I bring out the worst in everypony, don’t I?”