//------------------------------// // Chapter 9 // Story: Fallout Equestria: Old World Dreams // by KDarkwater //------------------------------// 9 They were all dead. Just like before. To be fair, Mom didn’t kill all of them herself. The purple mare had some sort of freak-out and cut the last two up like a celery stick, which explained all the blood on her. She could only stand to look for about two seconds and then turned tail back outside, and let Mom and the mare do all the stealing-from-the-dead they cared to. Which naturally left her alone with the colt, and he was somewhat more willing to engage in pointless, idle talk than she was considering that she’d just narrowly avoided being shot in the freakin’ head— “Hey,” he sputtered in a bored voice, his left forehoof coming up to try and scratch at his neck and failing thanks to that big metal collar around his neck. “What’s yer name?” Grateful to have something to think about other than the events of the last five minutes, she stared back at his face nervously for a brief moment before staring back down at the street again. “Uhhh….L-Light Tail….what’s yours?” “Bee-jay,” he answered immediately. “…well, actually, that’s not my name, but my mom gets mad if I say it, so I just say BJ. Says it’s uncouth for girls’ ears, or somethin’. Grown-ups are weird.” “Well, then, why not pick another one? Somethin’ that won’t make her mad? Like Butter Jelly!” BJ stopped scratching at his neck and stared back at her with that same, blank bored look he’d had since he first came out of the crumbling building. “….oh great, I found a dumb one….” El-Tee had to bite herself in the inner lip before she could smart off right back at him. “No, seriously, if yer name’s that bad why not just ditch it? It’s not like anypony’s got it written down on a record or somethin’ that says, ‘Dis be yer name ‘till the end of yer days’. Who’d know?” “Me,” he shot back almost instantly again. “….and my mom. And whoever gave me my name. And my last three masters. But hey, BJ’s good enough—“ Oh jeez, how long was he kept as a slave? “Okay, stoppit right there. First thing, you ain’t got a master. You’re yer own pony, you don’t belong to anybody.” His eyes lost that blank glaze and began to scrutinize her face for several moments. “….you a stable pony or somethin’? You talk like one.” Crud, even talkin’ gives it away! “You’ve met one before to say somethin’ like that.” BJ’s eyes finally began to brighten up a little, perhaps delighted that she wasn’t quite as stupid as she looked (sometimes). “Hunh. Maybe you’re not so dumb after all. Yeah, Mom and I met a couple of ‘em a year back. Pretty clean lookin’, like you. And they didn’t know how things are up here, ‘cause everythin’ we told ‘em just made their eyes bulge ‘till they looked like they were gonna pop out if ya so much as breathed on ‘em. Like yers did when ya told me I didn’t have a master.” Did they….I didn’t even notice…. “’Cause it’s true. You’re only as weak as you let yourself be. If you let bad folk push you around all the time, you’ll always be less than a pony to them.” As quickly as they brightened, his eyes fell back into that dismissive, disdainful stare he seemed to view the world with, and the clear disappointment in his voice was hard to miss….or stomach. “Tough talk’s easy when ya got the gun. Why don’t ya talk to me about it after you find out if ya got the guts to shoot ‘em or not?” For a brief moment Light Tail felt herself seemingly shrink in size in the face of such a sharp accusatory tone. She felt….lessened. Like she was no longer a pony, but something less than normal. And it wasn’t just because of what BJ had just said, but how he said it. Did he mistake her words for overconfidence just because of the two guns she had on her? She didn’t get to snap back at him, or try to fix the mistake she’d just made. Mom and the grape (blood?) colored mare emerged from the building ruins only a couple of moments later, laden down with the pilfered loot of the departed slavers (and in the mare’s case, considerably less blood than she’d been covered in two minutes earlier). Mom’s overly eager gait made it clear she wanted as far away from here as they could get. “Let’s go,” she said with a clipped tone. “Sooner we get away from here the better.” Gladly. El-Tee bounded into a light gallop and quickly caught up with her mother— —only to hear the approaching hoofsteps of that same colt and his mom following right behind them— “….M-mom, what are th—“ “They’re coming with us,” Mom answered quickly, before the question could finish forming in her mouth. “Try to keep up, I want as much distance between us and that griffon as we can get.” A palpable sense of dread began to creep into her lungs as she briefly glanced back behind her, but thankfully BJ was less interested in glaring at her than he was at hopping around every few seconds to check behind them before catching up with them again. His mom likewise kept her attention focused on the side streets and alleys as they trekked through the town ruins, leaving herself and her own Mom with the task of watching out for anything in front of and, now, above them. She was more than happy to contend herself with the skies. Just looking at BJ’s mom was sickening, even after she’d cleaned herself up a little. How the mare could even stomach walking around covered in blood was equally as disturbing. Were ponies up here so desensitized to death and violence that they accepted it as part of the natural order of things? I wanna go home, she whined to herself quietly, keeping her gaze glued to the depressing, Equestria-wide cover of dark gray clouds so nopony would see her tearing up a little. I wanna go home, I wanna go home…. -------------------------------------- The trek to the edge of town was, for once, eventless and without peril. Though there’d been a time or two when she’d thought the griffon had been sneaking up on them, it turned out to be a piece of trash being pushed down the street by the wind. And with Kite quietly guiding them along, they made it through in less time than it would’ve taken Sling to do it on her own, and even managed to get them onto the street that connected with the main thoroughfare leading out into the vast, empty, and soulless wasteland of the prairie. Patches of parched, dying tallgrass and shriveled, dead brush swayed about in the breeze, poking out of cracks in the asphalt of the highway and dotting the dry land in seemingly random spots as far as she could see. Dust clouds occasionally rose from the ground, stirred by the wind, but flittered back to the earth in a scattered spray shortly afterward. And as she’d feared, Blue Star’s tale of the pegasi cloud cover seemed to be holding up, for that damnable dark gray canvas continued to stretch across the sky in every conceivable direction. It was exceptionally difficult to tell if the whole thing was one large, continuous cloud or an insane combination of millions mashed together into a whole entity. Kite did not let her linger for long. “Still shocked by the clouds, stable pony?” Got to find a way to file that big “115” mark off my PipBuck. “….I’m more shocked that the pegasi have kept it up for so long,” she sighed with a slightly wavering voice. “….is this really it? What we’ve become after nearly two centuries?” “It’s all that’s left,” Kite replied simply, unmoved by the teal-blue unicorn’s plight. “Twenty miles down this highway is another town, we can figure out what we’ll do from there. If a storm picks up again there should be a couple of solitary homes between here and there we can wait it out in, if bandits or raider gangs haven’t taken them over yet.” Sling latched onto the set of directions, finding solace in the planning of a course of action and survival. Gave her something to think about other than the terrible reality she didn’t want to acknowledge just yet. “Anyone there that can disarm those collars?” “Should be, if you can afford the work—“ Light Tail’s ever-inquisitive ears did not fail to pick up on the conversation, and injected herself into it without warning or invitation. “…wait, what are you talking about? Disarm those collars? What’s wrong with them?” “They’re bombs,” BJ’s voice answered flatly, getting a jolted gasp out of the little filly with his bluntness (which was probably why he did it). “It’s how the slavers keep us in line.” The ghastly image of an explosively-decapitated pony flashed itself before her eyes, and apparently her night light’s as well, because she sounded more horrified than before. “…oh s-stars, what kind of sick soul does that….” “A slaver,” Kite replied unsympathetically, finally breaking away from the group by continuing on forward onto the highway. “Good thing about this area, it’s pretty wide open, not much to hide behind. Should be able to see them coming from pretty far off.” “Two mares and their kids are still an easy target when they only have a shotgun and four working pistols,” Sling shot back tersely, galloping ahead until she was back in front of the group. The first thing she wanted a potential threat to meet was an armed pony, not a freshly-freed slave. “I can already tell you know your way around a knife, but what about guns?” “Not my thing, but I can manage. BJ’s better at that.” Sling’s blood began to run just a tad colder as her magic began to envelop the 9mm pistol she’d lifted from the pile of dead slavers and pulled it out for a quick look— “Crap, this one’s shot,” she snarled when her eyes swept across the slide and noticed a patch of empty space and a small piece of the slide missing from where the rear sight normally sat. In its place, somepony had crudely carved a slight “trench” sight cut all the way to the front sight. It was an amateurish job by a soul with access to few, if any, tools, and she cringed when she saw a crack in the slide near the external extractor—no doubt made from the effort to carve the trench sight into the slide. “I’ll take it down later for parts, but we’re not using this one.” “Fine by me,” BJ replied, seemingly more interested in the air around him than in the actual conversation. “Things ever get to a point where I need a gun, there’ll be plenty on the ground to pick from.” A rather morbid way of looking at it, but he’s right, she thought sadly, taking little note of El-Tee’s soft gasp other than that she seemed upset by his attitude. Only nine shells on the shotgun, don’t know that I’ll ever find any .44 Mag, and 10mm isn’t much good against hardened barding… “This town we’re going to….does it have a merchant? One that trades in weapons?” “Didn’t the last time BJ and I were dragged through, but that was two months ago,” Kite answered quickly, her hoofsteps faltering slightly as she chanced a quick look behind them. “Ought to be thinking of finding food and water—“ “We have plenty,” she assured her with a quick tap of her water canteens dangling off the side of her traveling saddle. “Wouldn’t mind knowing where a good water source is once it comes time to refill, though.” “Clean water’s hard to get,” the grape unicorn murmured with a guarded tone. “Only a few places in the entire prairie with a functioning water talisman, and two are close to burning out. They charge a good sum of caps for non-residents, and it’s rationed. The stupid try to get by on booze ‘till they realize that the alcohol actually dehydrates them. Funny thing, all those old soda vending machines that popped up during the war still get re-stocked, somehow. And the stuff’s fresh.” “Soda?” Light Tail quipped with doubt. “What good is that? That stuff’s loaded with sugars and ingredients I can’t even read off the bottle. And how in Celestia’s name is the stuff still being made?!” “Nobody’s ever figured it out,” Kite explained further. Satisfied that the road behind them was threat-free for the moment, she fell back into step with the group in three strides. “There’s an old bottling plant south of Withercha, some of the bots outside are still working, maybe that’s where it’s coming from—“ Sling’s horn unconsciously began to release the spell work for her hearing protection, a low (but unmistakable) groan of dread rumbling through her throat— “There’s working robots out there?!” El-Tee’s voice screeched with joy, having caught up with the grape-colored mare so quickly that her now-muffled hoofsteps had come across as one single bound of excitement. “Are they friendly?! Do they talk?! What kind of robots—“ “W-what the frig, how’d you get here so fast—“ But El-Tee’s “Endless Excitement Switch” had been triggered on—now that Kite had caught her attention with interesting knowledge of the surface world she wanted to know (and that would take her mind off of whatever was bugging her), there was no escape from her or her endless barrage of questions. “—does anypony fix ‘em up?! Are there any Handy models?! We have a couple in the stable, one of ‘em we call Spiner likes to sing and I taught him “A Griffon Tar” a couple months back and now he sings it at least a once a day—“ Kite’s body whisked itself beside her in the next instance, seeking escape from the awakened bundle of energy that now hounded her. “Sling Shot, turn her off—“ “She doesn’t have an off switch,” Sling groaned back. Though the hearing protection spell dampened a good bit of the shrill in her night light’s voice and softened the volume, the constant stream of questions and the obliviousness to the world as she sought to sate her curiosity could not be deflected or defeated—but at least now she knew who to blame for Spiner’s spontaneous singing. “Good luck.” “What?! You’re not even gonna help me out here—“ “Hey! Hey!” the little filly began to badger, hopping up and poking at Kite’s side with her hooves to try and get the mare’s attention again. “Are there any models with a pony-shaped chassis there?! Do any of ‘em have brains for a processor—“ “S-stop, please, I don’t know—“ Her pleas may as well have been uttered into a gushing tornado, for all the good it did. “—do you think they might have something to do with the soda machines getting re-stocked?! Maybe that means there’s a bunch more inside makin’ the stuff, how far from Withercha is it—“ “I-I’ve changed my mind, take me back to Saurus—“ With all the noise and hyperactive antics her daughter was getting up to, she never thought to look for BJ until the little colt’s voice moaned in displeasure from her right, and she stole a glance downward to find him hopping along on three legs as he tried to drown out the shouting filly with a forehoof to his ears. “Ugh, it’s like being surrounded by radroaches.” “Not quite,” Sling disagreed, but only slightly. “You can shoot the roaches.” “—where would they be getting the bottles and the water and the sugar and all the other stuff—“ Kite turned her pleas to the afterlife in the hopes of finding a sympathetic ear in the Beyond. “Luuunnaaaa, Celestiaaaa, help....pleeease…” -------------------------------------- Once Kite figured out that her only escape was to placate the filly’s questions with answers, the thing calmed down in time as curiosity was satisfied and the questions dwindled from a few dozen to three. Her constant bouncing had settled back into a controlled walk and her shouting and gleeful shrieking turned into a calmer and more pleasant conversational voice, allowing Sling to release her hearing protection spell roughly an hour after Kite had inadvertently hit the “Death by Endless Questions” button. Fifteen minutes afterward she had run out of things to ask and fell back a few feet to go bother BJ, but his refusal to entertain her attempts at conversation finally got her to shut up. For most of the next hour, they’d been blessed with relative peace and quiet. And then Kite jinxed it—and their chances of traveling unnoticed by strangers—by speaking up once again. “Oh gods, she’s still shouting at me in my head,” the poor mare whimpered slightly, rubbing at her left ear with a foreleg. “Does she read Dar—“ That was as much as she would get to say before Sling’s left forehoof shot out and plugged the mare’s mouth shut. “If you want to live to nightfall, do not say that name. You will die with her voice in your head in the afterlife if you finish that sentence.” Kite’s irises shrunk to the size of a pinhead and began to visibly shake slightly at the thought of being hounded to death by an overly curious and excitable filly, and when Sling’s hoof returned to the ground to continue the journey, the dreaded name was not uttered. “….how have you survived her?” “She’s pretty well behaved most of the time, actually,” she said, focusing her gaze on the endless, pockmarked and cracked highway in the far distance. Aside from one lonely looking, debilitated house sitting off on its own a hundred yards away from the road thirty minutes ago, she’d seen nothing but endless hilly wasteland and small patches of tallgrass for the entire walk so far. “But if she gets real curious about something, and you let on that you know something about it, you’ll never get rid of her until she gets the answers she wants. She once followed me all the way to bed when she got to wanting to know how unicorn magic works. I put her in her room and locked the door so she couldn’t badger me in my sleep, and the little devil still found a way out and into my room, and kept hopping on my bed like the six-year old she was until I broke down.” Kite began to laugh quietly, though a sad, wistful sigh made it tough to tell if she was amused or dismayed….until she spoke. “….wow. That…that sounds so….alien….” Oh buck me, how could I be so stupid? Stables must sound like the Canterlot Castle to these poor surface ponies… “I-I’m sorry, I didn’t me—“ “No, no, it’s fine,” the older mare assured her softly, though her tone remained downcast and slightly stung. "….it’s…when you live in the wasteland your whole life, it’s hard to imagine life could be any different. Things like soft beds, friendly faces, no mutated wildlife trying to eat you alive, or enough necessities to go around….most folk live their whole lives never knowing anything like that, and somehow along the way it just got accepted as….normal. The stables are dream worlds to us. And most of ‘em are gone. Yours is one of the last….” A hard lump began to form in her throat that couldn’t be swallowed away. “….it’s gone now, too. Radroach outbreak….power went out….my little girl and I were the only ones that got out in time.” “I figured as much,” Kite whispered back. “Nobody ever leaves paradise willingly. Does she understand?” “She’s a lot smarter than she looks,” Sling forced herself to say through her tightening throat, fresh memories of Cloud Wind trying to force themselves forward. “And incredibly optimistic. She knows the chances are slim, but she’s convinced the stable survived, and that we’re trying to find a new home for them too, not just us.” Kite’s voice took on a slightly harder edge. “And you’re going to let her believe that?” “If believing that everyone she knows is still alive is what gets her through this hell of a world, then that’s what I’ll let her believe….” She would have said more after that, but her eyes began to focus on a small set of black specks coming up over the top of a small hill several hundred yards ahead, straight down the highway and heading right at them. She came to a full stop in two steps, floating her binoculars out of her saddlebag and the shotgun out of the long gun scabbard on her left side— —CL-CLANK!— —the shotgun’s rough slide-action caused two tiny bodies behind her to come to a stop, just as the focus on the binocs began to sharpen and turned the enlarged blobs into the recognizable shape of a group of ponies— “M-mom—“ “Hush,” Sling commanded of her offspring, going so far as to encourage her to move behind her completely with a consistent swish of her tail across the filly’s body towards the empty space right behind her. “….what do you see?” Kite asked nervously, slowly inching backward as the blobs grew larger. The pony-shapes gradually turned into actual ponies—an equal mixture of mares and stallions, eight in total, clad in khaki-shaded, thick-looking armored barding with a mottled three-shade pattern, like a chocolate chip cookie. Desert camo, her security training told her in the next instant. Makes sense given the terrain, but that doesn’t look painted on— One stallion turned to his left, ostensibly to scan for potential threats to his group’s flank, and mounted to his right side was a belt-fed rifle of undetermined caliber. A second stallion behind him sported a similar weapon on his side, and a unicorn mare at the rear sported a shortened, griffon-style carbine within her magical grasp— “Oh shit,” she spat quietly, forgetting the extreme proximity of her daughter behind her. “Automatic rifles, desert camo barding—“ “O-o-oh fu…..oh gods not them—“ The sheer terror in Kite’s trembling voice told her all she wanted to. She stuffed the binocs back into her saddlebag and frantically began searching around them for the nearest hill they could book it to. “Kids, get ready to run, slavers—“ “Union,” Kite interrupted, her legs buckling as she sought safety behind the former stable mare. “They’re not slavers. They’re merchant union. And they’ve already seen us, oh gods—“ For the first time that morning, BJ’s detached demeanor was nowhere to be found. Instead she heard what sounded like benign assurance…a tone a slightly tired parent might take towards a child still scared of their imagination’s work in the dark. “Mom, quit it, your new friend can just blow them away with that big gun of hers—“ Union….merchant union….the way Kite uttered those words…. “What’s this merchant union? Talk quick.” “They’re the power that runs this part of the prairie,” Kite answered freely, her voice close to tears. “They r-run the major trade routes, they patrol them, the towns in their territory….they t-trade in everything. Including slaves.” Sling did not any more information than that to figure out what had Kite so terrified. Two slaves, in the company of the mare that had slaughtered their former “owners”…. And there was absolutely nowhere to run to. The nearest hill with any meaningful cover was over a hundred yards behind them, and she could already see the group of ponies picking up their pace to meet them. No way they could bolt for it, and she was not willing to risk the chance that they would be mistaken for bandits or savages and shot at— “Kite, BJ, stay behind me, don’t look at them,” her mouth spouted off quickly over her quickening heart rate, slinging the shotgun back into its scabbard and popping open the holster latches for Grayhawk and her 10mm. “Nopony say a word to them, I’ll do the talking.” “M-mom—“ “I mean it!” she snapped back sharply before her filly could get any cute ideas about trying to help out, her magic relieving Kite of her knife and its scabbard without protest. “Stay back, stay put, and say nothing—“ Oooooh shit what the hell am I doing!? Four hundred yards now and closing. These union ponies could really move when they wanted to! Light Tail’s hoofs finally moved her further back, though whenever she tried to scoot to the side to see around her mother, Sling would overtly side-step in front of her to discourage the attempt, and after three tries the filly gave up and did as she was told. It took the union ponies half a minute to cover the remaining distance, but when they finally got close enough for her to discern coat coloring they slowed down and began to spread themselves out across the highway and onto the puddle-filled, muddy ground on both sides of the road. A pale foliage green-coated stallion with a darker green mane and tail, flanked by a chartreuse mare with a matching mane tied into a single braid and a short, cropped tail continued their steady gallop towards her, and as they drew close enough for her to see their eye colors she finally recognized a set of three sharp pale yellow-colored chevrons on the front of his camouflaged barding— “Stay where you are!” the chevron-marked stallion barked sharply, slowing into a trot as he began to scrutinize her and her entourage. “I’ve already been attacked twice in the last twenty-four hours,” she shot back with an equally strong tone. “And if you and your squad don’t stop surrounding me I’m going to take three of you with me into the afterlife.” For a brief moment she was afraid he’d call her bluff and cut her down with his saddle-mounted rifle, but then he clicked his forehooves across the pavement twice, and the rest of his party halted mid-step and began inching backwards but remained spread out across a forty yard spread. “…no need to get violent over a standard ownership check—“ She would never know how she managed to not flinch or jolt in place as her heart smacked into her ribcage in fear. She never expected there to be any sort of functioning bureaucracy after what she’d seen yesterday, certainly not one competent enough to formalize some set of standards and regulations for the barbaric practice of slavery. But it did explain the blood-soaked scrolls of parchment she’d found beneath one of the dead slavers when she and Kite had done a quick once-over search of them before they’d left. Papers she’d left behind because she’d considered them useless. “My papers are gone,” she said as she forced herself to stare him down in the eyes and hoped she could fake enough confidence to get him to back off. “One of those two times I got shot at. Had to chase the thieves down and wipe them out to get my workers back, but the papers got ruined in the mess.” “Likely story—“ “Y’know what, go on,“ she cut him off angrily, swiping her left forehoof back in the direction of the town she’d left. “Go on towards town, take a right at the second intersection, walk three blocks, turn left and walk for two, turn right and go another five. You’ll come up on a street with a two-story building with part of the outer wall collapsed and forming a slope of debris to the second floor. Fish through the bodies all you like, you’re bound to find those bloodied papers, and good luck reading them!” “Ma’am, if you can’t prove ownership on demand we’ll have to detain the slaves until we can verify it with the main trade office,” the chevron stallion remarked calmly, though she caught a hint of discomfort in his voice, as if he was starting to grow uneasy (or uncertain) about the way things were going, and his eyes began to try and tear themselves away from her. “My sympathies for your troubles, but—“ “My troubles!?” she shrieked back to his face, bearing into his eyes with as much rage and hate as she could muster. She did not want his gaze going anywhere near her Pip-Buck—if he spotted that stupid “115” on its outer casing, her hasty bluff would be shot. “I came all the way out here on some stupid rumor that somepony near the mountain finally found a way into that damned stable last week!! I thought I could strike it big on a new trade route, but all I found was the same locked door that’s always been there! I come back into town and don’t even get one block in before some local bandits take a shot at me and my little girl! I just got ambushed again this morning trying to get out of that cesspit and I almost lost the most valuable things I had left from this entire idiotic venture! My entire week has been nothing but one stupid mistake after another and I just want to go home, before I go out of business!!” The stallion’s face began to lose its composure, forcing the chartreuse mare beside him to cover for him—and the subtle tone of disapproval and disrespect gave Sling the impression that this was not the first time this mare had to cover for her superior. “….suggest moving on our way, sir,” the mare hissed quietly into his ear, her rifle lowering further as her attention was shifted from her weapon to getting as far away from the screaming “merchant” as possible. “Papers get lost sometimes. We have more important places to be.” His left eye twitched at the tone of the mare’s voice, and though he was able to set his face straight again, he never did have the gall to look back at her, or at Sling, as he clapped his right forehoof into the ground with two solid strikes. In the blink of an eye, the six ponies spread out at the sides unlatched the firing reins from their mouths and began moving forward again without a word. “….get your ownership credentials straightened out,” he said in parting as he began to trot past her. “The next patrol you run into won’t be so forgiving.” “Forgiving my ass,” the chartreuse mare muttered under her breath, but fortunately for her, the stallion never heard it. She didn’t even bother to acknowledge that Sling existed and simply followed in his wake, quickly darting ahead once she’d caught up to him and taking the lead for the eight-pony squad as it gradually reformed into a two-line staggered formation on the road. Within a minute they’d become little more than the black blobs they’d started out as. And only then did Kite finally allow herself to fall apart. She simply collapsed onto the asphalt and began heaving in large, gasping breaths and soft wails, while BJ promptly bolted away from them, off the road and into the wasteland until he was about twenty yards away— “H-hey, BJ, where ya goin’—“ “Leave him be, El-Tee,” Sling said loudly, already having a pretty good idea why he was moving away from them so quickly. “Just…let him go for a minute.” The filly insisted on making sure that BJ wasn’t going to get gobbled by the mud or a hidden swarm of bugs, but quickly changed her mind once she saw why he’d gone off to the side and quickly backpedaled back to the other side of the road. “I just wanna make sure he’s gonna be okaaaaaaaeeeee WHOA whoa whoa nevermindnevermindhe’sfine—“ “Oh shit, oh shitohshit—“ Kite squealed softly, barely audible over her frantic breathing, and her body began to shake from a combination of fear and adrenaline bleed-off. Even her tail quivered in place. “Shit shit SHIT—“ “Hey, cut that out,” Sling whispered quietly after the sixth curse. “Just br—“ “—ake a minute, just breathe—“ Windy’s voice faded from her mind, seemingly blending in with her own as she fought past the memory flash and continued to try and soothe this cowering mare into a walking mood. “….take a minute, just breathe—“ “Oh sh—….oh my gods, I could see the selling block again,” the quivering mare sobbed, her forehooves clasping down upon her face to wipe away her tears. “I….I’ve never seen anyone talk their way out of an ownership inspection like that…“ “It wasn’t by skill or luck,” Sling said in return, keeping her eyes on the shrinking dots of the patrol ponies in case they changed their mind and doubled back. “That stallion isn’t fit for command of anything, too used to his position alone getting him through his tasks, and he let that mare practically give him orders once I started going off on him and pushed him out of his comfort zone. If she’d been in charge we’d all be dead or in chains right now. She could still convince him to come back if she starts thinking too hard about the bad lie I just gave them.” Kite’s body stiffened at the prospect that potential threats to her newfound freedom still lingered, and though she was still shaking and trembling she refused to allow it to stop her any longer. She rose back up onto her hooves and began testing her legs with tiny steps forward to ensure she could at least walk without tripping herself. “…right….keep moving….’nother mile up, we can stop there for a bit—“ “We’re not stopping until we hit the next town,” Sling cut her off as she began to search the rain-touched wasteland around them for any other threats that might have taken notice of four ponies stopped in the middle of the road. “Those collars are going to get us all killed or worse if we don’t get them off fast.” For the next two and a half hours the group moved along the degraded highway with the silence of the dead. Sling didn’t care to slow down, not even for lunch—she’d already put them all in a mess with an on-the-fly constructed fib to a Union patrol, and the collars did attract attention. The sooner they were off, the easier future journeys would be. Near the end of the twenty mile journey, she could begin to make out the sight of a looming city in the distance, quite larger than the tiny ruined settlement they’d just left earlier in the morning. A few war-damaged, jagged peaks of tall towered-office buildings leered over the sprawling cityscape around them, with several support beams exposed to the elements of nature and many of their windows shattered or cracked. Once such building was adorned with a dying neon sign depicting the stereotypical pitcher of maple syrup, its light occasionally flickering out but fighting its back to existence seemingly by willpower rather than by any known power source. “Hey!” Sling Shot bellowed over her shoulder. “What’s this town we’re about to walk into?!” Kite’s head had to shake itself awake before she could respond. “Syrup Mound,” she answered after a lingering look at the syrup pitcher, and Sling began longing for a fresh, warm blueberry pancake. “Supposed to have been mostly an industrial town. One of the few in the prairie, before the Last Day….” “…the what day?” “The day the war ended,” Kite explained a little further, just as Sling finally tore her eyes away from the forty-floor structure that tormented her with the trappings of a breakfast she’d probably never taste again. “When all the megaspells went flying and turned the world into….this. It’s been called the Last Day for as long as anypony can remember.” Sling Shot’s eyes softened slightly, barely focused on the mile of highway that separated them from the outskirts of the city. “….that name actually makes a sick kind of sense. In the stable, we called the era before the war’s end ‘Equestria That Was’.” “….think I prefer that, actually. If everybody out here focused more on what was lost than on how we lost it, things wouldn’t be so bad as they are now...” “So do you know where to go to find the one that can get those collars off?” -------------------------------------- She was starting to figure out how things worked up here. Firstly, there was no government…well, at least, they didn’t know of anything that resembled a functioning government. Maybe Kite or BJ knew, but they weren’t saying much. Still, without any sort of working government, or harmony, or nice stuff, or anything resembling peace and love and tolerance and all that jazz, ponies and griffons were really miserable and really hungry. They were stuck with the ruins and relics of the beforetimes, and all the ills and pick-me-ups that made one forget said ills. Like booze. So for the second time today, the place to go to find what they were looking for was a bar. And this was an actual bar, not some burned-out hotel re-purposed into one. It had tables for its patrons, a bar, and a bartender pony (a pinkish unicorn mare with a really tiny drinking cup for a cutie mark that Mom said was a shot glass when she asked about it) that stayed behind the bar, and she thought she could smell a kitchen at work somewhere through a drape-obscured doorway next to the bar. A few other mares of varying shades of pink and purple were going this way and that, the earth ponies balancing delicate plates of shot glasses and bottles of booze on their heads and the unicorns simply floating it about with their magic. Mom shuffled them all into a corner booth table at the far end of the room, where she could see every soul that came in through the front door….and she made sure that every one of them could see the three guns she carried with her. It didn’t seem to be having much effect, though, since she could see that half the room was armed themselves. If anything, she felt like Mom had just deselected them from their list of things to harass. The rumbling chorus of talking ponies drowned into a barely comprehensible muffle as Mom’s hearing protection spell enveloped her ears, and her spirits dampened slightly. She’d been hoping the noise around her would keep her from thinking about home…. “You’re new ‘round here,” a dark pink waitress mare cooed sweetly (or she was really good at faking it) not even five seconds later, causing Mom to stop fishing around her saddlebags to look at this mare in the eye. “Sight-seeing?” “Business,” Mom replied flatly, keeping her voice calm as her eyes darted around the room for a quick second or two. “You sell anything other than booze?” “Now what kinda soul walks into a bar and don’t want a drink?” the waitress pushed back gently. “Me,” Mom replied, still calm but slowly losing her patience with the mare’s sales pitch. “Alcohol dulls the senses. It makes you slower, dumber, and more likely to shoot yourself in the leg. Dehydrates you, too. Water’s not easy to come across, y’know.” The waitress huffed a lock of her mane out of her face, a slight hint of displeasure forming at the corner of her mouth in the face of what was probably the first pony that day who didn’t want booze, but she didn’t push it. Probably because of Mom’s guns. “….got a couple cases of sarsaparilla in the back. Ket keeps ‘em chilled with a fancy cold spell, so it don’t come cheap. Five caps a bottle—“ Mom didn’t even hesitate. She just pulled twenty bottle caps out of their sack and dropped them into the waitress’s pouch tied around her neck. “I’ll take four.” The mare’s eyes widened slightly at just how quickly Mom was willing to throw money down on something like that without even haggling a little, but she didn’t say anything and just trotted on towards the kitchen. Once the waitress was out of earshot, Mom turned her attention back to more pressing issues. “Who are we looking for? What does he look like?” “G-griffon,” Kite whispered back, her neck and head leaning in as if she were afraid the words would reach the wrong ears if she spoke too loud. “Runs a junk shop, but stops in for lunch every day. Shouldn’t be long, it’s past noon already. Wears a toolkit around his torso and a pair of goggles. Calls himself Fixer.” Oh wow, somebody smart enough to know how to fix stuff out here, even with everything that’s been wasted! I bet talent like that’s real valuable— Her short glee died in a flash. If a soul with the skill and know-how to fix stuff was hard to come by…..his services wouldn’t come cheap either…. And how many caps had Mom blown today already out of the six hundred she’d picked up? “…..what does he charge for his services?” she heard herself asking before Mom could get the guts to say it out loud. Kite’s eyes couldn’t bear to look at either of them anymore, and settled for the warped, splintered table between them. “…..for collars? ….four hundred apiece.” Mom’s body seized up on itself beside her, and her expression was no longer hidden behind a composed veil. “….four hun….I don’t even have half that for one of you!” she hissed back softly, her eyes furrowing in distress. “You didn’t think to mention this before we came here?!” Kite seemed taken aback by Mom’s sudden, drastic change in behavior and mood, and actually shrank back into the booth seat. “I-I…I didn’t think of it….it’s not like caps are all he takes, there’s….other ways….to pay him…..” She meant it to try and calm Mom down, but it only seemed to make her more frustrated, because she came within a second of smacking her hoof onto the table before she caught herself. “No. I’m not doing that. Ever. You understand?” Now it was Kite’s eyes that changed. The growing sadness in her voice was unmistakable. “….try to say that when your kid needs you to do things you’d never imagined yourself doing.” Light Tail chanced a look back towards the kitchen, just in time to see that waitress mare emerge from the draped doorway with a saucer plate in her mouth and four soda bottles cradled atop it in an impressive display of balancing skill. Or luck. “Could you kids stop fighting long enough to enjoy a cold drink?” BJ blurted with surprising assertiveness, given how he seemed to look at everything with about as much interest as a school filly in a boring subject (which she knew plenty about!). “....lunch would be nice sometime today too, but one thing at a time.” El-Tee couldn’t help but snicker at the fact that a smart-mouthed colt got two supposedly adult mares to stop bickering at each other, though that changed to a surprised, gurgling choke when the waitress dropped off their drinks and left with new requests for something edible from the kitchen. Her first taste of the sugary, sweetened sarsaparilla was…. “….holy Luna, this stuff’s awesome!” she squealed as the last of her sip sizzled into her taste buds with the sharpest, most delicious sensations she’d ever tasted. “What is it?” “Root beer,” BJ muttered, clasping his bottle between his forelegs after gulping down roughly a quarter of his its contents. “Doesn’t taste flat either, they must brew their own. Awesome.” A shock of surprise managed to knock out the taste of this “root beer” from her mouth. “….p-ponies can make this stuff?” “With the right ingredients and equipment, yeah—“ Mom’s groan of fear hardly registered with her, given that her veins began to fill with a wondrous, heart-racing thrill that she couldn’t explain. She suddenly wanted to pounce on the colt and wring his tiny brain for all the information he had on the subject! If this stuff could be made, she wanted to know how— “Don’t bother asking me how it’s made or what it takes, I don’t have a frickin’ clue,” the colt added hastily in his deadpan, sullen tone, and the filly felt her bubble of excitement bursting at the touch of his rudeness. “All I know is that’s possible. Stuff’s loaded with sugar anyway, don’t need to be drinking it all the time.” Her drive of discovery deflated by the uncooperative colt, she sat back down into the booth seat she didn’t realize she’d leapt from, and contented herself with making this chilly, five-cap bottle of heaven last. “Spoilsport….” “Baby,” he snorted back over the top of his bottle, just before he took another sip. Oh, you did not just call me that! “Scum-bucket.” “Cut it out,” Mom snarled sharply at the both of them, before BJ could fire back with an insult of his own, and El-Tee felt her ears droop slightly in shame. BJ, unfortunately, didn’t seem to get the message right away. “Hey, I’m just acting my—“ “BJ!” Kite snapped back, causing the little colt to jump in place as his mom turned her “wrath meter” up a notch. “Stop!” She wanted to laugh at how quick BJ was to turn into a cowering foal before the sight of an angry parent, but there was enough fear behind his glazing eyes that it was actually uncomfortable watching him get the third degree like this. “…o-okay….” And Mom noticed it too. But she kept her mouth shut about it, probably more concerned with getting those collars off of their new traveling companions. “….after lunch we should probably find some traders, see what we can get for the gear we picked up this morning.” Despite the hearing protection spell and the muffled backdrop of twenty different conversations happening around them, Light Tail still managed to make out the creak of the front door as it swung open, and out of curiosity she stole a glance past her Mom to see what new life forms had waltzed in looking for a pick-me-up— A griffon clad in leathery barding and a short-brimmed hat, plastered with the same khaki-tan-beige mottled patterning as those scary “union” ponies, sauntered through the door with nary a care in the world, the dusty leather coat covering most of the rest of the body. Two long guns were strapped across the back, one all-black and one with a wooden stock, and around the right hind leg was a holster with a pistol stuffed inside, its flat, tan-colored frame mixing in with the slightly gold shade of the fur. A second griffon in identical clothing was right behind, and his rifle even had the same color pattern as the leather barding. This one kept a pistol in a holster strapped across the barding, and kept a strange-looking gun cradled in its right forelimb. She was starting to wish she knew guns a little better so she could at least know what kind of threats she was surrounded by….and wish she could tell griffon genders when they were all armored up like that. So far she couldn’t tell whether they male or female— …wait, think the one up front’s a girl, she amended after a closer look at the uncovered back legs and body. For some reason the front griffon’s body—what little there was that wasn’t covered in armor—seemed a bit more lean and slender, while the one in back was somewhat thicker and more solidly built. And the front griffon’s green eyes were more….feminine looking? She couldn’t figure out how she could tell that, or what made her see them that way, but— The front griffon’s eyes took a quick sweep around the room, and both of them stopped cold the moment they spotted her staring right back at them…. …and then shifted away from their bar-bound course and began coming for them instead. -------------------------------------- It took little more than two seconds for Light Tail’s curiosity to re-assert itself and bring trouble with it. The filly had taken a quick look around and found something worth staring at long enough to be noticed….two somethings, in fact. Very well-armed somethings. And by the time Sling noticed they were there at all, they were already less than five feet away, their silent approach defying the cumbersome look of their armor and gear— —the lead griffon plucked a shell casing from the pocket of its leather duster and set it down right in front of her as the pair reached the booth, and although Sling’s eyes were briefly distracted by it, it did not keep her from latching onto Grayhawk’s grip in a flash of her magic. But she had little doubt that things would end badly if she’d actually attempted a quick-draw right there— “Ruined a perfectly good shot,” the griffon’s voice chirped politely, her crisp tone coming across as oddly calming and polite. “.308 match rounds are hard to find.” For a brief moment Sling could only wonder in confusion about what the hell this griffon was talking about, until the word “.308” was aired, and then she had a brief flashback to that street, to the sound of the bullet that hit the asphalt three seconds ahead of the actual sound of the shot itself…. …and one look at the bolt-action rifle strapped across her back made her eyes bulge slightly inside her sockets. “….you took a six-hundred yard shot without a scope?” The griffon’s beak sharpened into a gleeful smile (somehow), and her eyes began to scrutinize her in a new light as she let off a low, sharp whistle of approval. “Close. Six-twenty-seven. How’d you know?” The answer was so automatic she didn’t even feel herself saying it, though she heard it loud and clear. “It took around two seconds for the sound of the shot to catch up to the bullet. If I remember it right the report of a gunshot travels about three hundred yards a second, which would make it close to six hundred in two seconds.” “Hot damn, most souls can’t tell one gun from another,” the griffon squealed in delight, taking the expended casing back into her coat pocket. “Leon, we gotta recruit this one, she’s sharp.” The other griffon merely moaned in despair as he pulled up two chairs from a nearby unoccupied table. “Oh gods, two gun nuts now?” “Oh, get stuffed!” the female griffon laughed at her partner’s dismay. “What’s yer name, pony?” The quick, fortunate turn of events before her made her answer slower to come than was probably socially acceptable, but the griffon didn’t even seem to notice. “…S-Sling Shot…” The female griffon’s eyes studied her as the unicorn struggled to answer, and took considerable interest in the PipBuck around her left foreleg. “…so, S-Sling Shot, how long you been topside out of the one-one-five?” That remark was enough to shock her senses back into full alert, and she hastily stuffed her left foreleg under the table before anybody else could point it out. “Fu…scream it out, why don’t you?!” she hissed angrily, glaring daggers at this oblivious avian…thing…. But the griffon just laughed quietly. “Anybody with two working brain cells ‘round these parts is gonna figure it out if they notice that thing. And I overheard your talk with Blue Star this morning. He left a lotta open gaps.” Another flashback played out in her mind, this time to the store counter in the hotel-turned-bar, in the ruined settlement, and the scarred, female griffon walking away on all fours with a box of ammunition tucked inside her beak— Her heart stopped cold in fear. “….you’re tracking me.” “Well, I am now,” Ada snipped back playfully, as if the entire conversation was merely a game to her. And probably was. “But before that, I was trackin’ the griffon you winged—“ Her face contorted into a compressed visage as the curious wordplay games in her head began to come together. “Snrrrrk!! Hehahaha…get it? ‘Winged’? ‘Cause you totally shot him in the wing…” Sling didn’t find the concept of shooting another living creature (even a slaver) very funny, but for whatever reason El-Tee did, because the filly began bawling with laughter as her head sank to the table. “Hahahahaha!!! ‘Winged’ him, that’s a good one—“ “Ain’t it?!” Ada laughed back. “Anyways, yeah, he’s a slick piece of work. Even without bein’ able to fly, he managed to give us the slip. Stupid booby-traps and all. Seven months of tracking and hunting, down the drain ‘cause of….y’know, this would be a good time to tell me what went down. From my vantage point all I could tell was that he got the drop on you, literally—“ El-Tee’s laughter picked up again, just as it had begun to die down, and she wanted to be sore at her for finding humor in the fact that that griffon had “dropped” down solely intent on murdering the little filly. And she couldn’t. “….he did,” Sling answered, her eyes darting back towards the kitchen to see if the waitress mare was bringing their lunch out yet, but nothing emerged from the drapes. “Threatened to shoot my little girl if we didn’t give up. But he kept his eyes on me the whole time, didn’t seem to think my daughter was any kind of threat or problem. And she hit the mag release on his gun the instant he stopped talking. Took him off guard, and gave me a chance to get a couple rounds off. You saw how that went.” “Awww, sweet move, kid!” Ada chuckled heartily, even going so far as to extend a forelimb and a closed talon towards her daughter— —El-Tee reacted almost instinctively, as though they were back in the stable diner and in Windy’s company once more. Her left forehoof tapped the closed talon with a soft thud, and both filly and griffon mimicked (poorly) the sound of an explosion as their respective limbs withdrew from the impromptu hoofbump. Just like the filly used to do with Windy— “Dumb griffon!” El-Tee laughed with another sip of her sarsaparilla. “I hope he never hurts anypony again!” “Yes,” Kite offered quietly, her first softly spoken words in this new conversation with the two griffons. And yet, Sling’s senses caught a hint of…. ….oh, shit, don’t you dare— “In fact,” Kite continued, her soft voice giving way to a more rage-filled, hateful tone, “Why don’t you tell me why you let that monster and his sick friends hold me like they had?! You were watching the whole time and you did nothing!? Why?!” What little cheer and goodwill that had been built up with Ada’s almost child-like attitude seemed to vanish into the abyss. Even the griffon’s eyes seemed to pale in the face of her accuser, and for good reason. Anyone that took long-ranged shots at targets with the expectation of hitting them could have easily sprung Kite and BJ from the malicious grasp of their tormentors. And yet she’d done nothing but watch. And had probably watched the horrible things they’d done to her when the whims struck them… Light Tail sought to try and defuse the potential hostilities, even though she had no real clue about the unspoken implications that all the adults understood. “H-hey, I’m sure she—“ “If you’re gonna track a target, you have to learn to set yourself aside,” Ada mumbled sullenly, her downcast eyes no longer willing to look up at any of them. “No matter how much it might piss you off to see ‘em doing things you wouldn’t want done to you, how badly a soul needs you to save them from those things….you can’t let yourself get involved. You gotta stay put, and stay smart. I was watching him for the last month to find out how wide his operating range was, how many other freelance slaver parties he might know or barter with, who he sold his catch to and what kind of numbers he sold in. We’d been looking for him in these parts for over six months ‘fore we found him, and I didn’t want to just blindly blow his head off without knowing how big an impact he had on the slave trade here. I could save ten souls immediately, or a hundred in the long run. I chose the hundred.” Sling felt her vitality drain from her body. She couldn’t imagine forcing herself to sit and watch the things those savages must have done to Kite, sit and watch and know she could do something about it. Nor could she imagine herself doing it for the sake of others, because until El-Tee had yelled the senses into her she’d been willing to up and leave the poor thing and her colt in their hooves. And here this griffon was, all but admitting the coldness of such a choice, and how wrong it was even if it was meant to save more souls later…. She hated the wasteland. Not even two days in it, she hated it and all the wrongs it brought upon those who lived in it. She wished she’d stayed in the stable and suffocated in it, not knowing the truth of the world above. She would’ve died in ignorant bliss— “….wait, ten?” Sling heard herself ask numbly as she replayed Ada’s words in her head over again. “….but….” “Saurus had eight others, when he took me and BJ from our last master a month ago,” Kite explained, still willing her eyes to fire arcane beams into the griffons at the side of the table. “Sold ‘em off over the last four weeks, but kept me and BJ for himself. He tends to hire raiders to scour around for victims, but from what I heard a couple of days ago they went overboard at one homestead outside town. The things they did—“ “Will not be done again,” Leon finished for her, his left talon tapping along the receiver of his SMG. Sling couldn’t recognize the model right off, but she was certain it was tucked away somewhere in her firearms recognition book. “We saw to that.” “Then maybe you could see to making up for watching them ra….for watching them do what they did to me,” the purple unicorn’s voice quivered in a husky tone. “We’re looking for Fixer, to see if he still offers his “side” services—“ “Fixer’s out of town,” Ada said with some degree of apology. “Left Thursday morning, went up north. Probably won’t be back for at least a week, assuming we don’t get any more rain.” Kite’s eyes withdrew their hateful stares, and her withers began to slouch back into her body in defeat. “….great….” Ada seemed torn on the inside, as if fighting herself in her head for some reasonable way to salvage herself out of the mess she’d inadvertently walked into. Only after the waitress mare had returned with the four unicorns’ lunch (plus two additional plates of steaming meat for the griffons—they were apparently regular enough visitors to warrant an automatic order without asking for it) did she seem to have something to say. “Tell ya what,” she offered in a subdued tone. “Leon and I picked up a job to scope out a little farm town a few miles north of here. Some raiders been holed up there, making hits on independent traders in a twenty mile radius, and there’s rumor that the clinic there still has some unlooted supplies. You help us out, and I’ll get those collars off.” The surprisingly edible lunch before her—lightly buttered maize and a smattering of fried, breaded sticks she assumed to have been made from a potato—managed to make Sling Shot slightly more inclined to listen to this stranger’s proposal than she might have been otherwise. “Do you even know what’s in those things?” “Half a pound of plastique, shaped around all through the casing to encompass the neck and wired to a detonator that’s connected to a pulse receiver,” Ada rattled off, as if listing off the components of a meal. “Receiver’s set to receive a signal from a transmitter that blows the collar up if the wearer doesn’t get out of range in time, but Saurus pulls those out of all of his collars. The one time somebody thought to try and take him out by using his own slaves as a living bomb was enough to make him paranoid over it.” Sling didn’t want to ask how she knew that much about Saurus (particularly when Kite had mentioned the same thing earlier), or the specifics of why he went to the trouble of removing a portion of an explosive-laden slave collar out of self-preservation. She was pretty certain the answer was one she wouldn’t like. “….so what’s the catch?” “The catch,” Ada said amidst a swallow of her fried….whatever it was that had been dropped in front of her, “is that I want to keep the plastique in the collars for my own use. And the raiders in the farm town are better armed than that small group you ran into yesterday, but between the three of us they shouldn’t be a problem. You can take a share of any med supplies we find in the clinic afterward, but we get first dibs on weapons and ammo. We’ll split a piece of the bounty off to ya after we pick up the payment, but don’t expect a good share. Our gear’s pretty expensive to keep running.” Mercenaries, she spat derisively in her head as the griffon counted off the conditions of their participation in their “contract”. Still, at least she knew she was dealing with a level-headed one….and perhaps one willing to haggle if the counter-offers were just right. “How expensive?” she deigned to ask, not just out of curiosity, but in the hopes of finding some leverage. Perhaps her eight years as an armory quartermaster would come in handy after all. “The armor? Insanely,” Leon gurgled through a beakful of meat. “We’ve taken to sharpshooting our way through jobs on account of the four souls within fifty miles that can keep them in shape charging two legs for the efforts, and we don’t like getting shot in the first place. The guns are cheaper, but only because we know a dude in town with access to the parts they use.” “They in need of any work right now?” she asked next. She didn’t care at this point if they saw her angle coming—if anything, it might even make it easier to talk them into parting with a few extra caps. “Wouldn’t do to be walking into combat with guns that don’t shoot straight.” “Sidearms are running great,” Ada beamed with a slight grin. “My .308 too. My other rifle’s a bit sluggish, though, and the compensator on his SMG needs work. Probably from all that hot +P ammo he likes to feed it.” A tiny, insidious smile began to form on her lips. Bingo. “Well, then,” Sling said after scarfing down a couple of crunchy—and slightly salted—potato sticks. “Lemme take a look at ‘em. If I can get them squared away, you can afford to part with a bit more of that bounty instead of paying somepony else to do it later. Minus the cost of any parts you have to buy, naturally.” Ada stopped chomping on her lunch just long enough to gaze up at her with a curious eye. “And what, pray tell, did you do for a living, stable pony?” “Quartermaster, security department,” the teal blue unicorn replied, licking away bits of salt from her mouth. Whatever these fried potato sticks were called, they were quite scrumptious. “And the stable was quite well armed. Nine and ten-mils, a full battery of R-series five-five-six rifles, some semi-automatic .308s, even a few shotguns. Whatever ails your firearm, I’m fairly certain I can find the problem.” The griffons began to see her in an entirely new light—whether it was a good light or not, she couldn’t say, but she began to get the feeling that she had just uttered words that would doom her to work others could not bother themselves to save their lives. “See, Leon? Told you, gotta recruit her.” -------------------------------------- With lunch behind them and the pair of griffons set to head out for the farm town tomorrow morning, it made sense to bunker down in a relatively safe location for a night’s rest. An old six-story hotel two blocks away from the bar was still intact enough that a few ponies had taken it over and re-started its old business in their own name, and they had a few vacant rooms left on the third floor to rent out for interested travelers at a rather modest rate of ten caps per room, per night. Kite and BJ were given their own room, while she squirreled herself and El-Tee away in an adjacent one. Ada and Leon took one across the hall. Ada wasted no time in gathering hers’ and Leon’s gear together for the former quartermaster to tinker with, and surprised Sling by doing so completely unarmored. She seemed fit into her armored barding as though it was made specifically for her, but was glad to be rid of its weight and allow her imposing frame to stretch out and be cooled by the open air. “Okay, here’s the problematic children!” she heaved in a massive sigh of relief as she dropped a pair of long guns and a small black bag onto one of the two stained beds in the room. The mattresses had long ago hardened and the bed springs stiffened into little more than static, frozen coils of metal, but it was still better than the worn, faded carpeting beneath her hooves. “There’s some spare parts and the repair manuals for the guns in the bag in case you need ‘em. And before you ask, no, the rifle does not need a cleaning or fresh lube, I tried that already. Think the spring on the buffer tube might be acting up, but I haven’t had time to take it down and test it.” Sling was still trying to get over how huge Ada seemed to be, even without the barding covering most of her body. She was quite a bit larger than any stallion she’d ever seen, and the slightly tannish-gold fur of her lion half sported a handful of scars—one slashed across her back, another adorned her belly, and two more that looked like crude surgical scars across the front of her torso, just beneath her plumage. The two slash scars on her left hind leg that she’d seen earlier looked to be more superficial than anything, as Sling could not see any noticeable stagger or limp to her gait. “….see a lot of fighting, do you?” the mare couldn’t help but remark as she traced her eyes down the griffon’s torso once more. The back scar looked particularly nasty, the way it curved across the spine and trickled down into the left side…. “That’s life in the wasteland,” Ada huffed as she pulled her desert camo boonie hat down off her head and allowed it to slide off behind her neck by its strap. “These are just some old war scars from years back. If yer lucky you can get a couple. Then we can trade war stories and stuff over a bottle of root beer, or whatever. That oughta be fun!” Her response was postponed by the noisy—but healthy sounding—flush of a toilet in the adjoining restroom, and a refreshed and washed-up Light Tail emerged through the door looking greatly relieved. “Oh, wow, that thing actually works!” she sighed deeply, sauntering up to the other bed and hopping up onto it. “It looks….old. Hope the shower runs too.” “Don’t get used to it, kid,” the griffon warned lightly. “This is probably the only place this side of Trotpeka that has a working water system. Savor it.” Light Tail’s face darkened considerably, her hopes for future pleasant places to sleep dashed as quickly as they’d been dreamt up. “…oh, thanks for that. I thought you were the life of a party, bird brain.” “And don’t you forget it, short stop!” Ada jested in return with a thunderous laugh. “I’ll be back in a coupla hours, check on our stuff. Leon and I should have a rough plan worked out by then.” Sling was already pretty sure that planning was far from the actual activities that Ada and Leon would be doing, but she wasn’t going to argue or debate the subject in front of her little girl. And she had work to do if she was going to get these guns sorted out by the time the griffons returned. “Then I’d better get started,” she said in parting as she enveloped the guns and the black bag into a field of magic and began pulling them towards a table nested against the wall on the far side of the room. Ada took the hint and padded on out into the hall, shutting the door behind her with her tail. Within a few seconds the griffon’s footfalls faded from her hearing, but for added measure she went ahead and re-applied her hearing spell over their ears. El-Tee didn’t even bother to remark on the spell. “I like her,” she giggled loudly as she shifted about on the bed until she was facing towards her mother, with her legs tucked in beneath her. “Reminds me of Aunt C. A lot.” “Don’t get too comfortable with her,” Sling Shot warned her, setting the two long guns down on the table before shifting her telekinesis field to her saddlebags piled up against the wall. A quick glance at her PipBuck’s organizational matrix helped her zero in on the object in question— —a brief flash of purple light emanated from the opened saddlebag as she withdrew a large, worn hardback book and floated it up to the table. The slightly discolored title, “FIREARMS RECOGNITION GUIDE, VERSION FOURTEEN”, adorned the middle of the cover, and she quickly flipped it open to the table of contents. She already knew the rifle bore a resemblance to an M-series 5.56mm rifle, but the sub-machine gun eluded her memory— “…well, yeah, sure, she’s kinda scary lookin’, but she seemed pretty nice! And she even offered to get those collars off Kite and BJ—“ “By going with her to wipe out a band of bad ponies a few miles away,” she finished for the filly, her eyes scanning across the contents page until she found the subsection for “SMGs” on page iv. Page 141, separated by caliber… “Or did you not catch that part?” Light Tail’s good mood found itself waning in the face of what said help for their traveling companions entailed. “….I know. I was right there, remember? I’m just sayin’ ya don’t need to keep everybody at room’s length. If those two wanted our stuff they’re goin’ to an awful lot of trouble for it, woulda been easier to just bushwhack us on the road this morning when we didn’t even know they existed. They were followin’ us the whole way.” Sling had to replay the words in her head twice before she could acknowledge that they’d come from her night light and not the suspicious part of her head that had warned her of something similar. And also because Sling had been thinking of them attempting such a ploy tomorrow, rather than earlier this morning when it would have been a much more perfect opportunity to do so. But then there was the matter of all those scars….and the potential stories they had behind them… “We don’t know what they’re ultimately doing here,” she said, quickly flipping through the pages until her eyes caught the number “128” in the lower left corner, and then took a more leisurely pace through to ensure she didn’t miss the intended SMG subsection. “And the scars she’s accumulated this early in her life have me worried. I think I might actually be older than she is, and she’s seen a lot of fighting. Probably killed a lot of ponies along the way. I don’t know what kind of griffons these two could be, and I don’t want you getting hurt. Besides, once we’ve completed our deal tomorrow we probably won’t see them again. Best not to get too attached.” Unfortunately for Sling, her filly’s fresh memories of Cloud Wind—and on how much this Ada reminded her of the pegasus—seemed to make her more intent on making sure their two newest “friendly” encounters became more than that. “What if we could get them to stick around? They seemed awful eager to let you tinker with their guns, and they’ve got to know somepony else that’s been doing it for them for years.” “Only because I promised to take far less in compensation than what they’ve been paying out in the past to that other pony,” she answered back, flipping past page 151 and so far not seeing the SMG in question. A quick look at the barrel listed it as a .45 Auto, though…. “That’s still worth somethin’! And she said Blue Star left out a lot of gaps, whatever that means! D’ya think he maybe might not have told us stuff we oughta know about what’s what around here? Even Kite hasn’t said much other than this…this union of ponies that trade in slaves…and stuff…” She had to admit that that had been bothering her ever since that coward of a stallion had left to return to his “law enforcement”, or what passed for it in the wasteland. Blue Star had never once alluded to the existence of the Merchant Union, and even Kite wasn’t willing to say much on the matter. If they were going to be passing through their territory (or living near it), she wanted to know as much about this world as she could. And Ada certainly seemed traveled enough to give a little information…. “….let me just worry about making it through tomorrow, first,” she relented slightly, just as the pages turned onto the weapon in front of her, and she quickly set the book down for a quick study of the passage. .45 Auto submachine gun, twenty and thirty-round stick magazines, fifty round optional drum mag, ten-point-five inch barrel without the compensator….hunh, the one on the table looks like an older model, cooling fins on the barrel, wing-protected rear sights, and a top-mounted charge handle on the receiver…okay, then, repair manual’s next— “What about me?” Light Tail dared to ask next, filling her mother with a pall of dread at the next few seconds of this conversation. “You’re not gonna leave me here all alone, are you?” “I’m not taking you anywhere near a gunfight if I can see it coming!” she returned sharply, pulling at the black bag for anything that felt like a book and quickly finding two falling into her spell field. “You’re staying here with Kite and BJ, period!” “Oh no I’m not!” El-Tee shot back, the bed beneath her creaking slightly as she stood up in defiance of her mother’s wishes. “I’m coming with you, and that’s final!” A sudden, sharp rage filled Sling’s blood as she dropped the repair manuals on top of the table and fixed her “Angry Parent” glare onto the increasingly rebellious filly. “I ever hear the words ‘that’s final’ come out of your mouth again, they truly will be. You’re. Staying. Here!” “Here is wherever you are—“ An obnoxiously loud, unmistakable rumble of forced air chugging through a throat forced the arguing mother and child to turn their budding frustrations towards the source— —an innocent-eyed Ada tapped her throat with a left talon, while her right talon held a slender, black object within its claws. “Well, you two definitely fight like mom and child ought to. But anyways! I forgot, you might need this multi-tool for the rifle. Damn M-series is almost a crew-served weapon sometimes, helps to have something like this around.” The griffon casually flung the object towards the two bickering unicorns, which fell into Sling’s spell field and slowed into a graceful curve until it was cradled next to the black rifle. “….been there long?” she sneered over her withers. “Long enough to add my own two bits,” the scarred griffon answered calmly, her wings unfurling momentarily to shake themselves a little. “Better if all you ponies come along for the trip.” As hostages, I bet?! Sling didn’t say out loud. Though she was going to if she didn’t like the answer that came next. “Any particular reason, merc?” “You can’t leave slaves alone,” Ada responded, unwavering in the face of Sling’s unspoken threat of violence with the fairly tame slur she’d thrown out. “If a Union patrol finds them here, and their supposed “owner” isn’t around, they’ll be carted back off to the main slave pens and sold off again. And leaving the kid behind with them won’t count, they’d likely take her too. You went to a lot of trouble to get those two out of Saurus’s claws. It’d suck if they got slurped up by the very thing you promised to get them away from.” “It’s not safe—“ Sling began to retort, despite the fact that much of what Ada said actually made good sense. She just couldn’t consent to bringing her only child within range of an assured firefight that was going to see ponies killed. “Have you figured it out yet, stable pony?” the griffon rumbled back, her throat firing off a quick, animalistic growl befitting her lion half. “There’s no such thing as a safe place out here, only safer. They are safer in our company than they would be if we left them here to the risk of being picked up by a patrol looking for some merit points with their superiors by finding runaways. If you want those two in the next room to have a chance at never getting put in chains again, you need to keep them in earshot at all times.” “She’s right, Mom,” El-Tee added next, going in for a swift kill before her mother could get a chance to come up with a better reason for why leaving her here in the hotel room was the best option. “I don’t wanna leave you alone, but more than that….I…I’m scared to be alone. We don’t know how these union ponies keep track of who’s a slave and who’s not. We haven’t even been up here until yesterday! If there’s a system to the whole thing, we’re not in it. We need to stick together…wherever.” Sling did not want them sticking together in every potential gun fight for fear that when it was over, she would look back expecting a healthy, unharmed child, and see instead a dead or dying daughter bleeding out her last seconds life in the cold, unforgiving hell that had formed from the ashes of Equestria That Was. Her heart seized itself into tight, painful fits just imagining it, and she couldn’t bear the thought of how she might react if such a thing ever came true. She didn’t want to find out. She wanted Light Tail safe, here, in this relatively normal hotel room from over two centuries ago. She wanted something to come back to, to assure herself that the killing of bad ponies had been for a good reason. And then the potential scenario….the one that Ada alluded to, began to play itself before her. Began to show her ghastly images of a ransacked room, of spent 9mm shell casings, blood, and bullet holes in the wall, and empty space where her daughter should have been waiting, or where Kite and BJ should have been. Images of El-Tee in shackles, being paraded and corralled like a domesticated sheep in front of hundreds of depraved souls seeking a filly to mold into whatever they desired…. She had to choke back the upsurge of bile that threatened to expel itself onto the floor at the thought, and shut the imaginings away before they could get really bad. Either option was a terrible thing….but at least if El-Tee was nearby, she could kill anything that even remotely threatened her. She couldn’t do that if they were seven miles apart. She spat an angry glare onto the pair of souls that had ganged up on her, resigned to the slightly more desirable risk of seeing her night light get caught up in the midst of a gunfight and zipping bullets. “….fine,” she huffed in defeat, squaring herself towards Light Tail as she spoke. “But you! When we get there, you’re go—“ “Going to do whatever you tell me, whether I like it or not,” El-Tee finished her sentence—the exact sentence, because that was precisely what she was going to say. “And I’m not coming out of whatever hidey hole you stuff me into unless you call me out or I have no choice but to leave.” “….you, BJ, and Kite, all three of you,” Sling added, hoping the slight blur at the edge of her vision was just the cool air biting at her eyes. Even though she knew it wasn’t. “Good, then!” Ada announced loudly, in some vain and pathetic attempt to break the tension that had sprouted up. “Now that we’ve got that settled I’ll just—“ She stopped talking in coherent, sensible words as soon as her eagle eyes fell upon Sling’s traveling saddle, and the griffon began to babble in broken phrases and pieces of words as her left talon tried to point out what had gotten her so tongue tied. “—juaaah….juaa…..guhhh….guuh…..” Both ponies found Ada’s infantile babbling profoundly confusing, and did much more to relieve them of their lingering frustrations than any genuine attempt at peacemaking could have done. El-Tee even hopped off the bed and trotted up to the griffon, though she had to leap up very high in order for her forelegs to even wave themselves in front of her eyes. “Hey!” the little one shouted, her tail beginning to swish wildly as she leapt and landed with short, quiet grunts. “Hey! What—unnh—what happened? Why’d your brain get all screwy?” “Guuuaaah—“ “Equestria to Ada!? Hellooo?!” “G….gun!!” the griffon finally managed to sputter, her eyes growing larger as she finally began to get herself back…mostly. “Big, shiny gun!” Sling unconsciously shifted herself towards her traveling saddle, Grayhawk’s pristine, premium-grade wooden grip poking out of its holster, accompanied by the dulled, matte-silver metallic sheen of the frame beneath the holster flap. “….what, my .44 Mag? What about it?” Somehow, just mentioning the caliber seemed to freak Ada out even further (or drastically increase her happiness, it was exceptionally difficult to tell). Her beak began to open and close, in some strange attempt to utter words, and failed to utter anything of consequence for three seconds until she found her voice again. “Oh….my…..gods,” she mewed softly. “D…..do you have any freakin’ clue what you have there?!” “A .44 Mag with the strongest frame and barrel construction I’ve ever read about,” Sling answered cautiously, slowing backing away from the now-trembling griffon as she answered the question. And Light Tail followed suit right with her. “….umm….Mom, shut up—“ “T-that’s not just any .44,” Ada continued to speak in awed, almost adoring tones. “That is one of the rarest, most precious handguns to ever come out of the Phoenix Rising arms factory…the single most precious griffon-designed .44 Mag ever built. There are only supposed to be a hundred of them. The grip alone is like touching the heavens to my kind….” “Oh Luna, Mom, hide the thing—“ “No!!” Ada shrieked loudly, causing the ponies to jump in place, startled by the sheer shock in her voice. “I just….I’ve only seen one in my life. One. And it’d already had hundreds of thousands of rounds through it, and I had the misfortune to see the barrel snap off the frame in its last firefight of its life. It got the slaver, but the owner lost an incredible arms treasure. And you’ve got one, and it looks like it’s brand new out of a war-era factory, and how the hell did you get it?!” ….oh sweet Celestia I wish you’d ignored us and flew on by! “….I didn’t,” Sling answered cautiously. “….umm, I mean….it’s a family heirloom….my ancestors brought it into the stable with them, the day it was sealed….and we’ve had it ever since….” Now Ada’s squeals began to cause the griffon to shiver in delight. “….oh sweet moonlight it’s….lemme hold it.” The rather simple, benign request took the mare off-guard, simply because if not for the fact that she was staring at her, she would have sworn that Ada was no more than a little…griffon…hatchling….or however it was that griffons came into the world. “….t-that’s it?” “P-pretty much, please,” Ada affirmed, even going so far as to assume a slight submissive posture, complete with what could have been described as puppy-like, pleading eyes. “….y’know, if ya don’t mind….” I do mind, but it’s safer than letting you stand there and blabber like an idiot! With great resignation (and fear), Sling carefully reached out to the holstered revolver and pulled it free from its holster, popping the cylinder open to remove the six rounds inside, and then gingerly floated it towards the griffon until it was within grasping distance— —Ada took hold of the weapon with far more grace and care than Sling had expected, given how she’d been reduced to a stuttering child by the mere sight of the grip. And as she took it into a firm, two-talon grip hold, she had to admit that the revolver seemed like it fit the griffon far better than it would have fit anypony else. Her claws seemed to fit over the recessed grooves at the front of the grip like she was putting on a glove, and the strange, raised curve that adorned the top of the left grip panel was especially well suited to allow the off-claw to rest upon it in fairly good comfort— —that off-claw suddenly zipped up and placed itself upon the hammer as her left talon came up and gently pushed the cylinder back into the frame, and before she knew it she was playing with the hammer and trigger pull— “Ooooh sweet Sisters that is smooth—“ She was so enamored with the pistol that she even rose up onto her hind legs, flaring her wings wide to preserve balance as she continued to keep up a firm, accurate firing grip with both talons, managing to take eight dry-fire practice shots before she had to return to all fours….well, no actually, three limbs. She cushioned the fall with her left forelimb, and kept a safe, solid grip on Grayhawk as she began to emit a pleasant, purring sound from her throat. Grayhawk flipped around in her grasp until it was turned around and being held by the frame and cylinder, with the barrel pointed down and the grip held out towards Sling. “We are officially best friends forever!” Ada squealed in sheer delight. “….or until next Wednesday. I wanna shoot it someday.” Sling’s dumbstruck mind could only think to retake possession of the revolver with a gentle pull, surprised at how willing the griffon was to let go of it considering her girlish freak-out over just the sight of it…. …and said the worst thing she could have said. “….s-sure….someday….” With a final, exasperated shriek of joy, the griffon happily excused herself from the room and bounded back down the hallway, leaving two utterly confused and slightly terrified ponies in her wake. “….M-Mom…is it too late to reconsider staying behind?”