//------------------------------// // Hook // Story: Fallout Equestria: Foreshadow // by NitoKa //------------------------------// Fallout Equestria: Foreshadow Chapter 1: Hook “The pen might be mightier than the sword, but I’ll bet a gun blows both of those out of the water.” It is at night, especially when the moon is gibbous and waning, that I see the thing. I tried morphine; but the drug has given only transient surcease, and has drawn me into its clutches as a hopeless slave. So now I am to end it all, having written a full account for the information of the contemptuous amusement of my fellow-stallion. Often I ask myself if it could not have been a pure phantasm – a mere freak of fever as I lay sun stricken and raving in the open boat after my escape from the Germane mare-of-war. This I ask myself, but ever does there come before me a hideously vivid vision in reply. I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of the day when they may rise about the water to sink their talons into the remnants of ponykind – of a day when the land shall sink and the dark ocean floor will then arise as the top power The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as if something is throwing its detestable slimy, slippery body at it. It shall not find me. Celestia, that hand! The window! The window! ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I smiled gently as I closed the book in front of me. Dagon, one of my favorite short stories by a mistress of horror, Hanging Peril, was finished for what had to have been the hundredth time in my life. Oh how I wish Hanging Peril was still alive, to give me pointers and notes on how to write the suspense in such a style as if it were a journal. But alas, even before the world exploded she had passed away. Suicide, befitting considering how many of her protagonists had decided to end their lives. I looked about the old library I resided in, many of the books burnt and toasted, those ones organized onto the west shelves, as I had done with my time here. The usable and readable ones have occupied the east shelves, though I wish they occupied more than just half of them. I picked up the large book where I kept my favorite author’s collection of stories in and set it back into my saddle bags. The dusty smell of books preceded the smell of death and decay that this place held, though I chose to live here, so I suppose I can never truly complain about it. As I picked up and set a few more books on my back, I trotted, despairingly, to the west shelves. My hoof steps were never as steady as to I could carry more than three or four books on my back at one time, as this showed to the dust and the air when the books fell from under me. I silently cursed as I bent down to pick them up, my glasses falling down off my face, into the pile of burnt and ruined texts beneath me. I could see fine without them, just not read fine. I quickly picked up the books and placed them in my bags as well, then moving to establish my glasses to their rightful place, my muzzle . My endeavor paid off as I set the books to their rightful places, the collection of the lost texts I preferred to refer to as a graveyard. Not just a graveyard to the books, but to the stories and information they once held. Every character, real or fictional within those pages had some form of life, and had been enjoyed by one person or another at one time, even if that time was centuries ago. I had to at least give them some form of rite, something that I think the books, if they could speak, would say thank you. “Yo, Bookworm! You gonna come out and chat or you gonna stay in there and collect dust?” A familiar feminine voice said to me from out into the lobby of my bountiful home. “Can’t I do both?” I chuckled quietly as I trotted my black and white scarf fluttering as I did so. I moved past the door and was immediately assaulted with a barrage of tickles. As my eyes teared up and my lungs ran out of air to laugh with I returned fire, attacking the leafy colored filly above me, her beige mane waving back and forth as she laughed. “Hahaha! I-I give! Cut it- hahaha- out!” The filly said past her efforts to get off me. I stopped my tickling and she hopped off. “Geez Page, you’re not supposed to win against a filly! Didn’t your mother ever teach you manners?” “Oh hush Fauna; you knew what you were getting into coming into my turf.” I smirked and rustled her mane. “So what’s up kid, didn't your dad tell you to stop coming here and annoying the weirdo hermit book stallion?” I ask, adjusting my glasses. “Well yeah he did tell me that. He didn’t say anything about coming here and having fun with the weirdo hermit book stallion.” She stuck her tongue out at me, to which I bopped her on the head lightly. “Listen to him sometimes, dummy.” I gave her a frown and then changed it to a smile after a second. “But I’m pretty glad you seem to rate me that high up there.” I say before hugging her softly. She returned the hug then moved over to the bags she must have brought with her for the trip. Between Fauna’s town and my library, it’s about a four hour trek through some pretty bad urban landscape, with raiders and manticores abound. My area is a bit hidden, and by that I mean in a hole. The library I reside in was something of a test by Stable Tech from before the war, just some basic testing of if they could make large areas inside of the ground, primitive stuff in comparison to Stables. But after they finished, the city bought up the land and used it to make their public library inside. Outside the entrance, there used to be a sign before I had arrived. After finding out about what was in here and being ridiculously amazed at the fact there were so many books down here, I setup my home and took down the sign. Then I put up my own sign, one that warns about rads, on the front door. It’s just to deter some ponies from coming in here to search for salvage and the like. Sometimes it doesn’t work and I have to defend my home, but that’s to be expected for someone who doesn’t live in normal society nowadays. “I brought something for you!” She says, wiggling her flank a bit as she digs through her packs, her cutie mark of what appeared to be a potted fern moving in time with her flank. She arises and turns to show me what looks to be a book. The corners of my mouth tilt upwards in pleasure and happiness as I moved and grabbed the book softly from her. Reading the cover I couldn’t believe my eyes. “The Sanwich Horror!” I was positively giddy as I jumped up and down. I moved and swept the filly up in a huge hug that must have been too tight seeing as had she squirmed in my grip. “Thank you thank you thank you!” I said to her. She weakly managed to get a hoof out from my grip and pat me on the back. “No problem, can you let me go?” She asked as I blushed in embarrassment, letting her go. “Sorry.” “Like I said no problem. I found that on one of the town’s scavenging missions.” She smiled, but inwardly, my heart sank. “The answer is still no Fauna.” I said, my face turned from its previously happy state to a colder one. “What?! But come on Page! You’d be a lot safer if you just came and joined the town! I’ve been trying and even my dad seems fine with letting you stay with us until we work out a job for you there!” She pleads as I take the book and set it on the front desk, a ruined husk of a terminal near it. “I don’t want to go and live in your town Fauna, we’ve talked about this. I prefer living here, with the books.” I said, sitting down in the cut up chair behind the desk. The filly huffed a bit and shook her head, continuing an argument we’ve had for a long time now, at least a whole year, since she and her father found me. “Page Turner! Do you know how crazy that sounds? They’re just books! We can make trips back and forth to bring all of them back to us! You could let the town read them!” She took on a tone that for a filly as young as she was, she shouldn’t be able to, the tone of a mother scolding their child. “No! I’m happy here Fauna! I go out and barter with the traders every so often, scavenge off of what the manticores or raiders leave, I have a normal living here, I am just fine with where I am now!” I growl, starting to get mad as she had insulted the books. Nopony seems to care about them as much as I do. No one understands that they aren’t just books; they have a soul, a soul that can die as soon as you can no longer look at it. “You might be happy here, but for how long Page? How long before you wind up staring down the barrel of a shotgun of a raider gang just stupid enough to come into a place that says it’s irradiated?” She points out. I cringe a bit and move to touch the missing chunk of flesh near my right ear, I had lost it in a firefight with pretty much what Fauna just described, a couple of idiot ponies who wanted to get some loot and didn’t care how glowing they became. I managed to kill them off and thankfully they were the only ones who knew that they were going there. I left the bodies out in the streets for the manticores to pick off what was left of them. “Yeah I see you touching that, Page. How long before the rest of your head is like that ear?” “I-I… I don’t know. But I can defend myself! I’m a smart pony!” “Smart ponies don’t cut themselves off from everything that can make them safe.” The filly moves closer to me as I sigh and hold my head. “I just can’t Fauna; I just don’t feel comfortable around a lot of ponies at once.” I explain to her for what had to be the fifth time since she brought this up. “Fifty. We have around fifty ponies in our town Page, and usually half of them are out scavenging or working. We could even find some sort of easy job for you, maybe a records keeper or a medical assistant.” She says to me. “I want you to be safe. I really care for you Page, You were a nice pony when we met, and you still are. My dad says it’s hard to find nice ponies in the world now, so we need to take all we can get.” “Your father’s a wise stallion.” I smirk a bit and chuckle. “It’s a long trip back… I could rig up the security for a bit.” I say to Fauna, who slowly gains a smile. “So you’re really-“ “One week. I’ll stay for a week. If you all find me a job I’m comfortable with doing, I’ll consider it more than what I’ve done before.” I rustle her mane again. “Let me just pack up some things and say my goodbyes.” I say to her, getting up and trotting towards the back again, Fauna in tow as she followed me. “Oh yeah! Before I forget and we’re already too far away, Splint wanted to borrow the umm, what was the name? Medical, Ectopleadah?” She struggles over some words, making me wonder if this really is the same filly that just convinced me to come out of hermitage for a week. “Medical Encyclopedia, I assume Splints wanted the one specifically about Ponies?” I ask her, moving to the East shelves and searching through the letters. “Yup! We found a group of ponies a few days back. A family actually. All pegasi, Dashites, a few bumps and bruises, but it’s been awhile since Splints fixed up anypony with wings.” I nodded as I selected the medical journal I had set, placed perfectly in alphabetical order, right next to the ones on Gryphons and then Minotaurs. “Alrighty, is that all?” I ask her, she nods happily. “Good. I’ll just get some food and we can-“ The words start to stick in my throat. “Go.” I managed to get out after a few moments, the reality of what was happening washing over me. I shook my head, trying to focus on other things, moving to collect up some food and water I had ready for scavenging missions. I threw it into my bags and looked to the filly, or perhaps I should say looked for the filly. I found her jumping up and down in the front lobby, waiting for me to come and join her on her way home. As I joined her she bounded off up the stairs that led into my library, causing me to chuckle and run up as best as I could behind her. Beside me, hanging from a loop on my backs was a bronze sculpture of a pen, sharpen to a tip. I had found it long ago, and managed to keep it sharp and usable in a pinch. I liked to call it Inktip, but the only ink it ever saw would be blood. As I trotted out and looked to the setting sun, then to the green filly I could call a friend, I thought for just one moment that everything would be alright. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “… And then one time Glimmer made a weird magic barrier and used it to play ball with us, but he launched the ball all the way onto a pony’s house. So they had me climb up there and take it down, I got yelled at for doing it later, but it was fun to play with the colts after that.” Fauna finished telling her twelfth story as we started to get out of the cityscape. We had a few close calls with some roving raiders and the occasional manticore, but we both knew how to keep our heads low and our voices quiet when we needed to. The scenery started to change as we trotted, high rise crumbled buildings gave way to smaller ones, perhaps the highest being a hotel only 6 stories. I knew night was coming, but we needed to get to the town, as Fauna’s father would be so worried about his foal that he might try to go out and find her. Then maybe even kill me when he finds out she had spent all of her time trying to convince me to come for only a week. “Hey Page?” Fauna began poking my flanks. “You haven’t spoken much! Why don’t you tell a story for once instead of me?” She smiled. I gave a brief cough and a chuckle. “Well I’m not sure what to tell about.” I gave a small excuse, knowing full well I could make up a story on the spot for the filly. “Well what about how you got your cutie mark?” She asks which makes me sigh overdramatically. “I’ve told you that story before!” I said, smirking a bit, just the tiniest hint of a smile. “Well I want to hear it again, but this time, with more feeling!” She giggles a bit, making me regret ever lending her that book 101 Plays To Perform. “Ugh fine! Well, when I was a little colt, my parents took me out on their scavenging missions every so often. I usually stayed with one of them and hid when things got too dicey, so I didn’t explore much.” I paused my story as we passed by someplace I would have to visit sometime, a book store. “Okay so, this one special mission I was with my mom, and she had found a bunch of mole rats! She told me to go hide in a closet or something until she had killed all of them. So I did, but the was filled with a multitude of things. I might still be a blank flank it it weren’t for the-” “Pens, Paper, and a little peek hole for you to look through!” Fauna exclaimed. “Well since you know all about the story, I guess I don’t need to continue.” I give a brief chuckle and trot ahead of her, as she had stopped with her mouth open. “Hey! No fair! I just wanted to get that part out of the way; you always make it too dramatic!” “You’ve heard it a few times now anyways, I don’t want to bore you.” I said, turning to her and smirking . “Aw come on! I wanna hear the rest Page!” She said before stomping her hooves. “Yeah, come on. Might be a nice story.” I heard the click of a gun behind my head as an unfamiliar voice said those words. “Probably the last story you’ll ever tell.” --------------------------------------------------------------------- Tag Skills: Medicine, Science, Explosives Traits: Four Eyes: You need something to help you see! +1 to PER when wearing Glasses, but -1 to PER when you are not Socially Inept: You’ve spent all your time by yourself, giving you more time to learn your skills better! +10 to your Tagged Skills, but -1 to CHA and -10 to Speech and Barter. Author’s Notes: I would like to thank KKat for creating the Fallout Equestria universe, SwimmingEagle and InkSplash for inspiring me to write this. Thanks guys, your works are awesome