The day Equestria died
“If anything could save us from madness, it's uncertain.”
- a crazed zebra
An old zebra stallion stood alone his shabby apartment room. He stared out out of his window onto the city of Moscva, while listening to a small radio scanner. Suddenly the radio chatter picked up. He picked up a headset, turning a small gem on the device trying to clean up the static from the signal. He listened for a moment before throwing off his headset. In a frenzied panic he quickly threw on a saddle already heavily laden with survival supplies.
He ran out of his room abandoning all other possessions making his way down a few flights of stairs. The building was old and rather run down. The plaster had in many places had large pot marks and aged a sickly yellow. It was a slum building, only inhabited by the very poor. So it came to no surprise to him to see a vagrant mare gently soothing an infant foal wrapped in blankets camped outside the stairwell.
At first he ran past her not paying any attention, then over a pang of guilt he stopped for a moment. He turned to warn her, “get to a shelter, their gonna drop the bombs!” The mare only hugged her foal protectively glaring at him. He must have seemed mad to her, but he didn't stop to further convince her.
He burst onto the street below, he intended to find refuge in the metro system. An entrance was only a few blocks away. He felt a sense of guilt, like with this knowledge was some great responsibility. It forced him to scream at all passerby’s. That they needed to get to a shelter, make way to the metro.
They ignored him. It didn't help his message that a nearby preacher was fervently shouting nearby, “...from ursa minor, to ursa major. We are all in very grave danger.”
Suddenly a loud air raid siren sounded. The long, loud cry seemed to freeze everything within the city. The siren slowly died and thus its power did as well. Immediately there was mass panic. As all the zebra in the city turned into a massive, screaming, stampede. All, save for the street preacher, who stood up crying out in almost rapturous pleasure. “ARMAGEDDON! HAHA! ARMAGEDDON!”
The old zebra tried to continue his gallop, but with his failing health he was unable to get anywhere near the metro before a large crowd formed around the entrance. He feebly pushed his way into the panicking crowd. Some of the zebra noticed his full saddle bags. They mobbed him, grabbing at his saddle ripping the bags off. His efforts to defend himself and his supplies only resulted in him getting trampled.
A stallion zebra wearing an army uniform stood before a set of heavy iron barred doors. The right side of his uniform was heavily decorated with medals proclaiming honer and acts of valor on the field of battle, proclaiming him a centurion. Standing next to him was small troop of six soldiers ready to follow their leaders orders.
Originally the metro didn't close or house soldiers, but as the Equestrian war progressed the metro systems where considered sites of possible enemy infiltration. The metro began to be shut down during the night, patrolled by armed services. On this day, orders were passed down from the local senate to have the metro closed, the city on it highest alert, everything short of declaring marshal law. Then, only moments ago new orders came through.
The centurion was fighting with himself, listening to his ear-bloom. He couldn't show panic in front of his fellow soldiers. Fighting his urge to abandon his post, grab his elderly parents, friends, anyone and rush them to safety, but a cold logical reason prevented him. The bastards higher on up were aware all their troops would be tempted to rush loved ones to safety, so they gave them as little warning as physically possible.
He had to hide all his traces of fear and panic, he had to be a source of order and stability in the face of chaos. The chaos that will be charging in, as the order rang through his ear-bloom that the air raid siren just sounded.
“Open the doors!” he ordered then stood back along the wall. He pulled out a watch and looked down at the timer. Past drills had shown how long it took to shut the doors after the final warning was sounded, and he intended to make every second count. As soon as the doors opened slightly, the three soldiers on either door fought to keep themselves from being crushed by the stampede of zebras. They pushed themselves in, diving down the stairs into the metro below.
The centurion and his soldiers maintained their discipline, holding their post along the doors. He continued to listen to his ear-bloom. “Equestrians are retaliating, Roam has gone silent, advise to all forces to begin sealing shelters!” This was it, that was order. He looked up to the very large crowd that has only now managed to gather around the entrance. He looked down at his watch counting down. He could only give these poor souls another forty five seconds.
He avoided looking into the eyes of the crowd. Instead he looked to his soldiers covertly signaling them that in a moment they'd have to force the doors close and run for their lives. He looked down again to his watch 5...4...3...2...1...“Close the gate,” he said. His soldiers could barely hear the order over the screaming of the crowd, making out the order from watching his mouth.
The soldiers immediately threw themselves into the door slamming it into the zebras trying to force their way into the station. A mare at the front of the mob was trying for force an infant foal wrapped in a cloth through the half closed door. The centurion could feel his heart tear in two. If his troops let up on their momentum they'd never be able close the doors, possibly dooming all the zebras they'd just saved, however the foal fit through the crack. Seeing the opportunity, he made up his mind. He grabbed the foal from his mother's outstretched forehooves. The mare's face lit up for a moment but then turned to utter panic as the doors continued to close.
She shrieked hysterically as the doors closed, “No! Khonvoum… no my baby!” The soldiers quickly dropped the bar in place sealing the door, before all of them turned and began running down the stairs into the metro. He only made it halfway down the stairs with the foal cradled in his hooves when the screams outside intensified for a moment before being silenced with an intense wave of heat radiating from the door above.
The metro system of Moscva was an engineering marvel of the zebra people. Built out of the advancement brought by the early contact with the ponies of equestria, the metro system was actually a product of earth pony design. The massive mass transportation system helped industrialize the once agrarian city making it the economic rival of the capital Roam. However when war broke out the metro was changed, it still served it's primary purpose, but the underground nature made it a natural shelter from pegasi raids.
The stations were expanded into bomb and fallout shelters, massive stockpiles of vitamins and medicine were stored inside these station-shelters. Self sustained water filters were installed along with green rooms with UV lights to grow crops, geothermal heating and power were all built under the stations. Throughout the course of the war it became the worlds largest bomb and fallout shelter, now home some forty thousand survivors.
However not all stations were created equal. Many early on had experienced water filtration failures or some other critical life sustaining equipment break. Some stations had zebras with the technical expertise and tools to fix and maintain their stations, others did not. Those unfortunate had to flee to other better stations and hope they wouldn't be rejected for fear of overcrowding. Some stations had more societal problems.
Almost in all stations had angry civilians who've lost everything far out numbered the soldiers and officers who were blamed for the apocalypse. In such cases, a lynching often soon followed. The ingrained tribal nature of Zebra seemed to win out over the past half century of cultural innovations as all notions of government and unified people dissolved immediately. The stations fell into individual city states.
However within the following year alliances and unions began to form between the stations. The first to rise was a trading union forming along the outer ring of metro system. It started out as three adjacent stations, but they were soon motivated by prospect of wealth that would be brought if all the stations along the ring joined. This became their original and still driving goal of the traders who began to refer to themselves as the Trade Guild.
Their spread to the other stations was normally peaceful, and helped along with the traders themselves as they would migrate into the targeted stations planting the seeds of the guild. Of course some stations outright rejected them, but by the time the guild controlled nine stations, they formed a well armed and supplied military force that pacified resistance, for the good of all the metro citizens of course.
They were not without rivals. Near the southern edge of the ring a powerful idea emerged between a station and its two horizontal stations before it. The Camaraderie, a dictatorship of administrators who gathered all supplies and redistributed it back to population by what they considered to be a fair portion. All members of the stations were conscripted into labor forces yielding great amounts of food and security for its population, so long as they submitted to the absolute authority of the administrators. This powerful group forcefully spread north, seeming to creating a line on the map of the metro.
The growth of the two major factions continued until the fifth year. The Camaraderie did also spread to its adjacent stations along the southern ring. The guild was diplomatic at first, both factions were aware of each other and planned for the their inevitable clash. The guild's motivations were purely profit and opportunity while the Camaraderie was an ideology hellbent on control. The guild build bunkers around the Camaraderie southern stations. While the factions were sizing each other up, the war broke out on the northern ring when the Camaraderie line finally clashed.
Neither side truly had vast resources needed for a war. The guild was better equipped while the Camaraderie had more equines, yet Moscva's zebras were faced with both a looming population and resource crises having being forced to live underground. So the war was fought with small raiding parties, terror attacks, unconventional warfare as these were like a zebra's second nature. Ultimately though it was a stalemate. One side would raid, often failing to gain any ground, and if they did, it was impossible to hold before a counterattack drove the attacker back.
Once the guild managed to capture the western south station, putting them dangerously near the founding station of the line. The Camaraderie responded sending waves of zebra, first the elderly, the sickly and weak as meat shields armed with only crude clubs. The tactic worked as the guild forces ran low on ammunition and had to retreat as armed comrade forces retook the station.
The bloody stalemate lasted six years. It slowed down at times due to population shortages but hostilities ended when a new threat emerged. At a western station around the outskirts of the metro system, well past the trade guild ring. There was no warning as huge tailless rodent like creatures invaded. They looked similar to rats, except they were a little bigger than your average zebra. Almost all of them had no visible hair, showing off their light pinkish skin covered in small tumors or patchy malformed flesh, only the ones that did have visible hairs where larger and obviously a more muscular build. They came pouring in the thousands from a line that continued well out of the city and into the countryside.
The denizens of the station stood no chance, hardly any of them managed to get out of their tents or hovels before the swarm flooded in drawn by the scent of zebra flesh. A group of zebras lucky enough to be near a motorized rail car were able to escape before being consumed by the horde. The next connected station was soon lost as well. The little warning they got from the zebras speeding through on the rail car was too little too late for these poor souls. The few residents that were able to even grab a weapon did little to stem the flood of mutants before being washed away. The residents of the metro may have faced extinction that day, as that last station connected to a guild station the lead in the metro proper.
The rail car crashed into the guild station with it's riders raving and claiming for the residents to take up arms. The war with Camaraderie had forged the Guild. They had improvised the ultimate weapon in the metro, and the warning prompted them to use their super weapon. A large pressure washer was pointed down the tunnel as the cries of the swarm approached. The pump was refitted to spray a large stream of fossil fuel, with a flaming munition gem welded to the barrel.
The improv flame thrower worked perfectly. Tongues of flame shot down the tunnel incinerating hundreds of mutant swarms. High pitched squeals filled the station as the swarm slowly died. Zebras maintained their title as the worlds supreme killers that day.
That wasn't the last of the rat creatures now commonly referred to as nosalis. They began to infiltrate the metro system. Some inner stations had been over run turning into breeding grounds. Those stations either had to be burned out or the surrounding tunnels collapsed sealing the threat away.
Such extreme measures were unpopular when employed. Not only was it the loss of space and resources, but the metro was fast facing a new problem, flooding. Radioactive rain water as well as natural ground water constantly seeped into the metro. A combination of pumps and old drainage pipes ran through the metro. Sealing in any station ran the risk of redirecting the flow of water into inhabited areas.
With the mounting problems the two factions declared a truce and diplomacy was enacted. The Camaraderie surrendered the two station along the ring but still maintaining the founding ring station. The guild also surrendered the north ring station, making the Camaraderie line complete. However, the stations along the ring were co-controlled. A small armed guild presence, an embassy was allowed at both ring stations ensuring free passage of traders through controlled parts of the stations. So the guilds dream of passage through the ring of the metro were finally realized, and zealously guarded to this day.
Another constant power present in the metro lay slightly left of the metro center. Three stations that lay underneath the Moscva University, the nearby military academy and the nearby great library. These three stations quickly united, being greatly composed of the zebra military and academic elite they managed to stave off the worst of the post-megaspell horrors. They called their station union the Civitatem, the last known bastion of zebra civilization. It's military refers to themselves as the Spartan order.
Although smaller in numbers, a combination of well maintained old world equipment and training, their operatives, or ‘Spartans’ were a fearsome force to be reckoned with. The Civitatem managed to stay mostly neutral during the Guild-Camaraderie war, focused only preserving whatever old world knowledge they could.
Lastly a new but growing power was growing north of the Civitatem, drawing members from among the independent stations, the Purists. Its founding philosophy dates long before the war the with the ponies of Equestria. It began in days when the zebra tribes were first united into the republic. The most prominent tribe the Roamani, self convinced of their own superiority formed a minor but notorious political movement against tribal unification. Under Caesar's command the group was considered illegal and it’s members to be exterminated after the brutal murder of a member of the senate.
The government was never successful in completely removing them, they remained quietly in the backgrounds, mostly recruiting members of the poor, the desperate and the disenfranchised. It seemed with the fall of civilization granted them the opportunity they needed to truly thrive. As mutants began appearing, first as zombie ghouls, then deformed babies, and finally mutant monsters began pouring into the metro. Their ideals changed to that that of a personal calling. To becoming warriors-knights who mission in life was preserve the purity of the zebra people against mutations. At the end of the world, the Purists movement finally began gaining momentum.
Some twenty years after the megaspells rained. A lone stallion climbed up a long set of stairs leading up onto the surface. His face and muzzle were completely concealed inside a steel gas mask, with the glass holes for his eyes being darkly tinted. He wore a full body suit that loosely hung on him obscuring his physic. The suit was made of a combination of rubbers and plastics with small squares machine printed the shades of gray giving him urban camouflage. He wore a saddle with the same camouflage, laden lightly with gear with a few more bags strapped across his chest. The saddle also had two large gun barrels strapped to either side under his bags.
The soft regular sucking of air could be heard as he climbed up the stairs. His breath was pushed out of a valve on the side of his muzzle. It condensed creating a small thin vapor cloud that form around him as he labored up the stairs. He felt oddly nostalgic here along with the normal nervous sensation of going onto the surface. Like he had been here before. He came upon an iron door, grunting heavily before turning to buck the rusted bar, forcing the door open. He walked out and look upon the scorched city of Moscva.
P.S. This story is inspired by the works of Fallout Equestria by Kkat (link) and Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky (link). All intellectual property of “My Little Pony” and “Metro 2033” respectively belong to Hasbro, 4A games, Deep Silver and respective owners.
P.P.S. Special thanks for expanded lore form Somber’s Project Horizens (link)
P.P.P.S Sorry for the rewrite of the Purists origins and changing of titles to better fit in with established lore, if anyone would like to help with editing please message me, as I’m sure it will help with the rate that I upload and reduce my “retcons”