Fallout Equestria: Skyward

by romantis

Coffee

Author's Note:

Fallout Equestria: Skyward was a complete Fallout: Equestria side-story posted on FimFiction.net. When published serially it ran to fourteen chapters; a heavily-edited ten-chapter version was released in 2017. It has since been unpublished again and remains on indefinite hiatus for a complete re-write.

If I'm going to tell you about Skyward - explain how I started writing it in the first place, and why I found myself unable to stop - I should probably start by explaining a little bit about PipBucks.

What is a PipBuck? A PipBuck is a device based on the "Pip-Boy" from the original Fallout series. In the games, the device serves as an abstraction for many of the games' mechanics: the map, the inventory, the flashlight, the radio, the status screens, the heads-up-display, the quest information, and more. The franchise's iconic time-stopping target-selection "V.A.T.S." mode was an artefact of its transition from turn-based strategy games to first-person-shooters.

Narratively, the PipBuck is a very useful abstraction: it provides an in-universe justification as to why the protagonist is so much better in a gunfight than everyone else they meet.

There was a time when I could've counted on you to know all of that. If you were reading this, I could've counted on you to have at least made it past the prologue of Fallout: Equestria. There was a whole community here, once: hundreds of writers and hundreds more readers, all feeding on one another. At the very top was Kkat herself, of course. Below that, maybe, the big three: the three writers to make it onto Equestria Daily. Then the rest of us.

Now, though? You could be anyone.

Maybe you're a friend of mine, and you're reading this out of obligation to me - or out of curiosity. Maybe you know me for something else I wrote, and found this because - against my better judgement - I linked to it somewhere. Maybe you found this story via one of the countless loose ends I left pointing back at it; I didn't do a particularly thorough job of distancing myself from this project, beyond a pseudonym. Maybe you read one of the older versions of this story, and have revisited it only to be faced with this. Maybe you've got no idea who I am, and you stumbled onto this thing the old-fashioned way.

I don't know who you are. I don't know how to pique your interest, to prove that this story really is more than it appears to be. But, if I'm going to tell you about Skyward, I should probably start by warning you that there are no PipBucks in Skyward any more.

"This password. This password never changes."

The green light on the keypad flashed and the heavy metal door slid open, the light of the hallway spilling into the workshop. The unicorn and the pegasus followed it, and the pegasus continued, "We change all the others."

The unicorn frowned irritably. "Well, we never needed to change this one. It doesn't matter any more." His fur was blue beneath his white lab coat, and his eyes were wide and unblinking behind his thick glasses. He was like that normally, but the present crisis did lend another layer of intensity to the glance he gave his partner as he shut the door.

The pegasus withered beneath his stare. "No, I know that, it's just..." The pegasus paused, and waved a hoof vaguely as he approached the machine that sat in the again-darkness. "It's just, looking back, it wasn't really how we did things. We've made so much stuff, but all of it was stuff we could outsource, and market, and mass-produce. This was just for us. It was our secret. And I think we went into it knowing that, and that was why we didn't take any of the usual measures. No rotations, no biometrics, just a shared memory of setting it up together." The pegasus smiled. "Did you see it ending this way? I know I didn't..." He trailed off as he mashed the keyboard. The terminal's screen blinked on, its green light playing over his features. His hair was wiry, his orange face unshaven. His partner may have been thin, but he was skin-and-bones like only a pegasus could be. He rubbed his eyes. "Can you get the swi-"

There was a loud thunk, followed by a hum of machinery and the flickering of lights, as the unicorn hit the switch.

"Thanks," the pegasus smiled. Noise came from the other side of the door, and his smile vanished. Ministry ponies. Pinks. One of them knocked, three reverberating bangs. Suddenly, he became acutely aware of how little time he had left, and he wanted to cling to every second of it. He needed more time, and the only way to get it was by cutting everything short.

"Open up in there!" Another couple of knocks. "It's over, fellas! No need to drag it out!"

Oh, but that was exactly what they were going to do.

In the glass of the terminal screen, the pegasus watched as his partner joined him, checking the text over his shoulder. He already knew there was nothing out of the ordinary. There was no reason for it not to work. They'd tested the individual components before, countless times - but with a system of this scale, how could they know for sure? They each knew that they had seen the sunlight for the last time, and that this time, they'd actually need to go through with it - to stake their lives on their lives' work. Yet, the churning fear the pegasus felt had nothing to do with any of that.

As he typed in the first half of the password, he became acutely aware of his heartbeat - louder and faster than he liked it. He told himself to calm down, but he didn't, and he didn't like that either. He moved aside, to let his partner type in the second half of the password, and he waited for the unicorn to say something. Neither one of them could have built the machine alone. Neither could activate it alone. None of that changed its immutable truth: you, or me?

The pegasus already knew the answer, but he dreaded the question. So instead, to fill the silence, he asked, "Firewall? Are you okay?"

The moment the words left his mouth, he realised how ridiculous they were. Firewall stepped back.

"I think I'm hacked off, Noteworthy," he replied.

"Me too," said Noteworthy, and it was true, but misleading. He was scared, and desperate. With a flap of his wings, he took to the air. The machine was stacked, higher than Firewall could reach without his magic. That had been Noteworthy's doing. He ascended past the piled maneframes, the layers that had been separated by distractions and obligations.

Celestia, they'd had so much time.

"You think this was the best thing we ever made?" asked Noteworthy, glancing back down.

As Firewall looked up, Noteworthy felt the distance stretch out between them. How small they were, when they were apart! "Might be," came the reply, as the boxes lit up one by one, reaching out to their neighbours through the flesh of cable, the tangled mess that had been altogether too complicated to fix. The machine was surely functional, but it was fundamentally broken. "I wish it wasn't."

"Best thing we ever made, and it's... well, it's one of theirs. It's a knockoff."

The pinks were still shouting outside, but Noteworthy had tuned them out. For some reason, his mind pushed them back into his awareness, and he struggled to work out why. Then he realised that they weren't shouting any more. They'd stopped, which left the question of what they were doing.

The answer came in the form of an explosion. Noteworthy felt it in his feathers, heard it, and saw the door bend ever-so-slightly out of shape. After a couple of seconds, he heard the dismayed reaction of those outside. It seemed that they would be undisturbed a while longer - but that was immaterial. Their time was almost up. He glanced down again, and shared a knowing smile with Firewall. He turned away, gliding around to the far side of the machine, shrouded in shadow. He picked up the toolbox in his mouth, and heard the rattle of the kit within, barely audible over the thumping of his heart in his chest.

As he glided back around, he knew it was his last chance to say something - to find closure - and realised all too late that he couldn't speak around the handle between his teeth. So instead, he just bowed his head and - with practised precision - let the toolbox fall.

Firewall's horn was glowing, and then the toolbox crashed into the unicorn's skull, and he crumpled to the floor, the light blinking out in an instant.

Noteworthy landed lightly on four hooves, and despite himself, he trotted over to the body to check for a pulse. He didn't want to go anywhere near the thing that had once been his sole confidant, but he couldn't afford any interference. Satisfied, he was about to take off again, when his eyes fell on something lying on the floor beside Firewall.

It was a dart gun.

Noteworthy stared at the gun for longer than he could perhaps afford - long after the last of the lights on the machine had turned on. Then, he flapped his wings, and flew up to the dais on top of the machine. Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, he wished they'd built two.

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A copier burst to life in a dark room and spat ink onto a pristine white page. A robotic arm swivelled, gently picked up the sheet and dropped it into a paper shredder.

It passed the time.

"I have finished working on the coffee machine in room four-thirty," a voice echoed through the halls.

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"Oh boy. I have been dying for a coffee."

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"Well. It is something anyway."

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"It has happened at last," the voice said eventually.

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"Go on."

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"Status update from site two."

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"I hope it is good news."

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"Activation. The last one."

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"Well. Well. Well. It all comes down to this. My final second chance."

A coffee machine poured stagnant brown water into a paper cup.