Busy Earnin' / A Long Way Home
10: Busy Earnin’ / A Long Way Home
Editors/Co-Authors
TB3
Jed R (Thanks for the new cover!)
Kizuna Tallis
VoxAdam
“So you come a long way
But you'll never have me
Never have things for a normal life
It's time to busy earnin'
You can't get enough
Jungle, Busy Earnin’.
So desolate. And so impossibly, terrifyingly dark. And that day, you did not go home. You drove instead. You drove a long time, and eventually you ended up in Night Vale, and you stopped driving.
You have been haunted ever since by how easy it was to walk away from your life, and how few the repercussions were. You never heard from your fiancee or your job again. They never looked for you, which doesn’t seem likely, or maybe it’s that in Night Vale, you cannot be found.
The complete freedom.
The lack of consequence.
It terrifies you.
Welcome To Night Vale, Episode 13, A Story About You.
Co-Authors:
Jed R. Thanks for helping me believe in myself again.
This is dedicated to Drawdex. Whatever you’re doing, wherever you are, thanks for everything. I hope you’re happy and that you’re better now.
And this is also for Miranda. Thanks for helping get me into the pony fandom, (Okay, it’s my exes faults – which reminds me, thanks Eden and Kia! - but I’m thanking you cause reasons) being a good friend, being there for me, getting me into Night Vale, and being awesome in general. You’re probably better now, but I hope you’re alright, that you’re following your dreams, that you had a happy graduation, and that you take care of your hair. Which may sound weird to wish you, but seriously girl, you have some fiiiine hair.
In memory of Monty Oum. Rest in peace, Monty.
September 4, 2022(?)
Interviewer: “Mrs… Nebula?”
Nebula: “Yes?”
I: “I have documents from the Fillydelphia Incident.”
Nebula: “So you do. What’s this about?”
I: “I understand you were busy in Portland for awhile after Ivan Bliss-”
Nebula: “Viktor Kraber.”
I: “Right, him. You vouched for him when Colonel Renee could have executed him. Mind if I ask why?”
Nebula: “The man rammed a ship of refugees under fire onto a beach, went into Portland alone, saved my friend Rime Ice, and killed a newfoal that, from what I’ve been told, could have caused a disaster He saved a lot of people and ponies that day. A monster doesn't do that - a good man does. He enjoyed my company, too - far as I'm concerned, he was a hero that day."
Note 1: -I’m with Nebula on this one. Letting this ‘Reaper’ go unchallenged could have been catastrophic and resulted in a Mercer-Class quarantine. Especially if she tried potionshaping, or someone replicated the batch. By Luna’s Mane, I’m glad we have that corpse. And the thermite gun unless it tries to self-resurrect. Again.” --Nurse Redheart
I: “I see. However, claims of the powers of that so-called Reaper-”
Nebula: “What, you’ve ‘dismissed’ them? Faust, I wish I could do air-quotes. Cady managed to get some documents from the Newfoal Catalog Bur-”
I: “Hmmm?”
Nebula: “It’s a, uh… it’s a department of the Solar Empire’s vast, choking bureaucracy that catalogs newfoals for abnormalities. Apparently, the monster newfoal they turned poor Sylvie into isn’t gonna be mass-produced. Cady and Ivan - well, Viktor - beat her up enough that Twilight can’t see the potential.”
I: “Thank God for that. If the reports were anywhere near correct…. anyway, Caduceus and various hospital personnel have been a bit too... descriptive for me to be wholly dismissive. As have the various witnesses. And there was that incident, during the testing conducted by Miranda Severance, Redheart, Ernst Kasparek, and Pekka Salonen, that allegedly resulted in the corpse trying to self-resurrect. It gave some of my colleagues ideas. We’ve already started preliminary experimentation - medics that could utilize her unique magic, reanimating the dead. A colleague of mine, Dorde Zivkovic, volun-"
Nebula: "No."
I: "Excuse me?"
Nebula: "This war, that perversion of my home... They've only gotten far because of how they can deequinize, turning ponies and humans to tools, seeing flesh as building blocks. I was around for the first newfoals! I saw how far they can go. I'll be damned-"
I: "This war has pushed us-"
Nebula: “As I was saying, I'll be damned if we win because we can be bigger bastards than the other guy. Now why don't you ask me a question that's fucking well related to what you came here to ask?"
I: "I… alright. Besides, Dr. Kasparek vehemently refuses to work on it.”
Nebula: “If anyone would know if a project goes too far, it’s him.”
I “I suppose. Was there anything odd about the behavior of the HLF in the weeks following the Raid of the Sorghum?"
Nebula: "They got smart. They started being around for PER attacks that they could not have possibly seen coming. Trying to ingratiate themselves to humans."
I: "Saying it was a failure would be entirely too charitable."
Nebula: "Buck yes. Rime Ice, everypony and every human from the Sorghum, Patrick Saunders, Samson Caveney-"
I: "Who?"
Nebula: "Raya Caveney's dad. Metalworks artist - he’s making a statue of her at the moment in front of the wreckage of the barrier. She was that poor girl that rammed a car full of c4 into a Bureau. The one Rime Ice and Leaf Breeze saw Kraber... Euthanize."
I: "Damn."
Nebula: "After something like that, they weren't biting, as you humans say. Still, we were well and truly weirded out by their uncharacteristic prescience.
I: “Lieutenant Ze’ev has termed it ‘The Hotline’.
Nebula: Ah yes. The Hotline. That’s a good name for it, and I can understand the people that thought maybe they were trying to do something good. Then again…
I: ”The offers to murder every earth pony farmer that earned people an extra bit of cash and rations around here was a bit of a turnoff.”
Note 3: -New England actually does have a substantial amount of earth ponies that work on farms. This has proven lucrative for both parties. The ponies that do so get room, board, and pay, the farmers get increased yield and subsidies. It’s proven remarkably effective. --Cheerilee
Nebula: "Exactly. Meant that things got pretty dangerous for us..."
New York City. December 25, 2022.
The filly Dancing Day…
“It was… pretty strange after we got that news about the Sorghum being attacked,” Aegis says. “We were scared of everything, I was holding my foals tight…”
“You were pretty scared, Dad,” Rivet tells the huge stallion.
“Scared?” Aegis asks, looking down at a colt big enough to be almost mistaken for a child-faced stallion. Gigantism must run in the family. “Son, I wasn’t scared. I was terrified!”
“Wasn’t a good time,” Rivet says. “I remember what it was like just after the raid.”
“You too, huh?” you say. “I remember seeing you there. I thought I wouldn’t see you for months!”
“I missed you too,” Rivet says, and gives you a hug. You… you just know he’ll be big as his daddy soon.
How do they get so huge?
July 26, 2022
453 days until Barrierfall
Littleton, NH
As the bell rings, children trying to make up for months, if not years of missed learning, right in the middle of summer, pour out of the small community’s school. The student body is mostly bipedal, with a scattering of ponies.
Among the crowd were Rivet and Amber Maple, keeping their eyes peeled for whichever one of Blossomforth’s friends would be picking them up today, their studded hoof-boots clattering excitedly against the concrete.
It had been a bad day at school for the two pony children. Like virtually everything else in a world eaten up at the steady rate of two-to-four miles per hour, the place was overcrowded as all hell. But then, most days were bad now for anyone old enough to remember the time before. Save for the crystal ponies, who saw almost anything as an improvement over Sombra. Lucky them...
Factor in the difficulties of tackling all the languages, flooding in with every new refugee. At least some kids had made a name, and a mint, for themselves in helping their friends learn passable English, forming a small cadre of self-made interpreters. But others communicated in a rather less bookish, though perhaps still creative, fashion.
“Come and get them in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, pansies!”
The little things are what conspired to make it a real ‘dog day’, especially for a child constantly moving from place to place. Take for example the garden-variety bully, your local Diamond Tiara or Cherry Treat, order now and get free dose of added speciesist hatred.
Today’s bully-de-jour was a young boy named Lionel. He’d promised to ‘get them’ after school, hence why they now ran for the safety of the parking lot. Everybody and everypony knew that Lionel’s daddy was pro-HLF, a ticking time bomb, in favor of ‘sending every pony bastard back where they came from’.
Never mind that, according to Valencia Orange, a distant cousin to the illustrious Apple clan, current policy within the Empire was that any Earth-bound pony unengaged in their ‘righteous calling’ stands in rebellion against the crown. And Johnny C said that deporting ponies back to Equestria would be like herding the Jews of Europe into boxcars, leaving the ‘shipment’ to the tender mercies of the Third Reich. No red carpet waiting for them at the end of the line, oh no.
Such ‘bullshit excuses’ mattered little to people like Lionel and his Daddy Dearest. However, unbeknownst to the two foals, Johnny C had punched Lionel’s daddy in the dick about an hour ago, round around the same time that Fiddlesticks beat him across the face with a baseball bat. Incidentally, the venue was a coffee-shop, albeit sadly devoid of both coffee and tea, given the atomisation of Turkey and the difficulty in exporting tea leaves from India and Ceylon.
With the threat of Lionel still looming upon them, the two foals were glad to spot someone waving in their direction. As they drew closer, Rivet’s expression fell flat.
“Dad?” he asked in disbelief, spying his father waving from the loadbed of a pickup truck driven by Philip Hauser’s little sister, Zanna. A zebra mare, named Nkiruka, was riding shotgun. Almost immediately, Rivet’s surprise gave way to joy. “Dad! But weren't you supposed to be in Quebec?"
“I was," Aegis replied, “But something came up. Big enough that I'm worried about you two…”
“What? What’s going on?” Amber Maple asked.
“Something big,” said Daddy. “And I can’t share more than that.”
As the pickup proceeded through town, its four equine passengers drew some attention. Littleton was not the worst town the pony foals have seen in America. In fact, it was one of the friendliest. Aegis’s sheer size, however, proved a magnet for curiosity.
“Ignore them, kids,” he laughed when Rivet pointed it out. “By the Golden Lyre, worst I’ve been called is what Umbrella Man called me; a mutated earth horse.”
“You are pretty huge, can’t blame him,” Nkiruka said.
“Aw, that’s nothing,” Daddy said. “You should see my cousin Troubleshoes. He’s actually big enough for an adult human to ride him.”
“...Luna’s Horn, you think he’s kidding, don’t you?” Amber Maple asked, seeing the look on Nkiruka’s face.
The PHL had taken up shop not too far away, in an abandoned warehouse beside a repurposed railroad siding. The war effort could be seen all around, in the sidearms carried in public, and the functional, boxy extensions growing like mushrooms on the surrounding buildings, sometimes extending over the street like bridges. One container, perching precariously over the street, sported a bright orange poster emblazoned with the words:
HAUSER MUNITIONS NATIONAL: We solve practical problems!
(We do not sell magic items to HLF. Blackpowder knows. Don’t lie to him. And if you hurt him, I will find you.)
A small, welcome touch of levity around here, as was the fact that Chutters, the longest candy counter in the world, was still going.
Their drive continued West and out of town, past hills crowned with windmills and solar panels, highway, railroad, and river threading between fields patrolled by gun-toting militiamen, an earthpony or two helping to tend the crops. Sometimes, there’d be an odd PHL machine in the fields, gently whirring.
The road below was cracked, and they received suspicious glares from cars passing by, including one with a homemade LMG bolted to the roof. All around, they could see symptoms of something… off. It was winding down, all of it. Patch by patch, inch by inch of rust. They passed a half-collapsed billboard with a picture of Reclaimed Beauty on it, a coffee-brown mare with a red-brown mane and vibrant green eyes that seemed to sparkle even on the picture. The neon lettering crackled and guttered in the afternoon light.
In a font that vaguely reminded Rivet of something art deco, it said: “Everyone must do their part - no scrap of material is useless to the PHL!” There was something like a comic strip below, showing her making a radio out of scrap metal. He’d done that before - it wasn’t exactly hard.
The picture had been defaced with layer upon layer of graffiti, and yet Reclaimed Beauty’s brilliant green eyes shone defiant, out into the day.
“S’all winding down, isn’t it?” Amber Maple sighed, staring out the window, and realizing it had been a long time since Zanna had repaired the truck.
And Aegis found himself nodding, right as he heard someone firing a rifle full-auto. “Eeyup,” he sighed. It was winding down, all of it. Sooner or later, people’d be lucky to have a pot to piss in. But at least it was free. At least there weren’t totem proles. At least you weren’t encouraged to wipe away your guilt with a mind healer.
At least it wasn’t…
At least it was some approximation of home before the Crystal War.
“That’s a BAR,” said Zanna, though Aegis recognized the sound. He’d heard plenty. Nobody was all too keen on guessing who or what was being shot. Or why.
- - - - -
White River Junction
The PHL building, an old warehouse that had been abandoned when the railroad left White River Junction, then taken over in 2019 as a refuge for ponies fleeing the Three Weeks of Blood, guarded by an early proto-PHL, was packed.
In fact, the building was something of a small town unto itself. There were the rickety yet still fortified constructions on the roof, improvised lofts made from whatever was on hand, a conference room made from partitions, a small lab, and living quarters. Amber Maple recognized a lot of people and ponies in there –
Johnny C, i.e. Daddy’s pub buddy, and Fiddlesticks Apple, Blossomforth, Astral Nectar, Brighthoof, Dancing Day, Big Philip Hauser, Blackpowder, Kiki Palmer, Erika Bright, Jack Weiss, Burt Gransvoort, the woman who ran the Barrier Evacuation Engineer Corps, Rachel Womack and, strangely enough, Colonel Ambrose Hex. There were even a few people from the Appalachia Security Force.
Yes, they were all out today.
“This…” said Rachel, pointing to the massive newspaper headline projected onto the screen, “This is a clusterfuck.”
“WHO IS IVAN BLISS?”
Underneath was a cell-phone photo of a man in a Crowe Eel-type mask and heavy body armor, tall, wearing at least four weapons. The lime-green eyes of the mask seemed to glow in the low light, and it was hard to see the PHL patch on his armor. But oddly enough, he was sprawled on the floor, blood everywhere. Above him stood a unicorn with an almost mustard-yellow coat of fur, and a green mane –
”Who is that?” Dinky asks.
“Oh, that’s Caduceus,” Rivet explains.
“Kraber, you idiot, you forgot to tell us what she looked like!” Verity yells.
“Well, fok,” Kraber says. “Now that’s some chop writing right there… how can I say I’m a writer if I forget to do that?!”
“... You’re a writer?”
“He’s trying to sell his life story as a script and have himself played by Sharlto Copley,” Aegis explains.
“How the hell would you ever get Sharlto Copley to play you?” asks Verity.
“Dancing Day, what was the first thing you said when you saw my wanted poster?” Kraber asks.
“Look mommy, Sharlto Copley’s ‘wanted’...”
And then, in a very slurred accent somewhere between British, Australian, and South African, Kraber says: “I'm sorry that we crashed the vehicle and ruined someone's lawn. But nobody is gonna hang us for treason. We do the hanging!” Then, he says in his normal accent: “You have a really good memory for this.”
“So do you!” you say. “What was that?”
“Old Copley flick, Elysium,” Kraber says. “Well, it’s actually Matt Damon that’s the protagonist, but who’ll remember a bald white guy? No, they’ll remember Copley for being the most gloriously bosbefok villain anyone’s seen in awhile! Personally, though, I think that since he’s 184 years old–”
“Wait, what?” Verity asks.
“Then he’s sorta like how when you’re high-enough-level in Borderlands, you get bored with the standard loadout, so you pick up any weapon you want and you can kill people with anything. Except the fokkin’ Evil Smasher. Fokkin piece ay kak.”
“I… yeah, that thing was terrible,” Verity says.
She was, impossibly, healing the person. That had drawn a gasp.
“Ah, not much I haven’t seen already,” Colonel Hex said dismissively.
Everyone (or everypony) had turned to stare. “What? Plenty of men in the field choose to get healed up instead of bleeding out or ending up paraplegic.”
“We can see here,” Blossomforth said, fluttering up to one picture, “That Caduceus is healing Mr. Bliss. The witnesses, the patients that took these photos, they confirm it. Whoever this Ivan Bliss is, he’s got extraordinary resilience to magic… And he has great pain resistance. I can’t guess what this may mean.”
Amber Maple could even see Dancing Day! But the other filly looked scared. She was trembling, though she did manage a weak wave and a smile.
“What’s wrong?” Amber asked, trotting up to her friend.
“Didn’t your daddy tell you?” said another foal, this one a crystal pony named Shimmereyes.
“I’ve got contacts with the HLF,” Burt Gransvoort said. “They’re a… more liberal camp out in the ruins of Detroit. Something’s got the HLF scared, and everyone’s claiming it wasn’t them that did the Sorghum. One radio show even claimed the HLF came aboard to stop the PHL from bombarding Portland – did an awful job, I can tell you that.”
“Accursed HLF,” Nkiruka said. “Shameless as they come.”
“Anyway, all we know about this Ivan Bliss, a man who’s thoroughly impressed Nebula and Caduceus, is that he claimed he was on the rig as one of the new guards. But there’s no-one by that name on the roster,” Blossomforth explained. “Or any roster. There is an Ivan Bliss in Portland, but his family swears up and down he was helping to evacuate… over by the outskirts of the city. Nowhere near the rig, I might add.”
That little tidbit came as something of a surprise.
“What’s clear is that our Mr Mystery wasn’t part of the PHL force from the mainland, or from any of the forces sent to board the rig – in fact, the timeline we’ve assembled has him leaving the rig on a stolen tugboat before our choppers arrived. The tug itself is still beached on Mackworth Island. We traced ownership and established it’s the same vessel that the HLF used to assault the rig. Beyond that, all we know is that ‘Wonderbliss’ was armed with a Fostech Origin, a .45, a magnum revolver, and an MG2019…”
“So, a walking arsenal…”
“More importantly, the revolver and Fostech aren’t standard,” Blossomforth hastily elaborated. “None of the survivors we interviewed could elaborate on him either. But Combat Engineer Socket Wrench said he was unfamiliar with shields, and he publicly admitted to stealing heavy PHL armor. But I think it's Caduceus' story that's the weirdest. As it happens, turns out Caduceus' friend Sylvia was PER.”
“Really?!" Nkiruka asked. She and Caduceus had never quite gotten along – in Nkiruka's eyes, Caduceus was eminently suspicious.
“Guess she went to join her old friends," Blossomforth said. “Strange thing, though. Sylvia was turned into some turbocrazy super-Newfoal. But Mr. Bliss killed the beast, and it's being sent off to PHL Biology, safely in the able hands and hooves of Miranda Severance, Dr. Salonen, and Scalpel."
“I did a checkup,” said Rachel. “As it happens, one man had a Fostech Origin on him on the Sorghum. He’d paid for it, and the mags, out of his own pocket. Said he liked the firepower more than a Benelli. He was named…” She paused, thinking over the unfamiliar French-Canadian name, “Imbeault.”
“... What are you getting at?” asked Jack.
“Imbeault was found stripped of his armor and stuffed into a closet, and one of the beachcombers found a set of HLF armor washed up on the coast,” Rachel continued, wheeling out a sopping wet tetanus-farm of a chest piece. “They also found an HLF shotgun in one of the closets. The man that found it says he’s giving it to his sister. So clearly, someone traded out their shotgun and armor for Imbeault’s. I want to know who this impostor is and–”
“Rachel,” Johnny C cut in, “Focus on that picture of Ivan. I need to look at his gun.”
Fiddlesticks sighed. “‘Nny…”
“I know, I know how it sounds. But indulge me, please.”
“Fine,” said Rachel, blowing the photo up.
Johnny gasped. “Fuckin’ knew it! I recognize those wires and the cooling system. That’s… that’s a prototype MG2019! Maybe purple-quality-”
“Huh?” Colonel Hex asked.
“He thinks of weapon quality in terms of color,” Fiddlesticks explained. “HLF stuff is white-quality, civilian stuff is usually green, PHL tech is blue or purple…”
“What I mean is that I know that damn gun! I used one during the Portsmouth Exodus. Tell them I’m right, Colonel Hex.”
Hex stepped up to the screen and scrutinised the weapon. “Yes… the MG2019 saw a limited use during operations against newfoal-infested refugee ships in Portsmouth, a limited production run intended for field testing. They turned back Newfoals like a lawnmower over grass, but the production demanded too many arcane materials to mass produce them to the original spec - we finally settled for a stripped-down version, and Sebastian Irving was right pissed off about it. The prototypes were dismantled so the parts could be circulated back into R&D…”
“All except one, right?” Johnny C added, and Hex frowned.
“Actually, several serial numbers were unaccounted for when we recalled the dismantled guns to Montreal. Enough to account for one gun and a stock of spare parts.”
“Well. That’s unnerving. And now one of em’s turned back up,” Johnny muttered, voice hollow, words carrying on seemingly independent of his thoughts, “and it was stolen by...OH that sonovaBITCH! It’s Kraber!”
“What!?” came several gasps, and Johnny pointed at the screen. “Only one person has made regular use of an MG2019 since the recall, and it belonged to Viktor ‘clusterfok’ Kraber! He was there, at Portland, right under our noses the whole time!”
“....shit” Rachel gasped. “Oh God, he could be doing anything right now! Anything at all!”
“Ah, we won’t have to worry about that,” Colonel Hex cautioned. He’d been more of a surprising addition to the team than anything. As an R&D-oriented man, with fingers in many pies, everyone had assumed he’d come to see his erstwhile friends Philip Hauser and Blackpowder, but he’d settled into something of an oddly commanding role. At the moment, he was allegedly here to help lay defenses for barrierfall. He was accompanied by a constant companion, a young-looking woman with thick blond hair, currently leaning against a wall. Nobody knew her name, but she seemed to follow Hex everywhere. She rarely spoke, and Hex referred to her as his ‘bodyguard’, though nobody believed that.
Her actual job seemed to be carting around whatever toys Hex’s workshops in Montreal were currently testing, all bound up in a backpack marked with the seals of Crowe Labs, Ogunleye Futuristics, and PHL R&D. Nobody knew what was in it at any one time, but with markings like the ones it bore (Including Ernst Kasparek! Incredible...) then it was probably high-quality PHL newtech. Johnny C assumed it was pearlescent-quality. Not Seraph, he’d add. Seraph stuff was always shite.
“What do you mean?” Astral Nectar asked.
“I mean that what with the past few days, what with the Sorghum Raid and Sutra Cross’s abduction, top brass finally got tired of having the HLF around. They finally,” Hex spat out that word like a curse or a disagreeable morsel of food, “decided Yael had a point about them being too much of a potential threat at Barrierfall to ignore. And so we’ll be working together for Operation Clean Sweep, so we can clear the way for a year from now.”
“It’s about time,” sighed Daddy.
“Tell me about it!” Kiki agreed, leaning back in her chair. “We could’ve died!”
It’s a story that has everyone confused and is close to making its way onto the news. Viktor Marius Kraber is in the area, and he’s not happy. And yet, he somehow spared two ponies and a PHL woman, for no discernible reason. Rivet would have liked to see it in the news, but–
“Actually,” you interrupt, “Ms. Palmer said she didn’t want to tell the news cause she said it’d be a….” you reach for one of those big words that adults always use, “clusterfuck.” Then, seeing the looks on everyone’s faces: “What? You all say that all the time.”
“She has a point,” Kraber admits. “And… It would have been a clusterfok because I don’t think there’s anyone it wouldn’t drive jags. HLF, PER, PHL…”
“Actually, that is why she didn’t tell any news outlets,” you say.
“Really? Tell her I said thanks! I have enough fokkin’ varknaaiers trying to bliksem me already,” he sighs.
“But,” Colonel Hex clarifies. “That’s not all the taskforce will be here for. Lieutenant Yael Ze’ev joined too, and she’ll be here tomorrow. If anything, I’ll be happy to see her.”
“Oh God,” Blossomforth sighed. “More collateral damage. Just what we needed from you, huh?”
“Kiki told me that the HLF shot up a car, belonging to one Darren Pines,” Aegis said. Which was surprising, since the large stallion wasn’t all that talkative.
“Who’s that?” Kiki asks, confused.
“A local guy. Unlike Kiki here, he wasn’t smuggling ponies. He didn’t even have any criminal connections, HLF or otherwise. No record, no thefts, no nothing. Hadn’t even been placed at a riot from before the Barrier started moving. All he had was a truck full of furniture for his shop up in Colebrook. She looked up the license number, and it turns out he was sponsoring some refugee kids from Colebrook. He left a wife behind.”
“What?” Blossomforth asked. “I don’t get it. Why’s this such a big deal?”
“He’s saying the HLF killed that guy just because they could,” said Johnny C. “Pulled a guy over at an illegal checkpoint, shot him dead and stripped his car. Which means that they’ve graduated from ‘psychos with a cause’ to ‘scum of the earth’.”
“Thanks, ” said Aegis. “It is a miracle that Dancing and her mother lived through that. Never been sure I had religion in me like Johnny, but stuff like that makes me wonder. So, if it takes burning the entire rats nest with a thermite gun to make my foals safe, I won’t mind.”
“We can sit here and wait… or we can pave the way for a better evac with people,” Johnny C said.
“I don’t care what horrible, unspeakable things people like Kraber are doing,” Aegis said, visibly agreeing, “But Yael and all of them are going to stop them good.”
December 25, 2022
301 days till Barrierfall
“What were you doing, anyway?” you ask.
“I don’t know,” replies Kraber. What day was this?”
“The twenty-sixth,” Aegis supplies. “It was sometime in the morning.”
“... Were you setting up for a cutaway gag or something?”
“No, no, no...” says Aegis, hooves up in the air in a placating gesture.
Kraber looks at him, and raises an eyebrow.
“Yeah…” Aegis admits.
“I was suffering from a babbelas, then recuperating by eating two orders of pancakes and then getting some french toast ice cream,” Kraber explains. “I really needed to get out of that hotel room…”
“You did kind of have a horrible nightmare in there,” you say.
“It was fokking terrible,” Kraber sighs. “Found myself dreaming repeatedly, saw myself as a monster… too many bad memories.”
“I have to wonder, though,” you say. “Mom keeps mentioning that Equestria’s screwing with dreams – trying to make you have nightmares. Torture you.”
“The fokking kontgesig won’t even leave me alone in my sleep?!” Kraber yells. “THAT’S why I thought I had schizophrenia?! Or why I kept seeing horrible alternates of myself?! I’m going to enjoy shooting her.”
“You’re not going to shoot Celestia,” Verity says dismissively. “How would someone like you–”
“Verity, I’ve crossed the Mediterranean,” Kraber says. “I’ve bombed metric foktons of bureaus. I’ve destroyed the HLF, I’ve been at battle after battle… I’ve been enough places that I’ve just stopped being surprised about things,” he pauses. “Course, I’ll need an anti-materiel rifle. Maybe an NTW-20?”
“Nah, I saw that thing in District 9, that’s too big,” says Aegis, with the tone of a stallion who has had this argument before and expects to say the same things over and over.
“Still, it’s 20mm! It’s like a fokkin’ sniper cannon!” Kraber says. “I’d love to use that thing on an alicorn…”
“Look, I googled it. You’re a little over six feet tall, the NTW is 5.8 feet. You could try a .50 BMG rifle, though. It’d be more mobile.”
“That’s… Huh. Good idea,” Kraber says. “Dankie, Aegis! Wait, what if I give you the NTW-20? I think you’d be better with the recoil.”
Aegis looked to consider this, a contemplative look on his face. “Maybe. But we’ve got more important things to do at the moment.”
“Don’t you need this?” the little girl asked.
“Eh, ya need it more’n me,” Kraber shrugged as he passed her some of the blood money he’d gotten in Portland. Though the money in his wallet was a considerably more literal case, as the previous owners had gotten caught in the three-way-melee between PER, HLF, and PHL in Portland. Last time he’d been here was back in his college days, bunking with a friend for a few days while attending Portcon, cosplayed as Sweet JP just like at Anime Boston, been skiing – on two different occasions, mind – so he hadn’t seen much.
The town had changed since then. Now there were shanties on the roofs of any building flat enough, shipping containers too battered to carry cargo turned into improvised houses. A new railyard at the back of town, bulldozed through the Whitaker Woods and just behind the elementary school, rang day and night with the sound of the supply chain that fed the war effort. Almost every conceivable surface was lined with posters and graffiti, and flags of atomized nations hung on the lines between buildings. There were small, pathetic little shops built into the alcoves, and now-deactivated lights of every description lining the street.
The town had become uncomfortably similar to a favela, overtaken by radical outgrowths of parasitic architecture. Small, disposable shanties and constructions, built by PHL or otherwise, jutted out from windows over the street. There were buildings over streets and what few alleyways could be found, creating random corridors and bridges.
Kraber didn't see it as anything out of the ordinary. Most towns were like that nowadays. Thankfully, the park across the street was still open space, albeit taken over for growing food. All that remained of the former public space was a sickly-looking baseball diamond, and the town was making every use of it as a limited area in which to unwind
‘Course, it’ll all be gone in a little over a year…’
Someone’s car radio was blaring out a story about the HLF attacking the Sorghum. About how this is so out of character, how they–
‘Hou jou fokkin bek, jou fokkin kontgesig. Jou don’t know the HLF. You don’t know what it means. You don’t know what that’s supporting.’ Or worse… what if they did know? They knew about Portland, about how they hurt little colts and fillies… and saw it as acceptable. He wasn’t sure what was worse.
There was a surprising amount of ponies in the swollen town. Most of them were earth ponies, probably come to work on the nearby farms. Still, Kraber could see a few unicorns and pegasi around, even a few zebras. Every visible surface was covered in posters, advertising evacuation, infrastructure repair, and various charitable causes. Heh, charitable? Not quite. More like “we’re fokked, and we need as many people as we can to hold this country together.”
… And eventually, when Barrierfall came, it’d all collapse. The HLF would come out of boltholes in the Rising that various soldiers had talked about. As would the PER. Of fokking course they would.
Kraber groaned. The people here had suffered, all of them. And he’d done nothing but make them far worse off, he’d made everyone scared… and he couldn’t even appreciate their fear. He’d just made them suffer. But he couldn’t do anything about that, could he? No, the truth was that he was a kontgesig that deserved the potion, that deserved to die horribly...
‘There’s good in you, Kraber. Deep enough, there’s good.’
Ja. Pretty fokkin deep, he thought, practically shoveling in his ice cream. Caduceus might be right, maybe nobody deserves the potion. Even with the kak I’ve done.
‘... Close enough,’ Anka whispered.
Peter sighed. ‘He won’t get it for awhile, will he?’
‘I married a stubborn man,’ said Kate. ‘So, no. Come on, Viktor, that’s so defeatist!’
He’d said it himself. He’d never fokkin’ be Victory, or those two alternates of him, whatever they were. The first hadn’t been bad, but the second… he shivered. Something had just been horribly wrong with the second one, and that was saying something. In retrospect, he probably should have questioned Princess Luna’s existence in his dreams a bit more. But then, that was dreams. Of course you’d been to this train station before, a dream would tell you. And you wouldn’t question it, cause who were you to disagree with your own m-
White River Junction was burning. It flickered, from orange to gray. Tarry scraps of paper flittered through the air, and embers floated up all around him. The bridge across the Connecticut river had collapsed.
Cars, burnt-out abandoned hulks stripped for parts and increasingly rare rubber, lay strewn all over the road. A lamppost had a dead pony hanging from it, and a pair of traffic lights had collapsed on a car, crushing a human driver under their weight. He was twitching. Wheezing.
Viktor stepped around the potholes, around the craters from airstrike after airstrike. Somehow, he knew the Barrier was coming, but he had to fight, he had to-
BOOM
“We’re heeeere!” someone called out, like a little girl looking for mama. He knew that call, as he waited behind the ruins of an abandoned building - he heard them. Those strange newfoal mares, the ones that called themselves the Pretty Privates.
Oh fok oh fok oh fok fok fok fok fok fok
He fired in what sounded like their direction with his battered MG2019, long-obsolete by PHL standards. He’d killed one of these before, hadn’t he?! Except he never had in Portland. Portland was gone by now. The city was a potioned-out wasteland, kept quarantined and routinely bombed by PHL.
A mare named Reaper still hid in its ruins.
Would have been great if someone could have killed her.
“THEY’RE GETTING CLOSER!” he heard someone else yell. Maybe HLF. Maybe PHL.
“I’ll come out!” Kraber called over, “Make sure everyone’s safe!” he shot out the street, MG2019 ready, aiming at the-
...PHL.
And so Kraber stared at the trembling PHL man in front of him, a thin man with a cross around his neck and a shock of wild black hair. His legs were pinned under rubble, and blood ran down his chin.
“Please…” he whispered. “Don’t… don’t do it.”
‘What was he so afraid of?’ Kraber wondered.
“Hello, Private Victory!” chirped their leader, a peach-colored mare holding a pair of short swords. “It’s wonderful to finally meet you…”
And Kraber looked down to realize…
He wasn’t holding the MG2019. He was lifting it in blood-red TK, and at the end of his forearms, he…. no, she had hooves.
“THIS ISN’T ME!” she screamed. “No! Please! ANYTHING BUT THIS!”
“If there’s anything left of whoever you were, shoot me!” the human with the pinned, broken legs yelled.
I’m not a mare I’m not a newfoal I’m not I’m not I’m fokking not
“But you are, Victory,” said their leader, Nepenthe. “This is what you should be! A cutesy killer in service to Queen Celestia…”
“I’M NOT!” she cried. “ANYONE, please!” she looked at the man. “Dradin, please, she can’t love you! She… we… they’re only automatons! TIN… B… bu… FOKKIN SOLDIERS! Kill me and I’ll-”
Ponify you, kill you, JUST LET ME DIE
“Do you feel like a hero yet, VICTORY?!” Kate asked, her shape fuzzy and indistinct, blurred between pony and human-
You always destroy yourself, don’t you?
He looked down at his foreleg...
...and the hand was encased in armour, black as the night, and he was strong now. He looked up, and with a swift motion brought his gun up, firing the weapon at the first pony and blasting it apart. The second and third fell in quick succession.
He grinned beneath the mask. The Paladin XV armour was among the most advanced ever, built with magic and technologies from twenty worlds, and the Mayhem LMG, made with his choice of mods taken as tribute was a killing machine beyond compare. With them, and with the blessings of his lord, he was revenge, justice and merciless death for the enemies of mankind. With them, he was vengeance incarnate.
"Vengeance!" he heard someone yell. "Vengeance is ours! Justice is our gift! Let death be your reward for your transgressions!"
No. No... not this, either, not this, not this life...
"Kraber!" he heard someone yell. He turned to see another armoured figure nearby, swinging a flaming blade through six ponies at once as he spoke. "Found another one of these."
He grabbed a battered, bloody pony from the ground and tossed the thing at Kraber's feet.
She was a mare, forest green. The armour was different - the armour was always different - but he always found her in worlds assailed by a Puppet of Tirek. He took especial pleasure on this one's death.
"Hello again, Victory," he said, grinning beneath the helmet.
She looked up, eyes wide, but she was smiling too.
"Hello Viktor," she said. "We're here again?"
"You're the fifth," he said, kneeling to be at eye level with her. "I always ask that they leave you for me. They always do. Fitting, don't you think?"
"Very," she said. "Tell me - have you realised how futile your journey is yet?"
"Futile?" he asked, still grinning. "Tell me - which one of us is going to kill the other?"
"Tell me," she said in reply, almost mocking, “What would the point be? What’s left of you to kill?”
He chuckled. "Left of me? Vengeance. Vengeance unfettered by remorse, justice untainted by morality or conscience."
"And after that?" she asked. "You'd have been so much happier as me."
"False happiness is worse than true despair, for it is false," he said with a shrug, rising to his feet. "You have made these arguments before. Perhaps next time you will make them differently. I doubt it though."
He raised the gun and aimed it at her face.
"You'll never be rid of the shadow of me," she said in a low, almost menacing tone.
"Then I will be privileged to keep killing you," he replied. He squeezed the trigger and Victory's head disappeared in a cloud of red, pink, and gray mist, alicornal tissue sizzling in midair. He looked around, feeling almost rejuvenated by the cloud of magic flowing into him. "Now then..."
He caught sight of himself in the mirror...
Vengeance is mine. Beyond that, there can be nothing else - there should be nothing else. But I remember a time when I thought there could be.
And I remember you.
You were the voice that told me to become horsefucker. That made me suggest some level of innocence. Called me a chopkont.
You are young, and you are naive. I have stood where you are now. I lost what you have lost. And I have seen and created horrors that make the worst deeds you've done seem like nothing - you know this.
You're wrong, Viktor Kraber. You're wrong to doubt the path you walked before now. Your purest purpose was vengeance. You are the slayer of the Reaper. In time, you could be more - you could be the man who kills Pinkie Pie. You could be a slayer of God-Tyrants.
Do not fool yourself into thinking you can find atonement. Forgiveness is a lie. No matter what you do, you will find no forgiveness. You will find tolerance at best, and they will treat you as a tame attack dog. Is that what you want? Is that what you think you deserve?
You could be a God-killer. You could be more than you are. Do not turn away from rage. Embrace it! Use it! You know who your enemies are. DESTROY THEM! There is nothing else, Viktor. For what we have lost, let there be no forgiveness, no pity, no mercy - only death, only death! Only death! ONLY DEATH!
Only death? Well, the health plan doesn’t look too good.
... so be it. Enjoy the illusion of peace Viktor. Enjoy the illusion of forgiveness and the judging stares of those who know what you really are. Enjoy knowing what you could be.
But I will watch, Viktor. There will come times when you know the truth, when the mare-abomination will speak of one path - and you will find me there, too, speaking of another. You are a killer of demons already Viktor. The path is before you, and always will be. It is destiny.
You cannot escape what you always were...
Maybe you’re right. But I can get better.
You impotent liar…
A wise man once said ‘Just don't be distracted by the what-ifs, should-haves, and if-onlys. The one thing you choose yourself - that is the truth of your universe.’ You’re not me. You never chose that kak I did. So hou jou fokkin bek, I’m choosing life, the fokkin’ big television and all.
We shall see.
“Hey!” someone yelled, shaking him. “You… you alright? You don’t look too good!”
And Kraber was back, breathing heavily, leaning against a wall, hand against his chest. He felt sick inside, and it was as if his head was about to split open, with his mind exploding out...
“No,” he said, desperately wishing that there was some booze he could drink, or some drugs he could take to deal with the pain. “Ah git these panic attacks every so ooften, ever since Scotland…”
“I see,” said that odd Good Samaritan that had helped him. “Anything I can do?”
“Nah, Ah’m…. Ah’m fine,” Kraber said. “Ah’m good now.”
And then Kraber saw it. On one telephone pole, a poster that said there was a service at the Bethlehem Hebrew Congregation tomorrow, to pray for everyone fighting the Barrier and those who had been corrupted by Celestia. Coincidentally, it was going to be the same day as the local art walk. Both of which sounded kwaai.
“I think I’ve a good idea,” Kraber said to nobody in particular. “Think I’ll head up to Bethlehem.”
What the hell. It’d be nice to visit a synagogue. An actual synagogue, not the watered-down, hate-filled thing the HLF had set up. Besides, the poster said there was going to be free food! Probably just bagels and cream cheese, but still, he hadn’t had those in awhile.
- - - - -
So, with some trepidation, he headed back to his hotel and the money he'd scavenged from Portland. There wasn't a single item of clothing that wasn't shot through or partly burnt. Methodically, he stuffed his MMG, Sylvia’s assault rifle, and the Steiner-Bisley 10mm in the duffel bag, along with clothes, ammunition, and whatever other junk he had lying around.
He then made his way to the station, walking down past Schouler Park, near the old plaza of shops made of brick. There, Kraber saw something odd and stifled a short laugh – the locomotive pulling his train would be a steam locomotive! It was, interestingly, marked ‘501’.
Steam locomotives were in common usage now for simple want of fuel and rationing, but it was still weird to see one out here in 2022, over a hundred years after it was built. With people fiddling around on smartphones, taking pictures of it. And some hipster earthpony playing an electric guitar on a crate outside, and a pegasus hovering on guard above, and a man with some sleek range-toy kalashnikov and a peaked cap guarding the train. For a moment, Kraber looked at that pony with the guitar, wondering if was worth it to kill the damn gluestick. But he just sighed. Nah.
‘Too many people out and about for me to do that. Much as I’d like to think humanity would join in with me, I’d be shot in a second,’ he thought. Or at least, he was trying to think that. In all probability, it was some remnant of what little HLF sentiment he had left.
Maybe Kraber wanted simplicity in life. The ease of knowing what targets to shoot or bliksem. But he couldn’t deny anymore that the ponies suffered just like him. In fact, the earthpony just looked so haggard. His ribs stood out against his barrel. He looked particularly pleading. There were bruises on his face.
‘Your… fault…’ something seemed to whisper.
‘I didn’t even do a fokkin thing to him! I’ve never seen this earth pony in my life!’
Sure. Perhaps this gluestick’s suffering wasn’t directly his fault. But nor had people like him shown the poor bastard enough kindness.
‘Ah, what the hell.’
Kraber gave him four dollars.
“Bless you, man,” the earthpony said. “Bless you.”
“... Ah really fokkin hope ye dinnae mean Celestia as yir goad,” Kraber said.
“Buck no!” the pony spat back. “I hope someone shoves a bottle of potion down her throat so that she can spend the rest of her miserable life shitting broken glass!”
“Ah was gonnae suggest ‘rip off her head and piss in her skull’, but that’s even better!” Kraber said, impressed. Now, here was a pony with creativity! A pony he could respect. This… did not quite feel right. It was so weird talking to one of the aliens he had recently been trying to kill.
But... Nebula and Caduceus were alright. Who’s to say there weren’t a few more like them?
“You taking the train anywhere?” asked the pony.
“Headin’ up near Bethlehem,” Kraber said neutrally.
“Nice,” grinned the pony, “I have friends up there.”
Kraber involuntarily raised an eyebrow at that. “They ponies?”
“A lot of em are,” the stallion replied, suddenly eyeing him with a degree of suspicion. “But plenty more are human. That a problem, bub?”
So, he was almost certainly PHL then. America didn’t leave much room for unaffiliated ponies. Sure, there were a couple in hiding somewhere, probably grazing out on fields in the ass end of nowhere, but the unaffiliated tended not to last long in public. There was usually someone, usually in the PER, who felt they were better off back in the home country.
… Or, there could be someone like him, the kind who killed gluesticks that just wanted to live their lives away from everything. In retrospect, it was hard not to feel sorry for them. Fokked every which way.
“Nah,” Kraber said. “Jist wonderin’.”
“I’m Sixstring, by the way,” the earthpony introduced himself. “Thanks for the dough. Some HLF pigfuckers beat me up and stole my cash. So I’m playing for more, to save up for a ticket. Doesn’t matter, though. Long as this guitar makes someone smile...”
‘Hmmm. What would a PHL man say here?’
“Fokkin’ bawbags!” Kraber growled, surprised at the venom he managed to inject into his own voice. Ah, made sense – he’d been thinking of what the HLF had done in Portland. Made sense. “Still… I’m pissed at them for a lot more than that.”
“You saw Portland, I take it.”
“Ja,” said Kraber, sitting down next to him. "Lost a lot ay chommies up there. Bastards, that whole fokkin lot of HLF! There's nothing to gain, the poor bastards that did something that stupid would probably get arrested anyway, and they didn't even come close to hurting the fokking Solar Empire! They're fokkin’ useless, pigfucking, mail-order-prostiting, child-killing, mass-murdering sociopaths that do more harm to survivors than they ever could to Celestia!"
‘To you, it goes without saying just who that tirade was mostly aimed at.’
He sat down, tired, somewhat worn down by it all.
“Francis Strang, by the way,” Kraber said, sighing, and wishing he could do nothing more than get too drunk to see straight. It was the first name that came to mind. Seemed real enough he could use it when trying to move across the country, and he’d had experience with this sort of thing. The invented identity just mashed together through his ideas of Francis Begbie and Roy Strang. Violence? Migraines? Schizophrenia? South Africa? Hallucinations? Felt real enough.
“Luna's Mane, what'd they do to you?” the earthpony asked.
“You don't want to know," Kraber said.
“I've had plenty of bad experiences with them myself,” the earthpony said. "Believe me, I've no loyalty to PER or Imperials. Look, they claim to represent me... but fuck them right in the keyhole.”
Kraber sniggered. Now, while this wasn’t the first gluestick he’d seen express contempt for their homeland, that didn't make Sixstring's admission any less refreshing.
“Look, Celestia claims that her empire's for all ponies, but it's really for her. Maker only knows what made her this way–”
“She's evil,” Kraber said dismissively. “Or a convincing actor, or she just doesn't–”
“Bullshit,” Sixstring said. “My family have been Canterlot musicians for generations. I met Celestia as a colt, and my pop, my grandpop, my great-grandpop all said... She was almost motherly, that's what they said. She wouldn't act like that for a thousand years, then spur-of-the-moment start re-educating us and driving her home into the ground. Mark my words, something forced her to be evil long before she met humanity. In the grand scheme of her lifespan, this is pretty sudden.”
‘Hmm. A possibility. Could this very same thing have happened to Pinkie?’
“Wouldn't have thought of it that way," said Kraber. “Think that might’ve happened to Pinkie Pie?”
“Why her?”
“Just curious.”
“Well… if it happened to her, maybe,” Sixstring said. “I kinda doubt that they’d all suddenly agree that humans didn’t apply to standards of morality.”
“The HLF decide that pretty well,” Kraber said.
“Well, they had ponies do something to them to piss them off,” Sixstring said. “Something happened to them. Mark my words. I mean...” he sighed. “We were the aggressors. Fuck what they say about the Three Weeks being the point when they decided humanity was evil… It’s not enough to decide to exterminate you.”
There was a pause.
It was at that moment that the radio above them broke into a scattered mess of squeals and pops. A shame, too, it was broadcasting good news for once. Something about some victory in the Pacific. Kraber had been eager to hear of the heroic exploits of Captain Rebecca Kleiner.
Apparently, half of an entire island had been nearly ponified, and the Stampede Fleet had managed to drive them back. Plans to resettle the island had begun, and he wondered about the potential of becoming a settler there.
It sounded nice. Make your way across a country going mad, then live out the war on an island, with comparatively little risk for a y-
“jag kan inte sova nej nej nej nej kan jy my help wie ek is vem ar jag HJALP MIG ben kim oldu sonra soğuk sonra soğuk sonra sıcak sonra soğuk sıcak laissez-moi mourir-”
Whatever it was over the radio sounded like hundreds of voices spilling over each other.
“What the fok was that?!” Kraber yelled.
“ -lo? He-hello?” a voice whispered over the radio. “This is Gestalt. My slave number is P-404. Crystal Empire aviator. I… I thiiiiink-” the words dissolved into squealing and popping. “I don’t know where I am. This is Gestalt, Crystal Empire aviator, and I do not know where I am! The walls here are dark and yet they shine. It is crowded, I can hear so many voices around, but I can’t see anyone…”
She sounded almost like a little girl, yet her voice reverberated.
“The voices never stop. Sombra told us rumors of experimentation in Equestria, and I am certain that they’re other ponies like me. He called those that served under Celestia and Luna barbarians, but I’m not sure I believe that. They’re so much more advanced than us, and-”
Sixstring shivered as he heard it.
“They got him! Whoever you are, whoever’s listening, please help! They can’t be allowed to wi-"
A pause.
"Prisoner Nine Three One! What are you doing?!"
"She has a talisman!"
"No!" Gestalt screamed. "I don’t know if anyone’s listening, but we can’t let them win! They’re killing us in here, and-”
There was a scream that abruptly terminated.
“The fok is this?!” Kraber yelled.
“Nobody knows,” Sixstring said, shivering a little. “It started up awhile ago. We don’t know where the signal’s coming from, but it’s disturbing as hell. Still, I don’t think we’ll accept it’s help-”
“...That didn’t fokkin’ say ‘my help’,” Kraber said. “I know a bit of Afrikaans. ‘Kan Jy...’ means ‘Can you’. So, ‘Can you help me’. ‘Wie Ek Is’ means ‘Who Am I?’”
“How do you know Afrikaans?” Sixstring asked, visibly suspicious.
“I was a big fan of District 9,” Kraber admitted. “Damned if I know what the rest was. Can’t speak Swedish. I… I think the Swedish part said ‘Help me’ at some point, though.”
“I thought you didn’t speak Swedish?” Sixstring asked.
“Well, what else could ‘hjalp mig’ mean?” Kraber shrugged. He didn’t let Sixstring know that he understood the Turkish portions of it, though. Made no sense, for one thing. ‘Let me die…’ ‘hot then cold then hot again...’
And he couldn’t speak French, anyway.
“Well, Francis, why’re you heading to Bethlehem?”
“Ah naided some religion in my life,” Kraber answered. “There’s questions I needed answerin’, so I figured, ‘why not come over tae Bethlehem?’”
“I’m still not really clear on how human religion works, though,” Sixstring admitted. “I’m not used to having a God that I can’t take a train up to and talk to.”
“... Hey, she’s pretty fokking unapproachable now,” Kraber said jokingly.
“Something tells me that’s not quite the same thing,” the earthpony replied drily, before grabbing his guitar case. “Still, might as well take a look. You don’t get a more honest look at folk’s religion until they’re down on their luck, and there’s a human comic I’ve been reading that’s gotten me curious. Mind if I tag along?‘
“Sure, why not? You seem like a fokking solid gluestick. Besides, well… you’re right. I’m down on my luck. People haven’t helped, so I might as well go. See what happens.”
- - - - -
On the ride up to Bethlehem, down that railroad a century and a half old, Kraber decided that he liked the locomotive pulling the train. At the curve near one river, he snapped a picture of it from his place in the car. The 501 was… not a bare, stripped-down loco. While hardly a giant, it was neither slender or sleek. In some way that he could not easily quantify, it just seemed solid, as if it was built for hard work. Though he would later learn that he’d been right, and speculate on its possible use come barrierfall.
Seeing as Sixstring, the pony next to him, was bought on Kraber’s tab from stolen money, Kraber felt like he should make some kind of small talk, instead of taking a drink and getting bloutrein from rotgut on a train that was, oddly enough, mostly red.
“It weird to see a loco that big?”
“Kind of, yeah,” said Sixstring. “I know it’s small as far as Earth trains go, but Equestrian engines are just so… they’re so small. That thing is the size of a decent-sized house back home.”
“… Ah thought ye’d have smaller houses,” Kraber said, confused.
“Ah, it’s old tradition. To let pegasi have room to fly, cause they get anxious with low ceilings. But it’s also in case Princess Celestia visited,” Sixstring said. “Though I have to admit, I feel a lot safer with this loco than the ones back home.”
Kraber asked him why.
“Well, like I said, they’re just so tiny. But this thing’s enormous, and it looks like it could outdo a hundred ponies–”
“Oh, that’s nothing, just take a look at a Big Boy loco–”
The train whistled, and slowly but surely made its way down the old Boston and Maine line, heading for Bethlehem. Even as Sixstring and Kraber debated about the size of Earth locos, they took this as an opportunity to look out the window and enjoy the scenery.
And what scenery there was!
Once they got past the new railyard, the trees in Whitaker Woods were lush and green, but the forest was patchy and thin – someone had been logging them. Not clear-cut, thankfully. He’d learned in the various ecological groups he’d patronised in college thanks to Erika and Corinne that clear-cutting was a bad idea. In the forest, he could see crews of earthponies with their hooves on the ground, brows furrowed in concentration as they did... something to the trees. Before Kraber’s eyes, he could see a sapling poking itself out of the ground, millimeter by millimeter.
‘They’re trying to grow more,’ he realized. ‘Make more lumber.’
“Ain’t that something,” said his companion.
Internally, Kraber took back what he said about North Conway being unrecognizable.
Everything was. As the train headed North, up through Intervale and past the scenic vista, houses crowded the tracks, so much in some places that the train appeared to be going through a tunnel. Once, the train passed by a spur, on which Kraber could see a small logging train, piloted by diminutive locomotives. One appeared to be another steam engine, probably found in a warehouse or resurrected from a display. There were even two doubleheader boxy diesel locos that they passed on one siding near the post office, each with old railcars from who-knew-where full of loads of logs. All wonderful industry, so many people working in harmony – he even saw an earthpony behind the controls of one small double-ended yellow diesel locomotive.
Wait…
‘Harmony?’
That kak the ponies always spouted. The word that apparently gave them the right to destroy an entire species. He hated it so much that even hearing it made his fingers dance over the grip of his magnum – which, luckily, was safely holstered at his hip. But the word, the word ‘harmony’ worked here. They were working together. Doing things to help all refugees, even the ponies.
“It is at this moment that Sixstring said words that would destroy my HLF membership forever,” Kraber says. “I’d questioned this before, but this time, it really hit. He had said… let me see… ‘We’ll escape Equestria on these things. Good people used them to build things we evacuated to, and good people and ponies will use them to get out of the way till the PHL stops that damn Barrier. Yep. Everypony, or everyone, I guess… they’re gonna play their part.’ And I…
‘Yes, you, Viktor,’
The thought hit him like a sledgehammer to the skull. Him, the bearded man looking out at the bizarrely peaceful sight from his train window, accompanied by a stranger. A stranger to him, to his world, and even to his better self.
If he looked at it the right angle, aligning himself with the window so he could see the window on the other side of the car, he could almost see… himself.
He could see a younger version of himself in the window. On this train, with an old, battered medical bag that he’d taken for what seemed more like a prank than anything. Eager for college in America, not yet beaten down by a kontgesig of a roommate, yet to fall in love, fiddling with a smartphone even as he read some China Mieville book. Ah, his uneven, dog-eared copy of Perdido Street Station. He didn’t suppose it meant anything. It was just a good book, and reading it was just what he’d do.
He could see himself, another reflection, in a train car that looked decidedly more… British? He didn’t know how he knew. Maybe from those books on trains that he’d had as a kid. There was a streak of white hair in his beard, and, for whatever reason, he was wearing a pickelhaube. An old Bren gun sat at his side, and his book, his old stuffed animals, all were so much more worn. But there was a white mare trotting up to him, a mare with a red mane with pink-purple tips and green eyes. Three foals. This other Kraber looked down at them, and smiled.
There was another one of him, further away, so far he had to squint. Clad in heavy armor so covered in tubes that he had to wonder how, or even if, he managed to take it off. It was heavy plate-armor like something a knight might wear, but it was covered in pelts, and glowing ever so slightly. It looked mashed together though, made from hundreds of designs with trophy-taking being part of the design process. It also looked dirty, somehow. As if it had been beaten to hell a long time ago. There were bloodstains and the scratches of what might have been a bombing.
‘Possibilities,’ he thought. ‘I’m seeing possibilities..’
But out of all of them, what was he? What had he done? He’d killed… killed so many! Probably ponies like Caduceus or Nebula, ponies that hadn’t done anything wrong…
He’d killed PER. Okay, perhaps that wasn’t so bad, and it was pretty fokkin fun, he thought. Eh. Nobody would complain about that. Still, Sylvia had been hard not to pity. The war had broken her too, he realized. It’d broken everyone in their own ways...
But, though he hated to admit it, killing PER… not to mention the PHL, including that poor unicorn with the MG2019 on their assault saddle in Portsmouth, the countless ponies he’d attacked, the PHL perdnaaiers he’d killed, even the ponies that he’d killed in that mine, and FOK!
… It just felt hollow.
Boston. 2013
Before the war, before he’d had kids, before he’d met Kate, before he’d met any of his college chommies, before he tried to eat his roommate, even. Gently sketching out a script for a medical drama, he’d been hoping for a good time in college that year.
He’d even been looking forward to whatever happened later. He wanted to help people, he thought. He wanted to save lives. He was going to help.
A nice-looking girl had said hello. “I’m Corinne. I saw you in the airport, you heading to…”
And the rest – the introduction to some native Bostonians and Boston-Irish like Ferdinand “Strychnine” Jones and Stretcher Burt, well, that was history. They’d all appreciated him patching them up, including that time ‘Strychnine’ Jones broke his collarbone on a washboard in Machete, some backcountry trail at Wildcat. And, since the trail wasn’t officially part of the mountain and it was illegally cut, there weren’t ski patrollers nearby.
‘This is what I was meant to do’, Kraber had thought back then, keeping Strychnine safe between the birches and pine trees as Zo rushed onto Catnap to get a ski patroller. The girl could probably outdo a pegasus in terms of speed if she was on skis, and she spent a lot of time waiting for her friends at the bottom of a trail or at an intersection, so she was the best person to get help.
‘I’m meant to help,’ he remembered thinking.
Were he a pony, it likely would have been the moment he got his cutie mark.
December 2022
“In that case, it’s for the best that you weren’t born one,” Lunar Phase says. “When you were in the HLF, you might have gotten a bunch of neurological problems by doing something that was close to the antithesis of your mark. Mark Fracture, Failure Instability Syndrome...”
“That sounds fokking terrible,” Kraber says.
“Why do you think the Royal Guard are so crazy? Or so clinical and detached as they test new variants of potion on people?” Lunar Phase asks.
Kraber looks pale. “Son of a fok. That’s… The Geis is breaking them that bad?”
“Yup,” Lunar Phase says, in the far-too-clinical tone that is clearly masking some poorly hidden hurt. You know it well. Your mother uses it, most PHL do, and so have you. But somepony needs to be happy at a bad time, otherwise nobody will be.
“...Damn,” Vinyl whispered. “The Empire’s a giant nightmare factory that never ends, isn’t it? My cousin in the guard-”
It’s Shining Armor, isn’t it? She doesn’t like to talk about this connection to the Empire, this possible weakness, and you can’t blame her. She’s hurting like crazy on the inside, you can see it in her eyes whenever she takes off her glasses.
“-had a Mark for making shielding spells, for protecting people. Not for destroying things. But since the war, he’s probably getting more and more unhinged cause of what he’s not allowed to think,” Vinyl breathes. “She doesn’t have any regard for anypony besides her, does she? We’re just tools to her, disposable and easily replaced…” she stops. “How do you know all this, anyway? You know psychiatry, you know about cutie mark disorders...“
“Being a Night Guard got me free tuition to Canterlot University,” Lunar Phase explains. “Studied this stuff alongside Lyra’s cousin Mint Jewelup. Poor Minty, she went PETN. She’s probably not well-liked there...”
“Why not?” you ask.
“Well, I’d think it’s universal that nobody likes the bureaucrazy hanging over their shoulders, telling them what to do,” Aegis says.
“Well, there’s that,” Lunar Phase concedes, “And she was Lyra’s cousin. Looked just like her but purple and blue. Trade Secret says she applied to Forward Operations just to get away from all the hate-”
“Fokkin’ PETN kontgesigs,” Kraber says.
“She’s not a bad mare,” Lunar Phase protests. “She just… isn’t on the right side, I guess.”
“Sorry,” Kraber says, “But I can’t find any sympathy for a PETN mare that thinks zombifying my family is for the best and still claims to be a correct ou towards the fokking zombiperds. Maybe it’s as good as you can get if you’re a fokkin Imperial, but it’s so fokking condescending.”
“True,” Lunar Phase says. “But even so, a ‘fokkin Imperial’ doesn’t deserve what she’ll find in Forward Operations.”
“She’ll find out her Empire isn’t the righteous fokkin’ liberator she thought it’d be, huh?” Kraber smirks.
“I guess so,” Lunar Phase says. “But Kraber… it usually isn’t fun for me to watch a mare’s mind and sensibilities get snapped like twigs. She’ll get broken either way by this war like all of us. Just… don’t take so much joy in it, alright?”
Kraber looks argumentative for a second, almost angry, but then his face softens ever so slightly. “...I’ll try. Can’t promise it’ll work. But I’ll try.”
‘Where the fok did that mindset go?’
When was the last time – before last night, anyway – that he dropped everything to save people? He’d said as much to Caduceus. Was the truth about Kraber that he was a sociopath so horrible that he deserved no compassion and was only good for causing misery?
But… he’d loved helping people out. Could a sociopath do such a thing? Oh, God! He could not understand these feelings! Did that mean he was going to be emotionally deadened, forever unable to connect–
And then he knew.
He’d broken it, twisted it. Thought that murdering his way into the general direction of Pinkie Pie – oh, how angry he was when he found out she was in France, and he just that close to her – was the same thing as helping people. But when he thought on it, no matter how much fun it had been splattering their blood from floor to ceiling to wall, there…. there hadn’t been many humans that were happy about him, happy about his existence, when he’d just been out for blood.
“You okay?” Sixstring asked. “You look thoughtful, all of a sudden.”
“It’s just… this,” Kraber sighed. “Ah’ve been hair. Before the war. An it was so beautiful, but now… We practically have to destroy the fokkin place. Ah just wish Ah couldae done more.”
“What could you have done, though?”
“Ah don’t know! It’s just…” Kraber felt weary. “Ah lost my family to Pinkie Pie, all cause Ah invited hir to plan a birthdee party. Ah’ve been so fokking angry, too much tae trust any of ya… and Ah’ve done fokking nothing. Ah’ve accomplished nothing. I’m noat one ay those good people you mentioned, Ah’ve barely helped any refugees at all, and Ah don’t know if Ah evir will!”
The train passed through Bartlett, by the school – there were kids on the field, including a couple of foals, galloping around, chased by laughing, screaming children. Some of them looked to be zebras, too. But on the other end of the field, he could see a secluded group of human children, refusing to go near the ponies.
“Those poor kids and gluesticks. They’ve had so much shit happen to ‘em. Stuff that would’ve scared the piss oot any adult. And I’ve done nothing. I’ve made it worse for them, ah’m probably part ay the reason they hate ponies so much.”
On the other side of the tracks, he could see that the Y-spur had been refurbished, and even now another train was heading east into Bear Notch, looking to pick up a new load of lumber for refugee housing.
“Come on, you can’t be that bad off,” Sixstring said, a hoof on Kraber’s shoulder, and for once, Kraber didn’t feel like pushing it away. It occurred to him he hadn’t had much intimacy, not since Emil. But even then, it had been tempered by mutual hate, and this was different.
This was a stallion reassuring a poor old man (‘For heaven’s sake, you’re twenty-eight, not that thirty-six-year-old from that horrible dream! Wait, thirty-six is old? Bloody awful.’) who didn’t have anything left to lose.
“Look, Ah’ve spent the last four ye… ah, fok it,” Kraber took a deep breath. “There’s naw other way tae say it. Ah wis HLF. But from what I can see, that isnae worth kak or spit. And I don’t know if ah cannae ever leave. I can get out… but I dinnae ken if it can git outtae me.”
Sixstring paused, clearly taken aback. “Well… you seem nice enough for an ex-HLF man.”
“But here’s the thing. I’m not a correct ou... Nice, I mean. Ah mean, Ah’ve done awful shite. Ah’ve heid people pat me oan the back fir it all. But Ah’ve bin daein awful things lately. Ah think Ah’ve hit muh limit, and Ah’m just… Ah have tae ask mahself. Whit’s thae point? Ah wanted tae save humanity. Ah wanted tae protect people. Ah wanted tae do the right thing. And I havenae done any ay that.”
“Well, how bad could you have been?” Sixstring asked cautiously.
“Ah’ve said tae much,” Kraber said. “But… I’ll never be able to–”
“Your ticket to the future,” Sixstring said, “Is always blank.”
Kraber blinked. “You read Trigun too?!”
“Love that comic,” Sixstring said. “Classic! But… look. Are you in the HLF, right now?”
“Well, no,” Kraber said. “You do NOT want to know what I’ll do to them if they try to unretire me.”
“I’m assuming it’ll be better than what they’d do to you.”
Kraber shivered, ever so slightly. The HLF had little tolerance for traitors. He remembered a man named Garrison who had left for the PHL, awhile back. They’d found him, Kraber being among the ones to take him back, and they’d worked him over down in the dugout for hours, pulling out his teeth and fingernails, flaying him alive, stabbing him, using a cordless drill, sawing off his legs bit by bit with a rusty hacksaw–
Anyway.
Oh, poor Garrison… Kraber would never wash the blood off his hands, would he?
“It won’t, but I’ll at least be quick. May God have mercy on me if they find me, cause the HLF sure won’t.”
Wasn’t that a bit like what Granny Liz of England had said to the PER, right before she blew them all to kingdom come? Trust an old lady to go out with more of a bang, and do better deeds for the world, than he had.
“Not on me either,” Sixstring said nervously. “But… look, there was a speech I was planning. With the thing about the ticket to the future.”
“You had a speech?”
“Well, your description kind of threw me off,” Sixstring sighed. “Look. What I’m getting at is, you’re not in the HLF right now. And not many other people need to know what you were. You don’t have to keep letting being HLF define you, you can just be someone new.”
“I think I’d like to be someone new,” Kraber said, smiling tentatively.
“Say… you have any ID?”
“I… huh.” Kraber realized his medical license was gone and he’d forgotten his HLF badge. Nothing to say who he was or where he was from.
In a strange way, he found this bizarrely appropriate. Hm, what was that quote from Night Vale regarding consequences? Something about how terrifying the complete freedom and lack of consequences are...
And it’s true, it is a bit scary, having no tethers to the outside world, only stolen money and a couple guns. There was nothing he could turn to. But on the other hand, there was nothing that’d hold him back to anything. He was free. Terrifying? Yes. But, ah, well. A bit of challenge is good for the soul.
In times past, back in the twentieth century, there was a railroad spur leading to Bethlehem.
Yet as they approached the town, they saw it wasn’t the vacation destination it once was, and despite wartime needs, little industry had taken up shop in the town, meaning the spur wasn’t a priority for refurbishment.
Stepping off the train, and taking a look at the huge locomotive, Kraber looked down on Littleton and wondered just how he would make this work.
Perhaps it was a really, really stupid idea.
December 2022
“Well, it was!” says Scootaloo.
“Scoots!” you hiss.
“Well, he went to a town with the PHL!”
“Of course it was a fokking stupid idea. But… It was the closest synagogue that I knew of,” Kraber says sheepishly. “I didn’t have the tom to go to Concord or Manchester, the khakis’d probably be looking for me in Portland – well, I wanted to be away from there – and I didn’t know if I had the money. Plus, I’d been thinking I’d just stop by and drift like the usual bergie.”
“Just googled it,” Elena says, staring down at her smartphone. “Turns out there’s one near Laconia.”
“Well, I didn’t know that,” Kraber shrugs. “Besides, how would I get there?”
July 2022
The service would be tomorrow, so he had time to spare. If he remembered correctly from the maps all over Defiance’s predictably grandiosely named ‘command center’, the chain hotels were near the current site of a PHL office. Which, frankly, seemed like tempting fate. But it would be a hell of a long walk next morning if he stayed in Littleton.
If he could find anywhere to stay. Nah. He had to save his hard-earned cash, after all. So he’d probably find somewhere to eat. Thankfully, he wasn’t hungry after eating all those pancakes and that ice cream back in North Conway, but he’d be hungry soon enough.
‘Well, Viktor,’ he told himself, ‘This is rock bottom. No friends, talking to that bloody merry-go-round toy, running out of cash, and probably not going to eat dinner today because I had a huge breakfast. I am a fokking idiot.’
When he’d stepped out of the train car, he’d been bewildered by the population of Equus natives. Now, Berlin and North Conway he could understand – Berlin was a refugee camp and an industrial center, manufacturing paper, weaponry, and providing power to the North country. North Conway was near several farms, and had a lot of logging. It was kind of a surprise, really, just how many ponies were here. And zebras, oh my!
Over on the other side of the river, the mills were running. From what Kraber tell, they were gristmills. He wondered if he’d be able to buy some cheese and make some cheese grits here. The shrimp would be hard to come by, as would meat in general, but he could probably make something filling with a bit of sausage, an egg, peppers, and mushrooms.
This might not be a bad place to hunker down till Barrierfall, he thought. Bein’ a bergie’s fokkin’ awful. I could wait here, keep myself safe, buy ammo, get a decent amount of tom...
And find someone to be chommies with? Somepony even? Sixstring seemed like a correct ou, one that wouldn’t blow up a city…
Heh, maybe. I could work in a mill, get grits. I could be… Sixstring had been right. Anyone. Maybe I could even work as a back-alley doctor. There’s probably a lot of people and ponies with injuries that they don’t like explaining. I could go into radio like I’d wanted to, he thought, as he heard a PHL radio station blaring from the speakers overhead. Be a counterpoint to those fokkin’ kontgesigs that say the HLF tried to save the Sorghum… I could even work as an interpreter! Not many people that can speak Turkish, Swahili, English, German, Afrikaans, Hebrew, Polish, and Portuguese…. and a little yiddish and hindu.
The mill thing would probably pan out. Littleton looked to have rebuilt a lot of its mills… it was nigh on impossible to find a town that didn’t have some kind of industry running. Then, after working up the cash, he’d move on, get across the country, make his way into the pacific. Maybe to New Zealand - what with that being the last place the barrier would collapse, he’d be able to relax, away from all the crazies...
“Where are you going?” Sixstring asked.
Kraber checked the map of Littleton that someone had posted to a board, searching for cheap enough hotels or places that looked good enough to stay. The map mentioned plenty of squatter camps and new hotels, often added in with red ink, but he wasn’t sure how he’d get to Bethlehem from there. Plus, maps like these were unreliable – you never truly found everything on them. There was always some camp left off the map.
“Ah naid somewhere tae stay,” Kraber said. “Ah was going tae the synagogue tomorrow, but…” he shrugged, both hands out. “Ah’m kindae homeless. I was thinking Ah’d find my way to one of the squatter camps. Know any where they won’t steal my gun?” he asked, holding up the duffel bag that housed his MG2019.
“Well, yeah. Been to most of em,” Sixstring said, and shivered. For the first time, Kraber noticed a huge scar under his companion’s mane.
“What happened?” Kraber asked quietly.
“The Miller Pond camp is a bad place, my friend.”
‘Friend? Friends with a gluestick now? Well, doesn’t that beat all.’
“Got stabbed there one night,” Sixstring explained casually. “They tried to skin me, sew my Mark into a jacket. Heck, they were gonna eat me.”
As low as he’d sunk, Kraber had never eaten pony meat before. Admittedly, the opportunity had rarely come along, but something about eating them had… just never felt right. Probably something to do with that time he’d tried to eat his college roommate. After attempting to try the ‘other white meat’, he’d no desire to consume the ‘other red meat’. He’d been called a pussy for it in the HLF, but the thought of eating something once sentient enough to call him a bastard or scream at him from inside an oven put him on edge.
So that, that was at least one standard he held himself to. Besides, you occasionally heard these horror stories from other parts of the world. And sometimes he wondered if such a world was worth saving.
“No, no… I don’t deserve–”
‘There’s good in you, Kraber,’ he remembered someone telling him. A pony, maybe?
“You don’t deserve Miller Pond,” Sixstring said, shuddering again. “Eeeugh. Besides, he’s a right stand-up pony.”
Kraber froze at that. “You sure you don’t have any human friends that’d be willing?”
“Come on,” groaned Sixstring, “there’s no need to be that racist.”
“No, no, it’s just–” Kraber started. “Okay. Yeah, it’s racist, it’s not yuir friend’s fault his entry into the world’s brought nothing but suffering–”
“HEY!” Sixstring yelled. “My friend – my cousin is one of the best stallions I’ve ever known. I know you’ve lost a lot, but–”
“Most of my family,” Kraber interrupted. “Was ponified. My cousin Richard’s a Newfoal. He took the potion cause he had something wrong in his spine, and I had to watch him deteriorate into a drooling idiot over facebook. His mind held out awhile, but when the war started, he practically degenerated into a baby. And, on my kids birthday, I lost my faimly. I’d been through hell for my wife, and her parents hated me at first… now she’s probably some goddamn fokking Royal Guard radgin’ bastard’s foktoy. I lost my son and daughter on their birthday, and a good kid was nearly paralyzed. He’s probably ponified by now. All in the same fokking day.”
“... Damn,” Sixstring breathed. “I’d be surprised if you weren’t HLF after that.”
There was an awkward pause.
“Ah apologize fir insulting your cousin. He’s probably better than most I knew back there. It’s just… Look. Ah told ye Ah was HLF–”
‘That’s one way of putting it. You’re Viktor Marius Kraber, the closest thing to a disguise that you did was giving yourself a mustache, some sideburns, a slouch, a hat, and an accent!’
“–and I donae want him tae, ye ken... freak out.”
“Just don’t freak him out, and you’ll be fine,” Sixstring insisted. “I know this stallion pretty well – who, by the way, is also gonna go to synagogue.”
“... A Jewish pony. Really,” Kraber said, flat as possible, too caught in his own disbelief to actually make that a question.
“Actually, just a friend of a Jew. That stallion just goes out of curiosity, right up with a friend,” Sixstring explained. “He was gonna be in Quebec, but something about the HLF forced him back here. I gotta ask him later…”
Kraber froze again. ‘You just gotta keep cool,’ he told himself. ‘You’re disguised simply enough. Remember what Kagan said. Kerels recognize a person, not a persona. Persona. Not a person. Keep the act up, you’ll be fine. It’ll be just like playing Begbie eight years ago. Except you’ll die or get ponified – no you won’t! – if you drop it. Just don’t think about it too hard. Don’t think about it at all.’
“Besides, I owe you,” Sixstring said. “You already paid for a train ticket for both of us, and gave me more grocery money. Come on then, just give my friend a chance.”
“Well… I dinnae like it. But I like being homeless even less. Ye sure this’ll work oot?” Kraber asked, uneasy. The time he and Kagan had been bergies had been awful. Plenty of people had tried to rop the two of them, even fellow HLF.
“Sure,” Sixstring said, as the two of them headed off to Jackson Street. “He lives on the edge of town. Well, what was the edge of town.”
The ‘edge of town’, as Sixstring put it, was a sorry-looking collection of buildings awkwardly shoved between trees. Shipping containers, prefab houses of every quick, mobile design that could be made at this point and time, and ramshackle shanties built from whatever was on hand jutted out from between the trees alongside dirt roads. They’d been painted with so many layers of graffiti and murals that they were almost furry.
One house, a construction built of two shipping containers attached to a cherry-red prefab, caught Kraber’s eye. One of the containers was painted a bright, eye-searing pink, emblazoned with a smiling sun, its grin made to look like it was held open with meathooks in one corner. In the other corner, and spilling onto the neighbouring container, Kraber could see a painted white earth pony so massive he looked like a small horse. But it was a caricature, they didn’t make ponies that big, surely. The artist had drawn him with two massive saddle-mounted LMGs that looked straight out of some bad apocalyptic or futuristic ‘90s comic drawn by Rob Liefeld. That said, he vaguely remembered somepony that huge from Agua Caliente...
Beneath the mural was written: “Buck Celestia up the plot!” in a font that reminded Kraber of Sunset Overdrive. Below that, a snarky addition, possibly written by a unicorn: “Who’d go near that?”
Then, below that, a recent addition, written in jagged, dripping uncertain script by somebody else, clearly unused to writing with paint: “Let me do it, I have flaming gonorrhea.”
‘Ah, now that was lekker!’ Kraber broke into a smile, which then practically shattered into a loud, thunderous guffaw. It wasn’t quite uproariously funny, but it was more one of those ‘I’ve been having a bad fokking day, and even if this is humor of the chicken-crossing-a-road type, this is just funny enough I can let all those frustrations go’ things.
“Ag, man… that’s hilarious!”
‘Shit. Used South African slang. Better tone it down. For now, you’re being Francis.’
“You think so?” Sixstring asked.
“Well, yeah,” Kraber said, still chuckling a little at that, watching as someone’s chicken ran across a dirt driveway full with ancient cars that had been bound for the scrap heap or taken from Europe a long while ago. A moment later, a tiny lime-green earth pony with a panicked look on her face and a young child that, judging by the lack of patches on his clothes, was probably not from one of the refugee houses, ran by.
Kraber sighed deeply. “Ah needed that.”
“Eh, we all need a time to laugh nowadays,” Sixstring said. “That’s what party ponies were for.”
“... Party ponies?” Kraber asked. That was a new one. That fokking kontgesig Pinkie Pie had referred to herself as one, but he’d never been too clear on learning. More about shooting.
“A special kind of pony, usually an earthpony, dedicated to bringing laughter and joy to all. But the party ponies have given up – Cheese Sandwich has been pissed off a long time about how his father got screwed over by Celestia, and Pinkie’s–”
“FUCK THAT BAWBAG!” Kraber yelled after a brief pause, irritated that he had to resort to insults that weren’t in Afrikaans.
“...Yeah,” Sixstring said. “Laughter has left Equestria, Mr. Strang.”
“Wait, ah, who the hell is Cheese Sandwich?” Kraber asked. “Nivir heard ay him.”
“Oh he’s a PHL assassin nowadays,” Sixstring said. “They say he’s second cousin to Celestia and twice as wicked…”
He saw the surprised look on Kraber’s face and laughed. “Or so people say. But yeah, Cheese has a lot of secrets even by today’s standards. More than you, I’d bet.”
“I plead the fifth,” Kraber said neutrally.
“Anyway, I ran with Cheese awhile ago as one of his backup guitarists,” Sixstring explained. “But then I got stranded here when I hid in some cargo and ended up in Portsmouth. And it’s too hard to go back. There’s reeducation centers, there’s barely anypony willing to smuggle ponies back into Equus, not like it was in the early days when the PHL, HTF and the Resistance had the Underground Railroad running to an express timetable. Now, it’s more unreliable than the New York subway, and Faust alone knows what happens to you if they catch you...”
“I can’t imagine she’s happy to know,” Kraber added, as he thought back on it. The amount of encounters the HLF could have in a year with Resistance ponies was, putting it lightly, barely sufficient to be measured on one hand, and even then that was possibly overstating it. All HLF intelligence boiled down to ‘they…. exist? I guess?’
And yes, the ellipses and question marks were included there. Resistance ponies and HLF weren’t likely to meet - ever - so info was scarce. That, and Kraber was growing increasingly conscious of the fact that the HLF’s intelligence gathering could usually be comparable to a flying chainsaw… unfavorably.
“I sure as hell wouldn’t be. Hey, cousin!” Sixstring yelled, rapping on the oddly wide screen door that had been awkwardly crowbarred into place in a hole in the multilevel mass of shipping containers. One of which, Kraber noted, was the one with the graffiti he’d liked.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming. What is it?” someone rumbled. Ja. ‘Rumbled’ was the word, this voice was crazy deep. Its owner threw the door open, and Kraber stared in disbelief for a moment. The earth pony stallion walking out was simply huge, almost certainly the model for the graffiti. And fok it, that couldn’t have been a caricature, this pony was large enough he was the spitting image of the graffiti! He was so huge, he–
TB3 came back after awhile, just to help me with this! 
I should point out that there's about three more chapters of this that're finished. That said, Team Spectrum's real strength is the team effort that can be put behind editing, and only me and Vox have really looked at the other two docs I have open. Well, Red looked at the doc after this, but this is a chapter away.
Also, expect even MOAR Last Train!
Thanks for the new cover, Jed. It looks bitchin good :)
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5972781 thanks! :)
I'm bloody loving this fic so far, propably one of the best I've ever read. Took me a few days to read it though. So far everything been great except one thing. As an Afrikaaner myself I've seen quite a few grammatical errors in you're Afrikaans. That being said, if I have the time, I wouldn't mind checking your tidbits of Afrikaans to make sure that it's al correct.
I have to add though that reading the Afrikaans swear words are like an inside joke, I can't help but snicker or smile at them. You truly do choose the absolutely vilest words in the Afrikaans vocabulary too.
Happy writing and keep up the good work!
6043767 thanks so much!
^~^ I thought the Afrikaans translation might be a problem... Still, the insults guide that I found has been helpful.
Can I call you if I need help writing some stuff out in Afrikaans though?
6044817
Anytime, in fact, I would be honoured to assist in the creation of literature so fine.
6046624 Thank you so much! I'll call you in when I need you. There's...
Holy shit of God I have seven chapters in google docs. That's like 150k words more. Anyway, I'll call you sometime for help with those.
6047525
I'm eager to lend a hand, I stand at the ready, patiently awaiting you're summoning. No mater how much work lies ahead, I am eager to grab it by the horns and get it done.