Fallout Equestria: Old World Dreams

by KDarkwater

Prologue

So much had changed.

A lifetime ago, the world was so much simpler. Friendlier. Safer.

And then something happened. Somewhere, somehow, the Equestrian ideals of harmony, peace, and friendship were…displaced. Shoved out of sight by far more baser, uglier notions. Lust. Greed. Angst. Rage. Distrust. Malice.

And these notions weren’t contained to Equestria. They seemed to seep into the collective consciousness of every society in every parcel of land. Within a few short years, a concept most ponies could never fathom had arrived.

War. And when it came, ponykind was forever altered. Tainted. Taking a life was something so alien, so unconscionable to ponies, that such things had never even been discussed for generations.

Yet, to her eternal dismay, ponies proved more than willing students in the art of war. The Equestria of today was not the Equestria she’d read of in school. Vast cities of skyscrapers of glass and metal attempting to reach the skies themselves replaced the simpler wood and brick houses. Technology and knowledge progressed at such rates that its impact on the natural world was only just now being realized (but often ignored in favor of survival against the zebras and their allies). New, more terrible weapons were developed and deployed each year with surprising speed and efficiency. Even the more peaceful studies of levitation and conjuration magic gave way to the more straightforward and conflict-centered arts of widespread destruction and misery. Spells so powerful, so devastating in their effect as to be dubbed megaspells, the very name instilling a foreboding doom in the heart.

But the most gut-wrenching, damning thing to come out of all these horrors wasn’t some new method of killing or a world-defiling technology. It was the long-term effects of this new state of affairs.

The Equestria that was, wasn’t anymore. Where friendship, harmony, and understanding once united the unicorns, earth ponies, and pegasi, deceit and conspiracy now began to drive them apart. Rumors had begun to spread that the zebras had sympathizers within Equestria, funneling to them intel, weapons, even unicorns willing to use their magic for the zebra cause. Princess Luna’s ministries were growing far beyond any one pony’s ability to control or contain—even for the Elements of Harmony themselves. Corporations grew to become almost as powerful as any ministry, bringing with them their own ills and poisons upon the souls of ponykind. The darkest of tales told that the zebras even had their own form of megaspells in the form of something called a balefire bomb.

In the bluntest of terms, the world had gone to Tartarus in a single generation, and as much as she hated to admit it, the pegasi were probably more accurate in their assumptions than anypony dared to believe. And she’d done the incredibly stupid thing of bringing a foal into this new Equestria. She did not want her only child to see the fear in her eyes as she read the morning paper, hear the terror in her voice as she spoke with her neighbors over the latest war news, feel the panic that sucked her lungs dry as the rumors of the power of megaspells grew more prevalent with each passing month. She wanted her daughter to know the Equestria that was, and that could be again, if everyone would just put their damned guns down and start working together towards a better future.

But most of all, she wanted her to live long enough to see that Equestria. She had to forcefully bite down on her own tongue to keep from bursting into tears whenever she took to the streets of Hoofville, scowling at all the war propaganda posters that marred the walls of the shops and businesses. She was most disturbed by the images of a pink-colored pony, whose silver-streaked pink mane reminded her of a fluff of cotton candy. Her message ‘Pinkie Pie is watching you FOREVER’ seemed to be the favored reminder of her ministry to ponyfolk, and was yet another reminder of the world she now lived in and wanted to forget.

She didn’t even notice her filly poking at her until the poor thing had to bite down lightly on her left foreleg to get her attention. As much as it stung, she didn’t bother to berate her for it. She had been awfully inattentive right then.

“Sorry, honey,” she murmured quietly, turning her head down behind her where her filly dutifully waited for her. “Got lost in my head again.”

“We should get you a map or somethin’,” her child responded with a touch of disdain. “You get ‘lost’ all the time. What’s wrong?”

Everything, she thought sadly. Aloud, however, all she was willing to utter was, “Just…thinking. Maybe I’ll get better at it if I keep doing it.”

“Hope so, you almost wandered right into that light pole!” her filly laughed lightly, bringing a rush of warm blood to her face as she swiftly hopped off to her right in time to avoid the aforementioned pole.

“Maybe I should leave the thinking to smarter ponies today,” she caved after a moment’s thought. Nearly beaning herself on a light pole she should have seen half a mile away left her wondering if the stress of living in this world was starting to get to her. Perhaps it was finally time to admit to her husband that she did need some help. Just a little bit.

“Now yer talkin’ some sense! We’re supposed to be relaxin’ today, remember? The park’s not far now, it’d be a shame if you missed out ‘cause you banged your head on something that stood still!”

The amusement her daughter derived from her misfortune finally proved to be enough of an annoyance to take her mind off the state of worldly affairs, and she promptly scooped the little filly within her left foreleg and brought her up close for a forced re-arrangement of her mane with her right hoof. “Speaking of which—”

How her treasure of the world got to be ticklish on her skull and crest was beyond her, but hearing the thing squeal and laugh as her morning brushing was ruined never ceased to lift her heart from her heavy chest. “Ahah-hahaha that tickles!” she cried joyfully, her struggle to escape her “punishment” doing little more than giving her mother a decent workout. “Mom that tickles stoppit!”

“Hey, it’s your fault banging your head on something that stood still!” the mare quipped briskly. Her filly’s token resistance to her teasing only prompted her to reach her hoof further down her neck, where the real ticklish spots were.

Her squeals and chuckles quickly morphed into loud, shrilly cries of laughter, drawing the pair a great deal of uncomfortable-looking stares (and a few light-hearted grins), but neither of them paid them any attention. “Aaaaaah! O-okay I’m so-hahaha I’m sorry quit it hahahahaaaa!”

Hearing her teal coated filly cave in, she promptly stopped her tickling assault and released her prey from her grasp, settling her forelegs back onto the sidewalk. The dark, brooding thoughts that had clouded her mind earlier had been completely forgotten—though she had this odd feeling that she’d been upset at something earlier, she couldn’t fathom what, and so long as she could her daughter’s laughter, she didn’t want to. “Apology accepted,” she said with a hint of smugness—

“But the great and powerful Star Shine will get you next time!” the daughter dared to challenge anyway as the pair began their trot once more.

“The great and powerful Star Shine may be missing her daffodil sandwich and hay fries later,” she laughed back. Oh stars the sky looked so beautiful today! Celestia’s gorgeous sun shined through like a beacon to higher lands, its rays piercing through the layer of stubborn clouds that tried to block it from everypony’s sight. She couldn’t believe she’d never noticed it earlier! What wonders her daughter’s laughter did for her mood!

“Not if she gets to her mother’s share of the picnic!” Star Shine schemed aloud, as she was wont to do when she was having too much fun pestering her mother. “A heist for the ages! Or…at least for the week.”

“For the week?” the mare poked back, her body slinking around to the right at the curb. “C’mon, you’ve got to set your dreams higher than that. You’ll never make it big this way.”

“Start small, win big!” Star Shine chimed proudly, no doubt reciting some words of wisdom she’d just gleaned off of a book at school earlier in the week. “You can’t shoot for the stars if you don’t know how to walk there!”

“Sometimes you have to run before you can walk,” the mare countered, briefly recalling how her bundle of life had come into the world—through a hasty (but enjoyable) evening with her coltfriend that would become her husband when she told him the end result. She hadn’t thought it at the time, but Star Shine was the best, brightest thing to ever come into her life.

Even if she’d just been barely old enough to marry at the time.

“That’s just silly!” Star Shine rebuffed. Having grown tired of walking, she’d begun to hop and bounce along beside her mother in a seemingly endless bout of energy, and it was infectious. “Runnin’s a lot harder than walkin’, ya can’t run if you don’t even know how to work your legs in the first place!”

She began to make small hops herself. She could easily outbounce her little star, but that wasn’t the point—she was just starting to feel as tightly wound as her filly, and she wanted to burn off some of that energy before it got to her and made her take off at the speed of light. “It means that sometimes big risks are the only way to get where you’re going. You can take baby steps all your life and never reach your destination, but if you take a chance and just run for it you might make it there before you know it.”

“And yet you tell me to be careful all the time,” Star Shine moaned derisively, though her hopping and bouncing didn’t abate any. “Always ‘Star Shine, watch where you’re going!’ or ‘don’t stand on your hind legs like that!’ or ‘don’t reach up so high on that step ladder!’ or—“

“That’s different!” she said with a slight edge, finally having something with which to focus her building energy—keeping her offspring in line. “I just don’t want you to hurt yourself doing those things. Like when you touched the stove after I turned it on and told you not to touch it. You touched it anyway.”

“Yeah, I remember,” the little filly reluctantly agreed in a grumble, her mood souring at the lecture that had just sprung up out of their back-and-forth playful bickering. She stopped hopping about like a rabbit and resumed her leisurely trot, but her gaze was focused more towards the sidewalk than anything else. “My hoof was sore for days, I could barely walk on it.”

“My heart was sore for weeks,” she continued, trying not to cringe at the year-old memories of Star Shine limping about on a bandaged leg. She followed her child’s lead and stopping leaping about herself. “It hurt me to see you like that, and I was always thinking of how much worse it could have been. I love you to death, but I don’t want that to be literal. I just want to go through the day and know you’ll be okay at the end of it. That’s all.”

“So what’s this talk of ‘runnin’ before I can walk’? How’s that bein’ careful?”

“Like I said, that’s different,” she repeated herself, wondering if she’d even get her point across. As smart as Star Shine was, she sometimes wondered if she was even qualified to be her mother. “Someday you’ll understand.” I hope.

An awkward silence grew between mother and child, and mother began to regret that the light-hearted, cheerful teasing had turned into a parent-knows-better lecture. Hearing her daughter’s squeals of delight was the only thing that kept her going some days, and she always felt guilty when she was the reason it stopped. She tried to think of something to get it going again, something to bring that blissfully ignorant smile back to her face so she could marvel at how much happier Star Shine was without knowing that something was wrong with the world.

But she never got the chance. Having mostly ignored the world around her up to that point, she finally had time to notice that many of the other ponies in the streets were in a rather big hurry to get somewhere. Some were shouting to their companions in high, panicked tones, while others simply raced along the roads as if their tails were on fire. But none of them seemed to be going to any one place in particular, resulting in a rather ugly mashing of bodies in the intersections streets as they began to run into each other in their blind rush towards….whatever they were trying to accomplish.

A few even bore looks of pure terror. As if someone had just told them dire, dreadful news and didn’t know how to deal with it.

“….Mom, what’s going on?” Star Shine asked her, her voice quaking as a general feeling of panic began to grow more prevalent amongst the townsfolk. “Everypony’s scared of something.”

As if it were trying to ensure that her upcoming lie would fail, the town’s tornado warning system began to wail at the world. Once used to warn townsfolk of a pegasi-generated tornado that had grown beyond their control in their efforts to re-hydrate their clouds, it found new use as an air raid warning when the zebra began getting help from the griffons and dragons.

Yet the zebra hadn’t been spotted anywhere near Hoofville for at least a month.

“I-it’s probably just a random test,” came the lie from her mouth—

“They don’t do random tests,” Star Shine continued, becoming both adamant and scared at the pretensions of her own words. “They test it on Wednesdays. Today’s Saturday!”

I know! But screaming the words wouldn’t help the kid calm down. And the town had drilled over what to do when the alarms went off, regardless of the actual cause. “C’mon, Clover Luck’s shop is just ahead, I’m sure she won’t mind us waiting out the drill in the back—“

A mare’s shriek of horror caused her to jerk her head back towards the intersection behind them, saw a bright teal coated pony collapsing onto her haunches as she stared out at something in the far distance.

Something terrible enough to leave her in a state of pure shock, her eyes locked wide open and unable to tear herself away from the sight that froze her.

“Mom, ma-maybe we should go home—“

She turned around and galloped back towards the curb, her heart unable to decide whether to keep pumping blood through her veins or seize up entirely, and she had to focus incredibly hard just to get a steady breathing rate going. Please just be a tornado please please please Celestia please—

She zipped around the hat shop at the corner to face whatever had terrified the mare into a living statue—

Found herself frozen as well, her eyes attracted to the large mushroom cloud of smoke and fire far beyond the horizon of the tall grass fields that surrounded the town, felt her lungs stop sucking in oxygen completely as a cold, bone-numbing veil of fear began to cover her body.

The only city in that direction was Trotpeka. Fifty miles away.

No, everything’s fine, j-just a wildfire—

A sphere of crackling of purple energy, concealed by the mushroom cloud, peaked up over the rising plume and sparked upward into the skies above, so bright and large that nopony could miss it.

Her eyes smashed themselves shut, her breathing turned ragged. I’m not here. I’m in the park. I’m watching Star Shine chase a squirrel to a tree—

Her eyes creaked open.

Another one, trailing off in a different direction and quickly being swallowed up by the distant skies.

Eyes shut, inner voice crying. I’m calling out to her for lunch, putting an apple next to her sandwich—

Eyes open, trying hard not to cry and barely breathing.

A third sparkling sphere, this one in red with a trail of arcane tendrils in its wake, coming downward in a trajectory that suggested it came from lands far beyond the other side of town, barreled straight towards that distant horizon ahead of her at the speed of a pegasus trying to break the spectrum barrier—

Eyes shut again, her mind screaming and begging. I’m showing her the difference between an oak tree and a maple tree, showing her the pecan tree Sugarsweet planted last spring—

Eyes reluctantly open, hoping to see trees, heart refusing to work as intended.

The red crackling spark dipped down beneath the hills beyond the town, and though it was no longer so easily visible, its brightness still splayed its ominous glow upon the straw-colored earth.

Eyes sloshing shut a blurry vision of the street, drowning her vision in pitch black. We’re walking home, orange skies and a gorgeous sunset, blue jays and robins building nests in the trees by the library—

Eyes begged open, pleading to Celestia and Luna for the sunset through an endless wall of tears.

A flash of intense sunlight engulfed the sky for a few seconds, but the line of shops beside her spared her eyesight from any pain.

Only then could her mind finally smash through her denial to acknowledge what she was seeing. No. Oh dear Luna NO—

The screams came again, from another mare somewhere behind her (or a stallion), and she was dragged out of the surreal scene playing out in the skies above just long enough to notice a second mushroom cloud had appeared in the horizon.

That was the point when everypony else figured out what was happening. And then the real screams began. The high-pitched, sorrowful screeches of ponies staring death itself in the face, and finally realizing that this was it. The end of the world as they knew it.

She would’ve screamed with them until her voice went hoarse in complete denial, if Star Shine hadn’t bit down on her hind leg to jolt her out of her stunned stupor. When she inched her neck down at her filly, she saw large eyes, dilated in terror and soaked with salty tears that could’ve come only from knowing what they were seeing. And it broke her heart.

“M-mom…I’m scared,” she cried. “I don’t wanna die.”

A mild breeze helped dry out her watery vision, her only child’s terrified voice becoming her best tool in helping her focus her own fears into something somewhat more useful than ruining her lungs with fruitless screaming.

“You are not dying!” she snapped sharply, hoping to shock the filly out of her quiet crying. “You understand? I won’t let you! You’ll make it through this!”

“H-how?!” Star Shine heaved, choking on her own gasping sobs. “Mommy, I don’t know what to do—“

She hasn’t called me Mommy in years, the mare realized almost immediately. Hearing her filly utter those words began to make her realize just how crippling an effect the mushroom clouds were having on her emotional state of mind—and honestly, if such a young thing could fathom and understand such a concept as a pony-wrought cataclysm, what could she possibly say that would be any good? How could she stand there and tell her little star that despite what was about to happen that everything would be all sunshine and roses?

Worse still, mindless destruction was not the day’s only planned horrors. In her search for answers she dared to look up past her filly, to the horizon on the other side of town in hopes that she wouldn’t see any mushroom clouds in that direction, only to spot a barrage of small rapid moving, rapidly growing green sparkles of arcane energy barreling towards the town from the hills near the creek. And as the pulsing spheres began their final descent, one of them peeled away from the group and veered off towards the crowded intersection of ponies just a few yards away from her.

Her motherly senses subconsciously urged her into motion, pulling Star Shine across the pavement until her body stood between the filly and the coming destruction, and managed to push the terrified thing along for about a dozen steps before she threw herself over her child—

—thunder erupted in the streets behind her, and she only heard a snippet of concrete forcefully crumbling apart before the world vanished into oblivion.

Comments

[Wolf Bane]

oshiiiiiiiiiiiiii! Must read next chaptar! Also... FIRST BUCKING POST.