Fallout Equestria: Old World Dreams

by KDarkwater

Chapter 7

7

To be completely, totally honest, neither of them were expecting a land of sunshine and rainbows. Thus, it was with relief and mild trepidation that their initial expectations of what the surface was like was not so far from what they’d reasoned.

A massive, overhanging carpet of gray clouds obscured the skies as far as her eyes could see, distant patches flashing white and blue as random lightning strikes came alive within the clouds. The accompanying thunder rolled gently across the barren landscape, pockmarked in seemingly random patches with shriveled bushes and small clumps of prairie grass. Much of the ground in front of them, however, looked dusty and dry, and a cool wind whipped about the land in a seemingly random pattern. Clouds of dust occasionally rose from the ground and spread out in a misty fashion, and her damp mane began to grow cold from the touch of the rushing air.

More disturbing, however, were the rows of ancient sky wagons scattered about, many of them twisted and broken into barely recognizable heaps of metal. Nearly two centuries of exposure to the elements had ruined them—most were rotted out by rust, a combination of sickly looking brown and dark red, and the few baggage cases and storage boxes that looked intact had been looted long ago. Several contained remnants of the bones of their former passengers, and she was surprised that were any to begin with. Even so, there was little left inside the two closest sky wagons for anypony to be able to tell if they had once been mares, stallions, or little fillies and colts. She honestly didn’t want to know.

Aside from the bare earth and dead shrubbery, she saw only one husk of a tree masked by the field of debris and ancient machines, its trunk whittled down to the height of the Princess Sisters. But what remained was at the very least, still standing.

A perfect target.

Thankful to have a task to take her attention away from her lingering grief, she slowly nudged Light Tail out of her stunned daze with a quick tap of her snout. “C’mon, I need to teach you something before we get moving.”

Without waiting to see if the little one would respond she walked on past her, her route taking her near a rusted sky wagon that unfortunately did have a fairly intact skeleton still inside its passenger berth, and she did her best not to let her eyes linger on it as she hurried past.

“….t-teach me what?” Light Tail asked, her hoofsteps beginning to tap along behind her in a quick trot to match the larger pony’s casual walking speed. “And….and where did all of these sky wagons come from? The First Ones never mentioned any of this in their journals….”

This earned the filly a quizzical look from her mother, who was momentarily surprised by the fact that her daughter had shown any interest in the Founding Journals at all. “How much of them did you read?”

“Only the ones Miss Amethyst had us read in class,” El-Tee answered quietly. By the sound of her voice Sling presumed her to have moved past the rusted sky wagon, and the lack of terrified shrieks at the sight of a pony’s skeleton was welcome. Probably too short to see over the railing and inside the passenger deck. “None of ‘em ever mentioned these things bein’ out here, only that they crossed a field to get to the Stable.”

She briefly pondered how best to answer the question in a way that would get the point across without being overly detailed or descriptive of the fates of the souls the wagons had once borne. “…..what little I’ve read on the megaspells suggests they’re capable of emitting a secondary backlash wave of residual mana energy that can disable anything more advanced than a steam engine within a defined radius of the blast. Sky wagons, arcane energy weapons, spark generators and portable batteries, even the armor of the War Ministry’s Steel Rangers. My best guess is that these wagons were trying to escape the megaspell exchange when one detonated nearby or above them. Shut down the engines in mid-air, and their pegasi drivers don’t have the strength to pull them along behind them without the support of the engines.”

She didn’t finish her exposition; she didn’t have the heart to. And Light Tail was smart enough to figure out the rest from there on her own regardless. “….oh…”

They spent the next minute and a half in solemn silence, the filly now realizing they were essentially walking through a gravity-built graveyard and having little interest in conversation of any kind. When they’d come to within fifteen yards of the decaying husk of the tree trunk, however, Sling was forced to break that quiet and sanctity with the cold, indifferent necessity of reality. “I showed you this once before the other day, so you’ll probably get some vague feelings of déjà vu. You’re gonna learn how to shoot that gun on your traveling saddle.”

She stopped walking and looked back towards Light Tail, who had stopped herself cold mid-step to the point where even her right foreleg had halted its downward motion towards the ground. She took a slow, hard look at the lightweight .357 revolver tucked into a holster along her left side, and then sat down on her haunches with a heavy sigh. “….yer right, it does sound familiar. An’ I don’t like it. I don’t wanna shoot anypony.”

“You said the same thing the first time, too,” Sling answered back calmly, more than slightly afraid that the future might have other ideas about that particular statement. “You shouldn’t want to shoot other ponies, but that’s not the point. I want you to be able to look after yourself if we get separated, or….or worse. And not knowing how the gun works can actually be more dangerous. At least if you know how to handle it you can do it more safely. You saw how crazy it got in the Stable with all those bugs running around, right?”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it,” El-Tee blurted suddenly, her unusually sharp tone catching the mother off-guard. “I just said I don’t like it.”

“I’m not asking you to like it,” Sling bit back, letting her “Parent mode” slip into her tone. “But you will learn this. It’s important, especially now. Those bugs came from the surface and there’s no telling what else is out here.”

The little one’s response was simply another deep, resigned sigh, as if she were forcing herself to go through with the task ahead out of necessity. “….I know…”

Her daughter’s subdued, sullen mood took some of the bite out of her voice, and for the next ten minutes the lesson went largely as well as it had the first time, and even expanded a little as she showed her how the 10mm pistol worked as well—loading, unloading, the safety and magazine release, how hard she needed to work the slide to get it to snap forward after locking back on an empty magazine (it turned out the squirt’s magic pretty much maxed out at that particular trick). One particular caveat of interest did not escape her notice—it seemed as though merely repeating the lesson had done something to trigger El-Tee’s first memory of it, even if she could no longer recall it directly, and her first round of 125gr .38 Special fired from the lightweight revolver smacked right into the middle of the tree trunk. It was hard to tell at fifteen yards, but she noticed it largely because she was merely watching while El-Tee did the shooting.

“Wow,” her lips breathed of their own accord, her eyes locked onto the deadened chips of bark that had split away from the impact point. “Dead center, first try. Good shot.”

The lightweight revolver floated down below Light Tail’s face as she spied her own handiwork for herself. “I couldn’t tell from here with the gun in the way,” she said quietly, though much of her earlier disdain for the task was disappearing now that she was getting to the actual shooting. “…but this all feels kinda familiar to me anyway. Like I’m just re-learning somethin’ I already knew.”

“It definitely took you a couple of minutes to figure out to pull just the trigger and not the entire the gun the first time we did this,” Sling agreed, her mind already revisiting that Thursday morning and recalling another aspect she’d overlooked the first time. “Since you’ve already got the single-action pull down, just practice firing on double-action for the next nine shots. That takes more effort to shoot accurately and you won’t have time to keep pulling the hammer back if you ever need to draw that thing.”

With no protest (at least none that she could hear), the filly proceeded to do just that, peppering their spell-protected hearing with carefully-deliberated shots over the next twenty-five seconds. It quickly became apparent, however, that Light Tail was not going to get the hang of the ten pounds of pull pressure it required to pull the trigger and fire the weapon in a single session, as her shots were grouped all over the tree trunk. To be fair, though, fifteen yards was asking quite a bit of a weapon that was designed more as a trail kit gun than an implement of battle. And .38 Special wasn’t exactly a powerhouse round either.

Which the squirt was quick to notice when she’d fired her tenth and final round, taking out the tip of a jagged splinter of trunk at the top. “….so what’d you load it with? It’s not nearly as loud as it was in the Stable thirty minutes ago.”

“Those hallways were tight, cramped, and filled with metal,” she pointed out, finally giving in to her inherent curiousness and drawing Grayhawk from its holster on her left side. She already knew she could still shoot the 10mm just fine, but she hadn’t fired this hoofcannon in three years. “That amplifies the sound immensely. Out here there’s nothing to stop the sound and reflect it back at us.”

“I know that,” Light Tail bit back bitterly, turning the revolver upward to dump the empty casings free from the five-round cylinder. “I can still tell a difference in how this thing sounds. What were you shootin’ in the stable? Special bug-killin’ bullets?”

Sling snickered slightly at the remark, but it still stung hard to think back to such recent events and so she simply pushed the fresh memories out of mind for the moment and focused more on the present. “In a way, I guess. You wanna try one?”

As Sling pressed down on Grayhawk’s cylinder release to check the rounds inside, she could almost hear the gears in her night light’s head grinding to a sudden halt as she tried to contain her sudden rush of childlike glee. “Would I?!”

Sling kept her sinister grin mostly to one side of her mouth as she reached into the squirt’s saddle bag and slipped one round of .357 Mag out of its box, floating it out to her daughter in a teasing invitation. If nothing else, the prank would help take her mind off of what had just happened five minutes ago. “Here, I’ll give you one. Don’t have many to spare.”

Light Tail had the lightweight revolver back out in a flash, carefully guiding her mother’s offered ammunition into an empty chamber. With a careful press and indexing of the cylinder she ensured that the .357 round would be rotated into firing position when she cocked the hammer. Not something she’d taught the kid at all.

With her daughter’s attention focused on the upcoming shot, Sling was free to allow her grin to spread unsuppressed, stepping backwards as she sought to get the best view possible of the upcoming calamity. Still, her motherly protective instinct compelled her to keep her prank from being unnecessarily cruel. “Keep a good grip on it, it’ll kick some.”

“Yeah, I saw how you handled it,” El-Tee waved her off with a forehoof. “I’ll be fine, Mom.”

Suit yourself.

A quick glance at Grayhawk’s cylinder confirmed that all six chambers were loaded before she nudged it back shut, and her attention shifted back onto Light Tail as she focused on making the perfect shot—

—El-Tee squeezed down on the trigger, probably a little sooner than she’d expected to, and the resulting sheniagans gave her a good laugh. Even over the sound of the gunshot she could clearly hear her little girl’s shriek in surprise as the gun bucked its way free of her spell field and smacked her in the face, and the backlash of recoil knocked her off-balance enough that she wound up stumbling down on her butt a couple of seconds later when she couldn’t get her balance back. Her shot, surprisingly, managed to blow off the top of a jagged chunk of bark sticking out of the dead tree, but El-Tee never noticed.

She was too incensed over her mother’s sudden burst of laughter. “….you knew that would happen!!” she howled angrily once she’d gotten over her shock (and embarrassment).

She suppressed a snicker into a short snort long enough to answer clearly. “Hey, I warned you. And you said you’d be fine, remember?”

Light Tail’s answer was to simply growl and glare at her mother as she quickly picked the revolver off the ground and opened the cylinder, unceremoniously pulling the fired casing from its chamber, and then flicked it over her back and onto the ground beside her. “Fine, then, let’s see how you handle that monster you’re holding.”

Sling Shot’s grin only got wider as she brought Grayhawk’s sights upward and lined up the red-crystal front sight on top of one of Light Tail’s hits on the tree, and a slight shift in the spell field enveloping the revolver squeezed back on the trigger—

—Grayhawk roared to life for the first time in three years, and the sound and muzzle flash overwhelmed her with its abrupt eruption. Had she not remembered to keep a death grip on the weapon it could have very well bucked back right into her snout just as Light Tail’s gun had. Even with the hearing protection spell, the sound itself thumped its way into her chest and briefly made her heart feel as though it were being grabbed by a griffon’s talon. She swore she even felt the front of her mane being batted around by the back-end of the muzzle blast.

But this heavy price of recoil and noise was rewarded with the explosive deconstruction of the target—where Light Tail’s shot had merely split open a few pieces of dead wood, Sling Shot’s .44 Magnum absolutely obliterated the impact point and sent two-inch pieces of the trunk flying outward in several directions. The ancient tree, rotted out from the ravages of time, proved a much more fragile construct than she’d anticipated, for she could see much the same result exploding out from the back end of the tree trunk as well.

It took a few seconds for the two ponies to shake the noise of the gun out of their heads, and Sling resolved to work on amplifying the strength of the spell later when she began to hear a very faint ringing at the edge of her range of hearing. No more shooting for her, but at least she’d found out if she could still handle the weapon.

And it brightened Light Tail’s mood into one of stunned acceptance, which she preferred over a brooding demeanor. “….holy LUNA,” she shrieked, her rump sitting back down onto the ground as she soaked in every last detail of her mother’s shot. “….what is that thing?”

“Family heirloom,” she answered, unlatching the cylinder just long enough to replace the fired round with a fresh one before slipping the massive revolver back inside its holster. “Our ancestors brought it in with them before the Sealing. Passed down through the generations ever since. Same thing with the one you have, too.”

Light Tail’s gaze fell upon the lightweight revolver resting against her side in its holster, her eyes holding a mixture of fear and wonder. “…you….you mean these guns are over two hundred years old?! How are they still working after all that time?!”

“A properly maintained firearm will last for centuries,” she quoted from memory, recalling the opening line of the firearms chapter straight from the quartermaster training manual with which she’d become innately familiar in her eight years of security service. “That was my job in the stable, until Thursday, anyway.”

“Sounds pretty important,” El-Tee noted needlessly—

Trap, she recognized in the next instant. Something to get her to answer and draw her out of a comfort zone, into a place where she’d be forced to either answer the next question or make it obvious that she wasn’t comfortable answering it by shifting the subject.

Sometimes the kid was just too smart for her liking.

With no real polite way out of the mess, she went ahead and sprung the trap. “It was,” she offered as a reply, lifting her PipBuck up for a better view of its screen as she focused her telekinesis spell onto the mode switch and began flipping through the device’s various functions. With the short weapons lesson over and done with, it was time to get moving, and the first thing she needed to know was which way to go. At the very least, they could at least try to find the final resting place of some long-dead town or village, or whatever remained of the road system.

“So why’d you quit?” came the question she’d predicted would come, and feared answering it. Not just right then, but potentially forever. She’d talked and talked about staying true to Celestia’s words of wisdom, of refraining from violence for the sake of satisfying one’s rampant rage or anger, and the last thing she wanted was to admit she’d done exactly what she’d scolded her daughter for doing more than once when she gave Farsight her short “I quit” message.

Fortunately, when she switched the display to the local area mapping spell matrix function, she found an excellent way to squirm out of the situation even if the new one was potentially worse. “Oh, fu—poke me with a ten-foot pole!” she spat at the monochrome green miniature screen, catching herself before she could drop a rather uncouth curse upon her ten-year-old’s filly ears. “Of course this thing would have to draw itself a new map to replace the one it’s programmed with!”

“….what made you think a map from two hundred years ago would be any good now?” Light Tail inquired politely, likely deciding to forgo the hunt for her mother’s recent troubles in light of the fact that she’d just now admitted they were basically lost.

The simple logic of her reasoning almost caused Sling to slap herself in the face the moment she processed it. “Look behind us,” she replied with a touch of grief, her hoof slipping back down onto the ground as she reached into her bags for her binoculars. No use in messing with the local mapping function if it was just going to start drawing a new one. “Wherever those sky wagons came from, nopony’s been out this way to at least bury the dead ever since the war ended. The road systems and cities on the map might be in ruins but something of them could still be there. I was just hoping to find something that might show us the way to the closest road and we could go from there.”

With the binoculars in her magical grasp she lifted it up to her eyes and began scrutinizing every magnified detail the ten-power optics offered to her. The field of broken, rusting sky wagons and their skeletonized former riders only went out for a further forty yards, and the tree trunk they’d been shooting at sat atop a small hill, giving her a decent vantage point for surveying the immediate area. So far, however, she saw nothing else ahead of them except more patches of dry, dying tallgrass and cracked earth. What about to the right….

“…well, the stable was built near a town, right?” El-Tee suggested next.

“And that helps us, how?” she shot back as she swung the binoculars to her right…and saw much the same thing in that direction as well. Just more empty, barren land. “We still don’t know which way to go to get there.”

“It’d be in walkin’ or runnin’ distance,” the filly continued insistently, but her tone grew quiet and contemplative as she went on. “…y’know, since the First Ones woulda had to get here quick once the world started blowin’ up without warnin’….”

When she put it that way the idea sounded less stupid and wasteful. She held no illusions about what they would find, save that it wouldn’t be anywhere near as comfortable as their stable quarters and probably lacking a running plumbing system. She was already beginning to dread the next couple of days ahead.

With resignation she stopped scanning the lifeless landscape and slipped the binoculars back into their case inside her saddlebags. “….so your idea is to wander aimlessly in a circle until we find whatever’s left of this town?”

“Yup,” Light Tail quipped proudly. “It’s not like we got anythin’ better to do anyway.”

Sling stalled for a few more moments as she took the 10mm pistol out and made a quick round count. The gun belt had two full magazines in it, plus one empty one and the partial mag of five rounds she’d swapped out back in the stable. She’d picked up one empty magazine off the floor as well for a total of five spares…pop the mag out of the gun and scan the witness holes—

Terrific, she snarled bitterly as she counted nine rounds through the witness holes. With one I the chamber as well that left her….thirty-nine rounds of 10mm? Hardly encouraging considering how quickly they could be fired off from a semi-automatic weapon. She pulled the partial magazine out and stripped three rounds from it, and then stuffed them in the magazine she’d taken out of the gun to top it off before putting both mags back where they’d been earlier. She didn’t want to be caught with an empty weapon in the first two seconds of a fight if she needed it. She’d just have to remember not to grab the partial magazine for a reload until she had nothing else left.

She was pretty much carrying everything she owned now. “….guess we’ll start out going straight ahead for a few miles, then.”

“I don’t suppose that PipBuck’s got any music on it, does it?” Light Tail inquired innocently as the pair began their aimless trek.

“Not one iota of it,” the mare answered, distracted by her hounding thoughts of the stable they were leaving behind.

She only realized her mistake when the little filly began clearing her throat in preparation for a vocal task, and by then it was too late to talk her out of it. “Well, then—“

“No, wait—“

“One hundred bottles of beer on the wall, one hundred bottles of beeeeer—“

Sling’s hearing protection spell flared to life, muffling the little filly’s high-pitched singing….but unfortunately, there was really no way to tune her out completely or convince her to shut up. She knew—she’d tried it countless times, and failed. She was doomed. “Oh dear Luna, this is gonna be a long morning…”

“—ss it around, ninety-nine bottles of beer on the waaaall—“

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She got down to sixty-two before they came across their first hopeful sign that some remnant of civilization still existed.

It was a pretty lonely looking thing, perched atop the crest of a slightly-upward incline of ground. Despite two hundred years of time and weather, the wooden house was somehow still standing, though parts of it had long ago fallen apart. One corner of the front had collapsed some time ago, and judging by the haphazard planks of wood nailed over the hole, the soul that lived here was not a pro at house building. The planks were probably just meant to keep nasty critters like radroaches from getting in for lack of better options and skill. Nothing wrong with that.

She had enough sense to stop singing and let Mom slowly creep forward, keeping a sharp eye on how she regarded the rickety house before them. Every few seconds, Light Tail would take a short look around them to make sure nothing was trying to sneak up on them while they weren’t looking, but all she saw was an endless, dusty wasteland. Barely any plant life to sustain the ground and keep the wind from eroding it, which meant that whatever survived up here had little to use for hiding spots when stalking prey. It was kinda sad, really. She already missed the familiarity of the stable, its cool air, her…

….her friends….

Oh stars, I hope they’re okay…

“H-hello?” Mom’s voice called out suddenly, breaking her out of her brief pang of homesickness and causing her to look back up the tiny hill towards the house ahead. “Is anypony there?”

She quickly trotted up to her mother’s side, and Mom sidestepped out in front of her to keep her from going any further up. She wanted to be annoyed, but she knew Mom was probably just trying to keep her from getting hurt if something happened. She probably shouldn’t have been running forward like that to start with. Mom was stressed out enough as it was.

The dead silence that answered them did not make either of them feel any more comfortable about it. Mom called out again in a louder voice, but still got no answer from any living pony. Only the hollow, haunting howl of the wind greeted them.

Mom seemed frozen in thought, torn between one thing or another, trying to make some sort of decision. Yell again? Forget the house and move on with their day? Stick around an—

A quick dust-up of wind rushed across them, scraping the front of the house and rattling it some…and pulling the door open slightly as it passed, allowing an incredibly stout stink to escape from the interior. The mere whiff that she got was enough to make her reel back and wish she’d been standing a lot further away.

“Whoa,” she half-heaved, trying to pinch her nose shut with a small telekinesis spell. “Umm, I don’t think anypony’s home, let’s just go—“

If the smell bothered Mom any, she did a really good job of hiding her distaste, but the second she pulled the black gun out and flicked the safety off she stopped wondering about bad smells entirely.

“Stay outside,” Mom barked at her as she began to saunter towards the door, her tail flicking and twitching about. “Let me know if you see anything. Anything at all.”

Light Tail felt her little heart start to tighten up, beating faster and harder as she began to wonder what had Mom so spooked all of a sudden. She didn’t want to be out here all alone if it was that bad. “M-mom? What is it—”

“Just stay outside,” Mom repeated fiercely as she snapped her head back towards her, now less than a foot away from the door. “I mean it.”

Light Tail’s ears drooped, unconsciously flinching at the sudden change in her mother’s voice, and slowly stepped back a couple of feet. “O-okay…”

She thought she saw Mom’s left eye wince a little, probably just now realizing how much her tone of voice had hurt her, but she didn’t say anything else and looked back towards the house, slipping through the open crack in the door with the gun out in front of her. A moment later the last of her tail followed her through, and Light Tail’s ears couldn’t make out any hoofsteps after that.

Only then did the filly allow herself a few tears.

Jeez, she didn’t have to yell at me like that, she sniffled, wiping at her eyes with a forehoof as she tore her gaze away from the house. Just wanted to know what she was doing, I can’t help her if I’m stuck outside all clueless.

…still, probably better that she wasn’t following her, if that was the kind of mood she was in. Maybe she shouldn’t have been singing as long as she had? Or maybe Mom wasn’t sure what was in the house and didn’t want her getting in the way until she knew it was safe? Whatever the reason, the filly couldn’t help but feel stung. Twice now Mom had bit her head off for asking a simple question, and now that they couldn’t get back into the stable she didn’t really have anypony to talk to, or help her with everything that was stressing her out. And Mom made it pretty clear she didn’t want to talk to her about any of it. Not old enough, or something like that.

So how was she gonna change her mother’s mind? The blatant-but-logical-question trick hadn’t worked so far, and she wasn’t sure she could get away with a more subtle—and time-consuming—approach with Mom like she could everypony else (even Aunt C). Still worth a try, just for the sake of trying. She couldn’t just stay back and watch her mom fall apart trying to deal with all that stuff on her own. It was already hurting her.

Stupid ponies, she hissed in her mind, laying her head down on her crossed forelegs as she stared out at the vast, dry wasteland before her. I bet if everypony that ever said mean things to her saw how she was blowing up at me from all the stupid stress they’d cut it out…

….or maybe they wouldn’t care. One had to be pretty ambvi….darn it, what was the word she was trying to think of?! She was supposed to be smarter than this! She was….

….was now entirely transfixed by the growing black dot on the horizon. It was so far off that she could only describe it as a dot, but it was definitely moving because it was getting bigger and bigger. Maybe it was another pony, possibly even one that lived in this house that Mom had just broken into!

….okay, she hadn’t really broken into it, she just kinda invited herself in when she smelled that awful stink. Still, this pony wouldn’t take kindly to strangers in his home—

—oh Luna, does he have a gun too?!, she thought suddenly, startled into action by the potential danger and standing up on all fours after rummaging through her saddlebags for some binoculars like Mom had. She floated them out and up to her eyes, barely noticing the mana flowing through her horn and empowering her telekinesis spell, too focused on figuring out what to say to the pony when he got to his house and saw a little filly parked on the bottom of the gentle hill. She didn’t want anypony getting hurt over a misunderstanding, not with the mood Mom was in. Still, she couldn’t help but get excited to finally meet somepony else, her first contact with a pony on the surface! That black dot couldn’t be anything else but another pony!

The black dot was not a pony.

She blinked her eyes, hoping she’d seen wrong or that the lenses on the binocs needed to be cleaned off or something. The subject of her viewing, however, refused to morph into the shape of a pony.

With a gasp she flipped the binocs over until she was staring down at the objective lenses, hoping she’d see some big scratches or damage that would explain why she wasn’t seeing a pony. But the lenses were fine. Eyepiece lenses were fine, too.

She had to tell her lungs to breathe when they started to complain about the lack of air she was getting, and she brought the binoculars up to her eyes again to make sure that this dot was a pony.

The black dot was still not a pony. No pony could be this big, except maybe Luna or Celestia, and they were alicorns. And this dot was not an alicorn, either. In fact, she didn’t know what the dot was. She didn’t know of any creature from the textbooks in class that looked anything like what she was seeing.

It was very large, and walked on four legs like a pony, but it was not a pony. And as it grew larger (and thus closer), she began to wonder if it was even alive. She was finally able to start making out some concrete details. The kind that made her insides quiver and churn, because to be honest it was terrifying her. It didn’t have a lot of fur, or hair, or whatever, and it looked like it’d been in some fights because it was missing chunks and long, ragged strips of its hide. And the creature’s hide itself was like some….grotesque and hideous jab at an animal’s body structure, it looked massively powerful. Way more than even those bears in that nature book in the library—

….o-oh dear Luna is that what it is….

….no, was. Now that she thought about it, it did look something like a bear. A really big, ugly bear with mange that probably made it really mad—

—it cocked its head in her direction, and stopped moving entirely.

She froze still, not out of any intentional effort to not attract its attention, but because she was so terrified that she couldn’t even bring herself to breathe. Whatever this…this bear used to be, it wasn’t anymore and it was looking right at her—

—its body began to turn towards her, no longer walking along its path. But running.

At her. And something that sounded like a heavy, snarling, hungry grunt managed to make its way to her ears even at the distance that this thing was at, and she was finally spurred into doing something other than wetting herself. She stuffed the binoculars back into her saddlebags, turned around, and high-tailed it back up the hill, back to Mom, as quickly as she could.

--------------------------------------

Not even the sheer stench of rot and….and other stuff, could upset her anywhere as much as the look on her little girl’s face when she’d snapped at her like that. It wouldn’t have been that much of a stretch to say that she’d practically slapped her across the face. The end result was pretty much the same.

Nice going, you stupid bitch, she admonished herself harshly, feeling a slight wetness in her left eye as she inched through the grime-layered living room. As if losing everything she’s ever known and loved isn’t bad enough, now you have to start yelling at her when you leave her alone for more than a couple of minutes and she wonders why? Why did I bite her head off like that, WHY? I’m just scared to death that she’s going to find the dead body I smell in here and I can’t explain that?!

….well, that settled that, then. The instant she was certain the house was safe, she’d go right back outside and apologize. And try not to cry in the process. She was a hair trigger away from bawling herself into dehydration as it was. No more fresh food and water, no more warm bed, no more library, or…or watching El-Tee and her little cadre of friends wreck things around them trying to find their cutie marks, or…

She pushed the mood-killing thoughts of the stable out of her mind when her throat began to grow so tight that she could barely breathe. Hard enough saying good-bye to a door. And by the looks of the surface, she might very well be wishing they’d stayed in the stable and died with all the others. But right now, she was too focused on making sure her only child would stay in one piece from one day to the next.

She hoped, and prayed, that she only smelled the remains of some predator’s latest catch.

The living room was not what she would have called homely. A single couch sat against the wall to the left, sitting on one broken leg and covered in dust. Aside from missing a good deal of its upholstery there also looked to be rust-colored stains across the one single cushion that was in decent enough shape to sit on, and she didn’t want to know where they’d come from. An equally dusty coffee table sat in front of the couch, with what looked like a burnt, black shell of a book that could have crumbled to dust with a simple touch of her breath. A pile of plaster, broken wood, and rubble sat in the far left corner, beneath the hole she’d seen outside that had been patched up with crudely made wood planks. A stairway along the wall in front of her with a broken railing led up to the second floor, and attached to the side of this stairway was a picture frame, but its glass had been shattered long ago and the picture inside ruined beyond all recognition, leaving only faint patches of various shades of gray and black.

Most tellingly, on the floor lay what looked like two empty 9mm casings a few feet away from the door, but she could see no evidence of a bullet hole either in the ceiling or on the wall surrounding the doorway behind her. Embedded in the wall ahead was an open doorway, leading into a kitchen of sorts—from where she stood she could make out part of a rust-covered stove, missing the handle on its oven door and two hotplates on the cooking surface. To her right was a hallway to the other half of the first floor.

Her nose was so overwhelmed by the stench that she couldn’t tell which direction it was coming from, so she chose to climb up the stairs and check it first. So far her EFS had not found any hostiles within the range of its spell matrix, but she wasn’t going to trust it entirely. Not now that she was the only thing left in Light Tail’s life.

The stairs creaked precariously beneath the weight of her hooves, and at least one step cracked under her right hind leg as she pushed upward, causing her to freeze mid-step and cast her gaze downward, waiting for a red hash mark to fizzle into view and start dancing about her vision. But when nothing happened for several seconds she allowed herself a quiet sigh of relief and resumed her journey, eventually reaching the top of the stairs and stepping into the hallway beyond.

The second floor was in no better shape than the first, but now that she was up here she could definitely tell a significant drop in the strength of the stench, so whatever had died in the house wasn’t up here. Paint was peeling off of the walls or gone entirely, and large sections of plaster were torn or rotted off, revealing the wooden frame beneath. More dust covered the rusted doorknobs on the three doors in the hall. The door to her immediate left led into a small bedroom, empty save for the bare frame of a bed and a mattress with nothing more left than its bedsprings and a few tatters of its fabric clinging to one corner. The next room down the hall was better decorated, with a wooden frame bed and an intact—but heavily stained—mattress, which she guessed to be mold or…

…no, you know what? It’s mold. Whatever else it could be, you’re gonna believe it’s mold.

With that queasy and unpleasant possibility pushed out of her mind (and no slumbering threats in sight), she continued on to the end of the hall, pushing the door to the third and final bedroom aside and sticking her head through for a quick look.

Master bedroom, she surmised almost immediately once the size of the room was quickly shown to have dwarfed that of the other two. In fact, it seemed to take up half the second floor’s space, just above the other half of the first floor that she’d yet to inspect. The bed itself was large enough for three ponies to sleep comfortably, with a dresser and bed stand to its left and right. A wardrobe the size of two ponies sat against the right wall with its doors closed, and what looked like a lockable long cabinet was right to the left of the wardrobe. To her left, just beside the doorway, was a chest of drawers, but instead of resting against the wall, it looked as though somepony had pulled it away in search of the embedded wall safe behind it. The safe itself, while missing some of its exterior finish, was in much better shape than she would have expected, and its hinges appeared to be intact. A quick push against its door handle with her left forehoof confirmed that the locking mechanism was still engaged, and the combination dial was a tad loose but still moved in distinct clicks when turned. Whoever had been here had not been able to get into it.

With the second floor cleared of threats, she retraced her path back to the stairs and the living room, where the stench returned with a vengeance, filling her nostrils with its foul and loin-wrenching touch. She sorely wished for a smell suppression spell she could cast to mitigate the ill odor. Her only hope, however, was to find the source and pray she could close a door to at least mask the stink a little.

She pushed the smell aside as best she could and quickly trotted down the short hall, taking note of a room on each side of the hallway for a later search once she’d found the decaying corpse. At the end of the hall was a second door on the left that led into what looked like a bathroom, and a second door on the right that led to a small bedroom.

It was in the bedroom that she would see her worst nightmares come back to her.

Dangling from a hook tied at one end of a rope, was a sight unfit for any pony’s eyes. The stallion’s corpse was horribly mutilated in ways she could not bear to make herself remember in any great detail. He was missing a hind leg, most of his tail, his….his male parts, oh dear Luna…even his insides were….

….his eyes too….

No more. She couldn’t stand to look at him any longer.

The poor mare on the bed….she couldn’t say the girl had gotten off easy, even with the dangling body offering strong evidence otherwise. Splotches of blood splattered the space between her legs, and down the inside of her hind legs, and there was enough blood beneath her neck to give a clear indication of how she’d been….

….murdered?

Violated, and murdered….in this rotting, ramshackle excuse of a home…and what had been done to the stallion….

….Light Tail could not see or hear of this. Ever.

Sling backed out of the room after holstering her pistol, clamped on the doorknob with her magic and pulled the door shut—

—it stopped half an inch away from the doorway, blocked by an object on the floor she’d neglected to spot on her way in. When she shifted the spell field downward to pick it up, the heft of the object’s weight tingling the bottom forward half of her horn triggered an instant sense of familiarity, and she quickly brought it up to eye level.

9mm pistol, specifically the Mare & Alicorn Manufacturing model that had proven so popular in local law enforcement service during the war. Probably the one that had been fired in the living room, to no avail. The left grip panel was cracked and held together with what looked like two hundred year-old duct tape that had turned fuzzy along the edges, and the firing hammer wasn’t much better off with a noticeable crack line running up one side. Its exterior finish was in terrible shape—most of the matte black bluing had been worn or scrapped off, leaving the ordnance-grade steel beneath exposed to the elements. Pits of rust dotted the slide and frame, and most of the front sight had been broken off, leaving only a jagged splint as an aiming point.

Had the circumstances been any different she would have taken a couple of minutes for a full inspection. Right then and there, though, all she wanted to do was shut that door and get as far away from this place as she could. She pulled the door shut with her left forehoof and stuffed the pistol into an empty holster right beneath Grayhawk, for a grand total of three pistols and one remaining empty holster for a fourth if she ever found one. The saving grace of the 9mm was that it was light enough that she barely noticed it. She did take a couple of seconds for a quick peek into the first two rooms she passed up, and caught sight of two spare magazines on a workbench, one loaded with FMJ rounds and the other with jacketed hollowpoints. She’d barely dropped them into a storage pouch on the left side of her stable suit when Light Tail’s body flew into the living room, hyperventilating as she slammed the door shut behind her.

Having just walked away from one of the most horrific things she’d ever seen in her life, her only concern was making sure her filly never found the sight in that bedroom, and she trotted into the living room and began to open the door again. “We’re leaving—“

Light Tail wasn’t having any of it. “Outside!!” she yelled frantically, as if struggling with herself to even speak properly as she backed away from the door. “It’s….oh crap it saw me it’s outside—“

Sling’s muddled confusion lasted only as long as it took her to mutter a bewildered, “What?”, before the object of her little girl’s fear made itself known with a deep, booming roar that rumbled through the door and the walls—

—El-Tee’s shriek was brief, but loud and shrilly, and Sling stopped pulling on the door and pressed herself up against it, peering through the peephole to see what kind of beast waited outside.

Waiting, however, was not in this creature’s vocabulary. In the two seconds that Sling was able to stomach looking at it, it had climbed up much of the hill and was only twenty yards from the front door, and it was an absolutely horrifying beast. It looked kinda like a bear….if one had taken that bear, shaved off most of its fur, and doubled its muscle mass before throwing it into a fight pit. Its claws were easily as long as her ears, and as far as she could tell, its eyes had no visible pupils and were a solid, cloudy-looking white.

And it was charging straight for the door as though it weren’t even there.

It was something akin to a miracle that she didn’t shriek or cry like El-Tee had, but in her defense she was simply too frightened to bother. The most she could consciously recall doing was using her magic to pick her filly up off the floor and pull her along behind her as she raced back up the stairs, completing forgetting how careful she’d been in traversing them the first time. She’d barely made it to the top of the staircase and into the second floor hallway when she heard the wooden door crashing and splitting apart from a violent impact. The hungry roar of the not-bear thing, however, sounded much more important, because it seemed to have caught their scent.

Run run run RUN—

—she made it inside the master bedroom, unceremoniously flung her daughter onto the bed and spun around to close the door—

—felt her heart trying to leap up her throat as the not-bear thing appeared to have skipped the stairs entirely by leaping up and through the guard rail at the top of the staircase to land directly inside the hallway—

“Oh fu—“ was all she heard of her own curse before she slammed the door shut, overpowering her foul language enough that even she couldn’t make out what she was saying. For added security she wrestled the chest of drawers away from the wall safe and shoved it right up against the door, the effort barely draining or taxing her in her heightened stress levels. Adrenaline was a powerful thing….

And so was this not-bear thing. She’d thrown herself against the drawers, trying to mash the heavy furniture up even closer to the door, when the beast rammed itself into the door. The impact caused the door itself to crack along the top, and she wasn’t expecting the blow to be this strong to start with. It toppled her over and caused her to hit the floor, and a sharp, tiny cracking sound accented her fall. At the moment of impact she was afraid she’d just broken a rib, but when her chest and lungs failed to set themselves on fire in searing pain her worries were transferred to the two holstered guns on her left side. Grayhawk’s grip seemed undamaged, but….

….but the nine was damaged to start with, she snarled in anger when she pulled the 9mm pistol back out of its new home, the damaged grip panel now split in two entirely. The tape holding it together was far too old to have any strength left, and the threading on the grip screw was so blunt and worn that it actually slipped right on out when she pulled part of the grip panel off the gun, causing the other piece to fall to the floor. Judging by how quickly and easily it had just broken on her, she was surprised its former owners had even managed to fire off a couple of rounds without getting the same result.

A second crash into the door split the crack open further, but the door remained in one piece and the chest of drawers didn’t budge. Much. The not-bear thing beyond the door stopped attacking the door and began to paw at it, grunting and huffing as it tested the impromptu barricade. After a few moments it gave a final, disgruntled snarl of disapproval at its luck, and muffled, heavy thuds began to sound out as it slowly walked away.

She didn’t trust this sudden turn of luck one bit. And neither did Light Tail.

“N-n-no w-way,” the terrified child stammered through frightened gasps. “N-no way s-something that b-big is just w-walkin’ off….”

Hell no, she agreed silently as she stowed the pistol away once more. “See if there’s anything sturdy enough we can use as a rope,” she cracked with considerable effort as she turned the broken grip panel over out of habit. “We can….”

She stopped talking as her eyes caught sight of a crude hoof-scrawling of what looked like two digit numbers along the back of the grip panel, with a dash between each number and a….

….a letter? An upper case “L” right next to the “36”—

—Oh Luna, is this what I think it is?!, she realized in a brief moment of brilliant insight, picking up the other half of the grip panel off the floor—

—the remaining portion of the third number was etched inside the back, and when combined with the other half of the grip panel formed a complete sequence of numbers and letters: “47L-15R-26L”.

Was this what the murderers of those poor souls downstairs had been looking for?

The thought to raid the safe herself came so freely and quickly that she almost didn’t believe she was the one twisting the combination dial until the lock clicked open upon hitting the last number, and even then her resistance to her first theft was surprisingly….numb. Like a part of her had already begun to accept that with the former owners dead, the safe’s contents belonged to whoever could get them first.

And she supposed that in the end, she would rather her own things be taken by somepony who needed them, rather than the monsters that had done…whatever they had done to those two.

Her mood swung southward, however, upon discovering the meager contents of the unlocked safe. Aside from a partial box of nineteen 9mm rounds all that awaited was a broken revolver with a dented and bent barrel, a large, thick pouch that jingled when she moved it, a ruined book, and a rusted hammer.

But she didn’t get to scowl at it for very long. Even as she was stuffing the ammo and the pouch into her saddlebags the not-bear thing returned with a thunderous desire for the two living ponies in the room. Its footsteps were quick and heavy, and it rammed itself into the door with sufficient strength to turn that crack in the door into a complete split, and one of its massive, long-clawed forearms wasted no time in shoving itself through for a quick swipe at the drawer chest pinning the door shut.

The re-emergence of a deadly threat brought her focus back where it should have been—on getting out of that house before it killed them. With little time to find a better alternative and Light Tail frozen stiff on the bed, she simply began pulling the stained, dirty bed sheets out from under her as she raced for the window near the bed stand—

—sixteen feet to the ground, she guesstimated the moment she poked her head out and stared straight down at the earth outside. Gods I hope these sheets don’t shred apart from the weight!

She quickly sorted through the sheets, picking the strongest and thickest looking blanket and tying one end around the closest bed post, and then began tying the remaining sheets together end-on-end to make an impromptu rope—

“Light Tail, get over here!” she snapped when she looked up and saw her night light still sitting on the bed, her body frozen stiff and her eyes locked on the splintering door, and the hideous, wasteland-spawned beast destroying it. “Now!!”

Being commanded about like that always seemed to get the little one to move, no matter what state of mind she was in. El-Tee remained on the bed for only a moment longer before she began to scramble away from it, and Sling hoisted herself through the window, hooking one foreleg inside the window sill to hang herself from it and sticking the other one out towards her daughter—

—but when El-Tee took hold of it and began to find herself being pulled up and over the window sill, she finally had a reason to take her eyes off the door and saw where they were going, and shrieked in terror as she began to pull away from her mother.

And the last thing she needed to happen right then, started to happen.

She saw Hoofprint again.

“O-o-oh Luna no, I don’t wanna fall!!!” El-Tee cried fearfully, her face streaked with tears. “I can’t do this!!”

—white-lit halls of steel began to morph into slick, crimson slabs as she rounded the corner, slipped on the floor and smacked into a thick, wet pool—

“Yes you can!! Just grab my leg and climb on, you’ll be fine—“

The door cracked apart with another violent slam, and the chest drawer began to jolt as the beast heightened its efforts to get inside—

—a tiny, severed limb five feet from her face oozed the last of its blood through its severed veins—

“N-noo! Please, can’t we think of something else—“

A futile attempt by her horn to release even a simple levitation spell fizzled as her insides began to quiver, her own fear overpowering her mental control over her magic. “This is something else!! Just grab onto me—“

—she didn’t hear herself screaming at the sight of four radroaches hunched over the poor colt, tearing into his body in a vomit-inducing feeding gorge as they splattered themselves and the walls with his blood and bits of bloody flesh—

“Gr-grab me with a spell or somethin’—“

“I can’t, I’m too scared to concentrate!!!” she howled back in a mixture of rage and pure terror. “Just….just grab hold of me!! Please!! You’ll be fine, I know you can do it, just please grab onto me—“

—the chest drawer bounced away from the door, giving the not-bear thing the last bit of room it needed to shove its forelegs through the broken door and begin to dislodge the drawers entirely—

—tried, desperately, to get to her hooves as the bugs feasted on their catch, and merely wound up getting herself soaked in crimson as she flailed about like a newborn foal—

—stuck with either a newfound fear of heights or an excruciating death at the massive paws of a not-bear thing, the filly finally came to a decision and leapt at her mother, grabbing onto her neck with her little forelegs and nearly choking her as she sought safety on her back—

—the bedroom door broke off of its upper hinge the moment the beast had pushed the drawers aside enough for brute force to finish the job, and Sling let go of the window sill and grabbed onto the length of bed sheets she’d tied together into a rope after falling roughly two feet—

—the beast’s roar became one of anger as it watched its prey vanish from the window….but instead of chasing after them, it instead turned around and dashed out of the room, as she could hear its heavy footsteps thundering through the walls even though she was now outside—

Oh SHIT it’s coming back outside—

—she abandoned her plan for a gentle descent and simply let go of the bed sheets, and then grabbed at them again after exactly one second to slow her descent. Even with El-Tee screaming in terror, however, she could still hear the two-century old cloth tearing apart at the sudden tug of a pony’s weight upon it, and mother and daughter jerked in place for only a split second before the bed sheets came apart and sent them crashing into the ground.

But that brief stop was enough—by then they were only three feet away from the ground, and while the pain from the impact was sharp, no lasting harm was done. Unfortunately, it also meant she didn’t have enough time to recollect herself and dash to the front door before the not-bear thing could reach it.

….but if it was a meal it wanted more than anything else….

She bucked the filly off of her with a gentle roll of her body and dashed up the side of the house, to a window that led into the first floor bedroom with the eviscerated stallion and the poor violated mare, her desperation giving her enough control of her telekinesis magic to break through the window and pull the bedroom door open. She then turned the spell on her daughter, pulling her back to her previous home along her spine and allowing the filly to grab onto her neck as she broke into a hard gallop away from the house, being careful to avoid tripping herself in her panic but otherwise paying little attention to anything else other than what was in front of her. Even El-Tee’s death grip around her throat barely registered to her nerves.

She just ran, faster and harder than she’d ever run in her life before.

And she hadn’t even been out here for more than an hour, to boot.

--------------------------------------

She didn’t dare look behind them until Mom’s body finally began to slow down into a terrible, disoriented stumble as exhaustion caught up to her, and felt a mixture of terror and relief flood her chest.

The house was nowhere in sight. She didn’t think she could find it even with those binoculars now—she couldn’t even find any hint of that small hill in the horizon. But the….the thing that was so eager to gobble them up wasn’t in sight either, so she supposed it was a fair trade. Better to be lost than to be a meal for some mutated monster bear.

“I…I think it stopped chasing us—“

Mom’s body collapsed onto the ground without warning, an exhausted groan of pain coming out of her snout on impact, and Light Tail tumbled off onto her flank alongside her mother in a similar undignified manner. The little filly quickly fought herself back to her hooves and began poking at her mom, desperate for some sign that the mare wasn’t in dire straits.

“M-mom?! Are you okay?!”

Her heavy, labored breathing made her reply torturously slow. “…..water….please….”

El-Tee stopped prodding her mom with her hooves and starting digging into the mare’s saddlebags for one of her canteens, pulling it out with her magic and twisting the cap off as she hoisted it to her mother’s waiting maw. “H-here—“

Mom’s magic took over, but in her exhausted state its hold was shaky at best, so El-Tee merely dialed back her spell’s hold to one of gentle support as Mom began to suck the chilly water from the canteen. She only took three gulps before she stopped, though, and then began to peel part of her spell field off to encompass the dangling cap and re-seated it onto the spout. With all the running she’d done just now she’d have thought Mom would’ve wanted to drain the entire thing….but who knew if they’d find fresh water anytime soon? Probably best not to get greedy with the stuff.

With her parched, sore throat slightly abated, Mom was content to lay there for a few minutes under Light Tail’s worried glare until she was breathing normally again, and then began the arduous task of standing on four wobbly legs. Only when she managed to stand for more than a few seconds without stumbling did El-Tee finally start allowing herself to relax a little.

At least, she relaxed until she noticed that her Mom’s eyes had become focused on the space in front of her, transfixed into a state of open shock and….

….despair….

El-Tee dreadfully turned to her left and followed her mother’s gaze, her magic refocusing itself around the lightweight revolver’s grip…

….and let it vanish into nothingness as she too stood frozen in place, her right foreleg falling slack onto the ground.

Neither pony had ever taken notice in their zealous desire to get away from the monster in the house, and now they could see how they’d gone so long without ever recognizing it. Dust matching the ground beneath them coated the maze of ruined, crumbling buildings in the near distance and unintentionally camouflaged them from the casual glance that one might give from a distance, as they’d done. Some had already collapsed into a pile of rubble from age and untold damage from distant times—others still stood but made one wonder how, as entire sections of wall were gone, exposing flights of stairs to higher floors and collecting into a pile of debris at street level. One building now and then would look mostly intact, save for a hole where a window used to be.

But not one sign of life could be seen anywhere in sight. Even the sign that marked the outer marker of its borders had succumbed to the touch of time, broken free of its mounting posts and partially buried in the earth at an angle. Amidst the dust that twisted and smoked away from the wooden board in the wind, Light Tail could only make out a handful of words. Some letters had vanished entirely or covered by a thick coating of dirt and grime, while others were barely readable:

“ L OME T H V LLE”

Mom was the first of them to break free of the trance with a soft cry of despair. “….oh, Luna…”

El-Tee didn’t bother to ask why she was so upset, because she already had a pretty good idea. If this was all that ponykind could accomplish in rebuilding efforts after two centuries….what did the rest of Equestria That Was look like now? Could it even be called Equestria anymore?

….are we ever gonna find a new home for the Stable in a world like this?

Mom’s voice croaked again, barely louder than the wind that began to howl around them. “….we should keep moving. There might be somewhere we can wait out the storm. Stay dry, at least.”

El-Tee’s legs stayed put, suddenly unwilling to creep even an inch further towards the silent town that had probably become the resting place for hundreds of poor souls in the last day of the war. It felt wrong…sacrilegious, to be stepping into such a place. “Wh…in there?” she squeaked, trying not to think too much of all the skeletons they’d walked past in their first minutes outside the stable. “….m-mom, ponies…ponies probably died in there…it feels like walking into a graveyard….can’t we go someplace else?”

“It was your idea to find this town in the first place,” Mom reminded her, her voice slightly terse. “….and I don’t know that we’ll find anywhere else to stay before that storm gets here. Just stay close and don’t look at anything you don’t have to, okay?”

A not-so-subtle poke at her hindquarters from Mom’s magic made any further protest an exercise in futility as the mare began moving forward—once she was startled into a quick trot she found it impossible to want to stay still. If she did, Mom would get too far away. And she didn’t want to be very far away if she could help it.

One small comfort—the gun. Even as she began to follow along in her mother’s wake, she felt the heft of the lightweight revolver inside her spell field as she drew it out and kept it close….and feeling its weight, its potential power just waiting to be utilized, made her feel far more comfortable than the gun had any right to make her feel. She was well aware of the irony at play here—an hour ago she was literally sick with the idea of using it on any living creature (except bugs), necessary as such an act might have been now.

Now it was the most comforting thing she had, next to Mom.

Except maybe Snowy, but…that was back home in the Stable, still on Mom’s bed where she’d left it.

Oh wow, what a grown-up little pony you are, she sneered at herself as they crossed over a decrepit-looking bridge that had been built over what was probably a creek bed before the war. Giant bugs, huge mutated bears trying to peel you apart like a banana, and huge crumbling ruins of a town and you’re crying over a stupid stuffed plush…Sun Star would have a field day with you if he saw you like this you idiot, toughen up a little.

A distant bang of thunder rolled over the decaying town, breaking her out of her hateful self-monologue and back to the unreal situation before her. Her hooves began to clop loudly as they touched down upon the broken, wind-eroded asphalt of the streets, and she shifted her leg muscles mid-step so that said clop would be much softer from here on out. She didn’t want to attract anything in the ruins that might be hungry. Like that mutant bear. Or…or whatever else lived and hunted around here.

She took her mind off the panic-inducing thoughts of huge predators by looking at all the buildings around her, and was surprised to see that quite a few of the standing structures still had their signs attached to them. Most of the lettering was faded, with some letters gone entirely just like that big welcoming sign at the town border, but it was still kinda neat to play the guessing game and try to figure out what the buildings had once been.

For instance, the one at the very edge of the town, the first building to her left that they passed, had a sign that said, “G LD SLE V S’ PRO PE TING O I E.” With about ten seconds of thought she came up with “GOLD SLEEVES’ PROSPECTING OFFICE”—it also kinda helped that the sign had a picture of a very faint-looking pile of gems with a miner’s pick underneath the words. Given that the Stable had been built underneath a nearby mountain, it would have made for a good front cover for a Stable-Tec office trying to operate discreetly—

I-Deeeeaaaa! she thought instantly when the spy-novel level wondering struck a chord within her brain. “Hey, Mom, can we look in there real quick?” she whispered quickly, tapping her mother’s left cutie mark with her right forehoof.

Her mom’s head turned and followed along the direction she was pointing in with her left foreleg, but her face showed no hint of interest in the building. “Not now, honey. Maybe later—“

“Pleeeeeaase!?” she begged (just a little). “I got this funny feelin’ about it!”

“What are you talking about?” Mom asked, her voice already starting to grow a little annoyed with her. Not good!

“Just…please? One minute, that’s all!” she begged again, for real this time.

Mom looked like she was about to say “No!” in her Stern Mom voice and physically drag her along, but at the last minute her face lost its hard edge. “….one minute,” she relented, turning towards the building and trotting towards it. “And what possessed you to beg for this in the first place?”

She had to suppress a giddy squeal as she bounced forward ahead of Mom and reached at the door handle with her magic. “I dunno, I just looked at it and—“

Her mouth stopped working as the handle firmly resisted her efforts to pull it down, refusing to move for more than a few millimeters before stopping cold no matter how hard she tugged on it. “…..aaaand it’s locked….wow, that sure killed that idea….”

“Not a surprise,” Mom grumbled, continuing to walk towards the door as her horn’s magic flared and withdrew a small pouch from her saddlebags. “Locking mechanism probably froze after two centuries of rusting. That or nopony ever bothered picking the lock for all this time.”

El-Tee wasn’t quite sure about that—after all, if all that was left of Equestria That Was after two hundred years was whatever had managed to survive the megaspell exchange, how many freakin’ locks could possibly be left untouched? Wouldn’t ponies have scoured every last inch of ground for supplies and stuff in the immediate aftermath? “Two hundred years is a long time for a lock to stay….locked. It don’t make any sense.”

A pair of precision tools floated out of the pouch and came up to the lock embedded inside the door handle, swiftly slipping inside in the next moment as Mom began to fiddle with them. “It would on this door. I can’t make sense of the letters but the picture on the sign suggests this was a—“

“Prospecting office!” she finished for her mother proudly. “Gold Sleeve’s Prospecting Office, I think!”

Mom’s head came up and away from the lock, and amazingly the little tools she was using to pick the lock continued to work as though she’d never taken her mind off of the task. “Is that what you think that sign says?”

“As a matter of fact, yes!” El-Tee answered. “The first two words are just a guess, but the third one’s pretty easy, most of the letters for it are still intact. And the only word I can think of with the letters oh, eye, and ee in the first, third and sixth letters in a six-letter word, is “office”.”

Mom’s face seemed to grow a little brighter—a small grin tried to force its way onto her face, and her eyes looked like they wanted to cry a little. The lock to the door clicked open a moment later, and Mom floated her tools back into her pouch as one of her forelegs pulled the door handle down and nudged it open. “Guess it’s time to find if you’re right.”

This time around a little part of a giddy squeal managed to leak out through her throat despite her best intentions at keeping it to herself as she dashed through the open door and into the interior—

—and promptly sneezed as a waft of dust floated down from the door and touched her snout. That settled that question, at least. Nopony had been in here a long while. Perhaps even since the day the megaspells were dropped! Being the first souls to set foot in here in centuries was awesome!

With a soft giggle, she brushed off her encounter with the dust and set about examining the room. A simple metal desk with a very old, very worn out terminal sat in the middle of the room, with a door at the back leading into another room. A table rested along the right wall and there was a large, black safe beneath, but she was too short to be able to see if there was anything on the table itself. A pair of filing cabinets in the far left corner looked like they’d seen better days, but they definitely looked a lot better than that field of sky wagons right outside the stable. Other than that, however, there was little else to the room to give any hint as to what it’s purpose was.

That settled it. Office. Offices never looked very useful. Or exciting.

Mom’s attention, naturally, seemed to gravitate towards the safe under the table, and she trotted right towards it without saying a word as the filly clambered around the desk and hopped up onto the chair where she could get a better look at the terminal—

“Oh, wow!” she squealed when she saw the screen come alive at the press of one of the buttons on the keyboard, and the terminal itself began to whir to life as it booted up. “I didn’t know these things could work this long!”

“That is impressive,” Mom agreed, the sound of her hoof pulling at the safe handle resulting in a soft thump!, and then a second one, before she gave up on trying to open it. “I didn’t see any kind of a back-up battery or a power source attached to it when we came in, it shouldn’t be working at all.”

“Well, it is! And it’s even booting up into a….uhhhh….”

The screen’s dull green background flashed to life at last, and in the upper right corner a pair of words in bright green letters became the only thing that stood between her inquisitive mind and the secrets buried inside this machine:

USERNAME:
PASSWORD:

“….oh crud,” she snarled at the dimly-glowing screen. “Ummm….it’s passworded….”

“Standard computer security one-oh-one,” Mom said, trotting up to the desk to search its retractable drawers, where several tattered remnants of papers lay. Most were too dusty and faded to read, though. “….I got an idea, scoot aside for a minute.”

The cushioned leather of the seat had aged remarkably well, still comfortable to the hindquarters and belly, and so she opted to stay in the rolling chair but pushed it along the desk to the side with her forehooves so Mom could get behind the terminal and start working on it. And to think she wasn’t event that interested in this place to start with. Funny!

“What’re you doin’?” she asked as Mom’s horn began to glow, enveloping the keyboard in the hold of her telekinesis spell.

“Trying to remember the command line for the debug matrix,” Mom answered, staring down at the keyboard.

“…..the what?”

“Something I learned sitting behind a desk with a terminal for eight years with nothing but the operating manual to pass the time,” the mare said, still staring at the keyboard and not moving. “All of Stable-Tec’s terminals use the same basic operating system and interface, and there’s a backdoor program built into it that lets technicians in if they happen to need to get access to it but don’t have the password. I got to playing around with it whenever I was really bored and stumbled across it, and found out I could crack passwords with it. Just trying to remember how it…wait, it’s coming back to me….”

True to her word, Mom’s magic began to peck away at the keyboard, and within moments she had those pesky “USERNAME” and “PASSWORD” lines whisked away in favor of a….

…..a whole freakin’ screen-full of absolute garbage! Tons of characters mashed together into an insane soup of the Equestrian alphabet and numerical system, along with lots of symbols like “#”, “%”, “@” and such!

“…..and this is an improvement, how?” she wondered aloud as she scooted the chair back towards the terminal for a better look. “It’s a total mess now!”

“Look closer,” Mom replied, and the lack of concern or panic in her voice led the little one to give the screen a second glance….

….and spotted the word “LACKY” in the second line of useless text. Scrolling her eyes down the left side of the screen, she spotted a second word in the fifth line, “FIGHT”, and a third word in the seventh line, “MIGHT”. At the top of the screen above the scrambled lines of characters was a short, but telling line:

FOUR ATTEMPTS LEFT:

She had it figured out in an instant. “You’re hacking the password out of the system!”

“Eee-yup,” Mom snickered, tapping the “DOWN” arrow key until the word “LACKY” was highlighted and then hit the “ENTER” key, causing a message to pop up along the right side of the screen, right beside the screen-wide lines of scrambled code:

>LACKY
>ENTRY DENIED.
>0/5 CORRECT.

“….well, that definitely narrows things down,” Mom muttered darkly. “Let’s try….”

>FIGHT
>ENTRY DENIED.
>3/5 CORRECT.

Mom’s mouth sputtered in disdain. “Better, but still not great…”

“How does this work out, exactly?” Light Tail asked, though she was already coming to a conclusion about the subject just watching Mom fight with it. “You pick a word and see how many letters are the right ones?”

“You got it,” the mare confirmed her suspicions, moving the flashing cursor down the page to highlight the words “MIGHT”. “It can be a bit frustrating, though. The debug program won’t tell you which letters are right, only how many of them are. You have to guess at it, and it only gives you four chances. If you get it wrong four times the program will kick you out and lock up the system entirely. Only Stable-Tec technicians know the process for re-setting it, it wasn’t covered in that dusty operating manual.”

“Why would they make a program that could break a terminal that easy?”

Mom’s hind legs started to flex and stretch themselves out as she flicked the cursor further down the screen. “I’m honestly not sure, but there’s a way to reset the program to keep it from locking you out. Just try three times and if you don’t get it by then, just cancel out back to the login screen and boot the debug program up again, and it resets. You can keep doing this until you get the password right.”

“Neat-o!” El-Tee laughed, momentarily dazed at how Mom knew of such crazy and useful stuff a mischievous pony could use to stir up trouble with. “So how many times did you break into the stable’s network with that?!”

“What are you implying, young lady?” Mom’s voice questioned sharply, her tone suddenly one of dark, foreboding warning. That kind of “don’t you dare say what I think you’re going to say” warning.

Which meant nothing to her, naturally! “I’m not implying anything,” she said confidently. “I mean….nopony was ever that nice to you, except Aunt C or Tender Mane….just figured you’d have used it to get back at some of ‘em once in a great while, is all….”

Mom’s head snapped towards her so suddenly that the filly nearly leapt out of the chair, and those hard, angry eyes bore down into her soul with such intensity that she began to fear that this was probably the one time she should have taken that unspoken warning to heart and shut up…..

…..and then Mom’s face melted into a sort of sad, wistful state as she laughed quietly, turning back to the screen in front of her. “…..okay, so there was a time a couple of years back when Sunflower was getting on my nerves. She kept stepping on my tail whenever my shift met for a monthly safety seminar in the classroom on L5. Sometimes she’d pass on a complaint to Farsight about my record-keeping in the armory when she covered my duties while I was on break or lunch, and I’d get chewed on for a quarter-hour about how I lacked responsibility and needed to get my act together or some such….”

Whoa, El-Tee thought sadly, watching her mother’s face as she tried a third password without success and began typing at the keyboard to reset the de-bug program. Of all the things I coulda done to get to her talk to me and this is what ends up working? A story ‘bout how she got back at somepony for hurting her? ….w-why were they so mean to her….

“…..so one morning when I punched in for my shift, I finally got the nerve to mess with her day a little. I had to drop by the mainframe room on L6 to do a hard reset for the armory terminal, and hacked into her user profile, and just had all her private messages sent to everypony in the Stable. Oh Luna the things in some of those messages were….um, let’s just say they weren’t fit for the eyes of little colts and fillies. Nopony ever did figure out that I’d done it and she spent most of her time after that trying to do damage control. Even Windy couldn’t stop laughing at her at times….”

“….that’s it?” she prodded with a gentle nudge of her snout after scooting herself to the edge of the chair and within foreleg’s reach of her mother. “You just embarrassed her to near death and never let her know it was you?”

The terminal’s screen flooded with that page full of garbled text again, and Mom went back to work flashing the cursor through the mess to try and find the right word to crack the system open with. “I knew. And I wasn’t trying to get recognized for it because I would have been fired and locked in the jail on L4 for three months if I had been found out. I just wanted her to stop bothering me, and the best way to do that was to make her more worried about herself. I don’t think she ever said another two words about me after that.”

Here Mom stopped, because by then she’d found the correct password—“OUGHT”—and the login screen brought itself back up, the username and password automatically entering themselves into their appropriate lines:

]USERNAME: gsleeve
PASSWORD: *****

“Finally,” Mom heaved with relief as the screen filled with what looked like data entries for some sort of message file folder. Most of the subject lines were all messed up and garbled, and whenever Mom tried to access them the system spat out a “CORRUPTED DATA” error, but a few entries were still intact, and there even seemed to be option for the terminal to unlock the safe under the table nearby. She moved the cursor down to the second one up from the bottom and tapped the ENTER key, and the screen began filling with text, which her eyes scanned through almost as quickly as the letters were being spilled onto the screen:

“Entry #5: “Gold Sleeve’s Prospecting Office” has been established without a hitch. It sounds crazy, but it just might work to keep the construction project a secret, for a while at least. Tomorrow morning I’m meeting with the forepony, Jack Hammer, from the excavation crew we’ve hired on from Baltimare. As far as they know it’s another wild goose chase for coal and arcane gems, but this is too big a project for it to run effectively by keeping them all in the dark. The MoM is still doing background checks on the crew, but Jack Hammer and some of her supervisors are already vetted, and I’ll need their help and cooperation to keep things under wraps until the job is done. And judging by the size of the Stable requested by the local communities, it’s going to be a long time before I see home again in Vanhoover.

I miss it already.”

Excitement filled her heart with every word she read. She was actually right! Totally, completely right about the whole thing being a big cover for the Stable construction way back in the days of Equestria That Was! How long ago was that?! Two hundred and ten years?! Two hundred and fifteen?!

“….oh, wow,” Mom’s voice whispered in awe as she soaked in the words on the screen. “This is…wow….nothing in the Stable ever mentioned how it was built or organized….”

Light Tail’s grin threatened to split her face in half as she hopped up onto the desk and started nudging the chair over into her mother’s side to encourage the mare to take a seat in it. It was big enough for the both of them, saddlebags and all, if Mom got in it first—

The back end of Mom’s body hopped up as she drew the chair in behind her, plopping back down onto the cushioned leather and leaving just enough room on the side for Light Tail to squeeze in beside her, and soon mother and child were pouring over the next few legible entries in the terminal:

“Entry #27: Eight months in, and this “prospecting” cover turns out to be a legit operation after all. We found a cache of arcane gems in the mountain two weeks ago, and whaddya know, finding the origin point requires us to dig deep down under the ground. We’ve already placed the industrial drilling units on order, and they should arrive next month for inspection and set-up. We should be ready to start digging just after Hearth’s Warming Eve. Perfect time for an operational shutdown, let everypony get home to their families for the holidays so they can come back charged up and ready to split rock with their bare hooves. Got my own plans for the time off as well.

As discussed with HQ, the proceeds from the gems will augment the locally-collected funds for the Stable project to help offset unexpected cost overruns. The excavation crew will get a good bonus as well, help keep them loyal to the project for as long as we need them here. Jack Hammer also runs a construction firm as well, and considering her exemplary work here, I feel confident in recommending she get the first bid for the construction project once we’ve drilled out the tunnels we’ll build into. She runs a tight crew here, firm but fair, and so far they’ve only had three accidents in the two years they’ve been running.

“Entry #64: Excellent progress made today. Now have the tunnels for the ground level, as well as the first three levels for the Stable. Seven caches of gems found, three imbued with massive amounts of arcane energy.

“Entry #81: Levels four through six excavated. Five caches of gems. Had an accident on level five yesterday, still investigating but it looks like a chunk of loose rock wasn’t cleared from the tunnel ceiling before the prospecting team went in and it broke a junior member’s back leg when it fell. Jack Hammer’s not happy, it turned out to be a first cousin of hers.

“Entry #125: Excavation is done. We’ll still need to drill out tunnels for the oxygen ventilation systems when we begin Stable construction, but the vast majority of digging work is complete and all the gems that could be found were extracted. Bittersweet moment when Jack Hammer announced it, most of the work crew have been here for over four years and they’ve grown attached to the area. Some even started families here, and those are the ones with the most to lose. Even Jackie seemed a little disappointed. There’s not much work out here for rock diggers, unless you like the life of a farm hand. JH’s construction firm is having a much harder time for the project bid than I anticipated. She knows some of her crew got settled down with a lucky mare or stallion, that they need some employment to keep their new families rooted here where they’re comfortable. I want to help, but my….personal involvement with JH makes that impossible without appearing to show favoritism. We’ll talk tonight.”

“Personal involvement?” El-Tee broke the silence once she’d read through the last of #125. “Ya mean like, coltfriend and fillyfriend?”

“Probably,” Mom said as she flicked the cursor onto the next data entry…sadly, one of only three left that were still intact.

“Entry #126: Fight with JH at her house last night, didn’t go well. I should never have gotten into that mare’s work pants, she was livid that I wouldn’t back her up for the contract bidding process HQ had last week in Canterlot. I told her I couldn’t show any favoritism for her on account of our relationship, and she said, quote, “You bloody well oughta show some favoritism if you want me to stay here!”. Mares.

I left a short while later. No use arguing with her, we’ve gone over it before and doing it again won’t do any good. If I show any favor for her, no matter how much I want to, I could lose my position and my job here. I’ve been overseeing this Stable project since the beginning, I have to see it through to the end, make sure it stays hidden from the zebras. That’s too important to put at risk….even for the sake of staying with loved ones. She has to know that. Why is she so adamant about this?”

Get into her work pants? Light Tail mused to herself, wondering why this stallion would even want to dress in a mare’s work clothes as Mom pulled one of her water canteens back out for a drink. Grown-ups can be really weird.

“Entry #127: Oh Luna and Celestia I should have known. The way she was acting lately, how much less like herself she’s been…she’s with child. Our foal. Oh dear Alicorns I should have seen it coming a month ago. She told me this morning before she went to work, and she was still mad at me to boot.

Too late. The bidding stage is over. JH will know within the week whether she gets the contract or not. And if she doesn’t, she said, she’s heading back to Baltimare, with or without me.

Oh dear Luna what I have done….please let everything work out.”

El-Tee wasn’t quite sure what to make of this one. With child? “Our foal”? How did grown-ups get to having kids, come to think of it? “….mom, where do foals come from?”

Mom’s immediate response was to choke on her water canteen and spit out the water that hadn’t gotten into her lungs in a sharp cough. It took her a few moments to get the rest of it out before she could answer….

….and predictably, she avoided the question entirely. “I’ll tell you when you’re older,” she gurgled, coughing up a slight wet mist as she quickly opened up the last entry in the system.

“Entry #130: It worked. I can’t believe it, it worked!

I had some suspicions about the Los Pegasus firm that won the contract and did some quick digging through some friends I still have in Vanhoover. Turns out their last three contracts are under investigation by the government for lax workmanship, and several of their executives are suspected by MoM to be funneling minor material aid to the zebras. As soon as I found that last bit I sent the information to my liaison at HQ, asking how such information could have gotten past the company’s own investigators who are supposed to be watching for exactly this kind of thing! The district supervisor for the prairie projects is absolutely seething. Now half the stables in the prairie are on hold until the other excavation and construction firms have all their employees re-vetted. That will slow progress considerably. No word yet on whether the Los Pegasus firm was ever told the truth about the project they bid for.

But none of that matters. What matters is that Jackie got the contract afterward for the stable she just built the tunnels for, and with additional bonuses to make up for the lackluster vetting on Stable-Tec’s behalf. She’s still not happy with me, but we can work that out because there’s no way I’m letting my mare and our foal go, now that they can stay here. Whatever it takes will be worth the effort tenfold. It’ll all work out.

Everything will work out. All of it.”

--------------------------------------

The safe turned out to be a letdown, materially—only a couple of old, drained spark cells for a pistol-sized MEW, a cracked clipboard, and a small stack of papers that had not weathered two centuries’ imprisonment in a safe very well. A surprisingly well-preserved journal inside, however, piqued her interest and she quickly found its survival to be a result of a spell enchantment once she’d applied a quick scrying spell of her own to it. The faint tingle she got from the feedback loop was not as strong as she would have liked, but it was a moot point as the enchantment had done its job.

What puzzled her was how it had gotten there to start with. Most preservation enchantments didn’t last more than a few years (the specialized talismans in the Stable being the exception), particularly if they’d been applied solely through a unicorn’s horn or an enchanted scroll, and she knew the difference between a preservation talisman and the simpler spell variant. The only immediate logical explanation she could think of was that the journal belonged to a surface pony that had used the prospecting office as shelter for a time, and had been careful to avoid leaving any sign that they’d been there by re-locking everything before leaving.

She deigned to allow the illusion to remain by leaving the journal and the safe’s contents intact, and locked it back up through the terminal before logging it off and ushering her filly out the door. After locking it behind her, however, she began to think they might have been better off staying inside.

In the span of a few minutes the approaching storm had grown close enough to belt the abandoned town with strong, consistent gusts of wind that carried a moist feel to it through her nose. Lighting now visited the town proper in white, split-second sheets of light, and the thunder that followed was at times almost as deafening as a gunshot. Her hearing protection spell flared back to life after the first such thunderclap, when Light Tail’s forehooves came down upon her ears in pain, and afterward the thunder was not a bother.

If only her little girl could follow suit.

“Maybe we’d be better off back there,” the filly suggested loudly roughly two minutes after they’d left the office and turned down an intersection seventy yards into the town. “Y’know, that place of shelter you’ve been looking for?”

“Somepony else is using it,” she answered back, nudging the filly along behind her with a subtle push of telekinesis to her hindquarters. After what she’d found in that house, she wasn’t going to trust anything out here. “I don’t think they’d take kindly to a couple of strangers breaking in when they come back.”

“And how do you know that for sure?” was the next logical protest to the mare’s decision. By Luna’s moon this child’s brain could be aggravating at times.

“I don’t, but that journal in the safe is too well-preserved,” she replied, trying her very best to keep a level, pleasant tone with the filly. “It’s a few years old at best, not two centuries. Whoever left it went to the trouble to lock everything back up before leaving.”

“It’s still a better place to be than out here,” El-Tee continued to press as they grew closer to a second intersection further ahead, maybe forty yards. “That place has a lockable door, it’s sturdy, and isn’t surrounded on all sides by other houses and stuff. It’s perfect—“

“It’s a fallback if we can’t find somewhere else in time,” Sling cut in, stopping the filly’s words mid-sentence with a sharper, more insistent tone now. “The last thing I want is to be dealing with an angry pony with every right to be upset with us for breaking into his shelter for our own use.”

Especially if they turn out to be the ones responsible for that….that slaughter….

“You’re assuming he’ll mind—“

“And you’re assuming that anypony up here will behave like the Stable ponies we grew up with!” she snapped back, and instantly regretting the harsh rebuke when she looked back and saw her filly’s ears flattening down out of fear.

“H-hey, okay, okay, stop yelling at me I get it I-I’m sorry—“

All of her sharpness, her fear and rage, vanished at the sight of her own daughter physically flinching away from her in such a fearful state. Again.

How many times now? How many times had she let her own personal stress and grief get the better of her like this?

How many times had her little girl suffered for it?

A push of telekinesis gently stopped the filly’s backtracking and nudged her back forward, and El-Tee’s immediate reaction when she came to a stop was to plop her hindquarters onto the ground and wait to be punished.

It never came. “…I’m so sorry, honey….I’ve been a real jerk to you lately, haven’t I….”

El-Tee’s eyes still bore fresh tears, but they were at least willing to stare back her now. How well a sincere “I’m sorry” could work was nothing short of astonishing. “….more than once.”

“I shouldn’t be.”

“….no. But until last week you weren’t being chased by mutant insects or bears….or quitting your job to start a new one in a library where you could hide yourself from everypony a lot easier. And you weren’t worrying about just getting by from one day to the next, like we might have to up here—“

“That’s no excuse for taking it all out on you. And it’s not just dangerous wildlife or harsh country living I’m worried about.”

El-Tee’s perceptive nature was quick to cut to the root of her intended words, as usual. “You found something in that house. Something you don’t want me to see or know about, because it scares you.”

She wasn’t going to ask how Light Tail came to figure that out. She didn’t want to have to explain it either. “I did. And I’m worried that ponykind hasn’t changed one bit since the war. Or gotten worse. I know you’re smart enough to have figured some of that out with just what little we’ve seen of the surface in the last couple of hours.”

“It can’t be that bad as how everypony treated you back home,” the filly suggested softly. And not without reason, that had been the kid’s sore thorn in her mother’s side for most of the morning. “This isn’t the stable anymore.”

“That’s just it,” she corrected for her. Much as she didn’t want to go into what she’d found in that bedroom, she did want Light Tail to know how potentially dangerous this new world of theirs was. “We just don’t know what kind of world we’re in, and I’m not going to trust that things will somehow work themselves out just because we’re in a new place. I need you to trust me when I do things that don’t make sense to you, because as logical as it is to go back to that office I don’t want to because I don’t feel safe there. I want—“

Sling Shot’s little lecture came to an abrupt end when El-Tee’s left foreleg poked her in the chest and pointed behind her, her little eyes becoming fixated on a distant object. She almost asked that cliché question of ‘What?’ as she turned round to see what had captured her night light’s attention so quickly—

—a tan earth colored earth pony stallion was coming to a stop twenty feet away from her, far closer for her tastes than she was comfortable with, and her instinct was to put a few extra steps between them as she pushed the filly along with her with her back legs. His mane was a wild, chaotic mess, fixed into several mohawk-shaped braids that exposed much of his skull, and what looked like a miss-mash of torn leather barding adorned his torso and withers. Several ring piercings in his ears and left foreleg flittered in the wind, and his coat was unkempt and dirty-looking, with tiny scatterings of scars along his forelegs and face.

And across his back was a metal pole, with what looked like a chunk of concrete at the end of it, as if he’d simply pulled a street sign straight out of the sidewalk for use as a blunt weapon—there were certainly plenty of pale, reddish stains on it.

A couple of feet behind him was an equally outlandish-looking earth pony mare, her light pastel blue coat clashing with her purple mohawk mane and multi-braided tail….and the rusted, but sharp-looking machete she clenched between her teeth in a death grip.

But most disturbing of all….their cutie marks. The stallion’s was horrific—a heavy-looking sledgehammer head, with a pool of blood underneath it and what looked like the broken pieces of a creature’s skull scattered around it. The mare’s mark was a crisscrossed pair of machetes, coated crimson with dripping blood—

“—three more behind us,” Light Tail’s voice whispered as quietly as she could manage, adding to her growing despair and her list of things to change on her hearing spell. She had not even heard any hoofsteps around her, but then, her attention hadn’t been that well focused on her surroundings a few seconds ago.

They damn well had her full attention now.

“Whoooo-wheeee, lookie here!!” a stallion behind her whooped loudly, a slight maniac shrill in his voice. “Have you ever seen such clean-lookin’ souls in yer whole miserable lives, I mean look at these two!! I bet they crawled right out of a stable this morning!”

Oh, shit—

“They did, ya brainless sack of oats!!” the stallion in front of her roared back, his eyes searching her over much as a predator might survey a potential meal. “Can’t you see the damn suit she’s got on?!”

“Oh, I’m not lookin’ at her suit!!” the whooping stallion hollered back, and Sling unconsciously dropped her tail down between her legs before they could get any more ideas. “Such a fine little specimen of the fairer sex—“

Her heart began to beat harder against her ribs. Oh shit this is bad—

“Hey, if they came out of a stable maybe they can get us in!” a mare behind her shouted out, her voice shifting as she moved around to box them in from her left. “Must be all kinds of shit in there, we’d be like kings and queens for life!”

“Yeeeeaaah, now there’s an idea I can get behind!” the sledgehammer stallion cooed, still not taking his eyes off of her as he began to scrutinize specific things in detail…like her holstered guns. “Judgin’ by yer getup ya came from the one-one-five in that mountain near here, so we already know where it is. Just tell us how we get through the damn door.”

She hoped her legs weren’t shaking as badly as she thought they were. “You can’t,” she answered calmly, trying to instill a fresh telekinetic spell in her horn as subtly as she could. “We left only because the power failed and we were being swarmed with radroaches. We were the only ones that got out alive.”

There was an unfortunate brief silence that did little to comfort her about the next two minutes of her life ahead. “….shit, thought it was weird that bug swarm vanished all of a sudden. Guess we know where they are now.”

“’Least we can scour around that mountain now,” the flanking mare sneered darkly. “Those bugs will be feasting for weeks.”

Her heart grew heavier, and beat harder. Now her lungs were starting to work erratically. Her options were starting to grow slim in her panic. Fight. Flee. Beg. Give up. The latter two were suicide, her mind’s voice told her.

The four options became two when the sledgehammer stallion’s eyes diverted downward, off to her side, where El-Tee had huddled herself to stay as close to her mother as she could manage. “You checkin’ out my flank, kid?”

No no no no—

“I think she is!” the flanking mare cooed in agreement. “Daaaymn they must start ‘em out young in those stables!”

You sick, depraved lunatics no NO NO—

Sledgehammer stallion began to stalk towards them, and she began inching backward, scooting El-Tee along with her back legs as she turned her back towards the crumbling building beside her to keep any of these savages from getting a free shot at her from behind. “S-stay back—“

“Tell ya what, you just go along quietly and things’ll go smoother for alla us,” Sledgehammer said, a menacing, sickly grin beginning to grow on his face. “I mean, there’s a big storm comin’, and we’re gonna be cooped up out of the muck for a while. We’ll need some entertainment.”

El-Tee’s body stopped moving despite Sling’s most insistent efforts to push her into doing so…and she started to cry. “M-mommy…I’m scared—“

Her heart stopped. Her lungs stopped fighting with her to breathe normally. Her trembling legs stopped shaking and became stout, firm pillars of strength. The two muddled options left to her became one very clear, very sensible path dictated by an enraged inner voice, one she had no trouble agreeing with.

Kill. Them. All.

Her 10mm pistol scratched against its holster as it flashed out and leveled squarely upon the flanking mare’s chest, who turned out to be a pale green unicorn wielding the only firearm among the group of five savages, but she seemed oblivious to its presence. “…bitch, you ain’t the first to pull an empty gun on me and even if it were loaded you don’t have the ba—“

It was just like live fire practice. Aim, careful breath, smooth squeeze and follow-through—

—BOOM!—

—the low-light conditions of the raincloud sky made the muzzle flash stand out, its bright orange tongue of flame roughly half the size of the gun itself and obscuring the results of the shot, but her pained cry of surprise told her all she wanted to know. She didn’t even wait to get a second sight picture, but fought the gun back down as close to its previous position as she could, as quickly as she could, and squeezed off a second shot so close to the first that one could have mistaken it for an automatic weapon.

She stumbled back, choking on her ruptured lungs as her pistol clattered to the ground, and Sling swung the sights to the right, on the sledgehammer stallion, his eyes widening in shock at how quickly their prey had turned on them—

—Sling fired another two quick shots from a single sight picture, managing to put one round on her target’s torso but missing with the second, just as the sky finally began to rain down on the land below.

Somepony, somewhere, starting screaming. She knew it wasn’t her, but beyond that it was a mystery she didn’t have time to dwell on, because now she had three fresh savages and one wounded one all charging at her, promising exceptionally obscene and unpleasant acts upon her corpse once they were done, and she didn’t intend to let them molest anything, ever again.

Sledgehammer stallion was the most motivated and therefore the first to reach her, his jaws snapping onto the metal pole and tearing the makeshift weapon free of its carrying strap as he brought it up in a rearing charge for a downward swing—

—she intentionally dropped her sights down below his exposed belly and squeezed off a fifth shot that brought him back down to the ground, his cries of rage turning in shrilling shrieks of agonizing pain and tears—

—the machete mare closed in before Sling could get a good bead on her, so the teal blue mare did the only thing she could think of in the half-second she had and darted forward, leaping over the screaming stallion and turning around for a better shot—

—two stallions with cropped, short manes and a bad case of mange on their dark red coats were splitting off from each other, one going straight for her night light and the other coming about to cover the machete mare as she skidded to a halt now that her target had moved. The charging stallion wore no barding or armor of any sort, but his mouth bore a very sharp looking and partially serrated knife—

—El-Tee’s revolver came up in front of the filly and fired off a shot at the stallion approaching her almost instinctively, and Sling joined in with a shot of her own that tore through his left side and made him forget about her little girl—

—the knife stallion closed the distance faster than she’d expected and bowled her over onto the broken street on her back, the knife in his jaws coming down towards her neck—

—she jammed the pistol’s barrel up against his lower jaw and squeezed the trigger once, his skull muffling much of the 10mm blast that obliterated the brain inside. His lifeless body collapsed onto its side next to her, mercifully giving her a good view of Machete Mare and the two seconds she had left to get out of her way—

—at the last second Sling rolled over to her left, the machete-wielding manic missing her head by about two inches but startling her hold on her pistol, and it clattered onto the pavement before she could fix her misfiring spell—

—Grayhawk’s weight left her side as she rolled over onto her hooves, the massive revolver’s red front sight swinging up onto the Machete Mare’s chest just before she pressed back on the trigger—

—the shot tore straight through the savage mare, caving in a ragged, bloody hole through her chest and expelling an unholy amount of blood out through what she prayed was one of her back legs, and Machete Mare dropped to the ground in a bloody heap without so much as a gasp—

“S-S-SHIT!” the last remaining stallion shrieked. Having been shot at by a ten-year-old filly and watching the mother ventilate one of his friends with a through-and-through shot, he’d become convinced that his only salvation was to charge straight for her with the straight razor he had tied to his left foreleg.

KILL. THEM. ALL! The red sight rose again, water droplets splattering all across the top of the barrel and the frame, obscuring the trail of smoke sifting out of the barrel—

Grayhawk roared again, the sights settling just slightly ahead of the stallion’s path when she fired, and when the revolver bucked up she bore witness to a sight almost as gruesome as Hoofprint—his head came apart like a melon, and his body tumbled over in a forward roll of flailing limbs before coming to rest near the sledgehammer stallion.

The screaming stallion had by then becoming a weeping, gasping shell of a gelded colt as shock began to set in, his blood becoming diluted into the growing pool of water collecting on the streets. “Y-y-you..you c-castrated me ….”

Grayhawk slid back into its holster, and her 10mm pistol came back into her grasp as she trotted towards the dying savage. “I told you to stay back,” she snarled back angrily, taking careful aim at a very specific spot between his eyes. “You should’ve listened.”

His glassy eyes began to shrink as they stared down the business end of the 10mm barrel leveled in their direction—

And El-Tee’s tiny body crashed into her legs. “Mom, stop!”

Her spell field stopped mid-stroke on the trigger, her aim unwavering. “Don’t look honey—“

“No, please!!” Light Tail’s voice cried, even going so far as to start pulling on her forelegs to try and move the larger, stronger pony. “Stop! They’re not gonna hurt us anymore!”

KILL! THEM! ALL!! the angry voice in her head repeated. “I’m just making sure of that—“

“This isn’t you!” the little one begged harder, her tugging becoming more frantic. “You’re better than this, I know it!”

Her pressure on the trigger tried to press back, to send a bullet into this savage’s brainpan, to keep him from being able to do unspeakable things to her and her little girl. “I said—“

“Are you listening?!” Light Tail screamed through her hearing protection spell. “Or are you so mad at everything that you’re gonna go ahead and take it out on anything you think you can get away with?!”

“What do you think this sick filth has been doing his whole life?!?! He’s getting off easy—“

“You’re not like them!!” El-Tee howled, her voice beginning to crack with tears. “You’re my mom and I don’t want you to do this, this isn’t you!! You’re not a murderer, so STOP IT!!!”

She had a sudden flash, back to that house they’d been in not even thirty minutes earlier, and to that poor stallion whose entrails had been allowed to hang from his split stomach, and to the poor mare who suffered unspeakable abuse before she was—

…..murdered….

Murdered.

And here she was, standing in the decaying ruins of a dead town, amidst a pile of corpses she’d just made, with a ten-millimeter, one-fifty-five grain slug sitting in the chamber ready to spray this helpless savage’s brains out all over the slickening streets right in front of her most treasured possession in the world, because all she could think about right then was how much hate and anger she had grown to harbor over the years.

Murderer….

The slide-mounted safety clicked on, snapping the hammer down into its uncocked position just behind the firing pin, her stoic hold on the pistol beginning to waver as she stepped away from the whimpering stallion. It took her three tries to stow it back in its holster—the cold rain didn’t help matters any.

Murderer. Sick as the rest of them.

Her ears never registered any of the thunder that sounded out with every bolt of lightning. She put all her effort into getting as far away from the slaughter she’d indulged in, delaying just long enough to appropriate the single pistol from the remains of its former owner and as much ammunition as she could fumble into her stable suit pockets in five seconds—a paltry seven rounds of ball-round 9mm. She deigned to allow Light Tail to take the lead when it became apparent she was losing the concentration needed to find a safe, dry haven, and the child chose the only singular safe place she knew of—the prospecting office they’d broken into when they’d first arrived.

It took her three minutes to fumble through the lock and pick it open, breaking four of her twenty bobby pins in the process, and another three minutes to fight her wet, rain-slicked stable suit and traveling saddle off of her body. It only took her a minute to find a dry towel from the saddlebags and begin to dry herself off with it.

A sick, sad angry shell of a mare that can’t stop blowing up at her own child even when she’s trying to save your conscience.

She began to shake and tremble. From the adrenaline bleed off, from the cold touch of the water, from her own growing horror that her daughter was more right than she’d ever realized. And that it was only by her night light’s intervention that she avoided poisoning her soul forever. To say nothing of the other four ponies she’d shot dead when she felt herself backed up into a corner by lustful savages with no care for anything but their own selfish desires. The only saving grace there was that they had all been trying to kill her.

It started as a gasping, choking sob as her coat and mane became frizzled from the remaining moisture that the towel couldn’t soak up, and before long she had broken down into a quivering blob of fur and hair as she cried in horror over what she’d nearly become. Not even Light Tail’s nuzzling hug could make things better.

And in the sickest of ironies, as the filly’s forelegs found purchase around her mother’s neck, the perceptive thing’s endless optimism still sought to comfort her with two-hundred year old words.

“It’s okay mom, it’s okay,” El-Tee murmured softly. “Everything will work out. All of it.”

Comments

[Deathpony]

Wow this chapter was really good and what was that bear thing? Man bear pig?

[KDarkwater]

2248053

Don't feed the yao guai! :D

[Turtledude]

1863491 Do you mention this on every story with a prologue and an intro, Mr. Pleb?