Fallout Equestria: Old World Dreams

by KDarkwater

Chapter 11

11

A blissful existence in dreamland came to an abrupt, rude end with the uninvited touch of a cold object sticking itself to her face. Its effect was such that her senses were rapidly coming back to life, to the point where she couldn’t even remember being asleep at all.

She’d come to learn the culprit of this crime very well.

“Hey!” she squealed in sleepy protest, a foreleg coming up to push the puppy’s nose away from her. “Quit it!”

But the puppy wasn’t fazed—if anything, trying to refuse its presence just made it more determined, and now included a healthy licking across her face. In addition to being really gross and wet, it did a good job of killing any remaining vestige of sleep from her body.

“Oh, gross, stoppit!” she commanded again, this time using both forelegs to make her point a little more clear. “I mean it, stop!”

The other puppy joined its sibling in the showering of affection towards their new adopted caretaker, and now two wet, cold noses and sloppy tongues were rapidly ruining her mane and coat as she quickly retreated from the bed and began to flee towards the restroom. “Help! Mom! Kite! BJ! They’re being clingy again!”

But nopony came to her rescue, and little Max and Mona had gotten exceptionally talented at staying within two feet of her whenever she was awake. By the time she’d made it to the restroom and began to reach out with her magic to slam it shut behind her, the pups had already managed to catch up to her and resumed their near-daily “good morning” greeting.

Fine, then! she grinned evilly as Max’s head pushed its way around her left foreleg to lick at her cheek below her left eye. You wanna play rough? We’ll play rough!

“All right, fine, slobber me, but guess what?” she cackled, turning her magic towards the barely functional bathtub behind her. “When you’re done, it’s bath time!”

To make her point loud and clear, she then deliberately shifted a spell field over the faucet knob and twisted it on, and the change in their mood was instant and priceless. They no longer wanted anything to do with her, and even began to turn away and try to run back out the door, but she quickly shut it in front of their faces to trap them inside the restroom with her.

“Oh no, not this time! I gotta take a bath ‘cause of you two, so you’re gonna get one too! Now get over here!”

Their excited yips quickly turned into a series of pitiful whimpers and yelps as they found themselves encased in her telekinesis and dragged into the running shower with her. She had to practically sit on Mona to keep her still most of the time, but once Max got soaked all the way down to the skin he usually stopped struggling with her and gave up, lying down in the tub and begrudgingly allowing her to soap his coat with a dab of conditioner. She’d have washed them separately (along with herself), but with water being such a precious commodity out here, it was faster and less wasteful to just go ahead and get it all done at once.

She spent the next ten minutes washing both herself and the two husky pups as thoroughly as she could manage, and then shook herself free of the remaining loose water before hopping out of the tub and pulling the pups in behind her. They followed her lead and covered the walls (and herself) with water shaken from their own bodies, but it wasn’t anything that couldn’t be cleaned up in a couple of minutes. In fact, this time was probably the least destructive bath time she’d given the pups so far. The first time, it turned out that their “gray” fur was actually more black than gray, mostly because with all the dirt and grime they were covered in it was hard to tell—but this awesome discovery was marred by the fact that it took two days to completely clean the towels she’d dried them off with afterward.

As she strolled back into the hotel room and floated the pups over onto her bed, her eyes swept over her saddlebags nestled against the foot of the bedframe….and found that Mom’s bags were missing from her bed, and her heart took a short plunge into her chest.

Gone, again. Without even saying a word this time….

No telling where she went off to. Sometimes she’d be gone half the day, and other times she’d be back before lunch. But when she was gone most of the day, she usually came back with less ammo and more caps.

She didn’t have the guts to ask why. She figured it out the first time Mom had done it—bounty hunting seemed to require the hunter to shoot and kill the bounty for a reward. Mostly caps. And Mom had done this twice a week since….

….a quick glance at a series of hash marks engraved in the wood above her bed reminded her of the passage of time, and for a second time felt herself grow depressed with her morning.

Five sets had been crossed out with a single line, making the sixth set stand out with its four unbroken marks. She barely felt herself scratching it out with a small folding knife, partially unwilling to believe the number.

Thirty days. A month, more or less.

That was how long it’d been since they left the stable. They’d spent most of it here, in this run-down hotel from centuries back, because Mom wasn’t willing to venture any further without knowing the area they were going through. And while she knew Mom was right to want to learn about the region before trekking through it, she couldn’t help but wonder if she was also using it as an excuse to stall and put off the resumption of their journey.

It wasn’t like Mom to be scared of something to the point where she’d put off doing it.

With little else to do until she returned, however, Light Tail resigned herself to another day of lounging about the hotel room, re-reading Mom’s firearms recognition book or The Mare of the Everfree (she’d finished it three weeks ago), or counting up all the bullets in her saddlebags, or taking her guns apart and putting them back together for practice. She’d gotten to the point where she could get both of her guns down to their major components and back together in under a minute.

But before she could start another boring day in the hotel room, she had to dry herself and the pups off before they turned the whole bed into a wet blanket. So she pulled a dry towel from her saddlebags, hopped up, and started rubbing the towel over their damp bodies to soak up the moisture. Neither of the pups seemed to mind this part of bath time—in fact, Max seemed to like it. Probably felt like getting scratched behind the ears to him.

She became so absorbed in the task that she didn’t even notice she had company until BJ started bumping the bed frame with a forehoof to catch her attention. “Lot more work than you’d thought they’d be, hunh?” he said as his hoof banged against the wooden leg in front of him.

“Actually, I thought it’d be worse,” she shot back with a grin. “Thought they’d be using the entire floor for a bathroom, but it turns out they figured out what commodes are for. Surprised me and Mom the first time we heard them use it.”

“……gross,” the colt shuddered in disgust, jumping up onto the bed so he wouldn’t run the risk of being ignored. “Impressive considering they’re maybe three or four months old, but still gross.”

“Less gross than having to clean up after them,” she reminded him, half her towel now damp to the touch whenever it brushed against her forelegs. She tossed it onto a nearby bedpost and pulled another dry towel from her bags to resume the task—she’d gotten herself mostly dry now, and Max was only wet from the shoulders on up, but Mona’s coat was still slick with water and beginning to soak the sheets beneath her.

BJ wasn’t one to keep up small talk, she’d learned—when he was done with a subject, he’d just stop talking and walk away, or find something else he wanted to talk about. “Your mom tell you if we’re gonna be leaving today?”

I wish we would get moving again. “She was gone when these two jokers woke me up,” she murmured disappointedly, rubbing the towel against Max’s shoulders, much to the husky pup’s delight. “Her bags were gone too, and so’s most of the junk she and Kite have been hoarding for the last two weeks. Maybe they’re finally getting around to selling it.”

BJ snorted in contempt and settled down into the bed with his legs folded in beneath him. “’Bout damn time, got tired of tripping on all that crap. We might be leaving today after all. Your stuff still packed up?”

“Always,” she answered, feeling a slight relief at the idea that they might finally get back to finding a new home for the stable. “We’d be gone already if we hadn’t kept all that junk Mom kept bringing back every day.”

“Nah, she had the right idea. Trotpeka would be two or three day’s walk from here if that highway west wasn’t blocked off right now. We’ll have to go up and around it, through a coupla smaller towns to the northwest, and then come back down towards the city. Adds a couple weeks to the journey. Might need the extra caps.”

“What’d the Union block the road off for again? I wasn’t really paying attention when Mom came back last night.”

“Some mass outbreak of ants,” he answered with a soft sigh. “There’s supposed to be several nests of ‘em around an old stable twenty something miles north of here. Your mom said they lost a couple of patrols around there last week, and another on the highway yesterday morning. And that road happens to be a major trade route for the Union’s more prosperous caravan companies. So of course they’d shut it down for a clean-up. Our route goes around the wasteland the nests are located in, so when we do get moving, don’t wander too far off the road when nature calls and keep a gun handy.”

Great, El-Tee spat inside her mind with dread. ‘Cause having to relieve yourself in the open wasteland just has to have the risk of getting you killed doing it. I’m gonna miss this place. “You call it an ‘old’ stable….meaning nopony lives in it now?”

“Nah, everypony in it came out decades ago,” he said, shifting in place a little but otherwise remaining completely still. “Their descendants are spread out all over, probably even across the valley.”

“Why’d they leave?” she asked next, though in the back of her mind she was already coming to the conclusion on her own—that they had no choice.

“It wasn’t willingly,” he confirmed for her, and the speed at which the towel lathed and rubbed against the pup’s damp fur slowed a little bit. “But nopony knows for sure now. Maybe the power died, like your stable. Maybe they couldn’t grow their own food anymore. Maybe those ants found a way in and they couldn’t hold ‘em off.”

El-Tee couldn’t help but think back to the morning that had forced herself and Mom to the surface, to all the gunfire that she’d heard in just the fifteen minutes from the power outage to the explosion in the infirmary that had sent everypony running for another safe haven (and leaving her and Mom behind), and she swore she thought she could even hear it again for a moment. Short bursts, or singular ear-splitting booms, or….

…or the fact that mere radroaches had managed to do enough damage to trigger the evacuation alarm and simultaneously disable the majority of the power grid for the stable. And they weren’t much bigger than a really big full-grown cat. If these ants out in the wastes were truly as big as a cow….

“….our stable had plenty of guns,” she heard herself whisper hoarsely, her magic hold on the towel slackening to the point of dropping it on top of Max’s head. “And they couldn’t keep a bunch of mutant cockroaches from breaking the spark generator. If those ants had gotten to that stable, I don’t think anypony would’ve made it out at all. But they still scare me, those Union ponies got armor and bigger guns than anybody else, and Ada and Leon left the day after we came back with these pups….”

“I wouldn’t fret none,” BJ consoled her—truly consoled, as his voice had somehow lost its blandness and disinterest and taken on a slightly concerned tone. “Your mom might not be right in the head at times, but there’s no way in hell she’d ever take you anywhere near a death trap like that.”

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The time spent in Syrup Mound had been an enlightening experience.

Her short adventure with Ada and Leon had given her a course of action for sustaining herself and her daughter through some form of steady work. Bounty hunting was a surprisingly lucrative occupation—someone, somewhere, wanted someone else dead or captured virtually every week, and sometimes they were willing to pay rather well for the effort. With her best skills being magic and firearms, Sling found herself particularly well suited for the lower-risk bounties posted at Chet’s diner and soon found steady enough work to keep herself a regular seat in the corner table and stockpile caps for the inevitable time when she would need to find more ammo and med supplies. She did her best to pick bounties that were clearly directed at savages and raiders, but more than once she caught sight of a job offer that had the feelings of being less than honest upfront with what the job entailed. She never had the guts to track down the posters of those bounties to get more concrete details.

In a month’s time, she’d wound up with nine more dead bodies to her name…and the strange, sickening sense that she was being turned into something less than a pony when she found she could look at the accumulated caps and not feel herself close to barfing all over it like she had the first time she’d been paid for killing somepony. It helped that she’d only killed savages so far, but she was not counting on that luck holding for much longer.

When she wasn’t thinking of her changing conscience or her degrading sense of shock at the act of taking life, she was dealing with more external problems. Kite turned out to have a thing for mares, and for her in particular (which made a sick kind of sense considering she’d been the one to kill the slavers holding and abusing her). She didn’t find out until about a week after settling into the hotel, when Kite had made a subtle pass at her after the kids had gone to bed. Caught off-guard and with no real way to gently disappoint her, her only reply was that she didn’t “swing that way” and wasn’t looking to start anytime soon. Kite took it surprisingly well, particularly after Sling explained to her that she was probably just feeling that way because of how they’d met. The two were laughing about the whole thing within three days…but Sling could not ignore the fact that once in a great while, she would feel scrutinized by Kite’s gaze whether her back was turned to her or not. She wanted to say something, but when she considered that most of Kite’s intimate encounters might not have been by choice, she couldn’t bring herself to object. In the end, she decided that so long as Kite’s longing stares were all she had to put up with, she could live with it.

Allowing her to indulge in her silent desires and longings seemed to help a great deal in getting her to open up some. She’d been unwilling to divulge much in the way of information at first, but as time passed and their familiarity with each other grew, the former slave grew a little more comfortable with dealing with her. And today, it finally began to pay off.

The two of them had taken the pile of loot she’d collected over the last two weeks—mostly dinged, freshly repaired barding and .32-caliber revolvers and a few barely serviceable tools—and sold it to three separate traveling merchants that had set up a temporary market about nine blocks away from the hotel, near the edge of the settled portion of the city. They had just started the walk back to the hotel when Kite popped a question that didn’t deal with immediate survival or their next meal.

“Sling Shot isn’t your real name, is it?”

She curled her head around to her left to stare back at the scarred ex-slave behind her in mild shock. “….you’ve wondered that for weeks, haven’t you?”

“….the way you tell your name kinda gives it away,” Kite murmured in reply, suddenly finding an intense interest in the air off to her side. “Like it doesn’t roll off your tongue like a reflex . I’m the same way with BJ. And let’s be honest, your name doesn’t match your cutie mark at all.”

“Not everypony’s name has to, you know.”

“But enough names do that the ones that don’t stand out more. I’m…I’m just asking, is all.”

She allowed herself to slow down a little so that the other mare would be closer and easier to hear. “…you’re right, it’s not. It’s a nickname I got in the stable when I got good enough at pistol shooting to be able to draw it from a holster and print two-inch groups at twenty-five yards in under four seconds. It’s stuck with me for eight years now. I got to the point where I answered to it as well as I did my real name, and I don’t know that anypony even remembered calling me by any other name after a while.”

“I figured it had something to do with guns,” Kite said. “So what is your real name?”

“What’s BJ’s?” she countered calmly.

She instantly regretted even trying to get that answer. Kite’s body began to visibly shiver, and the confidence in her voice wavered. “I-I don’t wanna talk about that. F-forget I said anything.”

Don’t push it. Easy enough. There were things in her life she didn’t want to talk about either. “…tell me about the slavers, then. How they’re organized, things like that.”

Kite actually wasn’t any more comfortable with this subject than she was with the last one. “….I’ll tell you, after you tell me how Light Tail can be so damn smart and still have no clue where babies come from. I thought stables had schools.”

Sling’s insides began to tense up as decade-old memories began teasing her with snippets of emotional torment suffered along an eleven-month pregnancy….at fifteen….

…and the changes made to the school’s teaching curriculum afterward…

“….I…didn’t…plan on being a mother. It just….happened. My fifteenth birthday, I got the idea to celebrate it by sleeping with a colt…got pregnant right off, but I didn’t find out until about four months later. After that, the stable decided sex ed shouldn’t be taught in the school, but by the parents. Most do a decent job, but others…well, they put it off so long that a few mares and colts fresh out of school and on their first job assignment couldn’t explain why they had different parts or what they were for. I still don’t know myself when I ought to explain it to her….and she’s not old enough to bear young right now anyway.”

“….oh,” Kite’s subdued, quiet voice mumbled. “….you aren’t the first teen mom in the world…even if most of ‘em I hear about didn’t get a choice in the matter….”

Sling felt her breakfast churn slightly inside her stomach. That was not what she wanted to hear half an hour before they were set to venture back out into such a black, evil world….

In hindsight, she’d begun to wish she hadn’t asked about the slavers, but when Kite began to explain it all to her she found it easier to keep from throwing up if she thought about how she was going to deal with them if they ran into one of their “hunting” parties. “The slavers are organized into five guilds, all registered with the Union for trade and asset protection. Each one focuses on providing….”product” for a particular purpose. One guild focuses on farm hands, they’re the Union’s sole source for their crop field workers. Another guild focuses on providing house servants and assistants to traveling merchants…that’s the one that initially caught me, but they didn’t keep me for long. A third provides….whores, for lack of a polite term. They’re one of the worse guilds, they don’t care who buys their slaves, or how old the slaves themselves are. They even have their own brothel that serves double-duty as a…”try before you buy” store of sorts….”

….oh shit, to know that much about them, you’d have had to have been….

Fortunately, Kite kept on going before she could complete that thought and hurl her breakfast onto the neglected, eroding asphalt beneath their hooves. “….one guild focuses on providing physical labor. Wagon pulling, construction, shit like that. The last one is something unique, they actually train their slaves in some technical or medical skills, for the town or two lucky enough to have a semi-functional factory or med clinic. Treat their slaves pretty well, compared to the rest, even let them work their way to freedom. You’d think that would make them an easy target, but they got access to knowledge and instructors you can’t find anywhere else, and everypony knows that what little technology we can still get to work would crumble to dust without them. Plus they got the biggest collection of M.E.W.s this side of the prairie. You don’t mess with them, they’ll dust you and use the ashes as kitty litter.”

“….and they’re all….they get a free pass from the Union to go and catch anyone they want?”

“No, nothing like that….not yet, anyway. There’s no business in having everyone enslaved, they wouldn’t have anyone left to sell to. Plus the Union’s got the guns and the numbers to wipe them out if they ever do get out of hoof. There’s a couple rules to who they can catch and who they can’t. Merchants and caravans pay monthly taxes to the Union based off their profits, so they’re off-limits. Anyone in their employ’s out of bounds too, but as you might’ve guessed some of them use slaves as employees themselves. If you’re a contracted merc or town guard, you’re off-limits, but you can’t stop the slavers from capturing anypony or you forfeit that protection. Union ponies themselves are untouchable, period. But everyone else is fair game outside a town. Thing is, those rules only apply to the slaver guilds—anypony else that fancies to make some quick caps, they can try and kidnap anypony else they think they can take, and the Union and the guilds won’t raise a fuss. It pretty much boils down to whether or not you got the guns to keep yourself free. And if you don’t, and you’re not lucky enough to be working for the Union or a merchant…you’d better stay in town, or travel with a caravan, or you won’t get to where you’re going.”

No. She wasn’t going to wait for a caravan to pile together and start a trade run through the wastes…and they’d stayed too long in Syrup Mound as it was. Saurus was still out there, and any kind of a head start they’d had on him when she’d crippled his wing had long since vanished, even with Ada and Leon hunting him down. They had to leave, today, before he could pick up their trail and hunt them down…assuming he hadn’t already done so and was just waiting for them to leave town.

“Third option is to kill anyone who tries to take you, whether they’re guilded or freelancers,” Sling replied with a fleeting touch across Grayhawk’s grip. “So long as we’re not actively hurting a guild’s operations they shouldn’t be too mad at that, right?”

“Not many folk try it anymore,” Kite answered solemnly. “Most of the ones that did wound up dead, and a couple of times a group did form up to try and make a difference. The guilds just got all their guns together and slaughtered them all, even down to their newborn foals, and the asset protection clause of their registering with the Union means they can do whatever they want to protect their “business”. Prairie Runners are the only ones they’re afraid of, which is why they keep to this side of the prairie. Any slavers heading across the valley are independents—Union and the guilds won’t turn away the “product” if it gets here, but they won’t protect them either. If the Runners ever did start hitting the guilds, it’d give the Union cause to start another war…one they might win.”

Get out of the prairie, she repeated to herself for the hundredth time in a month. Get over the valley, find that mountain pass and find a way through, and get out.

“How do you feel about a plunge into an old, abandoned stable?” she asked next. She’d learned enough about the slavers’ operations for the moment, and there was still the matter of finding better weapons capable of penetrating armored barding. Syrup Mound didn’t have an arms merchant, and the few traveling traders that did have weapons didn’t have anything she would classify as ‘armor-piercing’.

And El-Tee might even enjoy the idea of “treasure hunting” in ancient, pony-built ruins….

“….what are you looking for in there?” Kite asked, a hint of fear in her voice.

“Ada said there might be one or two guns still left in one, twenty to thirty miles away from here,” she answered quietly, her eyes focusing on the dizzying mix of pale colors in the far distance that would soon begin to separate into a throng of ponies milling about the streets. “It’s a hell of a long shot, but I want to check it out and be sure. We need something that can punch through armor or we won’t last long in a firefight with slavers or Saurus. It’s surrounded by—“

“Ant nests, I know,” Kite bit back. “I know the area. Saurus used it to move between Syrup Mound and another town forty something miles out called Maize when he didn’t want to be followed. He knew where most of the nests were, even though new ones seem to crop up all the time as they fight each other for territory. He never went into the stable itself, thought it was a deathtrap with all the ants around it. But he made sure to find it in case he ever changed his mind. One gun can’t be worth all that trouble.”

“One gun, no, but there could be med supplies in there too, I’ve already used up most of the healing potions I left the Stable with.”

“….fine, then. Think I remember enough about the area to find a way around the worst of it…”

Sling’s brief elation at her stroke of luck was dampened by a month’s worth of learning experience in the wasteland….and of the general tendency of luck in her life to be fleeting and random. “….what do you want in return?” she asked, trembling slightly as she began to mentally list off all the possible prices Kite could want to extract from her—

“I want you to take me home,” Kite said crisply without hesitation. “I came from out west. I want to go back. Ada was exaggerating a few things, but she’s right, it’s better over there than it is here. I’ll humor your detours through the wastes, I’ll tell you how to get where you want to go, but I want you to take me home because you’re the best chance I have at getting there alive and free.”

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She was struck with an intense sense of irony. Standing in the dusty, cracked landscape of the wasteland, staring out into the endless, abyssal reaches of barren earth and isolated tallgrass, filled her with such an overwhelming notion of defeat and dismay that she couldn’t help but turn her frustration onto the closest living thing she could see.

The one that had told her she had nothing to worry about.

“….what was it you told me back at the hotel, BJ?”

“Shut up, Elly.”

“Both of you be quiet or I’ll be the least of your problems,” Mom snarled sharply, but quietly, her eyes furiously scanning the vast, empty wastes before them in search of large, cow-sized bugs that could bite all of them in half in a single motion.

That was enough of a threat to keep even BJ and the puppies in line—the pups huddled close to her legs and refused to move until she did, and even then they would only move at her speed, and never ventured away from her side. BJ stayed close as well, probably feeling safer within her small sphere of protection than he did outside of it, even if he would never admit it. Light Tail, for her part, was still trying to come to terms with the fact that for once Mom was willingly leading her into a known den of danger, death, and dismemberment for the chance that they would find something worth all the risk at the end. And she missed her chance to bug her about it a half hour ago, because she didn’t want her talking and chattering to be the reason they all got snipped to pieces.

She also had trouble believing she was even out here, worrying about things like food, water, decent places to sleep, having enough ammo to…to kill things, before they killed her. She wanted to believe that she’d wake up back home, in the stable, and be bugged by Emmy and Jam at lunch hour, or in the library, or bug Mom by pouncing on her like a cat from out of nowhere when she trudged through the door to their quarters. She wanted everything she’d ever taken for granted to come back in her life.

Instead she had the company of a scarred ex-slave, a screwed-up-in-the-head colt, two husky pups whose mother had met a very messy end to her hard life, and a mother who seemed to be losing a piece of herself with every life she took…all while she privately whined for petty things like working plumbing systems and a clean bed.

Shut up, Elly, indeed.

So she just squared her withers and, with a final check of her weapons to make sure they were fully loaded, followed Mom and Kite as the scarred, grape-coated mare began to lead them through the seemingly endless swath of dry, dusty earth that looked like it was taking its sweet time dying. Since Mom had the Pip-Buck she could pick up threats that none of them could see, but only as long as they were in its range. Light Tail wasn’t sure if it would show anything that was behind them, so she kept herself occupied by diligently looking around them in a full circle about once every ten to twenty seconds.

Everypony was, in fact. Made it difficult to keep a steady pace going, but at least they weren’t going to be sneaked up on. She even made it her business to look up to make sure no bad griffons were circling overhead….or that no mutant birds existed. She hadn’t seen any, and nopony had ever mentioned any, but she wasn’t going to discount the possibility entirely. She’d never thought a cow could have two heads, and in a month’s time she’d seen over two dozen.

But it wasn’t long before she began to put the majority of her focus on the ground, where more immediate dangers laid in wait. She heard Mom and Kite begin to slow down for a time, and she heard them cursing at what they thought was a low volume, but it wasn’t until she passed by a large splotch of dried blood off to her right that things began to get interesting.

Which, in the wasteland, was usually also dangerous.

“—ething hit a patrol out here, we know that much just by the blood here,” she heard Mom curse out loud as they inched their way through the blood-caked ground beneath them. “But you’d think there’d be a lot of shell casings, they would’ve been able to see trouble coming a mile away—“

“Yeah, Union patrols aren’t usually this sloppy with their situational awareness,” Kite agreed worriedly, moving almost lockstep alongside Mom. “But I don’t see any holes in the ground either, what are we missing—“

“Hey,” BJ’s voice whispered into her left ear as a foreign, tingling sensation began fiddling about her travelling saddle for one of the canteens she’d taken to keeping tucked away within grabbing distance of her magic. “Need a drink.”

“Knock yourself out,” she whispered back softly, swinging her eyes about in a quick sweep and cringing at the sight of what looked like the skeleton of a two-headed cow splayed out with several of its rib seemingly pulled outward.

“Thanks,” he muttered just before the canteen slipped out of the pouch, and she could hear its icy cool contents sloshing about inside as he drank down a quick swig. “…wow, this thing’s awesome, keeps the water nice and cold. It’s got a chill enchantment on it, don’t it?”

“Probably. Never bothered to pull the canvas cover off of it to see.”

“Meh, long as it works, I won’t ask how,” he gasped after a second gulp from the canteen, and then slipped it back into the pouch he’d taken it from. “….probably not a good time for talking anyway, our moms seem pretty freaked….”

When isn’t my mom freaked out lately? she wanted to say aloud. But still, he was right to be worried. Mom had her shotgun out in front of her, aimed low towards the ground so she could see in front of her, and Kite’s magic was wrapped tightly around her survival knife, slipping the blade under a carelessly dropped rifle and laying herself out on the ground to look beneath it as she slowly began to turn the blade upward to tip the rifle up a little. Like she was checking for something beneath the gun…

“…Beige, what’s your mom doin’?” she couldn’t help but ask when her curiosity began to overpower her sense of fear, if only briefly.

“Checkin’ for landmines,” he answered coldly, causing the filly’s stomach to churn in terror as she watched Kite’s actions with a new, horrifying insight. “Mom says the Prairie Runners were really well known for rigging just about everything you could imagine with booby traps during the war, knowin’ the Union would check everything on a battlefield for any kind of salvage. Heard some stories about how they rigged one whole ghost town so bad that it wiped out over sixty Union ponies with just about every improvised munition they could throw in there. Mines, three or four different kinds of grenade traps, shotgun door traps, even heard a couple tales about single-shot rifles slapped together from water pipes and couplings, pipe plugs, screws, a few bolts, and a nail for a firing pin. Bad thing is, the idea spread around to everypony else. Gotta be careful with what you find in the open.”

“…oh Luna, that’s awful,” Light Tail gagged lightly. Suddenly Ada didn’t seem quite as cool as she did a few minutes ago. “Just…it’s awful.”

“It works. Be thankful the Runners had morals, raiders and bandits sometimes use living ponies, hopin’ somebody with a bleeding heart will come running. Those types tend to have more med supplies. If you see somebody standing or lying in the open begging for help, but they won’t move, don’t get close, they could be bait for a trap.”

….oh gods, that’s even worse, nevermind, Ada’s a saint compared to the sick soul that would do something that horrible—

Seemingly satisfied that the rifle was not a trap waiting to claim her life, Kite’s knife floated its way back into its sheath tied around her torso. “Rifle’s clear, take a look at it, Sling.”

A second indigo-colored glow enveloped the rifle, bringing it up to Mom’s view as the magazine fell out of the weapon. “Hate the weight on these service rifles,” she grumbled as she checked the rifle over, its wooden forearm heavily taped together to keep it from falling off the rifle. “Full mag, no barrel obstruction….front sight’s a little bent, but intact…want it?”

“Not my thing, but I’d rather shoot a bug than stab it,” Kite answered, and the weapon and its ammunition slowly floated its way back to Kite until the grape-coated unicorn had it within her own telekinesis spell. Within a moment’s notice she’d placed the magazine back in and flicked the safety switch on, slipping it around and over her back by its carrying sling until the barrel was pointed out to the right. The whole weapon itself, now that she could get a much better look at it, looked a lot like Ada’s black rifle, only longer and heavier looking, and with some wooden parts to it, like the stock and forearm. “Okay, the Stable should be about three miles further….northwest, I think, but there were a couple of big nests between here and there the last time Saurus dragged us through here, we may have to keep going north another mile before we can swing around ‘em—”

Light Tail had her 9mm pistol out and in her tight grasp a split second before she heard the earth around them begin softly rumbling from three different places. For whatever reason she couldn’t place, she’d just known that once Kite started talking about safe paths to this abandoned Stable their luck would run out, and that they would get to find out exactly what had been responsible for all the blood around them.

Probably because those “somethings” that BJ was afraid of were nesting all around them, just waiting for prey to come along before springing out from beneath the ground—

“W-what the hell is that?!” Mom cried out, swinging her shotgun over at one of the three sources of noise beneath the earth.

“Fu—run!” Kite screamed sharply, following her own advice and bolting out straight ahead of them. “Get some distance, they’re slow enough you can outrun them!”

Great idea! Light Tail agreed with a slight, shrieking gasp, stuffing her pistol away and plucking Max and Mona off the ground with her magic before joining everypony in a heated run away from whatever it was that was trying to unbury itself an—

—she finally got to see what it was when a plum of dirt spiraled up out of the ground, pelting everything within ten yards in a brilliant shower of dirt clods and rocks. She didn’t know how long she screamed. Or how she managed to do it and run at the same time.

She’d seen blown-up images of ants in school, back home, and this thing was like, thirty times bigger. It was almost as big as some of those two-headed cows that all the traveling merchants used to haul their wagons around. And those hideous looking mandibles were certainly big enough to kill one outright! Little ponies like her would’ve been gobbled up whole! It made the radroaches that stormed her home look like….

….like…well, ants.

Another giant ant erupted from beneath the dying earth as she screamed her way past it, just as her screaming began to morph into a twisted, terrified laughter.

A laughter that made sense to no one but her.

“Elly, what’s so damned funny?!” she heard BJ screaming into her ears, furious with either her or the giant, murderous bugs digging themselves out from under the ground. Probably both.

And she still insisted on laughing. “Hehehaaa! It’s just…I was just thinkin’ ‘bout the radroaches that swarmed into my stable! And…snrrrk!...and these bugs make them look like old world ants! Hahahahaha—”

“That’s what’s got you laughing your tail off?! By Luna’s moon, why’re all you stupid stable ponies so insane?!”

—a flash of orange lit up the far end of the hallway, accompanied by an echoing burst of gunfire—

Light Tail blinked the memory away, her laughing dying in the instant it took for the real world to come back to her senses. W-what am I thinking, this isn’t funny at all, we could die here—

The sounds of the world rapidly faded into a muffled mess—the screeching ants, the rumbling, cracking ground they were ripping apart to unbury themselves, her own increasingly labored breathing as she fought the air for the oxygen she needed to keep going, all of it began to sound much, much further away than it was before, and in some cases vanishing entirely.

Mom usually started shooting things not long after applying that spell.

With her hearing dampened, she was forced to start paying much closer attention to what she could see. BJ was right where he’d been for the last two hours, right beside her on her left. Mom was only a few feet ahead of them, and Kite was maybe twenty feet further ahead from her. They both had guns out in front of them, Mom’s shotgun was tracking something off to her right like it was trying to line up a shot—

—even with the hearing protection spell, the shotgun’s report was loud enough to rattle her chest, and the burst of fire flaring out from the barrel seemed almost comical in appearance considering how loud the gunshot was. She jerked her gaze right for just a second, just to see what Mom was shooting at—

—she saw an ant half-buried in the ground just a few feet away, as if it were pulling itself out, and Mom happened to shoot it at the moment when its head was oriented up towards the sky. A chunk of its exoskeleton simply burst off of the head, and a second, larger burst exploded from the top, accompanied by a spray of disgusting, greenish liquids she couldn’t identify. Did bugs even have blood?

Regardless, it died instantly, and its body slid back down the hole it had tried to crawl out of. She didn’t even hear it scream. Probably the hearing spell. Or it never felt the shot.

But it was just one giant ant among dozens. Maybe even hundreds. She spared another two seconds to look around, the puppies’ weight pulling at her spell field and making her horn tingle, and she thought she was seeing things at first. She counted two—no, three, four, seven, ten ants behind them, having fully emerged from their hiding spots and scurrying after them. They’d probably walked over the things earlier and never knew it.

To their left….six? Some of them very far off, and more were popping up with every moment.

To their right she counted another eleven, not counting the one Mom blew away.

And yet there was nothing in front of them….

…nothing at all.

Maybe that’s our way ou—, she began to hope, cutting her hopes short as a dark, almost impossible thought came to her. Mom and Kite were wondering what had happened to a Union patrol out there, why they weren’t seeing as many bullet casings as they thought they should….and then she understood. The empty space in front of them wasn’t a path to safety.

It was a trap.

“…w-wait, STOP!!” she screamed as loud as she could, following her own advice and slowing herself into an ungainly and awkward stop as she began to trace the sights of her 9mm over the nearest ant to their left. “They’re herding us!! They want us to go that way!!”

She saw BJ’s body begin to stumble into a slower gait in the brief moment that she could still see him, before she’d turned to face the dozen-plus ants closing in on them with little more than a pistol and thirteen bullets in its magazine—

She got off three shots at a bug, hitting it once in one of its many legs and slowing it down a bit, before she heard Mom’s voice again, much closer than she’d expected her to be, which gave her great relief. “Whoa, Kite, stop, she may be right—”

“Bugs aren’t supposed to be that smart!!” Kite screamed back, her voice growing softer for a moment, then grew louder again as she seemingly turned around to rejoin them. “I’ve never seen or heard of them doing anything like this before!!”

“Well, they’re doing it today!” Mom shouted before her shotgun went off again, and was rewarded with the death screech of another ant behind them. “Ther—oh shit, now there’s thirty of them that way—”

“Another twenty just joined the chase from the way we came!” BJ called out, though El-Tee didn’t bother to look to confirm it for herself. She just kept shooting at the bugs in front of her right now, finally killing the one she wounded after another four shots. How did Mom make this look so easy, she could barely concentrate on holding the gun and keeping the puppies safely in tow! She wanted to focus on just one task, but she was afraid the pups wouldn’t be able to keep up with them on foot when they started running again—

—the pups were ripped free from her spell field, their absence empowering her hold on her gun, and not even a moment later she felt a pair of small hooves stuffing them into an oversized equipment pouch on her saddle—

—the sights on her pistol began to solidify, no longer wavering like a bouncing foal learning to walk, and she had no trouble tracking them onto the next ant and sending two rounds into its body. Though mortally wounded and no longer moving closer to her, it didn’t die right off and continued to scream in pain. Same thing with the third ant, a bit further left, only this time it took three hits to make it stop moving. Eleven…twelve shots fired? She’d lost count, best to reload—

—she slapped the magazine release and caught the magazine as it popped out of the gun, stuffed it in an empty pouch on her traveling saddle and yanked a fresh one out and back inside the gun—

—just as she’d feared, she heard the earth near the seemingly empty path to freedom crack and break as a swarm of ants forced themselves to the surface—

—BJ’s magic took hold of the lightweight revolver still strapped into its holster on her left side, ripped it out and started shooting at the approaching swarm coming at them—

“Idea!!” Mom screamed, bolting out in front of her and scaring the living daylights out of her as her head came within mere inches of sliding into her pistol sights, and she instantly dipped the gun’s barrel down towards the earth—

“Mom, what are you doing?!”

“Plowing a hole through the thinnest ranks!!” she screamed over her withers, her shotgun sliding into its scabbard along her left side, before her 10mm pistol slung out in front of her seemingly of its own will—

Mom started blasting the things left and right, sparing only one or two shots per ant as the eight-strong gang rapidly dwindled to little more than two barely moving stragglers. Bits and pieces of ant heads flew about in a scattered shower of gore with every shot, and amazingly enough, a couple of ants managed to keep moving forward after the first shot tore a chunk out of their brains (if they even had any). The slide on the pistol locked back just as the last threatening ant was sent to the great anthill in the sky, and despite the colossal expense in ammo, they finally had a way out of this nightmare of an ambush.

“Keep running!!” Kite screamed, flying past them all at a speed that seemed almost supernatural “Stay on my tail, we can make it to the stable if we don’t stop!!”

The lightweight revolver found its place back inside its holster just before BJ took off after his mom, and Light Tail’s magic flicked the 9mm pistol’s safety back on as she joined in the great chase of Kite’s tail. With all the adrenaline and fear running through her, she found herself more than capable of keeping up with the two of them despite the weight of her traveling saddle. In fact, she barely felt the thing at all.

But Mom stayed behind them. Never more than a few feet away, but never really closing the distance. She seemed intent on killing any ant she passed by with her pistol if she was certain she could hit it on the run—about once or twice every twenty seconds or so, to be exact, and most screamed death throes before stopping cold forever. Did she think it would make a difference later?

Or was this all just target practice?

Within a few minutes’ time she began to make out what appeared to be a cluster of small buildings far ahead of them, and strangely enough up to that point no ants had ever broken out of the earth in any great numbers. One or two had tried a minute earlier, but Kite’s rifle put them down almost as quickly as they had appeared. It was just another one of the many oddball things about the entire bug ambush that gnawed at her mind…and it was awfully convenient that their route to the abandoned stable was relatively clear, considering how many dozens of the things were popping up all around them every step of the way so far.

She was starting to convince herself that it was deliberate, and not a stroke of luck. That this stable might have the answer for a great many questions as to how their day had turned out like this…and how to get out of it. And that, frankly, intrigued and excited her almost as much as it terrified her. It was almost like a rough draft for an unpublished Daring Do book! Danger? Plenty of it, especially the lethal kind, which terrified her! Mystery? Enough of it to occupy most of her time in that dank, dark stable trying to figure it all out—like, for instance, what had made the bugs smart enough to lay an ambush designed solely to drive them to the real trap, and why there weren’t more bugs in their way when they figured it out and made a straight dash for the stable. Adventure? Having spent her entire life inside a working stable herself, the allure of traveling to unknown parts of the world to discover what lay beyond the next road was as close to unrestrained freedom as she could possibly imagine. Every step was something new to her, and every ruined town and building was a chance to try and find out what had happened to the world after the war, and how things got to the way they were now.

Maybe coming out here wouldn’t be such a waste after all.

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

It seemed like such an illogical place for a stable to be hiding—a small hamlet of buildings huddled together in the middle of a vast field, far from the highways and side roads, with no easy or quick access possible except by hoof and wing. And the lack of crashed sky wagons compared to the gravity-induced graveyard that had first greeted her when she emerged from Stable 115 was rather worrying—her stable was quite a bit further from Trotpeka than this one. Logically, if the field in front of her home had been littered with the infernal contraptions, than areas of the prairie closer to the Sister Cities should have been crammed with them as well.

But these were rather silly concerns to be having when she was being chased by pony-eating ants the size of a cow, and which had managed to surprise her by launching an ambush designed chiefly to drive them into a pre-prepared kill zone. She couldn’t say from experience that insects never did this, but from all the school studies she still remembered, nothing she’d read suggested that they were ever that clever. The more she thought about it, in fact, the more this particular scenario stood out. She would go so far as to call a classic military tactic.

Which was something that would have to be taught…and which made her wonder if the relatively clear path to this abandoned stable was another trap, or the answer to all the questions that this morning had brought up so far.

She hoped, and prayed, that this stable’s entrance wasn’t locked or frozen shut from decades of rusting—her lungs were beginning to ache and burn from all the hard running, and her legs were beginning to slow down despite her massive physical and mental efforts to keep going. The others were beginning to feel the effects of their strenuous exertions as well, as their hard gallops had begun to degrade into a steady canter. If the stable had been any further way, the predatory bugs surrounding them would have had little trouble catching up t—

Kite dashed straight through the center of the tiny eleven-structure village, ignoring it entirely in favor of a lone barn roughly forty yards away from the clustered single-floor houses and shops—

“Inside the barn!” she called out, sparing only a brief moment to look around her for unseen or unnoticed threats before speeding on ahead. “We’re almost there—“

—a haunch-quivering shriek from behind caused Sling to turn her attention back behind them and fire the last round in her second magazine at a pony-sized ant drone that had managed to scurry ahead of the main horde. But her exhaustion was starting to have an effect on her aim, as the 10mm slug merely ricocheted off the ground in front of it and barely grazed one of its legs. It didn’t even seem to acknowledge that it had been shot at.

Not willing to waste another shot now that she wasn’t shooting at her best, she turned around again and started to charge after Kite and the kids—

—the earth exploded behind her in a frightening display of power, and a cold, stiff something scratched at her hind legs as an adrenaline surge gave her the speed to escape a near-immediate dismemberment at the mandibles of an ant….and what felt like a flash of heat at her hindquarters—

—a plum of flame erupted behind her, nicking at her tail as her startled, tumbling body tripped itself up and caused her to fall over, allowing her a full view of the fire-breathing ant that had nearly bit her legs off—

“Holy FU—”

—her shriek of terror was punctuated by the rapid appearance of her shotgun and a quick tug of the trigger, and the bug’s red-hued skull jerked and bobbled as the charge of nine .33-caliber pellets perforated its exoskeleton, the flames from its mouth dying in a pitiful, vanishing flash just as they’d begun to lick at her hind legs. Its body dropped to the floor in a disgusting, quivering mass of legs and antennae only a few feet away from her.

She didn’t bother to look at the horde slowly pushing its way through the village, but just scrambled back up on her hooves in a running, startled jump that saw all her exhaustion and pains vanish, at least until she had a megaspell-proof blast door between herself and this insane world—

She found herself inside the barn, barely a second behind her daughter, and nearly ran straight into a massive sinkhole making up the majority of the ground inside the structure. The sinkhole itself formed into a wide-mouth tunnel, its wooden supports somehow still intact and decorated with rusted, broken lanterns.

A hole big enough for the ants to get through.

Kite’s tail was already disappearing into the tunnel’s darkened depths, and it was something of a miracle that Sling was able to relinquish control of her telekinetic hold on her shotgun long enough to form a simple illumination spell at the tip of her horn. Its bright white light enveloped everything around her in its revealing glow, chasing away the darkness as she charged into the tunnel with BJ and Light Tail right beside her.

They caught up with Kite only a few seconds later—it turned out she didn’t have a light spell of her own at her disposal, and had slowed herself almost to a dead stop until the light from Sling’s horn threw itself out ahead of the group. But even with everypony in the group back together and within inches of each other again, Sling found it hard to find comfort in their company.

Not when the tunnels were bringing back memories of hallways lit in red, filled with the chittering screeches of mutated bugs and automatic gunfire…

O-oh buck me, not now! She cried in her throat when she thought she saw the walls around her warp slightly. She tried to convince herself it was just the way the light from her horn was hitting the walls, and when that didn’t work she tried to explain it as shadows moving and tilting as she trotted through the tunnel.

And when that didn’t make her feel better, she tried to tell herself that the ants wouldn’t follow them into such a narrow and constricting space.

And when she heard a faint whisper of splitting wood and the high-pitched clicks of excited, hungry ants, she tried to tell herself that the door would open and close long before the ants could reach it.

A notion that died a tragic death in its infancy less than three seconds after she’d thought of it, as the tunnel widened once more into a spacious cavern with enough room for a hundred ponies to fit inside. A large, gear-shaped door imbedded inside a solid sixty-foot wide slab of steel bore faded white numbers—“128”—and signified the location of the Stable that Ada had mentioned a month earlier.

And the operating console by the door was in terrible shape—its monochrome display screen was cracked, and as she skidded to a shaky halt in front of the console she saw that a portion of its built-in keyboard consisted of blank-faced buttons whose identifying paint markers had long ago eroded. It appeared as though only half of the Equestrian alphabet and four numbers remained readable, though she didn’t doubt even those would fade away in the coming years.

Most distressing of all, a quick peck at the keyboard did absolutely nothing to bring it to life.

“O-o-oh crap!” she squeaked in terror as she planted herself upon the ground, tearing at a panel beneath the console to begin a quick check of its wiring. Please be a loose wire, loose wire loose wire—

“Oh crap, what?!” Kite’s voice cried back over the sound of her rifle’s bolt being partially racked, perhaps for a quick check of the chamber. “Open the door already!”

I’m trying!! “I need a minute, the controls are shot—”

“What?! Oh shi—”

The covering panel bent easily beneath her magic, even taking the screws out with it as she broke it off and tossed it aside. The tunnel proved to be an excellent conductor of sound—she could hear the damned ants marching through it even from where she was, and she had to clamp down on her insides to keep from soaking herself and her tail in urine when she heard what sounded like a burst of flame from the depths of the tunnel—

Green wire’s the power cable where it is where it is where is it—

The culprit wire for the power connection—still green in color, somehow, despite two centuries of time—hung loosely from the massed coil of cables and other colored wires, its plug partially disconnected from its socket. She hurriedly snapped it back in place, scooted back out from beneath the console to check the monitor—

A dull green wall of text filled her with relief and allowed her rapidly beating heart some extra room to move in as she began to scour the screen’s contents—

STABLE-TEC INFORMATION SYSTEMS INTERFACE, V.7C4.
SYSTEM RE-STARTING, PLEASE WAIT…

Sling’s mouth dropped open in wordless shock, her body growing numb with despair as her floundering magic began slapping at the keyboard in an effort to make the process stop. “S-shit shit shit no no no no—”

“Mom, quit cussin’ and open the door!” El-Tee’s high-pitched voice pleaded fearfully as Kite’s rifle began to fill the cavern with bright orange flashes. The hungry shrieks of mutant insects began to turn into angry, pained screams.

“—no no start working dammit, work—”

STABLE 128 DOOR INTERFACE.
DOOR LOCK RELEASED.
CAUTION: MAIN POWER OFFLINE. BACK-UP POWER SYSTEMS ACTIVE.
ESTIMATED RESERVES REMAINING: 18%
PROCEED? (Y/N)

Her eyes quickly scanned the debilitated keyboard until she found what she hoped was the “Y” key and tapped it with a quick burst of magic…and was rewarded with the dust-shaking groan of ancient metal as massive gears within the embedded Stable wall began churning for perhaps the first time in sixty-plus years.

“There!” Sling cried out with a mixture of laughter, joy, and tears, feeding a string of buckshot shells into her shotgun until she’d stuffed it full. “It’s opening! It’s openi—”

—she made the mistake of turning around, hoping to see a tunnel filled with dead bugs, and instead found herself staring at what looked like a gang-pile of mutant ants trying to climb over two dead comrades to enter the cave and reach their prey—

“—iieeeeeEEEEEEE—”

Her shotgun rose up in front of her, seemingly unbidden, and began emptying the magazine tube into the ant pile as fast as her magic could work the forearm and settle the bead sight on a moving body part—

—the first blast sheared a quarter of a bug’s head off. While not killing it outright, it stopped moving and writhed in place, stuck amidst its comrades—

—two rifle shots peppered another ant near the top of the pile, but only succeeded in angering it even further as evidenced by its increasingly frantic efforts to break free of the group and eviscerate the stupid little pony that shot it.

Light Tail’s 9mm joined in the fusillade of gunfire assaulting the impromptu bug wall, though Sling quickly found it hard to tell whose shots were doing what other than her own. Her second shot tore through the thorax of an ant that had managed to push its way through the middle of the clogged group, dislodging the dead bodies that had been blocking their progress and allowing better access into the cave proper.

The star-pattern muzzle flashes from Kite’s rifle lit up the cavern another three times, just as Sling racked a third shell into her shotgun’s chamber, and then stopped altogether as the grape-coated unicorn spat a look of hatred upon the silent weapon. “Dammit, I’m out—”

Shotgun blast number three ripped through the guts of a fire-breathing ant as it raised its upper body and began to emit its horrible flames from its mouth. The flames died out as it crumpled onto the cold, rocky floor, screaming in agony and attempting to crawl…somewhere. Forward, off to the side, wherever it wanted to go, it wasn’t getting there quickly. Its legs scraped the floor in vain to move its body, and yet it kept trying…

Light Tail’s gun was the next one to go empty as shell number four bounced into the chamber—a total of three newly deceased ants littered the ground in front of the little filly. “I’m out too—”

The earth shuddered behind them as the Stable door screeched into place atop a track of rails in front of the wall, and the megaspell-proof door began to roll off to the side and exposing the entrance—

“It’s open!!” BJ yelled out, his legs already taking him through the entrance—

—Kite slung her empty rifle across her back and took off after him as Sling fired again, this time taking out a smaller drone ant that had gone around the growing pile of dead bodies to come at them from their right—

—she saw Light Tail turn and dash past her, out of the corner of her vision, and she took this as her cue to move back to the console and quickly mash in the command to re-seal the Stable door, and then run into the Stable herself—

—a shriek from behind, far louder than any of the others, was the only warning she got before she felt a pair of hard, sharp-feeling limbs snap onto her left hind leg and bring her running to a crashing halt just past the entrance. She managed to twist herself over onto her back, cutting her leg in the process, reached out with her magic for the shotgun that had flung forward into the stable when she’d been grabbed—

Her captor was a crimson red, monstrous-sized ant, larger than even a brahmin, using its large mandibles to grab onto her leg and pull her towards its hideous mouth and a second, tiny pair of eagerly clicking smaller mandibles—

For perhaps the first time in nearly eleven years, she screamed like a little foal as she frantically ripped her shotgun off the grated floor and slung it into the mutant insect’s mouth, barrel first, shucking the empty shell out of the chamber to make room for the fifth round—

—the mutant bug’s head muffled much of the shotgun blast (as well as its brief, surprised shriek of momentary pain), and its large mandibles instantly released her slashed, bleeding leg and allowed her to pull herself back through the closing door. It continued to stumble about, as if no longer receiving clear instructions from its brain, and only as the massive stable door rolled back over the entrance did it collapse and begin to twitch uncontrollably on the cavern floor.

One less problem to deal with when they came back out, at least.

With the stable door sliding back into place within the entrance and sealing it against the outside world, the four terrified, exhausted ponies were finally given a respite from the wasteland’s trials to focus on more immediate concerns. For Sling, the most immediate concern was to find a dark corner in this stable’s “Gate Room” and let her bladder empty itself onto the floor rather than her hind legs and tail as her body began to come down from its adrenaline-induced state of survival. She barely had the capacity to be ashamed for such loss of self-control, though she did catch Light Tail’s gaze trying to follow her before Kite bluntly nudged the kids further back into the Gate Room to allow her some semblance of privacy for the next thirty seconds.

She tried hard, with some success, to think of anything but bugs and stables, and just put all her mental focus onto other thoughts, and onto not sounding like she couldn’t breathe (even if it was true). Shotgun was still within reach, empty, locked open—odd, she didn’t remember working the forearm after that last shot—10mm pistol still had…..three loaded magazines? Four? So hard to think straight all of a sudden, it was so clear before th—

No. Think of something else, think of Light Tail, Mare of the Everfree—

—a field of wheat stalks amidst a chilly, cloudless winter afternoon, Celestia’s sun shining high above the world—

She wasn’t sure if her sigh of relief was from the daydream or the sudden lack of pressure on her bladder. Didn’t matter either way. Her body was done humiliating her.

After taking a few moments to clean herself up, she began to tread back out into the dim, dark red lighting offered by the back-up lights, already taking note of how much different this stable’s entry floor was from her own. Aside from a side office off to her right where stable security would normally station a pair of ponies as a form of administrative punishment, the entire room was flat throughout, with no raised platforms or stairs of any kind. And the way this Stable’s door opened and closed was not like 115’s door either.

She didn’t know why she expected it to be the same. She would’ve felt more uncomfortable about this place if it was. Even so, with her body beginning to lose its shakes and her breathing coming down to a soft, silent rhythm, she felt it prudent to at least check her shotgun over. Seven shells fired in the course of…what was it, five minutes total? Not bad, really, though the expenditure of twenty-five 10mm rounds was a little distressing, she hadn’t found much of the war-era stuff in the last few weeks. Out of reflex she racked the shotgun’s forearm forward to close the action, squeezed the trigger to reset the slide lock, then began to load the magazine tube up with more buckshot rounds, but stopped after slipping the fourth shell in and leaving it one shy of its maximum capacity—this way, if her target was out of shotgun range at the start of a fight, she could just load a slug round on top of the four buckshot rounds, chamber it, and give the target a nasty surprise as to how safe they really were. So long as she didn’t top off the magazine tube entirely, she could keep doing this until they were dead or close enough for the buckshot.

She’d barely gotten the fourth shell into the tube when she spotted Kite slinking out of the side office, heading straight towards her and keeping as neutral a look on her face as she could manage.

“….everything okay now?”

Sling’s face burned hotly with a mixture of shame and anger. “Nobody thought to mention that these things breathe FIRE!?”

Kite’s body froze into place, her face flinching under the sudden burst of anger flung in her direction. “….I-I didn’t know,” Kite whispered fearfully, her eyes slowly tracing downward. “I’ve never seen or heard of that either, I swear! I don’t know every damn thing there is to know out there!”

She almost made the mistake of uttering ‘BULL’ when her nerves began to remind her of the very sharp mandibles that had grabbed hold of her right hind leg, sending fiery jolts of pain straight into the bone and muscle as she walked. “….fuu….dammit that’s starting to hurt…”

Kite was quick to jump onto the opportunity to change the subject. A little too quick. “Y-yeah, it’s bleeding pretty good, cut up all around the gaskin. But you’re not limping. Better lay down anyway, even if it’s not serious we’ll need a minute to clean it up and bandage it.”

Every step she took seemed to make the pain sharper and move deeper into her leg, and so she promptly stopped and plopped down onto her left side after popping her travelling saddle off and setting it on the floor—

“—oh crap, didn’t see that,” Kite snapped at herself harshly, quickly zipping her head down towards the injured leg. “Stay still—”

Sling’s thoughts of the other mare’s intentions briefly took a dark, sinister turn before Kite’s teeth clamped down on what felt like a small knife embedded on the inside of her leg, prompting her to raise it momentarily so the ex-slave could get better leverage on the offending object—

Kite jerked the piece of toothy mandible out without hesitation or a warning, causing Sling to scream in pain for a couple of seconds before catching her tongue. Couldn’t let El-Tee see her lik—

“Mom?!” Light Tail’s voice cried out tearfully, her hooves quickly pattering across the floor as she emerged from the side office at the sound of her despairing mother. She could hear Max and Mona’s feet scrambling after their caretaker—

“Whoa, slow down and take it easy!” Kite snapped back before the filly could start freaking out and hyperventilating. At least, that’s probably what Kite intended to prevent. “I just need some med supplies and we can fix this up.”

El-Tee slid to a stop right next to her mother, her magic reaching into her spacious, spell-enchanted saddle bags for a first aid kit and plopping the metallic case down beside the two mares. “Got some water too—”

“Save the water,” Sling butted in, reaching into her own bags to take out one of her stable suits as she began to find a sense of calm washing over her now that she had something else to focus on. “The iodine and antibiotic ointment in the kit will do for cleaning the wounds….”

Kite’s eyes darted back to the first aid kit by her forehooves, widening slightly in surprise as her horn lit up and pried the casing open to examine the contents. “….oh dear gods, this is sinful. You have a better set-up here than what most “doctors” can scrounge up from the ruins of an old hospital.”

Sling almost laughed at the notion until she remembered the first makeshift med clinic she’d seen in the wastes, and specifically the image of a mare with a handsaw and medical cross cutie mark having just finished amputating a poor soul’s leg…

“…gimme your knife,” she sputtered as a stable suit was dragged from the depths of her travelling saddle and pulled towards her. “Sooner we get this done, the sooner we can start poking around for something we can use to fight our way back out.”

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

Kite felt an unbidden urge to sarcastically remind the stupid stable pony whose idea it was to come here in the first place, but the sight of the poor thing bleeding all over the floor and still coming down from a fear-induced panic attack made it very difficult to actually want to do something like that. So she set to work cleaning up the series of slashes that adorned the mare’s gaskin—dry cloth cut from the leg sleeves of a stable suit to wipe off the blood, a few droplets of iodine across the oozing cuts themselves for disinfectant purposes (which caused Sling to curse through her teeth and flinch from the stinging pain), a dab of antibiotic ointment to help prevent further infections, and a few gauze pads to both sides of the leg, tied down with about six feet of elastic bandaging to cover the wounds, though this meant Sling would be walking with a slight limp due to the restricted movement of her wrapped leg. If they could find some spare healing potions in the clinic in the next hour, she could come through the injuries with next to no scarring—otherwise, she’d have to resort to a suture kit to help close the cuts, and Sling would be sporting reminders of her close encounter with a fire-breathing ant for the rest of her life. While they had a few potions hand at the moment, Sling was not willing to use them for non-crippling injuries until they could get ahold of a steady supply of them. At the moment, they only had…seven? Eight? Out of the ten total that she and her kid had put together when they came out of their stable a month ago?

It was a shame, really. She’d just grown used to the sight of a pony with no visible scarring to them. She hated to see this mare finally get a mark of the wastes on her body.

On the other hoof, it did give her an opportunity to get a little physically closer than she could have otherwise. She was pretty sure Sling noticed those wandering eyes as she worked to treat and bandage the wounds. But the stable pony didn’t say anything—whether that meant she cared or not, she couldn’t say.

She resolved to make her staring a little less obvious in the future.

With all wounds and weapons taken care of, their foray into the abandoned stable’s darkened depths could begin, and it quickly became something of a fight in of itself as to what part of the ancient structure they would defile first. Sling, naturally, wanted to find that damned gun she’d dragged them all out here to find. Light Tail wanted to find the library and search it from end to end. She, herself, wanted to find the infirmary and see if any medical supplies had been left behind by the original inhabitants.

BJ just wanted to find someplace to take a leak without “a bunch of dainty girls” around. He peeled off from the group when they hit the main atrium on the third floor and disappeared around a corner, and nopony bothered to follow. With all the signs and arrows on the walls pointing the way to wherever a soul could want to be, it quickly became apparent that getting lost in this stable wouldn’t be one of their issues. The hallways themselves were quite spacious, as well. More than enough room for a crowd to roll through, which seemed to throw the two stable ponies off, for some reason.

But thus far, Sling’s PipBuck hadn’t picked up any sign of hostile life. Probably wouldn’t, if that door had been powered down all these decades. If not for all the ant nests in the fields above, this stable would probably be as good a place as any to settle down and make a living.

“Infirmary, level six,” Sling read from the giant, mold covered signboard hanging off the corridor wall by a single screw near the top. “Library….level seven, just like back home….security station’s on level nine, along with the armory….odd, ours was on level five...”

“Looks like the cafeteria’s on five, though,” Light Tail added, a tiny hoof fighting its way around her mother to poke at the lower portion of the signboard where the various locations were listed. “Say we all meet up there in an hour, see what we’ve found?”

“Twenty minutes,” Sling offered instead, backing away from the signboard. “Don’t know how many doors or stairways could be intact. Just see if there’s a clear path to whatever we need to visit, then come to the café. We’ll work out what to do then.”

Not a bad plan. She’d never been in a stable herself—all the rumors of the wastes said the things were supposed to last for centuries, but nopony had ever thought to mention that that estimate was made with the assumption that ponies would be around to maintain the place. She had no idea how long a stable could last without some TLC here and there. “Go on down, then,” she said, stealing a look down the hall to her left to see if BJ was coming back right then, but he wasn’t. “I’ll wait here for BJ before I hit the medical ward. If I don’t find any potions and you’re not willing to use one, I’m stitching up those cuts when we meet up again.”

Sling’s eyes grimaced in fear as the mother-daughter pair wordlessly turned away from the signboard and cantered on down the hallway, disappearing around a corner with the two husky puppies hot on their tails. She couldn’t blame her—a suture procedure with no localized painkiller was…painful.

“Ugh, girls everywhere, never gonna survive this,” BJ’s voice crept into her ears from the hallway, and Kite’s brain flashed brief, blurry images before her that she washed away with a furious shake of her head before the horrors could come back to her.

She wished she could’ve forgotten the day of his birth…

“Oh, toughen up, Beige,” she snipped back. At least that little pet name of El-Tee’s didn’t stir up harsh memories. Seemed to ruffle his nerves a little, too. Which was good, because he’d need to start paying better attention to their surroundings now that their stable pony helpers had gone off on their own. “Could be worse. We could be cramped together in a one room house with nothing but an old pot for a toilet.”

She actually heard his body shiver in disgust as he came to a stop next to her. “….oh gods, why do you say things I can never unhear?”

“Because I can,” she laughed with an evil smile as she began a steady trot down the hall. All the arrows on the corridor pointed ever onward straight ahead, hopefully to a flight of stairs down to the sixth floor. “We’re going to pay a visit to the infirmary, see what’s worth taking. Shouldn’t be long, I don’t expect there to be much left. We’ll meet back up with Sling and Elly in a…café, on the fifth floor in about twenty, see what happens from there.”

“I bet the baby’s all fired up over a library or something silly like that,” the little colt grumbled in her wake as he followed along behind her. “Swear to Luna she never went without a book for more than an hour back in Mound. Something called Everfree Mare or some such. Sling has this real thick book in her bags that she won’t let anypony near, though, guards it real close. Looks important, might be worth somethin’ if we can get to it.”

Oh, her little wastelander entrep…entre….godsdammit, how did that word go? Oh, forget it, they shouldn’t even be having a conversation like this! Not this time! This time would be different. “Not an option. You’ve seen her shoot. We wouldn’t get ten steps away before we got ventilated.”

“Nah, just wait ‘till we get back outside, she’ll wet herself facing all those ants again—”

“I said not an option,” she snapped back sharply, and she could hear his hooves come to a full stop out of reflex. “For Luna’s sake we’re not raiders!”

“N-no, we’re slaves on the run with a pair of clueless stable ponies that got no idea what they’re in for out here,” he replied with a slight shakiness of his voice. “I told that baby to leave those pups behind and her bleeding heart adopted them anyway, they’re sucking up food and water we could be eating.”

“And here I thought you were learning to get along with somepony else your own age for once,” she growled darkly, turning to glare down at her offspring. Gods as her witness, she tried to raise him right, but he had too much of his bastard father in him at times, sh—

“—en that mouth, whore, I don’t care what state yer in, I bought you for only one reason—”

“Yeah, sure, she’s cool sometimes, but she’s so stupid!” BJ shouted back through her memories, mercifully cutting it short before it could turn into a bowel-emptying flashback. “She don’t get that this ain’t her stable, she’s gonna get herself or us killed with that naïve attitude of hers! Sooner we can cut them off, the better!”

“She’s learned enough to point out a trap that I didn’t think was even possible,” Kite said with a slight edge. “She’s a decent shot on her own, took a few bugs out back there. Keeps quiet when she needs to, stays alert, watched the sky far more often than the rest of us bothered to. So what if she can’t fathom the idea she might have to kill somebody? We got more than enough of that attitude between us to make up for it. Kinda nice to have a travelling companion that ain’t lookin’ to gut every living thing they see for their caps and ammo. Could learn somethin’ from her.”

“Like what?” the rebellious colt dared to challenge. Which wasn’t often, she was used to him backing off when she got angry with his callous disregard for anything but himself.

“Like what it’s like to be treated decent for a change,” she snarled angrily, turning around with a stomp and marching off down the hall again. “I don’t care what Saurus’s bastard friends told you. They hurt folk weaker than them for a livin’ and look where it got them! You want a chance at livin’ long enough to die in bed? Keep some folk close to you, folk you trust not to stab you in the back for the scraps you’ve got on you when you aren’t lookin’.”

“Master Bark Skin treated us well enough—”

“We were property to him and all the others!” she howled over her withers, her tail beginning to shake at distant abuses revisiting themselves upon her eyes. “Bark Skin just knew to take better care of his tools so they last longer! I did more than just serve as his nurse in his clinic, y’know! You ever live long enough, I may even tell you what else I did when you weren’t around to hear it!”

“I know enough, Mom,” BJ droned back in that flat, distant tone of his. The one that infuriated her with its disdain for life in general. “We had that “talk” months ago, I ain’t forgot. I…I know what Saurus kept you around for….”

…by the moon, why is this life so hard…. “That’s not what “us mares” are around for,” she said coldly. “It takes two souls to make another and turn it into a family…something I wish you could have had. Those bastards just wanted cheap thrills. You treat a girl nice, you hear me? You don’t treat them as some plaything to toss aside when you’re done, they’re ponies like any other soul.”

“….what got into you all of a sudden?” BJ’s voice squeaked softly, the first sign of emotion other than panic that she’d heard out of him today. “You never talked like this before. It was always ‘stay quiet so they won’t hurt you’, or ‘don’t pay them ponies no mind, we won’t stay forever’. It was always ‘us against them’. What changed when I wasn’t lookin’?”

She hoped the water in her left eye was just the decades of dust she was sniffing as she breathed. “….all you’ve ever known is a slave’s life. You were born into it, told what to do, why to do it, where you could go and what would happen if you didn’t obey. You couldn’t think for yourself if you tried. I still remember what it’s like to be free, to have friends and family you could count on. They may all be dead now, but I didn’t forget them. And if we can get the hell away from the Union, you might get a chance to taste that kind of life. See for yourself what a pony is meant to be. We aren’t property or pack mules, we deserve to forge our own path through life.”

“Ponykind tried that once, blew everything up,” the colt poked back simply. But in those seven words, he managed to punch a hole in her on-the-spot speech of freedom and living. One big enough to fit a megaspell into. “Left all this ruin behind as our legacy. Is any of that worth it?”

She didn’t have an answer. Never would, really. Much as she wanted to say otherwise, when ponies were at the top of the world…what did they do to it? Ruined it, first with their newfangled technology, and then their new weapons. In fact, they ruined it for all life on the world. There was no way of knowing who fired the first megaspell—she doubted that even during the Last Day that anypony knew for sure. She did know that ponies were the ones to come up with the idea. The tech.

The purpose for it.

And what did somepony want to do with something when it was built? Use it. It was silly to think to build something with the intention that it never be used. She couldn’t think of a dumber idea in all the world.

She didn’t have an answer, at least, until they slumped down to the fifth floor, coming out of the crumbling stairwell to stare at a pair of placards on the wall. One read “INFIRMARY”, pointing to the left, while the other read “OVERMARE”, somewhere to the right.

“….go check out the overmare room,” she commanded in a dulled tone. “Come find me when you’re done. Watch for traps, heard stories that those overmare rooms had laser turrets built into their desks or some shit.”

Mercifully, BJ went on his way without another word, and with almost immediate gusto. Probably happy to have something to do that would take him away from her and the increasingly uncomfortable conversation they were having.

Just like all the other times she tried to talk some sense into him.

She made it to the infirmary, barely realizing she was walking, before her frustration and anger grew too great and tight to be contained within her scarred frame, and she lashed out at the closest fragile object she could lay into inside the front lobby—an old table, littered with bits of paper and clipboards. She hammered her rage into the table with her forehooves until it bent and collapsed to the floor before her, spilling its inhabitants across the grime-coated floor like spilled dice.

How, Luna?! she cried silently. How the hell can I do him better than what I got when he doesn’t even want it?! How can I get it through to him?! HOW?!

Like every other prayer she ever bothered to make, she found no answers coming to her. No great epiphany, no sickening realization that she’d been doing it all wrong. Just a face full of tears, aching legs, and a sick sense of hatred for the bond that Sling seemed to have with her own filly. How could such an angry mare be so doting and attached to her offspring like that?! It was obvious to anypony that paid attention that neither of those two would last a week without the other. Elly adored her mother too much to be able to imagine life without her—Sling was so angry, so emotionally distraught for some form of attachment that didn’t include being ridiculed for being a teen mother that her daughter was something akin to a teddy bear to her, whether she realized it or not. And somehow, despite these odd little neurosis, they were family.

Something that Kite hadn’t had since she was fourteen.

With the table obliterated and her rage slightly abated, she began a quick check of the infirmary’s maze of rooms and halls. Many were patient rooms with long-eroded beds and rusted medical equipment, though she did spot a couple of relatively clean scalpels and tweezers she pocketed for later. She found one intact stethoscope on a rolling cart in the main hall, but it looked like it had been home to colonies of various molds and bacteria over the decades and likely ruined. A few rooms turned out to be offices—two still had name plaques in one piece outside their respective doors, a Dr. Lame Hoof (a poor name for a medical pony) and a Nurse Darkheart (also a troubling name that didn’t inspire confidence). Lame Hoof’s office was mostly empty, with only a few trinkets and cracked clipboards inside the desk drawers and a bookshelf that had collapsed on itself. Darkheart’s office, on the other hand, seemed to have been abandoned in a less thorough manner—a terminal on the desk still functioned, connected to the stable’s power supply and still running despite the presence of red back-up lighting suggesting otherwise. The desk had a few syringe kits, with five vials and needles apiece, perfect for making an injection healing stim or a shot of some other, less helpful chems like Med-X or Buff. Or Rage. The chemicals tortured souls were willing to abuse to escape the hell of the wastes was astonishing, when one considered the long-term damage.

Not that she could blame them.

She stuffed the syringe kits into her saddlebag (which had been violently pilfered off of a raider by Sling last week) and quickly found her way through the terminal’s main menu and into the long departed nurse’s filed records and reports, though only a few were intact and readable:

“Log #572: Another session with Wind Shear this morning. Wings are holding up well after his accident a month ago, but not mending as quickly as he’d like. Suggested I use a dose of Hydra to speed the healing process, which I denied. Not much of it, we can’t make more of it, and we may need it if our first venture into the surface world since the bombs goes as badly as I fear it might. With time and proper rest, Shear’s wings will make a full recovery and he’ll be able to fly again. Why is that damn stallion so impatient?

Anyways, as a precaution I’ve asked Lame Hoof to have the Hydra moved to a more secure location than our meager storage room. Suggested the armory on level nine, don’t know if he’ll actually do it, but the request was logged on both the central mainframe and the Overmare’s office. Stuff is damn nasty, we have old records from the war about how recipients grew extra legs or cancerous, bulbous growths in regenerated limbs. There’s a reason it’s listed as “Last Resort”!

Remainder of scheduled appointments went without a hitch. Think Solar Flare is pregnant, but I need her to come in for a check-up to be sure. She’s not a drinker, but the café keeps a stock of whiskey and beer for off-duty residents to chug back. Don’t want her having even a taste of the stuff if she’s with foal, the damage can’t be undone. Only seen it happen once, to Dancer’s foal, but that’s one time too many in my opinion. It’s also the reason why all expecting mares are required to be listed at the café to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Tomorrow’s a pretty light day, maybe I can talk her into squeezing an appointment into her schedule. I’ll talk to her after I punch out anyway, just to make sure she won’t go near the booze.”

Kite added the armory to her list of spaces to search for medical supplies—risky or not, Hydra had it uses, not least of which was as a trading item. Some merc companies used it to keep their numbers from dwindling after a hard fight. Mercenaries that couldn’t walk or shoot couldn’t earn their pay.

“Entry #579: We’ve finally done it! The Overmare allowed a group to venture into the surface for the first time in a hundred and twenty years. They left this morning, eight pegasi and a couple of unicorns. Was told to issue two weeks’ worth of medical supplies and equipment to them, which is listed in the morning log. Still worried about what we’ll find—nopony’s heard anything from Equestria since the war. Could be there’s nothing left of it, or the zebra won and claimed everything that was left in the ashes. Might even be griffon territory now. No telling what they’ll find.

I almost wish we hadn’t opened the door. So much easier to just live down here, forgotten by the world, no troubles but what we stir up on our own. But our stable is important to the survival of those that may have come after. It was slated to house weather pegasi, with a few earth ponies and unicorns for support functions like mine. The miniature weather factory in the lower levels won’t be enough to handle all of the prairie’s weather needs, but it’s done well for retaining weather management skills in the generations after the megaspells fell. Even if we feel we’ll be better off down here, the world above will need these pegasi, if they don’t already.

We owe that much to all those that couldn’t make it to the stables in time…”

She flicked out of the log, moved the cursor down to the next one when her eyes had scanned enough of the remaining passage to figure out it was little more than a rant to relieve unvoiced fears and thoughts. But sometimes, a pony needed somewhere to just let that stuff out, or they’d crack. A lesson Sling had obviously yet to learn.

“Entry #584: It’s been ten days since the expedition left, and everypony’s on edge. Seeing a few more patients than usual lately. Nothing major yet, but if ponies don’t stop fretting and concentrate on their tasks we’re eventually going to see a serious injury, possibly even a fatality. Going to the Overmare later this afternoon to talk about morale efforts.

Oh, yes, I was right about Solar Flare. She came to my quarters last night after my shift, crying and begging me not to tell anypony just yet, only for word to get out this morning so there’s no harm in putting it on official record. Seems she was seeing Mellow Field on the side as well as Bell Seed. She was intimate with both on a regular basis, to the point that she has no idea who the father might be. Both stallions got into it in the café at lunch break, security had to practically form a wall between them to separate them. They’re both cooling off in the brig at the moment, but Solar’s really suffering. Her neighbors on L10 are particularly bothersome, went so far as to smear her door with, ahh…words. Something about being a…”slurping slut”, which is all I care to type down here. Heard another resident on her floor outright asking her if she gave group discounts for threesomes, in rather grotesque detail. Oh, and yours truly now has a warning citation for violence amongst the population and two weeks reduced rations. I still say the jerk deserved it. Letting Solar stay on my couch for the moment until new quarter arrangements can be made. Swear I have no ulterior motive, she’s not even my type. Just…nopony should be treated that way.

And to think I suggested the other day that we have some massive party and orgy to relieve everypony’s stress and boost stable morale—nothing like a healthy, rambunctious night of mindless mating to take your mind off things, right? Yeah, real bright idea, DUMBASS. I’m lucky my skillset prevents me from being punished more heavily than I already have been, or I’d be spending the rest of my life scrubbing washrooms after what happened today.

That expedition team had better get back soon. I can’t wait to have some work to take my mind off all of this.”

Wow, Kite though sadly, flicking on down to the next entry. Guess some things never change…not that Sling would feel any better about knowing somepony else suffered like she did…

Though she had to admit, a night like that with no fear of consequences, biological or otherwise, did sound quite nice….

“Entry #586: My prayers were answered, and now I wish all I had to worry about was which stallion knocked up which mare on his off day.

The expedition team came back, everypony accounted for, and in surprisingly better shape than most of us anticipated. Minor injuries to four, which were treated without issue. All ten have been given indefinite leave from their stable duties while they recover. Not physically.

Emotionally. Their ammunition and med supplies…they didn’t have much left, which might be why they were in as good a shape as they were. The world really went to hell in the last hundred years. Bandits and crazed “raiders” everywhere, stealing, murdering, and raping anything they catch. Small settlements have just enough guns and bodies to stave them off. A massive cloud cover blankets the entire prairie, maybe even all of Equestria itself. Maybe the world. They don’t know. The Twin Cities are in ruins, Withercha especially, seems something called a “bale fire bomb” went off, poisoned most of the earth around it for miles and miles. Not much farmable land. The day the war ended is called the “Last Day” up there. Creepily fitting, actually.

Animal life is nearly gone. What’s left, horribly mutated, bears big enough to claw a pony’s head off in a single swipe, mutant lizards and ants the size of cows. Big, bloated, hideous looking parasprites that shoot spines, carnivorous hogs and pigs….even the fish around the one lake they found are murderous. Lucky Streak swore he saw one walk on two legs, looked more…well, he didn’t know how to describe it. Best he could do was say it walked upright like a monkey, but straighter, and didn’t drag its “knuckles”, which would mean it had…arms?! Celestia perish the thought. Said it tore a little filly in half when the “caravan” they were travelling with got too close to the lake. Recommending him a year’s worth of sessions with the counselor.

The pegasus city of Serenity? They abandoned us. Sometime during the “Last Day”, it’s said, Serenity’s pegasi went and sucked up all the water from the river that they could. The riverbed’s dry now, and the valley around it is lifeless, makes a sort of crude barrier in the middle of the prairie.

One bright spot to all this madness, though. They said they sent Dusty, Leaf Mender, and Sky Star up past the cloud cover. Those three apparently made contact with something called the Enclave. From what they can tell, the pegasi cut themselves off from the world during the “Last Day” of the war, and this Enclave may be all that’s left of Equestria Before. Their meeting wasn’t very friendly, in fact they made it sound like this Enclave is rather distrusting of surface dwellers. But they did show interest in them as pegasi, and at the fact that there might be descendants of the prairie’s weather pegasi still separated from the rest of them.

I nearly peed myself thinking of how this Enclave might seek to “liberate” them from the tight, cold confines of our Stable.

….gonna schedule a counseling session for myself after my shift. Think I need it too.

Dear Celestia, help us through this.

And send a nice stallion or mare my way while you’re at it.”

Ah, the frustrations of a lonely soul looking for intimate company. She could relate, a little. Once in her life, she’d like to have some private time with a willing partner. Preferably a mare. Like Sling.

Who was not into mares, or into experimenting.

Dammit.

This was, unfortunately, the last legible log—the remaining hundred-plus entries that the terminal listed were all corrupted and of little use. Perhaps a year’s worth of data, which meant this stable had been abandoned…what, a year and a half after it opened? How did it get so bad that they had to leave?

She did know one thing for sure—Light Tail wouldn’t want to leave until she’d figured out the mystery. She could, at least, offer an explanation to the inquisitive little bugger as to why the hallways were so spacious.

With her snooping through the terminal done, she trotted back out into the hallway and did a quick sweep of the remaining rooms. Only one held anything of use—the storage room mentioned in Darkheart’s log entries. Though it had clearly been cleaned out during the stable’s evacuation, a few items of worth still remained, namely a rather extensive first aid kit with a healthy supply of bandages and gauze pads. Unfortunately the kit itself had not been sealed well, so the bandages would have to be heavily sterilized first. Alcohol or an antiseptic compound would do the trick. She also found what looked like a forgotten case of healing potions, four in total, though one was not quite as colorful as the others. She discarded that one and kept the other three, making her way out of the room and retracing her route back to the infirmary lobby, where she found BJ waiting for her. She doubted she’d find much more in here, but a more thorough search later wouldn’t hurt.

Her return trip to the café was quiet and uneventful. BJ wasn’t saying much of anything about the Overmare’s office just yet, but neither of them could bring themselves to bring up the subject. Or any subject, for that matter. Probably just as well, she’d always been terrible at making small talk. They made it with about five minutes to spare, and thankfully Sling and Light Tail were already there, poking around behind the service counter and lifting what appeared to be crates of empty bottles onto the countertop.
“Find anything?” Sling asked with a huff after setting a fourth crate onto the counter, a foreleg hanging off over the edge as she leaned into it.

“Matter of fact, yes,” Kite heard herself answering, setting the first aid kit and healing potion case onto a nearby table booth and popping them open. “Coupla healing potions and a first aid kit. Need something to sterilize the kit with, though. Use the potions, or get ready for some stitches. With no painkillers.”

She thought she heard the night-colored mare mouth a rather foul curse under her breath, but she didn’t bother to protest or put it off and sullenly made her way across the café’s floor. “…gimme.”

“Say please,” she said in what she hoped was a soothing, alluring voice as she dangled the box of healing potions out in front of her in a teasing fashion. “Manners, you know.”

“You know an awful lot about medical stuff,” Light Tail’s voice called out from somewhere behind the counter, in between her grunts and heavy breaths as she began to push a fairly heavy object across the floor. “I didn’t think bad ponies would let slaves learn anything like that.”

“….it’s a bit complicated,” Kite replied, still keeping hold of the potion case. “Not all slave owners beat and abuse their charges. Not all the time, anyway.”

“She makes a good point, though,” Sling muttered from three feet away, her horn beginning to glow. “Where did you learn it?”

Crap, better answer before they think I’m hiding something worse…

“…my third master,” she answered, surrendering the potions without any further teasing. “He was a stable-taught doctor, out of a clinic in Stifla. He taught me enough to help with his workload. Among…other things. Found that the work occupied my brain pretty good, so I kept at it after he sold us to our fourth master to pay a debt.”

Sling’s magic took hold of the case and flipped it open, drawing a flask towards her and draining it dry in a single, three-second gulp. “…what kind of debt?”

“He never said,” she replied, laying the freshly acquired medical kit onto a table nearby to lay out its contents and separate them by category. “Might’ve been mercenaries, a caravan making a supply delivery, maybe some chem dealers in another part of town he dealt with for short-term med needs. Don’t really matter in the end, he sold us, and that was the end of our time there. Fourth master figured out quick we weren’t quite like dogs, traded us off to our fifth master for a month’s supply of Dash. That guy lasted maybe two months before he made the mistake of trying to rob a travelling merchant from Trotpeka rich enough to hire a Runner for a bodyguard. Wasn’t much left of him to bury when it was over. And since ownership of slaves don’t transfer over just ‘cause you killed their previous owner, he had to bring us to the main slave office in Stifla. We’ve kinda bounced around since. Saurus got his claws on us a month ago....already seems like a lifetime….”

By the time she’d finished, she’d had most of the kit emptied and sorted—bandages and gauze pads in one pile. Minor instruments like hemostats, scissors, a scalpel with replaceable blades, and tweezers in a second pile. Air-tight tubes of burn ointments, iodine tincture, and antibiotic gel in the third pile. A long-expired cold pack, she tossed aside. Bandages and instruments needed to be sterilized before they could be used. The rest of it was in decent enough shape to make use of…

“…library’s a mess,” Sling said quietly as she began to pull the bandaging off of her leg to check how the cuts were mending over. Off in the back of the café, Light Tail’s battle with the heavy box began to bear some semblance of success as it oozed into view around the edge of the service counter. “Armory’s in better shape, but it’s locked. Think the desk terminal can get us in, if I can crack the password out of the system. Good news is, this café’s loaded with cases of glass bottles, all empty. I’m guessing they served booze over the counter here.

“I’d hate to hear your bad news,” BJ finally spoke up from the comfort of the far corner of the room, where he could keep everypony in front of him and in sight. “That junk’s useless.”

“It’s useless now, but if this stable was as well stocked as mine, it could still have supplies stocked up somewhere,” the stable pony answered with a mad, slightly maniacal grin, flicking her leg in some sort of quick test for lingering pain. “I got an old Equestrian armed forces improvised munitions manual in my bags. Kerosene, oil, turpentine, baking soda, white phosphorus or sulfur, there’s tons of ways to mix up a Maretov cocktail. If we can find enough components, I can make us enough of those babies to burn out half the nests up topside. Just need to raid the residential levels for clothes to use as wicks.”

Oh, shit, she’s dangerous, Kite nearly squealed aloud in glee. By the gods I wish I could pounce her, why are the dangerous, exciting ones always straight?!

“I can search out the chemicals,” she chirped excitedly. “BJ and Elly can gather the clothes while you hack up the armory—”

“Hold up a sec,” Light Tail butted in loudly as she huffed to a stop, apparently satisfied with simply pushing the heavy crate up against the wall and laying down for a brief moment of rest. “Before we go pokin’ around for stuff, we maybe might wanna figure out what made everypony leave in the first place. What if the spark generator’s damaged? Could be leakin’ radiation all through the bottom levels.”

Both mares stood frozen where they stood, shocked less at the loudly aired threat and more at the fact that the little filly had thought of it before they had.

And the fact that a year’s worth of log entries in Darkheart’s office had degraded into error codes made it impossible to discount the possibility. “….I’m….not entirely sure, but I think this stable housed weather pegasi,” Kite murmured with hesitation, already preparing her ears and brain for the inevitable “Death-By-Endless-Questions” response she was about to trigger in the little girl. “…I…I found a working terminal in the infirmary, said something about the stable being a home for them. Also said they opened their door about…eighty years back, ran into the Enclave…”

“…the what?”

“…the pegasi,” she answered, flinching slightly as Elly began to rise from the floor and stretch her legs out. Probably preparing to hound her to death with question after question. “Their government…they call themselves the Pegasi Enclave. They seem to view visiting the surface as a crime against their own, because they only come down to hunt and kill those that try it. Once in a great while they might send a group to observe us “surface” folk for a bit, but they never bring any kind of help. They just….stand by and watch, and waste anypony that gets too close to them. They got tech from the war, tech nopony else can get. Power armor, MEWs, even cloud ships…Celestia knows how they keep ‘em fueled and maintained, none of the old history books I’ve read ever mentioned Serenity having the facilities to build them.”

Pounce her, the filly did….but not in the way she expected.

And it scared her more than the outcome she’d initially feared.

“….then what in Luna’s name made the ponies here abandon the only safe sanctuary they had?”

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

There was something bad wrong about this stable. She could feel it all through her little body the moment they calmed down enough to take notice. The big halls with enough space for pegasi to fly through if they wanted, the decades of neglect of what should have been a very long-lived stable, the fact that the back-up lighting still worked somehow, the decades of neglect in most of the places they saw...

She wouldn’t say it out loud just yet, not until they found actual proof of it, but she just felt that somepony actually lived here still. It was perfect—it still had stuff in it, and all those terrifying ants outside would make a lot of folk reluctant to come poking around (excluding present company, of course). Still had some manner of power, though she couldn’t see it lasting years. Only one way in, and Mom had to fiddle with the console to make it work—which, curiously, only had one loose wire rather than a bunch of them torn out or eroded from the ravages of time, and which had merely been unplugged.

Something that someone would do to ward off less determined visitors from going any further.

And then there was the stable itself. If what Kite said about the pegasi was true, and they really were that mean now…why would the weather pegasi in this stable abandon it? Why not just seal the door, make it impossible for anypony to come hurt them?

For that matter, why was this stable meant to house weather pegasi, while hers barely had any at all? She would’ve thought something as obvious as weather management in the new world would’ve been accounted for when Stable-Tec built the things, and that her stable lacked pegasi simply because they never made it there in time. It seemed like a really bad idea to spread out and concentrate important elements of a society into single places like that—if one stable failed, like this one did, it lost everything it had been meant to save with no back-ups elsewhere to take over. It seemed smarter to Light Tail to build stables as a complete package—weather pegasi, earth pony farmers and various types of crops, unicorns for support and magic studies preservation, miniature weather factories (which her stable didn’t have, but she was willing to bet this one did). Give every stable a chance at being able to do what they were supposed to do—save ponies, and build a better world than the one that ended in widespread arcane destruction.

Why would Stable-Tec build two different stables with completely different goals? It didn’t make any sense.

All of these thoughts crossed her mind in the two seconds that it took for her question to sink into everypony’s brain and get them to thinking about just what had really happened down here. There was more to it than what Kite had found, and the Overmare’s office seemed like the best place to go to find out. Any decision about whether or not to leave, the Overmare would have been the one to make it. She just hoped the terminal there still worked, like the one that Kite had found.

“….BJ, is the Overmare’s office open?” the scarred, grape-colored slave mare asked after a few more seconds of uncomfortable, uneasy silence. For Luna’s sake, she could hear Max and Mona breathing right behind her, it was so deathly quiet….

“…don’t know,” the colt quipped with a nervous tick. “It ain’t blocked off or nothin’, but when you mentioned killer gun turrets I didn’t wanna go in….”

El-Tee’s brain stumbled over that one. Gun turrets!? In the Overmare’s office?! “…M-mom, is that true—”

“Yes,” Mom answered immediately. “The Overmare’s office terminals can access every function in the stable. Life support, water, power, environmental controls….all of it, right at the Overmare’s hooves. The desk is fitted with automated turrets as a defense mechanism. In our stable they were .308 caliber chain guns, had to work on them once a couple years back. Only the Overmare has the codes to activate them, which is why we didn’t see them when we used her office to get to the top floor of our stable. But this stable…no telling what kind of turrets they are. And we don’t have the firepower to knock them out if they’ve been activated.”

Her insides began to churn in fright, and she hoped she didn’t end up having to find a corner in the very near future. “A-armory might, if we can get in it…”

“That’s my first stop,” Mom said, a sense of purpose filling both voice and body as she began to walk quickly towards the exit. “My Pipbuck wasn’t picking up any radiation on level nine, so we can go down at least that far. But until we know for sure if the lower levels are safe or not we shouldn’t be poking around any further. If the Overmare’s terminals are intact we may find out for sure there….otherwise, we’ll have to find out where the stable mainframe’s at. Residential quarters start on level 9, maintenance storage rooms should be on every level, if you want to get a head start on those Maretovs.”

…oh crap what if the library was irradiated—

“We’ll get to that in a few minutes,” Kite said as Mom passed through the doorway. “Need to sterilize the bandages and tools, if there’s booze back behind that counter.”

“Couple cases of whiskey,” Mom answered, her tail peeling around the doorway as she trotted on into the hall. “Knock yourself out. You coming or staying, honey?”

Light Tail had a sudden and intense desire to follow Mom as closely as she could, fearful that the library she’d tried to move through had been tainted by radiation she couldn’t see, smell, or taste. She chased her tail through the door and wound up nearly smacking into Mom’s hind legs before she’d even gone out of sight of the door.

“Coming!” she squeaked through a shaking voice. “Kinda wanna know where radiation is so I don’t walk in it!”

“Don’t worry, I didn’t pick up anything near the library,” Mom said softly, though she was pretty sure she caught a bit of a laugh in her throat too. “Passed by it on my way to the armory, I heard you thrashing around in there. Was it a mess before or after you got there?”

Her primary fears abated (for now), Light Tail could feel her chest heaving in relief even as Max and Mona’s small, fuzzy bodies caught up with her and locked pace with them. “…both. Thought I found an atlas of Equestria That Was, but it was ruined. Most of the history books too. Didn’t get a good look through the fiction section, was hopin’ I’d find a Daring Do book in there or something….”

“Still might, if we have time,” Mom offered gently. “….assuming, of course, we’re the only ones here. I know you’ve thought of it too.”

Now that there was no way of avoiding the subject (not when Mom had brought it up, anyway), she resigned herself to feeling notions of abject terror for the rest of their time in this place. “….yeah, kinda convenient that the door console only had one loose wire. One that turned the thing on when you fixed it.”

“Too convenient. It’s what I would’ve done if I wanted to seal myself inside a stable. Didn’t occur to me ‘till I picked the cage door open in the armory. Main power’s out too, but there’s enough in the reserves for about another year’s worth of operation. After that, that’s it. This place is done.”

They passed through an intersection without making any turns, instead heading directly for the end of the hall where she could make out the overhead, barely working backlit panel marking the stairwell leading down to the next level. “…still wonder what made everypony here leave. If this…enclave is that bad, you’d think they’d wanna stay inside.”

“I’m wondering why our stable didn’t have a contingent of weather pegasi,” Mom wondered aloud, just as Light Tail’s eyes wandered down to her mother’s right hind leg where she’d been bit. Thin lines of her coat were missing where she’d been cut, but other than that she couldn’t tell she’d been hurt at all. Healing potions were really awesome that way. “You’d think something like that would’ve been planned for. The stables were supposed to save ponies, so that they could rebuild when it was safe to come out. We’d need pegasi for the weather…but all the First Ones had were those that had been working in the local area the day the world ended. It’s why we’ve only had a couple dozen at a time through the stable’s whole existence. Why would Stable-Tec stick so many of them in one specific place?”

“….yeah, why not make each stable capable of doing their rebuilding on their own? Specializing like this…you lose one stable, might as well not bother with others, they can’t do it on their own. Weather, crops, magic studies and support…all in one package, for every stable. It’s how it should’ve been done. Why wasn’t it?”

“….if we can get into the Overmare’s office, we might just find out.”

Will we even like what we find? El-Tee didn’t say out loud. Though she honestly didn’t need to. If she was thinking, she was pretty sure Mom was too.

Their trip to the ninth floor continued on in dreadful silence. With the thought that somepony else might be inside the stable with them, it was probably for the best that they not talk much anyway. Light Tail contented herself with watching their backs and keeping the pups as quiet as she could manage, and for the most part they behaved. Now and then they’d start squealing and yipping when their noses caught a sniff of something they wanted to investigate, but a stern shushing and a light tap to their noses discouraged them from running off on their own. She felt kinda bad about it, but she had to keep them in line for their own good, until they learned to watch out for themselves on their own.

Made her wonder if this was what Mom went through every day with her. She made a note to try to behave better herself.

Within a matter of minutes, they reached the ninth level of the stable, and Mom’s pace quickened considerably in her dash to the armory. El-Tee followed behind her the best she could, and both of them stumbled through the entry to the armory at roughly the same time. It was a lot like the armory in their own stable—a small reception area, with the main counter separated by a cage with a lockable door. Behind this “cage” was the door leading to the actual armory’s store room where most of the stuff was kept.
Mom leapt right onto the terminal inside the cage, having picked her way through the cage door in her list visit, and went to work on the keyboard hacking the password out of the system. Light Tail kept her eye on the front door while she worked…and her magic less than a second away from releasing a telekinesis spell on her 9mm pistol.

Odd how that became such an ingrained habit in just a month.

It took Mom considerably longer to get this terminal working than the one in that “prospecting office” they’d slept in a month ago, but she did eventually get through after a few frustrated curses at her luck and at passwords in particular. “’Bout time,” she grumbled darkly, giving the counter one last thump with a forehoof as the terminal began whirring to life. “Frickin’ nine-letter passwords, pain in th—”

“Can you open the door?” El-Tee cut in before her Mom could go off about ponies that wanted to keep other ponies out of their stuff. This really wasn’t the time for it.

“….yeah,” Mom answered a few seconds later, her eyes flicking across the screen. “Safes too…terminal entries are too degraded to read though. A shame, might’ve been an inventory list in there….”

With a pair of taps to the keyboard, a hollow clunk! Sounded out from the storage room door, as well as a few softer clicks from beyond the door, and the pair quickly pried their way through to the interior to th—

“….oh crud….”

The armory, to put it kindly…was a mess. She could see entire walls stuffed full of empty weapon racks and display cases, dozens of crates and thin, metal boxes toppled over with carelessly discarded lids and empty insides. Tatters of paper, rusty screws and bolts littered the floor—only a few safes along the right side of the room seemed intact and sealed against the elements.

…well, so much for finding anypony a gun down here…

Her mood now considerably darkened with disappointment and ill will, Mom could only grumble in disjointed, aimless spats as she began to nose about through the safes on the other end of the room. She probably didn’t even care for finding the Overmare’s office now. All she’d ever come here for was to find a gun or two, and the place was picked clean of them.

She went almost unnoticed to Mom’s ears as they poked through each of the six safes in turn, starting with the first one on her left and moving on as she cleared out each one of any worthwhile items—mostly cleaning solvents and lubricants, as well as several bags of cleaning patches and wire brush tips. Predictably, it was the last safe that would contain the most valuable prize of them all.

Resting atop a padded shelf at the top of the sixth safe were two pistols, one silvery-looking and with what looked like a few unpowered light diodes along the body. The other one was tucked inside a dark brown leather holster and strapped closed, along with six five-round speed loaders that were curiously empty. Mom took hold of the holster and slipped it out of the safe, unsnapped the retaining strap and withdrew the pistol for a closer inspection—

“Awww, shit,” she cursed at the air upon seeing the gun—and more specifically, the noticeable, deep-reaching crack that marred the left side of the five-chamber cylinder body as she hit the release switch. The cylinder whirred and clicked, as if it had a little motor inside of it, flipping out to the left side with rapid speed and automatically popping out to push out the three rounds still loaded inside with this star-shaped disc in the center of the cylinder. The base of each round read “5.56 MATCH”, and were in decent shape, just a couple of light dents and blemish marks on the bullets themselves. Despite the thin coat of oil, the gun’s clean, matte-black finish had some shine to it. She didn’t know if that was a good thing or not.

None of that made the crack in the cylinder any easier to take. She had no idea if the gun was even safe to shoot or not, and if not for that one bit of damage, it would have been perfect. Mom silently uttered another foul curse—one she couldn’t make out this time—as she closed the cylinder and slipped the pistol back into its holster, gathering the speed loaders to store them in a small pouch attached to her left saddlebag. Best they could hope for was to find another pistol with an undamaged cylinder and swap it out.

The silvery pistol had no holster of its own, and the moment Mom pulled it out it became clear that it wasn’t in any better shape than the revolver. A noticeable dent along the top forward half and some unhealthy chinking sounds as the weapon rattled in her grip caused Mom’s scowl to darken even further, somehow. “By Celestia, one lucky break in here, please?”

“Can you fix it?”

“Don’t know,” Mom answered, a touch of frustration coloring her voice. “It’s a mew.”

“….a what?”

“Magical energy weapon,” she extrapolated, this time in a calmer tone as she continued to tilt and turn the pistol in her inspection. “Some folk call ‘em laser or plasma guns depending on what kind of energy they fire, but they’re all basically the same. Takes special spark battery cells, very high end arcane-tech weaponry. It’s not something I have a lot of experience with, all of our stable’s mews were long broken by the time I became quartermaster. All I know is what I bothered to read out of the technical manuals.”

That sounded a lot more like an “I don’t know” answer, but something this advanced had to be worth the effort to fix, if it promised them the firepower she thought it might. One run-in with those ants had already taught her that bullets alone might not be enough. “Do you at least know what’s wrong with it?”

Mom didn’t seem to like being pestered by a barrage of questions right then, but she didn’t drop the weapon on the ground either, so she guessed that there was at least a chance the thing could be fixed. “….this isn’t like an AE-series pistol. Looks more like a conventional gun, makes the components harder to diagnose and get at for replacement. But I think the focus housing chamber is damaged, which is the part that concentrates the energy from the battery into a beam or bolt and fires it. If I can find a gun with a working part and the right tools, I might be able to fix it, but I need the tech manual so I’ll know how the whole thing works. Might break it otherwise.”

“Bet the library would have one. Didn’t get a look through the whole thing.”

“We said the same thing about this armory, and look what’s left,” Mom bit back bitterly with resignation. “….still, if the library had any copies, they’d be in either the references or the special interest section, if the library here is arranged anything like ours. Once we’re done here you can go search for it while I make a pass at the Overmare’s office. When you’re finished, head back to the café, help Kite or BJ with anything they bring back.”

“So what am I lookin’ for?” El-Tee prodded gently as she strained to find some sign of identification on the gun. Something to tell her what model it was, or who made it, or something like that.

“Lightbringer 2000,” Mom answered almost immediately, and the silvery pistol floated its way over towards her. “F1.2 series variant. Says so right on the receiver, take it with you so you can look it up if you forget.”

Light Tail released a burst of magic from her horn, re-forming it in a telekinesis field around the pistol and slipped it into an empty holster on her right side. One left. She was starting to have almost as many guns as Mom did. “See anything else in there?”

Sadly, there were only a few spark battery cells in the safe itself, and no spare parts or repair tools to speak of. There was, however, a fairly large black nylon knife sheath on the bottom of the safe interior, along with what looked like a removable data disk, small enough to fit into a terminal’s data port, or Mom’s Pipbuck.

“….that’s a funny thing to stick in a safe with a coupla guns and a big knife.”

Mom wordlessly plucked the rectangular-shaped disk out of the safe and slapped it into her Pipbuck, then turned her magic’s focus towards the controls and quickly began downloading its contents onto the onboard memory. In moments the monochrome screen began to fill with rapidly filling lines of text, and El-Tee squeezed her head around Mom’s leg to read it for herself:

“Quartermaster Marked Star, Stable 128 Security.

Age: 35

Gender: Mare, pegasus

Hometown: Vanhoover

Previous occupation: Sergeant, Trotpeka Police Department, Range Officer for District 5

Relatives: Lucky Break (husband, pegasus, 32), Blueberry (daughter, pegasus, 12), Shale Stone (son, pegasus, 13), Home Stretch (mother, pegasus, presumed deceased), Glide Wind (father, pegasus, presumed deceased)

Log #1, four days since the megaspell exchange:

Our lone griffon survivor lost his last battle earlier this morning. The wounds he received during his drive to the safety of the stable proved too much, and as he had repeatedly stated that we not use our more advanced medical technology that could have saved his life, his injuries ultimately proved fatal given the treatment options left available to us. It is Doctor Harp Stroke’s belief that “Blade Runner” had simply lost his will to live, having lost his mate and daughter in the blasts and his son during their trip to the stable—a loss I frankly cannot fathom coming back from myself, so his request is understandable. His company of mercenaries had originally been contracted by the government to deliver armaments to Fort Wiley, intended for the 5th Aerial Ranger Battalion which is….was…comprised solely of griffon volunteers for the military. Having lost contact with Fort Wiley and with the megaspells flying in numbers too horrifying to count, most of the mercs apparently opted to re-route their delivery to the closest safe haven they could find. It was blind luck that they ran into the main 128 group from Syrup Mound just south of here.

Several companies of zebra commandos, unfortunately, were inserted into the prairie just prior to the megaspell exchange, alongside several of their hired griffon mercenaries. One such commando team managed to locate the main route for the stable and was waiting in ambush six miles out of town, hiding in the wheat field. Roughly forty percent of the stable population would have been wiped out before even reaching their destination had Blade Runner’s team and their weapon caravan not been with them. As it was, all but Blade were killed in the twelve-mile running firefight, including his son, before the group reached the stable entrance, with Blade himself suffering multiple gunshot wounds to his body, wings, and left hind leg. Twenty-nine others in the civilian group were also killed. Security had been alerted ahead of time by a team of weather pegasi that had flown ahead of the group to get help, and were able to drive off the few zebras that still remained. All information about the zebra commandos and their objectives were obtained off the three bodies that security was able to extract from the field before the sealing of the stable. We can only guess as to how many were ultimately operating at the time of the exchange—it is exceptionally doubtful that any of us, or our descendants, will be able to safely leave the stable for decades to come. If there’s more behind this last attack in the prairie, it died with Equestria. We do know that none of the intel recovered from the bodies indicated that the megaspell event was planned or even anticipated. It’s entirely possible this operation was planned to be executed on its own, without the unleashing of the megaspells, and that the two events simply happened to occur on the same day by sheer misfortune. It’s also possible the commandos were left entirely in the dark as to the coming destruction and merely sent as a last insult to our kind, that one last stab in the back that comes just when you think things couldn’t get worse. Nopony will ever know for sure.

Our lone griffon was named so due largely to the eyewitness accounts of the Syrup Mound group (as well as a lack of persons who knew his actual name as he refused to give it), who stated almost to the last mare and child that he ran more than a few zebras through with his knife when his pistol was damaged by a stray round. Still sharp as a razor, it nicked my foreleg just below the joint with a simple brush. The vast majority of the weapons now secured in this armory are from the weapons shipment his team died to protect, including several crates of AEP-7s, AER-9s, nine older model six-barreled laser miniguns, and several of the newer model Lightbringers and Model 86 pistols. Unfortunately, most of these weapons were not designed to be used by pony hooves or in conjunction with battle saddles—while they could certainly be jury-rigged into a saddle mount, it would be a spotty method at best, and we only have a handful of unicorns in security. Recommending that all unicorns regardless of their respective department be trained in the use of our new weapons’ stockpile to augment our pegasi-heavy population here in the event of a breach of the stable door. Which is likely decades away, if it is even at all possible.

As per the Overmare’s request, Blade Runner’s pistol and knife are to be stored in a secure safe, alongside this data file, and not to be re-issued to any security personnel out of respect for his actions and the fact that he has no next of kin to which they could be passed onto. Standing orders of myself and all future quartermasters are to maintain these items to the best of our abilities without compromising our other armaments. This includes, unfortunately, the replacement of the cylinder of Blade’s pistol.

I sorely wish Blade Runner had allowed us to save his life. Even if his leg and wing injury had proved crippling, he would have made a fine addition to our security department, and as a source of first-hoof knowledge for the unicorns now tasked with preserving all of our personal histories and those of our homelands. I had always been curious about the griffon skies and their homelands, even had a griffon lover once in high school and university. Blade Runner’s knowledge of his people’s history is now lost to us, perhaps the only chance we had at preserving some part of it forever—a greater loss than even his own life.

All future quartermasters should denote the condition of the firearm and knife at the beginning and end of their service so that proper preventative maintenance can be taken. A separate file, contained on this data chip, will examine the weapons in detail for those unfamiliar with them. As to myself, I estimate the pistol to be in serviceable condition aside from the damaged cylinder, and the knife is in astonishingly superb condition and dangerously sharp. Given the material the knife is made of, I expect it to remain so for at least another century given proper care, if not longer. It’s a work of art.

And so was the departed owner. Whatever afterlife he believed in, I hope he reached it. The life ahead of us, of our descendants, is not one I would wish upon anypony. Those that died in the blasts may very well have been the lucky ones.
-M. Star, 128 Security”

Mom’s foreleg dropped to the ground in numbed dismay, both of their eyes now falling upon the holstered revolver in an entirely new light. Of all the things they’d expected to encounter in this abandoned stable, a note detailing a damaged weapon’s former owner and the last days of their life was not one of them. She couldn’t even summon the energy to be angry at the crack in the cylinder anymore. It felt wrong to hate it. Like she would be spitting on the ashes of its long-dead wielder. Wasn’t his fault it got shot, after all. Not when he was too busy getting shot to death the day the world ended.

Mom still took the weapon, stuffing it inside her right saddlebag, and attached the knife sheath and its accompanying blade onto an empty mounting point on the left of the travelling saddle just in front of the saddlebag. Not being nearly as learned up on a blade as she was a gun, she could only discern that the grip had a slight curvature to it from the hilt all the way to the end, and that the end of the grip section formed into a pointed cap that looked strong enough to break glass or bones if the user wanted to. The tan grip panels themselves were a mystery—while they had the grain pattern of wood, they most certainly were not made of wood, but rather some sort of synthetic material with fairly aggressive stippling and a set of two grooves for a griffon’s claws near the hilt. Griffons seemed to like putting grooves for their claws in all the weapons they used. Made sense, actually.

But at least now Mom had a knife. This last month had taught her the necessity of such an overlooked tool; Mom had been constantly borrowing Kite’s for some task or another. Now she just needed to find herself one.

Assuming they made it out alive.

“Remember, search the library for anything on the laser pistol, then go back to the café,” Mom commanded gently, her body rising up from the floor in a quick stretch of her legs before trotting off for the exit. “And watch your back.”

And just like that, Mom was gone, slipping through the doorway and back into the corridors of level nine, leaving her alone to carry out her task.

On her own.

….okay, not alone. She had two husky puppies with an annoying habit of getting under hoof when they got spooked. So they could probably double as an early alarm that something nearby was not right, if she thought to pay attention to them.

So! Off to the library.

Alone.

She barely made it out of the armory before her nerves began to give out. That familiar, cold chill in her chest that grabbed at her heart and made it beat harder. She’d felt it quite often lately.

Couldn’t be the walls. The rust-brown, decaying metal hallways, bathed in red emergency lighting that reminded her of her home stable. No, not the walls at all.

She suddenly began to feel like Max and Mona—cut off from a parent’s protective gaze and their superior strength, suddenly looking at everything around her in a new, more hostile light. Things she might have brushed off as nothing now seemed more important—distant shadows and sounds, unusual smells, signs of recent habitation by ponies she might not be learned enough on to know by sight. It suddenly became very important that she get back to the library, find what she needed to, and get back to Kite and BJ. No messing around, no loitering, no side-tracking…

….well, maaaaybe a quick peek through the fiction section, she thought when her mind began to think back to snippets of Mare of the Everfree or any of the first three Daring Do books. A short paragraph in an otherwise-blank page, just past the publisher/copyright page, listed Everfree as merely the first in a four-book series. The other three were laid out by title—Legacy of the Moon, Return of Chaos, and Crystal Winter, all presumably almost as popular as Daring Do for author White Quill to have penned them. She got the impression from the ending of Everfree that it had been intended to end right there.

And then there were those two and a half pages that had slightly glowing runes adorning their surfaces, replacing all the text upon those pages. She knew Mom’s magic when she felt it, even if she didn’t know what the runes actually meant. It was hard to describe that feeling, though—she could only say that when she felt it, it felt like a little piece of her was mixed in with it. She felt as though Mom was right next to her, even if only faintly. Most non-unicorns didn’t get it. Which was fine, because they would never be capable of feeling it in the first place. But the runes still puzzled her. Mom had never done that to any book on that old shelf before. Why this one? Why just those pages? There was certainly enough violence in the rest of the book to qualify for supervision of…she hated to think it, but most colts and fillies in the stable weren’t quite what she would call….responsible. Any other parent might not have let them read that book for another couple of years.

But Mom wasn’t like that. Not yet. It wasn’t like the book was graphic in detail or anything, but it was clear that ponies were dying or drawing blood when the action got heavy. It was one thing to read about death in a work of fiction—it was all planned, the characters weren’t real anyway, and the most one could feel at the passing of a character was some sense of loss or sadness. No real, honest-to-Luna grief or crying, unless one let themselves get really emotionally invested in the book to the point of believing it to be real.

It was quite another thing to watch her own mother kill ponies for real, far more violently than anything she could have read in that book. She didn’t think she’d ever get that first gunfight out of her head. The way she just…changed….slaughtering them that way, and losing herself in her own rage to the point of nearly murdering some soul…the things she’d done to the others….

She had to stop in the stairwell, just before the doorway into L7, and lie down on all fours for a minute to chase away the shakes that began to seep into her legs. Closed her eyes, and wished away the bloody images with daydreams of wheat, sunny winter days, and warm, fuzzy blankets and hot chocolate in a living room and its fireplace. Daydreams of boring days in class, of stable-wide hijinks with her friends, of surprising Mom the second she dragged her sleepy, tired self through the door with an out-of-nowhere pounce and hug. Anything that would push out the images of her mom blowing heads apart with that monstrous revolver, or nearly murdering a hurt, dying pony out of sheer rage.

Her relief from this sudden torrent of horror, surprisingly, wasn’t from herself, but from two small, warm, fuzzy packages that whimpered in sympathetic tones as they nuzzled and pawed at her face. Somehow sensing (or more likely seeing) her distress, the pups found it impossible to move on without trying to nudge their caretaker back into a better mood. And it worked.

She consoled herself by returning the animalistic affections, scratching the pups behind their ears and allowing them to head-butt her across the cheek until she found herself back in the cold, dark stairwell, their warmth blanketing her face and forehooves. These pups were suddenly worth all the hassle of keeping them in line, solely for the comfort and company they provided right there.

With a resigned sigh, she finally pushed herself back to her hooves, and the pups began to step away from her as their playtime came to an unwanted end. But they didn’t whimper or bark at her heels when she whisked herself through the door and into L7, and simply continued to hound her legs as they carried her ever upward.

She quickly came upon the library door, maybe a minute’s walk after leaving the stairwell, and to her relief nothing about the interior had changed since she left it. The receptionist’s desk was still covered in molded, ruined books and a broken lamp, several bookcases had fallen over and spilled hundreds more books across the floor, and so far as she could tell, all of the lounge chairs and sofas on this end of the library were covered in a thick layer of dust and carelessly discarded index cards from the library catalogue. The one intact, legible poster on the wall behind the receptionist’s desk was a leftover from Equestria That Was, apparently from the Ministry of Arcane Science. A lavender unicorn pony bearing a purple-colored mane with pink highlights—Twilight Sparkle—adorned the lower right corner of the poster. Arrayed around her were piles of books, with a particularly large hovering in Twilight’s magical grasp. The faded words at the top read, “KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.”

The first time she saw the poster, she had uttered something to the effect of knowledge not being enough to keep the past from repeating itself. This time, she just stared at it in wistful silence, wishing that the library could have simply pointed the way to a time travel spell that would let her and Mom go to the days of Equestria That Was, an Equestria that wouldn’t go down the dark, violent path that had left the world in ruin. Then she wouldn’t have to worry about things like food, water, and not being eaten or torn apart by mutant wildlife.

If only.

This library, fortunately, seemed to be arranged much like the one back home, even though it only took up half the floor. The non-fiction section was on the far side of the library to her right, while the fiction stuff took up the left half, where she now stood. Since this library seemed to have arranged its books by both author and subject/genre, she started with the “fantasy” section, about a hundred yards into the library to her right, and started nosing through the shelves. As she delved further into the collection of tomes, the damage seemed to grow less severe, though she could see signs of age and erosion on just about every shelf in sight. Many bookcases rose up almost to the ceiling and required the use of special ladders to traverse to the upper shelves.

But by luck, the “W” section started at the top of one bookcase, and continued on to the bottom shelf of the next case down the row, and she quickly fell upon the “Wh-“ named authors. White Cape, White Case, and so on. At an eye level shelf she finally began spotting names closer to the ones she wanted—White Nose, White Opal, White Qu—

White Quill! Her mind’s eye shrieked with joy, quickly pulling the brown leatherback book out of the shelf for a closer look. The binder didn’t list the title, just the author—

Her silent shriek turned into a high-pitched loud one as her eyes scanned over the title, Legacy of the Moon. She had to fight with her lungs to keep slightly calm as she carefully opened the book to begin a quick inspection of the pages themselves, blowing a thick dust off the surface that caused Mona to sneeze when the cloud enveloped her nose. Binding looked okay, hard to tell what condition the pages were in with all the dim, red lighting…

She fished a flashlight out of her bags and flicked it on, holding it in her mouth so her magic could flip through the pages, and she liked what she saw! Edges didn’t seem to be all that discolored or anything, the hard leatherback covers kept the book itself straight and rigid so nothing was bent or warped, the pages themselves seemed to have escaped the majority of aging damage that had ruined a lot of the other books she’d seen when she first came in. She couldn’t sit there and glance at every page to see if all the text was intact or if some of it had begun to run off, but through the first hundred or so everything seemed at least readable. She counted that as “good enough for now” and gently stuffed the book into her right saddlebag, its enchanted interior flashing with a bright purple glow as it sought to fit the recovered tome amongst all the other stuff it was tasked with containing. Someday Mom was going to explain how these bags could hold so much stuff and still be so darn weightless. Still, awesome find! She’d never bothered to look in her stable’s library for these, so she had no idea if Mom had read this one or not. Either way, both of them would be happy with this find!

Unfortunately, this seemed to be the only copy of White Quill’s books that were there, as the next one down the line read “White Rose” on the binder, and she couldn’t see any more mention of White Quill anywhere else on the shelf.

Next stop….the adventure section. Back towards the library entrance. In hindsight, she should have started there, made things a little quicker. Oh well.

It wasn’t hard to track down the “A” labeled author section—there weren’t a lot of pony authors whose name started with the letter A, and even fewer who had such strange names as A.K. Yearling. The entirety of “A” named authors comprised a single bookcase, with the bottom three shelves quickly narrowing down to the “Ya”, then “Ye” an—

“Yearling!” she shouted aloud upon spotting the familiar, green-shaded hardback binder of the first book in the series, Daring Do and the Sapphire Statue. This book she pulled out as though it were made of glass, and it might as well have been if the loose binding was any indication. The cover art wasn’t quite as crisp as the copy back home—in fact, she would go so far as to call it grayscale, there was so little luster to it. But the pages inside the cover seemed remarkably intact, with sharper looking print than in Legacy of the Moon. And that was really all she needed. She’d just have to be careful with the page turning and such, lest she wear the binding out to the point of entire pages coming loose.

The second book in the series, The Griffon’s Goblet, was also present on the shelf, and in a similar condition. Faded cover art, but stiffer binding, and the interior print was a little duller but still more than readable. Sadly, no other Daring Do books could be found. But two was more than she’d expected to find in the first place, and she was willing to call it a good salvage at three readable books.

With her new acquisitions stowed in her bags, she set about searching through the non-fiction half of the library, feeling far more energized and uplifted than she had fifteen minutes ago. She could hardly wait for them to find a better spot to set camp for the night so she could break out Sapphire Statue for the first time in….four months? She was willing to bet that Mom wouldn’t mind a little quiet time with the second White Quill book as well. Maybe even Kite or BJ would want a read-through.

….well, maybe not BJ, he didn’t seem all that interested in….well, anything. He seemed to just float through the day without any care as to what went on around him, unless it was threatening or dangerous. She’d have to correct that. Somehow.

The references section was rather anemically stocked—while there were at least five bookcases for the section, most of the shelves were empty, and of the few dozen books left she could quickly see that none of them looked like they had anything to do with guns. But the absence of information here was rather odd. Most other bookcases here were empty simply because they were broken—here, it seemed as though they’d been carried away and never returned.

Could this enclave of pegasi have taken them? Or had this part of the library never been stocked well to start with? She might have been able to tell if the indexing system had been intact, but that had been her first stop the last time she came here, and it was wrecked. Like somepony had deliberated destroyed or removed most of the index to make it difficult to find any specific book. Jerks.

The special interest section, just a few bookcases down, seemed to be in better shape, at least, though it was quite a bit smaller in size and only encompasses two bookcases. Each was given the honor of its own ladder, making it a simple affair to start eliminating shelves as potential hiding places for the book she sought—

One of the pups began to growl behind her. Endearingly cute, actually, to hear such a tiny young thing try to scare off something it didn’t like….

…until she realized that if the pups didn’t like it, she probably wouldn’t either.

She swung around, shifting the flashlight into a telekinesis spell and shining it in whatever direction the pups’ eyes seemed to be staring—

—a ragged-out, dirt-patched pony, dressed in what could charitably be described as rags sewn together into a crude vest, barely flinched at the introduction of light into his green eyes as he stared down at her. His coat was some sort of light blue, kinda like Socket back home, and his mane was unkempt but clearly a shade of dark lavender. Not a great combination, really.

Color combos were the least of her worries. She’d been literally jumping for joy at the discovery of cherished books not even three minutes ago—now she was face-to-face with a stranger who looked hungry, had at least one bladed weapon at hoof (literally, it was tied around his left foreleg), and who had only been spotted because the pups’ sense of smell was a lot better than her attention span.

And he was right between her and the straightest path back to Mom that she had.

“…how’d you get in here, kid?” the stallion asked her in a gruff, hoarse voice.

Despite the terror creeping up and down her spine, El-Tee still found it impossible to not be a little snarky with him. “…through the door. Ain’t locked.”

“You know what I mean, kid, now answer the question,” he warned in a slightly sharper tone.

Her hold on the flashlight wavered slightly as her chest began to tighten. “….t-the door console…we fixed it.”

“We?”

S-shoot, do I tell him? Would numbers mean anything to him? Would he back off or get the idea to use me to get to them….

“…me, my mom….coupla others,” she relented under his unfriendly gaze. Beneath her, the pups continued to growl and snarl, but stayed well within her reach.

“And where are they at?”

Her tail quivered, this time in fright. Not working like I thought…

….but she’d already told him too much. Holding back info now might just make him angry….

“…my mom’s close. Probably coming up right now. And she’s not near as nice as me.”

This seemed to make the strange, threatening stallion even less likely to leave her alone. “Heard that plenty o’ times. Drop your guns and food, slowly. You won’t be the first filly I’ve run through for their stuff.”

Her legs began to shudder as she did the exact opposite, but in her increasing panic she found it difficult to hold both her 9mm and the flashlight, so she settled for the pistol.

She didn’t even see herself draw it, it came out so fast….

And it did nothing. Even as she had the sights settling somewhere around his chest, she found it exceptionally difficult to ponder the idea of actually squeezing the trigger. To actually shoot somepony.

He could see the conflict in her, the indecision and unwillingness to harm another just because she was scared of them. “What do you think you’re doing?” his gruff voice seemed to laugh at her as he started to stalk forward, and her legs found it hard to back away from him in a steady manner. Sometimes a leg would slip or stay put. “Seen that look in your eyes before. The wastes eat little ponies like you for breakfast. That gun might as well not even be there. You don’t have it in you to pull that trigger.”

He’d barely finished speaking when she heard the world go deathly quiet, her heartbeat becoming muted to her again, and her gasping breaths became like whispers.

….m-mom? Her body waited for death to claim this stallion’s life—

—CLICK!—

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

She’d found little in the Overmare’s office of worth besides a few terminal entries she’d simply downloaded to her PipBuck for reading later, and a battered copy of Equestrian Army Today which by chance happened to feature the Lightbringer 2000 in a corner photo on the cover. A quick glance at the 10-page article went into just enough detail on the weapon’s inner workings that it would suffice as a starting point for learning how to troubleshoot it, so she stuffed it in her bags and darted off towards the library on L7.

Because she’d suddenly developed this chill in her guts, an icy itch that something in her world was not right. And the last time she felt it, she’d found Light Tail bleeding on her couch from a head wound and barely capable of speaking.

When she bumbled her way to the library, the red hash mark on her EFS sent that itch to the rest of her insides with how close it was getting to the green triangle marks that were her daughter and the puppies she’d taken in.

And when she’d snuck up on that danger mark, and found it to be a dirty, disheveled stallion stalking his way into Light Tail’s personal space, she felt all that fear and terror wash away in the cold, furious emotion that she’d come to believe was a mother’s rage at the sight of a threatened child.

She had her 10mm pistol out in front of her without so much as a sound, and allowed the flick of the safety to announce her presence to this stallion of ill intent.

“Stop,” her angry voice called out from the darkness behind the stallion, setting the sights over the back of his head. “Stay exactly where you’re at. Move even an inch closer to her, and I’ll kill you.”

The stallion’s forward movement stopped, though whether he acknowledged the presence of her gun or not, she didn’t know. She didn’t really care, either. Light Tail started making her way around him, and kept herself facing him the entire time with her 9mm pistol in front of her. The growling pups beneath her daughter stayed with her every step of the way.

“You the mother?” he dared to ask.

His rear legs snapped shut against his haunches as she peeled off a second spell, took hold of his boy parts and began to squeeze them in a vice-like grip—

“Talk to me again and I’ll rip these off,” she hissed, giving this second spell field a slight twist to implicate how she was planning to accomplish that particular task.

He took the hint and stopped talking, or moving. Or doing anything that made her want to shoot him any more than she already did. It didn’t take El-Tee long to get past him and back within her leg reach, and she even brushed up against her, probably just to make sure that she was really there and that she wasn’t just imagining this.

“We’re leaving,” she said next, her 10mm pistol somehow hovering almost perfectly still as she began to inch backward. Despite the pain that had to be assaulting him from his nethers, she didn’t hear so much as a tortured cry…and it was starting to scare her. “You come near us again, and you’re dead.”

She gave his stallionhood a slighter tighter squeeze to hopefully encourage him to stay put, urging her daughter back towards the library door with a brush of her right foreleg, and the filly didn’t even ask any questions. She just turned and began running back towards the other end of the library, hopping over spilled piles of ruined books as she went.

She followed right behind her only after she’d backed far enough away that maintaining a hold on his family jewels strained the reach of her magic further than she could keep up with.

She didn’t even get within sight of the front desk at the entrance before she heard his hoofs galloping along behind her. She skidded to a stop, whipped around to plant two rounds in his head like she’d promised she would—

—found herself facing not one grime-coated stallion, but three of them, as the other two had been far quieter and somehow managed to evade her EFS’s threat detection matrix until she spotted them—

No, not threats, she realized when a quick glance of her eyes downward still showed only one red hash mark approaching her, while the other two stallions were tagged with green marks. Still didn’t answer the question of how they’d managed to avoid being picked up by the EFS—

“Cleaver, you take another step and we’ll let her waste you!” one of the friendly-tagged stallions yelled out, his voice more even toned and cleaner than the charging fool before her. But it had the effect of causing this poorly-armed threat to stop running, though it took him a second or two to stop completely.

The knife-armed stallion—Cleaver, she was going to guess by how quickly he answered back—bristled slightly under the barrel of her pistol, but he never took his eyes off of her. “Idiots, told you we shoulda jumped ‘em at that café—”

Buck me they’ve been watching us that long?!

“We got enough food and we don’t need the Union or a Runner poking around looking for somebody’s lost lover or some shit,” the left-most friendly stallion berated Cleaver from the shadows. “And if you haven’t noticed, this mare’s got enough firepower to take us out if it pleases her and you damn near made her do it for tryin’ to jump that kid like that! So stay put and let us fix the mess you just got us into!”

“….whatever you’re doing here, I don’t care,” she tried to say in a calmer, softer voice. “I came to see if there were any supplies left behind by the original residents. Now that I’m done, I want to leave.”

“Take anything out of the infirmary?” the other friendly stallion asked next, finally stepping forward from the poorly-lit backdrop to reveal the battle saddle harness and the heavily used automatic rifle mounted to it…and what looked like rope or duct tape wrapped around the barrel and forearm.

“…me, no. Travelling companion helped herself to a few healing potions and a med kit…”

The rifle-armed stallion gazed at her momentarily before turning his attention to his partner across the aisle. “….guess a couple potions and a pile of junk is a fair price for them leaving without killing us, don’t you think?”

“Hold up,” the other disagreed, his face furrowed in suspicion as he glared back at her. “The old armory. You got in somehow. What’d you take out?”

“Nothing useful,” she said, briefly gauging the distance between each of the three males and how quickly she would have to shift her aim to down all three. “Just a coupla broken guns and a knife. Place is empty. Nothing on the terminal said why. Check it out yourself later, I didn’t bother locking it back up.”

“And those chemicals your friend and that little colt have been moving around for the last half hour?”

“Improvised incendiary devices,” she replied immediately.

The armed stallion jerked his attention back to her, suddenly becoming slightly more interested in her than she thought was healthy. “….leave us a few on your way out, and we’ll call it even on the potions and whatever you did get out of the armory.”

Bastard, she spat in her head. I didn’t come here to save you!

“I’m making those for the bugs up top,” she countered—

“We can help with that.”

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

The bad pony’s friends were much better behaved, and much more willing to help in some way (it probably helped that they were afraid Mom would shoot them dead if they did anything else wrong). A couple of hours later after running in them, two of them came up to the café bearing vials of slightly foul-smelling, green-shaded liquids, just as Mom had finished sorting out her “maretovs” and booze-soaked cloth strips. Twenty in all.

“This is how we get past the bugs whenever we head out for salvage,” the rifle-armed stallion mumbled through his teeth as he set the small box of vials atop the service counter. “They’re terrified of yaoi gai, for good reason. The first time we saw one come through, every bug in sight got the hell away from it before they even saw it, and we figured they could smell it somehow. We found a way to extract that scent. Pour it on a scarf or something, and the bugs won’t want anything to do with you.”

She was still coming to grips with how close she came to that gut-wrenching choice of shooting somepony, even if she felt it might’ve been the only way to keep him from hurting her. She just stayed in the corner, curled up to keep the lingering cool air at bay, and Max and Mona cuddled up right next to her and had been dozing off for the last hour. Felt rather nice to have their warmth nearby, actually. She didn’t much care for this place anymore, or for anypony that might’ve been in it aside from herself, Mom, Kite, and BJ. She just wanted to leave.

So she let Mom do all the talking this time. Listening to the adults bicker and talk kept her from thinking too hard about much of anything. Just what she needed.

“You’re not particularly well-armed,” Mom said from behind the counter as she re-counted her bottles for a third time. “How did you manage to get your hooves on this stuff?”

“It got some of us killed the first time, but we brought one down,” he answered calmly. “Second time we needed to find one, we baited it with a slaver we caught out on his own, away from his group….”

Brief, haunting images of her first hour in the wastes caused her to tighten herself into a slighter smaller ball and bury her face into Max’s side. He squirmed slightly at the touch of her nose, but didn’t wake up and continued to dream whatever it was that puppies dreamed of. She couldn’t think of much worse fates than being caught and used as live bait…even if it was a bad pony like a slaver. She wasn’t sure she could forgive anypony for doing that.

“After that, a few months ago, we finally ran into somepony who’d managed to tame one enough to the point where it wouldn’t tear her to pieces. Wasn’t hard to talk her into joining up with us, most folk don’t even venture out this far, let alone come to the stable. You’re the first group to try in the two years we’ve been here.”

The steady, muted thump of bottles settling against a hard countertop stopped momentarily. “You want to be here?”

“Why not? It’s surrounded by ant nests in a place where nopony wants to be in the first place, so we rarely get visitors. And slavers don’t stray this far off the road, not around here. Weather don’t bother us, there’s only one way in, and until today pulling that green wire out of the console outside seemed to be working pretty well. Guess we’ll have to figure somethin’ else out.”

With her face buried in Max’s fuzzy fur coat, she couldn’t see anything else in the room, but she was content enough to just listen. “Yes, you will,” Mom’s voice said, and she sounded a little sad as she spoke. “You don’t have much power left. Can’t see it lasting years. A few months, maybe.”

“….yeah,” he sighed in resignation. “Most of us would rather not admit it. But we know it’s coming. Kinda why I asked you to whip these up. Might need them when it’s time to relocate. How long will these keep?”

“Don’t know, never made one ‘till today,” Mom admitted freely, briefly startling the filly (and probably the stallion too!). “Just followed the directions in an old Equestrian Army field manual. Might take a couple to see if I did it right, light a few of the bugs up. But if this scent masking trick of yours works, I don’t think we’ll need any.”

“So all that work we did was for nothing?” Kite’s voice mumbled, stung by the seemingly wasted effort she’d put in.

“Wouldn’t say that,” the stallion said. “You did take a few healing potions out of the infirmary, used one already. If these things work, we’ll call it even. Otherwise you’re out some caps.”

The foul-smelling, musky odor from those vials began to grow stronger as she heard Mom take a vial from its box and presumably began to pour it onto something, eliciting a choked gasp out of her when she inhaled that finally did succeed in jolting the pups awake. “Holy cow that stinks!” she gagged, coughing on her own oxygen.

“Has to, if it’s gonna work,” he said with a sympathetic glance, once she got to opening her eyes again. “It’s hard enough coaxing that yaoi gai to let us extract his pheromones in the first place. We want what we can get to work. That means making it stronger than usual. One whiff of these scarves, and you can walk right on top of their nests without them raising a fuss. They might even carve a path for you if it gets you away from them faster.”

Light Tail’s nose wrinkled in on itself at the thought of having that smell almost directly in her face. But after how things had gone earlier in the morning, the discomfort of a stinky odor seemed like a small price to pay for being able to walk back out in one piece.

Plus seeing Mom shaken out of her wits like that was….hard. If there were more giant insects like this in other places, she wasn’t sure that Mom would want to keep going…or that she’d be able to keep herself together and fight through them. She hoped this “trade” included a few vials of this stuff for use later.

“One more thing before we go,” Mom said, pulling a set of scarves out of the box of foul-smelling vials and laying them out across the counter. “When those bugs came up out of the ground, they were trying to herd us towards another group waiting for us to get right on top of them. Where did they learn to do that?”

“No idea, but you’re not the first ones they’ve tried that on,” the stallion answered, shuddering slightly as he talked. Could have been the chill in the air just then….or he didn’t like talking about it. “Saw ‘em wipe out a Union patrol a week ago doing just that. They made a stand for a few seconds, saw what looked like a clear path and made a run for it. Got swallowed up whole, not a damn one of ‘em made it out of that trap. Looks like you found the one rifle they left behind….”

Light Tail felt a sharp chill through her spine, slightly horrified that they had narrowly avoided the same fate only because she saw something that didn’t look right and had the guts to point it out to two adults who thought they knew better. L-Lucky….

With nothing left in the stable to hold them there, they quickly gathered around the counter as Mom doused a set of scarves in the greenish liquid and passed one out to each of them in turn. Kite and BJ didn’t seem the least bit bothered by the smell, and she and Mom tried not to let it get to them. Max and Mona, however, took an instant disliking to the scent and refused to huddle beneath her like they usually did. They kept at least several feet away from the group as they journeyed back upstairs to the ground floor, a pair of “maretovs” floating alongside them in Mom’s magic.

It wasn’t until they reached the ground floor and the stable entrance that she finally saw a sign of hope in Mom’s eyes.

Predictably, because of the impending use of a weapon. One apparently meant to burn things alive. So long as they only used it on bugs, she could survive its horrific existence. Might even give Mom some kind of stress relief to see them burst into flames after how badly they had scared her earlier.

“Still a couple of bugs beyond the door,” Mom warned as she brought one of the bottles up in front of her, along with what looked like a small flip-top lighter. “Stand back.”

Four sets of hooves did as they were requested and scooted about fifteen feet away from her, just as she brought the open flame of the lighter onto the soaked strip of cloth, setting it alight. Gave her enough space that only Mom would suffer if something went wrong with her flaming bottle.

Not that she liked the idea.

When she was satisfied that everypony would be safe if she screwed up, Mom quickly shifted a part of her spell to cover the console and tapped a few buttons on the keypad, causing the gear-shaped door to begin screeching its way outward and onto a rail, where it then rolled off to the side and out of their sight—

A pair of mutant ants were indeed hanging out in the little cave outside the door, though most of the other ants they’d killed earlier were long gone, likely dragged away by their surviving nest mates. Did they eat their own? Use the corpses for some other purpose? Did they just want to make it easier to move around in such a tight spot?

Whatever the reason, it still left two living ants and one hours-long dead one in that little cave, and the moment the door began to roll away from the entrance their antennae began to twitch as their heads turned towards them—

“Here, catch!” Mom screamed out, the flaming cloth beginning to burn down into the bottle itself as it was hurled directly at the ant to her left—

—she heard the glass bottle shatter against its head, right before a great FWOOOSH! Erupted from the ant’s head, suddenly engulfed in a great bonfire as flames completely enveloped its head. Smaller patches of flames burst into existence in some kind of splatter pattern, like water, but none of them did near as much as that initial burst.

The immolated ant began screaming. Really screaming. The sounds it made were simply a much higher, sharper pitch of its usual bug screeches, but it was definitely screaming in pain and fear. It flailed about the cave, blinded and unable to sense or feel its way back to the tunnel, for a few moments before it stopped moving and fell, its legs beginning to lash and kick as it rolled itself about in agony.

….and Mom just laughed at it, barely even registering the release of her hearing protection spell that encased her ears in that familiar muffled sensation.

The other ant wisely fled the cave before it, too, could be turned into a flaming effigy. She was pretty sure the stinky scarves had nothing to do with its desire to flee. Mom continued to cackle in deviate joy as she trotted past the burning ant, even spitting on it as she passed by. “How do you like it now, ya flame-spitting mutant? Gods I wish I could burn the rest of you out.”

She watched her mother disappear into the tunnel, the glow of her magic from her horn lighting her way forward, while the ant continued to burn and scream in lower, softer tones as the flames took their toll. Kite and BJ simply strolled on by, stepping around the thing as they might step around a pothole in the road.

And she just stood there, gawking at the dying bug, suddenly beginning to grow sick to her stomach at the whole thing. Bug or not…that was a horrible way to go….

Worse still to laugh at it.

It was the dirty, rifle-armed stallion still lingering at the door with her that spurred her to move forward through this fit of insanity. “….is she okay?” he said, his voice coming through as a whisper.

Her voice was a sad, broken song. One she feared would become quite common in the weeks ahead. “….I don’t know anymore….”

“…then don’t give up. Or you’ll lose her, and she might not come back.”

…o-oh Luna, I wanna go home….

…but since she couldn’t, she had to go on. Somehow. And find some way to make Mom talk to her. That thing with Hoofprint…she should have seen it coming the second Mom suggested coming out this way weeks ago. She was nowhere near ready to deal with these things, not then, and definitely not now. Or any kind of giant, pony-eating insect. She’d been harboring a deep-rooted fear of them for too long.

She nudged the pups into following along with her with a click of her tongue…and stopped just long enough to pull her 9mm out and put the bug out of its misery with a single shot to the head, ending its screams and death throes in an instant. Despite the presence of Mom’s spell, the shot seemed a lot louder than it should’ve been, though it was nothing compared to the supreme irony of what she’d just done.

She’d just killed something to end its suffering. And it was a bug she could barely stand in the first place, when she’d been too conflicted to contemplate even hurting another pony that clearly had no problem with hurting her.

She made it halfway through the tunnel before her disgust caught up with her, sending her into a gagging fit that took her ten seconds to fight off. Thankfully, nothing escaped her stomach this time…except her hopes that Mom was getting better at handling her stress. And her own.

But whining did nothing. So she just pushed on, and resolved to try hard not to think about it too hard. Yet.

When she finally stumbled her way out of the tunnel, back into the barn that hid the stable, she couldn’t see anypony in sight, so she hurried to the barn door and squeezed through after making sure the pups were still right behind her—

As she’d expected, Mom had quickly found another bug to use her last fire bottle on—she found it crumpled in a heap of crunched-up limbs, on its back, silent. Of the few bugs that milled about around the fake village, only one seemed to be having any conflict about whether to stay and fight or flee for safer territory—all the rest were doing their best to get as far away from the ponies as they could. She would’ve expected one bug to flee in the face of flaming death, but not eight. She figured the stinky scarves were doing the trick after all.

Fine by her. One death-defying shootout was more than enough for her in a lifetime, though she knew more would follow. All she could do was watch for it, and hope that next time it wouldn’t be because they went looking for it.

Mom wasn’t too far away, happily trotting through the town and back into the wastes in short little hops, and Kite and BJ followed along in her wake. El-Tee had to run for a bit to catch up with them and get back beside Mom, but after that their walk was blissfully uneventful. They watched as ant after ant suddenly found themselves needed elsewhere when they came by, some going so far as to begin digging themselves another hole to hide in. It would’ve been funny any other day. Today, it was just a relief that they didn’t have to shoot their way out.

The return to the age-weathered asphalt of the ruined highway was a welcome change from the dusty wasteland—so long as her hooves were hitting concrete, she was on the right track, so she could keep an eye out for threats and not really worry about where she was going. Gave her plenty of time to think, to try and figure out how she was going to get Mom to start talking about…about this deep-rooted terror she harbored in the presence of mutant bugs. Not an unreasonable fear, but one she was starting to let take deeper hold than was healthy. It was a really familiar path, one she’d thought she’d steered Mom off of. It was okay to be scared of them—it wasn’t okay to let that fear justify turning savage at the sight of them. How long before she turned that justification around, made it so she could justify doing the same things to bad ponies? Slavers?

Or folk just trying to get by, same as them? She never said anything about it, but she’d been listening to Ada in that town, after she and Mom and Leon had wiped out those “raiders”, from the safety and concealment of the grocer door. Listened to her describe the horrible things these kinds of ponies would do, and though she didn’t understand some of them, Ada painted a clear enough picture for her to figure out that they were the worst kind of pony to run into. She said something about them seeing oblivion in the wastes and going mad from it. Turning cannibal, sadistic, all simply for the sake of it.

And she was getting worried that Mom had begun to go down that path. It was a small thing she’d done, in such a bleak, dark world as this. But bad ponies didn’t get that way in a day, it started with small things.

Like burning a bug to death and laughing at it. She thought so, anyway. And she wasn’t going to let Mom go that route. She was a good pony, she just got really scared and wanted to make herself feel better about it. She was just doing it the wrong way! She knew it. She just had to make her see it. So long as she let herself believe that this violent outlet was the best way to relieve her stress and fears, she’d keep doing it every time she felt that scared. There had to be better ways to accomplish that.

But for the life of her tiny self, she couldn’t figure it out. Not in the three hours and fifteen-plus miles they’d walked before they caught sight of what looked like an old “rest stop” station for sky wagons, just off the road. Back home, she’d read about these places being something like an “all-in-one” store for travelers on sky wagons—get more fuel for the wagon, or get it fixed up if there was something wrong with it, get a bite to eat or use the restroom facilities and such. Pretty popular places to stop, if all the parked, ruined sky wagons on the other side of the road were any indication. The rest stop station wasn’t much bigger than a house, but it was something with four intact walls and a roof, and she didn’t like the idea of sleeping outside in the open.

“Think we found our stop for the day,” Mom called out as the rest station drew closer and closer, and she could start to make out the letters on the signboard at the top of the building: “SALT LICK’S ONE-STOP SHOP! FOOD, FUEL, FULL-TIME MECHANIC!”

“Yeah, looks pretty sturdy, actually,” Kite agreed with what sounded like….pleasure? Hope? “Might actually find something in there.”

She couldn’t help but notice that Kite had been sorta glancing at her out of the corner of her eye as she said that. Some subtle hint that the scarred, grape-colored mare had an idea of what she was trying to do, and trying to tell her she would be better off waiting a little bit. She was probably right, too.

“…think I’ll slink off in that little boneyard across the road,” Mom said, her head turned towards the scattered debris and overturned pegasi contraptions that adorned a good seventy yards of ground. “Nature calls, and all that.”

Kite saw this as an opportunity to forestall a coming fight/argument between mother and daughter, and wasted no time in springing into action. “Elly, BJ, c’mon, we can scope out the rest station pretty quick between the three of us.”

Light Tail didn’t take the bait. “N-nah, I…I gotta go too,” she lied. She didn’t really have to. Yet. She just wanted a shot at talking to Mom alone. Could have picked a better time, yeah, but…how often would they be getting any kind of privacy now, if at all? Just the thought of a colt being in the same place as her while she slept and ate and did her business was unsettling. At least in Syrup Mound they had working restrooms. No such luck out here….

“You sure it can’t wait?” Kite persisted anyway. Had to give her credit for trying, at least.

“It’ll be a lot darker later,” she countered, taking a passing notice of the sky and how it seemed a bit…darker in color. Even with that cloud cover stretching across for hundreds of miles (if not more), there was a stark difference between night and day, and she’d learned to tell when the sun was starting to set by how much light was still left. And judging by the sky, it was mid-afternoon…probably close to four, she didn’t have a PipBuck with a clock so she couldn’t say for sure. “Would rather do it while I can see what I’m doing.”

Kite’s face, despite losing only a hint of a smile at her lips, had changed, now seemingly apprehensive about what kind of problems would be strolling through the door in the near future. But she had no polite or subtle way of convincing her to change her mind now, not unless she wanted to potentially start a fight right here.

“….right,” the mare said through a forced cough from her throat. “Better be proud of how lucky you are, BJ, you don’t have the problems we have.”

BJ’s groan of disgust was clear and unmistakable. “Oh gross, I do not want to hear about your problems with going to the bathroom, just dig a hole and get it done!”

She was pretty sure three sets of cheeks blushed red with blood and embarrassment at the suggestion….until she got to thinking about it a little longer, and….

“….hey, that’s not actually a bad idea,” Mom said, seemingly impressed with the snarky little colt’s thinking, for once. “Bury the waste like a cat. Keeps predators and folk from tracking us that way, at least. Didn’t think of that. I was wondering if I would ever need this stupid folding shovel in my packs.”

BJ’s face found one of the few occasions to show his emotions—his features began to cringe and crunch up as he tried to block out the mental images no doubt assailing his brain at that moment. “….I’mgonnagoaheadseeyalater!” he blurted out in a second-long burst of speech before bolting off towards the rest station, small clouds of dust puffing up from the ground around his hooves.

She tried to stifle a short laugh at his expense, but relented and let it hound him in his wake when his mom began to choke on her own snorting.

“Pffft-snnrk, so scared of us girls half the time it’s a wonder he gets through the day,” Kite mumbled through her nose as she trotted along in his trail of dust. “He’ll never survive us.”

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

She didn’t really have to go that bad. She was just making up an excuse that would ensure no one would bother her when she went out of sight, where she could begin to properly freak out over the morning’s events.

The first thing she did once she and Light Tail had found sufficient distance from each other within the miniature scrapyard was to smack her head into the side of a sky wagon that still had some shade of pink color to its chassis.

“Bucking idiot!!” her voice snarled at her in anger, a hoof coming up to join in the battering of the ancient husk of metal. “You stupid, bucking idiot what were you thinking?!”

Thinking? Oh, no, not thinking, her mind argued back. Just venting—

—the shattering of glass, the showering of volatile chemicals set ablaze in an instantaneous combustion that utterly consumed the mutant ant’s head in an instant—

…right. Venting. Violently, and right in front of your only child who’s such a bone-deep pacifist she can barely stomach shooting a bug to start with…and yo—

…and…

….and little Light Tail had put the thing down with a bullet, rather than leave it screaming and burning, like her mother had….

Just a bug, she’d told herself. Terrified the piss out of her, literally. It was okay to vent and take back some of her pride and dignity, show the damned things not to mess with her. Burn the bastards alive, make things better for the wastes and make herself feel better about peeing all over the floor like a terrified, wild animal, right in front of her little girl. Visit vengeance upon them tenfold for all the pain Kickstart felt at the sight of her five-year old son eviscerated and spread across the walls like paint. The horrors she lived with having been the one to find him in the first place.

Dumbest idea she’d ever had. Not even messing around with El-Tee’s father for a fortnight and getting pregnant could compare to what she’d just visited upon her precious child. She would regret this day for the rest of her life. That one little gunshot, to end a creature’s suffering by killing it….

Her lunch came back up abruptly, but she didn’t fight it. Just let herself gag out her disgust at herself, washed her mouth out afterwards with some water and staggered away from her corner of the scrapyard in tears. Bad enough to be killing ponies right in front of her eyes, but this…

“…w-what am I turning into….”

She hadn’t expected an answer to be waiting as she stumbled into a rough clearing in the scrapyard, formed from an irregular ring of sky wagons encircling the bare-bone remains of what looked like an outside camp site replete with a small fire pit and a rotted, rusted out barrel. She got an answer anyway…from her little night light, who was waiting by the barrel and staring right at her as she came around the edge of the camp site perimeter, with her puppies nowhere in sight. Likely left with Kite and BJ.

“….you’re a good pony, getting lost in her own emotions,” Light Tail’s electric blue eyes pleaded in sympathy and pain. “Angry, scared…you let it get to you…and you can do better. Even if you have to kill something, you don’t have to do it out of anger or fear…don’t have to…to do things, and laugh about it….we’ve been through this before, you know that.”

Her legs buckled and fell in on themselves, her world blurring into a watery swirl of colors.

By Celestia, her only child was a better pony than she could ever be.

She cried for a while. She was pretty sure El-Tee did too, pressing her face up into her chest and refusing to part ways. She tried to tell her how sorry she was for hurting her, for being the reason she had to go and clean up after her and twisting the best parts of her into something horrible, but all that she could do was gurgle something out of her throat that sounded something like “So sorry I hurt you”. Or something to that effect. It didn’t matter, in the end.

It was a little late for ‘sorry’. She would have to try to be better than what she was if she wanted her most precious treasure to grow up and still be the same pony she was two months ago. The wastes might very well devour her soul and body alive, but she would suffer a thousand hells to make sure the legacy she left behind in her child was better than the world she lived in.

It didn’t take her long to run out of tears. The willingness to leave, and just move on with the day, came from the bundle of fur and love she’d birthed into her life, and made her wish their home had survived. “…w-we should get inside,” El-Tee squeaked. “Gonna get dark soon….”

…y-yeah….inside…dark enough inside me already… “….gonna need dinner…hurled my lunch…”

“…I heard. And…um….y’know, maybe even if we don’t really need to right now…we might wanna um….take care of business? While we got light, anyway…”

Even in such a sour mood, she had just enough sense of herself to shake her head at herself at how they had both made the same excuse to get some space to talk. “….we need to come up with a better lie next time…”

Light Tail promptly snorted into her chest, leaving a little more than just tears soaking into her coat, and the filly quickly pulled herself out of her mother’s legs as she stood up. “H-hey, it was your idea,” she snickered.

“It was your idea to go along with my idea.”

Her child’s body began to turn towards her right, towards the other end of the scrapyard, and it began to dawn on her that she might actually have meant what she said. “Yeah, well, now I think I might actually need to….um….uhhh, I’ll be back…”

She watched her daughter slink away through a gap between two nose-crunched wagons that had likely fallen from the sky in the blasts of ages gone by, laughing as she went.

With a heavy, tired, sigh, she forced herself up to her hooves, to slip back to that quiet corner of the scrapyard and dig a hole—

—she heard metal creak and groan in the distance beyond the camp site’s impromptu perimeter, seemingly explainable by the presence of wind that would bat a chunk of twisted steel about like a stalk of grass.

Except that the light breeze was not nearly strong enough to do it.

All thoughts of relieving herself into a hastily dug hole vanished, fear gripping at her heart as her shotgun slid out of its scabbard and racked a shell into the chamber on instinct—

—a heavy thud sounded out from the other side of the sky wagon in front of her—labeled “Princess’s Pride” in faded standardized Equestrian—followed by what sounded like the chassis frame being physically peeled off—

—a massive, dark gray feathered griffon, his right wing held in place by a make-shift splint and bandage, bounded over the wagon’s roof in what looked like a running leap, his right talon already swinging downward to swipe at her. And in that brief moment when time seemed to slow to a standstill, when it felt like she could make out every detail of his body in exquisite detail, she spared a glance at his eyes…and saw a world of hate and fury being directed strictly at her—

O-oh fu—

She had time, just barely, to start to backpedal away from him, to try and bring the shotgun up for a clean shot at his torso, but it was already too late for that. His talon’s claws slashed at her head, just above her left eye, and raked down across her face, the prickling sensation on her skull giving her eyelid just enough warning to smash shut before the hit—

She felt the left half of her face suddenly explode in blinding, fiery pain. Even her eye seemed to scream in agony along with her voice as she found herself howling and screaming, losing her hold on her shotgun and stumbling onto her back in her blinded efforts to put some distance between them.

“Not quite like clipping a wing, but it’s a start,” the griffon’s voice roared angrily through her screaming, his body thumping into the ground hard enough to send a slight tremor through the earth beneath them.

It was his voice that brought back some of her focus, that gave her something other than blinding, intense pain to fight through as she began to recognize this griffon. This animal.

Saurus.

Her other eye, undamaged, forced itself open, and she glared upward through a slightly off-centered view of the world—

She remembered Saurus being quite a bit more…robust, in his appearance…but with only one eye to see through, the world as a whole looked quite a bit flatter than usual. She still recognized his face, his eyes, that large pistol with the open-top slide and its exposed stainless steel barrel that, at this distance, now looked to be a 9mm-sized bore—

“You’re lucky you didn’t blow my wing off,” he snarled, stalking towards her on all fours, a black rifle slung across his back jiggling slightly to his movements. “Or I’d be pulling that eye out with my beak. I’d make you my bitch if I thought I could keep you penned in, but you’ve just pissed me off enough to make me not care about getting some on the side. Maybe that little shit of a filly instead—”

She had a brief mental image—one that infuriated her far more than those savages she’d blown apart in the rain. One that showed this animal, this thing, pinning her precious treasure onto the ground as she struggled against his violence—

KILL HIM!!

An explosion of pure, savage rage emboldened and energized her frightened frame, turning her magic into a barely-thought of process that seemed to know what she wanted before she did it. The eroded metal barrel became a projectile, flung towards the sadistic griffon with such speed that he was startled into a halt and hastily knocked it aside before it could smash into him.

In the time that it took him to do that, her shotgun had zipped back into her magical grasp, the bead sight focused on the obscured griffon and waiting for a clea—

—her ears perked upward at the sound of bare hooves clopping against the ground, rushing towards her from behind the wrecked Princess’s Pride and heading for an opening at the far corner—

—she swung the bead sight off towards this new threat as she bolted for better cover, waiting until the last moment to be sure she was shooting at a threat—

A grungy-maned earth pony mare bearing a 9mm pistol in a mouth-bit grip harness sped around the edge of the camp site perimeter, five yards away, her roughly-hewn, tattered vest showing no sign of any body armor beneath it—

She squeezed the trigger back on the shotgun, the muffled blast surprising her almost as much as the rough, ragged patch of ripped metal that marked the buckshot’s actual impact point. Cursing her half-blinded sight, she worked the shotgun’s forearm and attempted a second shot, holding off when the savage mare ducked back behind the Princess’s Pride—

Two more shots rang out from behind, beyond the camp site, and smacked into the Princess’s Pride in a “walked” pattern behind Saurus as he ran for cover himself—

Sling finally made it to the edge of the perimeter herself, leapt through the pony-sized gap where the overturned sky wagon’s passenger doors used to be in a past life, and planted herself against the frame on the other side—

“Light Tail, run!!!!” she screamed in terror, her magic briefly shifting to her travelling saddle, jerking at the zippers that attached the saddle bags to the harness—

The bags fell off onto the ground, and though their enchantments nullified much of the weight within them, that wasn’t the point. It was simply much easier to move about quickly without those things on her side. She’d learned that the hard way.

“Run where?!” El-Tee screamed back in clear panic from the maze of warped metal and bones. “There’s five of ‘em—oh sh—”

A burst of gunshots bellowed out before her daughter could finish her first swear word of panic, and Sling felt her heart twisting and tearing in ways she’d never thought possible. Frantic, she risked a peek up over the chassis, hoping to catch sight of either Saurus or this new mare “hireling” of his—

Saurus’s body rose up over his cover twenty yards away, his arms leveling a black rifle that reminded her sharply of Ada’s and squeezing off a pair of quick shots at her as gunfire off to her left began to ring out in a steady pattern of shots from seemingly two sides—

—two metallic pings zipped through her cover, culminating in a pair of tear holes on her side of her cover that showed just how protected she really was against his rifle—

—she answered back with three shotgun blasts—at the distance she was shooting from, the buckshot pellets were able to spread out and cover a larger area the size of a pony’s chest, but he was quick enough to duck back into cover before the second blast—

The mare finally drew enough courage to charge at her again, coming out from behind the Princess Pride and squeezing off a shot in passing as she tried to get around Sling’s cover to finish her off up close—

She let off her fifth and last shell in the gun, missing her target by a hair, as at close range buckshot was compacted much like a solid slug round and had almost no spread to it. Faced with a charging, armed mare less than ten feet away and an empty shotgun in her own magical grasp, she briefly contemplated bashing the mare’s face in with the taped-off hook end of the sawn-off stock—

—she dropped the weapon instead, flinching as the mare fired off a second shot that twanged into the wagon’s front end—

—the pistol failed to cycle completely—she saw the weapon jerk within the mouth-bit grip as the empty brass casing got caught in the ejection port mid-cycle, a simple stovepipe malfunction that she could clear in less than a second. But this earth pony mare didn’t have the magic to accomplish that clearance with that speed.

The mare’s eyes widened in stark terror as Sling burst forward, her forelegs reaching up and pulling the savage back towards her before roughly shoving her into the side of the wagon. She followed up with a pair of solid blows to the side of her head as she tried to struggle out of her grasp, then threw her onto the ground and unconsciously ripped her newly appropriated knife from its sheath—

—you can do better—

Her daughter’s words saved this savage at the last second, and the knife’s drop-point, seven and a half-inch blade was flipped over in favor of the hilt’s backside, clobbering her attacker into unconsciousness in a single blow—

“Mom behind you—”

This mercy was not extended to this new threat—she barely had time to register her daughter’s warning when she heard the hooves behind her, running up to her without firing a shot—

—she whipped around, blade end facing outward, and drove the entire blade into the throat of a pale orange unicorn stallion before he could bring his crudely-forged sword down upon her spine. The pale yellow glow of his magic vanished and dropped his weapon—

—Saurus’s rifle began barking at her from across the campsite, ripping into her cover and nicking the back of her hind legs—

—she caught the unicorn stallion’s falling body in her forelegs, bringing it around to face the griffon as she drew her 10mm pistol and pushed it past the bloody neck, using his lightly armored body as her new cover as she began to unleash a steady stream of slugs—

—even through her reduced field of vision, she could make out bits of flesh, fabric and blood popping up out of the dead stallion’s backside as they exchanged fire, and she pulled the body with her as she hopped away from her shot-up cover, trying to escape from the camp site’s perimeter barricade—

—he stopped shooting, ducked back behind his cover, and she dropped the dead stallion and bolted away, barely remembering to take her knife with her—

—she spotted Light Tail huddled behind an upside down wagon, one empty magazine on the ground next to her and another one being flicked out of her 9mm pistol as she frantically tried to get a third one into the gun. Across from her was a maze of wreckage, some of it little more than ruined engines pulled out of their home sky wagons and dismantled for parts lifetimes ago, and at least two more threats trying to kill her and her night light.

One of them—a scruffy-looking griffon with pale gold feathering and a tan body, was raising a 10mm SMG over the top of his position, unleashing short bursts of four to nine rounds in Light Tail’s general direction. While he had sufficient cover from El-Tee’s position, he was partially exposed on his left flank as Sling galloped into this part of the firefight, and she took advantage of it with a string of fire from her pistol—

—the slide locked open after the fourth shot, but three rounds punched into the griffon’s left side. His arm slackened and slid off the side of the engine he was using for covering, dropping the SMG as he slumped in place and grasped at his mortal wounds.

Light Tail had barely reloaded her pistol when she was picked up off of the ground by her mother’s magic, pulling her along with her as she made a mad dash for the edge of the scrapyard. The fewer directions they could come at her from, the better—

A burst of automatic fire smacked into the dirt behind her, spurring her into running faster, darting left and right and deftly edging her way through the maze of dead sky wagons, before finally coming to the edge of the mess. A lone commercial passenger craft, built to accommodate many souls within it for lengthy travels, had half sunk into the ground many decades ago and was preciously exposed for much of its remaining visible topside. But the back end, where the engines were housed, remained more than tall enough to hide a pair of terrified ponies in the midst of a honest-to-Luna gunfight, and she firmly threw herself up against the chassis frame before finally letting go of her daughter.

The shaking, trembling filly had trouble finding her legs, and settled for crawling up to be next to her mother as she fished out a fourth—and final—magazine from her travelling saddle. “M-mama—”

Her exceptional rage had begun to subside, leaving her exhausted-yet-energized for the next burst of gunshots, and the sound of her daughter’s crying, choking voice spurred her motherly instincts into trying to soothe the terrified thing into a calmer state of mind. “Ssshh, ssssh, it’s okay, I’m here,” she tried to say calmly, nuzzling her child across her face. “I’m right here. Where’s the other one?”

“I-I…I don’t know!” she sobbed, her body continuing to shake as she tried to get up to her hooves. “I don’t know, there were three of them, and I heard you scream and I pulled the gun on ‘em…and they seemed surprised or somethin’ they didn’t do nothin’, not ‘till I turned around and shot at that big griffon to make him move…and then they got some sense back in ‘em and started pullin’ guns on me, I barely got time to warn you before they started shooting an—”

Her hind legs suddenly began to part slightly, her tail hiking involuntarily—

“—aaand oh crap I think I really gotta go no—”

Oh fu—

She barely had time to lift the filly off and away from her, further back, before the poor thing lost it, and she turned her attention back towards the center of the scrapyard to see if Saurus or the other unknown threat were making their way through to her. And to give her frightened, crying child a moment’s peace to let her fear run its course.

In the minute that it took for Light Tail to suffer in humiliation, she was able to get a rough count of remaining munitions organized in her head. Three magazines left on her 10mm, a full cylinder in Grayhawk and five full reloads….her shotgun was still where she’d left it so that was useless to her….

….Light Tail had two mags left, twenty-six shots….

“—idn’t say anything about a kid bein’ with her!!” she heard a male voice growl out from somewhere within the scrapyard—

“I said there was a target I wanted dead!” Saurus roared back. “And I told you not to kill anybody else with her if you could help it, and you damn near screwed that up!!”

“Damn kid pulled a gun on us, knew how to use it! Drilled a hole in my leg, I didn’t sign up for this sh—”

A lingering whiff of hot urine began to creep into the air, just as a single gunshot rang out and put an end to the short argument in violent finality.

“…wha….was that what I think it was?” El-Tee heaved in deep, hard breaths, her saddlebags popping open.

Sling couldn’t bring herself to answer right away, still shocked at how callously Saurus seemed to regard the lives of others. “….oh, shit….”

“….hunh…yeah, it was,” the child stammered. A few seconds later she could hear her hooves begin to stumble forward, almost like a foal still learning to walk—

—a blood, placenta covered newborn, her mane and tail slickened and flat, struggling to even find a way to pull itself towards her as it mewed and cried in distress—

Her mouth went dry, cracking apart to speak the next horrifying words from her throat. “….honey, I need your help….”

“…no, Mom, d-don’t make me kill somepony please—” the child cried, still stumbling forward.

—its cries and its jerking, rolling movements to try and get its legs working stirred her exhausted body, suddenly drawn to this helpless, shrieking package of flesh that had been ripped from its comfortable, warm bubble and pushed out into a cold, unfamiliar world devoid of the steady heartbeat that had been its entire world—

“Honey, please…we won’t make it unless we work together…”

Light Tail had to fight herself, her senses and morality, in order to answer her. “….ma…mamaa, please—”

Fresh tears began to flow from her eyes, stinging the flaming cuts across the left side of her face. “I don’t want you to kill him. I’ll do that myself.”

“Then what do you need me for?!” Light Tail finally found the strength to scream back.

“I need you to…I need you to shoot at him so he stays put. I don’t care if you hit anything or not. I just want you to make him stay put, so I can get around him and at his side—”

Her words died in the air as Saurus emerged from the crude perimeter of the camp site in a manner that had her nearly wetting herself for a second time that day.

He came out walking upright, on his hind legs, with his rifle up and shouldered, ready to fire. His walk was ungainly, aided by only one wing…but he was walking, and with a superior view of his line of fire. There was no sneaking around him.

She’d seen this once before, too.

“….oh, fuck me….”

“…m-mom….what’s that mean….”

Fu—…oh shit shit shit—

Now caught between two equally uncomfortable positions (one of her own doing), she sought to put an end to at least one of them as quickly as possible. “…honey, shoot, now. Before he gets any closer. Shoot!”

She said the last word a little too sharply—Saurus’s hearing picked up on it almost immediately, and his rifle dipped around towards her—

—she bolted out from cover, heading left, raising her 10mm up and blazing away in his general direction in the hopes that he would focus on her—

—his rifle tracked her movement down to the tiniest muscle twitch, bellowing round after round at a moving target. Metallic pings and clods of dirt sprang up ahead of her as she ran—

—Light Tail’s pistol began barking out shots, coming precariously close to Saurus’s position, taking him off-guard and causing him to stop and take cover behind a sky wagon turned over on its side—

—her 10mm locked back on an empty magazine, which jettisoned out of the mag well with the push of a button to make room for the next one—

—caught in a cross fire between two shooters, Saurus took the incoming rounds in stride, only rising to pop off one or two quick shots at either of them before ducking back into cover. Light Tail didn’t want to move anywhere regardless, but Sling had been hoping to get a better shot at his side and was cut short of her goal. Her only cover was a broken-down engine, most of its innards ripped out, and there was simply too much empty ground between her and the firing position she wanted for her to risk making a run for it.

It was only about fifty feet, but against that rifle, it might as well have been the other side of the world.

The three exchanged sporadic fusillades over the next twenty seconds, and Sling was able to keep track of only her shots and Light Tails, and barely at that—she thought she’d counted eleven shots from Light Tail, but a break in her shooting caused her to wonder if she’d missed hearing two others. Her own round count was also off a bit—she’d initially counted nine, rose up to fire another three, and was shocked into a frantic dive when the “tenth” shot turned out to be number twelve and locked the slide back. With next to no time to line up a good shot, none of them were able to land a hit.

She shook the empty magazine out—for some reason it was sticking to the inside of the magazine well—and slapped her last one into the weapon, when she heard Saurus’s rifle click after just two shots at her cover.

She sprinted out of cover, squeezing off three rounds at his body as she dashed towards what looked like the storage trailer of a moving company, with a white silhouette of a pony with a packed-up box on its back against a black circle backdrop—

—her jaw swung loose from her face in shock at Saurus’s response to an empty gun—rather than duck back to reload and faced with the prospect of taking fire from an exposed flank, he chose to vault over his cover, rolling over in a sort of forward flip, and when he landed on the other side he had his pistol in both talons and was already shooting back at Light Tail, who had thought it best to open up on him with her last magazine while he was vulnerable.

He quickly found a way to put as much cover between him and Sling Shot as possible, and she panicked and began taking any shot that presented itself, to little avail. Within a few seconds the 10mm’s slide slung back and locked open, and in a shrieking fit she dropped the weapon and ran back towards the campsite perimeter, not willing to unleash Grayhawk’s firepower with her daughter so close to the line of fire—

—get the shotgun get the shotgun get him away from my baby—

She barreled past the gap that Light Tail had used to enter and leave the camp site, doing her best not to gag at the sight of a unicorn stallion's body and his spurting head wound sprawled across the ground, intending to dash on across towards her original cover and the shotgun she had left behind—

—Saurus’s body lumbered out into view in front of her just as she reached the other side of the camp site, his left talon lashing out and sinking its claws into her chest—

—her pained scream curled up into her ears as her magic reached out for the only viable weapon she had left at this distance, her knife whishing up in a crude slash—

—he lifted her up and slammed his head into hers, the cuts on her face flaring up once more and disrupting her hold on the blade—

—she felt a warm, metal pipe lightly brush up against her left side briefly before she heard three gunshots blaring into her ears, and three sharp, deep stings that tore into what she assumed to be one of her lungs and her stomach, because she suddenly found it hard to breathe…

….or to do much of anything. She felt pain inside her, pain in places she didn’t know she could feel pain in, and she felt the world…slipping….

….growing smaller…..

He dropped her, hard, but she barely registered the landing, struggling to even cry out in pain. She’d never been shot before….

…he stood over her, empty pistol, trying to swap out the magazine and finish her off….only…

….he looked hurt….bleeding from his left shoulder….

He glanced at her for a minute, then at something off in the distance….and then he vanished in an eye blink.

….or her eye had shut for more than a second, because she could see Light Tail shrieking at the sight of her, dropping her five-shot revolver and trying to get her attention….

She tried to talk, to say something. To say something that would make this heartbreak easier, to say “I love you” one more time….her vision blurred, wet and warm, and Light Tail’s face blurred into a swirling of colors….

…Luna….not like this…..please….

The color swirl vanished, and Sling Shot began to cry as she began to see the first time she’d seen her little girl—

—her forelegs, unbidden, reached out, gently scooted the screaming, crying newborn up against her chest, and its cries halted as it heard the familiar beat of her heart—

….not…like this….

She barely managed the breath to sob when her night light’s voice shrieked into the world, at a volume she’d never heard anyone cry at before, and her legs began to slacken as she lost the energy to move herself any further.

"KIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITE!! HELP MEEEEEE!!"

Comments

[CloudTwister]

*Logs on* Hmm lets see whats here.
Oh look a fallout equestria story updated.
Reads.
Oh. Oh dear.
This story is so good. Like filled with the problems of life and the wastes so I love it when the story makes you feel like you are invested in the lives of the characters.
Keep up the good work.

[Deathpony]

Please, please, please don't let her die, this chapter was really good but she can't die. I hope Kite saves her somehow, good chapter again

[KDarkwater]

4002659

There seems to be several ways the word "griffon" can be spelled, like "gryphon", or "griffin", or whatnot. I went with the method that flowed off my brain the best. :D But yes, I could have done a better job with Leon than what I've accomplished so far. When I conjured this pair into existence the idea was that Ada would be the more sociable of the two and therefore the one that would do most of the talking for them. So far, however, that's turning out to be far too one-sided, and I've a few ideas for how to break that mold I've set myself in. Now if I could just get away from World of Warcrack long enough to get the next chapter finished....

[platogkrone]

Ah, the Enclave. The (in my opinion) most interesting part of the wasteland.

Also, I never expressed it before, but... I was actually hoping that Sling Shot would eventually lose herself to the point of being completely insane, but still loving her daughter as much as always. I still think that it would make for a much more unique and interesting story.

[KDarkwater]

10335576
Interestingly enough, that was pretty much what the first draft of the story outline was--Sling Shot slowly and agonizingly slipping into raider-level madness in an effort to keep Light Tail safe and eventually becoming a feared and very dangerous warlord...which pushes Light Tail into running away from her mother to flee her murderous lifestyle and which pushes Sling into full-on insanity. The final short arc would have been a ten-year time jump in which a grown-up Light Tail leads a combined force of mercenaries on an assault on her mother's lair to put an end to her madness. Dark, depressing stuff...perhaps too dark for my tastes, I decided.

The second outline draft had the pair making it almost to the Equestrian wasteland in Kkat's original story, but Sling dies shortly after a nasty fight with another wastelander, leaving Light Tail to face the rest of her journey alone. This was as far as I'd planned that particular version before scrapping it.

The third outline is actually the one I wished I had gone with. The Merchant Union figured much more prominently into the story and had total control of the entire prairie, not just half of it. This version was more of a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk/Shadowrun-like setting, with Sling having to navigate through the Union's various trading companies and caravans to eke out a living for herself and Light Tail. Kite appeared as a doctor for one of the larger trade companies, but without a child.

Then I made it to story draft outline four, and that was what I had up until around chapter 16-17. As I slowly slogged through the chapters over the last four years, I've come to realize that outline #4 was no longer interesting me enough for me to want to stick through it, and so I started rebuilding it up from around chapter 17-18 while I continued to plug away at the subsequent chapters in the meantime. I've been really, really slow with both processes, but I think I've come to an acceptable compromise. The current plot outline doesn't go full-on cyberpunk, but elements of that third version will start creeping into the story and the Merchant Union will be a larger part of it than originally intended. They were originally going to be rendered almost inoperable after a devastating war with the slaver guilds, but this would only come out as background or expository plot points over the course of the story. The end of the Union-slaver guild war would be set around the same time as Kkat's story, in order to time it with the Enclave invasion. The Merchant Union's war was to leave a power gap that would see the prairie end up in a much wider-scale war between the east and west halves and which invites the Pegasi Enclave to spread their invasion plans to encompass the prairie to take advantage of the chaos. While interesting from an "epic scale" perspective, it's not something I felt I could have done adequately, given how confusing Kkat's story gets around the end with all of the forward-and-backward plot jumps and whatnot.

The only constant in every outline has been the prairie itself. It's loosely based on the state of Kansas--references to the real life locations of Fort Riley, Topeka, and Wichita should be obvious, and the Union-slaver war plot line was a reference to Kansas's pre-statehood nickname of "Bleeding Kansas". The setting itself was inspired mainly by Fallout Tactics, which takes place in the American Midwest from Chicago down to St. Louis and westward through Kansas before ending in Colorado. The story was never intended to have characters running around in the same world space as Littlepip and her entourage. Never felt right, really. Easier for me if I don't have to constantly reference the original story for details, or at least that was the hope before I looked at the date I originally started posting this story and realized that I am a colossal failure at deadlines. @.O

[platogkrone]

10335874
I wasn't thinking that insane, just... Perpetually half-way there, with Light Tail being her Morality Chain and having to regularly rein in her worst impulses.