Fallout Equestria: Old World Dreams

by KDarkwater

Chapter 24

24

Of all the ways to defeat a hungry horde of kinda dead ponies, singing Hilda and Mulligan songs and soothing their souls into submission was one of those “WTF” moments, or at least that’s what Rally was saying for the rest of yesterday when it was all over. She still whacked her on the ear for that, ‘cause she’d finally figured out what the F part of that three-letter word stood for and since nobody would tell her what that word meant and got really nervous and had these ‘oh crap’ looks on their faces when they said it she figured it was a really bad word that they knew they shouldn’t be using.

It didn’t do anything for the near-hero worship the Runners were showering her with afterward. They really liked her before, but now it was like “Songstress Light Tail” or “Light Tail the Zompony Soothsayer”. They kept asking her what made her so crazy that she would even consider that a good idea, or how she had any confidence that it would work. She didn’t have any answers for them, only an incredibly important need to go talk to Mom and make her make the Runners give her a little space and peace and quiet and stuff.

She just wished Ada and Rico had picked somewhere else to stay the night besides the once-infested-and-haunted ruins of the ministry place where all those zomponies had come from. Never mind that they’d all crumbled to dust and withered away to the point that there was no sign they’d ever been there. It didn’t make her feel any safer being in a place where hundreds of ponies had been cruelly murdered and several dozen eaten alive. She didn’t sleep all that well at first and wound up squeezing into Rally’s sleeping bag just to have somepony trusthworthy to cuddle with and keep her safe, because Mom and Kite were in the next office down the hall. Rally had a blast trying out all the tech tools and oskiscope-somethings and a lot of other stuff she didn’t understand, but which caused Rally to make high-pitched squealing noises whenever she turned them on and found that they worked. It seemed like some of that stuff was going to work out great for helping keep her cyberleg in good shape. So…at least she was happy. And not freaking out. And not worrying about all the horrible things that had happened here.

Sometimes it sucked to care so much about life.

At least Rally didn’t snore, or complain about having a stupid scared little filly take up space in her sleeping bag and cling to her like a lost puppy. And it was…nice, to have something warm and soft and fuzzy in her grasp that wasn’t Max or Mona or Mom or whoever. What had been a difficult and trying evening trying to get some sleep became a much calmer and nicer snooze once she caved and just crammed herself into Rally’s sleeping bag. Mom would probably tell her to start growing up, but if she was going to be all cuddly and snuggy with Kite, then her words didn’t mean much.

So! Anyway! Morning came, whether she liked it or not. At first it was like every other morning. Wake up, beg for her brain to give up and go back to sleep, and when it failed to shut down, reluctantly leave the warm, secure sleeping bag and stretch a bit. The usual morning routine and everything that came with it afterward. She wound up coming back to the office she slept in with Rally and ate her ration there. It was only a half-hour into the morning when she realized that Mom hadn’t bothered her yet…

Her curiosity overrode her common sense and she went looking for Mom. Her first thought was that Mom had probably decided to just keep sleeping in, like she used to all the time back home in the Stable. Wouldn’t have been that big a surprise even after everything that had happened yesterday. Her second thought was that Mom was already awake and just prowling around, making sure there weren’t any other monsters or threats hiding somewhere. She wasn’t sure about Scenario #2—if Mom found nothing, then of course she would hear nothing, but if Mom found something she’d have heard gunshots before now. She hadn’t heard any gunfire, or explosions, so she hoped that meant good things.

Going on the assumption that Scenario #1 was much more likely, she opted to check the office next door and make sure that Mom was either; 1. Still sleeping soundlessly, or 2. Actually awake and either eating breakfast or doing something else, somewhere else.

She had not mentally prepared herself for the third possibility that Mom was awake but doing something else in that room. And so it was that when she opened the door unceremoniously and without announcement and invited herself in, that was exactly what she found.

Mom.

With Kite.

Buried under wool blankets, using their sleeping bags as mattresses.

Doing….something. Kissing? Or…

Something awkward and really, really private and not for the eyes of anypony, especially those of a ten and three-quarters old filly who’d only just two days ago figured out that Kite was…smitten, with Mom.

Curse her luck and her stupid little voice, she just had to go and say something.

“Ma…maaaooooom what are you doing?”

Mom’s body, though obscured by the blankets draped over her and Kite, jerked suddenly in place and then froze, her head snapping back at the door with this really wide-eyed “OH CRAP” look on her face. Kite was just struggling not to laugh out loud and wound up plugging her mouth up with her forehooves, though she stayed still underneath Mom otherwise.

“I uhhhh….I’m….uhhmmm…K-Kite…a…a little help here…please…please help me explain this.”

Light Tail simply stood there, agape and flabbergasted and confused and everything.

When Mom said nothing after a full ten seconds, Kite had finally managed to stifle enough of her amusement to give an answer that wasn’t a dodge or a screaming order. “Elly, close the door.”

She probably meant that as “leave and close the door”, but El-Tee numbly did exactly as she was told and closed the door behind her. “…’kay, door’s closed what are you doing?”

Mom’s eyes shrank into pin-prick irises, though Kite just snickered for a couple of seconds. “…okay, should have told your broken brain to leave first, my bad, but I suppose some explanation is in order. Unless you can figure it out in the next ten seconds.”

“Kiiiiiiiite,” Mom whined and warned simultaneously, though her exceptional nervousness made her words a little less…impactful, or something. She didn’t care, she just wanted an explanation that wouldn’t make her brain explode.

“Oh come on, she deserves something for her trouble. And if you don’t tell her, I will.”

Kite realized her mistake almost immediately—which was about when Mom made the most of it. “Fine then all yours.”

Kite’s eyes finally lost their mirth and regarded Mom with the disdain she’d show a misbehaving child. Like herself. “Oh, for the love of…fine, you big baby, but you’re going to pay me back for this. Elly, you are aware that when two ponies love each other, they may want some…private time, with each other, yes?”

The puzzle started piecing itself together in her brain, piece by piece—heck, it even made clicking sounds in the process! Mom. And Kite. And Kite smitten with Mom. And Mom kinda smitten with Kite. And now they were alone, in this room, and…

…it clicked suddenly. So very suddenly. As in click, click, BOOM hooolleeee—

I just walked in on them getting freaky and lovey and oh HOLY HORSEFEATHERS—

“AaaaaaHHHH YOU MEANT LEAVE AS I CLOSE THE DOOR SO YOU CAN KEEP HAVING FUN OKAY OKAY I CAN DO THAT HAAAHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA—”

She didn’t know how she managed to do exactly that so quickly—like, one second she was in there, with Mom and Kite, and the next she’d simply appeared in the hallway and tried to slam the door and leave Mom and Kite alone so they could do all the freaky things they wanted for as long as they wanted and she didn’t want to be there anymore only she couldn’t because she felt a cool, slightly tingling sensation wash over her and she realized that Mom was dragging her back in with a telekinesis spell and she didn’t want to go back—

“—aaawwait wait wait wait leggo leggo I don’t wanna sta—”

But Mom wasn’t having any of that. If anything, the moment her body was flipped around sideways, Mom just started…

…it was a weird sound. Like, a squeal and a shriek, and happy, all at once, and she just jumped out of the sleeping bag and started hopping towards her like an uncoiling spring—

“Oh oh oh oh OH OH OH LIGHT TAIL LIGHT TAIL HONEY LOOK LOOK LOOK—”

She heard the word “look”, from a mare that sounded like Mom but was way too happy and cheerful and bubbly, but she saw the forehoof pointing at her body somewhere, so she just started scoping out any part of her body that might have something stuck on it, like her sides, or her tail or h—

The world beyond froze in time when her eyes swept over her hindquarters, and when she didn’t move from her statue-frozen posture for a couple of seconds she felt Mom’s magic putting her down on her four hooves, but she didn’t really care about escaping anymore.

Her hindquarters, having always been blank and filled with nothing but her coat color, were now adorned with a rite of passage that all fillies and colts strived for.

A cutie mark.

Hers, to her eternal delight, had a black eight-point compass rose as a background. In the center of the rose was a brilliantly shining heart made of either crystal or diamond, almost like it was a piece of jewelry. The heart itself had a crack on its lower left surface, and a thin layer of crimson was seeping from it. Like…blood? Weird, but…

…but she didn’t really care because all she could see on her butt right then was that cutie mark that she thought she’d never get and now she had one and today was just going to be SUPER AWESOME and she had to lift her hind leg up and curl it towards her a bit to get a better look at it and it was probably a good thing that nobody was around to see her eyeballing her hindquarters like this but—

“SWEET CELESTIA WHEN DID I GET THAT IT’S SO AWESOME FINALLY FINALLY YES YES YES YES—”

“YES YES YES YES!!” Mom squealed with her, scooping her up and throwing her onto her back as she started hopping out of the room and into the hallway. “You got your butt tattoo at last, you get to be lazy all day and do nothing today I’m not joking we’ll figure out some kind of party later but YES YES YES!!”

“LUNA’S MOON MY BUTT MARK IS AWESOME I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IT MEANS BUT I WANNA SING SOMETHING—”

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The only thing worse than Elly screaming like the little girl she was…was Sling screaming like one too.

To hear both at once was…a Really Bad Sign.

With a snarl and a hissed curse at the wasteland gods, BJ stumbled out of his sleeping bag and struggled to walk in a straight line towards the door of the office he’d hid in for the night to escape yesterday’s insanity. Zomponies that wouldn’t die? Elly singing to the damn things, and find it actually WORKED? And then the world went WOOSH! with some kind of surge of magical energy and suddenly everybody was hopped up on a sugar and caffeine high from hell? No! None of that! That was his limit. He grabbed a sleeping bag, two fleece blankets to use as pillows, and locked himself in the first unclaimed office space he could find once they’d settled on spending the night in the Ministry complex and refused to acknowledge the world for the rest of the day.

Maybe he was gonna have to extend that to this morning too. With the racket that Sling and Light Tail were making, he was pretty sure everyone in the building could hear those two no matter where they were at. And sure enough, when he barged out of the office and zeroed in on the source of the commotion, it looked like the two had attracted a hell of a following. He could see Rally’s head poking out from another office, and then there was Mom’s head staring at Sling’s backside as the crazy stable mare hopped down the hallway in his direction with a crazed, gleeful and cheerful smile on her face and it was honestly TERRIFYING—

“A frolicking band of fillies we, who grew tired of boring history—”

No. Oh gods no, it wasn’t Really Bad, it was A REALLY BIG BAD. Sling and Elly singing together in joyous unison as their madness to—

--Sling Shot’s body hopped past him momentarily, and he dared to chance a look up at Elly…and saw something that had not been there yesterday.

A cutie mark on Elly’s butt. It had some kind of heart made of diamond or crystal on top of a compass rose, and the heart was cracked and bleeding a little, and it was weird looking, but did so much to explain their sudden descent into gleeful madness.

“—were trotting about in truancy when we ran into angry bees!”

He didn’t even wait for them to get out of sight or turn a corner. He just zipped back into the room and slammed the door shut, and buried himself back under his sleeping bag and wool blankets, the only shelter available to shield him from Insane Day #2. “Nope nope nope nope nope not dealing with this shit.”

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

A fleeting glance at her checklist of the haul from the Rain Song facility only served to remind her how close she had come to losing the most important things in a pony’s life.

Misty, still weak and ravaged by the zompony curse that had been laid upon her, was lying in the sheltered cargo wagon draped in a blanket and sleeping bag as though she was attempting to escape a terrible cold. Her vital signs had improved noticeably since yesterday afternoon, but that by itself did not bring her comfort. If not for the day’s work ahead of them, her caravans would already be high-tailing it back home. Sling had been inclined to let them leave, but…

Ada had the right call, even if it put one of her ponies at risk. There was simply too much valuable salvage to leave unguarded now that the facility’s defenses had been more or less permanently disabled. Maybe three ‘bots were left in working condition—a Handy model, a combat sentry ‘bot that had thankfully never powered itself up in yesterday’s chaos, and some kind of bi-pedal prototype model that had everypony mystified. The rest had all been rendered inert, either by the backlash wave or by the central controller mainframe being hit by it. These alone—even dismantled—took up two of her ten wagons. The bi-pedal prototype was coming back home with her expedition, much to Rally’s disappointment, but she had no objections to leaving the other two behind.

Then came the weapons and ammunition, and by gods was this place loaded. The test lab in particular had better weaponry than what had been available to the security team, and might have made a difference in the survivors’ odds had they thought to use them in the hours after the megaspells. Some of this haul was being left with Sling’s party, and some of it was coming with them.

A few minutes prior to midnight last night, they discovered the most important and valuable find they had ever made since they’d started exploring the surface world.

A Steel Ranger power armor suit.

Or what remained of it, anyway. It was missing most of its component pieces, meaning it wasn’t sealed against environmental hazards like radiation, chemical weapons, and diseases. And a few servomotors had frozen up and needed to be replaced—not that the suit would have taken anyone anywhere even if the internalized servosystem had been pristine, as the suit’s onboard power source had gone dry roughly a century ago and needed to be replaced. But even in its damaged and non-functional state, it was a highly valued prize, and at first there had been something of a tense argument about who would lay claim to it, since Sling had already been promised the Alicorn’s Star and half of its spare power cells. Some of her people had been ready to take the power armor by force if necessary, and Ada wanted to keep it for her team and trusting Rally’s unhidden and unbridled giddiness to fix it in the near future. The facility had the tools and equipment necessary to repair and maintain the armor, though moving all of this equipment regardless of its ultimate destination would take up four of her wagons, and would slow their travel speed significantly. Citrus had thought it worth the trouble.

But she gave it up, in the end. If Ada was going against Chief Virgil’s wishes and going solo in getting Withercha back under the control of its residents, she was going to need every possible advantage to succeed. A half-hour she’d spent with Rally cataloguing and organizing the equipment in one of the tech labs had convinced her that the teen had taught herself enough about MEW tech that she could reasonably wing the rest of it so long as she didn’t take stupid risks, and ultimately surrendered the power armor and its associated equipment and maintenance tools to Ada and Sling. The armor’s power core was intact and hot, but some of the relays in the armor itself needed replacement, and it only had the torso component and one right front leg component. Additionally, only two of the eight sets of underarmor bodysuits found in the power armor’s test lab fit Sling, so they would need to be careful with them. And she didn’t want her expedition slowed down on the trip home. Misty was alive now, but she needed medical attention and she needed it as soon as possible.

That hadn’t gone over too well with her expedition. Losing both the Alicorn’s Star and the first working suit of power armor they’d ever found in the wasteland was almost a slap in the face after what happened to Misty. Had Leo not found the blueprints and a full technical data sheet on the Alicorn’s Star and its MF Breeder cells they might have up and tried to take the whole haul by force and hightailed it back home—and she couldn’t have blamed them for it. Two wagons’ worth of experimental guns, ammunition, and three souls who had actually lived in the Equestria Before was a poor reward for all the risks they had endured yesterday, to say nothing of Misty’s survival still potentially at stake.

They were compensated, mostly, by the claim to the cache of MEW weaponry in the security armory, most of the spark battery cells, and a small manufacturing cell with a complete suite of machinery and equipment necessary to produce a MEW weapon, though Ada insisted on a meaningful amount of batteries for the five MEW weapons that Sling’s group had. In addition to Rally’s laser rifle and Light Tail’s Lightbringer pistol, Kite had kept two plasma guns and an AER-12 laser rifle from the two wagons’ worth of loot she had “inherited” from her attempted murderers in Trotpeka. An AER-14 prototype in the facility had at first brought Rally to uncomfortable levels of glee, and then to near heartbreaking levels of sadness when Rico had claimed it for her expedition team. The kid was placated slightly by a couple copies of Tomorrow’s Technology, Today! magazines that had detailed articles on it back when it was being touted as the potential replacement for the AER-12, in direct competition with the AER-12 Mark IV Improvement Program. The -14 offered power and range, while the Mark IV -12s touted an insane versatility and modularity previously only seen in ballistic firearms. But it would take a room stuffed of MEW tech and electronics testing and diagnostic equipment to give her enough to obsess over that the AER-14 would be pushed out of her mind for a bit. Her obsession with MEW tech was getting uncomfortably unhealthy…

…sort of like a certain mare’s predilection for custom-grade firearms, and she had quite a haul to go through today. Those two were more alike than either of them cared to admit. How long until they found out they had the same birthday too?

…probably three minutes, Rico pondered fearfully, finally looking up from her checklist at the chaotic scene before her. With the Rain Song facility’s defenses more or less a no-go thanks to the surge of magical energy ruining their ancient and degraded circuits (along with almost all of the security bots), Ada had opted to activate the Runners’ back-up stronghold in the southwestern corner of the city. On the surface level, it was an old, but sturdy, city fire department firehouse, minus its three assigned fire engines (likely having been sent out to respond to the chaos of the Last Day), and had three floors and lots of space for a platoon of Runners to make a base of operations out of it. It had been fortified over the years with sandbag barriers and two-inch steel plates over its windows, and concertina wire was being added to the sandbag barriers that ringed the firehouse, as well as the outer perimeter of the property itself, to discourage any attempts to charge the place head-on. The garage doors for the fire engines were surprisingly thick and heavy, almost like blast doors, and while the power grid for the area was non-functional, the doors themselves could be manually operated and proved immensely helpful for giving them the room they needed to park the wagons and offload their cargo.

And anyone with even half a brain could take one look at Sling and Kite and guess at how the two had spent a portion of their morning before their departure from the Rain Song complex. Sling was moving about like she was on a cloud, exceptionally chipper and happy and just glowing with positive feelings and vibes. Kite was…less bubbly, but she didn’t have that rough, sharp edge to her mannerisms and body language that spoke of a harshly-lived life.

And then there was Light Tail, whose childhood dream of a cutie mark had finally come true and rendered her a hyperactive bundle of energy and uncontrolled velocity speeding about the place at random intervals until something finally intervened to put a stop to her, and inadvertently found out the circumstances under which the filly had discovered said cutie mark.

That something turned out to be Rally, who did not appreciate being the one to have to calm down a little girl having witnessed a very private moment, and she made sure Sling knew it.

“Next time save it for a room, would you?” the teen sneered at her impromptu guardian as the two were pulling a crate out of her number four wagon from her caravan. Sling used her magic, while Rally was content to simply lift the thing with her cyberleg and awkwardly follow Sling’s lead on her other three legs.

“We were in a room!” Sling protested back, slightly defensive, but a little laugh in her voice spoke to the possibility that her thoughts were already streaming back to her time alone with her new lover. “I just…forgot to lock it. I thought she’d be hanging around you most of the morning.”

“She has been! I only got away ‘cause she finally crashed from all the excitement of her cutie mark and walking in on her parent getting laid and by the way YOU WERE JUST AS CRAZY!”

“Why wouldn’t I be?! She’s been driving me mad with her constant cutie mark crusades since she was six! Now I only have to worry about the rest of her childhood growing pains!”

“Like this blubbering nonsense she was slipping into when she was turning in for a nap? Something along the lines of “ISWEARIDIDN’TSEEANYTHINGIJUSTWANTEDTOLETMOMANDKITEKEEPINGHAVINGTHEIRGROWNUPFUN?! She looks like’s she been driven insane!”

“She’s got a wild imagination, maybe she was involuntarily imagining what she thought was happening when she couldn’t see—”

“By Celestia that’s even worse! Your stable has screwed up the both of you on this stuff, I oughta find her a naughty magazine or four and sh—”

“You do anything of the sort and I’ll turn them into a fire pit and roast your mane and tail over it!” was Sling’s final, angry, and violent rant, at which point both of them stopped mid-step and glared at each other very angrily with bared teeth, like hungry predators fighting over a fresh kill.

This lasted for about three seconds, and then they both simultaneously released their angry faces and burst out into roaring laughter, and Rico’s brain stuttered a little. The pseudo-parent and the yearling, arguing playfully over the little filly’s messed-up sex ed (or complete lack of it) from her stable school? Was everyone here born a screwball?!

“Okay, no, I seriously wouldn’t do that,” Rally laughed as she hoisted the crate back up and nudged it about a little as she tried to find a good weight balance on her three remaining legs. “Even if she’d learn far more from it than she’d ever learn from you.”

“She won’t, on account of the fact that I took the two you had out of your saddlebags when you weren’t looking,” Sling mocked in return with an unsubtle wink before she lifted her end of the crate up in a field of her magic and resumed their journey.

“You did wh—oh gods that’s what happened to those things!? I thought I’d left them behind at the Runners’ base you big jerk what’s the idea going through my stuff like that?!”

“Light Tail was going through your stuff when I stopped her and she nearly found them. Lucky for the both of you that I did first. You can have them back when you’re eighteen.”

“Can you make it fifteen instead? My birthday’s only a few months out.”

“Define “few”. Light Tail’s is in…” and here, Sling had to pause and look up the date on her PipBuck, and her eyes shot open almost immediately. “Oh shit, not even three full months away. Are there any intact libraries in Withercha that you know of? Maybe we could scrounge up some Daring Do books for her.”

“So, her birthday’s in November?”

“November ninth, yes. Meanest four and a half hours of my life, labor and birth are a deep pain I cannot come close to describing.”

“…oh, wow, that’s so cool, my birthday’s like, a month after that.”

Sling stopped cold again, though she wound up getting smacked by the crate when Rally kept going for another second before she followed suit. “…wait, what? What day?”

“….the tenth of December? That’s the only thing I know for sure, from the shitty orphanage in Withercha that I came from…”

Sling’s eyes blinked slowly, as in disbelief, and Rico groaned inside her own mind at the realization that her sarcastic thoughts had just been confirmed to be spot on. “…oh my gods, my birthday’s on the tenth of December too.”

Now Rally’s eyes turned wide with shock as she shared in Sling’s disbelief. “….no ffuuaaaaaat the hell, are you actually serious right now? We have the same birthday?!”

“…well, everybody keeps saying how much alike we are, so…”

“Oooooh my gods this is not real! This is like, some sick joke or something, I finally find a grown-up that’s decent and won’t hurt me and takes me in and shit and she has the same birthday I do what the hell?!”

“…well, at least I won’t forget now,” Sling murmured. “…not sure that I could find you a gift that wouldn’t have you doing age-inappropriate things if your reactions to all the tech yesterday is your usual response.”

“Noooo no no nonono shut up shut up shut up!!” Rally squealed in rage. “Seriously shut up I don’t wanna talk about that I was just having a really weird day, what with the stupid zomponies and Elly singing opera songs to them and it actually worked and then there’s all this awesome and pristine MEW tech and the oscilloscopes and oh my gods I gotta shut up or I’m gonna have problems again—”

“Yes yes yes shut up shut up shutting up let’s talk about this again never!”

“Set it here?” Rally asked next immediately afterward, her indignant rage gone, somehow.

“Yes,” was the entirely calm and collected answer…

…though when they set the crate down next to the other two, the heat in their words came back in full force as they headed back to the wagons to retrieve another—

“Can I get my own room here at least?!” Rally demanded loudly, though there was a rather glaring lack of force behind her steps. “One with a lock?”

“Celestia’s suncheeks, n—”

“There’s three lockable rooms on the second floor, actually,” Rico interjected after taking a look at the crate they’d set down and seeing a crudely drawn “3” on its side, next to what looked like an equally crude drawing of a screwdriver and a gear. Tools and equipment, mostly. Total of five of these on that wagon, so this would be number three…

“Oh cool, I’m claiming one!” Rally chirped happily, even hopping about a little. “And don’t tell me I can’t because I know you and Kite are gonna claim one so you can do whatever you want to each other in private!”

“Nobody’s claiming anything!” Sling shot back. “We’ll draw straws or something, I don’t want an entire floor of our temporary home to be full of se—”

“We’re taking the one at the south end of the second floor,” Kite’s voice sang serenely from an office window overlooking the garage section. “And really, a fourteen-year-old girl should have her own room.”

Rico’s lungs heaved with despair and exhaustion. If they kept arguing about like this it’d take most of the daylight hours to unload the cargo—

“Did you not hear what I just said?!” Sling shrieked upward at her lover.

“I did,” Kite cackled in return. “I don’t care. In fact everyone is in agreement that we should be kept somewhere private and away from the eyes and ears of others, so I hope you’re well practiced in applying sound suppression spells to walls and doors. And a fourteen-year-old girl in the hormone-charged phase of her childhood wants her own room and space, so she gets it. We can work out where everyone will bunk for our stay here later. I’m gonna go put all our stuff up and get to work on getting our new one-stop clinic space set up and running. Rally, I may need your help for that in a bit.”

Kite’s head disappeared back into the darkened office and shut the window, and Rico stifled a laugh when she caught sight of Rally’s victorious expression. The teen even dared to rasp her tongue at the back of Sling’s head—

—which Sling caught and pinched slightly with a quick magical grab, turning the teen’s gloating into a painful grimace. “Ow ow ow ow—”

“Do that again and the rest of your meals today are military MREs,” Sling threatened casually, and Rally’s eyes shrank in terror at the prospect of food better served as an implement of torture. The teen nodded slightly for a moment before realizing that Sling couldn’t actually see her doing it—

“Owowow ‘ay ‘ay stahitleggo—”

The indigo spell field around Rally’s tongue disappeared, and her tongue snapped back into her mouth and started lapping around inside her jaws. “Ow. Ow. Ow ow oooowww…”

Rico’s sigh echoed back at her from the concrete floor beneath her hooves. “This day just keeps getting longer and longer…”

“I should hope so,” Sling’s voice pleaded aloud. “This has been the closest thing to a normal day I’ve ever had up here.”

Rico stifled her remaining complaints. If it brought an emotionally estranged mare with too many guns enough peace and quiet to be happy, then by god she’d deal with the feeling of time dragging its feet at a snail’s pace.

“…so how long are we gonna stay here?” Rally questioned her guardian. “Like, do you actually intend to live here permanently? ‘Cause this place’ll be too big without the Runners once we finish our business in Withercha.”

“That will depend on whether Rico can deliver on her end of our bargain,” Sling replied with an evil grin directed at her, and Rico cursed the stable pony’s existence. If MEW tech alone got the teen filly all riled up, she dreaded the reaction that would be triggered once she learned about this…

“What deal?”

“…I…may have promised Sling and Kite,” Rico began with a dreadful tone, her clipboard rising up to shield her from what would follow. “That I would…try to talk my stable’s leaders into letting you guys in, in exchange for your help with the Rain Song facility and in getting Withercha’s trade back under the control of its residents…”

The reaction was just as she feared. For a moment Rally just stood in reverent silence, and then a soft, tinny squealing noise began drifting into the dead air from her position and her tail began quivering slightly. Sling even had to cast a quick chilling spell on her to calm her down—

“Holy crap what’s with you today?!” Sling cried in exasperation. “…with everyone, actually, now that I think about it—”

“A side effect of the exceptionally unusual magical energies that were released yesterday,” Julaya’s voice creeped in from another of the wagons parked inside the garage. The zebra, for the moment, seemed to be occupying herself with sorting all of the wagon’s cargo by what belonged to Rico’s caravan and what was being unloaded. “At least, that is my suspicion. So much of what happened in Zulana’s lair was unique to that event. Her thrall spell, the totem she used to extend her spell’s control range, and the rune circle she inscribed on a whim, the use of the Alicorn’s Star against said totem, and the little tail of light’s impromptu singing that turned the dark, despairing veil of doom hanging about the air into such a positive vibe…all of that, combined together, at the time you destroyed the totem’s enchantments, released a very profound and unmatched wave of emotionally primal magic across the area that is appearing to have different effects on all involved. In your case, it appears to have dropped your inhibitions and compelled you to enjoy a night of carnal pleasures with your friend—”

Could have just been years of bottled tension suddenly snapping too, stripes. “It could just as well have been the build-up of stress, tension, and adrenaline clashing together, as crazy as yesterday got. The first time I got into a gunfight defending my caravan’s outer perimeter, I had so many thoughts and emotions running through me that the first thing I did when I got back to camp was to duck into the closest tent I could find and screw whoever was in there. Which turned out to be a mare and a stallion sharing a sleeping space. Cit was so mad at me I thought he’d divorce me, but he forgave me in the end. He hasn’t let me run the caravan without him since, though.”

“…that is so much more information than I ever wanted to know from an adult, I’m getting some air,” Rally squeaked quietly, and slowly slinked away through the open garage door and out of earshot.

Sling was not nearly as amused as the cackling zebra, though Julie paid the scowling mare little mind. “For the yearling, it appears to have heightened her already impossible levels of hormones and is beginning to break her self-control. I have noted a rather stark increase of hostility from Rico’s people, though that could also be attributed to the large collection of rare loot we have claimed from the facility. I, myself, am ever more eager to pounce and play with you, and I am already thinking of ways to coax you into it. And the Runners are…more juvenile than usual, and they are already quite childish when they are not working to begin with. Only Blue Jay appears to have suffered little, if any side effects.”

“That sounds like the usual where you’re concerned,” Sling sneered back. “And BJ is…well, he’s more open and talkative than he was when I first met him and his mother, but that’s mostly El-Tee’s doing. He seems to be a shuttered book, emotionally. If this magical backlash of yours was an emotionally-fueled event, it would make sense that someone like that would be the least affected.”

“A fair observation,” Julaya beamed proudly, as if she had just witnessed a student making a profound discovery borne of their own intuition. “I would suggest keeping the children under close watch for the next two days, and establish those sound suppressed spaces your new lover has begged for. Some of the Runners with us are…intimate with each other, for reasons besides boredom. This residual side effect may make them far less inclined to restrain their activities to private spaces and surrender to their passions wherever the mood strikes them. Putting them to work today may be enough, but tomorrow and the day after will be a different story.”

Sling’s mouth cut off its own foul curse as the first letter seeped out, and a foreleg lifted up and smacked across the concrete floor in frustration. “Just. What. I. Needed. A bunch of deadly mercenaries hopped up like horny teenagers. One’s bad enough.”

“I worry most for the little tail of light, actually,” Julaya said, her tone growing more worrisome. “She is a very empathic soul, and while I cannot surmise any unusual behavior from her, I know that the backlash has affected her in some way. I will watch when I can, but consider keeping her close to you. If nothing else, I will refrain from making any inappropriate advances on you in front of your daughter.”

“Make sure of it, or you’ll wake up in the afterlife and have no idea how you got there.”

“Ominous threat,” Ada’s voice quipped gleefully into their midst, slightly muffled, as the griffon shouldered through a hall doorway in the back of the garage. “I like it. But your day off is out of the question, I want you, Leo, and Rusty to head out and get in touch with the Life Givers. We need a steady supply of water if we’re gonna stay here for as long as we plan to, and they run the only two working water systems with an intact purification talisman. You three are the only ones I can trust to get the job done without stopping to mess with each other, seeing as how you’re all practically strangers to each other.”

“Water is good,” Sling mumbled, seemingly only slightly miffed that she wasn’t going to get to relax the way she wanted. “But a life-essential resource like that is bound to be on the Pythons’ list of things they want control of.”

“That’d be like committing suicide, but with others doing the dirty deed for you. The Life Givers are the most well-armed and armored faction in the Western Prairie, after us. And they’re notoriously neutral. They won’t take sides with anyone, not even against raiders. They won’t sell us out to the snakes, but they won’t fire so much as a bullet their way either unless it’s to protect their water systems. All they want is for everyone to have enough water to survive. Any excess water they have is used to trade for things they need. Food, ammo, meds, armor and scrap parts to repair their automated turret systems, shit like that. For the right price, they may even help us get this station’s water and plumbing systems in working order.”

“…what kind of price?”

“That’s what you three are going to find out. Get your gear and meet Leo and Rusty back here in ten.”

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

“So that’s four groups in Withercha now? The Scrappers, the Radical Angels, the…the Bullet Farmers really who comes with these names?”

“Ponies,” Leon replied pointedly. “You guys got the whole weird name shtick locked down tight. Sling Shot? Blue Jay? Light Tail? I could probably spout some silly nonsense like bookcase and find a pony with that name somewhere.”

The answer fled from her mouth before she could think to stop it. “Uhhh, that…that pony would be…right in front of you why did I just say that…”

Sling’s eyes darted down to her E.F.S. display, almost praying for the deadly appearance of red-marked hostiles to save her from this conversation, but no such salvation came. “…wait, are you shitting me? Your name’s actually Bookcase?”

FuuuuuuuuuuUUUUUUUU—

“Holy shitbaskets that is so wild and weird!” Rusty’s voice laughed at her expense, and she almost willed a surge of magic to burrow into the upturned, broken asphalt before her to dig herself a hole to hide in. “What, did your mom pop you out in front of one or something?”

With the harm long done, there was little risk in filling in the exact details of her first moments of life. “…y-yes, actually…”

A chorus of laughter from her soon-to-be-deceased griffon companions hounded her backside. “Oh wow, we are telling everyone that first chance we get—”

She stopped, spun around, and engulfed her horn in the brightest, angriest surge of magic she could conjure short of an actual casting of a spell—and thus, the normal indigo shimmer had become a bright and intense blue. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you over your inane cackling. It sounded something like ‘kill everyone behind you’.”

She could barely see their faces through the magic glow, but she felt a little better imagining their faces to be an expression of terrified and voluntary compliance and pleasure to do her bidding. “W-w-wait, did we say that? We meant to say ‘not a soul will know’!” Rusty’s voice assured her in a panic. “Right, dude?”

“Y-yeah, sure! Our little secret!” Leon agreed heartily (and loudly). “Not even Kite!”

She almost made the mistake of telling them that Kite already knew that, but stopped her tongue before she could snatch her little victory away. She spun back around and allowed her magic to disperse into the soft breeze, briefly mesmerizing herself with the sparkling flow of mana as it died out around her. “Ah. Thanks for clearing that up.”

“Crystal clear!” came the simultaneous cries of nervous assurance.

“Now tell me about the Life Givers,” she continued, her eyes scanning up and down the street for potential ambush points. Alleyways, distant windows from which a sniper would be perched behind, piles of junked, broken vehicles or hollowed-out ruins of old shops and businesses where a few miscreants could hide from plain sight. “Leadership, how they work, that sort of thing. Rico mentioned almost every faction with a trade resource except these guys, and if they were having the same kinds of problems as the others I think even you would have heard about it already.”

“Not much to tell about them, really,” Rusty answered with a heightened sigh of relief. “They’re led by a pair of minotaurs, one of the only ones in the prairie that don’t live with the main tribe in the northwest.”

Wait, what?! “I thought almost every sentient lifeform besides ponies and griffons might have died out or something.”

“Sometimes I wonder that myself,” Leon admitted. “But these two aren’t too keen to share much about the tribe. The brother handles most of the logistics part, so we hardly see him. The sister’s more or less the muscle and the visible face of the group. She can keep MEWs running and knows just about everyone in the city, real easy to get along with so long as you don’t threaten the water supply. She’s got this huge ass plasma caster gun that I swear was ripped off a tank or IFV, takes both of her hands just to carry it and it cuts through almost anything in one shot. Knows some strange magic, too, seen her cast lightning bolts on some raiders once and she could make it hit several of them at a time with some chaining combo shit or something. She’s probably the second or third most dangerous person in this town, after you and Ada.”

“Damn. But if she works with MEWs, she might just know where we could source some spark batteries too,” Sling surmised aloud. “Doubt she’ll give it up for free, though.”

“Let’s get our water set up first, then we’ll worry about finding energy cells for the five MEWs we do have. Couple more miles, take a right at the next intersection. The quickest point for first contact with them is a pump station. It’s surrounded by armed guards and turrets, can’t miss it.”

At least it’s fairly close to the safehouse, she noted as said intersection drew closer. Three miles, tops. Old maps of Withercha show the city stretching out over like, fifteen to twenty…

…well, the old Withercha. The one that was intact and not partially a balefire bomb crater.

True to his word, the Life Givers weren’t hard to find. She didn’t really know how an urban water system worked, but she assumed the building surrounded by almost fifteen heavily armed and armored ponies, zebras, and griffons to be connected to the system in some way, given that a hoof-painted wooden sign hanging off the side of the building read, “PUMP STATION SEVEN, LIFE GIVERS TERRITORY” in bold yellow. But the furrowed, uneasy glares of the guards put her on guard for potential trouble—

A griffon clad in black combat armor covered in pouches and straps, strode towards them with an analytical stare, keeping his right talon gripped tightly on the carbine strapped across his torso while he walked on the remaining three limbs. “Leo, Rusty, and…new blood? Don’t think I’ve seen this pony before.”

“She’s with us, Gar,” Leon greeted back. “You can lay off the kill stare.”

“After the freaky ass sky shit we all saw yesterday? Whole town’s on edge! Some poor saps near the old ministry got the only glimpse we know of and they didn’t like it. Somethin’ about gray ghouls moaning and shuffling around like they were hungry. None of the usual trade runs are even running today, everybody’s holed up ‘till we can get enough volunteers to go check it.”

“That was us,” Leon said flatly. “A salvage expedition wanted to get in and hired us as security, and we tripped on something better left alone. Everything’s good now, though. No ghouls. Dusted, all of them.”

Though Gar sounded a little relieved, he didn’t dare let go of his rifle just yet. “No shit? How?”

“Long story, no time to tell it today. We need to talk to Taurus or Saber, get our safehouse down south set up for water. We got work to do in the city and expect to be here awhile.”

Gar’s face lost its relieved, pleasant lines and shifted into a hardened, suspicious glare. “Go back and tell Virgil to go fuck himself. Called you guys for help once and we got hit with a contract demand so outrageous I’d have shot him if he’d given it in person.”

“…Rusty, what the hell did Virgil do while Ada and I were away?” Leon growled angrily.

“Got me, dude, this is news to me too,” Rusty replied apologetically. “Gar, what contract? Virg ain’t said shit about you guys asking us for help.”

“The contract that said the Runners were going to take a third of our water system in exchange for getting us the equipment we need to keep it going, along with a ten-thousand cap annual tribute for additional security assistance? That bullshit contract!?”

“Virgil has no idea what we’re doing here, yet,” Sling offered as way of hopeful appeasement. “He thinks we’re going after the Pythons’ main territory in the east side of the city, but we have no intention of doing that at the moment. We need water, so we can get to work getting everybody what they need to get their operations going again before the Union gets wind of how bad things are here and rush to take the whole western prairie.”

“You have any idea how bad things are, pony?”

“Bad enough that you tried reaching out to a merc group known for knocking over raiders and gangs on their own time without being paid to by anybody, instead of working with the other groups in the city who were a lot closer to you. Some of the Runners are here now, so let’s talk about what you need.”

Gar’s eyes flashed off of her momentarily. “This pony speak for you, Leo?”

“She does right now,” Leon answered. “Do you speak for Taurus and Saber?”

Gar’s hard, angry stare stayed locked onto them as he stepped back and let a sharp whistle loose from his beak. After a few tense seconds of silence, a door on the west end of the pump station swung open to allow the large, imposing figure of an earth-colored minotaur to stomp through and emerge into the cloud-covered daylight—

Oh my, she’s huge, Sling mewled silently as she took in her first gaze of a minotaur, the bi-ped creature straightening out into full height after having to duck under the doorway to squeeze through. While most ponies and griffons viewed clothing as optional, this minotaur seemed to believe otherwise, with tattered shorts and a stained, patched-up tunic of sorts with open sides, top and bottom. The minotaur’s overall build and structure seemed…lithe, but muscular, and more than capable of bending steel girders for amusement. The top half of the tunic covering the chest had a pair of rounded bulges underneath it, but which seemed restrained by some bandage wrap. The long, cow-like snout was marked with white stripes on each size of the muzzle, and the minotaur’s horns were a little on the short side, with the tips curled upward…

…and in the minotaur’s left, four-fingered hand was a six-barreled MEW gatling laser, held aloft by the overhand grip, looking much like a conventional minigun in the way it was built and laid out, but the lights and display panels on the main body were a dead giveaway as to the weapon’s true nature. And the amber-colored focusing lenses on the muzzle ends of the “barrels” helped too…

The minotaur barely missed a step once she had slipped outside and spied the foolish newcomers, and strode forward on two powerful legs until she was within ten feet of them, and that was when Sling realized just how truly massive this creature was, for the silly stable pony barely had the height to be eye-level with her belly….

“…the laser today, Taurus?” Leon’s voice greeted casually to the monstrous minotaur girl. “Something wrong with the caster?”

The minotaur girl’s response—or rather, Taurus—was a light, almost dismissive shrug of her shoulders as her low, deep voice boomed into the air. “Ehhh, just felt like a switch today. These type of gatling lasers are pretty rare these days, thought I’d let it see some action. So who’s the new blood scoping out my belly button?”

“That would be Sling Shot, the crazy pony,” Leon answered lightly. “I’m sure word of her has gotten around town by now.”

Taurus bent over and brought her face down to Sling’s to study it a little more closely, putting a healthy dose of fear and terror into the meekling pony she felt like she was right then. “Coooool, so that’s what she looks like. Way those Pythons jerks tell it, she was supposed to be this hyped up, battle-scarred magic mare that could blow people apart with a mana ball or something. Might wanna find another name to call her by in town, though. We might want to stay out of everybody’s business, but there’s enough starving folk out there who’ll throw her to those bastards first chance they get. Now, what business do you have with us?”

The word “business” brought Sling’s senses back to her, if only because Leon had just told Gar that she was doing the speaking for her small group here and she didn’t want to worsen their position in the coming water trade talks. “…w-water. We…need water. The Runners are activating a safehouse, a bit south of here. Plan to stay a while.”

“Ahhh, the old fire station base,” Taurus mused through pursed lips as she straightened upright again. “If memory serves, the underground pipes between here and there have an intact connection to this pumping station. Could get you set up with drinking water in about four days, six if you let us re-do some of the interior plumbing in the station itself. Purification talismans too. You’d be the only other place in town outside our direct control with that kind of luxury.”

Even in her awed, fearful state from being this close to a living minotaur that could rip her in half bare-handed with almost no effort, Sling could sense ulterior motivations behind all the juicy, tantalizing benefits they had just been offered, and focusing on deriving what those motives were helped to lessen the fear factor. “A very expensive luxury, considering how pissed you must be at Virgil for what he tried to pull on you.”

“Oh, the depths of my hatred are simply unfathomable.”

…is this what it’s like for others dealing with me? “Umm…look, all we need is a regular supply of drinking water at the safe house. How it gets there doesn’t concern me much.”

“Yeah, probably not, but it’s a pretty big deal to us when everyone can barely scrap by to get food and water, and that’s with us doing the best we can to get water to people for next to nothing,” the minotaur countered evenly. “Brahamin-pulled caravans have a nasty habit of getting knocked over unless you got a small army rolling with it. If we peel guys off to protect the caravans, we have less muscle guarding the pumping stations and the purification plant. And right now that muscle is needed to keep our operations protected. Folk are going to want to know why their water isn’t getting to them regularly pretty soon, and hungry, thirsty mobs get violent really quick. We’ll kill to keep the water flowing, but we’d rather not have to in the first place.”

Well, shit. Was hoping to get this done in an hour… “Fixing that by getting you your pumps sounds like the right price for the water setup services you’re offering.”

“Isn’t it?” the minotaur girl smiled, revealing a healthy set of omnivorous teeth—canines, incisors, and molars, all. “Unfortunately, it’s not a simple matter of just schlepping on over to the next derelict pumping station and ripping them out. We need enough parts to get four pumping stations back in working order. Normally, we would just salvage anything we need from derelict stations in the city, but with all the gangs infesting the streets lately there’s only one such station we can get to safely right now, and there’s a load of squatters living in it. We can’t just roll in and kill everyone to get to them, even if that would be the quickest way to do it.”

“What do these people want?”

“What they always want,” was the minotaur’s contemptful snort. “Free water, free food, free protection, free everything. They won’t let us in unless we promise to take care of them like children, and the world didn’t work like that even in Celestia’s reign.”

Something feels wrong about all this already. “How is it that the most heavily armed and armored faction in the city has no ability to simple waltz and muscle everyone out without serious injury or death?”

“That would be complication number two. For a bunch of free-loading bums, they managed to scrounge enough firepower together to give us trouble if we tried to move them by force. We’ve had eyes on them for a couple of weeks but haven’t seen much in the way of trading activity or scavenging skills, so unless they had their gear with them to start with we can’t figure out how they got ahold of it.”

…ooooh shit, I think I know where this is going… “Yet they manage to mysteriously end up occupying an area you badly need access to. Hell of a coincidence…if you’re stupid enough to believe it.”

Taurus’s smile widened a little, and her eyes began regarding her with a very familiar look she’d seen on Kite’s face more than once. “Leon, I like this new blood. She taken?”

Godsdammit why is every other female I meet out here hitting on me?!!? “She is,” Sling growled back.

“Awwww, that’s a shame,” Taurus moaned sadly—even her ears flattened out with disappointment. “Still, you’re here on business, not pleasure, so…yeah, we’re not buying it either. Only one set of assholes in Withercha could stand to gain anything from us losing the ability to keep the water flowing, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other suspects. Regardless of who or how, they managed to talk the squatters into moving into that pumping station, and the last time we walked up to the place to scope it out our scouting party got a lot of lead slung at them. Nobody died, mainly because those damned morons can’t shoot straight, but even morons can get lucky once in a while and I’m not risking any of my people or their skills until we run out of peaceful options. So we need a gopher to run back and forth and be the messenger, more or less. So long as you don’t murder everybody in the joint, don’t get us roped into a supply contract with them without my say-so, and don’t let them talk you into coming back to us with a feed-us-and-care-for-us demand, I don’t care how you get us access to the building. You help get our operations back online, and we’ll fix you up with whatever water needs you want.”

“And which way do we schlep to find this pumping station shooting at you on sight?”

Taurus’s snout shifted into a small grin as she turned about and pointed down the street with her free hand. “Keep going east for a bit. When you reach an intersection with a junked-out convoy of old military IFVs, swing south. The pumping station will be on your left, about one and a quarter miles into your walk. I’ll be here all day, got some repairs to do, so just come find me once you reach a conclusion, good or bad. Any other questions before you head off?”

“Nothing worth asking just this second, so we’d better get to work. Close to ten in the morning already and I don’t wanna wander about town in the dark.”

No good-byes or parting words were traded—both parties clearly had work to do and they weren’t exactly friends (although they were hardly hostile to each other, Vergil’s actions notwithstanding). But there were plenty of words to be shared within her own group once they were safely out of earshot of the Life Givers.

“Pythons,” Rusty belted out flatly. “They’re already trying to get control of the city’s main trade routes with the rest of the western prairie. Getting control of the only fresh water supply in the area would be the thing to give it to them wholesale.”

“Yeah, but why bribe a horde of wandering squatters with guns they probably didn’t even know existed and have them sit on top of a pumping station?” Leon countered back. “You don’t just give out that kind of hardware on a whim when it could easily be turned against you. It doesn’t make sense.”

“It does, if you assume the Pythons aren’t the only ones involved,” Sling answered. “They sent out, what? Twenty five? Thirty souls after Rally? All dead now, and have been for at least three weeks. That’s not an insignificant number to be short of when you’re making plans to try and muscle your way into a region’s scavenging economy. And word’s already flying around about a bounty on my head, so they must figure I’m either already here or well on my way. They’d want some help getting more control of the city, to try and make up for the losses in people and guns we inflicted on them recently. These squatters were probably offered the guns and the job of keeping the Life Givers out of that station on the off chance that I might come along to see about setting things right. Y’know, since that’s supposedly what us high and mighty stable folk are prone to doing on the surface?”

Rusty’s beak fired off a short, sharp whistle. “So this is where Light Tail gets her brain from. That’s pretty slick thinking, for them. We can do nothing and let them run the Life Givers out of town over time, or step in to fix things and word gets back to them and they gain intel on where to start looking for you and who else they might have to contend with. No matter what we do, they benefit in some way that works against us down the road.”

“For the short term, yes. But that still doesn’t explain who supplied those guns to the squatters in the first place, I can’t see the Pythons letting go of any of their hardware right now with the losses they’ve taken already. I say we walk up to the front door, see what we can get these squatters to tell us. However badly they might want the bounty on me, they might hesitate to act on it if it means starting a shooting war with Runners. Being right beside me might be the safest place you two can be when we get there.”

“Desperate, hungry folk do strange things they wouldn’t normally do,” Leon warned her. “You hopin’ that was the case when they took in those guns and parked themselves in there?”

“I don’t hope it is, I know it. And if we can get them to talk for just a few minutes, it’ll help me think of a way to get everyone out of this mess.”

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

In the beginning, there was only darkness. No thoughts, no light, no lingering sensation of self or even the world she inhabited. Just darkness.

And it was comforting.

Fate being the evil bitch that it was, that comfort was peeled away like a blanket and the darkness began to resemble something she would call light. Light would become shape, shape would become form, and soon the forms began to become recognizable objects. Ahead of her, a terribly unkempt wall, almost devoid of paint and speckled with gouges and holes in its surface. Beneath her, a soft but ultimately useless fabric of some sort that did nothing to make the hard floor under it any more comfortable. Above her…she couldn’t tell, but the ceiling had clearly seen better days. It’s only redeeming quality was that it was intact, save for the broken ceiling fan in the center with only one blade left attached to it. She was…

…confused. This wasn’t matching the last memory that she could clearly recall (and she had a damn good memory, thank you kindly). The last thing she could clearly remember was her office, and the old, painful pangs of memory and broken hearts that had become her past that had her chasing herself from her workspace to go bother the one soul she could be her complete self with…

…and that the place was a hell of a lot better kept up than whatever sodding mess this was! She was going to have a word or four with the maintenance department later!

…at least, she would as soon as she could make herself get her lazy old self up and moving.

Lords of Kobol I am getting too old, she bemoaned her fate as she slowly, forcefully and painfully rolled off of her side, her aching logs she called legs still unwilling to bend, and so she settled for stretching them out as far as she could manage and thanked said lords that no one was about to see her splayed out like an awakening cat. Why does retirement always feel so far away…

Ugh. Best not to dwell on it. Better to dwell on…

…on the growing, unsettling feeling that something was not right. Her memory was starting to clear up further. The last place she was at wasn’t her office, it was a clean lab, one of two they kept bare and open for the development and practice of magic, save for a few cabinets and tables and a desk or two—

--her back slammed onto the desk’s surface, her vision rapidly clearing as she watched the zebra’s head pull away from the kiss and zip down further—

She stopped the memory before she could recall any further. Messing around at work with a subordinate was one of those cardinal rules she had been told never to break and while she wouldn’t deny the incredible thrill of such a debacherous act, she had gotten lucky that there were only rumors floating around at work about her and their resident zebra. If rumor ever became proven fact, even her position wouldn’t save her from Personnel Resources. Those bastards were almost as ruthless as the Royal Treasury and Taxation Office.

Still, the situation was clear. She’d been at the lab. One of the desks—the one often used for disallowed acts of debauchery when they could get away with it—was the host of a hoof-friendly tea cup filled to the brim with a very dark wood-colored liquid that tasted quite different from the decaf black tea that was normally her morning ritual, and she had to ask if the cup had been filled with a caffeinated tea by mistake because the doctor had told her years earlier that she couldn’t have caffeine or cheese anymore or her acid reflux would only get worse…

…and that was as far as her memory could go, and no further. Had she fallen ill? Was there something in that tea that shouldn’t have been? Had something else ha—

The familiar, if grating, sound of creaking wood snapped into her thoughts, distracting her enough to make her turn to the door protesting its use, and watched a grape-coated unicorn mare with a short-cut red mane slip through with a small bag held aloft in a light violet field of magic. The pretty thing had barely passed through the doorway when her magenta eyes finally noticed that she wasn’t the only conscious creature in the room, and then she stopped dead cold with widened eyes of surprise and shock that made her magic field flicker briefly.

The four seconds of tense silence allowed her enough observation to realize that she was not where her memories said she was. She couldn’t recall this mare’s face from anywhere in her life, and she would have remembered anyone with as many scars on the legs and torso as this poor girl had. A faded poster on the wall next to the doorway had just enough of its artwork and lettering left for her to discern that it was a fire safety related notice and even had a firepony in full gear as its centerpiece…something she did not recall seeing anywhere in her facility.

And her cup of tea was nowhere to be found. Truly, fate was an evil, vicious bitch.

Her left foreleg rose up and swayed about in a cute, little wave as she spoke…or tried to. “…hi, pretty mare I do not know,” her coarse, husky voice croaked, dry as the floor beneath her.

The pretty scarred unicorn blinked, slowly, and calmly set her red cross-marked bag onto the floor. “…hello, dry husk of a mare I do not know,” she greeted in kind, and her opinion of this mare rose considerably. Witty, but polite…and considerate, if the olive-drab canteen floating out of her little bag was truly filled with worthy sustenance and not a clever way of hiding booze or whiskey or something. “…let’s try hydration to cure your mummy’s voice, and start from there.”

Oh, yes, witty, polite, and smart, I like this one already, she mused silently as her shaky forelegs cradled the canteen between them and carefully rose the open top to her mouth. Should I ask permission to court, or just start the chaaaoooooh wooooooow cold water my old friend where have you been?! All further thoughts ceased as the cold, refreshing taste of clean water washed over her admittedly very dry and parched throat, soaking it in life-giving touches and easing away a pain she had not even realized was there. She kept hold of the canteen until she had drained it completely, and by that point her throat no longer felt like it was choking on dry air. With a forced gasp of air to clear the remaining sensations from her vocal cords, she set the empty canteen down and pushed it out to the edge of her reach before letting go of it. “Ahhhh, sweet Celestia that hit the spot right on,” she said as way of thanks, enjoying the vast improvement to her speaking ability. Sounded like her old self again, she did! Amazing how her voice hadn’t aged a bit over the decades, really.

The grape mare’s eyes stayed wide and on the canteen as she pulled it back towards her…and replaced it with a second one. “…well, drink up. You do need it.”

She wasn’t going to say no to a pretty face offering cold refreshment, so she took the offered canteen and popped the cap off with her teeth, though this time she took the contents at a leisurely pace, to better savor the sensation of such a precious life-sustaining liquid hydrating her parched insides. “Much obliged, stranger, though I’d prefer a name to call you by.”

“…Kite,” the grape mare offered with a slight hint of hesitation. “Your turn.”

“Dark Times,” she answered after a quick sip from the canteen. “DT is fine, too.”

“Feel any pain?” Kite asked next, settling onto her haunches as she popped the center compartment of her bag open. “Lingering aches, nausea, dizziness, things of that sort?”

She took another quick glance at Kite and her bag, and came to a minimum of three conclusions in the one-point-two seconds’ worth of details she could discern. Her scars were not new or recent, but without any context or explanation to go with them there was no way of knowing if they had been the aftermath of fights or the marks of an abusive partner. Her bag was…acceptable, but clearly well-worn, evidenced by the frayed fabric of its carrying strap and the two patches of canvas stitched over the left side of the bag. The red cross mark, as well, was considerably faded and seemed lighter and less colorful than she could recall being standard, but that could have easily been the limited amount of light provided by the nearby lantern. And the fact that she was being offered water in the form of a canteen and not a cup, combined with the decayed state of the room she occupied, alongside the lack of power…

She didn’t want to believe it. She hadn’t even been awake five minutes. But something had clearly happened to her, and then the rest of her world, and she was not where she last remembered being. Another twenty seconds would tell her if she could expect honest answers.

“Just the same annoying problems I deal with every time I wake up from a good, deep sleep,” she quipped, taking another swig from the canteen and feeling her stomach begin to protest against having so much of it shoved down at once. “What happened?”

Kite’s response was both vague and to the point—the kind of answer she herself would have given just to be a snarky pain in the flank. “Any specific event you’re thinking of, or will anything across time and history do?”

She allowed herself a flat, annoyed glare at Kite’s pretty face. “…look, we’re both clearly not idiots here. Let’s stop pretending things were the same as they were when…whatever happened to me, happened, right?”

Kite’s pursed, nervous lips bit down slightly. “…damn.”

Something did happen…

…and a growing, sickening hole in her core began to open…

“…how bad was it? The megaspell exchange?”

There. She said it. She didn’t want to, really. Just keep pretending everything was okay, that she’d just taken a bad fall or something, but…no, she never would have believed it for much longer than this anyway. Better to just be done with it and move on. But she was afraid there might not be any moving on from this…

“…pretty bad,” was all Kite was willing to offer. “Things are…not what you know.”

Then I’ve been out a while? How long? How was I put under to start with? How…

“…what’s left?”

The answer, meek and quiet, was all the more horrifying to her with all that it said, and didn’t say out loud. “Ruin, and a broken world,” Kite whispered. “…take your time getting up. I’ll find you some breakfast. When you’re ready, we’ll talk more.”

Kite took her patched-up bag and slowly departed from the room, leaving her in the flickering light of the lantern, the canteen, and a wellspring of tears that began to bleed from her eyes.

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

Their first sign of the trouble mid-day would bring was the string of gunshots that clanged into the rusted hunk of a car ten feet in front of her. She chose a closer vehicle just to her left for cover, making sure to duck behind the engine block as her rifle came up in front of her. Hard to tell the exact position of the hostile fire—she was learning quickly that the sound waves enjoyed playing hell with her expectations by deflecting and bending around all of the buildings around her.

Unless, of course, those sounds were coming from right next to her.

“Yeah, I feel real safe being right by your side!” Rusty snarled angrily at her backside as a second burst met her cover, her two griffon companions slamming into cover right beside her.

“Shitfire this whole damn prairie’s out to get me!” she screamed back. “Even your reputation doesn’t help!”

“First burst was way off, second one was spot on if not for the cover,” Leon observed calmly. “Odd as hell, maybe a little advertisement’s in order. See a possible target in the pump station, second floor, boarded window with a gap in the bottom and a peephole in the center board. Controlled joy?”

“Controlled joy,” Rusty replied.

Before Sling could even begin to question what manner of crazy this “controlled joy” plan was, Leon’s body rose up over the top of the engine hood, his rifle aimed at a building that at a glance looked quite similar to the one they’d met the Life Givers at, and let off a short, controlled burst of four rounds as Rusty bounded off for another junked car further ahead. A second burst of three shots followed a second later, just as Rusty reached his destination—

—now Rusty was the one touching off short bursts at their target building while Leon rushed forward. No more than two, three and five rounds each, and then he was ducking down behind the rear quarter of his cover position—

“Wait wait WAAAAAIIIIIIIT!!!” a panicked, terrified male screamed out into the streets from the depths of Leon and Rusty’s impromptu target practice, which quickly revealed itself to be a scruffy, lean-bodied earth pony stallion with a dark butterscotch coat and faded blue mane. His weapon—a rather heavy-looking belt-fed machine gun—was slung across his back and not immediately accessible to him even as she found the floating reticle of her reflex optic hovering over his chest—

“WAAAAAAAIT stop stop we don’t want a fight with Runners!!!” he went on, coming to a sliding stop on his knees and belly as he literally pleaded for mercy. That slide could not have been gentle on his gnads. “We don’t want a fight we just wanted the bounty on that mare’s head stop shooting!!!”

“That depends on you,” Leon returned flatly. “The mare’s off limits. Try that shit again and we won’t stop.”

“Seriously?!” the stallion yelled back. “You know what she’s worth?!”

“Don’t care, she’s with us,” Leon warned angrily. “Last warning!”

What little she could see of the stallion’s face obscured by the window frame of her reflex sight showed a pissed-off, hateful glare as he shot to his hooves, angrily stomping about and faced towards the pump station—

“…dammit, fine, but you get the hell out of here!” he screamed over his shoulder. “Got nothin’ for you!”

“We’re here for the Life Givers, not for us,” Leon called out. “They need parts and machinery from the building you’re living in, and you shot at them before they could even attempt an honest trade arrangement. Turn us back, and they might decide to come at you a lot harder next time. Nobody will come out of that a winner.”

“I’m willin’ to take that chance, and so are my people,” the stallion huffed defiantly, beginning a hasty trot back towards the pump station. “You tell those water pipe nerds if they want their parts so badly, they can start sending us food and water, or take the place from us. We’re not going to be pushed out to starve to death.”

“Yeah, that’s going to be a problem,” Sling shouted out to his back, slinging her rifle across her chest as she grunted up onto her hooves and shook off the dust and dirt that had clung to her. “Taurus already told us they weren’t going to be taking in refugee camps.”

“Then it sounds like option B—”

On target with the second burst, Leon says. Could be a happy accident, or—

“Pretty big gun for a scrawny fella like yourself,” she noted out loud, walking closer towards the building with one eye on said gun and the other on her EFS bar—at present, she noted him being marked as a cautious yellow, while a mix of red, yellow, and green marks began popping into existence in the direction of the pump station as it came within range of the PipBuck’s detection radius. “Bit of surface rust on the barrel and missing a bipod…big-ass receiver held together by what looks like rivets, so I’m guessing an army-issue thirty-caliber model, name escapes me right this second. Disintegrating ammo belts won’t be easy to scrounge up if nobody knows how to make them. Cartridges look like civilian .308 rounds, which are actually hotter than military-spec 7.62x51mm, so if you’re using those to keep the gun fed it’ll wear out a little faster, but you use what you have in the wastes so can’t fault you on that point. Gun firing on us from the second floor, was it a rifle or a dedicated MG?”

The stallion paused mid-step as she began analyzing his weapon aloud, and by the time she’d finished she managed to garner a great deal of interest out of him as he spun about and crossed back towards her until he was practically close enough that she could hit him the face with a hoof if she wanted. “…shit me, you already told me more about the gun than the assholes that gave us the stockpile. Who the fuck are you?”

“I’m Sling Shot, the bounty you just tried to blow away, remember?” she snarked back. “You never thought to ask yourself why the Pythons would pay out so much for one mare’s life?”

“…proposal,” the stallion pursed through firm lips. “Take a look at our guns, tell us what’s what, and if they need work. Only a few of us can read, and not that well. The little books we got with the guns might as well have been written in dragon language for all the sense we make of them. Get us sorted out, or at least on track to getting there, and we can talk about the Life Givers.”

“We can do that, but I’d rather hear what got you into this situation in the first place,” Sling counter-offered. “Might be something we can help with that puts you in a better position, or at least in one where you don’t face immediate death by violence and have the means to keep from starving to death. Start by telling me about the assholes who…’gave’ you the stockpile of guns? Did you misspeak, stallion whose name I don’t have?”

“No, I did not,” the stallion said, one of his forelegs briefly waving about above his head before he turned back to the pumping station and resumed his original journey, now moving about at a slower and more relaxed pace. “Call me Easy, my parents were jerks with my actual name so I don’t use it. And we’re not complete idiots. Nothing like what they offered comes for free, we just ain’t figured out what it is they want yet.”

Only when the red marks on her EFS morphed into yellows and greens did she begin to follow him, and Leon and Rusty fell in behind her in a staggered line. “And who are ‘they’, exactly?”

“They never said,” Easy answered, shouldering the one remaining door of a two-door entrance aside as he passed through it. “Me, I was thinkin’ the Pythons. But these cats were wearin’ enough leather barding armor that any markings or tats unique to the Pythons alone would have been covered up, cutie marks included. Don’t know anybody else in town that could get the hardware they were givin’ us either, ‘sides the Life Givers, and we already knew we weren’t dealing with them—”

“Yo, Easy, what’s the deal?” somebody up above called out, briefly interrupting their conversation. Sounded male, fairly close to that window Leon and Rusty were shooting at—

“The deal is everybody brings their piece down here while these two Runners take up watch for us—“

“One of us will, the other stays with the crazy mare,” Leon amended his order.

“What, you think one of us will take another shot at her?” Easy challenged back—

—to which herself, Leon, and Rusty all answered back in unison. “Yeah.”

Easy didn’t seem to appreciate the lack of trust he was just shown, but having already invited them inside to scour over their weaponry roughly a minute after trying to shoot her with said weapons, he hadn’t exactly left himself a pleasant way out of his predicament. “…fine.”

“I got watch,” Rusty announced immediately afterward. “Might take a short scouting flight—”

“Stay groundside,” Leon pushed back. “So far as this town’s concerned, we aren’t here yet, let’s not advertise it out loud with a sky sighting. Gunfire alone may bring tourists as it is.”

Now it was Rusty’s turn to be disappointed. “Awww, man, my wings are begging for some exercise….”

Sling ignored the grumbling, pouting griffon shuffling off and focused on the machine gun that Easy was carefully rolling off of his back and putting down in front of her. A closer look at the barrel showed that the rust on it was minor and easily scrubbed away with about twenty seconds’ worth of work from a solvent-laced brass brush from her maintenance kit. Thanks largely in part to having practiced on the four machine guns the Runners had at their base last week, she was able to detach the box magazine and pop the top cover for the receiver without any difficulty, followed by the barrel, and a quick cursory inspection showed no rust in the feed mechanism or the underside of the cover. And because the Ministry facility’s test firing range included an armory with a full suite of gunsmithing tools, she now had a quality bore scope with which to inspect a barrel’s rifling and interior condition—

“Whoa, this barrel’s clean,” she whistled in sharp approval as she slowly extended the boroscope's lens down the barrel. Through the objective piece’s viewing window, she couldn’t find much, if any, sign of ill-treatment or neglect, and the rifling looked very sharp and defined, as if it had rarely been fired. There was the expected traces of copper lines along the rifling itself, but not enough to mark it as a heavily used barrel. “Rifling’s almost pristine, too. No corrosion. I’d say the barrel is practically brand new. Got any spares lying around?”

Easy’s answer was both distressing and informative. “…spares?”

Oh lords, these people have no idea what they’re working with! Who would be stupid enough to give them this kind of firepower freely?! “…machine guns are designed for suppressive fire, lots of shooting, very quickly. Quick change barrels are the norm here, not the exception. First barrel heats up, you switch it out with a cold spare so you don’t ruin it by overheating it too much or for too long. Without spare barrels, you’re down to short controlled bursts, and only one ammo belt, if you want to stretch that one barrel’s lifespan as much as possible. Am I really giving you more instruction on this gun than the people you got it from?”

“I am beginning to feel an incredibly offended sense at having been played for a fool, yes,” Easy grumbled. “This is the only machine gun of the stockpile, so…there’s that, I guess. But a lot of the rifles can shoot full-auto too, does this mean we need to be careful with those?”

“More so, actually,” she answered. “Barrels on a rifle usually aren’t easy to swap out without tools, and they aren’t meant to be used as suppressive weapons to start with. I’d stick to single aimed shots. With training and practice, you could probably get away with short bursts on a target up close, but that’s about all the use I have for full auto on a rifle. The two bursts flung my way earlier were taken about as far out as I would try it, myself.”

“…good to know,” was Easy’s nervous, hesitant reply. “…so…what did you do to get the Pythons so pissed at you?”

“Killed over a dozen of them across the span of a week as they tracked down a fourteen-year old girl and tried to kidnap and rape her,” she said with an even, calm tone. So very calm, couldn’t let herself blow up over it at some guy who had nothing to do with it. “Another dozen or so were killed by others with me at the time, but they think I did it all. Wish I had, honestly…”

“And they’d send that many to get their jollies on a kid…why?”

A glance at the congealing green and yellow marks on her EFS had her divert her attention back to her surroundings to see how many souls were bringing their weapons to her for inspection, and after a few seconds came up with a head count of about nineteen (discounting Easy). Seven mares, nine stallions, three griffons, strong mix of unicorns and earth ponies, with two pegasi among the ponies. Most of them seemed to have struggled to get enough food and water through life—thin-framed, a little smaller than average, four mares and a stallion had the faint presence of ribs poking through their flesh and coats, and even the three griffons seemed less physically intimidating than she expected. Having spent a fair amount of time among wastelanders who had considerably improved access to the necessities of life, being faced with the rough reality of how the majority of souls in the wasteland fared brought the imbalance of the east and west prairie into a sharper focus than she’d have liked. The west may not have been rife with hedonistic slavers, but it didn’t have the stability and trade flow that allowed the Union to get food and water where it was needed, either.

She resolved to complain a little less about military MREs.

“She says she destroyed a major arms cache they were about to collect on, when she found out who she was fixing it up for, ran off to escape their anger. Took ‘em a while to find her, and my anger turned out to be stronger than theirs when they did.”

“Girl, your anger scares us,” Leon pestered her with a soft chuckle. “That’s hard to do.”

Guns began piling up next to the disassembled machine gun—mostly rifles, with a couple of shotguns, three pistols, and a bolt-action .308 that belonged to one of the griffons. At least she would have plenty of work to occupy herself with while she quizzed Easy on this “gift” these scavengers had received. “So let’s go back to this group that gave you all these guns. Was there anything about them that stood out at all? Language, where they were positioned, what manner of hardware they had themselves? How they talked to each other?”

“Only one of ‘em talked any,” Easy said as she pulled the bore scope out of the barrel in favor of a bottle of gun oil and some cleaning solvent. One wet patch down the barrel, then a dry one, then she’d start lubing critical points in the receiver, where the Runners had showed her. “Seemed to be the leader, or at least the one picked to do all the talking. If he needed somethin’ from the other seven that were with him, he would look at them directly and tell them. Never referred to ‘em by name.”

Nothing damning there, either for or against her theory. She hadn’t seen anything about the Pythons that would indicate they were this smart when they wanted to be sneaky, but that didn’t necessarily mean they weren’t capable of it.

“As for their guns…eh, not much there that you wouldn’t find in the hooves and claws of most mercs. Ammo, too. Two cans. Marked five-five-six on the side. Looks like military stuff, black-painted tips—”

AP rounds?! “How many rounds, exactly?”

“Me and two others kinda know our numbers, so we gave it a shot. Best guess is close to a thousand, I think. That mean anything?”

“It means whoever gave you this didn’t mean for you to use it on lowly street gangs,” Leon remarked. “Those are armor piercing rounds. Tungsten tip, steel core, and damn near impossible to find now. Armor plates don’t mean shit to these, just cuts right through. You don’t just give that much AP ammo away as carelessly as these guys supposedly did. And that they have that much of it they’re willing to pass out like this, means they got a lot more of it.”

With the machine gun lubed and cleaned out, she reassembled it and set it aside, and turned her attention to the rifles. The five M-type rifles were first, simply because they usually needed the most work and she wanted to know how much of it she would have to do. “How did you come to meet such well-heeled friends out of the blue? None of you strike me as the hard-charging merc type.”

“We had a place, before this,” one of the mares to her left answered, grief underlying her tone. “Families, of a sort. We had that, at least, if not much else. Then everybody in town started…shutting down. The Bullet Farmers, the Scrappers, the Radical Angels, and a few others. Mostly little parts shops. Some folks like us, we got by from scavenging, diving into the ruins of the old factories for anything that looked good enough for the big factions to buy or trade for. But even that got dangerous. Without trade goods going out, food wasn’t coming in so regular, and about a month ago it stopped completely.”

“That’s when our camp got hit,” Easy continued—by then Sling had poured through enough of her first rifle to be satisfied that it was in working order, if a little worn. The barrel had definitely seen some use and the bore had a little erosion, but not at a degree that would hurt accuracy…yet. Trigger pack looked good, no rust, but the bolt carrier group had some excessive wear that suggested a regular lack of oil. A little education would be in order shortly. “There were seventy of us then. Large enough that some of the street gangs thought we had more food than we were letting on. Three of ‘em grouped up just long enough to make a run on us, and most of our guns weren’t in the best shape to start with. Tangent here, with his old hunting rifle, was the only one who’s gun didn’t break down or jam up on him in the fight, but really, we aren’t fighters. Half our group died in under five minutes. Ten more died from their wounds over the next few days.”

“And the gangs?” Sling pondered aloud. It sounded like the gangs barely got along to start with, so maybe…

“Last we heard, they turned on each other when they found out we had even less food than they did. Each of ‘em though the others had conned them into the fight to try and thin their numbers for a later attack. Maybe three or four of ‘em staggered out alive, if that. Pretty much ended their existence as gangs. About the only bright side to the whole thing.”

“The Life Givers and Pythons are the only ones who managed to keep something going out all these months,” the sad mare said next. “For the Pythons, it’s chems and booze, mostly. But they got the east side of the city in their territory, where Union-backed caravans come in, so they’re getting most of the incoming trade now…which means they’re getting most of the food, and they get to set the price for it. Life Givers are the only reason a lot of us in the west side are still alive, they got a couple of trade routes going out west for some of their excess water. What food they can spare after they feed themselves, they’ll tuck in with the water they trade out, nothing extra for it—”

“Manila you know they got to have more than the scraps they’re “giving” out,” Easy fumed angrily. “How else you think they can afford to part with any at all?”

“Could be they’re better people than the lot of us, you daft pencild—”

The second rifle was in much the same shape as the first one, which did not strike her as completely odd, but perhaps if the third one was in a similar state, it might. “So if the casualty count is right you went from seventy to thirty-five, then twenty-five. I’m counting twenty of you in total. What happened to the other five?”

“What do you care?” another voice, a scruffier-sounding male, sneered. “You're just here to run us off the only hope we got left.”

“I’m starting to care less with that attitude, but I need the information regardless.”

“We ain’t sure,” the mare answered testily. “Best we can figure is that they got separated from us or went their own way when the gangs ransacked our home. Been struggling ever since. We’re lucky if we don’t go more than two days before finding a meal somewhere.”

“Then a couple weeks ago, we ran into a merc near the old hospital in the center of the city, asked if we was looking for some work,” Easy said. “I said yes, he told us to meet with his group later, in an alley where a brothel used to be ‘till last year. When we get there, there’s these crates of guns and ammo, and the talking head asked us to go scope out some buildings here in the west half of the city and come back to them with what we saw. Took us a couple days, we tell ‘em what we saw, and they say thanks and that we could probably get us a good deal for food and water if we sat on this place and waited for the Life Givers to try and salvage anything out of it. Maybe it works different in the Union, but out here, just knowing where a claim is don’t make it yours, you gotta be physically sitting on it, like we are. This is our claim, and we ain’t just walkin’ off.”

“So don’t,” Sling hummed agreeably. Third rifle was, so far, holding to the same expectations as the previous two. “Make a deal.”

“You heard our terms the first time, didn’t you? The terms you said weren’t going to fly?”

“Yeah, and you know why they aren’t going to do it? You’re ripping them off. Having to set up and maintain a continuous supply of food and water for access to spare parts in a building they’re only going to visit for as long as it takes them to get what they need? Even you wouldn’t do that and you know it.”

The frustrated, quiet growl in his throat was a good sign, despite the anger behind it. The truth could hurt, whether one wanted to admit it or not.

“And your generous friends setting you up with weaponry and ammunition you usually only see in well-equipped mercs or the Union’s trooper corps? What do you think they expect you to do with that, sitting here and goading the Life Givers into taking a shot at you? You’re being used, and I’d like to think most of you aren’t so stupid that you can’t see it.”

“Oof, savage,” Leon snickered.

“Get to the fucking point,” Easy roared sternly and loudly.

Yeeeeaaah, maybe lay off the bitch mode a bit, you stupid-ass mare… “You survived and bartered for what you needed by scrounging up old tech out of factories and such, right? Go back to doing it…for the Life Givers.”

“You mean go back to where we were when half of us got slaughtered?”

The third rifle's serviceable condition was starting to give her ideas on their origins, but she wasn't willing to to share them with these scavengers just yet. “You said it yourself, most of your guns barely worked then. What your new fair weather friends have given you is looking to be in much better shape than most of the weaponry I’ve come across in the prairie outside of Union control. Somebody wants to take another shot at you, they’ll have to actually fight you this time, if you don’t mind being taught how to actually use a gun in a fight.”

“And this is going to help us with the Life Givers how?”

Considering she was making the idea up on the fly, she wasn't sure it was going to work, but Taurus had asked for a solution that didn't spill blood, and this was probably going to be the only one they'd find in the time frame they had. “Your demands are set on doing nothing but sitting here, but if you work for it they may be a lot more willing to indulge you. The Life Givers are putting most of their people to guarding their operations right now. They’re locked down, can’t get around much to track down parts they might need. But you do exactly that for a living, and you and yours are a prime package deal they’d be idiots to dismiss. You have good weaponry to protect yourselves with, so they won’t have to arm you, and you can get trained to use them effectively in a fight. You can be taught what it is they look for and need for their operations and put your experience to work for the both of you. And you come with almost a thousand rounds of 5.56mm AP rounds that they can stow away for heavy trouble down the road.”

“…hump me with Luna’s moon, that could actually work,” another female voice whispered breathlessly. “Wouldn’t be scraping for food anymore…Easy, we gotta give it a shot. Ain’t like we got a lot left to lose now.”

A growing chorus of approving mumbles around her effectively served as a majority vote on the proposal being laid out. And yet Easy would put a slight damper on it with an unpleasant (but not unrealistic) reality. “Yeah…sounds good, in your head. But feedin’ an extra twenty souls on top of what you gotta worry about already ain’t something you take on lightly. And the quiet goons who gave us all these spiffy guns and bullets…if their aim was to have us shoot the shit out of the Life Givers when they came to claim this place, they ain’t gonna be happy about their investment just walking off and joining up with them instead. They felt comfortable enough to part with this stuff, what do you think they’re packing for themselves? Might be willing to take a chunk out of anybody that messed with their plan. Who’d be first on their list?”

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

“Hell of a risk to take.”

I did not spend an hour cleaning and lubing guns to leave here with nothing! “There’s risk for everyone, but it’s a solution that doesn’t have you killing each other and gives you a few bodies that can search out parts for you without having to pull any of your other people off their tasks, which you said was a big problem for you earlier.”

Taurus’s body heaved in tune with her deep breaths and long sighs as the massive creature contemplated the risks and rewards the arrangement offered. “Bodies that barely know what kind of firepower they were so freely given, by your own words. Takes time to train ‘em otherwise, time we ain’t got right now.”

“We might,” Leon counter offered. “Had to train up on our new hardware ourselves, won’t be a big issue.”

“…fine, your time to use how you want, but that still doesn’t solve the other two problems I have with this. Whoever gave those scavengers that much firepower is not going to just let it walk off without a fight. I guarantee somebody’s keeping a discreet eye on them and these mysterious jackholes are an unknown I don’t want to deal with without more intel. And then there’s the fact that we might not have the food and water supplies to feed another twenty mouths to start with. That’s something I’ll have to run by my brother, he handles most of the logistics.”

“…and how long will that take?” Sling begrudgingly asked. Damn that stallion, his fears about this whole arrangement were turning out to be spot on…

Taurus’s eyes seemed conflicted, as if she would rather have put this off for later, but reluctantly began thundering off to a corner in the office that overlooked the main pumps and maze of pipes that made up the primary operations center of the station. Sitting upon a patched, crudely hoof-stitched cushion sat a brilliant crystal sphere roughly the size of a computer terminal, which reacted to Taurus’s outstretched hand as she began to rub it in a vertical direction, then swiped her hand off the top of the sphere to her left—

—a deep blue light began to come to life and quickly filled the sphere’s interior, then swirled and bent into virtually every color in the visible light spectrum—

“Please be working and not playing, please be working and not playing—” Taurus begged of the sphere’s light show—

—the swirling spectrum of light and color rapidly spun into the visage of another minotaur, this one far more masculine and ragged-looking than the towering female who had activated the sphere’s magic—

“…sis?” the male’s voice buzzed from within the sphere, slightly distorted by an underlying static. “What’s the deal?”

Taurus’s initial reaction was one of immense relief. “Ooooh, thank the gods above, not playing aHEM uummm Saber, dude, what’s up listen do you happen to have a count on our food and water supplies?”

Saber’s face tilted off to one side like a curious dog. “Uhhhhh…why? Feeling snacky?”

“No, no, we…we might have a solution to our squatter problem. Turns out they’re what’s left of a scavenger camp from Python territory, and they might be willing to put themselves to work for us, but I don’t know if we can take in another twenty souls or not. How’s our incoming supply versus what’s being used up, and such?”

Saber’s head vanished from the sphere, though it continued to carry his voice across time and space along with a heavy amount of paper shuffling. “Yeah, good question, actually, I’ve been meaning to go over income versus expenses and leftover supply anyway, so this would be a good chance to work that out and I got a couple ideas for adding to our incoming stream but we’d have to basically open up an entire new trade route and we don’t have nearly enough caravan partners willing to take on the risk so—”

Taurus’s eyes seemingly sunk back into her skull as she let off a deep, whining sigh to the ceiling. “Oh, gods, here we go…”

Saber’s voice continued to rattle on amidst an increase ruffling of papers and the occasional thunk of a book upon a wooden surface. “—so anyway you know how the Pythons locked down the main trade port in their territory and get all the good caravans, right, and I was thinking what if instead of them having to come in from that one point we could convince a few caravans to swing around to the south and come in from the Scrappers’ territory, I mean that’s gotta be better than being backed up like an overflowing outhouse on a single stretch of decaying highway—”

“Disgusting mental image is real,” Sling’s voice wailed softly.

“Quite,” Taurus likewise wailed in pitiful agreement.

“—it’d bring the Scrappers access to trade goods and get another source of food opened up that wasn’t under Python control but the main reason the caravans go to their territory in the first place is the security so we’d have to be able to offer a similar safe route and trade exchange post—”

Her lingering disgust was gradually fading away as the rambling minotaur’s words began to dance about in her head. Despite not having seemingly taken a single breath in twenty seconds, she was starting to think he might have been on to something there….

“Saber!” Taurus roared at the crystal sphere, and Sling swore it actually shifted a little within its cushion nest. “Focus! Supply on hand! Can we handle twenty new souls or not? Long-term, not just a few days.”

His sibling’s shouting seemed to snap him out of his runaway train of thoughts and brought him back into the sphere’s view. “Oh…right, that. Sorry, um….uhhh, lesee here—”

His head vanished from the sphere again, though this time the shuffling and rustling of paper was much more controlled and thoughtful. “Uhhh…supply cache as of yeeesterday, current head count divided by species, ummm….latest invoice for the last trade caravan with the food parcels and projected acquisition, estimated overflow after self-use—”

Taurus’s left hand began to rub along her brow. “The short, stupid version, bro.”

A long, uncomfortable, but thankfully quiet moment passed before he found the courage to answer. “Weeee….might have an issue accommodating extra workers,” Saber squeaked, directing as much attention as possible to his conversation and not the papers shuffling about in front of him. “Unless we stop setting aside surplus food for trade. If we did that, then we could take them on, but that would mean no longer being able to offset the food crisis on our side of the city. We aren’t making a huge dent in it, but we are helping just enough to stave off outright starvation. It’s basically a ‘lesser of two evils’ question.”

Now both of Taurus’s hands were starting to press against her skull in self-agony. “Some choice. Starvation or dehydration. Death either way, but at least if we can keep the water going we get a few days to try and fix the food problem…”

A pang of guilt hit Sling’s heart and stopped it for a couple of beats. She hadn’t meant for her solution to more or less make things worse in the long run… “…how often do caravans from the Union come out here?”

“A few come in roughly once a month,” Taurus groaned, still in despair that the quest to fix her water system was taking a rather dark turn. “Each caravan that comes and goes makes about two trips a year, so it’s a constant revolving door of new faces and new deals. The next bunch is due in early next week, but rumors floating around the city are saying that the Pythons aren’t buying much of anything besides food, guns, and ammo. And only the food is getting put out for trade in town.”

“And how long has that been going on?”

“…three months now, I think.”

“…I think I have an idea how to get some of that diverted to you,” Sling pondered aloud, once she’d sorted through her thoughts and silent misgivings. “But it depends on whether I’m right about who supplied the scavengers with their guns and ammo, and I don’t have enough information to be one hundred percent certain of it.”

“Naw, go ahead, fill my head with more doubts.”

“I think I know where she’s going,” Leon assured her. “Said it herself. Only two possible sources for arms and ammo outside town—other merc groups, or the Union. And the Union’s got most of the known AP ammo.”

“Fuck me, you mean the troopers are slinking around trying to piss on us now?!”

“Not so directly, no,” Sling explained. “I doubt it’s even the troopers themselves doing the work. But the Pythons did, at one point, keep up a contact of sorts on the Union side of the valley with a rather large and evil slaver guild run by a soul whose name induces a shit-me reaction when I say it—”

Even without directly saying it out loud, just alluding to the reaction she got when she said it was enough to provoke said reaction almost exactly as she described—wide eyes, furrowed brow of shock, even Taurus’s mouth dropped open a bit. “…yeah, that’s the one. Anyways, he…or she, or whatever…this slaver guild may have some under-the-table connection with one of the Union’s Board members. Said Board member would have access to the troopers’ armory stores, and could conceivably arrange for some of the weaponry and ammo to mysteriously cross the valley. Given how much trouble this mystery group went to to cover up any identifying marks or clues as to who they were, they could have been from the Board member’s own trade guild. I’d considered the possibility of slavers or Union troopers themselves in disguise, but there’s too much risk in openly violating the agreement the Union has with the Runners where those two are concerned. A trade caravan would be the only other way to get the weapons and ammo across the valley and through the western prairie without raising any undue alarm. Whether the Pythons asked for this sort of sneaky help, or if this third party decided to do it on their own, I don’t know, and probably never will.”

“…and when our new scavenger workers take all that stuff with them to work for us, their benefactors are going to take issue with it,” Taurus surmised softly. “It’d be your one chance to catch them off guard with an ambush at a time and place you know where they’ll be.”

“Catch them off guard, and get answers to a number of questions I’ve got,” Sling confirmed. “But we’ll only get that chance if you take the risks that come with taking the scavengers on. And I can’t guarantee that the ambush won’t end up with a lot of dead bodies, or that it’ll even get us any good intel.”

“There’s risk in everything, stable pony,” Taurus said with an angry huff. “This is just…riskier than most. But that’s probably what it’s going to take to get control of this city out of the Python’s grubby hooves. So…let’s see where this goes.”

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

Ninety minutes.

Ninety minutes, one second.

Ninety minutes, two seconds.

Coward, Kite admonished herself at the door, still unable to bring herself to tap upon it with her upraised hoof. All she had to do was tap. The. Door. Go in, visit the displaced pony and relish in that Trottingham accent that made her weak in the knees just hearing it.

And bring that poor girl’s world down upon her head.

At what would have been ninety minutes and seven seconds since she had dropped off the breakfast ration, the door unexpectedly creaked open, filling the open space with the gray-coated mare’s face and bringing attention to the moist streaks of fur under her eyes.

“…hi,” Kite’s voice greeted meekly, her hoof still raised to a door that was no longer there.

A moment of tense silence was broken up by the mystery mare left foreleg slipping through the door and connecting with her hoof, then shaking it briefly. “…hello.”

“…you’ve figured it out, haven’t you?”

A sad, soft sniffle betrayed a hint of the mare’s inner turmoil. “…not the finer details. For instance…how long I’ve been out. And you’re not telling me because you think it’ll break me, so…I’ve been out long enough for everyone to figure out that there’s no help coming from Canterlot, ever.”

….DAMMIT I hate the smart ones sometimes. “Sooo…you’re going to passively aggressively pressure me into telling you over the next ten minutes.”

“I can. Or you can do it the same way you would rip off a bandage, and just get it done with quick and harsh. Won’t be the first time I’ve had to do that.”

This is a terrible idea. This is a terrible idea this is a terrible idea this is a—

“Quick and harsh it is,” Kite agreed, even though inwardly she was already screaming at herself with such ferocity and foul language that even her brain was forced to filter it out of her thoughts. “But remember that you asked for it.”

“I ought to, I strong-armed you into it. Now, where do you want to start?”

Now locked into the terrible idea, there was really little left to be done about it, except get it over with. She released the mystery mare’s hoof from her own and beckoned her to follow along as she sought out the stairs she had just climbed. “The hard part. Let’s take this outside.”

Four hooves gingerly fell into a steady trot behind her as they clambered down the stairs to the first floor, then moved out into the open garage space where Rico’s caravan wagons were still being worked through and presenting the first challenge of the walk. These stable ponies were going to be so damned curious and eager for a chance to talk to perhaps the first known survivor of the Before in the flesh that they’d ever come across outside of the sentient, non-violent ghouls that lived near the balefire crater in the city, and she was going to have to shoo them off very quickly.

Case in point, Rico was checking the last of the cargo being unloaded from one of her wagons, making sure the stuff was intended to be left behind and such, and seemingly brightened up as she caught sight of the mystery mare following her—

Kite waved her off with a sharp swipe of her left foreleg with a silent message of “not one word” and a harsh, disapproving glare. Rico seemed a little offended by the rejection, but her expression softened when she looked back at the mystery mare and then began making the same silent request of the rest of her crew. They thankfully obeyed the request and let the pair pass by in peace.

She purposefully slipped through the front door to the outside as gently as possible, so as not to give the mare a sneak peak at the horror awaiting her. Better that she freak out in the street, where the walls of the fire station might absorb enough of her shrieks that the kids wouldn’t hear it…

She kept watch on that door, and on the mare that passed through, and sure enough, as she began to get her first good look at the new world she inhabited, her worried gaze quickly shifted into a total state of disbelief and shock at the crumbling ruins of the city street around her. Her legs continued to trot forward of their own will for a short distance before she came to a dead stop, and from there just silently stared in horror at the fate of her old world.

Kite just stared in pity and guilt. It wasn’t how she wanted to do this…but the girl did ask for the hard way. So she got it.

The girl’s hindquarters dropped onto the pavement, her shaking hind legs no longer capable of working correctly. “…haa…h-h-how l-long…”

Luna on a stick, here we go…

“Roughly two centuries,” Kite answered softly, nonetheless eliciting a very sharp gasp of shock and horror from her guest.

Now the mare’s body was starting to tremble all over. “F-fuaa…gggaaah how?!”

Kite stole a glance across the road, mainly to stall for a couple of seconds while she put the details together in her brain. “The way we understand it, you were poisoned by somepony in your facility, almost to the point of death. A zebra working there…Zulana, is the name I’m told…she tried to heal you with a ritual spell at about the same time that a balefire bomb went off in the norther part of the city, and the bomb’s effects twisted and amplified her ritual far beyond what she’d intended. Instead of using the souls of your murderers to heal you, it killed almost everyone in the facility and within a few hundred yards of it and…and turned them into zompony thralls. Zulana didn’t survive, but her soul lingered about, tethered to the spell and the totem she used to cast it, kept the thralls under control until we fucked up and triggered them yesterday. The short version of yesterday is that my…friend…broke the spell and destroyed the totem, and your body recovered from whatever it was that brought you down. We don’t know what happened to Zulana’s soul after that…and then, after all that, we gathered ourselves up and whatever we could carry out of the place before sunset, and came here. And now we’re…out here, I guess.”

The mystery mare took most of that quite well. At least, she did at first. She trembled, and tried to speak but all that came out were little gulps and sputters of words, and there was the expected muffled shriek or two. She expected all of that, so she was content that as long as that was the worst of it, for now, she would say the girl was taking the end of her world about as well as expected.

And then, quickly and almost imperceptibly…the trembling just stopped. She stopped gasping and crying, and…well, she just sort of stopped everything. And then her head looked up at the old, empty shop across the street, but it was a slow, casual movement, almost robotic even.

And then the mare’s hind legs stood back up, and she turned around at a very calm and relaxed pace, and began walking—calmly—back into the fire station, and her eyes we—

Oh shit, Kite realized all too late when she dared to study the mare’s eyes. Stern, attentive, searching for…something.

“….ummm…is there something I can help you with?” she dared to ask of the robotic-moving mare.

“No,” came the calm, but crisp reply, and the mare darted through the partially-open door to begin her search.

Her search began amongst the wagons—she would hop into the back, pad about the thing in search of whatever it was she searching for, and leave after not finding it in ten seconds. She did this with three wagons, hopped down from her third search target, and then spotted what she desired in the company of one of Rico’s people.

A large, heavy, gray stone sledgehammer, resting on its head as the stallion used its long handle as a leg rest while he chatted away with another stallion across from him (who was equally lackadaisical in his work responsibilities)—

The mare sauntered into their personal space and wrested the sledgehammer from its owner with the ease that a parent would remove a toy from a newborn foal, slinging it across her back and holding it steady with her right foreleg. “Taking this,” she muttered nonchalantly, walking away from the pair on three legs and, eventually, back outside into the street.

Kite followed her back outside, but kept close to the fire station in wary deference to the mare with her freshly acquired toy. She had an inkling what was about to come, and didn’t want to be anywhere in the vicinity when it happened.

It started with the mare’s entry into the shop. At first she appeared to be studying it, or perhaps attempting to reconcile memories with reality. After a few moments she moved further into the structure, out of view of the doorway, and from there Kite could only listen for any sign of discontent or distress…which turned out to be the least of her worries.

With the sudden fury of a thunderclap, she heard a great, hearty THWACK! from inside the shop…and then another one almost a second later, followed by a third, and the crunch and snap of old wood and plaster among the THWACK—

“You godsdamned motherFU—”

A fourth THWACK!, louder and more violent than the previous three, muffled her curse and the one immediately afterward, though she wondered if that was the effect of her physical exertions or simply the power of her swearing amplifying it—

“—K SLURPING FUCKSHITS YOU ACTUALLY FUCKING DID IT—”

Two more THWACKS! Were accompanied by the disturbing sound of collapsing drywall…and then, the visible shifting of a corner of the shop’s roof, now robbed of the support of part of the structure beneath it—

—she sensed the presence of another soul beside her, and thought she heard some second floor windows in the fire station creaking open—

“—WHAT THE BLOODY HELL DID YOU SHITE DICK SAMPLERS THINK WAS GONNA HAPPEN WHEN YOU BUILT THOSE GIANT PISSBALLS OF DEATH YOU FU—”

More THWACKS!, and more cracking wood and plaster, began to fill the air with as much volume and frequency as her swearing, and soon the THWACKS! were joined by WHOOMP!, and then exceptionally sharp CLANG! as her violence began to come into contact with rebar.

Her caps were on the angry, cussing mare.

Ada’s voice mewled weakly in awe of both the destruction and the swears pouring forth. “…is that…”

THWACK!, and very soon afterward the left front corner of the roof began to collapse into the ruins of the shop, followed by the back half—

“—IF YOU COWARDS WERE STILL ALIVE I’D RIP YOUR SODDING BALLS OFF AND FINISH YOUR SEX CHANGE CHOICES FOR YOU WITH A RUSTED KNIFE UP YOUR ARSEHOLES—”

The THWACK!s, WHOOMP!s, and the occasional CLANG! began to move from the crumbling section of the shop onward to the right, and the intensity and volume of the breaking wood and drywall began to increase in turn—

“…yah,” Kite squeaked in fear.

“—HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS DEAD AND GONE YOU DEATH-LOVING BASTARDS!!! WHOLE CITIES OF FAMILIES WIPED OUT BY YOUR FUCKING BOMBS AND FOR WHAT?!?! WHAT WAS THE SUNDAMNED FUCKING POINT OF IT ALL IF YOU WERE JUST GONNA RAPE THE WORLD OF EVERY LAST DROP OF HOPE FOR PEACE IT EVER HAD AND SHIT ON THE ASHES YOU PISS-DRINKING BITCHES—”

The center of the shop came crumbling down on itself, and the cussing, destructive mare stayed well ahead of her work and emerged into view of the doorway, now covered in splotches of white and wood splinters as she continued her merciless assault on the building. From her side, Kite heard a terrified “eep!”, and then Ada’s body scrambled to retreat back into the fire station, her talons and claws scraping the pavement in the process. Above, she could hear the windows clicking back shut in hurried succession as the onlookers sought to be elsewhere.

Kite just stood there, and marveled at the fury and strength that was demolishing the (admittedly decrepit) shop in less time than most souls spent taking a leak. By this point, the mare’s cussing had degraded into enraged screams, and with a small view of her work through the door and the broken shop window, Kite was slightly disturbed to learn that apparently some of the destruction being wrought was by the mare’s own bare hooves—a few times, she would buck the living shit out of a portion of the wall behind her while she swung with all of her rage and hate at whatever was in front of her. And when the last remaining section of the roof and structure began to come down, the mare came charging out of the shop display window, taking one last mighty swing at the window frame and blowing a pony-sized chunk of wall out in the process—

—the abused, debilitated shop, having been thoroughly abused and assaulted by a single pony, finally gave up on existence and simply collapsed in on itself in a cloud of dust, spilling debris across the sidewalk and into the street as the mare came to a stop just outside of its splash zone, breathing heavily and setting the head of her sledgehammer down to lean into the handle for support.

And yet after maybe ten seconds to catch her breath, the mare’s breathing had settled down into a steady rhythm, and so she hoisted the hammer back across her body and began to stroll back towards the fire station as if she merely been out for a midday stroll.

Kite had lost most self-awareness of her world until the angry swearing mare crawled to a stop a few feet away from her and made a politely-worded request. “Could I trouble you for another drink? I seem to have worked up a terrible thirst.”

If not for the destruction and voracity of her swearing, Kite might have found the sight of this mare overwhelmingly mesmerizing with the way the light breeze was blowing her black mane about. But faced with the aftermath of violence that could be meted out at will, Kite’s desire for survival greatly outweighed her lust. “…weeeee have water, Sparkle-Colas in three different flavors, and a 2-quart canteen of black pekoe tea—”

“Tea sounds lovely,” the mare chirped happily almost immediately upon hearing the fourth option, and gently trotted around her and ventured back into the fire station.

Kite stood there for a few moments, pondering the implications of what she’d just witnessed. She’d thought Sling was a bit of a mess, but this mare was already competing with her for the picture of “emotionally unstable creature” and she’d just met her.

And now she was potentially sharing a roof with two of them.

“…awwww, shit.”

Comments

[PonyofEntropy]

Great update! Still loving this story. Looking forward to the next update.

[PonyofEntropy]

Just checking in. Hope all is well with you.