24 - GLORY TO EQUESTRIA!
The towering concrete walls surrounding Los Pegasus truly boggled the mind. It was simply massive. The wall looked like the gums of sky-scraper teeth in a concrete titan's jaw. I had been told Los Pegasus had a wall. Several times, even. But nothing could have prepared me for this monolith.
Walls were nothing new to me. Fillydelphia’s defenders had made their walls from scrap and old auto-wagons. Canterlot allegedly had an elegantly designed, yet functional, wall of plated stone before the Enclave blasted it down the side of the mountain. Sire’s Hollow had its palisade wall crafted from hewn timber and bits of rope.
Even Pomare had a wall of sorts… Sure, it was a weather shield, not really a wall. Not exactly. But it did the same job as a wall… Kind of?
The walls in the Heartlands had all made sense. They were maybe five ponies high tops and made from junk, aside from Canterlot’s of course. Canterlot’s wall had been built centuries ago in the days of massed infantry warfare, bows, spears, and spells. Every city had a nice tall wall back then.
Canterlot’s now-non-existent wall had made sense when it had existed. A thriving civilization with access to masons, stone quarries, architects, and wizards built it to show off their wealth.
Los Pegasus’s wall made no sense at all.
Los Pegasus’s wall towered at least eight stories high. It appeared to be solid concrete. There were no seams I could see from the train’s window. No sign of where concrete blocks of bricks had been stacked and joined with mortar and rebar. It was a single. Solid. Piece!
It had to be a prewar relic. I held no doubt in my mind as to the wall’s origins in the Great War, but why anypony would build such a thing… The city sat on the beach! The open sea stretched out across the entire horizon to the south. The wall would be useless for defending the city.
The Empire would have used an amphibious landing for Los Pegasus. Battleships would have shelled it day and night. I personally would have made as big a hole in that wall as my commanders pleased. It would have been useless against me. Entirely useless!
“Why the buck did they build this!?” I demanded aloud, my face almost glued to the window as I tried to comprehend the absolute insanity of the wall’s mere existence.
“To keep the barbarians out back in the early days of the wasteland,” A soldier in the seat in front of me commented.
“Heh, Vantapink, you owe me ten caps!” her sister, More Pink, called with a mocking laugh.
“Oh come on! She didn’t ask how we built it, we both lost,” Vantapink shouted back while my brain tried to process what the first soldier had said.
“Excuse me,” Wander said for me as she held up a hoof rather poignantly. “Did you just say that wall… THAT wall, is post-war?!”
The soldier in front of us turned around and pushed his long chartreuse mane out of his eyes. “Sure is, ma’am! My great-grandmother helped with the Great Pour.”
“Oh… you… have a limestone quarry and a cement plant?” I asked again, my ears perking up excitedly.
Concrete would be a gift from Celestia herself for so many things! We could replace all those little piled up rock fences with more orderly piled up rock fences! Or pave roads!
Eeee! Paved roads! Think of the postal delivery times I could get with paved—
Um… Also, more important things I could think of later when not trying to process the sheer enormity of the motherbucking wall to my left!
“We have lots of things,” the soldier dismissed with a shrug. “I’m certain the Prince will show you. He is very proud of our work.”
They said the same thing last time, too. The question was, did they have explanations amongst all those things they apparently had?
“Remember what I taught you about cults and conspiracies?”
Well duh! There’s a cult of personality going on, he literally admitted that himself. Infact, that is kind of how he came to power to begin with… And actually, everyone knows that. Which… you know!
“I know, Gears. I’m just trying to remind you that small groups like this are insular. It will take a bit of force to get answers out of them. Um, not violence force. Effort force.”
Oh! Thanks dad.
“Or, you could tell me how you made it,” I pointed out as I aimed a hoof at the wall. “It’s seamless, one piece. How did you do that? Is it a veneer over brick?”
He shook his head. “No. The wall is solid, well, sort of. It has a core of sand and dirt, but the wall’s shell is a meter thick with rebar reinforcements.”
Wander blinked. “Wait… I’ve been here before. That wall is easily ten meters thick, and you made it post-war?”
“Yuhhuh,” he said with a smile.
“Meter thick… with rebar, that colossal…” Wander said trailing off to stare out the window. “How the actual buck?!”
Finally! She was as baffled by the megastructure as I was!
I stared into the soldier’s very soul, slowly narrowed my eyes into a Glare Configuration, cleared my throat, and... “WALL! EXPLAIN NOW, PLEASE!”
His face contorted with worry. “Uh… I— I’m— We’re not cleared to talk about our supply source. Sorry… Suffice to say, we spent half a year manufacturing alloys, concrete, and earth to build the wall, which was primarily done via telekinesis. It was a joint project between all the Corporations, um, they ruled over us before the Prince did… The wall is an example of what we could have been doing this entire time if they weren't compelatly self interested and gave a buck about Equestria… Sorry, that’s all I can say! You’re the Prince’s guests but I don’t know if you have security clearance.”
Speed hummed and opened the window, “Want me to go up to the engine and ask him?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Yes, but I thought you couldn’t fly.”
“I can't,” she confirmed with an embarrassed blush. “But um… I could parkour across! Like in one of those spy simulations where the writers ran out of action set piece ideas and added a train!”
Wander shook her head. “Sit down. You were complaining just ten minutes ago about not having had any food for two days. You’re not going to—”
The soldier in front of us gasped, his silver eyes nearly popping out of his head. “Nopony bothered to feed you guys?! What the flying buck?!” He turned around and yelled up the car. “Hey! Somepony get these girls a steak or something! They haven't eaten in days!”
The car quickly descended into a panicked sea of chaos as literally everypony suddenly realised they had been bad hosts. Honestly, as a pony who didn’t need to eat, it was quite adorable to watch nearly fifty poneis scrambling to see if they could fix a meal with whatever they had on them at the time.
Speed kept trying to get their attention and failing, until finally she just screamed at the top of her lungs, “THANK YOU, BUT I AM A VAMPIRE BAT! I CAN'T EAT SOLIDS!”
I held back a grin, waiting for the soldiers to descend into an uneasy state of worry about my little psycho's diet and starving state.
Vantapink trotted up the aisle with a relieved look on her face while drawing her combat knife...
“Oh good, everypony’s out of rations. Here, go nutssss—,” she said as she cut into her own foreleg then offered it to Speed. “Ow! Bit dull.”
Before Wander and I could even blink, let alone gap in shock, Speed jumped out of her seat, tackled the mare, and clamped her muzzle around her foreleg and began to suckle.
“Um!” Wander and I managed to squeak out in unison.
Vanta shrugged her free shoulder. “What? She’s hungry.”
Note to self: Pegan Rangers are badflank. Do not upset.
☢★★◯★★☢
The train came to a stop in front of a set of huge iron gates. The city’s fortifications were immaculate. The gates themselves looked like they could stand up to tank-shells for a few minutes at the very least. A small semi-circular parade ground had been established in front of the colossal gates, protected by a sand-bag wall and even a twisting strand of razor wire.
Given the fortifications, I had expected the train to carry us into the city, but apparently not. Everypony instead got off and marched towards a small outbuilding set up in front of the gates, as if it were a gate for the horseshoe shaped sand-bag wall. One or two ponies entered at a time, with a voice calling over a megaphone “Next!” every so often.
A border checkpoint. Los Pegasus had an honest to goodness border checkpoint.
It blew my mind!
We stood in line, trotting forwards every so often. Wander looked surprised, as if she didn’t remember this form the last time she had been down this way. Speed was quietly admiring the fortifications and happily licking her lips every so often.
I’d asked if Vantapink had tasted that good. Apparently she tasted like pink lemonade. An interesting hypothesis which needed some sciencing… If only I could taste things.
“Good evening, girls,” Prince Silverlight said form behind us, snapping me out of my thoughts.
I turned my head to greet him with a friendly smile. The Prince’s hood was down, allowing his gloriously flowy mane to blow in the salty breeze.
“Hello!” I said before immediately pointing to the wall. “How build? Tell please now!”
Silverlight laughed and after a moment’s consideration nodded to himself. “It was before my time… Assuming the story is accurate, every unicorn slave the Corporations owned was made to spend months gathering the materials, while every earth pony slave they owned shaped the earth-works core of the wall in a manner similar to the design of highway ramps. Every pegasus slave assisted in creating a colossal mold of assorted timber, and when all was ready, a wing-power created waterspout was used to transfer sea water into the mold to hydrate the concrete. Though marred by the enslavement of the builders, the Wall is a testament to what we can accomplish together.”
“B— But that would take literally thousands of slaves! Maybe even tens of thousands!” I protested as I looked up at the massive wall again. “It’s huge! It encircles the whole city! How big is it? Sixty square kilometers?!”
Silverlight blinked several times as he looked at me in shock. “Miss Gears, I believe you have the most accurate sense of scale I have ever seen in a pony. Our city is indeed nearly as large as you think. If my memory serves it is sixty one and a half square kilometers. Furthermore, yes, it did indeed take many thousands of slaves.”
Wander cleared her throat. “So uh, Gears? Last time I was here, the Corporations controlled the city. It’s… it’s huge. It’s dense. I wasn’t allowed out of a small area. I felt like I was back in Manehattan centuries ago, only the shitty part of it. I don’t know how they do it, but they have pre-war population numbers.”
“Oh no, not really,” Silverlight dismissed before I could die from pure shock. “Pre-war Los Pegasus had nearly seven hundred thousand residents, not counting the suburbs of course. We have nothing near that today.”
“Oh thank goodness,” I sighed in relief. “I don’t know how I would process the fact that millions of ponies were alive in one settlement in the Heartlands.”
“It sure felt like there were hundreds of thousands of ponies…” Wander murmured. “Maybe they just all crowded around me?”
“Probably,” Silverlight said to Wander before turning back to me. “Los Pegasus is not part of the Heartlands, Miss Gears. That term refers to a roughly two hundred kilometer radius around Canterlot, as well as the northeast grasslands. We are in the Gentle Dunes region. To return to our previous topic, while the majority of Pegans survived the War, the Corporations ran the city into the ground, living lives of luxury and power without any care for the outside world. By the time I took control, we were down to twenty eight thousand. As of last month’s census, we are just shy of thirty thousand counting reported foaling—”
I spent the next several moments staring off into space processing that. Finally, after a mini eternity, “I— But… H— How come you didn’t just steam roll over— Why don’t you just steamroll over everything now!”
“Our standing army is only seven thousand strong,” Silverlight commented idly. “Most of them act as our police force, with roughly two thousand free for deployment as needed, and I have most of them scouting the old world, running trade routes, and at the moment, nearly six hundred of us are purging a rather nasty variety of feral ghoul from a region to the north west, and half as many heading east to save an ex-NCR township from the NCR’s mess…”
I raised an eyebrow at that. “Wait… Then, you would invade the NCR if you could?”
Silverlight sighed and nodded. “Yes… But not for the sake of conquest. They will not respond to diplomacy, and I truly do need to speak with Celestia on a crucial matter. If I had enough troops to ensure I could get that audience by force without civilians coming into harm during the operation, I would.”
“As for “Steam Rolling” Equestria,” he continued, “I simply do not have enough troops to occupy the whole of Equestria, even assuming we had absolutely no losses, and magically gained a few hundred thousand troops through the Power of Friendship, or some such thing. I couldn’t succeed at reuniting Equestria by force even if I could somehow commit all of my people to military operations, and that’s ignoring the lack of an Equestria to unite. The rest of our citizens are required to work in the factories and keep our city running, as well as keeping the wasteland’s reputable folk supplied with ammunition. It may seem as if we have an endless supply of ponies, but we do not. To use the nautical term, Los Pegasus is running on a skeleton crew.”
“Wasn’t Los Pegasus a weapons manufacturing center?” Speed asked out of the blue while I tried to process the idea of nearly thirty thousand poneis living behind that impossible wall.
What the buck did they eat?! Where were the farms? Greenhouses behind the wall, perhaps? Or maybe fish? Did they have an enormous fishing fleet out at sea which I couldn’t see due to the curvature of the earth and distance?
If so, could I go boat for a little bit? I’m sure Her Highness would understand. I should call her soon… And ask if I could go on one of the boats they must have to get all of the food in the world which they needed for their Celestia’s plot sized population!
“Yes, we are an are arms manufacturing city,” Silverlight corrected. “If you would like to browse our wares, I will of course be happy to accommodate you once we have entered the city.”
Speed shook her head. “No, I mean, Los Pegasus should have been a priority target for the Empire. You yourself admitted its suburbs were destroyed. But, and I know this sounds crazy considering the rest of the Wasteland, I can totally see actual skyscrapers behind that wall. The city center is intact. No evidence of naval shelling. How? Shouldn’t a coastal city this close to Zebrica be a glass-rimmed crater?”
Really?! Speed was on about that when there was entire feasts worth of food behind those walls and my mom had to spend bits and slots on a ration card to get old pemmican?!
Wander’s ears perked at Speed’s remark. “That’s a good point! I never thought to ask how the city survived last time I was here. How did you manage that, exactly?”
Silverlight opened his mouth to answer Speed.
No! No, he was answering me!
“What the buck are you eating?!” I exploded, my left eye glowing and twitching with rage. “My people are starving so much that it’s not uncommon for fathers to starve to death trying to make sure their foals eat enough to grow up properly, most of us are undersized, and here you are, able to feed tens of thousands!”
Silverlight’s face fell. He reached out gently taking me by the shoulder with one hoof. “Miss Gears… That shall not be true for much longer. Once we are inside, I will show you and you alone where we get all of our supplies, including our food. What’s more, I am more than willing to send two tons of food north for your people as a gift of good faith. No strings attached… I cannot speak our secrets here, nor will I inform your companions without due cause, but I will tell you and you alone so you can confirm the truth of our city for your Queen. Are we clear?”
I closed my mouth, my jaw having dropped without my having noticed. “T— Tons?”
“Tons,” Silverlight applied evenly. “I am quite interested in acquiring an airship, I have heard your nation can produce them. A few tons of meat and grain is nothing to get on the good side of your people. However, this is a matter for when we are in a secure location.”
Silvelright turned to look at the line in front of us then sighed. “We have time for the story of our survival, are you two still interested?”
Wander nodded. “How— How would I not be?”
“Duh!” Speed said with a roll of her eyes.
“I’m also interested… Just… how the buck are you feeding tens of thousands?!” I stammered, still firmly stuck on that.
“A quite similar way to how Stable-Tec fed a thousand of ponies for centuries,” Silverlight remarked before clearing his throat.
Oh! Well, that’s something to work with at least… Even if they did have a massive hydroponic farm I was still going to visit the Sparkle-Cola corporation. I felt my core cool down as my anger began to subside.
“As for Los Pegasus’ decidedly mostly intact state,” Silverlight continued. “This is a long story, and I do not tell it very often. It would be very kind of you not to interrupt me unless you absolutely must ask for clarification. Understand?”
Wander nodded and chuckled. “Yeah, I get it. People think it’s easy to just tell a story, but once a bunny trail gets going, well…”
Speed tilted her head. “What do rabbits have to do with anything?”
My ears perked in excitement. I knew this one!
“Bunny trail is slang for the way a question can divert an inprogress topic of conversation onto another topic, occasionally several times in succession, such that the original topic is never returned too.”
Speed nodded in understanding. “Thanks!”
Silverlight facehooved. “That. Please do not do that for the next… Eight minutes. Okay?”
I blushed. “Sorry. I’ll be quiet and listen.”
Speed and Wander nodded in agreement.
Silverlight took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and began to recite what had to have been a well known story. It had the rhythm and feel of something mothers told their children as they lay in bed, or as an answer to a curious question asked at the dinner table.
“Everypony wonders how Los Pegasus survived the bombardment as well as she did. In days long past, when the Great War raged like a wildfire but before the first spark of balefire was struck, the Corporations who once ruled over Los Pegasus served a common cause. Equestria.
“The Seven Corporations were her warsmiths. Before the war, they paid the ponies of Los Pegasus to make guns for Equestria’s soldiers. Big guns, small guns, guns for ponies to hold, guns which required wagons to be moved, guns that spit lead, guns that spit magic, they built them all. The guns we produce today are but a shadow of what once poured out from our armories.
“Indeed, more than weapons alone were produced in Los Pegasus. If the Equestrian army used it, there was a good chance it was built in Los Pegasus. Especially bullets. Los Pegans produced a lot of bullets.”
Speed raised her hoof. Silverlight sighed and nodded. “Yes?”
“How many bullets?” Speed asked with an adorable excited foal-ish smile.
Silverlight frowned and closed his eyes, murmuring as he did the math. “I— I honestly can’t say? The city’s stockpile of ammunition was at least several tens of billions of rounds, between all types.”
Wander sputtered. My tail stood up in alarm. Speed eed.
“All of the bullets!” She whispered to herself.
“WHAT?!” I demanded. “How the buck do you make tens of billions of anything?!”
Wander shook her head. “It’s an impressive number… But thinking back, that amount of bullets makes sense pre-war. The Great War had fronts all over the world. We were probably burning a billion rounds a month, all told.”
Silverlight nodded and sighed. “Exactly… And as for the stockpiles in our city, that is addressed next. May I... continue?”
I blushed and nodded. “S— Sorry.”
Silverlight paused a moment, then continued the tale. “In the very last days of the old world, the casinos of the strip found themselves in dire straits. Before the war, tourists had come from all over the world in an endless tide to gamble within their resorts. As the war went on, ever fewer ponies came to gamble and frolic. In their last few months of life, the casinos were visited only by a few hundred ponies a month, not counting the high rollers who lived within the resorts.
“Where once Los Pegasus had survived on the taxes paid by the casinos, the war had forced the city to change industries, shifting to manufacturing. As you can imagine, the noise and pollution further diminished the casinos’ profits. Desperate for a return to better times, the entire strip chose to pour their remaining wealth into the production of more weapons. They believed that if Equestria could simply out-field and out-supply the Empire, Equestria could bring a swift end to the war.”
I desperately wanted to ask if that strategy could have worked, but I didn’t want to interrupt again. Instead I simply moved forward as the line advanced and kept listening to the Prince’s story.
“Nearly a trillion bits were dumped into the city’s coffers, earmarked expressly for producing as many munitions as possible. Los Pegasus began to produce more guns and ammunition than Equestria had need for and far more than our ancestors could ship to military bases across the nation,” SIlverlight continued. “Los Pegasus’s warehouses were filled to capacity with surplus guns and ammo in mere weeks. The Corporations loved the increase in profits, and had no intention of stopping or slowing production rates simply because they were out of storage space. They ordered ponies save space by going out, unpacking bullets, and preloading the magazines. This bought another week, but, soon enough, our ancestors resorted to storing munitions heaped in the streets beneath tarps.”
Wander winced. Speed nodded in apparent agreement. “Yes. That was indeed terribly insecure. I do not know if guards were posted or not. Presumably, organized crime had a field day… The Corporations didn’t care. They were paid per item produced, not item shipped.”
“That’s pretty dumb…” I murmered quietly.
Silverlight nodded in agreement again, then resumed his story. “The Zebrican Empire was a master of sabotage and subterfuge. Equestria had created a warning system long ago to alert it if the Zebras ever launched their missiles… The Zebras, desperate enough to end the war at any cost, executed a daring operation to disable that very warning system. They succeeded, and in the same minute their agents disabled our warning system, before anypony activated any backup systems, they fired. Equestria was doomed, blind to the attack due to the sabotage. Los Pegasus, on the other hoof, was not.
“Commander Solemn Creed, who had a habit of looking across the sea each morning, was our savior. By pure chance, a single Zebrican submarine had surfaced to launch just a little too close to Equestria’s coast, and he saw it unleashing its payload through his binoculars. Our port’s air raid sirens carried their warning to Los Pegasus, but the zebra sabotage prevented us from warning the rest of Equestria.”
I briefly wondered if we simply had a shaman bribe the machine spirits living within Equestria’s Term-Link system to keep quiet. In truth, the spies who took the warning system down likely had to do something far more complex, or perhaps much more simple, like cut the transmission lines.
Regardless… It was amusing to picture the end of the world happening due to the equivalent of bribing a foal with a candy bar.
“Realizing we were alone, the Seven Corporations chose to act,” Silverlight said as we all stepped forward as the line continued to advance. “Some say they acted to save themselves, others say they chose to try and save us, others believed they knew they could use their power to create the world they ruled over for centuries. Whatever the reason, they decided to put everything they had into defending our city.
“We had no idea we were in for a rocket bombardment, anything seemed possible. The Mayor deputized everypony in order to allow them to fight off a possible enemy landing. The weapons piled in the streets around warehouses were handed out to anypony passing by. Every cannon in a fireable state was wheeled out of the factories, set up, aimed skywards, and together with the hundreds of AA guns erected on the rooftops long long ago, our ancestors created a flak cloud above Los Pegasus.”
“Huh! Neat!” Speed exclaimed with a grin.
“Pardon?” Silverlight asked with a frown.
“Oh, well, I grew up in a Dream Pod doing military simulations. I figured out our flak cannons would shred Zebrican missiles pretty early on… I always thought that was a physics engine glitch. I mean, it makes sense that they would mess up a missile now that I think about it, but the way it made them explode rather than just fall to bits can’t be how it worked in real life, right?”
Silverlight shook his head. “No… Whatever detonator the Zebricans used, it indeed went off when struck by flak.”
I hissed as I realized what that meant. “Oh wow… So, Los Pegasus didn’t get blown up, but it was irradiated to Tartarus and back… That explains why you didn’t become a beacon of safety for survivors.”
Silverlight nodded. “Indeed… Amongst many other things. To continue, the flak was so thick not a single Pegan knew Eqeustria’s air force had turned traitor and sealed off the skies. The sky above them was already invisible, as was the sun, hidden behind a pony-made total solar eclipse. The roar of the cannons was constant and shook the very earth so hard the subway beneath the streets caved in, swallowing an entire district whole.
“The blanket of flak served our ancestors well. Dozens of flashes of green lit up the sky as detonated rockets blasted holes into the protective blanket through which the sun could be seen for but an instant. It is said more cannon shells were fired in that single moment than had been fired by both sides in the last six months of the war... Yet, the unprecedented amount of gunfire was not enough.
“Each time the flak detonated an incoming rocket, it punched a hole in the flak blanket. The Guard Ponies coordinating Operation Hide Under the Blankets calculated, given estimates of how many warheads the Zebricans had and how many might be aimed at such an important center of manufacture, they could only stop ninety-three percent of the rockets aimed their way. Even worse, even Los Pegasus couldn’t keep firing forever. We only had so many flak rounds. If the bombardment continued for forty-five minutes, Los Pegasus would be lost.”
“Wait,” Wander said with a frown. “If you didn’t have enough flak for six hours, how is your city still here?”
Silverlight laughed and shook his head. “That, my dear ghoul, is thanks to either the dumbest awesome thing ever, or the awesomest dumb thing ever. You can decide when we get there.”
“NEXT!” I jumped slightly as the megaphone enhanced voice barked a clear word for the first time.
Thank goodness we were nearing the end of the wait for the border checkpoint! That pony’s voice sounded like barbed wire being pulled through a jar of marbles inside a bushel of cotton.
Wander looked the Prince up and down then raised an eyebrow enough for me to see it over her new sunglasses. “You’re serious… Why are you serious?”
“Because it’s one of those two things. Depending first and foremost on your personal preference,” Silverlight said simply as he laughed. “While it worked… It’s still one of those two things. Where was I?”
“If the bombardment continued for forty-five minutes, Los Pegasus would be lost,” I prompted.
“Ah! Right,” Silverlight cleared his throat. “As fate willed it, Commander Creed saw the flak blanket could only cover the city center. He watched as the suburbs burned, and he felt nothing but rage. In his own words, Equestria’s fall demanded a “futile and stupid guesture of defiance on somepony’s part”... and he was just the stallion to do it. The Commander drew his side arm, took aim at the skies and screamed “Not one more shall touch Equestrian soil!” as he unloaded his side arm into the heavens.
“The Commander’s attendants, sharing his rage, joined him in venting their anger upon the skies. Then, the guardsmares who were not manning the tower’s AA guns joined in as well. Pony herd instincts being what they are… Heh. This began a chain reaction of ponies joining in just because others were shooting upwards, and others believing their must be actual orders to personally light up every last inbound missile with anything they had at hoof.”
My jaw dropped in shock. “I— Bu— But—”
Wander glared at me. “Shh! That can’t be it, so shh!”
I closed my lips as tightly as I could. Silverlight grinned.
“Within ten minutes,” he continued, “seven hundred thousand ponies turned the small arms of the Pegan guard upon the skies, unleashing a roar and thunder ponies never heard. Pistols. Carbines. Rocket launchers. Anti-material rifles. At least one slingshot. Everything we had made was put to work in this one last act of defiance and desperation. Then, somepony lost to history had the bright idea to start coordinating all that small arms fire.
“Pegasi used their eagle-eyes to spot rockets through the flak and coordinate entire platoons’ fire. Unicorns created targeting illusions to help lead each group’s shots and telekinetically redirected stray and falling rounds back into the skies. Civilians and soldiers alike fired upwards, constantly, for six hours as the rockets came down. It shouldn't have worked, but it did. At least, in part.”
“Right, the radiation,” I murmured.
“While the bombardment was stopped before balefire could reach the ground and burn Los Pegasus to ash, it was flooded with radiation each time a warhead burst in the flak, or was shredded by small arms fire on the way down from the clouds. Everypony manning the tower-top AA guns withered and died by the end. Many of the ponies on the rooftops of all but the shortest buildings faltered in their efforts, becoming so sick the city’s storm drains were said to have clogged. Many more poor souls in the streets became ghouls in that very instant…
“It was the ghouls which saved us. The radiation baking the upper half of Los Pegasus empowered them, fueled them. Even as their flesh bubbled and fur fell out, they rushed to the city’s defense, clearing the sick, taking up the guns as they fell silent, believing they would die any minute and wanting their last moments in life to mean something. They are our heroes, and the greatest shame of our city is how nearly all of them were killed by the other survivors out of fear of the undead…”
Silverlight grew quiet for a while. Long enough for us to advance several more places in line before he resumed. “Los Pegasus survived, struck by a single low-yield tactical warhead which vaporised the mayor’s office, and much of the city’s governing district… Mysteriously leaving the industrial and residential districts intact… Many ponies believe that particular explosion was not of Zebrican origin, but I digress. For this is not the story of the Corporation's rise to power. This is the story of how our city stands, how the Pegan Guardsmares earned the nickname "The Wall of Guns", and why for two hundred years, Los Pegasus has been safe behind the Wall.”
His story completed, the Prince took a canteen out from under his cloak and drank deeply from it.
Wander, Speed, and I stared at Silver as he drained the entire cantine then smiled at us apologetically. “Sorry. I know it’s a long story. I got a little horse.”
“You… just shot the missiles.” Wander said flatly.
“With bullets,” I added, equally incredulous.
“Correct,” Silver replied.
“There is no way a single bullet would do anything to an ICBM!” Speed protested with a stamp of her hoof. “I tried! There was an achievement for it!”
I nodded firmly in agreement. “No way at all! I can see flak clouds shredding them easily enough but there’s about a centimeter of steel around the typical balefire warhead and—”
SIlverlight held up a hoof for us to be quiet. “You’re not thinking about the scale of firepower unleashed,” he prompted.
“What do you mean?” Wander asked. “We’re talking small arms fire against intercontinental ballistic missiles. The odds of simply hitting one on the way down with a single shot are—”
“Next to impossible. I know,” Silverlight confirmed with a smile. “One bullet wouldn’t do anything, this is true. Ten wouldn’t accomplish anything either. We were not shooting at them with such small numbers of rounds. Think for a moment. Try and do the math in your head. Seven hundred thousand ponies, assuming they were only armed with one gun each, which is very unlikely as many ponies prefer two… But, let’s lowball it. Worst case scenario. Seven hundred thousand guns, most of which were fully automatic weapons, were putting enough rounds into the air for barrels to melt and runners were needed to bring fresh weapons to the rooftops. There were easily millions of rounds in the air at any given second. Those missiles were effectively running one by one into floating gravel river beds on the way down.”
“Oh…” Wander said with an understanding flick of her tail.
Then the truth of the magnitude of just how many bullets had been fired hit her and her eyes widened. “OH!”
“But why didn’t your ancestors immediately head out for relief efforts?” Speed asked curiously.
“Because radiation!” I said with a suspicious eyebrow. “Weren't you listening earlier?”
“Oh yeah…” Speed said with a shy blush and a flick of her tail.
“Well, I have been mentioning how the Corporations turned the city into their own little playground,” Silverlight reminded. “As for the immediate period after the Wall of Guns fired… Half the city died from radiation poisoning. This caused quite a bit of chaos, as did the immediate panic over cut supply lines. There was also the unique problem of the Wall of Guns having been a roar and thunder ponies never heard. That wasn’t purple prose, girls.”
The fact that guns are loud suddenly clicked with just how many weapons must have been firing at once.
“OH!” I said as I recoiled at the very thought of anything that loud...
“Everypony in Los Pegasus on the Last Day went deaf or suffered from crippling tinnitus,” Silverlight said with a shudder of his own. “Our ancestors didn’t manufacture suppressors, and if you look up at the towers… Well, they were not black before the Wall fired. That is not paint to commemorate our survival, or honor those who died. That is baked on gunpowder residue.”
I looked up at the top of the towers. The sun had set long ago, but the lights in the towers themselves shone brightly enough for me to make out every detail of the many, many ancient skyscrapers within the city wall.
Sure enough, every tower I could see faded from one color or another to black as you looked up their sides. The windows were clean. The walls… The walls were indeed all black.
Celestia...
“We fired so many bullets that a good number of ponies died from black lung. A disease normally only found in coal miners,” Silverlight added.
“R— Really?” Wander asked, her ears drooping back.
The Prince nodded. “Eyep.”
“Damn…” Wander said as she shook her head.
“So many bullets fell into the river we source our water from that until we realised we needed to fish all the lead out of it five years later, lead poisoning was a leading cause of death for foals. Our homes are roofed in brass… Because we can’t pry the trampled shell casings off them. The sheer concussive force of that many guns firing for that loong, and all those hooves scrambling to replace arms and ammo, hammered them into the stones. Any building not earthquake proof collapsed. I am neither joking nor exaggerating.”
I winced and recoiled inwards. “Oh… I see…”
Speed hummed in thought, then shivered. “You know… Now that I do the math… I mean, I can’t factor in the diminishing rate of fire as ponies died since I don’t have numbers for that. But if all seven hundred thousand fired for the entire time, that’s two-hundred-twenty-six billion rounds fired assuming the average rate of fire of nine hundred rounds per minute is the average, which it should be given a majority of automatic weapons in the crowd.”
Wander and I sputtered trying to even fathom that much of anything… well, anything!
Silverlight nodded. “Indeed. It’s still at least fifty billion rounds fired when you do factor in the dead. Up to a hundred and ten billion, as we were the number one producer of miniguns. To be honest… Trying to calculate that is futile. Even if we had proper numbers to work with, you wouldn’t comprehend the scale of things.”
“Holy bucking crap!” Wander exclaimed in genuine shock. “Okay, I’m calling it. There was enough dakka once. Just once!”
“Dakka?” Silverlight and I asked together.
“The Minotaur word for rapid firepower,” Wander replied. “It was— There was a thing. If you want to make a minotaur really happy, tell them this story.”
I made a mental note to do just that.
Silverlight adjusted his cloak. “A lot of ponies tend to think the Wall saved us from everything… It’s critical you don’t believe that. You must not forget that our wall was built by slaves. We were not spared the horrors of the End. We just made different ones than what the rest of Equestria experienced.”
The three of us waited quietly, trying to picture what the Los Pegas skyline must have looked like during the Last Day as the line continued to advance. Just as I was beginning to wonder if the combined muzzle flashes could have been seen from orbit, we reached the checkpoint.
“NEXT!”
The little outbuilding was a tiny cinder block structure. Grey, uninteresting, aside from words painted in white on the side facing us.
Equestria welcomes you!
☼
Los Pegasus border checkpoint.
A single crystal lamp lit the sign, with another glowing within the building itself. Speed, Wander, and I walked inside. There was just barely enough room for three ponies to stand side by side in the “hallway” in front of a small counter. The interior wasn’t lit quite well enough for everything to be easily visible. The single lamp on the counter was pointed down, there to illuminate passports, and nothing else.
A positively ancient gray furred stallion dressed in a deep blue and crimson military dress uniform sat behind the counter, barely visible in the dim light, which was partially blocked for us by a metal blast shield the pony could close for his safety. His head was perfectly framed by the wings on the Equestrian flag hung on the wall behind him.
The stallion leaned forward slightly, not interested in us, but simply getting ready to take something. “Papers, please.”
My ears perked up. I had papers! The President had given them to me.
I reached into my saddlebag to dig for them while Wander and Speed shared a distressed look and an “Uh…”
Silverlight suddenly leaned through the open wall to give the old stallion a sympathetic look. “Inspector, they are with me.”
The ancient stallion looked up and instantly went white as a sheet. “My apologies, your highness! I’ll make up entry permits for them right away, your high—”
“Mister Record,” SIlverlight interrupted with a kind smile. “We don’t fine you for being wrong anymore. You’re thinking of the previous regime… Do you need to take the rest of the night off?”
“N— No, sir!” The stallion said as he removed three sheets of paper from a drawer and began to quickly fill out the forms typed on them.
Silverlight slowly shook his head. “It’s okay, Mister Record. Your family won't have their rations cut for you taking a half day either… I understand that is how life was for you for sixty five years. I truly do. What I do not understand is how you’ve failed to grasp things have changed for the last fourteen years. Honestly, you should retire, good sir.”
“I wish to remain at my post, sir,” the ancient stallion said as he finished the papers aside from the top most field. “Names?”
“Whirling Gears,” I said quickly, not wanting to cause the ancient one any more distress than he was already experiencing.
“Wander… or Wanderer. Take your pick,” Wander remarked, then facehooved as the Stallion wrote down everything she said instead of just one of the names.
“Speed Run,” Speed finished.
The Stallion quickly stamped all three papers and handed them to us. “Equestria welcomes you. Cause no trouble.”
The three of us hurried out to let the Prince through. As I slipped the entry permit into my saddlebag I turned to see if the Prince would just walk through, and to my surprise, watched him stop, show a passport, declare a few items for customs, then walk through the checkpoint calling over his shoulder, “And with all due seriousness, Mister Record, consider retirement. You will be treated well and fairly for your last days, my good sir.”
The Prince trotted forwards, shaking his head as he caught up to us. “That poor stallion has been working the checkpoint since before my father was born… It’s a miracle he wasn't executed for some minor mistakes in the distant past,” he said as he took the lead of our group. “Things have changed quite a lot since I took charge of the city, Miss Wander, and I do hope you’ll approve… Regardless, please follow me to the Palace. I will give you guest rooms for as long as you wish to stay.”
The Prince led us to the two massive gates, and through a smaller door set in them. Two guards flanking the doors nodded as we entered, offering a greeting. I held my metaphorical breath, wondering what amazing wonders might be on the other side of these towering slabs of iron.
My jaw dropped as the arid dunes and sparse grass gave way to a working shipyard!
Well, bargeyard might be more accurate. Another wall curved inwards, forming a large horseshoe shape which was cut in half by the Celestial River. Piers extended out into the river, allowing dozens of barges to be docked where a series of cranes could load and unload cargo from each individual vessel.
A series of wagons on the far side of the river would take the cargo to or from the city which lay byond another massive set of gates, identical to the ones we’d just came through. Our side was filled with booths and kiosks, much like Junction Town’s market, only each booth and stall had a consistent design to it, rather than being slapshod and made from scraps.
Everything was new. Everything was lit by large crystal lamps. Even the four huge drawbridges which connected this side of the market/shipyard to the rest of the city.
“This is so cool!” I squeed. “I never thought I’d get to see another proper dock ever again!”
I zipped across the market to get a better look down into the canal at the barges. They were no warships, obviously, but they were boats! That boated!
Each of the barges had their own name painted on the hulls, little houses for the crew to stay in, and even a turret or two for plinking away at pirates. So awesome! Maybe they’ll let me shoot one! Sure, Feature is a bigger gun than those heavy machine guns but she’s not a ship-mounted gun so that’s different in a good way.
None of their spirits were awake enough to talk to, but I thought hello at them real hard anyways.
“Looks about the same as when I was here last time,” Wander remarked dryly as everypony caught up to me.
“Humm?” Silverlight said, sounding genuinely confused. “Oh! No, not the port. The actual city. My apologies for not being precise… Miss Gears, are you alright?”
I turned to smile at him. “Yes! There’s boats!”
Wander blinked, then giggled at me. “Heh… I guess you can take the gunner off a ship, but you can’t take the ship off a gunner.”
“You have sailing experience, Miss Gears?” Silverlight asked with genuine curiosity.
I nodded and trotted over to keep up with them as they began to cross one of the wooden drawbridges. “Mhm!”
The little-doors in the gates on the far side of the market/docks were open for us. Or, at least, open for everypony returning home.
“Why doesn't the train take us inside the city?” Speed asked curiously.
“It would have if it were not going to be loaded up with troops to go help the village Miss Gears informed me the NCR decided not to save from ghouls,” Silverlight said with a slight growl in his voice. “For the moment… Let us discuss more pleasant things. For example, the work my people have done repairing this place. I’m certain you noticed the condition of our market, even though it is closed.”
Wander nodded. “I did. It looked like that fourteen years ago.” She said with a dry unimpressed flick of her tail. “I don’t doubt you’ve done a better job ruling over your city than your predecessors did but—”
Wander stopped mid sentence as we passed through the gates. In her defense, I would have too.
The streets were clean. Swept, washed, and recently touched up with fresh mortar between the cobbles. The sidewalks were in similar condition… and also teeming with ponies.
Hundreds of ponies of all tribes were happily welcoming their loved ones home, and they weren't even the only ones there. Many more were simply walking… or carrying shopping home. Not just groceries, but shopping! Bundles of clothing, weapons, there was even one pony carrying a chair!
All of this was illuminated by working street lights. Working. Motherbucking. Streetlights! All the way down the street as far as I could see! They lit up everything. Every single pony. Every storefront. Every pane of intact glass. Every freshly painted sign advertising this or that.
Sprite-bots, shiny new ones, or at least refurbished, raced through the street, carrying little bags with the ancient Equestrian postal service logo on them. Mail! Real actual mail! Delivered by robots!
Not just one either, but a proper fleet! I could see four! From just here! At the front entrance to the city! At night!
There was more! So much more. I could hear the faint sounds of factories working in the distance. The wall had blocked the sound until we’d passed through the doors but— Wait… What was that sound?
I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to separate each of the many sounds I could hear. The distant hum of machinery. The hundreds of voices in conversation. The sizzle of meat on a grill. Foals cheerfully playing…
“How the buck…” Wander whispered almost got herself, snapping my attention away from my search for the noise.
“A simple reallocation of resources and labor,” Silverlight said as if he wasn’t ruling over a piece of the old world.
“I— It’s just like…” Wander said before she suddenly shivered and pulled her hood down so her face was fully hidden in shadows.
I frowned and gave her an immediate side hug. “I’m sorry… Are you okay?”
Wander nodded. “I— It’s… It’s just like…”
Silverlight nodded and smiled proudly. “Don’t thank me, Wander. Thank yourself… And also the copy of The Princess I found. None of this would have happened without you as inspiration and Princess Celestia’s guidance through her book on how to lead your fellow ponies to prosperity.”
Silverlight began to walk down the street, taking more than a few steps before waving for us. “Don't’ stand in the gateway, girls. You’re keeping the poor ponies behind you from their families. Besides, this is but the threshold! Surely you want to see the heart of Los Pegasus!”
Yes. Yes, I did!
☢★★◯★★☢
The city was packed. Even as late as it was, ponies were everywhere! Some were out moving from bar to bar just having a good time. Others were coming to or from work. Still others were shopping.
Shopping!
There were just shops here. Selling useless nicknacks!
Poor Wander had to look down at her hooves and awkwardly shuffle through town. My heart went out to her. She was walking through a living, breathing piece of the old world. I couldn’t justify calling Los Pegasus anything but that.
I overheard ponies talking about problems like their landlord raising the rent, their boss asking them to work weekends… Pre-war problems! Not “my foals are starving”, “I can’t find any more medicine”, or “windigos ate Sugar!”. Pre-war problems!
Nopony was scared for their safety. Nopony was worried about the immediate future. The city’s wall might as well have been the border to another world.
As we walked, the Prince was greeted by hundreds of different ponies. Many of whom he knew by name, all of whom he took a moment to say hello to. They all treated him like his soldiers had. You expect soldiers to treat a leader with the utmost respect… Civilians? Not so much.
“It’s like he’s Celestia…” Wander whispered under her breath as we stopped yet again for the Prince to briefly ask how a baker’s business was faring.
“What do you mean?” I asked her quietly.
“This is how she was… Everypony just loved her. She loved them. She cared. This… This is how it was… I don’t understand how it can be like this again! I don’t—”
SIlverlight’s ears turned towards Wander, followed almost immediately by his eyes. “Excuse me, Miss Cookie. Would you please explain to our esteemed guest how we managed to restore this fraction of Equestria, and why?”
The plump (yes, plump!) plum mare he had been talking to nodded immediately. “Of course!” She trotted over to Wander and bent down just enough to look her in the eyes. “Hello, miss. Are you a ghoul?”
Wander nodded. “Yeah… I don’t… I don’t understand how you could have done this.”
“Hard work. Caring for each other… and a leader with a vision,” the baker replied. “You don’t have to leave. There’s plenty of places for rent, and once we can find somepony who knows how to build those fancy water farms, we’ve got a whole district ready to be converted into one big farm!”
The Prince nodded in agreement. “The Corporations had the resources to make this happen for centuries. Greed prevented it. Pip’s story inspired me, I showed them a better way, and with luck… One day soon, anypony in Equestria who needs or wants a home, a real home, in a real civilization, will be able to live here. I just need to talk to Celestia… There are some things we are missing. For now… we can care for our own. But one day soon, we will care for anyone who wishes to be a part of this.”
“But… How did you get the stuff to build all of this?” I asked as I looked through the glass storefront into the interior of the bakery. Which had a freaking new looking oven!
“Pre war cities were not self sufficient. How is this possible?” Wander demanded, almost angrily. “Why are you able to do this when nopony else has managed to recover even a fraction of this in centuries?!”
Wander seemed like she was about to explode… When a toilet flushed.
A. Toilet. Flushed!
Wander and I shared a moment of incredulity.
“YOU HAVE INDOOR PLUMBING!” Wander bellowed. “I DEMAND A HOT SHOWER! WITH SHAMPOO!”
Silverlight held up his hooves defensively. “Easy! Easy… It’s okay, my ancient friend. When we arrive at the Palace you may have as many showers as you like… No luck on shampoo, but we do have soap. Furthermore, as we are now within the city and it’s causing you distress, I will gladly explain the source of our wealth. It’s magic.”
Wander nodded, her face impossible to see through her hood’s shadows. “Okay. What kind?”
“Conjuration,” the baker said with a smile as she turned to return to her establishment. “Have a nice evening, your majesty.”
Oh! Well, that sort of made sense. If they had a lot of wizards, they could of course just slowly conjure things they needed and eventually build up to, well... Anything. Right?
How did unicorn magic work, anyways?
“You too,” Silvelright said before turning to walk up the street.
“That answers nothing,” Wander said firmly. “I’m a unicorn. I know conjuration spells. I could make a teacup right now. It would decay to dust within an hour. Your bullets last forever, as far as I can tell. I have a mag from fifty years ago for my back up gun! You have new glass! New appliances! Everywhere! They are stable. Conjuration doesn't work that way!”
Oh…
I narrowed my eyes suspiciously. “If that’s true, since you want to trade with my Queen, maybe you should tell the truth.”
“I am,” Silverlight said firmly. “You are correct, Wander. If a unicorn were to use conjuration magic to create something, it would rapidly decay into dust. Were you trained in theoretical arcana?”
Wander shook her head. “No, and what difference does that make?”
Silverlight sighed. “Quite a lot, I am afraid. In short, basic compounds are more stable when conjured than finished items or even complex compounds. A small team of mages were trying to find a way to make such simple compounds stable enough to last a month or more in order to aid the war effort. They discovered a formula which indeed can create stable conjured compounds… Unfortunately, it’s far too complex for any individual pony, or even a group of ponies, to cast successfully. In addition, it requires a sample of the material you wish to create, which is consumed… Fortunately, conjured copies of the compound can serve as further samples but—”
Wander stopped mid step, her ears perking as if hit by an epiphany. “WE FIGURED OUT MOTHERBUCKING REPLICATORS?!”
“Repliwhats?” I asked with a frown.
“Machines that make anything you want via magic,” Wander said incredulously. “Science fiction’s most awesome creation. Did you. Make. One. Silver?”
“We did not make them, but we do have several,” Silverlight said with a simple nod. “Stable-Tec developed them. Los Pegasus’s Stable was where they were testing a small number of prototypes. If the Last Day had just come a few months later… Well, resources wouldn’t have been a thing to fight over anymore.”
I looked around at the city street, three times as awestruck as before. “You have an infinite supply of everything… A push of a button and you have anything you want… What do you need us for?”
Silverlight sighed. “That’s not at all how it works. We do not have an infinite supply. We can produce items at a fixed rate based on the number of machines we have. We cannot push these machines, as when they break, they break for good, as we do not know how to repair nor maintain them. Furthermore, they require power. Not electrical power, nor steam power, nor anything safe and easy, every item you can see was made from a unicorn’s sweat and blood!”
Wander flinched. I gagged. Speed bent down to sniff the sidewalk, going as far as to lick it then make a disappointed “Aw…”
The Prince facehooved.
“Not literally! Figuratively. They run on magic. Pure magic. As supplied by unicorns,” Silverlight elaborated.
Wander took off her sunglasses to roll her eyes at the Prince. “Oh, you have a supply of anything you want limited by the population of ten thousnad unicorns in your city. What was that excuse you had for not helping everypony recover again?”
The Prince’s eyes narrowed dangerously. Speed took a step back from him with a worried look in her eyes. He leaned in towards Wander. “I am helping them. It will take time. Listen more closely. We cannot push a button and conjure any finished object. This is not possible. Physics, as far as we know, prohibits it. We can create simple compounds. Iron. Brass. Wood. Lead. Lead.Two hundred tons of simple base resources every day. Resources which still need to be crafted into finished products, or processed into other forms. We probably cannot do this forever. We burnt out three of our replicators building the city wall alone. The Corporations continued to burn them out slowly over the centuries. We have precious few left and one is committed to producing only food. We are also limited by technical knowledge, there are many things we cannot make simply because nobody here knows how they were made! We cannot just magic the world’s problems away. We can, however, slowly, over many years, if I can get some information from Celestia, create a stable society on par with the old world to serve as a seed from which a new world can grow. Are we clear?”
Wander nodded, most differently taken aback as she slipped her sunglasses back on. “Yes… I am sorry. I didn’t understand.”
The Prince sighed and offered Wander a small bow. “I am sorry for having been angry at you, Miss Wander. That was perhaps the most insulting thing said to me since I was enslaved as a bedchamber colt… This includes insults by deed. For example, the NCR has all six Elements of Harmony, with active bearers, and yet… The Wasteland remains a wasteland. How many disasters have those relics prevented or repaired? And yet, the Wasteland remains…”
Wander blinked, frowned, then began to look absolutely furious at that absolutely extremely very good question.
“The elements are working!?” Imaginary dad asked in shock
Um. Yes… I knew that. How did you not?
“Reasons! What the buck, NCR?!”
Silverlight sighed and closed his eyes. “Excuse my outburst… I feel as if the only other pony to even try to restart civilization was Red Eye… I look at the Herd and the NCR and see greedy ponies out for their own ends, much like the former masters of this city. I— I am trying to be better than them. I am trying to heal the wounds our ancestors inflicted on this world, my hero is dying in a pod, my mentor is being kept from me by damned fools, and my only peer was a monster. It… It can be quite distressing.”
I cleared my throat. “That is a good question though, about the Elements. I have one of the Bearer’s radio frequencies… let’s find out why!” I said as I pressed on Rainbow’s MoA communicator pin.
To my surprise, Rainbow answered immediately. “Hey, Gears… What’s wrong? Didn’t you call me like an hour ago?”
I tilted my head. “Uh, no? That was nearly three days ago.”
“Three days?!” Rainbow gasped. “What?! HOW?”
I flinched as my core churned uneasily. “Uh… Y— You haven't been regenerating this whole time, have you?”
“No. I fell into a hole,” Rainbow said matter of factually. “Had to walk through an old subway system to get out… Well, I say subway but it’s more like a labyrinth! Who the hay built our subways? Minotaurs?”
I blinked and wished I could see Rainbow to make sure she wasn’t joking. “You... fell in a hole?”
“Yep.”
“But you’re a pegasus… Why didn’t you just fly out?”
“A bus fell in the hole too and jammed it up but good,” she replied with a little sigh. “Trust me, I tried… Twice. Once after falling in, and then again after backtracking to see if I could find another way out and not have to fight a drugged up alicorn mare who decided to chug a barrel of toxic waste the Gardens missed and go super to, and I quote: “Smash flappy thing! SMASH!” Pretty sure that wasn’t the fun kind of smashing, so yeah. Tried to move the bus…”
I winced and took a few steps back. “Oh… Um… So, I’m kind of wondering why you and the other Elements didn’t just.. Magic the Wasteland better.”
“Is that all?” Rainbow asked curiously. “Wait, is that not common knowledge?”
“Well, Prince Silverlight doesn't know it. Neither does Wander.”
“Oh. Well, long story short, the Elements amplify the collective power of the Bearers. Twilight, Rarity, Pinkie, Fluttershy, AJ, me… We had more oomph. A lot more. The six of us had a much closer relationship too. That’s important. The new bearers? We had the right virtues, but as they say, friendship is magic.”
I tilted my head and froned. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
“It was just like the last days I was a Bearer the first time,” Rainbow sighed. “We weren’t close enough. Too many secrets. Not enough of an emotional bond. We could barely make the Elements kickstart the Gardens. We tried other things, but we just didn’t have the juice. I told everypony we’d need to become close friends to make them work at full power, and we were well on the way to that… Buuuut, one of us was a very old stallion and he died a few months after the Gardens were used.”
“Oh… So, they didn’t have a full “charge” and are out of commission now?” I asked.
“Yeah that’s the long and short of it… If we can find a new Magic, we’ll try again. Pip’s looking. She found us, I'm sure she’ll find a new Magic, then we can do the whole friendship thing and see about hitting the undo button on this apocalypse! Thaaat might be beyond the Elements’ power. But I’m pretty sure we could go around bamphing farms and forests and the like into existence!”
“Good to know… Thanks, Rainbow. Oh, and um, you should go to Los Pegasus.”
“What, that hellhole ruled over by seven megacorps? No thanks!”
“Yeeeaah, it’s totally not that anymore. I’m talking to you from outside a bakery on a city street with foals playing tag… At night for some reason… Huh, why aren’t they in bed?”
Rainbow was silent for a moment. “What?”
“You heard me!”
“Well… Once I make sure the world won't blow up again, I’ll have to check that out. Speaking of, I have to go. Talk to you soon, Gears.” Rainbow said as the comm went dead.
I started at the chip on my collar in shock. “WHAT?! AGAIN?!”
Calm down, Gears! She was using a metaphor.
“Again what?” Silverlight asked with a worried frown.
“Nothing…” I sighed. “I think I took a metaphor seriously. She’s trying to make sure something bad won't happen. Apparently the Tainted took over an old military base and—”
I blinked and looked at Silverlight curiously. “Come to think of it… Why haven't you tried to stop them?”
“I am. I have many patrols out in the Herd’s territory,” Silver sighed. “The NCR refused my help. Now then… What did she say about the Elements?”
Wander nodded in agreement. “Yeah, see, I remember them returning the magic to everypony in Equestria after Tirek ate it. I never realty thought about it, but functional Elements should have fixed the world.”
“They weren't fully functional,” I replied simply.
Wander’s ears drooped. “The war broke them…”
I shook my head. “No. Friendship is Magic. The new bearers were not good friends so the Elements couldn’t do very much. They activated the Gardens, and decided to do their best to become good friends to power up the Elements, but then the bearer of Magic, who happened to be an old stallion, well…” I bit my lip and sighed. “He died of hardware failure. So, the set is incomplete at the moment.”
“Oh,” Wander said with a frown. “Huh… I never thought about that… Too used to them just, fixing whatever problem occurred just like that.”
Silverlight stroked his muzzle for a moment then shrugged. “I know a good deal about magic and enchanted relics… Through the rebuilding over the last decade and a half, much of my time, and most of the time of what few true Wizards we have, has been spent studying magical items. One of the major pursuits being to find a method of repairing or maintaining our replicators rather than slowly burning them out. I can confirm that friendship does influence many spells, and it makes sense for it to effect a collection of items that work together, naturally… I just didn’t think it would serve as that much of the power source for something so… God-like in power.”
I shrugged. “Well, somepony had to make them to begin with, right?”
“I suppose so, yes,” SIlver mused.
Speed scuffed her hoof against the sidewalk.
“Are you okay?” I asked her, realising she’d been quite quiet for the last few moments.
“I’m still disappointed the sidewalk isn’t made with blood…” She admitted with a sad little wing flap.
Wander snickered. “If I didn’t know you were a hemovore, that would be terrifying… I admit, I would love a city with sidewalks made of cinnamon rolls.”
“Right?!” Speed asked with a giggle.
Prince Silverlight cleared his throat. “As enlightening as this conversation has been… I believe I have just explained my entire position in terms of why precisely I wish to trade with your nation, Miss Gears.”
I nodded. “Yes. If you can make raw materials, but then need to refine them into finished items by manual labor, our technical knowledge is definitely something you need.”
“Indeed,” The Prince agreed with a nod. “So if we could continue to the Palace, I would like to show you the replicators, have you confirm their existence over the radio to your Queen, and thereby begin the recovery of more than a single city.”
“I think literally everypony would like that,” I said with a truly happy smile.
We could do it! Between our two civilizations we really could heal the world!
Almost as importantly, Wander was crucial to having kicked this off! No way could she think of herself as a bad pony now!
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I f***ing loved it! Your work continues to be the best.
Ummm....Equestira? That a typo for the new chapter there?
PFff
You don't say!
Somepony fix up gear's tastebuds asap.
Smart pony, not to overextend.
oof.
Speed is very happy thinking about that!
She's adorable, an ork in batpony form.
Huh.
Huh.
Yusssssss.
:rolledupnewspaper:
Wow.
Sobering, that...
kek.
...I want to hug Mister Record.
Boaty mc boatface is one of them.
yessssss.
Good problems to have, yes.
HAH!
...oooh, working replicators!
I giggled.
Oh dear.
Heh. rainbow be like
and 
Note to self. Read the original fallout equestria...
Awww, sad little nini flap flap needs a hug.
If the main OCs in this story were voiced, what would they sound like?
9670154
Well....Vinyl technically has a canon-not-canon voice. As for Gears and Speed, I tend to think of Gears as sounding like the English voice for Emelia from Slayers or Nene from Bubblegum Crisis, while I tend to think of Speed as having the voice of Hexidecimal from Reboot. I dunno why she seems approriate to me.
Question addressed. That was fast!
Congratulations, Los Pegasus, you just became the official bucket list retirement destination for one Whirling "The Machine" Gears, robot spirit cyborg zebra mailmare extraordinaire!
Of course they did. Windigos are coffee snobs. If the creamer is non-dairy, they'll just go for straight Sugar.
That's not how guilt works, Geary-deary. Sorry. Buuuut. You can get the word out on What She Did so more ponies are nice and say "Thank you so much you awesome super-old music pony!"
Wowsers...
Minotaurs are orks here? I like this plan.
The theme for today's chapter is Scale!
Thanks Meep!
Don't get you're hopes up, one of them is a protagonist and they are notoriously good of getting into trouble
... getting Stargate flashbacks here
Getting really curious about what he believes she knows
I saw the chapter title and instantly thought of "papers please", glory to Astaska
So... Los pegasus survived by making a literal shield of lead, the one and only time there was sufficient daka
Hey Gear, the prince has pre-war tech that nopony knows how to fix or maintain, if only you knew somepony with pre-war technical knowledge who was good at repairing things.
So I've been thinking about this for a few chapters now, I don't think Lift is imaginary, he knows things Gear dosen't, Gear now knows things he doesn't, he is able to communicate with Jasmine, the soul bound spirit Gears has, I'm gonna say it he is a spirit attached to Gear
Now Meep, you claim there are several quest markers in the city, shall we get to that, or is this going to be like mu Fall out playthroughs and just keep quest sitting in my pipboy
That's a big piece of concrete.
Particularly so built post-apocalyptic.
Yikes. I mean, that's very generous, but yikes.
Thirty thousand is still a pretty good post-apocalyptic population.
It's another great trading opportunity, that's for sure.
Pretty wild story for how Los Pegasus survived.
Hey, sure.
But you already were a little horse.
That's just being polite.
Nice.
Good job, Vinyl.
Even more of a reason to get a good ending to the Sparkle Cola side quest.
Ironic that Silverlight got so pissed when asked while Los Pegasus wasn't doing more to help with its impressive resources when he turned around and made the exact same accusation about the NCR and their possession of the Elements. In both cases the answer was "mitigating circumstances and details", but in the end he basically made the same apparently offensive assumption.
People would be walking on them all the time, it would be pretty gross.
9670067 Thanks, Koo :3
9670103 Wow XD Total fail on my part. I'll go ahead and fix that.
9670154 Funny you should mention that. I had a long conversation with a friend the other day about Gear's voice. We both agreed she should sound like a fun loving but naive dork. After some debate, we settled on the best voice for her would be... This one. Mostly for reasons of nostalgia and it sounds good.
Don't take this as word of god that she sounds like Starfire alla the original Teen Titans. That's just my headcannon.
As for Wander... Who is Vinyl Scratch... I'm not sure if she has a cannon voice. But this old video kinda formed my personal headcannon on who Vi is and how she acts. Which is probably why that's how she's always sounded in my head.
If you want a good laugh, my notes for the story say that Gear's voice modulator has an organic sounding voice thanks to Swan obtaining a phoneme map from Jack... While he was doing a mare impression. So if Gears sounds like Starfire, her dad had an adorably girly voice (Seriously if you bump Starfire's voices pitch down one octave and twitch the timbre to get a male voice, it still sounds female. That cute sultry, husky, female voice, specifically.), or was very very practiced in voices.
9670134
Deep within her sub-bacment lab, Swan shivered. "Stupid head-voices!" she muttered before shaking a mechadendrite at the sky. "I am not evil. Ho dare you... HOW DARE YOU TELL ME TO DO THAT TO A POOR PONY! Gears will never taste broccoli! DO YOU HEAR ME?! NEVER!"
Wanna wanna hug him even more? Based him off the short film Papers Please...
Yeah.
Oh Magic and Generosity are unnamed in the original. I think it's to help inspire fanfictions alla the Missing Primarchs. As for Hardware Failure, Gears isn't implying he was a robot. Gears is just a derp and dosn't know a "more accurate" term for "old".
9670440
Same way they survived the missiles... A bunch of terrified ponies with guns that were already at hoof. They DO have about 500 sane ghouls still though! Including CREEEEEEEEED!
Or at least, where she'll go if the coin comes up heads. The other option is "wheever the biggest gun in the world is!"
... Approved.
"NO! NO DON'T BE NICE TO ME!"
*Hoard of ponies drags her off zombie style* "Huuuuugs...."
"AAAAAAAAA!"
9670532 Hope you had a blast :3
9670684 NEver gave them any culture in any fic before. I rolled a d100 on my "human cultures" table to pick one. It cmae up "fictional" and then I remembered "Hey, Orks are a thing."
9670959 You're most welcome :3
9671206
The old stallion sat back in his chair, producing a single lonly creak. "Oh, I know... I've seen all types a million times. I gotta say it. It's in the book. I know she'll probably wind up lighting the whole place on fire from an alien sausser ship's bridge or something. But, her papers all checked out, so, in she goes."
Replicators are actually canon to Fallout, so that should be Dead Money flashbacks. Thats actually what the despencers are. You put in tokens, they replicate an item from digital memory.
"Oh. I just want to know where her cake vault is. Her throne's sized for Cake Flanks and my palace's throne is a replica of it at full scale." (Not really just had to say the thing that made me giggle)
9671587
Sufficient, but not enough...
Hey Gear, the prince has pre-war tech that nopony knows how to fix or maintain, if only you knew somepony with pre-war technical knowledge who was good at repairing things.
He's indeed real. It's just that Gears read a book on psychology and convinced herself he's just a coping mechanisum Because, well, obviously if your dad just died and you start hearing his voice...
We are here.
2.bp.blogspot.com/_UXXtCpkeKiA/So0IurCQaeI/AAAAAAAAKxo/MIWPGp-EPRo/s1600/shitfan.jpg
9671772
Indeed it is! Nice American small town sized.
"No, I mean," Silverlight reached beneath his cloak and produced a small sculpture of Princess Luna. "I got a little horse. See?"
YAY! Someone got the irony! ^.^
Food cities are a bad idea no matter how you slice them.
9672334
Really ?
Been a while since I played a Fallout game
9672379 Yep! They are called as much in game, you unlock new items to buy form them via finding data files on holotapes... Not sure if the chips are like, a fule source for them. Hold on, let me look that up!
Yep! They do and they are replicators.
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Sierra_Madre_vending_machine
Enough Daka to make a Nob cry, just before the Fallout returning to the ground shreds him.
Replicators? Sigh, I keep forgetting whats in the Deep Notes, its been that many decades since I did the work on them. I cant remmeber the movie which used Holographic Video tape to record Brainwaves, but I looked at that and thought, if you made a holographic movie of something being vapourised from the surface inwards, then played it back, could you get laser condensation of the material from the centre out, at least for simple stuff at first like metals? Well, it was the 80s, I was just in university and dumber than 6 classes on a Saturday night.
Huh... I'd say it's probably the awesomest dumbest thing ever, actually
But definitively enthusiasm dakka if even for just half a dozen hours. Nice touch on how such a monumentally insane effort changed the landscape, if even still only on a pone-made scale.
I did specially like how you made replicators be plausible. They're not instant win buttons, only unicorn-operated mines of raw stuff. Sure, once stripey pone mom looks at it she might be able to not only build more but even improve them a little, but until then they're just one more slice of hope for the wasteland.
9672384
ooo im about to play that dlc here soon, been replaying F:NV, also loved the just enough dakka wall of lead, i do wonder though will it last (las pegasus)
Okay, two things there. One, am I correct that Creed is a shoutout, and two, I'll bet that the zebras DID do that. Precisely because it seems rather obvious on the face (meaning that it might well be overlooked) and because it would be amusing as heck to find out that the defenses failed for such a stupid reason.
That is either a typo or a subtle pun. Evil either way. :D
The wall of lead is as sad as it's awesome (and also silly). That's a heck of a thing to look back on. :(
That bit about the Prince's favorite reading material is a bit alarming, though. I have to wonder if it's like the book we know of, or if it's a much kinder book since it was written by Celestia? For that matter, we aren't sure if The Prince is supposed to be satire or HOW it's meant to be read, but let's hope that Silverlight has good ends to justify...
fed thousands of ponies
Though I hope that it's not Soylent Green...
returned to
long
9681277
If you go back and look at the description of Los Pegan army uniforms again, you'll have your answer. Let it be known the planet broke before the guard.
It was part of how they got the drop on Equestira, yes.
Intentional pun :3
I couldn't think of a more pony way for a city to survive the bombardment other than being overlooked and uh... No city in Equestria's borders seems to have been. So, they had to have a defense, and it had to be pony-level silly but also plasuable. What do you mean by sad tho? Like, bad writing sad or... ?
It's a nod to the RL book, but this in univerce version can be thought of as Princess Celestia's "guide to not being a terrible leader" whcih was intended for like buisness owners and managers.
Glory to Arstotzka!
Yea... Speaking of cults and having mares offer themselves up for dinner sure goes well hand in hand... I said it before, I will say it again, if someone are too friendly to you in the wasteland is it because they are planning something, so watch out Gears and co!
9798493
Glory Greatest
The second most ridiculous victory of the Great War. THE FIRST WAS NEIGHPONS
That. Uh. Wow. Yeah, that was actually enough dakka. Or at least infinitely close to enough dakka.
I wonder if Black Swan can help them put those replicators back in working order? Granted, she's tech-based, not magic, but her expertise could be useful. I think the trade deal with Lith will help out both sides here. A lot.
It's strange though. How does Los Pegasus get their food? That mare said they don't have hydroponics. The replicator dedicated to it undoubtedly helps, but does it make all the food? That would be... Very impressive.
10784722 They have a lot of vertical farms, grow lamps, and rooftop gardens.
Welcome to
ArstotzkaEquestria, cause no trouble.Really burned out trying to read this. The pacing has completely broken down.
Last several chapters have been nothing but massive infodumps.
11160076 Sorry you didn't enjoy it. Hope you find something else more your style.