Fallout Equestria: Standing Tall

by Pyrolich66

Chapter 2: Reality (Incomplete)

Author's Note:

Hey everyone.
FoE: Standing Tall started several years ago as my little self-insert into the universe. As time passed, though, I've lost some enthusiasm for the project, and haven't really worked on it in almost a year. I can't say whether or not I'll pick it back up at a later point, but for now here's what I've got typed of Chapter 2.
If you want something non-self-insert and a bit (more?) mature, my other Fallout Equestria story, Out of The Icebox, is over here.

Chapter Two: Reality

“If it was heaven, then heaven was underwhelming. If it was hell, then hell was lame.”

I sat in the lobby of an office building, naked except for my hair. Across from me sat a reddish unicorn mare, wearing a jumpsuit and fiddling with a computer on her ankle. Ten feet away sat the 200-year-old, blackened bones of another pony. And past that, through the broken glass of the lobby entrance, fell a pounding thunderstorm of radioactive water.

It was a hard choice between being there or being in school.

Frozen had calmed down a lot with four walls around her, but she was still pointed straight away from the door. And while I was calm, I was also getting bored.

“Hey Frozen, it looks like this rain’s gonna keep coming down. Want to check out the rest of the building?”

She looked up from her Pipbuck to look at me incredulously. “You want to explore this place? It’s two hundred years old! It could be on the verge of collapse!”

“I’m two hundred years old and I still work fine. Also, this place is intact enough to have at least one working light. If it’s still standing after 200 years, I’m inclined to believe it’ll stay standing through this storm.”

Whether or not Frozen wanted to explore, I was tired of sitting around. I got up, walked over to one of the doors into the building, and tried the knob. It didn’t budge. I twisted a bit harder, and there was a metallic snap as the handle came off in my hand. I walked over and tried the other door, to much the same result.

Frozen walked up behind me. “Well, that was an easy decision. Guess we’re staying out here.”

I shook my head. “Nah, I just need a more creative door-opening technique.” I looked around the room, and my eyes fell on the rows of chairs sitting in the lobby. They were those row chairs, with one attached to the next. One whole row had fallen over, and it was that row that I grabbed as a battering ram. I carried it over to the door on the left and slammed it into the rusted metal. Both the chairs and the door let loose showers of rust, and I hoped the chairs held out longer. I swung again, and was rewarded with a massive dent in the door. I kept going, and soon the door was bent almost in half. With a metallic groan, the door tipped back into the hallway behind it.

I dropped the bent chair-row with a victorious grin. Said grin didn’t last very long as the building’s ancient intercom crackled to life. “There has been a security breach in the main lobby. All employees, please remain in -BZCH- are deployed.”

I had a whole second to wonder about that before a panel in the hall dropped open, and strange metal contraption dropped out. It was basically a box with a barrel pointed at me. The turret started firing before it lined up on me, so the burst of laser fire hit me in the side rather than the chest. I didn’t dodge out of the doorway so much as fall, but I was swearing by the time I hit the ground. The turret kept firing, almost hitting me in the foot before I yanked that out of the way too.

“Son of a fuck!”

Frozen ran over to me as I gritted my teeth and checked on my side. There were six round wounds on my side, each as big around as a pencil and maybe an inch deep. The pain was… intense. I hadn’t really been injured since I’d arrived in the world, and now I’d taken a laser burst to my side. There were a couple of tears running past my gritted teeth.

Frozen looked at the injury for just a moment before floating something out of her saddlebags towards me. “Here! Drink this!”

I glanced up to see a bottle of purple fluid floating just in front of my nose. Frozen had little reason to betray me, and far be it from me to refuse help, so I grabbed the bottle and tossed it back. Best case scenario, it was some sort of painkiller.

Turns out, there was an even better best case.

I forgot there was magic.

A warm, sort-of glowy feeling spread down my chest and out through my body, quickly concentrating on the laser burns in my side. I watched in awe as the holes almost grew shut, leaving neat little circles of scar tissue in their places. Then the glow and the pain faded away, leaving behind a dull ache, like I’d been punched in the side rather than shot.

I slowly turned my awed expression from my former wounds to Frozen. “Did you just… give me a healing potion?”

“Yeah, we um, used them all the time in the bunker…” Frozen paused a moment, looking at me in confusion. “... have you never seen one before?”

“Well, I have, in games and stories and wishful thinking! Healing potions actually exist here? And you just carry some around?”

The little unicorn nodded hesitantly. “Well, I only have a half dozen or so, but they were pretty common before the war. There should be some left around…”

I shook that little revelation from my mind as I stood up. “I have to admit, I’m a bit curious what was so important they put a turret in the ceiling to protect it.”

“I think they were actually pretty common back-WHAT ARE YOU DOING!”

I pulled my head out of the way before the turret could come to bear, and it’s barrage hit blank wall. “What? I’m not gonna just jump out in front of it.” I looked away from her to the rest of the lobby. I had a battle saddle and two bullets for said rifles. Frozen had her Pipbuck and whatever was in her saddlebags. Other than us, it was broken glass, really old chairs, and a very dead skeleton behind a very old desk.

With nothing better to do, I wandered over and started rummaging through the old desk. For a secretary’s desk, there was a startling lack of office supplies. There was just a stapler and a bunch of weird bottle caps featuring a carrot and the words “Sparkle Cola”. Yeah, that was the stuff I drank back in the rest stop where I met Frozen. I pocketed them ‘cause I wasn’t carrying anything, and didn’t question why they were there in the first place.

Since the desk was a bust, I tried my luck with the skeleton behind it. It felt kind of weird to shuffle through a pile of bones, but at the end of the day they were really only bones. I found what I wanted pretty quick anyway, where the ponies neck had once been. There was a lanyard with a picture of a red-maned, blue-furred earth pony mare. Apparently her name had been “Blue Raspberry”.

I tossed it over to Frozen. “Here! Try this on!”

She caught it in her magic and took a look at it. “Um… this isn’t mine, Keith.”

“I know, but it belongs to someone who works here, so maybe it’ll keep you from getting shot.”

She pushed it back my way. “I don’t want to try that! Why don’t you do it?”

“Because, as you may have noticed, I’m not a female or even a pony at all. You have a far better chance at fooling the security.”

“...and if your brilliant plan doesn’t work?”

I grinned my most shit-eating grin. “Well, I do know what a healing potion looks like now.”

Frozen looked at the lanyard, then back at me. Then did so again. And again. Finally she sighed in exasperation and hung the lanyard around her neck. “Fine, I’ll do it. Wait here.”

Gritting her teeth, Frozen stepped out into the view of the hallway turret.

Nothing happened.

I watched as my only friend in the world trotted into the unknown, then I sat back and waited for her to come back.

And I waited…

And waited.

…

I was beginning to regret sending Frozen away. I was pretty sure from the lack of lasers and screams that she was alive, but there was only so much worrying for her survival I could do. Once I ran out of that, all I had left was the lobby around me, and the only thing to do there was poke my scars and think. My scars weren’t too interesting, and I didn’t really want to think at that moment, so I fell on my fallback fallback, and started to sing. Old music, the kind that wasn’t made for music with it.

(there was supposed to be a song here, but I couldn't decide on one. Well, on one that Fim would let me post. Probably "Sixteen Tons" by Tennessee Ernie Ford, so you can hum that if you want)

I was about to start my way into the next verse, when I heard a sound like coconuts clapping together. Turning, I saw that Frozen had returned unnoticed, and she was clapping her hooves together with a surprised look on her face. She stopped almost as soon as I looked at her, looking slightly embarrassed. “Sorry, that was just… really good. Did you get your cutie mark for singing or something?”

“My what.”

“Your… cutie mark?”

“No, I heard that part. What’s a cutie mark?”

“There a symbol of a pony’s special talent. We have them on our flanks?”

“I mean…” I thought back on it, “... I think I’ve seen a few of them. I guess I haven’t been paying too much attention to ponies’ butts. I figured they were some kind of tattoo or something.” Seeing Frozen’s confused look, I clarified, “Tattoos are permanent ink images etched into your skin, but they don’t have anything to do with talents and stuff like that.”

“Humans don’t have anything even close to cutie marks?”

“Nope!” I shuddered. “Ugh, getting a job would be a nightmare. You chances at any job you weren’t talented for would just get bulldozed.”

Frozen thought over those deep moral implications for a minute, then shook her head clear. “Um, anyway, I couldn’t find a way to end the lockdown. There were very few areas I could access, and they were full of security. There’s no way you’d get anywhere without a pass.”

I sighed. Dammit. “Ah well, I guess it was just a hope that there’d be something interesting in there.” Standing up and stretching, I looked out into the overcast outdoors. “Well, it looks like the rain’s petering off. Want to keep going? See if we can find a town or something?”

There was silence for a while, and I finally glanced at Frozen. She was looking at me more than a little skeptically. I raised an eyebrow in response. “What?”

“You… want to go find a town.”

“Hell yeah. Towns have food, money, people to talk to… what, did you think I was planning to just wander the wastes randomly forever?”

“Not really, but didn’t you say that the last town you went to shot at you?”

“Nooooo. The ponies in the town just pointed guns at me until I left. The ponies surrounding the town shot at me.” And I killed them. “Besides, I have you with me now! You can vouch for my trustworthiness!”

Frozen snorted. “Yeah, that’ll work. ‘Oh, I know he looks like a monster straight out of a horror story, but I’ve known him for a whole day and he hasn’t ripped out anypony’s organs!’ I’m sure that’ll go over great.”

I beamed. “Exactly!”

“That was sarcasm!”

I sighed, dropping the smart-ass facade. “Look, I don’t actually care what you have to say to get us in. Say I’m deaf, or stupid, or you tamed me or something. If you don’t want to go to town, we can always stay in some ruins like last night. You know, out here with the flensers and the mutated gods-know-what’s.”

Even indirectly bringing up Frozen’s trauma was a low blow, but it worked. Once again, I found myself trudging across the wastes, Frozen at my tail. It was still cloudy, but at least it wasn’t raining anymore. Frozen’s Pipbuck clicked ever-so-slowly as it warned us of the tiny residual radiation of the wet dirt. She assured me the amount was (probably) far from dangerous, so we kept moving along.

The thing about walking long distance is that it is really, unfathomably boring. Even more so for Frozen, who couldn’t bear to look around for more than a few seconds at a time. After a while we started talking. I talked about the world that I remembered: politics, science, the lack of magic. My info may or may not have been two hundred years out of date, but that wasn’t what mattered. I was sharing my memories, and the world that I had come from.

In exchange, Frozen told me of the world that I had come to, though her info was more certainly out-of-date than mine was. The country we were in was called Sorata. It had once been a peaceful nation ruled by an alicorn (like Esmer, but more respected) called Lady Signis. A few hundred miles to the north was a country called Equestria, ruled by its own two princesses (more alicorns). 200 years in the past, Equestria got in a war with a neighboring country of zebras, some kind of race/culture clash. The war got big, world-war big, where every country got pulled into one side or another of the conflict- all, except Sorata.

Most countries were barely even aware that Sorata existed, but those that did send request their aid in the fight were adamantly refused by Lady Signis. Though she refused to let the war enter the country, she couldn’t stop the fear that came with it. Her subjects brought in new technologies from Equestria: reinforced buildings, robots, turrets, all sorts of things. In only a few years, the kingdom went from a fantasy wonderland to a paranoid suburbia.

It was thanks to Lady Signis’ denial that only one Equestrian company even managed to set up shop in Sorata. Of course, by most accounts that was the most important company, called Stable-Tec. Their business was setting up stables, huge underground bunkers to protect Sorata’s citizens if the war went south for the whole world. When the bombs fell, Stable-tec sent out the call, every pony that had space reserved went in and stayed there.

That was where Frozen’s knowledge of the outside ended, because her family had been one of those families… in a way. Her particular family lived in the bunkers and tunnels outside the stable entrance, which were somewhat less radiation resistant. They were a sort of rad meter, to let the Stable know when it was safe to come out of their hole. Since they were a bit more prone to diseases and the like from the outside, every year the family entered the stable, got checked out by the doctor, and left with a stable resident as a new “family” member. That’s how it’d been for years and years… until I messed it all up.

At that point she couldn’t really talk anymore, so I went back to telling her about Earth. Honestly, everything I told her was apparently astounding. A blue sky and the sun overhead was shocking enough, but cities with millions of people in them? A world where magic was the stuff of children’s stories and no more? The ability for everyone to eat fresh, sun-grown food? If it was that shocking for an underground resident, I could only imagine how the ponies of the wasteland would react.

Not that I just told her about the good stuff we had; I told her about the bad stuff too. The wars we were fighting, the people starving… the list went on and on. The more I thought, the more things that I knew we could be doing better. It was depressing, and soon I was back to just talking about whatever crossed my mind.

After so many hours of walking and talking, we - well, I - spotted something that looked like shelter. A barn and silo duo sat in the middle of nowhere, no farmhouse anywhere in sight. I stopped and looked around, but there was nothing around moving, either. Just the oppressive grey sky above the dead brown land. Even so, I stopped and held out a hand to stop Frozen too. She yelped as she walked into me anyway, then peeked around me to see what was going on.

I waved my arm at the ruined farm. “What do you think? Probably our best bet for a place to stay the night.”

“I wish it wasn’t. That place looks creepy enough in the light.”

I shrugged, pulling out my rifle and the whole two bullets it contained. “Well, tell you what. I’ll go in, and if I survive then it’s probably safe! Be right back.”

I left Frozen there, then crouched a bit as I crept towards the barn. For whatever reason, bending my legs 30 degrees made me feel a hell of a lot sneakier. The barn door (the one that wasn’t missing) was wide open, so I crept up beside it and peeked inside. The barn was basically empty, probably swept clear by wind and weather. All that I could see was a very old, worn tractor and a ladder up to a loft overhead. I stepped into the open space, then froze as I immediately heard movement by the tractor.

I waited, pointing my dinky little rifle at the rusted contraption. There was evn more rustling, then out leapt… a cockroach. Admittedly it was a really big roach, as long as my forearm. But it was a bug. I couldn’t help but snicker as I lowered my gun, looking around the room for something to crush it with. No need to waste bullets. There was a rusty old shovel leaned up in the corner, just what I needed. Backing carefully away from the hissing bug, I came back with said shovel in hand. The roach chittered at me as I got close, but a single thrust of the shovel cut it in half. It died with a gross little hiss.

With no warning at all, another roach leapt out of the tractor and dug its mandibles into my arm. Reacted on pure instinct, I yelled in pain, tearing the offending bug away and flinging it at the tractor, where it was impaled on a rusty lever. The wound it left on my arm was a mess, but thankfully I had the healing potion Frozen had lent me after our earlier incident. Not wanting to waste such a precious resource, I dripped the fluid carefully into my broken flesh. It was one of the strangest things I’d ever seen, watching my own flesh grow and knit itself back together.

I gave the tractor a kick, but no more roaches made themselves know. Assuming that was safe now, I headed over to the ladder and started up. Even in small pony architecture, the loft was a bit too high to jump up and climb onto. Halfway up the ladder, I paused as I heard voices above. They didn’t seem to react to me stopping, or sound panicked at all, so I resumed my climb. Just as I reached the top, the voices stopped and so did I.

I hung at the top of the ladder for a minute or two in silence, then gave up and lifted myself up into the loft. Most of the area was occupied by bales of very old, very dry hay. Unable to see who’d been talking, I crept towards the largest stack of bales. Bracing myself, I stepped behind it to find… a skeleton. The ancient bones were laid over a box that weakly crackled with static.

Had anyone been around to hear, they’d have heard a sigh, and a palm against a forehead.

A radio, of course. The signal I’d been hearing had ended, but there was a handset attached. Maybe I’d mess around with the signal later, see what was being broadcast out over the wasteland. For now, though, I glanced around the rest of the loft. A skeleton and a bunch of hay bales. All clear.

Frozen was right out where I left her, staring down at the rocky ground. She glanced up at me as I approached, then her eyes slid past me to look at the sky and her head went back down with a shudder. I was about to report my findings when she raised her head slightly and raised an eyebrow at me.

“Why do you have a shovel?”

I gave the bug-stained rustlump a glance. “I picked it up in the barn, of course. I didn’t want to squish bugs with my bare hands.” Chuckling, I added, “Honestly, I expected you to ask more about the blood.”

As soon as I pointed it out, Frozen panicked, her magic lighting up her saddlebags. “Oh no! Are you ok? Do you need-”

I waved a hand and cut her off. “Relax, I already used a potion to clean it out. The barn is cleared, and there’s a loft where we can get off ground level for the night.”

Frozen nodded hesitantly, and I led her inside. The dead bugs got a grimace out of her, but in her defense I had killed them quite messily. I got halfway up the ladder when I stopped, (again) this time because of a realization.

“I, uh, should mention that there’s a pony skeleton up here. And a radio. In case either would freak you out.”

I paused long enough to hear a careful, “Thank you?” Then I continued on up the ladder.

There’s not a lot to do in an ancient barn while you wait for the unseen sun to set. I ended up burying the bones (at Frozen’s request) and eventually rearranged the hay bales to form a crude square for me and Frozen to sleep in. Just that bit of extra cover made the ruin feel much safer to sleep in. Even if all we had to worry about were scorpions and roaches on the ground, the visual barrier would help if we were happened across by Flensers. Actually, any encounter with ponies would be nerve wracking for several of those involved.

I had just finished cleaning the blood off of my arm when the radio crackled to life once more, making Frozen (and me almost) yelp in surprise. Fortunately, it’s not like we’d been foolish enough to turn on broadcasting, so we were alright.

A distinctly male voice came through, his words chopped up a bit by static. “NS Command, this is Corporal Bitter Wind -smkas- Sergeant Net Blade got hit soon after we -sdkfnjsd- There’s were at least a dozen raiders in the group that-” There was a metallic clang in the background, “-Bucking hell!” Pause. “We’re holed up in a safe room in the -jnej- but we need reinforcements, and soon. Over!”

I admit, the (assumed) pony was pretty calm for being trapped and surrounded. His transmission was quickly answered by a deep military voice.

“Received, corporal. How many are left in your squad? Over.”

“Me, sir, and two privates. -sdnfi- on ammo, and out of medical supplies. Over.”

“All other units are recovering or on their own missions. You have to hold out until we can get someone sent your way. Over.”

I saw a chance, and took it, grabbing up the handset and pressing the button. “Sounds like you fellows are in a bit of a pickle. Over.”

There was a pause, then the military voice answered. “Who is that? This is an official military frequency!”

I sighed, and pressed the button again. “I know, and I’m not normally the type to interrupt a good drama, but it sounds like you could use a hand there. Over.”

“We don’t need help, whoever-”

I cut him off. “Corporal. How long do you think it’ll take for someone to bash their way into your room there? Over.”

There was a pause, then said pony came onto the radio once more. “It’s a good metal door, but -assdzx- won’t last long if the raiders really try. Maybe an hour or two. Over.”

“Now, Commander Loudpony, my companion has a Pipbuck with a map on it. I can help your soldiers, given their coordinates. Or, you can ignore my offer, and we can see how long it takes for there to be raiders on your little military channel. I leave the choice up to you. Over.”

There was a tense pause (at least from my side of the call). Finally the stallion from “NS Command” came back over the airwaves. “Get whoever has that Pipbuck on the radio.”

I gestured to Frozen, and she hesitantly picked up the set. “Hello?”

The command had brought over some sort of technician pony, and he guided Frozen through a maze of menus until she was ready to take the coordinates. With a brief screech of static from the set, the transmission was over, and a new place popped up on Frozen’s map. A supermarket, according to her device, maybe half an hour from our current location.

I smiled and picked up the handset once more. “We got them, NS. We’re thirty minutes out, moving now. Over.”

I was about to grab all five of my possessions when there was a final transmission from the Command. ”Hey, whoever you are. I don’t know how you got on this channel, but if you’re going to be on here you need a call sign.”

I thought for a moment… then another moment. When the answer occurred to me, it was as obvious as a brick to the head. I was chuckling as I picked up the button and said, “Call me Impulse. Over.”

A pause. “Understood, asset Impulse. New Sorata Command, out.”

“See you soon, I hope, Impulse. Bitter Wind, out.”

“Pleasure meeting you all. Impulse out.”

I set down the radio, and immediately noticed Frozen staring up at me. “...What?”

“You probably don’t even know who you just agreed to help, and I don’t even know what a raider is! Are you crazy?”

“Yep.”

That threw her for a moment, and I began my own counter. “I had reasons, of course. Yes, I just offered to help a group that I do not know. What I do know is that they’re powerful enough to have at least a somewhat organized and coordinated military. They have enough organization and awareness to send out patrols and mission teams, and they have the sense to let wounded soldiers spend time in recovery. I don’t like that they had nobody at all on standby, but everything else I know tells me this is a pretty good group to make friends with.”

Frozen faltered under the sudden stream of logic, but did her best to push through. “We still don’t know what a raider is, though.”

“Hmm… I’m pretty sure that Pearly mentioned that the Flensers around her town were a tribe of raiders. From what I know of that group, I don’t really have a problem fighting this one.”

Frozen’s ears laid back, and she shuddered. “You… you’re talking about killing ponies, to try and get someone to like you.”

“I’m talking about killing evil ponies that threaten a number of less well-protected non-soldiers throughout the wastes, and saving a group of ponies in the process.”

“You… you don’t know that they were attacked. They could’ve been lying.”

I raised an eyebrow at Frozen’s faltering argument. “You got me. They were probably lying on the distress call that they had no idea I was listening in on.”

“Yeah… I guess so.”

“We should get going. Those soldiers only have so long, and we only have so much daylight left.”

Packing was quick and simple. Frozen had to shrug back on the saddlebags that she’d taken off. I had Vex’s saddle, two rounds in one of my two rifles, the water bottle Pearly had given me, and the shovel I’d just picked up a few hours ago. I was really missing any of the backpacks I had at home. Maybe I’d have been able to take the radio with us.

The… generally bright area I thought was the sun was getting low in the sky as me and Frozen left the barn. I tried to move fast, but there wasn’t much I could do when the sun set on our way to our destination. With the seemingly-perpetual cloud cover, the world got dark far faster than I was expecting. Fortunately, by the time it was dark, we didn’t really need Frozen’s map. I could hear the distant gunshots that marked our destination.

We had to cross through a bunch of burned ruins near the end of our trip, but the one we wanted was plenty distinctive. There was a ton of firelight coming out the front windows of the building we’d been sent to, making surveillance easy. It was a little brick square, with wide windows across the front that had been destroyed a long while. As best I could tell, most of the shelves were still standing, keeping me from seeing much other than the firelight and the occasional flicker of movement.

Frozen and I were sitting in the frame of an old house across the street, taking it in. Even if raiders had some form of night vision, all they’d see would be two more shadows in an old ruin. While I was taking in the scene, Frozen only had eyes for one part of it: the headless corpse of a pony, tied up by its hooves in one of the windows.

“So, still think I’m helping the wrong side?”

Her only response was to stare at the body that adorned the ancient structure. I reached out and tapped her on the shoulder, and she turned to me with eyes so wide that I winced. Her mouth was moving silently, and finally she managed a murmur.

“How… how could anypony do… that?”

“Madness, maybe. Mental illness. Whyever they did it, can we really leave those peo- ponies to do that to someone else?”

Frozen shook her head, and I started to stand up when she whispered, “They aren’t ponies.”

“What?”

“Whatever they are, they aren’t ponies. Ponies would never… they wouldn’t…”

At that very moment, I don’t think I cared if the ponies in that building were evil. The brokenness in Frozen’s voice made me so angry I could’ve torn that store to the ground with my bare hands. It was the perfect feeling for tearing someone apart, but I forced myself to be calm. This needed to be done quietly. I wasn’t equipped for a heavy assault like I wanted to do. I stalked my way across the street, listening to the sounds of harsh, drunken laughter. Hopefully not the kind of laughter you’d make after breaking open a safe room and killing the soldiers inside.

I hopped through the shattered window, and immediately came face to face with my first raider (I wasn’t sure if the Flensers counted or not).

Comments

[Pyrolich66]

10091491
Sorry about that. I was doing some editing (taking out the lyrics) and I guess I deleted the stop point for the centering.

[Ranakastrasz]

This is really good. There aren't many human in Fallout Equestria stories, and as always, most of those are crap anyway.

Shame you lost motivation, but I can understand that. Still, am hopeful.