RoMS' Extravaganza

by RoMS

Jan. 2014 - Fallout:Equestria Wish Machines - 1. Hit The Road, Wrack!

Chapter One: Hit the road, wrack!

“Every road beckons. No matter where they lead, each has a distinct story to tell.”

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Growling with a grisly pout cast on my face, my left prosthetic arm grabbed the last of my rooks and slid it aside the chessboard between my defeated ranks of pawns, knights, and bishops. They were already too many to count as I gave a sigh.

“Damn it!” I rasped, struggling not to hack my hoof through the remaining standing pieces to end the mock game and the humiliation.

“Check,” a stallion’s voice chuckled, picking my ears through a receiver stretched off behind the chessboard, crackling with static.

Built into one of the remaining wall sockets, the military radio sent whirring noises in fits and starts; the only interruption in a series of long unnerving silences.

“Your move,” he mentioned with a teasing and slurring voice.

“Oh, come on!” I shouted to the idle piece of scrap metal. “How can you be so strong at chess? You’re not even looking at the board!”

“Not my fault if I have a good memory,” he giggled. “And maybe… I say maybe… I have my own chessboard to keep track of the challenge… well… if you could call that a challenge.”

His laughter set my cheeks ablaze. I bit my lower lip and swept the sweat of my forehead, my hoof joints popping out as I glared daggers at the receiver. With a victorious grin, I moved forward one of my pawns, the tips of my metallic claw biting in the dirty plastic of the piece.

“Bishop, e, two,” he claimed so quickly I hadn’t had the time to lay the pawn down the wooden plaque.

I studied the chessboard with dumbfounded narrow eyes, eyeing my pieces sternly, eagerly searching for the motives behind his choice. My eyes followed the path of a knight toward my line of scattered pawns and found my king was trapped, again.

“Check,” he snickered.

My ears burning, I roared and threw the pawn across the room, turning my back to the board. I heard the piece bounce on a wall and roll under a nearby furniture, grating over the parquet. I slapped my face.

“Really?!” I grumbled. “How can you do that? I haven’t told you what I was going to play.”

I rose my eyes, the seeping smirk reeking off the receiver throbbing in my mind. Staring at the ceiling was not that bad after all… At least better than looking dumbstruck at my defeat. The greyish lintels had bent under the weight of the years, struck with slithering fissures, their dark brown varnish trickling into layers with slivers of dust.

“Not my fault you’re that bad at chess,” he huffed. “Even more if you’re that predictable.”

Chewing on the inside of my lips, bulging my cheeks with air, I sighed and focused back on the game.

“I’m sorry, Monsieur Moebius, if it’s the only game I have.”

Couldn’t he just stop laughing at me? It was… just humiliating.

Moebius, also known as ‘the little fucking trickster’, was an abrasive annoyance for many, but I knew he could be a kind pony. I had met him a long time ago, back during one mission I had signed for hadn’t turned quite well. His help had taken me out of a faux-pas. The guy was a pure genius as a scavenger and stealthy throat-slicer, a fucking bastard if you ask me. But, if I had one advice for anypony, it would have been not to trust him on a daily basis.

The bad sportmare I was wondered why I was still talking with him. Well, I hadn’t seen anypony else in Hollow Shades to play with in a long while… The question: “How had the stallion gotten my number?” was still vivid in my head. I wasn’t mad at him for breaking into my private life... finding the right number and a line that still worked was amazing.

“You want to play another round?” he asked, probably grinning at me from the other side of the receiver. “It’s a guessing game.”

“I don’t like that kind of stupid,” I grunted. “Spit it out.”

“You’ve got some visitors.”

The connection broke, leaving the room silent, empty. Prostrated, I sit unwaveringly for a few minutes, my breath and heartbeats the only sounds reaching my ears. I looked at my desk in the back of my office, next to its emptied cells, an orange light was glowing from behind my monitors.

“Oh, fuck me,” I gurgled, forcing my shaky, achy hooves to stand up.

I hopped to my desk. Its many screens were flaring a painful muddy green at my eyes as I sat in my wheeled comfy chair, one larger and not meant for ponies in the first place. But, as I couldn’t pull my strange battle saddle off, thanks to the fact that I had lost the key a while ago, I was deemed to sit in an uncomfortable position that made me jerk and twist more than often. Snaking in the chair, I listened to the terminal’s speakers, bipping stridently in unison, a reddish diode glowing over my keyboard. Nothing good was coming out of this.

I glared back at the radio, troubled that Moebius had hinted something was ahoof before I did. Anxious, my heart clenched at the idea the radio dissimulated a camera, spying on each of my movements from the shadows. Heck, call it a Ministry of Morale complex, but eighteen years after the end of the world I was still afraid of the sprite-bots eyeballing me from the next street corner, at least when I was not in control. Those little balls of metal creeped me when they were wandering about, whether silent or blasting a thousand times rewinded pre-war music.

I stared at my monitors, their degraded quality making me want to bulge my screwed eyes out. Many pixels had died throughout the years, their happy green light melted into a murky and painful glow. I focused. Pressing repeatedly over my keyboard, I narrowed my eyes to picture shapes out of the pixelated images, seeking for an intruder inside the city. Maybe Moebius had just messed with my paranoia…?

The night wrapped Hollow Shades into a thick dark blanket, the wind’s roars flinging the remaining shutters on their creaking and jolting hinges; a torture through my terminal’s obsolete speakers. Gritting my teeth, I forced myself to listen to the low and discordant cacophony.

A series of pushed keys later while fighting my head throbbing, the screens switched to the western entrance of the town. There, the black tapestry was still whipping over and over again on its pole, the violent breeze blasting the contours of the lonely fabric. Sole passer-by, the dust swept past across the two walk-paths of the alleys, weaving between the cracks of the road. As usual, shadows were carved into the walls and asphalt, beaming off a reeking, darker than black sludge that spiked jerks and sweat down my spine. Hoofmarks stamped the ground, tracing a trail toward the inner parts of the city. A moment of victory later where I believed I had found a burglar, I grumbled my dissatisfaction out. Those were just mine.

Getting bored faster than ever, I zapped between different scenes like I did decades ago with my old TV, searching for a camera displaying a useful angle. That many were long dead wasn’t helping at all. Yet, one caught my attention. It monitored a large boulevard of the eastern part of the city I had always been reluctant to wander in, an industrial area cast into a lid of creeping shadows, teasing my heart in discomfort. The ruins were as terrifying as a ghost city could be in an era of world’s ending. The area had always bore the traces of the apocalypse more than the western side of the city. I winced, the wind moaning on top of the chimneys and through the scrapped metallic façades made my speakers grunt despicably. Phantoms’ pleads in my ears. I zapped and… I blinked at my monitors with blurry eyes. A zoomed in, carbonized, toothless, cracking, and dangling open mouth welcomed me.

“Aaaah!” I jerked out of my chair, my bum and head hitting the floor with a huff of dust.

My breath uneasy, I looked at the ceiling for a moment that stretched to eternity. I hauled my hoof to my ribcage, feeling my heart trying to rip it open and fly away out of fear. Damn it, I hated when a cadaver was hanging in front of my CCTV…

“You sure somepony lives here,” a feminine voice beckoned, muffled by something covering her mouth. “Who would stay in such… hole?”

Struggling to get my breath under control, I crawled to my seat and rolled my hoof onto the keyboard, seeking for a better view. Between abandoned rusty delivery carts, two ponies in heavy barding were hitting the street toward the Hollow Shades’s center, drawing large circles around the mummified corpses strewn across the roads. Slow and uneven, their pace suffered from sore hooves that came from a probably long walk. I forced my eyes to catch their worn out features despite my screens and the darkness outside, leaving me nearly stranded. It wasn’t my night.

“Well, a pony does inhabit the place,” a stallion noted with a deep voice, rolling his tongue with a characteristic pop before he looked asides, checking the crossroad before him. “I guess we have to trust the paladin, she was not really happy to tell us where her old friend was living. But it was necessary. What we’ve been charged to do is of the utmost importance. We can’t fail.”

My ears perked up at the mention of the Steel Rangers’ rank, they had talked to the Paladin I owed, and she gave them my location. The mention of a quest or whatever was also… disturbing. I licked my lips and craved for a better point of view.

Activating a sleeping sprite-bot with my terminal’s override code, I forced it to float over a nearby factory’s crumbled roof, opening over a chain production line that hadn’t moved for a long time. Maneuvering clumsily, it stationed stealthily over the duo. Willing to take a broader look, I turned its zoom to its maximum. Though the green shaded computer screens blew any sense of color, I could still see their cloths and equipment. Heavy, ragged, and dusty.

The mare’s long and disheveled mane fell on her face as she was struggling with a bulky gas mask, its strap falling loose on her temples. Holding the protection with her left front hoof, she was hopping with difficulty on her three other legs, striving to catch upon her companion.

“Stupid. Earth. Pony. Gear!” she grunted.

Two steps ahead, the stallion granted her with a scowl and a wink. “Well, if you hadn’t been a dick to the merchant, he would have provided you some better stuff. Like, you know… something useful for a unicorn.”

She smirked back, shielding herself with a laughable pride.

“He tried to rob us!”

“That’s called business.”

“Yeah, I still…” her right forehoof tripped in a bump of the asphalt. Muzzle first, her face hit the dirt in a loud thump. Butt toward the sky and hoof sprawled over the road, she swore inaudibly, her mouth forced shut by her own weight forcing on her jaw. Breathing puffs of dirt over her mask, its glass protection shattered, she eyed her companion in silence. He hoofed her a small IV bag filled with RadAway, a straw piercing its top, offering her a single raised eyebrow from behind his own glass helmet.

“Want some?” he said, grimacing over the rancid and horrid taste of the orange liquid in its plastic pack.

I chuckled, my voice echoing in the sprite-bot’s speaker.

And a long, long… very long silence followed.

I blinked at my monitor, the duo slowly looking up at the hovering sprite bot one or two pony-length over their head. I scrunched my nose at my screen as the three of us spent an unsettling pause scanning each other, well… my robotic emissary. Only my teeth biting on my lips kept me from laughing. Yet, I couldn’t stop my recurring snorts. The stallion screwed his eyes at the bot with curiosity. The mare however glared daggers at it, keeping her proctologist examination stance up, her eyes cursing it for her bad luck.

“Wasn’t me,” I blurted through my microphone, pressing on the bot’s retreat command.

“Catch it!” the mare blared at her stooge, pointing at the metallic parasprite with a hoof. Her mask fell in response and she roared her rage out.

Losing no time, the stallion flashed forward in the robot’s tow through the Hollow Shades’ streets. Making it fly by the pipes and pass under the bridges, I sometimes found the time to cast a glance back. Sweating over his leathered gear, the stallion wasn’t inclined to give space to me. The hopping mare, on her own, had nearly disappeared far behind. Not so comfortably seated in my chair, I found the mouse and cat game enjoyable. It could go on for hours. But like everything, it had to have an end…

A bell rang out across Hollow Shades, sending shudders through the concrete, walls, and cracked windows. The glass twinkled and shattered, the doors flung shut, and one or two standing cadavers slopped down the dirt in a retching flopping noise. City roaring under Midnight’s beckon. A call from outer space echoing to the underworld. The stallion and I gradually slowed down until we stopped, looking away toward the darkest alleys of the town. A chill crawled over the city, blanketing everything with a cold feeling of emptiness. Void.

The bell clattered once again. Vibration through my bones.

Eyes wide, I jumped out of my chair. My knee tangled in my keyboard cable. My installation crumbled on the ground as I fell head first, my chin hitting the parquet rather violently. Fear shooting quivers down my spine, I grappled a large blanket, wiping the sweat off my forehead at the same time, took my guns, and ran outside. I hoped I wasn’t already too late.

“Ah, ha! Gotcha!” the stallion mocked in the interphone far behind me as I left, his hooves tinkling onto the sprite-bot.

The bell gave another tremor. I rushed through the threshold of my office door. Its clock hung on its wall over the three balloons heraldic, dead for eighteen years. I couldn’t slack. My hooves stomped the ground, cracking the thin layer of vitrified mud beneath the dirt and scraps scattered around. The distant bell boomed in my ears. I was already late.

The bell tolled a ninth time as I reached a crossroad, the one the duo had passed by earlier. Deserted.

“Fuck,” I spat.

A sound of rumble in my back forced my head to jerk.

“There’s a pony right here!” a crystalline voice pealled.

The mare faced me, her features and colors broken by the darkness, the stallion standing behind her, a hoof hung around my sprite-bot. I cringed back as a sliver of starlight briefly illuminated the city block through a hole in the cloudy sky. Running with sweat, spitting loads of steam with my raucous breath, two bloodshot eyes maring my face, I glared death at them. They stepped backward as my two mechanical arms stretched out of my sides and grabbed them by the collars.

The tenth bell modulated the sharp cold of the night.

I kicked the robot out the stallion’s grasp and pulled both of them toward the nearest building while they vainly bit down on the metal limbs to free themselves. The mare shrieked, the cold embrace of my prosthetics needling on her skin. I bucked the entrance door open with my earth pony’s strength. It fell into pieces as two decades of caring disdain had rotten it away. The eleventh bell clacked as I found a narrow storage room, pushed the two rash intruders inside and closed the trail behind. I locked the door as the twelfth bell ring zoomed and I stared back at the two bemused ponies, my guns dangling on my sides, my two additional limbs whizzing on their cogwheels, and a siren’s howl rising from the depths of hell around the city. A world’s ending appetizer.

The mare opened her mouth and I stuck my hoof in.

“Hush!” I ordered through a whisper. “Fools!”

“What’s…?”

“Shush!”

I flung my blanket over the three of us, curled up, forcing my two stooges down with my cold steel claws.

“No move, no sound, and we might survive,” I whispered, tears breaking off my eyes before I began my pleading, the siren muffling my voice. “Please maketh them go away, Celestia. That in thy beaming embrace the death flies over us but does not stop.”

“Who?” The mare fidgeted on her hooves.

“That thy eyes keep the shadows at bay… Those of the unrests. Maketh them go away, that they absent hooves leave no crack in the house, that their breath does no sound, and that their missing eyeballs do not stare at us, for it means to die. Please, Celestia, giveth us hope, keepeth the shadows away, for dead must not blend with the livings.”

I closed my eyes, listening to the deafening siren blasting through the house bricks and foundations, attentive to the creeping cracks of the walls, caring about the crawling winds weaving through the unwatched fissures. The locked door slammed and jerked on its hinges and lock, an eerie storm roaring behind. The three of us snuggled in each other’s shoulders. The room was unbearably cold.

“The shadows,” I whispered. “Don’t look at them. They will eat your hearts.”

I felt the mare shiver in my hug. Whimpers, hiccups, and tears.

“Soon they will away,” I concede.

“Mom…” the stallion muttered.

Humming over the roofs of the town, the wind twisted and turned outside, wobbling the door like a maddened pony eager to break in. I kept us below the blanket, the warming air slowly impregnating the makeshift hideout with our own stench of fear and stress, a spicy reek added to the whole. Minutes flew past, and the siren finally began to die in the distance. I rose my head from under the blanket and stared into the two pairs of twinkles before me, the duo’s eyes. One of them had peed all over the place and I felt my skin soaking bit by bit.

I licked my lips, pushed the cover aside, groped the wall with my hoof and switched the light on. The lamp exploded in light, showering us with glass. Gasping, the mare sought for a refuge below the stallion’s powerful shoulder, undoubtedly an earth pony. A chuckle grew stronger deep within me as I let the silence between the three of us sink in like a rusty knife in a wound. I took a long and deep inhalation, stared at them and giggled with a wide grin that presented a range of yellow teeth.

“Well, hope you enjoyed the thrill ride and the big drops on Stallion Mountain. The attraction opens once a day at midnight when the bell rings across Hollow Shades,” I said with a low snicker. “The first ride is always free. The direction refuses to pay for your cleaning.”

“What?” they shrieked in unison.

I dodged the febrile mare’s hooves, trying to strangle me in the dark. Clumsy, ashamed by the pee splattering her hindquarters, she dropped by my side, her back hooves intertwining in my wet blanket. I raised a brow at her exposed bum, her horn suddenly glowing orange. I walked away from her disincarnated grasp and my rump hit the stallion’s forelegs. A sudden flash of light lit on his face. An electric torch between his hooves. The room suddenly thrown into stark relief, the two peers laid an eye on me as much as I eyed them back with a low playful smile, happy they had gone so far in the joke.

Yet, something caught me off-guard. Air inflated my warming cheeks until they swelled to the point they were about to blow up like balloons. To be short, I failed controlling my burst and I rolled down my left side, a harsh and teasing laugh breaking through me.

“What?” the stallion growled. “It’s my coat that disturb you?”

I waved my brows, ducking my lips in a funny grin. “Now that you say it.” I fell back on the ground, cackling as I held my sides, the stallion trying to set me on fire with his glare. “Did Pinkie Pie drop you in Cloudsdale’s paint factory?”

I laughed, wiping a tear off my cheek.

The stallion’s bright pink hide shone in his torch’s chiaroscuro light, his violet mane streaked with indigo tied into a ponytail falling behind his left shoulder. It was too awesome, amazing, not to laugh at, I only knew one kind of pony with such set of colors, at least until now: mares. A big muscled oiled earth pony male piñata. The sight was eerie, unreal in a world where green and pastel colors had been blasted away to leave behind just their darker and moodier tones. If not for moving to kick me around, swearing at me, he would have made a magnificent Fillydelphia Fun Farm’s statutes from before the Last Day.

“Stop it,” he hissed, to no avail. “Celestia dammit, stop that.”

My laughter slowly spread to the mare who’d been looking back and forth between the two of us, a hoof in front of her mouth as she tried not to mock her friend. The dirty orange fur on her shoulders was covered by long disheveled brownish locks, falling all over her head and hiding half of her eyes with only her glowing horn sprouting out of the mess.

“Stop what?” I rolled over my back.

“Just stop it,” he mumbled, his face turning red as he hunched over, hanging his head low out of shyness. “It’s already difficult to bear on itself. So don’t make it harder to take.”

A few low hues and cries later, I sat over my flanks, massaging my achy cheeks and ribs. Little compared to her companion, the mare shook her head, her eyes craving to set me on fire after she had calmed herself. I could see her barding humid with pee. Laughing time was over.

“Sorry for… that,” I apologized.

She threw a hoof at me with enough delay to shield myself with one of my prosthetics. A moment of stupor later spent staring down at my mechanical barding, she hissed, “Do this once more and I swear I’m gonna break your mouth.”

“Oh come on,” I countered. “It was fun.”

“No!” both the mare and the stallion spat at me.

Smiling, my eyes wandered on their equipment, eager to get a closer look on what I’d already witness through my CCTV. Both wore a thick leathered armor peppered with scraps of CBRN-proof yellow suits and metal plaques that clicked and clanged over their shoulders with each step. The stallion carried a massive black shotgun on his left side, tied to a brown light battle saddle, its trigger extension folded behind his neck. The mare on her own seemed to take a great care of a bolt action wooden precision rifle strapped to her back, displaying a metal support that had stripped off its scope. A mask dangled around the stallion’s neck while the mare’s counterpart was nowhere to be found, probably lost in the chase. I pointed my hoof at her missing item.

“I’ll replace it for you,” I proposed.

She patted her face with widened eyes and gazed sternly at the pink stallion, whose hoof stretched in his saddlebag to pull out another small medical bag of RadAway. Quickly, he hoofed it to her, gave me another, and sucked on a third little glowing orange bag, disgust tearing up their faces. I stared down at the bag with disdain. I sighed and pushed it back to him.

“Don’t need it,” I stated.

He screwed up his eyes to a knife blade’s width and raised an eyebrow. “You’ve already taken some?”

“Eh… sort of,” I chuckled. “Don’t waste one for me,...eh...” I suddenly realized I didn’t know their names.

I drew my hoof out to them and gave the weird couple the best smile I could muster.

“Name’s Vault Skin,” I presented. “Sheriff of Hollow Shades.”

They eyed each other with that look of surprise and suspicion. My lips shut close as they glared back at me. The hoofshake that followed went overwhelmingly formal.

“I’m Lozenge.” the stallion insisted with a not-at-all mistrustful pout. “But call me Loz.”

My playful grin wasn’t going to fade soon. Loz’s sight was giving me cuteness diabete all by itself. He was young, maybe not old enough to remember the days from before. Yet, his skin was already marred with scars of past skirmishes, usual between groups of survivors fighting over the scraps of the big cities’ peripheral towns. His Cutie Mark was a pulley with a red rope sliding in. I tilted my head to the mare who wiped a narrow stream of glowing orange running off her lips.

“I’m Blast,” she grunted, grimacing as she caught me looking at her flank, marked with a large black rectangle shattered in the middle.

“You hate geometry?” I teased like hot embers on a bare skin.

“Yeah, maybe.” She giggled and shrugged, falling back to a more serious look. She wasn’t going to forgive me soon for my joke. “I’m not gonna stay here without a gas protection. I don’t wanna die.”

“Follow me,” I said, waving a hoof toward me. “I’ve got a house.”

We walked out of the lonesome building we had taken refuge in, the wind chill stinging my skin. The town was now eerily calm, the breeze the only rustle in the air. Loz followed me close, lighting the road with the sliver of his torch, seeking to unveil with the light every piece of shadow that appeared darker than black in his eyes. Was he afraid of the dark…? I didn’t know. But I could see him looking with disgust and fear at the grim shadows cast around the walls. I even saw him wince at the look of one little foal, its dark silhouette cast in some falling pebbledash, his smile strangely white in that all black face. Welcome to Hollow Shades.

While he was agitating around, I couldn’t stop but looking at his hilarious fur and mane. Poor boy, he should have had a hard life with other colts. He was an earth pony granted with a bulky frame that even seemed alien in my eyes, bigger by two heads than Blast or me. His shotgun was clattering on the buckles tying his barding to his sides. What beamed from him was an impression of cleanliness. His mane and hide were properly tied and brushed, and even if the fragrance of sweat and labor reeked off him, I could see his care for his own person. I even put myself to shame. Loz wrestled a large and rusty rad-counter out of a pocket, waving it around. It cracked back and fro, up and down. Not a good sign I guessed, his eyes flickering and his lips closing tight. He gulped, his head slowly leaning next to me.

“You’ve been living here for a long time?” he asked with a low grave voice, his eyes riveted on my Cutie Mark exposed to the light of his lamp. That was a question I was eager to sweep away.

“Since ever,” I answered.

“How are you not…”

“We’re here,” I cut him off hastily, pointing the entrance of the sheriff office.

We contoured the massive fountain that borrowed Princess Luna’s traits, built to open on the central square of Hollow Shades, and walked toward my office. The building stood fiercely, a muffled green light glowing through its cracked windows. Caring about Loz and Blast, I watched dumbfounded the nastiness of my hideout. It needed to be scrubbed, to have its furniture dusted, its hinges oiled, its walls repainted, its shutters replaced, maybe its canalizations redone, and finally some ponies to populate the city around. Similarly, it reeked off the fact that I was a messy, oblivious, and often disorganized mare. My yet-to-come guests would dislike having me as a tenant. I caught my two guests staring at the camera hung onto my office walls.

“Just my camera system,” I explained to them, afraid to walk into a deadly trap.

I put a hoof on the wood stairs leading to the swinging doors of my office, ready to pass by the old buck and his burnt rocking chair when somepony coughed behind me.

“Vault,” Blast initiated with a whimper, her eyes avoiding mine. I looked upon her hide, smeared with her own fluids. I pinched my lips in comprehension.

“I’ll get you something to… wipe it off,” I said. “I’m sorry if I went too f…”

“No, no… It’s not about… that,” Blast cut me off then asked dubiously: “It’s just… Where did the bell ring come from?”

I raised my eyebrows, thought about it and frowned.

“Oh that? No fucking clue. There’s no church in Hollow Shades.” A hoof through the door, hiding my smirk behind a flat face, I welcomed her. “Après vous, Madame.”

Blast’s terrorized face made me smile on the inside. She huffed past me, her chin overly pointed up.

“The RadAway’s in the kitchen,” I shouted at her as her flanks disappeared in the dark. My ears flicked at the creaks Loz’s hooves wrestled from the porch stairs. I winked at him. “Make yourself at home. You two must be tired from the walk. Long time I haven’t got visitors… Heck, it’s even my first time.”

I pinkie-smiled and pushed him inside. Slowly, I raised my head and I fixed the other side of the Luna’s fountain in the middle of the square fronting the office. There was nothing but somber shadows distorted by the night and my accumulated fatigue… For a second I thought… nevermind.

Sighing, I jerked my head away from whatever fading vision my spirit could come up with in such damned city.Swallowing my saliva, I walked in my office, the swinging door creaking as they closed behind my rump. My eyes wandered in the large hall, searching for the presence of my visitants under the dim light of the dying lamps above our heads.

Blast had already found a gas mask in my storage. Both she and Loz had readjusted their suits to be exposed to as less radiation as possible. I was certain radiation here wasn’t that deadly… I should investigate that. Her bag leaning against my desk, I saw the myriads of orange medical packs within. How many had they bought to reach me? I didn’t even know where they came from. I looked behind her, my eyes riveting onto the stallion’s face, his jaw chewing on the space between his clenched teeth. I was sat comfortably in from of my screen. lowly, his head rose and two picky, glaring, and hurt eyes struck me with questionable motives.

“You’ve enjoyed spying on us?” he grunted.

“My duty as sheriff,” I replied, looking down to dodge his stare.

“You’re a kinda loyal mare if you’ve been doing that job for eighteen years,” Blast chuckled, letting her voice drop to a scary growl. “Not that keeping an uninhabited city is of any interest.” She let a long silence set in like a knife in a wound. “Unless you’ve got something to hide...”

I tensed, a little frown on my face. My mouth opened, dangling silent for a second or two as I ransacked my memories. Why I was dedicating myself to Hollow Shades was eerie for anypony else. I wasn’t on a quest or anything that would influence the world. I just… loved my city. I loved the anonymous prisoner blasted asunder in his cell, the old buck sitting still in his rocking chair… the playing children…. and of course, the... shadows. So why was I staying here, or more likely always coming back here? It was a good question. I bubbled with my lips, staring into thin air before Blast waved a hoof before my eyes.

“Hey? You okay?”

I blinked. “It’s just my home,” I confessed. It was the truth, Hollow Shades was what I could call home. A small radioactive island lost in the middle of an ocean of radiations, away from the daily survival, sometimes violent, that plagued the ‘outside’.

“How long have you been living here?” Loz asked,looking at me with pecky eyes, betraying distrust.

“Oh, the pinkie plushie isn’t confident?” I teased, making him growl. I smiled, remembering my time past at the local school playing along with classmates I had long forgotten the names. Soccer, hoof wrestling, or some hide and seek. “I’ve always been here. Good memories.”

We eyed each other for a short but unsettlingly silent pause. I coughed exaggeratedly, clearing my throat to make myself heard. It was time to reverse the conversation.

“Why did you come here? If my guesses are right, a long trip such as yours isn’t for chocolate treats.”

Loz sighed, throwing his violet ponytail over his right shoulder, twitching his hoof around his chin, ill-at-ease with my recurrent teasing. He gave Blast companion a stern look. She breathed out, and shrugged disappointedly.

“You’ve heard about Tenpony Tower?” she began, unsure about me being a trustable pony. I looked up to the ceiling, giving them an obvious answer.

“Who didn’t?” I said, tapping my hoof on the dusty parquet.

“So you know the Steel Rangers tried to break in lately but failed.”

“With casualties,” I added, Loz acknowledged the truth with a silent nod. Was he sad? “So what?”

“The Steel Rangers’re gathering a small squad to break into the tower’s defenses, again. They want to check on the tech’ kept inside the tower’s protection shields.” She broke her speech and looked at Loz, waiting for a sign of approval. “The first encounter wasn’t very well handled from both sides.”

“Tell her.”

Rubbing an absent beard, pensive, Blast looked at me with sad little eyes.

“The Steel Rangers’ main force might break everything inside if a skirmish with the surviving inhabitant happens. Needless to say that those survivors would be stomped to death.” She shook her head, probably thinking about the countless dead it meant. I was more eager to balance her last statement. Rangers had been killed apparently. “I’m gathering a team to go in and see for ourselves what’s going on inside.”

“You’re from the Steel Rangers?” I brought forth.

Both looked at each other, and after a short moment spent staring at each other, they both went through their saddlebags and hoofed out a strange round piece of leather; its contours were shredded. Puffing a haze on the inside of her mask, Blast showed me an insignia I couldn’t forget. Etched on a leather canvas, a pair of phoenix wings enclosed an apple-shaped box circling three uneven cogwheels, the whole cut into two symmetrical halves by an sword. Steel Rangers. Eyes widened, I gulped my saliva. I was picturing power armors, embracing their sunken and starved curves.

I swept the ‘we’re Steel Rangers so follow us’ argument away with a swift lateral movement of my hoof.

“Why me?”

Loz fidgeted on his hooves, probably thinking about how to phrase his demand.

“You’ve worked for the Ministry of Morale,” he stated to my stupor.

“How do you know?” I hiccupped, my tongue forcing flickers through my voice, turning in an awful lisp. “Who’re you working for?”

“We’re initiates,” Blast cut Loz and me off. “And we’re the last hope before the paladins decide to bust in Tenpony Tower’s doors. We have ten days to find a team, go in, and negotiate a peaceful way out.”

I growled, closing my eyes and holding my temples between my hooves. I sat down the dust and parquet beneath. Volutes of smoke flew off from under my rump.

“Why can’t the Steel Rangers give me some rest?” I groaned. “I’ve just finished a mission with them and they already want me back.”

“You do a good job apparently for a… mere wastelander,” she smirked at me.

Our eyes met, my left eyelid twitching under the fatigue.

“Why me?” I repeated.

“You’re a former Ministry of Morale’s agent,” she said so neutral it shot spikes of shivers down my limbs. She pinched her lips, and gave a grave look. “You know… unconventional technologies.”

I shook my head in disapproval. I was too old for that kind of things, and I had left that past behind me. I had even forgotten a lot of my training. Thinking about Tenpony Tower, the truth unveiled.

“You want me to hack through the Tenpony Tower’s computer defenses,” I wailed, my hooves giving two steps back out of Blast’s reach, now dangerously far too close to me. “Why?”

Loz put his right hoof in front of his partner.

“Tenpony Tower is a Ministry of Arcane Science Hub. There must be a shitlot of tech inside, which means a lot of defenses we can’t go through without an expert’s help. And the previous engineer had been killed by the Tenpony Tower’s occupants.” I smirked at that. “However, many remains have… probably suffered of the balefire bomb that exploded near the city center,” Loz finally hummed. “And surviving agents from the MoM are rare today.”

“Why can’t you contract an engineer from the M.A.S. or from the M.W.T., you’re Steel Rangers after all. You must have got plenty of them after eighteen years making a bad reputation!” I fought back.

“Well, Paladin Seed was right about you,” Loz sighed. “Half-hearted as a mule!”

“Wait, she gave you my location!” I will have to spank that overconfident mare the next time I’d meet her.

Loz gave me an eyebrow. “But she asked you to consider this as a favour from you to her. You owe her, is that it?”

This was bad played from her. I was indebted with a mare from the Steel Rangers, a paladin. And today, she had to ask me to fulfill a promise I had made years ago. I hated that feeling, being trapped in a deal that was more about stealing that paying back some debt was unnerving. It was also involving killing ponies, starving, probably badly trained, and maddened by isolation. I was maybe a mercenary, but not a murderer.

“Because… well...” Blast started laughing. “Steel Rangers are soldiers, not Doctors in Computer Science. We lack of proper engineers and ponies around Manehattan that can handle tech properly. The competent personal is located elsewhere at the moment…”

I’d have asked where this ‘elsewhere’ was but knew I would get no answer.

Blast’s glare shot untold threats at her friend who ashamedly smiled and shrugged in response.

“Hey,” Loz cackled. “Don’t look at me like that, not my fault if you made me trip over the keyboard last time. You sent the wrong order.”

Blast face changed from a stern stoic look to a wrinkled vexed face. “Don’t talk about that,” she hissed.

I laughed at those co-workers putting sticks in the other’s wheels. I rubbed my left hoof with the other, pondering the implications of the mission I was given. It was extremely dangerous. That a few Rangers had already lost their lives in the process was more than a needed evidence for me to refuse… But Seed… damn! First I was forced in this trade. And I wasn’t talking about being required to show off what I had quickly forgotten eighteen ago. With the balefire had indeed come unemployment.

“I’m not suited for the job, not anymore,” I confessed. “I –“

“You are,” she insisted. “We need somepony like you. And well, you’ve signed for this before looking at the bottom of the contract.” She smiled.

Grunting, I facehoofed, holding my head my hoof pressing on the metal strap stuck in my skin; my elbows resting on my akimbo knees.

“We can’t stay here,” Loz peered in the conversation. “I don’t know about your… condition, but Hollow Shades is radioactive… on a deadly level. Blast and I can’t stay here. We’ll wait for you beyond the Eastern border of the Hollow Forest, tomorrow. If you miss the appointment, we’ll find a more suited pony.” This hurt like a knife on a fresh scar.

Still hanging my head, I stared at the inside of my hooves. In the low light I could still see the smears of blood from the poor stallion from Junction, blackened, dirtied, and washed away by two weeks of travel. How could those two young ponies stand my company? I was pathetic. Biting my tongue, shoveling back tears I didn’t understand the origin, I looked up. Both were waiting impatiently a positive answer… or negative. I couldn’t tell whether they really wanted me or they were just following orders.

“Tell me,” I sliced in the building silence. “Even if I have to respect a promise, what’s my reward? I don’t work for crumbs.”

The businessmare she was smiled as if she was signing a fruitful contract. Trying to fit in, I shared her grin. With difficulty, though.

“A full-time position within the Steel Rangers,” she brought forth.

For anypony that wandered the wasteland, such offer was a chance of a lifetime, for it meant being sure not to starve and live a longer and healthier life among the rumbles. However, I wasn’t feeling like leaving Hollow Shades… definitely.

“You’re lonely, Vault,” Blast whispered, triggering quivers along my backbone. “I can see it on your face. Why not come on an adventure. It’s better than waiting to rot in a dark rat hole such as Hollow Shades. I may be rude, but being the sheriff of a city with nopony to defend is rather cynical. You could save life going with us. There are ponies outside that need help of ponies like you.”

“I know,” I murmured. “I’m just…”

“Old?” Loz finally teased, grinning as he finally balance the score between him and me.

I was forty five years old, fuck him! In Wasteland’s standard it was a rather long life indeed. But.

“I. Am. Not. Old!”

Some ponies had died unborn., though. I got to leave several lives through peace, war, and apocalypse. I clenched my eyes, hunching over my shoulders as I cracked the joints of my hooves together, hurting myself to make the hurting questions go away.

Blast sighed and smacked her hoof on my desk, wrestling a jolt out of my legs. The screens flickered and wobbled softly. “You’re wasting our time, and health.”

“I’m sorry,” I blubbered. “It’s just…”

“We’ll wait outside the eastern Hollow Forest’s border tomorrow,” Loz comforted me, hauling himself out of my chair to walk up to me, giving me a hoof on my shoulder and a warm smile. “Agent, it’s your choice.”

My mane crawled and my fur itched along the way to the border of Hollow Shades as I followed them to make sure they went out without a problem. My belly churned at the thought of leaving once again my native city and ached by the silence that had followed Loz’s last words. I didn’t know what I wanted.

“Tomorrow,” Blast repeated, her voice seeping care. “We need you. We’ll be waiting for you, don’t worry.”

Yet I did.

Once back to my office, I sat in my rocking chair under the cracking porch, wobbling back and forth under the freezing windchill. Drums started over my head as rain flowed down the city from the sky. The dirt melted and washed away in torrents through the cracks in the asphalt under my eyes. Light streaked the sky, its rumble following close. What should I do?

In abrupt bursts, bolts of lightning showered the city. The lights cast shadows over the black buildings, moving and living eerily. As the headrest of my chair ascended, I peeked a look at the walls closing on the square. Darkness was seeping out of the carvings, shadows and undead getting back to life. The black silhouettes crawled numbly around, my eyelids unbeatably heavy. Was my mind failing me? Ranks of anonymous featureless shadows crawled forward around Hollow Shades, entering, leaving, waiting in my range of vision, seeking for some incomprehensible things that I couldn’t even fathom. I heard the laughter of children playing soccer, the humming of an old buck puffing through his pipe, a mare welcoming clients, another eyeing passers-by, and screams… lots and lots of tortured shallow howls.

Cold trickles of sweat rolled from the top of my neck to my left flank, stinging me along its way with unbearable shakes. Wind blowing through my mane, the night loomed its darkness over me, the rain its maiden. I fought back tears, biting my lips in resignation. Blinking to wash away the achy dark waters, I screamed the vision for the vision to disappear. But it wasn’t my choice to do. He… it, or she wouldn’t go… Through the raindrops, one specific child’s shadow lurked out of the night from beyond the occupied Luna’s fountain as a drowned foal out of black and murky abysses. Her two dull green glowing eyes punctured my coat, pain ripping off my soul. My fur raised on its root. Lightning bolted through the watery sky, cracking off the dark dissimulating veil masking the… thing’s smile. A monstrously wide grin. Saw-shaped green-glowing white teeth. Smiling, waiting, teasing. The blackness bubbled around its traits, popping and sprawling so its shape was never really defined… or simply redefining throughout its wavy movements, like a primordial darkness from where life was going to birth and die for the first time. Sometimes edgy. Sometimes only a simple overzealous and devouring smile in the nether.

“Go away,” my lips articulated, my throat deprived of air and sound. “No pony will be yours tonight. Go away, ghost lost in darkness. Remain far away from them.”

I blinked. It disappeared. My stomach churned and growled. Fear crawling in my mind, clamping my thoughts with alien desires. Freedom, escape, destruction, oblivion.

“Vault…” Just a murmur.

I gulped.

“Vault!” A mere scream.

I whimpered.

“Vault.” A simple order.

I looked aside at the old buck rocking chair, now completely black and reeking off darkness. Above the carved black shape moved a mass of shadows, slowly materializing. A head, two… no four hooves, snatching off the furniture’s forms. Lightning boomed. Its smile, through melted, holed, and rubbery, bubbled lips. A tail weaving like a snake around the wood of the chair. A darker than black, light-devouring, and dropping mane. And finally white eyes ripped off their pupils staring into me.

“Why are you leaving, Vault? Why’re you leaving if you always come back,” it tore through his throat.

“It’s my home,” I answered. “My place is here.”

“So, why do you even leave? You thrive to flee. Pathethic! You don’t deserve nothing of this.”

Yes, I was pathetic, a mare that didn’t even know what she wanted, hesitating between many possibilities and offers until those opportunities had long run dry. Incapable of choice. Incapable of thought. Incapable of living.

“Do you remember the day the bombs fell?”

The creature’s head hung on the side toward me, giving me tearing black puppy eyes. I nodded, thinking about the many screams, shouts, and cries… Incapable of forgetting. Pain flowed down the back of my hooves as the apparition touched me. But the pain came from where my teeth had bitten deep, imperceptibly at first. Blood dripped down, melting with the rain splashing over me, the wind rendering the porch useless. Eyes burst open, I looked at the shadowy square, hazing with the flashes, rumbles, and drumming.

“Yes, I do,” I muttered.

“it still burns, eh?” it teased. “The screams, the heat, the pain. But you lived against all odds!”

“I…” I whimpered. “Everypony keeps disturbing me, I want to rest.”

It smirked at me with such jealousy it reeked off her pitch-black swallowing hide.

“Who are you?” I was fed up repeating that question at each of our encounter. It wasn’t the first time I had that argument.

“Stupid question as always,” it retorted. “I’m what you’ve stolen from! From everypony that died here.”

I breathed in and found myself unable to exhale, my head turning red, burning. The thing stood over me from her fragile stature, scowling down at me.

“I…”

“What is good is forever forgotten, and it’s bad,” she howled. “What is bad is worshipped on an altar, and it’s bad too.” She giggled. “So, what can you be sure of?”

“Of what I do!” I spat back mechanically. “That I must survive.”

“So, why are you coming back here again and again? You’ve stolen lives. Now you’re offered freedom but you’re stealing it from yourself?”

“Because you can’t leave Hollow Shades,” I hissed. “Ponies hurt, but I can forgive them. You! You hurt more. You cannot leave.”

“Yet I will!” It neared its head toward mine. It kissed my closed lips and I felt my breath taken away. Her voice rose once again. But it wasn’t hers… It was… mine. “One way… or another.” She… it gave me a little challenging nod, its smile ripping off its cheeks from ear to ear and beyond. An open maw.

It dropped his… its head on the side and drifted away for what seemed to be an eternity, hopping on legs shaped into slicing cones. Hooves sent through an oversized pen sharpener, sinking slightly in the mud, cracking the layer beneath. A nearly inaudible feminine laugh fell in its stead as it merged away in the pitch-black rain. It took effort not to faint on the spot, knowing it would come back stabbing me.

I cried under the muffling wind, the deafening thunder, and the horrid howls that had gobbled up my town. I crawled my poor body to my desk, crumbled down in my chair, curled up, and the good hoof of Morpheus welcomed me in a nightmarish sleep as I wept myself until my tears would dry. But they never had.

Ø VƱ ϵ α Ħ E!α ϵ Ʊ Ø

Outside Hollow Forest, once travelers had crossed the border, a makeshift encampment stood still, soaked in the rain that had watered down the region the whole night long. The sun had peered over the hill and clouds in the eastern horizon, nibbling the wasteland with cold tendril of grey light through the grey lid over my head.

“She won’t come,” Loz rambled, focused on scrubbing off the mud splattered onto his shiny black shotgun, his battle saddle suspended next to him on a low branch of a carbonized tree. “We shouldn’t have come here. Used too much stuff for nothin’.”

His pink coat had turned violent with the rain, his ponytail was now a disheveled mass of hair falling on his shoulders. around him was scattered emptied RadAways.

“We said we’ll wait in the morning. And morning ends at noon,” she condescended. “We stay.”

“Smartass,” he grunted.

I had awaited long behind a tree nearing the end of the forest, trying to catch anything from the duo. Minutes spent doing so taught me they were kinda boring.

“I’m here,” I bellowed, slowly walking out of the Hollow Forest, a small saddlebag hanging over my loader barding and my two guns shining below. “Sorry for making you wait.”

Surprisingly, Blast hugged me tight, giving me a bright warm smile. “Thanks. I was sure you’d make the right decision. Staying alone there is not healthy, ponies are meant to band together.”

“Yeah.” I wasn’t so sure about the band-thing. I had heard grim things happened in the south, near the Bad Lands.

“So, are we going?” Loz asked, loading his gun with large twelve millimeters cartridges. Grinning at each crystalline and smooth click his shotgun gave in response. Damn scary pink buck.

I looked down at the box of cartridges between his hooves. My eyes grew wide. The gauge cartridges were transparent, leaving the slugs exposed… Well, first there were only one slug per cartridge, similar to a sabot if it was the name. One large heavy sharp slug with fins filling each gauge entirely made my mane crawl. How deadly were those bullets, if you could still call them that?

“Brenneke slugs,” Loz called out, smirking at my sudden fear of his arsenal. “Meant for deep penetration, extreme crippling, and wall breaking.” He aimed at me and pulled the trigger. I ‘eeped, until I understood the safety was still on. “...you don’t want to be on the trajectory.”

“Fuck you with a metal bar,” I shouted.

He clacked the pump back and forth in his mouth, loading in the last slug.

“An eye for an eye, a tease for a tease,” he cackled.

Blast whacked the back of his head with a hoof.

“Stop scaring people with your gun, dumbass. You already do with your color,” she mocked.

“Don’t start with that too,” he muttered. “You promised me”

She raised her eyes to the sky. “Of course.” Then looked at me. “You’re ready to go?”

“Yes. But we aren’t going straight to Manehattan.”

The two pairs of glaring eyes that rammed through me after that creeped me out. I had to pull out an explanation, quick. I sweated, stuttering. “Don’t worry, we’ll just need help. I know a buck. Name’s Moebius.”

“Where does he live?” Blast asked, not reassured. “We’re running out of time.”

“It’s on the way. There’s just a short detour to make. He lives in Fillydelphia.”

I had never seen pupils shrink so fast and veins burst red around irises.

“Filly… delphia?” they both trembled.

“Yes, why?”

“…” They both stared silently at each other. They looked back at me like I was some kind of autistic-aggravated idiot that hadn’t crawled out of an isolation chamber for two decades. People often gave me this look. Never understood why.

“You’re crazy!” they cried out. “It’s a death hole!”

“You’ll see, he’s a funny stallion!” I laughed.

“You’re twigged.”

And I laughed even more.

ⱴ ⱷ ꜠ Ω ꜡ ⱷ ⱴ

Footnotes; Vault Skin, Class: Wanderer, Level Up

New Perk: “’You saw that?’ ‘Saw what?’”

Maybe you are a parapsychic mare, or maybe you’re just plain crazy. However it seems that you nurture a deep connection with the past. Be careful it doesn’t trap you in a thought reality that isn’t real.

Maybe… just Maybe...