RoMS' Extravaganza

by RoMS

Jan. 2014 - Fallout:Equestria Wish Machines - Prologue

Prologue

---

How does it feel trying not to fall asleep while being in the most precarious situation? Well, from my expert point of view, it’s slightly annoying…

‘Snip’

I jerked my head aside, a dull spike of pain shivering down my left ear.

“Ouch! Careful with scissors! You jerk!” I spat at my manedresser, struggling onto the largest shop’s angled chair, a large fabric thrust over me and a hot humid towel on my eyes, for security he had said.

I was just afraid of scissors… and knives… and needles… and files… everything that able to slice and cut through a pony’s hide. Dammit, my life had been threatened to end at the tip of an edge so much I had developed repulsion to anything enough sharp to kill. Somehow, I was glad I was a mare… I wouldn’t be able to shave myself if I had been gifted… well... that testosterone factory between a male’s legs.

“Oh sorry, Vault,” a stallion chuckled. “But with that shock of hair you’ve got, I can’t really see where your ears fall. How long has it been since the last time?”

“Two years,” I grumbled, feeling clumps of dirty and disheveled hairs fall onto the canvas covering me.

“See,” he snickered. “If you were to come here more often, you wouldn’t have suffered from my little misdemeanor.”

Well… big words. I was used to them with that poor rump of a stallion he was. Damn, memorizing names had never been my talent. Another shameful weakness he had remind me the second I had stepped in his shop. It wasn’t my fault, I traveled. I had never been able to come back here since the last time. It wasn’t even more my fault if caps didn’t flow out of my wallet to get a proper haircut regularly. Trading was a daily struggle in the wasteland.

“You shouldn’t be so cheap,” he admonished me. “You would gain to be beautiful.”

“Ain’t my job to be a pretty mare,” I growled.

“Suit yourself,” he playfully acknowledged my complaint.

I huffed. I wasn’t penny-pinching with that lad, I swear!

“You really ain’t easy to deal with, you know,” he neighed, struggling with the smelly tangled locks he combed and cut, paying no care to my whining.

“Ouch…” I sighed. “If you were kinder… Ouch! …With me.”

“What don’t you get rid of that big tiara of yours?” Did I have to go through that question every time I needed to socialize with somepony? “Because, it’s not making my job any easier.”

He was a clever boy, he had kept in mind how I had reacted to the sight of scissors flying over my head the last time. In this position, the towel over my eyes, I wasn’t given to see the mirror in front of me. But it didn’t matter. I had looked at my face so many times and shoveled down that constant headache to get that my ‘tiara’ wasn’t gone. It would never be.

“For a hundredth time… it’s rigged to my head. Like screwed, riveted, stuck, glued…”

He heard him shrug. The jewel, if you could call it so, was a one-centimeter thick strap of black metal circling my forehead. It stretched behind my ears until its two ends met above my backbone where my mane stopped growing. Across the years, time had attacked it, leaving a dark, almost wrecked, tiara. Once completely plain, the diadem was marred with indents that had stripped the paint away.

This item followed me everywhere with its constant, nearly invisible migraine. It was my own stupid, ugly crown, which ponies were used to giving me names, fearful stares, or curious glances from. In the Wasteland, differences were despised on, marks of the alien. And to be honest, I often felt like a stranger to myself.

I had been teased so much throughout the years I never stuck with any group, settlement, or pony. I wasn’t an outcast though. I referred to myself more like a mercenary, an escort, and sometimes a factotum. I was bound to side with nopony. A sad life in perspective. But I was given to travel and do something different from just surviving, scavenging the rotten remains of a society dead eighteen years ago.

“So Vault, whatcha gonna do?” my manedresser told me. “Heard you finished your job with the Talons.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I sighed, waving away his coming questions. “Had to help a group of Steel Rangers through the Wasteland’s northern regions. Happened that an Equestrian Army’s wrecked warship had ran aground in South Québeak. I wasn’t expecting they would ask me to escort back their finding to Baltimare.”

“Baltimare, that’s quite a long run,” he snorted back in surprise. “Haven’t they finally cleared a path to Tenpony Tower? After eighteen years?”

I grumbled. I had heard stories of Tenpony Tower… The mega spell that had hit Manehattan during the Last Day had been so disruptive thick greyish clouds of radiation had plunged the whole coastal region into a deadly darkness. Worse, the fallouts had stayed so concentrated and intense it even messed with the spell matrixes and regenerative talismans of the Steel Rangers’ power armors. Manehattan had had been a pit of silence, cut from the remains of civilization wandering about Equestria since. Yet, every status-quo was to change one day.

The rumor had spread like wildfire. A courageous group of Steel Ranger initiates, commanded by a paladin, had pierced through the crumbled city’s metro and found its way to Tenpony Tower. What they had found were survivors. Real survivors! Not the feral ghouls that commonly roamed inside those no pony’s lands. How they had survived for eighteen years was still unknown to me… Rumors were rumors, but the fact remained that over the five Steel Rangers that had roved in Manehattan’s deadlands, only three had come back. Apparently the survivors had reacted with violence to the group of heavily armored scavengers.

Many ponies had been laughing under cover to this half-failure. During the maybe six or five last years, the surviving rangers had gathered into cohorts and started a gory crusade, wrestling out of the dust the technologies lost after the apocalypse. A noble quest if you ask me… But kind words weren’t an excuse to the massacres they had originated. ‘Technologies over ponies’ were their motto from now on.

“Baltimare is a safe place,” I retorted. “But heck… we moved a warship cannon on more than seven hundred miles… a real pain in the ass.”

“A… cannon?” he pondered, hardly finding any truth my statement.

“Not any kind of gun,” I added. “A monster that shot rounds of sixteenth. Kinda something capable to saw off a skyscraper.”

“You just had to roll it down the hills,” he teased me with a sarcastic tone.

I glared daggers at him, the towel on my face blocking the way though.

“They just wanted to take the loading system out,” I grunted. “They didn’t expect it to be worth seventy tons. The operation lasted four months instead of one…” Feeling the sore muscles in my back and legs I let a long breath slither through my teeth. “At least I got a humongous pay.”

The stylist’s ears flapped happily at the thought that I was indeed going to pay for his services. He didn’t even hide his glee… Had I built such a reputation about being a bad customer? It wasn’t my fault if my wallet had nothing but dust and moths inside most of the time.

I groaned, completely exhausted by the journey. My job had been to scout around southern Québeak, making sure no random scavenger was going to disturb the operations. Some skirmishes with bandits and Talon’s remnants had happened, but that was all. Those four months had gone languidly, nearly boring me to death.

“Why did the Steel Rangers recruit you? They never rely on an external help.”

He was right. The rangers were notorious for their chauvinism, preferring to go naked into radiation rather than asking for help from wanderers like me.

“I have… had a debt toward a paladin,” I dropped.

“Oh…”

I wasn’t really answering the question, but at last it was better than just pissing the real reason out. Yeah, I was indebted toward one of the Steel Rangers’ paladins, but I hadn’t paid it back yet. The real reason was far less appealing.

A long silence settled between the two of us, only broken by the snips and snaps of his scissors over my messy locks. I could hear a few ponies walking outside of the shop, talking loudly as they passed by. Conversations were all about Tenpony Tower. Rumors indeed spread like wildfire. He took a long and muffled breath.

“So, how much do you weigh now?” he ‘subtly’ asked.

I snorted. And he said I was picky on money...

“A lot of caps and...”

The doorbell rang as somepony stepped into the shop, his horseshoes thundering on the creaking parquet. A coat flapped on the pony’s side as breeze engulfed the room, until he slammed the door shut.

“Sorry. I already have a customer, please come back in thirty min-”

The rattling of a weapon being unstrapped shushed my manedresser. His hooves started fidgeting and he deliberately fall back behind my chair...

“Don’t you dare move,” a stallion barked at him.

A clip being loaded in a chamber pinged on my far right, the newcomer’s hoofsteps echoing on the floor as he contoured my chair.

“Keep doing your job, wrinkled balls,” he spat.

Now cursed with irrepressible quivers, the scissors summed up their activity over my head. I bit my lips, he was going to needle me with the tips, again. Did I told you I feared pointy things?

I tried to hide my own tremor, to no avail. At least I benefited from that canvas to dissimulate my train of thought. Unfortunately, my hooves dwelled on the chair’s armrests and I couldn’t move properly. Enough said the wet towel on my eyes blinded me as well.

Chair legs screeched on the wooden floor as the aggressive stallion pulled a stool one or two pony’s lengths in front of me, somewhere a bit on the right.

‘Snip’

I gritted my teeth at the scissors, feeling their movements as they tickled the top of my mane. The security of his weapon tinged off and I slightly ducked my head between my shoulders. A drop of sweat trickled down my neck and I swallowed.

“What do you want?” I croaked.

The intruder pulled his chair closer and the cold bite of a barrel stung my cheek. Cogwheels whizzed and turned and… A power armor… he had a fucking power armor, even if it sounded scrapped and lighter.

‘Snip’

“Please stop,” I requested my manedresser, pleading his messy hooves and tools would stop touching the skin under my mane.

“Keep going,” he was ordered.

I was dead if I couldn’t find a way out of this situation. And those damn scissors! Stop.

“You stole something from the rangers, didn’t you?”

My ears perked up. My breath died. I would have vented my innocence but the tip of a gun pressed painfully into my skin. My heartbeat raced up and sweat moistened my face. His hoof petted mine on the armrest.

“Good,” he cracked. “You’re not going to fuck me up on this argument.”

“Why do you think I would?” I chatted, trying to gain time to think straight.

‘Snip’

If only that scissors could stop.

“In Baltimare, you’ve dealt with us. We paid you a lot of caps but still, you stole something in the archives.”

“You really think I would smuggle something out of the Ministry of Wartime Technology’s hub?” I sneered. “I’m not that dumb, you know. I wouldn’t fuck with an employer that pay me three times the common price for my services.”

He snickered. “Yet you still took something away from us. Vault the trespasser ain’t a pony that messes with the Steel Rangers. So now you’ve got two choices. First one, you give us back what you stole and the caps we paid you, and we won’t talk about it ever again. Or, I just have to kill you and justice will be served. For my brothers you’ve deceived.”

The hammer of his revolver clicked back, now armed and ready to fire a big caliber bullet right into my face and skull. The cold maw of the weapon ran across my skin, weaving to my right ear, then wandering to my eyes until it reached my forehead, stopping only under my leaded crown.

My face was burning, the tip of my hooves quaking imperceptibly under the cape collecting the fallen hairs.

‘Snip’

Oh, please… made that sound stop.

“I don’t have all my day, Vault Skin,” the ranger bleated. “I would dislike to kill you, you’re a good pony, helping. Just a shame you’re a little thief.”

Under the swab, my eyes shot open, aiming in the direction I thought he was. his gun waved around my head in an impossible way, resounding with the twinkle of telekinesis. So he was a unicorn.

“Comply, Vault,” he averted.

I would have paid to see his face as my grin grew onto my own, revealing teeth I knew were yellow, some missing, loose, or decayed by time and a lack of hygiene. Casually, I turned my head right. I had dealt with bandits before, this one was a poor bum trying to get some food in his stomach. He had tried to bluff me with something I never did.

“You’re not a Steel Ranger,” I emphasized and licked my lips. “First because Steel Rangers don’t give power armor to unicorns. Second, because the Steel Rangers don’t refer to me with my real name.”

His hoof hit my face and the towel jolted away, leaving a trail of water as it twisted in the air. It hurt but I was now able to see. I looked aside and met the eyes of a young brown male unicorn with a muddy yellow mane. His horn flared a buttery white glimmer which clenched onto his massive revolver. He indeed possessed a power armor. However, it was a downward wreck of shit, a wreckage of what I had been used to see back with the Steel Rangers, the real ones. The armor’s joints were pierced, its wires and tubes leaked, and whole plaques of metal had been torn away by bullets. He even seemed ill-at-ease in this cage of metal.

“Where did you find that crap gear?” I coughed out small splatters of blood. “On a cadaver?”

“Stop playing that game, cunt!” he cursed. “Just give me your caps, I know they paid you well.”

I gave him one of my exhausted looks. I was tired. If he had asked me my spare change I would have given him. Heck, I was rich! But not for long, though. Yet, he willed to take my life and my caps. The gun quit its position aiming at my head and descended toward my chest. He wouldn’t dare, killing him was out of question, he would have done so the moment he had entered the shop. My guess was that he wasn’t a killer, not a yet-to-be murderer. Just a poor err...

‘Snip’

He was still here… My really dedicated manedresser. Or he was just scared to hell to move any further. Yep... his drumming teeth were enough to know he had pissed himself. The odor was just another proof.

Grimacing with disgust at the stylist, the unicorn drifted his attention back to me and jabbed my neck with the cold embrace of his gun.

“Where’re the caps?” he insisted.

I tried to stand up but one powerful blow in the face shoveled me back in my sitting position.

“Stay where you are, with your hooves on the armrest.”

“If you want them, I’ll have to take you there,” I noted. “You really think I would keep all my stuff on me? I ain’t silly. It would be uncomfortable.”

“Don’t be so cocky, bitch!”

The swish of a knife being pulled out of its sheath petrified me in my sloping chair. I saw the glint of the blade passing over me, enveloped in a magical aura. Though he didn’t move, the unicorn swapped his gun with the short sword, aiming at the poor manedresser who curled up, dropping his scissors on the ground. My attention was all aimed on the short blade, rusty, smeared with coagulated blood, and broken at its tip.

“You, colt cuddler,” the robber intoned at my stylist. “Get me her stuff, or I blow up your sorry head.”

“You threaten bunnies with that tooth-pick?” I ironized.

The blade suddenly dropped at an inch of my neck. Screaming, I jerked and kicked in my defenseless position. My breath reached its maximum. My heart pumped haphazardly, it was going to jumped out of my chest. My eyes watered. I could see my reflection on the sharpened edge beyond the filth. A pale green mare with a black mane broken with tiny streaks of greenish white. Age had taken a toll on me since the last time I had encountered a mirror. For a second I even forget the mirror was an epée meant to cut open my carotids. I looked in my green eyes, dark rings of fatigue circling them. My jaw was shivering at the sight of the sword. Please, I hate them so much.

“You’re less chatty, eh?” he grinned at me before turning back to the stylist. “Hurry up, gimme the caps or I kill you.”

“D-...” I began.

The sword dropped and I froze. The feeling of the edge on my skin was pregnant. No blood was running out. That bastard had swiveled it to its unsharpened side in his movement. I saw myself crying as I met back my reflect in the rising blade’s body. I also caught fear and anger, teeth gritted to a point I thought they would shatter. Yet, I calmly hung my head, defeated. Or not… Nopony threatened me like that. No pony.

Fighting through my tears, my instinct crying at me that survival mattered, I stared aside at the unicorn, gathering all my spirit to muster a fine answer.

“Let him go,” I stumbled upon my words.

Well, it wasn’t like I had wasted a chance for an epic line… He chuckled back at me, finding reassurance in my hurried and stuttering speech.

“Otherwise what?” he spat at me. “I can see your two hooves. If you’re not growing a horn or a pair of wings in the seconds to come, I don’t know what an old runt like you can do.”

That burned. An earth pony in this situation was pretty useless. In fact, in my leisure time I had often wondered why earth ponies hadn’t run extinct in the Wasteland. Unicorn were far more useful in a daily survival, and today unicorns monopolized the few remaining job in the wasteland. I had to admit unicorns proved themselves far more efficient than us earth ponies. Even a unicorn bandit was scarier than his earth pony counterpart. To be honest, only the Steel Rangers were tipping the weights back to a balance.

The roof started drumming and ponies sought for shelters outside. Rain, and with its acid and radioactive droplets, forced ponies away, throwing the shop into a stark silence and chiaroscuro ambience. It only needed a lightning bolt and… Here was a flash… one, two, three, four… and the loud crack rammed on the walls, vibrating in unison. The wasteland, so chaotic but predictable at the same time.

I focused back on the stallion, my breath loud and heavy, my eyes wobbling back and forth on the blade and the pony waving it at me.

“Otherwise I’ll kill you,” I proclaimed, gulping down the lump in my throat. I could still feel the touch of the knife on my neck. “As sheriff of Hollow Shades.”

I tensed. Looking in his eyes was a difficult exercise, I was the one nearly strapped onto the chair, my hooves empty and seeable by everypony smart enough to look at them. And it I who was at the wrong end of a knife. My belly growled from the stress and my head had a hard time not to reel. Messing around in a tilted chair wasn’t among my qualifications.

Yet, I obtained a little respite. My statement sparked a bribe of fear in the stallion’s mind. I had expected he would laugh at me, and I would have shared in the laughter with him. But he simply glared at me with blank empty eyes. The silence overwhelmed the shop, the drumming of the rain and the dripping of water falling through a crack in the roof counting the time for us. Watches had stopped functioning a while ago.

The unicorn’s nose was sizzling as he inhaled slowly, probably broken in the past in a tug fight. Given to see him under a better light, suspense building up between the two of us, sweat hurtled down the wrinkles cast upon his young frowning face.

My heart clenched, giving place to a strange void feeling I could only fill with fear. My stomach retched as I struggled to maintain a decent poker face. His eyes riveted on mine, goggling me with a blend of unbelief and incomprehension.

“Hollow… Shades… ?” he hesitated.

“Yes,” I prompted with a hissing voice, aware his knife was lazily dropping over me in his lack of attention. “That’s my city.”

I breathed out in an effort to erase this impression of deafness in my ears. Blood rang in my eardrums, hassling my concentration.

“I’ve…”

‘BANG!’

The rumble was followed with the gargles of a body dropping on the floor, the stylist’s.

‘BANG!’

The unicorn’s eyes met mine.

“No, I…”

His magic flailed. His smoking gun and short sword fell on the ground. His stare slowly looked down at my hooves, still on their armrests, only a small hole was visible in the cap covering me, giving fumes. He lifted his hooves to his neck, groping clumsily where his Adam’s apple should have been. He only found a jetting open wound, smearing his brown fur with loads of dark red. His legs darkened with the blood’s color. His hindquarters staggered and failed him. Crumbling on his back, he didn’t even fight back the pain. His eyes vomited anger and bewilderment at me. Those eyes… gradually fading to a shade of black.

“The Steel Rangers didn’t only give me caps.”

I rose from my innate stance, my back giving cracking pops under the effort. I shake myself, letting my sore and asleep limbs drop on the ground. Chills ran beneath my skin as my fur rose on its root. The unicorn gunning me down with his crying eyes, I tapped the cape put on my body with my hoof. He followed me to the small hole where fumes still billowed through. His mouth was formulating one deaf question… why… or how…

“I’m a one trick pony,” I conceded. “You don’t teach a monkey how to make funny faces, though.”

I pulled off me the canvas. The expression of stupor on his face broke a sad smile on mine. For the whole duration of his crazed conversation, I had slowly moved beneath the cover. Only my two hooves unmoving on the armrests had lured him away from the true threat.

“You’ve never seen a powered work loader saddle?” I mused sadly. “Don’t worry. You’re not the first one… You won’t be the last.”

Turning my head back at my rump, a dusty battle saddle welcomed my sight. The two rivets where should have stood weapons gave their space to large hydraulic joints powering two humming mechanical prosthetics which wrists ended with four-finger claws. The right one seized up one large revolver stamped with the Ministry of Wartime Technology’s symbol, giving fumes from its bore. The other limb however was folded on my side, occupying the place of a would-be saddlebag. A laser beam handgun was clipped beneath, ready to be draw out as the limb would telescope. Completely built in metal, its edges were cushioned with a worn out leather that would irritate my skin. Maintained onto my back with locks easily distinguishable under the metal limbs, the saddle fitted closely with my starved curves. A keyhole was constructed in each side of the item, ready to welcome a terminal key to discharge the magical locking system that managed the fixation. Too bad I had lost the key years ago… I didn’t always take the largest chairs for no reason, and I wasn’t fat! The upper part of the saddle covering my back was occupied with a zooming spell matrix allowing me to control the machine. It was a beautiful piece of magic and technology, a property of the M.W.T. I hadn’t stolen, I swear!

The unicorn hiccupped before me, tapping onto my front hooves with his. Pleading eyes that refused to accept it was the end of the trail for him. Biting my bottom lip, I stepped closer and looked at the heavy tears rolling off his cheeks, melting with the blood for those which trickled from his neck. I sighed.

“I’m sorry,” I apologize. “I can’t do anything for you. It’s too late.”

A moan of pain erupted from behind the chair. I peered an eye beyond and saw the manedresser jerking and yapping about his shoulder. He might be a wimp, but he would survive. The other stallion however...

Watching over a dying pony was never easy. Especially if it was one you’ve just shot. I sat next to him and scanned his body. His blood expanding under his body was soon almost like a red lake. My fur soaked in the fluid, warm and smelly. Exhaling, I hunched over him and slipped my hooves beyond his shoulders. Straining on my muscles, I lifted him up to my chest, sporting the most motherly face I could draft. I sang a lullaby for the dying.

"Little filly, why are you weeping

While I'm watching over you?

Tell me, little filly, why are you crying

While I'm staying with you?

My thought are all for you,

Caring for every moment

For my girl I have and will pursue

Each simple enjoyment

There is a train, Little Filly

Heading to heaven’s gate

Crying freedom with mighty glee

Ready to take away the hate

Dry those tears, Lil’ Filly

The dark nights soon will end

Though the storm is chilly

The sun will surely ascend

Sadness is common load, Filly

I just hope you’ll find laughter

While everypony gonna knee

To the reaper mare’s cold brazier

Thank the time you will spend

to walk life with beaten cleats

Just be careful Filly where you wend

Be careful with the rails down the streets

Lil’ Filly, the train takes blindly

As long as you can, away from its tracks

Let the heart run ablaze in your thorax

The train awaits ildy, brashly... bluntly

Little filly, why are you sobbing

Remember I’ll always be right here

Little filly, stop your mourning

For you, I’ll never… disappear...”

Glassy and teary eyes dropped in their sockets, witnessing a nether I couldn’t fathom. With the same sorrowful smile, I leaned my head to his ear.

“I’m sorry,” I begged. “Hope the Ever-After will treat you well.”

I hauled him out of the puddle of blood, hearing it dripping off my kneecaps and belly. Scrapping the armor off his starving limbs, I laid him on the cape. Something as simple as a piece of fabric which had served to hide the slow movements of my prosthetic arm, an extension of myself that had, in the end, dealt him the final blow. Leaving him there, not like he was going to move anyway, I paced toward the stylist and put him right back on his three remaining working legs.

“You okay?” I eyed him with those ironic moves of my brows.

He was bleeding and grunting, but it was not something that would kill him. The glare he shot back at me said it all, he’d survive. I chuckled. He just stared back at me with scared, shaky eyes.

“I’m sorry I messed up your shop… and your shoulder,” I panted, feeling all the stress I had ducked back in my chest pour out of each of my pores.

Breathing loudly, I let my bum hit the floor in a crack. My coccyx and tail would hurt me for a few days. On his own, the stallion was wincing, sweating heavily as he bit on his tongue and lips to lower the pain. The tendons of his neck flapped under the rush of adrenaline, his eyelids shivered uncontrollably.

“And you,” he called, looking at me like I was a ghost. “You sure it’s okay. I’m just hurt. But you… Don’t you fear the blood.”

I laughed, a cackling which died in the instant as I raised slowly my head up to him, seeking for an excuse, and any kind of redemption in his look.

“Not the first time I killed,” I mourned. “It won’t be the last. And I’ve seen worse.”

I sighed at that painful truth. The wasteland was harsh on everypony. Few were given to live long and even if eighteen years only separated ourselves from the last day of civilization, it was far enough for challenging the spark of a pony we all were, remnants of the old world. I was more worried for the generations to come. Such acknowledgments as Celestia or Luna’s reign and visions would soon be forgotten, or would become forlorn myths. And like many ponies, I was wondering what was going to happen after this tipping point.

“And the song?” he found the courage to ask.

I would have preferred he didn’t.

“A song I wrote for my daughter… a long time ago,” I blubbered, feeling tears I couldn’t fight back crawling up to my eyes.

“Where is she now?” he brought forth.

“I don’t know… I don’t know anymore.”

Hiding my mood, I passed by his side and went to the stock room behind his stall where I knew he had stored my gear. I found a small torn brown coat, a cowmare’s hat, a heavy purse, and two pairs of leathered and metal reinforced horseshoes, worn out by endless walks. Putting the coat, the hat, and the shoes on, I hesitated to throw the purse upon my flank. My eyes met my bloodied side, hiding under a thick and glued layer a good half of my Cutie Mark. I caught the curious stylist’s look.

Even I often failed on how to properly describe it. A pitch black shield of a rectangular shape which bottom side was tapered into a point, slit open in its middle and closing on a strange dark green circle engulfed in imperceptible green flame. I concede it was a pretty badass Cutie Mark.

“Could I borrow a towel?” I chipped in, eager to waive away the topic. “Just to wipe off the blood.”

He hoofed me one. The next few minutes stretched to eternity trying to erase the red shade off my greenish hide, to no avail. I will need a bath. I chided myself, I lacked time for such a fancy leisure. It was time to hit the road again. I sadly looked at the stylist, waiting, observing me. I hung my head. I opened my purse and put a hoof full of caps in his. If we would have been in a cartoon, his eyes would have blasted with two equestrian notes, too bad we weren’t in one and that bits had fallen into disuse. You couldn’t hold value in something that wasn’t built to last.

“I’ll take care of the body,” I offered. “I don’t want that on your shoulders, nor on any of the ponies from that town. Just use my money for cleaning everything, and get a healing potion. The wound is superficial, but you know, infections come fast.”

“You sure you want to do it?” he demanded after a short nod. “I could get the undertaker.”

Walking to the corpse, I caught the ponies giving us fascinated looks through the windows of the shop. The rain had imperceptibly stopped and the gunshot had attracted passers-by like crows to a fresh carcass. Many were fillies and foals, dirty and malnourished, eyeing me with devouring eyes. Crows. I glared daggers in their direction and they fled.

I leaned toward the cadaver, eyes closed and the blood already clotting in his open throat. Somehow, a slight smile was drawn his lips. I closed his front hooves over his chest, folded his hind legs over him.

“Sorry I didn’t know you name,” I murmured.

Using the same absorbent towel, I washed off as much blood I could before closing the stylist’s cape over him. Working as an undertaker I supposed was a pretty grim vocation. But somepony needed to take the shift.

“How you’re going to move it?”

“Him,” I corrected. “I have a brahmane outside.”

“Wait, you’ve got one of those two-headed cows?”

I laughed.

“Don’t be silly. Those are legends. I have yet to see some of those mutated creeps that ponies say graze the wastes. I turned off toward here when I reached Fillydelphia’s borders. I just found that brahmane hanging around, and it was a tamed one.”

“Well, I’ve seen some big cockroaches in the region.”

“Radiation kills,” I stated. “And if it doesn’t, well… Celestia has mercy of your soul.”

I didn’t leave him the time to answer. I would be glad to avoid talking about ghouls. I pulled the packed body out, leaving a bloody trail in its stead. The cow was there, standing idly next to a bucket of murky water I had bargained at the saloon. The sky was bleeding out, aching and choking, the air drenched with thick reddish clouds that blocked the sun’s light, its slivers struggling to pierce through. The wind whizzed over my head, making the brass sun sculpture hung onto the top of the nearby church spin in an endless screech. The ground was moistened with rain, small rivers was weaving in the cracks, and soon my horseshoes would be covered in mud.

Throw in stark relief, the town was marred by a layer of red and sickened orange descending from the sky. Ugly and rotting houses creaked around me, and yet ponies survived here. It was a rather enjoyable sight, if not purely depressing. But as I’d just said, they outlived the many ordeals of a merciless daily life, barely. Skin over bones, sunken cheeks, and bulged out eyes struck my sight. Seeking for something more reassuring, I looked up beyond the decaying roofs that populated the small city. Beyond the distant I found my eyes stuck on the sharp steep of a massive mountain… Foal Mountain, going straight from Canterlot’s peak to the outskirts of Fillydelphia. The Western part of the chain was delimited by the bed of a dried river that had evaporated with the balefire. I also nurtured memories of the tips of Foal Mountain being covered by the white embrace of snow. Today it was just an ugly shade of brown, grey, and red sprouting like a bad pimple toward the blocused sky. My hometown was beyond that mountain, but it was dangerous to clamber it, ponies have disappeared on its slopes. The cold hacked them away, or something else might have. My way was to hike around the mountain to finish my journey. The city I was in marked the location where the ancient river forked toward the south. Junction was its name.

I hoisted the wrapped body over the brahmane’s back which snorted at the new and disturbing load.

“Do this for me,” I gently asked the creature, rubbing its chin. “It won’t be long.”

The cow carried a large saddlebag I had darned back to a rather good shape. I had emptied though, I hadn’t been trustful in leaving it unattended with food and supplies while being given a haircut… haircut… I growled. I hadn’t finished the session. Turning around, the stylist was waiting in the threshold of the door. With the dim sunlight, I was finally given a proper view on his traits. He was a grey turquoise unicorn with a brownish orange mane falling behind his ears. His thin legs looked even slender, a long lasting lack of nutriments was to blame. His flank sported white and grey open scissors. He smiled at me.

“My name is Snips by the way.” He blinked at me, setting my cheeks on fire.

His hoof on his shoulder, blocking the blood from flowing out too quickly, he trotted to the nearest medical centre, leaving small smears of blood behind. I hung my head low and took my only cattle to the nearby food shop. I had a long way to go back home.

Finally, I went my own way and stepped out of the city, lonesome and battered by those time of wrongness. The brahmane humming in the air, I cast a last glance at the old isolated town of Junction. Everything was a shade of yellow, orange, and red… An atmosphere of death and reclusion.

Days passed as I walked along the waterless bed of the Foal Mountain’s river, each one of them making the high slopes of Canterlot’s peak bigger and bigger in the horizon. The sky above the ancient capital was swamped with pinkish clouds, which forced ponies to avoid that place like the plague. Strange stories circulated about monsters and inventions of the devil hiding among the ruins. I wasn’t enough brave enough to check it by myself.

A week had flown by when I reached the end of foal mountain’s ridges. Canterlot was only twenty miles from there. Its look only was sufficient to wash me with a retching impression of emptiness. I had visited Canterlot in the past, before the bombs. I wasn’t ready to excavate the past from the ruins. The past… I had been told once that a beautiful architecture is what makes beautiful ruins. I didn’t remember who had said that, a wise pony for sure, and he was right. The world was deeply ugly to my eyes; the truth was the world had always been ugly to begin with. Even in the wasteland there was a kind of continuity.

Contouring Foal Mountain, I headed toward the East in Manehattan’s direction and soon I followed the tracks of an old rusty railway, which had connected the big metropolis with Canterlot. The railway was not a single straight trip toward the coastal city. The tracks forked after their detour near of Neighagra Falls toward the South, a large forest hung to the north face of Foal Mountain. There, deep beneath a once green ocean, ponies could find a medium-sized city wearing the sweet name of Hollow Shades. My hometown. The city I was responsible for as a sheriff.

From Junction it took me two weeks to reach the border of the Hollow Forest. The trip had been spent lonely with a wasteland and a cow for some companions. I was used to it though, at least since the bombs had dropped. Trees had been scrapped off their leaves. Birds died long ago and their chirping, long forgotten. Even the color green was something eerie today. And without my own pale green hide, I would have thrown that piece of basic knowledge into oblivion. It was amazing how ponies could forget such basics if they weren’t used to deal with them on a daily basis.

Cracks splitted the road in the Wasteland, giving space to a yellowish weed growing among the fissures in the asphalt. The white paint of the marking had been scratched away and the blackness of the coating had turned grey and brown with dirt and sand.

The road… The road stopped at the border of the forest, leaving a narrow beaten path next to the disused railway.

The Hollow Forest itself had once bore the leaves of the deepest green. But today, it was nothing but a gigantesque orchard of burnt black, crooked, and disgusting trunks which branches pointed at the absent sky, imploring mercy to the princesses. Maybe they were howling at the hidden sun, the excruciating pain the Last Day had spread across Equestria. I would never know. I just stepped on the path with my brahmane, alone with those blackened ribs of long gone life.

Like many things in the wasteland, the Hollow Forest was stuck in a bubble of time and utter silence during the day. Unsettling and mind-wrecking, the forest was cast in shadows that fought back the weak sunlight. Wandering deep in its meanderings was an ordeal, similar to moving through the dusk during the few minutes before all light had died in the horizon. By night, I was huddling myself close to the cow, both seeking for the little warmth we could snatch out of each other. I was afraid of lighting a fire in such a place. I did once. If the forest was creepy by day… The night was the nest of my deepest fears. The hot embers rising in the air blasted across the field of dead trees relentless and mangling shadows that twisted, turning into improbable shapes that gave my mind terrific hallucinations to chew on. Never again I would use my lighter here. You didn’t light a torch in the Hollow Forest. You just keep your rank, hiding, waiting immobile for the sun to rise again behind the cloud cover.

If the forest was dreadfully silent by day, the night was a nightmare of low, recurring sounds. Trunk cracked in heavy thumps, their dead black fossilised branches waving under an absent wind. I always closed my eyes during those moments, when your superstitious brain rambled on that the night was going to swallow you whole like a nameless god’s mouth, crunching your bones apart and sucking your blood out. I was curling up, putting my hooves onto my ears, waiting for sleep to take over me.

It was the last night before I finally made my way back home and it was as dark as ever. Stars had deserted my nocturnal life since eighteen years and the light pouring out of the moon was not strong enough to carry a glitter through the cloud cover. The trees moaned and their darker than black shadows tweaked and hacked in my eyes. I could feel the shivers running through the cow. It sought for a refuge under my shoulder. A root cracked within a stone’s throw, and I perked my head low, sniffing. My trembling hoof reached the cow’s saddle. I ransacked its bottom and stopped on the object of my thoughts. Pulling it out, I skidded on the pocket’s leather strap and the item bounced off me, bashing over the top of my head until it hit the ground in a bone crack.

Fearing a forest and shadows that I knew couldn’t hear or smell us, I stretched my hooves and caught the thing. Protective, I curled over the round object. It was a cold curvy ball with two large gaps encasing a smaller triangular shaped one. The whole stood over an articulated part which edge tickled my skin beneath my fur. A skull...

Rolling over, encasing between my hooves the thing, I coiled myself against the cow’s smelly belly and it did the same with its head. Whistling softly, I waited for the night to eat me away. Sleep only came one of two hours later.

The morning struck me like a punch in the gut. Sipping some poorly purified water, I chewed and swallowed some preservative-soaked cereals. Everything was bought from a store back in Junction, even the food for the cow though it could sustain itself with the grass along the way.

Taking one of the leather straps of the Brahmane’s saddle bag, I tied the skull to it and hit the road once again. Drizzle was raining from the sky as the sun reached noon. We passed by an antique plaque marking two miles before Hollow Shades. Grass and mangled thorns wrapped the rails, pointing out that no train had rolled down this track for two decades.

The more I moved forward, the more the land slowly lost its cover of dead trees, giving on a dust-saturated ground devoid of relief, eerily plane and sloping toward a city that could welcome thirty thousand souls. I smiled. I was back home.

As always, foals played next to the walls of the cottages, their soccer ball thrust in the air. As always an atmosphere of decay glowed out of the houses. Many had their roofs destroyed, knocked off walls and the doors and other wooden infrastructures bore the marks of flames and time.

“Hi, Munchkins,” I greeted the foals with their balloon, who didn’t looked at me, absorbed in their game.

I shrugged. I passed by the bakery and saluted the old mare standing idly behind her stall, always waiting for a client. Among the many habitations where ponies hung around the terraces or the inner yards, many shops still showed off their logos.

The first was Brewy’s Emporium with its rows of jars behind dusty windows. Behind the door stood the shadow of the tenant. The poor old buck managing the place was kinda paranoid, spying on everypony entering the city. At least, I was a known face. Silly Snake’s shop was built between two massive ten stories high council housings which ruined facades watched upon me with as many eyes as they had windows. The buildings’ white paint had washed away with a thick cover of grey and brown. Silly Snake was a joke shop like many, its pediment once a bright green had stripped off the roughcast.

“Howdy?” I asked the tenant, keeping my path down the road.

I waved at her but she never answered, occupied with customers. I could see their silhouettes being deflated balloons. I would need to ask the next traders to bring back some tubed helium. I walked by and reached one of the many squares of the city. A large pond gifted with a magnificent fountain sculpted in Luna’s traits was standing by its center, jetting a continuous dash of murky water. Moribund moss covered Luna’s brass features, leaking from its rivets a greenish goo that oozed over her perfect body. The repair pony hadn’t come for years. I sighed and passed by.

The square was covered by the unique shadow of a massive building, a monolith of black metal bearing the symbol of the Ministry of Wartime Technology, a set of gears surrounded by an apple-shaped box, with a sword bisecting through the middle. Standing solely with its one hundred feet tall size, it was an intimidating sight. No windows gave on the inside. It always left me the feeling of a scar in the middle of Hollow Shades. It had helped Equestria in the war effort, though.

Before the main entrance stood a statue of her minister, Apple Jack. The sculpture who’d been five ponies tall had slopped on its side, crumbled, and shattered into bits over the dusty marble stairs of the entrance. The guilty mechanism was still visible, an intertwining of rails and pistons that had pushed the construction aside, revealing a massive and dark deep missile silo. The hub had been a launch facility during the war, holding on a megaspell missile aimed at the far away lands of the Zebras. The silo was now empty. I had never been inside the facility. I was curious but not insane. I guessed the basement of the hub would remain an abstraction to me.

After a moment of sad contemplation, I fell back to the fountain, touring it to reach the other side of the square. I saw the candy store, with its usual queue of greedy ponies. The comic book shop was next. Foals used to stay inside, reading idly all the pages they could before their mothers exited the market store nearby, ready to go back home.

Everypony was acting silent, respecting their order as always. Waiting stoic, as always. Taking off the saddle of the brahmane, I slapped its butt and it ran away.

“Make sure you’re not eaten by a rad monster,” I cried out in laughter.

Wiping a tear off my face, I swiveled on my hooves and finally faced the end of my journey. I stepped on the creaking wood stairs of a famous place of mine. Built in concrete, stamped with a balloon triangle, one yellow and two blue, the sheriff office of Hollow Shades stood proud with its sole ground floor, constructed plain pied with my cottage behind. Two rocking chairs awaited under the office porch. One was already occupied.

“Thanks for taking care of my badge, dude,” I smiled, taking the six dusty golden star off the wobbling armrest.

I pinned the insignia on my brown trench coat, pushed the office door, and threw the cow saddle into the room. I sneezed. Dust was everywhere, covering every piece of furniture and items strewn over the place. With a swing of my hindquarters, I bucked a lever on and a humming noise engulfed the police office as the light slowly brightened over my head. One flared and exploded in a small rain of glass.

“At least water’s still running,” I cheered.

Before the war, the city was fueled with a coal power plant located outside of the Hollow Forest. The Balefire striking Equestria had put an end to that and Hollow Shades had to go back to its ancient way. Before this time of necessity, I had barely been taught that an underground river was running below the city. In fact it was that geographic wealth that had permitted the city’s erection. With the industrial revolution, the first electric power brought to the city had come from a turbine built in the cavities hundreds of feet below the surface. Apparently, it was still turning. One by one, electronics woke up behind a desk set up at the back of the office, next to a row of cells.

“So, bandit, you still there?” I sniggered, tapping my hoof against the bars. His silhouette waited in the back of the last cell, curled up above a pitiful bed. “I hope the others treated you well.”

No answer… I sat in the chair in front of my desk and tapped the tip of my hoof on the ‘enter’ key of the terminal’s board. I unsheathed my two hoof guns and put them aside on my bureau and took a comfortable position in the seat. I spread the content of my purse next to them and a few caps fell off the desk’s edges. I dropped my shoulders, feeling all the tension in my muscles stiffening my movements. Time was to be lazy.

Today was a good day.

The radio burst out cracks, eighteen years it had stayed silent, only barking static at me. I had kept it switched on, no matter what, ponies might call for help. Typing on the terminal, a series of small screens displayed on my left attracted my attention. Hitting the same key repeatedly, I checked Hollow Shades’s CCTV. Some had died during my absence and over the ten sprite-bots I once had, only four still worked, floating right out in the streets, searching for proof of sedition among the population.

I saw the same foals, mares, and stallions in the streets, deformed into black silhouettes by the old and expired cameras of the town. Bored, I looked at the cow saddle and took it on my laps. Stretching a hoof to its bottom, I wrestled out the skull. Diligently, I laid it on the keyboard, for it to face me.

“I already told you I was sorry,” I argued. “You were the first to attack me, and you were threatening that stallion… what was his name alr… Snips! You could have just asked me and I would have shared some bits with you, but noooo… you had to make all that mess.”

I sighed, the skull looking at me with those two deep pits of black.

“Oh, don’t give me that look,” I scolded him, grabbing it between my legs. “oh fuck you, go with your brothers.”

I took the skull off the keyboard and leaned on my right. It would fit with the others, all assembled in a small pile. I was far too lazy to count, but that wasn’t a problem. I saluted them all.

Tilting my body back toward the saddle, I found inside a small rectangular plaque of plastic and metal. I play amusedly with the cassette between my hooves for a minute or two. Clumsy, I messed up one of my juggling and the tape bounced off my hooves and fell on my right. Growling, I spread to reach it. It had tucked the skull, left on the top of the pile. I looked at it with wide eyes.

“Oh, come on,” I pouted. “I know, you gonna bash me ‘cause I lied.”

Yes, sort of. Back in the warship’s remains, I had forced open the captain’s cabin and took out one of its records. Steel Rangers disregarded remnants of the past that differed from valuable technology. They never knew, they wouldn’t have to. It was my secret with the skull.

“Hey, it’s just a radio record,” I snorted. “The wasteland is just so silent… Hollow Shade’s so dead it’s deafening.”

And it was, really. I put the tape in the radio station. A rising crescendo followed by a unison of stallions and mares cracked out of the old speaker. The sweet rhythm in my ears, I left my sitting and wandered to the nearby kitchen. My prosthetics extended and snatched a sealed bottle of hooch and a dusty glass. On the brink of leaving the room, I caught the grizzling counter on the table, ticking toward the red. In a spiteful huff I pushed it off the edge; it broke when it reached the ground. I walked out, the bottle and the glass twinkling in each of my metal claws.

“Across the Equestrian’s borders

Are creatures which roam, roam, roam...”

Sitting in the empty rocking chair, I glanced at my close neighbour.

“Want some?” I asked, expecting no answer.

The rocking chair was just reeling with the wind. My stare bore on the distance. Far away, beyond the children’s silhouettes, the mares’ shapes, and the stallions’ shades, the border of the city stood lonely.

“Afar from places where the sun glows

Are wonders nopony saw, saw, saw...”

There, one large pole carried a long, shredded, and pitch black standard whipping in the wind, alone just like me.

“From the deepest caves to the highest peaks

Are ghosts of the past wai- aiting.”

Next to the pole was a large slab of metal printed with the name of the city, Hollow Shades. Beneath, the number thirty thousand five hundred seventy two was crossed, replaced by one single digit, as lonely as I.

1

I was finally back in Hollow Shades. A city of damned. A city of black contours cast onto the walls. A city of many winds moaning prayers from the past. A city bearing the eternal ashes of the dead. A city of still standing screaming corpses, blackened but vigilant. A city of countless smiles, eyes, and shapes carved into the vitrified dirt.

I turned my head to the other rocking chair and stared at the ashy shape of a stallion blasted into the carbonized wood. I smiled.

Hollow Shades, a city of children’s shadows burnt into the brickrock. I was finally back home…

“Home. Sweet. Home...”

ⱴ ⱷ ꜠ Ω ꜡ ⱷ ⱴ

Footnotes; Vault Skin, Class: Wanderer, Level Up

New Perk: “Good to be back home”

Could it be a feeling of déjà-vu or memories, this place keeps a special room in your ablaze heart.

You gain +5% in Speech and Survival in the places you’ve already visited.