Prologue + Chapter 1: Lying To Your Loved Ones
A mashup story by Clint Ambrose
Publishing started in December 2012 under the pen name of Clint Ambrose.
This is a parody/ “mashup” fan fiction story. It was not created for the purpose of monetary gain.
Resources from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic © Hasbro and its parent and affiliate companies.
Resources from the Fallout video game series © Bethesda Softworks and its parent and affiliate companies.
Resources from any other franchises are copyright of their respective owners.
This being a parody, no copyright infringement has occurred under United States statute.
The author simply wishes to acknowledge the primary franchises upon which this story is based.
The author wishes to state that other fan fiction authors are welcome to reference events from this story’s plot, but wishes the characters within it to not be used in other works, as the author will wrap up all character’s stories on his own. The author specifically does not want “clop” fiction made of his characters. If these characters are used in other works, the author will be very, very cross.
Original story Fallout Equestria by Khat.
Additional material from Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons by Somber.
War is born in a series of mistakes.
Every war starts with one mistake.
Every war is lost with one mistake.
We owe a debt to our forefathers to
know our history so that we never
repeat the mistakes our species has
already paid for in precious blood.
There is no greater waste of life
than fighting a war previously fought.
There is no greater waste of time
Than repeating our past mistakes.
Introduction
In the magical land of Equestria, there came an era when the beloved ideals of friendship, love, and peace gave way to greed, paranoia, and a jealous raping of any resource of value. Energy resources were depleted at an alarming rate, and soon, a viscous war broke out over them. Equestria hadn’t known war for over a thousand years, and the first battles against their zebra foes went terribly. But the earth ponies, pegasi, and unicorns pushed back, shoring their defenses with new inventions, new magics, and one horrible weapon of mass destruction: the megaspell. Originally designed for healing, the megaspell was reworked to magnify the power of any base spell or magical mechanism. Soon, megaspells were attained by the zebras, and then they were weaponized. An arms race erupted, and even mutually assured destruction was not enough to sate the destructive hunger of either nation. One day, the megaspells were cast, but the zebras and ponies were not content to their doom without casting the same fate on neutral parties. No nation was spared from ragnarok. Nine tenths of all living things on the planet died, and the desecration was obvious from space. Too obvious, as it would turn out.
But it was not, as some had predicted, the end of the world. Every war since the first is a result of the unresolved issues of a preceding conflict. Even now, this would not be denied. While thousands of ponies were saved in underground communities known as Stables, another more final apocalypse was approaching. One foreseen by only one individual, an individual who wanted a final confrontation with all his foes, despite the inevitability that his subjects would pay the highest price. But there was another who would assist that individual—and perhaps, one day, destroy it. For as long as life has existed, the struggle for power has been a war without end.
And war… War never changes.
Prologue
Hi. My name is Flag. Flag die Verdediger. Oh, sorry, you probably don't speak Zebrikaans. That last bit means "the (legal) guardian," or "the caretaker." Kinda says everything about me. I take care of others. Not like a doctor, more like... a judge. Without judges, there is no fair rule of law. No equitably distributed peace.
Why do I even bother...
Look, if you read this, you're gonna get ideas about me. Ideas about what my powers mean. Ideas about my deeds being heroic. Well, let's get this out of the way right now.
This ain't the story of a heroic demigod.
This isn't the story of how a savior emerged from humble roots to become a paragon of the Wasteland.
This isn't a story of a righteous avenger striking down the evil ones with hellfire and damnation.
This isn't a story of how the least likely of ponies can be anything they set their mind to.
This is my story.
And it's kinda morally ambiguous.
I have killed scores and sent thousands to their deaths, but I did so knowing that it was a better option than he had taken in the past and would have taken in the future. This tale was originally meant for my people, so that they could know the pony that built their nation and why I did what I did. Now, I give this tale to you.
Sure hope you like long stories. Here’s the Book of Flag die Verdediger, otherwise known as...
Fallout Equestria: Jakintsu
Chapter One—Lying to Your Loved Ones
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.
We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be
fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.”
Security Chief’s Office, Stable 68
Year of Celestia 1230 (1230 CY)
Twenty-three years after the Last Day
I looked up from my paperwork at the hooftap against the frame of my open office hatch. “Mistah Flag,” Primrose said in her creaky old voice. “You got an unscheduled visitor.”
“Let ‘em in, it’s why the door’s open,” I said, using a wingtip to slide my paperwork atop the heap of unfinished papers on the floor that within a few inches of desktop height.
“Go on in, little missy,” Primrose whispered to whomever was outside. “Ain’t nothing to be ashamed of.”
Shit, I thought, remembering the last time I’d heard Primrose say those words. One of these again. Dammit. I mean, consarn it! I cussed too much for my position as Chief of Security. I was trying to cut down.
The shy young mare crept inside, her flowing red-and-brunette mane covering one of her azure eyes. My face-hugging tech glasses brought up her file: Chrysanthemum, goes by Crissy. Female Unicorn, age sixteen. Flux generator technician career track. Cutie mark of a geode.
“Crissy, come on in. Close the door.” I flicked a desk drawer open with a wingtip, and scooped up a tin with my pinion feathers. “Fudge?” I asked. Crissy looked at me silently, then nodded. I flicked the lid off and slid the tin across the table. Crissy levitated out a piece with her magic, and took an exploratory nibble. I flicked a piece into the air with a pinion feather and caught it in my mouth, then put the tin back in the drawer.
“You know, I sure do wish my horn was good for something other than finding cabinet doors via physical contact,” I said as I chewed, waving a hoof up at my small horn that was mostly obscured by my shaggy brown-and-blonde mane. Twenty-three years (all my life) of intense training and not so much as a flicker from the dang thing. “Guess that’d make me an alicorn though, and what’s so special about that? Outlive all your friends, get prayed to and have everypony’s failed dreams placed at your hooves, rule a kingdom, yadda yadda yadda… None of that for this buck, no sir. Besides, we wouldn’t be living inside a tunnel boring machine if alicorns had made decent leaders.” Crissy nodded slightly at my statement. We were stuck in the Stable because of the failures of our parent’s generation, especially their leadership.
After a pause, I addressed the elephant in the room. “So, what brings you here?”
Crissy looked down at her hooves. “I’m pregnant,” she whispered.
I blinked slowly and nodded. “Let me go out on a limb here and say that you weren’t willing when the child was conceived?” I asked.
“I wasn’t, but… Out on a limb?” Crissy asked.
Right, Crissy and I had never actually seen a tree. Well, I probably had, but I was nine days old when the Stable sealed on the Last Day, so that didn’t count. “Trees were big old plants on the surface. Most were about as tall as the main tunnel is, but some were even bigger. Their limbs were like plant stalks, but a little stiffer and about as strong. So to go out on a limb is to risk the limb breaking under you and you falling out of the tree. Anyhow, who’s the father?”
“Rastus,” she whispered. Of course it was our Stable’s young problem buck. Damn, I was hoping that the kid could have been straightened out.
“Ok, I’ll need to get a memory orb made of the event,” I stated. “Sergeant Rowbuck will perform the spell. This will likely be shown to an entire jury. I’m sorry for trotting your personal life out in front of everypony, but this is the only way.”
Crissy nodded. “Ok…”
“I’m sorry we couldn’t put Rastus in line sooner,” I stated. “Preventing crime is the hardest and least successful part of Security’s work. I hope the child is a blessing to you. I pray for some good out of this. Don’t you worry none; the Laws of Stable 68 will bring you justice.” I tapped the gun cabinet behind me with my left wingtip, indicating 68 Laws, the custom five barreled drielling shotgun the first Security Chief of Stable 68 had brought inside with him. Driellings were a break action combination of shotgun and rifle. Most driellings were basically a side-by-side double barrel shotgun with a rifle barrel slung underneath the two. Mine had four twelve-gauge barrels boxing in the central rifle barrel. I’d named it 68 Laws for several reasons. First, Stable 68 originally had only 68 laws (go figure). Second, when loaded like the original security chief preferred, flipping the fire selector to “Full” fired 68 projectiles out of all five barrels. Finally, 68 Laws had performed the only executions to date in Stable 68, only one of which had been during my tenure. It looked like there would be another to add to that list.
The punishment for a rape conviction in 68 was execution.
I sighed, and brought up an incident report on my terminal. Tapping away at the keys with my hooves and pinions, I was one of the fastest typists in Stable 68. The massive report would take me less than an hour, but I was interrupted by a summons on my emergency comm terminal.
*** *** ***
In the Overmare’s Office of Stable 68
1230 CY
“What do you mean, we can’t go forward?” I asked the Overmare, as I polished my black-rimmed technician’s glasses while sitting at the conference table in her office. From the looks I got from around the room, I knew everyone else had been thinking the same thing. I just asked it first.
“The drill head hit a void,” the Overmare, Miss Emerald Shard, stated. “The seismic scanner and ground-penetrating radar picked it up several weeks ago, but the maneframe didn’t issue a course correction. Flag,” she said, turning towards me to give an order, “I want you to assign somepony to find out why. Until then, I don’t trust the automated guidance. In the meantime, we need to find out what we hit—or didn’t hit, actually.” She pressed a button on the keyboard in front of her, and the overhead projector warmed up. The slide shown was a color diagram of sonar returns from the drill head’s sensor package. It painted a portion of the main tunnel of Stable 68, a spiral carved into the bedrock of Equestria almost a hundred fifty miles long. The tunnel was sixty-five feet in diameter, and the mined rock was processed by a series of magical talismans to extract all useful material from it. The entire Stable was pulled behind the drill head like train cars, and as the population grew, more cars were added, made from mined materials. In theory, we could sustain an infinitely large population, once we got enough hydroponics bays to lift the birth rate cap.
The slide showed the next inside track of the spiral, a couple hundred feet to the side of the drill head. The main tunnel was painted blue, but the blue curve ended near the corner of a multi-colored plaid pattern, right where the drill head had punched into the void.
“We hit a mine,” Rocksalt, the unicorn mare in charge of the drill head itself, stated. “Room and pillar construction, but the pillars are very small. Either they’ve been mined, or the mine is near the surface. But considering how we’re on the bottom level of the mine, and it extends upwards for at least a thousand feet, I don’t think it’s the latter.”
“The rock strata are very metallic here,” stated Mucker, the earth pony stallion in charge of refining operations. “It seems very, very strong, although we’re still making reinforcing rings like normal. It could be that they don’t need large pillars for the mine.”
“The greater question is whether the mine is active,” I stated, then tagged on an addition. “Or radioactive. This would be a huge breach in our defense either way. We need to examine it. I propose getting our best SPAT team members, put them in radiation suits, and I take them out the maintenance hatch in the drill head, say tomorrow afternoon or evening, after the TubeScooter races. We’ll reconnoiter and place sensor packages at every street and avenue intersection, and we’ll work our way up. In the meantime, we need to back the Stable up and start digging under this mine. If we have to, we can collapse the tunnel in front of the drill head with charges, then place a giant plug of synthetic granite in to seal it all off. Then we’ll spiral down and out for a while, then start climbing after a few passes.”
“But what if the mines are clear and safe?” Green Leaf, the elderly hydroponics supervisor, asked. “We could convert this area into a massive hydroponics bay, living quarters, power plants—and set up a second community nearly independent of the drill head. Maybe even remove our birth rate caps for a few generations. Imagine being able to have as many children as we wanted.” Green Leaf and her husband, Redleg, the power systems supervisor, had grown children before the war, but neither one had made it into a Stable. For a while, they had tried to have another child, but never did.
I knew this because I, at the young age of 23, was the Security Chief of Stable 68, and I had to understand the personalities of the senior staff. And Green Leaf had been my foalsitter many years ago.
“We still need to reverse the drill,” Rocksalt stated. “We punched through the roof of the bottom floor. That won’t take the Stable’s weight. We have to regrind the slope. Regardless, we need to know more about what we hit than we can through passive observation.”
“Scouting party approved,” the Overmare stated. “However, I’m sending Amethyst Shard with you. She’s a much better negotiator than you, Flag. On the off chance that anything is living in there.”
I sighed. Amethyst Shard—or Amy to her friends, of which she had many—was next in line to be Overmare, as her Cutie Aptitude Test (CAT) had determined. Mine had come up with Offensive Security Actions Officer and the Administrative track, which had put me in charge of a newly created department of the security force. At age seven. When Chief Checkmate passed away two years ago, I had the most seniority of any department head. The Overmare had promoted me, but I mainly let the department heads run things. I trusted them to do their jobs and they got it done, leaving me to focus on the Special Purpose Assault Tactics (SPAT) team.
I must say, Cutie Marks are a nice feature of ponies, but they have their downsides. Cutie Marks appear when a young filly or colt discovers the thing that makes them unique, usually some kind of specialized skill. In Stable 68, once you got a Cutie Mark, you then started training towards a related field (often as not, though, the CAT pointed you into a field that you found your Cutie Mark in after you started training). Some ponies get their Cutie Marks later than their classmates, the so-called “blank flanks.”
I’d never been the blank flank of my class for two reasons. First, I was the only child brought into Stable 68 when the megaspells hit, although I was only a couple weeks old. No child was born for another three years—that had been Amethyst Shard. So I was the first child to enter the Stable 68 School, alone in my class.
The second reason was that I never had a blank flank. I was born with a Cutie Mark, a red-orange flag bearing an emblem of a winged black dagger superimposed over a blue lightning bolt. That’s why my name was Flag.
Some ponies complain that Cutie Marks tie you down to a set future, others that we’re more than just a single skill. Ponies are complex individuals. Cutie Marks are simple. I don’t like them because everypony has been guessing what my Cutie Mark signified (the flag wasn’t known to be used anywhere in the world above, at least before the megaspells hit) since I was born. That’s why I got the CAT at age seven, three years early. The Overmare then thrust a child into a position of authority.
That had been at the order of our original Overmare. I try not to think about her—all of those memories just piss me off. Emerald Shard was far better.
My childhood hadn’t been easy, especially without any foals my age to play with. I had just started playing with Amethyst Shard when I got my CAT. But I was also a pegasus in a Stable, and the last word from the surface before Stable 68 sealed the entrance tunnel behind it was that the pegasi had seceded from Equestria, clouded over the sky to camouflage their remaining cities, and left us to die at the hands of the zebra megaspells. They didn’t even mount interception missions to shoot down the zebra missiles before they hit Equestria. I can’t say I blame them—the pegasi had taken the heaviest loss rates in the war, and provided more troops per capita, so they had earned a little salvation. But not at the cost of everypony else.
In truth, my lineage has always been in question. I have a horn like a unicorn, but it’s very small and I had never been able to perform unicorn spells, despite thousands of hours of training and tutelage. I personally reckoned that it was a birth defect, but a benign one. Except when I rammed into the underside of a cabinet or skewered a light socket while hovering—it was certainly malignant then with the pain it caused! Besides, alicorns had led us to Equestria’s destruction. I was glad I wasn’t one. I’d rather be a traitor pegasus than a self-centered egotistic alicorn.
Wings weren’t much use for me inside a mineshaft, but I regularly flew through the tunnels behind the Stable, sometimes for recreation, sometimes to go replace a sensor unit miles behind us. I had pretty good stamina flying, but I’d never tried aerobatics inside the concrete tunnels. They were too tight and too hard to crash into comfortably.
Anyway, back to the meeting. I mildly protested bringing Amethyst Star along because she was a civilian, but that didn’t get very far—Amy had taken self-defense and martial arts classes alongside me, and she could handle herself in a fight. We discussed the timetable for our recon mission, which security officers I planned on taking, and a few other things, including one vote on another issue.
The Overmare finally dismissed us, and I galloped back to my office a few cars away. I had to get a hold of everypony I wanted for the recon team, and fast. Most of them would probably be off-shift, but some wouldn’t, and I needed them all to go home and get a good night’s rest before tomorrow afternoon—that meant cancelling shifts and finding other ponies to work them the day before the Stable’s main sporting event. I hated to do it, but I’d have to make a few work double shifts.
I noticed my secretary—Primrose—wasn’t at her desk, but had left her “BE BACK SOON. To REPORT ANY PROBLEMS, please speak to the secretaries at the FRONT DESK or DIAL 111 on your PipBuck” sign out. She was probably using the little filly’s room—at her age, frequent bathroom breaks weren’t too bad a tradeoff for the bang-up job she did as my secretary. I walked up to my office door, and waved my PipBuck over the scanner I used instead of a lock and key.
“DIE, YOU STRIPED BASTARD!” somepony shouted. In the heightened state of alert I was operating in, I spun around and had started to draw my sidearm before I saw my unicorn friend, Amethyst Star, standing to the side of the passageway hatch.
I took my mouth off the revolver’s bit as I reseated it. “Amy, you bugger,” I said, tapping the firearm back into position. “This is no time to be playing with me!”
“I’m sorry,” Amy said, giggling. “You were so rushed and so wrapped up in your own thoughts that I had to scare you.”
“Yeah, well, I’m a little busy right now, so…”
“Too busy for our date?” She asked.
How in the name of Celestia had I forgotten about our date? Stupid, stupid, stupid Flag! Amy was in a light blue sundress that went with her tan coat, her normally straight blonde mane set up in curls. The dress covered her cutie mark, a golden scepter. It was our third date, and we’d be going to Sarsa’s, the up-scale dining car not far from the administrative section. Afterwards we were going to the theatre to watch a movie. (68 was a little sparse on dating locations, with only four cafeterias and one rec center. Unless you were into watching ore extraction talismans running or staring at thermoconcrete tunnel walls. Fun fun fun.) I’d somehow completely forgotten about it.
“Oh pony feathers,” I said. “Amy, something’s come up, and I’ll need you on this one, but right now I need to reschedule my officers so the ones I need are available tomorrow. We can’t make the movie, and I don’t think Sarsa’s will hold our reservation long enough…”
“Well, hello there, Miss Amethyst!” I heard Primrose say in her loud voice as she walked in. “Migh’ty fine seein’ ya this evening!”
“Good evening, ma’am,” Amy replied.
The obvious struck me. “Primrose, I need you to do something for me,” I stated, and trotted over to her typewriter—Primrose didn’t use her terminal very often, and preferred to use a manual typewriter whenever possible. I fed in a new sheet of paper and set my hooves to keys as quickly as I could. “These officers are going with me on special assignment tomorrow afternoon. I need you to get a hold of them, tell them they’re off regular duty and on special duty, and get somepony to fill-in for their shift. Got it?”
“Easy-peasy, Mistuh’ Flag. I’ll get right on it,” Primrose replied as she walked (slowly) over to her chair.
“I am blessed by Celestia and Luna themselves to have you for a secretary,” I complimented the elderly mare as I stood up and went into my office to take my uniform barding off and slide on my black dress coat. I stepped back out, and escorted Amy down to Sarsa’s for our date. “Oh, did Sergeant Rowbuck get the…”
“Yes, mistah Flag, she did,” Primrose answered. “Supports the poor lass’s claim.”
“Right, well, we’ll see to that the day after tomorrow. Give the bastard one last day of celebration. Have a good night, Primrose.”
“Goodnight, mistah Flag.”
“So what’s this thing that’s come up?” Amy asked me as we descended the stairs towards the Transit Hall in the center of the Security Section. The Transit Halls were walkways that speared through each section of the Stable for quick transit. They were a little more than two stories tall, and once the Stable got big enough, there were provisions to install a chairlift-style system of mass transport on the bottom deck and board the top half up for pedestrians. Plans were to start that in five years, just after we finished the new reactor section to provide additional power. Until then, everypony hoofed it.
“We hit a mine,” I said. “Room and pillar, seems rather extensive. Didn’t show up on any hazard charts, so we think it may be recent.”
“Could somepony still be working it?” Amy asked.
“That’s why you’re coming,” I said. “You’re our negotiator, and you can still handle yourself.”
“What if it’s a sand dog tunnel?” The sand dogs—previously known as diamond dogs, before their relocation during the war—were adept tunnelers, although not exactly the most intelligent of sentient species of Equestria. The massive mine complex that had been constructed under their Splendid Valley home had been dug by sand dogs in a couple years.
“Don’t think so,” I answered. “We’re in an iron-nickel ore body with band of iridium-osmium. That would be hard for them to claw through. And the tunnels are square-edged—sand dogs dig circular tunnels.”
“I still feel sorry for them,” Amy said. “Getting kicked out of their homes.”
“We wouldn’t be down here if both sides had fought the war smart,” I stated. “Smart ponies and zebras don’t rush headlong towards apocalypse. Still, not our place to judge, even if they damned us all.” And with that we arrived at Sarsa’s.
Sarsa’s serviced the fewest ponies of all the cafeterias, as it’s placement near the front of the Stable meant most of the neighboring cars were devoted to ore processing and administration. As a result, it was the most upscale (and expensive) dining car in the Stable. The walls were draped in velvet curtains, and the inlays in the ceilings dampened the noise level. It was dimly lit during the evening hours, and they’d even through drawn sheer red curtains over the lights to color the otherwise bleaching white of the Stable’s illumination source.
“Bonsoir, monsieur et madame,” our waiter asked when we settled at the table I’d reserved. “May I interest you in our wine menu tonight? Stock is running low, you never know which drink might be your last.”
“Tell Chef Mozzarella to pull the special bottle,” I instructed.
“Of course, sir,” the waiter said and trotted off.
“Special bottle?” Amy asked.
“Roseluck Vineyards Champagne, ’72,” I said. “I hear it’s the best champagne made in the years before the war. And we do have something to celebrate.”
“Oh really?” she asked. “What is it?”
“I’ll tell you in a moment,” I said. We browsed the menu until the waiter returned with the bottle. “Ah, thank you. Now, please bring us an order of lettuce wraps and an order of eight-layer salad to split.”
“A bit presumptuous tonight, aren’t you?” Amy asked. “Even if that does sound delicious."
“My emotions are swinging between extremes today,” I said. “Looks like we have a rape trial coming up.”
“Oh, horseapples,” Amy said.
“Yeah,” I stated as I uncorked the bottle with my teeth and poured our glasses. “But, I don’t want you to think about that.”
“You want me to think about why you ordered the champagne,” she said with a coy little smile.
“Yes,” I said after taking a sip. “Chef’s right: that is good stuff. Amethyst Shard, it is my honor to inform you that your proposal to establish a Department of Advanced Research and Techniques in Stable 68 has been approved by the Council.”
“Oh my gosh!” Amy said, putting her hooves up to her face.
“I’m not finished yet,” I said. “Furthermore, the dee-ay-ar-tee will be granted a seat on the Council so that the new department will be able to support existing departments equally.”
“Ohmygosh ohmygosh ohmygosh!”
“Still not done,” I said, raising a hoof. “We had a unanimous vote as to who will be the director of the new division. Congratulations, Councilor Amethyst Shard.”
Amy leapt over the table and tackled me in a hug.“Ohmygosh ohmygosh ohmygosh ohmygosh ohmygosh ohmygosh ohmygosh!”
“A little decorum, Councilor,” I said on the floor with a smile.
At ten ‘til eleven, I walked through the hatch of my quarters with a still very excited Amy bouncing on her hooves beside me. Neither of us were ready to part just yet, but Alpha shift curfew was coming up. Amy had bunked at my quarters so often over the years most didn’t find a sexual connotation to it. Not that I’d ever made moves to make a sexual connotation the appropriate assumption with any mare, even if Amy and I were dating. Nice and easy does it every time, know what I mean?
My mother, Enduring Faith, was stretched out on the couch, reading a book. No, she was pretending to read the book—her eyes were studying the amulet around her neck, a family heirloom handed down for countless generations. The clear sphere of crystal was bound in polished bronze filigree hung on a golden chain. “Hello, Amy,” my mother said, slipping a bookmark into the pages and closing Daring Do and the Griffin’s Goblet.
“Hello, Faith,” Amy replied. “Has Flag told you yet? Has he? Has he has he has he has he has he?”
“Told me what?”
“I’m a COUNCILOR!” Amy sang out, then started bouncing again.
“We approved her DART proposal this morning,” I told my mother. “A full department.”
“Well done, Amy. Now, sit down, both of ya,” my mother said, getting up from the couch. “Got some things to talk about.”
“OK,” I said, and let Amy sit down first, something she was not inclined to do in her joyous state, which had only been further augmented by half a bottle of champagne. I metabolized alcohol pretty quickly compared to most, and as long as I stayed away from moonshine or low quality liqueur, I didn’t get hangovers. I plopped down on Amy’s right as my mother sat down in the recliner opposite us.
“I have something to tell you,” my mother said seriously. “And Amy might as well hear it now, too. She’s been your best friend for o’er fifteen years now.” My mother paused. “Remember how when you were a foal, Flag, how you would ask me about your father?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve found his records, though. Pitahaya, known as Dragonfruit Pete, a zebra sympathizer and smuggler. Imprisoned at the Shattered Hoof Rockbreaking Camp about seven months before the megaspell strikes. I understand why you didn’t want to tell me. Zebra sympathizers aren’t well liked down here in the Stable, and for good reason. I’m at peace with the fact that my father sided with the zebras…”
“Your father was a zebra,” my mother said. “I didn’t know until five years after the Stable sealed itself. Pitahaya was an alias. His real name was Gaius Xebec Caesar.”
I was stunned, confused, dumbfounded. My jaw was literally hanging open.
“Yeah, the uncle of the zebra that started the whole damn war in the first place. The biggest thing, though, is that I’m not your mother. Hell, right now, you’re probably the last surviving member of the Equestrian Royal Family. Your mother was an alicorn, the daughter of Cadenza.”
*** *** ***
Three hours later, I lay awake in my bed, Faith’s amulet heirloom in my hooves. But it wasn’t an heirloom; according to her, it was a memory orb from my true mother, in which she explained “everything.” I doubted a simple memory orb could explain “everything”—why she had left me with Enduring Faith, why she didn’t enter the Stable herself, why she had mated with the enemy. So many question. How could a few hours of memories explain my entire life? I was her infant child; should I not have been fated to perish with her in balefire? Why spare me?
I closed my eyes and held the memory orb tight against my chest. Why couldn’t you be there for me? Why did you have Enduring Faith raise me? I gave out a sob; in one fell stroke, my entire world had been destroyed as surely as the surface had been by balefire. Why would you not be here to love me?
Something snapped. I felt what I can only describe as a magical click, some sort of arcane lock releasing its hold. And the floodgates opened.
An entire lifetime of memories poured into me. Trillions of images flashed before my eyes. My skin crawled under the rapid waves of tactile sensation. I strobed from hot to cold as I smelled everything that had ever been around her. Spasms of pain racked my body in fits, and I tasted a lifetime of delicacies. The babble of a hundred thousand overlapping voices deafened me. And then, it all stopped.
I crashed into sleep, my mind weary from the deluge.
*** *** ***
Stable 68 Tunnels
23 years post-war, 1230 CY
“Hey, chief, you racing today?” Stress Shear asked, acting as referee for the TubeScooter races.
“What in hey could stop me?” I asked, strapping on my safety helmet with a look of false optimism. “I invented the sport with Amethyst, and I’m not giving the game to the upstart kids just yet.”
TubeScooter was a racing sport that used the slight incline of the drill head’s excavated tunnel as a gravity track. Obstacles and ramps were placed along the steepest thirty miles of the tunnel, and there were several divisions of play. Flash division was based on judge scoring of stunts performed, Dash division was based on time, Drag was a two-mile course with the highest ending speed winning, and Crash division had twenty or thirty contestants racing alongside each other for the full course. Each division was further separated into unicorn (unicorns could use spells to increase their speed or perform insane stunts), Earth pony, and open enrollment sections. Age was another dividing line. Cameras at each obstacle allowed the audience to watch the action, and several armored grandstands were built into some obstacles.
The scooters for kids were leftover RedRacers brought down before the megaspells. Adults used custom built metal scooters, although small wagons were finding popularity in the informal competitions of both age groups.
I was the sport’s figurehead. I competed in the Earth pony Dash (already done, blue ribbon), having my wings lashed to my sides to be fair, and Open Crash (again, done, second place) and Open Unrestricted Crash (any scooter or wheeled contraption could enter). Amethyst Shard did Unicorn Flash, Unicorn Crash, and Open Unrestricted Crash, her and I always battling it out one-on-one in the latter.
“Howdy, Chief!” the small, squeaky voice of a colt said beside me. I turned, and saw the light-gray unicorn Regolith beside me, standing on his RedRacer, crash helmet and pads taking up most of his ridiculously small frame.
“Hey, Reg,” I said, rubbing the colt’s helmet with my right forehoof. “What races ya in?”
“Marked Unicorn Flash, and Open Unrestricted Crash,” he said with a grin.
“Day-umm, Reggie, that’s some stiff competition there,” I stated. Marked was for foals with their cutie marks, but Reggie hadn’t gotten his yet. The officials had moved him up a level to balance the scales, because Reggie was good at TubeScooter—in a few years, I knew he’d be beating me and Amy at the sport regularly. “Good job, fella’, but ain’t the Marked Uni-Flash about to start?”
“Oh!” he exclaimed, and pushed off on his scooter, weaving through the crowd of waiting contestants towards the start line. “See ya later, chief!” he yelled back.
“At the winner’s podium!” I replied back with a smile. I sighed. Damn good kid, that one. Not like the Rastus colt I had to bring in every other week for vandalism... and soon enough, rape charges. No, Reggie would be a good sort of pony. And his parents, Gordo and Torch, were some of my best security officers.
Reggie looked at me like I was a hero. Yeah, being the figurehead for TubeScooter was fun and all, and I did like the cheers of the crowds, the pats on the back after a particularly good race, the fans. But Reggie idolized me, and that was a little unsettling. Besides, at some point in everypony’s life, you find out that your heroes aren’t perfect, and I didn’t like the thought of Reggie finding out I wasn’t perfect.
And how would he take learning I was the son of an alicorn and a zebra? I felt no hate for zebras, but the fact remained that they had detonated their megaspells on Equestrian soil first. I may not hate zebras, but I didn’t trust them at all. And now I was part zebra.
All right, I always had been half zebra, but I didn’t know until then, and that changed how I thought of myself. It was a major shock to my self-image. It made sense, actually. My tan coat had always had stripes of green and brown through it. And there was my little horn. I always figured my dad had been a pegasus, which explained how I was one when Mom was a unicorn…
No, a little pony in my head said, Enduring Faith is not your mother.
Fuck that noise, another part of me said.
“You know, she may not have born you in her womb,” I heard Amy whisper into my ear before my mind could come up with supporting evidence, “But she raised you as her own. She loves you as her son, and sees you as such. That counts for something.”
I turned towards Amy. “How do you always know what I’m thinking?” I asked.
“I’ve known you my entire life, Flag,” she said. “I’m been reading you since before I could read books.”
“I’m just… I mean, me, son of a… you-know-what and a member of their family… their families… What does that make me? Prince of a dead kingdom? The bastard child of mortal enemies? The legacy of the imbeciles that killed us all?”
“You were always what you were,” Amethyst Shard said. “Now are you going to make yourself something different than that? That choice is up to you.” She leaned her muzzle next to my ear, and whispered in a sultry voice, “Myself, I’m rather partial for you not changing…well, not changing very much…”
“Let’s find a monitor,” I said to change the subject, my face flushed. “Regolith will be racing soon. He’s in the Marked division now.”
Amy rolled her eyes at my dodge. “He is a good TubeScooter, that one,” she said, and pointed towards a monitor on a wall. We trotted over, and nudged our way through the crowd until we could see.
“By the way, nice job on the Flash stage, Amy,” I said to my companion. “The trailing light beams in darkness was a bit unorthodox for the sport, but it did look great. We’ll have to think about that one for the rulebook revision.”
“Alright, ladies and gentlecolts,” the announcer on the monitor said, “Give it up for Rastus, with a respectable third place. But can he hold onto it? ‘Cause it ain’t over ‘til it’s over, ponyfolks! Here we go for the Marked Unicorn Flash final contestant, a little colt without a Cutie Mark yet. I know whach’ya’ll are thinkin’, but this is our own protégé of the TubeScoot, the destroyer of records—ok, we’ve been doing this for three years now, just about every run is unprecedented in some way—anyhow, this is the talented, the brave, the awesome, Stable 68’s little underdog pony, REGOLITH!”
The crowd around the monitor started cheering, and I could hear echoes from deeper down the tunnel. “Now we all know Reggie’s record—nothing below third place in every event he competed in last year, and scorching hot preliminary scores, but will our little pony be a one-hit wonder or will he make this just a competition for Second Place Overall every year? Let’s find out in three… two… one… GO… holy carp, look at him take off! I’ve never seen such acceleration! Little Reggie is going with a spell right off the start, but the acceleration doesn’t match any spell we’ve seen before. The little guy has some tricks up his sleeve, but does he have the stamina to keep that spell up throughout the race? Ok, he’s crossing into the obstacles now, a quick hop-and-rail-grind, a 360 coming off the rail, dodges the ramp, the halfpipe, the second halfpipe, he does realize that he has to pull off some stunts here, right?
“OK, he takes the ramp at Macintosh Hump and OH MY WORD, did you see that! He landed on the ceiling and is spiraling down the tunnel! I know what the competition is saying: horseapples! Ok, he’s tightening the spirals, he’s losing speed, HE’S FALLING! HE’S—Damn, that was slick! He fell off the full-pipe of the tunnel, righted himself, and pulled a 360 mime-and-barber-pole off to boot! Nice moves kid!
“Now he settles into the familiar routine, hitting every obstacle he can for a trick. Ollie, and Annie-Annie-Over, a vaudeville-cane-juggle, wait, a double, TRIPLE vaudeville-cane-juggle on the hump, he was just shuffling back and forth over the vertex. Look at him, there is no downtime between tricks, he’s just going at it. Is he even looking at what he’s doing? Look at his head, folks, it’s always pointed downslope at the next obstacle he hits. He isn’t looking at his scooter, he just knows where it is. This kid is gonna be something, folks, I can tell ya’ll that right now. This far outstrips his performance last year. Remember, this is the medium course, so he’s almost out of distance.
“Coming up on the Camelbacks, and he does an excellent series of vaudeville-cane-juggles at each hump. Look at him go, he’s building his speed up very quickly, must be that spell again, he must have something planned for the final ramp. I’m betting it’s that spiral he pulled off, we’ll see, because HERE… HE… GOES! Whoa, Nellie, he’s not on this scooter! Oh-no-no-no-nononono-YES! YES! YESSSSS! He had his board spiral around and he flew on through the air to land on it on the far side of the finish line! Did he self-levitate, or move the board telekinetically? The judges should look at that, but, from the lights on the table, there’s no foul—no, wait, the possible foul light came on. Regardless, that was undoubtedly the best Flash performance we’ve seen across the board. Give it up for REGGIE, my little ponies! Woo-hoo!”
“Day-umm,” was all I could say about Reggie’s run.
“Agreed,” Amethyst said. “Day-umm! That was great!”
The intercom buzzed for the Adult Open Unrestricted Crash contestants to form up at the starting line. Sadly, I would miss Reggie’s final event, but I’d catch it on rerun. That was great stuff he’d just pulled off. Fuck the foul, he’d made a hell of a show out of it, and that’s what Flash was all about.
“Ready to go, Flag?” somepony said from beside me, on my left. Razor, the older brother and legal guardian of our Stable problem child Rastus. Razor had brought Rastus into TubeScooter to try to focus the colt, to get him to apply himself to something non-destructive. It hadn’t worked, but Razor was trying to get Rastus straightened out. But Razor and I didn’t get along, and that didn’t help things on my end. Razor was a decent stallion, don’t get me wrong; we just couldn’t be in the same room. Unless we were racing.
“You bet, Razor,” I said, mounting my new custom-built scooter. It was longer and a bit wider than the standard adult scooters, but that’s what the Unrestricted Division was for—experimentation.
“I gotta say, your little protégé is good,” Razor said. “He beat Rastus fair and square, even if he hadn’t done that foul at the end. But don’t tell Rastus that.” See what I mean? Decent stallion.
“Got it,” I said. “Rastus wasn’t too bad, either. Fourth place ain’t shabby, though I suspect he won’t take being knocked off the winner’s podium well.” I saw Reggie running up through the starting grid. I briefly wondered why he hadn’t stayed down at the bottom of the run to watch me cross the finish line.
“I’ll try to lessen the blow,” Razor said. “Reggie and Rastus have never gotten along.”
“Think your plank’s got what it takes, Chief?” Amethyst said, three ponies to my right.
“Got more of what it takes than your deathtrap,” I hollered back. She wore roller skates on her hindlegs, and had a scooter with aerodynamic cowling in her forehooves. Except the scooter was missing the back wheels, and Amy had the front of her right-side skate magnetically snapped in where the rear wheel would be. She’d go down side-on.
“Ladies and gentlecolts, get ready for today’s big event, the Open Unrestricted Crash!” the intercom buzzed. The announcer paused to let the cheering die down. I slipped my goggles onto my eyes, and grabbed my scooter’s steering column in my hooves. The other contestants hunkered down, getting ready to shove off at the starting horn.
“Ok, folks, here’s how it goes—seventy competitors in a fifty foot diameter tube, 30 miles long with obstacles—ramps, half-pipes, full-pipes, rails, boxes, all kinds of stuff spaced randomly along the way. Anypony on any unpowered wheeled contraption that posts a good enough qualifying time can compete. There’s plenty of talent in the tube right now, but of course, nopony without talent makes it into competition. But we do have a list of the who’s who of TubeScoot down there. We got Razor, the caped Mare-Be-Quick, the Bounce, Hop, and Skip siblings, Amethyst Star—congrats on the Council seat, little lady—Security Chief Flag, and, if I may be so bold, our new crowd favorite, Regolith!”
I started coughing, hard. Reggie was in the adult division? I looked behind me, and sure enough, in the starting position that indicated he’d qualified at 67th of 70 competitors, was Reggie in a modified red toy wagon. But… the rules didn’t specify a minimum age requirement for the “adult” division, just an ability to post a good enough qualifying time/score. But Crash involved a good deal of body contact—I hoped Reggie wouldn’t be injured running into the bigger ponies.
“Now, I know what you’re thinking, folks, but there ain’t an age restriction on the so-called ‘adult’ divisions—ya’ just need to do a good job in qualifying, like I said. Alright, ponyfolks, let’s do this in three…”
I turned back around, and hunkered down, my hindlegs spread slightly, ready to shove off.
“Two…”
At two, the Eyes-Forward-Sparkle (EFS) of all the competitors’ PipBucks was remotely activated. The display was modified to display a minimap of the course (not very necessary, as the route was a spiral, but it did let you know how much farther you had left), had a speedometer, and displayed distance to each competitor and the next checkpoint. The internal processors of the PipBucks were forced into an overclocked operating mode, as they normally couldn’t generate the framerate needed for the EFS hologram to work for a racer. All contestants had their PipBucks go through a servicing after a competition.
“One…”
I sent a quick prayer to Celestia for good sportsmanship, and one to Luna for victory.
The starting gun fired. I shoved off, gaining enough speed to catch a little air on the second camelback just after the start line. I hadn’t gotten the best headstart, but it was better than most. I lowered myself down, putting most of my body behind the aerodynamic cowling I had attached to my scooter’s steering column. The contestants started to accordion out as individual skill levels stratified. Razor, Amy, and I were side-by-side near the front (that order, me being on the far right), with Mare-Be-Quick in the lead with that crazy cape billowing behind her. Mare-Be-Quick was a nickname, as the mare under the cape didn’t want fans off the track, but I knew who she was in real life—you’d never guess our schoolteacher could TubeScoot with the best of them.
The pony in second, a unicorn chap named Soybean, had the rear wheel detach from his scooter at Mile Three. He managed to throw himself onto his back, skidding down the tunnel towards a padded box obstacle on the right-hoof side. Soybean lost hold of his scooter, which the next pony (ironically named Ramrod) rammed into, sending him hooves-over-mane.
I cut right, swinging onto the tunnel’s side and over the box-obstacle Soybean had hit. Razor broke left on his lightweight scooter, and Amy actually hopped over Ramrod, clipping his scooter with her left hindleg on landing. She wobbled badly, then steadied, several yards behind Razor and me. We were side-by-side, hunkered down to catch up to Mare-Be-Quick.
I heard a rhythmic clatter behind be, occurring about once every three seconds. As Amy pulled up on my right, mane whipping behind her, I saw she was using the brake on her free roller skate to kick herself to higher speeds. Smart. I soared over a ramp, and landed on the other side. Now we were getting into the Flash section of the track, were the obstacles were thickest and smart ponies slowed down—and the unwise didn’t. I started laying on my brakes, trying to shed just enough speed to be safe but not so much I had to make up ground. I banked off a half-pipe and swerved around a rail. A quick glance to my right showed Razor grinding on a rail, but with his scooter parallel to the rail. I filed that image away—I had to concentrate on dodging obstacles.
Mare-Be-Quick wiped out, screwing the landing off a ramp when her lightweight scooter snapped in half. Like Soybean, she threw herself onto her back, the safest way to slow down after a crash. The three of us dodged her, and reformed into a triangle, Amy and Razor in front, me in back, catching their slipstream as we cleared the Flash area and went into the speed-geared Dash section, half the course left to go. I looked back quickly, and my EFS showed three racers within a hundred yards—one of them Reggie. I looked back forward, and willed myself to go faster. But every time I moved to get around Amy or Razor, I dropped out of the slipstream and lost speed.
Amy performed a hop-skip-kick, swapping her tired left hindleg into the back of her scooter to let her rested right hindleg kick up her speed.
As she did, I heard a rattling behind me, coming up on my right. I leaned left, trying again to pass Razor, but this time I hunkered down so low and so far forward that my muzzle was against the handlebars, with only my eyes and helmet peaking over the cowling. I leaned left, and edged out of Razor’s slipstream, but I continued to gain on him this time.
As I passed, I saw Reggie on my left, in that three-wheeled modification of a wagon he’d made. He was on his back, with the wagon’s handle squeezed between his hindlegs—it looked like an awkward way to steer. His forelegs wrapped around two handles, and as I watched him clear Amy, he twisted himself, canting the large rear wheel and sliding the wagon sideways. I noticed his horn was aglow, with a magic field wrapped around himself. I slid right, and got into his airstream. I could hear Amy and Razor slide in behind me.
We came up to the gentle slaloms, and the four of us started snaking back and forth. Reggie released his magic spell, and his wagon started to slow, but he switched to another spell that targeted his wagon, and he started weaving sharply through the slalom. Too sharply—he was shedding speed fast. I leaned harder, and, at a shallower slalom, shot past him, gaining the lead. I tapped my brake, slowing slightly for the remaining slaloms, but I was in the lead—and I stayed there for the next five miles. But with only five miles left, Reggie came barreling past me, his horn shining brightly. And there were no obstacles on the final five miles, just a huge speed run.
Reggie slowly opened up the gap, and I knew he had me. Still, I wasn’t giving up—the speed run had yet to produce an upset, but this time, by Luna, it would. I willed myself to go faster, to slice through the air—and somehow, I think it worked. I started gaining on Reggie, not quickly, but it was there.
The bend of the tunnel reversed for about a half mile, then swerved back to its old direction, but tighter. Here, the drill head had detoured around a subterranean spring, making a switch-back in the rock. Reggie and I took different lines through the feature, mine less aggressive. Again, Reggie’s sharper turns shed energy, and I really started to gain on him.
We hit the finish line neck-and-neck. I couldn’t tell who won. And neither could the judges. But the crowds cheered wildly for both me and Reggie, the champions of TubeScooter.
*** *** ***
Stable 68 Security Department Locker Room
1230 CY
The victory party for us went on for hours, but I had to excuse myself to go ready my men for the excursion into the mine we had hit. We were all barding up—I guess you can use barding as verb when you’re putting on barding—in the Security Section Locker Room when the SPAT team sounder went off. Everyone who wasn’t on the team (which was three ponies, I think) scrambled out, and the rest of us waited for the intercom to kick on to tell us which team was activating.
My heart stopped when I heard what it said.
“Rastus has taken Regolith hostage at gunpoint. Chief, take the expedition team to the drillhead immediately, we think Rastus is trying to get into the mines.”
Oh fuck me with a manticore tail!
“Alright, drop your cocks and grab your socks!” I barked out. “Finish with the hazmat suits, then don your plate carriers and weapons. Move it!” Within two minutes, everypony was ready and galloping towards the drill head with me. I had three weapons on me—the PDW I’d used on the SPAT team, my 10mm pistol, and my shotgun, 68 Laws. The hazmat suit and plate carrier combined had made it uncomfortable to carry 68 Laws in its quick draw holster across my chest, so I attached a sling and hung it on my neck. We got to the drill head just in time to see the lower access hatch swing shut.
“Gordo, throw the latch on the top hatch,” I ordered the unicorn. “Highway, do the same on the bottom. Torch, throw a smoke grenade through the lower hatch and close it. Everypony else, boost me through the top hatch when the smoke starts coming through. And keep your EFS and SATS spooled up, they’ll tell us if we can take Rastus alive.”
I tied the end of a rope ladder around my waist, climbed up the ladder of ponies, and as soon as the smoke started to float through the hatch, I pushed over. But my shotgun got stuck on the edge, leaving me dangling, and I couldn’t work my way out from it. Gordo drew a knife, and used his magic to slice through the sling. I fell through the door, turned back, and Gordo telekinetically passed me my shotgun.
I slung 68 Laws across the back of my neck, and untied the rope around my waist. Lashing it down to a roller on the drillhead, I told everypony else to come out. Once the twelve of us were through, the access hatch on the drill head was closed. The drill didn’t use spiral grooves to cut through the rock, but instead used a flat face with magically-hardened rollers to crush through the rock as it went. The whole thing was animated by unicorns, and it worked very well, averaging a hundred feet of tunnel a day ever since the megaspells had struck. Refining talismans pulled valuable materials out of the mined rock at the molecular level. (I didn’t get molecules at the time—if I couldn’t see it with a microscope, then it was less real to me than magic—but I did know that it was a very small scale, and at it, there was a teeny little bit of gold or iridium or titanium or carbon or whatever in any rock.) We reworked the most common compounds into the waterproof lining of the tunnel walls, and stored what we didn’t need right then a density-enhanced state in containers along the tunnel.
“Alright, form up. I’m taking point, non-SPAT personnel, stay in the middle. Torch, Highway, Beige Ball, take our six, walk backwards. I’ll lead us to Rastus and Reggie. When I say ‘biscuit,’ pair up and fan out into a semicircle, half the ponies facing Rastus, half facing out. We don’t know if there’s anything in these caves, so eyes open. Let’s move!” I drew my PDW.
The drill head had reversed two hundred feet from the point its lower edge had breached into the mine. The smoke reduced visibility and we couldn’t see the end of the tunnel. As we moved forward, the smoke began thinning. With fifty feet between us, I spotted Rastus and Reggie, dead ahead, both of them with their PipBuck lamps on. Fortunately, my EFS was painting both Reggie and Rastus as friendly. We could still talk this out.
“Stop!” Rastus yelled, telekinetically drawing the revolver he’d obtained. He waved it at us, then pressed the muzzle against Reggie’s head.
I motioned with my left foreleg for a skirmish line. For some reason, Rastus didn’t want to go into the mines. Ok, we could play that angle for a while, long enough to get some knockout gas pumped into the tunnel and mine, hopefully. Our radiation suits had full rebreather gear, so we’d be alright.
“Rastus, what’s going on?” Amethyst asked kindly, softly, as she walked up alongside me.
“What does it look like?” Rastus demanded. “All my life, ponies have treated me like shit! Mom, Dad, teachers, strangers, they all see me, kick me down, and trot all over my ass! When I try to ask for help, nopony does fucking nothin’! I finally get into something they can’t push me down at, and then—BAM—they move this fucking worthless cheatin’ blank-flank against me, and let him cheat his way to victory! Swiped the medal I’d earned away from me! And then that little bitch goes screaming rape when she was the one coming on strong to me. Too damn bad I didn’t get a chance to waste her, too!”
“Why do you have the gun, Rastus?” Amy asked. I kept looking for an opportunity for a shot, but my EFS still tagged Rastus as friendly, non-threatening. The kid was just blowing off steam. In the worst possible way, but he didn’t seem to want to harm Reggie. But things could change real fast.
I swished my tail horizontally twice, the signal for kill when hostile.
“I’m gonna kill him!” Rastus roared. “Oh, don’t be so pissed off about it. We’re stuck in this fucking tunnel, stuck in the Stable until the day we die! It’s a death sentence to live down here! What’s so wrong…” Rastus moved his head onto the opposite side of Reggie’s, “with taking a worthless cheatin’ little fuck out of the picture a couple decades early? We all die, whether by a tunnel collapse, an electrical fire, a gunshot wound, or old age. Why let the worthless ones waste our resources? Resources aren’t infinite, that’s what the fuckin’ war was over! So let’s conserve them, stretch them out by removing the worthless ponies, and make sure there’s more than enough to go around. Besides, it’s not like the truth can stack up against a memory orb in court. I’m a dead pony; I just choose to go out on my own terms!”
Something let out a piercing scream, one that made you screw your eyes shut in painful reflex. Everypony gasped, but as soon as it started, it stopped.
“What the fuck was that!?!” Rastus yelled, glancing behind him. The scream had come from behind him, from the mines below. But my EFS wasn’t catching anything.
“Rastus, maybe you should step away from the edge,” Amy suggested.
“Yeah, yeah, ok, but you all move back, too! We’re keeping the same distance between us all,” Rastus said. “And you ponies first!”
I nodded my head. “Alright, do it, ponyfolks,” I ordered. “Three steps back.” Our skirmish line took three steps back. Rastus took three steps forward.
“OK, Rastus, you wanna move anymore?” Amy asked. Rastus shook his head. “That’s fine, that’s fine,” Amethyst said, taking a deep breath. “Now, Rastus, is there anything you want from us? Anything we can do for you?”
A loud growl filled the tunnel. I saw Rastus’s IFF pip turn red—no, there was something hostile on the same bearing, directly behind him. I spit the bit of my PDW, and cradled it in the crook of my right foreleg. “Rastus, there’s something hostile behind you,” I said, taking a step forward as I rose onto my hindlegs, standing tall. “Let’s continue this inside the Stable…”
“No, NO, STAY BACK!” Rastus yelled, pressing the pistol harder against Reggie’s head, just as ten—no, twenty hostiles, fuck, too damn many red ticks appeared on my EFS.
“Rastus, bring up your EFS, NOW!” I shouted.
Rastus flicked his right forehoof against his PipBuck, then turned pale.
“Orders, sir?” Gordo asked.
Rastus turned around, and looked into the mine.
Everything happened at once.
Rastus screamed as his IFF tick turned red. He’d put his back to us and Reggie’s head out of the line of fire.
My markspony put a single fragmenting round through the back of Rastus’s skull. He was dead instantly and quite messily. It’d be a closed casket funeral for him.
Four nightmare monsters leapt up from the mineshaft—that’s all I could describe them as, an armored carapace with three glowing red-orange eyes and seven orifices with squirming, shadowy tendrils bursting forth from the openings. They slung tentacles at the tunnel floor, and pulled themselves to the ground, between us and the living Reggie.
Three squid-like tentacles, each as big around as I was tall at the withers, burst over the ledge into the tunnel. One grabbed Reggie, one grabbed Rastus, and one anchored itself in the ceiling.
“Open fire!” I yelled, locking targets with my SATS (Stable-tech Arcane Targeting Spell). I slammed the foregrip of my PDW with my left foreleg, driving the gun’s bit into the flesh of my right foreleg until it pushed against bone and the trigger activated—it was painful, but faster than switching the bit into my mouth. My spell guided the wild burst into what I and SATS figured was the middle creature’s head, fifteen rounds pouring in with a single burst as I used up the full spell charge. All around me, ponies were firing, pumping rounds into the monsters, tendrils severing under the withering fire, but the abominations weren’t even phased. They started advancing.
A glow snapped on beside me, then stepped up in intensity twice. The monsters stumbled back, mainly, I think, because of the light—subterranean creatures can be very sensitive to bright lights. I glanced, and saw Amethyst, standing tall on her hindlegs like me, her horn covered in two layers of overglow, her mane whipping wildly in the energy field she was gathering.
Amethyst Shard wasn’t the strongest at unicorn magic, but she had been able to master a wide variety of spells, a very rare gift. Most importantly, no unicorn known could cast spells as rapidly or ramp her power into non-sustainable levels as fast as she could. She’d once achieved a burnout-level spell in ten seconds flat—and been magic-less for a month afterwards. But we’d be dead within five minutes if she didn’t change the battle dynamic into our favor.
Amy collected three balls of energy around her left forehoof, grabbed one with her right forehoof, and chucked the magic sphere at a monster. Quickly, mechanically, she threw the other two energy spheres with practiced ease and precision. On contact, the monsters were repelled backwards with great force, splatting into the tunnel face behind them. Their bodies slid down into the mine, but five monsters leapt up to replace them. These lashed themselves down with their tentacles, and when Amy immediately hit each with the propulsion spell, they were bucked backwards… but held their ground, several tendrils snapped under the strain.
“Swap spells!” I ordered. “Incendiary ammo if you have it! Fighting retreat, let’s go!” I placed my PDW’s bit into my mouth, and fired it as designed until the magazine was spent. As soon as I had reloaded a magazine with red-tipped bullets, my targeting spell was refreshed.
Amy was sloughing the monsters with fireballs, which burned away their tentacles, but not their bodies. As tentacles regrew out of their armored carapaces (WHAT THE FUCK!!!), they’d lash themselves back to the tunnel floor, negating her propulsion spell. And dozens of the monsters were now in our tunnel, advancing at the same speed we retreated. There was a flash as a third layer of overglow covered Amy’s horn.
“Everypony inside!” I ordered, again holding my SMG in the crook of my right foreleg, this time to reload. “I’ll go after Reggie, try to save him. Amy, I need you to bring the tunnel down behind me, and then get the Stable moving in reverse. Seal the shaft as you go, and stay the fuck away from these things!”
“Fuck that noise!” Amy said, as she starting slamming the monsters with Weight Gain Spells, scaling up their apparent mass until they collapsed against the floor. But the fresh troops just walked over their fallen brothers, still advancing on us. “That’s a one way trip, and you aren’t taking it! Not on my watch!”
“Not up for discussion, my love!” I screamed. I flexed my wings with all my strength, and tore them out of my radiation suit. My PipBuck started clicking as I started to be lightly irradiated.
“Goddesses dammit, you’re coming back!” Amy yelled.
“Of course I am,” I lied. This was suicide, and even if it wasn’t, then I’d never be able to get back inside the Stable. The main door had been sealed via tunnel collapse. “I’ve had a good run. No regrets, my love.” I finished my reload, pulled up Reggie’s tag on my PipBuck’s homing/tracking system, placed the PDW in my mouth, and leapt into flight. I skimmed just over the monsters, rolled, and bolted into the mine. I heard Amy scream a stream of curses, and then she did as I asked.
We were thousands of feet underground, with millions of tons of rock above us. A Weight Gain Spell on the tunnel roof brought it crashing down. I turned on my PipBuck lamp, and sped through the mine after the signal from Reggie’s PipBuck tag.
I flew harder, faster, and longer than I ever had before. While Reggie’s signal took a convoluted path through the mine, it kept jumping up to the next level, slowly headed for the surface. I kept flying, knowing I couldn’t lose him. If I lost him, all would be for naught.
I must have flown for hours before Reggie’s signal stopped moving, one floor above me. I flew up, and saw something my mind could not believe.
I was at the surface. The surface. I’d spent my entire life underground, and here I had emerged into the clouded twilight of the surface. I was outside, and it was HUGE! So much space! This was what a pegasus needed! SPAAAAAAAACE!
But my reverie was smashed as I saw the mining and refining facility downslope of me. It stretched through the entire mountain valley, a massive operation that pulled the metal-rich rocks the Stable had been drilling through out of the ground and loaded them onto barges, all locked together and pulled by a single mighty tug.
Except the barges weren’t in the water. They floated several hundred yards over the mining camp. A camp inhabited only by the monsters that had snatched Reggie, who’s PipBuck tag read as coming from the tug vessel.
And from the middle of the camp, right underneath the tug, came a distorting pulsating field of rainbow light. It was emanating from a complex geometric shape of zebra construction—a balefire bomb. What the fuck was that doing there? I knew what it was from a government document on them that the Stable had somehow gotten a hold of. So why did these bastards have one sitting inside their camp?
I focused on what I was doing. I needed to grab Reggie and fly us out of here. Then, if I could, maybe come back and wipe these bastards out. With a shotgun, a PDW, and a pistol. Long odds at best, but I knew I could do it.
“You need more than confidence to defeat them,” someone said behind me. I turned, and I saw an alicorn hovering behind me. An alicorn! He was a member of the Royal Family! His body was brown with off-shade spots, and his draconic eyes were yellow-green. His wings were a random mass of feathers, but they kept him aloft. His black-and-grey mane and tail were sharply swept back into large spikes. His horn had been broken off at some point, and his left ear had the tip bitten off. He sported forest camouflaged barding, but carried no obvious weapons. And he was easily three times my height at the withers—he was massive, and that probably meant old, too. True alicorns, like those of the nearly immortal Royal Family, were said to take over a thousand years to reach full size, but they never truly stopped growing.
“Who are you?” I asked.
He paused for a while. “Someone who only cares for those strong enough to aid himself. Sorry, but you get to die today.” A light formed on the jagged end of his horn, and then slammed into me. I collapsed to the ground, completely immobilized.
“You want to live? Destroy these creatures, these oodalekka. Earn being of the alicorn species,” the stallion said before he flew off. Within a few moments, several of the tendril creatures came along, some sort of impossibly fat and stocky rifle clutched in their tendrils. Two of them picked me up and stuffed me into a large canister.
I passed out, and a memory came into my mind.
ooo OOO ooo
I’d been in memories before via recollector, so I was only surprised, not disoriented, by the shift into the mare’s body. She felt young, her wings were strong as they flapped idly. I saw that she was in a stonework building draped with rich banners and adorned with stained glass. My host walked up to a mirror, and I got a good look at the alicorn.
She was taller and more gracefully built than most ponies. Her royal purple coat was stained with blood and mostly hidden by the armor and battlesaddle she wore, but what I assumed was her Cutie Mark was emblazoned on her armor’s flanks—a golden flagpole with an alicorn topper bearing the blank outline of a flag. Her crimson mane fell past her belly, with streaks of gold, silver, and ivory in it. Her golden eyes bore exhaustion, a terrible grief, and a fierce determination.
“If this is anypony but Flag watching this memory," she said in such a musical voice, "Then I ask that you pass this memory orb off to another pony as soon as you can. The enchantments I’ve laid upon it will ensure that it gets to its destination through barter and trade.
“If this is Sparrow, I’m sorry, honey, the spell must have locked onto you instead of your Flag. Get this to him, but know that much of what I say is meant for both of you.
“Now, to business. Where do I begin? I know your destiny, my child. If you haven’t been told, yes, you are my child. Your father was a zebra, Gaius Xebec Caesar. He was the uncle of Gaius Xavier Caesar, the Caesar whom we fought the war against. You have as much blood right to being Caesar as Xavier did, but you must gain the Senate’s acceptance to do so. I met your father when he was disguised as a pony, a buck who went by the name Pitahaya, after his cutie mark, or Dragonfruit Pete. He was a good person. I did not know his lineage until after we mated… until after he was imprisoned.”
The alicorn paused, and her musical voice took on a tone of that tore my heart up in sympathy for her pain.
“I just watched him die in my hooves…
“I guess you should know who I am," she continued after a moment to compose herself. "I’m Princess Mi Amore Azienda, child of Mi Amore Cadenza, the Princess of the Crystal Empire. I served as the alicorn caretaker of the nation of Ponyvois, the true superpower of our world that ensured they profited from both sides of the conflict. I left the government to run itself—perhaps too much so. Here at the end, we are at war with both the zebras and Equestria, a fate which has doomed us to the wrath of both.
“As I speak to you, Equestria falls. I feel the balefire bombs going off—Cloudsdayle, Maripony, Manehattan, the Hoof, Fillydelphia… Roam. The pegasi have abandoned us to our doom, saving themselves as they cower behind their cloud cover. Fools, they fail to realize that they can’t survive without us. I can feel the echoes of our own megaspells—Celestia Prime is dormant now, with the Manehattan skies clouded over. But I feel the earthquakers sundering dams and uncorking volcanoes, the thermals and photonics are vaporizing all combustibles, and Luna Station is raining down Mjolnir warheads on my beloved Ponyvois. And I know that they have a weapon within the Canterlot shield already.
“I parted from you because I foresaw this outcome while I was pregnant with you. I had to ensure you survived, because I’ve seen your destiny. Flag, you will bring a true end to the Age of Alicorns. Our world has always been under the sway of immortal beings. As alicorns, it is our destiny to reshape the world. But what I realized was that alicorns are not meant to rule, we are meant to advise. The populace is meant to rule."
I felt her ears twitch to sounds of distant screams, and the mare turned her head to look out a busted stained glass window. Outside, a pink fog was rolling across a huge plaza and reflecting pool. Ponies caught in it where dropping dead and... melting into whatever they touched.
“Necromantic gas, like at the Academy. Of course. Not the best way for me to die. I’ll try to shield Celestia and Luna as long as I can—their shield will keep the gas inside Canterlot, maybe long enough to evacuate Zebratown and the other settlements. But I must cut this short.
“My child, I do not envy you your fate. But our fate is divined by another—our destiny is what we do to accomplish that fate. It’ll take a lifetime to truly understand what I’m saying, but know this: the things that will happen to you are tests. How you pass those tests is up to you. You have a nation to build from the ashes of the world.
“All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope. Which are you, my child? You must find out, or he will destroy you."
ooo OOO ooo
Footnote: Level Up—Lived Under A Rock—Whoever said dim lighting was bad for your eyes wasn't you. You see better in low-light conditions, and your eyes adjust to changes in lighting faster.
Species Trait—[REDACTED]
Species Trait—Zebra—You striped traitor! Ain’t ya supposed to be fighting for Equestria? +1 Agility and +10 to Stealth and Melee skills. Your relationship with all faction starts off at -50
Starting Trait—Four Eyes—The more the merrier, in a way. You suffer a -1 Perception penalty when not wearing corrective lenses, but gain at least +1 while wearing corrective lenses.
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23 years? So this takes place more than 200 years before FOE?
1877922 It takes place about 175 years before Fallout: Equestria. My character, Flag, is going to change the world on a scale similar to LittlePip, but I don't want to trample on/ignore other fanfics or the original story. The only logical way to do that is to put Flag into the world soon after the Last Day, so that by the time LittlePip leaves Stable 2, everypony just remembers the Wasteland in the state Flag leaves it in. Everypony assumes that's how it always was, so they don't care to find out if it was ever any other way or why it changed.
I think I have a story worth telling here. Hopefully you'll agree.
1965348 Thanks, man. And, yes, I plan for this to be epic... and AWESOME!