Fallout Equestria

Chapter 11.

"Gone.

"Everypony in Manehattan is just... gone. I-I was talking with my best friend, Silver Spoon, over terminal chat when the connection went dead. My... my best friend is dead. Only she's... she's not... laying dead somewhere. One minute she was talking to me, telling me about the concert she went to last night at Hoofbeats, and then she was just gone. Erased.

"Th-they say the ponies in a few of the Ministries' buildings might have survived... but that doesn't sound real. Shattered Hoof is more than two days trot from Manehattan, and some of the guards said they could hear the megaspell go off. It was unnatural, alien... not like a real sound. A few of the guards ventured up the highest ridge. They came back describing a huge pillar of perverted green fire with a strange rainbow sheen, wrapped with rings of black smoke, lifting up into the clouds from just over the horizon where Manehattan is supposed to be.

"Now they're saying Cloudsdayle was hit too. And that Equestria's own megaspells have already been cast back at the zebras. Oh... oh no... will the zebras hit Ponyville? It's so small! They wouldn't, would they? I... I've got to warn mom and dad!

"Maybe they can get into the Stable at Sweet Apple Acres. Oh please, oh please, it's got to still be open! Last week, Silver Spoon told me that Stable-Tec was filing ponies into the Stables around Manehattan, but that was only as some sort of test run. Nothing for ponies to panic about. It's not like they knew..."

I turned off the log. While it had played, several others had been downloaded into my PipBuck. I had been finding bits of this pony's audio diary scattered all about the guardhouse. I had pulled an earbloom from my armored utility barding and tuned it into my PipBuck, allowing me to listen to the recordings in one ear without giving away my position.

Calamity returned from scouting ahead, signaling with his tail that the path was clear.

Movement through Shattered Hoof was proving swifter than I felt we had any right to expect. Our progress was partially due to keeping our hoofprints as small as possible -- no lining our saddlebags with items that could be missed. (I made an exception for the contents of the Lost & Found safe, justifying the theft with the reminder that the safe had not been opened since before the megaspells, and so no pony here would be suspicious if it was empty, so long as I closed and locked it again.)

But more than that, these ponies didn't seem to consider that the fortress could be infiltrated; they weren't on guard. I'm not a mistress of shadow, but I hardly needed the advanced tutelage from Zebra Infiltration Tactics to slip past ponies whom were being this oblivious. (I'd skimmed through the book while Calamity was fetching the mattress cover.) Calamity wasn't quite as good and had nearly tipped a Shattered Hoof Raider to his presence twice now, but we'd managed to hide each time. I figured once we got back to the train-fort of Gawd, I'd pass him Zebra Infiltration Tactics to peruse himself. (It's not as if books can only be read once, after all.)

The inside of Shattered Hoof proper was a cold, monotonous grey -- much like maintenance in Stable Two, except here all the walls were cracked and chipped, the ceiling decayed, the light weak and uneven, cast from small lanterns hung from railroad spikes chiseled into the walls. The darkening sky of clouds outside turned the high-set, barred windows into dead eyes staring vacantly into the halls. Somewhere down the hall, a terribly sad song was playing over a radio -- we were within the range of DJ Pon3's broadcast again.

"...Ponies on the expressway, with no features, with no faces,

Ponies milling about me, trudging off to nameless places..."

The song pulled a melancholy chord in my heart; the singer somehow managing to make the Equestria of before the war seem as dreary and bleak as the wasteland itself. As I followed Calamity, I considered turning on one of the other entries from the audio diary just to drown it out; but I realized that with it playing in only one ear, the two would likely mix into something even more depressing.