War. War sometimes changes.

I mean, it must have changed at some point, right? I somehow doubt ponykind always had the ability to turn the entirety of Equestria into that charred stuff at the bottom of a barbecue. We probably don't have it now either, otherwise we'd just be blitzing it all the time.

Where was I even going with this? Man, if this wasn't the most pretentious fucking way to start off a story. Start with an Aesop about the brutality of war, that'll go down a treat! The hell with that. You're here to hear my story, not hear me spout nihilistic crap about genocide or whatever.

You've probably heard of the Stables, right? Those big bunkers with corporate-run social experiments that usually result in everyone inside dying or going insane, shoddily disguised as balefire shelters? Now that I think about it, there's not a lot of 'stable' about them. The big metal door at the front locks shut like a bank vault to keep the 'precious' life inside safe in the event of everything going tits up... 'vault' seems an awful lot more descriptive. It sounds like 'stable' was some marketese crap that a pre-war advertising agency came up with to try and sell the concept of spending the rest of your life in a hole in the ground to a retarded public. But whatever. Everyone calls them Stables, so in the interests of clarity I'm gonna stick to that.

I'm Atom Smasher, and I was born in Stable 512. The funny thing about Stable 512 is that it was so far down the list of Stables to be built that you can barely think of it as a Stable at all. Sure, it's a bunch of tunnels and they managed to plate the walls and floors, but there's panels missing everywhere, half the life support systems have never worked, and the outer door was never finished. Seriously, the only things standing between Stable 512 and the Mareseyside wasteland are two regular locked doors. It mostly did the trick I guess, because as long as I've been down there, we've never had anything nasty get in. But I'll get back to the top-notch security later. I have to talk about me some more.

I can only guess that I got the name Atom Smasher from being coloured like a radiation hazard sign. You can see me coming from a mile off, fucking safety orange coat and bright green mane. I came to embrace being lit up like a Hearth's Warming tree by genetics. Everyone down in the Stable was just so dreary and morose all the time. I mean, can you blame them when they're all like, grey and brown and shit? Sucks to be them.

I guess it behooves me (if these puns keep coming I'm just going to strangle myself) to say what I did in the Stable. All these Stable Dwellers that fall out of their cosy little cots and manage not to shit themselves for long enough to survive ten minutes in the wasteland are always like "I was my Stable's marriage counsellor! I was a hairdresser! I was a PipBuck technician!" You have to remember that Stable 512 is probably the least stable Stable that had ponies living in it (FUCK THERE'S ANOTHER PUN). There wasn't any formal settling in it or anything like that, a bunch of ponies just ducked inside when the shit hit the fan and waited for it all to blow over. And rough-and-ready as it was, for the longest time, it was still better in the Stable than it was up top. There were some plans around for things like social organisation, PipBucks, stuff like that, but ponies are fucking stupid.

They tried going on like they had before, just in the environment of a Stable. Immediately all the farming-type ponies were out of a job, because all the food came out of machines. Not ten minutes into the apocalypse and already there's an unemployment crisis. And it's not like ponies are good at upskilling either - they've got their destiny pictured on their butt, so whenever they try to do something else they're all like 'b-but this isn't my special talent' and get all depressed.

Then we have the staggering shortage of mechanic types. There was maybe one pony who had to keep all the life support systems going at the start, and there wouldn't be more until the first generation of foals born in the Stable. Then there was the complete disregard for proper operating procedure of a Stable, there was a coup or two by security, the fact that the jumpsuit dispensers didn't stitch a number in so someone had the job of sewing '512' into every one manually, and oh it was just a mess. Still better than the wasteland though.

So because of this unique Stable circumstance, I didn't really have a proper job. I had a talent alright - ever since I was twelve, I've had that atom from the "Duck and Cover!" magazines on my ass and the Stable has had unisex bathrooms - but blowing shit up doesn't have many applications in a long term bomb shelter. In fact, some sensible soul thought it would be a good idea to make grenades and dynamite scarce after this, and I had to make do with cherry bombs and a Nerf gun to amuse myself. In hindsight the logical thing to do would have been just to kill me, but they probably couldn't bring themselves to kill a filly. Spot the Stable Dwellers, eh?

Anyway. Now you have the late-teenage me with a dwindling supply of cherry bombs and a Nerf gun trying to find something to do. I was as depressed as a peach farmer watching their dinner being squirted out of a converted ice cream machine. I did a lot of exploring. Thing about the Stable is that after a while, ponies just stopped going to certain places. The layout wasn't confirmed when they moved in, so ponies just set things up along paths of least resistance. There were whole wings of the place that hadn't been touched for decades when I found them. I could blast stuff there and not be heard, which... it's not as fulfilling as turning the Overseer's chair into a moon rocket, but it's a vent. But this was hardly the most important thing about my exploration.

I would have been like nineteen or so when I found the Stable's front door. Or, rather, the doorway. It had taken me a couple of weeks to find a way to get through the last two doors - those two locked doors I was telling you about earlier. Cherry bombs don't cut it on blast doors and there isn't a normal door lock to pick, so it was a right pain in the ass, but I did it. After all this trying, I got this second door to unlock, and I spent a full two minutes just shoving and bucking at it to get the rusty old thing to open, and when it finally twisted off its hinges, I got hit with a wave of cold, wet air. I mean, most of the air in the Stable is cold and wet, but it's also clammy and recycled. This was weirdly fresh, but probably radioactive. If I were stepping out of a proper Stable, I might have had my PipBuck start clicking like crazy, but Stable 512 had maybe two working PipBucks ever, and one Geiger counter besides. The thing on my foreleg was a bit of scrap metal with a sticker on it. I'm not sure how happy those peach farmers were to find out that the Stable had a fully functional printer and stacks upon stacks of sticker paper, but all of the food was artificial nutrient goop.

Did I just spend a paragraph on walking through a door? If that's how this is going to go then this is going to be a really long story.

So I break down this door and I'm into the 'hallway' of the Stable, you could call it, and the big steel door is just... not there. It's not like it was opened and someone forgot to close it, it was just never put in place. Maybe someone stole it, if they wanted a gigantic piece of scrap metal to melt down for something. But hey - never assume malice when stupidity will suffice. I have more faith in the incompetence of Stable-Tec than the ingenuity of wastelanders. Marvelling at the staggering oversight of construction, I headed out, kicking the skull of some unfortunate late-comer as I went. Beyond where the Stable door should have been was a rickety little wooden door with some chicken wire across it with bright light filtering through. I ran through a quick checklist in my head. Trusty Nerf gun sidearm: check. Cherry bombs: blew the last one trying to get the door open. Trepidation at leaving a familiar world behind for a dangerous new one: completely absent. Nobody in that hole ever cared about me and I never cared about them. Not that I was that angsty or poetic about it at the time, I was mostly just like 'ooh, what's out here?'

Outside, I quickly found out why the air was so cold and wet. In Mareseyside, it rains all the fucking time. Seasons and weather just aren't a thing in the Stable, and now here I was in the Great Braytish summer. I miraculously emerged during a dry spell, but the ground was still wet and muddy. The sky was streaked with murky grey, which seemed to reflect the lifeless, soggy countryside. Husks of trees dotted the landscape of rolling hills, and some charred buildings sat in clusters on the horizon. But most of all everything just looked and felt wet. The air and ground were saturated with moisture, and even without rain, I could feel the omnipresent dampness beginning to claim me too.

Weather. Weather never changes.

I proceeded to abuse myself with the textures of the outdoors. The first thing I did was slip in the mud. Fucking smooth. I think I could feel my ass getting irradiated as I skidded down the hill on it, leaving a gouge in the yellowed grass. I stopped in a puddle at the bottom, having spun halfway around, getting a look at where I'd just emerged from. It wasn't exactly inconspicuous - the pile of rocks on the only hill in a field with a shitty door set in it. I was surprised nobody had come to loot the place sooner. It wasn't until later that I found out that it was just so far from other shelter that nobody had a reason to go that far.

It being the tallest point in my immediate vicinity, I decided it'd be a good idea to get on top of the rocks to get my bearings. It was surrounded by sheer walls, but despite sitting in a puddle half-covered in soil, I ain't no mudpony. I flapped my wings twice, and covered the other half of me in mud. With a grumble, I picked myself up and tried again, getting a couple of feet into the air before losing it again, and gouging another chute down the hill to the puddle.

See, in the Stable (am I going to be doing these 'back in my day' asides to Stable life all the time? I hope not) there wasn't much room to try and fly. I'd always known pegasi were supposed to fly from reading things they had around the place. It was just a sensible thing to assume, that ponies with wings were adapted to some kind of airborne travel. The most I'd ever used them for was a long jumping. Get a running start, and with a couple of flaps I could close distances pretty quickly. But actual flight was not something you could do in a Stable without giving yourself a concussion.

I stood up, shook myself off and stretched out my wings again. Damn, the books made this look so easy. I started flapping them just straight up and down. That just pushed me a few inches up and then a few inches back down again. Useful for forcefully stamping the ground and getting mud fucking everywhere, but it wasn't flight. I took a couple of moments to figure out what ways I could move my wings. There was some rotation at the shoulder joint, but the pinions didn't seem to do anything apart from fold and unfold... I tried again, moving them in circles. This was a bit more productive, but it was still uneasy flight. I got a bit of a hover going, before crashing to the ground and rolling backwards, so I landed in the puddle again on my back. Y'know, just in case I missed a spot in my previous two mudbaths. I contemplated looking for a couple of cucumber slices to finish the job.

Since staring at the infinite ceiling of this outside place was starting to make me dizzy, I rolled over and got back up. One more try, I thought. I reared back with a shake, ran a couple of steps forward and jumped, swinging my wings as I ascended. I was still going through the motions of running, but I couldn't feel ground. Success! I was even moving forward! I pressed my nose towards my target, the summit of this infernal rock. A moment later, I stuck it in the ground with a squelch. I stopped myself before sliding all the way back down. I pouted and just started climbing like a stupid mudpony. I'd get to the flying part later.

On top of the rock was kinda windy, and being covered in wet mud, this made for some pretty bad wind chill. If all the wasteland was this miserable, I was considering just going back into the Stable for the sake of it being warm and dry. I mean, if I'd come out somewhere nice and sunny, it'd be great. Maybe more irradiated, but radiation isn't uncomfortable. I had a pretty good view of the area, but it didn't mean a lot to me. I couldn't tell one cluster of bombed out ruins from another, and the only thing my 'PipBuck' was telling me was how happy the little guy in the illustration was.

I shrugged and jumped off the rock with wings outstretched, looking for any old direction. My first attempt at gliding went better than the flying, and with the height advantage I managed to get a whole ten feet before losing control and dumping myself in the puddle. My wings ached from effort. In hindsight it's not surprising, because I'd never seriously used them before, but man, my wings were weak. I huffed and started walking.

One thing that was becoming pretty apparent to me by now was how big outside was. I'd decided to head for one of the building-looking things, but fifteen minutes later it didn't seem any closer than it had when I started. Or it might have been fifteen minutes, the clock on my wrist was never going to say anything other than 12:34. I'd cleared a couple of hills and passed some trees with some dead stuff nailed to them, but nothing really interesting or useful.

A crackle startled me. I looked around for the source. The hills were bunched here, and the dips between them were a bit steeper. I hurried to the top of one hill and lay down. I was already caked in mud, what was a little more going to do? There were some more vaguely mechanical sounds. A voice and some hoofsteps approaching. As it got closer I could recognise wheels rolling on stone. I lowered my brow and slipped my foreleg into the straps for my gun.

We had a few guns down in the Stable (here we go again), but not much ammunition for them, so they were left to one side as mere curiosities. The pistols were clearly not designed with affirmative action in mind, because with the little trigger there was no way anyone but a unicorn could get it to work. There was also some mean-looking saddle-mounted minigun with a mouth trigger. There wasn't really a way to aim without turning your whole body, which is kinda cumbersome at the best of times, and plain useless in the close quarters of Stable tunnels.

And then there was my Nerf gun. I found it in a storage crate when I was eight, and never got tired of it. It was just so much fun to annoy ponies by shooting them in the face with little foam darts from a hiding place. But what set it apart from the other guns was that it was foreleg mounted. It had a holster and some straps, and was designed so that you just slip a hoof into the straps to take it out, and then holster it again to walk. It needed two hooves to operate and wasn't very friendly to moving and firing, but it was just so much easier to aim. I'm still confused as to why more guns aren't built like that.

Set up atop the hill, I gazed down the sights at the source of the noise, and pulled the pump. Two ponies rounded the corner, pulling a cart and chatting to each other. I waited for them to get a bit closer, raised my aim a bit, and fired. The wind made the dart swerve and curl, but it was inconsistent enough that it still bopped one of them on the forehead. They froze and lowered their stances. They had faces like a peppy teacher had just exclaimed 'pop quiz!' I pulled the pump and fired again, this time accounting for wind. I was able to hit the other one right between the eyes. He jumped and yelped, swatting at his own face. Maybe he was trying to bolt without untethering himself from the cart, or he just had a fit, but either way he fell forward and planted his face in the mud. I couldn't contain my giggle any longer at this point.

His companion screwed up his face, and looked on the ground. He levitated one of the darts up to his face and inspected it. "Come on Sandy, they're just foam bullets. Some joker is hiding in the bushes with a toy."

'Sandy' leapt up and started dancing anxiously in place. "What if it's just a distraction? We have no visibility! There could be raiders behind us! Run for your life!" He started heaving against the cart, again forgetting to untether before trying to flee. The other pony just looked at him with an armour-piercing stare. At this point I rolled over and laughed out loud. He must have spotted me then, because a few seconds later I was in mid-air without having opened my wings.

"There we go. Hey. Relax, it's just some Stable rat. I didn't even know there was one around here."

"Hey!" I swung a hoof at him from my useless magical hover. He brought me closer and examined me.

"How long ago did you crawl out of that hole?"

"Ugh, it's been so long that I'm not sure I remember. Twenty minutes?"

He frowned and dropped me in front of him. "You're lucky we're the first ponies you've come across up here. Stick with us and we'll take you to a town so you can get on your feet."

"Really? You don't sound happy to see me."

He picked up both my darts and stuffed them in my nose. "If you'd tried that trick on raiders they'd be ventilating your skull by now. I'm Hard Sell, and my jumpy pal here is Sand Dollar." Sandy stopped trying to run away and lowered his head with a blush. "We're traders. Now c'mon, we need to get moving before it starts raining."

"Rain?"

"Right. Stable." Sell sighed and grabbed my head and tilted it up. "See those clouds? More often than not, they make water fall from the sky. Water that doesn't come out of a machine is probably irradiated. If radioactive water is falling on your head and you don't have shelter, you're probably going to die a horribly painful death of radiation poisoning. You don't want to be blowing all your caps on RadAway." I stared at him blankly. I guessed caps referred to currency based on context, but playing the part of the oblivious Stable Dweller was more fun to watch. He grumbled again. "Come on. The sooner we dump you in civilisation the better. The orange is just going to attract attention." He started walking, and Sandy started walking too.

"I'm Atom Smasher by the way," I grunted, removing the darts from my nose and returning them to my weapon.

"Say, Atom..." Sand started. "If you want to make yourself useful, I think we have just the ticket for you... Sell, get that jumbo revolver wheel. I think we found what it fits!"

Hard Sell rolled his eyes and rummaged in the cart. A roll of charred Nerf darts floated into view.

"Hey! More darts!" I went to grab them, but Sell lifted them away from me.

"Careful with those! Sell, show her what I mean." Sandy's lovely assistant picked one dart off the roll and tossed it down the road. Upon hitting the ground, the mud burst with a loud pop and flung little drops everywhere. "Nearly blew my leg off handling them. And the best part?" We came to the crater, and the dart was resting on the side. Sell picked it up and returned it to the roll. "I spent a good half a day just throwing them, and they work every time. Enchanted, probably. And if they fit in that toy, you've got yourself a pretty handy grenade launcher."

"Cool! Gimme."

"Ah!" Sell, continuing to be a bastard, lifted the darts away from me again. "That'll be eighty caps."

"Oh come on! I just crawled out of a bunker!"

"Everything has a price. No caps, no darts." Sand Dollar frowned at him, and then at me. "Sandy, don't even think about giving away our stock. She's probably just going to get herself killed as soon as we let her out of our sight."

"Maybe we can work something out. We don't have security for this leg of our trip..."

"Sandy, no."

"She hit us both between the eyes with the regular darts. Just sit her on top of the cart and we've got a short range turret."

"Until she gets hit by a sniper."

"Better than nothing."

Sell stopped walking and glared at Sandy. Sandy grinned hopefully. I kept my mouth shut. Eventually he lowered his head, started pulling again, and shoved the darts at me. "Fine. Get us to Colton in one piece and you can keep them."

"Deal!" It's not like I had a better plan. I mean, now that I had an offensive weapon, I could just pop them both in the head and loot their caravan, but then I'd still be in the middle of nowhere. I changed the regular darts for the explosive ones and crawled on top of their goods pile.

Maybe I'd wait until we could see Colton before offing them.

Level up! Wait, what? New perk: It's Nerf or Nothing!

You deal lethal damage with foam-based weapons.