Then, I learned what memory loss feels like. I woke up somewhere I was pretty sure I didn't fall asleep in - glowing blue lines crossed my field of vision, I had a pain in my neck from whatever awkward upright position I'd slept in, and my hooves were held to the wall by more fields of glowing blue science. I was having one of those really bad experiences of waking up - y'know, spending an hour beforehand half-awake and not really getting any rest but still too groggy to properly wake up, really dry mouth, slight headache... Just generally feeling like shit. The lights made everything that wasn't the lights hard to see, which only added to my headache, and I couldn't feel my goggles or glasses, which pissed me off. You haven't skipped a chapter, by the way, I'm just not even going to try and narrate the parts I can't remember.

I was going to shout 'hello', but that felt too cliché. That's what all the helpless victims shout. I wasn't helpless, I was just... indisposed. I took a leaf from the raiders I'd met and yelled "Oy!" as loud as I could. Nothing. I'd been dumped into the start of either a torture porn movie or a weird fetish video, and neither of those options appealed to me. I still had no working clock, so I might have been waiting ten minutes or two hours. It was really fucking uncomfortable. Eventually some asshole decided to make himself known. I couldn't see the door, but I heard one - a hydraulic-powered sliding door, I'm guessing - and a smooth, subdued voice, like a vodka martini. Actually I have no idea what a vodka martini tastes like, I'm just going on some vague pop cultural reference.

"Ah, Miss Smasher. You're awake."

"I have floodlights beaming directly into my eyeballs, of course I'm fucking awake."

He chuckled. "My apologies. The techies tend to leave these things on their default settings." The lights dimmed enough for me to see some other things in the room. It looked rather like a stable - metal plated everywhere, some grating on the floor, high-tech doors... then there was this asshole in a startlingly clean tuxedo. Where do you even find washing powder that's still good in the apocalypse?

"So who's the bad cop?"

"We don't play that kind of game." He had a smug look on his face that I just wanted to punch until his whole head was inverted. "I can tell that you might have a few questions about your current predicament."

"Yeah. Can I get some coffee in here? Black, two sugars." He frowned. "Okay, okay. I'll humour you. Oh no! Where am I?" He furrowed his brow at my mocking tone. "Okay, seriously. What is this place and what am I doing here?"

"You've caused the Enclave quite a few problems, Miss Smasher. You caught the Majesty with her trousers down. To which, I must say, excellently done."

I frowned this time. "Okay, you badger me for asking you the wrong question, and then when I ask the question you want, you don't answer it. What the hell, man?"

"Aren't you going to ask about my commendation or pester me to reveal my allegiances?"

"Cripes, you are following a script, aren't you?"

He sighed, and shook his head. "I am Agent Horse Brosnan of Her Majesty's Secr-"

"'Horse Brosnan', are you fucking kidding me!" I made a note to save that one for later.

"Excuse me?"

The pun rage vanished from my face in an instant. "Continue."

He raised an eyebrow at me. Like, this guy had some impressive eyebrow control. When he was done staring at me, he shook his head and continued the bullshit. "Myself and a few of my superiors in the Enclave have taken your actions as a blessing in disguise, Atom. Do you mind if I call you Atom?"

"Do you guys serve breakfast?"

He ignored my tangent. "The Majesty was weak. Her crew were complacent. They were just waiting for someone like you to come along and catch them off guard. Natural selection has taken its course, Atom. The rest of the fleet has been reminded that weakness will be punished, if not internally, then by the brutal wasteland we watch over."

"I'm just gonna stop you there and make a few deductions. First, you haven't killed me. You managed to find me somewhere and put me in this tanning bed so you can, secondly, give me a rambling lecture about how me wrecking your shit was actually a good thing for all involved. This isn't the first time I've been presented with the not-being-attacked-slash-compliments combo. Next you're going to tell me that you've been watching my progress from afar and think I have potential, and then offer me a job. Is that what the script says?"

He paused. "Yes, actually. I was warned that you're sharp, but you're still sharper than I was prepared for."

I shrugged. "Okay."

"Wait, really?"

"Well if I say no, you're going to kill me, aren't you?"

"That is standard protocol, yes. It's just that usually the heroic types try to hold on to some integrity when they're cornered."

"Heroism and self-preservation instincts tend not to go hand-in-hand."

He laughed. "You and I are going to have an excellent working relationship."

"Can I get that coffee now?" He ignored me and went to do something at the wall. My restraints opened, and all the blinding blue lights vanished. I fell flat on my face and burbled for a second before getting up.

"You're going to need more than just coffee. We have big plans. Your belongings are in the locker by the wall. We could provide you with power armour, but you'll likely need training before you can use it properly, and either way, we figured that someone like you would rather play by her own style." Seriously? They were just going to give me my stuff back? This was stupid evil in action. I staggered over to the locker and rummaged through it. Everything was here, neatly packed. Even Xena. I think they'd even washed my jumpsuit for me. I got everything together so I was kitted out as I had been. Brosnan led me out of the room.

The corridor was as grim and metallic as the room I'd just come from. A couple of uniformed pegasi were running about, looking busy. One of them was playing Gallopga on a terminal. I realised now that it contained the word 'gallop', and must have been a pun on something. Fuck you, J'skar, now I'm seeing puns everywhere. It was oddly familiar - it looked rather like I imagine Stable 512 was supposed to look if it was completed. "What is this place? It looks suspiciously like a stable."

"It was. Stable 16, underneath Runicorn. It's about ten miles southeast of Liverpole." The geography was meaningless to me, but I didn't interrupt. "It was the first in the region to open after the war. It was still being used as a settlement right up until a few decades ago, when we cleared it out for use as a backup base in the north."

"Efficient."

"Precisely. Digging our own tunnels would have been a large commitment of effort, and already empty stables would have decay problems and be a health hazard."

"You're probably the first pony I've met up here who's even mentioned health and safety." He laughed. We went through a door to the atrium of the stable. They must have been using the intended layout, because I remember the atrium of my stable being used as a general 'eat and laze around' place. This one was literally just a great big hallway. I was a little disappointed. "You mentioned big plans. What have you guys got in store?"

"I'm glad you asked. Her Majesty has decided to capitalise on the destruction of the Majesty. Without the clouds in the sky, the wastelanders will, no doubt, be crawling out of their holes. This is good. We even have weather teams minimising the rain to keep them out in the open. Treat them to the Great Braytish summer. Then when they're at their most relaxed, we bombard the entire county into rubble. Her Majesty is personally leading the fleet to purify the wasteland, which will be departing from Buckingham any day now."

"Sounds like you've got that all down pat. Just roll the stable door closed, hole up, have a cup of tea, and wait for all this to blow over."

"We still have a few days to make the most of it. This is where you come in."

"Soften them up, right?"

"Less softening them up, and more smoking them out. Find shelters and render them... out of service in the short term. There's also an old airbase north of Liverpole. We don't know what condition it's in, but there's potentially some anti-air guns on-site that a local resistance could use. They probably wouldn't be much trouble, but if you could be a dear and take care of them, it would make life easier for us."

"Hang on, you have uncountable numbers of power-armoured assholes trained in all kinds of weaponry and engineering, and you're asking a delinquent teenager to take out a tactical objective?"

He laughed again. I wondered when it was going to get old. "For someone to whom discretion comes easily, you underestimate its value. Sending a squad to Formby would cause alarm. News spreads with surprising speed in this part of the wasteland. We don't altogether know why."

"Ah, prepared for that plot hole, were you?"

We went through a door, around a corner and through another door to the dining hall. It was no Jennet View Inn, but everything still smelled tastier than the last stable food machines I'd encountered. Behind the counter were fridges and grills and a microwave and some other food apparatus I didn't recognise. None of these looked like the Protapaste-5000 gloop squirters I'd grown up on. A few ponies were quietly eating as far away from the radio as they could comfortably sit. I had coffee for the first time and decided I didn't like it, but that I'd continue using it in quips. Then against my own better judgement I tried it again, just with a shitload of milk in it. It was better that way. The breakfast menu had a lot of meat on it. Brosnan said that a lot of ponies' first encounter with meat is one of revulsion. I just didn't care because it smelled so good.

The kitchen was open, so I went over and started poking around. There were a couple of gas canisters under the counter for fuelling the stove. There were drawers for cutlery, crockery, a toaster that certainly looked like it had seen better days... I pulled the toaster on to the counter.

"That old thing? It hasn't worked for months. Just use the grill."

"Nah, I feel like a challenge. Who says toaster repair can't be a useful skill?"

Brosnan laughed. Okay, now it was getting old. "Knock yourself out." It occurred to me now that he was wearing a tuxedo at what must have been some time in the mid-morning. I put the toaster on my back and exited to the left. Then I crossed the door to the right. Then I crossed the door again. "Workshop's through the atrium, lower floor, door underneath the overseer's office." I made a note of where the toilets were as I passed. It was weird, seeing two sets of functioning loos in a stable setting.

Now, I don't know much about toaster repair. They're not complicated devices. There's a spring-loaded tray that the bread goes on, which clicks behind a catch, which opens when a timer runs down. No problem with that - the popping mechanism seemed to be working just fine. The heating element was probably on the fritz. I got to the workshop and popped the cover off. The element was a blackened pile of ash at the bottom. This toaster had seen a lot of use in its day. I started plundering the workshop for strips of metal. I found an iron strip, and got to work sticking it in.

A technician looked at me with concern. "Is that nichrome?"

"Duh. What kind of idiot do you take me for?"

"It just looks kinda rusty."

"Have you looked around lately? Everything looks kinda rusty. Even the glass." I tapped the window. It rattled an awful lot from just one tap.

"Hah. True." I continued putting the not-nichrome strip in the microwave. I tested that it functioned as originally intended. With that confirmed, I started hacking apart the electronics. I rewired the toaster so that the element would be powered when the tray was up, not down. I stripped out all the resistors in the path of the element to give it maximum power. Then I took some scrap paper and stuffed it under the element. Thing was a fire hazard waiting to happen. Last, I changed the dial on the timer to two minutes. One minute to set up, and another minute based on the amount of gas and the size of the room.

I returned to the kitchen, stuck the bread in, and made sure to plug it in and press it down at the same time. I started counting in my head. I got a couple of kitchen knives out and jammed them in the valves of the gas canisters.

"What are you doing?"

"There's some grit here that's bothering my OCD." I heard a grunt, and they went back about their business. "I'm just gonna head to the bog while that's doing, okay?" Brosnan gave me a dismissive wave from behind his Times. Once I was through the door, I legged it.

Now, I didn't have a plan. I reckoned I had about thirty seconds before the mess hall became a furnace. It'd take me longer than that to find the armoury, get something explosive and bring it back to start a chain. Didn't mean I couldn't start more, though. I headed for the generator level.

As I opened the door, I heard a distant rumble. It was barely audible over the generator, usually a mere hum you hear throughout the stable, but when you're next to it, you can't hear a thing. A technician ignored me as I entered. There were three milling around. None of them were armed. I sat back and pulled out the gun. Click-pfft-click-pap-click-pop-click-pfff. First shot missed, but the next three had them floored before they could look twice. I collected the darts, then I went for the master terminal. They'd be sounding the alarm any second now.

First thing I did was look for the systems list. I cut the power to the alarm system first. No sirens started blaring. I probably wouldn't have heard any outside anyway, but there were none in the generator room. Next I cut the power to the overseer's desk. I pondered on how much of a security liability that had to be, the fact that you could just cut the power to what was presumably the only other workstation in the stable that had the authority to shut down my shenanigans. Then I started going through security systems and shutting them down: automated turrets (definitely an Enclave addition), the wall sockets in the security office. Presumably that's where they had the things that charge power armour. Was that how power armour worked? I wasn't sure. They certainly weren't going to be playing arcade games instead of working now.

Next I thought about how to make things explode. Actually, I thought about how if I was going to be shutting this place down properly I would have gone straight for the generator room rather than made the kitchen explode, and how the workshop probably had more things than the kitchen that can cause problems for the whole stable. Ever since I earned my cutie mark I'd been banned from going anywhere near the generator room. I thought this was because they thought I'd just make everything explode forever, or that somewhere in here there would be a great big red button marked 'DESTROY THE UNIVERSE' but now I guess it was just because if I made something explode next to the generator, then nobody would have any light or water or nutrient gloop.

I started twisting knobs until things started beeping and saying 'danger'. The light bulbs overhead exploded. The tone of the generators turned into a distorted, strained whine of machines doing things they really don't like doing. I don't know what I did, but I figured it was time to get the hell out of there.

In the corridor outside, most of the lights had burst like the ones in the generator room. The broken circuit had triggered the emergency floor lights. There must have been guards making a beeline for the generator by now, and I didn't have the time nor will to ditch all my stuff and try to sneak by in a technician's uniform. I got out the volt whip, thought of some awful puns, and got ready to tank some damage.

When I got to the stairs, I could hear two of them thundering down the other way. Armoured, by the sounds of it. A rumble, followed by a pair of thuds as their momentum carried them into the wall. I cast the whip into where I expected them to be. It connected with the armour of the first one, which absorbed the shock. He flinched, but then grinned when he saw it did nothing. He stepped forward to use the incline of the steps to aim his battle saddle at me. Mid-step, the smirk turned into alarm. I took to the wing to ascend the staircase. The whip must have fried something in the armour, because he started tumbling down the stairs. I sailed over him and touched down at the top of the stairs. Rather than stop, I used this touchdown to spring myself back to the ceiling. The guy behind him filled the wall with bullets. I dropped, planting two hind legs on his head. I fell over in the resulting collapse, but he didn't get up. I lashed his armour with the whip to be on the safe side.

It occurred to me that my way out of the stable would be past the cafeteria I'd just incinerated, which would be, no doubt, crawling with soldiers and cleanup crew. Others would likely be scouring the facility for suspicious looking ponies. Which, to be fair, was everyone. Maybe if I got lucky, they'd open fire on each other.

I crested the top of the stairs and slammed into the door. Duh, electric doors. They were probably going haywire with the generator on the fritz. The ones on the two levels below had been stuck open (guards must have come from the middle floor). I gave it a lash with the whip, partly out of experimentation, and partly out of frustration. The jolt of power made it shudder, then slide mostly open. Out of curiosity, I went back down - the door below was mostly closed now. I frowned. Dammit, Stable-Tec, who wires a door system to work like a puzzle when it's suffering a power surge?

I ignored the weird doors and moved on. The smell of smoke and gas was still thick on this level. It was probably pretty oxygen poor now, and both my means of self-defence had a danger of igniting leftover gas. I was right that there were ponies around by the cafeteria, but they were all passed out. That meant the ventilation was offline. I went for the apartments to try the door up that way. I must have skipped a couple of levels of the puzzle, because it was pounding up and down repeatedly on the remains of a now bifurcated pony. I didn't feel like trying my luck, so I went for another way. There were two more doors I could try. One was the next level up from the stairs I'd come up from. That would take me past the security office, which didn't sound fun. I jumped over the remains of a fridge to take the route out past the clinic.

A thump to my side broke my gallop and floored me. I caught my bags before they spilled my shit everywhere. It turns out the strap didn't actually go that time, but it was becoming reflex. "That was one hell of a bathroom break, eh, Atom?"

"Bronson!"

"Brosnan."

"You're alive?"

"You don't survive as long as I have without spotting IEDs before they go off."

"And you left those three other dudes there to die?"

"I could tell they were trying to sit as far from the radio as possible."

"Wow, if you guys were any more ruthless, you'd get standard-issue twirly moustaches!"

Brosnan lunged at me for another kick. I went to scurry out of the way, but it connected with my hind leg and dropped me again. I kicked back, and he cartwheeled out of the way. Damn. Stupid secret agents and their training. His next blow was a bit limp, possibly from asphyxiation. I capitalised by whipping his stomach and making a break for it while he was spasming. Nothing blew up from the whip.

I whipped the two guards standing at the outer door. They didn't notice anything except for an odd sound. I sprinted for the cave mouth. The two guards shouted some angry accented things and then fell over when they went to shoot me. I stopped at the exit and looked back with a smirk. Then the ground shook, and I started running.

The first time I emerged from a stable to Mareseyside's rain-stricken, soggy countryside, it was a traumatic experience. The second time around it was just anti-climactic and dull. Yeah, yeah, all-claiming moisture and infernal wetness and stuff. I broke into a brisk jog. The stable was set in the side of a hill in a park. Twisted trunks and blackened stumps lay everywhere, and from the top of one I had a decent view of the surrounding area. No more mudbaths when I'm just trying to get my bearings!

The Maresey estuary snaked around the ruins of Runicorn. Canals circled the town just inside river, and a rusty railway bridge crossed it - the only bridge I could see. I scanned the horizon for the tower in Manechester. I saw the top of it at least, but the bottom was obscured by a black hole in my vision slowly eating everything. It hit, and knocked the wind out of me. I then couldn't breathe for a few more seconds on top of that, because my face was being scoured by a smelly, wet roll of sandpaper.

"Snowy! Snowy, let her up!" He gave me another lick, before stepping back. I staggered to my feet and wiped my face in Stars' cloak. She shoved me off her.

"Ah! There you guys are. What happened?"

"We were going to ask you!" Stars actually looked halfway concerned. I must have been out for a while.

"Well, the last thing I remember before this morning was... walking. I don't know how long ago." I rubbed my temples. "I think it was maybe an hour after Altrickham."

House blew his hat. "Musta been one hell of a blow to the head."

"Atom, Snowy found us near Altrickham and we got to Warreington yesterday evening. Somehow you decided not to solo the entire base, though I don't remember you correctly saying 'Steel Rangers' once..."

"'Spoon Radigators' is hard to remember."

"Uh-huh. Anyway, you were missing this morning with evidence of breaking and entering where you were sleeping, so command told us to track you down. So, yes, I'm here because I have to be, not because I want to be."

"Love you too, Stars."

"What happened to you, anyway?" House stepped in front of Stars before she could get the temptation to murder me.

"Eh, wasn't much. Found a stable, repaired a toaster, messed with some terminals... oh! I was kidnapped by the Enclave too. Nearly forgot about that."

Stars shoved House out of the way. "There's an Enclave base around here?"

The ground shuddered, and a plume of smoke started rising behind me. "It's not really a problem anymore."

Level up! I'm actually getting excited for these now New perk: Toaster Repair Pony

Whenever you fix a broken toaster, you receive a bag of loot from nowhere with no explanation. I guess this might be handy to kill some time at some point.