I have a confession to make about Full House. I haven't been faithfully recreating his accent in this account. However, there is method to this madness. You see, if I had been accurately representing his particular set of inflections, it would be coming out all like "waell howdy doo missy ah lahk yur stahl" and it would just be a complete fucking mess. So, his lines have already been run through auto-translation to proper spelling. Who says I can't be nice?

With some degree of physical force, he got me to stay in Colton long enough to buy some supplies. He was surprised I had so many caps on me. I said I found them. He was suspicious, but I had a straight face. He asked what happened to the kid, now that he thought about it. I said he got distracted. Stupid kids. He bought that one too. We stocked up on food and water mostly. The shopkeeper was surprised that neither of us were buying ammunition. I was all too happy to give a demonstration, but Full House was playing his cards close to his chest. (I'm going to start taking a drink every time I say a pun, which should hopefully kill me of alcohol poisoning if I say too many.)

House picked up a bag of RadAway. "How much?"

"Eighty caps."

"What? That's extortion!"

"Can't move on that, mate. Supply and demand."

"I'll give you sixty."

"I said I'm not moving, so don't even try. The next fool coming in here that got caught out in the rain will gladly fork over a hundred for the privilege."

"Seventy."

"You're not exactly making a compelling argument."

I flicked House's hat. "Just leave it. We'll find some somewhere."

"Wait," the shopkeeper said. "Jumpsuit. How long you been up top?"

"I still get nauseous looking at the sky."

"Alright. Because I'm such a bleeding heart..." House snorted. "Five caps and I'll give you this." He floated down a roll of nylon on a stick. I tilted my head. He stood back and popped it open; the fabric was stretched taut on metal arms, propped up on a central beam. He closed it again. I shrugged and tossed out the caps. Might make a decent melee weapon.

"What is it?"

He gestured for me to come closer, and leaned in to speak in husky tones. "Let me tell you something. The Flankashire wasteland demands sacrifices. It drenches bits of you until you can't recognise yourself anymore. So you find an umbrella. You find something on yourself that you can shelter in, that you do not compromise. Ever. And as long as you can keep that part of you, that one dry thing, then you can bear to look at yourself in the mirror each morning. It becomes your anchor, the thing that lets you live with yourself." He stared seriously after finishing. I shrugged, twirled it in my mouth and tossed it in my bag.

When we left the shop, I flicked my bag open again and tossed a RadAway at Full House.

"Where'd you get that?"

"Pocketed two of them while you were arguing with him. You Equestrians make a show of everything. Perfect cover."

"But..."

I quickened my step. "Now put it away or give it back, but don't just stand there looking at it."

He looked at the shop, then back at the RadAway, gulped, and slipped it in the pocket of his duster.

"So why are you coming with me? Everything you say gives me the impression that I'm pants-on-head crazy for even going to Manechester."

"I always pay my debts. Wastelanders don't have many principles, but that's mine and I stick to it. You saved my life from those raiders, so I'm sticking around to return the favour."

"Oh, don't tell me you're one of those poncey white-knight types..."

"Only once, and by the way you're carrying yourself, that won't take long at all."

"Hah. Thanks for the vote of confidence."

We walked some more without talking much. Full House just kept walking and seemed to know where he was going - not too hard, since Manechester was just a ceiling of really dark, concentrated clouds on the horizon. I took my time to inspect things we passed. Old road signs, wrecked vehicles, ruined buildings... I stopped to loot, but most things had been looted already. Fucking rude. How am I supposed to get by scavenging if some asshole's gone and taken everything before me? Every now and then I'd catch up to him.

"Ah, shit."

"What?"

"I just remembered what we should have got at the shop."

"What?"

"A radio."

"You have a PipBuck."

"I have an imitation PipBuck."

"... why?"

"Otherwise I'd look like I just killed a Stable Dweller and took their jumpsuit."

"No, why don't you have a real one?"

"Stable 512 was really bad at a lot of things, among them, making working PipBucks."

"Is that a sticker? You actually went to the trouble of making something that looks like a PipBuck from a distance?"

"You have a lot of free time in a Stable."

"Clearly."

We walked some more. I ate some food. I had a weird experience of eating something that actually needed to be chewed. I could feel the envy of my long-dead peach farmer ancestors weighing upon me from beyond the grave, so I remembered to chew conspicuously in their direction. Which was somewhere up, maybe. I remember trying to be smug but not having any particular target for my smugness.

Look, I don't know what you're expecting me to say about a long, boring walk. I mean, we could have stopped to investigate some of the things like a colt scampering around in charred rags, the settlement that had blood all over its sign, the Stable with its door rolled out and left at the top of a hill or the group of ponies that had all their skin rotting off, but if you stop to look at every little thing, you're never going to get where you're going. You need a bit of focus, y'know?

We were passing a sign saying Saltford when I felt a drip of water on my nose. I stopped and wriggled it. House assumed I'd gotten distracted again and kept walking. I felt another few drips, and decided to get out the umbrella. Between his wide-brimmed hat and duster, he probably didn't notice anything, so he kept going. I batted the umbrella's handle. Nothing happened. Was this thing designed with just sparkle ponies in mind again? Fucking self-serving jerks. There was a steady flicking of moisture on my ears now. I paused to wonder if House's duster was waterproof. Not that it would make a difference, since you'd still have a wet, irradiated coat... I took the umbrella handle in my teeth and started biting bits. I yelped when I managed to hit a button, and some part of it scratched my lip. I didn't have time to press the wound, so I just let it bleed while I picked up the umbrella, propped it up in my saddlebags and hurried back to House.

He caught a look at me out of the corner of his eye. I had to stop every couple of seconds to adjust the umbrella. It kept falling forward and getting in front of me. He frowned and looked up. A big splash of water hit his nose and made him flinch. I giggled. He grumbled, adjusted his hat, and started heading for a ruined overpass. It hadn't been raining two minutes and already water was cascading down the slopes either side and forming a stream at the bottom. We ducked underneath, and I spent five minutes trying to close the umbrella again.

The rain came down in spears. Daggers of ice-cold water, fired from the sky with relentless rapidity. It sapped the warmth from the air around. Even under our concrete bastion, we weren't safe. It struck the ground with enough force to splash fingers of water all around it, wet fingers that smeared moisture down everything they touched, like a dying pony clutching their killer with bloody hooves and staining them with guilt before they pass on. The sky was heaving its last breaths at us, rasping the words in our ears in the white noise of the rain; 'murder! Mur- Wait, who were those douchebags out walking in it?

I squinted to try and see. I ended up poking my nose out of cover and getting splashed. House chuckled, and I thumped him. The figures were still there, four or five of them walking in procession. Between sheets of rain I could make out some of the details: masks, or helmets with masks, and some of those stupid saddle-mounted guns. I took out my Nerf gun, pumped it back and took aim.

House knocked my barrel down. "What are you doing? Don't shoot them!"

"Why not?"

"They're Steel Rangers."

"Is this another wasteland politics lesson?"

"They just go around hoarding pre-war technology and keeping records. They'd be useful if they ever shared it, but don't bet on it. If you don't trouble them, they won't trouble you. And with the laser saddles and power armour they're carrying, I wouldn't bet on us if you thought it'd be funny to use them for target practice."

I took aim again. "You wouldn't have bet on me in the raider camp either, eh?"

He grabbed my side and pulled the gun out of my hooves. After a bit of fumbling, he shot the ground at the bottom of the overpass to discharge it and tossed it in front of him. I stared at the gun and the crater.

"So, you just going to fuck off now?"

He licked his teeth while he thought. "I was saving myself that time."

I shrugged and picked up the gun and dart. I still didn't know what he was packing, but if he was sticking around, he'd at least be good for a meat shield.

The rain took another hour to ease up, and it continued to spit for a bit after we started moving again, so we stayed near shelter whenever we could. Everything as we got closer to Manechester got darker. Like, the clouds were thicker and it was later in the day so there was less light around, but there were also taller ruined buildings, lots of ash and scorched earth, and grislier remnants of unfortunate wanderers. We had been in city proper since Saltford, so we used the tram lines for navigation. They were mostly clear of rubble and puddles. There were fresh gouges and scratch marks in the concrete, and someone had patched up the overhead cables. It was almost like they were being maintained. House didn't think this was odd, but he was concentrating on listening.

We stopped about fifty yards from the river. A sign saying 'River Rearwell' hung lopsided on the far side, and below the writing, there was something illegible written in entrails. There were dozens of bridges in sight, but the nearest one had a sheer wall on the Saltford side. I can't say what the purpose of it was before the war, since you wouldn't be able to drive from one side to the other, but raiders had turned it into a pretty solid-looking bastion. A sign saying "City of Manechester", possibly pilfered from somewhere else, was perched on the end of the bridge, and above that was a raider... sculpture. The severed wings and head of a gryphon were attached to the sides and top of a piece of sheet metal hammered into the shape of a shield. Bits of Stable jumpsuit were used to cover parts of it, making a pattern of blue and reflective silver, and three heads sat high on pikes above and behind the shield, with horns and spikes stuck into them to make five-pointed stars.

While I was busy contemplating how 'Gryphon Bits on a Shield' challenged our preconceptions about the nature of art, Full House was looking beyond that, into the city of Manechester itself. There were quite a few half-towers and industrial-looking halls, but one thorn in the skyline remained; a storm-blasted pillar of concrete and steel, the top obscured by the clouds.

"Hah. Look at that. Rule of drama in action."

House had to parse my sentence a couple of times, and still couldn't make sense of it. "What?"

"The Thunderhead is over that tower, right?"

"Yeah."

"The most obvious, striking-looking thing in our entire field of vision?"

"I guess."

"It always is, though. This isn't even a visual medium and our destination is still a piece of scenery porn."

"Atom, what the sweet crap are you talking about?" I sighed, and fluttered up to the bastion-bridge. Couldn't hurt to get a bit more flying practice. "And where are you going?"

"Don't get your panties in a twist..." The top of the bridge was deserted. The sign was probably just for scare purposes. There were a few fresh-looking bodies and some casings, so raiders were probably here recently. A rope ladder was rolled up near the edge, with one end tied to some tetanus hazards. I pushed it off. "Raponzel to the rescue!" I could hear his grumble from here.

As we got closer to the city centre, rain got more frequent. I could see from the bridge over the Rearwell that the rain near the tower was more or less constant. House said it was probably to stop ponies like me from getting near them. We'd been dodging little showers for about fifteen minutes, when lightning struck somewhere, and the rain intensified. We ducked under an old tram stop shelter. The buildings funnelled the wind along the street, making for intense wind chill where we had gotten wet.

Noise filled the air. The pounding of rain on the cracked streets, the broken glass, the blasted cars, echoed around us. The ghosts of ponies long dead jostled to be heard amid the static, forming nonsense words. The water streamed down the slant of the street in front of us, lapping at the kerb. Raindrops landing in the gutters sent splashes reaching for me, the damned souls lost in the balefire crying out to be sav-

"Now might be a good time to tell me what your plan is."

"What?" I shook myself back to reality and stood back from the edge.

"I'm guessing... well, hoping, that you have some kind of plan for when you get to the Thunderhead."

"Of course!" I lied. "All we have to do is..." Ding ding ding. It came from the right, up the hill. "Hold that thought."

"What in the..." The bell rang again. A metal box trundled down the tram tracks. There was an electrical whirring as it approached. A harsh screech began when it got close enough to the stop, and it coasted to a shuddering halt next to it. The doors hissed, and one of them slid open. The other was jammed on something. Inside, something pony-shaped was sitting in the driver's seat. I say something pony-shaped, because there was no way that that inorganic head-spin and the lighting up of the eyes was anything other than a machine.

A synthesised feminine voice rattled from the robot. "All ab-b-b-b-b-" Fizzle. The head spun again, and some nonsense chatter played in a tone ascending from subsonic to chipmunk pitch. "B-b-b-Piccafilly! I'm Tramway, your drrrrrrrr and tram car for today! Please have your ti-" A static stab interrupted her. "-s ready for the inspector!"

We stared. Neither of us knew where Piccafilly was, but the tram was pointing in the right direction. I looked at him. He shrugged. I shrugged back, and hopped through the one open door. He followed. Tramway waited a few more seconds for passengers that didn't exist to embark and disembark, before closing the door and starting up again.

The inside of the tram was actually quite clean. There was natural deterioration, yes - one or two windows were missing, there were bullet marks in the back of the tram, and the roof had rusted through in one spot, but it was devoid of raider 'artwork', or even pony remains altogether. I was kind of disappointed.

"Anyway, Atom. This pl-"

"I do not understand that instruction!"

"Shut up, Tramway."

"I do not understand that instruction!"

House continued, ignoring her. "Anyway. This plan of yours. How are y-"

"Track obstruction detected!" Tramway called out. "Please remain in your s-" Some whirrs and clicks. "-ile the obstruction is cleared."

I frowned. There was no screeching of the tram coming to a stop. I looked out the front of the tram. There was a flaming car across the track and some gunfire being exchanged, and the tram just kept going. A telescopic metal sheet advanced up the windshield, blocking my view. A second later, there was an almighty crash and a shudder of the tram as the shield scooped the car out of the way, depositing it to the right of the track. There was the crack-ack of assault rifle fire from somewhere in front of the tram, and a thump followed by a scream that moved left. I looked over just in time to see a raider sail through the air, limbs flying limply.

"Obstruction has been cleared! Next stop, Deansgait." The shield dropped.

I nodded. "Nicely done, Tramway."

By now, the part of the tower that disappeared into the clouds was no longer visible through the windows of the tram - we were too close. The track went up a hill that left street level, and coasted (with the deafening screech of the brakes) into a purpose-built station. When the mechanical wail subsided, the door hissed and slid open again, and Tramway turned her head back to the car. "Now arriv-riv-riv-riv..." The lights went off, and she went limp, then sprang back to life. "Now arrived at: Deansgait! Thank you for travelling with Manechester Metrolink! A division of Stable-Tec." We didn't waste time getting off.

The station was practically bare, having already been stripped of everything of value. There were just bare tiles where the turnstiles might have been, and shops had been stripped of even their shutters. A pony was asleep in the corner. I reached for my gun, but House stopped me and shook his head. The open front was a hundred yards from the bottom of the tower. The rain here was constant. Water pooled at the bottom of the tower, not just by drains and dips in the road, but everywhere - the bottom floor of the tower was flooded up to about pony height, as were all the streets around, right up to the steps of the station.

"My original plan didn't involve waders, so, gonna have to think of a new one."

Level up! Maybe if I ignore these they'll go away New perk: Commuter Ticket

All transport services that cost caps can now be taken for free.