While I was starting to unscrew bits of the armour, I took a look around at the group on the train. Hobo blanket was still waking up, just a head of long black hair, some glasses and a lilac horn poking out of a tatty grey blanket, and House was putting as much distance as he could between himself and Tramway.

"I feel like this is a setup. What's the punchline?" Nobody laughed. Wow. Tough tram.

"I... I wasn't going to say anything because I thought you were fleeing Enclave," she said.

"I seemed to pass for one alright."

"You don't come across many pegasi in the wasteland that aren't." She took another look out the window. The depth of rain between us and the tower was starting to obscure the mess of loose clouds that was now the Thunderhead. "I'm... still not sure if I'm dreaming or not. That was the Thunderhead Majesty."

"Ask hat accent at the back, he'd know better than me."

"And now it's in bits."

"To abbreviate this scene, yes, I infiltrated the Thunderhead with stolen power armour, nicked two balefire eggs from their armoury, detonated them on board and legged it. Hi, I'm Atom Smasher and I make things explode for fun. Can you get the wings on this thing?"

She sat agape for a moment. She snapped out of it and unscrewed the wings, and even slid them off for me. "Since it otherwise might take a few days for the messenger from Warreington to find you... I am Scribe Shooting Stars, and allow me to formally thank you on behalf of the Flankashire Steel Rangers..."

"Hey, House! She's one of those techno-armour douchebags we passed on the way here!"

Full House sat forward, training his gaze on us. She blinked. "Excuse me?"

"When we were on the way here, we passed five dudes in power armour, and he said they were Steel Rangers. Said they were useless technophilic hoarders or something along those lines." I crawled out of the last of the armour, and started pulling on the good ol' jumpsuit. I popped a health potion for the limp.

Her jaw hung slack. She looked down the tram, back at me, and then back down the tram again. "Where did you get something like that?"

"Oh, there's machines in the Stable that make these by the boatload. I'm pretty sure they actually violate the law of conservation of mass..."

"Not the jumpsuit! The horribly skewed view of the Steel Rangers." She glared at House.

He leaned over the seat in front of him and lowered his nose. "Ain't no Steel Ranger I ever met done anything worth a damn for anyone but themselves."

"Ah. There's your problem." She relaxed in her seat. "Equestrian, right? Most chapters of the Rangers haven't been in proper contact since the war. Some of them - like my chapter, based in Warreington - stuck to their principles. Preservation of knowledge and its charitable application. Others, for example, what seems like every chapter in Equestria, let the second part crumble in the name of self-preservation." House kept his eyes narrowed, and then sat back.

"Nice infodump, sparkleface." I slid on the shades to complete what I was wearing before I went in.

"Is that..."

"Yes, these are, in descending order of surprise - order may vary based on personal preference - a Nerf gun, shutter shades, a thing with a sticker on it that looks like a PipBuck, and stolen raider armour parts." Got all that? Because I don't want to have to explain that all again.

"Should I ask?"

"Just roll with it. Go back to showering me with praise for blowing up the Enclave."

"Well... it'd be great if that was it, but the Enclave have much more influence further south. It's a blow alright, but not a killing blow."

I rolled my eyes. Probably blew the thanking part when I called her a douchebag. "But more importantly than that, check out what I swiped from them!" I fished the radio out of the armour and sat it on the back of a seat. House came forward to sit a couple of rows behind.

"You stole from them?"

I snorted and doubled over laughing. "I just killed probably a few hundred of them and you're complaining that I stole a radio?"

Stars sat up straight, and pulled that expression that ponies do when they get on the soapbox. Y'know, eyes closed, nose up, hoof to chest. "There is enough debauchery and corruption in the wasteland, and even if it would aid our goals, we in the Steel Rangers do our best not to add to it. We do not steal, we do not use violence unless forced, and..."

"Sounds boring. Let's see what's on the radio." I clicked it on, letting off a static fizz. Stars grumbled. I caught House pulling a smirk on the far side of his mouth. I twisted the dial for a bit, and the first thing that came on was a talk broadcast. Some fancy bitch pontificating in proper speech. The signal was so faint you could barely make out what she was saying, especially against the noise of the tram and the rain. Out of curiosity, I let it run for a bit. "What's that?"

"Can't tell." After half a minute or so, the speech ended, and some dreary orchestral melody with lyrics I couldn't make out.

Stars grimaced. "Enclave."

"Sure?"

"They loop two songs, and some speeches from their leader, Queen May XII. Unmistakably rubbish."

"It's a lot fainter than it was twenty minutes ago."

"You just bombed their main relay in the northwest. That signal is coming all the way from Buckingham."

I nodded at a job well done, and started twisting the dial again. Most of the rest of the spectrum was static, except for one signal that I almost skipped straight over. I tuned back to it trying to get it clear, but the best I could do was mildly grainy. Rapid lyrics that I can't repeat for copyright reasons played out over a jaunty melody. Showtunes. "Now this is more like it! Can't get it any clearer than that though."

"That's probably Radio Free Mareseyside."

"So that's what RFM means!"

"You heard of it?"

"These two Enclave grunts were shitting their pants about being caught listening to it. I gunned them down, their superior officer commended me for putting down insubordination, and then I took their radio."

"You what?" House tapped her on the shoulder shook his head. Just let it go, his frown said.

"Well I could have let them go, they'd still be dead, and we wouldn't have a radio." She frowned, and backed against the window. "It sounds like their transmitter is made of wood."

"They're always having problems. Local raider siege. Alicorns playing frisbee with their relay dish. One time they called us up and it turns out they'd forgotten to plug something in."

"Brain cells seem to be a scarce commodity in the wasteland."

The tram pulled up next to a large building with lots of smashed glass awnings and shelters, timetables faded and rotted into illegibility, and the remains of what were once overpriced taxis. We were out of the rain, but the ground was still wet. Nothing was going to dry the ground. Ever. "Now arrived at: Piccafilly! Thank you for travelling with Manmanmanmanman..." Tramway trailed off.

"Where are you headed?" Stars folded up her blanket and stashed it in a bag. Instead of power armour underneath, there was just a robe. I was disappointed. I shrugged at her question.

"I got this far because I was bored, and this guy..." I flicked House's hat. "... hasn't got anything better to do than follow me around waiting for me to nearly get killed so he can save me."

"Hm. I suppose you can follow me if you like. I'm on leave from official duties to look for my brother, Paladin Comet. He fell out of contact somewhere in the Preak District - the hills east of here. He's probably fine. Not many ponies are going to mess with a Paladin, after all. Never hurts to make sure though."

I gathered the Enclave armour and carried it off the tram. I couldn't fit it in my bags, so I just left it. Nobody wanted the battle saddle either, so we left that too. I stuck the radio under the saddle of my bags. The song came to an end, and someone with her voice permanently set to 'loud' came on.

"Woah! Did you see that? Did you see that?"

"Who's thi-"

"Shhh."

"Cats and kittens, I don't care if it's raining balefire where you are, stick your head out that window and get a load of the mushroom cloud over Manechester! There cannot be much left of the Majesty after that! And I think. I think. I have an idea who did it." I looked at House, then Stars, then back around at the radio. "Remember the little saint from the Stable that sprung those ponies from the Wanderers near Colton earlier today?"

"How did-"

"Shhh!"

"Well! Some of my buddies in the Steel Rangers spotted her making her way to Manechester about two hours ago. Coincidence? I don't think so!" Wow, this bitch is loud. I was wondering if I was actually hearing her from where she was sitting rather than through the radio. "Cats and kittens, I think Mareseyside and Greater Manechester may just have its very own hero of the wastes! Call it premature if you like, but Stable Dweller - if you're out there - I have faith in you. This is Tribute and you're listening to 91.1, Radio Free Mareseyside, I'd tell you not to go anywhere, but who's honestly going to listen to that Enclave crap anyway?" When the fanfare of the next song started up, I stopped suppressing my laughter and fell forward, giggling uncontrollably.

"What's so funny?"

I put a hoof to my face to put a lid on it. This worked for all of three seconds, and I broke down again. On the next attempt I was able to form a sentence. "Okay, okay... I just... You guys up here are unbelievable. Up until, what, ten hours ago, I'd never seen the sky before, and since then I've done nothing but pursue my own whimsy, and now some bitch on the radio is hailing me as the messiah. I..." A chuckle slipped through. "It's too much."

"You destroyed an Enclave Thunderhead..."

"Out of sheer impulse, yes. I mean, it wasn't hard. They're so bad at what they do that it's almost as funny as how big a deal it seems to be. I'm supposed to be the naive one, and it's like nobody up here has thought of using a disguise before! I mean, that's the second time today I've infiltrated a group of baby-eating, moustache-twirling bad guys and they haven't figured it out until they're eating shrapnel! If you Steel Rabies weren't so up on your high horses..."

"Steel Rangers."

"... you'd get a lot more done."

Stars glared at me, and then at House. "And what's your story?"

"I'm just glad she's not aiming at me."

Being halfway up the stairs to the station, I whipped out my gun and pointed it at House. He jumped and made a noise somewhere in the high soprano range. I put my gun away with a cackle. "C'mon, let's go."

"She just pointed a toy at you and you were actually scared."

"It's a long story."

There wasn't much left to scavenge in Piccafilly station. I was still able to recover something processed and sugary from the remains of a newsagent. Stars said something about how stealing from the dead is still stealing. Was she always going to be this whiny? I remembered what happened to the last pony that got whiny around me.

We started heading east along the train tracks. We passed another sign like the one on the bridge - the shield with gryphon bits.

"Hm. We saw that before. Maybe it's some kind of plot token."

"It's a territorial marker for a raider tribe," Stars said.

"No shit."

"Most of the raider groups around here grew up around the grounds of pre-war football clubs. The ones you met earlier were the Colton Wanderers. This sign is for Manechester City. The other main tribes you have to worry about are Manechester United, out in Troughord, a little west of Manechester..."

"Because that's not confusing."

"... and Liverpole FC and Ewerton over in Liverpole, on the coast."

House frowned. "I thought raiders were all the same."

"Maybe they are in Equestria, but that's definitely not the case here. They may be equally brutal, but they're far more brutal to each other than anyone else. If you wander into the wrong place around here you might find yourself in an arena for their next 'match', but if you're wearing the wrong colours, well..."

"They sound like a fun bunch. I wonder if they do tours."

She sighed. "Just keep your head down until we get out of the city. We'll probably lose the RFM signal at some point, and the City raiders usually don't go much further than that." Great. Shooting Stars whines and dispenses exposition.

We gave the City stadium a wide berth, since I guess neither Full House nor Shooting Stars were anywhere near as comfortable as I was with throwing on raider armour and waltzing through incognito, and carried on out of Manechester. The RFM signal started dying when we reached the suburbs, and I turned the radio off to save battery. By now the sun was gone, and we were putting a safe distance between us and the city before finding shelter. Stars led, lighting the way with her horn. It's like we were starting some kind of racial diversity mural! We just needed a ghoul and a zebra to finish it off.

Am I really going to have to get into the droll details of setting up camp in a cave for the night? I mean, we boarded it up for safety, we lit a fire, we ate, I made some jokes that they didn't find funny, they went to sleep, I drew on their faces with the ash from the fire, then I went to sleep, they woke up, they still didn't find it funny, and then we got going. I mean, where do people get the idea that every part of an adventure is exciting and interesting, or at least important for later? There's actually a lot of walking and not doing anything and looking after mundane needs and not talking to each other because forced conversation is awkward and you don't have anything in common and if I was going to get into it it would just be really repetitive, y'know?

At some point I was just rescanning the airwaves for signals every ten minutes, but all I was picking up was the shitty Enclave signal, and eventually Stars took the radio off me and shouted at me for wasting battery before stuffing it at the bottom of my bag. Stupid unicorns.

The next day was clearer and the ground had dried up a bit, and Stars wanted to make the best of it, so she was practically power walking. I ended up lagging behind a couple of times, because fuck, this whole walking long distances thing is new to me. I got really frustrated at how I was getting cramps from walking. I wanted to go get some clouds and drift on those to spare my legs, but they were too high to reach, because of my stupid fucking weak wings, and... shit, now I'm whining. Who wants to read a few pages of me angsting about being physically unfit because of spending my whole life in a bunker? Fucking nobody! Oh hey, now I'm whining about whining. Let's see how meta we can make this! Isn't it fucking stupid that I'm going so far off the actual story to complain about things that I'm now whining about me whining about whining? Sure is a lot of whining in the wasteland.

The Preak district was pretty, I guess. I was too busy being in pain and exhausted and contemplating if I could blow Stars' head off from this distance to really pay much attention. She'd occasionally stop and point out something from the top of a hill, which mercifully gave me some time to catch up, because yeasty cunt-froth on a sandwich, I do not like hills. (Actually now that I think about it, I'll stick to concise profanity. The long ones bog down my sentence flow.) Apparently the megaspells didn't fall here, and the only contamination is secondary fallout from rain. Looked just as barren and lifeless as the rest of the wasteland to me, but there are crops of surviving forest somewhere in the Preak District, she said. I didn't really care.

I had to wonder how something that stuck out as much as a Steel Rangers Paladin could get lost up here. Even the time I fell so far behind that I didn't actually have a choice but to start flying or risk losing them, I could still see them two hills away. And their predominant colours were grey, black and brown, how hard could it be to see a walking tin can?

We stopped for a break at an old picnic site. There were skeletons and the remains of their last picnic lying around. Stars picked up a few foal's toys and said something mopey and poetic about life and death and war and childhood and shit. House had a stoic non-reaction, and I looked up from rummaging in a bin to say "What was that?" Prissy Whine grumbled and went off to make a grave out of toys or something.

I finished most of what was left of my food and water, and an unopened Sparkle Cola that I found there. I contemplated drinking my RadAway. When I thought about it, a cloud passed over the sun, like the atmosphere was saying to me, 'if you even think about it, I will shit in your cornflakes'. I gulped and put it back in my bag.

From where we were we could see the tower in Manechester, and the dissipating wreckage of the Majesty. We were far enough away that the tower was just a pinprick on the horizon, but the sky was clearing up very well. On the other side of the hill, there were just rolling moors into forever, save for a pillar of black smoke coming from beyond the next row of hills.

"What's that?"

Stars grimaced. "Showffield."

"Looks fucking toxic."

"It is. Slavers got the old steel works there running again, and they keep it running on slave power. Between the industrial pollution and the radiation, it's a miracle anything's alive down there. Ponies that go in don't normally come out, but when they do, they're nearly always horribly disfigured with lesions and rashes, and usually on the brink of death."

"Like Fillydelphia then," House added. "Old industrial town run by slavers."

"The whole steel industry's just gone to hell. Say, we were going in that general direction, weren't we?"

"Uh, yes, Comet's last transmission was in the hills about six miles west-northwest of Showffield..." She gazed at the horizon and grimaced. I shrugged, finished the rest of this tinned crap and started walking.

The walk after the break was no less gruelling than that before, only this time Stars wasn't so infuriatingly enamoured with all the nature shit we were passing. Most of it was just as poisoned as everything else, so I don't know what there was to make a fuss over. We passed a lake that looked so bad, I took a RadSafe before we went anywhere near it. After another hour and a bit, we crested the hill overlooking Showffield. The place was a mess of smog, with the only thing punching through it being some faint orange glow. Probably open furnaces. There was a second hill just before it. It was bare.

Stars' pace quickened. It took us another half an hour to reach the lower hill, and she was going fast enough that even House was getting left behind. Being a mostly downhill journey, I was able to keep up by gliding every now and then.

"This is the site... this is the site," she muttered. "Comet?"

House was panting when he caught up. "There's nobody here. You're just going to attract attention."

"That's what I'm trying to do, get Comet's attention!"

He grabbed her by the shoulders. "Deep breaths. C'mon. Get a grip."

She did as instructed, and when she was ready, she nodded, and started investigating the scene. I just rolled over and sprawled on the grass for a rest. One of my bags opened and spilled its contents everywhere. I cursed and got to clearing it up while Prissy Whine threw a wobbly. "There's... there's some tracks. I can't make out the hoofprints, but there's a couple of gouges..."

"Spoilers, they go to Showffield."

"You weren't even looking at them, how did you..."

"I knew we were going there since we saw the smoke. The universe draws me towards dramatic repulsive scenery." I stood up and fastened my bags, and started trotting down the hill. "Now c'mon. Last one to get face cancer's a rotten egg!"

Level up! Fuck. They're still here. I wonder if they actually do anything New perk: Pack Horse

You can carry an additional 50lbs of equipment. Yeah, big fuckin' use this is after the hike over the Preak district!