Fallout Equestria

Riding the Shortbus

Prologue: Part 1

Swept Up

MLP:FiM belongs to Hasbro, support the official release! With thanks to KKat for Fallout: Equestria and Mimezinga for Pink Eyes, which both inspired this fanwork.

Status: WIP

i.e. this is really, really early - pre-alpha and I know it.

it's also only just over 2k words, so it's a snack, not a meal.

***

"Turn." Soft Touch's voice was hollow and just a little bit snippy.

"Look, I'm sorry, okay? I didn't mean to forget you there. How about I give you a nice brushdown? Will that make things better?" Frumpy Slacks was conciliatory and hopeful.

"Just turn the page." Soft Touch said, sulking, her eyes not leaving the pages of the book she was reading.

Frumpy reached out with her hoof and turned the page of the book, carefully. "I really am sorry, you know? How about... how about I give you a nice shampooing?"

There was a pause. "With the scented shampoo?"

"...If you want." Frumpy was hopeful now.

"And I want to lie flat to dry out, in the sun! None of this 'hanging on the washing line' business."

"Of course! Anything you want, Softie." Frumpy stroked her hoof gently along Soft Touch's back, smoothing down the ruffled coat as the fire warmed the hut. It was early spring, the days were getting longer, but it was still cold by early evening, even before the sun had gone down. Not that it could be seen all that often through the almost-ever-present cloudlayer.

"I suppose I can forgive you, but only if you massage me between the... well, where my shoulderblades would be? Ahhh, yes, that's right... just there..."

"I really am sorry, you know," Frumpy Slacks said, kneading the ghoul-pony with her hooves, "I do occasionally forget you're rather... mobility challenged."

Soft Touch sniffed, "You left me looking at the wall all day. I'm a rug, not a doormat."

"I know, Soft Touch, I'm sorry." Frumpy Slacks reclined on the rug and kneaded more, very gently. "You know, you never did tell me how you... you know... got like this."

"No?" Soft Touch's strangely glowing glass eyes didn't stop staring at the book, but Frumpy felt their gaze somehow turn as far in her direction as the mostly-motionless pony was able to manage.

"No. You haven't."

Soft Touch was silent for a moment, "I wasn't anypony important. It's not that interesting..."

Frumpy Slacks soothed the rattled ghoul with some well-placed hoofwork and gentle words, "Oh, come now, you're very interesting. It's not everyday a pony buys a talking ghoul-skin rug for their home, is it? You've got to be a collectors' item, Softie..."

"I suppose I am," Soft Touch considered, "do you see... up near my top right hoof? That little brown mark..."

"Eew, what... what is that?" Frumpy peered closer at something crusty and unidentifiable. It smelled like something dead. Well, technically the entire ghoul was dead, but she at least had been cleaned and tanned, and was surprisingly warm and comfortable for a ghoul-skin rug.

"That's where The Stable-dweller herself bled on me after a gunfight."

"Oh she never did..."

"She did too. I was also in Tenpony Tower for a while. I kind of met DJ-P0n3, the stories I could tell you about her..."

"Now I know you're lying," Frumpy laughed, "everypony knows the DJ is a stallion."

"Heh, yeah... you got me there, I guess." Soft Touch was silent for a moment.

"Come on then, tell me your story."

"Did you say story time, Aunt Frumpy?" echoed a new set of voices, as three boisterous foals exploded in through the door, where they leaped around and bounded across the room.

"Settle down! Settle down, children! I didn't mean..."

"Wait, wait..." Softie said, "my story's not all that interesting, so what if I told you about a real hero? A teacher, from before the war, who faced everything in his sacred quest to discharge his duty to his students. He was brave, valiant, and kind."

"What was his name?"

"They called him... Shortbus."

"Shortbus." said Frumpy, as the foals fell about laughing, "Well alright, but if you want to tell us about Shortbus, you'd better tell us where you came in first."

Soft Touch sighed, her glass eyes fixed on a memory many centuries past, "if you insist." She seemed to take a deep breath, though she had no lungs to fill, before speaking again.

"...I never was much good at anything... our stable, number thirty three, was of a really non-standard design. Not that we knew that for sure at the time. We found that out afterwards..."

***

        "Soft Touch? Soft Touch! Get down to the Balefire Reactor Room, pronto! Golden Rule dropped her Sparkle Cola and somepony needs to clean it up." Paper Press, the old maintenance matron, snapped, waving a hoof from her reclining position.

        "Aww, but-" Soft Touch had just come in through the stable door, and was looking forwards to a nice hot cup of tea. It was going to be One Of Those Days.

        "And I'm on my break." Paper Press said, placing the magazine she was reading by what had to be osmosis over her muzzle and leaning back in her hammock.

        Soft Touch sighed, and looked down at the floor. It was always Soft Touch, get this or Soft Touch, do that. One day she'd show them. One day.

        The stable was pretty generic, as far as she could tell, even though it wasn't a Stable-Tec Stable. This was one from Solaris, 'The More Stable Stable'. They were supposed to be built to the same standards as 'the real thing', but scuttlebutt was that plenty of those were unique, and so Solaris had taken liberties of their own. Soft Touch wondered, as she pushed the arcano-broom across the metal-shod floor, what was different in hers. Air conditioning and filtration, water filtration, hydroponics, theatre... it was the soft click click click of her pipbuck that snapped her out of her daydreaming as the doors to the lift opened and she emerged into the reactor hall.

In front of her stood the Balefire Reactor. It was a gleaming construct of metal, wood and bizarre fetishes and crystals that she couldn't understand and that didn't look entirely safe. It made her teeth itch and creeped her out - she was pretty sure most stables employed basic Arcane reactors. A balefire reactor seemed... well, she didn't even know what balefire was but it didn't sound healthy. Soft Touch stood hesitantly back from the construct that seemed, somehow, to leer at her. The unicorn balefire reactor technician 'Golden Rule' was peering into the thrumming depths of the device, seemingly communing with it. Golden Rule creeped out Soft Touch almost as much as the reactor did.

"You took your time. Somepony worthwhile could have slipped and hurt themselves, and then where would we be if the stable door closed? Hmm?"

"Sorry G.R." mumbled Soft Touch.

"I should think so..." Golden Rule turned back to the reactor, making notes on her clipboard with a pen she kept levitated in her TK field, eyes never leaving the core. Her horn glowed softly, pulsing in time with the light from the arcane device.

Soft Touch had been dismissed. She sighed. She activated the relay talisman on her pipbuck and interfaced with the arcanobroom. It sprang to life, and started sweeping across the floor. In truth, the floor had already mostly dried. It was just a bit sticky. She rolled the bottle across the floor before picking it up with her muzzle and dropping it into a waste basket. Anypony could have done it. Nopony did. Typical.

        It was when Soft Touch was returning with a wet rag to clean up the rest of the spill, that she felt... it. A prickling sensation. Golden Rule felt it too, her mane almost standing up on end.

        Fweep! Fweep! Fweep!

        Soft Touch's pipbuck started to chirp at her, and her eyes went wide in alarm. She spat out the rag, "Gold? What... what is this? ...Is this a test? Please say it's a test!"

        "I don't know! Whatever you do, Softie, keep out the way! Let the qualified-"

She never got to finish the sentence.

Whilst she had been speaking, that odd prickly sensation had been growing, like an itch between the ears. In one bone-shattering moment, the reason for it became crystal clear.

***

"Wait, did you say a balefire reactor? That's..."

"I know," Soft Touch answered, "zebra technology. Where they got it, I have no idea, but our entire stable was built based on zebra fetishes, charms, spell matrices and talismans. Maybe they figured a zebra-magic powered stable would be left alone if the worst happened."

"I take it they were wrong," Frumpy whispered, stroking the undead rug beneath her hooves.

"Very."

***

Later, much later, even centuries later, ponies would still be talking in hushed whispers about that day. It was the longest day, the last day, of Equestria. Tempers frayed, agreements fell and dark thoughts became darker deeds. As cold hostility turned to outright war, from the sky rained great balefire bombs, titanic forces barely harnessed into poorly-targeted yet still cataclysmically-lethal objects of mass destruction.

The next phase, a combined attack through land, sea and air, never happened. It didn't need to. There was little left to attack with let alone to attack.

The bomb that hit Solaris' Stable 33 was a stable-buster, experimental - more so than that rest of the until-that-moment-unused weapons. An incandescent, shrieking harbinger of doom descending like a fiery monster to devour the very earth itself, parting the rock not entirely unlike a hot knife through butter. It was thaumic-seeking, and even had it detonated furlongs away it would have done its job. It hit the reactor, having passed through tonnes of rock, metal and ponies on the way down.

It was designed to seek, kill, and destroy. Like every other weapon of mass destruction, it only had to be partially successful to count as a win. In absolute terms, it failed. The kinetic payload failed to detonate, talismans failing at some point during the first phase where it speared down into the very heart of the stable it had been targeted at. This didn't mean, however, that it was any less lethal.

The balefire reactor of stable 33 was built to last, but nothing could withstand the full fury of the arcane hell unleashed in that one bright flash as the magical missile penetrated the core. The fact it was partially made of wood didn't help things at all.

The shields fell, the safeties melted, the spell matrix went critical.

The reactor failed, terminally.

If it hadn't been the end of life as she knew it, it would almost have been beautiful. Everything seemed to move in slow motion for Soft Touch as she cried out to the technician, or anypony who might be listening, through the pipbuck intercom.

They never stood a chance.

Golden Rule was vaporized in the first momentary blast of light and fire, not even ash remaining to show where she had stood just moments before. Wild necromantic spells wrapped in green dragonfire flooded the stable, searing through doors and bursting bulkheads, choking and burning everything in its path. The heat and the blast killed those who were near enough outright, with the rest of the stable succumbing to the dark magic as it slowly and painfully ripped the life from their helpless bodies.

        Soft Touch, in the middle of all this, screamed and turned to run, her voice inaudible above the crashing boom of the explosion. She was quick, but nothing could outrun a multi-tonne slab of necromancy-infused metal, propelled by a critical thaumic blast. The gargantuan lump of reactor-shielding impacted the pony even as her hooves scrabbled for purchase on the metal gangways, attempting to wrench the doors to the emergency stairs open.

        Earth ponies like Soft Touch are tough, but not that tough.

        She screamed again.

        There was a crunch.

        There was blackness.

***

        "Then what happened?" the three awe-struck foals asked in unison.

        "I died." Soft Touch said softly, "Crushed to death by a piece of the reactor shielding. Everypony died. Everypony in the entire stable died, and our stable door never even got a chance to close. So many ponies died when Equestria ended. The Wasteland was all that was left, after that day."

        The foals started sniffing and snivelling, wiping their muzzles with their little hooves.

        "I died... but I lived to tell you about it!" said Soft Touch triumphantly.

        "Yay!" the foals answered, jumping up and down.

        "You're such a ham." Frumpy Slacks sniggered.

        "Do you want to find out what happened?"

Everyone, including Frumpy, nodded, spellbound.

"Then I'll continue..."

***

Game Over! YOU ARE DEAD. Respawn: Y/N? N

Cheatcode: GODMODE 1

Achievement Unlocked: Cheater!

So you've bucked the system, don't think it's all going to be roses though.

Achievement: Undying

Welcome to life as a ghoulpony... such as it is.

Points: 5/1000 - at least you got your pipbuck on this time, shame you broke it.

Next Chapter: FoE - Riding the Shortbus - prologue pt2 Estimated time remaining: 43 Minutes