Fallout Equestria

Riding the Shortbus

Prologue: Part 2

Cutting a Rug

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.

***

        "Is there anypony in here?" came a hesitant voice. The tortured squealing of metal as it was forced to budge drowned out anything else for almost a minute.

        "I think I can..." There were sounds of huffing and puffing, though curiously wheezy and whistling.

        "Let me try to squeeze through, I'm a bit thinner than you."

        "Careful, Hay Bale, that wound looks kinda... bad."

        "You know, Kite String? I think it wasn't just bad, it was fatal."

        "What do you mean 'fatal'?"

        "I mean... haven't you noticed... you don't exactly get out of breath any more? Or, in my case, breathe at all?"

        "What are you saying?" Kite String asked.

        "Well-"

        Hay Bale was interrupted by a very weak, "Help! Anypony?"

        It took them a few minutes of searching for any survivors to find her. The lights were out, wreckage was strewn across the floor and nopony had thought to look under the half-tonne slab of metal.

        Hay Bale finally gave up looking in the obvious places, and started skirting the rest of the ruined reactor room. As the cries continued, he finally turned to the one corner he'd initially pegged as a no-brainer for a negative possibility. Kite String followed his gaze, and his mouth dropped open.

        "What, you think... that's crazy! Nopony could've survived that!"

        "She didn't. Doesn't mean we can leave her there... help me, find something to wedge it up with."

        Kite String returned with a long pole made of metal. Bracing it against a fallen lump of bedrock, he jumped up and down on the end until, grudgingly, the massive slab of metal shifted minutely.

        "Alright, miss, I'm going to pull you ou- ...oh dear."

        "Oh thank you thank you thank you! Please get me out from under here! I've been shouting my lungs out for hours! It's me, Soft Touch, the janitor." Soft Touch was almost sobbing.

        "Yeah, about that..." Hay Bale pulled the only part of the pony he could reach. With a wet slurp, it started to move. He winced, and took a better, very careful hold with his muzzle, attempting to taste as little as possible. It helped that his tongue had been a little cooked by the blast. Not enough, but a little. "Harder, Kite, get that rock up just a bit more, I've got to get her head out... that's it..."

        The noises, as the thing that could only be called a 'body' by application of a great deal of charity, started to shift, were... distressing. Hay whimpered. It was like pulling an overstuffed beanbag full of water and twigs. Things scraped. They slurped. They flopped, wetly, as they grudgingly moved. Hay Bale kept his mind off what he was doing as much as he could. There was a lot of red, he was sincerely worried that bits would rip and tear, and he was entirely unconvinced that much could be done for the bones that could now best feature as a brain teasing three-dimensional puzzle for a budding orthopedic doctor with a serious attention to detail, and quite probably no social life. He wasn't convinced he even had them all. He hoped it wouldn't matter. There was more huffing and puffing, some scraping, but finally Soft Touch was free. Mostly. What was left of her.

        "There, I've got you... miss. I think. How do you... uh... how do you feel? Any pain?"

        "No, no... I... I can't move though. Oh goddess, I can't move..!"

        "Relax, I'm sure it's only temporary." Hay Bale sounded rather hesitant on that last point, "Listen, can you tell me if this hurts? Or this? How about that?"

        "N-no... it feels a little weird but... wait, what's that... what are you... what are you doing?"

        There was another series of strangely wet, sucking noises as Hay Bale moved various bodily extremities of the pony formerly known as Soft Touch. At continued murmurs of no discomfort and requests for information, Hay Bale made a decision. After a brief few moments of manipulation, he stood up, "Those are your back hooves, what's left of them, and those are your front hooves, mostly... they're kind of busted up, I know. The... white bits... oh goddess... are your bones. What's left of them. I've kind of folded you up... sorry about that."

        "You what?!"

         "Yes, I know, mama always did say I was bad at making my bed. I'm sorry, you're more of a heap than a sheet. It's the bones, they're kind of lumpy."

        "No, I mean... where are my... but... how are my... and... but..." The world no longer made sense. Soft Touch just lay there, blinking. Metaphorically, of course, she didn't seem to be able to move her eyelids. She wasn't sure she had any.

        Hay Bale waited.

        "...Oh." Soft Touch said, finally, in an empty voice. It didn't seem real. She knew she should be freaking out about now; screaming, shouting, crying, wailing, gnashing her teeth... but it was too strange. She didn't have it in her. She didn't have much of anything in her.

        "Kite, do you wanna lift her onto my back?" asked Hay, after watching for a minute or two.

        Kite String looked at the flat, somewhat oozing, folded pony, "No, not really, can't say I do." He pushed a hoof down onto the piled up lump of flesh and bone. It squished, and splurted down the sides, pooling in a warm sticky mess.

        "Oh you're such a baby... fnnf, f'll foo fit fy felf... fere, fee?" Hay Bale hauled up the approximately square and worryingly squishy pile and placed it on his back, between his withers. It flopped open and oozed down his sides, mingling with yellow ichor and covering his own white ribs with a fresh coat of crimson. He spat a few times, making a face, "Okay up  there?"

        Soft Touch replied, voice trembling, "I'm flat... I don't think I'll ever be right again."

        "Glad to hear it. Anypony else in here with you?"

        "Just Gold, but she... she..." Soft Touch started sobbing, though no tears came.

        "She didn't make it even less than we didn't make it?"

        "Something like that." Soft Touch managed.

        Hay Bale sighed, "And today was my birthday, too."

***

        "So why didn't you die?"

        "I did die!"

        "You know what I mean... and I can't believe it was that neat, being crushed to death and all..."

        Soft Touch sighed, "Have you ever seen a balefire phoenix? When they bombed manehatten, everything was obliterated, turned to ash - including the rare animals at the zoo. Now a phoenix doesn't have the same problem with the whole 'turning to ash' thing as you or I would, so they came back with very few problems, other than being... changed. Balefire though... it's a strange mixture of necromancy and enchanted dragonfire. The reactor was soaked in it. What it didn't outright destroy... didn't always stay dead."

        "Whats nec... necro... manatee?" one of the foals asked, eyes crossing as he twisted his tongue around the unfamiliar word.

        "Bringing the dead back to life."

        "Coooolll!"

        "Great. Go giving them ideas. Bad rug! Bad!"

        "Anyway, no, it wasn't pretty... and there wasn't much else they could do. They found a tanner."

***

        "So, what do you think?" Harmony Ribbon asked, maneuvering a second mirror so that the first, set in front of Soft Touch, would display more of her.

        "You said that stuff was called Sparkle RAD?"

***

        "Wait, wait... that's not fair!" the foals whined, "We wanna know what happened!"

        "Yeah!"

        "Yeah, tell us!"

        Soft Touch sighed, "Fine! But don't blame me if you can't sleep tonight."

***

        "Buck it! Again! It broke again...  you know, I don't think this is the right piece of bone. Have you tried putting it all back together?" The doctor looked up, monocle clenched in one eye, and sighed.

        "Err... no?" Hay Bale replied hesitantly.

        "So you're telling me, you've had us gluing pieces of this... rug back together, and you don't even know if you have all of them? That's it, I quit. You don't need a doctor, you need a taxidermist."

        "You know, that's a good idea?" Hay Bale replied, tapping his muzzle with a hoof.

        "What?" asked Soft Touch. She would have struggled to sit up, but seeing as she didn't have any functioning muscles left that could do the job, she just lay there.

        "Not a taxidermist, but..."

        "I don't want to be stuffed!"

        "How about we get you stable, first, alright? Then we'll..." Hay Bale was being soothing and calm. Quite the feat, considering.

        "No."

        "You'll feel much better when we can sew up those holes, and all those broken bones aren't doing you any good, you know, and... you're kind of... leaking. Somepony could have a nasty accident."

        "Somepony did have a nasty accident! Me!"

        "Yes, and now we have to deal with it. Augur, go get Pickles. We're going to need him. He's still ali- ...er, not quite dead, right?"

        "I think so."

        "Oh, my yesh... you've come to me jusht in time."

        "You're not going to-"

        The scraping started very soon after Soft Touch was flipped over. The metal workbench was cold enough that conditions were more or less ideal. Pickles worked methodically and with the expertise that came of great practice. Nopony really wanted to ask how the unicorn known as Pickles knew quite so much about an art that was practically unknown of within Equestria, but Hay Bale guessed that every so often such obscure skills came in useful. Soft Touch's complaints were mostly ignored as what innards remained were sluiced off into buckets. After that, the last of her bones were removed. Her hooves were a bit tricky, so were unceremoniously cut off with a sharp saw. Pickles promised to save them for reattaching later, if possible.

        Hay Bale wasn't sure how that was going to work, but then again he hadn't seen undeath as being very practical either. Just something else to get used to, he guessed.

        Pickles worked methodically and carefully, snipping and slicing neatly, sewing where he could to preserve integrity where the bones had gone through the skin. A dull knife was finally applied to scrape the last of the fat and bodily fluids off the skin.

        With a final nod, the dark green and appropriately wrinkly unicorn nodded, "Now, hash anypony got about five gallonsh of that Shparkle RAD?"

        "Whut?"

        "Whelp, I don't think any of ush really needsh to drink it, and it'sh the besht darn tanning acid thish shide of Canterlot."

        "Whut? I used to drink that!"

        "Hehe, yeah, sho they shay, shonny. I tried to avoid the shtuff. It'sh why I've lived sho long."

        "But..."

        Hay Bale was stopped by a gentle hoof from Wicker Basket as the strange old taxidermist hobbled off to make a big tin bath of gently glowing soft drink. The pony that now passed for the Overmare shook her head, "Don't, he's been like that a long time, I don't think you need to tell him. You alright down there, Softie?"

        "No." Soft Touch sulked, eyes still fastened on the distant wall, upside down.

        "Good. We're going to put you in a bath of Sparkle RAD now, okay? It may feel a little weird..."

        The now much-flatter, trimmed and fixed-up flattened ghoul pony was lifted into the air within a sparkling soft pink field of magical energy, and gently lowered into the tin bath.

        "Oooh! That's kind of nice..." Soft Touch sniffed, somehow, nose catching the acidic scent of cola and radishes, "nice, but sticky. And tingly. How long did you say I've got to stay in here?"

        "About three to five days."

        "What!?"

        "That's what Pickles' said. I think we've got some... books or something? Daring Do?"

        "Oh, alright..." said Soft Touch as the first of the Daring Do series - only slightly scorched - was placed in front of her on a pedestal. She settled into the bath and prepared for some light reading. Then she scowled, "Hey, how am I going to turn the page? Anypony? Anypony? Oh horsefeathers."

***

        "Sparkle RAD is bad for you? I'll never drink it again!"

        "Yeah! Eeeww!"

        "Yuck!"

        The foals were silent for a while, then one of them said, "Auntie Frumpy? I'm thirsty! Have you got any Sparkle RAD left?"

        Frumpy Slacks sighed. Foals.

***

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