"I don't trust a pony that doesn't have something strange going on about them, 'cause that means they're hiding it from you."

I didn’t remember drinking last night. Though, in fairness, there were a lot of nights where I didn’t recall drinking. However, on many of those occasions, the collection of empty bottles around my body suggested that I had been and that they was the cause of my pounding headache. I wasn’t even surprised by that sort of revelation anymore after waking up to it on a nearly weekly basis.

Jackboot had occasionally pointed out to me that, were it not for my love of all things distilled, I’d probably have had enough bits and caps to buy most of New Reino by now. True though that may have been, it would also have meant that I wouldn’t have had all of that lovely whiskey and scotch. Granted, there were often nearby pools comprised of simply fascinating colors that suggested I had merely ‘borrowed’ that alcohol for only a few hours, but I never remembered those parts. I just remembered not feeling like complete shit…

...until the morning, at least, at which point I woke up feeling like complete shit. But at least I was feeling like shit for all of the right reasons then.

Hangovers made sense to me. I drank a lot, it fucked me up, and in the morning I suffered for being fucked up. It was a logical progression, and I could accept it.

It was those hours leading up to the drinking that I couldn’t ever understand.

The screaming. The rattling gunfire and thundering explosions. The splashes of crimson fluids that painted the walls of decrepit buildings and the desert scrabble of the Wasteland. The faces with those ghastly, twisted, expressions or anguish, pain, and terror.

Oh, Celestia, the screaming…

All the while, there I am, raining down a hail of bullets and dropping grenades on ponies that, realistically, didn’t stand a chance. How could they, when they were going up against a pegasus who had been killing since before she could even fly? When her whole talent revolved around killing?

Nopony could possibly stand up against an adversary whose destiny it was to end the lives of other ponies.

So many hundreds―or was it thousands by now?―of ponies dead at my hooves. As young as I was, how many more would end up reduced to smears of blood and viscera before my own life finally came to an end? I might even reach a million someday.

Successfully living up to your talent a million times should have been cause for celebration, I would think.

Me? I just felt the need for another drink so that, for even a couple of hours, I couldn’t hear the screaming…

I’d never encountered any other pony who ever abhorred living up to their destiny, so why did I?

The headache that I was feeling right now though wasn’t precisely the kind I usually had after a night of blissful ignorance. This was more of the ‘aftermath-of-a-bar-fight’ sort of headache. There’d been a few of those over the years as well; though I hardly ever felt like I’d lost those fights. Whatever I’d tussled with last night though, had definitely whooped my rump...ooh…

Praying to Celestia that there wasn’t any nearby sources of bright light, I chanced opening my eye. The dimness that surrounded me was about the only good thing about my situation.

I was on a bed. The kind that was fairly typical of the Wasteland: half of it was mold and the other half was mildew. My weapons were gone, all of them. My saddlebags weren’t in sight either. I wasn’t even wearing my eyepatch anymore! Who robbed somepony so thoroughly that they stole an eyepatch?! The only thing that had been left alone was my pipbuck. Unfortunately, it looked like the device was still on the fritz. The screen was black, and there was no sign of the hovering display in my field of vision.

My mind raced as I tried to piece together what had happened leading up to this point. The memories weren’t as clear as I would have liked, but there had been something about stick monsters, falling buildings, rainbow fireballs, and…a radiation pocket. I’d been caught in a radiation pocket. It hadn’t just been me either. I’d been with―

“You are conscious. That is a favorable sign.”

The stallion’s voice drew my attention to the doorway of the bedroom that I was lying in. Arginine’s gray bulk stepped through and I very quickly noticed one key detail about the genetically designed unicorn: he wasn’t wearing the explosive collar anymore.

My blood froze in my veins. Arginine’s collar...the intense radiation must have deactivated it in much the same manner as it had my pipbuck. Now he was free of the only means of restraining him that I’d had. Worse than that: I was unarmed. In fact, I could see my weapons and saddlebags draped over the stallion’s back. He was free, he was armed, and I was helpless. I was his prisoner now.

Arginine approached me slowly and my mind raced to come up with a plan. I wasn’t tied up or restrained. Whether that was some sort of oversight on the part of the stallion or he had simply not thought it worth the effort because of how stupendously fucked I was right now, I couldn’t say for sure. If it was the latter, I couldn’t deny that he had a point. I couldn’t fly, barely felt strong enough to offer up any sort of fight, and he could do whatever he wanted to me with his magic.

I spied an open window not too far away, and briefly entertained the notion of making a break for it. However, I could tell from the skyline that we were a good ways up. With one working wing, I wasn’t going to be able to do much more than slow myself down just enough so that when I hit the ground I merely broke my neck instead of outright liquefying on the pavement. It would be a lot messier than when those tree-beasts had shattered. Maybe if I could stall the stallion until I had a chance to get one of my guns back without him noticing?

The stallion’s horn glowed and enveloped my gear. Then, much to my wide-eyed dismay, Arginine floated them over and deposited them on the bed next to me, “your belongings have been decontaminated as best as I could manage. However, I was forced to use the last of the RadAway,” he walked over to the opened window and peered out, “it is unclear whether or not the danger had passed.”

When he turned around again, I had my compact out and pointed at him. There was a brief moment of surprise on the stallion’s face before it quickly shifted into a disappointed frown, “I had thought it was obvious that I don’t mean you any harm,” he said, gesturing at the pile of gear he’d returned to me.

“Your whole stable wants to kill everypony who’s not like you,” I said around the grip of the weapon in my mouth, not taking the barrel of the gun off of his head. Just because I didn’t know what game he was playing at didn’t mean that there wasn’t one. After all, he was designed to be a very intelligent pony.

He offered a slight nod, “that is correct,” he admitted, though he managed to make it sound rather convincingly like he regretted that fact, “however, I have begun...reevaluating our directives of late, based upon variables that have been omitted from my briefings.”

I didn’t take the gun off of him, but I was at least curious to hear where he was going with this, “such as?”

“Our leadership has indeed been quite silent on the topic of how other races will be approached once it has come time to deal with them. Our doctrine currently stands at: ‘if it is inferior, then it must be removed’. This has been in an effort to ensure that only the best ponies remain; and thus a better Equestria can arise. However, as you pointed out to me not long ago: there were two sides in the war. Unless modern ponies and zebras are superior to our ancestors, then another war would likely be inevitable…”

He sighed, “...and yet, the very act of removing the inferior zebras would be tantamount to a repeat of the very war that was fought two centuries prior. Our entire purpose has been to avoid exactly that scenario.

“I have spent the last several days considering alternatives,” Arginine grimaced, clearly not happy about the conclusions that he had come to, “but all of them are in opposition of the directives of our leadership. It is possible that I have simply not been privy to details of which they are aware, but…”

“You think they’re wrong,” I finished.

The stallion looked like he had just eaten something unpalatable, “I am open to the possibility that there was an...oversight along the way,” he corrected in a level tone. That was probably the best that I was going to get out of him at the moment as far as admitting his stable was run by genocidal monsters, “However, until I have confirmed that one way or the other, I have decided that your method of improving the Wasteland is at least deserving of further observation and evaluation.”

I blinked in surprise at the stallion, “wait, you’re going to help me stop your stable? Why?”

“It is my estimation that it would take the combined committed resources of nearly every pony in this entire valley to successfully oppose our forces. Though, likely a good deal more,” I could only have wished that Arginine’s tone sounded boastful right about now, and not it’s usual clinically detached ‘these are just the facts’ way of stating things. He was probably right if what they’d done to those stable ponies was any indication. They’d been better armed and equipped than most of the forces in the valley, and Arginine’s stable had basically just waltz through their defenses and slaughtered everypony in a matter of hours, “if that can be accomplished, and our stable defeated, then there is one inescapable fact that even our more stubborn leaders could not deny: we are not as superior as we think we are.

“Ultimately, it is my personal desire that the best ponies be the ones to inherit a reborn Equestria. It has been a goal that I have devoted my entire life to pursuing,” the stallion said with a wry smirk, “if it turns out that it is not my own stable who are those superior ponies, then so be it.”

The weapon in my mouth finally started to list away from the larger stallion, “you’re serious, aren’t you? You’d really help me.”

“We are not so different, you and I,” my gut reaction was to feel revulsion, recalling in vivid detail the abattoir of dissected ponies that was the room where I’d first encountered Arginine. I wanted to deny that I was anything like a pony who would do things like that to others...but then I saw the twisted faces in my head of those that I had killed over the years.

“I spent my life searching for those little things that could make a pony ‘better’,” the stallion went on, not seeming to have noticed my reaction, “lungs that could process more oxygen, a heart that could beat stronger, bones that were harder to break, skin that resisted radiation exposure; and I would preserve those traits so that they could be shared with the next generation.

“But you…” he looked back at me, his expression one of admiration, “I have observed that you are doing this, not on the genetic level, but on a sociological one. You have sought to preserve ponies who exhibit strong tendencies towards honesty, and cooperation; while culling those who tend towards deceit and betrayal. It is a rather extraordinary engineering process that I am not aware of having been considered by the progenitors of my stable.

“So, yes, I will help you,” he nodded, “because it would be foolish to dismiss any methods for building a better Equestria that so closely mirrored my own stable's right out of hoof.”

It was my turn to grimace now as I put away the weapon. Arginine was reading a lot more into my motives than I thought he had any cause to, “I’m not trying to ‘build a better Equestria’,” I said, “not really. I just don’t want what happened to me to happen to anypony else,” though I suppose it would be a much better world indeed if no filly or colt had to grow up watching their family get butchered. Still, I didn’t for a moment think that I was actually going to fix the whole world, or even the whole valley.

I was just one little pony. Nothing that I could possibly do would change things.

Arginine shrugged, “that sounds to me as though it would be an improvement over the current paradigm,” he said, “even my own work has been about making little improvements across many generations. You do not think that we always looked like this, do you?” he said, indicating his own appearance, “my efforts are merely building on the work of those that came before me. Those that inherit my duties will use my contributions as a foundation for their own endeavours.

“The Equestria that will someday come after us will be the legacy of the efforts of all the ponies that contributed to its rise; be they in the form of dominant genetic material, or exemplified character traits,” the stallion smiled wryly, “indeed, I would be quite curious to discover which of those two categories proves superior to the other…”

“You make it sound like a competition,” I snorted. Satisfied that Arginine wasn’t going to try and interrogate me or kill me or whatever, my attention now went to my gear and an evaluation of what the two of us had to help us get out of this death trap of a city. Without a working pipbuck we had no way of contact the others and getting Starlight to simply teleport us to safety. We’d have to make our own way to Wind Ryder’s and hope that the others made it there too.

“Survival is a competition,” the stallion argued, “be it against raiders, monsters, the elements, or whatever else confronts somepony: one side is competing to defeat the other. That which triumphs is superior, and has thus earned continued existence.”

“Even if it’s not your own stable?”

“Even then.”

He sounded like he believed it to. He probably did. Me? “I don’t want to believe that my family deserved to die because they couldn’t fight off the White Hooves,” I said quietly, “they were just brahmin farmers. What kind of chance did they have against a horde of tribals who’d spent their whole lives killing other ponies?

“My parents never hurt anypony―they never wanted to. They just wanted to be as happy as they could be out there on their little patch of Wasteland. They weren’t competing with anypony.”

“It is not about what anypony ‘deserves’,” the stallion responded. His tone wasn’t dismissive or critical though, as I might have expected based on the context of our discussion. It might not have been as empathetic as somepony like Foxglove would have sounded though. Arginine didn’t really ‘do’ empathy, I’d noticed. But, at least he wasn’t being as abrasive as he could have been, “the world pays no regard to the desires or dreams of ponies that live upon it.”

“Isn’t being a good pony enough to earn the right to be happy, then?” I shot back, feeling my eye starting to burn as a result of the topic of conversation.

“Perhaps, long ago it was. Perhaps, someday it can be again. It has been my observation, however, that the Wasteland―as it is―does not abide a ‘happy’ pony,” he responded evenly, holding my gaze, “the question is: do you believe that what you are doing will help make that a reality?”

“I just want to help―aarggh!” I cried out, clutching my head with both of my hooves and burying my face in the grimy mattress as a piercing pain flared up in my head. Then it promptly rushed all the way through my body, causing me to spasm as it went. When it finally passed, it was as though the pain had never happened. All I felt was a dull numbness. Arginine was looking down at me, his expression one of concern. I let out a frustrated sigh, “I just want the world to be better.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” at least, I felt fine at the moment, “Starlight said the headaches were normal and that they’d go away eventually,” I really hoped that ‘eventually’ came sooner, rather than later.

“Very well,” the stallion didn’t sound completely convinced, but that was his problem. It’s not like there was much that could be done other than letting Starlight Glimmer’s cutie mark spell run its course, “have you given any thought to our next course of action?”

Glad for the change in topic, I began looking around the room, “well, we can’t really do anything until we know it’s safe to go anywhere,” a thought occurred to me, “where are we exactly?”

“The top floor of a large hotel,” he explained, “being left with few alternatives, I continued to ascend the stairs after you struck your head and fell unconscious,” he pointed at the working radio sitting on a dresser across the room, playing some quiet music, “I began to notice that some electrical systems were still functional on the upper levels. It would seem that the high-intensity radiation bursts that migrate around the city remain relatively low to the ground. It would seem we are safe up here.”

“But we don’t know when we can go down,” I frowned.

“Not reliably, no,” the stallion agreed, “not without your pipbuck working.”

I glanced at the black screen, “I hope it’s not broken for good,” I muttered.

“It will just need to be reinitialized,” Arginine assured me. Well, that was some good news at least, “and I believe that I have come up with a means to determine if we are in danger of wandering into another radiation pocket,” even more good news! Maybe not shooting him in the head had been a good call after all.

“How’s that?” I asked as the stallion pulled over an old camera. I cocked my brow dubiously, “you don’t mean that we can honestly take pictures of it, do you?” would it even matter? I wasn’t aware of anypony who knew how to get those things to create new pictures anyway. I’d once brought up the notion of getting my picture taken with Jackboot when we’d found a camera early on, but apparently the process required the use of some chemicals that nopony bothered producing anymore.

“Not as such, no,” the gray unicorn admitted as his magic opened up the ancient device and removed the film from inside of it, “photographic film is treated in such a way that exposure to electromagnetic radiation generates a reaction. When that exposure is to visible light, it creates an image. More energetic forms, such as magical radiation, produce a similar, yet distinct change,” he tore a segment of the roll of film off and used his magic to loop it around my fetlock like a bracelet, securing it in place with a dollop of wonderglue. He then repeated the process with himself, “if we see the film begin to turn from brown to black, we will know that we have encountered unsafe levels of radiation.”

Then he gave a resigned shrug, “however, if neither of us notice the change, and the film is completely black by the time we glance at it, we will have already received a lethal dose.”

That...was not good news, “lethal as in drop dead right there lethal, or…?”

He shook his head, “not as such, no. However, depending on the intensity and duration of the exposure, we could well have as little as a day to acquire a dose of RadAway before expiring. It would...not be a pleasant death either.”

I looked down at the little roll of film, “and exactly how quickly would this change color?”

“That too would vary with regards to the intensity of the exposure. It could be gradual, over a few hours, or occur within a few seconds.”

I kind of wanted to have him glue a swath of this stuff right there on the bridge of my muzzle so that it would be in sight at all times, “and the alternative is just staying up here until we eventually run out of food and water,” I was more reminding myself of the reason why we had to take the risk at all than pointing out something that Arginine doubtlessly knew just as well as I did. With my pipbuck on the fritz, we couldn’t call the others to help. More the pity, as Starlight Glimmer’s teleportation magic would have been a gift from the Princesses right about now.

They probably even thought that the two of us had died, honestly. We’d split up, lost contact with them, and then the building we’d been in blew up and fell into a siwrling rainbow explosion. Since then, Ramparts would have been unable to get any sort of response from me or my pipbuck. Would they even bother to wait up for us at Wind Ryder’s? Without the information contained on my pipbuck―which I really hoped was still intact―it wasn’t like they had a whole lot of reasons to hang around at the old MoA safehouse for very long.

“Shall we see if it is safe to proceed?”

The question snapped me out of my reverie and I looked at the stallion for a long moment. I wasn’t entirely sure how far I was willing to trust him. His whole life had been devoting towards a mission to wipe out every pony that hadn’t been engineered by the scientists in his stable. Now he was telling me that he was willing to help me oppose him after just a few short weeks. Arginine didn’t strike me as the type to make rash decisions, but could somepony as analytical as him have really undergone any serious change of heart in that amount of time?

I couldn’t deny that his little explanation had a certain logic to it: if you wanted to make sure that the world was only full of the ponies who were the most fit to survive, then why not put your best up against your opponents? Was Arginine now trying to stack the deck against his own stable just to make sure that, if the other engineered ponies like him eventually came out on top, they wouldn’t have any doubt of how good they really were?

But even if his stable did win, did that make them right? This was a rigged match, no matter how I looked at it. Arginine’s stable had been preparing a population of the biggest, toughest, strongest, ponies that had ever lived, and training them to do battle on the surface. Meanwhile, while I couldn’t speak for the ponies of the rest of the Wasteland, the population of the Neighvada Valley had just been trying to get by. With the exception of various raider and tribal groups or some town guards, the ponies of the valley weren’t a very militant group at heart. Not in the way those ponies had been that stormed that stable.

Perhaps, I decided, he was trying to help me gather together as many ponies as I could to oppose his stable in order to make their job easier. If they managed to wipe all of the valley’s best combat forces out in a single fight, then the rest of Neighvada would be easy pickings. The smart move would seem like not agreeing to play this stallion’s game. On the other hoof, letting his stable just move from settlement to settlement, slaughtering their way through smaller groups who were too weak of possibly resist wouldn’t do anything but make eradicating all of us take longer. The only good that possibly did was hopefully buy time for other forces elsewhere in the Wasteland to mobilize in opposition.

Buying time for the rest of the world by taking as long as possible to die. Not the greatest plan in the world, to be sure. It certainly wasn’t the plan I would prefer. The alternative meant actively relying on one of those engineered ponies to help me...until the point of his sudden but inevitable betrayal.

Maybe, as long as I knew he was going to eventually betray me, that meant that I’d be able to do something to stop it and―

The searing pain shot through my whole body this time like a bolt of lightning. I was quick, at least. The gray stallion gave me a concerned look even as I waved him away. I was fine. This was just a part of the process that Starlight had told me about. It would pass. I just needed to focus on getting out of this damned city alive. When Arginine turned on us, then I’d just kill him and worry about getting myself as far from the valley as possible before things got too hot.

I grabbed a bottle of whiskey and took a couple of long pulls before replacing the stopper and tucking it back into my saddlebags. The caress of the alcohol on my brain helped me feel a little bit less like shit for thinking of abandoning the valley. I’d probably need to bring a whole case with me for the trip when I left.

“Let’s get out of here,” I muttered to the stallion as I finally crawled off the bed and gathered all of my gear together. My hooves still burned with a dull ache, but it wasn’t exactly painful. I chalked it up to all of the walking that I’d been doing over the past few days. My wing couldn’t heal fast enough.

“―and that is how Equestria was made.”

I stared at the larger gray stallion walking at my side as the two of us wandered down the deserted avenue of the Old Reino ruins, a dubious expression on my face. There were several long seconds of silence after Arginine concluded his story as I considered everything that he’d said. Then finally, I stated bluntly, “horseapples. You’re messing with me.”

“I assure you, that is the truth as I have been taught it,” he insisted in his usual monotone.

“Pegasi controlling the weather? Unicorns changing day into night? Snow spirits? The ‘magic’ of friendship fixing everything?” I made it quite clear that I regarded everything that he had told me up to this point as little more than some uncharacteristic attempt by the stallion to play some sort of practical joke by trying to get me to accept that absurd fantasy as being real so that I’d look quite the fool if I ever breathed a word of it to anypony else. Well, I may have been young, but that didn’t mean that I was an idiot. If he thought for a moment that I was that gullible, he had another thing coming!

“I will concede that there are certain...fanciful elements that I can not corroborate,” Arginine admitted, casting his gaze upwards at the overcast sky, “I have neither seen, nor heard recent accounts of, your race actively manipulating the weather.”

“And if there’s a unicorn out there controlling how long the days and nights are, who’s paying them and where do they live?” I continued, casting my gaze at the stallion’s odd double-horn, “you’re supposed to be super-powerful with magic, right? Go ahead, make it night. Right now.”

He glared at me and rolled his eyes in annoyance, muttering under his breath, “as I just said: ‘fanciful elements’. I have suspicions that the tale is meant to be more allegorical than factual.”

“Ally-who?”

Another sigh as Arginine shook his head and frowned, “it is meant to teach a moral lesson. Your vocabulary is atrocious.”

I shot a glare at the stallion and snorted, “well, excuse me! While you were busy getting your ‘fancy stable education’ about words that nopony else ever uses in normal conversations, I was learning how to prospect ruins and kill raiders. You know, important things that actually matter!”

“I fail to see how articulation is somehow a waste of time.”

“Because any math beyond adding up how many caps a box of whiskey costs doesn’t matter out in the Wasteland,” I said, matter-of-factly to the stallion, flashing a satisfied smile as I declared myself the victor in this particular debate. Given his stunned expression, which was immediately followed up by a defeated looking shake of his head, I concluded that Arginine recognized my correctness as well.

My self-satisfied smile quickly faded as I looked around at our surroundings, “speaking of caps,” I said with a frown, “we’re actually running pretty low. Rent’s due in a week. I really need to put in an order for proper barding with Sapi. You need a weapon or two…” with each addition to the list of upcoming expenses, my expression soured even further. Gathering together the medical supplies for this trip had consumed most of our liquid capital. There was enough left for provisions and a few odds and ends, but I foresaw quite a few big-ticket items coming up in the future.

The Ministry of Awesome seemed to have invested an unanticipated level of effort into concealing their operations in the Neighvada Valley; to include outright lying to the other ministries that they were working with. This suggested to me that even when we finally managed to find their hub, it probably wasn’t going to be as simple as just walking inside and picking up a few crates of conveniently gift-wrapped guns for delivery to Princess Luna and Ebony Song. This was going to be the sort of place that still possessed intact defense, and that meant bringing substantial firepower to overcome them.

I cast an eye to my fetlock and the length of film that was wrapped around it. The color remained unchanged as of yet, “we need to do some prospecting,” I don’t think that I’ve ever uttered those words with such reluctance before. Not that slinking through a whole bunch of buildings on the verge of collapse was something that I often looked forward to doing even under the most ideal of circumstances. Honestly, having had―sweet Celestia, has it really been three?!―buildings fall either on, around, or out from under, me in the last couple of weeks alone, I was feeling especially hesitant about skulking through another one.

This wasn’t going to become like, a thing, was it? Because that would really suck.

Arginine wasn’t looking especially happy about the idea either. He understood―probably better than I did, honestly―what the health risks we faced were if we lingered in this city. Neither of us were willing to bet that there weren’t more of those freaky stick monsters either. Then, of course, was the fact that the stallion was already pretty far outside of his comfort zone as it was. He wasn’t a Wastelander, not really. I got the same sort of vibe from Starlight, but she at least sounded like she was coming around to the reality.

Whatever Arginine might have said to me earlier about helping me fight against his stable in the interest of making sure that the ‘best ponies’ came out on top no matter who won; I wasn’t quite so naive as to trust that he wasn’t still confident that it would be his fellow engineered ponies. From his point of view, being out here was a temporary inconvenience that would be addressed once his stable emerged victorious and properly subdued the Wasteland. Then he’d go back to the life that he’d had before.

Honestly, aside from myself and Ramparts, the rest of the group wasn’t truly accustomed to life out here. Foxglove was closer than the other two, but as often as her thoughts wandered back to her old life in her stable, I had to wonder whether she really thought of this as her ‘new life’. Sometimes she’d get that wistful lilt in her voice, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she wasn’t entertaining the notion that she might find a way to get her transgressions forgiven and go back to her old life in the stable, or something close to it. She certainly wasn’t a huge proponent of getting into the sorts of scrapes that you had to expect out here.

Even Ramparts though...yeah, he had been born on the surface, and he clearly knew about taking care of himself out here. On the other hoof, I wasn’t sure if I was comfortable calling him a ‘Wastelander’. After all, he lived in Seaddle. Like, he really lived there. Sure, Jackboot and I had rented a place in the city, but I never thought of it as any sort of ‘home’. It was just a place where I could lock up any extra gear that was too troublesome to haul all over the valley all the time and catch a couple night’s sleep in a genuine bed. I’d spent the overwhelming majority of my life, since Jackboot had found me, out here, in places just like this, looking for valuable junk and tracking down dangerous ponies.

It was what I was good at...er, what I had been good at, I guess. My eyes wandered back to my flank and the dull double bars that now rested where my old cutie mark had. The sign of ‘mediocrity’, Starlight Glimmer had called it. I guess that meant that I wasn’t going to continue to be particularly adept at hunting down bandits and taking their stuff. Not that I’d really gone out of my way to do something like that since Jackboot had…

Well, since I’d become the one who was calling the shots, anyway.

That still felt really weird; being the pony making the decisions. It wasn’t something I was comfortable doing. I wasn’t a ‘leader’ pony. That had been Jackboot’s job. My purpose had been to follow his instructions and kill things as thoroughly as possible. I wasn’t quite so naive as to think that was how things were always going to be, of course. Some day the old stallion would have simply gotten too old for this sort of life. When that finally happened, in my mind, we’d settle down somewhere. Preferably on my parents’ old property and give the whole ‘rancher pony’ thing a try.

I just...I couldn’t see myself as continuing to do the things that we were doing on my own. I’d have been terrified that without somepony there to keep me metaphorically ‘grounded’, I’d start to slip. My greatest fear had been that, left to my own devices, I might lose sight of who were ‘acceptable targets’ and go full raider. That idea terrified me. When all of this was finally over with...I’d have to find something else to do. Being a wandering vigilante was out of the question.

Foxglove would have probably been happy working for somepony like Sapi, or maybe even opening up a little junk shop of her own down in Shady Saddles. That town could have certainly used a decent repair pony or tinkerer. She’d be able to practically stamp out her own caps if she was willing to mod guns and barding in New Reino, but something told me that she wouldn’t be particularly comfortable living in that place. Yet, for some reason, she was still following me around. I still didn’t quite understand that.

In the beginning, when Jackboot and I had rescued her, she’d felt a need for our protection. She’d come from a bad place in her life, and I think she liked being around ponies that she was confident wouldn’t do the sorts of things that others had to a pony like her. She’d needed time to get her legs under her until she could stand on her own. She’d adapted quick enough, and had proven to be a huge help. I couldn’t deny that. But even after it seemed like she’d recovered, she’d stayed.

At first, with the sorts of comments and questions she’d bring up with me―usually while Jackboot was out of earshot―I was getting the impression that she’d been projecting her own fears onto me. She’d met up with some stallions when she’d been younger and more naive and it hadn’t gone well for her. So, I could at least understand why she’d been a little...we’ll go with ‘concerned’ about the teen mare wandering around with an unrelated stallion old enough to be my father. It was obvious fairly early on that she thought that Jackboot was taking advantage of me or abusing me in some way. To the violet unicorn, that was what Wasteland stallions did with young mares after all.

I had not reacted well to that, for a couple of reasons. First, was the allegation from this strange unicorn, who knew nothing about either of us, that the stallion I respected most in the whole world would ever hurt me―or any mare―like that. He’d put his life on the line for me more times that I could possibly count, and I’d done the same for him. I felt closer to Jackboot than I ever had to anypony that I’d ever known in my life. How dare she imply he’d do something as monstrous as that!

Then, of course, was the semi-related fact that, well...I had long entertained the notion that someday, when I was finally old enough, that Jackboot would have that sort of relationship with me. Wow, had admitting that to Foxglove not gone over well with her! To me it had made perfect sense. He was the noblest stallion I knew, and I trusted him with my life. The horrors and trials that we’d overcome in the years we’d known each other gave us a connection that I don’t think I’d ever have with anypony else. When and how was I ever going to meet anypony else with whom I’d have that sort of deep connection with? Who could ever compare?

Foxglove hadn’t seen it that way. It had somehow reaffirmed with her the notion that I was being manipulated. Because of course I must have been! I was a young mare. He was an older stallion. That explicitly meant that I was just a puppet whose strings he was pulling. All those years of mentoring, tutoring, training, and life saving, were just a clever ploy to endear me to him! All of my shameless―and on occasion, not so shameless―flirting and coy suggestions that he routinely spurned were merely a plot to trick me into bedding him!

She had been so sure that was the case, and it had hurt me so much that she thought that. Both that she had thought so little of me, but even more so that she had thought that way about him.

Little had I suspected that things would get worse.

Then I’d found out that Jackboot hadn’t been the hero I’d thought him to be. He’d been a monster. The same caliber of pony that I’d spent my life exterminating from the valley. Foxglove had been right, I’d discovered. She had been right about him, and about me. At least, that was how it had felt, at first. Inexplicably, it had been that same unicorn who had worked to mend our relationship. I still don’t know what prompted her change of heart, but I was thankful for it. There had still been an ache, deep down, knowing that Jackboot had kept those facts of his past from me. Still, I was grateful to know that he was working to be that good stallion that existed in my mind. I’d even started to come back around to those thoughts of, maybe, finally getting him to see me as somepony he could love as more than merely an adopted daughter.

Then I’d found him with Foxglove.

Hadn’t that been a whirlwind of emotions? Here was this mare, who had never liked him, had always derided him in my presence, and had vehemently insisted that he was just another manipulative bastard who only cared about getting what he wanted from mares, and that only a complete fool couldn’t see that from a mile away.

Apparently all of that didn’t apply to her for some reason; because she seemed to have liked him well enough in that stable clinic when I’d caught her riding him when she was supposed to be ‘tending to his wounds’. ‘Strictly for the mares’ my ass!

At that moment I’d started to question why she’d continued to travel with us. Had it really been to protect my virtue, like she’d suggested, or was she more interested in getting her hooves on Jackboot? Had all of her derision just been some sort of ploy to try and drive me away from him in order to steal him for herself? At the time, that had felt like the whole reason she’d kept on traveling with us. As much as she seemed to hate Jackboot before she knew he was a White Hoof, I’d have figured that little bit of information would be the nail in the coffin of her association with us.

Instead she had broken him out of Republic custody. Twice, if you count her help getting him away from those bounty hunters. I’d thought she was doing it to help me. Now I wasn’t so sure. Of course, none of that explained what she was doing still hanging around me.

Guilt, perhaps? Did she actually feel bad about taking Jackboot from me like she had? I know that she’d told me she likes fixing up my gear, but compared to the sort of safe and comfortable living she could have doing that exact thing in a town, I was having trouble accepting it. Yes, it was nice to have her around, and I liked her well enough when I wasn’t actively thinking about how she’d been a wedge between me and Jackboot, but I still felt like I wasn’t getting the whole story from her.

I hung my head and sighed. Honestly, if it wasn’t for my actively needing help tracking down these weapons for the Republic so that they’d make peace with the Rangers and start fighting Arginine’s stable, I couldn’t see myself traveling with her anymore. Or any of them, for that matter. None of them had any reason to stay. Our association was just...convenient, and very temporary. The moment we found the Ministry of Awesome hub, Ramparts would go back to the guard. Starlight would have her answers about this Moonbeam pony she was looking for, and would surely be on her way to...elsewhere.

Arginine would probably want to hang around the Republic. If he was sincere about wanting to help fight his own stable, he’d be able to do that better with Princess Luna and her guards than with me. I certainly wasn’t going to be getting any more involved in any of this.

Then it’d be down to me and Foxglove again, and I couldn’t fathom the violet unicorn wanting to keep wandering with me for any reason but some variation of pity, and I wasn’t going to tolerate that if it was the case. With her gone...it’d just be me.

What was I going to do? I wasn’t a killer anymore, so I didn’t need to worry about going after raiders and such. The trouble was that I didn’t have any other real skills beyond fighting. Other than vigilante, mercenary, soldier, or raider, there weren’t a whole lot of jobs that I saw myself as qualified to do; and they were all the sort of job that I was no longer destined to do. I seemed to have overlooked a key step in my ‘not killing ponies anymore’ plan…

Maybe there was a need for courier work, getting small packages between the towns quickly? Being a pegasus, I could do it a lot faster than most other ponies and I’d be harder to waylay. Did I really want to be a mailmare for the rest of my life? I hadn’t planned on settling down on my parents’ old ranch quite this early in my life; and that job would be a bit much for a lone little pegasus besides.

Fortunately there was still a lot to get done before I had to think about that in much more detail.

The most immediate item being getting our hooves on a lot of caps.

“If I might make a suggestion,” Arginine piped up, raising a hoof and pointing it off to our left, “I suspect that there will be worthwhile material to be found within that structure.”

I rolled my eyes, “you can just say: that place should have good loot,” I said with an exasperated sigh before turning my head to look in the direction that he was pointing. The building lay on the far side of a massive parking lot that was still littered with the rusted hulks of various small carts and wagons designed to be towed by a single pony. It was three stories in height with the words, ‘Grand Reino Mall’ emblazoned over the remnants of what had clearly once been a very impressive looking entrance, “and yeah, you’re probably right. Let’s check it out.”

Now, over the many years that I’ve been investigating old ruins and even the odd abandoned stable, I’ve come across my fair share of disturbing scenes. Clusters of skeletons posed in vignettes that served as small windows into those last moments of the victims of the last days of the Great War were nothing new to me. Certainly they weren’t something that tended to fill me with any sort of unease.

These did.

I found myself actually pause at the entrance and spend nearly a full minute taking in the sight. I had anticipated finding a few scattered bodies or signs of ponies taking brief refuge within the structure that might have been caught shopping when the alerts of an imminent attack sounded. However, there were no ‘scattered remains’ in this old mall. There were hundreds of bodies here. Perhaps even a thousand or more if this scene was played out on the other floors.

This place hadn’t been a simple improvised shelter; they had turned it into a town! Many storefronts had been converted into homes shared by multiple families. Some, clearly, had remained shops and cafes of various sorts, their wares still proudly on display for the benefit of prospective customers. Nothing appeared to be in any particular disarray. There were no obvious signs that the ponies here had met a violent end either.

They’d just...died.

For a long while, I heavily debated the merits of venturing into this old mall. The simplest explanation for how the ponies here had died was the same reason that anypony who lingered too long in Old Reino died: the extreme radiation. However, I found it outright preposterous to believe that a whole population of pony pioneers had elected to establish a settlement in this mall, and done so with such speed, that they’d all summarily been caught unawares by the lethal radioactive pockets that wandered the city. The level of conversion a development of this place suggested that the ponies here had made this place their home for months, if not years, before succumbing.

I’d grown up being taught that these ruins had been the result of a megaspell that the zebras had unleashed at the end of the war. However, unless the ancient ponies of Equestria had been living the sort of post-apocalyptic lifestyle that the ponies of the modern Wasteland did today, I found that quite doubtful. This looked very much like the sort of settlement that I’d expect to find today. Well, mostly, anyway.

Upon closer inspection of some of the materials available for sale and the items festooned about the residences, I didn’t observe quite the same level of abuse that I was familiar with today. Aside from the aging effects that one would expect from nearly two centuries of weather and exposure, not much of the equipment looked as well used as what you’d find in a place like Seaddle or New Reino. It was of a quality that seemed to have been more or less freshly acquired from an old ruin. This stuff had been salvaged, but didn’t look to have needed all that much attention to get it back into working order. This was especially true of the machining tools and cooking surfaces that we found. In an older settlement, there’d be all sorts of signs or secondary, tertiary―and whatever came after that―repairs as ponies struggled to keep machines working two hundred years past their warranty expiration.

None of that was evident here. At worst, there were just signs that ponies had moved equipment from wherever it had been to wherever it currently was, and made a few additions to get it working. Like running a gas line into a clothing boutique in order to get a stove to work so that the family living in that boutique could cook hot meals. Or reinforcing the wiring of an old electronics store so that it could support an arc welder without blowing a fuse. That sort of thing. The sort of thing you’d have seen in a fresh settlement in the Wasteland a few months after the world ended.

“Any ideas about what killed these ponies?” I asked Arginine as I began to pick over the items covering the counter in said electronics shop. The pony that had taken over proprietorship of this place had apparently sought to satisfy this settlement’s needs for creature comforts like music and even visual media; repairing radios and televisions and adapting them to work with the much lower energy availability of their new home. I was confident that I could find some interested buyers back in Seaddle.

The gray stallion was perusing the cupboards of a cafe in a quest for suitable foodstuffs, “my initial thought was of disease,” he said while gathering together some packages of Fancy Buck Cakes, “but there is little indication of an epidemic.”

“How do you mean?” disease actually did sound very plausible. It explained the lack of violence and abundance of bodies.

“A viral or bacterial outbreak would have started in an easily identifiable portion of the population. There would be quarantine zones. Evidence of widespread medical treatment in ponies’ homes. As of yet, I have seen no sign of such things.”

He was right. Aside from the odd empty bottle of Rad-X or bag of RadAway, there wasn’t a whole lot of medical waste that would have suggested that whatever had passed for a medical staff here had been fighting long and hard against a disease; and those radiation treatments could just have easily been the trash left behind by particularly foolhardy prospectors―like us.

“The lack of blood stains and gunfire precludes raiders. This population would have been too large to have been overrun by any such group anyway,” Arginine continued.

“I seem to recall a whole stable being wiped out by your kind,” I pointed out, moving on to a small clinic and picking through the supplies that looked to still be serviceable. The Rad-X looked like it was still good; but it seemed that the packages of RadAway had been rendered nearly clear by so much exposure to intense radiation over the years. Unfortunate.

I cast another glance at the film on my fetlock. Arginine was sure that this stuff would actually detect exposure, right?

He grunted, “my stable was not conducting surface operations at the time this settlement met its end.”

“How can you even be sure when this place did die off?”

A calendar was floated over in front of me, wrapped in Arginine’s golden glow. However, this was not an example of the sort of date tracker that would have been professionally produce en masse for the consumers of Old Equestria. This calendar had quite clearly been created after the end of the world by a pony intent on tracking the passage of time, “the date on this calendar suggests that these ponies died just four years after the end of the war.”

I frowned, “or they just stopped bothering to keep track of the day,” I pointed out. Of course, everything else that I had seen up to this point did accord pretty well with these ponies all dying off a long time ago, but not when the world ended. Four years was more than enough time for this level of development needed to turn a shopping mall into the sort of town I was seeing, while still allowing for everything to look only lightly used.

“That still doesn’t explain what killed them.”

Arginine grunted an acknowledgement and the calendar went away as he moved on to pillage somepony’s home.

The next place I came to that was of interest was some sort of security office. In fact, it looked like it had been a security office before the war and had simply been expanded to fill the role of the headquarters for the town’s guard force. Complete with several sets of salvaged barding, most of which was stenciled with, ‘R.P.D.’ Naturally none of it was style for wear by pegasi. Fortunately a few judicious cuts with a chef’s knife from a nearby deli fixed that problem. There was also a wide variety of firearms available, which was good news because whatever had put my pipbuck on the fritz seemed to have killed the electronic components of my submachine guns as well.

I invited Arginine over to outfit himself as well after spending a couple minutes mentally weighing the risks or genuinely arming him. In the end, I decided that, if the stallion really had wanted to kill me, he’d already been provided with ample opportunity. As pragmatic as he was, the unicorn was definitely not playing some sort of weird mind games with me in an effort to kill me later is some obscenely specific manner. With an injured wing and no more Eyes Forward Sparkle, it was in my best interests to not ben the only armed pony of our little pair.

He selected a set of barding for himself―which only just managed to fit despite having once belonged to a pony dubbed with the nickname, ‘Gordo’ according to the name patch on the chest. My barding had once belonged to, ‘Smalls’. A part of my mind really hoped that I hadn’t finished doing all of my growing just yet. I had no aspirations to attain a size on the level of a ‘Gordo’, but I was starting to feel just a little self-conscious at the moment.

Weapon-wise, I found an automatic carbine with a sufficient quantity of five-five-six ammunition to ensure a decent of use out of it Along with them, I managed to procure a couple additional boxes of the forty-five ACP for my compact. Going back to the traditional battle saddle was going to take some getting used to, but at least it possessed an attached laser designator that would hopefully make up for the lack of SATS. The mouth bit tasted like dusty old ass though. I was really going to miss voice commands.

Arginine selected a magical energy rifle that seemed to be in remarkable condition compared to what I was used to seeing in operation in the Wasteland. He examined the weapon for a good while, inspecting at and even cracking open part of the casing in order to get a closer look at its inner workings. Seemingly satisfied with what he found within, I watched as he left the security station and headed for the nearby shop with the workbench and tools. Curious, I followed to see exactly what it was that he intended to accomplish.

He laid the weapon down on the bench and retrieved a pair of delicate looking probes with his magic. The pair of slim metal rods darted into the exposed interior of the beam rifle and began to rotate and prod various components. After a couple of minutes, Arginine withdrew the tools and inserted a cartridge of the refined gem dust that served as a power source for such weapons. He stepped past me into the expansive agora beyond the little shop. The stallion lifted the sleek looking beam rifle in his magic and peered down its sights along the thoroughfare. Then his magic depressed some control as I heard the rifle let out a brief, high-pitched, whine as a green line of energy shot forth from the tip of the barrel.

The stallion lowered the weapon, frowned, and then inspected the side of the energy rifle a second time as he floated the tools back over and additional adjustments were made. Again he lifted the weapon and fired. This time the beam was a deep violet. A third round of adjustments made under more intense scrutiny yielded a lance of vibrant blue light, which finally seemed to satisfy the stallion. He returned to the security office and procured a dozen more energy packs before he caught my inquisitively raised eyebrow.

“You wish to inquire about something?”

“I thought you were a medical pony,” I gestured at the weapon, “do all the medical ponies from your stable know enough about energy weapons to make those sorts of changes?”

Arginine considered the rifle for a few seconds before slipping it into a set of retention straps sewn into his barding meant to keep weapons of various sizes from simply falling off while the wearer went about their duties. Clearly something intended with unicorns and their telekinesis in mind, “I would suspect not,” he admitted, “though there is nothing particularly surprising about my knowledge.”

“Oh?”[

“Many of the dissection implements that I utilized in my former duties with my stable were energy-based. Granted, the scale and intensity were much smaller than what is present in a weapon such as this one. However, the general mechanics and the theory behind them are much the same.

“Over the years, I learned that certain adjustments yielded a beam that would cut tissue more cleanly in a shorter amount of time. It is a more power-intensive setting, to be sure, but I am willing to accept the tradeoff in endurance for significantly increased lethality,” he then added in a more dower tone that accompanied a glance outside, “given the quality of the threats that we have recently encountered.”

While I wasn’t exactly thrilled to learn that he’d figured out how to make a deadlier magical energy weapon based on years of dicing up innocent ponies, his ending statement did remind me that I should probably keep in mind a need for replenishing our heavier ordinance. We’d come out here with basically no explosives after all, “Right. Grenades…”

Not that there seemed to be many of them available here though. Four fragmentation, one green-banded, and two spark. While that was an admirable amount of armament for a single pony, I found it to be a paltry haul from what was effectively a whole settlement’s armory. Either they’d gone through their own supply at an alarming rate or had never had many to begin with. Still, even those few was a far sight better than the ‘none’ that we’d had five minutes ago. I passed a couple of the fragmentation and a single green-banded orbs to Arginine. First high-powered weaponry, and now explosives. Look at me placing all of this trust in a pony I’d been keeping in my thrall with a slave collar just yesterday!

Feeling a little bit better about our chances of dealing with the sort of threats that I was used to encountering in old ruins―malfunctioning robots, ghouls, automated defenses, and the like―we continued to pick through the remains of the inexplicably slain settlement. We bounced the odd theory off one another as we went, based upon what we were finding, but nothing really seemed to satisfy either of us completely. No signs of violence. No evidence of pandemic. Unless everypony here had elected for some sort of mass suicide, there was no reason for them all to be dead.

The presence of this settlement also called into question the universally agreed upon cause of the ruin’s dangers. Obviously, those surges of lethal radiation that sprang up weren’t the result of some co-opted megaspell that the zebras had used at the end of the war. Whatever the cause was―and perhaps it was indeed still megaspell related―had happened much later. As little as four years later, if Arginine’s theory was right.

Was that what had happened here? Had this settlement been the target of a megaspell long after the war was ended? Both of us agreed that that explanation was perhaps the most probability answer to the question regarding the fate of the ponies here. However, what that theory didn’t address was who would have been behind it. Surely no raiding group would have unleashed a weapon that precluded them from looting their victims. It could have been some zebra remnant from shortly after the war, but that just seemed really petty to do after the whole world had basically been ended as a result of the conflict.

Maybe it had all simply been an accident?

More than once, Jackboot and I had very nearly become the instruments of our own demise while pokey around in ancient ruins and manipulating equipment that we didn’t fully understand. It was quite possible that the ponies here were trying to salvage something that they thought would be of use and ended up unleashing a weapon instead. An accident would certainly have explained why all of the ponies here looked like they’d died without experiencing any particular distress or concern. They’d never seen it coming.

My thoughts were interrupted by a sign that indicated a door leading to the malls utility areas beneath the shopping plazas. I nodded my head in its direction, “we might find some more valuable components down below. Seaddle and New Reino are always looking for parts for their spark generators,” it took a lot of effort to keep those larger settlements flush with power, and fabricating new parts was out of the question. A lifetime of salvaging had taught me what to look for that were the most cost effective to take with us.

Arginine wasn’t too thrilled at the prospect of descending below ground level. Truth be told, neither was I really. But, if we wanted to get as much out of this trip as we could in the least amount of time, then cannibalizing the industrial equipment below was the best way to do that. Otherwise the two of us could spend hours picking through the shops and homes in this massive shopping complex. The weapons and ammunition that we’d taken from the security office would fetch a couple of thousand, all told; and that would do us for a while. But there was no way of knowing exactly how much smaller that area in the mountains was going to get once we plugged in the new numbers we could hopefully extract from Wind Rider’s. Depending on the size of the area involved, we could spend a couple of weeks out there.

The last thing I wanted to do was had to dive through more ruins out there or, worse, have to come back to resupply and then make a second trip out. I wanted up to go out there with enough food, water, medicine, ammunition, and whatever else we needed to last us a month; and that meant we needed a lot of capital.

Down below, I found myself wishing that my pipbuck light still worked. Arginine’s horn was the only source of light that the two of us had to navigate with as we followed the placards in the narrow utility corridors beneath the mall. I was actually a little surprised by how little sign of habitation we found down here, given the extensive population that had clearly made this place their home. The basements of the Seaddle Ruins were used quite heavily by ponies capitalizing on every square yard of space that they could get their hooves on. I suppose that this settlement’s population hadn’t had a chance to reach a point where they needed to look beyond the shops. Perhaps with a few more decades…

Finally we found the generator room. Well, what was left of it, at any rate. I barely managed to bite back an aggravated groan when Arginine’s horn revealed the gaping hole in the floor where one end of a massive spark generator could be seen poking up into view. We carefully made our approach, mindful of the possibility of additional collapses, and peered into the fissure.

I blinked and glanced back the way that we had come, “I didn’t know there was a second basement level. The stairway only went down one flight…”

What we beheld was a whole additional level into which both of the emergency power generators had been swallowed. One of them in its entirety, the other only partially so, along with an impromptu ramp that we could use to descend down to this deeper level.

Arginine frowned, considering the sight as he gave a slight grunt of effort and increased the intensity of the light generated from his horns, “I am unconvinced that what we are seeing is part of the mall’s original construction,” he said, looking around, “the contours of the walls and floor resemble those of a stable.”

Upon a closer inspection using his brighter light, I concluded that the stallion was correct. While I hadn’t grown up in one of them, as he had, I’d certainly rifled through enough of the defunct ones to recognize their trademark corridor style. My expression actually brightened. While we might not get as much from the damaged generators as I had hoped, stables were always teeming with valuable salvage, “a stable means water talismans and pipbucks,” I said as I trotted down the ramp, motioning for the stallion to follow, “this is our lucky day!”

The gray pony behind me seemed hesitant but, then again he wasn’t the experienced prospector that I was. He did follow in my wake of course, using his magical light to reveal our surroundings. We’d come out in the middle of some corridor or other. I glanced around for the usual signs that would indicate which direction we would need to go in order to reach any of the various sectors of the stable. However, and quite surprisingly, I did not find any such signs.

In fact, now that I had a good look at things, there was quite a bit else that wasn’t present. My initial assumption when we’d beheld the darkness was that the stable was without power. However, it was more than that. There wasn’t just a lack of power to the lights, there was a lack of lights. There were no signs of any fixtures whatsoever.

“Unfinished?” I asked allowed as Arginine noted the absence as well with a deeper frown.

“That would seem to be the case.”

I was feeling less sure about our chances of finding worthwhile material. If they hadn’t gotten around to putting in something like lights, then how likely were they to have built up the water purification system? Still, as valuable as those talismans were to the settlements in the valley, it was worth our time to at least look around for them. For a little while, anyway.

“Well, if the talismans were actually installed, they’ll be on a lower level,” I motioned for the two of us to keep walking. Surely we’d find a stairwell eventually. I noticed that Arginine had stopped after only traveling for a few yards and turned to see what the problem was, “RG?”

The unicorn was silent for a few moments, his eyes studying something on the floor intently. Then he tapped at the metal with a hoof, “the designers erred,” he said. I moved closer to see what he was talking about, and then I noticed it too: at a junction of two segments of corridor, they were offset by about half an inch. It certainly wasn’t very much, and I was actually surprised that Arginine had spotted it in the low light conditions.

“Maybe they were going to fix it later,” I shrugged, “or maybe they figured it wasn’t a big deal,” considering the stable had never been finished anyway, it was really a moot concern in the end.

“Perhaps,” he didn’t sound very satisfied with those possibilities, but he looked up nonetheless and fell into step behind me, “let us continue.”

For a stable that ‘wasn’t finished’, I had to admit that this place was simply massive! We’d walked in a nearly straight line for fifteen minutes without reaching a clear end of the stable. I’d never been in one of the Old World shelters that extended so far in one direction before. Had Stable-Tec been building a facility that was designed to contain the population of all of Old Reino? Because that was what it felt like they had been doing.

“...and that makes ten,” I heard the unicorn mutter under his breath, sounding quite annoyed.

I stopped and looked back, “what makes ten? Ten what?”

He pointed his hoof at the ground once more, “we have passed by ten segments that possess the design error I noted earlier,” indeed, I saw that we’d just crossed another portion of corridor that was offset, “in addition, I have noted an equal number of left and right deviations between these faults, spaced at identical intervals.”

“So...you mean that the layout’s repeating itself?” Honestly, that didn’t have me nearly as concerned as it seemed to have Arginine. A lot of the features of stables looked to have been cut from some sort of stencil or something to me. The same walls, floors, light fixtures, and doors. The same beds and lockers. It was obvious that the material used to build these places was mass produced and assembled onsite to make things go smoother during the construction phase of a stable. The notion that the layouts were treated the same way wasn’t something I found particularly noteworthy.

Arginine, on the other hoof, seemed to take exception to this, “indeed. That it highly unusual on this scale.”

“What are you talking about? I’ve seen lots of stables where the hallways and rooms looked identical. Frankly, I can see why you stable ponies needed signs all over the place to keep from getting lost. Every corridor looks identical.”

“On the contrary, while many sections are repeated if their utility is identical―like personal quarters―that does not happen on the scale that we are witnessing here. We have traveled just over a mile, and nothing of the layout has varied. A layout, I will remind you, that has yet to identify the purpose that it is supposed to serve for the stable,” he motioned me down one of the side passages that we had been ignoring in our search for a lower level. As we walked, he gestured at the open doorways.

That was something else that I had noticed was not present: doors. In fact, I couldn’t even see the slots where the signature sliding hatches were supposed to even go! “These are not quarters. Nor cafeterias, or workshops, or common areas. None of these rooms serve any clear purpose. They simply...are.”

Okay, now I was starting to feel a little nervous myself. Arginine was right, now that I took a moment to really think about it: this didn’t really feel like any stable I’d even been in. There weren’t clearly defined purposes to these rooms. It was more than the lack of furniture too. Where were the water lines for bathrooms? Where were the heating and cooling system vents? Where was anything at all except for seemingly unending stretches of metal hallways and empty rooms?

“...Maybe we should get back to the mall,” I offered, no longer feeling at all inclined to remain in this not-quite-a-stable.

“That is an agreeable course of action,” the stallion nodded.

“A simple ‘yeah’ is fine, RG,” I sighed as I turned and started trotting back the way that we had come at a rather gingerly pace. The stallion rolled his eyes and kept pace beside me.

About five minutes into our return, I felt my steps slow until the two of us were stationary. My ears were going wild, and judging from Arginine’s reaction, he was hearing it too, “RG?”

“Yes, Miss Windfall?” the slightly strained tone of the stallion’s voice didn’t do a lot to fill me with confidence.

“What does that sound like to you?”

“I am not intimately familiar with the various models of automatons that persist in the Wasteland. Those intelligence briefings were more for the benefit of security and reconnaissance forces than for specimen evaluation staff,” I was too focused on the noise I was hearing to glare at the stallion for his referring to ponies as ‘specimens’, “however, I believe that the sound and the vibrations of the deck plating are reminiscent of some sort of tracked variety.”

That was what I had been afraid of. In my experience, there was really only a single example of a Great War robot that used treads in place of wheels: and that was ultrasentinels. In my life, I’d had a single encounter with those things, and the fight had been technically inconclusive as I had taken the option to fly away from it while Jackboot managed to avoid detection and stay hidden until it passed. I most certainly did not envy the prospect of fighting one of those death machines under these confined conditions.

A light that was emanating from a source that was not Arginine’s horn appeared from around a corner about fifty yards ahead of us. Through its glare, I caught only the faintest glimmer of the outline of the machine, and it was a match for what I remembered the other ultrasentinel looking like before I’d flown away from it as fast as my wings would take me.

Maybe it was the shock of seeing one down here in this eerie not-quite-a-stable. Maybe I was just terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought. Maybe I was just an idiot. In any case, instead of running for my life like I should have, I but down on the trigger bit near my mouth and unloaded the entirety of my carbine’s magazine down the corridor, Either in a show of solidarity, or because he had come down with a case of the ‘stupids’ too, brilliant spears of sapphire light blasted beside my orange tracers, lashing at the threat looming in front of us.

What I would have expected to happen was to see those dozen or so visible rounds with their burning mixture of strontium and magnesium creating an orange glow deflecting off the thick steel plating of the powerful robot, amidst the sparkling flashes of their purely lead-based compatriots as the slugs flattened themselves uselessly on the armor. Similarly, Arginine’s magical energy beams should have expended themselves futilely, leaving behind glowing patches of metal that had been energized sufficiently by the strikes to become visibly hot. That was what should have happened.

Instead, what actually did happen, was that none of our shots connected at all. They were all intercepted by a shimmering ivory shield of energy that burst to life in a broad ring around the circumference of the ultrasentinel.

“A shield?!” I blurted at the top of my lungs as my surprised trumped my capacity for pragmatism, “that thing doesn’t get to have a shield; it’s basically impossible to beat without a shield!”

“...Yeah…” the stallion next to me said dumbly, gaping down the corridor.

Miraculously, reason managed to assert itself and I realized that remaining standing in it the open corridor which provided an unobstructed line of fire was a tactically deficient course of action. I tugged on Arginine’s barding, “this way! Run!”

And so we did, down one of the side passages. Of course, I had absolutely no clear destination in mind. My thought process was simply to go ‘somewhere else’, and as quickly as my legs would allow. Our pace was no mere canter, or gallop, or even a flat out run. We were leaving at the speed of, ‘being chased by an ultrasentinel!’ Any slower than that would mean certain death, after all.

It wasn’t a straight line course that we took either. Every few intersections, I opted to divert in what I was fairly confident was a random direction. If we didn’t know where the fuck we were, then it would obviously be impossible for the robot to know too. However, much too soon, both of us clambered to a halt so abruptly that Arginine had actually overshot me slightly. I was only fortunate that his much larger size meant that he was able to step to either side of my own smaller frame and not upon it. In any other setting, I might have even paused to consider what an amusing sight it could have been to see the abnormally large genetically engineered unicorn standing over top of a little pegasus mare as she peered out from between his forelegs.

Instead I was merely gaping in terror as a second ultrasentinel rattled around the corner just a few yards from us. It had to somehow be a second one of those absurdly deadly machines, because there was no way that the same one had managed to get ahead of us!

...Unless I had unintentionally taken the exact number of right and left turns to bring us nearly back to where we’d started from. If I was that unlucky though, I figure I would have died during one of those building collapses yesterday. Not that the idea that I was trapped down in this labyrinth of a stable with multiple ultrasentinels made me think that I was particularly ‘lucky’ in any commonly understood definition of the term.

“INTRUDER DETECTED!” crackled a throaty mechanical voice from the automaton in front of us.

My own weapon’s magazine was still empty, but Arginine managed to strike it with two protracted shots from his own beam rifle. Just as before, an ivory barrier rippled around the robot as an energy barrier deftly absorbed the strikes without even the slightest hint that the effort to deter them was any sort of strain on it. In response, the ultrasentinel rotated in place on its treads and turned to face us, its forelimbs pointed ominously in our direction.

That was as much as I saw, because I was sprinting away immediately afterwards, diving into the darkness of an adjoining corridor and resuming my wild course through the stable in a renewed effort to be elsewhere as much as was possible. I still had no concept of where it was that I was hoping to get to. Well, no, I knew exactly where I wanted to get to: the surface. I just didn’t know how to get there. In the back of my mind, I realized that I was far and away hopelessly lost down here. That had been the case since about the fourth turn trying to get away from the first ultrasentinel.

I was just running for the sake of running right now.

Arginine seemed to have been a like mind, because his glowing amber light washed over me a few moments later, his broad hooves pounding along the corridor in my wake. For a pony who had spent most of his life working in what amounted to some sort of laboratory, he was remarkably physically fit. Then again, I suppose that he was designed to be, wasn’t he? A pity he hadn’t been designed to be good at destroying super-powerful robots.

“Oh, come on!” I cried out just before making an abrupt right as I saw a third massive machine come rumbling into view further down the hall. This place was crawling with these damn things!

“They are herding us,” the stallion behind me announced, “we are being diverted to a central location.”

“How can you possibly know where we are or where we’re being ‘herded’ to?!”

“I have been keeping track of our relative position since we came down here.”

“Horseapples! I call big, stinking, horseapples on that!” I snapped over my shoulder as I made a left, “you cannot possibly have been keeping track of―”

“Since our first diversion; we made a right. Thirty yards into another right. Sixty yards to a left. Ninety yards into a―”

“Oh, stop showing off!” Arginine ceased his turn by turn description of the route that we had taken. Granted, it wasn’t like I’d been paying any sort of attention; so, for all I knew, he’d just been talking out of his ass. Indeed, had it been anypony else making this claim, I would have been positive that was the case. Arginine, however, didn’t ever seem inclined to lie, so I suppose that he―somehow―really had been keeping track of our location.

Not that his deduction did the two of us a whole lot of good. These things clearly had a much firmer grasp of the lay of this place than we did―or I did, at least. Doubling back wasn’t an option, and without my pipbuck’s EFS I had no way of anticipating where they would try to cut us off at next in order to get around them. That was, assuming of course, that there didn’t turn out to be enough of these things down here to completely block off every avenue of escape. For all I knew, there were a hundred of those damn robots down here with us at this point!

I drew up short again, though not nearly as abruptly as I had the first time. My eyes were locked on the glow that was spilling out into the corridor about fifty yards ahead of us. It wasn’t the brightly focused light of one of the ultrasentinels. This was much more reminiscent of a ceiling mounted fixture. The kind that I had encountered before in stables. It seemed that part of this massive sprawl had indeed been finished after all.

Of course, Jackboot hadn’t raised a complete moron.

“That’s where they’re herding us to, isn’t it?”

Arginine gave a curt nod, “I believe that to be quite likely, yes,” he glanced along the other options open to us down alternative corridors, his ears twitching even more than mine were, “however, it is seems that we are not being given any appealing alternatives.”

I loaded in what would surely prove to be another useless magazine full of rounds and took a moment to confirm the arrangement of the grenades on my barding. He was right. We weren’t going to be able to slip past them out here where they knew far more about the layout than we did. The dark wasn’t helping things either.

They weren’t moving very fast though. Perhaps their age was working for us in that regard, “we might be able to get there before they can box us in.”

“How will that benefit us?”

“There’s lights there,” I pointed out redundantly, chambering my weapon with a jerk of my mouth, “which means that part’s more completed than anywhere else we’ve been. It was probably built earliest.”

“I fail to see what benefit that does―”

“Well I doubt these robots just grew out of the tunnels,” I said, galloping towards the light, “which means that they’d have to have built a door first, doesn’t it?” If there was any genuine exit to this place, it would be there. I doubted that it would be as simple as just trotting up and leaving, but if there was a lock of some sort we’d stand a better chance against it than the ultrasentinels!

“That...is a sensible conclusion,” Arginine admitted―almost reluctantly―as he followed behind me.

It turned out that I was right, too. There was indeed an actual set of stairs that were leading up towards the surface. At the top of these stairs there was also a robust Stable-Tec quality sliding hatch style door. It was also, frustratingly, locked. There was, however, a terminal at the base of the stairs.

Arginine assumed the console, tapping away at the keys with an awesome show of speed. It was as though he was typing like his life depended on it. I took up an overwatch position, my eyes darting between the three clear avenues of approach.

During my observation of our surroundings, I noticed several interesting facts about the room that we were in. First, was that it was actually surprisingly large, given how little was in it. Not that any of the rooms that we had seen up to this point had contained anything at all anyway. This room had clearly at least been completed. In addition to the lights that still radiated their soft yet brilliant white Stable-Tec glow, I could also see vents meant to circulate air, and even additional lengths of conduit running along the walls that seemed to end rather abruptly at the doorways leading out of the room. Past those openings was where the whole atmosphere of the place seemed to shift rather abruptly.

My eyes were drawn not to those dim openings, however, but first to what looked to be a trio of large service bays of some sort. In fact, they looked to have been just about the right size to have―snugly―contained the bulk of something about as massive as, say, an ultrasentinel. It looked like Arginine had been correct: this was some sort of central point for the sprawling complex. If not strictly the geographic ‘middle’, then at least the point from which those robots operated. Not that it looked like those bays had been seeing a lot of continuous use, if the thick coating of dust that covered a nearly pristine paint job was any indication.

On the other side of the room was something even more curious, insofar as I had no idea what it was. I’d never seen anything like it before. Unlike the service bays though, this thing looked like it had seen a lot of use. It was covered in a great deal of corrosion, and only a few flecks of dull paint remained which had suggested it was once adorned in some vibrant yellow and orange colors in its youth. The remains of some embossed lettering identified the contraption as being a ‘Transmutron 6000’, and there was a curious looking logo comprised of two ‘F’s.

I couldn’t tell what it had once done, but I was confident that it didn’t do it anymore.

Beyond that and the terminal mounted into the wall that Arginine was currently working at, there really wasn’t much else that was evident in the room. If this was meant to be the focal point of a stable of some sort, I would have expected something more along the lines of an overmare’s setup, with a massive wall of monitors and a robust control surface. This was a...garage? That was certainly what it felt like, at any rate.

The sound of squealing servos and rumbling treads broke my train of thought and drew my attention―as well as my gun sights―back to the doorways. It was hard to determine which one an ultrasentinel would appear in first. The sounds of their motors was echoing so much that it sounded like they were coming from all three directions at once.

Celestia, I really hoped those were echoes…

“RG…” I didn’t even bother to hide the strain in my voice. My carbine wasn’t going to do a damn thing, and I only had the single spark grenade. There was at least a sliver of hope that the blue-banded orb which had been specifically designed to disrupt the functions of electronic components wouldn’t have its effects blocked by the shielding these robots seemed to be equipped with. Even if the grenade did prove effective, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to catch all three of them within its blast radius. If Celestia was feeling merciful, I’d cripple one of those robots.

Then the other two would cut us to pieces.

“I am having difficulty overriding the door’s locks,” the unicorn responded, sounding very on edge, even for him, “but I am making progress as swiftly as I am able.”

“I’m still going to tell you to hurry up,” I swallowed, my eyes darting from one doorway to the other. My wing wrapped around the grenade and dislodged it from its retainer. I might live long enough to throw it if two of them showed up at once.

“I am well aware of the urgency of our circumstances.”

The noise was getting louder as they neared. It soon became quite clear that at least two―more likely all three―would be making their appearance almost simultaneously. The sounds were becoming more distinct, and I could even seen the faintest glow in those dark corridors from their spotlights. I cast a furtive look back at the unicorn furiously tapping at the keyboard. He wasn’t going to get it open in time. I could see the despair creeping through his stoic features. Anypony who hadn’t spent as much time with him as I had wouldn’t have noticed it, but I did.

He was at least as scared as I was.

Which, if indeed true, meant that he had to be outright terrified. Because I was way passed that right now.

It took me a full ten seconds to realize that the fourth source of clattering that I was hearing was my own teeth hitting the trigger bit near my mouth, I was shaking so bad.

I’d been in some hairy situations in my life. Hell hounds the size of houses. Hordes of feral ghouls. Didn’t I just face down a whole squad of Steel Rangers not too long ago? I’d been...let’s say: conscious of the danger involved in those situations. Maybe even uncertain about the certainty of a positive outcome at specific moments during those encounters. But to say that I’d been genuinely scared at any time during those fights? I wouldn’t have said that, not as I understood the meaning of the term.

When I’d realized the full measure of what it meant to be Whiplash’s prisoner, that had scared me though. The full weight of knowing that there wasn’t any way out for me, and that there wasn’t anything I could do to change what was going to happen? Yeah. I’d been scared by that.

Those same thoughts manifested now, too. We were going to die, and there wasn’t anything that I or Arginine could do about it.

The light in the corridors was getting much brighter. We had less than a minute to live, and it was clear that the gray stallion wasn’t going to be able to get us out in time.

A sudden wave of...calm, washed over me. Apparently, I’d finally transcended fear, and even despair, and reached that state of acceptance that Jackboot must have been at when he’d bowed his head in anticipation of me ending his life when I’d discovered his White Hoof heritage.

Huh. So this was what being ready to die felt like.

...I didn’t much care for it. I wouldn’t be feeling it for very long though, I suppose.

“RG?” I think the complete lack of any sort of edge in my tone was what surprised the stallion enough to actually get him to pry his eyes from the terminal’s screen and look at me. I surprised the both of us by smiling wanly at him, “thanks. You know, for not leaving me to die in the radiation earlier. Sorry I got us killed anyway,” I said with a meke little shrug.

Maybe it was seeing that I’d given up on the prospect of getting away, or perhaps he’d finally accepted the realities of our situation himself. The corner of his mouth twitched in the faintest shadow of a smile that had certainly been the closest thing to the expression that I’d ever seen from the stallion―or ever would, come to think of it, “I...appreciate that,” he turned away completely from the terminal now, abandoning his efforts and instead readying the beam rifle he’d procured, “for what it’s worth, Miss Windfall: I would rate you as an extraordinary Wasteland specimen whose genome would have had much to contribute to my stable’s efforts to become better ponies. Your death here is regrettable.”

I blinked at the stallion, silent for a full three seconds before I threw my head back and laughed the hardest that I had in months. I actually had to wipe away a tear from my eye when I finally got myself under control again. There was a follow-up peal of mirth when I saw Arginine’s reaction to what his comment had prompted, “heh...sorry,” I finally managed to say, “it’s just...I think that’s the nicest thing that anypony’s ever said about me,” I cocked my head as I thought for a brief moment and came to the conclusion that, yes, indeed it was the most sincere ‘compliment’ that anypony had paid to me in my life.

I sighed and shook my head, “...and now I’m going to die all depressed. Horseapples.”

With a great intake of breath, I straightened my stance and directed my carbine at the passageway directly in front of me. It didn’t matter which way I faced, as we’d be outflanked no matter what we did. There certainly wasn’t any real cover to be had, “well, what do you say we at least go down fighting. Right, RG?”

The stallion nodded, “that is an agreeable course of action.”

I set my teeth on the trigger bit and focused my gaze straight ahead at the rapidly brightening light. When the ultrasentinel finally rolled into view, I bit down hard and leaned into the recoil of the automatic weapon vibrating at my side, intent on keeping the stream of lead focused on my target. At the same moment, my wing heaved the spark grenade into the doorway. I retained the arming pin on one of my pinions as the steel ord sailed forward and bounced beneath the robot. It didn’t appear the the shimmering magical shields extended all of the way to the floor, as the barrier which was so effortlessly stopping my bullets didn’t interfere at all with the passage of the grenade along the floor.

A sapphire pulse of crackling energy burst up from beneath the automaton. I could feel the hairs of my mane frizzing even from where I was as the destabilizing energies of the grenade overwhelmed the ultrasentinel. Miraculously, the shield failed and I could see my rounds sparking off of the robot’s metal casing. The machine jerked as tendrils of electricity crawled along the outside of its casing.

Beside me, Arginine was striking at the same target target with steady pulses from his rifle. Those intense beams of concentrated energy drilled into the thick steel plating of the now-unshielded robot, leaving behind smoldering holes that glowed white hot and dribbled molten slag in their wake. My rounds were ineffectual, even on the stunned ultrasentinel, but the stallion’s modified rifle seemed to burn hot enough to pierce the armor without much trouble. On the sixth or seventh hit, something vital must have ruptured.

Both of us turned our heads reflexively as the war-machine exploded in a sphere of shrapnel and fire. I felt a few slivers of superheated steel cut my face, but my barding managed to protect the majority of my body. Helmet, I mentally chided myself, I should really have worn that enclave helmet…

One ultrasentinel down. Two to go. Of course, with no other spark grenades at hoof, neither Arginine or I had any means by which to disable their shields and destroy them. They’d cut us to ribbons before we―

…

Why weren’t we already red vapor?

The stallion at my side was discarding a small plastic cartridge that was emitting a frankly alarming amount of smoke and slapping a fresh one into his rifle. However, I didn’t make any move to replace my own weapon’s empty magazine. I was distracted by the pair of ultrasentinels sitting in the doorways to either side of us.

That was all that they were doing: sitting there.

Arginine seemed to realize this anomaly too when he swung around to engage his next target, stopping short just before he fired. His head jerked with surprise as he glanced between the pair of stationary robots.

“REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE. THE AUTHORITIES HAVE BEEN NOTIFIED.”

“I―hwa?” it took my brain a moment to recover from it’s momentary hang-up and process what the pair of ultrasentinels had said in perfect unison. The…authorities? Since when did these things care about due process? It seemed like the standing order that had been given to every single robot in the Wasteland the day the bombs fell had been: “kill everything everywhere.”

Now that I’d taken a moment to really look at what was going on around us, I realized that their behavior wasn’t the only thing that was off. Their color scheme wasn’t one that I recognized either. Most robots that I’d ever encountered―especially military models―were either a boring steel gray or the rare olive drab motif. These robots were yellow and black. At least, they were where the paint hadn’t worn away or wasn’t covered by a lot of dirt and grit.

There was something a little different about their articulated limbs as well. The few examples of ultrasentinels that I had encountered, or even heard about from other ponies, boasted a variety of weapon suits that included―but wasn’t exclusively limited to―miniguns, grenade launchers, beam emitters, and even missile pods. I saw none of those in evidence right now though.

Cautiously, and over an objection from Arginine, I crept closer to one of the oddly colored ultrasentinels in order to inspect their limbs in more detail. One of them boasted an intimidating cluster of spiked cones that were even now slowly rotating. Quite a few of those steel spike had broken off, and in places I could even see chunks of stone pinched in the motors. Some sort of drilling tool? The other limb was just as intriguing, containing a combination of a welder, and what looked suspiciously similar to the cutting tip of Foxglove’s eldritch lance.

“Are these...construction sentinels?” I couldn’t help but ask aloud.

Arginine finally left the base of the stairs and came over to where I was standing, lending his own deductive gaze to the composition of the robot, “that...would seem to be the case,” it was a little reassuring to hear him sounding as surprised as I was to see this. It certainly wasn’t something that I’d ever encountered before!

I stared at the automaton in front of me for a few more seconds, and then turned my head to look at the other one behind us. A part of me was waiting for these things to realize that they were based off of death machines and start trying to kill us at any moment. However, seeing as how neither of them had reacted to my or Arginine’s approach, nor did they seem inclined to seek vengeance on behalf of their fallen comrade that we’d already slain, I suspected that wasn’t actually going to happen after all. They were just going to...sit there. Waiting patiently for long dead guards to come and arrest us.

I jerked my head back towards the terminal, “why don’t you go and finish unlocking the door.”

Arginine nodded hesitantly, his own gaze lingering on the motionless ultrasentinels, “...of course. It should only be a moment,” then he turned and headed back to resume his work on the console, with only the occasional glance over his shoulder to reassure himself that they weren’t going to spontaneously change their minds about killed us.

While the stallion worked, I continued to study the unusual robotic models. Not that there was all that much I’d be able to learn about them. If Foxglove had been present, I’m sure she could have told me all sorts of useful things. I smirked at the thought of the violet unicorn’s probable reaction to encountering these things. She’d want to take one of them apart for parts and probably enlist the second as some sort of companion, given its obvious capabilities to both assemble and take apart components of some sort.

Actually, I think I had a pretty good idea what these things had been doing for the last two hundred years, now that I thought about it. Something told me that it wasn’t a coincidence that this place was so large, and yet didn’t look like any effort had been put into actually finishing it up.

I glanced between the pair of robots, “you guys built this place, didn’t you?” Perhaps unsurprisingly, they didn’t respond to my question. I hadn’t really expected one. Wasteland robots weren’t known for their interpersonal skills, in my experience.

My gaze went to the Transmutron 6000 nearby, and then to the drilling apparatus on the articulated limb. I might be technically minded enough to know exactly how that piece of equipment worked, but I was confident that I had the broad strokes down, “you dug out the dirt and rock, and that thing turned it into metal, which you used to build out the stable,” my deduction was met with continued silence, “and when it finally broke down, you couldn’t build it anymore.”

I frowned up at the robot, “how long have you been just wandering around doing nothing?”

Then my gaze narrowed slightly as my eyes caught sight of a barely perceptible shimmer surrounding the ultrasentinel...er, ultraconstructor? Meh. I leaned in to get a closer look, but it was hard to identify what exactly it was that I was seeing. I suspected that it must have been the energy shield which protected the robots. Not that I had any notion what a piece of construction equipment needed with military-grade magical shielding. I reached out with my right leg and slowly prodded at the shimmering veil. My hoof passed cleanly through the curtain of twinkling motes, though I noticed a slight tingling sensation. I pulled back my leg and shrugged. The reason for the addition of the shield had likely died with the machine’s designer.

My attention was drawn behind me by the iconic sound of a stable hatch sliding open. This was immediately followed up by Arginine’s redundant announcement that he’d achieved success at finally deciphering the terminal’s passcode. I suspect that the task had proved infinitely easier without the threat of imminent annihilation looming over him.

In hindsight, I suspected that threatening to detonate his slave collar unless he managed to save Yatima’s stillborn foal probably hadn’t been as helpful a motivator as I’d believed at the time.

The two of us ascended the stairs, receiving no exclamations of protest from the remaining robotic builders, who seemed absolutely content to continue sitting where they were. Arginine and I exchanged a brief look and mutual shrugs before heading through the open hatch.

Okay, now this looked like an Overmare’s office! At least, at a glance. While there was indeed a grand, horseshoe-shaped, desk in the middle of the room the contained several terminals mounted into it, a seasoned stable veteran like myself immediately noted that no Overmare’s office would had had one of Stable-Tec’s signature cog-shaped blast doors built into it. The table set off to the side adorned with the remnants of various delectable snacks and treats seemed a bit out of place as well. To say nothing about the banner that was hanging over our heads proclaiming a welcome to prospective buyers of Stable-Tec’s new, top of the line, Robronco-built, ‘Stable-Trons!’ With the promise that the customer’s bright future underground ‘could be built in the present!’

Arginine frowned at the massive blast door across the room from us and then sighed as he stepped over the examine the nearby terminals. He tapped in a few idle commands into one of them, grunted, and then directed his attention at another, where he settled down into entering strings of commands. Meanwhile, I stepped around the desk and closed in on the food cart, which bore placards encouraging visitors to partake of the complimentary refreshments. I figured it would have been rude to refuse the two hundred year old sign.

Munching on a cherry-filled Fancy Buck Cake, I stepped back around to look over the stallion’s shoulder as he wrestled with yet another password-protected terminal. His typing slowed slightly after several seconds before finally stopping. He glanced over his shoulder at me, “do you require some assistance?”

“No,” I said around a mouthful of pastry.

We stared at each other, wordlessly, for a long moment before the gray unicorn cleared his throat and nodded his head at another terminal on the desk, “perhaps you would care to amuse yourself with the contents of the log entries on the other console? I imagine that it would be more fascinating than watching me work.”

I smiled at the stallion and swallowed the remainder of my piece of cake, “performance anxiety? Don’t worry, it happens to lots of stallions,” Arginine ever so slightly quirked a brow in a display of confusion and I just patted him lightly on the shoulder, as I shook my head, “it’s called a ‘joke’, RG. They’re these things that ponies tell each other to lighten the mood.”

Now his brow assumed it’s barely perceptible ‘annoyed’ position, “I am aware of the concept of humor,” he said tersely, “however, I do not understand the reference from which the humor is supposed to be derived in this instance.”

“Performance anxiety?” I repeated, as though saying it a second time would suddenly make everything clearer to the stallion who continued to display a tendency to be surprisingly dense on a number of topics, “you know, how some stallions have trouble…” I was actually starting to feel twinges of embarrassment as I went about explaining the subject of the joke to him, given my own lack of personal familiarity with the actual act of sex, “doing things...with mares...when they’re under pressure to do...good,” I could actually feel my cheeks getting more flushed. I fervently hoped that my otherwise white coat wasn’t visibly reddening.

“Ah,” Arginine said before turning back to the console and resuming tapping at the keys, “I understand the reference now, though I am afraid that I am unable to relate to the subject matter and thus derive no amusement from it. I will, however, defer to your judgement as to whether or not that was a ‘good joke’.”

It took a moment to process and translate what he had just said, but when I finally had, I looked at him in surprise, “wait, do you mean you can’t relate to it because you’ve never had trouble ‘performing’...or because you’ve never had sex?”

“The latter,” he replied, matter-of-factly, “no individual in my stable has ever copulated,” he glanced back at me briefly, giving me a look that suggested I should have been able to figure that fact out on my own, “our genetic structures are specially tailored in a laboratory to ensure the strains are the best available. Natural biological reproduction would introduce too many variables to guarantee an ideal genome.”

“So, wait...how were you born then?”

“My genetic structure was injected into a harvested inert ovum, and then matured in a specially designed synthetic womb until I reached viability.”

“...You were grown in a lab?”

There was that trademark RG frown again, “that is a―barely―acceptable summation,” he resumed trying to figure out the password that was get us out of here, “once we are reasonably sure there are no inferior strains anywhere in our genetic code, natural copulation will resume, as it is the most efficient means by which to grow our population without a prohibitively massive investment in infrastructure that would be profoundly difficult with the available resources on the surface. Until then, no, we do not ‘have sex’.”

I couldn’t help but still be fascinated by this revelation, “but, like, not even for fun? Don’t you still get...urges, and stuff?”

“No,” he answered simply. He must have sensed my dubious expression, because he soon followed it up with, “I do not possess a...‘sex drive’, I believe is the term. The associated genes affiliated with driving a pony’s biological imperative to procreate have been suppressed in our population until such a time as our genome is acceptably superior.”

“So, you don’t even...you know, um...explore yourself,” Arginine stopped typing and turned back around to give me the most profoundly perplexed look that I had ever seen from the stallion. It was almost like a normal pony was looking at me like I’d said something incomprehensible. Oh, Celestia, please don’t make me have to explain masturbation to this pony! My cheeks wouldn’t be able to take it.

“You know what, never mind,” I was ejecting myself from this line of conversation for the sake of my own sanity. As shocking as it was to learn that Arginine was, himself, also a virgin―to say nothing about his stable’s unique take on reproduction methods―it really wasn’t any of my business how often―or indeed if―he ‘polished his pistol’―Oh, Celestia, had I really just called it that?! “I’m going to just...look at some logs―records!”

I was suddenly very fascinated by the content of the other terminal screen, and absolutely in no way paying any attention to the stallion next to me who continued to stare at my back in bafflement before eventually returning to figuring out how to open of the cog-shaped door and let us out of this place.

Let’s find out what the ponies working here were doing before the world ended, shall we? Record the first!

Progress Report 07-112: Everything's in place and ready for the demonstration next week. Well, almost everything. We’re still waiting for those new Robronco robots. They were supposed to be here the day before yesterday, but we were told there was going to be a slight delay because of a last-minute change in their designs. Something about an experimental power source? Whatever, as long as they work as advertised. We have representatives from most of the districts in the southern part of the valley coming in for this demonstration. If they’re impressed, it’ll mean at least a dozen new construction contracts. However, in order for them to be impressed, we need those damn robots!
Hmm. Maybe I was going to be able to figure out what had happened down there after all! Next record entry…

Progress Report 07-115: For fuck’s sake! Are you kidding me?! The new robots finally get here, and they have a crippling flaw?! The damn things were running for all of five minutes before all sorts of alarms started going off and they went into ‘emergency shutdown’. Come to find out, those ‘experimental power sources’ run too damn hot for these construction bots. On top of that, I’m told that there’s no way to throttle back the power. If they sit still for even a few minutes, their system temps start spiking. What a load of shit! The demonstration is in three days! We are so fucking boned. Time to touch up my resume, I guess.

I cocked my head as I read over the entry. Why did that sound familiar…?

Progress Report 07-116: Finally some good news. Got a message from the customer service department of the company that apparently designed and built the spark reactors for these bots, Four Star Energy Solutions. I guess they’ve been catching a lot of flack over this ‘minor design oversight’ of theirs. Ha! Anyway, they were kind enough to ship us an ‘upgrade kit’ as well as a revised manual that’s supposed to give us a work-around. I’m going to say, right up front, that I think it’s a stupid idea, and that I don’t like it.

So, the fix is, get this: force the bots to leak magical radiation.

Yup, that’s right. We’re supposed to convert the ‘waste energy’ into radiation. Oh, but don’t worry! They sent us some shield talismans that are designed to contain all of that radiation and keep it from being a health hazard. All good!

Most of that last paragraph is sarcasm, by the way.

I’ve already done the math, and it sucks. These shields will only barely be powerful enough to contain the excess energy generated during normal operation. If these things are on idle, they’re not going to do squat; and those generators run hot enough that I don’t want to even think about how much radiation they’d be putting out then. I called up Four Star―turns out they’re a subsidiary of THE 'Four Star' out east, go figure―and told them about the numbers. They said I just needed to make sure that I never idled then, and just turn them off when not in use.

Fuck you too, asshole. Whatever. At least they’ll work long enough to finish building the demo section a couple of times for the investors. Once Stable-Tec HQ comes down and signs off on everything, I’ll just shut them all down.

In the meantime, I’m going to draft a letter to Management suggesting that, maybe next time, we use the NEXT to lowest bidder...

As I reached the end of the entry, I heard the whir of machinery as Arginine finally managed to crack the system and get the massive cog rolled aside. I read over that entry a second time, feeling my blood run cold. The robots. They had been the source of the lethal radiation that had wandered through Old Reino for so long! They’d gone on building out the little section of ‘demonstration stable’ that they’d been programed to build, but something must have happened that kept them from being shut down as planned―probably the world ending, now that I thought about it. So they’d just...kept on building.

Then that machine that they’d been using to convert dirt into metal finally broke down and they couldn’t build anymore. They’d gone into some sort of ‘standby’ mode, wandering around the corridors that they’d built ever since. Of course, without using all of their energy to build stuff, it was converted into too much radiation for their shields to contain―though they sure seemed to stop bullets well enough!

That was what had wiped out the ponies in the mall, I realized. The corridors ran right under it. The construction bots would have just started rolling along beneath the settlement, blasting them with a lethal dose of radiation, and they were none the wiser. That was why no obvious source of the radiation had ever been observed either, because they’d been underground all this time. Ponies had assumed it was a spell of some sort, but it hadn’t been. It was...the…robots...

Slowly, I looked over at the strip of film wrapped around my fetlock which, in all of the darkness and confusion running around the sprawling corridors below, I hadn’t gotten around to checking in a while. A solid lump formed in my throat as my gaze settled on the jet black plastic band.

“RG...look at your film,” my voice sounded hollow even to my own ears.

I saw the stallion glance at his own leg. His film was just as black as mine was. He managed to keep his features in check a lot better than I was probably managing though. His eyes closed for a few brief moments and he took a deep breath. When he opened his eyes again, he calmly ripped away the film and stood up, “there is little point in lingering here. We need to get outside and get our bearings.”

“RG―”

“Miss Foxglove and the others are unlikely to wait indefinitely for our arrival at the agreed upon rendezvous point. We shouldn’t delay any longer.”

“RG―”

He ignored me and headed for the exit, “with luck, we can be there by the morning―”

“RG!” I finally screamed at the stallion. He stopped in the doorway and went silent. I took a deep breath, “how long do we have?”

I remembered what he’d told me a solid black color on the film meant. What I didn’t know was the sort of time table that the two of us would have to work with. Meanwhile, the gray stallion, with his intimate knowledge of pony physiology that had been gathered over―I didn’t care to think of how many―years of mutilating innocent ponies, would almost certainly have it calculated down to the hour.

“You are unlikely to last beyond the day after tomorrow, around mid-morning,” he said softly, without looking back at me, “I will continue to endure for another eighteen or so hours after you expire,” the corner of his lip tugged ever so slightly in the approximation of a sad smile, “thanks to my superior endocrine system.”

Silence rang through the room for what felt like a full minute, but was almost certainly a much shorter period of time, as I let the brevity of my revised life expectancy trickle through my brain. Odd, that it was hitting me so much harder than it had just...had it really only been fifteen minutes since I thought those ultrasentinels were going to kill me? That sense of calm that I’d had at the time had managed to wear off, and it didn’t look like the feeling was going to be making a return. I guess you only got to feel serene about dying once a day or something.

“Is there anything we―well, you―can do?” Celestia knows that I didn’t know a whole lot about real medicine outside of: ‘use a healing potion’. Arginine was the medical expert here.

He took a deep breath, “Seaddle’s hospital would have the facilities to treat our condition if we arrived there promptly enough. For clarification, ‘promptly enough’ would mean in the next several hours from now.”

“Isn’t there a hospital in this city?” I pointed out, “you could use the stuff they have there to―”

“My own medical skills are...lackluster, I’m afraid,” he cut me off before I could get my hopes raised too high, “as I have made mention of in the past: I am not a doctor. We are beyond the simple application of RadAway, Miss Windfall.”

“Can we...can we at least try?” my voice very nearly cracked.

“We could,” he conceded gently. Oh, I did not like ‘gentle Arginine’. It felt really weird. The stallion looked back at me, and then pointed at my pipbuck, “but as I understand the state of affairs, there is valuable information stored on your pipbuck that can be used to stop a war between the New Lunar Republic and the Steel Rangers. Isn’t that correct?

“If we die in this place, trying in vain to save ourselves, that information will never make it back to Miss Foxglove and the others. If we can get that information to them, then, even in our absence, they will be able to carry on with the objective.”

I glanced down at the dead pipbuck on my leg. It had the reference numbers that Foxglove needed in order to look up the corresponding flight information in Wind Rider’s Wagons and Freight’s fragmented computer system. Assuming that those records weren’t among those that had been purged with so much else. Using what we already knew about some of their shipping habits, there might well be enough data to make an educated guess about where the real MoA hub was located. Foxglove and Starlight were smart ponies. They’d be able to figure it out if anypony could. Ramparts would make sure they got there in one piece.

All they needed was the pipbuck.

“Right,” I nodded listlessly. I felt bad for Foxglove. I’m sure she was worried out of her mind right now, thinking that I’d been killed. Now I was going to show up in the morning, and she was going to be so relieved that I was all right. Then I’d die the day after that and she wouldn’t be able to do anything to stop it.

I started for the door and then drew up short. My eyes went to the administrative console that Arginine had been working at and looked over the available system commands. I reached out a tapped a few keys. Then I closed out the computer, took out my compact pistol, and unloaded two rounds into the computer so that―hopefully―nopony would be able to turn those robots back on and start everything all over again. If anypony ever came back here, they’d just find the working terminal with the logs and their warning about the dangers that those construction machines posed. When the weapon was returned to its holster, I resumed walking towards the door, meeting the stallion’s inquiring gaze, “I shut down the robots. They were the source of the ‘wandering radiation pockets’.

“Maybe, someday, ponies can come back here and start rebuilding,” I said, somehow managing a little smile at the notion of that mall settlement getting a second chance, “this city’s nearly untouched. It could become a thriving town without a lot of effort.”

Arginine nodded and followed me through the door. We emerged into some sort of small office building. Judging from the logos stenciled on the walls and the friendly looking mascots everywhere, it was pretty clear that this was a Stable-Tec facility. There were a lot of banners and signs hanging around that seemed to suggest that this was where ponies came to apply for the few coveted slots in the bunkers. Judging from the logs I’d just read, it looked like they also sought out interested parties who wanted to finance the construction of stables.

There were quite a few skeletons, even in this place. A few of them were even wearing uniforms that identified them as being Stable-Tec employees. I couldn’t contain a pitying snort at the thought that even the ponies responsible for building those bunkers weren’t all saved by them. How many more years would Equestria have needed to ensure that there were enough stables to reasonably save everypony who’d been alive during the war, anyway? Exactly how short of that mark had they fallen by the time that final day arrived?

Given the number of skeletons strewn about the Wasteland, I suspected that the answer to that question lay somewhere north of, ‘very’.

For that matter, how short had I just fallen today?

Probably a lot more than I’d realized yet, honestly. It still didn’t feel real. How could it? Given everything that I’d been through and survived―even in just the last twenty-four hours!―how could I possibly be expected to accept that I was going to be dead in two days from something as pathetic and, frankly, mundane as ‘radiation poisoning’? I’d fought off hell hounds and Steel Rangers! Ponies like me didn’t just die because they ran into a few too many fucking rads!

We were going to get the Wind Rider’s, we were going to meet up with the others, they were going to have plenty of RadAway on them, and it was going to be all that was needed to, either, completely cure Arginine and I; or, at worst, keep us going long enough for Starlight to use her super-powerful magical teleporting spell to get us to Seaddle where Doctor Lancet would be able to fix us up with plenty of time to spare.

That was exactly what was going to happen, and I wasn’t going to hear any differently from anypony; especially not mopey-dopey RG trudging along behind me.

We were going to be. Just. Fine.

…

We were...

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