Ponies called me a hero after what happened, but I left that battle scarred by fear, and have allowed that weakness to govern my actions.

We talked―well, I talked―for what must have been hours. I recounted my experiences with Jackboot, and the upbringing that I had in the Wasteland. I told Arginine about how’d I’d come to admire the older stallion who was raising me, and how that respect had gradually grown into a desire for something more...intimate. I told him about the betrayal that I’d felt when I learned that the pony I’d come to love had been hiding his connection to the group of ponies that I loathed the most in the world; and how we’d reconciled later. How I’d felt when he died.

Then I moved onto my approach to life after Jackboot, and my adoption of the Wonderbolt persona. How I felt the first time I’d shown up to a fight wearing the old blue uniform and saved a mare and her filly from ponies intent on enslaving them, or worse. I talked about how I felt when I killed ponies, and the nightmares that I got where I saw their faces which persistently haunted my nights. I admitted to him my doubts about what I was doing, and how I wasn’t sure whether or not I could continue to be the Wonderbolt at all.

Through it all, Arginine listened patiently, offering little comment at all, save for the occasional request for clarification. He just...listened. Even when I was done telling him everything, he didn’t have much to say; just a single, simple, question:

“Are you giving up?”

“No,” I responded, maybe a little too quickly. I didn’t want the stallion to think that I was turning away from the fight entirely and risk him leaving; because that wasn’t what I was doing, “I couldn’t do that, not when I know ponies are in trouble. I’ll never give up entirely. I just…” I sighed and shrugged, deflating slightly, “I don’t think I can keep doing it as The Wonderbolt, you know? I’m not a hero.

“I’m not a good pony,” Ramparts’ comments earlier still cut me pretty deep. It was hard to deny what he’d said though. I’d killed so many ponies in my life, and every time I pulled that trigger, I could feel deep down what it was doing to me. The numbness that he’d talked about. I remembered when I used to make light little quips whenever I ended a life; like it was supposed to be amusing or something. It sickened me now, looking back on it.

It hadn’t been funny; it had just been cruel. The sort of thing some sadistic raider did when they were trying to draw out the last little bit of torment from their victims. What had it said about me that I was just like them?

“I’m a bad pony who just happens to limit herself to killing other bad ponies. I’m a particularly picky raider; but that still makes me a raider. Raiders aren’t heroes.”

“Why do you need to be a hero?”

I glanced up at the stallion, frowning, “because that’s what you have to be to help ponies,” my tone suggested that the question was a fairly ridiculous one, and I thought that it was. I wanted to help ponies and stop the valley from being wiped out by Arginine’s stable; only a hero could do something like that. Heroes like the Mare-Do-Well, or the Lone Ranger, maybe even the Stable Dweller or the Security Mare. Those were the kinds of ponies who could do something important like that.

Pegasus raider mares weren’t. I’d still try, sure, but I wasn’t going to be the hero the ponies of the valley needed right now. I was just going to be some silly little filly getting in over her head.

“I see,” he didn’t see. That was okay. Arginine may have been a smart pony, but that didn’t mean that he already knew everything. He’d come around to understand what I was talking about though, in time.

My stomach grumbled at this point, drawing the attention of the both of us to the fact that neither of us had eaten since breakfast. In fact, I hadn’t had all that much of that, as it turned out. I hadn’t had much of an appetite at that time, of course. I could do with a bite or two right now, though.

“Lunch?” I inquired of the stallion as I stood up and stretched out my limbs, minding that my wings didn’t inadvertently poke my bedmate in the eye.

Arginine glanced out the window, “dinner, more accurately, I think. But yes, a meal would be appreciated.”

“We’ll swing by and take a peek in on Starlight and Foxglove first, make sure they’re alright.”

I trotted over and opened the door, stepping out into the main corridor of the base’s barracks. From off to my left, I heard a familiar mare’s voice pipe up, “oh, so that’s where you’ve been all day!” I whipped my head around to find Starlight and Ramparts standing just outside the room that I had claimed for myself last night. The pair of ponies shared a brief look with one another before the pink unicorn mare spoke again, glancing between the two of us, “did you two have a nice, um, talk?”

I felt myself blushing brightly beneath my coat as I caught the subtle tone in her voice that suggested she wasn’t completely convinced that was all that the two of us had done throughout the day. Ramparts, for his part, was keeping his expression relatively neutral, but the gaze that he was directing at Arginine was unusually contemplative, as though he were evaluating the larger gray stallion in some respect.

“It was fine,” I replied tersely, “we’re heading out to grab a bite,” I glanced back at Arginine and jerked my head, indicating for him to follow me, which he did.

“Good timing,” Starlight perked up, “that’s why we were looking for you. Homily’s keeping an eye on Foxglove while we get some dinner. Care to join us?”

I couldn’t come up with a plausible enough reason why we couldn’t, so I was forced to agree. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the company of the other two ponies, because I did. However, I was wary of the sort of questions that the two of them might ask, having seen their reactions to finding me coming out of Arginine’s room like this. Not that there wasn’t a completely―and genuinely―innocent explanation. Heck, Starlight was the one who had suggested it in the first place!

In reality, I was probably just letting myself read into things too much. There was still a little bit of lingering shame regarding what I’d allowed myself to do with the larger stallion earlier. It had been stupid, and ill-advised, and very reckless; and if I had the day to do all over again I certainly wouldn’t have done it. The reality was, of course, that I had done it, and I was very keenly aware of that fact. My only saving grace was that, optimistically, nopony besides myself and Arginine actually knew for a fact that we’d had sex. I’d very nearly inadvertently revealed that fact to Starlight, but not quite.

At the moment, it was pretty much just lewd speculation on the part of two ponies who saw me and Arginine coming out of a room where we’d been together for hours on end. They were probably just poking fun, trying for a little levity. That was fine.

“Sure,” I finally answered and the four of us headed out of the barracks on our way to the dining tent.

It wasn’t quite dark yet, the sky was just only starting to dim as night approached. There was more than enough light for me to be able to tell that, while Arginine and I might have done little more than lounge around on his bed for the majority of the day, the ponies of McMaren had not been nearly as idle. They managed to erect sturdier looking stone parapets out of the rubble to serve as interim lookout and defensive towers for their perimeter, which they’d also constricted significantly from the size that it had been. This allowed them to concentrate their reduced numbers more effectively.

The dining area even had stone walls now, though the roof was still canvas and tarps. For now, at any rate. Salvaged steel beams were being collected and stacked nearby in anticipation of building a more lasting covering for their cafeteria. The radio transmitter tower was a looking a little better too. The ponies here had taken a pretty severe beating, but they clearly weren’t about to let that get them down for very long. It was quite inspiring, I suppose.

My celebrity status was still in full effect too, it seemed. That produced some mixed feelings. It was nice to be admired, of course; who didn’t like having a room full of ponies cheer when they walked in? That wasn’t to say that it wasn’t also a little embarrassing. I caught Ramparts looking at me, silently reminding me that I’d earned this praise, regardless of how deserving I might have felt about it. I recalled Homily too, pointing out that this was not the first time that I’d saved the lives of her and her crew.

I might not be a ‘Hero of the Wasteland’, but I was a mare that these ponies personally owed a lot to.

A table was cleared for us, the companions of the Wonderbolt apparently receiving their fair share of my own reflected glory it seemed. None of the ponies here owed much to any of the three with me, of course. Only Foxglove had ever been here before. It was enough, I suppose, that they were with me and presumably helping me out during my travels through the valley. Not that their names were included in any of ‘Miss Neighvada’s’ radio broadcasts.

Idly, I wondered if that was going to change; if maybe Homily would be making announcements about what the ‘Wonderbolt and Her Companions’ were getting up to in the future?

I was suddenly struck by a thought. What of the Mare-Do-Well and the Lone Ranger? Had they, in reality, been the Mares-Do-Well and maybe the Not-So-Lone Ranger? Were the Stable Dweller and the Security Mare traveling with companions of their own?

Or was that the sign of a true hero: not needing a whole entourage of ponies at your side to help you with every little thing? I couldn’t think of a single transmission that I’d ever heard from the distant DJ Pon3 about any other ponies in the company of the current pair of contemporary Wasteland saviors operating out east.

My thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of plates of some sort of Cram-loaf and dried apple chips. I guess their larder hadn’t been destroyed by the Steel Rangers during the fighting. The four of us dug in happily. I couldn’t honestly remember the last time I’d bothered to have a full meal, now that I thought about it. Ramparts as well was attacking her dinner with gusto. Arginine was reserved, as he was with everything that he did. Though obviously quite hungry herself, Starlight ate hesitantly.

“Still getting used to the food?” I asked, curiously, as I watched the unicorn mare push around the Cram-loaf. The apple chips she had eaten readily enough. She seemed to be in the midsts of trying to identify what all of the other ingredients of her meal were.

“It’s not daisy sandwiches and hay-fries,” the pink pony murmured.
I didn’t know what a ‘daisy’ was, but I didn’t have to to know what she meant, “I don’t suggest asking a lot of questions,” I offered by way of advice, giving the mare a sly wink, “everything goes down easier if you just think of it as ‘food’, and leave it at that,” even I’d run afoul of a few menus that I found to be of questionable taste―no pun intended. Growing up on a ranch had afforded me access to a rather tame diet, but my travels with Jackboot had soon exposed me to a lot of things I would never have thought of as being edible, let alone tasty, in the wider Wasteland.

“I never thought I’d find myself pining for stale breakfast cereal,” she sighed as she took an adventurous bite. Her expression shifted between various degrees of disgusted and nauseous before finally settling on resigned as she swallowed what she’d been chewing. She stuck out her tongue and cringed at what was still on her plate, “I don’t suppose pepper still exists?” I shrugged, not knowing what that was either. That wasn’t the answer she had been hoping for, it seemed, “I’d sell my horn for my spice rack…”

“Next time we’re near Shady Saddles I’ll take you to my sister’s bar,” Rampart’s offered, “she makes a mean vegetable stew.”

“Now that’s something I’d like to try,” the unicorn said, brightening significantly at the thought, “which brings up the matter of where we’re heading to next, and when?”

All eyes were suddenly on me. Oh, right, I was still the ‘leader’. They were all looking to me to call the shots, as though nopony other than me had yet realized how criminally unqualified I was to continue doing the job. Fortunately, I wouldn’t need to do it for very much longer, as the end of our mission was finally in sight.

“The Republic stole some technology from the Rangers: a computer that uses a foal as its core,” I had been keeping an eye on Ramparts while I’d spoken, wanting to judge his reaction upon hearing what the nation he was loyal to had been accused of. The stallion looked suitably disturbed, but he also didn’t appear to be particularly doubtful either. Given his position in the Republic’s military as a part of Luna’s special scouting groups, I’m sure that he had a good idea of the sorts of missions that were conducted against the Steel Rangers where acquiring material and intelligence were concerned.

It was Starlight’s reaction that caught me by surprise though as the pink mare started to almost immediately cough up the bite of food that she’d been in the middle of swallowing. After a rather concerning fit of choking, her cyan eyes locked onto me, wide and unbelieving. No, they weren’t doubtful. Rather, they seemed terrified. She didn’t want to believe that she’d heard me correctly, even though she was certain that she had, “what did you say? A computer powered by a foal?!”

Before I could utter a confirmation, Starlight had slammed her hooves down on the table and let loose a string of curses that made even Ramparts blush, “that fucking cunt! If she wasn’t already dead I’d rip off her wings and drag her in front of Princess Luna myself on the condition that I got to be the one to personally defenestrate her from the top of Diamond Tower after tying one end of her intestines to the balcony! I’d impale her ass first on a pitchfork and toss her into the fires of Tartarus! I’d get a hydra to grab ahold of each of her legs with its heads and take bets on which one popped off first!

“In that order!”

Every pony in the cafeteria was silent now, and they were all staring at the enraged pink unicorn mare. It took Starlight a good while to realize that she had managed to garner the attention of everypony, at which point she mumbled an apology of sorts and cleared her throat. While the volume of her voice when she next spoke had been significantly reduced, the magnitude of her ire was still readily apparent, “I can’t believe her,” she seethed through clenched teeth, “I watched her―watched―as she looked Princess Luna square in the eyes and ‘Pinkie Promised’―whatever that is―that none of the ponies―the foals―involved her Selene Program would―in any way―be used for the war effort.

“That was the only reason the Ministry of Peace even signed on to the project! That was the only reason―” Starlight’s expression suddenly became ill, and her eyes took on a haunted look as her voice fell to a whisper, “―the only reason I enrolled Moonbeam in it…”

I watched as the mare became progressively more panicked as she spoke, her wild gaze turning to me now, “Moonbeam wasn’t in the bunker with me. The MoA moved her before the bombs fell. What if…” she swallowed hard, finding the next words difficult to speak. It was as though she was worried that the act of saying them aloud would cause them to be retroactively true, “...what if that means that they used her for one of those computers?”

The vision of Trellis, the little green filly condemned to a tiny steel cylindrical prison buried at the bottom of a forgotten facility for two centuries, fully aware of her isolation for all that time, flashed through my head. Could that well have been the fate of Starlight’s own daughter? Seeing how upset the unicorn mare clearly was at the prospect of her foal being utilized for the project at all, I thought it best to perhaps not tell her about what I’d found beneath our hooves at this very moment.

“Then we’ll help her when we find her,” I assured the mare, almost automatically. What a stupid thing to say. ‘Help’ a foal in the same position that Trellis had been in. How exactly was I supposed to even do that? The only ponies who knew anything about what had been done to them―or, more importantly how it had been done―were all two hundred years dead. As skilled as even a doctor like Lancet was, I doubted that he’d be able to undo those kinds of modifications.

That I was little more than lying through my teeth didn’t change the fact that it was still what Starlight wanted to hear. The little orange mare in my head could give me the stink-eye all she wanted. At least the yellow pegasus seemed to understand what I was doing. Meanwhile, the cyan flier was wilting beneath the piercing glare of a pair of white and pink mares, pleading her ignorance.

“We’ll go to Seaddle, confront Ebony Song and make him take us to see Princess Luna. If, like you said, she was against the Ministry of Awesome using foals like that, then she’ll definitely let us help the foal in that computer,” Starlight was growing progressively more calm as I laid out the reassuring plan. Up to this point, I was pretty confident in it. I couldn’t see the ruler of the New Lunar Republic possibly wanting to use something like the computer that Ebony Song had stolen from the Steel Rangers once she learned how it operated. It was the next part that I was a little shaking on the details of, “then we’ll find out where they sent your daughter, and what happened to her. If she’s in one of those things, we’ll find a way to get her out.”

I received a determined nod of agreement from Ramparts. Arginine was slightly more noncommittal with his own assurances. Not that I could blame him. It wasn’t like I really knew how I was going to pull that off in the end. I was just kind of hoping that things would work themselves out in the end.

Much like with Arginine’s stable. I had no idea how the valley was supposed to really beat off the force being arrayed against it. I was just sort of hoping that, with enough ponies and equipment, that victory would just sort of...happen. It wasn’t like I was any sort of grand tactician. That was a matter for better ponies than me. All I was capable of doing was getting everypony’s attention and pointing them at the looming threat on the horizon and hoping for the best.

Yep. Real ‘hero’ material right here…

“Thank you, Windfall,” the pink unicorn said, “that means a lot to me,” she stared down at the rest of her meal still on her plate for several seconds, then she nudged the plate further away and stood up, “I’m not hungry anymore,” she then winced and put a hoof to her head, “ugh...stupid mana burn…”

Ramparts stood up and started ushering the mare towards the exit, “let’s go find you someplace to lie down for a bit,” he suggested, receiving a nod of agreement from Starlight.

As she walked away, she glanced back over her shoulder and offered an apologetic smile to the other diners at large, “sorry about the yelling.”

A few scattered acceptances could be made out, but for the most part the rest of the ponies there simply watched the pair leave in silence. When they were out of earshot, a murmur was taken up by the ponies as they began to discuss what had just transpired amongst themselves. I sighed and started poking at my own meal, my previously ravenous inclinations having been curbed by the conversation. I suppose that it was too much to hope that we could just have a mundane dinner table conversation that didn’t end in something depressing being mentioned.

My ear twitched and I briefly glanced in the direction that Starlight and Ramparts had gone, “...Selene?”

“I beg your pardon?” Arginine prompted.

“...I don’t know. That name just sounded familiar for some reason. It’s probably nothing.

“My life used to be really simple, you know?” I said as I turned back around to resume staring at my food, “I’d wake up, kill some raiders, sell their stuff for booze and ammo, get drunk, go to bed, repeat. I did that for eight years,” I thought for a short moment and then amended, “not the getting drunk part. I’ve only been doing that for about three or so.

“It was a very straightforward life.”

“Objectively, there is nothing that precludes you from pursuing such an existence at this moment,” Arginine pointed out, “you have the option of abandoning your self-imposed mission to combat my stable and resume eliminating undesirable ponies piecemeal.”

“No, I can’t,” I sighed, a sad smile tugging at my cheeks, “I’ve never been able to ignore ponies in trouble. When I see somepony in danger, I don’t even think about it. I act. It’s like...instinctive, or something” I shrugged, “the ponies of the valley are in trouble, and so I have to do something about it.”

“You make it sound as though such a compulsion is a burden.”

I guess I had, hadn’t I? “It’s not that. Not really. I mean, I like it. Seeing that look of relief on a pony’s face when they realize that they’re going to be okay? It’s an amazing feeling. Even though their life is probably going to go right back to sucking tomorrow because, you know, the Wasteland and everything; but for that one brief moment? They aren’t worried about anything at all. It’s this deep sense of relief that just goes right down to their bones.

“It only lasts for as long as it takes them to remember that there’s still plenty of other things in the world for them to worry about, but it’s still something. I don’t know. I guess it’s a pretty silly thing to look forward to.”

Arginine was studying me intently, and I started to grow a little uncomfortable beneath his amber gaze, “what?”
The stallion turned back to his meal and resumed eating, “you derive fulfillment from enriching the lives of others. I do not believe that to be ‘silly’,” now it was my turn to regard the stallion curiously, prompting him to shrug, “my own life has been devoted to ensuring that future genetic strains possess the best possible traits that I can discover for them. In that way, I am hoping to ‘enrich’ their lives―make their existence better. It was a pursuit that I too found fulfilling.”

I frowned slightly, “I get that you’re trying to make me feel better about myself by pointing out that we’re not so different, but I really don’t like being compared to you, RG. You know how I feel about what you did to ponies.”

“In that respect, we are certainly very different,” the stallion nodded in agreement, “you are bothered by the prospect of taking lives, even those of undesirable ponies.

“Meanwhile, I am incapable of feeling empathy for those I kill,” he held up a piece of what was clearly radroach which had been incorporated into the Cram-loaf, “for me, killing a pony bothers me as little as killing an insect,” I felt my frown deepening, not certain where the unicorn stallion was trying to go with this, “I have recently found myself wondering what I would be doing with my life if I was more like you.”

Okay, I hadn’t been expecting that. The stallion continued, “my strain was designed as we were so that we could perform the duties that were viewed as essential for the completion of our directive. However, as I have previously stated, the Omega Strain―the ponies we intend to ultimately inhabit the world―will be capable of great empathy towards all.

“No Omega would ever be able to do what I do. So then, were I an Omega, seeking to make a better world, what would I be doing instead?”

I waited for him to answer the question, but he never did. The stallion simply shrugged and resumed eating, leaving me to wonder if he’d been talking to himself there at the end. Then he spoke again, changing the immediate subject of the conversation, “you insist that you intend to carry on with your quest to fight my stable. Should I presume that you also intend to continue your endeavor to improve ponykind through your own devices?”

“That...I don’t think I’m going to be doing so much anymore,” I admitted, drawing an inquisitive look from Arginine, “at least, not the way that I have been. I’m really tired of killing, RG.”

“Removing ineffective or damage sequences is essential to creating a more robust genetic strain. Can the same not be said of removing violent and disruptive ponies from the surface population? You have previously demonstrated that you are quite capable in that regard.”

He wasn’t wrong. I was very good at killing ponies, and I’d been at it for a long time. That was kind of the point though, wasn’t it? I recalled the epiphany I’d had outside the bunker yesterday, “I’ve been wiping out raiders and slavers for eight years. They’re not exactly any harder to come by today even after I’ve put thousands of them in the ground.

“If I can’t make a dent in this one little valley after a decade, then what hope do I have to fix the Wasteland?”

“Little to none, I suspect,” Arginine confirmed without hesitation, drawing a dower look from myself. He didn’t have to agree with me quite that quickly, “which is about the same chances of success you’d have to beat back the ponies of my stable.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“It was my understanding that you were aware of this,” the stallion continued, munching on the last of his dinner, “and it was the reason that you had no intention of fighting my stable,” I frowned at the larger unicorn and was about to open my mouth to correct his rather oddly mistaken memory when he finished his thought, “you were working to array the entire valley against us.”

The words that I’d been about to speak died in my throat as I caught his telling gaze, and the meaning behind what he was saying. I thought for a brief moment on what he’d said. Of course I wasn’t going to fight his stable all on my own. That’d be pointless, and I’d fail in the opening minutes of the first fight. However, an alliance of every capable force that lived in the valley―thousands of ponies―at least had a hope of winning in the end.

In that light, of course I wasn’t going to be able to stop raiding and slaving in the whole valley. I was just a single pony. Even with Jackboot, a pair wasn’t going to have a chance of being much more effective. You’d need to have...dozens? Hundreds? A whole lot of ponies, at any rate, all doing what I’d been in order to make a difference in anything approaching a reasonable amount of time would be needed.

The valley was replete with armies, of course. The Steel Rangers, the Republican Guard, and then you threw in mercenary bands like the Lancers, and you could quickly come up with many thousands of ponies that could be sent out against not just Arginine’s stable, but also rounding up and stomping out bandits and the more murderous gangs. Not that any of those groups had been doing so in the past.

Everypony had their own problems, it seemed. That and it felt like it’d be the next best thing to impossible to get any of them to work together for very long under normal circumstances. The mercenaries would fight as long as enough caps and bits flowed into their hooves; but only New Reino’s casino barons had the sort of wealth essential to fund them long-term like that. The Steel Rangers didn’t concern themselves with policing the areas they roamed. They only wanted to secure advanced technology and lock it away.

The Republican Guard would be the most likely to want to help make the valley a safer place, and at one time they had―nominally. That had been before the war with the Rangers, of course. Though, even before the fighting, back when they’d been the Commonwealth, their forces had really only cared about those lands within their sphere of influence. Anything more than a few miles from their cities, they didn’t care about. If they’d been of a mind, they could have cleaned up the valley decades ago.

In order to make the Neighvada Valley a place that was free of banditry, I’d need to find an army of ponies that were willing to work for next to nothing, and who were willing to wander all over the whole valley, helping everypony in need, no matter what group they were aligned with, if any. Of course, exactly no such group of ponies existed that I knew about.

“You’re right,” I sighed, “I can’t do it myself. I’d need an army.”

Arginine nodded, “a fighting force of significant size would be required, that is correct.”

“So you’re saying it’s hopeless,” I frowned before rolling me eyes at the stallion, “unless, hypothetically, some group of genetically superior ponies came through and put an end to it; I get it.”

“While that would certainly solve the problem, that was not the conclusion I was specifically referring to,” the gray pony corrected patiently, “more accurately, I was simply pointing out that you would require a great number of allies to help you achieve your goal.”

I blinked at the stallion, baffled. Then I snorted, “very funny, RG. You could at least pretend to be helpful right now. Nopony’s going to go along with some filly’s stupid plan to get rid of all the raiders in the valley.”

“Perhaps,” he looked around briefly before excusing himself, “I am going to conduct an experiment; I will return.”

I watched the stallion walk away from the table we were sitting at. He didn’t go very far, as the cafeteria wasn’t very big. He approached a stallion sitting nearby and engaged him in conversation. The larger gray stallion was speaking in low tones, and I couldn’t make out what he was saying. For his own part, the stallion that he was talking to seemed initially surprised that he’d been approached at all. Then I watched as his expression shifted to intrigue, before his eyes darted briefly to me and a smile spread across his face. He reached into his saddlebags and passed something Arginine with a grin and a nod. Arginine moved on to another table.

As I continued to look on, I saw much the same exchange take place over and over again. Arginine would approach a table full of ponies, say something to them, and then they’d all give him something, all the while grinning broadly and glancing in my direction. A few even waved at me! After he’d visited every occupied table in the dining area, the large gray unicorn return, sitting down across from me at our table. He then dumped what amounted to a small mountain of supplies on the table.

Boxes of ammunition of all types, phials of healing potion, cans of food, bottles of water, even some grenades; it was a cache of supplies that could sustain a pony in the Wasteland for a week or more. My eyes boggled at the trove and I was about to ask Arginine where he’d gotten the money to pay for all of that when I realized that I hadn’t seen him pay for a single one of the items. Everypony had just given him all of this stuff!

“What…?” I gestured limply at the supplies piled on the table.

“The results of my experiment,” Arginine said simply, “I approached each table and asked the following question: ‘would you be willing to help the Wonderbolt fight raiders in the valley?’ This was their response,” he pointed at the mound, “though I feel compelled to admit that there were also several additional offers of personal assistance in the form of accompanying you to the den of the raiders.

“It seems that you greatly underestimated the amount of support your notion would receive.”

Everypony here knows that they owe you their lives…

I looked back around the cafeteria and took in the glances being cast in my direction. The pony who was the whole reason that they were even alive today had just asked them for any help they were willing to give. How could they not offer something by way of expressing their thanks? Understanding why they were doing it wasn’t quite the same thing as accepting that they were doing it though.

“RG, give that stuff back,” I hissed at the stallion, pushing the supplies closer to him, “we can’t just take their stuff!”

Arginine simply returned my stern look with his own patient gaze, “we have ‘taken’ nothing. I asked if they were willing to help you. They donated these items.”

“You asked if they were willing to help ‘The Wonderbolt’,” I shot back, “The Wonderbolt’s a hero, and I’m not.”

“The ponies here see no distinction,” he said, “you may try to return these items if you desire, but I suspect they will be unwilling to receive them back. Similarly, they did not appear to desire monetary compensation either.

“I feel compelled to point out that our supplies are genuinely running low. If we intend to return to Seaddle, then we will need food, medicine, and munitions.”

I couldn’t argue that point, unfortunately. Most of what had been recovered from the research base we’d escaped from had been given to the caravan ponies to help keep them safe as they got back to Shady Saddles. I was basically down to fighting with my bare hooves. It hadn’t occurred to me to ask what Ramparts’ situation was where ammunition was concerned, but it couldn’t be great. Grudgingly, I conceded the point and let Arginine pocket the supplies.

“My findings still stand as well: there seems to be little need for you to continue acting alone. Indeed, you appear to have been doing quite well to recruit ponies to fight by your side even in the short time I’ve known you.”

“That’s different,” I mumbled, speaking the words before I’d even taken the time to think about exactly how it was ‘different’.

“Is it? Enlighten me, if you please.”

My mouth opened, but no words came out. What was I going to say to the stallion? Was I supposed to tell him that none of the ponies traveling with me were interested in actually helping me? I knew that was a load of horseapples. Foxglove had flat out told me that was the whole reason that she was sticking by my side. She saw me as a good pony who deserved to be helped, and so she would. There were probably some demons of her own making motivating her to do that, but it didn’t change the result.

Likewise, Arginine had committed himself to helping me however he could. He’d been a little more straightforward in his reasons, at least. I was an experiment that he was conducting, in order to see if the ponies of his stable really were superior to the ponies of the surface. Most ponies might see this as a cause to be suspicious of any help he was giving me, as he was still quite clearly fully committed to the spirit of his stable’s mission. However, undermining me meant undermining the integrity of the experiment he was conducting. For better or worse, he wanted his stable to receive the most robust opposition that was possible. If they could overcome a completely coordinated valley full of ‘invalid’ ponies, then there was little reason to doubt that they could overwhelm the whole Wasteland and prove that they really were ‘better’ ponies.

Sabotaging me, even slightly, meant that his stable would be facing a weakened opponent, and leave the question of how much ‘better’ they truly were more open-ended than the gray stallion would have liked.

Arginine could probably honestly care less who won in the end. Since, in either case, the ‘better’ ponies would be the victors. If that was his stable, then I’m sure he’d be perfectly content. If it was the ponies of the valley, then he’d have shown his stable that they weren’t quite ready yet. They’d retreat, rethink their strategy, probably try to make themselves even smarter and stronger or something. If that turned out to be the case, we’d have to make more preparations to make ourselves ready for their next attempt; assuming that a peace couldn’t be struck somehow.

Arginine was firmly committed to helping me, because of what I was trying to accomplish in bringing the valley together: making us better ponies.

Ramparts wanted to repay me for saving his flank on multiple occasions, and because I was trying to bring an end to the war that he and his fellow soldiers had been fighting for years. He wanted the valley to be a more peaceful place by driving off the Steel Rangers, and he saw helping me as a better way to accomplish that than by following the orders of his immediate superiors; maybe even the Princes herself. That seemed like a pretty high bar to set for a filly, but the brown earth pony was still hanging around, even now.

Of all my companions, Starlight was the only one of whom it could be said wasn’t firmly committed to my cause. That wasn’t a strike against her, of course. She simply had other priorities at the moment, which even I couldn’t fault. I was her best hope for learning what happened to her lost daughter, and so she was going to stick with me until that happened. Afterwards, well, maybe she would stick by me. Who could say?

What was more, I realized, was that none of them was with me in order to help The Wonderbolt. They’d known me long before I’d played at that persona. They were helping Windfall: a little white pegasus filly who was probably biting off a lot more than was healthy for anypony to take on. They were helping me.

Nor were they doing it because they felt sorry for me, or anything like that. I’d met most of them in the course of saving their lives―or, in Arginine’s case, by kicking the flanks of his stable. They knew that I was capable of doing what I’d vowed to, and so they’d thrown their lot in with me. They believed I could do some good.

Who was to say that other ponies wouldn’t join me too if I put the word out there? It’s not like I wasn’t making some pretty staunch allies out in the valley. Homily’s ponies were clearly in my corner, as Arginine had just proved. Summer Glade had demonstrated that I’d made a good friend in her family and the caravan company that they owned. This had all been done in a month.

“Okay,” I finally said with a sigh, “I see what you’re saying. That doesn’t mean that it’s going to be easy though. Building a group like that would take time, equipment, resources―a base of operations,” I pointed out to the stallion, who was inclined to nod in agreement with everything that I was saying, “it could take years to get all of that together.

“Which is assuming we all even manage to survive the fight with your stable.”

“Assume that, yes,” the unicorn agreed. He was silent for several seconds, and then I spied the barest hint of a lip twitch as he ‘smiled’, “is it permissible to interpret that statement as indicating that you are making tentative plans to establish such a group in the future?”

I stared across the table at the stallion as a smirk wormed its way across my face. He was one manipulative bastard when he put his mind to it, I had to give him that, “I’ll add it to my Bucket List.”

We took our time recovering at McMaren. While I wouldn’t come right out and admit it publicly, it was very nice to have a cozy bed to sleep in at night and some hot meals throughout the day. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had what amounted to a real break like this.

That wasn’t to say that we were just lying about all day doing nothing. As much as I’m sure Homily’s ponies wouldn’t have minded putting up with our small band of freeloaders for a while, I felt compelled to make us at least mildly useful during our stay. Ramparts spent his time drilling the McMaren ponies in small unit tactics and conducting reconnaissance patrols to help give the ponies there even further warning about possible threats that were coming their way.

Arginine was using his superior strength and magical abilities to aid in the reconstruction effort. He even pulled brief stints as a physician, despite his repeated insistence that he wasn’t one. Fortunately, nopony seemed to care how he’d come by his remarkably keen knowledge of equine anatomy and physiology. Professional medical training or no, it seemed that having a keen insight into how a body worked made for a very useful knowledge base when it came to fixing it up again.

Foxglove, who had eventually made a full recovery, had awoken to find herself with quite a tidy list of things to fix. Jest about every piece of my gear needed attention, as did Arginine’s energy rifle. The violet unicorn mechanic seemed to actually be pretty grateful to have something to do to help out the group. I hadn’t been there for their fight against the ponies of Arginine’s stable when they’d attacked the caravan that night, by I got the distinct impression that she’d viewed her contribution to the fighting as being rather underwhelming.

It wasn’t just our equipment either. Foxglove had spent nearly the entirety of yesterday sequestered in the base’s radio tower with Homily in an effort to try and improve both the range and the quality of her radio broadcasts. There had also been some talk of trying to find a way to salvage and incorporate some of the tracking systems that I’d come across in the base’s underground facility. Homily was especially interested in having these features at her disposal, relishing the notion of being better able to track and report on trouble spots in the valley so that she could keep ponies away from dangerous areas as they popped up.

“Of course, I can only report what I know about,” the yellow earth pony mare lamented bitterly, “and I lost most of the network that was keeping me up to date when Scratch died,” I remained pointedly silent on that matter. The broadcast personality continued, “I’m reaching out to the caravan companies in the area to try and get them to report anything they see, but…” she shrugged, “by the time they know danger’s around, that usually means they’ve already been attacked. If they’re reporting it, that means they killed the raiders. If the raiders won then, well, it’s not like I’ll get a report then, will I?”

The problem was a serious one, and none of us had any ready answers for her. The best that I could do at the moment was offer to always have either my or Ramparts’ pipbuck radios tuned into the channel that Homily was receiving these alerts on in case we happened to be near where the attack was happening. The valley was a big place, and there wasn’t a very big chance that we’d be close enough to do any good the vast majority of the time, but the yellow mare seemed pretty appreciative of the gesture all the same.

She did ask that I also keep her abreast of any encounters I had with raiders or other violent groups so that she could use them in her news announcements. I was initially quite skeptical, but Homily was rather insistent, “please, Windfall? You can’t know what it means to ponies to hear that there’s somepony out there fighting like that. Celestia knows the Republic isn’t doing as much of it these days,” Ramparts had frowned at that, but hadn’t objected to the observation. If anything, he was all too aware of how much the Guard’s policing efforts had dropped off in the wake of their war with the Rangers. That would hopefully be changing in the near future though.

“Let Miss Neighvada give the valley a little hope?”

In the end, I’d relented, and promised to give her regular updates on my activities. Then I’d thought for a moment and amended, “on one condition: you have to tell ponies that it’s not just me. Make sure to tell them that it’s a group of us. The Wonderbolts, plural,” I emphasized the plural, “or whatever name you think would be better. I’m not doing this alone, after all.”

Homily had agreed, seeming to be intrigued by how best she could put the notion to good use. I was hopeful that if ponies heard that there was a whole team of ponies making the valley safer, they might not feel so daunted by the prospect of trying to help out as well, thinking that it’d have to be an individual effort.

Not everypony was a Stable Dweller or a Security Mare after all. Some of us couldn’t do this on their own. Maybe that made me a lesser ‘hero’, or precluded me from being any sort of hero at all. So what? I wanted to help ponies―I liked helping ponies―and so I was going to, with the help of my friends...

The crack of gunfire and a muffled string of creative curses drew my attention to the present.

...No matter how bad a shot they were, I thought with a heavy mental sigh.

I stared at the mockingly unimpressed targets downrange of Starlight Glimmer which remained defiantly unphased by her continued efforts to shoot them. I briefly entertained the notion of asking Foxglove to widen the choke on her shotgun in an effort to expand the spread of the shot, but that would only further decrease the range at which her weapon would prove lethally effective. The complete lack of any disturbance on the ground around her target suggested that such a modification would be unlikely to help her anyway.

“Aim at the base of the target, Starlight,” I said, not bothering to hide the fact that it sounded like I was repeating the same instruction for the hundredth time; because that was about how many times I had repeated it. It didn’t take a lot of scrutiny to see where the pink unicorn mare’s issues with her marksmareship lay. The barrel of the weapon was wandering all over the place before she depressed the trigger, and her whole head jerked back in an almost exaggerated-looking fashion with every shot.

In response, the mare spat out the shotgun, catching it in her cyan telekinetic field and glared at me as she reached up and started rubbing the back of her neck, “I am aiming at the base!” she insisted before adding, “this thing’s giving me whiplash. Why can’t I hold it with my magic? Or, you know, just use my magic? I can zap those bottles into dust with my eyes closed!”

Indeed she could, and I had seen her do just that in the past. Of course, that kind of flew in the face of the whole reason we were practicing right now, “because a few days ago you could barely hold up a fork with your magic,” I pointed out, “what are you going to do if you get burned out again and we’re attacked? You have to know how to fight under the worst conditions you’ll face; otherwise you’re useless in a fight at all,” I couldn’t wait to see how she was going to react when I told her about the hoof-to-hoof drills I had planned for her once she mastered the ability to at least graze targets with her shotgun.

“What if I don’t want to be useful in a fight?” the unicorn sneered, turning her lip up at me in disgust, “has it occurred to you that I might not have an interest in killing ponies?”

I slowly nodded my head. I could empathize with that. It wasn’t like I enjoyed killing either. Given the life that she’d known before waking up in the Wasteland, where ponies didn’t wander around killing each other all the time, I could easily understand how a pony like her could be repulsed by the notion. However, “unfortunately, there’s a lot of ponies out there who have a keen interest in killing you, just for what’s in your saddlebags. We’re going to come across those ponies sooner or later, whether we like it or not. That’s how the Wasteland works.”

“I don’t suppose that it’s occurred to anypony that that’s not the way it has to work?” Starlight asked sarcastically, “why does everypony just go right to killing anyway? That’s just stupid.”

Despite my best intentions, I was pretty sure that my expression must have appeared rather patronizing as I tried to keep up my best patient smile. The kind of things that the pink unicorn said weren’t borne out of idiocy, I had to remind myself, they were simply the product of a mare two centuries out of date with the world. I couldn’t deny the romantic appeal of an Equestria where ponies talked first, second, and third, and shot never; but that time had long since passed.

“It’s simple,” I eventually replied, offering the unicorn a resigned shrug and a sympathetic smile. Just because it was the truth didn’t mean that I had to like it either, after all, “food, clean water, weapons to defend yourself with, they’re all very scarce out here. Getting your hooves on the things you need to stay alive require you to either risk your life finding them in old ruins infested with dangerous creatures and traps, buy them from other ponies who risked their lives doing that with money earned from working long hours, or, well...you could just shoot them and take their stuff.

“It’s very simple to do the latter, so a lot of ponies take that option,” I said with a resigned sigh, “and the only way to respond, unfortunately, is by doing the same thing: shooting them. Preferably first.

“I know somepony who grew up in a paradise like the world was before the Wasteland and the War couldn’t understand that, but―”

“Ha!” the pink mare cackled, “I’d hardly call Equestria a ‘paradise’,” she retorted mirthlessly. The unicorn looked around her and then added, “well, I suppose it’s one relatively speaking, but trust me: there were plenty of ‘problem ponies’ back then too.

“We didn’t feel the need to kill them though.”

“And in a world where there was enough available food and water to imprison them for long periods of time, I’m sure you didn’t have to,” I said.

Starlight Glimmer shook her head, frowning at me, “prison? How exactly would locking troubled ponies away help things? What’s the matter with you? Haven’t ponies here ever heard of a Reformation Spell?”

“A what?”

“You know, a Reformation Spell?” she went on, as though describing the most common and mundane facet of pony life in the world, “available in the local public library of even the most podunk little hamlet?” I continued to stare at her blankly, “it was the cornerstone of the Equestrian legal system for centuries!” Starlight finally said in exasperation, “how can nopony remember it anymore? Unbelievable…”

The pink mare’s horn started glowing as she extricated one of the tomes that she’s procured from the Old Reino Ministry of Arcane Sciences hub that we’d recent raided. She then flipped through its pages with her telekinesis until she came across the page that she was looking for, at which point she flipped the grimoire around and shoved it in my face. I could only blink aimlessly at the writing contained on the page which surrounded a number of glyphs that looked geometrically impossible as far as I could tell. How could anypony make sense of that stuff?

Starlight withdrew the book a moment later, as though her point had been made, and said, “this was the spell that historians all agree launched the Harmonious Renaissance for Equestria! Ponies suddenly had the ability to, literally, end crime, in the simplest way possible: stopping the criminal from even wanting to be a criminal! With this spell, any stallion or mare who broke serious law could be instantly transformed into a model citizen.”

“So, wait, you’re telling me that this spell can turn bad ponies into good ponies?” I asked, not sure how ready I was to believe such an incredible claim.

“In an instant,” she affirmed resolutely.

“Permanently?”

“Until the day they die,” there wasn’t even the barest hint of doubt in her tone.

Honestly, despite in the pink unicorn’s display of absolute faith in what she was saying, I found myself still feeling doubtful. Mostly because it just all sounded far too good to be true. I’d never known anything in my life to be as cut and dry as, ‘zap the problem; fixed forever!’ Though, I suppose that pretty much summed up the life of a unicorn, didn’t it? This mare was even supposed to have held a position of note within the ancient Equestrian ministry that was dedicated to the pursuit of finding spells that would miraculously solve the nation’s biggest problem―the war with the zebras―in one fell swoop. In that light, was it really so hard to imagine that they already had solutions to some of the more mundane issues of their time, like rapists and murderers?

I guess I just didn’t want to get my hopes up too high. I’d been hurt before when things looked like they were going too well, after all. That was my own problem though, and had nothing to do with Starlight’s revelation. If she really did have a spell that could stop ponies from being raiders and slavers, then why should I shy away from it? It was pretty much a literal answer to my most vocal prayers right now: how to stop bad ponies without having to kill them.

“It’s too much to hope that you can just set that spell off right here and now and have it affect every raider in the world, isn’t it?” Starlight leveled a flat look in my direction that perfectly answered my question, “figured as much.”

“Sorry,” the unicorn explained, closing up the book and putting it away, “a Reformation Megaspell was never put into development. That’s not to say one wasn’t brainstormed early on in the war. After all, that would have been the perfect way to end the war, right? Just zap all of the zebras and make them peaceful.”

“So why wouldn’t that work?”

“Everypony’s different,” Starlight explained patiently, “our pasts, our ambitions, how we react to the world around us―no two ponies are the same. You have to reform ponies on an individual basis, because you have to identify what the problem even is. If you try to ‘fix’ something in a pony that isn’t what was ‘broken’ in the first place, you can just make things worse.”

“You can’t swap out a broken bolt for a .32 auto and replace it with one from a .30-30 Whinnychester,” I said with a nod of understanding.

It was Starlight’s turn to wear a blank stare, “...sure. I’ll assume that’s right,” she cleared her throat and continued, “so, no, even if you gave me the help of a hundred of the most gifted unicorns in the world, and built the most impressive megaspell matrix ever conceived of by ponykind, there’s no way to reform the whole Wasteland at once. It has to be done one pony at a time.”

I sighed in resignation. Of course it was too good to be true. Still, there was a silver lining here: I had a unicorn that could cast the spell with me. Which meant that that next time we came across a raider―and there would be a next time because, you know, Wasteland―an effort could be made to take them alive so that Starlight could zap them into good ponies who’d never become raiders ever again. If nothing else, it was a step in the right direction as far as I concerned.

“Even Old Equestria wasn’t built in a day, right?” I offered up a smile, feeling a little optimistic for the first time in a while.

“Isn’t that the truth,” Starlight Glimmer sighed, eventually managing to muster up a smile of her own in return, “it probably won’t get rebuilt in a day, either,” she added, “but, with the spells I have, I think we can make a real go of it.”

“Really?” my dubiousness was back.

“Of course!” Starlight’s own tone was replete with conviction though, “if I can get ponies to stop acting like complete psychopaths, and instead behaving like real Equestrian ponies, then the Wasteland can absolutely be changed back! I mean, maybe not physically,” she amended, looking around again, “that’s going to take a lot more work, and a whole bunch more spells, but it’s the ponies that really matter!

“Once everypony is acting friendly towards one another, and not killing each other anymore, we can all cooperate and work together to rebuild,” the drive and ambition in Starlight’s voice was...addictive. It was hard not to feel myself getting progressively more excited as she went on describing her plan to rebuild the nation that she’d once known.

It even sounded genuinely promising. Ponies that were once violent and dangerous, becoming friendly, productive, members of society? It was certainly a far more appealing plan for reforming the Wasteland than the, ‘exterminate all the ponies and repopulate with a new race of equines’ plan Arginine’s stable had for the world.

“The next time we come across raiders, reforming them is exactly what we’ll do,” I announced.

Starlight’s eyes brightened, “you mean it?”

“Absolutely,” I said, feeling myself grinning now, “this sounds like the perfect way to fix the Wasteland, and I want to see it in action.

“That being said,” I bent down and picked up her shotgun once more, “when we do eventually encounter raiders again, we’re going to need to at least fight them to a point where they surrender; and if you spend all your magic fighting them, then you might not have enough left over to cast the Reformation Spells, will you?”

The pink mare scowled, but she eventually grunted an acknowledgement to the point that I’d brought up. She was still rather reluctant though, “I don’t see why the rest of you can’t just do that part yourselves. You can’t really believe I’ll make a difference in a fight like that. I saw what you and Arginine did to those other augmented ponies.”

That was a fair point, “do the rest of us need you to help us fight off any raiders we come across?” I asked rhetorically, feigning as though I were actually pondering the question, “probably not. Ramparts and I are long time veterans at this sort of thing, Foxglove’s coming along pretty well, and I’ve recently learned that RG can handle himself too.

“But I’m not actually doing this for our benefit,” I pointedly informed the pink unicorn, much to her apparent surprise, “I’m doing it to help you,” I received a dubious expression from the horned mare.

“The thing is, I can’t promise you that the four of us will always be there for you. Things happen,” my face darkened briefly at the memory of Jackboot vanishing in a green flash. He’d been a pony that I’d taken for granted would always be by my side until, one day, he wasn’t, “and even if everything does work out for all of us, you mentioned early on about wanting to find out what happened to your husband in the Bristol Empire, right?”

“Crystal Empire,” she corrected, to which I waved a dismissive hoof.

“Whatever. My point is, that doesn’t sound like it’s close by?” I looked questioningly at the unicorn, who slowly shook her head in answer, “well, I’m not leaving the valley any time soon, and Ramparts has family here. Have you asked Foxglove and RG if they’re willing to go with you?” I was pretty confident of the answer, and Starlight’s frown served to confirm my suspicions. While there wasn’t necessarily anything tying either of those two to the valley―certainly not after RG’s stable was beaten back―this was still a very familiar place for them. I couldn’t see Foxglove abandoning the place where her old stable was, on the off chance she might be able to go back to her old home. Arginine was harder to read in that respect, but even without sentimental ties to Neighvada, there wasn’t a compelling reason for him to leave it entirely either that I could see.

“How long do you honestly think you’ll last on your own?” I asked the unicorn, “because there’s more out there than just ‘bad ponies’ that you might be able to reform. There are Radscorpions with stingers as big as a grown pony and shells thicker than Steel Ranger power armor. Hell hounds as big as a building that can dice a pony with a single swipe of their claws. Hordes of ghouls that pop up out of the ground without warning and devour you before you realize you’re fucked. Wandering roboponies designed to vaporize anything that moves.

“All those things have been responsible for the deaths of thousands―tens of thousands―of ponies who were, honestly, a lot better prepared to defend themselves than you are. Unicorns who thought they were good with magic. Earth ponies who thought they were tough,” A wry smirk touched my lips as I brought a wingtip over to touch the black patch of leather covering my right eye, “even pegasi who figured they’d be able to fly above it all.

“The Wasteland kills, and it’s been doing it for two hundred years. If you genuinely think you can survive in it on your own after seeing everything that you have in the last month,” I shrugged, “then fine. I’ll stop trying to teach you this stuff. I’ll think you’re wrong, and I’ll think you’ll die before nightfall on your first day out; but if that’s what you genuinely believe by now, then there’s honestly not anything more I can think of to say or do that would convince you otherwise. You won’t be the first idiot to get themselves killed out here; and you won’t be the last.

“In the end, you have to be the one to choose: do you want my help, or do you believe you know better than me about what’s out there, and what it can do to you if you let yourself―even for a moment―believe you’re tougher than the Wasteland,” I said, raising a hoof to gesture to my chest, with its numerous scars collected over a lifetime of shrapnel wounds and gunshots. My whole body was a veritable testament to how savage and brutal a life in the Wasteland could be to a pony who tried to make their living out here.

Starlight stared at me for a long while in silence as she digested my words. Her cyan eyes studied me intently, and it looked like she was even doing so for the first time as she took in the scope of the wounds that I’d received. Part of me wished that I could have dug out a photo of myself from a year ago, or even a couple of months ago, to show her what even that short amount of time could do to a pony. Whether it was my speech that had done it, or the pedigree of my wounds, the unicorn quietly retrieves the shotgun from my grasp with the mouth grip and turned her attention back to the range. She set her stance, lined up the weapon, and fired.

An hour later I was walking towards the base’s radio tower. Ramparts was showing Starlight how to properly clean and maintain her shotgun after we’d finished up at the range―she was hitting her targets nearly a quarter of the time by the end!―and I had nothing else pressing to do with the rest of my day, so I figured that now as as good a time as ever to sit down with the violet unicorn and see if we could go over the information that had been pulled from both the MAS hub in Old Reino, Wind Ryder’s, and the McMaren underground Ministry of Awesome facility. Even though I was confident that we weren’t going to need that weapon’s cache after all in order to convince Princess Luna to give up what the Republic had stolen from the Steel Rangers, given what we’d learned about it; having whatever was in there at hoof when we confronted Arginine’s stable struck me as a good idea.

It also looked like the MoA tracking station had been collecting all sorts of data long after the balefire bombs fell too. I wasn’t positive what useful information could be gleaned from two centuries of stuff like that, but Foxglove might have an idea or two about how we could make use of it if anypony could.

Hopefully I’d be able to pry her away from Homily long enough to get some worthwhile input. The two of them had become nearly inseparable while they’d been working.

“Hey, Foxy, do you have a...minute…”

Okay, when I’d remarked that I’d have to pry the two of them apart, I hadn’t thought that the task would need to be quite as literal as it looked like it was going to be. The violet unicorn’s head shot up from behind a control board, her emerald eyes wide and her expression mortified, “Windy?! I thought we locked the door…”

Homily’s head popped up a moment later, her hoof brushing away her disheveled mane from in front of her eyes as she peered sheepishly in my direction, “right…” she cleared her throat and tapped her hooves together apologetically as she looked back at the violet mare, “by the way, the lock’s been kind of broken for a while now. Can you take a look at it before you go?”

I merely blinked, shifting my gaze between the two mares as certain other details started to register. There was the odor of course, which could, upon first impressions, be mistaken for that of simply a stuffy little room in the Wasteland. Buried beneath that musty air was the scent of sweat and the distinct hint of an aroma that could be best described as ‘feminine’ in nature. Then I noticed that Foxglove’s saddlebags and her heavily pocketed harness with all of its tools had been tossed rather nonchalantly into a far corner of the broadcast center. It would be rather difficult to make any meaningful repairs to the transmission hardware without those readily at hoof.

Foxglove glared briefly at the yellow earth pony mare and then returned her apologetic eyes to me, “I’m sorry, I can explain―”

“I’m going to give you two a minute,” I said as I backed out the door and closed it. Once outside I let out a sigh and leaned back against the wall of the broadcast building.

It’s not like I was upset at Foxglove or anything like that. She was a grown mare who had found another grown mare that was interested in sharing a little ‘alone time’ doing grown mare things with one another. It hardly mattered to me who she hooked up with! Honestly, compared to the last time that I’d walked in on her having sex with somepony, this was a marked improvement as far as I was concerned. At least this time she wasn’t screwing somepony that she knew I was secretly pining for.

There was the sound of somepony fumbling on the other side of the door just before it opened and a violet face popped out, looking around frantically until the pair of jade eyes fell on me, at which point Foxglove finished extracting herself from the building and closed the door behind her. She looked down at her hooves, “you’re not mad, are you?”

I was mad that she asked that question, “of course not!” Foxglove recoiled slightly from the tone I’d used that, admittedly, had been a little harsher than I’d meant it to sound. I took a moment to sooth my own apparently frayed emotions and started again, “Foxy, it’s none of my business who you hook up with. Unless it’s with stallions you know I’m in love with,” I added in a bitter growl.

That made Foxglove wince. Perhaps it had been a little mean and uncalled for, but I didn’t particularly care on that point. I was still quite sore about it, despite Jackboot being long dead and the issue of ever settling down with him laid to rest along with him. It wasn’t something I was necessarily going to hold over the unicorn’s head forever, but I wasn’t going to let her forget that she’d hurt me by acting before thinking.

Not that any of this was why I’d come down here in the first place, “look, I didn’t come down here to talk about that,” I said, holding up my pipbuck, “when it’s a good time, I’d really like to go over all the stuff we pulled out of the MAS hub. I also grabbed a lot of stuff from the underground facility here. I’m hoping that some of it’ll be useful,” while I had yet to put all of the pieces together, I was confident that the Ministry of Awesome had been up to its withers in something big; and I got the impression that they didn’t even want either the Princess or the other ministries to know about it for some reason.

Foxglove brightened somewhat at the prospect, adding, “oh! That reminds me: I managed to salvage some more information from the computers at Wind Ryder’s while we were there waiting for you…” her face fell once more as the unicorn became distraught.

“I’m sorry we didn’t wait longer,” she said, barely meeting my gaze, “I wanted to, but when we couldn’t reach you with the radio...and Ramparts lost your pipbuck tag…” she swallowed, her eyes glistening, “we thought you’d died, Windy.”

I took a breath and nodded, recalling my own feelings of despair at the time, when I was so certain that radiation poisoning was going to claim my life, “I very nearly did; a few times. I don’t hate you guys for not waiting,” I assured her, “I wouldn’t have waited either.”

“We probably should have,” the violet mare continued, sounding bitter now, “maybe then we would have met up with you and not been captured by those stable ponies,” she grumbled, rubbing idly at her side. When she caught me watching the action with a curious eye, she stopped herself and looked away, “I wasn’t much help, it turns out.”

“They’re good fighters,” I said, trying to assuage any guilt that she might be feeling over her failure to protect the caravan they’d been with, “they’ve had a lot of experience ambushing ponies. At night, coming out of nowhere, when they all had pipbucks with SATS and you didn’t? That wasn’t a fight you were going to win.”

“It wasn’t even a fight I was a part of,” she said in a near whisper.

“What do you mean?” she’d clearly been there when it happened, as she’d been captured along with everypony else, right?

“I slept through it. I’d gotten drunk and passed out,” Foxglove admitted ruefully, “I didn’t even know we’d been attacked until I woke up in a cage.”

Oh. Well, that certainly explained why she’d been quiet about the attack until now, “I didn’t have you pegged for a big drinker,” I tried my hoof at a little light humor, not wanting to find myself in the position of consoling anypony who was hating themselves as much as I was. I could barely deal with my own shit, let alone somepony else’s.

“I’m not,” the mare nearly spat, “but you’d just ‘died’, and I knew you’d done it still hating me for what I did to you with Jackboot. I knew you still thought of me as a useless stable pony who couldn’t understand you,” she finally turned to face me again, and I could now see that her cheeks were wet with tears, her emerald eyes brimming with pain that she couldn’t keep back any longer, “I don’t want you to hate me, Windfall. I’m so sorry for what I did, and I don’t have an excuse. I wasn’t thinking, and it was stupid, and I can’t even think of a reason why I did it in the first place, which I know doesn’t make sense and isn’t what you want to hear, but it’s the truth!

“I respect you so much more than that, I swear,” the unicorn continued, wiping her nose with the back of her fetlock, “I’d never do anything to hurt you. You’ve done so much for me―I owe you my life! All I want is to help you. I already screwed over a pony I really cared about once before because I was thinking about myself, and it cost me everything I ever had. Now I have a whole new life and a second chance, and I feel like I fucked it all up again. And the worst part is that I didn’t even want what screwed it up this time.

“I hated Jackboot,” she said through gritted teeth, “I hated what he was, and what he was doing to you,” I had to give it to Foxglove; it must have taken a lot of courage for her to continue speaking to me like she was, knowing exactly how furious my expression must have been by this point. I bit my tongue though. This time. I was content to let her speak her piece in its entirety before lashing her verbally. Not that I found it an easy thing to do, and the ground certainly suffered where my hoof was gouging a rather deep furrow into it.

“You didn’t see the stallion I did. The conniving, manipulative, rapist. I know you don’t want to hear it, Windfall, but he attacked me! He threatened you too. He threatened to abuse you unless I...did things to him―with him. He was as bad as Tommyknocker―worse, in some ways.”
It was really hard not to say anything. If it wasn’t for a little yellow pegasus who had essentially wrapped herself around my mouth in an effort to keep it shut, I would have said quite a lot, and none of it ‘pleasant’.
She closed her eyes and wrapped her hooves around herself tight, as though trying to comfort herself, “but as much as I hated him, I hated myself more for not being strong enough to say ‘no’. I should have dared him to try it so that I could show you what kind of pony he really was…

“Then…” she swallowed, took a deep breath, and seemed to deflate, “then he...changed. He stopped coercing me. He left you alone, even when you went to him all on your own. It was like he was a different pony somehow. I can’t explain it.”

“Is that when you fucked him of your own free will?” I snapped my mouth shut, not having intended to speak that thought out loud.

Foxglove winced beneath the remark and slumped against the broadcast building, “I never thought of him like that, not even then. I just...I can’t explain it. I’ve been on my cycle before and found myself thinking about just about any stallion that crossed my path. That’s nothing new, and it wasn’t anywhere near my time of the year. I don’t know if it was the stress, or what. I just...needed a stallion, right then and there,” she buried her head in her hooves in shame, “I couldn’t even control myself, it was ridiculous! It was like I was some drunk, hormonal, teen riding Dash for the first time!

“I know hearing me say that it didn’t mean anything and that I didn’t even like Jackboot isn’t what you want to hear, and that it doesn’t forgive what I did―Celestia knows I’ll never forgive myself―but I need you to know it wasn’t malicious. I didn’t want to hurt you. I made a mistake, and I fucked up, and you’ll never know how sorry I am about it.

“I fucked up a lot, and I know that. I just...I don’t want you to hate me for it, Windfall. Please don’t hate me for it.”

A long, deafening, silence hung between the two of us as I carefully considered how I was going to respond. It took the concerted efforts of most of the little ponies in my head to keep me from simply lash her verbally and tear the unicorn down into little pieces. I had to temper that guttural inclination with the knowledge that, though hurtful, nothing she had said had been intended as malicious. Foxglove had been informing me simply of how Jackboot had been perceived by her, and I had to be mindful of perceptions.

I was also forced to admit that, in the grand scheme of things, I’d only known Jackboot for a brief period of his life. Certainly, I’d known him far longer than Foxglove had, but I couldn’t, in good conscience, claim that I truly knew who Jackboot was as a pony. My rosy recollections of him were very biased, based on what he’d done for me growing up. I’d known very little about him, it turned out, back then. There was doubtlessly a great deal I didn’t know about him even now, and would never know.

I didn’t want to believe that Jackboot would ever think of taking advantage of a young mare, and use her like a sex object. That wasn’t the kind of pony I saw him as. However, I was forced to remind myself that, long before he’d taken me into his care, he’d been a White Hoof; and that sort of sickening scenario sounded exactly like the kind of thing that I’d expect to hear said about them. As did Foxglove’s allegations about coercing her into servicing him. That too was what a White Hoof would do. If anything, they’d be a lot less subtle about it.

Did I want to think that what Foxglove was saying about the stallion I cared so deeply about was true? Of course not. However, I also couldn’t dismiss that niggling little kernel of doubt that had been sewed in my head. Maybe that was why I really hated Foxglove right now. It wasn’t because I truly believed she was making all of this up in an effort to maliciously sabotage my memories of Jackboot.

It was because I knew it was probably all true.

A part of me started wishing that she really had just been trying to steal Jackboot away from me. That pain had hurt far less than the twisting dagger in my heart that was carving up all of my fond memories of the older earth pony stallion.
Not that wanting something to be true had ever changed facts.

“I don’t hate you, Foxglove,” I finally heard myself say. The words sounded detached and hollow, even to my own ears. It was probably due to the shock that I was still experiencing as I digested what she’d told me, “I know you care. I guess I just hate that the world was actually shittier than I thought it was. The Wasteland gives you so few good moments that, when you think you find one, you just grab for it and hold on for all your worth, because you don’t know when the next one will come; if it ever does.

“Jackboot showed up at the darkest moment of my entire life. He offered me hope when I had none. I never wanted to think of him as anything less than a good pony―a hero; because that would mean losing that good moment,” I sighed, “it would mean that...I loved a monster; and what kind of pony would love a monster, who wasn’t also one?

“Even now, hearing everything you said he did...there’s that tiny little voice that can’t help but wonder if the two of us couldn’t have had a life together someday? That part that remembers the times we laughed together, as few and far between as they were,” Jackboot wasn’t prone to that sort of thing even on a good day.

“How am I supposed to feel about having fond memories of a rapist?” I cast a glance in Foxglove’s direction, but the unicorn had no answers for me. Neither did I, “it’s easier for me to think of him as a good pony who just wasn’t as good as he could have been than it is for me to believe he was just pretending that whole time.

“I’m sorry for what he did to you. I’m sorry you felt like you had to go through that to keep me safe. I appreciate that you thought you were helping me, and I don’t want you to feel like you went through it for nothing.

“You’ve done a lot for me, Foxglove. I’m not just talking about the gear and stuff either. You helped get me away from the White Hooves. You’ve tried to keep me level headed and stuck by me, even when I tried to push you away. You’re probably the most loyal pony I’ve ever known,” I took a deep breath, “and I’ve treated you like shit for very childish reasons.

“I’m sorry about that too.”

The violet unicorn mare stared at me for a long moment, sniffling and wiping at her nose and eyes, “wow. Where did all of that come from?”

A snort and a mirthful chuckle escaped my lips, “I’ve been spending my nights talking with a very smart pony,” that first day had not been my only session with Arginine. I’d made such conversations a regular part of my evenings, sequestered in his room for a few hours, usually until one of both of us simply fell asleep―typically myself. There may or may not have also been a bit of cuddling as well. No sex, certainly not until I’d found a way to take foals out of the equation; but Arginine wasn’t shy about demonstrating how much he knew about pony anatomy. Certainly not as shy as I was about making our ‘relationship’ public quite yet.

“It shows,” Foxglove nodded her approval, almost completely recovered by now, “and, thank you. It means a lot to me to hear you say all of that. I don’t think I’d ever quite thought about it that way,” the unicorn took a moment to compose herself further before taking a deep breath, “but we were here to talk about the information on your pipbuck,” she said, bringing our conversation back around full circle, “I’m actually working on putting something together that will help us sort out all of the data we’ve collected and compile it into something that makes sense.”

I flashed the mare a dubious look, prompting her to make a minor addendum, “er...I intend to work on something, I mean,” she blushed slightly, clearing her throat, “It’ll be done by morning.”

Her tone at the end had sounded like she was indeed rather committed to that timetable, and I didn’t have any reason to doubt her on that, “alright. I’ll bring Ramparts by in the morning and we’ll see what we can learn.”

“Sounds good,” Foxglove agreed. She then went quiet for a few seconds before hesitantly adding, “I should get back in there,” she said, nodding towards the door, “lot’s of work to do,” she earned another look from me, which she avoided as she slipped back inside and closed the door behind her.

Even if I’d felt compelled to rail on about her distracting herself with personal relationships while there was important work to do, I wasn’t inclined to make myself that much of a hypocrite. She had said that she’d be ready by tomorrow morning, and I trusted her word on that. Besides, I wasn’t feeling quite as mentally leveled as I’d have liked after that little discussion regarding Jackboot. I was going to need a little personal time with somepony too right now.

I made my way to what passed for an infirmary on the base. It was a rather recent addition, put together in the wake of the attack as a central location for those who were still recovering from their wounds to receive treatment. Homily’s crew hadn’t really had anypony who could reasonably be called a ‘doctor’, not really. I wasn’t sure if it was something that it somehow hadn’t occurred for them to bring, or if whoever they had tapped for the position had been killed when their group was first captured on their way here. Recent events had finally spurred Homily to correct the oversight, and she’d sent out a call for additional ponies to help bolster McMaren’s defenses, and to be sure that a medical professional was among them.

She didn’t have the benefit of a firm benefactor back in New Reino anymore who was ready to invest a great deal of caps in the enterprise, but I guess she’d garnered at least a few favors that she was capable of calling in with the caravans that she’d warned over the months. The unearthed facility that had been hidden beneath the base also provided the ponies here with an unexpected source of wealth that could be traded for what they were no longer being funded to simply buy outright.

Homily was being a little bit coy about announcing their newfound wealth, of course. The last thing that she wanted to do was invite raiders and the like; but she was confident that she could make accommodating enough arrangements with the major caravan owners. I even asked her to pass along my own personal recommendation to Summer Glade and her husband that they start doing business with the ponies here.

However, those reinforcements and skilled professionals would not be arriving for quite some time, and the ponies here needed care now. In that interim period, Arginine was serving as the medic overseeing their ongoing care. While not a medical professional―a fact he extolled at reminding everypony whenever they called him ‘Doc’―he possessed the indisputably greatest knowledge of how healthy ponies were supposed to function of anypony.

As I brushed aside the canvas flap that was currently serving as the infirmary’s door, I found that Arginine was in the midst of treating one of his regular patients: a stallion whose hind leg had been mangled by a Steel Ranger missile which had detonated too close to him. Compared to the pair of ponies who’d lost their lives in the same explosion, it could be said that he’d gotten off extremely light, all things considered. While his life had certainly been saved by the timely administration of a healing potion or two, there hadn’t been a lot of time in the midst of the fighting to do a ‘proper’ job of treating him, and so the healing provided by the magical elixir hadn’t been as definitive as it could have been.

Currently, the maimed stallion in question was lying on his side on top of the clinic’s singular treatment bed. His head was canted awkwardly as his enthralled gaze remained fixed on what the genetically tailored pony was doing to his leg. As I got closer, I could see that there was actually some minor surgery going on. A small pile of Med-X syringes in a garbage bin suggested how the pony being operated on could appear to be perfectly content with what was happening to his leg right now.

For my own part, I was caught between my own overriding intrigue as it very narrowly managed to win out over those reflexive feelings of revulsion brought on by the sight of seeing so much exposed pony flesh. My long history of exposure to vivisected corpses―some of my own making―in combination with how eerily ‘clean’ the visible musculature looked was enough to suppress whatever desire I might have to look away as I approached. Arginine glanced briefly away from what he was doing at the sound of my hoofsteps, just long enough to acknowledge my arrival, before returning his full attention to what he was doing.

I assumed an unobtrusive perch off to the side that still provided me with a clear line of sight and waited patiently. As I looked on, Arginine finished making what were apparently the final cuts meant to separate the ligaments affixing his patient’s calf muscle to his knee joint. He then very carefully guided those detached sinews to a new part of the underlying bone that was only a few fractions of an inch away from where they’d just been attached. The fine metal tools clutched in his telekinetic field somehow managed to be both gentle in how they handled the vulnerable flesh they gripped, and aggressive as they fought the tense muscles that resisted being stretched out as Arginine was trying to. The gray unicorn won out in the end, gingerly applying those ligaments to their new home. Once satisfied with their placement, he lifted a syringe filled with purple fluid that look remarkably similar to what healing potions contained and started applying the fluid with, well, surgical precision, I guess.

The selectively secreted fluid did as it was designed and melded the flesh to the bone as though it had always been there. Arginine continued injecting the healing draught droplet by droplet as he meticulously rearranged the flesh and sinew of the stallion’s exposed leg. His amber eyes scrutinized and evaluated the progress with the same intent gaze that I’d seen on Foxglove’s face while she was working on the Gale Force. He wasn’t fixing a hobbled pony’s mangled leg. He was restoring a broken piece of equipment to the way that it should be in order to function properly. That leg was all just squishy machinery to him.

Eventually, he was finally satisfied with his work and set about closing up the incisions that he’d made with a combination of suturing and more healing potions. Once the flesh was sealed up completely, the gray stallion retrieved a knee brace made of leather and steel and strapped it to his patient’s leg, “you should have full range of motion once it is done healing. Leave the brace in place for a week, no less,” came the brusk stallion’s instructions as he started cleaning up his equipment, “there will be stiffness and weakness for a time, but little pain if any.”

The other stallion looked between his braced knee and the larger pony who’d been working on him as he very carefully slipped off the table, mindful of the lingering numbness that still remained as he heavily favored the afflicted leg, “thanks a lot, Doc! You’re a miracle worker,” he reached out a hoof to Arginine in gratitude, but the stallion merely regarded him with his stoic golden eyes. Hesitantly, the smaller pony withdrew the hoof and laughed sheepishly, “right. They warned me you weren’t a ‘touching’ kind of pony. Sorry.”

“You are under no obligation to apologize for the actions you take out of habit as a result of a lifetime of indoctrinated social customs,” I found myself hiding a grin as I saw the other stallion’s eyes start to glaze over as he processed what Arginine was saying to him, “I accept your gratitude in the spirit in which it was offered, as I have been informed it is only polite to do so. I require nothing else from you. You may take your leave so that I can sterilize my equipment,” he glanced briefly in my direction, “and it seems that my colleague has need of my attention as well.”

The other pony blinked, “right...” he shook himself and smiled at me now, waving his hoof, “Wonderbolt!”

I waved my own hoof in polite reply and nodded, “we’re here to help,” I said as he turned and very awkwardly limped out of the clinic. I turned my gaze from the canvas flap and watched as Arginine did just as he had said he would and began to tidy up. For a couple minutes, I didn’t say anything at all, I simply sat there and watched him work. Part of it was because what I’d come here to say was kind of important, and I didn’t want Arginine to feel distracted, and I knew that the stallion didn’t do ‘small talk’. It would annoy him if I just started talking at him for the sake of making noise so that nopony felt awkward.

Arginine didn’t feel ‘awkward’ around ponies when nopony was saying anything. It was probably how he’d just as soon have every interaction with another surface pony go. For my own part, I was content enough to just sit and watch him work. It was...cathartic, in its own way. Everything the stallion did was approached with such seriousness that it kind of fascinated me. I only took a few things as serious as Arginine seemed to take everything. Part of that was his expression, I was sure. He had such an intense look about him whenever he was doing something, like he was constantly evaluating everything to make sure it was being done in the most efficient and effective way possible.

He was his stable in pony form: on a perpetual quest for perfection in everything, even a task as mundane as washing a scalpel.

Finally, the larger gray unicorn reached a point in his routine where he felt he could divide his focus, “you are not injured,” it was an observation, not a question, “so you are here for matters unrelated to medical treatment,” his peered over his shoulder at me, his amber eyes studying me for a short time before looking away again, “you are agitated. Are you seeking counsel, or sensual stimulation?”

I felt my lip quirk in a smile. Right to the point. That was my RG, “I was talking with Foxglove. Things got heated,” even though he didn’t look at me, I could see one of his ears swiveled in my direction. He was listening to what I had to say, and not just to be polite. Arginine didn’t do things just to be polite, after all. I continued, “Jackboot came up. She said some things about him that I didn’t like hearing.”

“You have previously mentioned Miss Foxglove’s animosity towards your former mentor,” he noted, “so this is not what has agitated you,” I picked up the slight inflection in his tone that suggested there was a small questioning element to that last statement. Only somepony who knew Arginine like I did would have picked up on it. He might be a completely rational pony, but he had come to understand that the same thing couldn’t be said for the average Wasteland resident. So while he knew that he wouldn’t have been agitated by something like that, he wasn’t as convinced that I wasn’t. Hence the veiled request for confirmation.

“I know she didn’t like him,” I admitted, “but this time she said some...things about him―things she claims he specifically did to her,” I felt myself tensing all over again as I recalled her comments, “bad things. Very bad things.”

“Are you upset that Jackboot harmed Miss Foxglove?”

“Of course,” I balked, a little hurt at the suggestion that I wouldn’t feel bad about something bad happening to Foxglove, “I mean, if it was true.”

“You doubt her integrity,” the stallion said before he paused, turned his head once more and narrowed his eyes at me, “no…if you believed Miss Foxglove was lying to you, you would have confronted her, not come to discuss the matter with me,” I found that I couldn’t help but look away from him as he drew his conclusion, “you doubt your own integrity.”

I winced, “I don’t know if what she’s saying is true,” I affirmed, “maybe it is. Maybe she was misreading things. I don’t know.”

“You do,” Arginine countered in his typically stern tone, prompting another small wince from myself. His perceptiveness was sometimes quite frustrating. Though, I suppose it was made him so good at helping me with this stuff. I couldn’t lie to this pony, even by accident.

“I mean, I know that he was a White Hoof. He admitted that he did a lot of really bad stuff back then. I wanted to believe that he’d changed, but…” I shrugged, “what if he didn’t? What if he was never the pony I thought he was, and it was all just an act?”

“In such a case, it would be reasonable to expect you to have been easily deceived,” Arginine replied simply, earning a frown from myself, after which he amended, “you indicated that you were very young when you began traveling with him; naive,” I didn’t particularly care for that specific word, but I supposed that it was technically accurate enough, so I nodded, if reluctantly, “it is quite easily to manipulate ponies in such a state. You cannot be faulted for being the victim of his deceptions under those circumstances.”

I really didn’t like thinking about Jackboot like this. It hurt. A lot. Mostly because, “what does it say about me then? Everything I am, I am because of Jackboot. If it was all just a lie―an act―then what am I?”

“Your question is based upon the predication that you were and are possessed of no inherent personality traits; and that only Jackboot contributed to your morality.”

“He raised me,” I pointed out.

“Which I will concede likely gave him a great amount of influence over the end result,” he nodded, “but every outcome, no matter the external influences, is possessed of an intrinsic maximum deviation from its source material,” he then gestured at himself, “even my stable’s own efforts are so constrained. There are only four nitrogenous bases that can be used to arrange DNA chains. Only so many of those arrangements produce viable results, and they are required to be in very specific locations within the genome to have any effect.

“These restrictions existed before we began making our alterations, and we are bound to work within those restrictions,” he then gestured at me, “you were possessed of a personality, morality, and personal values before you encountered Jackboot. Any malicious, or even benevolent, influence he might have attempted to exert over you would have been required to incorporate itself into your existing psyche.”

I thought about what the stallion was saying, mulling it over in my head as I tried very hard to compare the pony I was now, to the little filly who’d grown up on that ranch. I hadn’t thought much about that little farmer pegasus over the years. It hadn’t seemed like anything that she’d ever done or been through had really mattered much in the wider Wasteland. I didn’t need to know how to milk brahmin out here. Sewing had been useful on occasion. I wish I’d paid more attention to Ma when she’d cooked. Most of what I did these days had been taught to me by Jackboot.

Then I remembered a conversation that I’d had with the older earth pony stallion. We’d struck a deal, he and I. He hadn’t particularly cared for that deal, and he had pushed back on a few occasions over the years. I had wanted to hunt down White Hooves and other ‘bad ponies’. Jackboot had preferred that I not, but had eventually caved in and agreed to teach me everything that I’d need to know how to do in order to accomplish that task.

So maybe I had had a hoof in the way I’d turned out after all—unless Jackboot was a lot more clever than even I was prepared to accept that he was. Not that that particular thought did a whole lot to fill me with relief. As much as I might have been loath to cast blame on Jackboot for just about anything, a small, treacherous, portion of my brain had started to toy with the notion that I might now have a valid excuse for those murderous inclinations of mine. I’d asked Jackboot to teach me how to kill, and he had, and now I did. It was slightly more palatable than the notion that it was all the result of something buried deep down in the core of who I was.

“So you’re saying that Jackboot couldn’t have made me a killer?” I said in a defeated tone as I slumped against the larger stallion’s backside.

“I am saying that it is highly unlikely that he could have influenced you to do anything fundamentally against your nature,” he said by way of a correction, adding after a moment, “may we discuss a topic of my choosing?”

“Shoot,” I was quite curious to know what Arginine wanted to talk about for a change, given how little he tended to volunteer any information at all.

“You constantly lament the taking of pony lives, and I have directly observed the effect it has on your temperament. I would like to offer this observation: I am doubtful that you are inclined towards equicide.”

I frowned over my shoulder at the stallion, “what are you talking about? Of course I’m good at killing ponies. I’ve been doing it for years. You’ve seen me in action, you know what I’m capable of.”

“Indeed, you possess remarkable martial prowess,” he admitted with a slight nod, “but your proficiency in combat was not what I was referring to. I was remarking on your psychological inclination,” he canted his head and looked at me out of the corner of his eye, “you don’t like killing, and you have avoided doing so whenever you make a determination that there are other viable options.

“Those are not the actions of a pony who experiences compulsions to kill.”

“What about that pony outside of Notel?” I pointed out, “I blew his brains out from a few hundred yards away long after he stopped being a threat. I couldn’t stop myself from doing it.”

“That is true. However, I am concerned about counting that as a valid data point, given the circumstances,” I quirked an eyebrow, and he elaborated, “you were, at that time, still suffering the effects of having had your cutie mark excised. Miss Starlight Glimmer might be able to provide greater insight into the likely side effects of such a procedure, but I imagine they include emotional instability.”

“I didn’t feel much like myself,” I admitted in a soft tone as my thoughts flashed back to how I’d felt during those weeks. There had been that unmistakable...emptiness. I didn’t want to go through it again.

“I observed many serious deviations from your baseline behavior,” Arginine confirmed, “and an immediate improvement in nearly all areas upon being rejoined with your cutie mark. You have recently informed me that this has also included another instance wherein you refrained from taking the life of another, even when presented with both the opportunity, and a generally accepted premise for doing so.”

“I let the Ranger live, yeah. Hoplite didn’t even try to stop me. That mare deserved to die for what she did, killing another pony when he was defenseless like that. I’d already stopped him from being a threat to them. There wasn’t any reason for her to do that, other than being an asshole Steel Ranger.

“I just…”I let out a tired sigh, “I really didn’t want to kill anypony when it wasn’t going to change anything. She wasn’t a threat to anypony anymore either. Killing her would have just been...vindictive, or whatever.”

“Would the taking of her life not have been a just punishment for her crime against the ponies of McMaren?” Arginine offered. Not that he particularly cared for what passed for the Wasteland judicial system. His stable was out to wipe us all out. What did they care if we killed a few more of ourselves off for them?

“Maybe,” I answered with a shrug. Homily hadn’t said much about how she felt about what I’d done, if she did even have any strong feelings. I figured that she just wasn’t in the habit of ridiculing the filly who’d saved her life a few times, “but who would it have helped? The stallion was already dead, so he couldn’t have cared less. Another dead Ranger wasn’t going to do Hoplite any favors either. All it would have been was one more dead pony. The Wasteland has enough of those.”

“I submit to you that a pony whose destiny was to take lives would not be possessed of such an outlook.”
“Then how do you explain me having a sword for a cutie mark?” I retorted, “or getting it immediately after I killed somepony?”

“If you are looking for insight into specific cutie mark symbology, then I would once again suggest that you have a conversation with an expert on such things, like Miss Starlight Glimmer,” the large gray stallion suggested, “as to the circumstances surrounding its appearance: when you told me the story, your goal was to save your mentor, and your intent had been to intimidate the farmer pony assaulting him.

“I find it unlikely that one’s talent would be an action they performed only by accident.”

I didn’t have anything to say in response immediately as I mulled over what Arginine had said to me. It was a pleasant thought, to be sure, that my destiny wasn’t to kill. Not that I was about to take the stallion at his word. Like he’d said: he wasn’t an expert on this sort of thing. Neither was I, so who were either of us to say how and why somepony got their cutie mark? Given her field of professed expertise, I did think that Starlight Glimmer would be a good ear to sound these worries of mine off of.

“Does this put your most recent concerns to rest?”

“It helps,” I finally said, offering a wan smile. I wasn’t sure if there was anything that could completely dispel those dark thoughts that kept tugging at the far reaches of my mind. There was darkness in me, of that nopony could deny; and I had leashed that darkness upon ponies more than once in my life. In all likelihood, I would do so again, as well. The hope that it was a side of me that I could combat, and maybe even restrain, was a pleasant one.

From anypony else, I would have just accepted it as a pleasant little white lie meant to make me feel better; but, from Arginine…

I rolled off of the stallion’s backside and craned my head up, meeting his lips with mine for a brief embrace, “thank you,” I turned and headed for the canvas flap that covered the doorway, pausing just before I let it fall behind me, “oh, and there’s going to be a meeting in the morning. Foxglove thinks she’s found a way to put all of the information that we’ve gathered together and make some sense out of it.”

“I will be in attendance,” the gray unicorn assured me as he put away the last of his recently sterilized equipment.

“You’ll also be in my room tonight, right?” I asked, flashing the stallion a sly wink.

“As you wish.”

Foot Note: Level Up!
Perk Added: Ferocious Loyalty -- When you're low on health, your companions become tougher to take down.

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