John Hancock was rolling a cigarette using a roller crank. He'd rolled a dozen already, feeding the tobacco into a hopper, placing the filter and paper in one end, and then cracking a handle down to pack the tobacco in, and plug the cigarette.

He awoke three hours earlier, feeling the cold in the air, and the blood in his veins get thicker like tar. Harder to pump, he beat his chest twice. Kick-starting his heart, and to make sure it was still beating, the benefits of being a ghoul, also meant feeling the chill in your bones.

Smoking brought a damp-heat to his chest. A warmth that only hot soup, a dozen blankets, a roaring fire, and healthy living could bring.

Growing his own plants and herbs that could be ground up and rolled helped extend his personal supplies as well.

Ever since Kellogg hung five days ago, he'd woken up excited, high's had been absolutely fantastic, he spent the rest of Halloween and November 1st completely trashed, partying just as hard as any other night, but he couldn't help but jump up and say 'God! Revenge is the best drug!'

He even ventured out to the Boston Common, and saw a six Yao Guai, radiated bears tearing off sections of rotting meat from Swan's body. In an already inebriated state, his mind made jumps in logic and reasoning, walking out to a fire truck, he jerked and tugged at the fire axe held in place, until the clasps finally gave.

He already knew where he would do it too, he watched as the bears walked right under the gate awnings that lead in and out of the Boston Common, and climbed up. Waiting there, he watched as a bear walked right underneath him, and his mouth was already watering.

Bonzai! He jumped, swinging the axe down from high above his head, down onto the backside of the bear's skull, chopping right at the base of the neck. Embedding the fire axe all the way down to the stock, the bear died instantly and Hancock was cackling manically at the thought of trying to do it again.

\111/

That release, that lessening of pressure in his skull made all the beer taste better, and the drugs make him all the more high. He was happy and didn't need as many drugs to feel that intense rush of euphoria he was still riding five days later. It was energy, it was enough to make Hancock ask the Neighborhood Watch to inform him if the guy in blue came back.

While Hancock was hunting bears, Meathead passed through with Thunderstruck and proceeded to disappear down into Bobbi's warehouse, while Nate and Curie were dealing with mutants and Gunners in Malden.

\111/

Thunderstruck and Meathead left Diamond City with Nick Valentine, Nate and Curie left Bunker Hill and Charlestown behind them to go to the U.S.S. Constitution.

As Hancock was grilling himself a bear steak in Goodneighbor, Nate was making enough breakfast for a family gathering of eggs and sausage with rice in the galley of the Constitution. He didn't have to wait long, as his doppleganger and Thunderstruck both walked onto the ship.

"<Nate!>" Meathead said, "Good to see you." Quickly embracing each other with a hug and pat on the back, Meathead was surprised at the burn on Nate's hand.

"<I've got Nick Valentine below, told him to wait a minute while I disengaged the robots from firing on him.>" A green flash of fire turned Meathead back into a german shephard, "<Thunderstruck, this is Nate.>"

"Hi!" He said, dropping down to one knee to shake her hoof. "Glad you're alright. You went through quite a bit. I'm gonna go bring up Nick Valentine, and we'll all get caught up."

"Why don't you want the detective knowing about each other?"

Nate was already walking across deck when he turned back and answered. "As much as I trust what Nick says, I don't know for certain if he knows that he's being monitored. The Institute, the people who made him, could be logging everything he sees and hears, waiting to play it back, or if they've got a live feed camera beaming signals straight back to base. Until I know without a doubt that's not happening, this is the way our relationship with Nick will stay. I don't need the Institute knowing about Meathead."

Curie wasn't sure what to make of the two monsieur's, when what must of been a lag in her optical relay showed an intense flash of light and then a dog. Isolating the incident in her memory banks, she labeled the entire experience as a corrupted file and deleted it.

\111/

Introductions all around, Thunderstruck saw what type of game Nate and Meathead were playing at. A level of disbelief that she wore unceremoniously until she processed the whole sight, of how a man and his companion...changeling could bounce back and forth under the same identity and get away with it. How Meathead didn't have any objection to following behind as a dog, when he had the strength to overwhelm Nate, Nick, Curie, and herself in a heartbeat.

Spooning up bowls of sausage, eggs, and rice Meathead voraciously ate his portion, licking the bowl clean. Thunderstruck ate hers out of a bowl at the table using a spoon, and Nate ate a small portion with two mis-matching chopsticks.

It felt so alien to have a family meal, that she was missing out on the conversation. "What are we doing?" She asked.

"We're deciding on either going to Goodneighbor or Libertalia first. If we went to Goodneighbor, I'd need to talk with Hancock for a few minutes, or however long it takes, and then we'd go North. After freeing the other ponies there, we would come back to the ship." Nate said. "Afterwards, you and Nick would be off on your own adventure, tracking down other ponies from Nuka-World."

"But, it doesn't sound like Thunderstruck's friends have all that much time. We're racing against an unknown deadline for whenever those raiders at Libertalia get peckish for fresh meat." Nick argued.

"Right, so we should load up, and move North. Goodneighbor will still be here-" Rapping his knuckles against the wooden table, "...when we get back."

\111/

Meathead appeared in Goodneighbor, stepping out of an empty warehouse and right next door to the Old State House. He passed by a few Neighborhood Watchmen and went upstairs to the second floor which was curiously quiet for the early afternoon.

Trapsing up the steps, the wooden boards creaked and announced his presence to Hancock long before Meathead reached the top of the stairs.

Hancock had been listening to the footsteps, hearing the creak of each wooden step, focusing on how long the noise was, guessing in his mind how much they weighed, how fast they walked, because everyone was different. Seeing the top of Nate's head as he wound the spiral staircase, Hancock nodded to himself.

"So, my new favorite ball-buster breaks into my warehouse cause of a bad tip-from Bobbi No-nose," Hancock said, closing the door behind Nate as he entered. "And, sounds like you know a thing or two about assets I like keeping close to chest. You made a wise choice putting Bobbi down like that."

Meathead replied, "<We figured that whatever she thought she was going to get by robbing you, wasn't worth it.>"

"That's usually how the story goes around here, but, lemme ask you. How is it that your story involves stops at Pickmans, Bunker Hill, Goodneighbor, and two trips to Diamond City? Got a way of getting around I don't know about?"

"<Well, you know about ponies, and pegasus, and unicorns, so let me ask you this. Do you know about magic these ponies can use?>"

"Yeah?"

"<And there's three types, the two, and then a regular looking Earth pony. Do you know where they came from?>"

"I've heard a few things."

"<Like the names Equestria, Princess Celestia, Princess Luna, any of those ring a bell?" Meathead was watching Hancock's expression as he listed off the names, for as scarred Hancock's face was, he still couldn't hide his reactions.

"Okay, so you know about them too?" Hancock asked "Alright. The story I heard was that ponies showed up before the Great War, the bombs fell, and they got ditched by their Princess. No line of communications, no check-ups, no choppers coming down to pull them out of the shit. Or, if there were, it didn't happen around here. They all fucked off to Equestria and haven't shown their faces around here since."

"<That's the short version, so there's the three types you've heard about, but their Princess is the trifecta of all of them, a combination of all three, so that makes a fourth type. She's got the wings of a pegasus, horn of a unicorn, and the brute force of a Deathclaw in one Princess pony sized package. But!>" Meathead said, pausing, "What if there was a fifth? What if there were more? A sixth, or even more?>"

"So you got one of these ponies following you around?"

Meathead was quiet for a moment, wondering how to word his next sentence.

"<Yes, he can do magic and has been following me around for the better part of three years. Why do you want to protect Betsy and Revere?>"

"Cause, I feel bad for them, same as you, if you're going through all this trouble to hide your friend, but for the other reason too. I know what they can do, I seen it, and I may of been high, but I seen 'em move the weather, and make things happen that no man could ever accomplish in a million years without magic."

"<Do you think the Institute would be afraid of ponies?>"

"Afraid of? Nah, they'd shoot them all the same. The Institute is afraid of Jack shit as far as I can tell. They're bunch'a shadow government cronies."

"<My friend can tell between a synth and human with 100% accuracy every time, no second guessing. Now, wouldn't that put a monkey wrench in the Institute's plans? Changelings are a type of pony who can read a persons emotions like a giant neon flashing sign above their heads with a big arrow pointing down saying 'YEP! I'm a human! I feel emotion! This is what I'm feeling,' and then look the next person in line who's a synth and see a burnt out light with nothing coming from it. Not even a flicker.>"

"Well hey now, I didn't even know anything like that existed. Can your friend do that?"

"<Hancock, not only can he do that, it's how I interrogated Kellogg.>" Looking out the Old State House's windows, Meathead looked for any birds roosting. "<I got every last bit of information out of him because he can tell if people are lying or omitting the truth. He's the Institute's worst nightmare and they don't even know he exists. I plan on keeping it that way. He can undo their spy networks, cripple them from the neck down, but that's all over the moment the Institute gets wind of something fowling up their plans.>"

"So where is he? Roll him out."

Meathead raised both hands, palms turned upwards, and spread his fingers out.

"<Afternoon.>" Meathead said.

"Get out'ta here. That's trash." Hancock said, eyes narrowing to who he thought was Nate.

A green flame spiraled out, wrapping around Meathead disguised as Nate in a brief flash of light, before being replaced with the black shelled Changeling.

"Jesus!" He said, jumping up from being startled. "You're gorgeous compared to me! Damnit! At least you got a face a mother could want, I got radiation burns across 100% of my body, including mah' dick! I got nothing going for me except long life and...a...a memory like a steel trap! A rusty steel trap soaking in salt water!" Hancock admonished, "So who the hell are you?"

"<Maybe this might jog your memory?>" Meathead said, performing the spell again, the changeling shifted to the form of a German Shepard.

"You! You've been going around as his dog the whole fucking time!? Fuck that's smart. So what can you do? What the hell are you doing this for? Is that...you know about ponies don't you? You've been going around like the fly on the wall! You probably know more shit than anyone about what's going on around here."

Changing once more back to his original form, Meathead was glad that Hancock's reaction wasn't to gut the changeling for being able to shapeshift.

"<I know quite a bit, but I'm not a God, I don't know everything. I can tell you all about where the ponies came from, how we all got here, and all the bullshittery that was happening right up until the very last second before the bombs fell. It took some piecing together but, most of my life, really, but I these are the facts that remain true even after all this time has passed, and it starts with a magic spell that most unicorns and magical creatures can figure out with a lot of practice."

"Oh yeah? Which one?"

"<Think of a place. Any place.>"

"Diamond City."

The two disappeared from Hancock's office, materializing in the Colonial Taphouse in Diamond City. Still locked up and not open yet, Hancock spun around, coughing from the change of pressure in his chest. Whipping his head around, he felt like a leaf in a hurricane, "WoAH! Ah! Where! The bar...the Taphouse...Holy hell. We're here. Geeze, they really cleaned this place up since the last time I was here."

"<Actually that was also me.>"

"Teleportation! You mean to tell me you been jumping around the wasteland lickety-split!?"

"<Not all the time, but it cuts down on all the walking and dealing with anything in between.>" Floating a few more cold beers out of the fridge, Hancock blinked watching the bottles levitate through the air, wrapped in a magical green glow.

"<Want one?> Grabbing one, Hancock looked at the bottle and pressed it to his forehead, feeling the cold transfer.

"So where's Nate? Where's the One-Eleven?"

"<Ready to go back?>" Hancock nodded, and with a second flash, they both rematerialized in the Old State House, Hancock looking dazed before flopping down onto the couch. Wiping his eyes and setting the beer on the table, he looked at the Changeling across from him.

"What the fuck just happened? Catch me up. I wanna hear the whole thing. What are you doing here? I mean, what..." Hancock trailed off, mind lighting up like a circuit breaker. "Why aren't there more of you?"

A straight-line smile stretched across Meathead's face, "<So, just to cover the bases, you've got your Earth pony, your unicorns, pegasus, and then the princesses are the fourth kind, and they're a trifecta of the first three. After that, there's us. Changelings. We can make a picture perfect copy of anyone, anything, no matter what, no mother would be able to tell them apart.>"

"Kinda like a synth."

"<Changelings are nothing like synths, Hancock.>" Meathead had been thinking about how to answer this question for eleven days now. "<A synth was created by humans, in a lab, given bioengineered DNA, grafted onto lightweight composite metal, programmed by humans, receiving memories copied off real humans, and stored in memory banks, given a fusion reactor, and then let out into the world with a kill-switch. Can we agree on that about synths?>"

"Yeah."

<Good, because while a synth can be disguised as a human, synths and changelings are radically different in one aspect. Emotion. If synths are so perfect, then how are people getting crazy premonitions that someone they know is a synth? It's because humans remember traits over time, we take on scars, damage, we limp when we get hurt, and twenty years down the line, we may've forgotten the injury, but other people around us notice one step is shorter than the other. Synths aren't programmed for that yet. We're in the late stages of still being able to tell them apart. A changeling, however, is an actor playing a role. And, like any role, people watching a performance are critical of every detail, which is why a changeling will go the extra effort to not break character. You see, a synth wont do that, because it believes it's part of the whole society, it believes it's part of the collective, so it doesn't hide.>"

"So why the hiding and secrecy?"

"<We would have to go back to thirty years before the Great War. Ponies were chasing the changelings because even though they lived on the same planet, didn't mean they disagreed or didn't go to war. We had a leader, a Queen. Two Queens Gynavae, and Chrysalis, were being hunted because they were acting pretty Institute-y. Doing a lot of shit that was getting ponies and the rest of the races on Equestria rightly pissed off. The Queens banded together and took their armies, all the changelings and whatever wasn't nailed down and teleported to Earth.>

<Changelings left Equestria, and landed in Nicaragua, of all places.>"

"Where's that?"

"Central America, south of Mexico, south of Guatemala, just keep going south. One massive teleportation jump across millions of light years for an entire species, and we landed there. Now, why did they do this? Why did the changelings come to Earth? The Changelings were losing the war. They were on the losing side of a war they knew was wrong to keep fighting. There were two alternatives, one they knew all about, a slow stripping of all their rights under a new Equestrian government, limits placed on their natural abilities, forced change of their skin color and appearance, and then enduring racism from a tribalist species that looks at the reformed changelings as a second class citizen. We were the ghouls of their own planet, but we ran because of another reason too. There was a King of the Changelings, he was considered a traitor to changelings, hero to the ponies. He was their Benedict Arnold, told them all the changeling secrets, changeling hives, changeling bases, tactics, maneuvers, laying out his full abilities on display for the whole world to see, all at once. The Equestrians didn't like what they saw, and went to war with the changelings still holding out.>"

"What kinda Institute stuff?"

<Bear with me for one moment.> Rolling his eyes back, Meathead head a hoof to his mouth, neck muscles flexing, Hancock saw a lump rising up and out of his throat. "<Blu-eh,>" A small bright blue orb, no bigger than a lawn-bowling ball. "<This is raw emotion. Every living thing makes it, including us, but we're one of two races that can subsist off it.>"

"Who's the other?"

"They're called Windigos, and there's two, maybe as many as four in the Commonwealth, as far as I can sense. As far as lesser of two evils go, I don't mind being the last of a species and dying out. Windigos will fuck your day up because they're fucking asshole winter spirits that thrive off negative energy, hate, rage, and all that bullshit. Every time it's snowed this last week, was in isolated cases. Remember the night of the big fight in the Boston Common? Whole Gang war in every direction? It was snowing. I know now there's a big bastard sitting at the top of Trinity Tower, sucking on a big old titty of angry mutant milk. Riling them up, staying lazy at the top, making everyone else's lives miserable because that's all they want to do. Windigo's are bastards like that, they will take a person at their most vulnerable, most weakest, and squeeze them until they're an empty echo of their former self. I told Nate a while ago we should just bomb the whole tower, but he could escape. We need to take him out the hard way and make sure he stays dead.>"

"How do you kill them?"

"<Nate says to use lightning, zap them like god damn mosquitos.>"

Hancock counted off all the races of Equestria on his fingers. "Any other creatures I should know about? Loch ness mosters? Bigfoots? Yetis?"

"<Gryphons, dragons, yaks, upright walking-talking cats and parrots, hippogryphs, a whole mess of races on Equestria, but they all agreed that once the King took the spotlight, that two types of Changelings, was one too many. Once the ponies realized that the changelings were gone, they followed us. The Equestrians tried to do the same thing, one big massive teleport, except the ponies were going to go back when they were done. We were here for the long haul. They landed in China. Now, when you're trying to hit a target across a few million light years, and only have a 30% chance of actually hitting land instead of the 70% of water the planet consists of, they did the best they could. This part of the story I pieced together that while the first wave of ponies came, they were forced to stay in China, and cooperate with the Chinese government. All the while, the Chinese were abducting and experimenting on any pony they could vanish, trying to recreate the technology that would let them travel anywhere in the universe. Word gets out that the Chinese aren't all that hospitable, and so they send a second wave, and get a little closer, landing somewhere in North America to hedge their bets on rooting out the two changeling Queens. They're not commies, they don't give a damn about Earth politics, but they're not idly sitting on the sideline. The changelings landed in 2047, thirty years before the bombs fell, the ponies were here half a year later. So they fight for 30 years.>"

"Thirty Years?!"

"<The ponies labeled the queens an intergalactic terrorists, and us their accomplices. They weren't going to stop until they found her and erased her from existence. Working on earth, alongside both governments, rooting out changelings, they find out the United States forged an alliance with the Changelings to spy on the Chinese. That sets a few things into motion. The ponies in China get word that the U.S. is allied with the changelings, and now to stop the changeling Queens from taking over Earth, they need to go to war with the United States. Things ramp up, and somewhere along the way, the Equestrians figure out that Earth is headed straight for the shitter. They tried to stop all this, all the bombs and everything. They were willing to stop the war with changelings, to prevent an even bigger war between the U.S. and China.>"

"The Equestrians worked with the U.S. but by then, fifteen years into fighting a secret war, there were changelings in hiding all over the country, all over the world. Embedded, told to hide for the rest of their lives, and never look back. I was one of those changelings who was told at birth to run, hide, and never expose myself for fear of being castrated in the streets. Fast forward to the Great-War, the changelings and ponies already called a truce, but they can't get word out to the whole world that there've been aliens living among us for the last 30 years, and that it's okay for them to come out of hiding, so they focus on stopping the war. Changelings and ponies working side by side to stop humans doing exactly this. The U.S. was winning the war. No doubt in my mind about it now. We let loose early versions of the F.E. Virus across China, and the world, killing tens of millions. We had Liberty Prime, one of the largest war bots ever constructed. We'd been bombing, and shelling, and raiding, and pillaging, and raping China for years by sending over soldiers in power armor to decimate whole towns, yet China never even made it past the Inside Passage. Not a single bomb ever touched the mainland U.S.A. before the great war. We were facing food shortages, but that's no reason to bomb ourselves to the stone-age. We crippled their economy, destroyed their faith in humanity, plagued them, infected them, burned them alive, shot them as they tried to get close. Two years later Nate was sitting in a two-bedroom house in Concord drinking coffee, planning on giving a speech at the Lodge on how war never changes. God, how wrong does that sound now? And I was disguised as his dog. just a happy little German Shephard soaking up love from a family that cared about him. We were doing some diabolical shit to make war worse than a living hell for them, taking everything away from them that we could to force them into surrendering. But, that never happened.>

<Sometime during all this, the Chinese said, 'you know what? Fuck You. Fuck this, fuck the planet. If we don't win, Nobody wins. Mutually assured destruction, we already destroyed China, there's nothing here left for anyone except pestilence, famine, war, and death. Fuck you. Drop the bomb.>"

"<And so they did. So here we are. Day 12 out of the vault. Fourteen Days ago, Nate bought me a burger while listening to Nora talk about her friends at the office. Nora is Nate's wife.>"

Hancock looked high, not because he'd already smoked weed, and done some jet before Meathead arrived, but his eyes were all squinty, while his eyebrows were raised in surprise.

"That's dope. So. You follow Nate around, pretending to be him...for what? How the hell did you convince him to agree to this?"

"<That's a question you'll have to ask Nate yourself, he's been under a lot of stress, I've been helping him keep his emotions in check and focused on the task at hand. For the last two weeks, it's just been non-stop trying to get a part of his life under control again. From Kellogg, to everything else that's happened, we're used to having this symbiotic relationship.>"

\111/

Shaking his head, he threw down his feet, and stood up off the couch. Readjusting his hat, Hancock said, "That's a lot to keep under the cap, and this tricorner just ain't sitting right..." He stooped over the coffee table piled with drugs and beer bottles, guns, and ammo, looking for a particular roach to smoke. Filching one out of the ashtray, there was still half a loosey left to burn. " 'ere I've been saying fuck Tyrants," He said, lips down on the cigarette, lighting it, then transferring it over to his fingers, inhaling a pull, he spoke while exhaling smoke. "...but spending a lot of my time putting down people who I would've been proud to run with years ago."

He raised his arms and then let them flop to his side. "I need to go on a walk. Get a grip."

"<Okay.>"

"So where we headed? I need to see what really matters out here in the Commonwealth."

"<Oh.>" Meathead said, not expecting Hancock to invite himself along. "<Nate's just around the corner, he'll be here in just a few minutes. How about we drink up til' then?" Meathead said, drinking the beer taken from the Colonial Taphouse.

"Don't worry, I've gone on walks plenty of times, and a mayor is still a mayor, whether he's in this building or one down the street, or across the Commonwealth. Keeps me honest. Can't let power go to my head, after all that's not what Goodneighbor's about."

"<Well, if you're serious, we going to the Glowing Sea.>"

"Ah, well, now. Ain't that just what the doctor ordered. Radiation bath to help my skin glow, and restore my dashing good looks."

"<All right, we've been gearing up for a while now. When Nate arrives, he should be bringing a whole party.>"

"What's going on over there?"

"<Thunderstruck knew ponies were out there, one got eaten yesterday, the next got gunned down trying to escape, and the third tried to bury herself alive to end it all before humans got to her. Now they went back to pull the rest of them out.>"

"I like it, you and Nate sound like the kind of people who know how to stir up the right kind of trouble. I just gotta have a little chat with the community, and give them the news, then I'll start packing."

\111/

True story # 3, There was a guy named Stanley who worked up in Alaska, he was a Landing Craft boat driver during WWII, and knew all the tricks of giving machines a little 'johhny' to get into the beach fast, hard, then dead stop, before full reverse.

He fished around False Pass, and would hike, hunt, all over the place, back when regulations were looser, and the closest Johnny Law was a week-long boat trip away.

He knew of a trail that bears used ALL THE TIME, and I want you to think about how abundant bears were in AK back in the day, imagine Fallout or Skyrim glitching bears all over the place.

That is a normal day in AK.

He knew from the tracks and bear scat, that bears were using one particular trail all the time, he ALSO said he wanted to hunt a bear with an axe.

The normal response was 'Stanley, you're going to get yourself killed doing that.' But he was the ambitious type of person who thought about every little detail and would say to himself 'You know what?...I could probably do it like so...If i'm in the right spot. Bears don't look up anyway.'

So, while I don't know if he ever did it, the story goes he knew of some branches or a ledge, or a tree, that was right over the trail that forced people and animals to dip their heads down to go under.

Stanley said all he had to do was wait for a bear to go under, then WHAM!

Insane as it was to hunt a bear with an axe. He's passed away, but the story of his ambition is still fun to talk about.