Sand…I was so used to it being in everything that I was beyond caring about it anymore, aside from the rare times I was caught outside with my helmet off letting the damn stuff clog my ears and nose and make a mess of my mane. I never liked sand, even growing up when going to the beach was actually considered a treat rather than a 'potentially life-threatening adventure'. Why? Well because it's rough and course and, despite my best efforts, the shit got everywhere; especially places where its the hardest to wash or brush out. The rest of my coat (which I kept as meticulously clean as the Wasteland would let me) was kept safe beneath my duster, armor and underbarding. I suppose it was my fault for living in New Pegasus but still…I felt I had a right to bitch after I choked back a sneeze that would have left the inside of my helmet covered in sand filled snot. After all, who's more fun to blame when you're pissed off? Yourself, the cause of your own misery or an inanimate object such as sand?

I had a bit of a walk ahead of me, more so than what my usual jobs entailed. Old Bitch Face usually did his business in New Pegasus and its surrounding towns like Oasis, or the northern NER townships of Shady Sands and Barkerville. In the end though his drug caravans went everywhere there were ponies to be found giving him proxy hooves in nearly every major settlement for hundreds of miles around. Today I was headed a ways out of my usual prowling grounds out to the ‘thriving’ remnants of Old Appleloosa, a Raider/Slaver town of no little reputation in the Wastes as being an almost bigger shithole than all the crazy shit coming out of Fillydelphia, not that that town needed any introduction to anyone with a brain left in their skull. It was honestly not that surprising Green’s caps and ‘product’ ended up in such a southern town. The place was one of the biggest gambling mecca outside of the Stirrup and had an even more prolific narcotics abuse than all of New Pegasus combined. If it was dirty, kinky, enslaved, addictive or stolen in any way, it almost always could be found in or have come through Old Appleloosa. Or so the stories in recent years had let me know. I made a fine point for decades that I would do no work any further south than the 395B exit on the I-15, so long and so firmly that none seemed to even bother asking in recent memory. Enough time to dull some of the worst of the internal anxiety and extreme apprehension and for me to privately be at best neutral towards the idea of heading anywhere near the Badlands.

To add to the growing list of oddities with the job, my target was supposedly a mare who was kicked out of Tenpony Tower a few years back. As to why, according to word of mouth it was for strangling a colt who looked at her funny, which naturally resulted in a call for her immediate execution for such an affront to such an elite society. She then escaped from custody by spiking the nightguard on duty with an overdose of Buck hidden in her mane from her abusive lover evading Tenpony searches earlier in the day. The best part of the story? She had incited the stallion into a blind, drug induced rage by insulting the size of his dick and he then proceeded to beat the metal cell door down himself; opening her cell and killing the poor fuck with a massive heart attack in the process. Naturally, a mare of such infamy and determination was bound to take up an occupation that best suited her skillset and with new newfound appreciation for the power of lightly enchanted anabolic steroids, she took what she learned under forced assistance to her ex's closet production and formed a drug caravan of her own from scratch, completely out of pocket. She may have skipped town but she still had a fortune of her own she had nicked out of her apartment's wall before making her escape, the personal finances of her ex having allowed them to live in luxury even by Tenpony standards. Not exactly the quintessential story but I had to admit the course of events from murder to drug dealing kind of made sense. Though her operation wasn’t quite up to par with Green’s in terms of size and profitability, she was the undisputed Queen of the Buck in the Wastes. Green, unable to best the potency of her product, had to satisfy himself as the Dash King and that was all that needed to be said as for why the two were at odds. Two of the biggest drugs on the market, aside from Mint-als and Medix, controlled by two separate but very, very powerful drug lords. The caps were always tinkling in me and my fellows' saddlebags from the sheer might of how much they wanted each other’s operation to fall to its knees, give the other a rimjob and then get curbstomped on the corner for all to see.

“Bitch gotta name?” I asked into my mike as I edged around Cockatrice Pit, a smaller impact crater from the War filled with half chicken/half serpent abominations that could turn you into stone with nothing more than a passing glance unless your armor had a specific paintjob.

“Who? Oh, right…yeah, th’ name’s Jingle Jangle.” Green replied, his mouth obviously stuffed with food by the way his voice sounded far thicker than normal.

“What, are you fucking serious?” I asked, wanting to laugh at how ridiculous her name was. “What’s she supposed to be, a Hearth’s Warming Eve decoration or some shit?”

“A what now?” He asked through another mouthful of food. “Ya on somethin’ Crete? Didn't think ya had it in ya to kick back and get a little high! Atta girl! Little puffy puff or nicky pricky neva hurt nopony!”

I sighed and waved the topic off, indicating for him to continue. The less he knew about my time from long before I was in his employ, the better and easier life could go on for me. It wasn’t like a history lesson was going to make him any less of an unbearable asshole anyway. Wasn't anyone's business where I came from.

“Anywho, she’s fuckin’ stealin’ my business an’ I need her gone, ya hear me?” He growled into my ear, obviously forgetting that I wasn’t exactly a good pony to threaten. "I been puttin' up with her bullshit for way too fuckin' long. I told 'er years ago when she was just startin' her little Raider circus up that we could split the western seaboard between us evenly and split th' profits! And what does that there cocksuckin' cuntwipe say?! She tells me she's gonna fuck me with my own broken business!"

“What exactly does she have to do with getting your caps back?” I asked, genuinely wondering if, now that he had me under a verbal contract, he was going to shortchange me with a two for one deal. "First you tell me I'm just on an extreme debt collection job and now you're saying this is a full blown hit on the Queen of Buck and her operation? Where the fuck is the truth in all this mess?"

“Everywhere!” He snarled. “She’s th’ cunt who’s on th’ recivin’ end of them caps they took! She ordered th' hit on my boys while transporting a large shipment of product plus a hefty tribute towards Shady Sands, you knows the one.”

Well, that changed things a bit. The 'tribute' was the glorified semi-annual blanket bribe for the select in the NER's hierarchy, their laughable impression of a Senate, that were lets say...open to the idea of importing a bit more than the law allowed. That explained the 85k in play and with it being technically summer (after all the weather was always warm out here), the Black Churt roots were still hibernating deep below ground making production of Dash far slower and much more dangerous. After all, the caves they fled to to escape the excessive heat tended to be the homes of some of the worst the Wasteland had to offer. The job was paying a bit low, way too low for a high profile hit like this...but I had already agreed to a price. A price that was about fifteen thousand caps shy of what I would have charged if I knew the target before agreeing. When I had told him on a prior occasion I was willing to do a lot as a favor for him, this was a bit more extreme than I had ever intended. And for such a low price...as if I needed more reasons to find another employer who couldn't control his own GDP at least half the year and whose accounting records could best be described as flaming Hell Hound shit. Perhaps enough time had passed for me to try again at the casinos. Pay was similarly low but at least it was consistent.

Considering she was a big-time drug mare, I probably could collect some extra caps from her own private stashes plus any on the bodies of her thugs I happen to knock off on the way. Nothing wrong with taking a ‘gratuity’ as we liked to call it, from the dead. If anything it was expected, usually because most hits payed out in units ranging from bad to ‘meh’ since most clientele weren’t able to afford much else. The real money laid with the cartels like Green's operation or the thriving Medix/Mint-al market on the east coast. Only the inexperienced or ill-equipped picked off the low-tier dealers and those of 'passable' quality went for the mid-level distributors and couriers. Hitmares of say...my quality were best suited for the central distribution hubs and the chem labs themselves, where the assets were the most valuable and the challenge for bodyguards the most fulfilling. On the plus side, the loot from the bodyguards was guaranteed to be of some of the highest quality products available. Money from the hit, plus money from the guards, plus money from the sale of their gear equals one very rich mare. Or stallion of course; there's no discrimination in this business despite the name. How we differed from bounty hunters was a hazy line that sometimes relied solely on the name difference between us but often revolved around the question: on average, do you take a lot more jobs that involve leaving a cold body than bringing in a warm one? If yes, well...we might just let ya in our little club.

“Alright, so what’s she look like? Keep out an eye for the mare who looks like a stuck up bitch?” I asked, imagining some golden haired beauty living amongst a bunch of sadistic fucks with a gold plated Tenpony stick rammed up her ass.

“Pretty much, yeah. Likes to wear this old business dress she had left ova from when they’s kicked her ass outa Tenpony. You see her an’ you blow her fucking brains all over that dress ya hear me? Don't even let th' bitch speak, if anythin be comin' outa her mouth its gonna be blood and her fuckin brain juice.”

“Got it Bitch Face, now let me do my job.” I replied, reaching up to my radio to shut him up for awhile.

“What’d ya call me ya-” He snarled into my ear before blessed silence returned with a simple click of a button.

“Called ya a punk ass bitch you fat-assed, slack-jawed, whore-fucking, dirty-ass piece of drug snorting, ass-licking shit wipe!” I growled to the desert air around me, feeling gracious to be able to get that off my chest, even if it was to dead air.

He had some fucking nerve to think he could even begin to talk to me like he was about to. He was a deplorable pig who just strolled into my room whenever he wanted, kept me from having a lovely nap and enjoying my honeycomb and always tried to lord over me like he were my alcoholic father. Joke's on him because I grew up with a single mother who only drank on occasion but made damn sure it would be a memorable one. Considering the strange path this job had already been taking, I wouldn't be surprised to learn he also wanted me to do the whole thing with just a knife or some other crazy stipulation just to further see how impossibly knotted he could tie my tail up in.

I took a deep breath and imagined all my little frustrations filled up my lungs like smoke before breathing out the bad feelings into the open air and outa my head. The Equestrian Wasteland is home to all sorts of fucked up. First off, you had the shitheads that are all the mutated animals and everything else transformed by Taint and decades of constant exposure to magical radiation. Then you had the Wasteland itself, a giant twisted landscape of craters, burned and gutted-out towns and cities with all sorts of wonders and horrors hidden inside all under the dreary, tan/grey cloudy sky. And, without a doubt, the most fucked up of all were the ponies, Griffins, Dragons and the few other intelligent species who lived here. You can always expect (with an acceptable margin of error) what a mutated animal will do when you approach them, but you can never trust a fellow sentient at face value. Unlike animals, who run off of instinct and base level thinking, intelligence grants the user an almost unlimited access to unpredictability. The psychology of the Post-War sentient was far more fragile, prone to manipulation and overall more cutthroat it had been in my youth.

One of the biggest reasons I didn’t tend to make new friends and kept the list of friends I did have short was for that very same reason. The Wasteland, a dose of drugs and the allure of caps can turn all but the most stout hearted, straight laced goody horseshoes into a killer or worse. That all being said though…I preferred killers over slavers. Least you could silence any morality you had left in you along with your victim’s screams whereas slavers had to break their quarry and live with them until they dumped them off and got paid. A dead body is a much more willing piece of luggage than a live pony after all. And a lot less annoying too with no careful planning of supplies to feed and 'care' for my quarry. Slavery...was just another fucked up reality of life after the Great War. There would always be the strong who ruled through violence and fear and would force those considered beneath them as the means to their own ends and on the cheap as even the most inexperienced servant would still earn a wage and be able to sleep soundly enough at night knowing they still had a right to self-determination. It was a world I had witness emerge and mutate on its own amongst the rubble of the old world and one I had spent many years trying to find a new place in for myself.

The trot to Appleloosa would bring me near my old wartime stomping grounds in the Badlands where some fires still burned in the blood stained trenches of the Equestrian-Zebra War that had turned into the world war that ensured the demise of everyone involved. The few memories that still remained of that time were all too feeble to raise their heads and get my attention leaving my mind free to wander a bit more as my hooves seemed to walk themselves southeast towards my goal. The sky above was as dreary as ever, a constant reminder to everyone that the Pegusi were still up above us all, still being cowardly assholes and not letting anypony see the sun or hell even the blue sky save for those small breaks in their mighty cloud layer that were quickly patched up. Always hiding from the ruined world they had abandoned so readily the day one of their own cities was struck during the Great War. One memory did rear its head at that thought, a memory of the day fire pierced the night sky…only to be cut off, like everypony down below, by the clouds of the Pegusi.

I stopped for a brief moment to stare up into the clouds, the vision filters of my helmet doing their best to pierce through it to no avail, and curse them for their cowardice. While everypony down below was forced to watch every city and most towns get incinerated in Balefire, the Pegusi had only taken one direct hit to Cloudsdale and then bitched out. My fur stood on end remembering the fires of that fatal day…watching the Zebras take my home from me only to see the clouds gather above as the Pegusi took the sun and the moon away from me too. It had been over two hundred years since I had seen either…and yet, fond silver framed memories of the celestial bodies remained even after all this time. I was a Daughter of the Night as my mother had so often called me as a filly...somepony who never felt more alive than at night bathed in the light of Luna's moon. With all the work being done to harness Lunar magic during those years, a fact I learned later as an officer with enough clearance to investigate without extreme secrecy, it made a bit of sense why the night felt so...enchanting. Ah...the painful realization nostalgia can bring...realizing the past almost always feels more simple and the circumstances easier to bear than those present burdens that weighed any of us who 'survived' the birth of the new world.

The main path ponies took to get to Appleloosa from New Pegasus followed E-15 for a ways until it reached the crater that marked where Camp Macintosh once stood. At that point ponies with any common sense and a Geiger counter would veer east, and make for the old train tracks headed out from New Appleloosa towards New Pegasus, and then proceed directly south following the line. My path took me right through the mile wide crater and back onto E-15 making my journey an easy day’s trot rather than the two and half days it would have taken otherwise following other marked paths across the sands. ‘Why don’t you just shortcut and go cross-country around the crater and then get back on E-15?’ You might ask? Well, like all craters, it had a tendency to attract all manner of irradiated wildlife looking for an equally irradiated place to chill out. The surrounding desert was usually teeming with nests and nooks where they slept, the labyrinth of dunes constantly shifting their configuration in the winds from the Badlands making navigation a nightmare even with a PipBuck. In other words, you had to have a lot of guts, bullets and a damned good compass to make it through the open desert without a road. Even with a road things were always dangerous and unpredictable...but at least you have the road to follow right? Maps, as outdated as they were, were still accurate enough to navigate the Wasteland with and any who could tended to add in as many new unique eh...features the Wastes had developed since the last official topographical survey.

Only the strong and the cunning lived long enough to be considered 'old' by Post-War standards. It was rare to see grandparents in the Wastes as, with the Equestrian medical system being in literal pieces and the prevalence of deadly dangers in everyday life, living past the age of thirty-five was uncommon. As I said earlier, it was only the strong survived in the Wastes. Whether that was by the strength of bullets or by the cunning of mind or even sheer dumb, pervasive luck, it didn’t really matter. As long as you made it through the day alive and hopefully ended up better off than you were the day before it was a day well spent far as most were concerned. I did wonder sometimes what life would look like if even just vaccinations were still in widespread use instead of sporadic inoculations of social elites by trained doctors lucky enough to come across one of the Pre-War stockpiles that still has working refrigeration. Diseases that had been declared extinct in my teen years and adulthood like the Dragonpox and Chronic Withering Disease had made a comeback, only barely contained by the recent reemergence of homebrewed decoctions of the mutated flora that battled these ailments as sufficiently as the first introductions of antibiotics. Hardly enough to drive them back into extinction but it was the greatest medical discovery of the new world since the discovery of how to once again brew the lesser healing potions that formed the one-size-fits-all basis of the western world's medical system.

A beep pinged my right ear as I continued to ramble internally over a never-ending stream of thoughts and brought to my attention the proximity warning marker I had set in my map function perhaps a century earlier. The spot on the map I had dubbed too far south for comfort...two miles outside what remained of Camp Macintosh. I'd explored the place only once since it was rendered a misshapen crater on the map and the experience had been a decidedly short one. Not only was the place teaming with all manner of nasty shit that give anyone with sense enough anxiety to rival middle school but the circumstances surrounding the crater made it a maze to navigate. What I was able to piece together from observation during my short sojourn there was that the anti-missile defense grid had kicked in during the bombardment of the Great War but too late to prevent damage to the world below the detonation. Kinetic force of the blast was near enough to the ground to flatten all but the most reinforced buildings and expose the underground complex that housed the Camp's highest ranking officer's offices, prison cells, the officer's mess and private medical clinic amongst countless rooms of filing cabinets and intelligence operations infrastructure. A platinum mine of possibilities for any poor sap insane enough to try their luck at but a mine bathed in Rads and nested with giant centipedes and Radscorpions.

The great wall that ringed the Camp soon came into view on the right side of the highway shimmering and swimming in the summer heat. Even from a distance I could tell the hundred or so years it had been since I had last visited had hardly been kind to those old walls with massive spans crumbling into dust or full of so many cracks that to merely brush against them could invite a collapse. There was an odd feeling starting to grip my thoughts the closer I got to the place I had once called my home for half of my adult life, the other half naturally being spent even further south. Nostalgia of a sorts but one that was far more bitter to the taste. Tainted by memories of fire and harrowing brushes with the very face of death... It was uncomfortable...but it was not enough to bring me to my knees as it used to. Gradually the edifice loomed above me as I passed through one of the major holes broken into its length and stood on the edge of the bumpy, blackened crater that occupied the Camp now.

It was completely unrecognizable now. The only buildings still standing were those that clung onto the lesser bruised edges of the mighty depression in the earth. The central complex, the heart and nervous system of the Southern Front, was nothing more than the exposed concrete tunnels scattered throughout the center of the crater and beyond. Enough creatures lopped through the mess to make paths throughout the entire expanse of black dirt and charred rubble, which made finding a good path easier for me. A tip the Rangers taught was to follow the animals when in unfamiliar territory. They always have a knack (even if their brains are all fucked up) of finding the best way through, under, over and around things. Especially those lower on the food chain who know where the bigger and nastier things lurked. What I needed was a semi-sentient creature like a Giant Rat or something else relatively small to follow to lead me down the best possible path and away from all the big, scary predators. As only a few angry red ticks started popping up on my visor's Eyes Forward Sparkle, I decided fuck it. I was just going to go in as straight a line as the terrain offered and kill whatever got too close with something big and scary of my own. This was merely a...scenic detour that just so happened to be on the shortest route to Old Loosa, I lost nothing by going this way.

The wonderful invention known as Eyes Forward Sparkle (or E.F.S for short) was just one of many incredible brainchildren from the complex and mysterious relationship of the mixture of Unicorn magic with Earth pony innovation. Powered by a self-sustaining spell matrix, the E.F.S maintained an unwearying eye on my surroundings like a giant sphere of attention that gauged ponies (and others) overall disposition towards me. How it worked was beyond me but I knew enough to say it was like a portable psychic that could sense if things wanted me dead or not and warned me of them by displaying either red ‘bad’ ticks or blue ‘friendly’ ticks on my compass. It’s range was about five hundred feet, which was nothing to sneeze at and was both a blessing and a curse. A curse because I was a sniper and liked taking down targets from ranges far bigger than five hundred feet but a blessing because in close quarters with many blind spots, I could essentially see where my enemies relatively were even behind concrete walls. That wasn't to say it was perfect but it was a hell of a lot more useful than it was a setback. There was never shame in using a little technology to give yourself the edge you need to cut through the opposition. If it keeps you alive and is affordable to maintain, then by all means pursue it as fat as I personally cared. Playing to your strengths keeps shit feeling manageable.

The path down into the crater was easier than I expected, especially after the torrential downpour not two days prior and my well-maintained armored combat boots found easy grip in the blackened earth. The Geiger counter of my helmet clicking louder and louder with every step I took closer to the center. I considered turning it off more than once after realizing I didn’t absorb Rads like other ponies did but the sound was, in a very ironic sense, comforting to me. The sound itself I found strangely soothing and the thought that the only thing to be found in Rad Zones were predictable creatures was also comforting. Looking around the crater, it being a massive, rather shallow bowl in the ground with not even a charred tree in sight, I still found it hard to believe that this once marked the location of the Desert Ranger’s H.Q. Had it not been for memory and the auto-mapping spell on my helmet’s E.F.S, I would have just assumed the Zebras had aimed at nothing in particular but decided this particular area needed to be fucked up.

The red ticks on my E.F.S weren’t too much of a worry to me as aside from the barely standing ruins near the base of the crater, I had an unobstructed view of my surroundings and could count the various less than troublesome creatures that answered to the angry red marks on my E.F.S. Great as the red tick system worked, it was not sophisticated enough to gauge the relative danger each tick posed to me. Could be as harmless as a pissed off Radroach or as murderous as a Hellhound and I wouldn't know until it got close. There was more than enough rubble around to hide behind. When I approached the collapsed entry to a particularly large tunnel was when a new tick appeared on my visor, a green tick I hadn’t seen in several months which indicated a Ghoul or something else that had a very high resistance to Rads that was in a pony or other sentient species shape. Why the Ministry of Wartime Technology had decided to use blue for friendly and green for irradiated entity was a little beyond me. Why had they programmed in a specific marker for irradiated creatures during a time we had all believed the Apocalypse was an unrealistic eventuality? To give them the benefit of the doubt, I had to guess it was merely due to them thinking ahead and planning for every contingency as was standard for Stable-Tec. Despite the evidence standing against them as arguably the most fucked up batch of scientists and sociology nuts to ever come out of the country, they had also made their name with quality products that satisfied their customer base.

With a soft sigh of relief I popped my neck and stole myself against being this close to my old station after so many years of avoidance. I floated out my faithful Sequoia, remembering I had only three shots left after dealing with Tomato Harvest, and approached the ruins slowly, my combat boots making soft crunching noises on the glass like sand beneath me. I for one wasn’t any more fond of Feral Ghouls than the next mare but it did strike a sad chord inside me to know that the poor fucks had probably been around as long as I had, only to succumb to the zombifying process of becoming a Ghoul. I wouldn’t necessarily refer to myself as a Ghoul sympathizer but I treated them cordially because of what had happened to them. In the end…we weren’t so different I suppose…only difference was our history and the fact I still looked hella fine which meant I could live amongst ‘normal’ ponies without much fuss over looks. Feral Ghouls on the other hoof? Much as I pitied the poor shit-for-brains like I did the non-Feral Ghouls who kept their brains…I was glad to put them out of their cannibalistic misery and make the world just that much safer.

“Alright shit-for-brains, come on out.” I called out to whomever was skulking about the rubble. “Let’s get the whole ‘brrraaaiiinnnsss’ thing out of the way alright? I’ve got places to be and I don’t want your nasty ass teeth nipping at my ass when I trot past here alright?”

Although I definitely wasn’t expecting an intelligent response, I was at least hoping for a Feral’s usual howling growl of hunger to come answering the dinner bell I just rang. Either it meant Ferals were getting smarter or I had a regular Ghoul on my hooves. A Ghoul hiding away from the big scary ass mare in the armored trench coat and gasmask helmet...

“Well…shit.” I sighed aloud, my artificially enhanced voice sounding even more bored and stale than I felt. “Guess you want to play some Hide n’ Seek? Alright then…you better make this delay worth my time.”

I stepped into what I assumed to be the old administration building of Camp Macintosh, the missing walls and chunks of ceiling really giving no indication as to what I was walking into as I looked around for the green tick I had seen earlier. If ever I had to file a single complaint against the creators of the E.F.S, it was that the system was shit at telling you the elevation of targets relative to where you were. Outside it wasn’t too bad as all you had to do was look up (or get the fuck off the ground if it was below) to try and find your target but indoors with multiple floors? That was a completely different rodeo. Skyscrapers, like the ones all over Manehattan, were fucking nightmares to navigate on their own but add onto that seeing red all over but never knowing if they were on the same floor as you or the floor above or below you was…well, a clusterfuck of horrible emotions nopony should ever have to experience.

The tunnel connected into a larger room at one end while the other went the other direction towards some unknown destination, the whole complex only dimly lit by sputtering and dying emergency lights still somehow drawing power from the backup generators installed deep beneath the Camp for...well, exactly situations like it was in now. Time, heat and mildew had done their own toll in turn to the walls and ceiling, the once easily legible painted signs and paper maps on the walls having been blotted out of nearly all recognition. Map became useless the moment I strayed inside the complex, no way in hell would the military have allowed even Stable-Tec to map their classified holdings underground. If I were to explore, it had to be done quick to save on daylight and that Ghoul I knew was there had to not be.

“Alright, common’ out please?” I sighed into the ruins after the green tick had eluded me for longer than five minutes of looking all over without straying too far from the hole in the tunnel wall. “Unless you’re dead then just stay where you are and let me at least check your shit for anything good. I’d like some .45-70 shell casings please. Ah...who am I fuckin' kidding, nopony has the caps for that kind of ammo this far south.”

I licked my lips and realized I hadn’t drank or eaten anything before taking off from home and added a second wish to my scavenging basket of wants. “Oh, and a Sunset Sarsaparilla would be nice…maybe a can of sweet corn? I’m kinda hungry to be honest…and not in the whole I wanna eat your brain hungry.”

Again, silence. This was just insulting. Even the most lazy of Ferals would have come galloping to the dinner bell I was ringing so violently. This wasn't a Feral. This was just a terrified Ghoul hiding from the big scary Veteran Ranger poking around its 'prospecting' grounds. I had no gripes with a normal Ghoul that hid from me instead of straight out attacking me so I had no reason to stay any longer. Besides...the nostalgic vibes tingling in my spine were starting to get to me.

“Alright, fine! Be a cunt! I didn’t want your shit anyway…” I growled as I exited the ruins, feeling a lot more slighted than I was expecting though the growling in my stomach made me feel a little justified.

“W-will you unload your g-guns if I s-shared my food with y-you…?” Came the young, slightly raspy Ghoulified voice from behind me, my reflexes kicking in and pointing the barrel of my gun towards its direction.

“Umm...what…?” I asked slowly, looking around for the source of the voice using every vision filter my helmet had to offer including thermal, UV and infrared.

Suddenly before me appeared a young Ghoul colt wearing a mismatched collection of metal armor held together with rope and Wonderglue. I will admit I flinched slightly at his appearance but my curiosity was piqued as to how he seemed to use a StealthBuck without one visibly strapped to his legs or slotted into a PipBuck interface. He seemed to be around the age of fourteen based upon his size and the slight squeaky pubescent tone in his voice but I knew better than to judge a Ghoul by his size. For all I knew he was as old as I was. Well…maybe a decade younger.

“Y-you don’t look l-like a Raider…” He spoke timidly, “Your a-armor is too well m-maintained…lot o-of accessories.”

He definitely had been around long enough to have an eye to distinguish the kind of shitty, hodge-podge armor Raiders preferred to wear from the Pre-War military gear I wore. He seemed to have an eye for armor himself as I found myself nodding in approval at the rather clever construction and design of his hodge-podge gear. By looks alone I summarized he had been alive for quite awhile as no newly turned 14 year old Ghoul was going to have the skill to construct armor such as his. Of particular surprise though was just how well...'preserved' his body actually was for a Ghoul of his supposed old age. Only bits and pieces of his skin was missing exposing the cherry muscles and veins underneath and his coat was patchy and missing in areas but still distinctively a soft gold in color. A thinning brown mane curled around his head which sported a weathered horn and faded green eyes while near his similarly brown tail was the cutie mark of a pineapple fruit being used as a topical drink cup with a little pink umbrella and straw sticking outa it.

“Yep.” I responded, nodding to the ruins behind him. “This stuff is…was…manufactured by the Desert Rangers. Might not know but it came from this place once upon a merry time.”

“Y-you know them too…?” He asked with a hopeful gleam in his cloudy golden eyes. “P-please…unload your guns.”

I cocked my head slightly, wondering if he was attempting a stick up using the ‘cute’ method. Not exactly cliché for a colt, let alone a Ghoulified one, but still a tad predictable. Enough to make me pause in answering his request.

“Y-you said you were hungry…a-and I have Sunset Sarsaparilla and sweet c-corn with me…” He said softly, nodding towards my weapons again. “I’ll s-share them if you show you’re n-not gonna h-hurt me.”

I myself glanced over his small frame looking for any weapons he himself might be concealing on his person but was surprised to find none. I was about to decline his offer and be on my way when my stomach angrily demanded I satisfy its need for stuffing, a need I had blatantly forgotten about prior to leaving town in my rush to get on the road. And so it was with cautious reluctance I flicked the barrel and cylinder of my Sequoia downwards, catching the three live rounds in a web of magic as they were flung up and smiling to myself as the three empty casings tinkled on the ground at my hooves. After scooping up the empties and slipping them into my designated pouch, I unloaded my Anti-Machine Rifle (the sight of which seemed to fill his eyes with wonder) and my dual 10mm's, setting all the magazines on the ground to my right. Once the last magazine was out and on the floor, and he seemed satisfied I wasn’t hiding anything else (which I was), did he smile shyly and sit on the ground, pulling out a few cans of corn and a single bottle of Sarsaparilla from the burlap sacks tied around his waist as makeshift saddlebags.

I curled up on the sandy ground as comfy as it and my armor let me and, as an act of good faith, took off my helmet, setting it to the side and shaking my head to get my mane out of the bun I had to put it in to fit inside my helmet. He seemed awestruck upon seeing how much hair I managed to stuff into such a small space and I detected a hint of blush on his cheeks out of the corner of my eye as I brushed a hoof through my mane to let it all breathe some. When seemingly satisfied taking in my appearance without staring, he nudged a can of the corn towards me that he had opened himself with a smile before his cloudy green eyes returned to my helmet and AMR lying beside me for any curious eye like his to see..

“So…h-how did you get this armor…?” He asked in his timid, slightly raspy voice, his eyes slobbering over my gear like a fanboy at HoofBeats. “D-did you find it here or…?”

I shook my head, trying to swallow my mouthful of deliciously sweet corn before responding. I still had polite manners in my daily life and I had been raised to not talk with my mouth full. Mother would always force me to watch how birds fed their young in the wild and would ask if I wanted her to feed me the same way. Needless to say the grossout factor involved with the thought was enough to keep me in the straight and narrow in that regard ever since.

“Not exactly…” I said slowly, stomach gurgling happily at what I had been craving for a while but hadn’t made the effort to go out and buy. “It’s…well, it’s mine. I earned it.”

“O-oh…?” He squeaked as he popped open the bottle of Sass with a hiss, the cap being slipped into his saddlebags for later spending. “D-do you mean…y-you’re a Desert R-Ranger…?”

“Was…but if you can’t tell kid, there ain’t nothing left to be called Ranger…just a crater and some scattered bones and weapons here and there.” I replied, looking at the ruins behind him sourly. "I was so 'lucky' to survive by...by events I would rather not mention. Especially to a stranger heh..."

“W-well, the first p-part of changing t-that is g-getting to know each o-other. R-right Miss…?” He asked, looking at me inquisitively for my name.

“Crete...Athena Crete.” I said after a moment’s hesitation as it wasn’t usual for me to give my first name to complete strangers, though this colt was strangely calming to be around.

“H-huh…that’s a-an…o-odd name.” He said almost to himself, a sentiment I myself shared in private.

“It was my mother’s idea to call me Athena…” I explained slowly. “She always obsessed over these old romance novels about great gods who ruled lightning and the ocean and shit from back in the day. Middle name of Crete also came from that...decided to make it my last name some...well, some time ago. My mom’s name was hardly as unique. Just Colgate Minuette…and she worked as a dentist in Manehattan for Celestia’s sake.”

“A dentist…? W-what’s that…?” He asked.

K, so maybe he wasn’t quite so old as I had supposed. I knew I was going to be in for a long guessing game trying to figure out his exact age. The Wasteland never gave anything for free...including a Ghoul's true age. That is usually information they kept to themselves kind of like a mare with how much she actually weighs. It was rude and borderline suicidal to ask without being told by them personally in confidence. And to answer for all those who had asked me in the past, I weigh one-hundred and eighty-five pounds. Heavy for a mare but reasonable for the stallion level strength I had worked my body up to needed to operate the way I did.

“Ponies who make it their business to clean your teeth, charge you a hoof and a leg to pull one and bitch to you when you don’t brush them enough.” I explained, the concept itself ridiculous in light of the Great War and life in the Wasteland that followed it.

"W-weird..." He mumbled to himself as he seemed to be thinking about his own teeth by the way he licked them slowly under his lips.
After a moment of awkward silence I finally asked him what he was doing in the middle of an admittedly dangerous crater all by himself especially without a weapon of any kind. Apparently he had a weapon a few weeks ago, but had been forced to leave it behind in the crater after a Hellhound caught his scent and forced him to haul ass out of here. Now he was back again looking for it, this time armed with a StealthBuck he had purchased against any future Hellhound visits. I felt somewhat guilty for making him waste his only StealthBuck (which were expensive as hell to obtain normally, usually costing around two hundred caps a piece if the merchant liked you) and as a token of my thanks for the simple yet fulfilling meal, I offered to help him scrounge the ruins of Camp Macintosh for his old gun for a time. I wasn’t prone to charity much anymore as it felt like a losing strategy in life...but he had been charitable to me without needing to be. I would feel betrayed by my own stomach if I refused to help him, the weight of the corn becoming like lead weights of shame in my gut. Either that...or I was gonna have some gut problems in the next few hours from bad corn.

“Y-you’d do that f-for me…?” He squeaked softly as I stood upon my hooves and reloaded my guns in preparation for the coming search.

“I always believe in repaying a favor, and in this case, a can of corn is well worth finding a lost gun to me.” I replied, tossing up a speedloader and catching it perfectly in the cylinder of my Sequoia much to his awe. It was a cool parlor trick I had spent the better half of several decades practicing and perfecting since there was nothing wrong with adding a little flair to your gunplay. Sheer intimidation alone was worth almost as much as a full magazine of bullets in most situations and I had learned that it was little tricks like that, that really did the trick with certain ponies. Some of my ‘kills’ never even happened...but only a few. I had a reputation to keep up after all.

Needless to say the little guy was more than a little giddy at the prospect of having adult sized help in finding his gun and the fact I was a Pre-War Ranger seemed to be the icing on the cake for him. Despite what I said earlier about avoiding kids like the plague…I was willing to make an exception for him because of his kindness annnnd the fact I felt a little burning ember of pride at how he seemed to look up to me with admiration and respect. I was used to being admired by other hitmares for my skill and accuracy (hell, I returned the favor for the exceptional ones) but I had never felt the kind of…innocent admiration coming from my little Ghoul friend. It wasn’t crammed with adult themes and violent references (or even sexual innuendo) but seemed to be genuine appreciation for me as a pony. Not as a hitmare or a hot piece of ass like everypony else saw me as but as a former soldier. A blessed sigh of relief I hadn't experienced in quite a long time...

“What’s your name, kid?” I asked as we ducked through the entrance-way of the collapsed tunnel once more.

“Golden Showers!” He called back happily seemingly completely oblivious to the sexual term associated with his own name.

I snickered quietly into my hooves, covering it with a cough. Even the kid’s name was something I found appealing. Maybe bringing him along would actually prove to be worth it. Maybe...even fun.

Next Chapter: Chapter Four: Freefall out into Nothing Estimated time remaining: 30 Hours, 54 Minutes