Flashburn hissed faintly as it sliced through the air. Rainbow whipped the blade up over her head and brought it down in a two-handed strike, cutting down an imaginary foe. She had just over an hour left before she was due to leave, leading a strike team into the downtown ruins, and she was taking the chance to get in as much training as she could.

Unfortunately, the only place with enough space overhead for Rainbow to practice the occasional midair strike was out on the flight deck. She was used to being watched while she trained, it was a side-effect of being awesome, but it was a little weird when at least half of the people watching had skipped past hero worship and were actively coming up with scripture while they watched. Flashburn wasn’t even ignited, mostly to avoid accidentally setting fire to something, but more and more people were stopping to watch with every passing minute.

“Rainbow Dash?” A stern voice called out, making the Rainboom in question flinch instinctively. She turned to see Luna striding towards her with Excalibat in one hand, her weird crystal stick-thing in the other, and an expression that was equal parts curious and disapproving. “What are you doing out here?”

“I’m just training, I’ve got a mission later,” Rainbow replied, somehow feeling as if she had just been caught doing something wrong.

Luna walked up to her and gave the peanut gallery a meaningful look. “I don’t have a problem with you training- actually, that’s a lie, I have many problems with you girls having to train for combat, but I sincerely hope you aren’t doing it out here simply so you can show off.”

Rainbow shook her head vigorously. “No, I swear! This is just the only place in the city where I can practice swinging a sword while flying.”

Luna eyed her wings curiously. “Is that even practical?”

“It probably wouldn’t be if I didn’t have super-speed, but yeah, it does come in handy sometimes,” Rainbow replied. She held Flashburn up and admired the way it shined even in the dim afternoon light. “I just wish I knew some proper sword fighting skills. Sunset tried to teach me a little, but she says that she doesn’t really know how to use a sword like this.”

“Hm, that makes sense. Sunset has done a little saber-work in the fencing club, but she’s a lot more experienced with a foil or an epee.” Luna looked Flashburn over with a critical eye. “I’m pretty sure that Fluttershy has a jian of some sort, but yours… I’d probably call it a backsword?”

Rainbow’s mouth practically dropped open in shock. “Wait, you know stuff about swords?!”

The ghost of a smile played around Luna’s lips. “I’m no expert, but I am something of an enthusiast. Hasn’t Sunset told you that I help out the fencing club every so often?” Rainbow just shook her head blankly. “Well, I was coming up here to run through drills from a few different styles. They aren’t really meant for baseball bats or, uh, tide staves, but they’re good exercise either way. I’m happy to run you through a couple of them if you want?”

“I’d appreciate it, any training is better than none,” Rainbow replied. She fixed her eyes on Flashburn as she added quietly, “I need to get better. I can’t let the others down again.”

The look that Luna gave her was a sickening mix of pity and understanding but, to Rainbow’s relief, she didn’t comment on it and simply said, “Okay, let’s get to work.”

Rarity hummed thoughtfully as she leafed through her recently-purchased sketchbook. The pages yellowed and torn, but that hadn’t stopped her from filling every relatively intact sheet with designs for clothing and armor. Standard Brotherhood combat armor had served the Rainbooms well so far, but Rarity felt that it was well past time for some upgrades.

Of course, modifying military-spec armor was a little harder than tailoring a dress or a suit, but Rarity was fairly sure that Tabitha or the Brotherhood Scribes would be happy to help, and she could always ask Pia or the Enclave in a pinch. The only real issue was time. Rarity didn’t have a mission at the moment, but Rainbow, Pinkie and Fluttershy did, and she couldn’t very well do anything to their armor when they were using it.

That just left herself, Applejack, and Sunset. Altering Sunset’s armor would have to wait until she was whole again, a thought that Rarity immediately thrust to the back of her mind, and she could hardly put herself before the others, so Applejack it was.

Applejack’s designs were all at the back of the sketchbook. Rarity lingered on some of the sketches she had made that were inspired by raider attire she had seen, amusing herself by picturing a certain someone wearing the outfits that she had thematically dubbed ‘Badlands’ and ‘Painspike’, but she didn’t let herself waste too much time with fantasizing. After the self-indulgent drawings were the more practical ideas.

The Regulator overcoat was Rarity’s first concern. Applejack had mentioned that it didn’t sit very comfortably over her armor, so that needed to be fixed, and of course it needed to be lined with the armorweave developed by the Orchard Temple; Applejack had made sure that Rarity’s own longcoat was made out of the stuff, it was only fair that she repaid the favor.

After making a note of how much material she would probably need, estimating high in case adjustments needed to be made, Rarity turned to a blank page and wondered what else she could do.

It was no secret that Applejack preferred to fight using her magic instead of a gun, but she used her stripped-down minigun for the sake of practicality; no amount of strength was as useful as a gun when it came to a gunfight, not unless you had either the speed or the durability to match.

Rarity wanted to change that. She couldn’t give Applejack super speed or toughness, and power armor was a no-go due to the risk of mutating it any time the girls ponied up, but there had to be a compromise of some kind. Rarity just had to find it.

Metal squealed in protest as it was bent back into shape. Applejack adjusted her stance on the ladder, trying to get the torn metal panels as flush together as she could, then leaned back a little to check her handiwork. The gaping hole the giant mutated ghoul had punched through Rivet City’s hull was almost completely fixed. “Alright, how’s that look?”

“Looks good from down here,” the foreman replied. “Hop on down so Biggs can get up there and weld it.”

“Ah can weld it, if you want,” Applejack told him.

The foreman muttered something inaudible, then called up a little louder, “I appreciate the offer, but you’ve been out here for six hours straight. Go and take a break.”

“Ah’m fine, Ah can keep goin’,” Applejack said flatly.

“I thought honesty was supposed to be your whole schtick?” Grimacing as she recognized the voice, Applejack glanced down to see Harkness glaring up at her with his arms crossed. “Fluttershy and Rarity both warned me that you’d throw yourself into work and end up pushing yourself too far. Get down from there and come with me to get some food, or I’ve been told to send Pinkie Pie out here to fetch you.”

Applejack shuddered at the thought of being cornered by Pinkie. The girl could talk the hind legs off of a mule and still not stop until the poor beast drowned itself just to plug its ears, and that was before the Capital Wasteland had chewed through her patience and replaced it with brand new cuss words. Worse, Pinkie might try to discuss recent events and try to talk about feelings, and Applejack was not in the right headspace for that at the moment. “Fine, Ah’ll take a break.”

“Good, Pinkie’s preparing for her mission with Rainbow Dash and the last thing I want to do is distract her,” Harkness said with a nod.

“Pinkie’s goin’ too?” Applejack asked. “Why the heck ain’t the rest of us bein’ asked to do this?”

Harkness shrugged. “The mission is to draw out the Teleporter Mutant, maybe Elder Lyons just wants to be sure of who he’s going to target first.”

“Rainbow and Pinkie do have faster reflexes than the rest of us, they probably stand a better chance of catchin’ that bastard off-guard than anyone,” Applejack conceded as she climbed down the ladder. “How can we be sure that we’ll be able to draw him out, though?”

“The Super Mutants almost certainly have some way of communicating over distance, that’s the only way that teleporter would have been able to react to events at both Project Purity and the Exodus building with such timing,” Harkness explained. He glanced back at a handful of people throwing apples into the river for the mirelurks, a small reward for defending the city whether they knew it or not, then he turned and ushered Applejack back into the ship. “Go on, go get some food. Take a shower too, you smell almost as bad as those damned ferals did. Come find me when you’re done and we’ll get some sparring practice in.”

Applejack stopped sniffing herself and gave him a surprised look. “Sparrin’? Ah thought you wanted me to rest?”

Harkness met her gaze evenly. “You’re not the first person I’ve seen trying to prove that they’re still useful after they’ve been outmaneuvered. Sparring will wear you out quicker than fixing the walls, and it might just help you be a little more ready the next time things go tits-up.”

Pinkie’s concentration was absolute as she soldered another wire onto her latest instrument of death. It was almost finished. All it needed was a few more small components, an appropriate amount of Nuka-Cola Quantum, and a few odds and ends for good measure. It was just a little more potent than Elder Lyons had asked for, but it would get the job done.

A sudden twitchy sensation in her jaw made Pinkie snatch her hands away from the experiment. For one awful moment she thought that she had made a horrible mistake, then someone knocked on the door. “Huh, that’s a new one.” Pinkie carefully put down the soldering iron and stepped over to the door.

A nervous-looking technician was standing outside with a box in his hands. “Afternoon, Miss Pie. Uh, Pia asked me to deliver this to you?”

Pinkie eagerly took the box and peeked inside. “Yes, it’s perfect! This is exactly what I need!”

“Really?” The technician stared at the box curiously. “What do you need it for?”

“Making mean monsters bleed!” Pinkie replied cheerfully. She handed the stunned technician a mirelurk cake from her hair and smiled brightly before closing the door. Taking a deep breath, Pinkie set the box on her table and stared down at the component inside. “Everyone always seems to go for Sunset, ever since Burke” she mused sadly. Pinkie reached into the box and gently stroked the fusion pulse charge. “This time I’m going to take a leaf out of his book.”

Hundreds of butterflies flitted around the room, their pink wings glittering in the light. Fluttershy knelt in the center of the room, dozens of the butterflies resting on her arms and shoulders, with her weapons, armor, one of her Brotherhood-issued tops and a sewing kit spread out in front of her. For the sake of privacy, and in hopes of strengthening her magic, she was using the room where Doctor Li had once made the mistake of trying to analyze her magic. It felt like that had happened a lifetime ago, but in reality only a few months had passed.

Fluttershy’s heart pounded as she contemplated what she was about to do. It was terrifying, but at the same time she felt that it was something she needed to do. The butterflies felt like an apt metaphor for her life; she was constantly growing and changing, pushing through difficult times and emerging as something new, especially since she had arrived in this world. Now it was time for another metamorphosis.

Moving slowly so she didn’t disturb the butterflies, Fluttershy started by measuring each piece of her armor individually. That was the easy part. Next, she turned her attention to the top. She carefully cut the top to match each piece of armor, then padded what was left of her lower sleeves with spare cloth before adding ties to turn them into fabric bracers. With that, the clothing was done.

Additions to the armor came next; specifically, attachments to the back plate for injectors. It was tricky, but after a little fiddling Fluttershy managed to cobble together a sturdy holder on either side of the back plate using webbing and straps. She put a modified stimpak into the left holder, containing a recipe she had designed herself to work with her FEV-enhanced metabolism. Into the right holder she slotted an injector of Psycho. The bulky red injector contained a hideously potent mixture of amphetamines originally developed by the military. Fluttershy didn’t like the idea of using it, but, if faced with another situation like what had happened to Sunset, then it would be a powerful last resort.

Finally, Fluttershy slipped a pair of blood packs into pockets on her breastplate. They were also a last resort, in a way, to reduce the chances of her losing control of her vampiric urges on the battlefield.

When she was done, Fluttershy sat back on her heels and sighed. She wished that she could figure out a way of modifying Vampire’s Edge so that the blade stored any blood that it drew, but she couldn’t come up with anything simple and she did not have the gall to ask someone else about it. As for the sniper rifle, she didn’t have even the faintest clue of how to go about modifying that.

“Okay, I’m done.” Fluttershy stood up, gently shooed away the butterflies that were still on her, and put on her newly-altered top, essentially a sleeveless crop top now, then her new bracers, and finally her armor and Pip-Boy. When she was done, she took a deep breath and turned to face a bare patch of wall that was polished to a mirror shine.

A dystopian survivor stared back. Fluttershy fought the urge to cringe at the sight of her exposed midriff and upper arms, but she would get used to it. She reached around to her injectors and nodded with satisfaction. All she would have to do was flick off their safety and press a button for them to slam their contents into her back, retracting the needles automatically when they were empty. The blood packs were in easy reach, too, with little tubes attached so she could bite off the cap and suck out the contents without using her hands. Taking a deep breath, Fluttershy reached for her magic and let herself vamp out.

The survivor was gone. In her place stood a post-apocalyptic predator, toned and lean, a living nightmare as beautiful as it was terrible. Fluttershy drew herself up to her full height, throwing back her shoulders and throwing her wings out wide. That was better. The longer she spent with the FEV in her body the less the cold bothered her, and less fabric meant it was easier to administer injections to herself and she could help herself to any blood that splattered over her arms. Some small part of Fluttershy’s mind was well aware that she had other reasons for changing like this, very few of them healthy, but she ignored it. She needed to feel powerful, and she very much did.

Nodding grimly to herself, Fluttershy let the magic fade and reverted back to normal. The overinflated image of herself disappeared at once, but she no longer felt the urge to cringe and hide away at the sight of her reflection. Being in her vampire form always boosted Fluttershy’s confidence considerably for a while afterwards. Not giving herself a chance to second-guess it, she slung her sniper rifle over her shoulder, scabbarded Vampire’s Edge at her hip, and marched out of the room. She had a mission to attend to.

Twilight gripped the edges of the sink as if it was a lifeline. She knew that the Enclave had brought her out to the Air Force Base to help with Sunset’s recovery, but the sheer scope of what they were asking, of just how badly Sunset had been injured, made Twilight feel sick to her stomach.

Thankfully, Sunset’s life wasn’t in any danger. That at least was one less thing to worry about. All Twilight had to do was turn her intellect towards replacing at least a third of her friend’s body with magitech prosthetics using near-untested magical equipment and technology that was simultaneously more advanced and more crude than anything she had ever worked with before. Of course, it went without saying that every decision made during this process would directly impact not only Sunset’s long-term survival, but also her quality of life for the remainder of her existence. No pressure.

The guilt only made things worse. As horrified as Twilight was by Sunset’s situation, she couldn’t deny that she was fascinated by the opportunity she had been offered. She felt terrible about it, but at the same time the chance to push the limits of this world’s science further than ever before, creating something using components and knowledge from three different realities, was more exciting than Twilight would ever be able to admit.

There was, however, one small problem. Twilight knew more about electronics than probably anyone else in this reality, and she was certainly a dab hand at robotics, but she was still going to have to learn a lot of new stuff in a short amount of time. Her experience in studying nuclear fusion alongside the effects of FEV had taught Twilight just how difficult it was going to be to split her focus, and this time she could not afford to fail. Just the prospect of it was threatening to send her into a panic. As a result, just this once, she had decided to use a crutch.

Twilight bit her lip and looked down at the little box on the edge of the sink. Mentats. They were nootropic chems; drugs that improved creativity and memory retention as well as speeding other mental processes. They were also, annoyingly, supposed to be highly addictive.

Still, Twilight was already smart, she just needed a little boost. She would be careful. If at any point she felt like she was getting addicted or becoming overly-reliant on them, then she’d just lay off them for a while. It couldn’t be that hard.

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