Fallout Equestria: Sola Gratia
Chapter 12: Peach, Plum, Pear
“Don’t feed the Yao Guai.”

As my eyes blinked open, I found myself staring up at the terrifying, shifting uncertainty that was the Equestrian sky. It was darker as only trace amounts of sunlit gold cut through the near black cloud cover.

My body didn’t ache much, only what I’d expect from its rough collisions across the marble monument.
What really bothered me was that the chronological guideline the sky served as told me that I had been unconscious. Too long than was healthy, long enough that I should have sustained brain damage…
After searching for a moment I found that my mental faculties were whole and blissfully surviving.
And using my undeservedly preserved mind, I deduced that I should get up off of the rapidly cooling marble and take stock of the current situation.

As I rolled over and hoisted myself onto shaky hooves, I froze up in sudden realization. I was surrounded by stripes of black and white, a dozen zebras dressed in rough, fresh leather, their lithe bodies adorned with clean bone and armed with black rifles. Their faces were almost entirely white. The skulls painted across them made it look like the zebra’s skin and flesh had been peeled away to reveal the frame underneath. I instinctively sat back in surrender. This didn’t look good.

“Don’t be afraid, little one.” A mare stepped forward, eyes glowing teal, just as the otherwise black, striped rifle attached to her side did. Her mane was set in a medium, curling quasi-Mohawk; some of it fell loosely, bending at the tips and base. It looked like exertion had broken its containment and now a few strands fell in light curls over her forehead. “We mean you no harm.” The beautiful, if scary, Zebra said.

“I was unconscious?” I asked dumbly, phrasing ‘You shot me?!’ a little more cautiously. I might as well not get myself killed just yet. “What happened?”

“I shot you.” Called it. “You couldn’t light up this structure, at least, not so hastily.” she explained, not making me feel any safer. I was in trouble if she intended me harm, and shooting me was a pretty good indicator that she did. Outnumbered and confused I pushed for a conclusive explanation.

“So… what? You knocked unconscious to stop me from wasting my time?” There was no logic behind that. I decided that I wouldn’t be able to trust her until I knew where Caliber and Ash were.
“I prefer hearing words to taking bullets.”

“It was a concussive shot alone, I honestly intended no harm to you: only a stall. With which I stopped you from bringing a horde of savages upon yourself and your friends.” She justified in her silky, inexplicably exotic voice. Similarly accented to the Zebra in the orbs. “Who are safe.”

“Safe where?” I pushed. Her companions, eleven of them, stood by watching our exchange silently. None were armed with anything that looked quite as powerful as this mare’s glowing rifle, but they were most definitely armed. Their faces looked statuesque under the white camouflage, somehow less distinct and personable than their leader’s.

“The cold one is below, working on enlightening the tombs to aid in your escape.” Ash? “The burdened one, black diamond’s indicating the weight on her soul.” She ‘clarified’. “The fiery one was taken to our camp, as… security.” I frowned. “Please do not take it as an affront: She volunteered as collateral.”

“Why didn’t you take Ash?” I couldn’t imagine either mare being eager to leave me unconscious; something must have made them choose Caliber specifically… perhaps it was Caliber herself.

“We would rather avoid placing trust on the Falling Star.” She answered cryptically.

“I want to see her.” I demanded. Ash would be evidence to her truth. For now, this whole situation seemed suspect. The door to the maintenance room was open; and according to her that was what she had gone to great lengths to stop me from achieving. “What’s going on here?”

“We came up with a plan to end the reign of savagery over our valley.” The Zebra sounded mature and wise though she looked to be only a few years older than me. “We will light this structure up, call the horde… and thereby create a distraction.”

“So why knock me out? Sounds like you plan to do exactly what you shot me to prevent.” I admittedly hadn’t known the savages would come running to Celesta’s Landing if we had illuminated it. And it was hard to believe that Bookstack had simply forgotten to warn us.

“I was acting alone at first, watching you since you arrived in our valley, I saw your exchange with the savage’s messenger, then followed you back to this beacon. During the time you spent… incapacitated, I was able to gather thirteen of our best, and your friends helped us to formulate a course of action. We can hold off the Savages here, keep most of them away from the Stable.” She grinned. “It will be a formidable challenge, but we will hold their attention.”

The nature of our first contact hadn’t exactly been friendly, but I believed the mare. She had needed time, and it wasn’t in her nature to initiate a parley with words. The Zionists seemed militant, almost to a fault, and it was no small wonder that they had remained isolated from the rest of the country for so long.

Ash appeared from the elevator’s plaza, trotting eagerly across the marble to join us. A thirteenth Zebra followed her, torch strapped to his battle saddle, burning a bright, unnatural orange. The flames didn’t seem to affect him as they licked up at his sides. He had either been her aid, providing light in the cold dark below, or her captor, making sure that she didn’t run.

“Ash!” I called out, waving a hoof at her over the ring of black and white. She perked up at my consciousness and hurriedly entered the circle, filling a space that the Zebras smoothly allowed for her.

“Hello Grace,” her voice didn’t reflect the enthusiastic relief on her face. “I worried that the Zebra hadn’t been telling the truth about your condition, glad to see that you are alright…after all.” She nodded at the knowing military mare.

“Thanks, Admittedly I wasn’t quite ready to trust you either, ma’am.” I laced my words with civility as I readdressed the striped commander, inexplicably trying to apologize for my justified suspicion. Seeing Ash made me feel bad for doubting her. “So Caliber is alright?”

They both nodded but only Ash spoke. “She seemed more than willing to go with the escort; she’ll be fine once you prove that we’re here to help the Zebras. They couldn’t take our word for it.”

“That you aren’t like all other ponies, who take our charity then leave us to struggle eternally in this valley while they run off to New Calvary or whatever other doom awaits them?” she raised an eyebrow. “That is not a promise we can easily believe.”
After the validation of her words, I almost felt obligated to prove myself. It seemed clear that whatever this mare had done had been a precaution, not an attack. But before I could express my compliance, I was blinded in an explosion of brilliant, overpowering gold from the obelisk I faced. I turned my head quickly, taking shelter from the burning by looking out over the lit cliff at a darkening Equestria.

“What happened? It isn’t yet time!” I heard the Zebra mare bark in frustration. I braced myself against the light and turned back to regard the monument.

The flash of its illumination had been blinding, but now it shone beautifully and brightly just on the border of being uncomfortably invasive to an onlooker’s eyes. The floodlights along the marble knives that extruded through crags in the mountain face were bathing the entire marble plateau in golden brilliance. The obelisk was visible, extruding out of the darkness to its very tip, out of the black rock around it. The entire area was drowned in a haze, every shadow eliminated or exaggerated to polar extents.

“I just don’t know what went wrong.” Another striped soldier peeked out of the maintenance room, ashamed at her premature illumination. Her leader beckoned her over with a sour expression, but didn’t reprimand her when she arrived, instead turning in attention back to me with an air of urgency.

“I’m here to help. Just tell me what I need to do.” I recited, pledging allegiance to the suffering locals.
Ash stepped forward to explain what vestiges of a plan they had assembled.

“Grace, did your Stable have an orchard?” I shook my head; I wasn’t familiar with the term. “A place to grow fruit, you know? Sort of like a farm where food is produced, a field with an emulation of trees and grass? To grow fruit.” She desperately tried to make a connection as the savages undoubtedly approached. It was too late to turn off the lights, I heard someone whisper, they would already be coming.

“We ate paste.” I excused.

She paused looking at me with skeptical confusion. “Well… I’m sorry to hear that, but the Zebras think that there must be another source of food down in the Stable; otherwise the savages would have starved by now. That smart buck must have taught some of them how to use it, or it may even be automatic.”

“So… We have to shut it down?”

“Better,” the Zebra stepped forward, holding a glimmering orange bottle cautiously in her teeth. “This is Celestial Flame, spontaneous and incredibly flammable; it’ll create an unstoppable, enormous blaze when its containment is broken. Release it in their orchard, on their food supplies, on their lifeline.” She smiled in anticipation. “Many of their soldiers will die here at the monument; but their survivors will starve in that hole, they will all die out.” She slid the bottle into my saddlebags. “Close the door on your way up, they’ll be dead before they can figure out how to open it again.”

“No.” I stood firm, suddenly resolved, this wasn’t how this would end. “I’m not doing that.” It was cruel. Killing them was my intent, wiping them out was what I needed to do, but this wasn’t how I would let myself do it. It was easy, it was convenient, and it was slow…

“W-what?” she seemed flustered. “They are animals!”

“Grace, this is the only way.” Ash pleaded. “They deserve nothing better, they deserve to be purged.”

“That doesn’t mean they have to suffer…” my rationale was weak, I knew that, but I couldn’t lock them down there with no food or peace, they’d tear each other apart before they starved. “They may need to die, they truly can’t be corrected, but they don’t need to pay for their mistakes. You want them to hurt, to atone for what they’ve done to your people, you’d have them die slowly, and painfully.”

“It doesn’t matter what I want,” she confessed. “There’s no other way. We’ve tried to shut them in, sometimes it even lasted for a few weeks, but they always get out. Only one insurgent can sneak into that Stable successfully, more would never bypass all of them. Two zebras were caught and killed, and one alone cannot possibly kill them all. It is a hive.” I could almost hear the roars coming through the craggy pass, indicating that the savages were beginning their ascent.

“Of women and children,” I recalled. “How have none of your soldiers made it through there?”

“They never had this distraction to cast a shadow on their path, to draw the warriors out. And none will ever have it again, this is our only chance.” She nodded to one hemisphere of the circle and they scattered, taking positions around the monument. “We may fall here Shepard, but your friend is with our kin, and if we die in vain… so does she. You’ll get what you want if you help us, we’ve spoken you’re your mercenary, seen her terms… but first you have to follow our orders, and get the job done.”

“I’ll do it,” I lied. At that the Zebras spread out, their leader giving a final nod laced with a disdainful reminder, a vague threat. “Let’s go Ash.” I ordered. We would figure out another way once we were in the Stable. I knew the nature of their home and together we could surely find another, more merciful solution.

“I’m staying here.” She apologized. “Two ponies aren’t getting through that Stable if two Zebras couldn’t. Just do what she asks, they’ll find their repentance while they rot in that accursed hole.”

“She threatened Caliber,” the tension was rising, the yips and growls from the pass getting louder and wilder as the animals approached. “I’m not leaving you with them. If you won’t come with me to the Stable, at least don’t stay here.” I shot a nervous glance to the place where the savages would come spilling onto the bright marble sun, tearing at anything they got their greedy, thrashing maws around.

“Caliber is being brought here once word is out that you have complied, all the zebras will stand to fight the horde. I’m not going to be the only one in Zion who isn’t involved in its salvation.” She smiled. “Do you really think the Stable, their hive, is a safer place to be? Because I’ll go if your motivation to bring me is deeper than wanting to keep me safe, if you actually think that you will need me.”

She had me pegged. If Caliber was going to be here… they needed each other more than I needed them. “Fine, just stay safe.”

“In the wasteland?” she smiled, eyes down to the monument. Then, placing a hoof on my shoulder, she dropped her light demeanor. “Remember what’s at stake; don’t let your misplaced mercy overrule what you know you have to do. Burn their orchard down; don not let them have another chance that they don’t deserve.” I nodded in compliance, now unsure whether it was sincere or not.

Explosive rounds went off at the natural rock entrance to the monument. The first short line of the savages’ approaching swarm fell onto the powerfully illuminated stone, severed and still. They teemed over each other through the narrow spillway, like a wave of mud and bone cascading onto the clean, ancient memorial before it. Ash turned tail and ran towards the obelisk, taking a stance between two Zebras firing down on the horde from atop ceremonial stairs.
Stripes of black on white collided with bleeding wounds of red on dirty coats, the emulators meeting their inspiration with a violent barrage of teeth and knives. The Zebra leader’s gun still glowed teal and its shots landed with a similarly hued corona of force that sent impeded ponies flying, just as I had.

I stood in the center of the monument, watching the beginning of the battle as if it weren’t unfolding just a pony’s toss away. The violence was both awful and awesome, fulfilling every expectation of what I’d imagined a war torn battlefield to look like, every detail of savagery and desperation that came with the immediate struggle for survival and victory.

Snapping out of the analytic daze I tore my eyes away from the unfolding carnage and sprinted for the plaza. Running hadn’t been smart. When encountered by a wild animal you should remain as still as possible, cadets, don’t panic or make any sudden movements. Show no fear. Colt’s Life had told me that, but I hadn’t applied the knowledge to the savages, forgetting their animalism and seeing them as the ponies that they could’ve been: subconsciously giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Two charged after me. That’s all I saw when I spared a glance over my pumping shoulder, their gnashing teeth and suddenly wild eyes, bearing down on me. Adrenaline pumped through me as I gave every ounce of my strength to the demanding run. It felt as like was bleeding sweat from fear and exertion, and the elevator was the furthest thing away from me in the entire world. Their repetitive clops and yelps sounded their gaining proximity, it was almost as if I could feel them biting at my tail. The battle behind us was almost silent to my panicked mind; the elevator was my only solace.

I hit the call button, not with my hooves but rather my entire body, slamming into the wall and stopping myself with the concrete pain. The savages made the same mistake, but didn’t have the same consideration for their skulls that I did, they crashed head first on either side of me, one sounded off with a crack against the steel shaft doors. The other, hard-skulled and surviving, reared up before I could and pounced onto me. We sprawled together at the threshold of the elevator. He had me pinned though I kicked and writhed wildly at his underbelly. He had thankfully abandoned his crude knife and now bit sporadically at my face, never getting a solid hold on my coat, but never relenting.

He was tackled, slammed against the doors by another blur of blood-striped dirty energy. I got my bearings fast enough to dodge their unified assault, no, their competitive race to see who would claim my meat, for consumption or… I didn’t want to know what they planned to do with me; I wouldn’t give them the chance.

I hopped over Broken-Skull’s corpse, levitating my laser pistol out in the meantime. The energetic torrents that were my attackers slowed each other down, like dogs nipping at one and other would stall, and I had enough time to level the weapon before they were upon me again. I hit their faces away as best I could with either the gun or my hooves, but the two of them together was becoming too much for me to handle.

Beams of red energy cut into one’s coat, burning away leather and simplistic barding and leaving smoking skin or exposed flesh in its path. As he balked, the other pressed on, actually thankful for the opportunity to best his kin, in a feat of primal selfishness not entirely exclusive to animals. I cracked the pistol repeatedly against his filthy head, making him flinch and duck to great frustration. He let out an angry roar, rearing onto his hind legs to foreshadow an oncoming barrage of savage fury, a barrage that never came, fuelled by a wild emotion that was quickly cut short.

I unleashed half a clip of concentrated energy into his upright chest, reducing his middle to an empty, cauterized gap. I could see the other recovering through the nearly circular wound, as if I was looking at a picture of pain through a frame of charred meat.

To my disgust the survivor rammed his head through his dead compatriot, his neck now ringed with the corpse I had made. He barked and snapped at me. The stupidity of this attack strategy was made apparent as the body, whose ability to stand had been taken from it by death, collapsed to the marble floor, pulling the living pony down by applying its incredible weight onto his neck.

He kicked out desperately, trying to pull his head free of its morbid collar, to no avail. His barks turned to whimpers as I pushed the laser pistol against his imprisoned temple, pressing it hard against him for no other reason than to satisfy a disturbing urge to make him feel his fate, to appreciate his folly. The shot burned a neat hole directly through the side of his head, the heat and pressure popping out both of his eyes as it passed behind them. I could almost make out his pathetic, gray brain in the darkness, but couldn’t bring myself to stare for long. The familiar smell of burnt internals no longer made me retch, but they still forced me to gasp out for fresher, unsullied air.

The elevator arrived, having ignored my urgency to slowly crawl its ways up the mountain at its usual, relaxed pace. More savages were coming; they had overrun the monument and had enough of a force to spare a pursuit on me. Any that came would only make things easier for Ash and the Zebras; I consoled myself as I hammered the button for the church floor.

The doors slid closed, again with the docile speed only appropriate for a time of peace long passed. A singular savage dove his way in between them just as they were reaching their closing culmination. For a blissful moment I thought that they would crush him, divide him in half and tear the life from his scarred body. But ‘safety first’! The doors stalled at the sensation of a body between them, allowing the bastard passage into the small, circular vehicle. The intense light of the monument was hidden behind the steel curtains, leaving only blue-tinged fluorescents, cold compared to the warm gold that was summoning the savages to this great fight for Celestia’s landing, a claim that none of the combatants had any want for.

One of which now stood ready to pounce again, across from me, he inconsiderately crushed the children’s bones under his hooves as we paced around each other. I had holstered my pistol so I pulled the knife from my vest with my magic, preparing for his inevitable tackle.

“I’m going to kill your entire family.” I taunted him, hoping to get a reaction, an indication of a soul or even a consciousness higher than that of the beast before me. His eyes stayed wide in feral fury, no fear on his snarling face, no consideration for my words. “Does your Stable have a ventilation system?” I asked, getting an idea. The animal was less willing to attack a slow target, an opponent that stood its ground, intimidation by body language provided for what words couldn’t. Thanks Colt’s Life.

“I’m going to burn it all.” A plan formed in my mind, a vicious, genocidal, and yet merciful plan. “You hear that, I’m going to cook your Stable.” If there was going to be a time for these savages to redeem themselves, it would have to be now. A part of me wished that he would react, spare some emotion for the very real threats that I was taunting him with, but he stared on in his blind, animal rage. “Come on!” I yelled, frustrated at the magnificent failure that was Stable 34. “Don’t you care!?”

He didn’t. The blank-flanked old buck didn’t express a thing, or he didn’t even understand my words, either way, he was too far gone for salvation. If sudden movements were the only thing that could penetrate his instinctual mind…

I swung the knife down to my side, floating it hilt to the floor, its blade now pointing up beside my belly.
It dove at me, seeing the glint of the fluorescents on my weapon it pounced, crushing the bones of fillies and colts and it propelled itself forward. Just before its assault of hooves and teeth landed, I dug the combat knife into its heart, smoothly sliding it through ribs at just the right angle to sink into the most vital of vital organs. The fury left its cold eyes, and I let it collapse at my side, wrenching the weapon out.

The rest of the descent was strangely quiet. The corpse was bleeding profusely at first, but even the wet cascade of blood became silent after a while, leaving me alone with the bodies strewn around me. They were children, the savages, very dangerous children who could never grow up.

It wasn’t hard to see what I had to do. I wouldn’t let them starve; I had seen enough of their disregard for each other to know that the Stable would become a damned hotbed of cannibalism and desperate violence if the food source and exits were taken away. I would kill them, burn them in a wild fire spread by gas through the ventilation system. I wasn’t sure what my escape plan was, or how I could get gas pumping through the entire Stable, but I knew where I stood on the issue: Beautiful, clean, violent Mercy. A Genocide that would save the ones it killed from such a grim alternative was justifiable enough for me.

The elevator reached the church, opening to reveal an abbey lit with comparable magnificence to the monument far above. Ash had lit the way. I trotted out, down the horizontal plane of the cross-shaped room, taking time again to look at the eight windows. Even in the light Celestia’s and the yellow one looked brighter than the rest, while Luna’s somehow retained its cold, consuming darkness.

I retraced my steps down the aisle; fake candlelight emanating from some unknown, artificial source guiding me to the slope into former darkness of the entryway. The pillars stretched high along the descending walls, to a ceiling that was shadowed even in this new light.

I found myself unable to tear my gaze away from the path ahead of me, low and undisturbed by the usual curiosity for investigation. I didn’t want to look at the statues again, they had been grim, horrific even, in the darkness and I didn’t want to know if they had changed through enlightenment. If I saw them now, there would be no denying what they depicted; I couldn’t dispute the sadness, the violence of these effigies by deferring to the darkness. I would give them my unknowing doubt, to preserve my hope that they depicted happier day, and not an eternal pattern of war, as I truly suspected.

I knew the path, and navigating it blind was not a challenge, anything to avoid seeing those statues in the light, to avoid them in their honesty. A dying colt, a war-torn soldier, warring tribes, were things I did not want to remember the old world by, not what I wanted to know of it, especially not after my crippling exposure in the Border Patrol Station. The floor was interesting enough for me, though I couldn’t truly appreciate what effort Ash had put in to light my way. The Zebras must have further plans for this place.

The entrance, now the exit, was no longer a singular source of light in a corridor of darkness, but a void of black ending this corridor of revealing light. Zion proper was where I was most likely to lose my way.

Head down, I trotted out onto the dusted snow, watching as the marble became gradually carpeted underneath it. I dialed to my Pip-buck’s map, checking the location of the newly-marked ‘Stable 34’.
It lay west, towards the base of the natural pass up to the monument. It would have been faster to go that way, were it not for the horde compacted within the mountain crags leading up the escarpment. I set off along the relatively flat land, as it rose sharply to become the looming mountain face on my right.

I could hear the violence above me, faintly, almost indistinguishably. The occasional burst of concussive magic or explosive shrapnel signaled the Zebra’s defense against the roars and haunting whinnies of the savages. The monument’s light stretched into the dark sky above it, cutting up into the darkness like a beacon, drawing the animals to it in their primal fervor.

There had to be a lot of power being pumped into those lights, I thought, where was it all coming from?
A question for another time. I lit up my horn, my own little light, using the magical power imbued in me.
My pace peaked and slowed, rising and falling from an occasional, desperate sprint to an exhausted saunter. I knew I was pushing myself to hard, but the softly sounding battle raging above me pressed me onwards in a hurry. My actions would not stop the fighting in the mountains, but this mission was only made possible by them, to miss this opportunity would be nothing short of a disgraceful waste.

Win or lose, the last few savages would hopefully have nothing more to come home to than a charred, hollow grave. Fire was impersonal, I wouldn’t have to watch many die, if any at all, there had to be a way to spread it across the entire Stable. I didn’t know what I would do if there wasn’t… leave them to starve? Lock the Stable and hope they couldn’t break their way out until they all died of furious hunger, their own or their cannibalistic kin’s? I would not dwell on it…. Not until it was unavoidable.

The golden tower of light was now behind me, the monument’s haze no longer visible behind black peaks and precipices. The pass would begin somewhere amidst the rocky rise, indiscernible to my unaccustomed eyes. A surface was a surface to me, it should be smooth and dauntless, a border should be impenetrable and consistent, not riddled with byways and substitutes for traversal. The Stable had been knowable, repeating patterns of gray steel and sliding doors, but I couldn’t fathom the random unpredictability of a mountain range, or even of nature itself.

A part of me was looking forward to reentering a Stable, as I had by proxy through the memory orbs, but this time it would be real, physical and actual. This part was weighed down by the fear of what I would find, an abomination of the technology I once knew as my home, a primitive, unkempt, dangerous hive, discernible as a Stable only because of what it had once been advertised as.

Down this way, Mt. Zion rose up in front of me, creating a tiny valley in between itself and the rest of the escarpment, the Stable was apparently at the end of this narrow gap.

Trees, grass and exposed earth gave way to rocky collapse and hard, packed land. I now walked over gray stone, serrated and jagged as it tapered into itself. It dipped at the crux of the valley, subsiding into a dark overhand created by the mountains themselves. I dimmed my glowing horn, not wanting to draw the attention of the ghosts I felt leering around me.

Corpses, truly animal, of bird and beast I never would have expected to see surviving in the wasteland, all blackened and stained either by mutation or murder. They had been hunting, some of the bodies looked sickeningly old, rotted beyond their life’s condition and dipped in pools of congealed, black, blood.

Some were skinned part-way, untidily and jaggedly ripped apart for the warmth and nourishment their reagents could provide. None looked fully taken advantage of, wasteful; an abundance of corpses only yielded a little sustenance to the impatient, simple savages. They would undoubtedly be unable to survive by hunting even if I didn’t enclose them in their Stable, as it was the only thing keeping them alive and, hopefully, the thing that would be able to kill them.

A light flickered at the end of the dank, cluttered passage; it revealed a cog-shaped opening in the shadows, leading to what appeared to be a rusty metallic room, dim and stained. Not an air-lock, I realized as I got closer, they hadn’t bothered with that feature. This Stable opened directly out into the world, no sanitization or precaution taken against what awaited outside. My horn went out, gold light replaced by the metallic red of the chamber ahead.

I tripped and stumbled my way over the last stretch of rock and bone, too large to be pony and too brittle to be fresh. A question that would never be answered, though it needn’t ever be.
The Stable door had rolled to the side, into the mountain, and I now found myself stepping over the threshold between rock and metal once again. It didn’t feel like a return, or a reunion, already this place seemed disturbingly off, unmaintained and quiet. Empty?

No.
My E.F.S disagreed, strongly. The deeper I got into the chamber, the more bars appeared, all red and flinching. It claimed that I was walking over the hostiles, passing them by as I entered a conjoining hallway, which would lead to the Atrium if the Stables shared more in design than they did in their purpose. There were dozens, so many that they quickly overlapped and became a consistent, singular band of hostile red across my radar. They congregated, no; they lay scattered in the levels below.

This wasn’t familiar, this wasn’t a place to draw nostalgic comfort from, it was the replica of my first home, but it was not even its remotest twin. Everything was just wrong enough; just skewed enough to destroy what my mind might have insisted was home, turning it into a nightmarish mockery.

The underlying cold gray with yellow stripes was consumed by the rusty, dim lighting and bloody, dirty stains. It was a Stable, though had been coated in filth and neglect until it was barely recognizable.

The Atrium was horrendous. Bodies, some pony, hung from the walkways above, turning the hall into a dripping abattoir. It looked as if the savages were waiting for this meat to rot, almost as if they preferred it that way. Most disturbing was the fact that I wasn’t alone. A pair of roughly shaved mares lay reposed in one corner, picking at a body, a zebra body, judging from the distinctly darker stripes. The mares themselves were smooth, unscarred, at least not as badly or symbolically as the bucks were, their coats were mangy and wild but they still retained more of the similarity to me than their mutilated brothers and fathers. Their mates, I realized, with a wince. One looked pregnant…

I stepped out of the hallway into the wide room, the widest room that I would encounter down here, appreciating them for the simple beings they were. There were no alarms here, no security; selfish concern would keep these mares from calling to their kin, if I didn’t present a threat.

Their faces pulled back into snarls, the pregnant one’s eyes were burning with maternal instinct, their sharp teeth were revealed in all their bloody decay. Thought they didn’t rise, I gave them a wide berth and hugged the opposing wall of the Atrium, just passing by. As I slipped into the opposing doorway they turned their attention back to their huge, unethical meal, a full zebra’s worth of sin.

The bars meant nothing, I realized, these males were hostile by nature, they were attackers. But the mares were defensive, just as vicious but more reserved in the protection of their own. As long as I kept up this slow, respectful pace, I wouldn’t disturb them enough to warrant an attack. Would they come to one another’s aid if it came to that? Could one wrong move, one fight, lead to an entire Stable of females setting upon me in violent retaliation? I would likely not survive if I strived to answer that question.

After a time, passing more and more disturbingly familiar, and simultaneously alien architecture, I reached an elevator. It didn’t seem to be functioning; the door was open to the dark chamber within, the long vertical hallway, lined with too few cables to realistically lift an elevator with any guarantee of safety. However, a floor listing on the wall adjacent gave me some guidance.

1st Floor: Main Entrance
2nd Floor: Common Areas
3rd Floor: Maintenance

This was my Stable, the feeling nagged at me, biting at my resolve. It almost made me swoon, as the truth of this failure seeping into me. This could just as easily have been us, even without the incest, opening the Stable could have resulted in this death, this descent into another part of the wasteland.
I continued reading to draw the line, to differentiate this place from where I had been born.

4th Floor: Orchard, Oxygen Recycling.

That was it. Both solutions: access to the ventilation system and the Stable’s food production. My course of action wouldn’t be clear until I ventured down to the lowest level of the Stable, the belly of this monster. Oxygen recycling first, a merciful cleansing would be preferable to a cruel deprivation. This functionality had been stored in the Maintenance section of my Stable; I was familiar with the construct, but unsure of how difficult it would be to hack the system to allow flammable gas to be pumped vigorously through it. I couldn’t imagine any reason they would have made it easy, nopony was that stupid.

I peered cautiously over the lip into the elevator shaft, just barely poking my eyes over the abyss. The vehicle lay resting far below, visible only for the light coming from each of the similarly open doors, two visible, the last occluded by the elevator itself. Possibly a way to get back up here faster, I noted. The fastest way to get down would be to jump, but crawling back up to the medical bay in the common area to repair my crippled body didn’t sound appealing, or at all necessary.

I would have to use the nearby stairwell.

This was a journey I was used to, and nostalgia flooded my every sense. These walls, this shape, this descent, I had passed it all before. The rust was all that kept me from sprinting through the halls to find Cross, Clearheart or Chips, or the Overmare… Rust and reality.

I crept lightly down the stairs, radar still clogged with hostile markers, taking each step as slowly and carefully as I could restrain myself to. These measures had been well worth it, I realized, as I reached the next floor. The Common area remained a residential hub still, brimming and lively with dozens of mares. Their ragged bodies were scarred and tired; they were birthers, used for nothing more than breeding. Animalistic societies sometimes employed females for food preparation or grooming, but it was clear that these mares existed to be impregnated; they were preserved so that they, in turn, could preserve the Stable. There was nothing to discourage my rising fear that they had never left this tomb, never seen the sky, cloudy as it was, or felt the air of Equestria’s open expanses.

Most of them reclined against walls or lay curled up on the stained floor, some paced the halls aimlessly while others shared what basic interactions they could, nipping at each other playfully or grooming one another gently. Some fought; some were as still as corpses, but all shared the same blank-eyed, blank-flanked emptiness that drove me on, away from my pity and towards the one mercy I could give them.

I paced myself, walking tentatively past rooms that bristled due to the writhing creatures. This Stable was wider, more spacious. The rooms were clearly residential; overturned bedding and shattered dressers made that clear, but they were the size of my own bedroom twice over. Even the hallway made me feel small, as the walls were just a little too far away on either side as I followed my instinctual path to the medical bay. This Stable had been ready for the population expansion, but not for the genetic decline that followed it. They hadn’t planned for the citizen’s hormonal, excited carelessness.

The medical bay! The familiar white peaked out through the dim dirt, confirming my reliance on the similarity of this Stable to my own. The long window that stretched towards the door revealed a grim, sundered version of the place in which I had watched my mother die. It was larger, of course, much larger, like the genuine hospital wings I had seen in Today’s Physician, the magazine that I had studied vigorously as I aspired to find my special talent within the field of medicine, to no avail.

I would, however, get to use what medical skill I had for a genuinely useful reason, at long last. When I returned to the monument there would be injuries, casualties would need no more aid than the grave, but I could help the injured with the supplies I scavenged from this wing. The Zebras alchemic magic was all well and good for reliving memories or enchanting weapons, but nothing beat good old Equestrian tech for healing. They could take their herbs and stick them in a celebratory peace pipe when I returned with genuine medicine.

The wing was a mess, almost all the beds had been tipped onto their sides, their sheets stripped and mattresses ripped open, releasing their moldy stuffing onto the grimy tile, as if they had been dissected. IV props and curtain racks lay scattered, lost to their respective beds, making the room harder to traverse by barring smooth or silent passage through the shifted, disarrayed clutter.

I picked through the disorder, finding a small variety of pills and potions. They claimed sanitization and healing, so I levitated them into my saddlebags. My Pip-Buck recognized them immediately, citing them as Mint-als, Med-X and brands of rubbing alcohol. My search was aided by the white, flickering fluorescents that had been missing from the rest of this Stable. They were weak, but comforting compared to the aversive dim that had loomed along my way thus far.

The walls were adorned with posters, few of which I could read in the near darkness. I clambered over an upside down bed frame to reach one on an illuminated section of wall.

MINT-ALS!
It declared, as the comical caricature of a grinning zebra, dressed in a doctor’s garb, complete with stethoscope and head-reflector. He held up a small case, declaring the same name.
FEELING FOGGY?
GET A LITTLE OF THAT NATURAL, ZEBRA CLARITY!
ASK YOUR DOCTOR ABOUT THEM TODAY!
AND DON”T FORGET TO THANK THE ZEBRAS!

It hammered the point home, Mint-als were a Zebra drug, apparently useful enough to warrant abstract appreciation. This propaganda was the polar opposite of what I had seen in the Border Security Station, maybe it had even come from before the war, before the animosity between our two races. The Zebras were being painted as benevolent allies, not dangerous insurgents. Though it was clear which portrayal had won out in the end.

The supply closet at the back of the room was unlocked, I knew because its door was ripped off of its hinges, so I dug around within it, risking illumination by magic as substitute for the shattered light bulb above. Medical Braces, Surgical Tubing, Gauze, the closet was a cornucopia of medical supplies, it held more than I could possibly carry in its multiple crates and containers so I only took what was loose.
Making my way out of the large wing, I noticed the head desk standing upright and undisturbed near the main entrance. At the sight of a buck traipsing down the hallway beyond I froze, then slid my way silently over to the desk, crouching underneath it. The bucks were warriors, and they were most likely violently territorial, their presence should have been something I had expected, something I had prepared for.

I recited the action of drawing each of my pistols one by one, while still curled up underneath the chief of medicine’s desk. I would need to be ready if I ran into a buck in the hallways; I had taken the initial reaction of the two mares in the Atrium with too much faith, in fact there was nothing concrete that indicated I had any semblance of safety at all. My survival thus far could be solely accounted to luck.

Leaving the guns stowed I clambered out from underneath the wooden desk, sliding the drawers open as I went for one last scrounge. In one was a holotape, buried under a mess of papers and trivial objects. I slid it into my saddlebags for later, safer, listening. The other drawer held what looked like an inhaler, a clear capsule filled with orange liquid attached to the mouthpiece. Underneath the device was a note.

Acres

I’ve successfully synthesized a product that will meet your request.
It’s a consumable stimulant derived from an old recipe that I found tucked away in the storeroom.
It should give you the boost you need the next time you work the orchard, its father supplicant was known to act as an accelerator, giving the user a faster perception of time and events around them.

You’ll feel like the fastest thing in the world and, from your perspective, you will be.

Remember, while under its influence take things slow. Otherwise you’ll look like a blur of impossibly erratic energy to anypony watching. Just be careful, you of all ponies know how much your coworkers obsess over tradition, and ‘natural, hard work’. In any case, this’ll make bucking fruit a walk in the park; you’ll get your quota done in half the time easily, a third if you risk getting caught.

I’m not sure of any side-effects, or even if this has successfully distilled, so I’d like a full report on the experience. This could do great things for our food production and, judging by our current birth rates, we’ll really need to work overtime until the kids are old enough to pull their weight.
This may be our best shot. Maybe after we’ve perfected it you and your team can use it without hindrance, then the harvest will no doubt be complete in mere minutes.

The note wasn’t signed, but It didn’t sound like Acres had been a medical doctor, more likely this letter was never delivered and had remained in the desk of its writer. I took it, and the device that it advertised. Sounded like something worth keeping. My Pip-buck called it ‘Synthesized Dash Prototype’.

I huddled into the corner; my curiosity peaked by the doctor’s words about his quite agenda, and the premonition of the new, damaged generation. My E.F.S was bright as ever, consistently insisting that this Stable was really not a good place to be, but I slid over to the Data screen and played the log anyway.

A soft scuffle sounded through the dimmed speakers, not a fight but rather the clumsy juggling of a tape as it was activated and slid from hoof to table.

Damn it all, I forgot to check the date…

I think it’s a Wednesday… Wednesday night, a few months after the first discrepancy in the birthing, you’ll remember that surely, yes, that’ll have to do.

The voice was old, an intelligent sounding buck who I would have automatically pegged as a doctor, or a man of science, even If I had found this tape in the restrooms or cafeteria.
Your becoming senile, Olio, logs and reminders never used to be of concern to you, now they dictate almost all of your actions! He laughed, a hint of forlorn sadness surfacing for a brief moment in between.

You know that you wrote a reminder so that you wouldn’t forget to make this log? Evidence that this is too important not to document, to risk forgetting.

You’ve come to a conclusion about the children, the… damaged ones. It’s a genetic throwback, Celestia I hope it’s a throwback, to your earlier days in this Stable. Remember how wild they all were back then, how inhibitions stayed to burn in the balefire that we escaped? Well there were ramifications, clearly, or something went wrong with how they populated this place, with who they chose.

You’ve seen your friends from those days become grandparents, to these problem children. It was their foolishness that caused this, it wasn’t noticeable in their own offspring but apparently it has gone on, either by repetition or inheritance. I hope for inheritance, but the disgusting possibility of repetition seems more likely with this lot.

Families aren’t this small, is one way to explain it, to justify it. Here a family is one room, four or maybe five members at the maximum, they are all they know as relatives, they are all they consider family. Everypony else is a friend to them… but friendship isn’t the problem.

I’m avoiding admitting it… the fact that this disturbs me so should solidify its place in my memory, but its knowledge I must preserve, so I can prevent this from continuing.

We need to organize a talk with these kids, not the babies obviously, but the youth of this Stable. Somewhere along the line the gene pool has become mixed, indiscernible almost. We’ll have to enforce testing to determine who is allowed to procreate with who, to make sure they aren’t too closely linked.
It won’t be a popular law, but that’s what it must be, law. Otherwise we are entering a downward spiral, and things will only get worse from here.

So, in case you forget:

Deliver the test matter to Acres when you build up the courage to, remember that even if you get caught you can justify fabrication of illicit materials with your good intentions. So do it.

Confirm the inbreeding; nip it in the bud by founding some sort of ‘planned parenthood’ methodology. You need to convince them to be careful, no matter how little they think for the future.

Convince the parents to… try again. These genetics need to be purged from the Stable, or at least prevented from propagating. Sterilizing the children is the most agreeable, moral course of action, though removing them is the safest. So, lastly…

Remember what matters more.
The log cut out to more scuffles as the aged buck fumbled to switch it off. He sounded like an especially clumsy earth pony based on the closing struggle.

I pushed the thought that anything bad had happened to the doctor away, replacing it with reassurances that he must have just forgotten. I preferred to imagine his fate being a blissful, neutral retirement, having neglected his controversial requirement, rather than a vigilant lynching due to the harsh truth he spoke.
I kept the log, better not to leave all that may be left of Doctor Olio here in the abomination of his clinic.

The Dash was ‘illicit material’, huh? So were guns back then, I shrugged. Whatever illegality the substance had held could surely not outweigh the benefits it claimed to bestow. I would keep it, and the note, as memorial to another of the doctor’s unrealized aspirations. Perhaps they had brought ruin to each other. After all, how much worth could the Stable have given the words of a narcotics distributor?

Slinking out of the medical wing I found myself facing a wall of sullied steel, almost immediately obstructing my path. That wasn’t supposed to be there. Maintenance was down the stairs from here, the stairs that were at the end of the hallway, the hallway that had been replaced with a wall, an ugly wall at that. I felt the strange urge to clean it; ‘medical should be kept sanitary!’ had once been the tagline for a short-lived janitorial career of mine.

The elevator! Of course, the stairs were stacked along the elevator shaft, an obvious structural design that I had overlooked by assuming this Stable would be exactly like my own.
Realizing where I needed to go, I retraced my hoofsteps, backtracking towards the elevator. I passed the same silently occupied rooms that I had before, making good time on my way, until I felt an urge.

If the way to the Maintenance floor was so different… maybe other things were different too. Aside from the obvious exceptions of the elevator and the orchard floor, I had assumed I would know this Stable like the back of my hoof, but now that assumption was being challenged. The need to confirm or deny it was prompting me, nagging at me like a filly with a denied request that she couldn’t stop trying to attain.
I should go to the classrooms, that would decide the issue for me, I compromised with myself.

One little detour wouldn’t hurt anypony.
I had already got so many medical supplies that, even if it did, I would be able to help!
I needed this, needed to be heading anywhere but the Oxygen Recycling room… anywhere but the fire.

Better to spend more time here amongst the mares before I condemned them all to death.
Not that their animalistic repose, primal fighting, or obliviousness to their own abuse would sway me.

For a moment, as I drew near to the classroom hallway, I was sure that one had noticed me.
The Others obviously knew that I was there, but this mare had been different, the way her dead gaze had followed me. The way her shiny, wet eyes blinked at me through the rusty haze. She was expressionless, her lips locked into a tight seal, her ears neither perking nor drooping in the slightest.
But she was the only one who saw me for what I was… an intruder.

Before I could take a second glance at her, she had disappeared, becoming another indistinct head in the sporadic sea of shaven, scarred conformity. I didn’t know whether I had imagined her or not.
The uncertainty was worse than being able to reassure myself, so I hurried into the empty hallway making up the walls to the classrooms around me.
The mural wasn’t there… because it was somewhere else, somewhere better, I reminded myself.

This room was larger; more than a dozen empty chairs lined the singular class. A few weren’t empty: a few held bones, bones that slumped to unspecific heaps as well as bones that sat at attention, listening to a lecture from a teacher long passed, on a subject long rendered irrelevant.

The room was incredibly neat, preserved compared to the chaos that had once been the medical wing. I honestly preferred the discord. This eternal perfection was far more disturbing. Better for the dead children to have been broken, than to have sat at their desks staring eternally at the same empty space.

A projector was aimed at the open wall that was partially covered by a wide chalkboard, the implications of equations and letters written and erased decades prior still persisted under the chalky dust. I trotted up to the small machine, a red light blinking softly; perhaps this device had been enough to deter the savages. Though I was unsure of what led me to believe that they would fear such a thing.
I poked it.

A flickering screen of permeable gray covered, but didn’t obstruct, the chalkboard. Specks of dirt and dust on passing film raced and danced within the intangible frame, creating temporary stains and runes on the surface beneath it. The board was reduced to a haze of scratches, indiscernible symbols both numeric and alphabetic, and dust. The constantly shifting gray reminded me of the Enclave’s cloud cover.

One of the threes expanded into a clear, black, magnified version of itself in the middle of the screen. With a stall and a beep it turned into a two, and then cut the screen to black.

Securely soft music began to play, patriot trumpets and horns as a silhouette of the Equestrian flag clicked onto the screen, this was a slide projector and the image persisted, vibrating slightly. The Princesses, or Goddesses if you feel so inclined, fly in a tight circle around a minimalistic representation of the sun and the moon.

I had never realized how simplistic these representations were, how palely they compared to the actual astral bodies that orbited the world. Now that I had seen the real moon and sun, these cartoonish renditions were oddly insulting, pathetic caricatures attempting an impossible replication.

The music continued as the slide slid to reveal another: Canterlot, another black silhouette against a mountainside. Equestria, the slide announced, the letters appearing one by one in an arching, thick font. Next was a small group of ponies, a unicorn, an earth pony and a Pegasus, cartoonish and beady-eyed, bodies simplified into smooth curving lines. Citizens of our great Country, the sub-heading remained as the image changed to three zebras. Their stripes set them apart; the gray and black sepia tinted slides seemed more suited for zebras than for ponies, displaying their simple palette much more accurately than our own diverse, pastel variance.

The following slide was a callous image of explosions across a hand-drawn map of Equestria, no doubt representing the last day. The childishness almost dulled its implications, the perception of the countries death reduced to an infant’s aloofness, censoring all the suffering and destruction by taking what had happened in a lighter, almost comical stride. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the caption: Whoops! Had appeared, taking all remaining seriousness away from the horrible event.

Now the Stable was shown, Stable 34, Your new Home! It declared, showing the great, cog shaped door followed by various shots of the structure within. The Atrium, Medical Wing and Classrooms I recognized, but the fourth slide showed a green field, riddled with trees bearing fruits that looked colorful even through the projectors sepia haze. That had to be the orchard.

But What about Equestria? What had to be an artist’s rendition of how a post-apocalyptic world would look constituted this slide. It paled in comparison to reality, a few dead trees and an empty sky was nothing compared to the sprawling corpse of a country that was outside, shadowed by the eternally shifting dark clouds above and dotted with burnt ruins and devolved savages.
What about the Future?

The Stable door was open, unleashing a flood of the cartoonish ponies out into the rocky terrain, the rotting animal corpses had been left out, the blood that now stained those rocks hadn’t been predicted when this optimistic presentation had been designed. Everything was clean, no radiation, no death.

The ponies looked surprised, and delighted, by something, the question of what was answered in the next image. Our Zebra Friends! Another trio of zebras, haloed by a radiant light that solidified the image intended for them, as saviors, allies. The New Equestria! The Stable ponies followed the foreign caricatures through the reconstructed world. Old cities had been recreated, the architecture was foreign, and Zebra design now dominated what had once been Equestrian, curves rather than angular steel, aesthetic runes and symbols instead of our stark street signs or posters.

Our New Government! Regal zebras, a King and Queen replacing the royal sisterhood of the past, stood on a balcony overlooking New Canterlot. Out New Friends! Ponies and Zebras dancing in circles around great bonfires fueled by alchemic magic, masks and strange ornaments decorated the scene. Idyllic, but impossible. This place set out to educate its inhabitants to a false expectation. This slideshow was designed to prepare them for an unlikely eventuality, Zebra Victory followed by immediate Forgiveness, reconciliation and the rebirth of Equestria as a unified utopia.

A joke when compared to how things had really come to pass. Both sides were wiped out, in two hundred years only more destruction had ensued outside of this Stable, the door had opened to zebras, as planned, but only allowed the fire of war to spark once again.

When Exiting the Stable, Remember:
The tinny music picked up as the stylized words appeared one by one, swinging their way onto the screen in a sudden change from the slideshow preceding it. This wasn’t exclusively a slide projector; the video had just aimed to emulate that simplistic style.
We all Have our own Magic:
A unicorn’s horn glowed at a hovering Pegasus, while nearby a smiling zebra conjured a beautiful show of smoke and fire in the air. I guess it would’ve been difficult to show an earth pony being visually magical. What does an affinity with earth look like?
And something that makes us Special:
A gaggle of fillies crowed around a small zebra, a rune had appeared on her flank, incomprehensible but obviously meant to emphasize with a cutie-mark. The images were cartoons, fabrications, so I still had doubts as to whether this was how it actually worked for them.
Stars and Stripes don’t Mix!
A lone zebra was comically shying away from an exposed night sky. His exaggerated fear at the twinkling lights above was a little insulting, depicting zebras as if they were incapable of even looking up into the night sky, as if they hid in their homes until the safety of daybreak.
But we can all get Along!
Pictures of interracial friendship, community and caring flashed by, almost as if they were trying to subliminally ingrain themselves into my mind but moved just a little too slowly to pass unnoticed. The interracial interaction that had actually occurred, was about to be concluded with a genocide. This presentation hadn’t only been wrong; it had displayed the complete opposite of reality.
Welcome our new Overlords!
The last image was a map of Equestria, except this time it had been entirely striped in black and white.

A Production of Stable-Tec The video signed off as the projector cut to black, the enthusiastic music dimming along with it until the room reverted to its usual, silent emptiness, ending the tour de force of propaganda and indoctrination. I gaped at the bland board, one eyelid twitching in my otherwise stunned reaction.

I didn’t pine for the future that the video had predicted; I didn’t wonder where we had gone wrong along the path to a unified country of ponies and zebras. That had been nonsense, complete fantasy, the only educational value it had shared came from the knowledge of the Zebra’s perception of the stars, and even that had surely been exaggerated into an overshot stereotype.

I thought my Stable had been given a futile task, an impossibility of a purpose, and the farce that had been behind this idea made me smile. Although the nagging pity towards the dead population, who had once been lead along by this lie, was ruining my enjoyment.

Why couldn’t I even manage a little Schadenfreude once in a while? Why, when I was on my way to literally cook hundred of ponies, could I still not take a little sadistic pleasure from the fact that my Stable had been a better place than this one? That it was still more honest despite the things I had been taught to believe there, that in a way, it still could’ve been the last light of Equestria.
At least compared to this bittersweet mess.

Because I was on my way to literally cook hundreds of ponies, I answered. The distraction was gone, the detour was over, there was nothing keeping me here, nothing to do except descend to the Oxygen Recycling system, and commit genocide.

** ** **

The Maintenance level was the reason my E.F.S had been reduced into a blind haze of red, unable to detect movement or direction thanks to the surrounding, all-consuming hostility. Bucks filled the halls, the walls were bloodier than they were rusty, deepening the dim red that had followed me since I had entered, save for the respite of the hospital wing.

They were active, unlike most of the mares above, they paced and pounced around each other, constantly fighting or moving just for the sake of keeping themselves occupied. I huddled against the frame of the stairwell, cowering and cautious. A mare would be unusual here, whether they were kin or not, they would be seen as an intruder. The bucks were free to roam the Stable, but it seemed the fairer sex was reserved to the Common Area, the breeding ground, that was where they expected somepony like me to be found, dull-eyed, docile and ready for impregnation.

I might’ve spared the mares if I had the choice to, though death was the best I could now give them; I just hoped it would be quick. Crouching low and hugging the wall, I rounded the short distance to the next set of stairs, the last set of stairs. I passed the elevator doors, which collapsed open into the empty shaft.

Seemingly undetected, I slid into the next doorway, breathing a sigh of relief as my tail whipped reflexively into cover as quickly as I could move it. The barks and howls stayed level, not cries of alarm but of simple savagery. I had made it, I hadn’t been discovered.
Bloodstains gave way to rust once again as I made my way to the bottom floor, the very last set of stairs I would have to walk disappearing behind me. The elevator was my plan of escape.

Inspecting it didn’t give me any indication that it still worked. The doors on this floor were intact and impossible to pry open, pressing the call button could do it, but I didn’t want to risk drawing any attention to myself until my horrific job here was done.

This level was simple, one hallway led to a door labeled: ‘Orchard’. Another led to ‘Oxygen Recycling.’
After pondering for a moment, I decided to indulge in one last distraction.
I trotted down the empty passage to the wrong door, the door that held the solution that we all knew would work. Their lifeline sheltered behind it; their one consistent provider, destroying it with the Celestial Flame would starve them, and ensure that one day, a slow downward spiral into cannibalism and desperation away… the savages of Zion would be gone.

The door slid open at my arrival, exposing me to light brighter than any I had ever seen in a Stable. For a moment I thought that I had somehow managed to wind up on the surface, with the sun beating down clear and unobstructed across foreign lands, forcing me to shield my eyes. But there was no heat behind the illumination, no chill of breeze or freshness of air; I could still taste the rust on it and feel the synthesized cold of steel rather than the natural cold of snow.

Green, that was what I now looked at… green. A rarity, in both Stable and Wasteland, apart from coats, manes and balefire residue. But there was no life here, the nature and growth that the color implied were artificial, and even to my unaccustomed eyes, looked fake.

The trees were more like statues, leaves like amethyst crystals dotted with the occasional dull bulb. The grass was a carpet, the sky was a ceiling, and the sun was electric. The life here was an imitation.

I ran my hooves against the soft floor, enjoying the gentle tickling of the material strands despite their falsity. I buried myself in it, sliding on my belly as I propelled myself forward with my hind legs, face submerged in the green, allowing my senses to be disappointed. There was no smell, no dew or soil to tantalize me, nothing to help me get lost in the illusion. It was an obvious lie, but still a soft one.

I ended up under a tree, after snaking my way around the orchard for a while, trying to attain the enlightenment of blissful ignorance, trying to lose myself in the façade.

Above were the leaves. Light didn’t cut through them; the false gold didn’t dance off them as they swayed in turn to a breeze that should’ve been. They were thickly locked onto the tree, serving only to obstruct the branches that bore strange fruit. Generic, dull, spheres extruding every so often.

Apples, peaches, plums and pears were all converted into the things these trees generated. This was the nutrient paste of this Stable, a substitute that tried to pass off as the optimistic imaginations we had of food, that tried to brighten up the experience of keeping yourself alive, rather than enjoying taste.

Stacks of the Stable Brand sachets and sacks lined the walls, most torn open and spilling over the orchard. There was enough to last, that was clear, and apparently the trees would keep producing on a loop. Harvesting was no more complicated than aiming a buck in the right direction, something even animals were capable of, evidently.

This place would burn like the rest of the Stable, vents cut through the ‘sky’ providing the oxygen required for whatever life that allowed this place to persist. Not the grass, or the leaves, but whatever mechanism within the trees allowed them to constantly produce a harvestable yield.

I hurried out, on all fours now, disappointed and persuaded through dissuasion. There was nothing left that was worth saving here. The orchard had potential, but the hundreds of ponies above outweighed its value with their stalwart defense. To harvest its fruit we would have to kill the savages, one by one, the usual way. Poisons or fire couldn’t be used, and the casualties from the invasion would number higher than any other force I had yet seen or heard of, apart from the promise of infinite raiders.

‘Oxygen Recycling’
The door slid open, though I didn’t stall to wait for it, barely clearing its edges in my haste. Machines blinked and whirred on all sides, complicated mechanisms, difficult to maintain, impossible to create, but easy to control. A terminal, that’s all I needed and that’s all I recognized of the technology within.

I had no interest in the pipes that wound along the walls, or the buttons lining up for attention at the helm of each machine. I embraced what I knew.

Hit the switch, light it up. The forgotten source of green, a color that I now realized had been more prevalent in my life than I had falsely remembered, shone on me, bathing me in the warmth of familiarity.
Security Screen, bypass it, call the numbers, symbols and letters to be judged, to be picked over and eliminated one by one. Only one sequence mattered, a password.

Back out!

Breaching this system would be difficult; precautions had been taken for good reason.
The trust of this password would have to fall to somepony sane and pure, somepony who could hold the power of this all-consuming fire and resist its summoning.
Or a pony who knew when it needed to be called.
The password was: HEPA HVAC CADR
Abbreviations for technical terms unfamiliar to me, but discerned by my scrutiny.
Twelve unit Places meant millions, perhaps billions of potential possibilities. I was glad I had risked persecution by learning how to hack through the Stable’s system, with elimination and a little guesswork.

STABLE-TEC OXYGEN RECYCLING
CONTROL TERMIANL
ACCESS APPROVED < WELCOME USER>

I scanned a couple of screens, searching for any indication of gas control.
A few of the pipes that lined the walls around me were labeled with the symbol that encouraged caution due to flammability, there had to be some way to redirect them.

GAS MAIN: LINES 3, 4, 7, 14
ORCHARD… closed
MAINTENANCE… open, see within
COMMON AREA… open, see within
MAIN ENTRANCE… closed

I selected the options for ‘see within’, revealing comprehensive lists of exactly where the gas was currently being pumped. Names like kitchen and central heating appeared, as expected.
I knew opening all the pipes wouldn’t do it; I would have to find a way to pump the gas in place of oxygen.

REDIRECTS
Perfect.
Here was a list of ever pipe, each associated with a source for the substance it carried.
Lines 3, 4, 7 and 14 all originated from a singular source, so this had to be where the gas was coming from. I instructed each and every line to draw from this pool, gas would be pumping through every single pipe, and even the water that ran through the Stable would be replaced with its own flammable doom.
REDIRECTING…
AUTHORITIVE CONFIRMATION REQUIRED

A prompt to fill in a password popped up onto the screen.
I typed in HEPA HVAC CADR.

CONFIRMED

Like I was going to forget the password in the two minutes it took me to get to this point.

REDIRECTING…
COMPLETE

I could almost hear it happening, the soft flow of water being pumped through a few of the pipes cut off, now replaced with the steady hiss of the creeping gas as it invaded each and every pathway.
Soon it would fill the Stable, ready for ignition, ready to begin the cleansing.

My heart clenched, this was it, adrenaline pumped through me as I sat still before the murderous technology. I would run, to the door, and then light it with Celestial Flame.
It would be that easy, I could even use the Dash to ensure I put some distance between myself and the flames. I wouldn’t have to fire a shot, I wouldn’t even have to run, I’d just break a bottle…
to end countless lives.

I walked blank-faced and quite, following my path of entry, not thinking or even giving attention to the hallway I walked along, to the elevator I ignored, to the doorway I entered, or to the stairs I climbed.
I wanted to get out and forget this place, cremate it from existence as well as my mind.
But I couldn’t…

The way was obstructed, steel and concrete lay shattered and bent across my path, forming a wall, barring me from my escape. This was it. This was my punishment; I would be trapped here until some fool on the upper level caused the killing spark, or until the air was replaced with only inconsumable kindling.
Somehow, by karma or fate, I was destined, doomed to be buried along with this Stable, a victim of my own genocide. Another casualty of Equestria’s failed preservation.

I almost accepted this; I almost sat back and embraced this moment as my last. Until I saw the gun.
My gun… my tri-beam laser rifle, lay discarded beside a broken, battered skeleton.
Conjurations? Hallucinations?
No, I levitated it, looked along its sleek, angular black body. It was perfect, details I couldn’t possibly have remembered from the magazines, flaws beyond my juvenile imagining, made it real.

The skeleton I could have generated, I had seen enough of them in the last two days to create one from memory, and my medical knowledge meant that I could even name most of the bones as my mind constructed them. But this gun was something that I had never seen in the physical world or even in anything more that a two-dimensional picture. This wasn’t the same stairwell that I had descended earlier. The bones had been zebra, cornered in their last moments by an unprecedented obstruction, killed by enemies who didn’t even have the sense to take his gun.

My daze was broken, the weight of the decision that I had just committed to lifted by the reality ahead of me. I had done a good thing, I would leave this Stable with medical supplies, a back-up plan and a prize I had harbored desire for for all my life. Now it was mine, and with the Dash ready for emergency use, I had nothing to fear, not time-constraints or the savages critically under armed with simple bone and rock.
I retraced my steps out of the dead-end stairway, strapping the rifle to my side.

Their hive was brimming, I heard disgruntled roars and frantic pacing from above me, they could smell the change in the air, and they could tell that something had gone wrong, that there had been an intrusion. Pressing the call button for the elevator, I smiled, relishing my near victory for the first time.

The doors opened immediately, the vehicle had been resting at this level so had only needed a prompt to open itself for use. Stepping into it, I regarded the damage. Tiles of metal had fallen away from the small room’s roof, while the walls were pristine compared to the rest of this bloodied, rusty Stable. The buttons for each floor, labeled with their respective trademarks, seemed intact.
I ordered a straight trip to the Main Entrance, my exit from this kiln.

To my great delight the machine began to move, slowly it chugged into life as the ancient cables pulled taught, straining against the weight of the steel carrier. I didn’t care, I was getting out, the cables would hold against my weight, or any other, because I was getting out.

We were rising, sliding vertically through the shaft and gaining speed. But the velocity reached an apex and crested, before beginning to slow once again.

The elevator was being called; it was stopped, on the Maintenance floor, on the warrior’s floor. I crammed myself into the corner beside the opening doors, hoping to avoid detection by the level full of violent animal bucks. I counted on them being as oblivious as they were stupid, but the pony, who boarded my escape route, while oblivious, was far from stupid.

I smashed against him as I brought myself to the controls, and then slammed my hoof against the button for the Main Entrance once again. I found myself looking out on a sea of enraged faces; awareness had dawned on the most primal level, telling them that the mare they were looking at didn’t belong.
The steel closed over their anger, shielding me just in time from their impending charge, I heard the front line collide, almost as one against the doors.

“What did you do?” hissed the only other pony in this place who could have possibly formulated words. “The air…” he could smell the change; feel the thickening chokehold close around his Stable’s neck.

“I vented the gas, pumped it through every pipe I could.” I explained numbly as he cowered in his favorite position of fetal defeat against the wall of the rising elevator, still recovering from my spontaneous surprise attack. “In a minute it’ll be spread throughout the entire Stable, and after that, all it’ll take is a spark…” The savages barked from below, from their perception I had hidden myself within a room just one door beyond their reach. They couldn’t figure out that we had escaped vertically away. Their collisions against the metal rang, clear and rhythmical, throughout the shaft beneath us.

His fear dissipated, replaced by neither anger nor sadness, but knowing acceptance.
“It needed to happen eventually.” He shrugged. The sleazy smile was far from oozing over his face again. “They would’ve held out on the battlefield… maybe forever. I honestly don’t think you could have beaten them that way. This’ll do it though… this’ll definitely do It.”

“Did you look?” I asked, “For any that were worth saving?” Any that could’ve been saved.

“I’ve been looking my whole life.” He sighed. “I even tried having kids, hoping that I’d pass on… something, anything that’d give me somepony that was more to me than a bully or an easy, one-way lay.”

“I’m sorry.” The irrational pity from earlier today was seeping over me.
He didn’t say anything.
We waited out the rest of the short journey in silence, torn asunder only by the violence breaking out below. It sounded like the mares had picked up on the panic of their mates, as roars and screams from their lighter voices joined the resounding cacophony. It was as if their voices were lifting us.

“Get out, I won’t stop you.” I said as we reached the top floor. He gave me a look, almost thankful, but mostly of alleviated fear and pain. With a slight nod he picked himself out of his own pity and accepted mine, trotting hastily out of the elevator and towards the Stable door. I waited for him to disappear.

His solitary white bar blinked out. It had only been visible during the brief time frame in which he had been close enough to avoid burial under the red overload on my E.F.S.

Stepping out into the hallway; I levitated the bottle of Celestial Flame to my side.
It was too dangerous to bother preserving, though a simple shot from any of my weapons would have triggered the blaze, I longed for the closure that getting rid of this incredibly powerful, sensitive tinder would bring. The elevator descended back down to its eternally favored position at the bottom of the dark shaft, leaving the stretch of open space dark and empty.

I set the bottle down gently on the brink, focusing my levitation on extracting the vial of Dash from my saddlebags. I floated the device to my lips, bracing for whatever flaws it may have developed over each decade spanning the time between its creation and consumption.

It trickled down my throat, softly, seeming to gradually slow as it went, dragging the world along with it. I dropped the empty inhaler as my vision began to pulse; it crawled through the air, my gaze beating it in the race to the floor that it would eventually come to crack against.

The air itself seemed to move slower in the vibrant pulse that was my existence, it felt like everything had been submerged in thick molasses and I was the only one immune to its effects. I was lighting compared to the drawl that was the world, I was the greatest, fastest thing in existence. Children would speak of me in hushed, reverent tones for generations to come; they would hear the legend of the light-speed mare and dream to become like me one day, to become a Goddess.

I wasn’t going to sit around and wait for the rest of everything to catch up with me, no! I had things to do, races to win, entire continents to traverse! But here was a challenge…

The bottle of Celestial Flame, I nudged it over the edge and it seemed to teeter precariously as if it was always just on the verge of regaining its balance. But it fell; it couldn’t handle gravity, the wimp.
So, fire… You think I’m scared of you?

“Let’s see who’s faster.” My words sliced through the thick atmosphere like a freaking missile, baby!
The bottle was taking its time getting to the bottom of the elevator shaft. I could probably run down the stairs to the orchard and get myself a nice apple to eat. Then I’d come back here, eat the shit out of it and digest that sucker like there’s no tomorrow. And the bottle still wouldn’t have reached the bottom of the dark abyss, that slow, good-for-nothing sack of crap!

Who the heck is this guy? Some muscle-headed buck trying to step up to the chopping-block, huh?
Who do you think you are following me up here, some kind of smart guy? Some kind of egghead?
What are you Chief of the freeeeaaakin’ savages or what?

Hold on a minute big guy, I’ll ram your skull up your ass in just a minute; I’ve got a fire to humiliate.

“That’s one beautiful fire.” I said, because I say whatever I want. “Seriously, I would hump the crap out of it if I didn’t have to beat it in this awesome race.” The huge savage exiting the stairwell didn’t seem to care. “Aw, go read a book Chief Egghead.” I dismissed the charging juggernaut.

The flames expanded into a… like an explosion or something, because of the gas in the air I guess. I had to admit that the Celestial Flame was some pretty powerful stuff; add in the thick flammable air that filled the Stable and you’ve got yourself a big-ass genocide! A reallllllly slow, big-ass genocide.

The heat rose like a pillar, I could see it displacing the air as the fire swallowed the darkness around it, rising in a plume on its way to the starting line.

I smiled at the Chief, who was getting closer by the hour. “I guess it needs some time to warm up.”
What the hell that was hilarious.

“Y’know this place reminds me of a hive…except instead of insects…. You’ve got incest!”
Oh my freaking God, I should be a stand-up comedian.
My cutie-mark should be a pony dying of laughter or some shit.

“You suck Chief.” Motherfucker didn’t even smile. “Heh… motherfucker.”

Sexy Fire was here! On your marks, get set… stop that… that hurts, Sexy Fire. Screw it let’s Go!
I’m a freight train, I’m a bullet, I AM TERMINAL VELOCITY!
Cool, I’m at the end of the hallway, looks like I won the race… obviously.

What the hell?

Sexy… how could you?! He’s a dirty savage! He’s an egghead! Why are you touching him like that?!

“We were supposed to race!” I yelled back at Traitorous Whore and her new piece of meat.
“I would have humped you!” I cried, like I shouted, not like I cried… not tears and that gay shit.
At least Chief looked like he was in pain; Traitorous Sexy Fire Whore obviously didn’t know how to handle a buck. Wait… was she always that fat?

“Hey Traitorous Fat Sexy Fat Fire…. Whatever! Were you always that fat?!” I asked politely. The bitch was spread across the entire hallway; I could barely even see Chief anymore, beneath all her nasty business. I missed him, he had been my rock. Now all I could see was Fat Whore.

She had spread across the entire Stable! The Genocide remember?! Oh shit, right!
I may not have won this race. WAIT A FUdgING MINUTE! I totally did.
I may have won this race, but I also wiped out a whole den of Yao Guai, as Ash had called them.
Mmmmmm… Ash.
I bet she tasted like cake… a sad cake.
“You hear that Fire!” Fire was getting awfully close. “I’ve got a NEW! BOO! so AH don’t NEEED YOU!”

“In fact…” I didn’t need to yell now that she was so nearby. “You two might be related.”

Whoops, better back it up. I turned my head to look at my milkshake as I reversed out of the Stable.

My milkshake brings all the mares to the yard.
And they’re like…It’s better than yours.
Damn right! It’s better than yours.
I could’ve humped you, but you were a whore.

Lala-lalala
Warm it up!

Yeah… That’s right, you had better run, tramp!

Chief?! You’re alive!
My Milkshake has resurrected you!

Footnote: Level Up!
Perk Added: Merciful Killer: You deal twice as much damage to foes beneath 25% health.

A SUPER SPECIAL MESSAGE:
We’ve just about hit 1000 views and 150,000 words, baby!
I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing…
But thanks anyway!
At least I know that, even though I’ve spent a lot of my time on this, plenty of other people have wasted some of theirs too.
I think that’s what makes it all worth it.
Also: As of October 12th 2012, the city of Point du Sable has been renamed to Calvary.

Dedicated to Kkat and Jesus…
Though I’ve never seen the two of them in the same place at once.
Just saying…

Next Chapter: Chapter 13: Fix You Estimated time remaining: 8 Hours, 12 Minutes